by Ahmed Rashid
37 In September, Emma Bonino, a European Union commissioner and prominent human rights activist, led a large EU observer mission to monitor the elections and rounded on Karzai, saying that his marginalization of political parties had allowed warlords to stand and would not produce a democratic culture.
38 Those Taliban standing for the elections included Abdul Samad Khaksar, the former deputy interior minister, and three Taliban commanders: Rais al-Baghrani, Abdul Salam, alias Rocketi, and Abdul Hakim Mounib.
39 Just over half the electorate, or 6.6 million, voted. Some 41 percent of the voters were women and 59 percent were men.
40 Three hundred polling stations were excluded from the initial count on suspicion of fraud—sixty-two of them in the district of Paghman, outside Kabul, where the fundamentalist Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was contesting the polls, although he won his seat.
41 Ahmed Rashid, “It Takes Two Hands to Clap,” YaleGlobal Online, October 6, 2005.
42 At the NATO meeting in Berlin on September 13, Rumsfeld had also urged NATO countries to drop their caveats or restrictions on their troops deployed in Kabul.
43 UN and European Union assessments of the makeup of parliament, private cables, Kabul, October 2005.
44 Four senior Taliban figures had accepted the amnesty in February: Abdul Hakim Mujahid, the former Taliban envoy to the UN; Arsallah Rahmani, the former deputy minister of higher education; Rahmatullah Wahidyar, the deputy minister for refugees; and Mullah Fawzi, the chargé d’affaires in Saudi Arabia. All four were from Paktika province.
45 Associated Press, “Commander Predicts Collapse of Taliban,” Kabul, April 17, 2005.
46 Nick Meo, “The Taliban Rises Again for Fighting Season,” The Independent, May 15, 2005.
47 Sarah Chayes explains his murder in great detail. See her The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Khakrezwal was attending the funeral prayers for Maulvi Abdullah Fayaz, who had been killed by the Taliban on May 29 for organizing a meeting of one thousand mullahs that had stripped Mullah Omar of any religious authority.
48 The Joint Declaration of Strategic Partnership was signed on May 17, 2005, White House, Washington, D.C.
49 Michael Fletcher, “Bush Rebuffs Karzai Request on Troops,” The Washington Post, May 24, 2005.
50 Fifty-twoAmerican soldiers were killed in 2004, forty-seven in 2003, and forty-three in 2002.
51 Al Jazeera, “Taliban Military Official Reveals Contacts with Iraq,” Doha, July 13, 2005.
Chapter Sixteen. Who Lost Uzbekistan? Tyranny in Central Asia
1 David Cloud, “Pentagon’s Fuel Deal Is Lesson in Risks of Graft-Prone Regions,” The New York Times, November 14, 2005.
2 Agence France-Presse, “New Kyrgyz Leader Calls for Review of US Military Presence, ” Bishkek, July 12, 2005.
3 Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Stop in Kyrgyzstan Aims to Keep Access to Base,” The New York Times, July 26, 2005.
4 The Turkmen government passed a new law in December 2006 banning exiles from returning home to contest the presidential elections held in February 2007, which Berdymukhamedow won by a landslide, taking 89 percent of the votes cast.
5 In contrast, the average monthly wage was $ 55 in Kyrgyzstan and $120 in Kazakhstan.
6 For greater details on her holdings, see International Crisis Group, “Uzbekistan: Stagnation and Uncertainty,” Brussels, August 22, 2007. See also Peter Baker, “Battle Royal,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2004. Baker is one of the few journalists to have interviewed Gulnora Karimova. Also “Uzbekistan Offers Rich Pickings for Leader’s Daughter,” Financial Times, August 19, 2003.
7 International Crisis Group, “Uzbekistan.”
8 Martha Brill Olcott, “In Uzbekistan, the Revolution Won’t Be Pretty,” The Washington Post, May 22, 2005.
9 “Karimov is thought to rely most heavily on the security services—the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) and the National Security Service (usually known by its Russian initials, SNB) —to retain power. An uneasy balance existed between the two, but in the wake of Andijan massacre, the SNB emerged as the dominant force.” International Crisis Group, “Uzbekistan.”
10 Text of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks in Tashkent, U.S. embassy, Islamabad, February 25, 2004. The United States had provided $220 million in 2002 as aid to Uzbekistan and $86 million in 2003.
11 “Uzbek Leader Seeks to Block Influx of Alien Ideologies,” EurasiaNet.org, March 2, 2005. Karimov was addressing the Uzbek parliament.
12 Uzbekistan’s gas output in 2004 was 60 billon cubic meters (bcm). However, it had no sizeable exports, and Russian companies wanted to buy Uzbek gas cheaply to feed it into the pool of gas that Russia sold to the European Union at a much higher price. Russia exported a total of 107 bcm to Europe in 2004, a 13 percent increase from 2003. Both Gazprom and Lukoil pledged to develop new gas fields in Uzbekistan and to increase production at old ones.
13 N. C. Aizenman, “In Uzbekistan Families Caught in a Nightmare,” The Washington Post, May 18, 2005.
14 Steven Myers, “As Hundreds Flee, Violence Flares Anew at Uzbek Border,” The New York Times, May 15, 2005.
15 Human Rights Watch, “Bullets Were Falling Like Rain,” Moscow, June 7, 2005.
16 Jeffrey Smith, “US Opposes Calls at NATO for Probe of Uzbek Killings,” The Washington Post, June 14, 2005. At a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, European countries pushed for NATO’s support for the EU proposal of an independent investigation into the killings, but the U.S. delegates said they could not afford to lose the K2 base.
17 Germany refused to take a tough line against Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre. After 9/11, Germany trained Uzbek officers, provided a munitions factory, and delivered arms and night-vision equipment to Uzbekistan. Germany was the third-largest contributor of aid to Uzbekistan, providing $300 million worth of assistance between 1992 and 2005. In December, Uzbek survivors of Andijan filed suit against the Uzbek interior minister, Zokirjon Almatov, who was in Germany seeking medical treatment. At the time of the massacre, he oversaw the special security forces that carried out the shootings. Berlin came under intense criticism for allowing Almatov to travel to Germany despite the EU ban on his entering Europe.
18 Basic pay for soldiers stood at $135 to $180 a month, compared with $40 a month for a bureaucrat.
Chapter Seventeen. The Taliban Offensive: Battling for Control of Afghanistan, 2006 -2007
1 Victoria Burnett, “NATO May Take Prominent Role in Afghan Force,” Financial Times, February 11, 2003.
2 Agence France-Presse, “NATO Chief in Parting Shot,” Brussels, December 17, 2003.
3 Chris Marquis, “General Urges NATO to Send More Troops,” The New York Times, January 27, 2004.
4 Interview with Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, Washington, D.C., February 19, 2004.
5 Reuters, “NATO Head Says Alliance Credibility on Brink,” London, June 18, 2004.
6 Judy Dempsey, “Two Afghan Missions to Merge,” International Herald Tribune, February 11, 2005.
7 Editorial, “The Sound of One Domino Falling,” The New York Times, August 4, 2006.
8 Speech by Gen. James Jones heard by author at a NATO conference, Madrid, May 17, 2006. I met with Jones while his staff was decidedly nervous about his outspokenness on the caveats issue.
9 Roger Cohen, “Time for the Bundesmacht,” The New York Times, October 25, 2007.
10 “Blair Has One Last Chance to Defy Bush: Chris Patten,” The Guardian, January 9, 2007. For Carter’s comments, see John Preston and Kate Melissa, “Compliant and Subservient: Carter’s Explosive Critique of Tony Blair,” Sunday Telegraph, August 27, 2006. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter, was equally scathing: “Too often Mr. Blair would emerge from meetings with Mr. Bush and give an eloquent rationale to the crude unilateralism that Bush had expressed in the meeting. In that sense Tony Blair did us all a great disservice.” Se
e Edward Luce, “Smooth-Talking Premier Gave Tongue-Tied President an Easy Ride,” The Financial Times, May 11, 2007.
11 I was not surprised when Geoff Hoon, the former British defense secretary, echoed these same words, saying that Cheney exercised more power than the British had anticipated in comparison with Rumsfeld and Powell. “Sometimes Blair had made his point with the President [Bush], and I’d made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had made his point with Colin [Powell], and the decision came out of a completely different place,” Hoon said. Agence France-Presse, “Geoff Hoon Admits Poor Planning for Iraq Aftermath,” London, May 2, 2007.
12 Speech by shadow defense secretary Liam Fox, Conservative Party Conference, October 4, 2006. He said the navy was now smaller than the French navy and the entire ninety-thousand-strong army could be seated in the new Wembley football stadium.
13 Thomas Harding, “5000 Troops Are to Be Sent to Afghanistan,” The Daily Telegraph, January 27, 2006.
14 Agence France-Presse, “Reid Fears Taliban Comeback,” Copenhagen, April 1, 2006.
15 A report drawn up by officers from the Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade gave a withering assessment of how insufficient troops and equipment were sent out, how the deployment was conducted too slowly, and how the entire operation suffered from “a lack of early political direction.” Quoted in Daniel Dombey and Rachel Morajee, “UK to Send More Troops,” Financial Times, July 10, 2006.
16 Reuters, “Canada’s Help for Afghans Boosts Security,” Kabul, March 14, 2006.
17 “Support Plummets for Afghan Mission,” Globe and Mail, May 6, 2006.
18 Ahmed Rashid, “Intelligence Officers Widen the Net in Hunt for Taliban,” The Daily Telegraph, June 29, 2006.
19 Christina Lamb, “Soldier Quits as Blundering Campaign Turns into Pointless War,” The Sunday Times, September 10, 2006.
20 “Had the police been better trained, equipped and armed, they would have suffered less,” said Ali Jalali. Ali Jalali, “The Future of Afghanistan,” Parameters, Spring 2006. For figures of police dead, see International Crisis Group, “Reforming Afghan Police,” Brussels, August 30, 2007.
21 James Glanz and David Rohde, “US Reports Fault in Training of Afghan Police,” The New York Times, March 12, 2006.
22 The UN reported the status of these fourteen officers; see Tom Koenigs, “Briefing to the UN Security Council on Afghanistan,” UN document, New York, July 26, 2006.
23 Henry Schuster, “The Taliban’s Rules,” CNN, June 12, 2006.
24 Dave Markland, “Operation Medusa: Fog of War, NATO’s Failure and Afghanistan’s Future,” ZNet, February 5, 2007.
25 Matthew Fisher, “Top General Says Afghanistan Mission Unaffected by Political Furor,” CanWest News Service, October 15, 2007.
26 Ahmed Rashid, “NATO’s Top Brass Accuse Pakistan over Taliban Aid,” The Daily Telegraph, October 6, 2006.
27 The figures are derived from UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan statistics, Kabul, June 2006
28 Interview with Chris Alexander, Kabul, June 19, 2006.
29 United Nations, “Southern Region, Recommended Actions to Address Governance Issues,” Kabul, September 2006.
30 David Cloud, “US Air Strikes Climb Sharply in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, November 17, 2006.
31 Sami Yousufzai and Ron Moreau, “Suicide Offensive,” Newsweek, April 16, 2007.
32 Reuters, “Taliban Say Hundreds of Suicide Attackers Ready,” Spin Baldak, January 18, 2007.
33 I interviewed Saleh several times during the summer of 2006 and corroborated what he told me with NATO officers.
34 “Special Security Initiative of the Policy Action Group,” papers presented to President Karzai at the meeting of the Policy Action Group, Kabul, July 9, 2006. The paper on the Taliban is called “Insurgency and Terrorism in Afghanistan. Who Is Fighting and Why?” and was prepared in June 2006.
35 Tom Koenigs, sixty-two, replaced Jean Arnault as head of UNAMA in Kabul in February 2006. Arnault had held the post from February 2004 to February 2005. Koenigs had headed UN peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Guatemala and had worked at the German foreign office. He came from an illustrious Cologne banking family, but in 1973 he had given up his inheritance to Chilean resistance fighters and the Vietcong. He has been a member of the Green Party since 1983.
36 United Nations, “Report of the UN Secretary-General on the Situation in Afghanistan and Its Implications for Peace and Security,” New York, September 2006.
37 All the quotes come from IWPR, “Afghans Bemused by Mixed Messages from Musharraf,” Kabul, September 22, 2006. See also Reuters, “Pakistan Vows to Help Kabul Crush Taliban,” Kabul, September 6, 2006.
38 Interview with senior U.S. diplomat, Islamabad, March 5, 2007.
39 Ahmed Rashid, “How to Turn the Tide in Afghanistan,” International Herald Tribune, October 12, 2006.
40 David Montero, “Pakistan Faces a Less-Friendly US Congress,” The Christian Science Monitor, January 29, 2007.
41 Anwar Iqbal, “Taliban Command Structure in FATA Alarms US,” Dawn, December 27, 2006.
42 On November 4 the Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot called for Pakistan to stop the Taliban from crossing into Uruzgan province, where 40 percent of them were coming in from Pakistan to attack Dutch troops. Two weeks later the Canadian foreign minister Peter MacKay called for Pakistan to arrest Taliban leaders based on its soil.
43 Center for Public Integrity, “Pakistan’s Blank Check for US Military Aid after 9/11,” Washington, D.C., March 27, 2007. See also RAND Corporation, “Securing Tyrant or Fostering Reform? U.S. Internal Security Assistance to Repressive and Transitioning Regimes,” Washington, D.C., 2006.
44 Statement of John Negroponte to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, D.C., January 11, 2007.
45 Reuters, “World Underestimated the Potential for a Resurgent Taliban,” Kabul, June 30, 2006.
46 Radio Free Liberty, “Kabul’s Record Criticized at Brussels Forum,” Brussels, April 28, 2007.
47 Colum Lynch, “UN Plans to Send Troops to East Timor,” The Washington Post, June 14, 2006.
48 James Jones and Harlan Ullman, “What Is at Stake in Afghanistan,” letter to The Washington Post, April 10, 2007.
Chapter Eighteen. Conclusion: The Death of an Icon and a Fragile Future
1 Quoted in Mark Danner, “Iraq: The War on the Imagination,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006.
2 Griff Witte and Emily Wax, “Bhutto’s Last Day,” The Washington Post, January 16, 2007.
3 Interview with President Hamid Karzai by the author at Davos, Switzerland, January 24, 2008.
4 Aziz Syed, “10 Fold Increase in Suicide Attacks,” Islamabad, Daily Times, January 13, 2008.
5 Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema told a press conference on the evening of December 28 that Bhutto had fatally cracked her head on the lever of the sunroof. He then released a telephone intercept of Baitullah Mahsud congratulating the leader of a suicide squad for carrying out the bombing. See Ahmed Rashid, “After Bhutto Death, Pakistan on Edge,” Yale Global, January 1, 2008.
6 Fareed Zakaria, “Pakistanis Know I Can Be Tough,” Newsweek, January 12, 2008.
7 Bureau report, “Suicide Bomber Identified,” Islamabad, The Post, January 29, 2008.
8 British High Commission, Islamabad, “Scotland Yard Report into Assassination of Benazir Bhutto,” press release, February 8, 2008.
9 Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry’s testimony was given at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington, D.C., February 13, 2007. Text provided by U.S. Embassy, Islamabad.
10 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Pressing Allies, President Warns of Afghan Battle,” Washington, D.C., The New York Times, February 16, 2007.
11 “West Must Match Pakistan’s Efforts: Aurakzai,” Peshawar, Dawn, February 16, 2007.
12 Mark Mazzetti and David Sanger, “Bush Aides See Failure in Fight with al Qaeda in Pak
istan,” The New York Times, July 17, 2007.
13 Townsend’s interview with Chris Wallace, Fox News Sunday, Washington, D.C., July 22, 2007.
14 George Tenet, the CIA director, claimed in February 2003 that more than one third of al Qaeda had been killed or captured. In May 2003, President Bush increased that number to “about half.” Karen De Young and Walter Pincus, “Safe Haven in Pakistan Is Seen as Challenging Counterterrorism Efforts,” The Washington Post, July 18, 2007.
15 Reuters, “Al Qaeda Is Targeting Germany for Attacks,” Berlin, July 21, 2007.
16 Elaine Sciolino, “Terror Threat from Pakistan Said to Expand,” The New York Times, February 10, 2008.
17 Al Jazeera, Baitullah Mahsud’s first TV interview in Pushtu, translation provided by Gretchen Peters of ABC News, “Slaves to US, We Will Destroy White House, New York and London,” January 27, 2008.
18 The Pakistan Army Act of 1952 was amended by ordinance on November 10, 2007.
19 James Naughtie, interview with Benazir Bhutto, BBC Radio 4, November 13, 2007.
20 AP, “Bush Sees Positive Signs in Pakistan,” Crawford, Texas, November 10, 2007.
21 Khalid Hasan, “Clinton and Obama Oppose Emergency Rule in Pakistan,” The Daily Times, November 7, 2007.
22 Ann Scott Tyson, “US to Step Up Training of Pakistanis,” The Washington Post, January 24, 2008.
23 AP, “Musharraf: Pakistan Is Not Hunting Osama,” Paris, January 23, 2008.
24 See Hasan-Askari Rizvi, “Towards a Solution of the Present Crisis,” Lahore, Daily Times, June 17, 2007.
25 Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, London: Pluto Press, 2007,
26 Ayesha Siddiqa, “The New Land Barons,” Newsline magazine, July 2006.
27 Military officers worked in every sector, including communications, education, diplomacy, water and electricity management, information, post office, jails, local bodies, think tanks, industrial production, shipping, minority affairs, population welfare, health care, agriculture, railways, highways, housing, labor and manpower, social and women’s development, law and justice, and subsectors of sports ranging from cricket to hockey. Nasir Iqbal, “1,027 Civilian Posts Occupied by Servicemen,” Dawn, October 3, 2003.