Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  The dust-covered, earthquake-prone town of Quetta amid the fudge-coloured rifts of the Baluchistan Desert is known as Taliban Central these days. Several former Taliban ministers and commanders live there and have formed the Quetta Shura, a war council guiding operations inside Afghanistan. In this they are helped by their former backers in Pakistan’s military intelligence, ISI, according to close advisers of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who believes Islamabad has not given up its long-held designs on its neighbour.

  ‘The Taliban were defeated but they were not eliminated,’ warns Yahya Massoud, sitting in his Kabul house beneath a picture of his dead younger brother Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance who for years led the fight against the Taliban. Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before 11 September 2001, apparently as a favour to Mullah Omar in return for protecting Osama bin Laden. ‘ISI continues to support them and al-Qaeda while paying lip-service to helping the West.’

  As the West’s key ally in the war on terrorism, Pakistan might be expected to support its aims. After all, ISI has been crowing about its recent string of successes in capturing senior al-Qaeda members such as the operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Earlier this month, it even held a bizarre press conference at which spymasters drew flow charts of the organisation while waiters in white gloves and astrakhan hats served tuna sandwiches and tea in china cups. But such arrests also raise the question of how so many terrorists have been able to seek refuge in Pakistani cities; it suggests considerable local support for their objectives.

  The most high-profile of those captured were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known by western intelligence as ‘the Brain’, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, known as ‘the Paymaster’, arrested together in a smart suburb of Rawalpindi on 1 March. Yassir al-Jazeeri, a communications specialist, was found in the posh Gulberg district of Lahore on 17 March. Ramzi Binalshibh, the suspected twentieth hijacker, was captured after a six-hour shootout in an affluent part of Karachi last September. Others have been arrested in Peshawar, Quetta and Faisalabad, often in the houses of doctors.

  The past year has seen a string of attacks in Pakistan on western and Christian targets such as churches, the American consulate and the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. In elections last October, 20 per cent of the seats went to religious parties campaigning on an anti-American platform. In the North-West Frontier Province, now governed by an alliance of mullahs, Taliban-style measures such as the banning of music and satellite television have already been introduced.

  No one doubts that an American attack on Iraq will intensify antipathy towards the West. Already Saddam Hussein’s picture has joined that of Osama bin Laden on the barrows of street vendors selling pistachio nuts and sugar-cane juice. Neither man is in any way representative of Islam, a religion which preaches tolerance. One is a suit-and-tie-wearing secular dictator of unspeakable brutality and the other a long-beard from the extreme Wahhabi sect, which rejects modernity. Yet the two have become icons for Muslim youth.

  ‘By making them such objects of hate, the West has turned them into heroes,’ complains Mehmood Shaam, editor of the Daily Jang, Pakistan’s biggest-selling newspaper, sitting in his office in Karachi not far from some of the recent bomb blasts.

  After the suicide bomb attacks on the US consulate and the Sheraton in Karachi last year, Shaam wrote an article entitled ‘Letter to a Suicide Bomber’, urging the nation’s youth to reject militancy and instead follow the peaceful way of the poet Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late President of Egypt known for his Arab nationalism. ‘I got hundreds of threatening letters saying: “We are on the right track, who are you to question us?”’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Even political leaders contacted me saying you should not discourage this tendency.’

  Such sentiment is likely to be exacerbated by a war in Iraq. ‘I’m afraid war in Iraq will create lots of mini bin Ladens,’ warns General Rashid Qureshi, spokesman for President Musharraf.

  A country where a third of children are educated in madrasas, many of which espouse an extreme Deobandi version of Islam similar to Wahhabism, is fertile ground for breeding terrorists. A recent report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group entitled ‘Pakistan: madrasas, extremism and the military’ accused President Musharraf of failing to integrate or reform the madrasas as promised after 11 September, and warned that ‘their constrained world view, lack of modern civic education, and poverty make them a destabilising factor in Pakistani society. For all these reasons they are also susceptible to romantic notions of sectarian and international jihads which promise instant salvation.’

  ‘It’s a very dangerous situation,’ echoes Yahya Massoud. ‘If you take the official figure of 10,000 madrasas and say each has 200 militants, that’s 2 million. Then, if a quarter of these get military training, that’s a potential army of 500,000.’

  Even in Pakistan’s ordinary schools, the standard textbooks contain numerous examples of distorted history and the preaching of intolerance and hatred. ‘Minorities are described as inferior entities or second-class citizens,’ says Mohammed Shehzad, author of a survey on textbooks for the Future Youth Group of Liberal Forum. ‘It’s basically state-sponsored terrorism.’

  Pakistani youth are not the only ones in the Islamic world who increasingly reject the West and all it represents. From Cairo to Jeddah, the plumpest and sweetest dates on sale are sold as Bin Laden Dates. In the soft drink wars, Muslim Up has joined Mecca Cola to take on Seven Up and Coca-Cola. Started by a group of French Tunisians, the company states its aim on its Internet site as being ‘to thumb our noses at the “Made in USA” superpower and the arrogance it demonstrates in wanting to manage world peace’.

  Top of the Arab charts is ‘The Attack on Iraq’ by Shaaban Abdel-Rahim, an Egyptian folk singer. The chorus goes: ‘Chechnya, Afghanistan, Palestine, South Lebanon, Golan Heights and now Iraq, too. / It’s too much for people, shame on you!’

  Eventually Pakistan got wise and started stamping on journalist visas ‘Not valid for Quetta’. Once I even got one marked ‘Islamabad only’. Friends of mine from L’Express who ventured there in December 2003 were arrested. Later a New York Times correspondent, Carlotta Gall, was beaten in her hotel room (the Serena again) as was her fixer, and her computer and notes were seized.

  But Quetta was not the only problem. There were madrasas all over the country that espoused a Taliban version of Islam. I knew if I were a destitute mother in Karachi given the choice between a madrasa where my children would receive free board, lodging and education, however warped, and a government school where I had to pay, I would have little choice but to opt for the former. I thought about all those billions of American dollars that had flowed into the country in the 1980s to arm the Afghan resistance – if only some of that had been used to fund secular education.

  In addition to the madrasas, the other problem was the militant jihadi groups such as Lashkar-i-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba. Since the 1980s, under a policy begun by General Zia, these had been encouraged by Pakistan’s military to fight their war for Kashmir against India, so the government could deny responsibility. Now these groups were out of control. Pushed by Washington, Musharraf would periodically announce a ban on these jihadi organisations, only for them to re-form under new names. ‘We’ve created a Frankenstein,’ admitted one former ISI officer.

  The official line remains that General Musharraf is the West’s staunchest ally in the war on terror (even if the US did give him $5 billion of aid for his troubles and millions of dollars of CIA bounties for the arrests of al-Qaeda suspects). Pakistan’s President has after all narrowly escaped three assassination attempts because of this support. His ministers point out that, by the start of 2007, Pakistan had lost over 700 of its own soldiers looking for al-Qaeda in tribal areas like Waziristan– more than the entire coalition fighting in Afghanistan.

  Until early 2007 not a single senior Taliban official had
been arrested by Pakistan despite operating so openly that journalists like me could find them*. When Musharraf was confronted by US military officials with video evidence of armed Taliban freely passing Pakistani border guards, he finally conceded that some ‘retired ISI officers’ might still be helping the Taliban. But what if they were not really retired? And what if some of that American aid to Pakistan was going to fund the very people western troops were fighting in Afghanistan?** Back in the 1980s the Pakistani military had not had any qualms in siphoning off CIA money destined for the mujahideen and using it for their own purposes such as funding the nuclear programme.

  The West’s abandoning of Afghanistan after the Russians had gone had left a legacy of mistrust. Like the Afghans, many Pakistani officials thought the Americans were not really in it for the long term, so were hedging their bets.

  * Muttawakil was later released to live in a government guesthouse in Kabul as part of a reconciliation programme to try to win over so-called ‘moderate Taliban’.

  * Mullah Obaidullah, the former Taliban Defence Minister, was arrested in Quetta in February 2007, just as US Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting Pakistan.

  ** Another unanswered question in the 9/11 Commission report was just who wired $100,000 from two Pakistan banks to Mohammad Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 pilots, in the run-up to the attack.

  War in Iraq with a Dolphin-tamer

  January–April 2003

  News editors love wars. Male news editors love wars, to be exact. It is always said that wars sell newspapers but that isn’t why they love them and that hasn’t been true of the war in Iraq anyway. They stick up maps with coloured pins in for their ‘troops’ – us correspondents. Some collect caps from different regiments or armies as booty. At one paper where I worked, they even got out tin hats when a war started.

  At the beginning of 2003, I had just rejoined the Sunday Times from its rival Sunday Telegraph. There were already 60,000 American troops in the Gulf – the biggest military build-up since Operation Desert Shield in 1990 – and it was clearly only a matter of months until Bush and Blair launched the invasion.

  My first meeting with my new colleagues was at a war summit in Clapham at the house of fellow reporter, Hala Jaber, and her photographer husband Steve Bent. Over one of Hala’s mouth-watering Lebanese spreads, we stared at a map of Iraq to decide who would go where. None of us wanted to be embedded with US or British troops, feeling this would compromise our independence. Matthew Campbell was to be in Baghdad along with Hala and Steve; Jon Swain in the south where the British troops would be; Marie Colvin, entering from Jordan, and I would be in the north, the Kurdish areas where I imagined Turkey might try to invade in search of lost Mesopotamian ambitions once Iraq became a free-for-all.

  I found it difficult to be enthusiastic about covering the war. From my experience of reporting in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the West Bank, I worried that the impending war would provoke anti-western sentiment across the region and a wave of support for bin Laden and other militants. I had not liked Iraq on my only previous visit in 1994. The creation of Iraq – like so many African borders and the Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan – seemed another of Britain’s historical time bombs. I’d read about the British capture of Baghdad from the Turks in 1917 and warnings from the time of the impossibility of creating a nation from three communities – the Shia majority and Sunni and Kurd minorities – who hated each other. When I met Iraqi exile groups in London, it appeared not much had changed.

  In January 2003, while we waited uneasily for war, I was sent on my first Hostile Environment course. Almost all the other participants were from CNN, which appeared to be sending its entire staff. Among them was the presenter of their weekly golf show, one of those stretched-smile women who came down to breakfast every day in full make-up. As by then I’d spent much of the previous fifteen years in hostile environments, while most of my course fellows had never been anywhere near a bullet, it was difficult to take seriously simulations of ambushes in rural Wales. It wasn’t helped when a woman we were supposed to rescue urged us in a thick Welsh accent to ‘get a move on, will you’ as she had to collect her children from school.

  Bush and Blair’s assertions about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction – the infamous ‘forty-five minutes from doom’ – meant we all had to attend a one-day course in a country house to learn how to protect ourselves from NBC – nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Basically, we learnt that if any of these were unleashed, we’d had it. Even if by some miracle we managed to get into the cumbersome protection suits without being contaminated, we then, somehow, had to find an evacuation chamber within twenty-four hours. Along with the suit came a little book of touchpapers which would change colour to tell us which gas we were being poisoned by, though by then we would probably be undergoing a horrible death by blistering, vomiting or choking. I decided then and there that I would not take the kit. The self-injecting vial of atropine against nerve gas sat in our fridge among the milk and eggs, an unpleasant reminder of what was to come.

  Since my previous trip to Iraq, all I’d had to do with the country was binning the faxes of uncheckable ‘information’ that would arrive on the Sunday Telegraph foreign desk every Friday afternoon. These were from exile groups in London, all of whom seemed to hate each other. Most active was the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), led by Ayad Allawi, a genial former Ba’athist who had once tried to stage a coup against Saddam from his exile in Wimbledon. Not surprisingly it did not work and he remained in SW19, where we met for lunch one day at Cannizaro House Hotel. Over salmon in béarnaise sauce in the silk-curtained dining room, he offered me interviews with defectors who could reveal all about opponents to Saddam’s regime being killed in baths of acid or having their bodies chopped in paper shredders. None of these things seemed verifiable. He smoked a large cigar and when I tried to pay the bill, he refused, pulling out a thick wad of notes and saying, ‘It’s your taxpayers’ money anyway.’

  Despite our war summit, we all ended up in different places. On the eve of war, in March 2003, I found myself in Pakistan reporting the capture of the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. From there it was a mad dash across the border to Afghanistan, hoping to get an Iranian visa to enter northern Iraq, as both the Syrians and Turks had closed off their borders. It was the Shia holiday of Moharrum, however, and the Iranian embassy was closed.

  By then Matthew had left Baghdad amid rumours that Saddam planned to use foreign journalists as human shields and the foreign editor called to see if I’d like to go there. ‘No,’ I said, thinking, I’m a mother for God’s sake. He was replaced by Jon, and Marie had gone north, so I was instructed to head south. On Wednesday, 19 March, I departed Kabul at the crack of dawn to fly via Sharjah and Dubai to Kuwait where I would arrive in the early hours of Thursday the 20th then drive into southern Iraq. Before going, I had tea with Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace. Jokingly, he threatened to close the airport so I couldn’t leave, then added sadly, ‘Everyone will forget us again now.’

  The Kuwait Hilton was so full of hacks that people were calling it Groucho’s-on-Sea, though unlike its Soho namesake it offered nothing more potent to drink than alcohol-free Budweiser. Some of the correspondents had been there since January. Forced into teetotalism and with little to write about, most filled their time waiting for the war in the blissfully chilled air of Kuwait City’s shopping malls. What they were buying was gadgets: GPS, walkie-talkies, solar panels to charge satellite phones, inverters to run off laptops from a car battery, mini-generators and portable DVD players. A weird kind of gadget envy had developed and over breakfast in the hotel café overlooking the Arabian Gulf, reporters would boast of having acquired software of street maps of Baghdad for their GPS or trek towels ‘that absorb eight times their own weight in water’. Some of the most enthusiastic gadget-shoppers would end up spending their entire war in the Kuwait Hilton.

  I couldn’t help thinking of veteran journalist B
ill Deedes’s description of being dispatched to Abyssinia at the age of 22 to cover Mussolini’s impending war for the Morning Post. Before setting off he was taken by the foreign editor to buy a quarter-ton of luggage, including solar topees, a camp bed, three tropical suits from Austin Reed, and jodhpurs and riding boots even though he did not ride. All this was packed in a cedar-wood trunk lined with zinc to repel ants, and was mostly useless, inspiring Evelyn Waugh – in Addis Ababa for the Daily Mail – to create William Boot, the hero of his comic novel Scoop.

  For all my mockery, I did have to do some shopping. Southern Iraq was scorching desert unlike the mountainous north where I’d expected to be, so the sweaters, mountain boots, and arctic sleeping bag I had with me were all redundant. At the Sultan Centre I acquired a pop-up pod tent and a stock of self-heating cappuccinos that I knew would be the envy of the breakfast crowd. At an army-surplus store I bought military overalls; later I discovered that the Daily Mail had ordered copies of US uniforms complete with embroidered name badges for its correspondents. Marc from L’Express introduced me to Ikea from where I emerged laden with coloured pens for children, hundreds of yellow batteries, plastic boxes to put things in, and some picnic chairs. My colleagues laughed at the latter, but later, when we found ourselves living out of our car in the desert for three weeks, we would be grateful we did not have to sit and write copy on the scorpion-infested sands.

  The foreign editor kept interrupting my shopping with excited emails entitled ‘War Scoops’ and requests for memos on how I planned to cover the fall of Basra. The war hadn’t even started. I was quite sure it wasn’t going to fall that quickly. Not having to file copy like my colleagues on dailies, I thought of another way to kill the nervous waiting time. The previous year I’d covered the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea with photographer Karen Davies who impressed me by heading to the front with long crimson-painted nails. So I headed for the hotel beauty salon where a bored Filipina girl eagerly attended to me, unperturbed by the gas mask by my side. Chip Cummins from the Wall Street Journal walked past and banged on the window in disbelief.