Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  Mullah Baradar, the Taliban minister of defense and Mullah Omar’s deputy, called Dr. Khalil and demanded our release because he had given us permission to travel in Taliban territory. Another contact added pressure on Dr. Khalil by calling his former commander, who had arranged for his release in the prisoner exchange. Early in the afternoon Dr. Khalil finally showed up. He examined my passport and visas, and carefully went through my bags. He was most fascinated by my Gillette gel deodorant, opening it and smelling it. He took my toothbrush out of its container and carefully thumbed through the bristles, bringing it close to his eye to examine it. He leafed through my notebooks and was intrigued by my many medicines for diarrhea and dehydration. He asked me to show him the pictures I had taken. “Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you, but I will not,” he told me. Dr. Khalil’s attitude was markedly different, and he made me feel at ease. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I asked him a few questions. He was fighting for a government of Islamic law, he said, but Mullah Omar did not have to be the leader again. God willing, it would take up to twenty or thirty years until they got rid of the foreigners. If the foreigners left, he would still fight the Afghan army, and he refused to negotiate with President Karzai. Women could go to school and work, he conceded. Dr. Khalil had studied in the Hakim Sahib Sanai Islamic School in the Pakistani town of Jub and then studied internal medicine in Afghanistan. In 1992 he joined the Taliban, and he was a commander in the far northern Taluqan district.

  I wasn’t in the mood to ask too many questions, and we piled into the Corolla again, loading an RPG into the trunk just in case. Dr. Khalil got in the driver’s seat with Shafiq beside him holding the PKM. Qadim held an AK-47 and squeezed in next to me. Dr. Khalil’s escort followed on another motorcycle, as did Shafiq’s brother. We drove for about an hour through villages. The car got stuck, and I helped collect rocks to put beneath the tires. We drove through Dr. Khalil’s village of Asfanda, and he pointed to its outer limits. “This is the border between the Taliban and the government,” he said, proudly stressing his control. We drove undisturbed through the village. He asked me what I would write in my article. I told him that I would write about how much control the Taliban had in much of Afghanistan. He was now jocular and relaxed.

  He pointed to a nearby American base with a spy blimp parked on the ground and told me to take a picture of it. At the edge of town close to the main road he got out, followed by Shafiq, who held his PKM. The locals appeared stunned. He stopped a pickup truck and ordered the driver to take us to the bazaar. We parted warmly and climbed on the back of the truck. Shafiq’s younger brother followed us on a motorcycle to the bazaar, where we met Mullah Abdillah, who was very apologetic for what had happened to me. Abdillah was supposed to have been with me during my trip through Talibanistan, but he was tired from his surgery and had gone home to relax. “I paid for my mistake,” he later said. “This Doctor, he is a very nasty guy,” my contact told me on the phone. “He might send somebody to kidnap you on the way, and then I can do nothing for you.” Abdillah was also worried that Dr. Khalil had set up an ambush for me on the road. Later I learned more. Shafiq had incorrectly told local Taliban that I worked for Al Jazeera. Dr. Khalil called the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan and asked him if he knew me. When the chief said no they decided I was a spy. By the time Mullah Baradar had made the call to Dr. Khalil, the leadership in Andar had already decided to execute me.

  We dodged craters in the road on the way back with Abdillah, and the sides of the road were strewn with burned-out and exploded cars. The trucks I had seen burning two days earlier were still smoldering, and children were playing with them, removing pieces. I teased Abdillah for his Taliban having destroyed the roads and made our drive more difficult and perilous, and was surprised when he seemed to agree. He later expressed disapproval of the Taliban for killing Afghan civilians, explaining that they were not acting like Afghans. We didn’t stop fast enough at an army checkpoint, and the soldier raised his AK at us. It was a sunny day with clear skies, and I felt euphoric as we drove north to Kabul.

  I RETURNED TO KABUL to find that the UN had been put on four days of restricted movement to coincide with Afghanistan’s independence day and the anniversary of the 2003 attack on the UN in Baghdad. While I was there rockets were also fired at the airport in Kabul and at the ISAF base. I told a Western intelligence officer about the extent to which the Taliban were in charge of Ghazni. “Andar is a very bad place,” he said, explaining that it had recently become one of the most dangerous areas in the country. “The Taliban showed a lot of confidence and freedom of movement,” he said. “They pulled people off buses. That level of control is right on Kabul’s front door. The writing was on the wall for the central region two years ago. The international effort was fixated with the south, but they didn’t create conditions to act as a buttress against the insurgency. Environments regarded as extreme two years ago are still extreme but much worse. There has been a staggering intensification, and there are ominous signs elsewhere in country.”

  Between Ghazni and Kabul are the formerly peaceful provinces of Wardak and Logar. “Logar and Wardak were like canaries in a mine, and now they have gone,” a senior development official told me. His NGO had divided Afghanistan into stable, unstable, and volatile areas. “Now unstable provinces have become volatile,” he said. “Now it’s too late.” A former Taliban government official told me that Logar had become dangerous in the summer of 2007. “I was watching trends in Logar and Wardak because there was no movement from the government side to push them back,” he said. “It was the weakness of the government and the strength of the Taliban.” He explained that Logar was an important center for religious education in Afghanistan, with perhaps more Islamic schools than any other province. “In the south there are not many official Islamic schools, so you can deal with tribes,” he said. But Logar was producing new Talibs in its schools. A waiter at my hotel in Kabul told me that he had been at a wedding in the town of Warajan in Logar on August 17 when suddenly about fourteen Talibs came in with AKs and RPGs. They didn’t say anything but simply checked to see if there was music being played. Like most of the country, Kunduz province, in the far north, was also declining. “Kunduz was very safe last year,” a senior humanitarian official told me. “I drove up there and spent Christmas there. Now there have been NGO staff killed, threats of kidnapping.” The German contingent there was attacked every night and had recently accidentally killed Afghan civilians.

  As I saw on the road to Ghazni, the Taliban were cutting off Kabul from the rest of the country. The road southwest to Kandahar was lethal. “The Kabul-to-Ghazni road is gone,” the intelligence officer told me. “The Ghazni-to-Gardez road is exceedingly bad, the Wardak road is shitty, the Jalalabad road is sliding, and there is a sustainable deterioration in rural areas around the road—you run the risk of abduction. It’s routine ambushes now, so they have a routine capability.” In May and June 2007, the officer explained, there was a major shift in Wardak: “Within an eight-week period it went from nighttime ambushes to daylight roadblocks.” He told me that warnings had been issued about the Sarobi district of Kabul and the Qarghai district in the province of Laghman, which borders Kabul to the east. There was also an IED cell in the Puli Khumri junction, which was a key road for anything going from the north to Kabul. Even Badakhshan at the extreme northeast of the country was beginning to have problems. In the last three months the northern Parwan province, which borders Kabul, had also become more dangerous. It was mostly Tajik, but the main road was under pressure there as well. “All of a sudden we see IEDs in Parwan on the main road, attacks on police checkpoints,” he said. “It’s the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country.” Hizb-e-Islami clerics were sent to Parwan to preach against the government, and an increase in violence soon followed. “Given the ethnicity of the area, it’s not a permissive environment, but there are effective IED cells operating there,” he said.

  On
August 13 the international community in Kabul and most Afghans were shocked when three Western female NGO workers from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and their Afghan driver were ambushed on a road in Logar’s Puli Alam district in the morning and shot to death. The initial Taliban statement claimed the targets were legitimate because they were ISAF soldiers. In the past the Taliban said they would not attack NGOs, including international NGOs, which were free to work throughout the country. At first the Taliban statement seemed to imply that they had relied on bad intelligence and that they thought the victims were military people using civilian vehicles. “The IRC attack was a big watershed,” the intelligence officer told me, summarizing the final Taliban statement as “Yes, we killed them, and we’re proud of it—screw you.” He explained that the Taliban claimed they didn’t believe the IRC’s projects had merit or were in the interest of Afghanistan. In effect, the Taliban spokesman legitimized attacks on NGOs. On previous occasions the Taliban had admitted that similar attacks were mistakes, such as when they targeted organizations that disposed of land mines. “The IRC incident changed the whole rules of the game,” a senior UN official told me. “In the past, when de-miners were taken hostage and killed, they have issued statements that it’s Taliban policy not to attack de-miners,” the intelligence officer said. “That’s the story in Afghanistan with the Taliban, internal squabbling. They free de-miners in one place, and pick them up in another place.” In June 2008 there were twenty-one security incidents against NGOs, and the IRC attack in August brought NGO deaths in 2008 to twenty-three. “In Darfur we had thirteen killed in one year, and the international community went ballistic,” one senior Western NGO official told me. “Here there hasn’t been much of an outrage.”

  Some NGO officials were not surprised. In 2006 Mullah Omar had issued a twenty-nine-article order that did not prohibit attacks against NGOs, which meant that in practice it allowed them. A former Taliban government official from Logar explained to me that if the Taliban abducted Afghans working for NGOs, then surely they would abduct internationals. Abductions were used to help finance their operations or for prisoner exchanges with jailed Taliban members. In the case of the IRC women, he said, “they were foreigners, that’s reason enough.” He explained that the Taliban had cars with armed men on standby. When they heard that a high-profile SUV with tinted windows was coming, they waited on the main road to ambush them and then simply returned to the villages. The same thing had recently happened in Logar’s Muhammad Agha district, which was even closer to Kabul, on its southern border. The Taliban ambushed a police convoy and simply drove into their villages afterward, and the police didn’t dare follow them “because everyone likes their life.” The government remained in control of the main urban centers. But the Taliban had little need to take Kabul; it wasn’t relevant, and it never fell even in the Soviet days. “But once you leave the city, how safe do you feel?” a senior UN official asked.

  During this visit to Afghanistan I spoke with Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahideen commanders, former Taliban officials, NGO officials, and senior UN officials. All agreed that “things are not going well,” that the situation was “incredibly bleak.” Many told me that “what we’ve got to try and make happen is a fresh start” or “we have to start from zero again.”

  “I’m not optimistic,” a longtime NGO official told me. “You can’t help getting this increased uncomfortable feeling that you are waiting for something terrible to happen.” Taliban confidence reminded him of the mujahideen he had known in the Soviet days. Another senior Western NGO official who had recently left Afghanistan with his family spoke of a “loss of hope” and told me that “Afghans with money want to move their families to Dubai or India—they’re looking at an exit strategy. I’m increasingly unsure about the way forward except that we should start preparing our exit strategy. We’re not up to the task of success in Afghanistan.”

  “At the center is an extremely weak president,” said a European ambassador, “a corrupt and ineffective Ministry of Interior, an army that will fight but has no command or control, a dysfunctional international alliance.” The “enlightened” Afghan elite who lead the government have little in common with the majority of rural Afghans, who are the sea where the Taliban swim. There had been small successes in health, education, rural development, roads, bridges, dams, and wells, but these were ephemeral, a senior development official told me, and it would be easy to blow them up. “From the beginning I’ve been very worried and negative,” the European ambassador told me. “The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse. CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. The administration in Washington is not fit for the purpose.” But there was a divide between the analysts and the trigger pullers. The British army did not accept the negative prognosis provided by that country’s intelligence and continued to insist that things were not getting worse.

  “Last month was the worst ever and the month before that was the worst ever until then,” a senior UN official told me in August 2008. “The UN has 50 or 55 percent access in this country—in some parts we have zero.” UN maps divided the country into green areas for safety and red areas for danger. But the maps were misleading, he said: “Herat is green, but only essential staff are allowed there and only in the capital of the province. It’s actually 97 percent off-limits. In Kandahar we have plenty of international staff, but they are all hiding behind the doors.” The UN had declared Afghanistan to be in phase three out of its five phases of safety, with five being the worst. But in practice it was treated as phase four. “It’s a political decision,” he said. “They cannot say it’s phase four because ‘we are winning the war, we are controlling the situation. ’ We are thinking things will get much worse. There is a political interest in not acknowledging the situation. If they recognize that there are humanitarian issues, then they have failed.”

  Following the Taliban’s speedy defeat by the Americans in 2001, there was a wholesale handover of government to the warlords and no institution building. NATO forces were restricted to Kabul, and the focus of the mission was counterterrorism. The Americans built up the warlords and let them become entrenched. They would find weapons caches and give them to the warlords. Those who had been responsible for atrocities in the past were given renewed legitimacy. The parliamentary elections of 2005 then legalized the legitimacy the Americans had bestowed upon the warlords. The Parliament was led by warlords; they served as governors and ministers. “The American intervention issued blank checks to these guys,” one longtime NGO official told me. “They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. Anyone willing to work with the Americans was welcome. The warlords haven’t abandoned their bad habits. They’re abusing people and filling their pockets.” When President Karzai appointed governors and police chiefs, his options were limited. American-backed warlords were already in charge in many places, and Karzai had no choice but to appoint these same people—and he began to lose credibility.

  “I thought the Americans and international community could succeed in 2001,” a former mujahideen commander and Taliban government official told me. “I thought we would get rid of all these warlords, but in the first six months they supported the warlords and put them in power. Then there was hope for the elections, but warlords won. In 2002 the warlords were nervous about the justice process. Now they are in Parliament, ministers, deputy ministers. The main mistake was the agreement between the Northern Alliance and the U.S. before Bonn and the fall of the Taliban. In Kandahar drug gangs were appointed police chiefs and district administrators.”

  The UN, the U.S. embassy, and Karzai undermined justice and refused to take the warlords on because it would threaten stability. They ended up fundamentally undermining the process of creating a government that would be legitimate in the eyes of the population, who at best had an ambivalent view of a government that had done nothing to protect them. At the same time the American-led coalition dropped bombs on Afghans and sho
t them on the roads at greater and greater numbers.

  “The amnesty bill gave all members of Parliament and warlords immunity from prosecution,” the intelligence officer said. “Karzai was under pressure from the UN and international community to block it. I felt the ambience of Kabul change after the bill. There was increasing cockiness and a sense of impunity, corruption increased, there were more cash-in-transit robberies.” But many of these warlords had violated the terms of the amnesty by maintaining their private militias. “The issue isn’t who the combatants are,” he said. “It’s the elders and government members who have secret handshakes with local Taliban. That corruption is the absolute way of life here, from your smallest villager dealing with his melon crop to your minister.” As the situation worsened, “there is desperation setting in among the government: ‘Let’s shove this into our pockets, because it won’t last.’ Government departments demand bribes.”

  The intelligence officer singled out the general who headed the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation and Terrorism department. The increased abuses coincided with the general’s rise, he said. “He’s a psychopath, that’s the only way I can put it. He’s a mafia don, a mini Al Capone, a nasty piece of work, the scum of the earth, a fucking hoodlum.” Police harassment of foreigners also increased, he said. “The international community proved to be a paper tiger. The police will raid foreign companies, even security companies, and just steal everything: iPods, money, weapons, radios. They even tried arresting foreigners for not having passports on them, which is not illegal. Afghans connected to the government who have security companies wanted them out, they wanted their business. Afghan security teams were moonlighting as bank robbers. There is no respect for laws in this country whatsoever—it’s meaningless. In my view this whole governance piece is the most critical part, but you have utterly disgusting people in power. People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This government, they’re parasites fucking with you on a deal. If you go through the legitimate process, you haven’t got a chance.”