The Punishment of Virtue (32 page)

What must be confusing things, the humanitarians decided, was the behavior of the Americans. It was muddying aid workers'white-painted neutrality. In other words, if Ricardo was killed, it must be because he was mistaken, in some way, for an American.

I think this analysis is wrong. I believe this conflict is different. This is a struggle between parties—on both sides—working to precipitate that “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. To Muslim parties to this conflict—Al-Qaeda or a few leading Taliban—there
is
no difference between an American soldier and Ricardo. No matter how nuanced the aid workers' specific views might be, no matter how opposed to U.S. policy, they cannot be outside this conflict.

If anything, they are more threatening to Al-Qaeda's goals than Washington hard-liners. For Western crusaders and their with-us-or-against-us rhetoric force Muslims to choose sides, and most choose the opposing camp—just what Al-Qaeda wants. A Ricardo, by contrast, with his hand out like a bridge, increases understanding, believes in coexistence, offers human dignities to the people he helps without stripping others away. He appeals to the Muslims he is assisting in ways that allow them to approach and consider. Ricardo's death was no mistake. He was the militants' principal foe.

My reasoning has been confirmed to some degree by the fact that the attacks against foreign civilians were not visited disproportionately upon Americans. On the contrary, those organizations that made the most elaborate show of their neutrality and their opposition to the U.S. government, like Ricardo's International Committee of the Red Cross or Paris-based Doctors Without Borders, seemed to be taking the worst hits.

By pulling out when struck, groups like this relinquish the new and vital role that is beckoning—to take on the belligerents on both sides, by obstinately forging links, eroding ignorance, rebuilding bridges.

This is a combat, I believe, that is worth taking risks for.

Ricardo's murder did not make me panic; it made me mad. The inquiries into its circumstances that Akrem and I conducted in tandem proved more than anything to date the cynicism of Governor Shirzai. He was playing for the new Afghanistan, getting plenty of money for it, and playing against it too.

The militants who killed Ricardo, according to Akrem's information, included some of his own Alokozai tribesmen—that is how he had managed to land an informant. But they were mostly Barakzais, members of the governor's tribe. Natives of the villages up there by the Urozgan Province line, they had run to Pakistan with the fleeing Taliban. This was their first time back.

It is not that I suspected Governor Shirzai of active collaboration in the killing just because the perpetrators were Barakzais. It was that it simply did not seem possible for him to be unaware that some kind of attack was coming and, the way it looked to me, he chose not to thwart it.

Contrary to popular assumption in the West, the very loneliness of the Afghan countryside makes it harder, not easier, to hide in its wilds: navigable trails across the cragged wasteland are scarce and locals know them intimately, lovingly. No stranger can pass unseen, unknown, unbidden, unprotected. Given the tribal affiliations with Shirzai's Barakzais, the size of the infiltration, and given the efficient Afghan grapevine, Shirzai must have been alerted to the militants' arrival. Even I knew about the infiltration, in a way, since I had heard about their presence that afternoon in Akrem's office.

I soon found out my hunch was right. An army officer loyal to the Karzais had received a call from a colleague up in that wild district, saying that a large group of armed men had moved in. The Karzai loyalist had taken the information to Governor Shirzai, urging action. “We'll see about it next week,” the governor had replied.

But next week was too late.

Shirzai's behavior after Ricardo's execution rang an equally false note against the tuning fork tempering inside me. He took to the airwaves denouncing the insurgents, swearing he would root out all Taliban from government office—as though the personal rivals he was referring to had anything to do with this event. But it was not till the next day that he moved an armed force to the zone, less than three hours' drive from Kandahar. In Afghanistan, that kind of body language signified safe conduct for the insurgents.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, snatched at the declarations Shirzai pronounced for their benefit, parsing them for meaning like a poem in school, but never holding them up for comparison with his actions. Through several discussions at the airport and with contacts in Kabul, I learned what the State Department representative was writing to his hierarchy; I fired off a note of my own to counter his. To me, the event and the governor's handling of it were the clearest proof to date that Shirzai was working for—and satisfying—two masters with contradictory agendas: the United States and Pakistan. He was a man with two kites in the air.

I was at a loss to understand why U.S. officials could not see this. More broadly, I was at a loss to understand why American decision makers could not see how suicidally contradictory their alliance with Pakistan was.

To us on the ground, it was obvious that the resurgent Taliban who had killed Ricardo, these “insurgents” whom U.S. soldiers were fighting and getting killed by, did not represent an indigenous Afghan movement rooted in local ideology. Afghans, for one thing, were vaccinated against ideology by now, having lived through three ideologically inspired revolutions and a civil war in twenty-five years, and having had untold suffering inflicted on them at each turn. Afghans, according to every one of them I had spoken with in town or in the countryside, wanted a government that functioned, whatever its stripes.

And so, in the sense of a popular indigenous movement of opposition to the new government in Afghanistan, the “insurgency” was not one. It was a nuisance deliberately stirred up across the border. This was evident to us in Kandahar because no effort was made to hide the fact in Pakistan. Taliban, advertising their affiliation by way of their dress or their explicit self-identification, were given privileged treatment at the border in Chaman; they paraded around Quetta; they carried guns and weapons-authorization cards issued by the Pakistani government; their offices and lodgings were located in a well-known Quetta neighborhood, previously provided to the anti-Soviet mujahideen. These insurgents were not squirreling themselves away in warrens in Afghan mountains or the supposedly uncontrolled tribal areas of northern Pakistan, as the Pakistani government artfully persuaded the West. They were manufactured and maintained, housed, trained, and equipped by stubborn, shortsighted officials in that very Pakistani government. Our allies.

By so doing, these Pakistani officials were merely persevering in an established policy. For the past three decades, Pakistan had been manipulating religious extremism to further its regional agenda in south Asia. During the Soviet invasion, the Pakistani government cultivated the most ideologically extremist Afghan faction, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar's group.
¹
When it failed to gain control of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, the Pakistani government largely ginned up the Taliban “movement,” pressing into service ambitious petty commanders from the anti-Soviet period and uprooted,
madrassa
-inculcated youth from the refugee camps.

Similar factions had been employed to keep alive Pakistani claims to Kashmir, a paradise in the Himalayan Mountains over which India and Pakistan were in a custody dispute: four wars since independence from the British in 1947. Pakistani troops, under the man who now ran the country, General Pervez Musharraf, had mixed with and even dressed up as fundamentalist militants to launch an attack on Indian territory in Kashmir in 1999.
²

However, there is an important distinction that I began to discern as I pored over this issue during those early months of 2003. It is a distinction between global agendas and local ones. Pakistani officials' support for and manipulation of extremist factions seemed to be essentially local and tactical—the manipulation of religious ideology for ends that were not fundamentally ideological. Some of these officials must have been moved on a personal level by international holy war convictions. The government certainly tapped into the vocabulary of those convictions in order to win recruits. But in substance, it did not appear to me that Islamabad was embarked on an Al-Qaeda–style global
jihadi
movement. Pakistani officials' aim was not to bring the world under an Islamist government or even to cut ties with the West; rather, their goals were consistently regional and temporal—maintaining an upper hand in the regional balance of power, especially vis-à-vis India. Unfortunately, the Pakistani people were paying for these goals with their long-term futures, for, by instrumentalizing Islamist extremism, their government was deliberately wallowing in the forces of violence and regression.

It is this distinction between global and local agendas that explains how Pakistan has been able to play Washington so deftly since the Taliban demise. Every few months, the Pakistani government has caught and turned over an Al-Qaeda figure, as though throwing the United States a bone, while continuing to abet the Taliban insurgents who are aiming rocket launchers at U.S. soldiers, aid workers, and loyal Afghans inside Afghanistan.

Recent history helps explain the paradox of the contrasting treatment meted out to Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders—who are ostensibly, though not actually, part of the same overall movement.

When, a few years after the Soviet withdrawal, Washington and Moscow agreed to stop financing opposing factions in what had by then degenerated into a savagely vengeful Afghan civil war—the “
mujahideen
nights”
³
—Pakistan was abruptly deprived of a gush of U.S. taxpayer dollars. It had to look elsewhere for money for the protégés it was still backing in the fight to take over Afghanistan: first Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, and then, when he failed to gain power, the Taliban. Saudi Arabia had matched U.S. grants to the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance for years. And when Washington and Moscow stopped funding the civil war, Saudi Arabia stayed the course.

The Pakistani government must have been grateful, for conservative Saudis, inside and outside government, were eager to put their piety on display. Hoping to make up or cover up for a certain contradiction between their strict precepts and their occasionally debauched behavior, they tended to support the same extremist groups that Pakistan did.

In 1994, the Taliban, with overwhelming Pakistani support and involvement, swept across the Afghan south. But they had a more difficult time crossing the invisible ethnic line that divides Afghanistan just below Kabul. There the front line ground to a halt, amid bloody fighting. And so when, in 1996, a rich, influential, and seasoned Saudi individual named Usama bin Laden offered to come back to Afghanistan, where he had fought against the Soviets, when he offered to bring the threads of a network he had been building, along with money and veteran fighters and the know-how to train more and the beginnings of a worldwide charismatic following, the Pakistani government was apparently happy to have him come and quickly throw his weight behind the Taliban's effort to conquer the rest of the country.
⁴
Given Pakistan's overwhelming interest in what went on in Afghanistan, it is inconceivable that Usama bin Laden could have set himself up there without Pakistani approval.

But his agenda diverged from that of Islamabad. His focus was global, not local. And his was a totalitarian ideology. While detailing fighters to the Afghan front and Kashmir, Usama bin Laden was also setting about the job of provoking world war. Eventually, that agenda hijacked the Taliban movement. Kandaharis began experiencing Arabs as their rulers, instead of the local mullahs they thought they had bargained for. And Afghanistan was transformed into a country-sized staging ground for terrorist actions against the West.

The culmination of this progression was 9/11 and the U.S. reaction to the attacks. Because of what its Arab guests had done, the Pakistani government found itself, overnight, expelled from ownership by sometimes prickly proxy of about 90 percent of Afghanistan. Now Pakistan was a reviled refugee, driven out, like all of those miserable Afghan families.
⁵
All because of Al-Qaeda.

My own guess is that the Pakistani government did not waste a lot of love on Al-Qaeda operatives after 9/11. And so, in the post-Taliban calculus, Pakistan was not protecting Al-Qaeda operatives any more. While I was waiting on the border in Chaman to cross into Afghanistan back in December of 2001, I heard about dozens of Arabs who were being harbored in Pakistan. Even then I had the feeling that they were a kind of bank account, money squirreled away to be exchanged later for Washington's indulgence.

And sure enough, in the years following the Taliban defeat, Islamabad has captured and turned over a leading Al-Qaeda member at the steady rate of one every three to four months. Interestingly, these terrorist masterminds have usually been arrested in major cities, and not in the wild “tribal areas” where the Pakistani army stages highly publicized military operations against anti-American militants.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has hardly captured or turned over a single leading member of the Taliban regime, though they display themselves openly in Quetta and meet to plan their activities there. On the contrary, Pakistan has continued to provide former Taliban with logistical and material support, to tolerate the training camps that operate in plain sight, to provide “former” Pakistani army officers to teach there, and to offer insurgents safe passage back and forth across the Afghan border.