The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  By his own account, Musharraf was ready to cut off support for the Taliban after 9/11, and for the next two years, Taliban members went into hiding to escape the official crackdown. Pakistani forces rounded up and deported a large number of al Qaeda members and foreign fighters during this time. But Musharraf was not ready to dismantle the thousands of homegrown guerrilla fighters—Afghans, Pakistanis, and Kashmiris—who had been trained as proxy insurgent forces as part of Pakistan’s thirty-year-old defense strategy. Musharraf planned to keep the thousands of fighters who returned from Afghanistan in reserve, hidden somewhere.

  He told the then-U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, that Pakistani militants and the Kashmiri groups would be off limits in any action against terrorism.2 Senior leaders of the Afghan Taliban were secretly taken into the protective custody of safe houses. The rest were left to fend for themselves.

  A few days after 9/11, Musharraf invited several political analysts to a meeting, among them the retired lieutenant general Talat Masood, who was an influential liberal voice well known in diplomatic circles, on talk shows, and at conferences. Musharraf asked them for advice on what the government should do. Masood told the general that he should cease support for the Taliban and all militant groups, including the Pakistani ones that operated in Kashmir.3

  “My advice to him was you should completely stop supporting the Taliban and the jihadi forces in Pakistan, in the sense that the government, the state, must follow the policy, completely stopping support,” Masood told me. Musharraf agreed that support for the Taliban should end but insisted that the government would continue its support for the Pakistani groups in Kashmir. The two could be “compartmentalized,” he said. Masood, the senior in age, says he warned Musharraf that, from experience, it would not be possible to close one operation down and not the other. Still, Musharraf insisted he could do it.

  “Yes, I think we should stop supporting the Taliban but we will continue supporting the jihadis in Kashmir,” Musharraf told him.

  “That’s very difficult for you to do that,” Masood said.

  “Sir, you are becoming an apologist,” the general retorted.

  “I am telling you from my experience it is not possible to compartmentalize the way you are talking,” Masood protested.

  “As a matter of policy, he did want the Taliban to be controlled,” Masood told me. “But when this invasion took place, the Taliban were pushed into Pakistan, along with al Qaeda. And as there was no anvil, and there was only a hammer, and the border was porous, there were large, large numbers in Pakistan, and they filtered all over the place in Pakistan, wherever they found it more convenient to carry on their activities and to feel safe. And Pakistan did not really understand the implications of having the Taliban based in Pakistan, and that in turn gave rise to their own Talibanization.” Masood was not the only person to warn Musharraf in the months after 9/11, but the general was set on keeping at least some militant groups alive. His decision was to have dangerous repercussions for Pakistan and the wider region.

  Only a single prominent Taliban official was arrested and handed over to the United States in the first years after 9/11: the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was living openly at his residence in Islamabad. Mullah Zaeef had irritated the Bush administration by holding strident news conferences in the garden of the Afghan embassy in Islamabad in the months after 9/11. A founding member of the Taliban, Zaeef doubted bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks, and he denounced the American intervention. On American insistence, Pakistan detained Zaeef in January 2002 and allowed his rendition to the CIA. He was taken to the USS Bataan and spent four years in Guantánamo Bay. Afterward, he reserved his greatest vitriol not for his American captors but for his betrayal by Pakistan.

  The main Taliban leaders disappeared from sight into safe houses or the homes of sympathizers. Those who were detained were put on notice to cooperate with the ISI. Lower-level commanders and fighters like Habibullah were warned by their leaders to lie low—until the pressure gradually eased in 2003.

  The American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 had meanwhile lit a fuse in Pakistan’s border regions, and they erupted in a volatile mix of militancy, religious fervor, and tribal solidarity. The border regions were populated by Pashtuns and Afghan refugees who held close ties to their fellow tribesmen in Afghanistan, and they were angered at the intervention.

  One of the first to act was a militant cleric named Sufi Mohammad who raised a force of hundreds to join the Taliban in their fight against the United States. Sufi Mohammad was a Pakistani Pashtun from the Swat Valley. He had been a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s foremost religious party, formed along the lines of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, but he had split away after he came under the influence of Arab Wahhabists, including bin Laden. He formed his own movement, Teherik-e-Nefaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi, the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law (usually known by its Urdu acronym TNSM), calling for the establishment of Sharia law in Swat and the surrounding region.

  As the American bombing of Afghanistan began, he urged every able-bodied man to help the Taliban and go and fight jihad in Afghanistan. Hundreds of villagers, old and young, most of them subsistence farmers, heard the call in mosques and on the radio and dutifully climbed into the buses provided for them. They were ferried into Afghanistan, though they were of little use to the Taliban. Hundreds of them arrived in the north just days before the Taliban began their retreat. With few weapons or organization, they were quickly captured by United Front forces as the northern towns fell. Scores of them were killed, and hundreds taken prisoner. I interviewed some of the prisoners in Mazar-i-Sharif. They were illiterate laborers who had little idea what they were doing in Afghanistan. As survivors straggled home with news of the debacle, families turned on Sufi Mohammad in fury.

  The Pakistani government took him into custody—apparently for his own safety. He was detained by the ISI for seven years until 2008. He was neither charged nor put on trial for inciting his countrymen or endangering their lives. It was typical of the way the ISI dealt with militant leaders who went too far. They were removed from circulation but never formally punished. Some were even allowed to continue to run their organizations from behind a smoke screen of detention. In Sufi Mohammad’s absence, his son-in-law, Mullah Fazlullah, a radical firebrand with close-set eyes and a bushy black beard who had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, took on the leadership of his father-in-law’s movement with disastrous consequences. Less dependent on the ISI, intoxicated with power and al Qaeda’s grand ideas, the new generation of militants represented by Fazlullah would prove uncontrollable.

  In the month after 9/11, the mainstream religious parties in Pakistan began holding rallies to protest the war in Afghanistan and denounce Musharraf’s alliance with the United States. As they gained momentum, Musharraf detained their leaders, including Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a close supporter of the Taliban who had supplied thousands of madrassa students to fight in Afghanistan over the years. Qazi Hussain was placed under house arrest in a government guesthouse at Tanda Dam in Kohat, a remote spot in Pakistan’s tribal regions, a three hours’ drive from the city of Peshawar. Guarded by forty or fifty soldiers, he was the only “guest.” He was detained for four months and then allowed to move to Lahore for health reasons. Although his party is known for cooperating with successive military governments, Qazi Hussain clearly resented his detention. He complained that the ISI had always sought to control the religious parties through a policy of divide and rule. It was during his detention that he formed the idea for a coalition of religious parties to campaign in provincial elections in 2002. He wrote to the other leaders of religious parties and urged them to come together in an alliance coalition. “I wrote that people are disheartened and in depression and if we do not come together they will be disappointed.”4

  Musharraf not only agreed to the
idea of the religious parties’ coalition but released their leaders from detention and gave them help. Six religious parties came together and formed the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, the United Council of Action, or MMA. Cynics later dubbed it the “Mullah-Military Alliance,” for certainly the Musharraf government assisted its formation and rise to prominence. He was intent on keeping his rivals, the mainstream democratic parties, out of power. He needed democratically elected allies. The religious parties had never been hugely popular but had always been a useful and cooperative ally for the military, supporting the proxy wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan and channeling social dissatisfaction into religious causes.

  Now in 2002, even as they campaigned vociferously against the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Musharraf’s betrayal of the Taliban, they were again useful to the general because they siphoned support from his political rivals. Musharraf wanted to sideline the main threats to his power: the Pakistan Muslim League—led by Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister whom Musharraf had ousted in 1999—and the Pakistan People’s Party led by Benazir Bhutto, a longtime opponent of military rule. Both leaders were in exile outside the country. Sharif had been imprisoned and then exiled to Saudi Arabia by Musharraf after the coup. Bhutto, whose father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the People’s Party, had been executed by a former military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, had gone into self-imposed exile in 1998 after her husband was jailed and she faced a slew of corruption charges.

  In the 2002 election, the ISI went into action, imprisoning some candidates, persuading others to defect, and impeding supporters from canvassing and voting. The tactics were standard practice by the intelligence service. The man who led the political campaign for the ISI, Major General Ehtisham Zamir, the head of the spy agency’s domestic wing, later regretted helping Musharraf crush his opponents and went public about his manipulation of the elections.

  The 2002 election changed the makeup of the Pakistani assembly, sweeping the religious parties to power in two border provinces and winning them sixty-eight seats in the national assembly, where previously they had only ever held a handful. Many saw it as an ISI plan to control the border areas through the MMA. But even the ISI was surprised by the strong wave of anti-American feeling that caused the swing. On the day after the election, as they sat in an outer room at the grand colonial Governor’s House in Peshawar, a leading politician accused a senior ISI official of masterminding a landslide victory for the religious parties. The ISI man defended himself. “We did not expect them to be so successful,” he said.5

  The election of the MMA into the provincial governments of the North West Frontier province and Baluchistan was a great boon for the Taliban and Islamists inside Pakistan. The alliance was openly sympathetic. One new member of parliament in the North West Frontier province, Tajul Amin Jabul, twenty-six, admitted to having fought as a member of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Wearing a white shalwar kamize and white silk turban, his beard worn long and untrimmed, he looked as if he had stepped straight out of a Taliban madrassa as he greeted supporters on the lawn of the provincial parliament. He spoke with a soft voice and the gentle, even shy manner that students and mullahs often adopt, yet his eyes showed a wariness, and a proud insolence, when he replied to my questions. Along with a dozen female parliamentarians who were dressed all in black, veils covering their faces but for narrow slits for the eyes, Tajul Amin represented the new radical face of Pakistani provincial politics. During a break in the proceedings, I was chatting with a senior female parliamentarian in the women’s common room when the call for prayer sounded. A younger woman from an Islamist party asked the legislator accusingly why she was not joining them to pray. The question forced her to state to the whole room that she was menstruating, and thus, according to custom, should not partake in communal prayers. The tyranny of the Taliban had entered Peshawar’s parliament.

  With friends and supporters in power in Pakistan’s border provinces, the Afghan Taliban began to move around more freely and reorganize. Mullah Omar emerged from a long silence in February 2003, sending a letter from hiding calling on all Afghans to wage a holy war against American forces. He also made an audio recording with a similar message, distributed on cassette tapes that were duplicated and passed among his followers. It was the first sign that he was reassuming leadership in over a year. In the letter, sent by fax to a Peshawar newspaper, Omar accused American forces of committing atrocities against Muslims. He urged all Muslims to join the struggle against the United States and warned that anyone who collaborated with U.S. forces or the Afghan government would be killed.

  Infidels have encroached on Islam and today America is committing atrocities against Muslims, so Jihad is absolutely compulsory for all Muslims.

  Wage Jihad against America and its allies, and if someone cannot fight, he should quit his job and separate himself from them.

  Vacate all offices, ministries, provinces so that the distinction between a Muslim and a crusader is made.

  Anyone of you who helps infidels, or serves them in any manner, deserves to die.6

  Up until then, there had been only intermittent attacks against U.S. and government forces in Afghanistan. A gunman who had joined the police tried to assassinate Hamid Karzai in Kandahar in September 2002. A teenager threw a grenade into a U.S. Army jeep in Kabul in December. The following day, a suicide bomber—the first to strike in the capital—blew himself up at the entrance to a German peacekeepers’ base. They were one-off attacks, and mostly unsuccessful. The grenade-throwing teenager was caught and told police that he and a dozen others had spent a week in weapons training in a camp in Pakistan, just across the border from his home province of Khost. They were then sent into Afghanistan and told to attack Americans.

  Earlier in 2002, Afghan police had caught a twenty-nine-year-old member of a Taliban gang operating in a mountainous part of Kandahar province, and I was able to interview him. They had locked him up in a windowless room on their base in Kandahar city and brought him out in chains. He was thin and dirty, with long tousled black hair. He squinted in the sun. He wore a surly expression but was not hostile, and he answered questions as his guards looked on. His name was Juma Khan. He was from a village in the mountains. He had been a member of the Taliban and had fought under a commander from the same village. He said he was part of a group that had killed four Afghan officials who were helping to organize elections for the loya jirga, the grand assembly being convened in Kabul to decide on a new government. The gang had stopped them on the road as the officials were returning home from a canvassing trip. When the gang found sheaves of papers about the loya jirga in the car, they shot the officials and threw their bodies off a mountainside. Then they set fire to their car and left. Juma Khan seemed to be a casual Talib who rejoined his old unit without much thought and for lack of anything else to do. He said his former commander had pressed him to join and start guerrilla attacks against the government and American forces in March. “He told me: ‘This is jihad and we will fight the Americans,’” Juma Khan said. “My mind was not working but he is our leader and he told me to join him.” Juma Khan’s account was typical of the Taliban at the time: small gangs, a village commander with a few men, yet already following instructions from somebody.

  Mullah Omar’s call to arms in February 2003 brought a change in pace to the Taliban’s activities. Police posts in the districts came under frequent attack. Fliers, announcing jihad and warning the Afghan public against collaborating with American forces and the Karzai government, started turning up in towns across southern and southeastern Afghanistan. They became known as “night letters,” left at shop doors and scattered in the street at night by unknown couriers. In the southern border town of Spin Boldak, the town’s police chief, Lieutenant Colonel Mohammad Arif, pulled one from a drawer of his desk and showed it to me. It was entitled “The Taliban’s Emirate” and announced a “last warning” to Afghans to keep away from Americans and not work for them, “because our target is the Amer
icans.” The language was virulent. “Those who do not stop helping the Americans, we will slit their throats, target them with bombs and shoot them, especially those who work as spies,” it said. “If they do not stop, their punishment will be very, very harsh, and we will blow up their houses.”

  “They have lost power and so they are trying to change people’s minds against the government,” Colonel Arif told me. “They want to seize power again.”

  On March 27, 2003, the Taliban struck a blow that they knew would reverberate far beyond Afghanistan’s outlying provinces. A group of gunmen came down from the mountains and set up an impromptu checkpoint on the main road running from Uruzgan province to Kandahar. It was the same road where U.S. special forces had called in airstrikes and smashed the Taliban advance in December 2001. The road was a single-file dirt track through the mountains, ideal for an ambush site. The group began stopping cars at gunpoint, ordering passengers out of the vehicles. Soon they had two dozen people lined up. A convoy of vehicles belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross came along, three white Land Cruisers with the red cross insignia on the doors. The personnel were Afghan but for one foreigner, Ricardo Munguia, a water engineer from El Salvador who had been working on projects in Uruzgan and was returning to base in Kandahar. The Taliban stopped these cars too and ordered everyone out.