Change elsewhere was piecemeal. I had always found each province was like a different country, and Afghanistan provided examples for both optimists and pessimists.
An earlier, spontaneous uprising had taken both the government and Taliban by surprise. In the summer of 2012, a group of four or five young graduates in Andar district in the central province of Ghazni complained to the local Taliban commander about his men’s harsh treatment of the community. They demanded that the Taliban reopen the schools and allow reconstruction projects. They also complained that Pakistani Taliban were harassing villagers, checking IDs even though they could read neither Pashtu nor Dari. The commander told them to join his group and put up with it or leave the area. He gave them thirty minutes to leave. Instead the men turned on the Taliban, killing some and chasing the others out.
This little band was led by a tall, hook-nosed engineering graduate, Lutfullah Kamran, who had become disillusioned with the Taliban’s strictures. In interviews, he described taking the university entrance exams in the provincial capital of Ghazni and seeing scores of ethnic Shiite Hazaras but virtually no Pashtuns, who are the majority in his province. With schools banned in the Taliban-held areas, the Pashtuns were largely illiterate and falling behind, he realized. The Taliban leadership was slow to counter the breakaway group. Kamran meanwhile sought assistance elsewhere. He had approached the Hesbe-Islami Party in Pakistan for support the previous year without luck. He wanted to keep both American and Taliban forces out of the area, but he needed money, weapons, radios, and general support. So the group approached a fellow Pashtun from Ghazni in the Karzai government, Asadullah Khaled, who was then the minister for tribal affairs. Khaled met their representative in his Kabul office but warned them that they would have to stop their opposition to American forces if he was to help them. He gave them money to treat their wounded, and then he persuaded President Karzai to let him nurture the uprising. The American commander in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, understood the importance of the uprising too, Khaled said.3 Kamran’s Andar group expanded, gaining support from surrounding villages and pushing the Taliban out of an area of some six square miles. “When the Taliban recognized they had made a mistake it was too late, a lot of people had joined the uprising,” Khaled told me.
By September 2012, spontaneous uprisings against Taliban forces had occurred in half a dozen places around the country including Ghazni, Nuristan, Wardak, Ghor, Faryab, and Logar provinces. Each uprising had occurred for different reasons, and the government’s responses varied. In one case, in Paktika, the government told people to wait, warning them that it could not provide them with protection from a Taliban backlash. General Allen compared the uprisings to the Sunni awakening against al Qaeda in Anbar province in Iraq. “This is a really important moment for this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for local communities to have security has become so, so prominent—as it was in Anbar—that they’re willing to take the situation into their own hands to do this,” he said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.4 Not all were well intentioned. Some participants were opportunists, and some were criminals, preying on the communities they pretended to want to protect. A number used the chance to turn their guns on the foreign soldiers training them. But there were also genuine movements to kick out the Taliban.
In Kamdesh in Nuristan, local tribesmen fought for months against a determined Taliban and al Qaeda force. At one point the government and the United States flew in supplies and commandos to assist them. A senior Afghan intelligence official warned that it was not enough and the government was going to lose the moment. Kamdesh remained cut off by road, and the government was doing nothing to clear the route, the official told me. Karzai was issuing orders, but the ministry responsible was not acting. Nevertheless the tribesmen hung on.
As he entered his last year in office—Karzai was due to step down in 2014 as he completed his second term—the Afghan president still had reservations about the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban. He continued to apply the brakes to the local police program, denying or only grudgingly approving each incremental increase. He also kept a close grip over the reconciliation program, both the high-level peace talks with the Taliban leadership and the lower-level program to induce Taliban fighters off the battlefield. Karzai insisted on maintaining Afghan control over the programs, and that meant presidential control. Neither program really advanced at all.
The local police program offered the best chance for communities to secure their villages and the government to expand its authority, but it was stuttering along, an example of Karzai’s lack of leadership.
As spring unfurled into the summer of 2013, there was no doubt that Kandahar was a changed place. I had always believed that the Afghans in southern Afghanistan did not want the Taliban and one day would stand up against them. The Taliban’s supporters were a minority. The remainder stuck with the Taliban for so long because they lacked a decent alternative. The people neither liked the foreign forces nor expected them to stay, and they did not trust the Karzai government to deliver.
By 2013, the fear that had kept many Kandaharis on the sidelines had ebbed. At first it was not obvious. I flew into Kandahar on a civilian flight from Kabul in mid-February. A trusted taxi driver was waiting to pick me up. Scared to be seen driving a foreigner, he urged me to cover my face and head in a shawl. He wrapped his own head in a scarf so he could not be recognized by anyone he knew. He lived in a suburb and feared that if a neighbor saw him working with a foreigner, word would get back to the Taliban. Translators and local reporters were also nervous to be seen collaborating with foreigners. We had long given up street interviews in Kandahar because of the risks, but even two years after the surge, local reporters said that it was too dangerous for them to go to districts such as Zhare and Panjwayi.
Yet I found that many others were able to work and were pushing the boundaries. A campaign of assassinations had decimated the provincial and tribal leadership, from the mayor, religious and tribal leaders, and provincial and district council members, to ministry employees, including several women. Still, there were now more ministry and government officials working than before. Villagers were daring to approach government offices. Even women were coming forward to the district office in Panjwayi.
Two hundred madrassas in the province had newly registered with the authorities, compared with only five a couple of years earlier. Fifty clerics had joined the provincial Ulema Shura, the Council of Clerics. Being a member of the Ulema had been one of the most dangerous jobs in Kandahar since the council had gathered hundreds of clerics from twenty provinces in 2005 to divest Mullah Omar of his title of Leader of the Faithful. The leader of the council was assassinated by the Taliban soon afterward, as were several members of the family that guarded the Shrine of the Blessed Cloak. So many religious figures had been assassinated in the five years that followed that only fifteen clerics were left on the council in 2010, and they worked undercover. By 2013, however, improved security had broken the fear. The clerics were appearing on television and radio, and traveling out to the districts.
Tooryalai Wesa, Kandahar’s governor, told me that the surge had not only expelled the Taliban; it had changed people’s demands. “Before I was going to the districts everyone was complaining about security: ‘We don’t have enough guns, our guns are Hungarian, we don’t want Hungarian guns, we want German guns, or American guns,’” Wesa said. “Now they say: ‘We don’t have a clinic,’ and some say: ‘We do have a clinic but we don’t have a female doctor.’” Businessmen were no longer talking about security but about the economy, he added.
It was not just the Taliban who had been pushed back. The most powerful figure of all, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president and his omnipotent representative in the south, had departed from the scene. A trusted bodyguard and commander had turned on Ahmed Wali and shot him dead inside his own home in July 2011. He left a vacuum of power. He had wielded immense influe
nce, controlling virtually every government appointment in southern Afghanistan, overseeing security issues, and muscling in on nearly all commercial deals, legal or illegal. He told David Petraeus once that President Karzai kept him in Kandahar because he could deliver the vote for his brother across five southern provinces. Western generals found him useful for the influence he wielded with his brother, yet he had exercised a stranglehold on provincial life and tribal dynamics. Eighteen months after his death, the Karzai monopoly on power had splintered. For Kandahar, that was not a bad thing.
The 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of foreign forces loomed large. Skilled survivors that they were, Afghans were moving with events. As the foreigners withdrew, so the support for the Taliban would drop, some villagers predicted. One elder at the gathering in Wudood’s house in Zangabad told me that villagers could see the shift in power and so were supporting the government as it grew stronger and the Taliban grew weaker. “People applaud everyone who seizes power,” he said. “People were applauding the Taliban too.”
And yet, “a single bloom does not make spring,” an Afghan friend warned me. He said the Taliban would be maddened at losing Zangabad and would redouble efforts to regain their influence there. The Karzai government could still bungle things and lose the initiative, he added.
The Taliban struck quickly. In mid-March, a month after my visit, two workers from a construction firm were kidnapped and killed in Panjwayi. The company made metal grates to be fixed over culverts to prevent the Taliban from planting bombs under the road, and these men were monitoring the work. Their booby-trapped bodies were found hanging in different villages near the desert where Taliban fighters still had a presence, police officials told me.
Villagers and government officials warned that the uprising had to be supported or it would falter under pressure from the Taliban. “It all depends on what the government does with these people. If they support them and equip them, it will be a revolution,” said Haji Agha Lalai, a member of Kandahar’s provincial council from Panjwayi.
Few had much faith that the central government would deliver timely support. “The government is very weak and if the foreigners take their hands from their shoulders, the government will collapse like a wet wall,” said the landowner from Sangesar. It was a good analogy. In the villages, Afghans make walls from packed mud and straw. While the wall is fresh and wet it can easily collapse, but once dry, it can withstand a tank round. “If the foreigners continue their support, the government will slowly get more powerful,” the elder told me.
The police chief Sultan Mohammad exuded toughness as a new fighting season loomed with the onset of the spring. “If you think because the leaves are sprouting, the Taliban will start to fight, I will tell you I can also fight well in Zangabad when the leaves grow,” he said. Six months later, he was even more confident. Despite continued casualties from Taliban IEDs, he had expanded government authority throughout the district and established police posts on the desert’s edge, he told us.5
We called Wudood to see how he was faring. He had received repeated death threats but brushed them off. His son had been ambushed but survived. “I don’t have any worries for the future,” he said. “The time to die is in God’s hands, and when it is time, I will go.” His faith in the uprising was unshaken. “This time it is not only me. There are thousands of us in Zangabad and in Sperwan. They cannot eliminate us all,” he continued. “We are the true owners of this land and the men who are attacking us are coming from outside, and we are not scared. We will defend our land.”
Yet the threat from Pakistan was real and showed no sign of diminishing. Young Taliban graduates were continuing to arrive back in Afghanistan from years of study in Pakistan, preaching jihad and starting up bands of Taliban. I had come across several cases of new arrivals in 2012. They were all graduates of the Haqqania madrassa at Attock in Pakistan. They arrived flush with cash and began recruiting and training followers.
In January 2013, I decided to visit the Haqqania madrassa in Pakistan to ask some of the senior clerics about the graduates they were dispatching to Afghanistan. They denied sending out extremists. They gave the usual patter that it was every person’s individual choice to fight jihad, and that they could not influence their students who were set on going. “Our job is not to force religion on people,” said Maulana Imam Mohammad, a politician and deputy to Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, the founder of the madrassa. “Governments fear us because we have strength from the people.” The mullahs, however, revealed a fanatical support for the Taliban. “Those who are against the Taliban, they are the liberals and they only represent 5 percent of Afghans. We are experts on the Taliban and the majority of the people still support them,” Syed Mohammad Yousuf Shah, the spokesman for the madrassa, told me. He and his fellow clerics were set on a military victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan. “We would prefer the Taliban to win militarily in Afghanistan. America’s presence in Afghanistan is a threat to stability,” he said. “A parliamentary democracy cannot work in Afghanistan,” he continued. “Afghanistan is a weapons culture, a tribal culture, and they have been a monarchy for a long time. So a dictatorship is the only system for them.” Moreover, “it is a political fact that one day the Taliban will take power,” he concluded. “The white flag of the Taliban will fly again over Kabul, inshallah.”
These clerics seemed madly in love with the Taliban and, I felt, were out of touch with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, but they almost certainly reflected broader thinking within the ISI and the military establishment. They had always been an important conduit of ISI influence on the Taliban.
It would be easy to dismiss their comments as so many dreams of fanatics. Yet Pakistani security officials, political analysts, journalists, and parliamentarians warned of the same thing. Pakistan was still set on domination of Afghanistan and was still determined to use the Taliban to exert influence now that the United States was pulling out. Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press reported in September 2013 that Punjabi militants were massing in the tribal areas to join the Taliban and train ahead of an anticipated offensive into Afghanistan in 2014. In Punjab, mainstream religious parties and banned militant groups were openly expanding their operations, building larger establishments and recruiting hundreds of students for jihad. Dozens of young men had been dispatched by militant groups to Syria to fight jihad there, and dozens more dead were being returned to madrassas in the Punjab, a former legislator told me. “They are the same jihadi groups, they are not 100 percent under control, but still the military protects them.”6
The United States was neither speaking out against Pakistan nor changing its policy toward a government that was exporting terrorism, the legislator lamented: “How many people have to die before they get it? They are standing by a military that protects, aids, and abets people who are going against the U.S. and Western mission in Afghanistan, in Syria, everywhere.”
In Afghanistan, even General Razziq said that the Afghans would not be able to hold on long unless the United States maintained strong support for the Afghan security forces and put pressure on Pakistan to cease its support for the Taliban. “If they leave Afghanistan as we are now in present conditions, and if they do not put pressure on Pakistan and Iran, which are openly supporting the opposition, where they have training, where they have safe havens and everything, then I think the government will not be able to resist for long against the opposition,” he said. “Pakistanis are very clever and smart. They duped the world community by giving them false information.” Pakistan had been imprisoning those Taliban who supported negotiations with Kabul and was pushing others to keep fighting, he said. “They have been playing these tricks for the past ten years.
“We need strong support,” he continued. “The war is not in Afghanistan, it is not in our villages and districts, the war is being imposed on us.” Furthermore, Razziq warned, “Pakistan is playing a double game. On the one hand they are supporting the Qatar negotiations [peace talks between the Kar
zai government and Taliban leaders], on the other hand they are telling the Taliban to prepare their leadership and appoint their leaders for the period after 2014,” he told me. “Pakistan can hand over fifty big Taliban commanders but on the other hand they can do something else, they can make five hundred more,” he said.
A number of senior Afghan officials offered the same warning. While the Taliban pursued its campaign of assassinations, targeting in particular former Northern Alliance leaders, Pakistan began diplomatic overtures to leaders of all the northern ethnic groups. Pakistan’s ambassador announced a new policy of broader relations with Afghans of all factions, and, at the same time, began a campaign to savage Karzai’s reputation. It was a new way of showing they intended to play a role in deciding Afghanistan’s future. Apparently as part of that diplomatic offensive, an ISI official paid a visit to a senior Northern Alliance official in Kabul in August 2012. The ISI man gave him a veiled warning. The ISI controlled every Taliban and Haqqani group operating in the country, and the Northern Alliance would do well to make peace with the Taliban or suffer the consequences. “You have to extend the hand of friendship,” he was told.
Pakistan’s Afghan proxies were showing strain, however. There were signs of divisions within the Taliban leadership, which the U.S. forces and Kabul were clearly trying to exploit. The repeated calls for peace talks from the Afghan government had been resonating through the rural communities and the ranks of the Taliban for several years. Afghan officials insisted that many Taliban leaders did want peace but were prevented from entering into negotiations by Pakistan. Field commanders, who bore the brunt of the fighting, often complained about their leaders, and had begun to question why they were fighting, if their leaders were making peace. People who met with Taliban members described divisions within the Taliban. Some Taliban were exhausted, worn down by the night raids and ready for peace, yet there were still plenty of young firebrands who showed no desire to stop fighting. “These people don’t care about their own head. If someone does not care about his head, how can you stop that person,” an Afghan elder from Quetta told me.
The Wrong Enemy Page 33