The CIA chief in Islamabad, Robert Grenier, concluded that Omar was convinced of his own religious mission. “He really thought he was Amir-ul-Momineen and saw himself as the leader of a global jihad. He saw himself as more important than bin Laden,” Grenier told me.24
Pakistani military and intelligence support for the Taliban remained extensive and committed right up to 2001. The Taliban’s most dogged opponent, Ahmed Shah Massoud, wrote in an open letter to the American people in 1998 that, according to his intelligence, more than 28,000 Pakistanis, including paramilitary personnel and military advisors, were part of the Taliban forces arrayed against him. He said he was holding more than five hundred Pakistani citizens as prisoners of war in his jails. “Afghanistan, for the second time in one decade, is once again an occupied country,” he wrote.25 Western diplomats agreed that Pakistan was helping the Taliban’s military campaigns with specialized troops. “You would see a sudden qualitative improvement in the Taliban, such as in coordinating artillery fire,” Grenier said.
Pakistan even encouraged the Taliban’s waywardness. The government and the ISI conducted a deliberate policy of keeping the Taliban cut off from the wider world in order to control them, Rustam Shah Mohmand told me. “This was the basic tragedy. They thought to keep them solitary and ostracized, then they would be dependent on us.” Mullah Omar was a reticent man, unversed in worldly affairs, and over time he became a virtual recluse. Even after the Taliban took Kabul, he only ever ventured there once, preferring to rule from his base in Kandahar. He generally refused to meet with non-Muslims. Western officials had difficulty obtaining meetings with him, and no Western journalist ever gained an interview with him. When Spozhmai Maiwandi, director of Voice of America’s Pashtu service, first interviewed him by telephone in 1999, she said Omar was nervous speaking to a woman.
Nevertheless, Mullah Omar was not so cut off that he did not know what was happening inside Afghanistan. Although the Taliban deny it, the Taliban leadership certainly knew something of bin Laden’s impending attack against the United States in 2001. Taliban fighters knew about it. Arab fighters bragged about a huge forthcoming attack on America to a driver at a gas station in Kandahar, a Kandahari tribal leader told me. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, learned of the planned attacks from Uzbek foreign fighters and attempted to warn a U.S. consulate official in Pakistan, according to British reporter Kate Clark.26 Mullah Omar also certainly knew about the plot that assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before 9/11. The two al Qaeda assassins arrived in Kandahar from Pakistan and stayed in the southern city for two weeks. An official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was sent from Kabul to meet their plane in Kandahar. There was such importance attached to the visit that the official spent several days traveling back and forth to the airport in anticipation of their arrival.
The ISI also undoubtedly knew of their trip. The Pakistani embassy in London had granted one-year, multi-entry journalists’ visas to the men, Tunisians traveling on forged Belgian passports. Such lengthy visas to Pakistan, as every reporter in the region knows, are notoriously difficult to obtain and always vetted by the ISI.
After 9/11, when the United States threatened war and demanded again that the Taliban hand over bin Laden, Mullah Omar was at a loss as to what to do. He telephoned a variety of contacts, including journalists, in the days and weeks that followed. When Spozhmai Maiwandi called to interview the foreign minister about five Christian missionaries in a Taliban jail, she was unexpectedly offered an interview with Omar. The Taliban leader did not care that he was endangering the lives of his people, Maiwandi remembers. He railed against U.S. policy toward Muslims and its support of secular dictators in Muslim lands. To give up bin Laden would be cowardly and bring shame upon the Taliban, he told her. “Giving him to the U.S. would in fact be smashing Islam’s prestige on the ground,” he said.27
Some in the Taliban urged him to hand over bin Laden. The council of clerics, the highest religious body in the land, ruled that bin Laden should be asked to leave. The Taliban foreign minister Muttawakil even traveled to meet with American officials in Islamabad to discuss the mechanics. But it came to nothing.
Omar was listening to his Pakistani intelligence advisors, who wielded the greatest influence. Colonel Imam joined him in Kandahar in the days after 9/11. He urged Omar to ignore demands to hand over bin Laden and to resist the American attacks.28 Colonel Imam believed that the Americans would not bomb the country for long, and assumed they would not be able to sustain a ground war so far from home. He advised Omar to pull back into the mountains and wage a guerrilla war, as they had done against the Soviet Army.
The head of Pakistani intelligence, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, traveled twice to Kandahar to talk personally with Mullah Omar in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. General Mahmud did not do as his American counterparts and his president, Musharraf, had requested. “Musharraf wanted that they should come to some sort of compromise and allow bin Laden to be sent away or handed over to the Americans,” Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant general and well-known political analyst, told me. Instead, Mahmud, who was deeply caught up in the Taliban cause and a committed Islamist, told Omar to hold on to bin Laden and resist the attack. “He gave just the opposite signal. There is no doubt about it. I think Musharraf did not have full control over what was happening,” Masood said.29 General Mahmud even told the Taliban leader what he knew of American attack plans and how best to withstand them.
General Mahmud’s support for the Taliban became so obstructive that the Bush administration demanded his removal from the top intelligence post. Musharraf replaced him on October 7, 2001, the day the bombing campaign began. Colonel Imam remained at Mullah Omar’s side even after the bombing began, until an exasperated Musharraf sent orders: “What are you doing there?”30
For years American officials failed to recognize the huge investment in time, money, and military effort that Pakistan had put into the Taliban from 1994 to 2001. It was much more than the infiltration of a single intelligence operative. It was a seven-year bloody campaign waged by the Pakistani military. It was the continuation of a policy to dominate Afghanistan pursued by Pakistan since the early 1970s when it first began supporting Afghan Islamists. It meant that when Musharraf agreed to cooperate with America after 9/11 and abandon the Taliban, he was going against nearly thirty years of Pakistani strategic thinking. American officials should have realized that it was inconceivable for Pakistan to give up on so much time and investment, or that the military and security establishment could change its institutional thinking so easily.
4
The Taliban in Exile
“America should have selected to crush al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, rather than go to war in Iraq.”
—Habib Jalib Baloch, Quetta politician
May 2003. As the heat left the afternoon and the time for evening prayers approached, dozens of men began to fill up the square at Mizan Chowk, one of the main intersections in the center of Quetta, Pakistan. The crowd was mostly Afghan: bearded men wearing the heavy black turbans of southwestern Afghanistan and younger men in the tightly wound white turbans worn by students. They greeted each other in the Afghan way, placing a hand on the chest of their friend and leaning into an embrace, bringing their heads close. Pulling back, they would stand chatting, holding each other’s hands in a prolonged handshake, intoning the traditional Pashtun greetings, blessings, and inquiries about health and family. They wore shalwar kamize, the loose-fitting shirt and pants that is common attire in much of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Most had embroidered cotton shawls thrown over one shoulder. The shawl serves as a sheet, blanket, prayer mat, and cushion, depending on the need. Some displayed a short pant length that stops above the ankle, a sartorial affectation of the most fundamentalist among them.
They were all Taliban, some of them former fighters, officials, and supporters of the rump movement, and some of them were taliban in the original sense of the word, rel
igious students studying in Quetta’s numerous seminaries. Often part-time volunteer fighters, these students were foot soldiers of the movement.
Eighteen months after their defeat and flight from Afghanistan, the Taliban were gathering openly in the center of this Pakistani town. Every Thursday evening they could be seen mingling at Mizan Chowk, where newsstands sold Taliban newspapers and CDs of Taliban sermons, catching up on news before attending evening prayers together at nearby mosques.1
A longtime base for the mujahideen during the 1980s, Quetta had become since 2001 the Taliban’s home in exile. It was a quiet, provincial center of low-rise buildings and orderly streets. Once an outpost of the British empire that guarded the southern gateway from India through the Bolan Pass to Afghanistan, Quetta now served as an important military garrison town for Pakistan. It is the provincial capital of Baluchistan, home of the Baluch tribes as well as a large population of native Pashtuns. For decades the city and surrounding region provided a refuge to Afghans fleeing war and poverty. It has hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. After thirty years in Pakistan, many of these Afghans have become so well settled and integrated that they do not want to return to Afghanistan. The air is thin and cool in Quetta, even in the height of Pakistan’s torrid summer. Orchards bearing apples, pears, apricots, and plums thrive in the green valley beneath the barren brown of the surrounding mountains. Many of the Taliban spent their youth in refugee camps in and around Quetta and knew the area well. Some had homes, relatives, and small businesses in Pakistan from that time. Many had studied in madrassas in the region. Almost all carried refugee papers, or forged Pakistani identification cards, allowing them the right to reside in Pakistan. They blended in easily.
The Taliban were easy to find, though they were on their guard. I went to Mizan Chowk with two Afghan colleagues and a driver in a small hired minibus. It had curtains on the windows, and I sat in the back, hidden from view. The sight of a foreigner would generally attract the attention of police or crowds of passersby, who would then warn people off and break up any street interview. My Afghan colleagues—an interpreter and a friend who knew some of the Taliban—went off to find people willing to be interviewed. Several young Talibs came over to the window of the car and chatted easily. They were confident and defiant. They talked in slogans, boasting that they would fight the Americans and return the Taliban to power. They criticized the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and called the government of Hamid Karzai illegitimate.
“We don’t like the Americans, and Karzai is a puppet of George W. Bush,” said Abdul Karim, twenty-six, a soldier in the Taliban until he left Afghanistan in 2001. He was now studying at a madrassa in Quetta. “We want an Islamic government in Afghanistan,” he said. Several in the group told me they had left Afghanistan because of fear of arrest by the Afghan authorities. “It is too difficult to study in Afghanistan, because all the time people demand: ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What are you doing?’” said Mullah Shahzada, a religious teacher and former fighter from Helmand province.
A student called Nasrullah said he had left his home in Kandahar two weeks earlier, after the governor of the province ordered Taliban supporters to leave unless the elders of their village could vouch for their good behavior. “If the situation continues and the Americans do not behave well, I am ready to fight, because jihad is the duty of every Muslim,” he said.
Within minutes of starting the interviews, my Afghan colleagues were warned to stop. The students did not have permission to talk to journalists, only the Taliban spokesmen could, a young Talib said. He told us to leave. The Taliban security apparatus was still strong. Orders had come from somewhere in the crowd. The Taliban did not want their presence in Quetta publicized, and they did not want foreign journalists writing about them. The young Talibs moved away obediently. We closed the car window and curtains, and pulled out into the traffic. That warning more than anything indicated to me that the Taliban movement was intact and functioning. Unseen officials had political control over this group of refugees and students, and their orders were obeyed.
We went to pay a visit on a former Taliban commander. He was staying in a small house down a back street in Khoratabad, a sprawling refugee settlement on the west side of Quetta where many Afghans lived and the Taliban had found shelter. We approached down a narrow, twisting alley, like a “camel’s neck,” our host joked. The driver inched the minivan between high walls and through a gateway into a small courtyard. We ducked under a piece of canvas hung across to prevent visitors catching sight of the women of the household.
Along a concrete path beside the one-story, whitewashed house, we entered a side door into the guest room. Most Afghan and Pakistani houses have separate rooms for entertaining guests and holding meetings. The guest room often has its own entrance and is designed to allow visitors to be entertained without disturbing the sanctity of the women’s quarters. Many Afghan and Pakistani families, especially the conservative tribal and religious ones, still continue the practice of purdah. Women only mix with their extended family and do not meet unrelated men.
As a foreigner I was exempt from such rules. I had little difficulty working as a woman in Afghanistan and Pakistan where hospitality is a much-honored custom, and I often had the bonus of being invited into the inner sanctum to visit the women of the family. Only occasionally did conservative clerics refuse to meet with me or ban me from entry to their mosques and madrassas because I was a woman or a non-Muslim.
It is a strictly honored custom that no one enters an Afghan’s home without being invited, and no man unrelated to the family enters the women’s quarters. This becomes second nature to anyone living in Pakistan and Afghanistan, yet the readiness of foreign soldiers to violate this cherished custom in their search for militants, kicking down doors in house-to-house raids and searching women’s quarters, became one of the most upsetting issues for Afghans across the country. The American and NATO forces violated a code that could have worked in their favor: when you are invited into someone’s home, you are under the protection of your host. I felt no fear going to interview a Taliban commander in the warren of Quetta’s back streets. I knew and trusted my host, who had organized the meeting. He would make sure I came to no harm.
The room, like any simple Afghan home, had no furniture. Mattresses and cushions were placed on the floor around the walls, and white cotton fabric was hung over the window, softening the bright sunlight. The commander was half-lying on a mattress, propped up on a bolster with a cup of green tea on the floor beside him. We sat down on the floor. Someone brought more tea. The commander said his name was Mullah Habibullah Akhund (not his real name, I later learned). He was in his thirties and had served as a logistics commander in the Taliban’s Defense Ministry, supporting the frontline on the Shomali Plain north of Kabul. He had moved south to Kandahar with the rest of the Taliban army as their positions were smashed in the bombardment. When Kandahar fell, he escaped across the border to Pakistan.
Commanders like Habibullah, who had served in the Taliban from the beginning, did not trust Hamid Karzai’s promise that they could return to their homes and live in peace. They had lost the support of the people, and they fully expected retribution from opponents and arrest or even worse from American forces. They came to Pakistan even though here, too, they did not trust the authorities. Allies in the ISI were on their side, but President Musharraf was cooperating with the United States.
Those years—2002 and 2003—when the people rejected the Taliban and embraced the new vision for Afghanistan, were their lowest moment, a Taliban commander told me years later. Habibullah came to Quetta and went into hiding, living in a friend’s house, barely going out, worried he would be arrested and handed over to the Americans. “They were scared of the Pakistanis,” the Afghan refugee who hosted Habibullah told me later. “There were rumors that the Americans would arrest a lot of them in Pakistan like they did in Afghanistan.”
> In the meeting, Habibullah told me he was unsure what to do. Remnants of the Taliban movement were already conducting an insurgency inside Afghanistan, he knew, but he was waiting to see which way things would go. “There are different groups of Taliban,” he said. “Some are fighting, and some, like me, are waiting to see what the government will do. If they make an Islamic government in Afghanistan, then it will be all right.”
Officially, Pakistan had turned against the Taliban. When pressed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in a phone call in the days after 9/11, General Musharraf had declared his full support for the United States and promised cooperation in the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Musharraf was not in a strong position. Since seizing power in a military coup in 1999, he had been largely ostracized internationally. Although he had a liberal reputation—of a whiskey-drinking, bridge-playing officer—he was a military hardliner in his support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and Kashmiri militants. He had nearly sparked a nuclear war with India after seizing Kargil in Indian-held Kashmir in May 1999 and had stonewalled U.S. requests to help get bin Laden. Perversely, 9/11 offered Musharraf a chance to improve his relations with the United States and his own standing internationally. He gave a national television address on September 19, 2001, and told his people that Pakistan would help America with military intelligence, over-flights, and logistics. He sent eighty thousand troops to guard Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan.
The Wrong Enemy Page 8