Taliban (17 page)

The Americans failed miserably to exploit this tide of goodwill towards them. The first draft of the battle-plan Operation Enduring Freedom that George Bush approved contained no commitment whatsoever to rebuilding Afghanistan. ‘We are not into nation-building, we are focused on justice,’ he said – by which he meant the capture of bin Laden by all possible means. He was later persuaded that ‘it would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called “nation-building” after our military mission is complete’ – a policy later referred to by one despairing foreign policy adviser as ‘nation-building-lite’. International attention and resources moved on to Iraq almost as soon as the Taliban were toppled. In the crucial first year after 9/11, the international community spent just
75 per capita on reconstruction in Afghanistan, compared to an average of
250 in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Rwanda.

The best way to make aid dollars count was in the countryside. Eighty per cent of the population lived off the land, and officials at
the US Agency for International Development, USAID, were convinced that helping farmers to overcome the effects of five years of drought could cement the American victory by turning the farmers away from the Taliban for ever. But the Pentagon had little interest in fertilizers and irrigation systems in those days. The US military had determined that all American officials should have an armed escort in Afghanistan, but because there were not enough troops available, the few USAID officials at the embassy in Kabul seldom even left the building.

‘Volatile, security-risk-prone areas never stopped USAID in the past, so what was so different about Afghanistan post 9/11? Nothing – except that the Department of Defense did not want us around to see how they were aiding the wrong guys,’ said one official who later resigned.

When John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961, he specifically intended to create a humanitarian organization that would operate independently of the political and military interference that had plagued its predecessors. This did not now prevent the CIA from exploiting it as another tool with which to crush al-Qaida. As late as 2003, the agency was deciding which projects USAID should pursue entirely on the basis of the help these would give to the warlords it backed.

A priceless early opportunity to shape post-Taliban Afghanistan was thus wasted. Helping farmers to plant crops was a solution for the long term, while the neo-cons were looking for short-cuts: an approach that sometimes went disastrously wrong. The US Air Force’s idea of helping the starving was to bomb them with HDRs, or Humanitarian Daily Rations. Some 37,000 of these bright yellow food packages were dropped on the first night of the assault on Kabul alone. Most unfortunately, they were the same colour as
the cluster bomblets the Americans had also dropped against the Taliban, at least 12,000 of which turned out to be duds.
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The propaganda effect of the HDR drops was thrown into reverse as Afghan public radio issued warnings to keep away from anything American and yellow.

Another critical mistake was the Bonn Agreement. On 27 November, under the auspices of the UN, the Afghan factions gathered at the Petersburg Hotel on the banks of the Rhine to agree upon the deployment of an international peace-keeping force in Kabul, which would later become the Nato-organized ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force. The agreement also called for the setting up of a ‘broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government’.

The trouble with the Bonn meeting was that the twenty-five delegates who attended it were anything but representative of the Afghan people. None of the so-called Rome Group, who spoke for the long-exiled monarch Zahir Shah, had been in Afghanistan for the last twenty years. The Northern Alliance team almost exclusively comprised Panjshiri Tajiks, while the delegation from Peshawar was dominated by the family members of Pir Gailani, a Pashtun politician and ex-mujahideen fighter of only middling importance. The Uzbeks, Hazaras and Heratis were barely represented. Worse still, there were no Pashtuns from Kandahar or anywhere in the south, apart from Karzai. And the Taliban were not invited.

‘The Taliban should have been at Bonn,’ the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said later. ‘This was our original sin. If . . . we had asked them to come, because they still represented something, maybe they would have come. Even if none came, at least we would have tried.’

Just as the Pashtuns feared, the Transitional Authority cabinet
that emerged was heavily weighted towards the Northern Alliance. The Tajiks, accounting for barely a quarter of the population, were granted control of eight ministries, while the Pashtuns, who account for 42 per cent of the population, were given eleven; and of these, only Karzai came from the south.

No wonder the Taliban considered him an American stooge. The Bonn Agreement was described as a ‘roadmap’ for Afghanistan until 2005, by when it was hoped all the institutions necessary for a functioning modern democracy would be in place: a justice system, a bureaucracy, a police force, an army. A commission was set up to develop a new national constitution – the country’s sixth since the 1920s – which was eventually ratified at a loya jirga (grand council) in Kabul in December 2003. The Constitution – effectively a rewrite of one drawn up in the 1960s under Zahir Shah, but without the monarchy – provided for an elected President and National Assembly; Karzai was formally elected for a five-year term in October 2004.

The greatest problem was that the supposedly vanquished Taliban remained excluded from the process. The constitution’s 160 Articles were drafted with the help of several Western experts such as Barnett Rubin, a political scientist at New York University, and Clare Lockhart of the Washington-based Institute for State Effectiveness. Karzai’s opponents argued that the new constitution was a foreign imposition – and were thus almost bound to object to the terms of the new government.

There were other mistakes, notably a failure to take into account the trade and security interests of Afghanistan’s regional neighbours. Pakistan, Iran, the ex-Soviet states to the north, India and China all had much to gain or lose from whatever emerged from the Bonn process. They should, arguably, have had a direct stake in
it via the UN, which might have convened a special regional conference. Instead, the neighbours were never even formally consulted.

Pakistan and the ISI, in particular, were never likely to take the West’s empowerment of the non-Pashtuns lying down. The Northern Alliance had always been seen as pro-Indian, and a Kabul government dominated by it was perceived as a disaster for Pakistani interests. Delhi had helped to arm Massoud during the Jihad, and even Karzai had studied political science at the university at Shimla in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, the neo-cons’ determination not to commit serious numbers of troops to Afghanistan convinced the ISI that the Americans would not stay there for long. Throughout 2002 there were no more than 4,500 ISAF troops in the country, the bulk of them in and around Kabul. The ISI therefore advised Musharraf that it intended to nurture the remnants of the Taliban, whom they calculated would soon be needed again; and Musharraf, despite his public alliance with Washington on the War on Terror, needed little prodding to support this policy in private. He too was innately suspicious of India, and described the Northern Alliance as ‘a bunch of thugs’.

There were a few sacrificial lambs, notably Mullah Zaeef, who by that stage was the Taliban’s ambassador in Islamabad. Zaeef had spent the weeks after 9/11 imploring Bush and his Afghan adviser, Zalmay Khalilzad, to pursue dialogue with Mullah Omar instead of war, but to no avail. A senior ISI chief came to ask him to form and lead a faction of ‘moderate’ Taliban against Omar, but Zaeef distrusted his motives and was not prepared to break his beyat, the oath of spiritual allegiance, to his Amir. The last ISI officer who came to see him was none other than Colonel Imam, Mullah Omar’s trainer during the Jihad. They exchanged greetings, and Imam burst into tears.

‘Almighty Allah might have decided what is to take place in Afghanistan, but Pakistan is to blame!’ he blurted. ‘How much cruelty it has done to its neighbour! And how much more will come!’

It was apparent to Zaeef that his ambassadorial days were numbered. He was at home with his family late one evening, still working to secure the release of the Taliban fighters captured by Dostum at Kunduz, when three ISI men came for him. ‘Your Excellency, you are no longer an Excellency!’ said the senior officer, who according to Zaeef ‘looked as if he had been dragged out of hell itself’. He was driven to Peshawar. Even at this late stage he could not believe that ‘Pakistani soldiers, the defenders of the Holy Koran’ intended to hand him over to the Americans: ‘A moment written in my memory like a stain on my soul.’ In Peshawar he was stripped and beaten and shackled to the floor of a helicopter that transferred him to the hold of a US aircraft carrier: the start of a long journey that would end in a four-year spell in Guantanamo.

But Zaeef was a high-profile exception. In fact, the Taliban were safe in Pakistan after 9/11. The key to the movement’s regeneration was the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), the Assembly of Islamic Clergy, which controlled hundreds of Deobandi madrasahs across the region, and which had raised funds and provided troops for the movement ever since its foundation. Their power and influence was at its peak in 2002, when they swept to power in provincial elections in the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan. The JUI Minister of Agriculture in Baluchistan, Maulana Faizullah, had fought alongside Mullah Omar in Kandahar.

By 2003 there were at least seven Taliban training camps in Baluchistan, and more than fifty JUI-run madrasahs along the 80-mile road between Quetta and the Afghan border at Chaman. That
summer, vehicle dealers sold the Taliban nine hundred motorbikes. Mullah Omar, who went into hiding in Helmand and Uruzgan immediately after 9/11, arrived in Quetta at the end of 2002. By then the Taliban had effectively taken over a whole suburb of the city, Pashtunabad, where all the old rules about television and women and kite-flying applied, just like in Kabul and Kandahar in the mid-1990s. The entire region had turned into a mustering point for a new insurgency – and the ISI, driven on by reports that India was ‘taking over’ Kabul with its own multi-million-dollar recon-struction and military training programmes, was complicit in every part of it. Between 2002 and 2006, not a single Taliban commander was handed over to the Americans.

Such an enormous operation could hardly be kept secret. In April 2003, a month after the US invasion of Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad visited Islamabad to urge the Pakistanis to do more to rein in the resurgent Taliban, but was told that his concerns were ‘totally ridiculous and baseless’. Karzai then visited Musharraf and presented him with a list of the Quetta addresses of several senior Taliban figures. A spokesman for Musharraf subsequently denied the existence of such a list; whereupon the Americans, astonishingly, declined to corroborate Karzai’s version of the meeting, even though the list had been drawn up with the help of their embassy in Kabul.

Musharraf was playing Washington like a fish. He knew the Americans wouldn’t risk pushing him too hard now that they were committed to Iraq. The primary US mission in the region was to hunt down al-Qaida, not the Taliban – and the ISI made very sure that any Arabs at large in the border areas were kept well away from Quetta. The cadres of Taliban being reconstituted there were primarily an Afghan Pashtun affair – although the ISI made this
very difficult to check. For the last seven years, indeed, it has been almost impossible for any Western journalist to obtain official permission to visit Quetta, let alone Pashtunabad. The
New York Times
’s Carlotta Gall, who visited the city without permission in December 2006, was beaten up by a gang of ISI agents who then impounded her notebooks, laptop and camera equipment. She had earlier interviewed a former Taliban commander who said he had been jailed by the ISI for refusing to go back to Afghanistan to fight: an arrest that was naturally presented, locally and to the West, as a part of the crackdown on militants. The truth was that the ISI were not just turning a blind eye to the Taliban’s resurgence, but actively promoting it.