Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
Kabul during the civil wars

The Afghan civil wars refer to two concurrent civil wars which occurred in Afghanistan between 1989 and 1996. The background to these was the invasion of the country in December 1979 by the Soviet Union as it sought to prop up a communist regime in Kabul, followed by a decade-long Russian occupation of the country and insurgency war. The First Afghan Civil War occurred following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. It involved a clash between the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan that had formerly enjoyed Russian backing and the various mujahidin religious armies that were now in a much stronger position militarily. This ended in 1992 in the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. A new interim government was established under the Peshawar Accords of April 1992, but efforts to form a stable government quickly broke down and a Second Afghan Civil War followed almost immediately as the disparate alliance of mujahidin religious warriors and other groups that had fought for years against the Soviets and the Afghan communists turned on one another. The new conflict would last four years. When it ended in 1996 the Taliban came to power. The civil wars contributed to the ongoing refugee crisis in Afghanistan and the migration of millions of Afghans into Pakistan in particular.[1]

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Afghan civil wars chronology of events

Afghanistan has experienced almost continuous unrest in modern times. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century it had already become a buffer zone in ‘The Great Game’ between the British and Russian empires for hegemony over Central Asia and the British invaded the country on several occasions. Like virtually every country in the world, Afghanistan became a center of competition in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This led in 1978 to the Saur Revolution and the inception of a communist regime. However, it was weak and likely to lose power had the Soviets not decided to invade Afghanistan directly in December 1979. A bitter decade-long war continued until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. When the Russians left, the communist regime was still in place, but it was now fatally weakened and open to defeat. This was the context in which the Afghan civil wars began.[2]

The First Afghan Civil War was fought between the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the conclusion of the Peshawar Accords in April 1992. The conflict saw the various mujahidin religious armies continuing their attacks on the government. Shorn of aid from Moscow, the regime suffered major losses and eventually entered into peace negotiations. The Peshawar Accords were essentially a victory for the mujahidin groups and saw an end to the communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the inception of a new Islamic State of Afghanistan.[3]

Map of Afghanistan in 1996

The Second Afghan Civil War followed almost immediately after the Peshawar Accords were agreed as the various mujahidin groups and their more secular allies, who had found common cause in fighting the Soviets and the communist regime in the 1980s and early 1990s, now turned on one another and became rivals for power. The resulting conflict coalesced over time into a clash between groups like the Taliban, Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin and the Northern Alliance. Different groups acquired support from different foreign powers. The Taliban, for instance, were supported by Pakistan, while Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin were supported by Iran. After nearly four and a half years of intense fighting, the Taliban had secured control over more than two-thirds of the country in the south, west and central regions, including the cities of Kabul and Kandahar. As a result, many historians view the Second Afghan Civil War as coming to an end in 1996 with victory for the Taliban.[4]

Despite the seeming victory in 1996, endemic violence continued in the country. In particular, the Northern Alliance remained a power in the north of Afghanistan and were still active there in 2001 when the United States allied with them during the invasion of the country to oust the Taliban in response to the 9/11 attacks on the US in September 2001. The civil wars led to hundreds of thousands of deaths through the fighting, displaced millions of people once again after the Soviet war in the 1980s and were compounded by famines which led to many more deaths and suffering.[5]

Extent of migration associated with the Afghan civil wars

It is difficult to get an exact idea of the migration and refugee crisis which followed from the Afghan civil wars as they blended into a pre-existing refugee crisis. Beginning with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, millions of people were internally and externally displaced. For instance, early on in that war, approximately one and a half million people had fled to the capital Kabul to seek refuge there, while the city of Kandahar, which lay on the front lines of the fighting, was broadly evacuated. Millions more fled over to the borders of Afghanistan, principally into northern Pakistan, but also to Iran. Many people returned home in 1989 as the Soviet withdrawal seemed to augur the return of peace. No sooner were they home in Afghanistan though than the outbreak of the First Afghan Civil War created a fresh refugee crisis and waves of migrations. This would continue through the 1990s. Therefore, the Afghan civil wars led to considerable migration, but it is hard to put accurate figures on it, as it is difficult to distinguish by migration created by the crisis of the Soviet invasion and by the civil wars, during which accurate records were also not kept. What is relatively clear is that more than five million Afghans were externally displaced in the crises of both the Soviet invasion and the civil wars that followed.[6]

Demographic impact of the Afghan civil wars

The demographic impact of the civil wars was considerable. At home in Afghanistan it contributed to a temporary stasis in population growth. For instance, Afghanistan’s population had grown by 50% between 1960 and 1979 from just over 8.5 million people to 13 million by the time of the Soviet invasion. This growth rate collapsed in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s owing to external migration, deaths from the conflicts and also the inception of famine conditions during the era of the civil wars in the 1990s. By 1991, at the height of the First Civil War, the population is believed to have fallen below 11 million people.[7]

Peshawar, Pakistan

In terms of tracing one’s family history and how the Afghan civil wars might have impacted thereupon, the millions of Afghan refugees who left their country in the 1980s and 1990s headed to a number of particular countries in great numbers. The greatest demographic impact was on neighboring Pakistan and Iran, while there was also some spill-over into India and several other Central Asian nations. Further afield, Afghan refugees were taken in by countries like the United States and Germany and there are significant communities of Afghans there today where people will be able to trace their roots to family members who left Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s.[8]

As estimated 3.2 million Afghans have settled permanently in Pakistan since the late 1970s, though the number of Afghans in the country today may be closer to 3.7 million and most of these are now second or third generation Afghan Pakistanis born to refugees who arrived to Pakistan between the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the end of the civil wars in 1996.[9] In the city of Peshawar, one-in-five of the city’s two million inhabitants are of Afghan heritage.[10] There are also millions of people of Afghan descent in Iran, with a large concentration of these Afghans in the capital, Tehran.[11]

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