In 1812 the French defeat in Russian bought about a feeling of camaraderie between the British and the Russians. Captain John Macdonald seconded to the political department stated that the current assumption in London and in Calcutta that the deserts and mountains ringing India would keep it safe was not borne out by history or by those who had scouted the area on the border. Twenty or so attempted invasions had been made over the millennia .In 327BC Alexander the Great had crossed the Hindu Kush .In 13th century Genghis Khan laid waste to Samarkand ,Bokhara Balkh and to Merv reaching India .In the 14th century. Tamerlane crossed the Hindu Kush, descended into the Punjab, sacked Delhi, Babur invaded India from Afghanistan .Nabir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739 and among other things took the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond and the Peacock throne.

In February of 1825 British agent William Moorcroft reached Bokhara to be greeted by locals as Russians .Four years earlier a Russian expedition had arrived in order to ascertain the where about of captured Russians who were being kept as slaves. He next went to Balkh in northern Afghanistan and then vanished. In 1830 Lieutenant Arthur Connolly of the Bengal Light Cavalry reconnoitred the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass for a year. He found that there were only two routes a Russian army could take. One was Khiva through to Balkh through the Hindu Kush to Kabul on to Jalalabad and then through the Khyber Pass to Quetta. The other one was through Heart to Kandahar, to Quetta through the Bolan Pass into India.

The British came to the conclusion that they needed Afghanistan as a buffer zone against the Russians. They first tried to bring Ranjit Singh, the leader of the Punjab, who had one of the largest armies in the region, onboard. He was partial to fine horses and a team of Clydesdales in addition to a large cash payment and was sufficient. Next advances were made to Dost Mohammed of Afghanistan. In 1830 Tsar landed troops at Constantinople to �protect� the Sultan from the rebellion elements within the Egyptian army stationed there in his support. In November of 1837 Russian army troops marched upon Herat .Edward Pottinger the son Henry Pottinger, a British agent working in the area, rallied the troops within the fortress holding out for months. British troops landed in Persia threatening Teheran. The siege was lifted. In Afghanistan Dost Mohammed asked the British agents if they could help him regain the lost province of Peshawar in the Punjab. The British warned him that he would be replaced by exiled Shah Sunjah..The British Army of the Indus was set up in order to accomplish this and in 1883 marched in to Afghanistan entering Kabul in August. Mohamed fled and Shah was enthroned. A Russian expedition assembled at Orenburg for an attack on Khiva under General Perovsky consisting of 5200 infantry, and 10,000 camels. It was described by the Russians as a scientific expedition to the Aral Sea .Camels died at the rate of a hundred a day .Halfway to their objective the army turned back reaching Orenburg minus 1,000men and 8,500 camels.

In order to stop the Russians from using their captured citizens as an excuse for invasion the British attempted to arrange for the release of the hostages. A British agent by the name of Shakespeare was sent to Herat and managed to secure their release travelling with them to St Petersburg and receiving a decoration from the Tsar. On return to Britain he was also decorated, this time by Queen Victoria.

A rebellion broke out in Kabul forcing the British to retreat which after many months of hardship in the extreme cold combined with repeated guerrilla attacks resulted in the destruction of the Army of the Indus. In September of 1842 another army was sent which recaptured the country the next ten years being one of d�tente with the future Central Asian States on the northern border of Afghanistan. Russia suppressed the rebellion breaking out among the Circassia�s destroying guerrilla strongholds along the Styr-Darya river .Britain seized the Sind making it a province of India against the orders of the government ,the commander of the British force charged with the bringing in of a criminal gang believing that if he neutralized the Sind he would be more easily able to accomplish his task .At he did this he made a telegram to his HQ bearing only the word �Pavaci�-I have sinned -in Latin. The Russians expanded eastwards .The former attach� to London Ignatov was given the job of reconnoitring the Central Asian Republics sent word back to his masters in Russian that they could be annexed. He was next sent to China where he arranged for the transfer of 400,000 square miles of territory in the Russian Far East.Russian seized several fortress in the north of the Khanate of Kokand .They next took Tashkent.

General Konstantin Kaufman was made governor general of Turkmenistan and becoming aware of Bokhara troops amassing at Samarkand expressed to drive out the Russians from Bokhura.Kaufman invaded and drove out Bokharans who surrendered. Samarkand was now absorbed into the Russian Empire. In present day Sinkiang Yakub Beg rebelled against China and set him self up as Emperor of an independent Moslem kingdom of Kashgaria.The Indian viceroy asked him if he would agree to be a buffer zone between Britain and Russia. Kaufman launched an attack from Orenburg, Krasnovodsk and from Tashkent. With the Russian troops 200 miles from the capital Kashgar British scouts found a route 50 miles wide going through Kashgaria from India, good for invading India and Baluchistan. Baluchistan was bought into an alliance agreeing to lease the Bolan Pas to the British .By 1877 Kaufmanns 30,000 troops were in Afghanistan ready to strike at India. The Russian advance was bought to a halt with the end of the Turko -Russian war. In 1878-81 the second Afghan war had ended with the death of the Emir. Yakam Khan ascended the throne. London controlled Afghanistan�s foreign policy and the Khyber Pass and lands south of the frontier in exchange for a guarantee of protection from Russia. This protection ended with the revolution in Russia during WWI and at the end of WWII all of the Central Asian States and, Kazakhstan became part of the USSR

In Afghanistan a supposed benign expedition was used in order to invade Afghanistan in the latter part of the twentieth century with the expressed intention of aiding the newly installed socialist government fight the forces of reaction. With the installation of the new soviet backed government a rebellion occurred springing from the Mudjahideen who ousted Russia from Afghanistan. This was followed by civil war within the country as the various factions fought for control of the country.

Talib is the Arabic word meaning to seek something for oneself. This is modified by the Urdu language into Tabib-e lin; seeking knowledge. Taliban is the plural of the above. These fighters after the anti soviet jihad managed to defeat the seven Mujahideen groups responsible for defeating the soviets. What is even more remarkable is that they were, in the main, students studying in the deeni madras�s, off shoots of the traditional Madras�s. In Afghanistan there were 2500 spiritual teachers and leaders before the communist invasion .The government of Pakistan under Zial Haq established a chain of these institutions along the Afghanistan Pakistan border. (A survey conducted by the Home department of the government of Punjab in May of 1997 revealed that there was 169 deeni madras�s is having enrolled 17,533 students. The report goes on to state that most of these were being used as hide outs for terrorists attached to foreign mentors).

After the fall of the communist Dr.Najibullh�s regime these schools spread to Afghanistan especially to the eastern province of Herat, the majority of students Afghan nationals. These schools not only taught religion but also the military arts. Those selected to fight were associated with the various Afghan factions.

During the anti-soviet jihad the Mujahideen under Abdul Rashid Dostum had strength of 50,000 (Jumbish-e- mili) stationed in the northern part of the country composed of mainly Uzbeks, Ahmed Shah Masood had 30,000 fighters, mainly Tajiks who operated out of the Panjsheer valley and the easterly province bordering Iran and at Herart.The Hizb-e- Islami under (Engineer) Gulbadin Hikmetytar had a force of 20,000 Pushtuns who operated in the easterly Nangarhar province bordering Pakistan. All of these were of the Sunni factions the only Shia groups the fighters of Hizb-e-Wahdad operating out of the Bamian region. The final figure for the Taliban at the end of the civil war period under Mullah Omar, (strangely enough the son in law of Osama bin Laden through marriage) was 50,000 fighters. The main source of revenue for these groups were the smuggling routes running from Iran in to Pakistan where electrical goods, furniture, and even cars fetched three times there initial value,, the war lords charging a tax on all goods passing through their territory.

The Taliban are not to be compared to an organized army. Their main tactical methods comprised of the firing a large a number of rockets and artillery rounds as possible towards the enemy with no thought given to fire and movement, never mind forming up areas and initial start lines. When the enemy began to fade away through desertion frontal attacks of roughly five hundred fighters were mounted upon the largely abandoned positions. Where there was resistance attacks in the thousands were mounted showing great courage and a complete disregard for lose of life. Tactics were employed only in small scale actions such as flank attacks and when probing forward lines where a short sharp engagement would usually be followed by a barrage of artillery and rocket attacks, sometimes accompanied by air strikes, the aircraft in the main very ineffectual as they seldom ventured within AA range. Poor maintenance facilities and a lack of spare parts also contributed to their lack lustre performance.

Where would an army of school children get the necessary expertise needed just fly one of these aircraft; never mind fight in them, can be explained by the strategy employed by the Taliban at the time. Afghanistan had been at war for twenty years ,the population heartily sick and tired .Any force able to stop the fighting and allow the citizenry to go back to leading a normal life was welcome. Many of the fighters within the various Mujahideen had no axe to grind with the Taliban and were content to let them have their way, and in some cases even joined them bringing with them not only sophisticated equipment acquired from their defeating or taking the surrender of Afghan army unit�s but also personnel, who had in some cases been trained by the soviet armed forces, and if not, , certainly by their successors, the Afghan government army.

The Taliban established itself in the province of Zabul situated on the Pakistan border in November and December of 1994 by capturing a huge arms depot belonging to Hikmetyar by driving two trucks through the province loaded with about fifty Talibs posing as smugglers .They paid a paltry bribe at the various check points, at Spin Boldack jumping out from under the plastic sheet and after a brief firefight over came the opposition , five of them killed to take control of around 3,000 metric tones of arms and ammunition which included 80,000 Kalashnikov rifles. The Taliban further ingratiated itself to Pakistan by freeing their nationals held hostage by a tribal group. Herat in the east was an important communications center on the highway leading to Turkmenistan .Pakistan wanted to open the road for its own traffic so as to reach the oil fields and natural gas resources in Turkmenistan and Iran. Sultan Amin formally of the ISI (Pakistan�s inter service intelligence directorate) was posted as the first head of the Pakistani mission in Herat on 1st August 1994.Pakistan Major General Naseerullah Babar initiated the opening of the north western road to Turkmenistan .The interim Afghan prime Minister Professor Burhanuddin Rabanni objected .The convoy was halted .Colonel Imam in charge of the convoy stated that he had obtained the necessary papers in Kandahar .After much negotiating up to the national level nothing was achieved.200 students who has been studying at the deeni madras�s in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan suddenly swooped down .Fighting raged for two days until the hijackers surrendered, their commander killed ,the students loosing six of their own The captured convoy contained in addition to Pakistani army troops a ISI personnel. From this day on the Taliban went on dominate the entire Afghan conflict. They fought a battle at Kandahar lasting for three days then went on to take parts of Kabul then probed deep into the Pansjheer valley sanctuary of Mazir-e-Sharif. Gulbadin Hikmetyar ,the strong man of Afghanistan, had promised to teach the Taliban a lesson if they attacked his base at Mazir-e-Sharif and so launched a pre emptive attack upon near by Ghanzi resulting in disaster as his supposed ally the governor of the city switched sides taking with him a large number of his fighters and their equipment. Hikmetyar put in a counter attack but Rabanni ,also his supposed ally, also switched sides, leaving Hikmetyars forces decimated, the proud Mujahideen leader forced to find sanctuary abroad.