by Anand Gopal
“We were on the verge of something great,” he recalled, “but everything changed after the planes hit. That was the biggest mistake that ever happened to us.”
* * *
Early on the morning of September 12, 2001, in the cracked, war-eaten office building housing Kabul’s Foreign Ministry, a few turbaned Taliban officials sat watching the news on a flickering television—the only sanctioned set in town, as all moving images had been banned. As they stared at replays of the Twin Towers collapsing into an apocalyptic pile of burning ruins, President George W. Bush’s warning flashed across the screen: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
It was a moment some Taliban officials had long feared. To the most pragmatic among them, Osama bin Laden and his retinue of followers had been nothing but trouble since they had landed in 1996. The Arabs of al-Qaeda spoke a different language, practiced a distinct culture, and even followed a different form of Islam from their Afghan counterparts. Bin Laden was waging international jihad to overthrow US global hegemony, while the Taliban were concerned largely with politics within their country’s borders. Bin Laden railed against the West, and his acolytes bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, while the Taliban were seeking Western diplomatic recognition. Quickly, America’s bin Laden problem had become the Taliban’s as well. The two sides met throughout the late 1990s in an attempt to work out a solution, but cultural and political divides proved insurmountable. The Taliban agreed to place bin Laden on trial, but Washington, not trusting the impartiality of Afghan courts, demanded his extradition to US soil. The Taliban, for their part, doubted the objectivity of the American legal system. They agreed to hand him over only to a neutral Islamic country for trial, which Washington rejected.
The failed talks fueled Taliban hard-liners, who reminded their colleagues that bin Laden was helping bankroll the war against Alliance rebels. Both sides looked to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar for direction, but the enigmatic, one-eyed Commander of the Faithful, as he called himself, happened to be one of the most inscrutable and reticent heads of state in history. In his five years in power, he had never appeared on television; outside of a pair of grainy photographs, there is no visual record of his existence. During his reign, he traveled just twice to Kabul from his home in the southern city of Kandahar. He did not give speeches and avoided the radio. Indeed, to some Afghans he seemed a mythical figure conjured up by Taliban propagandists, an emblem of piety and virtue meant to serve as a focal point for Taliban rule.
The reality, however, was far more mundane. A lowly village preacher and minor figure in the anti-Soviet resistance, Omar had found himself, through an unlikely turn of events, thrust atop a fledgling state. As a mullah, a preacher qualified only to lead Friday sermons, he was at the bottom of the country’s informal Islamic hierarchy, beneath a class of theologians who could interpret the scriptures and issue religious rulings called fatwas. Omar was a religious parvenu, a small-time priest giving orders to bishops. Projecting theological credibility to his more lettered colleagues, and by extension to the entire Muslim world, was everything, and the symbolism of surrendering bin Laden to non-Muslims would have been damaging to the very soul of the Taliban project. Their legitimacy as a state, such as it was, rested upon the notion that Islamic law had saved the country. In their view, they had ended the anarchy and bloodshed of the civil war by restoring society to its Islamic roots and submitting everyone—warlords and foot soldiers, landlords and peasants, men and women alike—to God’s law. How then could Omar justify extraditing bin Laden and subjecting him to the vagaries of secular Western justice? Bin Laden’s presence was a problem that he saw no way to resolve. “Osama is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat,” he once admitted. “I can neither spit him out nor swallow him.”
Taliban pragmatists could see all too clearly the dangers that would befall them if the impasse continued. A week after the 9/11 attacks, they visited Omar in his modest Kandahar home. “We pleaded with him for hours” to expel bin Laden, one of them recalled, “but it was as if he covered his ears.”
On September 20, President Bush increased the pressure, declaring: “The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.” When Taliban officials again went to see Omar, however, they found him in a defiant mood. “You just care about your posts and your money, your ministries,” he said. “But I don’t care about mine.”
Behind the scenes, though, he was scrabbling for a face-saving solution. Twice he sent his top deputy to meet covertly in Pakistan with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station chief, Robert Grenier, in hopes of arranging bin Laden’s transfer to a neutral third country—but Washington stood firm on its position of an unconditional handover. Meanwhile, Omar’s intransigence was costing his government the few foreign supporters it had to its name, which became painfully clear when Pakistan, its key ally and patron, severed ties and sided openly with the United States.
Sinking into depression and paranoia, Omar was often on the verge of tears. He spent nights in a bunker underneath his home, a gas mask by his side due to rumors of an impending American chemical weapons attack. He restricted visits to his home to a few close aides and deployed troops to guard important armories and airstrips. Senior Talibs sent their families to Pakistan to wait out the inevitable.
Then, in late September, two developments gave Omar a glimmer of hope. First, Pakistani intelligence agents showed up at his home—without their government’s knowledge. Contravening dictator Pervez Musharraf’s stated policy, they pressed him to resist the invasion to the very end and assured him that he would have allies in Pakistan. It was the opening move in a perilous double game that the Pakistanis would play for the next decade. Second, senior Taliban figures, who until then were a threat to defect, decided to toss their lot in with the regime. “I was an original Talib,” one said to me later. “I fought against the Russians with these people. We took Kandahar together. We almost died against the Northern Alliance. I realized that we couldn’t abandon each other now, even if we disagreed.”
In early October, President Bush warned the Taliban that “time is running out.” A thousand troops from the US Tenth Mountain Division landed in Uzbekistan, near the Afghan border, while CIA agents and Special Operations Forces soldiers had already slipped into northern Afghanistan to work covertly with the Northern Alliance. Omar, meanwhile, kept himself and his family hidden in his bunker, passing messages to the outside world through a courier. On October 6, he received word from Pakistani agents that the American attack was imminent. That night, he gathered his senior lieutenants and delivered a last rousing address. “My family, my power, my privileges,” he told them, “are all in danger, but still I am insisting on sacrificing myself, and you should do likewise.”
The next evening, a few minutes before nine p.m., residents in Kandahar city saw the night sky flash a blinding white. In his bunker, Mullah Omar felt the house shake violently. The American war had begun. A missile had scored a direct hit on his compound, destroying a section and grievously wounding his ten-year-old son. Desperately clutching the child, he ran outside and, with the rest of his family, squeezed into an old Corolla. They sped to the hospital, where Omar begged the doctor to help his son. “He had very bad abdominal injuries,” the doctor recalled, “and a badly fractured femur in his right leg, and we could not save him.”
Distraught and furious, Omar jumped back into the vehicle and shouted to the driver, “Go! Go to Sangesar!” They raced through the narrow streets toward the village, where Omar had extended family, as dozens of townsfolk emerged from their homes to watch. On reaching the outskirts of Sangesar, everyone sprang out and hurried off on foot. Moments later, a missile slammed into the vehicle, blowing it to pieces. The Taliban leader and his relatives disappeared into the village. He would never be seen in public again.
* * *
In Gayawa th
at night, Mullah Cable saw the darkened sky light up without warning in flickers of hot white and orange. He found it, in an odd kind of way, beautiful. He could tell that the bombs were off in the distance—in Kabul, probably, where the Taliban had many military installations. He glimpsed his men watching the sky, their silent faces briefly exposed with each strike. No one knew what they would do should the bombs reach their camp, except retreat to their bunkers and pray.
But not a single bomb fell anywhere near Gayawa that night, or the night following, or any other night that week. Mullah Cable began to consider the possibility that he had put too much stock in the Americans’ technological prowess. In serious wars, there was no substitute for living and fighting in the mountains, for planning ambushes, coordinating artillery, and storming the enemy by sight and sound and gut alone. The Americans, on the other hand, hid behind the clouds, as if they knew all too well the fate of those who’d preceded them. By the fourth week of October, it was looking as if they would leave just as mysteriously as they came. “I thought the war would be over quickly, and then we could get on with things,” he recalled.
Even when the strikes eventually hit the hills nearby during the first days of November, Mullah Cable remained unworried. His camp was too small, too insignificant to be picked out from above. Every night the planes would fly overhead without incident and disappear into the jagged country to the north, and the earth would tremble and the mountain peaks would light up, and his men would watch and talk about the pilots and wonder at their motives. It was only after one bomb struck close to their camp, in a neighboring valley, that they decided to go see for themselves what destruction the planes could bring. A group of the fighters assembled to investigate, but Mullah Cable opted to stay behind because his last pair of shoes had worn down to soggy rags. “Can you imagine?” he asked me later. “We were out there fighting for our country and God, and I didn’t even have shoes.” For days, his footwear problem had been all he could think about.
From his mountain perch, he watched his fighters drive their pickup trucks down the bluff away from the camp, then turn a corner and disappear. Over the radio, he heard them exchange greetings with another group of Taliban soldiers.
At that moment, a jet shrieked past, turned sharply, and dropped a series of bombs just where they had gone. The explosions were massive and deafening. “My teeth shook, my bones shook, everything inside me shook,” he recalled. An enormous cloud of smoke rose above the mountains. All he could do was stand and watch.
The walkie-talkie had fallen silent. He waited for hours for some word. Finally, he decided that he had no choice but to go see for himself.
He drove into the basin and turned the corner and then stepped out of the vehicle. Oh my God, he thought. There were severed limbs everywhere. He inched closer. There were headless torsos and torso-less arms, cooked slivers of scalp and flayed skin. The stones were crimson, the sand ocher from all the blood. Coal-black lumps of melted steel and plastic marked the remains of his friends’ vehicles.
Closing his eyes, he steadied himself. In five years of fighting he had seen his share of death, but never lives disposed of so easily, so completely, so mercilessly, in mere seconds.
“There’s one still alive!”
He looked to see a villager coming toward him from a clutch of nearby houses. Inside one, he found his good friend Khoday Noor. Mullah Cable took his hand. “Khoday Noor! Khoday Noor! Can you hear me?” Noor stared back blankly. His right side was paralyzed and blood was draining from a wound in his back. They loaded him onto a vehicle, but he died en route to the nearest town. “He was just a young guy, a conscript,” Mullah Cable recalled. “He had no reason to die.”
Back at the camp, Mullah Cable washed his clothes and washed them again, but the smell would not go away. Those were men he’d known for five years down there in the valley—five years of mountain living, of meals and prayers shared. He sat there counting up the children they’d left behind.
The remaining men in the camp gathered for a dinner of naan and tea and offered theories about how the Americans spotted the convoy. Some said that they had advanced airplanes that could roam high above the clouds for days without refueling, picking out targets as they pleased; or that they could see every Talib in the country with a special type of flying camera, which beamed images back to commanders in the United States. Night washed over the mountains, the camp fell quiet, and Mullah Cable retreated to his bunker to try to catch some sleep. As he lay there considering the day’s events, he experienced something he’d never felt before about the Taliban: doubt.
Later that night, news came in over the radio: after a day’s bombardment, 880 fighters were missing across the front lines. Eight hundred and eighty, he thought to himself—what kind of unimaginable power was this? Outside, his men stayed up, chatting anxiously until just before dawn, when villagers arrived with more grim news. They had found the body of the local Taliban governor—a powerful, feared man—cut clean in half.
In just two days, they had suffered more losses than he’d witnessed in the previous three years. He needed to calm down and think clearly. The trouble was, he hadn’t slept since the bombing. That afternoon he retreated to his bunker for a short nap, but still sleep would not come. Instead, he stared at the ceiling for hours. A few of his fighters entered with rumors that whole Taliban units had defected up north. He said nothing.
In the evening, a message from supreme leader Mullah Omar, still in hiding, came by radio: “The people are suffering, but this is a test we shall pass, God willing.” The test was from God himself, Omar said, and the goal, he explained, was “martyrdom.”
Mullah Cable simply couldn’t believe it. To defend his country he would take deadly risks, suffer cold mountain nights, go for months without his family—he would do it all, gladly, but martyrdom? Talk of martyrdom from a man in hiding? For reasons he did not fully grasp, the Americans were trying to kill him and everyone around him. The Northern Alliance was still trying to kill him. And now, he realized, his own leaders were encouraging his death.
Then and there, he decided not to die in the service of hopeless causes. A thousand armies at Mullah Omar’s command could not stop a power like the Americans, not with the sort of jet he had watched eviscerate his comrades. If his leaders were planning to abandon him to such machines, then he would abandon them first.
He went over to see his men, who were busy checking provisions and talking among themselves. He knew that the scent of cowardice in his decision was unmistakable. He wasn’t the type to run or shirk responsibility. But it would be criminal to ask his fighters to sacrifice themselves for Mullah Omar, a man they’d never even seen. He gathered them together. Jets were shrieking overhead and the mountains echoed with booms like some otherworldly storm, and a few of his men were already in tears. “Go home,” he said. “Get yourselves away from here. Don’t contact each other.” Not a soul protested.
By morning, messages from other commanders were flooding in over his walkie-talkie, proclaiming battle plans and announcing this or that new mission. In communiqués broadcast on the national radio, the same words were on every fighter’s lips: martyrdom, jihad, infidels. They formed the quintessential elements of their argot, forged from years fighting the Russians and the Northern Alliance warlords. Yet it was only talk, aired for their superiors and perhaps for each other. Mullah Cable figured that in reality, Talibs everywhere were probably defecting. After all, hundreds of commanders up and down the front lines don’t just spontaneously announce missions at the same time, not without prior coordination. He was sure that only the Arabs of al-Qaeda and their foreign allies would fight to the death because they had nowhere else to go. Retreating to their home countries was simply not an option. As Afghan natives, however, the Taliban could hold out hope that they’d be allowed to return to their home villages in peace and, when the chaos ended, start afresh. This was how things had gone for decades. His countrymen had learned to switch sides when necessary
or give up the fighter’s life entirely—anything to survive.
As Mullah Cable stood shoeless atop his mountain base, he considered his fate. If he somehow could make it out alive, he promised himself that he would abandon politics forever. He’d get a job with his in-laws, who owned a shop in Kabul, where his wife and children lived. But getting there would not be easy. Chaos reigned: rumors were pouring in of fighters across the front lines throwing their weapons in ditches and fleeing. They were bribing locals for shelter, or heading off to their home villages—and often dying in the effort. The Taliban’s crumbling forces were up against a thousand or so highly motivated Northern Alliance rebels, a seemingly endless stream of American warplanes, and CIA agents and Special Operations soldiers directing the whole effort. The enemy was barreling toward Kabul—at this pace, Mullah Cable figured they might reach it any day—and he knew that he had to get there first to have any hope of making it into the city.
The fifty-mile journey along serpentine dirt roads through the mountains was hazardous and unpredictable. Capture by the Northern Alliance would mean detention and possibly death, a logic he understood all too well given how the Taliban had treated their own captives. And if his own superiors caught him fleeing, he would fare no better. Worst of all, with fighters switching sides in droves, he could trust no one. It was every man for himself, a world with no comrades, only enemies.
He walked over to the few fighters still in the camp. He hugged each in turn, boarded a Toyota HiLux pickup truck, and drove off alone.
* * *
It was November 6, 2001, and the war was about a month old. The first winter winds were gusting through the valleys and avalanches were tumbling majestically down the distant peaks of the Hindu Kush. But driving through small mud villages, past fields of wheat and corn, Mullah Cable kept his eyes fixed on the road. The trip proved humiliating. Whenever locals glimpsed his HiLux, a signature Taliban vehicle, gunshots soon followed. In one village, he saw even housewives firing out from their windows. From then on he opted for the spine-jarring back roads, and eventually he made it to Parwan, the next province.