2. Bob Dietz, Introduction, ibid., p. 6.
1. THE TALIBAN SURRENDER
1. Officially called the United National Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (or Jabha-yi Muttahid-i Islami-yi Milli bara-yi Nijat-i Afghanistan), the front was formed in 1996 after the Taliban seized power in Kabul.
2. Interview with Amrullah Saleh, chief of Afghan National Directorate of Security, 2002 to 2010, Kabul, September 30, 2012.
3. Summarized Sworn Detainee Statement, Combatant Status Review Tribunal Transcripts, Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility, p. 3, http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/7-mullah-mohammad-fazl/documents/4.
4. Interviews with Amrullah Saleh, September 30, 2012, and Arif Sarwari, head of intelligence for the Northern Alliance in 2001, Kabul, November 2012.
5. Interview with Mohammad Mohaqiq, Kabul, October 4, 2012.
6. Interview with Shams-ul-Haq Naseri, one of the mediators, Balkh, Afghanistan, December 2001.
7. Interviews with Northern Alliance officials who had intelligence from inside Kunduz at the time, Mazar-i-Sharif, December 2001, and Kabul, April 2013.
8. Interviews with Colonel Imam, Islamabad, May 2, 2009, and Rawalpindi, February 15, 2010.
2. THE PEOPLE TURN
1. The four were Karzai and three former mujahideen commanders from Kandahar: Hafizullah Khan, Haji Mand, and Haji Mohammad Shah Kako. Interviews with Hafizullah Khan, Kabul, November 2012.
2. Interviews with Mohammad Lal, Kabul, 2002 and October 2, 2012.
3. The four commanders were Bari Gul, a young and energetic commander; Muallem Qader; Mullah Jailani Akhundzada; and Ibrahim Akhundzada. Interviews with Mohammad Lal, his son Abdul Bari, and Mohammad Rahim, Durji, May 2002, and Kabul, October 2012.
4. Karzai has always claimed that he was evacuated to an airfield inside Afghanistan. This was clearly for political reasons so as not to be seen as having fled the country. In fact, he spent ten days in Jacobabad Airbase in Pakistan and only returned to Afghanistan after Kabul had fallen. Mohammad Lal and Hafizullah Khan spent five days with him in Jacobabad, and then were flown back to Uruzgan where they dispersed. In my view, it was a mistake by the Americans to break up the group since Karzai needed heavyweight tribal figures with him as well as fighters. Interviews with Mohammad Lal and Hafizullah Khan, Kabul, 2002 and 2012.
5. Interviews with Habib Ahmadzai, Kabul, 2005 and 2012.
6. Interview with Haji Din Mohammad, Kabul, October 3, 2012.
7. Abdul Razzaq was a notoriously vicious official from the Pakistani border town of Chaman. He is also accused of being behind the execution of former president Najibullah and his brother in Kabul in 1996.
8. The former Taliban minister, the late Mullah Khaksar, explained that the Taliban saw Abdul Haq as a potential leader and so a threat. See Lucy Morgan Edwards, The Afghan Solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan (London: Bactria Press, 2011).
9. A fragment of a speech of October 6, 2001, contained in an unreleased book written in 2004 by Amir Khan Mottaqi, a senior Taliban commander and former minister in the Taliban government, as reported by Carlo Franco in Antonio Giustozzi, ed., Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field (London: Hurst, 2009), p. 272.
10. Recounted to me by a friend who was told this by Haji Bashar.
11. Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 91.
12. Interviews with Abdul Waheed Baghrani, Kandahar, May 2005, and Kabul, July 15, 2009.
13. Interview with Western diplomat, Kabul, December 2012. A member of the Taliban delegation involved in peace negotiations with Karzai in 2012 told this to the diplomat.
14. Interviews with Hafizullah Khan, Kabul, October and November 2012. Hafizullah Khan is now a senior diplomat in Afghanistan’s foreign ministry and remains a close friend of the president. He joined Karzai in Kandahar soon after the fall of the Taliban and learned of Mullah Omar’s letter from Karzai himself. The Western diplomat involved in peace negotiations confirmed that the Taliban are now denying the existence of the letter.
15. Interviews with Abdul Waheed Baghrani, Kandahar, May 2005, and Kabul, 2010.
16. Some officials in Pakistan believe that bin Laden headed north through Kunar and then crossed over to the northern part of Pakistan’s tribal areas. But that would have involved returning to Jalalabad from Tora Bora, which would have been hard to do undetected. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has claimed that his group helped bin Laden into Kunar, although his assertions are often dubious. The more obvious route for bin Laden’s escape was toward North Waziristan.
17. Bin Laden’s words are paraphrased by Dalton Fury, Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), p. 233.
18. Interviews with villagers in Shkin and Bormol, January 2003.
19. One U.S. estimate is that ten thousand Taliban fighters were killed.
3. PAKISTAN’S PROTÉGÉS
1. Faizullah was aligned to Jamaat-e-Islami and then later Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami, the mujahideen party led by Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi from which many Taliban came. When Mullah Omar broke away from Faizullah, he remained with Harakat.
2. Telephone interview with Mohammad Nabi, December 25, 2012. Mohammad Nabi is not his real name. The commander asked not to be identified by his real name to avoid trouble from the Taliban.
3. Telephone interview with Mohammad Nabi, December 25, 2012.
4. Interview with Hafizullah Khan, Kabul, October 24, 2012.
5. Interview with Hafizullah Khan, Kabul, October 24, 2012. The Taliban always claimed legitimacy for their actions by citing atrocities committed by the warlords and militias. In particular, they popularized a tale that Mullah Omar first moved against a checkpoint commander after two girls from Sangesar were abducted and raped at the checkpoint. The tale was untrue, according to Hafizullah Khan, whose own men were present on the raids. Most of the checkpoint commanders were thieves and stole cars and extorted money, but the Taliban exaggerated their crimes in order to justify their own usurping of power, he said.
6. Interview with Ustad Aleem, mujahideen commander in Kandahar and contemporary of Mullah Omar’s, Kandahar, February 11, 2013.
7. Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 65.
8. Interviews with Colonel Imam, Islamabad, May 2, 2009, and Rawalpindi, February 15, 2010.
9. Shahzada Zulfiqar, a reporter with Agence France Presse in Quetta, was one of those reporters.
10. Interviews with Colonel Imam, Islamabad, May 2, 2009, and Rawalpindi, February 15, 2010.
11. Interview with Mansour’s nephew Brigadier General Abdul Razziq, police chief of Kandahar, Kandahar, February 16, 2013.
12. For one of the best accounts of Pakistan’s military assistance to the Taliban campaign, see Anthony Davis, “How the Taliban Became a Military Force,” Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, ed. William Maley (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 43.
13. Interview with a source who knew the family involved.
14. Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan 1970–2010 (London: Hurst, 2012), pp. 131–33. The authors suggest that there were questions about his leadership within the Taliban movement.
15. Interview with a journalist, Washington, D.C., June 22, 2012. The journalist requested not to be named for fear of repercussions from the ISI.
16. Interview with Abdul Waheed Wafa, Kabul, summer 2012. Waheed was at the time a student in Kabul. He worked at the New York Times’s Kabul bureau as a reporter from 2001 to 2011.
17. Rustam Shah Mohmand conducted his shuttle diplomacy in 1997 and 1999, on the request of then–prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif.
18. Interview with Rustam Shah Mohmand, Peshawar, December 3, 2012
.
19. Interview with Jehangir Karamat, Lahore, November 26, 2012. General Karamat served as chief of army staff from 1996 to 1998.
20. Interview with Amrullah Saleh, Kabul, September 30, 2012.
21. Interview with Ziauddin Butt, Lahore, November 29, 2012.
22. Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden, and Jean Sasson, Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), p. 247.
23. Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), p. 87.
24. Interview with Robert L. Grenier, Washington, D.C., June 22, 2012.
25. Ahmed Shah Massoud, A Message to the People of the United States of America, 1998, http://www.afghan-web.com/documents/let-masood.html. The numbers are higher than most diplomats’ estimates, yet Massoud’s intelligence gathering during the Soviet invasion and the Taliban era was often impressively accurate.
26. Reports by Kate Clark, The Independent, September 7, 2002, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0907-08.htm, and the British Broadcasting Company, September 7, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2242594.stm.
27. From the transcript of an interview with Mullah Omar by Spozhmai Maiwandi, Voice of America, September 21, 2001.
28. Interview with Colonel Imam, Islamabad, May 2, 2009.
29. Interview with Talat Masood, Islamabad, November 24, 2012.
30. Interview with Colonel Imam, Islamabad, May 2, 2009.
4. THE TALIBAN IN EXILE
1. The Taliban would also gather at two other squares in Quetta, Nawai Ada and Chalu Bowri. By 2013, the Thursday gatherings were far bigger and the Taliban much more self-confident.
2. Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), p. 65.
3. Interview with Talat Masood, Islamabad, November 24, 2012.
4. Interview with Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Peshawar, December 4, 2012, shortly before his death.
5. Interview with a senior politician, Peshawar.
6. The statement was received and reported by the Peshawar-based news agency Afghan Islamic Press, as reported by various newspapers and agencies, February 17, 2003.
7. This account is according to Red Cross officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, Kandahar and Kabul, 2003.
8. Interview with Mullah Dadullah by Mirwais Afghan, BBC Pashtu Service reporter, Kandahar, March 28, 2003; Carlotta Gall, “As Rockets Strike, U.S. Hunts for Taliban Tied to Ambush,” New York Times, March 31, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/31/world/nation-war-afghanistan-rockets-strike-us-hunts-for-taliban-tied-ambush.html.
9. Interview with Gul Agha Shirzai, Kandahar, April 2003.
10. As reported in the Pakistani daily newspaper The News, June 2003. Among those named were the former Taliban defense minister, Mullah Obaidullah; Mullah Dadullah; and Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Usmani.
11. Interview with Zalmai Khalilzad on Aina Television, Kabul, Reuters, June 18, 2005.
12. Interview with a senior retired ISI officer who served in positions in the tribal areas and the North West Frontier province, Islamabad, January 24, 2013.
13. Interview with Talatbek Masadykov, Kandahar, April 9, 2003, and Kabul, December 2012.
14. Interview with Robert L. Grenier, Washington, D.C., June 22, 2012.
15. Interview with Habib Jalib Baloch, Quetta, May 2003.
5. AL QAEDA REGROUPS
1. Chechens were often named as protagonists in the fighting, but the term seemed frequently to be used to include a variety of Russian-speaking Central Asians, Muslims from Russian republics such as Tartarstan and the republics of the North Caucasus, and even Chinese Uighurs. In 2001, I interviewed a Tartar who had fought in Chechnya, and a fighter from Kabardino-Balkaria, a republic in the Caucasus, among survivors at Qala-i-Janghi, but no Chechens.
2. Press conference by Colonel Rodney Davis, U.S. military spokesman, Bagram Airbase, October 29, 2003.
3. Briefing by Brigadier Amjad Rauf at the National Crisis Management Center, Ministry of Interior, Islamabad, September 13, 2006, at which I was present. Of the 709 foreigners apprehended and suspected of being members of al Qaeda, 542 were extradited, 123 were released, and 44 remained in custody in Pakistan. Some were given to the United States and sent to Guantánamo with their home countries’ consent.
4. Interview with Mahmood Khan Achakzai, Quetta, May 2003.
5. Interview with a former senior ISI official, Islamabad, January 24, 2013. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with the rules of his organization.
6. Zahid Hussain, The Scorpion’s Tail: The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militants in Pakistan—and How It Threatens America (New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 71.
7. Interview with Talat Masood, Islamabad, November 24, 2012.
8. Robin Wright and Peter Baker, “Musharraf: Bin Laden’s Location Is Unknown,” Washington Post, December 5, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35711-2004Dec4.html.
6. THE WRONG ENEMY IN THE WRONG COUNTRY
1. Interview with Abdul Rahim, Deh Rawud, Afghanistan, July 2002.
2. Interview with foreign aid coordinator, October 2002.
3. Carlotta Gall, “Evidence of Air Strike in Afghanistan Seems to Rebut U.S. Account,” New York Times, September 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/world/asia/08iht-afghan.1.15972217.html.
4. Carlotta Gall, “Afghan Leader Criticizes U.S. on Conduct of War,” New York Times, April 26, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/world/asia/26afghan.html.
5. Some of those involved in the mistreatment of Dilawar and Habibullah (see pp. 107–111) were charged and found guilty of lying to investigators.
6. Interview with Abdul Jabar, Zazi Maidan, Khost province, Afghanistan, February 6, 2003.
7. Interview with Hakim Shah, Spyworzai village, Khost province, Afghanistan, February 6, 2003.
8. Reporting by David Rohde; Carlotta Gall and David Rohde, “Afghan Abuse Charges Raise New Questions on Authority,” New York Times, September 17, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/asia/17afghan.html.
9. The death certificate was shown to me by Shahpoor at Yakubi, February 4, 2003. Under “Mode of Death” there were four boxes listing “natural,” “accident,” “suicide,” and “homicide.” “Homicide” was marked with a capital X. A photograph of the medical certificate was later taken by Keith Bedford for the New York Times; see http://keithbedford.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/AFGHAN-MAN-KILLED-IN-U-S-CUSTODY/G0000vFzilmAmyh0/I00007vNyyyFCt1Q.
10. U.S. military spokesman Colonel Rodney King confirmed that Habibullah’s death certificate indicated his death as a homicide to a New York Times colleague, Amy Waldman, in March 2003.
11. Carlotta Gall, “U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody,” New York Times, March 4, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html.
12. President George W. Bush, State of the Union speech, Washington, D.C., January 28, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html.
13. Two years after their deaths, the army’s confidential investigative reports were leaked to Human Rights Watch and shown to colleagues at the New York Times. The papers confirmed the Afghans’ accounts of the treatment at Bagram, and gave shocking detail of the behavior of U.S. military police and interrogators.
14. An Afghan government delegation visited the Guantánamo Bay prison in May–June 2006 and said that after interviewing the ninety-four Afghans still being held, roughly half of them were not guilty of serious crimes and should be released.
15. Interview with John W. Nicholson Jr., Washington, D.C., June 22, 2012.
16. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1998).
7. THE TALIBAN RETURN
1. Abdul Rauf was released in 2008 and resumed a promi
nent role in the Taliban insurgency. A number of senior Taliban figures were released as a result of poor coordination between investigators in Guantánamo Bay and Kabul. Officials in southern Afghanistan, who knew how dangerous the men were, complained that they were never consulted.
2. Interviews with Abdul Razziq, Kajaki, July 23, 2007, and by telephone, October 15, 2012.
3. A flier found in a mosque in Zangabad in February 2006 was shown to me by a villager. Translated from Pashtu into English, it read as follows:
Announcement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
This is our message to all Muslim brothers:
Today jihad is an obligation for all Muslim men and women; an obligation upon them, upon their wealth, and upon their sons. These infidels came to our country to destroy our Islam. If you call yourself a Muslim, come and work for Islam.
The infidels are lying to you when they say they are giving you assistance. Be sure, they are never truthful in what they say. Never believe them. They are the sons of Satan. If anyone helps these infidels in any way, that person is an infidel, and that person will be given the death sentence.
Quickly withdraw your hand of support for the government. If anyone does not withdraw their support, they will be sentenced under Sharia law.
Do not go to school. If anyone goes to school they will be sentenced under Sharia law. If anyone shaves their beards, or cuts it shorter than Sharia rules, and if anyone goes to a dog fight, or if a driver takes them to a dog fight, they will face a very strong sentence.
You must grow opium; this is a jihad against the infidels, and be sure that no one can eradicate your fields.
The Wrong Enemy Page 35