by Ahmed Rashid
Within days of the attacks President George W. Bush announced that America was now at war with international terrorists and declared a state of emergency in the USA. The world rallied around the USA as NATO pledged to support any military action Washington might take. On 15 September, President Musharraf was given an ultimatum by President Bush (“you are either with us or against us”), and the military regime immediately decided to switch sides, from helping the Taliban to supporting the US invasion of Afghanistan that would destroy it. The reason, as Musharraf stated, was that any other response could have led to the bombing of Pakistan, threats to its nuclear facilities, and the creation of US military bases in neighbouring India, Pakistan's long-standing enemy. The Islamic right erupted in anger at the decision, but Musharraf held his ground.
Mullah Omar rallied the Taliban to defy the USA and refused all demands that he give up power or surrender Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to the Americans. The ISI made several unsuccessful attempts to persuade Mullah Omar to surrender Bin Laden and save his regime, but Omar refused, though he knew the Taliban leaders were deeply divided on the issue, and he faced the possibility of a revolt from within his own ranks. Omar was also bolstered by the reassurance from his supporters in Pakistan and Al Qaeda that the USA might launch a bombing campaign – which the Taliban could survive – but it would never send ground troops into Afghanistan.
The USA was certainly reluctant to put many troops on the ground, wary of becoming embroiled in the same morass that had led to the failed Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Instead, the CIA head, George Tenet, put together an audacious plan in which NA Afghan forces on the ground would link up with teams of CIA and US Special Operations Forces. The NA would help find targets for US air power, which in turn would support NA ground attacks. US infantry would never be heavily involved in ground attacks. The US State Department began to secure bases in Central Asia, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf for use by US forces as aircraft carriers arrived off the shores of Pakistan.
On 7 October, Operation Enduring Freedom’ began with heavy US bombing raids on Taliban bases and infrastructure across the country, as well as against the 50,000 Taliban troops massed outside Kabul who were defending a long front line against NA forces. Four weeks of bombing followed before the first NA breakthrough occurred, on 9 November, with the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif in the north to the Uzbek and Tajik forces of Generals Rashid Dostum and Mohammed Atta. The Taliban were routed, and within the next three days all of northern, western and central Afghanistan fell to the NA. As the Taliban fed they were pounded mercilessly from the air by US aircraft, and many were killed and wounded. Meanwhile, CIA money had persuaded many of the Pashtun commanders to switch sides and abandon the Taliban.1
Having lost the north, the Taliban next abandoned Kabul and retreated to their southern headquarters of Kandahar, while several thousand still held out in the Pashtun enclave of Kunduz in the far north east. Also trapped in Kunduz were dozens of Pakistani ISI officers who had remained behind in Afghanistan to help the Taliban. In mid-November, at the special request of Musharraf, President Bush allowed the Pakistani air force to carry out an airlift over three nights to bring out ISI officers. Along with them the Pakistanis saved the lives of many leading Taliban and Central Asian militants, and even some Al Qaeda members. Thousands of remaining Taliban fighters were killed or died as prisoners of war after surrendering to General Dostum.
Mullah Omar surrendered Kandahar on 5 December, but he himself escaped into the desert on a motorbike. By then most of the Taliban had left Kandahar for the safety of their villages or neighbouring Baluchistan province in Pakistan. Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden, who held out for a time in the Tora Bora mountains in eastern Afghanistan, also escaped by crossing the border into Pakistan's tribal agencies. The USA had failed to stop this mass escape because Washington had refused to deploy American ground forces in the battle and instead had relied upon local NA militias to keep the enemy from escaping. It was the biggest mistake of the war.
According to military officers I spoke with several months later in Kabul, the Taliban had lost some 8,000 to 12,000 men, 20 per cent of their total force, with an estimated twice that number wounded and some 7,000 taken prisoner. But although they were seriously damaged, they were not defeated: almost their entire leadership structure remained intact, and the survivors had been able to escape and reorganize in Pakistan.
The war had gone faster than anyone could have predicted, but along with military success came the growing realization that the business of forming a new government in Kabul had been left behind. The UN, under the auspices of Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi and his deputy Francesc Vendrell, organized a conference near Bonn of various Afghan groups in order to try to work out an agreement about forming the next government in Kabul. Although several Afghan groups were represented, the dominant faction was the NA, which had emerged as the military victor. The Pashtun tribes were underrepresented at the conference, and the Taliban were not represented at all.
The meeting began on 27 November, and after lengthy, all-night wrangling it ended on 5 December when Hamid Karzai, a prominent Pashtun tribal leader from Kandahar who had remained loyal to the faction of former King Zahir Shah, was elected as the future interim President of Afghanistan. Karzai was a moderate politician, rather than a warlord, and in the early 1990s he had actually supported the Taliban from his base in Quetta. But he had turned against them and started to organize the overthrow of the Taliban regime after they assassinated his father in 1999. Following the 11 September attacks, Karzai was one of the few Pashtun commanders who took the risk of going into Afghanistan to rally the Pashtuns against the Taliban. Once inside Afghanistan he was quickly helped by the CIA, who supplied him with weapons, food and advisers.2
The Bonn agreement signed on 6 December called for ‘a broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government’, the holding of an emergency Loya Jirga by June 2002 that would decide upon a new transitional government and presidential and parliamentary elections to follow later. Then a constitutional Loya Jirga would be summoned to adopt a new constitution by 2003. Former King Zahir Shah was to be given the title Father of the Nation. The Bonn agreement was not a peace treaty: the vanquished were not represented, and it made no provision for a cease-fire or the demobilization of forces. Brahimi and Vendrell were later to regret that there were no Taliban present or that, since they had not been, the UN had not held a subsequent conference at which the Taliban would have been represented. Yet given the rushed circumstances – the quick, unexpected end to the war, the dangerous political vacuum in Kabul, the late realization in Washington that an interim government would be necessary – and the desire by all the outside players to prevent a full-scale foreign occupation, the Bonn agreement was the best and least contentious compromise possible.
It soon became apparent that the Bush administration had no great desire to rebuild Afghanistan or even to provide sufficient troops for its security and recovery. Within weeks of winning the war in Afghanistan, US troops were training for the invasion of Iraq, and US Special Operations Forces were pulled out of key locations in Afghanistan where they were hunting Al Qaeda. Afghanistan fell victim to the Bush strategy of preserving US resources, money and troops for Iraq. In Afghanistan, in order to minimize their exposure, the Americans cut deals with the newly installed NA warlords – even though the majority of these had participated in the 1990s civil war and were hated by the population.
According to US officials in Kabul who were opposed to the policy, these warlords and their militias were funded by the CIA and told to keep the peace outside Kabul and hunt down Al Qaeda members. Rapacious, corrupt and ruthless, the militias terrorized the population and eventually went into drug trafficking and other illicit businesses. In May 2002 Democratic Senator (and later Vice President) Joseph Biden issued a dire warning: America has replaced the Taliban with the warlords…. We are actually making them the centrepiece of our strategy’.3
But US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield insisted that the strategy of having the warlords share power with the government was the right one.
The Loya Jirga held in June 2002 resulted in the election of Hamid Karzai as interim President, but the euphoria created around the country by the Jirga never translated into improvements on the ground because of the lack of resources available to the new interim government. There were barely sufficient US troops to patrol the cities, let alone the countryside, and it took the USA some time to recognize the need to train a professional Afghan army and police force. Likewise, the Afghans’ hopes that billions of US dollars would flow into the country to rebuild the infrastructure, create jobs, invest in agriculture and industry and provide incentives for the Taliban to return home and live in peace with them were blighted by the lack of US funding and attention to the problems.
After considerable pressure was exerted on the USA by close European allies who insisted that a multinational peace-keeping force was necessary at a minimum for Kabul, if not the country, Rumsfield reluctantly gave his approval. A number of European countries formed a peace-keeping force, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), to help out in Kabul. Consisting of some 5,000 soldiers drawn from more than 20 countries, the ISAF was never allowed to expand to other cities despite incessant pleas that they do so from Lakhdar Brahimi and Francesc Vendrell, who was now the European Union representative in Kabul, as well as from President Karzai. The UN tried to start disarming the hundreds of thousands of men who made up the Afghan militias, but the efforts moved very slowly, largely because of the lack of US support.
Meanwhile, the Taliban, its senior leadership intact, had been welcomed back to Pakistan by a variety of former supporters. Many Taliban members returned to their families, who still lived in refugee camps in Baluchistan province; others returned to the Pakistani madrassas from which they had been recruited; while senior figures were welcomed by the ISI and the provincial governments of the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan.
The Pakistani military rigged the general elections of 2002, keeping Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the leaders of the two main parties from taking part. But although there was huge public opposition to the news of both the rigging and the fact that the two leaders had been kept out, as a result of the military's actions the elections in the two border provinces with Afghanistan were won by the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam party, the same party that had helped launch the Taliban in 1994, whose members believed in the strict Deobandi interpretation of Islam. The JUI once again offered its support to the Taliban.
Taliban members who had originally returned to their destitute villages in Afghanistan also soon arrived in Pakistan, looking for jobs and financial support. A few Taliban commanders surrendered to US forces, but they were harshly treated and then packed off to the prison camp for terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, the US naval base on Cuba. The USA made no attempt to negotiate with the Pashtuns or the Taliban, and the Pashtuns distrusted the Americans from the start. As US bombing of Taliban hideouts and targets in Afghanistan continued, killing many civilians in the process, the Pashtuns’ anger against the Americans increased. Matters were not helped by the fact that US forces tended to view all Pashtuns as potential Taliban supporters. The Pashtun concentrations in the southern and eastern regions became increasingly alienated, a disaffection that was soon exploited by the revived Taliban movement.
Mullah Omar, who had been hiding out in Helmand province, arrived in Quetta in the winter of 2002. Taking key figures from the former regime to create a new Taliban Shura, Omar appointed four commanders to reorganize resistance in the four southern provinces of Afghanistan (Uruzgan, Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul). These figures were Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the former Defence Minister; Mullah Akthar Mohammed Usmani, the former army chief; Mullah Dadullah, the one-legged corps commander who had destroyed the statues of the Buddha; and former Interior Minister Mullah Abdul Razaq. The four began to raise funds in Karachi and Quetta from supporters and sympathizers, and particularly from the Deobandi madrassas, and they received considerable backing from the JUI-led provincial governments. Moreover, they travelled to the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia and revived their contacts there in order to enlist more Arab donations for their cause to fight US forces in Afghanistan.
In eastern Afghanistan and in the seven tribal agencies in northern Pakistan known as the Federal Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), the reorganization was led by separate groups allied to the Taliban. The major group was headed by the former Taliban Minister of Tribal Affairs, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Sirajuddin, who operated out of Miranshah in North Waziristan. The two had especially close ties to both Al Qaeda and the ISI. Other groups were led by the veteran Pashtun Islamist Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, who arrived from exile in Iran, and Saifur Rahman Mansur, who had led the Taliban and Arab forces in battle against the Americans in the mountains near Gardez in the spring offensive that the USA dubbed Operation Anaconda’. The battle had raged for two weeks before the Taliban retreated into Pakistan.
The Pakistan army had stopped deploying troops around FATA in early 2002 because of the build up of tensions with India after the storming of the Indian parliament by Kashmiri militants. For much of that year problems with India preoccupied the army and allowed Al Qaeda to move around at will in FATA, forging new allies among the local Pakistani Pashtun tribes. Arab militants married into the tribes while at the same time helping revive the Afghan Taliban with training, funding and supplies of weapons.
Meanwhile, the ISI continued funnelling clandestine support to the Taliban, owing to the Pakistani army's fear that by backing the US invasion of Afghanistan, it had helped bring to power the NA, whom the military loathed because the NA received support from Pakistan's regional rivals India, Iran and Russia. (Most of the important ministries in the Karzai government were held by the NA.) The army was also deeply perturbed by the sudden infux of Indians into Kabul, fearing that India would now attempt to destabilize Pakistan through its western border. By stoking up the conflict with India, the army hoped to enlist US support in bringing about a final settlement of the Kashmir dispute, but the Bush administration had little interest in doing so. Already preoccupied with plans to invade Iraq, the administration wanted only to stabilize relations between India and Pakistan.
Once Musharraf and the army realized that President Bush intended to invade Iraq, they assumed that the USA would pull out of Afghanistan soon thereafter; at the least Washington would refuse to commit sufficient resources to that country. Pakistan would be left with Afghanistan on its hands, as it was in 1989 after the Soviets and then the USA withdrew from the region. For Musharraf it seemed better to hold the Taliban in reserve as a proxy force for Pakistan. The lack of trust between the Pakistani military and the US government helped fuel the revival of the Taliban movement.
Nevertheless the ISI did move against Al Qaeda, arresting several leading figures who were hiding out in Pakistani cities, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 11 September attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a key recruiter for Al Qaeda. In retaliation Al Qaeda enlisted local Pakistani extremist groups to assassinate Musharraf. Two unsuccessful suicide attacks were made against him in December 2003, but they failed to convince the Pakistan military that the country now faced a growing threat at home from the alliance of Al Qaeda, the growing Pakistani Taliban, and the Afghan Taliban.
After stockpiling weapons inside Afghanistan during the winter of 2002-3, the Taliban launched their first guerrilla attacks in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Zabul and Helmand – all adjacent to Pakistan. The first major battle against US forces took place in January 2003 when a US patrol surprised a group of some 80 Taliban members near Spin Baldak in Kandahar province. In March the Afghan nation and the international community realized the extent of the new Taliban threat when a Salvadorian engineer belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross was executed in cold blood after his convoy was halted by a Taliban group in Uruzgan
province on 27 March.
Over the next few weeks several more aid workers – foreigners and Afghans alike – were killed, indicating that the Taliban had no compunction about killing civilians. The Bush administration was preoccupied with the invasion of Iraq, and in Washington there was little importance given to small, localized attacks in Afghanistan. In the late summer, however, US forces did launch a large offensive in Zabul province, and they were shocked when instead of feeling, the Taliban stood and fought them for nine days, despite intensive US air attacks. By autumn the Taliban had established almost complete control over Zabul and Helmand provinces and set up supply lines from Pakistan.
In those critical days when the Taliban were far from popular and had little political control across the south, even a few more US troops could have made a huge difference in stemming the incipient insurgency. But insofar as the USA paid any attention to Afghanistan, it was to focus on killing Osama Bin Laden, rather than on stabilizing the countryside, rebuilding the economy and infrastructure or even dealing with the Taliban as a serious threat.
That any progress occurred on the political front was largely due to the efforts of the UN, which helped the Pashtuns gain greater power and bring their political isolation to an end. Winning the Pashtuns over would now be a matter of offering them economic development, jobs, good governance and above all US funding – which was not being made available. The two Loya Jirgas organized by the UN – the first in June 2002 which chose Karzai as interim President and the second in the winter of 2003 which agreed upon a new constitution – had both helped bring the Pashtuns back into the political mainstream.
It was not surprising that the return of the Taliban coincided with a huge spurt of opium production in the south. The Taliban had banned opium production for a year in 2000 because overproduction had led to a collapse of the price of heroin. After 11 September, therefore, only some of the farmers in the south were growing poppies for opium and heroin production. And, indeed, after 11 September most of them would have welcomed the chance to grow something else, but they had no alternative seeds or fertilizer, and the drought had seriously depleted the water supply. As they awaited the promised American aid that never materialized, farmers in the winter of 2001-2 began once again to plant the only seed they had – poppy. The Taliban soon reappeared in the south, once more taxing farmers on their poppy crop while at the same time promising to protect them against any government moves to eradicate it.