by Ahmed Rashid
But the agreement was never implemented by the Taliban and after the pull-out of UN agencies from Afghanistan in 1998, it simply fell apart. Six months later Arlacchi was less optimistic when he told me, ‘Afghanistan is one of the most difficult and crucial parts of the world but a wider political settlement is needed before drugs production can be be controlled.’14 The record of wealthy countries supporting UNDCP initiatives was not particularly hopeful either. Between 1993 and 1997 UNDCP had asked for US$16.4 million from international donors for anti-narcotics work in Afghanistan and received only half that amount.
The taxes on opium exports became the mainstay of Taliban income and their war economy. In 1995 UNDCP estimated that Pakistan-Afghanistan drugs exports were earning some 50 billion rupees (US$1.35 billion) a year. By 1998 heroin exports had doubled in value to US$3 billion. Drugs money funded the weapons, ammunition and fuel for the war. It provided food and clothes for the soldiers and paid the salaries, transport and perks that the Taliban leadership allowed its fighters. The only thing that can be said in the Taliban's favour was that unlike in the past, this income did not appear to line the pockets of their leaders, as they continued to live extremely frugal lives. But it made the Afghan and Pakistani traffickers extremely rich.
Alongside the drugs trade, the traditional Afghan smuggling trade from Pakistan and now the Gulf states, expanded under the Taliban and created economic havoc for neighbouring states. The Afghan Transit Trade (ATT), described in detail in Chapter 15, is the largest source of official revenue for the Taliban and generates an estimated US$3 billion annually for the Afghan economy. Customs officials in Kandahar, Kabul and Herat refuse to disclose their daily earnings but with some 300 trucks a day passing through Kandahar on their way to Iran and Central Asia via Herat and another 200 trucks passing through Jalalabad and Kabul to the north, daily earnings are considerable. The illegal trade in consumer goods, food and fuel through Afghanistan is crippling industries, reducing state revenues and creating periodic food shortages in all neigbouring states – affecting their economies in a way that was never the case during the jihad.
Taliban customs revenues from the smuggling trade are channelled through the State Bank of Afghanistan which is trying to set up branches in all provincial capitals. But there is no book-keeping to show what money comes in and where it goes. These ‘official’ revenues do not account for the war budget which is accumulated and spent directly by Mullah Omar in Kandahar and is derived from drugs income, aid from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and other donations. 'We have revenues from customs, mining and zakat, but there are some other sources of income for the war effort that do not come through the State Bank of Afghanistan,’ admitted Maulvi Arifullah Arif, the Deputy Minister of Finance.15
With the war being run directly by Mullah Omar from his tin trunks stuffed full of money, which he keeps under his bed, making a national budget is next to impossible – even if the expertise was available, which it is not. The Finance Ministry has no qualified economist or banker. The Minister and his deputies are mullahs with a madrassa education and knowledgeable bureaucrats were purged. The paucity of official funds can be judged by the fact that in 1997 the Finance Ministry had set a budget of the equivalent of US$100,000 for the entire country's administration and development programmes for the Afghan financial year – February 1997–January 1998. In fact this amount just covered salaries for officials.
Some of the mullah traders within the Taliban are trying to encourage industry and foreign investment, but there appears to be no serious support from the Taliban leadership for these efforts. ‘We want to develop Afghanistan as a modern state and we have enormous mineral, oil and gas resources which should interest foreign investors,’ said Maulvi Ahmed Jan, the Minister of Mines and Industries, who left his carpet business in Saudi Arabia to join the Taliban and run Afghanistan's industries. ‘Before we took control of the south there was no factory working in the country. Now we have reopened mines and carpet factories with the help of Pakistani and Afghan traders,’ he added. He agreed that few members of the powerful Kandahar Shura were interested in economic issues as they were too involved with the war.16
As an investment incentive to foreigners, particularly Pakistani traders, Ahmed Jan was offering free land to anyone who would build a new factory. But with the collapse of the country's infrastructure, any investor would have to build his own roads and provide electricity and housing. Only a few Pakistani and Afghan transport-traders based in Peshawar and Quetta, who are already involved in either smuggling or the lucrative illegal timber trade from Afghanistan, appear to be taking an interest in projects such as mining.
There is no educated or professional class left in the country. In the several waves of refugees that have left the cities since 1992, all the educated, trained professionals, even telephone operators, electricians and mechanics, have gone. Most of the Taliban running the departments of finance, economy and the social sector are mullah traders – businessmen, truck transporters and smugglers for whom the rationale of nation-building is seen only in the perspective of expanding the market for smuggling and the trucking business across the region.
One such is Mullah Abdul Rashid, a fierce-looking Taliban military commander from Helmand, who gained notoriety in April 1997 when he captured a Pakistani military patrol that had entered Afghan territory from Baluchistan province to chase a gang of drug smugglers. Rashid arrested the soldiers and sent them to Kandahar, sparking off a row with Pakistan. He also runs the Taliban-owned marble mines in Helmand. The mine which employs 500 men with picks, has no mining engineers, no equipment, no electricity and no expertise. Rashid's mining techniques are limited to using explosives to blast (and scar) the marble.
The Taliban's appetite for foreign investment had been first wetted by the competition between two oil companies, Bridas of Argentina and the US company Unocal, who were competing for influence with the Taliban in order to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan across southern Afghanistan (see Chapters 12 and 13). The pipeline attracted a few swashbuckling, risk-taking businessmen. These included Afghan and Pakistani traders who built regular petrol pumps in Kandahar and along the route to Herat. They also promised to build roads. A USA-based group provided the Taliban with a mobile telephone network between Kabul and Kandahar in 1999. Such activities did little for re-establishing a regular economy. They were solely aimed at improving the Taliban's smuggling business and making life easier for traders and transporters.
Serious foreign investment and even aid to begin reconstruction is certainly not going to happen until there is an end to the war and a government which can ensure minimum stability and public loyalty. In the meantime Afghanistan is like an economic black hole that is sending out waves of insecurity and chaos to a region that is already facing multiple economic crises. Afghanistan's infrastructure lies in ruins. Basic civic amenities available in any underdeveloped country are non-existent. There is no running water, little electricity, telephones, motorable roads or regular energy supplies. There are severe shortages of water, food and housing and other basic necessities. What is available is too expensive for most people to afford.
The laying of millions of mines during the war has created severe resettlement problems in the cities and the countryside, where agriculture and irrigation in the most fertile areas is hampered by mines. Since 1979, 400,000 Afghans have been killed and another 400,000 injured in mine explosions. A staggering 13 per cent of all Afghan families has had a relative killed or crippled in mine accidents and over 300 people are killed or maimed every month. Although some 4,000 deminers working for the UN and other NGOs are trying to demine the country as fast as possible, it could take another decade before even the major cities are demined. In 1998, after six years of extensive work, Kabul still had some 200 square miles out of a total of 500 square miles of the city which had not been demined.17
Apart from mines, the daily battle for most Kabulis is to find enough of the grubby Afghani note
s to pay for daily foodstuffs. Although the shops are full of smuggled foodstuffs from Iran and Pakistan, people do not have the money to buy them. Salaries for those Afghan surgeons who have not fled Kabul is the equivalent of US$5 a month. They only survive because their salaries are subsidized by the ICRC. Average salaries are around US$1–3 a month. As a result of grinding poverty and no jobs, a large percentage of the urban population is totally dependent on UN agencies for basic survival and subsidized food supplies. Fifty per cent of Kabul's 1.2 million people receive some kind of food aid from Western humanitarian agencies.
This poses a continuing dilemma for the UN as to whether its humanitarian aid is only sustaining the war, because it gives the warlords the excuse to absolve themselves of taking responsibility for the civilian population. The Taliban continuously insisted that they were not responsible for the population and that Allah would provide. However, the suffering of ordinary Afghans would only increase if the UN and NGOs were to cease their relief operations altogether and in particular stop feeding vulnerable groups such as widows and orphans.
In 1998 the economic situation visibly worsened. Northern Afghanistan was hit by three devastating earthquakes, the Taliban siege of the Hazarajat led to widespread starvation in central Afghanistan, floods in Kandahar submerged villages and crops and the urban population was blighted by the pull-out of aid agencies after the US missile strikes in August 1998. There was visible malnutrition on the streets of Kabul during the freezing winter of 1998–99, when few could afford to eat even one meal a day or heat their homes. However, there were signs of hope, if only peace would come. The WFP estimated that cereal production for 1998 would be 3.85 million tons, five per cent more than 1997 and the best year of production since 1978.
This reflected the improved law and order in rural areas under Taliban control, the lack of fighting and the return of refugees to farm their lands. Although there are still 1.2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 1.4 million in Iran, more than 4 million refugees had returned home between 1992 and 1999. However, the Taliban and the UN agencies still had to import 750,000 tons of wheat in 1998 for the cities to make up the food shortfall. Clearly the Taliban did not create the economic devastation in Afghanistan. Rather they inherited it from the civil war which all the factions waged after 1992. But none of the factions, including the Taliban have paid any attention to the needs of the civilian population.
Thus it is not surprising that Western countries are suffering from ‘donor fatigue’ – the reluctance to come up with more money for humanitarian aid, when the civil war continues unabated and the warlords are so irresponsible. ‘The level of suffering experienced by the Afghan people is literally horrendous,’ said Alfredo Witschi-Cestari, the UN Co-ordinator for Afghanistan until 1998. ‘As the years go by, funds trickle in slower and slower. We raise less than half the money we ask for.’18 The warlords are not even remotely concerned with planning for the reconstruction of the country. Afghanistan's economic black hole is getting larger and wider, sucking more and more of its own population and the people of the region into it.
∼ 9 ∼
GLOBAL JIHAD:
THE ARAB-AFGHANS
AND OSAMA BIN LADEN
At Torkham – the border post at the head of the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a single chain barrier seperates the two countries. On the Pakistani side stand the smartly turned out Frontier Scouts – paramilitaries in their grey shalwar kameezes and turbans. It was April 1989, and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had just been completed. I was returning to Pakistan by road from Kabul, but the barrier was closed. Exhausted from my journey I lay down on a grass verge on the Afghan side of the border and waited.
Suddenly, along the road behind me, a truck full of Mujaheddin roared up and stopped. But those on board were not Afghans. Light-coloured Arabs, blue-eyed Central Asians and swarthy Chinese-looking faces peered out from roughly wound turbans and ill-fitting shalwar kameezes. They were swathed in ammunition belts and carried kalashnikovs. Except for one Afghan, who was acting as interpreter and guide, not a single one of the 30 foreigners spoke Pushto, Dari or even Urdu. As we waited for the border to open we got talking.
The group was made up of Filipino Moros, Uzbeks from Soviet Central Asia, Arabs from Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Uighurs from Xinjiang in China. Their escort was a member of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar's Hizb-e-Islami. Under training at a camp near the border they were going on weekend leave to Peshawar and were looking forward to getting mail from home, changing their clothes and having a good meal. They had come to fight the jihad with the Mujaheddin and to train in weapons, bomb-making and military tactics so they could take the jihad back home.
That evening, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had hosted a dinner for journalists in Islamabad. Among the guests was Lieutenant General Hameed Gul, the head of the ISI and the most fervent Islamic ideologue in the army after Zia's death. General Gul was triumphant about the Soviet withdrawal. I asked him if he was not playing with fire by inviting Muslim radicals from Islamic countries, who were ostensibly allies of Pakistan. Would these radicals not create dissension in their own countries, endangering Pakistan's foreign policy? ‘We are fighting a jihad and this is the first Islamic international brigade in the modern era. The communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can't the Muslims unite and form a common front?’ the General replied. It was the first and only justification I was ever given for what were already called the Arab-Afghans, even though none were Afghans and many were not Arabs.
Three years earlier in 1986, CIA chief William Casey had stepped up the war against the Soviet Union by taking three significant, but at that time highly secret, measures. He had persuaded the US Congress to provide the Mujaheddin with American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes and provide US advisers to train the guerrillas. Until then no US-made weapons or personnel had been used directly in the war effort. The CIA, Britain's MI6 and the ISI also agreed on a provocative plan to launch guerrilla attacks into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the soft Muslim underbelly of the Soviet state from where Soviet troops in Afghanistan received their supplies. The task was given to the ISI's favourite Mujaheddin leader Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. In March 1987, small units crossed the Amu Darya river from bases in northern Afghanistan and launched their first rocket attacks against villages in Tajikistan. Casey was delighted with the news and on his next secret trip to Pakistan he crossed the border into Afghanistan with President Zia to review the Mujaheddin groups.1
Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982 and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea. President Zia aimed to cement Islamic unity, turn Pakistan into the leader of the Muslim world and foster an Islamic opposition in Central Asia. Washington wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world was fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghans and their American benefactors. And the Saudis saw an opportunity both to promote Wahabbism and get rid of its disgruntled radicals. None of the players reckoned on these volunteers having their own agendas, which would eventually turn their hatred against the Soviets on their own regimes and the Americans.
Pakistan already had standing instructions to all its embassies abroad to give visas, with no questions asked, to anyone wanting to come and fight with the Mujaheddin. In the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi-based World Muslim League and Palestinian Islamic radicals organized the recruits and put them into contact with the Pakistanis. The ISI and Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Islami set up reception committees to welcome, house and train the arriving militants and then encouraged them to join the Mujaheddin groups, usually the Hizb-e-Islami. The funds for this enterprise came directly from Saudi Intelligence. French scholar Olivier Roy describes it as ‘a joint venture between the Saudis
, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami, put together by the ISI’.2
Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujaheddin. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia's military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad.
In camps near Peshawar and in Afghanistan, these radicals met each other for the first time and studied, trained and fought together. It was the first opportunity for most of them to learn about Islamic movements in other countries and they forged tactical and ideological links that would serve them well in the future. The camps became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism. None of the intelligence agencies involved wanted to consider the consequences of bringing together thousands of Islamic radicals from all over the world. ‘What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?’ said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Adviser.3 American citizens only woke up to the consequences when Afghanistan-trained Islamic militants blew up the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993, killing six people and injuring 1,000.