Ghost Wars (49 page)

By 1994 the Kandahar Durranis had fallen into disarray. Many prominent leaders lived in scattered exile in Pakistan, Europe, or the United States. Pakistan’s army and intelligence service, fearing Pashtun royal power, squeezed out Durrani leaders who might revive claims to the Afghan throne. The mujahedin leaders most favored by Pakistani intelligence—Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Sayyaf, and Khalis—did not include any Durrani Pashtuns. Also, the geography of the anti-Soviet war sidelined Kandahar and its clans. The conflict’s key supply lines flowed north from Kabul to the Soviet Union or east toward Pakistan. None of this was Durrani territory. Kandahar knew heavy fighting during the Soviet occupation, but in the war’s strategic geography, it was often a cul-de-sac.

After the Soviet withdrawal the Kandahar region dissolved into a violent checkerboard—less awful than hellish Kabul, but awful still. Hekmatyar’s well-armed, antiroyal forces, backed by Pakistani intelligence, lingered like a storm cloud on the city’s outskirts. Trucking mafias that reaped huge profits from the heroin trade and other smuggling rackets propped up local warlords. Any group of young Pashtun fighters with a few Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers could set up a checkpoint and extort payments on the highways. By 1994 the main road from Quetta in Pakistan through Kandahar and on toward Herat and Iran was choked by hundreds of extralegal roadblocks. So was the road from Kandahar to Kabul. Shopkeepers in the ramshackle markets clustered around Ahmed Shah Durrani’s still magnificent tomb in central Kandahar—now a fume-choked city of perhaps 750,000—battled ruthless extortion and robbery gangs. Reports of unchecked rape and abduction, including child rape, fueled a local atmosphere of fear and smoldering anger. One of the most powerful Durrani warlords in Kandahar, Mullah Naqibullah, had fallen into a state of madness later diagnosed as a medical condition that required antipsychotic drugs. “I was crazy,” Naqibullah admitted years later. “The doctors told me that I had a heavy workload, and it had damaged some of my brain cells.”
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The birth and rise of the Taliban during 1994 and the emergence of the movement’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, were often described in the United States and Europe as the triumph of a naïve, pious, determined band of religious students swept into power on a wave of popular revulsion over Kandahar’s criminal warlords. The Taliban themselves emphasized this theme after they acquired power. As they constructed their founding narrative, they weaved in stories of Mullah Omar’s visionary dreams for a new Islamic order for Afghanistan. They described his heroic rescue of abducted girls from warlord rapists. They publicized his yen for popular justice, as illustrated by the public hanging of depraved kidnappers. “It was like a myth,” recalled the Pashtun broadcaster Spozhmai Maiwandi, who spoke frequently with Taliban leaders. “They were taking the Koran and the gun and going from village to village saying, ‘For the Koran’s sake, put down your weapons.’ ” If the warlords refused, the Taliban would kill them. “For us it was not strange,” Maiwandi recalled. Religious students had meted out justice in rural Kandahar for ages. “We knew these people still existed.”
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Much of this Taliban narrative was undoubtedly rooted in fact even if credible eyewitnesses to the most mythologized events of 1994, such as the hanging of notorious rapists from a tank barrel, proved stubbornly elusive. In the end, however, the facts may have mattered less than the narrative’s claims on the past. The Taliban assembled their story so that Pashtuns could recognize it as a revival of old glory. The Taliban connected popular, rural Islamic values with a grassroots Durrani Pashtun tribal rising. They emerged at a moment when important wealthy Pashtun tribal leaders around Kandahar hungered for a unifying cause. The Taliban hinted that their militia would become a vehicle for the return to Afghanistan of King Zahir Shah from his exile in Rome. They preached for a reborn alliance of Islamic piety and Pashtun might.

Taliban,
which can be translated as “students of Islam” or “seekers of knowledge,” had been part of traditional village life in Kandahar’s conservative “Koran belt” since even before the time of Ahmed Shah Durrani. Taliban were as familiar to southern Pashtun villagers as frocked Catholic priests were in the Irish countryside, and they played a similar role. They taught schoolchildren, led prayers, comforted the dying, and mediated local disputes. They studied in hundreds of small
madrassas,
memorizing the Koran, and they lived modestly on the charity of villagers. As a young adult a Talib might migrate to a larger
madrassa
in an Afghan city or across the border in Pakistan to complete his Koranic studies. Afterward he might return to a village school and mosque as a full-fledged
mullah,
a “giver” of knowledge now rather than a seeker. In a region unfamiliar with formal government, these religious travelers provided a loose Islamic civil service. The Taliban were memorialized in traditional Afghan folk songs, which sometimes made teasing, skeptical reference to their purity; the students were traditionally regarded as so chaste that Pashtun women might not bother to cover themselves when they came around for meals.
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After the communist revolution in Kabul in 1978, Islamic students and mullahs fervently took up arms in rural Pashtun regions. At the village level, far removed from the manipulations of foreign intelligence services, they fortified the anti-Soviet jihad with volunteers and religious sanction. But the war altered the context and curriculum of Islamic studies in the Pashtun belt. This was especially true just across the border in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia’s World Muslim League, General Zia’s partners at Jamaat-e-Islami, Saudi intelligence, and Pakistani intelligence built scores of new
madrassas
in Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi, and in between. Scholars introduced new texts based on austere Saudi theology and related creeds. One of the most influential and richly endowed of these wartime
madrassas,
Haqqannia, located along the Grand Trunk Road just east of Peshawar, attracted tens of thousands of Afghan and Pakistani Talibs with free education and boarding. The students included many exiled Pashtuns from Kandahar.
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Haqqannia’s curriculum blended transnational Islamist politics with a theology known as Deobandism, named for a town in India that houses a centuries-old
madrassa.
During the nineteenth century the Deobandis led a conservative reform movement among Indian Muslims. Many Muslim scholars updated Islam’s tenets to adapt to changing societies. The Deobandis rejected this approach. They argued that Muslims were obliged to live exactly as the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed had done. Deobandi scholars drew up long lists of minute rules designed to eliminate all modern intrusions from a pious Muslim life. They combined this approach with a Wahhabi-like disdain for decoration, adornment, and music.
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Nearly all of the Taliban’s initial circle of Kandahar Durrani leaders had attended Haqqannia during the 1980s and early 1990s. They knew one another as theology classmates as well as veteran fighters in the anti-Soviet jihad.
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The Taliban leadership had no special tribal or royal status. They first surfaced as a small militia force operating near Kandahar city during the spring and summer of 1994, carrying out vigilante attacks against minor warlords, backed by a security fund of about $250,000 raised by local small businessmen. But as the months passed and their legend grew, they began to meet and appeal for backing from powerful Durrani Pashtun traders and chieftains. As these alliances developed, their movement was transformed.

Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai ran lucrative transportation and manufacturing businesses from Pakistan to Central Asia. He was also a leader of the huge Ahmadzai tribe. He had known some of the Taliban’s leaders as strong fighters around Kandahar during the anti-Soviet jihad. When he met them in late 1994, “the sell was very practical, and it made sense. They were saying, ‘Look, all these commanders have looted the country. They’re selling it piece by piece. They’ve got checkpoints. They’re raping women.’ And they wanted to bring in the king. They wanted to bring in national unity and have the
loya jirga
process,” a grand assembly that would ratify national Afghan leadership. “It was not something you could turn down.” Ahmadzai threw the Taliban his support.
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So did the Karzai family, the respected and influential Kandahar-born leaders of the Popalzai, the tribe of Ahmed Shah Durrani himself. Their decision to back the Taliban during 1994 signaled to Afghans that this student militia stood at the forefront of a broad movement—an uprising aimed at the enemies of Islam and also at the enemies of Pashtuns.

ABDUL AHAD KARZAI was the family patriarch. He and his son Hamid, then thirty-six years old, had been moderately important figures in the anti-Soviet resistance. As a boy Hamid Karzai had grown up in bucolic comfort on prewar Kandahar’s outskirts. He and his brothers played in dusty lanes they shared with chickens and goats. Their family owned rich farmland; by local standards, they were wealthy. After the Soviet invasion they fled to Quetta.
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A lively, thin, bald, elflike man with bright eyes and an irrepressible voice, Hamid Karzai worked during the 1980s as a press, logistics, and humanitarian aid coordinator for the royalist mujahedin faction of Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. He spoke English fluently and maintained many American contacts, including diplomats such as Ed McWilliams and Peter Tomsen. They and other State Department emissaries saw Karzai as an attractive, reasonable royalist, a wily talker and politician. Two of his brothers operated Afghan restaurants in the United States. His royal Pashtun heritage and ease with foreigners allowed him to mediate across Afghan political and ethnic lines after the Soviet withdrawal. He was a born diplomat, rarely confrontational and always willing to gather in a circle and talk. He was appointed deputy foreign minister in the fractured, Massoud-dominated Kabul government during 1993.

Karzai tried to stitch his own fratricidal government back together. For months he shuttled between besieged Kabul and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s hostile encampment at Charasyab. Karzai sought to mediate between the Kabul cabinet and its estranged prime minister even as they fired rockets at each other.

Early in 1994, Massoud’s security chief, the gnome-faced Mohammed Fahim, received a report that Hamid Karzai was working with Pakistani intelligence. Fahim set in motion a bizarre chain of events that led the Karzais to offer their prestige and support to the Taliban.

Like all of Massoud’s most trusted commanders, Fahim was an ethnic Tajik from the northeastern Panjshir Valley. By 1994 the Panjshiris were seen by many Pashtuns in Kabul as a kind of battle-fighting mafia. United by a decade of continuous war under Massoud’s charismatic leadership, the Panjshiris were close-knit, tough, secretive, and a government within the government. The Kabul cabinet remained multiethnic on paper, but as the civil war deepened, the power of Massoud’s Panjshiri-run defense and intelligence ministries grew. Relations with Pashtun leaders deteriorated.

An important cause was the unfinished war with Hekmatyar. Massoud saw Hekmatyar as an unreformed creature of Pakistani intelligence. He and his aides felt they could never be sure where the next ISI-backed conspiracy, fronted by Pashtun leaders, might be coming from. They were bathed in wartime rumors and had few reliable ways to sort fact from fiction. They were under continual bombardment in their candlelit Kabul offices. The war’s chronic violence and deceit shaped their judgments about friend and foe.

Acting on a tip that he was plotting against the government, Fahim sent intelligence officers to Hamid Karzai’s Kabul home. They arrested the deputy foreign minister and drove him to an interrogation center downtown, not far from the presidential palace. For several hours Fahim’s operatives worked on Karzai, accusing him of collusion with Pakistan. Karzai has never provided a direct account of what happened inside the interrogation cell. Several people he talked to afterward said that he was beaten up and that his face was bloodied and bruised. Some accounts place Fahim himself in the cell during parts of the interrogation. It is not clear whether Massoud knew about the interrogation or authorized it, although his lieutenants denied that he did.

The session ended with a bang. A rocket lobbed routinely by Hekmatyar into Kabul’s center slammed into the intelligence compound where Karzai was being interrogated. In the ensuing chaos Karzai slipped out of the building and walked dazed into Kabul’s streets. He made his way to the city bus station and quietly slipped onto a bus headed for Jalalabad. There a friend from the United Nations recognized Karzai walking on the street, his patrician face banged up and bruised, and helped him to a relative’s house. The next day Hamid Karzai crossed the Khyber Pass into exile in Pakistan. He would not return to Kabul for more than seven years.
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He joined his father in Quetta during the spring of 1994. Within months he heard about the Taliban’s rising. He knew many of the Taliban’s leaders from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad. “They were my buddies,” he explained later. “They were good people.”
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They were also a way to challenge a Kabul government whose officers had just beaten him into exile. Karzai was not especially wealthy by Western standards—his hard currency accounts were often precariously low—but he contributed $50,000 of his own funds to the Taliban as they began to organize around Kandahar. He also handed them a large cache of weapons he had hidden away and introduced them to prominent Pashtun tribal leaders. Separately, the Taliban met with an enthusiastic Abdul Haq and with many Durranis who maintained close ties with the exiled king Zahir Shah. The Durrani Pashtuns hoped now to achieve what the United Nations and American envoys such as Peter Tomsen had earlier failed to deliver. Urging their new white-bannered, Koran-waving rural militia forward, they plotted a return of the Afghan king.
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