The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  But this was evidently Pakistan. The black and white striped flag of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), the Deobandi religious party of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, flew above the mosques and houses in every village. There were huge brick-and-cement madrassa compounds, incongruous among the small farming homesteads, funded by Arab donors from the Persian Gulf. Someone had painted “Long Live Faz­lur Rehman” in large white script across the hillside outside one village. Rehman, a Pashtun from Dera Ismail Khan on the edge of the tribal areas, was one of the most prominent religious political leaders in Pakistan, as his father, Maulana Mufti Mahmoud, had been before him. His party, JUI-F, held seats in parliament, and had been a close coalition partner to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s. It had also been a strong supporter of the Taliban.

  It was from Fazlur Rehman’s madrassas that so many students joined to support the Taliban in their grab for power in 1994. Although Rehman had not supported Pakistan’s military regimes, he nevertheless came to work closely with the Pakistani intelligence agency in its covert program to supply and train recruits to fight jihad in Afghanistan and in support of the Taliban. He did not stop that support after 9/11.

  In Pishin, we found families whose sons had been drawn away to war without their knowledge, and who were grappling with the news that their sons had blown themselves up in Afghanistan. They were shocked at the concept of suicide bombing, and they struggled to explain who had induced their sons to do such a thing. Their loss was compounded by the fact that they had no bodies over which to grieve. No remains of suicide bombers were returned to their families. They were buried in unmarked graves. Some families were not even sure whether to believe news of their sons’ deaths, relayed in anonymous phone calls or secondhand, through someone in the community. Most troubling of all, the relatives were scared: scared to talk about their sons’ deaths, scared to say who had recruited them.

  As we knocked on doors and asked questions, I realized the fear was above all of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Within a day of landing in Quetta, we were being followed by an intelligence agent on a motorbike, and we noticed that everyone we interviewed was visited afterward by men from the intelligence agency. Most families only spoke to us on condition that we not publish their names.

  One mother in Quetta did not dare to open the gate since she was alone. She did confirm through a chink in the door that her son had died a martyr’s death in Afghanistan. The next day when we returned, she begged us to leave and said men from the intelligence agencies had visited her and warned her not to talk to us. We quietly left.

  A widow in Pishin was too distraught at the loss of her twenty-one-year-old son to meet us, members of her family said. He was her favorite son, dutiful and religious, and she had dreamed of his becoming a preacher. A few months earlier, her son had been studying at a madrassa in Karachi when he told his family he was leaving with a group of friends to go to the annual convention of the Islamic proselytizing group, Tablighi Jamaat. In fact, the group went to Afghanistan. Two weeks later, toward the end of September, the student blew himself up. The others in the group reportedly followed suit. News of their deaths trickled back to their village in Pishin, and neighbors came and told the bomber’s widowed mother. Others visited with confusing stories that the group had been killed by anti-Taliban forces. Male relatives went to the madrassa in Karachi to try to find out more, but the clerics were unhelpful and said they had no knowledge of what the group had been doing. The family was too scared to go to Afghanistan or inquire further, the dead man’s brother said. “We don’t want to get ourselves killed.”

  With each suicide bomber’s story, a pattern of covert recruitment and training emerged. The madrassas were the starting point. Someone there, a mullah or an outsider, drew selected students away on training courses, with the compliance of the clerics running the institutions. It was when the students left for extra study, or training in a camp, that they were led off on a path of extreme militancy. A former madrassa student told me there were teachers who were sympathetic to the militant organizations, and even connected to al Qaeda, in every madrassa. They acted as talent spotters, singling out potential students for jihad training and suicide bombing.7 A former police official told me the same. “There are vacations in madrassas and students can go home, or go on a specific course, or go and have a look at jihad,” he told me. “The militant organizations come and take them off.” Some teachers were sympathetic and would pick out students and make the connections, and some students would make their own way and catch a bus to the tribal areas, he said.8 Both informants asked that their names not be published for fear of repercussions from militant groups and the ISI for exposing the system.

  A family in Quetta had lost their eighteen-year-old son in a suicide bombing. The family too asked that their names not be published. Their son had chosen to attend a madrassa in Punjab province for the last few years of his religious education, his father said. His friends were all Punjabis, and after graduating, he left home saying he was going to study with some of his friends. He was gone three months. He called occasionally to say he was moving to another place of study. The last place he mentioned was Chitral, a mountain resort in northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border. Then a man called to say their son was fine and continuing his studies. He called again two days later to say he had gone on a mission of martyrdom. He told the family they could hold a fateha, a ceremony to pray for his departed soul. That was seven months ago. “We are still waiting and wish our brother would come back. Until we bury him with our hands we will not be comfortable,” his younger brother said. He said that someone must have forced his brother into undertaking a suicide bombing, that he would never have committed such an act on his own. His father said someone had misled his son—he blamed the Pakistani government. The madrassa was the first point of contact, but he suggested there was a middleman who was paid to lure his son away. The government was protecting the people who were doing it, he added. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. “These days people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children.” He said he was scared the same people would come after his other son.

  I came across several reports of middlemen, men from the militant organizations who scouted in the villages or madrassas for potential recruits. In one village near Peshawar, a man was even nicknamed “al Qaeda” because everyone knew he was earning money recruiting local boys and inducting them into jihadi training camps. Using a middleman was a convenient cover for any organization to maintain deniability, whether ISI or al Qaeda.

  Another family in Pishin explained how their twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Daoud, had disappeared a year earlier. He had spent his entire education in madrassas, in Pishin, in Karachi, and latterly in Pashtunabad, a neighborhood of Quetta. Often during breaks he would travel with his teacher to other places to continue his studies. Daoud frequently spoke in support of jihad in Afghanistan; his father, Haji Noora Gul, who did not believe the war in Afghanistan was a genuine jihad, would try to dissuade him. “I used to tell him not to go on this line. He told me: ‘Father, you don’t understand what joy this is.’” Then, during Ramadan in 2005, someone told his family that Daoud had gone to Afghanistan for jihad. “We searched to know why he went away, and where he went,” his father said. “In our search we went to many places and everyone said different things.” At the madrassa in Pashtunabad, no one would tell him where his son was. “Even the madrassa people did not know.” Noora Gul, a long-distance truck driver, did not mince his words: “I know the mullahs, but I did not see the mullahs doing this kind of thing. If I saw them doing that, I would cut their throats.” He was more cautious in talking about the real culprits, the Pakistani militant organizations and their ISI controllers. “Behind the curtain of the madrassa, maybe there are other people who do this. Maybe there are some businessmen who take them.” In this case, his son ended up with the Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah. Two weeks after Daoud’s disappearance, they rece
ived news through a complicated chain of messages that he had died in Afghanistan. The message came via a contact in Hyderabad and from an Internet website, eventually reaching the family. Daoud had blown himself up in the Kandahar area, on the third or fourth day of Ramadan, just a day or two after they first heard that he had gone to Afghanistan. The family held a memorial ceremony for him. Not long after, they learned there was a DVD circulating of suicide bombers taking an oath before Mullah Dadullah. Neighbors told them Daoud was one of the bombers in the video. “Even his mother saw the DVD. He is covering his face in the video, and is preparing for suicide,” Noora Gul said. “He says, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’”

  I asked Daoud’s elder brother, Alla Dad, if it was Taliban or ISI who were responsible, and he said they were one and the same thing. “All Taliban are ISI Taliban,” he said. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the ISI. Everyone says this.”

  With so much pain and grief evident, I kept asking people why the ­Pashtuns allowed so many of their sons to be sent to their deaths. Many families were religious and wanted their sons to be preachers and religious teachers since it was a respected profession, brought blessings on the family, and offered them a chance at a middle-class life in a city mosque. The madrassas also offered free board and lodging to students, which was attractive to all families. These families trusted and followed the mullahs and their teachings, even when it came to jihad. Yet responsibility to family was also of paramount importance to tribal Pashtuns. When I pressed one Pashtun reporter in Quetta about why Pashtuns were letting their sons be used, he told me there were signs of unhappiness. He knew some Pashtun elders from a village in Pishin near the border with Afghanistan who had come to Quetta and paid a call on the head of the ISI in Quetta some months earlier. They asked for him to return their sons, who had been gone for three months’ “training.” The elders had decided the village had lost too many sons to the jihad in Afghanistan, and they did not want to lose any more. They were given short shrift. The ISI chief told them to go home and keep their mouths shut.9

  We visited the neighborhood in Quetta called Pashtunabad, “town of the Pashtuns,” a closely knit neighborhood of narrow alleys and high-walled houses inhabited largely by Afghan refugees. Over the years, they have spread up the hillside, building simple one-story houses from mud and straw, the same color as the brown mountain. The people are working class: laborers, bus drivers, and shopkeepers. Members of the Taliban also live here, in larger houses behind high walls, and often next to the mosques and madrassas that they run.

  Along the sloping Haji Ghabi Road stands a madrassa, the Jamiya Darul Ulum Islamia. The small, untidy entrance on the street conceals the size of the establishment. Inside, a brick and cement building three stories high surrounds a courtyard with classrooms for 280 students from the neighborhood. At least three of the suicide bombers we were tracing had been students at this madrassa, and there were reports of more. The place was known as a local headquarters of jihadi activity. Senior figures from Pakistani religious parties and provincial government officials were frequent visitors. Taliban would also visit under cover of darkness in fleets of SUVs, including Mullah Dadullah, who called on several madrassas in late 2006. The men running the madrassa were Afghans but naturalized Pakistanis. The head of the madrassa was Maulavi Jan Mohammad. His brother, Mullah Wali Jan, had served as a governor in the Taliban government, and was detained soon after 9/11 by Pakistani authorities and transferred to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp for a period. He lived in a house on the same road as the madrassa. We requested an interview and were told that a female journalist would not be permitted inside. So I passed some questions to the Pakistani reporter with me, and he and the photographer went in.

  One of the students from this madrassa was Abdul Sattar, the son of a packer at the fruit market, who lived on the same street as the seminary. It was known in the neighborhood that he had joined up to fight in Afghanistan. A Pakistani neighbor ran into him in a shop near his home one day and asked him how the jihad was going. “It will not stop, this will continue until the day of judgment,” he had exclaimed. A few months later, he died in a suicide bombing in Panjwayi bazaar in August 2006, a particularly devastating attack that did not touch any military or government personnel but killed twenty-one civilians, among them several children. Abdul Sattar’s family held a fateha ceremony for him at their home that was attended by many in the neighborhood and a number of local politicians and religious leaders, including clerics from the madrassa.

  My Pakistani colleague did manage to speak to the deputy head of the madrassa, Qari Mohammad Ibrahim, standing in the courtyard. He was curt in his replies. He denied there was any militant or physical training at the madrassa—only “oral” education—or any forced recruitment for jihad. “We are educating the students in the Koran and in the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s obligation to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran. Then it is up to them to go to jihad. We don’t send them by force.” He ended the conversation. Classes were breaking up, and I could hear a clamor rising as students burst out of their rooms. Boys poured out of the gates onto the street. They looked thin, even spindly, in flapping clothes, wearing prayer caps and turbans, but they were cheerful and energetic. They darted off on their bikes or in groups on foot, chasing each other down the street.

  The journalist and photographer joined me on the street outside. They told me a large banner was painted across the wall of the inner courtyard praising both its political patron Fazlur Rehman and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

  Here was the nexus of Pakistani support for the Taliban, the source of the Taliban resurgence that President Karzai and other Afghan leaders had long been warning about. In this nondescript madrassa, in a poor neighborhood of Quetta, one of hundreds throughout the border region, the Taliban and Pakistan’s religious parties were working together to raise an army of militants. “The madrassas are a cover, a camouflage,” a Pashtun legislator from the area told me. Behind the curtain, hidden in the shadows, lurked the ISI.

  Confirming the links between the ISI and the religious parties and Taliban was always difficult, especially when the families involved, journalists, police, and even the Taliban themselves were scared to talk for fear of retribution from the ISI. This was a covert program and designed to be deniable, as one Western diplomat told me. Western officials began to talk of the “S” Directorate of the ISI, which was responsible for Pakistan’s covert programs outside the country, namely the proxy operations. One department handled Kashmir, one Afghanistan, and another the Sikhs in India, the former Western diplomat told me. “It is truly deniable. They do not use serving officers,” he said.10 Retired army officers and special forces commandos tend to work for the “S” wing. They are the handlers of the Taliban who meet with the militant leaders and commanders. These are the men who go into the madrassas, meet with operational commanders, and coordinate support for Taliban offensives. They provide the Taliban with fuel, ammunition, and other logistical support, and they hold strategy meetings with the Taliban to discuss when to increase or ease up on operations. The headquarters of the “S” Directorate is in Camp Hamza, the ISI compound in Rawalpindi.

  The United States only began watching the links between the ISI and the Taliban in 2007 and 2008. Before that, the CIA had been focused purely on al Qaeda. The United States was tied to Pakistan as an ally in the war on terror, and U.S. officials concentrated on that collaboration. “When you are running a joint project with another country you don’t spy on them,” the former Western diplomat said. That changed when the National Security Agency began a program of worldwide electronic surveillance from 2007, however, and Pakistan became one of its particular targets.

  Despite the signals, at the U.S. State Department, support for the relationship with Pakistan became a mantra. Pakistan complained vehemently about criticism in the press, and American diplomats and administ
ration officials listened. The Bush administration for years praised Pakistan as a stalwart ally in the fight against terror, and never publicly questioned the wisdom or legality of the Pakistani military’s role in supporting the Taliban insurgency. The most Western officials asked of Pakistan was to do more to prevent cross-border infiltration by militants, which Pakistan easily deflected by saying it had neither the resources nor the military capacity to do better.

  The former Western diplomat complained that nitpicking government officials, whom he described as “stamp collectors,” always asked for proof of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, which was difficult to produce. “We were too much like stamp collectors. We should have taken as read that they were playing a dual role,” the diplomat said. “We should have not allowed the stamp collectors to keep sending us back for more proof. We should have said: ‘They are doing it, they are supporting the Taliban. So what is the policy?’”

  For those living in Quetta, journalists, politicians, and activists who saw Taliban leaders coming and going, visiting ISI offices and madrassas, there was no doubt about the close collaboration between the ISI and the Taliban. “The Taliban cannot work for a single day without our patronage, cooperation, and support,” Mahmood Khan Achakzai, the Pashtun nationalist leader in Quetta and a longtime opponent of the government’s support of Islamists, told me during my visit. “They are being protected here, equipped, and trained here,” he went on. Two intelligence departments, the ISI and the Military Intelligence, were organizing the assistance to the Taliban, he said. When I asked how he knew that, he replied, “How do I know you are in this room?”

  Even members of the Taliban complained of the pressures of the ISI. An Afghan reporter tracked down for me a former Taliban commander in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Quetta. The commander had fled Afghanistan after police detained him there. In Pakistan, he was also arrested. But far from opposing his connection to the Taliban, the ISI agents threatened him with prison unless he returned to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces. He went into hiding and was eking out a living selling religious amulets. “This is my life now. If I look up, there is a tiger that will eat me. If I look down, there is a river,” he said.