February 1998
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1997 began and ended with the pattern that has become all-too-familiar in the three years of war that have spread across Afghanistan since the rise of the Taliban movement led by provincial Islamic scholars and students in Kandahar in the summer of 1994. On the one hand, there were political negotiations initiated by the UN, regional, and Islamic states. Simultaneously, there were dramatic rounds of bitter fighting as the war spread to the fertile plains of the north, even to the border of Uzbekistan at the river port of Khairaton on the Amu Darya. Although the high tide of the Taliban forces was twice repulsed from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif (in May and September), the locus of fighting had shifted north of the Hindu Kush divide for the first time, thus intertwining Afghanistan's fate with that of Central Asia. Militarily, a new level of viciousness was revealed in the massacre of 2000 Taliban prisoners at the hands of a northern warlord. Politically, the Taliban gained a small but significant status of international legitimacy through recognition by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. However, relations with Iran deteriorated as the Taliban forced the closure of the Iranian embassy in Kabul. But perhaps the most significant development for the future lay in the advance of the gas and oil pipeline projects to bring the energy resources of Central Asia across Afghanistan to South Asia and the world.