Burhanuddin Rabbani Dead

Burhanuddin Rabbani

Burhanuddin Rabbani, who has died in a bomb attack in Kabul, has been a key player during some of the most turbulent years in Afghanistan's history.

A pragmatist who saw engagement in the reconciliation process as a way of securing his position in a post-US Afghanistan

Ten years from now, the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Afghanistan's High Peace Council (HPC), may well be seen as a decisive step towards a renewed civil war. Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan and important northerner, is the most significant national figure to be assassinated since the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001.

Born in 1940 in the remote northern province of Badakhshan, Rabbani became an outspoken professor of Islamic law at Kabul University and the leader of the ideological and activist group Jamiat-e Islami, or Islamic Society. In 1974, fleeing arrest for his political activities, he settled across the border in Pakistan. There, subsequent to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he would play a crucial role in transforming Jamiat, with US and Pakistani patronage, into a network of mujahideen fighters.
It was these mujahideen groups who inherited the country after the fall of the Communist-backed regime in 1991, and Rabbani became president for a brief period before the government split along factional and ethnic lines, ushering in a period of brutal civil war that was halted only by the rise of the Taliban, who captured Kabul in 1996.
After the fall of the Taliban, Rabbani presided over the fractious Jamiat network, which, though often opposed to Hamid Karzai, grew soft on the lucrative aid and contracting boom, was too divided by internal rivalries to be effective.
In October 2010, he surprised many supporters when he became head of the HPC, a Karzai-appointed group that was criticised for consisting mostly of former mujahideen, precisely the people the Taliban had kicked out of power.

And indeed, it is likely that Rabbani saw the council, which helps administer a $200m trust fund for reintegration, primarily as a patronage mechanism and a way to enhance his clout and resources after spending a decade outside of government. A friend and tribal elder from Badakhshan told me last summer that mysterious Taliban groups had appeared in formerly secure districts in his province, in what he presumed was a ploy by Rabbani's people for the funds made available for reintegration.
Taliban groups had appeared in formerly secure districts in his province, in what he presumed was a ploy by Rabbani's people for the funds made available for reintegration.
Still, Rabbani was a pragmatist who saw engagement in the reconciliation process as a way of securing his position in a post-US Afghanistan. His killing will undoubtedly harden attitudes against a peace process across northern Afghanistan. It also means the High Peace Council will be in disarray before important conferences in Turkey and Germany this year. And as the latest in a string of high-profile assassinations over the past year that has eliminated many of the old mujahideen leadership, it is a worrying sign that Afghanistan, with fewer figures capable of reining in its centrifugal forces, is careening towards a renewed disintegration.

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"It's like the World Series down here," CBS News chief national correspondent Byron Pitts reported from the celebration.






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President Barack Obama said in an address from the White House late Sunday night that a small team of Americans carried out the operation to kill bin Laden in Pakistan, and that cooperation from Pakistani authorities was crucial.






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Ahmad Shah Masud Afghan Warlord

Masud was easily the greatest captain seen in the Afghan civil war on either side, both in reputation and command skills. He joined the Islamic movement as an engineering student at Kabul University. During the Soviet war he created the strongest and most independent rebel force in Afghanistan with the least international help. He read widely about guerilla war, politics, and the world in general, and while an Islamic fighter, he was more moderate than Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, and Ismail Khan. Presently, Masud is worshipped as a martyr and a patriotic saint.
Masud was strategically important because he controlled the Panjishir Valley. The valley is 40 miles long, has many side valleys feeding into it, and is a natural fortress with 80,000 inhabitants. It was close enough to dominate the mountain road that brought fuel and grain to Kabul from the Soviet Union. Masud’s first attempt to spark revolt in the valley failed, and he fled with a leg wound. But after the Soviets entered the country, the people were ready to fight. Based in the valley, Masud raided the Kabul supply road, taking one in five truckloads as booty, either by ambush or in checkpoint holdups. To protect the road, the communists invaded Panjishir nine times, each time encountering a tactically skilled and brilliantly led militia which destroyed their vehicles, subverted conscripts from the Communist Afghan army, and shot Soviet soldiers from the cover of rough ground.
Unlike the other mujahideen commanders, Masud rooted his militia in the community by working with a council of tribal elders. However, this made him vulnerable to pressure by Soviet punitive attacks on civilians. As a result, he entered into periodic truces with the Soviets, angering the CIA and the ISI, who were only interested in Soviet blood, not the welfare of the peasantry. In 1984, Masud evacuated the entire civilian population of the Panjishir before the Soviets attacked.
After he defeated Najibullah, Masud found it impossible to cooperate with the distasteful CIA-ISI proxy, Hekmatyar, and failed to create a national government. Mullah Omar drove Masud back to the Panjishir in 1997, but could not finish him off. Masud wrote a battle plan to destroy the Taliban and waited for the United States to join him. Although Osama had Masud murdered on September 9, 2001, his battle plan survived to defeat Mullah Omar and reunite the nation under Karzai.