Taliban (23 page)

Such humility is actually not so unusual among the Pashtuns. It is regarded by many as an essential quality, a defining part of the Pashtun identity: a virtue that is practised as well as to be aspired to, and which is mirrored in every Muslim’s literal abasement before Allah five times each day in the mosque. It also serves an important practical function, because the principal institution of Pashtun government has long been the shura, an Arabic word
meaning ‘consultation’, and which is twice mentioned in the Koran. For many centuries in Pashtun society, all important community decisions have been taken not by diktat but by consensus among a gathering of the community’s elders. For such a system to work, patience, a willingness to listen to others, and above all humility before one’s colleagues are all critical. Omar’s modest clothing was thus not a revolutionary rejection of the trappings of power but an affirmation of Pashtun tradition. Humility also helped to define the Taliban, because it stood in such sharp contrast to the cruel arrogance of the warlords they opposed.

My first priority in Kabul was to see Abdul Salam Zaeef again, because if anyone knew what Omar was planning, he did. He had moved home since I had last seen him in the spring of 2007, to a house in the western suburb of Khoshal Khan Mina. It wasn’t far but the drive was long thanks to the atrocious traffic, which was back to normal the morning after the Safi Landmark attack. There was ample time to think about that as the car inched past the bomb site. The crater caused by the primary blast, a ten-yard-wide hole in the middle of the street, had already been filled in with gravel. A white-gloved traffic policeman now stood at the epicentre, furiously blowing his whistle at the motorized anarchy of another Kabul rush-hour. There wasn’t a window pane intact for a hundred yards about. The shards had been swept into sparkling piles around the bases of every available tree and lamp-post. It had evidently been a big bomb.

The Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan had spent four and a half years in American military prisons, mostly in Guantanamo, before being released in the summer of 2006 and repatriated. Since then he had lived a strange sort of existence in
Kabul. Although never charged with any crime, he was still far from being a free man. Along with 136 others, he remained on the UN Security Council’s notorious ‘Consolidated List’ of individuals who were either still or had once been connected to the Taliban.
⁶
This meant that all his financial assets abroad were frozen, he was forbidden to travel, and he was, obviously, banned from involvement in ‘the direct or indirect supply, sale, or transfer of arms and related material, including military and paramilitary equipment, technical advice, assistance or training related to military activities’.

These sanctions made Zaeef sound a lot more dangerous than he appeared. He was so good-natured that in the 1990s in Islamabad, where he frequently gave press conferences, he was known as ‘the smiling Taliban’. He looked bookish, almost cuddly, with his twinkling eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and his big bushy beard, and in fact he was clever, as well as fair-minded and curious about others and the world beyond Afghanistan. Some nicknamed him ‘the techno-mullah’ because of his unconcealed enthusiasm for the internet and all the gadgetry that accompanies it.

He was not smiling so much when I saw him in 2007. Understandably perhaps, he was still smarting at his treatment at the hands of the Americans. Partly as an exercise in catharsis, partly to document the injustice that he had experienced and witnessed, he had written a memoir that would not be published in English
for another three years.
⁴
He gave me a copy of the manuscript, which told the same shameful stories that he often related in person then, when the memory of his incarceration was still fresh and raw.

This was a man who had tried to put a brake on the Taliban’s ambitions, who once reduced his close friend Mullah Omar to tears when he accused him of propagating war in the north. At the time of his arrest in 2002 he was not a terrorist but a diplomat in Islamabad, who had tried earnestly to warn Omar what would happen if he did not acquiesce to American demands to do something about Osama bin Laden. Zaeef had a reputation as one of the Taliban’s few proper thinkers. As a pronounced moderate by the movement’s standards, his potential as a peace negotiator should have been immediately obvious. Yet his captors made no effort to nurture or exploit that potential. Instead, America in general and its military in particular seemed set on the crudest kind of revenge after 9/11. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were swept up in the wake of the invasion. All were branded ‘enemy combatants’, regardless of their actual role or status, and all were treated the same – which is to say, appallingly.

Zaeef spent six months in prisons at the airbases at Bagram and Kandahar before being sent to Guantanamo. He was shackled, gagged and hooded, kicked and beaten ‘like a drum’. The Americans knew his importance: ‘This one, this is the big one,’ he heard someone say at one point, before he was thrown to the ground once again and ‘stomped on with army boots’. After one such kicking, during which his captors ‘behaved like animals for what seemed like hours, [they] sat on top of me and proceeded to have a conversation, as if they were merely sitting on a park bench. I abandoned all hope; the ordeal had been long and I was convinced I would die soon.’

He was interrogated countless times, although there was nothing the Americans could ever hang on him. Zaeef was convinced they knew that he had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on their interests. Like other Taliban leaders, almost certainly including Omar himself, he had no forewarning of 9/11. The interrogators themselves changed constantly, but the questions were always the same: ‘Where is Mullah Omar? Where is bin Laden?’ If no distinction was made in the way the prisoners were treated, no distinction was made either between the Taliban and al-Qaida. The questioning itself became a form of abuse, particularly when carried out in conjunction with sleep-deprivation techniques, which was often.

Many prisoners, according to Zaeef, were entirely innocent. One man he saw being roughly dragged into an interrogation tent turned out to be 105 years old. At Guantanamo he met a man who had been picked up on the grounds that he was ‘“wearing the clothes of a mujahid” . . . One man was arrested because he was carrying a mirror, another for having a phone, and a third for watching his cattle with binoculars. One of the prisoners said that they had taken him because his only form of identification was a 25-year-old ID card from the time he had been a refugee. These were the facts and the proof of America.’

It seemed a deliberate policy to humiliate the prisoners, who at Guantanamo were kept in factory-farm-style rows of contiguous mesh cages, six foot by four. In an uncomfortable echo of the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Kandahar Zaeef was stripped naked and photographed before a group of mockers that included women. Even more damagingly, Islam was routinely insulted as well. The prisoners’ heads and, worse, their beards were shaved: ‘A sin in the Hanafi faith,’ Zaeef commented. ‘Every single
hair was gone . . . It is better to be killed than to have one’s beard shaved.’ At Bagram, meanwhile, a soldier urinated on a copy of the Koran and threw it in a bin. ‘All over the camp you could hear the men weep . . . We had been given a few copies of the Koran by the Red Cross, but now we asked them to take them back. We could not protect them from the soldiers who often used them to punish us.’

There was more, much more, in the same vein: a woeful catalogue of abuse and suffering. Guantanamo was ‘a graveyard of the living’. There were shades of a Second World War concentration camp in Zaeef’s descriptions of prisoners who went mad under the appalling pressure of incarceration without apparent hope of release – or else were already mad at the time of their arrest. Camp Five, a solitary-confinement block set apart from the rest of the camps, became notorious. Human-rights monitors were seldom if ever allowed to inspect ‘Grave Five’, as some prisoners called it. ‘Each brother who spent time in Camp Five looked like a skeleton when he was released; it was painful to look at their thin bodies.’

Just as at my last visit in 2007, the entrance to his Kabul house was under permanent police guard, complete with a little hut to provide shelter from the elements. Zaeef had been told that this was for his ‘protection’. He had no doubt, however, that the hut’s occupants were no ordinary policemen but agents of the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s Secret Service, who surreptitiously logged the identity of everyone who came and went. He was effectively living under a form of house arrest.

This did not mean that he lived in isolation. On the contrary, his
hujra
– the public reception room found in every Afghan home – was usually full of visitors. In 2007 I had sat down to lunch on his
sunny porch with at least a dozen bearded and turbaned men. Then as now, Zaeef was visibly broke, but hospitality was an obligation among the Pashtuns and there was no economizing on it. Cross-legged around a vinyl mat on the floor, the diners ate fast and in silence as was customary, attacking the mounds of rice and mutton with the dedication of the semi-starved. There was no doubt they were Taliban supporters – ex-fighters or administrators who had come to pay court to one of the movement’s originals. My translator and I had left our driver in the street to guard the car, and I won a murmur of approval when I asked if some food could be taken out to him. Consideration for others, respect for inferiors, disdain for hierarchy: I had accidentally done a Pashtun thing. You could get a long way with the Taliban simply by minding your Ps and Qs.

These days, Zaeef was in so much demand that his house had not one but two hujras. At busy times he shuttled back and forth between them, running two discussions at once. At night, the rooms doubled as sleeping quarters for guests who had often travelled far to see him. It wasn’t just Taliban supporters who came to visit now but the emissaries of foreign embassies, officials from the UN, as well as representatives of the government itself. Karzai might not have trusted Zaeef, but the truth was that he also needed him. If Quetta was ever to be brought to the negotiating table, as the President said he wanted, then Zaeef was reckoned by almost everybody to be the likeliest go-between.

Despite his travel ban, Zaeef had flown to Mecca in September 2008 for talks hosted by King Abdullah and which were attended by Karzai’s older brother Qayyum. Other senior ex-Taliban figures living under UN sanctions were present, including the former Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil. Zaeef did not explain
how they were able to do this. Either the UN travel ban was not being enforced properly, or else someone at the UN had deliberately looked the other way. At least one newspaper described the meeting as ‘historic’,
⁵
although it was far from clear what was achieved in Mecca. The Quetta leadership was not directly represented. Zaeef claimed, to general disbelief, that the war in Afghanistan was not even discussed, and that he had only gone there to celebrate
iftar
, the traditional breaking of the fast during the month of Ramadan. Nevertheless, when the Mecca meeting became public knowledge, it opened the possibility of meaningful Kabul–Quetta dialogue for the first time.

It was mid-morning when we arrived at the house at Khoshal Khan Mina, but Zaeef had been up half the night in a meeting and was still asleep. He was yawning when he eventually appeared in hujra number one, where he curled himself up in a blanket, weary but still twinkly-eyed between his black turban and beard. There was nothing so mild about his words, though. If anything, his anger at the Americans had hardened rather than dissipated with the passage of time.

‘In my last days as an ambassador in 2001, I sent an email to the world – to Congress, to all the embassies – warning that if you attack Afghanistan by force, you will lose,’ he said. ‘Nothing has changed. We are the same people.’

Whatever had been discussed in Mecca in 2008, he was in no mood to help negotiate a peace with the US now.

‘Three years ago there was a possibility, but not now. The Americans talk of peace but they are not sincere. They want a long war, and then to force their conditions on us.’

‘They don’t want a long war,’ I countered. ‘They want it to end. General McChrystal feels, as a soldier, that there has been
enough fighting. He has said a political settlement is inevitable.’

‘So why are they still fighting? What are they doing in Marjah?’

‘The point of the troop surge is to place the West in a position of strength from which to negotiate their exit.’

‘But that makes no sense! The Americans are already in a position of strength. They have everything – the troop numbers, complete control of the air. We can’t even move abroad!’

This wasn’t quite true, of course, but I let it pass. The UN travel ban was still technically in effect, despite repeated pleas to lift it from many quarters, including from President Karzai himself. That these pleas were still being ignored illustrated Karzai’s puppet status in the eyes of his Afghan opponents. To Zaeef and his circle the ban was a clumsy but humiliating symbol of Western power over them, and which proved once again that the US did not want to negotiate. Few believed it was really about the world’s security interests. Although the sanction was authorized by the UN Security Council, Zaeef had no doubt that it would only ever be lifted on America’s say-so.

‘The Americans talk about justice,’ he went on, ‘but they are killing innocent people here almost every night. Is that justice?’ He was leaning forward now, stabbing the coffee table with an index finger for emphasis, his eyes fixed on mine. ‘When they make a mistake they offer
200 for each martyr in compensation, yet after the Lockerbie bombing the US demanded
100 million for every American killed! Tell me – is that justice? Are Afghans really so worthless in their eyes?’