President Ronald Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the Oval Office in 1983
In his interview with ABC News, the ex Pakistani prime minister and Chief of Army Pervez Musharraf said that western countries, chiefly the USA and United Kingdom, had given aid of about 20 billion dollars during the 1980s to Pakistan specifically for training Taliban personnel and providing them with arms and ammunition.
Due to the sudden initiation of the civil war, working government departments, police units or a system of justice and accountability for the newly created Islamic State of Afghanistan did not have time to form. Horrific crimes were committed by criminals and individuals inside different factions. Rare ceasefires, usually negotiated by representatives of the Islamic State's newly appointed Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud, President Sibghatullah Mojaddedi and later President Burhanuddin Rabbani (the interim government), or officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), commonly collapsed within days. The countryside in northern Afghanistan, parts of which was under the control of Defense Minister Massoud remained calm and some reconstruction took place. The city of Herat under the rule of Islamic State ally Ismail Khan also witnessed relative calm.
Meanwhile, southern Afghanistan was neither under the control of foreign-backed militias nor the government in Kabul, but was ruled by local leaders such as Gul Agha Sherzai and their militias.
The Taliban were removed from power in October 2001 by a unified effort of United Islamic Front (Northern Alliance) ground forces, small U.S. Special Operations teams and U.S. air support.
In 1991, the Taliban (a movement originating from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-run religious schools for Afghan refugees in Pakistan) also developed in Afghanistan as a politico-religious force. The most often-repeated story and the Taliban's own story of how Mullah Omar first mobilized his followers is that in the spring of 1994, neighbors in Singesar told him that the local governor had abducted two teenage girls, shaved their heads, and taken them to a camp where they were raped. 30 Taliban (with only 16 rifles) freed the girls, and hanged the governor from the barrel of a tank. Later that year, two militia commanders killed civilians while fighting for the right to sodomize a young boy. The Taliban freed him. Mullah Omar started his movement with fewer than 50 armed madrassah students in his hometown of Kandahar.
In the beginning the Taliban numbered in the hundreds, were badly equipped and low on munitions. Within months however 15,000 students arrived from the madrassas in Pakistan. The Taliban's first major military activity was in 1994, when they marched northward from Maiwand and captured Kandahar City and the surrounding provinces, losing only a few dozen men. When they took control of Kandahar in 1994, they forced the surrender of dozens of local Pashtun leaders who had presided over a situation of complete lawlessness and atrocities. The Taliban also took over a border crossing at Spin Baldak and an ammunition dump from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In the course of 1994, the Taliban took control of 12 of 34 provinces not under central government control. Militias controlling the different areas often surrendered without a fight. Omar's original commanders were "a mixture of former small-unit military commanders and madrassa teachers."
At the same time most of the militia factions (Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami, Dostum's Junbish-i Milli and Hezb-i Wahdat) fighting in the battle for control of Kabul were defeated militarily by forces of the Islamic State's Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Bombardment of the capital came to a halt and the Islamic State initiated measures to restore law and order to the capital. Massoud furthermore tried to initiate a nationwide political process with the goal of national consolidation and democratic elections.
Afghan Taliban fighters overran an Afghan military base and paraded its troops through the bazaar in Kajaki in northern Helmand province.
Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the "Lion of Panjshir", had been named "the Afghan who won the Cold War" by the Wall Street Journal and had defeated the Soviet Red Army nine times in north-eastern Afghanistan. Hoping for the Taliban to be allies in bringing stability to Afghanistan, Massoud invited the Taliban to join the consolidation process and to contribute to stability. Unarmed, Massoud went to talk to Taliban leaders in Maidan Shar to convince them to join the initiated political process, so that democratic elections could be held to decide on a future government for Afghanistan. The Taliban declined to join such a political process. When Massoud returned unharmed to Kabul, the Taliban leader who had received him as his guest was killed by other senior Taliban for failing to execute Massoud while the possibility had presented itself.
The Taliban, however, suffered a devastating defeat against government forces of the Islamic State under the command of Ahmad Shah Massoud. The Taliban's early victories in 1994 were followed by a series of defeats that resulted in heavy losses which led analysts to believe that the Taliban movement as such might have run its course. Pakistan, however, started to provide stronger military support to the Taliban. On September 26, 1996, as the Taliban with military support by Pakistan and financial support by Saudi Arabia prepared for another major offensive, Massoud ordered a full retreat from Kabul to continue anti-Taliban resistance in the Hindu Kush mountains instead of engaging in street battles in Kabul. The Taliban entered Kabul on September 27, 1996, and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Many analysts like Amin Saikal describe the Taliban as developing into a proxy force for Pakistan's regional interests.
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