The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Although Pakistan did not create the Taliban, it acted swiftly to co-opt the movement. Before the summer of 1994 was over, Mullah Omar had acquired Pakistani advisors. People in Kandahar remember a Major Gul, along with Colonel Imam, the Pakistani special forces trainer. Imam was a distinctive figure. He sported a 1942 British paratroopers jacket, a long beard, and a flat white turban shaped like a car tire, as one Pakistani journalist joked. He was from a military family in the Punjab. He would come to epitomize the Pakistani officers who adopted the mujahideen cause as their own. He was familiar to thousands of Afghan mujahideen who had taken his training courses. He later told me that he had no memory of training Mullah Omar, though the Taliban leader told him that Omar had been his student on an extended three-month course in 1985. Omar always addressed the colonel by the honorific title of “Ustad” or “teacher.” The respect was mutual. Colonel Imam described the madrassa students as the most “formidable” of all the fighters he had trained because of their religious zeal. Omar, he said, was the only honest leader for Afghanistan.8

  Soon after Omar secured a base in Kandahar city, he attacked the border town of Spin Boldak. This time the Taliban showed clear signs of Pakistani support, including cross-border artillery fire. Local journalists reported that among the attackers were hundreds of Afghan students from Pakistani madrassas run by the Pakistani religious party politician Maulana Fazlur Rehman. They left a trail of wrapping paper as they unpacked brand-new weapons.9

  Two weeks later, Colonel Imam tried an odd Pakistani stunt, purportedly opening up a trade route linking Pakistan to Central Asia via Afghanistan. It was labeled a “peace convoy” but it was not cleared with the Kabul government and seemed to be an attempt to promote the Taliban as a new highway police force. Trucks bearing Pakistani medicines and goods for export drove out from the Pakistani town of Quetta, passing through southern and western Afghanistan en route to the Turkmen border. The Pakistani Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar and the government of Benazir Bhutto claimed credit for the plan. It was stage-managed by the ISI.10

  Colonel Imam, along with another ISI man, Major Gul, were deputed to lead the convoy comprising some thirty-five trucks. They took two Taliban commanders with him, Mullah Borjan and another. Not far inside Afghanistan, the convoy was stopped and the trucks impounded by Afghan militia. The mujahideen commander of the border region, Mansour Achakzai, famously pulled Colonel Imam’s beard and told him to get out of Afghanistan. “Why did you come to our soil without our permission?” he demanded.11

  Colonel Imam and Major Gul were released to the Pakistani consulate, but Mansour kept custody of the trucks and their seventy men, drivers and helpers. In Kandahar, Colonel Imam appealed to Mullah Omar to help release the vehicles and personnel, and the Taliban leader mobilized a force against the militias.

  They battled each other for two days at Takht-e-Pul, east of Kandahar, until finally the Taliban routed the militias. They pursued Mansour south to Dand, where they killed him. They hung his body from a tank barrel in front of Kandahar airport in a grisly lesson to all. Opposition dropped away after that. One of the most feared commanders, Ustad Aleem, told his men to surrender their weapons to the Taliban while he slipped away across the desert with a single companion. The Taliban moved on to Kandahar and took charge. Units of bearded Pakistani commandos in civilian clothes appeared and took up positions at the prison and several other strategic sites. “They were advising the Taliban and beating everyone who had fought in the jihad,” Mohammad Nabi recalled. If the mujahideen had understood their real intentions, they would have slaughtered the Pakistanis right then, he added.

  Through murderous methods and with Pakistani help, the Taliban took power in the south. They enforced a strict, fundamentalist code of behavior that harked back to the time of the Prophet Mohammad. They banned music, television, and almost all recreation. They ordered the male population to attend prayers in the mosque five times a day and to grow their beards long. They dealt out punishments such as whippings, amputations, and executions of criminals. They had little knowledge of how to run an administration or handle international relations, but they did deliver law and order, gaining a monopoly of force and disarming the population.

  The Afghan people, and the majority of the mujahideen, were so weary of the lawlessness and desperate for some strong moral leadership that they embraced the Taliban and accepted such harsh justice.

  The most powerful commanders were steadily disarmed or forced to flee, and the Taliban established themselves as the dominant force throughout Kandahar province and the adjoining districts. Even Mullah Omar’s early protectors were not spared. Haji Bashar was detained and had his head shaved. Hafizullah Khan was beaten so badly by the Taliban that he needed skin grafts. Others, however, accepted the new rulers because of the Taliban’s religious standing. Omar’s old comrade in arms, Mohammad Nabi, was disarmed and detained for a few weeks before being sent home. “We were happy to be done with this whole jihad thing,” he recalled.

  With control of Kandahar, Mullah Omar was on his way to dominating the southern and eastern Pashtun belt of Afghanistan. Within a few months, he had tanks, armored vehicles, artillery systems, and an army thousands strong.

  Borne along by a sense of righteousness and by substantial military and logistical assistance from Pakistan, the Taliban rolled across half the country in the next six months. They took control of some Pashtun regions without a fight, but as they advanced further north, resistance intensified. They lost hundreds of men in a bloody encounter with the Northern Alliance as they advanced on the western city of Herat, only succeeding in seizing the city in September 1995 after Pakistani commandos arrived to boost the Taliban assault, Mohammad Nabi said. He spotted Major Gul counting out ammunition for the offensive at one point.

  Colonel Imam was appointed Pakistani consul in Herat and was open about his involvement in the military campaign. The American reporter Steve LeVine visited the consulate there in June 1996 and found Imam directing the Taliban assault on the Shomali Plain north of Kabul from his desk, barking orders down the telephone. Colonel Imam remained close to Mullah Omar for the next seven years, serving as a Pakistani diplomatic envoy in Afghanistan for most of that time. Journalists and Western diplomats who met him in those years described him as wielding a remarkable level of influence. One Pakistani journalist saw him speak to a roomful of Taliban in a government building in Kandahar. His listeners all sat before him with their heads bowed in obedience, in the manner of students before a revered teacher.

  Wrenching Herat from the control of its leader, the independent-minded Tajik warrior Ismail Khan, was a milestone for the Taliban and their Pakistani mentors, and they next turned their sights on the capital, Kabul.

  For the previous two decades, Pakistan had fostered Afghan protégés in order to have a friendly ally in power in Kabul that would protect its western flank. Pakistan was a young nation and paranoically insecure about defending its territory. Since its formation and partition from India in 1947, Pakistan had fought three wars with its larger neighbor, India, and lost half its territory when Bangladesh broke away in 1971. Rulers in Islamabad were constantly concerned that regional rivals, whether India, Iran, or Russia, would use Afghanistan as a springboard to attack Pakistan. Pakistan’s generals wanted Afghanistan firmly in their own camp to provide “strategic depth.” Some even advocated annexing Afghanistan as Pakistan’s fifth province, as an ISI official once told me. For allies Pakistan had favored Islamists, who could be counted on to resist non-Muslim foes such as the Soviet Union and India, and ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan, who were affiliated to Pakistan’s own large Pashtun population. Besides external threats, Pakistan was concerned about controlling Pashtun nationalism. Some Pashtuns supported the creation of Pashtunistan, a separate state for themselves. Such a notion was unthinkable to the Pakistani military, and so it had long supported Islamist Pashtun groups to counter the nationalists. The Taliban, a primarily Pashtun band of radical mullahs, f
itted the bill and by 1995, became Pakistan’s new instrument of policy in Afghanistan.

  Mullah Omar’s vision was to overthrow the Kabul government and establish an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan across the whole land. Yet few of his old acquaintances believed Mullah Omar was doing the thinking by himself. There were brighter minds within the Taliban leadership, such as his deputy, Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, but the strategic plan and the tactical and logistical organization of the military campaign were on a scale much too advanced for Omar and his band of fighters.12 “He was not even street smart,” said Hafizullah Khan. “It was easy for the ISI to use him.”

  Yet the Pakistanis who came into contact with Omar often described him as an able leader with an unmatched ability to manipulate and command. Robert L. Grenier, who served as the station chief for the CIA in Islamabad, recalls a Pakistani associate who knew Omar well and described him as head and shoulders above the rest of the Taliban. A friend told me that Mullah Omar possessed three elements that appealed to Afghans: He came from Deh Rawud, known for the exceptional bravery of its fighters. He was a mullah (even if only half-qualified), and Afghans will follow their religious leaders whatever they say. And he was a mujahid, which was essential for any leader in the post-Soviet era in Afghanistan. Meanwhile his supporters spun myths of his holiness and uncompromising attitude toward right and wrong. His ruthless punishments earned him a fearful esteem.

  In fact, Mullah Omar was not so pure. He behaved like the typical mujahideen commander made good. After taking power in Kandahar, he flew one of the captured Russian Mi17 helicopters up to his uncle’s house in Deh Rawud to fetch all his furniture and household belongings to bring them down to Kandahar. He took four wives, which is permitted under Islam but frowned upon among Afghanistan’s middle classes. He also broke a taboo in Pashtun culture when he forced a family to give him their daughter even though she was engaged to someone else.13

  In April 1996, he took a step to augment his religious authority and head off any challenges to his leadership. He gathered hundreds of mullahs and supporters at a grand assembly in Kandahar, entertaining them for days. He called them to a ceremony at the city’s holiest shrine, the turquoise-domed Shrine of the Blessed Cloak, where a robe belonging to the Prophet Mohammad is kept alongside the grave of the great Afghan conqueror Ahmed Shah Durrani. Mullah Omar took out the cloak, a venerated relic that is rarely ever removed from its multiple caskets. Before the crowd, he raised the cloak and wrapped it around himself as followers proclaimed him Amir-ul-Momineen, Commander of the Faithful, one of the most elevated titles in Islam.14

  Omar may have been gathering support for his next campaign. His next target was Kabul. Pakistan piled support and money onto the Taliban offensive on the capital. The Taliban itself poured volunteer fighters into the assault, sending them racing across minefields in fleets of pickups east of the city. Even when a pickup blew up, more rushed into the gap, a Northern Alliance officer told me. The rapid advance surprised the Northern Alliance, and Ahmed Shah Massoud beat a retreat rather than fight in the city. His troops regrouped in the Panjshir Valley where they had survived repeated Soviet offensives, and Taliban forces swept into Kabul. In one of their first actions, the Taliban murdered the former Communist president Najibullah and his brother, who were living in the city in a United Nations guesthouse.

  Just days before the assault, the top operational commander of the Taliban, Mullah Borjan, had told a Pakistani journalist that ISI officers had given him orders to execute Najibullah as one of his first acts upon taking Kabul. Borjan had come from the frontline to Quetta, ostensibly to undergo treatment for his kidneys—but in fact to meet with his handlers in the ISI. The journalist met him in the house of a mutual acquaintance and asked what the Taliban planned to do about the Afghan Communist leader. Hated by the mujahideen and the Taliban for his brutal regime, Najibullah was nevertheless an influential Pashtun figure, and the journalist suggested to Borjan that the Taliban would lose the sympathy of many Pashtuns if they executed him. Borjan said he agreed. He wanted to arrest the former president and send him to Kandahar to be put on trial.

  “But are you aware of the black gates?” Mullah Borjan added. “I have just come from there. The gates are in your cantonment area,” he said.

  “Do you mean the ISI?” the journalist asked.

  “Yes. They are insisting that the first thing we do is kill Najibullah. If I don’t, I am not sure what will happen to me,” he said.15

  Mullah Borjan never made it to Kabul. He was assassinated on his way back to the frontline, reportedly by his bodyguard, a Pakistani from Kashmir. The journalist summed it up: “The Taliban do not have minds of their own.”

  When the Taliban took Kabul days later, the first thing they did was drag Najibullah through the streets and string him and his brother up on Ariana Square, where the CIA now has its offices, just yards from the presidential palace. The first ring of Taliban fighters controlling the gawping crowds were Urdu-speaking Pakistanis. Some of them were dark-skinned and wearing sunglasses, Abdul Waheed Wafa, a colleague who was there, told me.16 The ISI’s demand had been met.

  The Taliban were entering difficult territory from then on. Herat and Kabul were majority Persian-speaking cities inhabited by sophisticated, educated populations who mostly hated the mujahideen and welcomed their departure, but were equally revolted by the Taliban’s coarse justice and draconian rules, as enforced by the dreaded Department of Vice and Virtue. In one of the first protests against the Taliban, women in Herat demonstrated against the banning of women from the public baths. In the countryside, the Taliban’s campaigns were marked by mass killings and plunder. In one of the worst acts of the war, the Taliban laid waste to the fertile Shomali Plain north of Kabul, burning houses, orchards, and vineyards, killing villagers and abducting women. A UN special rapporteur described it as nothing less than a scorched-earth policy.

  The mujahideen groups in central and northern Afghanistan saw the Taliban as an instrument of Pakistan’s colonial ambitions and vowed to resist their advance. Undaunted, the Taliban continued their march north. They brought in thousands of foreign fighters, including Arabs, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis, to strengthen their extended frontlines. By 2001, the Northern Alliance had been pushed back to the far northeastern corner of the country.

  Mullah Omar was sure of victory. He thought the last resistance would wither away eventually, according to the Pakistani former interior secretary Rustam Shah Mohmand, who shuttled between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance leaders in the late 1990s in an effort to bring peace.17 Yet Omar also recognized that he needed non-Pashtun partners in his government if he was to sustain his power. In a three-hour meeting in the late 1990s—the longest meeting Omar had ever held, according to aides—Rustam Shah won Omar’s agreement for his foreign minister to meet the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud on neutral territory in Central Asia and work out a power-sharing agreement.

  “He was a very simple fellow, a man of few words, but very straightforward and very clearheaded,” Shah later said of Omar.18 But then General Pervez Musharraf seized power in Pakistan and promptly ended the peace efforts for Afghanistan. When Shah sought instructions to continue the peace effort, Musharraf’s chief civilian aide, Tariq Aziz, relayed a message from the general: “Please tell this fellow that I have better things to do.” Musharraf’s view was that “the Taliban are in power, and they are our people, why fiddle with this arrangement,” Shah told me.

  Pakistani officials, including senior military officers, often say that they could not control the Taliban. And it is true that, as the movement grew stronger, it fell under the influence of Osama bin Laden and increasingly began to resist requests from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The realization came as a shock to Pakistan according to retired general Jehangir Karamat, who served as chief of army staff in the 1990s.19 When, in 2001, there was a world outcry against the Taliban’s plan to blow up the colossal Buddhas carved into the rockface in Bamiyan, the Pakistani g
overnment tried to intervene. Mullah Omar rebuffed its intervention. “We reached out to them and they told us to get lost,” Karamat said. Earlier, when the Saudis had gone to Omar to ask him to give up bin Laden, they were also rebuffed. “That was again a shock,” Karamat told me.

  There is evidence showing that bin Laden became an increasingly powerful influence over Mullah Omar in the last few years before 2001. Omar’s actions revealed a growing radicalism, and moderates in the Taliban leadership were sidelined. Pakistani diplomatic cables found in Kabul in 2001 warned that the Arab militants in Afghanistan were growing “too big to handle.”20 Retired Brigadier General Ziauddin Butt, who served as ISI chief under Nawaz Sharif before being removed by Musharraf, visited Kandahar three or four times to see Omar after al Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. It was a sign of the importance of the relationship that the head of Pakistani intelligence himself traveled to see the Afghan leader. “Mullah Omar told me bin Laden was ‘like a bone in my throat,’” Butt said.21 Yet when he advised Omar to get rid of bin Laden, the Taliban leader asked, “How do we send him out?” The man who was ruthless with his own warlords and criminals apparently could not move against his Arab guest.

  Bin Laden’s son, Omar bin Laden, relates a revealing episode in the book Growing up Bin Laden. After the embassy bombings, Mullah Omar told bin Laden that he and his men should leave Afghanistan. Yet bin Laden used religion to persuade Omar to allow him to stay longer, saying that if Omar gave in to the demands of infidel governments, his decision would be against the tenets of Islam.22 American journalist Gretchen Peters, in her book Seeds of Terror, describes how bin Laden’s terrorists were part of the narcotics mafia making millions of dollars out of Kandahar and bankrolling the Taliban along the way.23 Certainly the money helped buy influence. But it was bin Laden’s Islamist dreams and commitment to help create an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that wielded the strongest influence over Mullah Omar.