by Ahmed Rashid
In July 2004 the son of an executive of the national airline was arrested in Lahore. Naeem Noor Khan, twenty-five, who had studied in London, was the communications chief for al Qaeda in Pakistan, transferring e-mail messages on its behalf. His computer files contained surveillance photos of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund buildings in Washington, the New York Stock Exchange, and Heathrow Airport in London, and a long list of e-mail contacts. His interrogation by the ISI led to several terrorist alerts in Britain and the United States, while twelve foreigners and fifty-one Pakistanis were arrested in Pakistan. Those arrested included Ahmed Khalfan Gailani, a Tanzanian who had carried out the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, and twelve suspected al Qaeda operatives in Britain, including Dhiren Barot, a Hindu convert to Islam. Barot admitted at his later trial to plotting to blow up the New York Stock Exchange building and limos in underground car parks in London.44 Pakistan had now caught 689 alleged al Qaeda members, of whom 369 were handed over to the Americans.
Reform-minded Pakistani politicians still hoped that the terrorist threats and the growing political criticism and isolation Musharraf faced at home would persuade him to strengthen the civilian government by empowering parliament and Prime Minister Jamali. On the contrary, Musharraf became more assertive in concentrating power in his own hands. He took to sitting in on cabinet meetings and overruling Jamali, which led to frustration and criticism from within the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q (Quaid-e-Azam) Party (PML-Q).
Musharraf’s assertiveness led to a political crisis, which he tried to resolve by forcing Jamali to resign on June 26, 2004. He made it clear he would not appoint anyone as prime minister who did not support the centralization of power under the army. He chose Shaukat Aziz, the former Citicorp executive and present finance minister. In July a suicide bomber exploded himself next to Aziz’s car, killing his driver. The attack had been planned by Amjad Farooqi and the same group of extremists who had targeted Musharraf.45
Aziz, an overly ambitious multimillionaire banker, had been appointed finance minister after the 1999 coup. He was strongly supported for the post by the ISI. After 9/11 he was instrumental in helping turn around the bankrupt economy and negotiate the debt write-offs given to Pakistan by Western nations. Aziz had been a private banker with Citicorp Inc. and had befriended both Prime Ministers Sharif and Bhutto in the 1990s, while currying favor with successive army chiefs. He was a smooth and glib talker who never showed emotion and who tailored his opinions to fit his audience. He had spent a lifetime trying to please anyone and everyone. According to one writer, Aziz had even tried to flirt with Condi Rice.46 Now he was targeting Musharraf.
Aziz was a technocrat and no politician. Even though he had been a minister for five years he had declined to build up a political base for himself, insisting that he needed only the support of his “boss,” General Musharraf. However, Aziz was also ruthless in his climb to power, making sure that he eliminated any civilian whom Musharraf might think highly of and demeaning any competent officials and technocrats who challenged him. He was to become the figurehead that Musharraf wanted, as Aziz left the politics of the PML-Q to the party’s elder statesman, Chaudry Shujjat Hussain and government policies to Musharraf. However, in his desire to please as many people as possible he entered the record books by appointing the largest cabinet in Pakistan’s history. A special room had to be found to accommodate meetings of the 126-member cabinet.
Jamali’s replacement by a technocrat represented the failure of the artificial political system Musharraf had created. The co-opted politicians who supported the military in parliament knew that their political survival depended more than ever on the continuation of Musharraf’s rule. After Aziz became prime minister, the PML-Q passed a bill in parliament that allowed Musharraf to stay on as both army chief and president until 2007. “The President to Hold Another Office Bill, 2004”—the strangest-named bill in the history of the country—rubber-stamped Musharraf’s prolonged tenure. The parliamentary opposition walked out. “Parliament has been stripped of all powers or legislative role and the president, who is supposed to be the symbol of unity for the federation, remains a divisive figure in both positions,” said Pakistan Peoples Party parliamentarian Sherry Rehman.47
After the passage of the bill, Musharraf further strengthened his grip on the army. Lt.-Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, who had been targeted in Karachi, became the new vice chief of army staff, and Lt.-Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who had been Rawalpindi corps commander when the attacks on Musharraf’s life took place, was appointed as head of the ISI.48 Seven junior major-generals were appointed as lieutenant-generals, superseding thirty-seven of their colleagues. Musharraf’s appointments ensured that those senior officers who had borne the burden of the war on terrorism alongside him were rewarded, while the new lieutenant-generals were so junior and owed everything to Musharraf that they would not offer any criticism of his policies. Musharraf may have felt secure, but the escalation of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a growing political crisis were to lead to severe repercussions for his rule.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Taliban Resurgent The Taliban Return Home
The Taliban did not just slip back across the border in the winter of 2001/2002; they arrived in droves, by bus, taxi, and tractor, on camels and horses, and on foot. As many as ten thousand fighters holed up in Kandahar with their weapons. For many, it was not an escape but a return home—back to the refugee camps in Balochistan where they had been brought up and where their families still lived; back to the madrassas where they had once studied; back to the hospitality of the mosques where they had once prayed. For those with no families to receive them, militants from Pakistani extremist groups and the Jamiat-e-Ulema in Pakistan—like benevolent charity workers—welcomed them at the border with blankets, fresh clothes, and envelopes full of money. ISI officials, standing with the Frontier Constabulary guards and customs officials at Chaman, the border crossing into Balochistan province, waved them in. Musharraf was not about to discourage or arrest these Taliban fighters who had been nurtured for two decades by the military. For Pakistan they still represented the future of Afghanistan, and they had to be hidden away until their time came.
Initially the arriving Taliban were a demoralized lot. In the previous three months thousands had been killed by American bombs or wounded and left to die in their burned-out pickup trucks. Some Pashtun villages in southern Afghanistan were now inhabited only by women, as all their menfolk had been killed in the bombings. The older Taliban blamed Mullah Omar for destroying their government for the sake of preserving Osama bin Laden. A few leading Taliban gave themselves up to U.S. forces in Kandahar, either because they were compromised by the ISI or because they were so disgusted with Mullah Omar.1 Two Taliban leaders surrendered to Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Kandahar, but he let them go. For the next five years not a single Taliban commander would be handed over to the Americans by the Pakistanis.2
The Pakistani military was stunned at the lackadaisical attitude of the Americans in mopping up al Qaeda. The U.S. failure to commit ground troops in the south and then at Tora Bora convinced army headquarters that the Americans were not serious, preferring that the NA militias do their fighting for them. Pakistani officers told me they were amazed that Rumsfeld would not put even one thousand U.S. soldiers into battle. The ISI sent memos to Musharraf stating that the Americans would not stay long in Afghanistan and that the Taliban should be kept alive. Afghan leaders feared the worst. Karzai had lived in Quetta for a decade and understood how the ISI thought and worked. In late January 2002 he sent Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah to Washington with a strong warning, asking the Americans to stop Pakistan from helping the Taliban regroup. Abdullah said, “I know that the Taliban leaders are in Pakistan. Pakistan should take this opportunity to clean its house because those elements who supported the Taliban for so long are still there in Pakistan, and they are strong, they are armed and they are well equipped.”3
Abdullah told me that he was extremely blunt in Washington, but the Americans were interested only in the whereabouts of al Qaeda’s leaders, and on that issue Islamabad was being helpful. “The CIA wanted Arabs, not Afghans,” Abdullah said. Karzai went to see Musharraf in February, at which time he pledged “to forget the past” and urged Musharraf to do the same and rein in the Taliban. Musharraf gave Karzai $10 million in cash so he could pay Afghan civil servants. In April Musharraf visited Kabul, where he said the ISI was under his control. “Let me assure you that the ISI is doing or not doing whatever I tell them or don’t tell them to do—they are behaving exactly as we want them to,” he said.4 Tensions between the two leaders did not ease, as nobody in Kabul believed Musharraf’s words.
Mullah Omar, with a handful of bodyguards, had gone underground, moving between Helmand and Urzugan, where there was no permanent U.S. military presence and where he could easily avoid the infrequent U.S. military sweeps. In May 2002, he gave an interview: “The battle [in Afghanistan] has [just] started, its fire has been kindled and it will engulf the White House, seat of injustice and tyranny.” The future for the United States in Afghanistan, he said, was “fire, hell and total defeat.”5
In the summer of 2002, Taliban commanders began to get back in touch with their fighters and told them to wait for the call. Many of the older fighters had had enough and joined the throng of Afghan refugees now packing up their homes in Pakistan and heading back to Afghanistan. The U.S. and British embassies in Islamabad reported that ISI officers were warning Taliban families not to return home; if they did, the ISI would hand them over to the Americans. The ISI told its American interlocutors that it was still trying to create an alternative Taliban leadership—not the much-disparaged moderate Taliban, but new figures who would accept President Karzai. During the summer several new Taliban groups emerged in Peshawar and Quetta, such as the Jaish-e-Muslimeen and the Jamiat-e-Khudamul Koran, but senior Taliban commanders refused to join up because they had pledged an oath of loyalty, or beyat, to Mullah Omar.
In the winter of 2002, Mullah Omar arrived in Quetta from Afghanistan. He was immediately accommodated by the ISI and stayed in safe houses run by the JUI Party, which now formed the provincial government in Quetta. Mullah Omar appointed four senior commanders to reorganize the fighters in the southern provinces of Uruzgan, Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul. These were Mullah Barader Akhund, the former deputy defense minister; Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani, former army chief; Mullah Dadullah, a famed one-legged corps commander; and the former interior minister Mullah Abdul Razzaq. All four men had close links to bin Laden and were known for their belief in global jihad. Mullah Omar appointed Usmani as his successor in case he was killed or captured. Razzaq, who was born in Chaman, became chief fund-raiser and recruiter in Balochistan, touring mosques and madrassas to motivate the Afghans there.
Dadullah, who had lost a leg in 1995 after stepping on a mine and received a prosthetic limb in a Karachi hospital, knew the Deobandi leaders of the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, and spent many months in Karachi raising money from the large Pashtun population in the city. He was to become the most ruthless Taliban commander after 9/11. While leading Taliban forces in the Hazarajat in 1998, he ordered the massacre of several groups of Shia Hazaras, which brought him to the notice of bin Laden. The two men were instrumental in the decision to blow up the Buddha statues in Bamiyan. Dadullah had commanded the Taliban’s last stand in Kunduz and escaped its fall by paying off NA warlords, who allowed him to reach Pakistan.
These exiled Taliban leaders received important support after the 2002 elections when the JUI Party came to power in the North-West Frontier and Balochistan provinces. The JUI had helped launch the Taliban in 1994, and its madrassas in Pakistan had provided ideological training and refuge for scores of Taliban commanders.6 Several JUI mullahs who had fought with the Taliban in the 1990s were now elected members of the provincial assemblies in the two provinces. The full state machinery and facilities of the provisional governments were now available to the Taliban, with the help of ministers such as Maulana Faizullah, the JUI minister of agriculture in Balochistan who had fought in Kandahar alongside Mullah Omar until the city was abandoned. Hafiz Hussain Sharodi, the minister of information for Balochistan, also became a spokesman in defense of the Taliban. Maulana Nur Mohammed, who ran the important Shaldara madrassa in Quetta, the first madrassa to send its students to fight for the Taliban in 1994, made it the major meeting place for Taliban commanders. The students were used to carry messages back and forth to Afghanistan for the Taliban. Maulana Abdul Qadir, the deputy of the madrassa told me, “We are proud that the Taliban are made and helped here and we do everything we can to facilitate them. The Afghan government and Karzai are the stooges and puppets of America, every Afghan knows this. Karzai cannot even go home to his village. Only the Taliban can constitute the real government in Afghanistan.”7
In Afghanistan’s eastern Pashtun provinces the Taliban’s reorganization was headed by Saif ur-Rahman Mansur, the charismatic young commander from the Anaconda battle, Jalaluddin Haqqani, the former Taliban minister, and his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani. They operated out of Miranshah, in North Waziristan, one of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Haqqani, a tall strapping Pashtun and an old protégé of the ISI, was leader of the Zadran tribe based around Khost. In the 1980s he was a major recipient of CIA money and arms routed through the ISI. After 9/11 the ISI promoted Haqqani as a possible moderate Taliban, and he visited Islamabad under ISI protection to talk to the CIA, just before the war began. During the war, the ISI asked the Americans not to bomb Khost and Haqqani’s home, saying that a deal with him was still possible, but Haqqani was a firm believer in al Qaeda. He now gathered around him fighters who had escaped, providing them with accommodation and money. In 2002 U.S. SOF made at least three attempts to kill him, including bombing a mosque near his home, an attempt that killed seventeen people—but he always seemed to be well tipped off before any U.S. attacks.
The Taliban received another boost when the Iranian government unexpectedly allowed Gulbuddin Hikmetyar to leave his exile in Meshed. After secret talks with the ISI in Dubai, he arrived in Peshawar and went underground. Hikmetyar had been Pakistan’s most favored Mujahedin leader in the 1980s and was the ISI’s nominee to take power in Kabul in 1992, but Ahmad Shah Masud had beaten him to it. Hikmetyar then unleashed the civil war by bombarding Kabul, until the Taliban routed his militia in 1996 and he fled to Iran. Washington accused the Iranians of backing Hikmetyar, and in order to curry favor with the Americans the Iranians had simply let him go. The ISI let Hikmetyar set up a base in the sprawling Shamshatoo refugee camp outside Peshawar, where many of his former fighters lived. He became an ally of the Taliban and al Qaeda yet never fully merged with either movement.
During late 2002 the Taliban began to move weapons, ammunition, and food supplies into Afghanistan, adding to those stockpiles that they had stored away during their retreat. U.S. and Afghan forces began increasingly to unearth caches of new weapons. In November alone they uncovered 475 large and small weapons caches. In one cache, 2,100 brand-new AK-47 rifles were discovered along with 70,000 mortar shells and 43,000 rockets.8 Meanwhile, the Taliban were raising funds through Islamic networks in Pakistan and the Muslim world. Journalist Elizabeth Rubin described how “Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men, Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military and intelligence ranks” helped raise money for the Taliban.9 Hundreds of Arab and Central Asian fighters who were hiding out in FATA reenlisted with the Taliban.
Experienced Arab militants from al Qaeda set up training camps for the Pakistani and Kashmiri extremists who arrived from the cities to learn bomb making and other skills. Pakistan had withdrawn its troops from FATA to meet the threat from India, so al Qaeda and the Taliban were free to move around at will. Posters and pamphlets exhorting people to throw out U.S. forces began to appear regularly in Afghan villages. On September 5
, 2002, Karzai was nearly assassinated in Kandahar, and a bomb exploded in Kabul city, killing fifteen people.
The Taliban began their military campaign in earnest in the spring of 2003 by launching guerrilla attacks in Helmand and Zabul provinces, where there was hardly any U.S. presence. The first major battle took place at the end of January 2003, when some eighty Taliban near Spin Baldak were surprised by a U.S. patrol. In the ensuing twelve-hour gun battle, in which B-1 bombers dropped twenty-one bombs, dozens of Taliban were killed. “It is without doubt the largest concentration of enemy forces that we’ve come across since Operation Anaconda,” said a surprised U.S. officer. 10 In February there were rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. army fire bases in eastern Afghanistan and on the U.S. compound at Bagram. With the American invasion of Iraq imminent, the sudden escalation worried the Americans, and General Franks arrived in Islamabad to try to persuade the Pakistanis to do more to rein in the Taliban. The CIA arranged for Lt.-Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, the head of the ISI, to meet with his Afghan counterpart, Engineer Arif, in Rome in mid-February to try to iron out their differences, but there was little progress and increasing distrust.