The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  And what of Pakistan? By allying himself with America’s “War on Terror,” General Musharraf had secured de facto international acceptance of his 1999 coup. Suddenly, all he had wished for—the lifting of sanctions, massive funding for Pakistan’s crumbling industry, IMF loans, a $375 million debt rescheduling and humanitarian aid—had been given him. Of course, we had to forget that it was Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) outfits—the highest ranks of the country’s security agencies—that set up the Taliban, funnelled weapons into Afghanistan and grew rich on the narcotics trade. Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the ISI had worked alongside the CIA, funding the mullahs and mawlawis now condemned as the architects of “world terror.” Most Pakistanis now realised that the ISI—sanctioned by Washington rather than Pakistan’s own rulers—had turned into a well-armed and dangerous mafia, and while money was pouring into its smuggling activities, Pakistan’s people lacked education, security and a health service. No wonder they turned to Islam and the madrassa schools for food and teaching. Pakistan’s military was now more important than ever, an iron hand to maintain order within the state while its superpower ally bombed the ruins of Afghanistan.

  Meanwhile, the United States—unable to bomb the Taliban into submission— cosied up to the murderers and rapists of the Northern Alliance. The Alliance’s bloodiest commander, Rashid Dostum, who first visited Washington in 1996, was now a good friend of the Bush administration. Here for example is how Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid met the man:

  The first time I arrived at the fort to meet Dostum there were bloodstains and pieces of flesh in the muddy courtyard . . . the guards . . . told me that an hour earlier Dostum had punished a soldier for stealing. The man had been tied to the tracks of a Russian-made tank, which then drove around the courtyard crushing his body into mincemeat, as the garrison and Dostum watched.

  Surely now the Americans would send in ground troops. First came the hopeless U.S. raid on Mullah Omar’s office in Kandahar. They didn’t find him. Then came the dispatch of U.S. Special Forces to the ruthless thugs of the Northern Alliance. If the Taliban had anyone to fear, it was the Alliance’s Shah Massoud. But he had been murdered by the two Arab suicide bombers on 9 September. Then Abdul Haq—a U.S. favourite who opposed the Taliban—was hanged while trying to arrange a regional coup in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. So what did our new “friends” in the Northern Alliance have in store for us?

  The capture of Kabul, of course. They arrived to liberate the capital on 12 November 2001 after originally promising not to enter it. The Alliance was supposed to enter, at most, Mazar-e-Sharif and perhaps Herat, to demonstrate the weakness of the Taliban, to show the West that its war aims—the destruction of the Taliban and thus of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement—were going to be accomplished. Captured Taliban men were executed or beaten in front of television cameras. Was it not Colin Powell who had assured General Musharraf that the Alliance would be kept under control? In the end, it did not matter to the Americans. The pictures of jubilation, of a single Afghan woman unveiled among her still burqa-ed sisters, were enough. Kabul had been freed. Western democracy was at hand. The misogynist Taliban had been crushed.

  We so idolised the Northern Alliance, were so infatuated with them, supported them so unquestioningly, pictured them on television so deferentially, that now we were immune to their history. Nor would you have thought, listening to the reports from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul, that the Northern Alliance was responsible for more than 80 per cent of the drug exports from the country in the aftermath of the Taliban’s prohibition of drug cultivation. Why, I wondered, did we always have this ambiguous, dangerous relationship with our allies? For decades, we accepted the received wisdom that the “B” Specials were a vital security arm of the Northern Ireland authorities against the IRA on the grounds that they “knew the territory”—just as we now relied upon the Northern Alliance because it “knew the land.” The Israelis relied upon their Phalangist militia thugs in Lebanon because the Christian Maronites hated the Palestinians. The Nazis approved of their Croatian Ustashi murderers in 1941 because the Ustashi hated the Serbs.

  There were brave men in the Alliance. Its murdered leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was an honourable man. But it remained a fact that from 1992 to 1996, the Northern Alliance was a symbol of massacre, systematic rape, and pillage. Which is why we—and I include the U.S. State Department—welcomed the Taliban when they originally arrived in Kabul. The Northern Alliance left the city in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind it. Now its members were our foot-soldiers. Better than bin Laden, to be sure. But what—in God’s name—were they going to do in our name? We were soon to discover.

  As soon as the U.S. Air Force bombed Mazar-e-Sharif, our Afghan allies moved into the city and executed up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report was a footnote on the television satellite channels, a nib in journalistic parlance, perfectly normal, it seemed. The Afghans have a “tradition” of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed. Journalists watched the Mazar-e-Sharif prison “revolt” in the third week of November, in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. U.S. Special Forces—and, it quickly emerged, British troops—helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN told us that some prisoners were “executed” while trying to escape. It was an atrocity. British troops were now stained with war crimes. Within days, The Independent’s Justin Huggler had found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.

  The Americans had even less excuse for this massacre. For U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that U.S. air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop “if the Northern Alliance requested it.” Leaving aside the revelation that the killers of the Alliance were now acting as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the killers of the Taliban, Rumsfeld’s incriminating remark meant that the United States was acting in full military cooperation with the militia. Most television journalists showed a minimal interest in these crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most had done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports.

  One of the untold stories of this conflict was the huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to fight for the United States. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance—which didn’t have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier— could throw a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a firefight. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province were now riding around in brand-new four-wheel-drives with thousands of dollars to hand out to their gunmen. In December 2001, a new atrocity was revealed: up to 1,000 Taliban survivors of Kunduz who had been taken away towards Sherberghan prison by the Alliance in sealed containers; almost all were suffocated to death—or were later shot—in the desert. Human rights officials and reporters found the mass grave at Dasht-e Leili in which they were buried. U.S. Special Forces officers were said to have known of the killings—even been present—but declined to intervene. The UN called for an international inquiry. The Americans were silent.

  What had gone wrong with our moral bearings since September 11th? I feared I knew the answer. After both the First and Second World Wars, we—the West— planted a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes. The very first Anglo–French–Russian attempt to formulate such laws was provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; the Entente said it would hold personally responsible “all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 1945, article 6 (c) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN Convention on Genocide referred to “crimes against humanity.” Each new post-1945 war produced a
raft of legislation and the creation of ever more human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western values. Over the previous fifty years, we stood on our moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing—in nauseous detail—the secret courts and death squads and torture and extra-judicial executions carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too.

  Yet suddenly, after September 11th, we abandoned everything we claimed to stand for. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants— blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for this slaughter—and then we allowed our ruthless militia allies to execute their prisoners. President George Bush signed into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a “terrorist murderer” in the eyes of America’s awesomely inefficient intelligence services. They were created so that Osama bin Laden and his men, should they be caught rather than killed, would have no public defence; just a pseudo-trial and a firing squad. What had happened was quite clear. When people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners or carpet-bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death-squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the “civilised” world. We were the masters of human rights, the liberals, the great and the good who could preach to the impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered—when our glittering buildings are destroyed—then we shred every piece of human rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.

  Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945 he preferred the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact that Hitler’s monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths—more than 17,000 times greater than the victims of September 11th—the Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg because Chief Justice Robert H. Jackson made a remarkable decision. “Undiscriminating [sic] executions or punishments,” he said, “without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would . . . not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride.” No one should have been surprised that George W. Bush—a small-time Texas governor–executioner— should fail to understand the morality of a statesman in the White House. What was so shocking was that the Blairs, Schröders, Chiracs and all the television boys should stay silent in the face of the Afghan executions and east European–style laws sanctified by September 11th.

  Yet bin Laden was allowed to get away. He retreated with his hundreds of Arab fighters to the Tora Bora mountains outside Jalalabad. Under intense U.S. bombardment, he was reluctant to leave but—so his associates let me know later—he was eventually prevailed upon to flee into the Pakistani tribal territories, at one point physically forced by his own followers to retreat below the mountain chain after U.S.-paid Afghan tribal fighters were suborned for a higher price by bin Laden’s own men. Yet America was not quite the “paper tiger” he had boasted to me about on a neighbouring mountain just over four years earlier. Defeat for the Russians did not mean defeat for the Americans.

  By 25 November, the Taliban controlled only a small area around the city of Kandahar. Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad—all the other great cities of Afghanistan—had been lost to them. And at the moment of their downfall, they decided to give me a visa. The Pakistani government had already ordered the Taliban’s embassy in Islamabad closed, but with the help of contacts, several bearded Taliban diplomats were finally prevailed upon to reopen the building for ten minutes, just long enough to stamp a pre-dated visa into my passport, the very last ever to be issued for Taliban Afghanistan. One of them wrote on the side of page 34 of my passport: “The Visa Valid Only for Kandahar.” I had no problem with that. Kandahar was the only place I wanted to go. Would I be able to watch its fall? Was bin Laden still in Afghanistan? Could there be, perhaps, a Last Interview?

  At the Chaman border station, the Pakistani immigration officer offered me a cup of tea. “Perhaps your last?” he asked me with a sorrowful smile. A few metres past a chain that lay in the dust along the Durand Line, a young Taliban whose black turban glistened like birds’ feathers stamped “Entry” over my visa and, less encouragingly, “Exit.” I would have less than a day in Afghanistan. But the Taliban, I informed him with all the authority of a Roman emperor, had specifically arranged for my journey to Kandahar. The young man looked at me with pity. There was a dark conversation about me with two other men in the corner of the mud hut that was the Taliban immigration office in Spin Boldak. Far away across the Kandahar desert, I could hear that drumroll again, the thunder of B-52 bombs. Then a more senior man stepped forward. He had large, slightly amused eyes. “We will give you some men who will take you down the Kandahar road,” he said. “Then they will decide what to do when you get to Takhta-Pul.” It was the same old James Cameron predicament that I had experienced in the Iran–Iraq War. The doughty war correspondent wished to forge onwards towards the fray, to witness the last theocratic struggle for Afghanistan. The sane fifty-five-year-old Englishman with increasingly greying hair wanted to return to Beirut, to live on into happy old age and write books and sip cocoa by the fire.

  I climbed into the front of a beat-up Japanese truck and we shot off down the dust-covered road towards Kandahar. The driver was a big Pashtun man, a plump face beneath his turban, who talked about his father and his grandfather and his family. A good sign, I thought. Family men don’t want to die. I was right. “You’ll never get through,” he told me. “The Northern Alliance have taken Takhta-Pul and the Americans are bombing the centre of the town.” Impossible, I said. Takhta-Pul is only 40 kilometres away, a few minutes’ ride from the Afghan border. But then a refugee with a cracked face and white hair matting the brow below his brown turban—he looked seventy but said he was only thirty-six—stumbled up to our truck. “The Americans just destroyed our homes,” he cried. “I saw my house disappear. It was a big plane that spat smoke and soaked the ground with fire.”

  For a man who couldn’t read and had never left Kandahar province in all his long-short life, this was a chilling enough description of the Spectre, the American converted AC-130 “Bumble-Bee” aircraft that picks off militiamen and civilians with equal ferocity. And down the tree-lined roads poured hundreds more refugees—old women with dark faces and babies carried in the arms of young women in blue burqas and boys with tears on their faces—all telling the same stories. I climbed from the truck to watch this trail of misery. Mullah Abdul Rahman slumped down beside me, passed his hand over the sweat on his face, and told me how his brother, a fighter in the same town, had just escaped. “There was a plane that shot rockets out of its side,” he said, shaking his head. “It almost killed my brother today. It hit many people.”

  Suddenly, being the last reporter in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan didn’t seem quite as romantic as it sounded. So this is what it was like to be on the losing side in the American–Afghan bloodbath. Everywhere was the same story of desperation and terror. “You’ll never get to Kandahar, they’ve cut the road,” another Taliban gunman shouted at me. An American F-18 soared through the imperial blue heaven above us as a middle-aged man approached with angry eyes. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he screamed. “Sheikh Osama is an excuse to do this to the Islamic people.” I pleaded with yet another Taliban fighter—a thirty-five-year-old father of five called Jamaldan—to honour his government’s promise to get me to Kandahar. He looked at me with irritation. “How can I get you there,” he asked, “when we can hardly protect ourselves?”

  The implications were astonishing. The road from the Iranian border town of Zabol to Kandahar had been cut by Afghan gunmen and U.S. Special Forc
es. The Americans were bombing the civilian traffic—and the Taliban—on the road to Spin Boldak, and the Northern Alliance were firing across the highway. Takhta-Pul was under fire from American gunships and being invested by the Alliance. Kandahar was surrounded. No wonder I came across the local Taliban commander, the thoughtful and intelligent Mullah Haqqani, racing for the Pakistani border to Quetta—for “medical reasons.”

  Out of a dust-storm came a woman cowled in a grey shawl. “I lost my daughter two days ago,” she said. “The Americans bombed our home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her.” Amid the chaos and shouting, I did what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen. Name of the daughter? “Muzlifa.” Age? “She was two.” I turn away. “Then there was my other daughter.” She nods when I ask if this girl died too. “At the same moment. Her name was Farigha. She was three.” I turn away. “There wasn’t much left of my son.” I turn back to her. Notebook out again, for the third time. “When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and all I could see were bones. His name was Sheriff. He was a year and a half old.”

  They came out of a blizzard of sand, these people, each with their story of blood. Shukria Gul told her story more calmly. Beneath her burqa, she sounded like a teenager. “My husband, Mazjid, was a labourer. We have two children, our daughter, Rahima, and our son, Talib. Five days ago, the Americans hit an ammunition dump in Kandahar and the bullets came through our house. My husband was killed by them in the bedroom. He was twenty-five.”

  U.S. Marines landed at Kandahar’s sporting club, the airport at which Saudi princes once arrived to hunt animals with the Taliban. The end was coming. At the border, you could see it already. About Chaman, they say nothing good. The muck moved across the Afghan plain in whirlwinds, great grey tunnels of the stuff, the sand and grit settling as usual into our ears and teeth and noses and behind our lips. Beyond, black mountains rose from the ocean of sand, and from way out across the Afghan moonscape, below the bomber contrails, came those changes in air pressure to remind us that the War for Civilisation was only a few miles away. The river of Afghan men, women and children that flooded through Chaman’s border wire was a CinemaScope obscenity. First, they needed to state their reasons for entering Pakistan to a soldier sitting atop a concrete bunker. Then they had to produce documents at the border gate. Then they had to face the press.