by Ahmed Rashid
12 Pearl, A Mighty Heart.
13 Azim Mian, “No ISI Role in Pearl Case,” The News, March 3, 2002.
14 Threats and arrests were used repeatedly by the ISI to keep journalists away from sensitive areas. In December 2003 two French journalists, Marc Epstein and Jean-Paul Guilloteau, working for L’Express magazine and investigating the Taliban’s regrouping inside Pakistan, were arrested in Quetta and put on trial for visa violations. Their Pakistani fixer, Khawar Mehdi Rizvi, was held by the ISI (which never admitted to holding him) until January 26, when he was charged with sedition and conspiracy. The arrests were seen as a blunt warning to Western journalists to deter them from visiting Quetta, where Taliban leaders were living openly. In May 2004, Afghan journalist Sami Yousafzai, a stringer for Newsweek, was held for several weeks by the ISI in North Waziristan. American journalist Eliza Griswold of The New Yorker, whom Yousufzai was accompanying, was also arrested but was extradited to the United States.
15 “If I am extradited, America will return me in the same way as Indian authorities had returned me and America will suffer if I am killed in a fake encounter,” Sheikh told Sindh high court judge Shabir Ahmad during his trial. He was referring to his being freed from an Indian jail after the Kandahar hijacking and to the fact that Pakistani police were prone to killing terrorist suspects in faked encounters after they had been arrested. “Omar Threatens US of Dire Consequences If Extradited,” The Nation, March 13, 2002.
16 Massoud Ansari, “Daniel Pearl Refused to Be Sedated Before His Throat Was Cut,” Sunday Telegraph, May 8, 2004. Three suspects believed to be guards who had watched over Pearl were arrested in the spring of 2004, but charges were never brought against them.
17 Steve Levine, “US Believes bin Laden Aide Murdered Pearl,” The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2003. See also Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s time with CIA in Jane Mayer, “The Black Sites,” The New Yorker, August 13, 2007.
18 “We purchased the vehicle a few days before the Musharraf rally in Karachi, and set up the remote-control system to the light switch of the vehicle to assassinate him en route from the Army House, but the remote control developed some fault,” said Mohammed Imran, one of the perpetrators at a police-held press conference. “Lady Luck Foiled Plot to Assassinate Musharraf,” Daily Times, July 8, 2002.
19 Zulfiqar Shah, Sectarian Violence in Karachi (1994-2002): A Study, Lahore: Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 2004. The United States gave $73 million to revive the police services in 2002.
20 Ahmed Rashid, “Can Musharraf Survive?” The Daily Telegraph, June 14, 2002.
21 “Musharraf’s Ambitions Eroding State’s Writ,” Daily Times, June 27, 2002.
22 Interview with Aitezaz Ahsan, Lahore, September 2002.
23 I read the private European Union report.
24 In July, visitors included Colin Powell, British foreign secretary Jack Straw, the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, and the European Union’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
25 Rocca was addressing Congress’s foreign policy subcommittee. Agence France-Presse, “Washington Nudges Musharraf on Polls,” The News, July 18, 2002.
26 David Rohde, “Musharraf Redraws Constitution,” The New York Times, August 21, 2002.
27 Reuters, “ ‘US, Musharraf Still Tight,’ Says Bush,” Washington, D.C., August 22, 2002.
28 The MMA evolved from the Pakistan-Afghanistan Defense Committee established in October 2001 by twenty-six Islamic parties and extremist groups to support the Taliban after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan began. Comprising six Islamic parties, the MMA was formed in January 2002 with direct encouragement from the ISI to revive the Islamic parties after the Taliban’s rout, according to Jamiat-e-Islami leaders. The MMA includes the Jamiat-e-Islami, the largest nationwide Islamic party; the Jamiat-e-Ulema, the largest Islamic party in Balochistan; and the NWFP, the pro-Wahhabi Jamiat Ahle Hadith; the Shia party Millat-e-Jafri; and Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan, headed by Shah Ahmad Noorani, who became head of the MMA.
29 Andrew Wilder, “Elections 2002: Legitimizing the Status Quo,” in Pakistan on the Brink: Politics, Economics and Society, edited by Craig Baxter, Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004. Wilder, an expert on Pakistani elections and the author of several books, wrote the best essay on voting trends in the elections.
30 The MMA won 48 of the 99 seats in the NWFP provincial assembly. In the 1993 elections, the Islamic parties won only 9 of 217 seats to the National Assembly. In the 1997 elections they won only 2 seats.
31 Ahmed Rashid, “Polls and Promises, Pakistan Election,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October 17, 2002. Other monitoring groups included the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute, the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. See also Ahmed Rashid, “Elections ‘Rigged’ in Pakistan by Military Regime,” The Daily Telegraph, October 10, 2002.
32 Khalid Hassan, “US Should Help Pakistan Become a Modern Islamic State— Milam,” Daily Times, December 11, 2003. Milam was addressing the Middle East Institute in Washington. Other comments were made to me by U.S. diplomats when they visited Pakistan after the elections.
33 Personal communication with Professor Vali Nasir, October 2003.
34 Illyas Khan, “What Is al Qaeda? Interview with Akram Durrani,” Herald, February 2003.
35 Ahmed Rashid, “Americans Under Threat as Islamists Take Frontier,” The Daily Telegraph, November 30, 2002.
36 Zamir Haider, “Opposition Accuses ISI of Manipulating Senate Polls,” Daily Times, March 13, 2003.
37 Masood Haider, “US Offers US $3 Billion Aid Package,” Dawn, June 24, 2003.
38 Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
39 Reuters, “Franks Says No Permanent US Military Bases in Central Asia,” Tashkent, January 24, 2002.
40 The meeting took place at an Italian air base near Rome. The Rome Declaration of May 28, 2002, appeared to signal the end of the cold war as both presidents Bush and Putin were present, along with NATO secretary-general George Robertson. Reuters, “US Doubts Russia Will Be a Future Threat,” Pratica di Mare, Italy, May 29, 2002.
41 Ibid.
42 Joshua Machleder, “Wolfenshohn Puts Faith in Uzbek Government,” EurasiaNet .org, April 18, 2002.
43 President Karimov told the media in May and June 2002 that Namangani was alive. Newspapers in Moscow and Almaty repeatedly reported that he was alive. The Kazakh newspaper Megapolis reported that “reports of his death are misinformation Namangani invented himself.” See Artie MacConnell, "Islamic Radicals Regroup in Central Asia,” EurasiaNet.org, May 15, 2002.
44 Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.
45 Reuters, “Germany Bans Hizb ut-Tahrir,” Berlin, January 15, 2003.
46 Edmund Andrews, “A Bustling U.S. Air Base Materializes in the Mud,” The New York Times, April 27, 2002.
Chapter Nine. Afghanistan I: Economic Reconstruction
1 James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation Building: From Germany to Iraq, Washington, D.C., RAND, 2003.
2 These figures were quoted by James Dobbins in The Washington Post. Colum Lynch, “Peacekeping Grows, Strains UN,” The Washington Post, September 17, 2006.
3 Kofi Annan, “The Secretary General’s Message on the International Day of UN Peacekeepers,” United Nations, New York, May 29, 2006.
4 These thoughts were helped greatly by Madeleine Albright, “Bridges, Bombs or Bluster,” Foreign Affairs, September-October 2003.
5 Council on Foreign Relations, “In the Wake of War: Improving US Post-Conflict Capabilities,” report of an independent task force, July 2005.
6 “Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication,” Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., September 2004.
7 David Rohde and Carlotta Gall, “Delays Hurting US Rebuilding in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, November 2, 2005.
9 Interview with Robert Finn, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., November 22, 2005.
10 Notes taken in meeting with USAID officials in Washington, D.C., January 24, 2002.
11 Personal communication by USAID staffer, March 2002.
12 Susan Milligan, “Together but Worlds Apart,” The Boston Globe, October 10, 2006.
13 Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, New York: Times Books, 2006.
14 Francis Fukuyama, State Building, Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century, London: Profile Books, 2004.
15 Karzai said, “We have one fear that without a full partnership with the international community, Afghanistan may falter again. In an environment of inadequate security, fragmented governance, the nonintegration of Afghan returnees, Afghanistan could remain a source of instability to the world and the region. . . . It is an almost unprecedented situation where an administration has no immediate source of revenue.” Text of speech by Hamid Karzai at Tokyo, January 22, 2002.
16 The pledges made at Tokyo were varied. The United States gave only a measly $296 million for 2002; the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank each gave $ 500 million for 2.5 years, as did Japan; the EU gave $177 million for 2002; Iran, $580 million over 5 years; China, $100 million for 2002; Saudi Arabia, $220 million for 3 years; Britain, $288 million for 5 years; and India and Pakistan, $100 million each for 5 years. Reuters, “Afghan Aid Pledges Made,” Tokyo, January 22, 2002.
17 The name was changed to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund on July 22, 2002, at another donors conference in Geneva. It was managed jointly by the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the Afghan government, and the Islamic Development Bank.
18 The UN Development Programme set up the Law and Order Trust Fund in order to encourage donors to contribute to helping rebuild the police.
19 Arthur Hilton, “Strategies for Afghanistan’s Immediate Recovery,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 2002. Hilton was later killed in Baghdad. Interview with Finn, Yale University, November 22, 2005.
20 Ahmed Rashid, “Afghan Finance Minister Is in a Hurry,” The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2002.
21 Toby Proston, “The Battle to Rebuild Afghanistan,” BBC, April 10, 2006.
22 See Barnett Rubin, Humayun Hamidzada, and Abby Stoddard, “Through the Fog of Peace Building: Evaluating the Reconstruction of Afghanistan,” Center on International Cooperation, New York University, March 2003. The speech at the UN was delivered by Dr. Mukesh Kapila, who worked for the UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan and Britain’s Department for International Development.
23 Carl Robichaud, “Remember Afghanistan: A Glass Half Full on the Titanic,” World Policy Journal, spring 2006.
24 Elizabeth Rubin, “Taking the Fight to the Taliban,” The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2006.
25 See Ahmed Rashid, “Massive Literacy Campaign Starts in Afghanistan,” The Nation, March 17, 2002.
26 Interview with Robert Finn, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., November 22, 2005.
27 Hearing by Peter Tomsen, former U.S. special envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan, 1989-1992, House Committee on International Relations, June 19, 2003.
28 David Rohde, “Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure,” The New York Times, September 5, 2006.
29 The Asian Development Bank had first offered to provide a loan of $150 million to the government to build the road, but Ghani had refused and demanded a grant.
30 Ahmed Rashid, “Karzai Threatens to Resign,” The Daily Telegraph, May 22, 2003.
31 “With both his command of details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternative seat of power since his arrival,” wrote Amy Waldman in “In Afghanistan, US Envoy Sits in Seat of Power,” The New York Times, April 17, 2004.
32 See Jon Lee Anderson, “American Viceroy,” The New Yorker, December 19, 2005. Khalilzad’s mother died in November 2005 while he was ambassador in Baghdad. She had joined him in the United States during the 1980s but had returned to Kabul in 2004. Khalilzad is married to Cheryl Benard, an Austrian-born writer and scholar. They have two adult sons.
33 Just before 9/11, on April 14, 2000, Khalilzad and I spoke at a conference at Meridian House in Washington, D.C., where he advocated the need for an alternative emerging in Afghanistan that would replace the Taliban.
34 The paper, called “US Policy in Afghanistan: Challenges and Solutions,” published by the Afghanistan Foundation in July 1999, was cowritten by Zalmay Khalilzad, Daniel Byman, Elie Krakowski, and Don Ritter. Khalilzad suggested that “the US should offer to recognize and work with the Taliban if it agrees to a ceasefire [with the Northern Alliance] and meets a set of conditions regarding human rights, . . . terrorism and narcotics and the formation of a more genuinely representative government.” His suggestion that Washington could make the Taliban “more responsible” by working with them was misread by many, who saw it as pro-Taliban. In fact, he concluded that the Taliban would never agree to U.S. conditions, so the U.S. had no choice but to try to weaken them.
35 In September 2003, Congress was asked to provide an additional $1.2 billion for Afghanistan. The breakdown was $37.0 million for voter registration, $20.0 million to fund technical experts, $105.0 million for the Kabul-Kandahar highway, $40.0 million to build 275 schools and train 10,000 teachers, $28.0 million to build 150 clinics, and $45.0 million to complete land registry and build market centers. The remaining money was for training the ANA and the police. There was still no money allocated for agriculture.
36 See Ahmed Rashid, “US Policy, Afghanistan Is Waiting for This,” Far Eastern Economic Review, July 31, 2003. See also Elaine Grossman, “Bush Administration Readies New Security, Aid Package for Afghanistan,” Inside the Pentagon 3 (July 2003).
37 Carlotta Gall and David Rohde, “Delays Hurting US Rebuilding in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, November 7, 2005. Louis Berger said that progress had been slowed by various requirements. The number of buildings it was asked to renovate or construct eventually rose to one thousand, and Berger did not have the staff, engineers, or monitoring experience to complete all this work. Another company, Brown and Root, monopolized the servicing of the major U.S. military camps in the country. In June 2002, Brown and Root won a $22.0 million contract to run support services at the K2 base in Uzbekistan. In November 2002, it won another $42.5 million contract to support the military bases at Bagram and Kandahar.
38 Joe Stephens and David Ottaway, “A Rebuilding Plan Full of Cracks,” The Washington Post, November 20, 2005. A former head of USAID’s Afghan operation was reported in a memo as saying that the numbers of schools and clinics to be built “were not determined through careful analysis . . . instead, they were based on back of the envelope calculations outside USAID.”
39 Margaret Cooker, “US Aid to Afghanistan Falls Short,” Cox News Service, November 19, 2005. Natsios was to leave USAID in January 2006 after five years as its head, calling his former agency “constipated.” However, he still refused to criticize the neocons, whose policies had by now failed USAID in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Celia Dugger, “Planning to Fight Poverty Outside the System,” The New York Times, January 14, 2006.
40 David Rohde and Carlotta Gall, “Delays Hurting US Rebuilding in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, November 2, 2005.
41 Ahmed Rashid, “The Great Trade Game,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 23, 2003.
42 The shortest routes from Central Asia to the Gulf via Pakistan were Dushanbe-Kabul -Karachi, 1,270 miles; Tashkent-Kabul-Karachi, 1,706 miles; and Ashgabat-Kabul -Karachi, 1,761 miles. The shortest routes via Iran were slightly longer, with Dushanbe-Herat-Bandar Abbas, 1,769 miles; Tashkent-Herat-Bandar Abbas, 1,984 miles; and Ashgabat-Herat-Ban
dar Abbas, 1,463 miles. Gawadar would shorten the route via Pakistan considerably.
43 Letter from U.S. Government Accountability Office report to Congress, “Afghan Reconstruction, Deteriorating Security and Limited Resources Impeding Progress,” June 2004.
44 Anne Carlin, “Rush to Engagement in Afghanistan: The IFI’s Post-conflict Agenda,” World Bank, December 2003.
45 “US Made Some Decisions, Says Rice,” Reuters, Dawn, January 19, 2005.
46 In fiscal year 2001-2002 (from October 1, 2001, to September 30, 2002), the United States spent a total of $ 928.0 million in Afghanistan; in fiscal year 2002-2003, a total of $ 926.0 million; and in fiscal year 2003-2004, a total of $1.6 billion. In 2006, the United States spent $3.2 billion, of which more than half went toward building up the army and police. The United States planned to spend $10.0 billion in 2007, of which 80 percent would go to the Afghan National Army, and $4.7 billion in 2008.
47 In 2004-2005, U.S. aid to developing countries was just $15.6 billion—with nearly one third going to Israel and Egypt. In comparison, the defense budget was $450.0 billion. The United States contributes just 0.14 percent of its total income as aid; Britain gives 0.34 percent and Norway, 0.92 percent.
Chapter Ten. Afghanistan II: Rebuilding Security
1 In Britain, fifty-six parliamentarians presented a petition to the government demanding an expansion of ISAF.
2 The quotes come from Ahmed Rashid, “US Embarks on New Afghan Strategy,” The Daily Telegraph, December 23, 2002, and “America’s New Strategy,” Far Eastern Economic Review, December 12, 2002. I spoke with General McNeill several times, but the longest discussion about PRTs was at Bagram, on December 13, 2002. The team of outside experts, including Barnett Rubin and myself, discussed the idea of regional teams intensively with UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, U.S. commander Gen. Dan McNeill, and Francesc Vendrell, the European Union envoy. There were also several concept papers put out by the UN.
3 The document was called “Principles Guiding PRT Working Relations with UNAMA, NGOs and Local Government,” March 2003.