Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  It was the start of a pattern that would persist for several years as the Clinton administration’s secret war against bin Laden and his Islamist network deepened. They had few reliable allies in the Middle East and Central Asia. The CIA’s paramilitary forces were small and sometimes less than nimble. The Pentagon’s planners thought in terms of large attack operations. Tactical intelligence about the enemy was patchy, fleeting.

  If their campaign against bin Laden was to be waged this way, they would have to learn to thread a very small needle.

  AT THE TIME OF bin Laden’s arrival, Jalalabad was controlled, if not governed, by a regional shura of eastern Pashtun tribal leaders and former anti-Soviet guerrilla commanders. Many of them were involved in lucrative smuggling and trade rackets across the Pakistan border. They had resisted overtures to join the Taliban but had also kept their distance from Hekmatyar and Massoud. Their most prominent leader was Haji Qadir, sometimes referred to as the mayor of Jalalabad. Their most prominent patron from the anti-Soviet era was Younis Khalis, now an octogenarian who took teenage wives. Khalis and other Jalalabad shura leaders maintained contacts with Pakistani intelligence.36

  Bin Laden certainly knew some of the Jalalabad group from the 1980s and early 1990s, and he had kept in touch during his years in Sudan. He may also have remained in touch with ISI. It is notable that bin Laden did not fly into Afghan territory controlled by the Taliban. Some American analysts later reported that bin Laden had sent money to the Taliban even prior to his return to Afghanistan.37 Yet bin Laden apparently did not have a comfortable enough relationship with the Taliban’s isolated, severe,mysterious leadership group to place himself and his family under their control.

  The Taliban were entering a new phase of power and ambition just as bin Laden arrived. They were no longer the humble, consultative Pashtun country folk of late 1994 and early 1995. They had evolved into a political-military movement with national goals. Some of their leaders, such as Prince Turki’s favorite, Mullah Rabbani, continued to hint to foreign visitors and United Nations diplomats that the Taliban were just a transition force. He and other “moderate” Taliban leaders, as they were now being called by American diplomats, said the Taliban would cleanse Afghanistan of its criminal warlords and create a fresh political start, perhaps including a return of the exiled king. But increasingly such claims had to be reconciled with menacing scenes of the Taliban’s appetite for power. Its leaders openly denounced the Massoud-defended government in Kabul as “the root cause of all evils in Afghanistan.”38

  Omar summoned more than one thousand Pashtun religious scholars and tribal leaders to Kandahar for a two-week grand assembly in the early weeks of spring 1996. It was the most overt political meeting of Pashtuns under Taliban leadership since the movement’s birth. Omar chose his ground and his symbols carefully. At the meeting’s climax he called the delegates to the great stone-and-tile square across from the Kandahar governor’s house. Within the square’s gates stood the tomb of the eighteenth-century king Ahmed Shah Durrani and the tile-inlaid Mosque of the Cloak of the Holy Prophet.

  Omar climbed to the mosque’s roof and unveiled the holy cloak. As the crowd roared approval, he wrapped himself dramatically in the relic. The assembled delegates formally ratified him as Amir-ul-Momineen, “Commander of the Faithful.” They created and sanctified a new name for the expanding territory under Taliban control: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They called for jihad against Massoud. Some denounced Zahir Shah as a criminal. Surrounded by the symbolic remnants of a lost Durrani empire, they had proclaimed their own one-eyed king.39

  VIRTUALLY BY HERSELF in the Clinton administration, Robin Raphel tried to drum up a climate of urgency about all-party Afghan peace talks then being sponsored by the United Nations. Raphel had support from a few members of Congress but hardly any backing from the White House. The State Department’s South Asia bureau, which Raphel ran, saw the Taliban as a distasteful but well-established faction on the Afghan checkerboard. The United States now endorsed Pakistan’s view that peace talks must include the movement’s leaders. By its secret support for the Taliban and its continual public lies, Pakistan had made the Taliban a fact of international diplomacy—and the Americans accepted their legitimacy. At the same time Raphel’s public statements made clear that State opposed all efforts to solve the Afghan war by military victory, whether by the Taliban or Massoud.

  Raphel traveled to Kabul, Kandahar, and Islamabad on April 19 and 20, 1996. “Tell President Clinton and the West that we are not bad people,” a Taliban leader told her in the Pashtun capital. Raphel and U.S. ambassador Tom Simons concluded that the Taliban’s humble, simplistic messages might reflect “a growing awareness, previously absent, of their own limitations,” as Simons wrote in a cable to Washington. Raphel and the ambassador believed—wrongly—that “a consensus has emerged” in the Pakistan government’s civilian and military leadership about the need to broaden their policies toward Afghanistan. As she had done before, Bhutto lied to Raphel in meetings and “emphasized that Pakistan was not providing military support to the Taliban and insisted that only minimal, nonlethal aid was being delivered.” Raphel absorbed Pakistan’s hostility toward Massoud and carried it into her meetings with the commander in Kabul. “Massoud outlined a vision for a bottom-up democracy” in Afghanistan, but Raphel and Simons dismissed this “rosy scenario” in a Confidential cable to Washington and denounced the “self-righteousness” of Massoud’s besieged government. For their part, Massoud and his aides were put off by what they saw as Raphel’s lecturing. Raphel seemed to treat Afghanistan “as a wilderness threatening the stability of Pakistan,” as one of Massoud’s intelligence officers put it. Massoud and his intelligence advisers worried that the CIA had covertly joined with ISI to engineer a Taliban takeover of Kabul to create favorable conditions for the Unocal pipeline. Massoud’s government had signed an agreement with Unocal’s Argentine rival, banking a $1 million payment in a New York account belonging to one of Massoud’s advisers. They feared they had been branded as Unocal’s—and therefore America’s—enemy.40

  In truth, nobody in Washington cared enough to conspire about Afghan politics. Still, Raphel and her State Department colleagues heard accusations about a CIA-led, Unocal-driven plot in Afghanistan over and over that spring. A decade of covert action in the 1980s had conditioned many Afghans and Pakistanis to see the CIA as a powerful force in their affairs. Raphel and her colleagues heard the CIA-Unocal-Taliban conspiracy stories so often and in such credible detail that they privately asked Langley a few times for confirmation that there was no fire beneath all this smoke. They were assured that the CIA was clean.

  More than any other American official at the time, Raphel outlined publicly the dangers an unstable Afghanistan posed to the world. The country “has become a conduit for drugs, crime, and terrorism that can undermine Pakistan [and] the neighboring Central Asian states and have an impact beyond Europe and Russia,” she predicted. She warned that terrorist incidents in the Middle East had been traced back to Afghan training camps. She argued that the Taliban’s severe interpretations of Islam defied Afghan traditions and that ultimately the balance of power would shift toward a more tolerant theology. Yet her policy prescriptions were all vague or narrowly drawn around commercial interests. The United States was “concerned that economic opportunities here will be missed,” Raphel said publicly during her visit to Kabul that spring. She told a Russian counterpart in a private meeting, “The United States government now hopes that peace in the region will facilitate U.S. business interests.” In Islamabad she declared that Unocal’s pipeline “will be very good for Turkmenistan, for Pakistan and for Afghanistan as it will not only offer job opportunities but also energy in Afghanistan.”41

  It was a tawdry season in American diplomacy. After years of withdrawal and disengagement American policy had been captured by the language of corporate dealmaking. In the absence of alternatives the State Department had taken up Unocal’s agenda
as its own. Whatever the merits of the project, the sheer prominence it received by 1996 distorted the message and meaning of American power. American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation. There were by now about 1.5 million Afghan war dead, dating back to the Soviet invasion. The land was desolate, laced with mines. The average life expectancy for an Afghan was about forty-six years. The country ranked 173 out of 175 countries on the United Nations human development index.42 Yet the few American officials who paid attention to Afghanistan at all talked as if it was a tax-free zone ripe for industrial revival, a place where vocational education in metallurgy could lead to a political breakthrough.

  For Afghans themselves the central question in the spring of bin Laden’s return was the military potential of the Taliban. For more than a decade the key to internal power in Afghanistan had been access to outside military supplies and cash—especially from Pakistan. Here, too, the ground was now shifting.

  In Islamabad, in the secret councils of her national security cabinet, Benazir Bhutto had entered into a new phase of debate with Pakistani intelligence about the Taliban. By the spring of 1996 she had capitulated, she said later, to ISI’s persistent requests for unlimited covert aid to the Islamic militia. But as the Taliban gathered strength and territory, Bhutto and her civilian allies clung to the hope that they could use the Taliban to force a negotiated, all-party political deal under the auspices of the United Nations. As Bhutto recalled it, ISI Director-General Naseem Rana and several of his key brigadiers asked her for permission to arm, equip, and train the Taliban for a final drive on Kabul. If the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital, ISI’s officers argued, Pakistan would have at last achieved General Zia’s dream: a loyal, Pashtun-led Islamist government in Kabul.

  Bhutto resisted. She feared that a Taliban government would press its Islamic militancy on toward Central Asia, damaging the trade-driven relationships she sought to build there. It would be much more profitable to use the Taliban’s clout to negotiate for a peace deal in Afghanistan that would include Massoud and other northern ethnic militias that had strong ties to Central Asia.

  Bhutto turned for support to her secular-minded chief of army staff, General Jehangir Karamat, Pakistan’s supreme military commander. “When the pressure would get too much,” she recalled, “I would have a meeting with the army chief and with my defense cabinet and all of the military brass—the air force chief and the navy chief—and they would support my idea that, no, you must work with the U.N.”43 But Pakistani intelligence was more and more insistent, she recalled. It seemed evident that they intended to push the Taliban into Kabul without telling Bhutto. Whether ISI also evaded orders from Karamat or privately received a supportive nod from the army high command was never clear to Bhutto. All the while the prime minister and her aides continued to lie to American officials about the nature and extent of Pakistan’s covert support to the Taliban.

  The American ambassador to Pakistan, Tom Simons, talked repeatedly with Karamat and other senior generals as the Taliban approached Kabul’s gates in the late spring and early summer of 1996. It seemed to Simons that the Pakistani army felt trapped by the momentum of its own policies in Afghanistan. The Punjabi secularists in their senior ranks viewed the Taliban cynically and worried that they had cooked up “a recipe for endless war” and that “Pakistan was going to be drained, and it was going to weaken Pakistan.” Yet the generals told Simons “they also felt that there was no alternative, no realistic alternative for the country.”44

  KABUL’S FALL CAMES WIFTLY. Osama bin Laden, now Afghanistan’s wealthiest sheikh, hurried it along.

  Taliban forces launched a surprise attack against the Jalalabad shura in August. Haji Qadir and the rest of bin Laden’s original greeting party fled across the border to Pakistan. The Taliban took control of the area, and bin Laden was now in their midst. The Saudi may have provided about $3 million from his personal treasury to pay off the remaining commanders who stood between the Taliban and Kabul, although bin Laden was under some financial pressure at the time. The Taliban may also have collected funds for these crucial bribes from other Saudi and Gulf patrons, the local trucking mafia, heroin traders, Pakistani intelligence, and other sources.45

  Bin Laden spent his first summer back in Afghanistan writing a lengthy fatwa about the alliance of enemies that had delivered him to this exile. His “Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Two Sacred Places” laid out his belief that the Saudi royal family had become “the agent” of an alliance between imperialist Jews and Christians. He protested that he had been “pursued in Pakistan, Sudan and Afghanistan.” He referred to his new haven as Khorasan, a reference to a lost Islamic empire that had once encompassed Central Asia. He faxed his proclamation to London newspapers as the Taliban turned their speedy pickup trucks toward Kabul.46

  Massoud lost the Afghan capital after forging one last ill-advised alliance with his old enemy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Fearing (correctly) that ISI had abandoned him for the Taliban, Hekmatyar reached out to Massoud for help. Massoud had little choice. Hekmatyar’s militia, however untrustworthy, extended his defensive perimeter east and south and held the Taliban farther out from Kabul. But Hekmatyar kept asking Massoud to bring his troops out from the capital to attack the Taliban. “Every day Hekmatyar was worried [saying], ‘They’re working to a plan. They’ve taken Paktia… . And you’ve done nothing, you’re not cooperating, you’re not fighting,’ ” Massoud said later. President Rabbani told Massoud, “Well, maybe Hekmatyar’s right.” But Massoud was now leading his troops into eastern and southern territory that he had never held during the long anti-Soviet war. He was not familiar with the terrain. He and his aides moved to meet the Taliban while studying their maps. “We came out,” Massoud said, but “we didn’t pay attention to the defensive line.”47

  The trap sprang shut on September 25 at Sarobi, Kabul’s eastern gateway. Hekmatyar’s local commanders sold out to the Taliban and stood aside. The Taliban had perfected mobile fighting with a cavalry of Japanese pickup trucks armed with powerful machine guns in their beds. They darted and swooped up the gorges from Sarobi and across Kabul’s open southern plains. Massoud’s helicopter and fighter-bomber strikes could not ward off these potent swarms. On September 26, Massoud told a council of generals that they had to withdraw. Overnight they rolled as many tanks and armored vehicles as they could organize north from the capital toward the Panjshir Valley, Massoud’s fortified rock-gorge homeland.48

  THE TALIBAN POURED INTO KABUL the next day. They wore black turbans and smeared their eyes with decorative kohl. They walked unopposed into pockmarked ministry buildings and unfurled their blankets on the floors. Within a day every major government building, palace, and military base in the city had been occupied by bands of Pashtun fighters.

  After Kabul fell to the mujahedin in April 1992, the former Afghan president Najibullah lived under house arrest at a United Nations compound in the city. Rabbani and Massoud never brought the former communist and secret police chief to trial, nor were they willing to release him into exile. Najibullah spent his years of incarceration watching satellite television, lifting free weights, and translating a history of British-era Afghanistan called The Great Game from English into Pashto. “Afghans keep making the same mistake,” he told one visitor, reflecting on his translation.49

  The Taliban burst into Najibullah’s house on September 27 while his brother was visiting. Judging by the conditions of their bodies when they were strung up above a traffic circle hours later, the brothers died slowly and painfully under blows from fists, stones, and sticks. The former president of Afghanistan—whose career began in the torture chambers of the secret police and ended at roundtables with international diplomats—probably expired before the wire tied around his neck pulled him up the ten-foot gallows pole selected by the Taliban for its visible location in central Kabul. “We killed him because he was the murderer of our people,” Mullah
Omar declared.50

  The capital’s new laws were announced as edicts on Kabul Radio, quickly renamed the Voice of the Sharia, or Islamic law. Toothpaste should be abandoned in favor of the natural root favored by the Prophet, the radio announcers declared. Their lists of banned items and activities unfurled as a roll call of life’s small pleasures: marbles, cigarettes, dancing, music, singing, homing pigeons, kite-flying, television-watching. Businessmen and traders were warned that they should no longer wrap their goods in paper in case they inadvertently used pages from the Holy Koran. The Saudi-inspired Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announced a ban on both sorcery and American-style haircuts.

  Taliban leaders ordered women to disappear. “All of those sisters who are working in government offices are hereby informed to stay at home until further notice,” the radio announced on the first day. Also: “Since satar [Islamic dress] is of great importance in Islam, all sisters are seriously asked … to cover their faces and the whole of their body when going out.” Eight thousand female undergraduate students at Kabul University lost their places at the school. A similar number of schoolteachers lost their jobs. Thousands of women who worked as civil servants in bloated government ministries, contributing meager but steady salaries to their extended families, were banned from their offices.51