Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  The public enthusiasm was palpable. In north Kabul, ninety-three-year-old Abdul Hakim arrived at a polling station on crutches. “I have lived nearly a century but I have never voted for my leader,” he told me with tears in his eyes. Women turned out in huge numbers even in the Pashtun south, defying all expectations. Stunned UN monitors sent back messages of how thousands of Pashtun women came to vote in the afternoon after their men had voted in the morning. A total of thirty-eight people were killed on the day, including twenty-five Taliban who had attacked a U.S. patrol in Uruzgan province. There were no major Taliban attacks on polling stations.

  The polling was far from perfect. Officials were supposed to mark every voter’s finger with indelible ink to prevent their voting twice, but in some places the ink washed off easily and people voted several times. Afghans with more than one identity card also voted several times at different polling stations. At midday, opposition candidates jumped on the issue and called for a boycott of the election and its result. In the afternoon, Western ambassadors led by Khalilzad and Arnault, with journalists trailing behind them, met with each opposition leader to calm him down. The issue rankled while the count got under way over the next few weeks, but a UN-LED panel of experts there to investigate all allegations of fraud was met with approval by the opposition.

  It took nearly a month to bring in all the ballot boxes and count the votes. On November 3, Karzai was declared the winner with 55.4 percent of the vote, thirty-nine points ahead of his nearest rival, Younus Qanuni, with 16.3 percent of the vote. Mohammed Mohaqiq, the Hazara leader, won 11.7 percent, and General Dostum 10.0 percent. Four weeks later in the United States there was much greater electoral controversy when President Bush was reelected by a small margin amid allegations of fraud.

  On December 7, with Vice President Dick Cheney in attendance, Karzai took oath as Afghanistan’s first legitimate leader for nearly three decades. Many grizzled old Afghan leaders broke down in tears. Three weeks later Karzai appointed a new cabinet, which pushed out the warlords and brought in many technocrats. General Fahim’s replacement as defense minister was the American-trained Pashtun Gen. Rahim Wardak. The only warlord accommodated in the cabinet was Ismael Khan. In the most controversial move, Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, a favorite of Western donors but disliked by fellow Afghans, was dropped. Two women were appointed, including Masuda Jalal. Five of the “power” ministries went to English-speaking Pashtuns with U.S. connections, signaling the end of NA domination. Of the Panjsheri Tajiks, only Abdullah Abdullah remained, as foreign minister.47 All the “security” ministries were in the hands of the reformist camp.

  Nine of the twenty-seven new ministers held doctorates, but those with dual nationality—several ministers held U.S. citizenship—had to give up their foreign passports to comply with the constitution. Karzai now had a year before parliamentary elections to implement a reform agenda and end the Taliban resurgence. His success or failure to do so would determine the future stability of Afghanistan and the entire region.

  PART FOUR

  DESCENT INTO CHAOS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Al Qaeda’s Bolt-Hole Pakistan’s Tribal Areas

  When Osama bin Laden escaped into FATA in December 2001, the place was so inviting that over the next few years he never strayed far. The seven tribal agencies that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas adjoining the North-West Frontier Province became the new base area for al Qaeda. It was from there that the bomb plots in London, Madrid, Bali, Islamabad, and later Germany and Denmark were planned. While Mullah Omar’s command structure in Quetta deliberately did not include Arabs or any non-Afghans, so they would not become a focus for U.S. forces chasing only al Qaeda, FATA became a multilayered terrorist cake. At its base were Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen, soon to become Taliban in their own right, who provided the hideouts and logistical support. Above them were the Afghan Taliban who settled there after 9/11, followed by militants from Central Asia, Chechnya, Africa, China, and Kashmir, and topped by Arabs who forged a protective ring around bin Laden. FATA became the world’s “terrorism central.”

  FATA’s seven tribal agencies—Khyber, Kurram, Orakzai, Mohmand, Bajaur, and North and South Waziristan—are populated by just over three million tribesmen, adding to the twenty-eight million Pashtuns who live in Pakistan and the fifteen million in Afghanistan. The tribes on both sides of the border intermarry, trade, feud, and celebrate with one another. They all adhere to Pashtunwali, the tribal code of honor and behavior, which includes melmastia, or hospitality, nanawati, the notion that hospitality can never be denied to a fugitive, and badal, the right of revenge. Pashtun honor is maintained by constant feuding revolving around zar (gold), zan (women), and zamin (land).1

  What makes the FATA tribes more rigid and conservative is that they live under a uniquely oppressive administrative system inherited from the British Raj and still maintained by Pakistan. FATA is designated a federal area directly ruled by the Pakistani president, whose agent is the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, who in turn appoints senior bureaucrats, termed “political agents,” to each agency. These political agents adhere to a rule book called the “Frontier Crimes Regulation” (FCR), part of a century-old legal system introduced by a British act of Parliament in 1901. In 1947 the Indian Independence Act abrogated any special treaties the British had signed with tribesmen, but the tribal elders of FATA agreed to continue the FCR in return for autonomy and the removal of all Pakistani troops from their territories.

  In the early years of Pakistan, the FCR had an even broader sweep, governing much of the settled areas of the NWFP until 1963, and Balochistan until 1977. Until 1996, when the government of Benazir Bhutto granted universal adult suffrage, FATA tribal elders “selected” their own representatives to parliament with the advice of their political agents. Even after 1996, FATA remained a backwater, as under the FCR, Pakistani political parties were banned from operating in the area, thereby giving the mullahs and religious parties a monopoly of influence under the guise of religion. Development, literacy, and health facilities in FATA therefore remained at a minimum.

  The FCR gave no constitutional, civic, or political rights to the FATA tribesmen, and they could not claim the protection of the Pakistani courts. FATA was off-limits to journalists, NGOs, human rights organizations, and political parties. The political agents traditionally had sweeping punitive powers, such as imposing collective punishments on an entire tribe, levying fines, and demolishing the homes of wrongdoers. Civil and criminal cases were judged by a Jirga of handpicked elders whom the political agent paid off from a secret government slush fund. The political agent was one of the most powerful civil servants in the world—a direct hangover from the colonial era.

  FATA’s anachronistic status was sustained by the Pakistan army, which could claim that the territory was not accountable to international law. Thus FATA provided the space and leverage to maintain the army’s influence among the Pashtun tribes in neighboring Afghanistan. FATA acted as a buffer against predatory Afghan influence while allowing the military to interfere freely in Afghanistan. This became critical in the 1980s when the CIA-ISI arms pipeline to the Afghan Mujahedin went through FATA while the Pakistani government denied all knowledge of it. In the 1990s, when Islamabad came under severe U.S. and Indian pressure to shut down militant training camps in Pakistani Kashmir, the ISI simply moved the camps to FATA and later to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Subsequently, FATA became a conduit for ISI’s support for the Taliban regime. Successive Afghan governments, especially the communist regime in Kabul, played similar games, using money and weapons as bribes to persuade FATA tribesmen to create problems for Pakistan.

  This unstable cross-border competition was enhanced by the fact that Afghanistan and Pakistan do not have a recognized frontier between them. In 1879, at the end of the second Afghan war, the Afghan monarch Amir Yaqub Khan was forced to sign the Treaty of Gandamak, in which he ceded parts of western Balochistan, Quetta,
and much of FATA to Britain. In 1893 Sir Mortimer Durand drew up Afghanistan’s present borders in order to create a stable buffer between tsarist Russia and British India. The Durand Line defined the modern Afghan state but definitively divided the Pashtun tribes. After the Partition of India, a Loya Jirga in Kabul refused to affirm the Durand Line, declaring that as Pakistan was a new state, Afghanistan’s borders had to be redefined. Afghanistan refused to recognize Pakistan’s accession to the United Nations and laid claim over FATA. In the 1960s and 1970s, diehard Afghan Pashtun nationalists, including Afghan president Mohammed Daud, claimed that Afghanistan’s borders extended up to the Indus River, well south of Peshawar—a claim that, if acknowledged, would have cut Pakistan in half.

  After 9/11, many Pakistanis maintained that if President Karzai only recognized the Durand Line, he would appease Islamabad sufficiently to halt the Pakistani military’s support to the Taliban. Yet the military never insisted that the Taliban regime recognize the Durand Line and refrained from insisting that Afghanistan sign the Durand Line agreement, despite several opportunities to do so. Pakistan could have extracted recognition of the Line as part of the 1988 agreement that ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but it never raised the issue, despite considerable prodding by the UN. Neither the Afghan Mujahedin government in 1992 nor the subsequent Taliban regime—which depended on Islamabad’s support— was asked to recognize the Line.

  Some senior Pakistani officials, including Sahibzada Yakub Khan, who was foreign minister in the 1980s, admit that the military deliberately never asked for Afghan recognition of the Line. At the time, President Zia ul-Haq passionately worked toward creating a pro-Pakistan Islamic government in Kabul, to be followed by the Islamization of Central Asia. In military parlance, this was Pakistan’s strategy to secure “strategic depth” in relation to India. Zia’s vision of a Pakistani-influenced region extending into Central Asia depended on an undefined border with Afghanistan, so that the army could justify any future interference in that country and beyond. A defined border would have entailed recognizing international law and obligations and the sovereignty of Afghanistan. As long as there was no recognized border, there was also no international law to break if Pakistani forces were to support surrogate Afghan regimes such as the Taliban.

  After 9/11, FATA became the escape hatch for al Qaeda and the Taliban, as we see in chapter 6. “Safe passage was provided to al Qaeda by not deploying Pakistani forces on the border in South and North Waziristan, although troops were deployed in Khyber and Kurram agencies,” says Afrasiab Khattak, a veteran Pashtun nationalist politician.2 “Thousands of al Qaeda and Taliban were allowed to settle in Waziristan, create bases, and restart military operations.” Jalaluddin Haqqani, the former Taliban minister, became the key organizer by hiring FATA tribesmen to provide sanctuary or safe passage out of the region. Young Wazir and Mahsud tribesmen who had guided al Qaeda out of Tora Bora became rich as they provided logistical services for a price. Within a few years these guides had become commanders of the armed groups that emerged as the “Pakistani Taliban.”

  Al Qaeda’s first sanctuary was the South Waziristan agency. With its high mountains, steep slopes, deep ravines littered with broken rock and shale, and its thick forests, it was an ideal hideout. Many of its valleys were virtually inaccessible, except along steep winding paths that required the agility of mountain climbers, and were easy to defend. In June 2002, U.S. military officers in Bagram told me there were up to 3,500 foreign militants hiding out in South Waziristan, and they could not understand why the ISI was turning a blind eye to them. At the time, Musharraf was deflecting U.S. pressure to send in troops on account of Pakistan’s standoff with India.

  Angur Adda, in South Waziristan, became the first headquarters of al Qaeda’s reorganization. From here in 2002, fighters regularly attacked U.S. firebases at Shikin and Lawara, just inside Afghanistan, and then retreated into Waziristan.3 U.S. military officers complained that paramilitary soldiers from the Frontier Corps (FC) were helping al Qaeda fighters cross the border or were providing covering fire to distract U.S. forces. At times al Qaeda fighters on Pakistani soil brazenly launched rockets on U.S. positions. American officers on the ground were at first confused, then frustrated, and finally very angry, and they pressured the U.S. commander, Lt.-Gen. Dan McNeill, to allow them to chase al Qaeda fighters into South Waziristan. McNeill did not have permission from the Pentagon to do so, but finally even his patience ran out. In January 2003, he threatened to cross the border into Pakistan. "U.S. forces acknowledge the internationally recognized boundaries of Afghanistan, but may pursue attackers who attempted to escape into Pakistan to evade capture or retaliation,” read a U.S. Army statement.4 There was now mounting U.S. pressure on Musharraf to act or face unilateral attacks inside FATA.

  The Pakistani army’s corps commander in Peshawar, Lt.-Gen. Ali Jan Orakzai, a close friend of Musharraf, was in charge of Pakistan’s complex policy of minimally satisfying American demands, not interfering with the resettlement of the militants in Waziristan, all the while assuring the JUI-led provincial government in Peshawar that the army would not stop their pro-Taliban policies. Pakistan’s army conducted a massive public information campaign, denying there were any terrorist camps in FATA— even though the Pakistani media were reporting their presence. Quite separately, the ISI maintained a high-profile presence in FATA. Wazirs who fled the agency reported how ISI officers in civilian clothes met frequently with Taliban leaders such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, Tahir Yuldashev, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and the new crop of young local commanders. Confident of their safety, the Taliban and al Qaeda began to run their own fiefdom in South Waziristan, killing tribal elders considered to be spying on them for the Afghans or the Americans and forcing others to flee with their families.5

  Pashtun bureaucrats in Islamabad and Peshawar told me of the ISI’s internal debates, whose subjects included some officers’ intentions to create a broad “Talibanized belt” in FATA that would keep the pressure on Karzai to bend to Pakistani wishes, keep U.S. forces under threat while maintaining their dependence on Pakistani goodwill, and create a buffer zone between Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns. According to this view, a Talibanized Pashtun population along the border would pose a threat to Karzai and the Americans but no threat to Pakistan, which would be in control of them. Whether such a strategy was ever formally adopted is doubtful, but Pakistan’s policies certainly created the same effect. For two long years, from January 2002 until the spring of 2004, the military did nothing to stop the extremists from consolidating their bases in South Waziristan. Yet the idea that such bases would not affect Pakistan was overturned when it became clear to the ISI that the twin assassination attempts on Musharraf in 2003 had been planned from South Waziristan.

  In the spring of 2003 severe clashes broke out between Afghan and Pakistani border guards on the Durand Line. As tensions between Kabul and Islamabad escalated, Al Jazeera released a videotape on the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks showing bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri strolling in a landscape very similar to that of South Waziristan. The image of the world’s most wanted men roaming freely deeply embarrassed Washington, which again pressured Pakistan to move troops into South Waziristan. On the eve of a visit to Islamabad by Richard Armitage in early October, Pakistani forces attacked an extremist camp in South Waziristan, killing eight fighters.6 Buying time by carrying out an attack just before the visit of a senior U.S. official became a pattern for Islamabad.

  Ayman al-Zawahiri’s fatwa calling for the death of Musharraf and the attacks on his life that followed in December 2003 finally convinced the Pakistani military of the need for action. The military determined that the suicide attackers had been trained in a joint Jaish-e-Mohammed-al Qaeda training camp. Two days before a visit by Colin Powell to Islamabad in mid-March 2004, Musharraf told tribesmen in Peshawar, “We have confirmed that 500 to 600 foreign suspects have been sheltered in South Waziristan. ”7 It was
his first admission that there was a problem. Powell gave Musharraf an ultimatum: either the Pakistan army would attack the al Qaeda camps in South Waziristan, or the U.S. Army would do it for them.

  In the early hours of March 16, 2004, hundreds of Pakistani Frontier Corps forces surrounded a mud-walled compound in Kalosha village, a few miles west of Wana, looking for al Qaeda militants. Instead, the soldiers found they had walked into a trap, as IMU and al Qaeda fighters opened fire upon them. Tahir Yuldashev escaped the army cordon as the Uzbeks killed many soldiers and took one dozen hostage. The FC fled in disarray, while others hid in mosques and people’s houses. Eight thousand regular troops were rushed in, and for the next two weeks the Pakistan army used helicopter gunships, fighter bombers, and heavy artillery to subdue the rebels. More than fifty thousand people from Wana and surrounding villages fled after the fighting destroyed their homes and shops.

  The attack was a massive strategic blunder by Orakzai. He had committed the underarmed and poorly trained FC, with no air support and little intelligence, to a battle that he had avoided fighting for the past two years. The small FC force had faced some two thousand heavily armed militants. Well dug in along the valley floors and commanding the heights, the militants had sited their heavy weapons along the entrance routes in their stronghold. U.S. officers in Kabul and Islamabad who were closely monitoring the fighting later admitted to me that the attack was a disaster, a result of miserably poor planning and a total lack of coordination among the FC, the army, and the ISI. But there were deeper suspicions. The ISI had held meetings with the militants and possessed detailed information about the enemy’s numbers and armaments, but this intelligence did not seem to have been conveyed to the FC. Western officers in Kabul and Islamabad wondered if the failed attack was due to a lack of coordination or was deliberate.