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From Forever War: Afghanistan 1973-Present, by Audrey Sinclair:
...Although turmoil had been endemic in Afghanistan ever since Mohammed Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973, and had worsened sharply following the Saur Revolution and subsequent Soviet invasion, Afghanistan remained a single, whole nation-state, albeit a dysfunctional one, until the Soviet Army's withdrawal from the country in 1989, whereupon the country fractured into warring militias, with the Communist government of Mohammed Najibullah controlling only the major cities and the ring-shaped Highway 1 connecting them...
...Until April 1992, the various militias were at least nominally united in fighting to destroy the Communist regime, but after the fall of Najibullah and the establishment of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, the country split apart once again, with the Pakistani-supported Hezb-i Islami under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fighting against the other mujihadeen forces in an attempt to seize power for himself. In January 1994, Hekmatyar was joined by the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, and their allied forces came close to capturing Kabul before being pushed back, but that fall a new faction, the Taliban, captured Pakistan's eye, usurping the support which had previously gone to Hekmatyar, and quickly captured much of southern Afghanistan; although initially repulsed by forces loyal to Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik, they regrouped and captured Kabul in September 1996...
...By late 2001, the only remaining anti-Taliban forces remaining in Afghanistan belonged to Massoud's Shura-e Nazar, Dostum having been forced to flee to Turkey following the fall of Mazar-i Sharif to the Taliban; since then, Massoud's forces had slowly been forced back into far northeastern Afghanistan, populated primarily by Tajiks. The worst blow came on 9 September 2001, when Massoud was assassinated by a pair of Taliban suicide bombers, an event that could very well have led to the final collapse of the Northern Alliance; however, the Alliance's battered and exhausted forces got their reprieve on 7 October, when US-led NATO forces attacked Taliban-held Afghanistan, which rapidly crumbled in the face of a joint Alliance-NATO offensive...
...The government set up after the fall of the Taliban rapidly proved to be both badly ineffectual and rife with corruption; this provided the Taliban with their chance to re-form a shadow government, which quickly regained much of the Taliban's former popular support and, though it never managed to wrest control of the major cities back from the occupying Coalition forces, could and did assert effective control over large areas of the countryside and proved a massive thorn in the side of the Coalition forces...
...Although the initial plan had been for a gradual, phased withdrawal over the 2012-2014 period as Coalition forces gradually handed over various tasks and responsibilities to the Afghan national government, this was thrown ass over teakettle by Hurricane Igor's devastation of the northeastern United States and Atlantic Canada and the consequent immediate and loud demands for the end of the moneysink that many now saw Afghanistan as; in addition, several U.S. and Coalition commanders believed that a fatal blow had been dealt to the Taliban by the massive, sweeping raids carried out after Ahmad Shuja Pasha's escape into Afghanistan at the end of the Pakistani Civil War and the successful discovery and defusing of the nuclear truck bomb intended for Bagram AFB...
...Unfortunately, the Taliban was still very much a force to be reckoned with, having been considerably strengthened by the ex-Pakistani forces under Pasha's command, and receiving an additional influx of new manpower in the form of Pashtun refugees fleeing into Afghanistan in the face of the genocidal Pakistani campaign against the Pakistani Taliban following the nuclear attack on Islamabad, a campaign noted among other things for making liberal use of chemical agents, especially sulfur and nitrogen mustards and several different kinds of nerve gas...
...It should not, therefore, be surprising that, following the withdrawal of Coalition forces from Afghanistan in November 2011, the nation almost immediately collapsed back into open civil war, breaking apart once again into numerous fiefdoms controlled by squabbling warlords; of these, the Taliban managed to regain control of a considerable portion of southern Afghanistan, including their old power base of Qandahar, although in the far south they were outcompeted by Baloch militias who proclaimed the unification of the Baloch-majority portions of southernmost Afghanistan with Balochistan, newly independent as a result of the Pakistani Civil War...
...In the north, the United Front, newly reformed in July 2011 in response to the impending Coalition withdrawal, managed to hold onto much of the northeast and north, including all of the territory previously held by the old Northern Alliance as well as Kabul and a considerable chunk of territory to the south and east, including the major cities of Gardez and Jalalabad, but they met with difficulty in their attempts to take portions of central and western Afghanistan; although United Front forces managed to successfully secure most of Bamiyan Province, as well as parts of Ghur and Badghis Provinces, their offensive then stalled, and a Taliban counterattack forced United Front forces to retreat from Nili on 15 June 2012, just three weeks after the city's capture by the United Front...
...Meanwhile, in response to defeats in Northwest Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban began meeting with its namesake, the Afghan Taliban, in the hope of negotiating an alliance; the end result, however, was even better than they had dared hope for, merging both organizations into a Unified Taliban Front covering both Afghanistan and Pakistan and allowing unrestricted communication and flow of money, weapons, and men across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Afghanistan has never recognized the current border between the two countries, known as the Durand Line after the British diplomat who demarcated it in 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand, and one of the first actions of the Taliban's reborn Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was to reassert its territorial claims to Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province as well as to all of Balochistan, including not only the areas held by the breakaway Baloch Republic but also those fragments in the northeast still under the authority of the Pakistani Balochistan Province as well as the large western portion under Iranian control...
...The Taliban unification also provided a boost to al-Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as, to a lesser degree, those outside this area; it is likely this which allowed the organisation to carry out its first successful major attack on Western home soil in years, a 19 October 2012 truck bombing in Nuremburg which killed nearly 300 people...
From Forever War: Afghanistan 1973-Present, by Audrey Sinclair:
...Although turmoil had been endemic in Afghanistan ever since Mohammed Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973, and had worsened sharply following the Saur Revolution and subsequent Soviet invasion, Afghanistan remained a single, whole nation-state, albeit a dysfunctional one, until the Soviet Army's withdrawal from the country in 1989, whereupon the country fractured into warring militias, with the Communist government of Mohammed Najibullah controlling only the major cities and the ring-shaped Highway 1 connecting them...
...Until April 1992, the various militias were at least nominally united in fighting to destroy the Communist regime, but after the fall of Najibullah and the establishment of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, the country split apart once again, with the Pakistani-supported Hezb-i Islami under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fighting against the other mujihadeen forces in an attempt to seize power for himself. In January 1994, Hekmatyar was joined by the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, and their allied forces came close to capturing Kabul before being pushed back, but that fall a new faction, the Taliban, captured Pakistan's eye, usurping the support which had previously gone to Hekmatyar, and quickly captured much of southern Afghanistan; although initially repulsed by forces loyal to Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik, they regrouped and captured Kabul in September 1996...
...By late 2001, the only remaining anti-Taliban forces remaining in Afghanistan belonged to Massoud's Shura-e Nazar, Dostum having been forced to flee to Turkey following the fall of Mazar-i Sharif to the Taliban; since then, Massoud's forces had slowly been forced back into far northeastern Afghanistan, populated primarily by Tajiks. The worst blow came on 9 September 2001, when Massoud was assassinated by a pair of Taliban suicide bombers, an event that could very well have led to the final collapse of the Northern Alliance; however, the Alliance's battered and exhausted forces got their reprieve on 7 October, when US-led NATO forces attacked Taliban-held Afghanistan, which rapidly crumbled in the face of a joint Alliance-NATO offensive...
...The government set up after the fall of the Taliban rapidly proved to be both badly ineffectual and rife with corruption; this provided the Taliban with their chance to re-form a shadow government, which quickly regained much of the Taliban's former popular support and, though it never managed to wrest control of the major cities back from the occupying Coalition forces, could and did assert effective control over large areas of the countryside and proved a massive thorn in the side of the Coalition forces...
...Although the initial plan had been for a gradual, phased withdrawal over the 2012-2014 period as Coalition forces gradually handed over various tasks and responsibilities to the Afghan national government, this was thrown ass over teakettle by Hurricane Igor's devastation of the northeastern United States and Atlantic Canada and the consequent immediate and loud demands for the end of the moneysink that many now saw Afghanistan as; in addition, several U.S. and Coalition commanders believed that a fatal blow had been dealt to the Taliban by the massive, sweeping raids carried out after Ahmad Shuja Pasha's escape into Afghanistan at the end of the Pakistani Civil War and the successful discovery and defusing of the nuclear truck bomb intended for Bagram AFB...
...Unfortunately, the Taliban was still very much a force to be reckoned with, having been considerably strengthened by the ex-Pakistani forces under Pasha's command, and receiving an additional influx of new manpower in the form of Pashtun refugees fleeing into Afghanistan in the face of the genocidal Pakistani campaign against the Pakistani Taliban following the nuclear attack on Islamabad, a campaign noted among other things for making liberal use of chemical agents, especially sulfur and nitrogen mustards and several different kinds of nerve gas...
...It should not, therefore, be surprising that, following the withdrawal of Coalition forces from Afghanistan in November 2011, the nation almost immediately collapsed back into open civil war, breaking apart once again into numerous fiefdoms controlled by squabbling warlords; of these, the Taliban managed to regain control of a considerable portion of southern Afghanistan, including their old power base of Qandahar, although in the far south they were outcompeted by Baloch militias who proclaimed the unification of the Baloch-majority portions of southernmost Afghanistan with Balochistan, newly independent as a result of the Pakistani Civil War...
...In the north, the United Front, newly reformed in July 2011 in response to the impending Coalition withdrawal, managed to hold onto much of the northeast and north, including all of the territory previously held by the old Northern Alliance as well as Kabul and a considerable chunk of territory to the south and east, including the major cities of Gardez and Jalalabad, but they met with difficulty in their attempts to take portions of central and western Afghanistan; although United Front forces managed to successfully secure most of Bamiyan Province, as well as parts of Ghur and Badghis Provinces, their offensive then stalled, and a Taliban counterattack forced United Front forces to retreat from Nili on 15 June 2012, just three weeks after the city's capture by the United Front...
...Meanwhile, in response to defeats in Northwest Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban began meeting with its namesake, the Afghan Taliban, in the hope of negotiating an alliance; the end result, however, was even better than they had dared hope for, merging both organizations into a Unified Taliban Front covering both Afghanistan and Pakistan and allowing unrestricted communication and flow of money, weapons, and men across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Afghanistan has never recognized the current border between the two countries, known as the Durand Line after the British diplomat who demarcated it in 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand, and one of the first actions of the Taliban's reborn Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was to reassert its territorial claims to Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province as well as to all of Balochistan, including not only the areas held by the breakaway Baloch Republic but also those fragments in the northeast still under the authority of the Pakistani Balochistan Province as well as the large western portion under Iranian control...
...The Taliban unification also provided a boost to al-Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as, to a lesser degree, those outside this area; it is likely this which allowed the organisation to carry out its first successful major attack on Western home soil in years, a 19 October 2012 truck bombing in Nuremburg which killed nearly 300 people...
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