by Ahmed Rashid
On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, bin Laden issued a taped message to his followers on what was expected of them in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We advise the importance of dragging the enemies’ forces to a long, exhausting and continuous battle,” he said. “The worst fear of the enemy is street and city fighting. . . . We stress the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy.”11 Hikmetyar also issued a message encouraging suicide bombings.12 As the U.S. attack on Iraq began on March 20, U.S. forces launched an offensive in Kandahar province to keep the Taliban off-balance. The Taliban swiftly retaliated by killing four Westerners.
On March 27, a two-jeep convoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross with Ricardo Munguia, thirty-nine, a Salvadorian hydraulics engineer, on board was held up by Taliban gunmen in Uruzgan province. The Taliban commander checked with his superior, believed to be Mullah Dadullah, on a satellite phone. “We have three Afghans, one foreigner. Do you want four bodies or one?” he asked Dadullah, according to a survivor.13 After receiving the reply, the Taliban executed Munguia and set fire to his body. Two days later two U.S. SOF soldiers inspecting a school near Gereskh, in Helmand province, were shot dead by Taliban gunmen mounted on motorbikes. On April 8 an Italian tourist was killed in Zabul province. The cold-blooded murder of the ICRC official had an enormous impact nationwide. Every Afghan knew that the ICRC had continued to provide medical care to Afghans during the Taliban regime when other Western NGOs had left. In killing an ICRC official the Taliban had delivered the uncompromising message that they had no compunctions about terrifying the local the population and Westerners.
Once again after the killings Zalmay Khalilzad traveled to Islamabad to try to encourage the Pakistanis to restrain the Taliban. “Success of Afghanistan’s new stability is in America’s interests and any effort that undermines that stability, that threatens it, is a challenge to America’s interests,” he warned. Pakistan rebuffed him and derided his comments as “totally ridiculous and baseless.”14 A few days later, on April 22, Karzai visited Islamabad to urge Musharraf to arrest Taliban leaders living in Quetta. He handed over a list of Taliban to Musharraf. When I met him, Karzai was very specific: “We have given the names of some top Taliban leaders for the Pakistani authorities to take action on,” he told me that same day. “Pakistan has to address this issue of extremism—the actions of these extremists if they continue will have implications in Pakistan.” The list included Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his senior commanders, Mullahs Dadullah, Usmani, and Barader—all believed to be living in Quetta. When I wrote up the story about the list, the military regime reacted strongly, denouncing Karzai and denying there was any such list. Washington declined to back Karzai publicly, even though the U.S. embassy in Kabul had helped draw up the list. The Americans were already deeply involved in Iraq and wanted no distractions such as a cat fight between the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Washington was unwilling to push the Pakistanis, and the Afghans were angry that the Americans had allowed Karzai’s credibility to suffer. The Afghans did not consider it in the context of Iraq but saw it as yet another example of Washington being willing to push Islamabad on capturing al Qaeda leaders but unwilling to do the same regarding the Taliban.
With Iraq on his mind, Rumsfeld was tone-deaf to the regrouping of the Taliban and to rising Afghan-Pakistani tensions. Just a week after the debacle of the Islamabad meeting, he arrived in Kabul to declare “the end of combat operations” against the enemy, even as a new war in Iraq was under way. His own commanders offered a totally different assessment. General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, the U.S. commander in Bagram, told me that al Qaeda and Hikmetyar were offering incentives of between five thousand and one hundred thousand dollars to kill or capture U.S. soldiers. “There are large numbers of Taliban coming back into southern Afghanistan from the Quetta region,” he said. “There are three groups of between twenty-five and one hundred Taliban operating in Helmand province facilitating the drugs trade.”15
In June, Mullah Omar constituted a ten-man Taliban leadership council, creating four new committees dealing with military, political, cultural, and economic affairs.16 The reorganization provided the impetus for more coordinated attacks on soft targets such as Afghan aid workers and officials. In the summer of 2003 one or two attacks by the Taliban occurred every other day. August proved to be the bloodiest month, with more than 220 Afghan soldiers and civilians killed. On a single day, August 13, 50 people were killed in multiple attacks in three provinces. The UN suspended travel for its officials in the south, and aid agencies fled Kandahar and Helmand. Whereas in April there were twenty-two Western NGOs working in Kandahar, by August that number had dropped to just seven.
Zabul province—the main entry point for Taliban based in Balochistan—became a major battleground as the insurgents tried to secure a base area where they could assemble troops and supplies. Securing Zabul province was essential for pacifying the area along the Kabul-Kandahar highway, which passed through the province and was about to be rebuilt by the United States. In early September, U.S. forces launched Operation Mountain Viper to clear out some five hundred Taliban led by Dadullah. For the first time the Taliban stood and fought for nine days. Despite heavy air and artillery bombardment that killed more than one hundred of them, by the winter of 2003 the Taliban controlled 80 percent of Zabul and remained popular; the pro-Taliban tribal and clerical network in the province had hardly been touched as a result of the war. Moreover, they were able to pour men, weapons, and money into the province from neighboring Balochistan.
The worsening security situation in the south delayed the political process set out at Bonn. The date for the Constitutional Loya Jirga, due to be held in October 2003, was pushed back to December, while the start of voter registration for the presidential elections was also delayed. Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) was also delayed, with the warlords saying it was too dangerous to disarm their militias. Karzai’s first attempt at offering the Taliban an amnesty to return home was derided by NA cabinet ministers, who said it would mean a surrender to the extremists.17 Increasingly pessimistic reports by UNAMA failed to move the international community to greater action. Brahimi warned the UN Security Council in December that “the international community must decide whether to increase its level of involvement in Afghanistan or risk failure.”18
In those critical days in the autumn of 2003, a few thousand more U.S. troops on the ground, more money for reconstruction, and a speedier rebuilding of the Afghan army and police could easily have turned the tide against the Taliban and enhanced the support of the population for the government. It was a moment when even a little could have gone a long way, but Washington’s preferred reaction to the Taliban resurgence was a blanket denial that anything was wrong. When Afghan leaders ruefully suggested that the war in Iraq might have diverted U.S. resources away from Afghanistan, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemed to be one remove away from reality in his answer: “I don’t think the war in Iraq has taken any of the resources away from the fight against international terrorism, especially al Qaeda. In fact I think the effort in Iraq has been very complementary. What we’re doing here in Afghanistan and what we’re doing in Iraq is in many cases the same thing.”19
Tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan intensified. Angry demonstrators broke into the Pakistan embassy in Kabul and ransacked it after reports of Pakistani troops intruding fifteen miles into Afghan territory along the border. Karzai quickly apologized and offered to pay for rebuilding the embassy, but Islamabad could now claim that it was being victimized by Kabul.20 Meanwhile, India’s successes in Afghanistan had stirred up a hornet’s nest in Islamabad, which soon came to believe that India was “taking over Afghanistan.” India had implemented a $500 million reconstruction strategy that was one of the best planned from any country. It was designed to win over every sector of Afghan society, give India a high profile with the Afghans, gain the maximum political advantage, a
nd of course undercut Pakistani influence. Indian companies were directly favored and won major road-building contracts, including the contract for the road from Kandahar to the Pakistani border. When India reopened two consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad that had been shuttered since 1979, Pakistan accused the Indians of using them to undermine Pakistan by funding Pashtun, Baloch, and Sindhi dissidents.
There was no doubt that the Indians were buoyant at their successes and aggressively trying to take advantage of Pakistan’s lack of influence in Kabul. Excessive Indian arrogance provided the complaints that Musharraf used with Western leaders to explain away his reluctance to befriend Karzai. The ISI in turn generated enormous misinformation on India’s role, such as briefing Musharraf that forty-two Indian agents were based at its consulate in Kandahar or telling Pakistani journalists that there were not two but six Indian consulates along the border. “If Pakistan is worried about the role of India, let me assure you, I have been very specific in telling the Indians that they cannot use Afghan soil for acts of aggression against another country,” Karzai said.21 Musharraf preferred to believe that Karzai was lying. Meanwhile, Pakistan evolved no coherent reconstruction strategy for Afghanistan. There were no high-profile Pakistani-funded projects that Afghans could see, although Pakistan’s private sector traded massively with Kabul. Bilateral trade increased from $100.0 million in 2001 to $1.0 billion in 2004 and $1.6 billion in 2006.
In the summer of 2003, I made several trips through the border regions to see the extent of the Taliban resurgence through FATA, the NWFP, Balochistan, and southern Afghanistan. JUI leaders in both provinces made it clear that they openly supported the Taliban. Other religious figures openly supported al Qaeda. Javed Ibrahim Piracha, a member of parliament from Kohat, helped secure the release from jail of hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who had been arrested by the Pakistan authorities. He hired lawyers to challenge their arrests in court and claimed to have returned 350 Arab fighters and their families to their countries of origin, paying all their travel expenses.22 Piracha also set up the World Prisoners Relief Commission, which acted on behalf of extremists—all without any hindrance from the ISI or any questions about where his funds came from.
In Quetta the JUI virtually handed over Pashtunabad, a large sprawling suburb, to the Afghan Taliban. Thousands of long-haired, kohl-eyed, black-turbaned Taliban roamed the streets. They forced or bought out the local residents and soon owned every home, shop, tea stall, and hotel in Pashtunabad. New madrassas were built to house a new young generation, who banned television, the taking of photographs, and the flying of kites, replicating Kandahar in the early 1990s. Local people, including the police and journalists, were too frightened to enter the suburb.
In the villages along the eighty-mile drive from Quetta to Chaman were more than fifty JUI-run madrassas, part of a well-organized cycle in which young militants were brought in for several weeks of religious training before being sent to the front line by Taliban recruiters, who often arrived with ISI officers. In the summer months—the fighting season inside Afghanistan—the madrassas provided accommodation to a majority of Afghan Pashtuns, while in the winter, Pakistani Pashtun students returned. Every month all the heads of the JUI madrassas met in Quetta with a senior ISI officer to work out their rotation of young men and their expenses.
The Taliban leaders treated Quetta as their new capital. Taliban spokesmen pretending to be in Afghanistan briefed Pakistani journalists on local mobile phones and threatened them if their newspapers did not carry Taliban propaganda. Mullah Dadullah’s extended family—some seventy people—lived openly in Kuchlak, a village just outside Quetta. In September 2003 he celebrated a family wedding in lavish style, inviting leading members of the Balochistan government, JUI leaders, and military officers. Quetta became the center for Taliban logistics. Vehicle dealers in Quetta told me that over the summer the Taliban had bought nine hundred motorbikes, which now became their favored mode of battle transport. For improved communication they imported hundreds of Thuraya satellite phones from the Arabian Gulf (Thurayas bought in Pakistan were monitored by the CIA) and long-range walkie-talkies. Arms and ammunition, bought locally or imported from the Gulf states, were trucked up to Quetta and dumped just inside the Afghan border.
In a dusty lane in Chaman, I met the family of a young Pakistani Pashtun who had been killed fighting with the Taliban. In early June a fierce battle had taken place near Spin Baldak in which forty Taliban and seven government troops were killed after Taliban were discovered to be lying in ambush along the main road. Twenty-two of the Taliban dead were Pakistani Pashtuns, including Nazar Mohammed, seventeen, and his cousin Fida Mohammed, fifteen, who had been recruited from a JUI madrassa in Chaman. When the Afghan authorities tried to hand over their bodies, Pakistani officials in Chaman refused to accept them—even though the boys’ families were there to claim the corpses. The corpses lay on the border crossing for several days while hundreds of family members held demonstrations against the army. Qadir Malizai, the father of Nazar, told me that a military officer had come to his home and told him not to hold remembrance prayers for his son or mourn publicly and not to speak to the media. He was never able to bury his son and he blamed the military for allowing the Taliban to brainwash the boy.
I had made the same journey through Balochistan and southern Afghanistan in the winter of 1994, when the Taliban had first arrived in Kandahar. What I now witnessed was history repeating itself in a worse way than before. In Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Karzai, echoed my worst fears: “The Taliban are gathering in the same places from where they started; it’s like the rerun of an old movie,” he said sadly.23 Governor Yousuf Pashtun listed the Taliban training camps in Balochistan: in Dalbadin, Chagai, Qila Saifullah, Kuchlak, Loralai, and two camps just a few miles from Quetta. “Do the Americans want to destabilize Afghanistan at the cost of keeping quiet about Pakistan’s support to the Taliban?” he asked. Afghans in Kandahar believed that the Bush administration’s silence on the role of the ISI was a larger conspiracy in which the United States would soon hand over Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt to the Pakistanis. Such conspiracy theories were far-fetched, but they had a lot of traction among Afghans.
What struck me was how little the Taliban had learned from their previous mistakes. Surely the second time around the Taliban would offer a more politicized agenda, either by exploiting Pashtun nationalism or offering a program to attract the people. Instead they had nothing new on offer—no program, no vision, and no political agenda. What they did offer was to drive out the foreigners, but it took several more years of abject failure by the United States and the Afghan government to reconstruct the country before that appeal took hold. Moreover, commanders such as Dadullah followed al Qaeda’s terror tactics and burned down schools and clinics, killing and mutilating aid workers. Never before had the Taliban terrorized their fellow Pashtuns in such a way.
In the summer of 2003 there was still no support for the Taliban among Afghan farmers and townspeople. The Pashtun tribes had reestablished their political identity in two Loya Jirgas, interethnic harmony had improved, Karzai was standing up to the non-Pashtun NA warlords, and a window of opportunity remained to rebuild the country. Yet systematically, as the insurgency took hold, and with insufficient funds for reconstruction and no international troops to provide security, the southern provinces were ignored.
After I published a cover story about the Taliban revival being directed from Pakistan, the military regime was furious and accused me of lying.24 Two weeks later the government flew Islamabad-based Western ambassadors to Chaman, where army bulldozers were throwing up a huge sand ramp in the desert along the Afghan border to demonstrate that it was being sealed off. None of the ambassadors bought this hopeless and futile gesture.
With presidential elections due in the United States and Afghanistan by the end of 2004, Rumsfeld and his generals insisted there was no insurgency. Yet behind-the-scenes policy changes were be
ing made and there was a massive stepped-up effort to capture bin Laden. In the summer of 2004, Lt.-Gen. David Barno, the new head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, introduced new counterinsurgency tactics involving small groups of U.S. soldiers living in villages to win hearts and minds and collect better intelligence. Task Force 121, the top-secret military unit that had caught Saddam Hussein, was moved to Afghanistan. The Pentagon redeployed from Iraq its top-secret reconnaissance aircraft, the E-8 Joint STARS (Surveillance Target Attack Radar System), which could track targets on the ground in any type of weather, and the RC-135 Rivet Joint, a long-range, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. U2 spyplanes and satellites were already involved in the hunt. For two years now, from the spring of 2002 until the summer of 2004, the United States had ignored Afghanistan, depriving U.S. forces of the technical surveillance needed to catch bin Laden because everything had been shifted to Iraq. Those two years represented a huge gap in U.S. intelligence gathering and efforts to win the trust of the tribesmen along the border.
Al Qaeda put itself back on the world’s agenda in the March 11, 2004, bombings at a railway station in Madrid that killed 192 people and wounded more than 1,600, the most devastating terrorist attack in Europe since World War II. Al Qaeda Web sites had urged Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq and restore “al-Andalus” (southern Spain) to Muslim control. In the aftermath of the bombing, Spain’s Socialist Party won an unexpected victory at the polls. It was a chilling moment because suddenly al Qaeda seemed to have the ability to change governments and dictate political goals in Europe.25
With the war in Iraq and terrorist attacks, Afghanistan remained off the international radar. Afghanistan’s southern provinces were still unmapped and off the intelligence-gathering beat for U.S. forces, even though the Taliban had accelerated their attacks there. Nobody was looking for Mullah Omar. In June the Taliban assassinated two dozen Afghan officials and killed fourteen foreigners, including French doctors and Chinese construction workers. Twice the number of U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2004 than had been killed throughout 2003.26 Villagers reported how the Taliban were sleeping in mosques during the day and coming out at night to persuade, bribe, or terrorize farmers into helping them kill U.S. troops. Not only Zabul but also more than 50 percent of four southern provinces were deemed to be in Taliban hands.