The Rise and Fall of the Rabbani Government, 1992–1996

Abstract

The period from 1992 to 1996 is one of the more misunderstood in modern Afghan history. It is all too frequently depicted as a period of unmitigated despair during which undisciplined ‘warlords’, seemingly determined to establish that they were even less appetising than the communist regime, battered each other for no obvious purpose at hideous cost to the civilian population. In more recent times, this has been developed into an argument that post-Taliban Afghanistan runs a grave risk of encountering a similar fate, since some of the personalities are the same. The vocabulary of ‘tribal warfare’, of ‘honour’ and ‘revenge’, and of the ‘blood feud’ is deployed to give a semblance of anthropological respectability to such claims.