When Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, they left a land that was in distress. Millions of land mines lay strewn across the countryside, and fields and pastures were mined. Almost every road that had been paved was obliterated, and 5 million Afghan people had fled their homeland to escape the violence.

Civil War

Many of the Afghan people hoped that the jihad was over; after all, they reasoned, the mujahideen had driven the invaders out. Those families who had been relocated in refugee camps across the border in Pakistan wanted to return home. Even though there was a great deal of work to be done to rebuild farms and villages, people were anxious to return.

But it soon became clear that the violence had not stopped. The mujahideen, unable to agree on who should be in charge of the...