Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition

by Ahmed Rashid

  Pakistan's policy-makers did not always agree with what I wrote. It was not easy to disagree with Zia. In 1985 I was interrogated for several hours by Zia's intelligence agencies and warned not to write for six months because of my criticism. I continued to write under pseudonyms. My phones were constantly tapped, my movements monitored.

  Afghanistan, like the Afghans themselves, is a country of contradic tions that are constantly played out for any reporter. Gulbuddin Hikme tyar, the extremist Mujaheddin leader sentenced me to death for being a communist sympathiser – along with George Arney of the BBC – and for a year published my name in his party newspaper, like a wanted ad. Later, in Kabul, a crowd chased and tried to kill me when I arrived moments after a rocket fired by Hikmetyar had killed two small boys in the Mic royan housing complex. The Afghans thought I was a Hikmetyar agent checking out the damage.

  In 1981 when Najibullah was head of the notorious KHAD, the Afghan communist secret service modelled on the KGB, he personally interrog ated me after KHAD officers arrested me for reading a banned copy of Time magazine at Kabul's Post Office. After he became president and I had interviewed him several times, he thought I could carry a conciliatory message from him to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. I told him she would not listen to me, and she did not.

  And many times I have been caught in the contradiction of crossfires, between Afghan communist troops and the Mujaheddin, between rival Mujaheddin warlords and between the Taliban and Ahmad Shah Masud's tank-gunners. I have never been the warrior type and mostly ducked.

  My interest in Afghanistan could not have been sustained without the help of many people, above all the Afghans. To the Taliban mullahs, the anti-Taliban commanders, the warlords who went before them, the warriors on the battlefield and the taxi-drivers, intellectuals, aid-workers and farmers – too many to mention and mostly too sensitive to mention – my many thanks.

  Apart from the Afghans I have received the greatest help from Pakis tani ministers, diplomats, generals, bureaucrats and intelligence officers, who either wanted to take me on or were sincerely sympathetic to my views. Many of them have become firm friends.

  Over the years the UN agencies and the non-governmental aid organizations have provided a home for me all over Afghanistan and have given me ideas, information and support. At the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan I owe many thanks to its successive chiefs, Martin Barber, Alfredo Witschi-Cestari and Erick de Mul and to Brigette Neubacher, who has been in the Afghan business almost as long as I have. At the UN High Commission for Refugees I thank Robert Van Leeuwen, Shamsul Bari, Sri Wijaratne, Jacques Muchet, Rupert Colville and Monique Malha. At the World Food Programme the indefatigable Adan Adar understood the Taliban better than any other UN officer.

  At the UN Special Mission for Afghanistan many thanks are due to Francis Okelo, James Ngobi, Hiroshi Takahashi, Arnold Schifferdecker and Andrew Tesoriere and at the UN in New York, Benon Sevan and Andrew Gilmour. At the International Committee of the Red Cross, Thomas Gurtner and Oliver Durr, at Acted aid agency Frederick Rousseau and Marie Pierre Caley and at Save the Children Andrew Wilder and Sofe Elieussen. The friendship and support of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative to Afghanistan has been crit ical to this work.

  For 16 years I have reported on Afghanistan for the Far Eastern Eco nomic Review and I owe my editors, especially Nayan Chanda, enormous thanks for giving me space in the magazine, travel funds and sustaining an interest in running stories from what has now become an obscure war on the edge of Asia. The former foreign editor V.G Kulkarni took a huge risk when he convinced sceptical bosses that my 1997 story on the oil and gas pipeline battle in Afghanistan and Central Asia was worthy of a cover story. From that story was to emerge the now common phrase, ‘the new Great Game’. Foreign editors Andrew Waller and Andrew Sherry have continued that tradition.

  My thanks to the Daily Telegraph's successive foreign editors Nigel Wade, Patrick Bishop and Stephen Robinson for not totally forgetting about Afghanistan. And to fellow journalists and friends at the BBC World Service, Radio France International and Radio Australia for con stantly letting me air my views.

  In Pakistan, Arif Nizami, editor of the Nation has stood by me as I wrote reams on Afghanistan. He always gave me front page space and he always took the fak, fielding phone calls from invariably angry Pakistani government officials. Sherry Rehman, former editor of the Herald also allowed me to fill her magazine with my photographs and stories.

  This could not have been accomplished without the enormous support and friendship – not to speak of the website – of Barnett Rubin, who knows more about Afghanistan than anyone I know. I owe heartfelt thanks to the Afghanistan brigade of scholars, journalists and human rights activists who like me cannot leave the story and from whom I have learnt so much – Olivier Roy, Nancy Hatch Dupree, Ashraf Ghani, William Maley, Anders Fange, Citha Maass, Eqbal Ahmad, Patti Gossman, Abbas Faiz, Steve Levine, Tony Davis, Edward Giradet, Sadao Sakai, Tim McGirk, Bob Nicklesberg, Maleeha Lodhi, Rahimullah Yousufzai, Leslie Cockburn, Francois Chipaux, Jennifer Griffin and Gretchen Peters.

  I am deeply grateful to Cathy Gannon, the bureau chief of Associated Press in Islamabad and Kabul, who deserves several Pulitzer Prizes for her excellent coverage over the years, not to speak of her gener osity and modesty. My many thanks to successive Reuters bureau chiefs in Islamabad, Jane Macartney, Alistair Lyon and Andy Hill. Many thanks to Sarah Hunt Cooke, my editor at I. B. Tauris who believed in the project from the start and was patient with deadlines.

  This book could not have been written without the patience, love and understanding of my wife Angeles and my two children, who have put up with my wanderings and absences and have shared my feelings for Afghanistan for a long time.

  Ahmed Rashid

  Lahore

  INTRODUCTION:

  AFGHANISTAN'S HOLY

  WARRIORS

  On a warm spring afternoon in the southern city of Kandahar, Afghan shopkeepers were pulling down their shutters in preparation for the weekend. Heavy-set Pashtun tribesmen with long beards and black turbans tied tightly around their heads made their way through the narrow, dusty alleyways to the city's football stadium just beyond the main bazaar. Children, many of them orphaned and in rags, ran up and down the alleys, gesticulating and shouting with excitement at the thought of the spectacle they were about to witness.

  It was March 1997 and for two and a half years Kandahar had been the capital of the fierce Taliban Islamic warriors, who had conquered two-thirds of Afghanistan and were now battling to conquer the rest of the country. A handful of Taliban had fought the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s, more had fought the regime of President Najibullah who had hung on to power for four years after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, but the vast majority had never fought the communists and were young Koranic students, drawn from hundreds of madrassas (Islamic theology schools) that had been set up in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.

  Since their dramatic and sudden appearance at the end of 1994, the Taliban had brought relative peace and security to Kandahar and neighbouring provinces. Warring tribal groups had been crushed and their leaders hanged, the heavily armed population had been disarmed and the roads were open to facilitate the lucrative smuggling trade between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia which had become the mainstay of the economy.

  The Taliban, drawn from the majority Pashtun ethnic group which accounts for some 40 per cent of Afghanistan's 20 million people, had also galvanized Pashtun nationalism. The Pashtuns had ruled Afghanistan for 300 years but had recently lost out to the country's other smaller ethnic groups. The Taliban victories revived hopes that once again the Pashtuns would dominate Afghanistan.

  But the Taliban had also implemented an extreme interpretation of the Sharia or Islamic law that appalled many Afghans and the Muslim world. The Taliban had closed down all girls’ schools and women were rarely permitted to venture out of
their homes, even for shopping. The Taliban had banned every conceivable kind of entertainment including music, TV, videos, cards, kite-flying and most sports and games. The Taliban's brand of Islamic fundamentalism was so extreme that it appeared to denigrate Islam's message of peace and tolerance and its capacity to live with other religious and ethnic groups. They were to inspire a new extremist form of fundamentalism across Pakistan and Central Asia, which refused to compromise with traditional Islamic values, social structures or existing state systems.

  A few weeks earlier in Kandahar the Taliban had lifted their longstanding ban on football. The United Nations (UN) aid agencies – seizing a rare chance to do something for public entertainment – rushed in to rebuild the stands and seats of the bombed out football stadium. But on this balmy Thursday afternoon – the beginning of the Muslim weekend -no foreign aid-workers had been invited to watch the stadium's inauguration. No football match was scheduled. Instead there was to be a public execution and the victim was to be shot between the goalposts.

  I had just got off a UN plane arriving from Pakistan and was told about the execution in hushed tones by depressed and embarrassed foreign aid-workers. ‘This is not exactly going to encourage the international community to give more funds for aid projects in Afghanistan. How do we explain the use the Taliban are putting our renovation of the football stadium to?’ said one Western aid-worker.

  They also looked nervously at my colleague Gretchen Peters, an American journalist. A tall, lanky blonde with a broad face and chiselled features, she was dressed in a one-size-too-small shalwar kameez – the local dress comprising baggy cotton pants, a long shirt that extended to below the knee and a long scarf that covered her head. But that did not hide her height or her striking American looks, which posed a threat to every concept the Taliban held – that women should be neither seen nor heard because they drove men away from the proscribed Islamic path and into wild temptation. Whether it was a fear of women or their abhorrence of femininity, Taliban leaders had frequently refused to give interviews to female journalists.

  Ever since the winter of 1994, when the mysterious Taliban first emerged to conquer Kandahar and then swept north to capture Kabul in September 1996, I had been reporting on the Taliban phenomenon, making more than a dozen trips to Taliban strongholds in Kandahar, Herat and Kabul. I was even more interested in trying to get to grips with who they were, what motivated them, who supported them and how they had arrived at this violent, extreme interpretation of Islam.

  Now here there was another Taliban surprise, both a nightmare and a gift to any reporter – a horrific event that made me tremble with both fear and anticipation. I had witnessed much death during the years of war, but that did not make it any easier to be a spectator at the execution of a fellow human being. And to view it as an entertainment, shared with thousands of people and as an expression of Islamic justice and Taliban control, was harder still.

  At the stadium the Taliban first resisted our entry but then allowed me in if I stood quietly at the touch-line and promised not to talk to anyone. Gretchen Peters slipped in, but she was quickly ousted by a posse of panic-stricken armed Taliban guards who nudged her in the back with their kalashnikov automatic rifles.

  By mid-afternoon every seat in the stadium was taken as more than 10,000 men and children packed the stands and overflowed on to the sandy football pitch. Children played games of dare by running on to the pitch before they were pushed back behind the touch-line by angry guards. It seemed as though the whole city's male population had turned up. Women were banned from appearing at any public events.

  Suddenly the roar of the crowd subsided as two dozen armed Taliban, wearing plastic flip-flop sandals, black turbans and the male version of the shalwar kameez, came charging onto the pitch. They ran alongside the touch-line pushing the playful children back into the stands with their gun barrels and yelling to the crowd to be silent. As the crowd quickly obeyed, the only sound was the Taliban's flip-flops.

  Then, as if on cue, several Datsun two-door pick-ups – the Taliban's favourite mode of transport – drove onto the football pitch. One pick-up sprouted a tinny sounding loudspeaker – the kind seen on thousands of mosques in Pakistan and Afghanistan. An elderly man with a white beard stood up in the vehicle and began to lecture the crowd. Qazi Khalilullah Ferozi, a judge of the Taliban's Supreme Court of Kandahar spoke for over an hour, extolling the crowd on the virtues of the Taliban movement, the benefits of Islamic punishment and a full history of the case.

  Abdullah Afghan, a young man in his early 20s had allegedly stolen medicines from Abdul Wali, a farmer who lived in their common village near Kandahar. When Wali resisted, Abdullah had shot him dead. After several weeks of searching for him, Wali's relatives tracked Abdullah down, arrested him and bought him to the Taliban for justice. Abdullah was tried and sentenced to death, first by the Islamic High Court of Kandahar and then on appeal by the Taliban Supreme Court. These were trials without lawyers where the accused is presumed guilty and expected to defend himself.

  The Taliban's interpretation of the Sharia or Islamic law demanded the execution of the murderer by the victim's family, but not before a last-minute appeal is made by the judge to the victim's relatives to spare the murderer. If they granted mercy the victim's family would receive blood money or monetary compensation. But how much of this interpretation of Islamic law by the Taliban is owed to the Sharia and how much is owed to the Pashtun tribal code of behaviour or Pashtunwali, is what is disputed by many Muslim theologians, both inside Afghanistan and beyond.

  By now some 20 male relatives of the victim had appeared on the pitch and the Qazi turned to them. Raising his arms to the sky, he appealed to them to spare the life of Abdullah in exchange for blood money. ‘You will go to Mecca ten times if you spare this man. Our leaders have promised to pay a huge sum to you from the Baitul Mal [Islamic fund] if you forgive him,’ he told the relatives. As the relatives all shook their heads in refusal, the Taliban guards pointed their guns at the crowd and warned that they would shoot anyone who moved. There was silence in the stands.

  Abdullah, who had been seated throughout the proceedings in another pick-up guarded by armed Taliban, was now let out. Wearing a bright yellow skullcap and new clothes, his feet shackled with heavy manacles, his arms chained behind his back, he was told to walk to the goalposts at one end of the stadium. His legs visibly shook with fear as he shuffled across the pitch, his chains clanking and glinting in the sunlight. When he reached the goalposts, he was made to kneel on the ground with his face turned away from the crowd. A guard whispered to him that he could say his last prayer.

  A guard handed a kalashnikov to a relative of the murdered victim. The relative swiftly stepped up to Abdullah, cocked the automatic and from a few feet away shot him three times in the back. As Abdullah fell on to his back the executioner moved alongside his twitching body and at point-blank range pumped three more bullets into his chest. Within seconds his body was thrown into the back of a pick-up and driven away. The crowd quickly and silently dispersed. As we drove back into town, thin slivers of smoke arose from the bazaar as tea stalls and kebab stands lit up for their evening trade.

  A mixture of fear, acceptance, total exhaustion and devastation after years of war and more than 1.5 million dead have forced many Afghans to accept the Taliban ways of justice. The next day in a village near Kabul, a woman was stoned to death by a baying crowd after being sentenced for trying to flee Afghanistan with a man who was not her blood relative. Amputations of either one hand or one foot or both are common Taliban punishments for anyone caught stealing. When they captured Kabul in September 1996, to be initially welcomed as liberators, many Kabulis and the world turned away in disgust after the Taliban tortured and then publicly hanged former President Najibullah, the ex-communist strongman who for four years had been living in a UN compound under UN protection.

  Since the end of the Cold War no other political movement in the Islamic world has attracted as
much attention as the Taliban in Afghanistan. For some Afghans the Taliban created hopes that a movement led by simple Islamic students with an agenda of bringing peace to the country might succeed in finally disposing of the warlord factions which had devastated people's lives since the communist regime in Kabul had been overthrown in April 1992. Others feared that the Taliban movement would quickly degenerate into one more warlord faction, determined to thrust despotic rule upon the hapless Afghan people.

  The Pashtun Taliban have also brought the question of inter-ethnic relations in a multi-ethnic state to the forefront, as well as other issues including the role of Islam versus clan, tribal and feudal structures and the question of modernization and economic development in a conservative Islamic society. Understanding the Taliban phenomenon is made even more difficult because of the excessive secrecy that surrounds their political structures, their leadership and the decision-making process within the movement. The Taliban do not issue press releases, policy statements or hold regular press conferences. With their ban on photography and television, nobody knows what their leaders even look like. The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar remains an enigmatic mystery. After the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban are the most secretive political movement in the world today.

  Yet the Taliban have inadvertently set a new agenda for Islamic radicalism in the entire region, sending shock waves through Afghanistan's neighbours. Not surprisingly, Iran, Turkey, India, Russia and four of the five Central Asian Republics – Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – have backed the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance with arms and money to try and halt the Taliban's advance. In contrast Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have backed the Taliban. In the post-Cold War era, this has created unprecedented polarization across the region. The Taliban victories in northern Afghanistan in the summer of 1998 and their control of over 90 per cent of the country, set in motion an even fiercer regional conflict as Iran threatened to invade Afghanistan and accused Pakistan of supporting the Taliban.