Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  By now the Pakistanis were deeply concerned that the Pashtun insurrection in the south was not under their control. Musharraf arrived at the UN in New York for his first-ever meeting with Bush, telling him to dissuade the Northern Alliance from taking Kabul and to let the ISI run the Pashtun insurrection. Musharraf showed abject contempt for the NA leaders, describing them to U.S. officials as “a bunch of thugs.” At their meeting, which took place a day after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, Bush pledged $1 billion in aid to Pakistan. Musharraf said this was not enough and instead asked for F-16 fighter aircraft for his air force. He said that only the delivery of F-16s would show that the United States was seriously committed to Pakistan. “It would be the most visible sign of your support, to blunt domestic criticism,” he reportedly told Bush. “We are not ready to talk about F-16s now, but this is a long friendship,” Bush replied. Musharraf asked, “How do we know the United States won’t abandon us again.” Bush replied, “You tell your people that the president looked you in the eye and told you that he would stick with you.”3 Musharraf asked Bush not to pressure him about democratization, or criticize what he would do politically. He received carte blanche from the Americans.

  The fate of Kabul was also of major concern to Musharraf. After meeting with Bush, the two leaders stood in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel before reporters. “We will encourage our friends to head south, across the Shumali Plains, but not into the city of Kabul,” Bush said. He knew then that it was too late to stop the advance of the Northern Alliance. On the night of November 12, 2001, the Taliban began to loot Kabul, and by the next day they had abandoned the city, stealing more than eight hundred cars and taxis to escape south. One Taliban group had hit the city’s money exchange and another the state bank, emptying both. Now there was nothing to stop the victorious NA troops and hundreds of foreign reporters from walking into Kabul unhindered. The city celebrated with noise, music, dancing, and, for the men, the shaving off of beards.

  Pakistan’s worst fears were realized when NA general Mohammed Fahim immediately moved six thousand soldiers into the city, ensuring total control. Musharraf put on a brave face, but Pakistani commentators were stunned, especially after Bush’s assurances. Pakistani newspapers called it “a strategic debacle” for the army and quoted ISI officials as saying “Pakistan’s worst nightmare has come true” with NA control of Kabul.4 The ISI told the Pakistani media that Bush had double-crossed them, that Fahim and other NA leaders were Indian agents, and that India now controlled Kabul.

  However, the military victory was quickly giving way to chaos from region to region, as NA forces could not move south or east due to their lack of support in the Pashtun areas. Warlords and former Taliban commanders took control of the eastern provinces. Three separate militias claimed to be in control of Nangarhar, the key eastern province, where Osama bin Laden had fled.5 Between Kabul and Kandahar was a vast, chaotic no-man’s-land ruled by commanders, criminals, and former Taliban. The vacuum in the east might never have been created, however, if the Americans had earlier backed another Pashtun leader who had entered Afghanistan to fight the Taliban: Abdul Haq.

  Charismatic, charming, and lionized by his followers, Abdul Haq was a legendary commander from the Afghan war against the Soviet Union with powerful tribal connections.6 He had been wounded sixteen times, including losing his right foot after stepping on a mine. We had been good friends since 1982, when to our mutual amusement I spent hours in his Peshawar office watching Western intelligence agents offer him plans and explosives to carry out another bombing of Soviet facilities in Kabul. The ISI labeled Haq a playboy because he refused to do their bidding.

  In 1999 the Taliban had killed Haq’s wife and daughter in Peshawar, and he had moved to Dubai. Now he was back in Peshawar to persuade tribal elders to join him in a rebellion against the Taliban. Haq’s aim was to avoid the bloodshed that was sure to follow an American invasion. “I am meeting secretly with Taliban commanders and elders, telling them the only way to minimize the bloodshed is to join in a national resistance led by the king against the Taliban,” he told me in Peshawar. “Some Taliban are good people who can stay on in any future setup,” he added. Haq received no help from the ISI or the CIA, who considered him unruly and unwilling to be directed. He had requested a meeting with Musharraf, who had declined, even though Haq was trying to mobilize the moderate Taliban whom Musharraf claimed to support. The CIA station chief in Islamabad refused to help Haq for fear it would annoy the ISI.7 Colin Powell insisted that the CIA do nothing without consulting the ISI, in case Pakistan’s support flagged.8

  Instead, Haq was supported by an American millionaire options trader from Chicago named Joseph J. Ritchie and his brother, James, who before 9/11 had lobbied the Bush administration to listen to Haq’s plans for an anti-Taliban revolt.9 Now they were in Peshawar supporting Haq’s venture. I warned Haq several times not to rush into Afghanistan, but he was convinced the Taliban were cracking. Ignoring all advice, an unarmed Haq, now age forty-three, entered Afghanistan on a white horse on October 21, 2001. Four days later, he and his group of nineteen men were surrounded in Logar province by Taliban forces.

  Ritchie desperately contacted CENTCOM, which belatedly sent a Predator drone to fire a missile on the Taliban. But it was too little too late. Haq was captured and taken to Kabul, where he was tortured and then hanged, along with two companions, in the rubble of a house where earlier twenty-two Pakistani militants had been killed by a U.S. cruise missile.10 Haq’s murder was revenge for the killing of the Pakistanis. I heard the news of Haq’s death while giving a TV interview, and I burst into tears. I was inconsolable, feeling both extreme grief and enormous anger at the Taliban, who had killed a peacemaker. His death was the saddest of moments, and all over Afghanistan people were in mourning.

  I attended Haq’s funeral in Peshawar. “I can cope with my son being killed—I have other sons who can take his place—but my brother was a national leader who was known across the country and he can never be replaced,” said Din Mohammed, Haq’s elder brother, whose twenty-two-year -old son, Izzatullah, was hanged alongside Haq. Many mourners openly blamed the ISI for Haq’s death, saying the ISI had betrayed his location to the Taliban. Pakistani officials denied the allegations. With the murder of Masud and now Haq, the Taliban were killing off every Afghan leader with a national standing. People feared that Hamid Karzai was next.

  It slowly dawned on Washington that the ISI had no intention of splitting the Taliban, creating a moderate Taliban, or supporting Karzai. The ISI kept telling U.S. officials that Karzai had no support in the Pashtun belt. The CIA had relied too much on the ISI’s promises, but now that it had a potential Afghan leader in place it needed the ISI far less. To the Americans, the ISI appeared to be drifting, rejecting all options suggested by others but incapable of coming up with a strategy or options of its own.

  Nevertheless, there was a massive Western diplomatic effort to keep Musharraf on side. One after another Western head of state and foreign minister visited Islamabad to bolster Musharraf and offer him debt write-offs and aid. Almost all European leaders, followed by Asian heads of state and a string of top U.S. officials—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Armitage—came through Islamabad in October and November. Tony Blair advised allies to appoint special envoys to Afghanistan to coordinate aid and diplomatic initiatives and keep Pakistan under pressure. Aid flowed to Pakistan from all quarters, especially from the United States. On September 23, 2001, Bush had waived all sanctions against Pakistan and asked Congress to reschedule repayment of $379 million in earlier loans and give a fresh loan of $597 million and a cash grant of $50 million. Similarly, Japan and the countries of the European Union rescheduled debt repayments and offered fresh loans and grants.

  In return, Pakistan had granted the U.S.-led Coalition forces enormous facilities. Unknown to Pakistanis at the time, 1,100 U.S. forces were based in Pakistan for the duration of the war, including Combat Search and Rescue Units, U.S. Special Ops
and CIA paramilitary teams, Red Horse squadrons (engineering teams that repaired airfields in the midst of war), and aircraft from the 101st Airborne Division. Pakistan agreed to a list of seventy-four basing and staging activities, such as overflight facilities, medical evacuation, refueling, and the setting up of communication relay sites for U.S. forces inside Afghanistan. Each agreement was premised with a note that the U.S. campaign would not involve the Indian military.11

  CENTCOM planes flew 57,800 sorties out of Pakistani air bases. Karachi’s seaport and airport were handed over to the Coalition, while U.S. naval operations at Pasni, off the Makran coast, were described as “the largest amphibious operations in size, duration and depth that the US Marine Corps has conducted since the Korean war.”12 Thus, despite the lack of cooperation from the ISI, the quick collapse of the Taliban would have been impossible without the massive cooperation extended by the Pakistan army to the Coalition, which is why Powell resisted any criticism of Musharraf or the ISI.

  Moreover, Musharraf had weathered the protests by Islamic groups, which petered out after Mazar fell. The mullahs failed to spread the protests to the largest province of Punjab or to the metropolitan business capital of Karachi. Instead, several government-sponsored rallies supporting Musharraf drew sizeable turnouts. The military had closed the border with Afghanistan, but it turned a blind eye to anyone wanting to fight for the Taliban. The army was unwilling to confront fired-up Pashtun tribesmen and it also wanted to show Washington the risks Musharraf was taking on behalf of the United States. Thousands of Pakistani tribesmen were killed or captured after Mazar fell. The main culprit in mobilizing tribesmen was the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, led by a charismatic, fiery orator, Maulana Sufi Mohammed, from the Malakand region of the North-West Frontier Province.13

  The Taliban were now cornered at two extreme ends of the country: in Kandahar, where Mullah Omar held out, and in the northeast corner in Kunduz, where the Taliban were joined by surviving Arab, Central Asian, and Pakistani fighters—some eight thousand in all. The Arabs insisted on fighting to the death. The Taliban wanted to surrender to U.S. forces rather than to the NA commanders, who had surrounded them on all sides. Dostum and his Uzbeks were to the west of the city, and Tajik generals Atta and Daud to the south. There was intense rivalry between these two factions, as they both wanted to capture any al Qaeda leader for whom the CIA had promised large cash rewards. Dostum held secret negotiations with Mullah Dadullah, a senior Taliban commander, and offered to give the Taliban free passage to Kandahar—as long as Dadullah handed over the Arabs.

  The Taliban feared they would be killed if they surrendered to the Northern Alliance. Speaking to anyone they could on their wireless, the Taliban commanders offered to surrender to U.S. forces, the UN, or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). They even offered to surrender to Karzai—anyone but the Northern Alliance. Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the ICRC, who was visiting Islamabad, was pressed by Musharraf to save the surrounded Taliban, but in Kabul, Kellenberger was unable to get any guarantees for their safety. He went to Washington to talk to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.14 CENTCOM declined to accept the Taliban members’ surrender, while the UN and other international organizations said they had no capacity to accept such large surrenders. The Pentagon wanted it both ways: declining any responsibility for surrendered Taliban but wanting to interrogate any high-level al Qaeda prisoners.15

  Gen. Tommy Franks could easily have put the U.S. troops waiting in Uzbekistan on the ground in Kunduz to accept an orderly Taliban surrender. The absence of U.S. troops, I believe, led to the deaths of thousands of Taliban prisoners at the hands of the Northern Alliance and the escape of top Taliban and al Qaeda leaders—an escape that was to be repeated in Tora Bora a few weeks later, when Franks again refused to deploy U.S. troops. Until the end of November, when some U.S. troops were deployed to help capture Kandahar, Franks did not deploy any American soldiers. It was a major strategic mistake, and it had awful consequences: it had resulted in the leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda escaping.

  For Pakistan, the stalemate in Kunduz was turning into a disaster as hundreds of ISI officers and soldiers from the Frontier Corps aiding the Taliban were trapped there. They had been ordered to quit Afghanistan after 9/11 and had two months to escape, but instead they had stayed on to fight alongside the Taliban. Musharraf telephoned Bush and asked for a huge favor—a U.S. bombing pause and the opening of an air corridor so that Pakistani aircraft could ferry his officers out of Kunduz. Bush and Vice President Cheney agreed, but the operation was top secret, with most cabinet members kept in the dark.

  On November 15, 2001, NA commanders outside Kunduz reported that Pakistani aircraft were flying into the city at night to airlift the Pakistanis. “Last night two planes, perhaps Pakistani, landed at Kunduz airport and we think they evacuated Pakistanis and Arabs from there,” said NA spokesman Mohammed Habeel. By November 23 The New York Times was reporting that as many as five Pakistani air force planes had landed in Kunduz.16 The Pakistanis certainly hinted strongly that something was on. Maj.-Gen. Rashid Qureshi, the army’s chief spokesman, said that Islamabad was engaged “in negotiations” with the U.S. Coalition for the safe evacuation of Pakistanis from Kunduz.17 The Pentagon denied that any such flights were being allowed. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “the [Kunduz] runway is not usable, I mean there are segments of it that are unusable.”18 Rumsfeld reiterated on December 2 that “neither Pakistan nor any other country flew any planes into Afghanistan to evacuate anybody.”19

  In fact, neither man was telling the truth. A former U.S. intelligence analyst, another senior U.S. official, and two ambassadors in the region confirmed to me that the airlift had taken place. ICRC and UN officials who were on the ground in the north also confirmed the airlift. The American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote about the airlift, reported that “the Pakistanis were indeed flown to safety, in a series of nighttime airlifts that were approved by the Bush administration.”20 Hersh said that Taliban and al Qaeda leaders also escaped with them. Hamid Karzai told me that the airlift took place but that he never asked the Americans who escaped because “even the Americans did not know who got away.” One senior U.S. intelligence analyst told me, “The request was made by Musharraf to Bush, but Cheney took charge—a token of who was handling Musharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State, including Colin Powell, until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan needed to save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tarmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders, and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU and al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge. The frustrated U.S. SOF who watched it from the surrounding high ground dubbed it “Operation Evil Airlift.”

  Another senior U.S. diplomat told me afterward, “Musharraf fooled us because after we gave approval, the ISI may have run a much bigger operation and got out more people. We just don’t know. At the time nobody wanted to hurt Musharraf, and his prestige with the army was at stake. The real question is why Musharraf did not get his men out before. Clearly the ISI was running its own war against the Americans and did not want to leave Afghanistan until the last moment.”21

  In fact the CIA could have insisted that it monitor all those who got off the planes in Pakistan, but it made no such demand. When the Kunduz garrison finally surrendered to the Northern Alliance on November 24, large numbers of people were missing. Only 3,300 Taliban came out, compared to the 5,000 to 7,000 believed to be there, implying that a large number had been airlifted out or had escaped the city by bribing top command
ers of the Northern Alliance.

  The “Great Escape,” as one Pakistani retired army officer dubbed it, would have enormous implications on the subsequent U.S.-led war on terrorism. It is believed that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than made their escape later from Tora Bora. In both cases, the foreign terrorists were allowed to stay in South and North Waziristan, the wildest of Pakistan’s tribal areas. In both cases CENTCOM could easily have placed U.S. troops on the ground on the Afghan side of the border, but it refused to do so. The ISI was now confident that it could play a double game with the Bush administration, as the Bush team was amenable to taking on board Pakistani desires and concerns. After helping the ISI escape from Kunduz, Cheney took charge of all future dealings with Musharraf and the Pakistani army.

  More mistakes were to follow. The Taliban who surrendered at Kunduz were taken to Qala Jangi, the Fort of War, Dostum’s massive fortress of mud-baked walls outside Mazar, which looked like the set for a Hollywood film on the French Foreign Legion. There they were interrogated by a handful of CIA personnel, who had them sit down in long rows in the huge courtyard. On November 26, Arabs who had not been disarmed properly staged a revolt. They killed their Uzbek guards and a CIA officer, Johnny “Mike” Spann, who became the first U.S. casualty of the war. ICRC officials working inside the compound clambered over the walls to escape. Dostum sent in 700 of his crack soldiers to quell the rebellion while U.S. aircraft dropped bombs into the courtyard. It took six days to subdue the rebellion in which 230 prisoners and 100 of Dostum’s best fighters were killed. One of the survivors of the uprising was John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, who had held out in the basement of the fort.