In the worst cases, these journalists died at the hands of their tormentors. The tribal-areas journalist Hayatullah Khan Dawar was killed in 2006 after being the first reporter to identify a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, which was an embarrassing revelation for the military. The government of Pervez Musharraf cooperated with the United States on the secret drone program but lied to its own people, denying that it was doing so. Hayatullah was detained for six months and then summarily executed. Saleem Shahzad, who wrote extensively about militancy and the ISI, was found dead in 2012 after being detained by intelligence agency personnel. He was killed on the orders of Pakistan’s most senior generals.1 At least forty-two journalists have been killed in the past decade, twenty-three of them murdered, in direct relation to their work in Pakistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.2 Not one of these cases has been put to a credible trial.
Those who survived were warned before their release not to tell anyone what had happened and not to talk to the media. This has proved an effective method of control. Quetta-based journalists could long ago have exposed the presence of the Taliban leadership in their city and the close relationship between the ISI and the militants. The reporters were entirely capable of tracking down the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and Osama bin Laden, yet they did not dare relate the things they saw and heard.
Three days after his all-night drive, the Quetta reporter received an anonymous phone call. “I am from the cantonment,” the caller said. He refused to give his name. He spoke Urdu with a Punjabi accent, indicating he was not native to Quetta. “Cantonment” meant the protected military quarter, and the reporter understood that the man was from the intelligence services. The caller warned the reporter not to work with any foreign journalists again. “If you do, you will be responsible for the consequences,” he said. With those few words he accomplished what he intended. The journalist ceased working with foreign reporters from then on.
Pakistan has always exercised a strong level of control over journalists and the institutions of the media. Journalists had been imprisoned, beaten, and corrupted by previous governments, both military and civilian. General Musharraf’s period of rule, from 1999 to 2008, was not generally considered a fearsome dictatorship. Still, certain sections of society came to fear brutal detentions and interrogations at the hands of Musharraf’s security services, in particular Baluch and other separatists, and journalists who broke the rules. Then and now, people writing or talking about events in the tribal areas that challenge the military narrative of events are silenced.
A schoolteacher from South Waziristan who is a writer and poet was noted for the eloquent articles he composed for local newspapers. Then one day he fell silent. He told an acquaintance that he had been called in by an army officer heading the ISI chapter in Wana and told to cease writing articles. “If you don’t, it will be very bad for you,” he was told. The army officer said that it was his job to shut the writer up, and he did not care how he accomplished it, by warning the writer or by killing him. “Even if we kill you we will still get paid [our salaries]. Are you sure you want to write anymore?” the officer asked.
After years of working in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I came to understand the depth of the ISI’s control over journalists and society at large. Journalists were not only warned off covering certain subjects, but hundreds of reporters and editors were kept on the government payroll to publish articles favorable to the military and in support of the policies it espoused. Military press officials would also write articles themselves, and then place them with a newspaper under a fictitious name. I learned this over time when I tried to follow up on interesting stories in the papers and discovered that the reporters often did not exist and the stories were bogus.
A retired editor explained to me how the system worked. He was once commissioned to write an article by an official in the main military press office, the ISPR. The ISPR edited the piece and placed it with two newspapers, after which the editor received official remuneration for his work from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The ISPR’s influence was such that it was able to order up an article, have it published, and arrange payment with evident ease. The civilian governments acted similarly but had nothing like the same reach or clout of the generals. Farahnaz Ispahani, media advisor to President Asif Ali Zardari from 2008 to 2013, told me that the ISPR would draft the press releases for the foreign ministry, and the head of the ISPR, a major general, would sit in on meetings at the information ministry to direct coverage on state radio and television.
In addition to the ISPR, there was another whole media wing of the ISI, known as the “M” wing, that worked to manipulate the media and control the discourse inside and outside of the country. Its officials drove campaigns in the press, whipping up support for jihad in Kashmir or Afghanistan, stirring criticism against civilian governments or political parties, and driving sentiment against the United States. Its aims were grand: to build national morale and maintain leverage in international relations. It also sought to manipulate public opinion away from issues that the military deemed sensitive, and encourage society to vent in a direction that did not hurt Pakistan. America was fair game for attacks even though the countries were supposed to be allies.
For more than two decades, the Pakistani military has been manipulating the media to hide the truth from its own people and its allies about the depth of its support for Islamist terrorism. This account tries to tell at least some of the stories that it sought to suppress.
1
The Taliban Surrender
“We should not wash blood with blood.”
—General Abdul Rashid Dostum on the surrender of Mullah Fazel, the Taliban commander in the north
November 2001. Even in defeat the Taliban were ferocious. They came fast out of the darkness, in a convoy of muddy pickups and SUVs, hurtling through the old fortress gatehouse and skidding to a halt at the headquarters building. Black-turbaned guards armed with rifles and rocket launchers leapt from the backs of their vehicles and flanked their leader’s car, a white Land Cruiser with blackened windows. They carried their weapons with the ease of long practice, and moved with an arrogance and sense of purpose that made us onlookers scatter. Two guards stayed atop their vehicles, manning antiaircraft guns. The remainder formed a perimeter, marking the opposition. It was 10 o’clock, a cold November night. The Taliban had driven into the heart of the enemy camp, inside the high walls and inner courtyards of the Qala-i-Janghi, the House of War.
The nineteenth-century fort lies southwest of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Its massive earth embankments, battlements, and mud-brick walls, twenty feet thick, were built by Amir Abdul Rahman, the creator of the modern state of Afghanistan. Until recently the fort had been a Taliban military base, but for the last month, U.S. bombers had been striking military targets in Afghanistan, and the Taliban had abandoned the fort and its arsenal of weapons. Now it was in the hands of their opponents, the American-backed fighters of the United Front, who had swept down from their mountain hideouts and seized power.
The men on guard were a mixed crowd. The United Front was a coalition of ethnic groups from northern and central Afghanistan. There were stocky Uzbeks with Asiatic features in long corduroy tunics and Uzbek police commanders in Communist-era uniforms, who wore mustaches rather than beards; small, wiry Hazaras wearing checkered headscarves, members of a Shiite group that had fought ferocious battles against the Taliban; and Tajik commandos of the Northern Alliance, in combat fatigues and army boots, the best-trained men of the anti-Taliban forces. The United Front was brought together by the late legendary resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud.1 His own faction, the mostly Tajik Northern Alliance, made up the backbone of the fighting force, but he had sought to broaden the resistance to the Taliban with support from other ethnic and regional groups. The fighters were mostly illiterate farmers and laborers, hardened men from mountain villages who had fought for ten years as mujahideen,
resistance fighters against the Soviet occupation, and then through another decade of Afghan civil war and Taliban offensives.
The United Front hated the Taliban. The Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks had been driven deep into the mountains over the last few years where they had struggled to survive. The Taliban were a predominantly ethnic Pashtun movement, whose fighters were mostly from southern Afghanistan and spoke Pashtu, a different language from the Persian-dialect Dari of the northerners. The northern fighters watched the Taliban warily but with weapons shouldered. Their leaders were inside the building, and the Taliban were expected.
The door of the Land Cruiser opened and a thickset, bearded man in loose white clothes appeared. Mullah Fazel Mazloom, deputy defense minister in the Taliban regime and commander of all Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan, scowled out from under his heavy black turban. He was a man with a fearful reputation for cruelty and for sweeping military offensives that spared no one. Behind him was Mullah Noorullah Noori, a slighter, younger man who served as the Taliban governor of Balkh and was the senior political figure in the north. The two men had led the Taliban’s offensive across northern Afghanistan, conducting bloody reprisals against communities that resisted. They were feared across the region. Just the sight of their convoy speeding through the darkened streets of Mazar-i-Sharif on their way to the fort that night had started a rumor that the Taliban were returning to recapture the town.
I was among a group of Western journalists who jostled forward as the car door opened. A television cameraman switched on his camera light, illuminating the scene and momentarily blinding everyone. The Taliban leader drew back into his car and slammed the door. There was a short silence as everyone looked around, confused. Then the order came: “No lights! No lights!” Television was banned under the Taliban government, and its officials usually refused to be filmed. They were still insisting on this rule, even in defeat, so the cameraman turned off his light. The cleric emerged a second time, his face obscured by a woolen shawl wrapped round his head and shoulders. He stepped down into the crowd, hurrying into the building and up the stairs, followed closely by a coterie of commanders and guards. The jostling eased once they were gone. The journalists spread out, talking among themselves, switching on satellite telephones to report the arrival of the Taliban for talks. The Taliban guards turned their attention to the foreigners. They advanced on me and another female reporter with curious stares until the guards shooed them away.
Upstairs, in a long, low-ceilinged meeting room, Mullah Fazel was confronting his deadliest enemies. Assembled on dilapidated sofas and armchairs along the sides of the room were men who, in the last week, with U.S. air support, had smashed his dominion and grasped control of northern Afghanistan: General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the growling Soviet-trained Uzbek militia leader who had often played kingmaker in the wars of the last twenty-five years, switching sides at critical moments and precipitating coups; Atta Mohammad Noor, the tall, lean leader of the Northern Alliance fighters, a bitter rival of Dostum for control of the north when they were not fighting the Taliban; and Mohammad Mohaqiq, the leader of the Shiite Hazara forces in the north, whose people had suffered some of the worst sectarian violence at the hands of the predominantly Sunni Taliban.
Each of these men had been fighting for the last quarter century, ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, sometimes on opposing sides. They had come together in recent months to stem the Taliban advance across northern Afghanistan. Since its formation seven years earlier, the Taliban had sought to gain control over the whole country and establish a fundamentalist Islamist regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. By 2001, they had come close to achieving that aim. Then came the attacks of 9/11 against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and everything changed.
As we waited outside in the courtyard with the guards, we watched some of the United Front’s new American allies enter the meeting room that night: a tall, broad-shouldered CIA operative who used the name Dave—or Daoud to the Afghans—wore a long Afghan tunic and hiking boots and spoke the local languages; and several bearded men in the plain fatigues of the U.S. special forces, who had been dropped in weeks earlier to assist the different groups of the anti-Taliban coalition. Several dozen Afghan elders and commanders had gathered too, among them a former Taliban commander, Amir Jan Naseri. An influential Pashtun mujahideen figure from the ancient city of Balkh, Amir Jan had fallen out with the Taliban and defected to the United Front six months earlier. His contacts on both sides allowed him to serve as an intermediary in bringing Mullah Fazel to negotiate.
The meeting was a severe turn of fortune for Mullah Fazel. He had commanded over ten thousand Taliban fighters along with hundreds more al Qaeda and other foreign fighters across several battlefronts in northern Afghanistan. He had come close to annihilating the men with whom he now negotiated. When two al Qaeda members posing as journalists assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001, they removed the most important opposition figure standing in the way of the Taliban advance. The United Front had seemed bound to collapse. Mullah Fazel was poised to overrun the last northern districts and complete the Taliban plan to conquer all of Afghanistan.
That was just two days before the attacks of 9/11. Within a month, U.S. missiles began demolishing Taliban frontline positions and military camps with a pinpoint accuracy that shook the Islamist fighters and awed ordinary Afghans. American special forces personnel in the mountains with the United Front called in strikes on Taliban positions. Afghans on horseback raced in after the strikes to seize villages and hilltops, and finish off stragglers. The Taliban were forced to abandon their command posts and take cover in civilian buildings. They smeared mud over their trucks and cars, covering every bit of glinting chrome in a vain attempt at camouflage. It was no protection against modern guided missiles. Even in the cities, missiles were finding the Taliban, guided by Afghan informers working undercover and equipped with GPS locators and satellite telephones. It took just over a month for Taliban rule to collapse in the north. The first major town, Mazar-i-Sharif, fell to United Front troops on November 9. Two other northern towns, Taloqan and Bamiyan, fell to United Front forces on November 11, and Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan, on November 12. The Taliban were suddenly on the run.
Mullah Fazel’s forces fell back to the town of Kunduz, under fire from American missiles. Afterward we saw the detritus of their retreat: their vehicles, shredded into fist-sized pieces of metal, littered the desert from Mazar-i-Sharif. Farming villages were dotted with yellow canisters, lethal cluster bombs that had decimated the Taliban foot soldiers. In Kunduz, a market town of low, walled houses and horsecarts, the retreating fighters were quickly surrounded by advancing United Front forces. The Taliban were cut off from the rest of their army hundreds of miles away in southern Afghanistan with no chance of reinforcements. Among them were thousands of Afghans, mostly Pashtuns whose homes were in the south, and hundreds of al Qaeda and foreign fighters—Arabs; North Africans; Muslims from Central Asia, Russia, and China; and a few men from Western countries, including several British Pakistanis and the American Muslim convert John Walker Lindh. They had nowhere to go and were dependent on their Afghan hosts. There were also hundreds of Pakistanis: scores of military advisors and trainers, members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, which was secretly assisting the Taliban; trained fighting men from Pakistan’s militant groups, which had long used Kunduz as a base in northern Afghanistan to train recruits and support the Taliban campaign; and hundreds of illiterate villagers and religious students who had rushed to support the Taliban on the urging of their religious leaders when the United States began bombing.
The collapse in the north rippled through the country. Taliban soldiers, police, and government officials began deserting their posts and escaping south to their home base in Kandahar—or east into Pakistan. On the night of November 13, the Taliban withdrew from the capital, Kabul, slipping away under cover of da
rkness. United Front forces drove into the city with barely a fight the next day. Their fighters claimed Jalalabad, the main city in the east, on the same day.
Trapped in Kunduz, Mullah Fazel faced being overrun or, worse, massacred by Northern Alliance troops who had surrounded the town and were set on avenging the death of their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Their commanders threatened daily to storm the town and slaughter the Taliban and al Qaeda forces unless they surrendered.
Mullah Fazel’s forces were depleted and badly shaken by the bombing raids. Dozens had been wounded. His units were struggling to hold the outskirts of Kunduz. Those who could were escaping the besieged town, bribing opposition fighters or using tribal contacts to smuggle themselves out. Most were ready to surrender, said one fighter who had been captured trying to escape Kunduz and who stood chained up in an underground pit guarded by Northern Alliance fighters when I interviewed him. “It is the bombing, there is no defense against it,” he told me, shivering in his muddy hole.
As the Taliban lines disintegrated, Pakistan’s leader, General Pervez Musharraf, put three telephone calls through to General Dostum, asking him to broker a surrender with the Taliban trapped in Kunduz.2 Musharraf did not want to approach the Northern Alliance, the followers of Massoud who had long opposed Pakistan’s attempts to dominate Afghanistan. The Taliban, for their part, did not want to surrender to the Shiite Hazaras, fearing revenge for the two thousand Hazaras whom they had slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif three years earlier.
The Wrong Enemy Page 2