Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  But that immorality, of course, was down to later Republican administrations.

  *

  Once the last battle of the Cold War was won, there was nothing holding the West in Afghanistan – no oil, for example. Not enough natural gas to stick around for. In fact, the West appeared confused and even repulsed by the bloodthirsty Mujaheddin it had armed.

  It left, it seemed, without a backward glance.

  On the ground, US desertion rankles. The distinction between the policies pursued by different administrations in Washington is not lost on people here. Afghans want to know why the United States funded ten years of war here, and then, having supplied enough arms for the Mujaheddin to keep fighting for the following decade, too, just upped and left.

  ‘Why has the world forgotten us?’ is the most common question I am asked by ordinary people in the bazaars and refugee camps. I feel a stab of guilt.

  In her clinic at the refugee camp, Farahnaz Nazir put it succinctly the first time I visited her there. She looked up from tending malnourished babies and said, ‘The September 11 attacks were terrible, simply terrible. But the US is paying the price for its belief that Communism was more dangerous than Islamic fundamentalism. The US armed the fundamentalists and then when the Communists were defeated, the US just left the fundamentalists here to ferment. They washed their hands of us, and they left us to live with the fundamentalists. For years we have suffered under them, and now the US is suffering under them, too.’

  *

  For the Republican administration in Washington, 1985 was a turning point. President Reagan’s government increased covert military aid to the Mujaheddin to US$250 million a year – double the amount spent in 1984. Under National Security Decision Directive 166, Washington secretly agreed to take US high-tech and military expertise to the Afghan battlefield. The possibility of trapping the Soviet Union in its own version of Vietnam was irresistible – and that’s just what happened.

  In 1985 the C.I.A. started supplying the Mujaheddin with satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets, plans for military operations and intercepts of Soviet communications. But that was just the beginning. In 1986 the US provided the Mujaheddin with sophisticated Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. There is grainy NBC news footage of the brave anti-Communist forces receiving their weapons. It is hilarious – anyone can be cast as an ally in the war against Communism, including turbaned Islamic militants on mules.

  The US program was that the C.I.A. would provide funds, weapons and supervision for the Mujaheddin, but direct contact would be left to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I. With the Stinger missiles, for example, it worked like this: In June 1986 Pakistani intelligence officers received training on the missiles in the United States, and then returned to Pakistan, taking with them a new US invention – an electronic simulator – to teach the fifth-century warriors how to use the state-of-the-art missiles.

  By 1987, 65,000 tonnes of arms were being supplied, and C.I.A. and Pentagon specialists were constantly travelling to the new I.S.I. headquarters at Rawalpindi.

  It’s worth noting that over the decade of the Afghan war, the I.S.I. grew from a small outfit of a few thousand operatives to an organisation of more than 150,000, with a US$2 billion budget. In many ways this war cemented Pakistan’s role as America’s ally in the sub-continent. In the Cold War context of the time, ‘socialist’ India was Russia’s partner, and an alliance with Pakistan redressed that balance.

  By 1988, the annual amount being pumped to the Mujaheddin reached a massive US$700 million. The US was even shipping Tennessee mules to Afghanistan to carry all the weapons over the mountains. A decade later, Afghanistan was still littered with rusted American shipping containers, some refashioned by scavenging locals to serve as doors, workshops, stores and even gaols.

  *

  Recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the Mujaheddin factions by an organisation based in Pakistan called Office of Service, Maktab al Khidamat, known by its acronym, M.A.K. One of three people who ran M.A.K. was Osama bin Laden.

  In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his degree in civil engineering, his business expertise and family funds, he built training camps, and roads to reach them. Some were dug deep into the mountains. These are the camps now dubbed ‘terrorist universities’ by Washington. They were built in collaboration with the I.S.I. and the C.I.A.

  Bin Laden established the al-Qaeda (‘the Base’) between 1987 and 1988 to run these camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly run holding company, integrating the operations of his armed forces with other ‘legitimate’ businesses.

  In 1989, bin Laden took overall charge of M.A.K.

  This history was known throughout the 1990s, reported on in detail in American newspapers, but it appeared irrelevant in light of the collapse of Communism. Debate over many issues, including the wisdom of arming Islamic militants and the policy of spawning a huge increase in opium production, was swept under the carpet.

  But following September 11, the kaleidoscope has shifted, refracting these events in a new and more damaging light. It now seems incredible that in 1986 C.I.A. chief William Casey supported an I.S.I. proposal to recruit young Muslims from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. American investigative journalist John Cooley has revealed that Muslims were recruited within the US for the Mujaheddin, and were trained at Camp Peary, a C.I.A. training camp in Virginia.

  Surely this is blowback with a capital B? It seems that as in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, America has helped train and arm its worst enemy.

  The C.I.A. is scrambling for cover, claiming that though it supported Afghan fighters, including international Muslim brigades, it did not have any direct dealings with Osama bin Laden. He was not one of ‘ours’, they argue. But the web is so tangled that it doesn’t make much difference. Bin Laden was, if not ‘ours’, then on ‘our’ side. He was linked to I.S.I., and I.S.I. was ‘ours’, taking C.I.A. money and spending it for ‘us’ in Afghanistan.

  The left-wing analysis is that bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was doing in Afghanistan in the 1980s – funding, feeding and training mercenaries. First it was for the I.S.I. and, behind the scenes, the C.I.A. Later it became for the Taliban.

  *

  After a decade of fighting, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989. The country fell to the heavily armed Mujaheddin, who turned on each other, plunging Afghanistan into seven more years of bitter warfare. This conflict swallowed up the Western dollars that had flowed here, and claimed tens of thousands more civilian lives.

  By 1994 the country was in chaos, close to disintegration. Smalltime commanders controlled huge arsenals and large numbers of mercenaries. They took control of trade and smuggling routes. On the road between Quetta in Pakistan and Kandahar, a distance of only 130 kilometres, 20 different groups put up chains and demanded 20 separate tolls. It didn’t matter that you’d just paid ten kilometres back – if you didn’t pay here, too, you’d be shot. Looting, theft and rape were commonplace. Afghanistan was utterly lawless.

  When religious students from the south of the country, calling themselves the Taliban, stepped in offering peace and order, a grateful war-weary nation accepted. The tiny doctrinaire group conquered more than half the country without firing a shot. Town after town acceded to their tough brand of Islam in order to obtain relief from the chaos and bloodshed around them. However, most people never saw their new leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. This is perhaps the strangest feature of the takeover. In a scenario unimaginable almost anywhere else in the world, in either a dictatorship or a democracy, there were no appearances and no photo opportunities. Mullah Omar was a name only. People were utterly oppressed by an invisible autocrat, his edicts enforced by brutal religious police.

  One of the few people to have actually seen Mullah Omar is the Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid. His book is the one all the journalists in Afghanistan are
reading. Everyone has a copy of Taliban except me, since I came in such a hurry, without any Afghan reference books. I read my friends’ copies, whenever one is free, dipping into Taliban history in Khoja Bahauddin until someone wants their book back. Rashid says there is an ‘entire factory of myths’ to explain how a group of ill-equipped religious students took on and subdued the rapacious Kandahar warlords. Sex, in fact sexual perversion, features in all of them.

  The most frequently told story concerns events in Kandahar in 1994, when a warlord abducted two teenage girls, shaved their heads, and allowed his men to repeatedly rape them. The Taliban took action. Mullah Omar gathered some 30 Talibs who had only 16 rifles between them – not even one per man – in Afghanistan a sign of their poverty and desperation. But they attacked the base, freed the girls and hanged the warlord from the barrel of a tank. Crucially, they captured a huge quantity of arms and ammunition.

  Some months later two Kandahar commanders were involved in a dispute over a young boy they both wanted to sodomise. Once again the Taliban took on the sexually perverse evil-doers and won, punishing the paedophiles and freeing the boy. As their reputation for heroism spread, the public began to appeal to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to sort out other local disputes. Rashid describes Mullah Omar emerging as a ‘Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to create a just Islamic system.’

  But once Afghanistan was under the control of the idealistic Taliban, the people found their yoke of repression and suffering had only tightened. And despite the vigilant presence of the Taliban’s religious police, as well as public amputations and executions, the war did not end.

  After all this, the country is now suffering its worst drought in 70 years, bringing with it the real threat of famine. I am here at this time as a guest of the Mujaheddin who helped bring Afghanistan to its knees. It feels as if all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding in, and it’s difficult to know how people keep going. The truth is, the effort of endurance kills many, or shortens their lives.

  Increasingly, I feel my job is irrelevant to the real needs of this country. What is the point in covering the long, slow lead-up to a conflict when people are starving? By early October, I am reporting more and more about the struggle to feed people.

  *

  A truck drives into the centre of a clearing marked out with a string fence in the desert near Khoja Bahauddin. It contains a precious cargo. Not weapons but food. French aid agency ACTED is distributing 50 tonnes of wheat, the first food aid here in three months.

  Hundreds of people line up outside the string fence on this flat piece of stony desert near the Qumkishlak refugee camp. The people are hungry, but there is no fighting. Guards with switches keep the children in line. Inside the clearing, men wait by the truck. Sacks of grain are loaded onto their shoulders. They carry them a short distance to a blue tarpaulin laid on the ground. The sacks are split, their contents falling in a white river on the dusty surface, making a satisfying, sibilant sound.

  The refugees stand patiently, covering their noses because the dust is ferocious. Women are also in the queue, bright absences in their burqas.

  When enough grain has been poured out, the aid workers signal to them to begin coming forward. One by one, they run up to a table inside the string fence. They smear an inky thumbprint on a file, to show they have collected their family’s quota, and then go to the tarpaulin where they receive three kilos of wheatflour. It’s poured into their clothing with a big plastic scoop. They make a well in the long pyjama tails of their suits to receive it. A woman in a blue burqa carries her flour in a red scarf. One small child, coming to collect the precious grain, suddenly freezes in panic. It is too heavy. She is terrified she will drop it. Her father comes forward to help her carry her load.

  ACTED logistician Eric Le Guin tells me, ‘This amount will support 2000 families for a month, and 150 tonnes more is on its way, along with oil and sugar, which are cooking staples here.’

  The people receiving this food aid are some of the 10,000 refugees who arrived in this region just over a year ago, after the Taliban conquered the nearby town of Taloqan. As Afghanistan’s crippling drought continued, they soon became utterly reliant on food aid. During this period there was also a decline in relations between the Taliban and the outside world, leading to delays and sporadic food delivery by international aid agencies, just when it was needed most. This left some of the refugees at the point of starvation. Many survived by eating boiled grass.

  ‘Yes, we boiled grass, and we ate it, there was nothing else. The children were hungry, we were all hungry,’ says Nasr, the head of a large family living in the Qumkishlak camp. He is standing on a hill above the camp. Leaning on a stick, with a grey beard and a grey turban, he looks like an Old Testament prophet. His face is weathered and lined. I am shocked when he says he is only 50 years old.

  Children gather around him, including his grandchildren, most of them with skin lesions and the bleached hair consistent with malnutrition. One small girl is startlingly beautiful, with perfect features and huge, glowing eyes. In the West she would become a supermodel. But when she smiles her face is also lined, like that of a woman in her thirties. She is nine years old. She follows me all day at the refugee camp, smiling often, tearing at my heartstrings with her luminous beauty and her dismal future.

  ‘We have to live there, what else can we do?’ Nasr asks. ‘The Taliban persecuted us, beating us with sticks. They would have killed us, just because we were Tajiks. We ran away, taking nothing but the clothes we stood in.’

  The translator I am working with at the camp is Dr Ashraf Aini. He fled Taloqan at the same time as Nasr and his family. I can see he is edgy here. Dr Aini, who speaks flawless Russian and English, is an urbane, witty man in his early forties. He works at the local hospital at night, but earns ten times his monthly salary working as a translator for Canadian CBC during the day.

  ‘I left everything behind, absolutely everything. I had only two hours, so I gathered up my wife and children and we fled,’ he says.

  The sun is setting. I can hardly see Dr Aini for the stinging dust and smoke from the fires in the camp. The refugees are winter-proofing their dwellings. What this amounts to is building mud-brick walls around their tents, in the hope that they will then withstand sub-zero temperatures. We are surrounded by swarming crowds of curious people and children. The beautiful nine-year-old stays close as I ask Dr Aini why he decided on this precipitate flight.

  ‘We heard about the conditions for people living in Taliban-controlled areas, the massive killings of people in the north, the burning of villages, and we fled in fear.’ He adds vehemently, ‘There must be no compromise with such people. The Taliban cannot be included in any broad-based government in the future.’

  Not all his leaders agree. This controversial issue consumes much of our attention as alternatives to all-out war are canvassed. When journalists ask General Bariolai whether a compromise allowing the Taliban to participate in government could be reached, he says no compromise deal could ever include the Taliban leadership. Men like Mullah Omar, he says, can have no say in the future of the country. ‘They are nothing but agents of Pakistan. They brought foreigners here to kill Afghans. They educated boys of 13 or 15 in Pakistan to destroy our history, our museums and our archives.’

  But General Bariolai would be willing to co-operate with lowerranked Taliban. If they defected now, he would be willing to see them participate in decisions on how the country should be run. General Mamur Hassan tells me that he agrees. ‘After the fighting, when we succeed, compromise is possible. Yes, I can even foresee the possibility of co-operation with the Taliban. I could sit in government with a former Talib, yes.’

  *

  In the late 1990s Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf was filming near the refugee camp at Zabol on the Iranian border. He was making his sea
ring movie Kandahar, about a woman returning from the West to see the sister she had left behind in Afghanistan.

  ‘I never forget those nights of filming Kandahar. While our team searched the deserts with flashlights, we would see dying refugees like herds of sheep left in the desert. When we took those that we thought were dying of cholera to hospitals in Zabol, we realised that they were dying of hunger. Since those days and nights of seeing so many people starving to death, I haven’t been able to forgive myself for eating any meals.’

  Makhmalbaf was there to choose extras for his film. The Iranian authorities explained there had been an influx of illegal refugees, and the camp could not afford to feed so many people, although they hadn’t eaten for a week. When the film crew offered to provide meals, the Iranian authorities were very welcoming, aware they could not cope. Makhmalbaf fed some 400 people. Most were children who had fainted of hunger in their mothers’ arms. ‘For an hour we were crying and distributing bread and fruits … This is the story of a country that’s been ravaged by its own nature, history, economy, politics and the unkindness of its neighbours.’

  *

  As people in the south anticipate American air strikes, more refugees are beginning to arrive in Khoja Bahauddin, clambering up the inhospitable mountains in a journey that can take days or even weeks on foot.

  The ACTED aid agency is pre-positioning food and assistance so that it is able to respond quickly if the need arises, and this trickle of refugees turns into a flood. The agency is concerned that the onset of winter will make its job much more difficult. In northern Afghanistan most of the population lives in remote regions. In winter many villages cannot be reached by cars and trucks – instead camels and donkeys have to be loaded with supplies, to cross the mountain paths. In some areas, the aid agencies have to send messengers to ask people to walk for two or three days to a lower village to collect the donated food.