by Tamim Ansary
DIRECTLY AFTER THE SOVIET WITHDRAWAL OF 1989, THE UNITED States and its allies might have called their clients together to work out a framework for a stable post-Communist government. There’s no telling whether it would have worked, but at least, at that moment, the United States had some leverage with both Pakistan and the Mujahideen.
It was then, however, that Afghanistan dropped off the US foreign policy view screen. Global politics drew US attention elsewhere. Afghanistan had been a Cold War battlefield, and the Cold War was over. It didn’t officially end until 1991, but it was over effectively as soon as the Soviet Empire went into its final throes. The fall of the Soviet Empire was the defining political earthquake of the early nineties, whose aftershocks monopolized Western policy and punditry for the bulk of the decade. In 1991, when aides briefed President George H. W. Bush on a new outbreak of fighting in Kabul, he said, “Is that thing still going on?”1
Actually, for the United States, the trouble in Afghanistan was just beginning. Crucial ingredients of this trouble started to form during the Afghan-Soviet War. In that period, some 3.5 million Afghans fled to Pakistan and almost that many to Iran. The refugees lived along the border in huge camps such as Shamshatoo near Peshawar and Hazara Town near Quetta. These camps were invariably situated outside cities to mitigate friction between the refugees and Pakistan’s own citizens. The refugees were not allowed to seek jobs because they would be taking employment away from Pakistani citizens. They were not allowed to start businesses because they would be competing with Pakistanis. They were welcome to huddle in the camps, safe from Soviet bombing, but not to build new lives. Food and water were delivered to them, courtesy of the United Nations; the food consisting mainly of oil, flour, sugar, salt, and tea. All the refugees had to do was nothing.
In general, these camps were surrounded by wire-topped fences that made them feel a bit like open-air prisons. Each camp had a gate manned by the Pakistani military. I visited some of these camps in 2002 and was amazed to find them filled with children. Every kid I talked to in the alleys of Nasir Bagh claimed to have ten or twelve siblings. Camp officials told me then that three-quarters of the population was under fifteen years of age. Hundreds of thousands of teenage boys were cooped up in these camps with no outlet for their restless teenage energy and nothing but horror to build memories around.
The boys did, however, have one escape hatch from the boredom. They could go to a madrassa. Hundreds of such schools were built by Pakistani clerics, and they were controlled by Pakistan’s powerful right-wing Islamist parties such as Jamiat-i-Ulama-Islam (The Society of Muslim Scholars), parties closely connected to ISI. Many of the schools got funding from wealthy Saudi Arabians intent on promoting the doctrines of their country’s Wahhabi sect, the most rigidly puritanical, fundamentalist, and politicized Islamic reform movement to come out of the Arab world in the eighteenth century. The Wahhabi establishment was, in turn, intimately connected through marriage and tradition to the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia, and they had been proselytizing vigorously in recent decades—but not among non-Muslims. They weren’t interested in converting non-Muslims to Islam; they wanted to convert Muslims to their brand of Islam. Official records list more than two thousand of these madrassas in the eighteen districts near the border, with a total enrollment of nearly 220,000 students.2 No one knows how many more were unlisted.
Afghan boys were welcome to enroll in these schools for free, and they even got room and board, provided they put themselves entirely in the hands of their teachers. Once they entered a madrassa, refugee boys were pretty much cut off from alternative sources of news and information about the world. And their teachers here didn’t just teach religion. One official report to the prime minister of Pakistan named about a hundred madrassas that were also teaching combat skills. The actual number was probably higher than the official count.3
Mostly, however, what the religious teachers gave their captive audiences was a narrative. They told the wide-eyed refugee boys about a perfection that had existed just once in history, during the lifetime of Prophet Mohammed, at Medina. For one generation, they explained, a whole community had lived in absolute obedience to the laws of God Almighty and that obedience had made them mighty, because God accompanied the original Muslims into every battle, and against God, no force could stand. This was not wild-eyed raving; it’s pretty much the standard core of the Muslim narrative. The context was what made it volatile.
Also, in recent years, the Muslim world had been awash with expectations of an apocalyptic battle coming up between God’s people and the devil’s, and this narrative came to permeate the camps and madrassas. Religious teachers preached that the rebirth of the perfect community would mark the beginning of the battle. Yes, if only some group of Muslims would live as the people of Prophet-guided Medina had lived—by those exact rules, by that code—the world would be saved. Boys who were suffering through the worst childhood on earth were allowed to imagine that it might be their destiny to establish the community that would save the world.
There will always be some dispute about the role that the Pakistan government played in all this. They were creating the cadre of the future Taliban, but did they know this? Was Pakistan consciously building an army to send swarming into Afghanistan someday? Public records provide no answer. The deliberate calculations, if any, were made behind closed doors.
One thing is certain. Pakistan had interests to advance in Afghanistan, interests shaped by factors, forces, and considerations beyond Afghanistan itself. Yes, once again, global forces were moving into position to do battle for big prizes, and once again Afghanistan was situated exactly where those forces would come crashing into each other.
IN PRESIDENT CLINTON’S FIRST TERM, HIS SECRETARY OF STATE, WARREN Christopher, never mentioned Afghanistan in his public speeches, not even once.4 Christopher’s diplomatic energies were focused mostly on Eastern Europe, and quite reasonably so; for it was here that the Soviet collapse produced the most violent repercussions. Here, the “stability” forged by Communism unraveled most drastically as nation-states dissolved into warring “nationalities” determined to settle old scores. Serbs fought Croatians, Croatians battled Bosnians, Macedonians Serbians, and Kosovans Macedonians. As each group tried to rid its territory of other groups, the term “ethnic cleansing” entered the lexicon of human shame. No wonder so much of the world’s attention focused on Eastern Europe.
But the aftershocks of the Soviet collapse rippled to the eastern frontiers of the former empire with equally momentous implications, although these went more unnoticed at first. The former Soviet Socialist Republics of central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—had been joined only uneasily to European Russia. Once Moscow’s power evaporated, trace memories of an earlier culture, long submerged by European Communism, began to re-emerge.
All of these countries (except Tajikistan) had been inhabited by Turkish-speaking ethnic groups since ancient times. All (including Tajikistan) had once been an integral part of the Muslim world. When the Soviet Union collapsed, bureaucratic inertia transformed the top Communist officials into newfangled dictators. They didn’t rule as Communists anymore, just as strongmen offering their people posters and statues of themselves and national holidays commemorating their own birthdays in place of something, anything, to believe in. No wonder Islam began to rise again here. It was the one indigenous spiritual idea that promised to provide some cohesive social meaning.
And because post-Soviet central Asia was in such cultural flux, it looked like it might be up for grabs politically. Turkey took an interest, for, after all, wasn’t a pan-Turkic state stretching from Istanbul to China a plausible vision? Iran’s whiskers began to twitch, for, after all, didn’t several major empires of classical times include both Iran and the Turkish steppes? Never mind that Persia was a conquered province in those empires, and the conquerors were Turks.
Above all, Pakistan saw seductive possibilities in the reconf
iguration of central Asia. Throughout its brief history, Pakistan had been a fragile country wedged between a hostile Afghanistan and a hostile India. Central Asia looked like an escape hatch because there as elsewhere Islamism came flowing in as Communism ebbed out, and Islam, as it happened, was the fundamental political and ideological premise of Pakistan, the one theme that provided social cohesion to Pakistan’s disparate parts. Also, no matter what Turkey and Iran might feel, ancient trade, traffic, and conquest through central Asia had flowed just as vigorously north and south as it had east and west. Never mind that the traffic had consisted largely of central Asian horsemen thundering south to sack the cities of the plains. There was a historical connection between central Asia and south Asia, and Islam might be the cultural solvent that could meld them into one again.
To Pakistan, this prospect looked especially promising because Sunni Islam was the dominant sect in both central Asia and Pakistan. Iranians by contrast were Shi’as, who had been at odds with Sunnis for fourteen centuries, so they looked to have no real chance of enlarging their influence in central Asia. As for Turkey, it was so far away. If Pakistan could get some trade links going with central Asia, it might build a loose Sunni Muslim co-prosperity sphere directed from Islamabad that would have the power to confront both India and Iran on equal terms. If that happened, Pakistan might end up as the greatest power in the region and the predominant country in the Muslim world!
There was just one problem with this vision: any trade route between Pakistan and central Asia would have to run through Afghanistan. Something would have to be done about Afghanistan.
THE SOVIET COLLAPSE WAS NOT THE ONLY FACTOR FRAMING GLOBAL politics in the nineties. Even before the Cold War officially ended, the first salvo had been fired in a new set of wars that political scientist Michael Klare has dubbed “resource wars.”
The core resource at issue was petroleum. Oil politics had reared its ugly head in the seventies when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries suddenly cut production in order to punish Western industrial powers for supporting Israel. Their embargo tripled the price of oil in a single year, driving the Western world into a recession. The oil embargo of 1974 sounded a warning: oil was clout. By the time the Cold War ended, the demand for oil had only risen, what with the world population growing by almost a billion people and industrialism spreading throughout the “Third World.”5
In 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein suddenly annexed his neighbor Kuwait, thereby gaining control of the second- or perhaps third-largest oil reserves in the world. Only Saudi Arabia (and possibly Iran) had more. With his armies massed on Kuwait’s far borders, Hussein seemed poised to take over Saudi Arabia as well. He certainly had a big enough army.
But Saudi Arabia had an asset of its own: a big friend. US president George Bush declared of Iraq’s invasion, “This will not stand.” His administration forged a coalition of thirty-eight nations and got United Nations approval for a war. The coalition landed 850,000 troops on Saudi soil to fight Hussein.6 The war began on January 17, 1991, and lasted forty-two days. The US and its partners hit Iraq with eighty-five thousand7 tons of bombs, Saddam’s army broke like a rotten reed, and his troops—mostly miserable draftees—fled back toward the city of Baghdad, with coalition jets shooting them from the air. The coalition sustained 358 casualties in that war, Iraq as many as 100,000.8 Bush then declared an abrupt cease-fire that left Saddam Hussein in place.
That (first) Gulf War dramatized what everybody already knew: the world’s oil came so predominantly from the Persian Gulf that a handful of countries around this body of water—Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a few of the United Arab Emirates—could hold the whole industrialized world hostage. The stability of the world required that oil and gas sources be diversified, and because the competition for oil was sure to grow more desperate as supplies shrank, the major industrial powers had to think strategically about retaining access to whatever new oil was tapped.
In the 1990s, geologists calculated that more than 50 percent of the world’s proven petroleum reserves lay in the Persian Gulf region, but that oil was being pumped vigorously and draining fast. The second-greatest known reserves were thought to lie in the Caspian Sea basin, from which oil had hardly been tapped.9 This region included Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, the very countries that Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey were eying hungrily. As the Persian Gulf oil diminished, the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin would become ever more precious.
How could the industrialized West take delivery of this oil? There were three options. One: a pipeline could be built directly to Western Europe from the Caspian Basin, but it would have to pass through thousands of miles of the former Soviet Empire, and Russia would certainly impose prohibitive tariffs. Beyond Russia lay strife-torn Eastern Europe, where the pipeline would have to cross many national borders, no doubt incurring fees and duties at every one; and heaven help the world if one of those unstable countries should go up in flames. So option one looked dubious.
Option two: the oil could be piped to ports on the Persian Gulf, which were already set up to ship oil. In that case, however, the pipeline would pass right through Iran, giving that country a stranglehold over the future of the industrial world, and this was unacceptable to the United States because Americans still saw Iran as their number one enemy (and vice versa).
That left option three: a pipeline could be run directly from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. From ports like Karachi on the Arabian Sea, tankers could take the oil anywhere in the world. Option three would be the shortest pipeline of the three. The United States certainly favored this option, because Pakistan was a long-standing ally. Pakistan, of course, favored it, not just for economic reasons but because the pipeline would give Pakistan real leverage in world politics. Add the pipeline to the possibility of building a Sunni Muslim entity stretching from Pakistan to Kyrgyzstan, and wow: the future looked exhilarating!
There was just one problem with option three. The pipeline would have to go through Afghanistan.
On the face of it, building a pipeline through explosive, anarchic Afghanistan seemed . . . what’s the word I’m searching for? Insane. But after you considered the other options, Afghanistan didn’t look so bad. It was just one country, after all. Surely, one country could be tamed, no matter how chaotic it was. Pakistan, in short, had a huge stake in stabilizing and controlling Afghanistan. And ISI had long worked to put the pieces in place to achieve this exact goal. The key to the plan was their factotum Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. ISI had hoped he would emerge as the undisputed boss of Afghanistan.
The Pipeline Proposal
Hekmatyar, however, disappointed his sponsors. First of all, he couldn’t match up to Massoud as a warrior. He rained death on Kabul but couldn’t gain an inch of territory. Also, he couldn’t form a coalition government with any of the other Mujahideen leaders. No one trusted him. Even when he negotiated a cease-fire, he himself broke it. Worst of all, he proved unable to win over the masses of Afghan people.
On this score, it must be said, none of the other rebel leaders was doing much better. Every one of them was losing popularity fast. In fact, the Mujahideen as a whole were forfeiting credibility as saviors because wherever they took over they plunged into looting, raping, killing, and fighting one another.
Finally, some movers and shakers in Pakistan began to think ISI was backing the wrong horse. One such figure was Pakistan’s interior minister, Major General (Retired) Naseerullah Babar. Even within ISI, some were losing faith. The doubters started looking for an alternative, and their gaze fell upon a little group just then getting organized in the city of Kandahar.
In 1994, these activists were not known as “the Taliban” or as anything else. “Getting organized” might be an exaggeration. They were hardly a group, just a handful of youngsters who had been through the cauldron of the war together and hung around with a slightly older man named Mullah Omar. They revered Omar and helped him carry out audacious act
ions he sometimes cooked up to protect local people from thugs.
Omar was about thirty years old at this time. He had joined a Hezb-i-Islam splinter group as a teenager and spent most of his adult life fighting. He had lost his left eye fighting the Communists, a badge of pride. After the Soviet withdrawal, he turned his weapons over to a senior commander and entered a madrassa, an Islamic seminary, to get some religious learning. That’s when people started calling him “Mullah.”
Like many Afghans, Mullah Omar got disillusioned with his former comrades in arms. He began cursing them as traitors to the faith and as criminals under the Shari’a. His daring denunciations won him a following among men his own age or younger, most of whom were or had been students at madrassas. The Arab word for student is talib, the plural of which is taliban, so this term was not the name of a party or a movement, originally. It merely described what Mullah Omar and his companions were: students.
Legend has it that sometime in the spring of 1994, the Prophet Mohammed appeared to Mullah Omar in a dream, offered him his cloak, and asked him to save the Muslim people. A few days later, the story goes, Omar heard about a particularly horrible crime in his neighborhood: some brutal Mujahid gangster had kidnapped two girls for himself and his men to rape. Mullah Omar told his followers to do something about it, and they did. Not only did they rescue the girls, they hanged the rapist from the gun barrel of his own tank as a warning to evildoers: there was a new sheriff in town.
I say “legend has it” because this story might be apocryphal. I know of no evidence that it was told at the time. This and many similar stories were told later, and often, when the Taliban were developing an image of themselves as incorruptible knights of Islamic piety and disseminating this image to the public—an image that, it must be said, they undoubtedly believed to be true.
Even if the stories were apocryphal, those young men must have been doing something to impress the locals, because they caught the eye of important people in Pakistan. Colonel Imam, ISI’s man in Herat, contacted Omar and began to work with him. Pakistan’s general consul in Kandahar (also an ISI man) helped out. Pakistan’s interior minister, General Naseerullah Babar, looked on approvingly.10 Pakistan’s Frontier Corps (a militia run by the Interior Ministry) began to provide Mullah Omar’s boys with military training. By October, they were ready to be tested.