Aboard the Democracy Train

by Nafisa Hoodbhoy

  On the day that would come to be known as 9/11, as the fall colors enveloped the picturesque Amherst valley, the radio reported that thick, billowing smoke had enveloped the World Trade Towers and the towers had begun to collapse. People trapped inside faced the horrifying choice of being burnt alive or jumping to meet a faster death.

  At Amherst center, bewildered American students milled around in a candle light rally to show solidarity with the families of the victims. Many of the students who subsequently enrolled in the post-9/11 course I taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst told me that they had joined to learn the facts that were kept secret from them by the US government, and which had resulted in such a terrifying and heartless attack on their soil.

  Knowing the longstanding relationship between the US government and the Islamic militants in my region, it was clear to me that the finger of guilt would point to Pakistan and its neighbors.

  I had left Pakistan just as the primordial Taliban fastened their tentacles around it. In 1999, Dawn had published my investigative report on the terror links between militants who bombed the US embassies in Africa and the Pakistan’s north-west region. In that front-page report, I wrote that the militants were foreigners who traveled to Kenya and Tanzania through Karachi, using fake passports and Pakistani identities.

  It was a time when the tail had begun to wag the dog. The Taliban had taken over Afghanistan in 1996 and were spreading in Pakistan. Shortly before I left for the US in 2000, the sectarian Anjuman Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (ASSP) – which translates as “Army of the Friends of the Prophet” – had shut down Karachi after an Islamic scholar, Maulana Mohammed Yusuf Ludhianvi and his driver were killed by rivals near the Binori Town mosque.

  In early 2001, I taught at the secluded Amherst College with a sense of despair at the “Talibanization” of Pakistan. I was making my first break from reporting and it was an uphill task to explain its stormy cross-currents to my small class of mostly elite American students. The region’s politics felt even more remote in the snow-covered hills and valleys of the Five College area.

  After the semester ended, I moved a few yards down the road to work for the WFCR radio. The station was affiliated with the National Public Radio. My co-workers eyed me curiously and with an element of surprise because of my passion for coverage of the Pak-Afghan region. Occasionally, I overheard them mumble that scarce dollars were being squandered to cover my unusual interests.

  As public funding was a big issue, it became harder to commission reports on my region. Only days before the 9/11 attacks, I had with difficulty convinced my program director to allow me to report on the Taliban’s kidnapping of foreign Christian aid workers in Afghanistan. It grew harder to secure funds for such foreign programming since the audiences were a select group with esoteric interests.

  And then the biggest attack on US soil in recent history occurred – and changed the direction of my life. Suddenly my telephone rang off the hook. Radio stations interviewed me on my cell phone. Television stations sent chauffeured limousines to interview me. Newspapers reporters arrived for interviews at my campus office. I spoke at impromptu meetings, seminars and question and answer sessions – organized by teachers and students in both the Five College and Boston areas – on why America had been attacked.

  All of a sudden, people hung on to every word I said about the Taliban and growing Islamic fundamentalism in my region.

  “Why do they hate us?” was the common refrain I heard all around me.

  My mind was captivated by the image of powerful stones breaking through America’s formidable ivory towers – and leaving massive debris all around.

  The Chickens Were Primed to Come Home to Roost

  The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington DC – which provoked the US government to overthrow the Taliban government in Afghanistan – were for me a powerful reminder that the explosive situation building in my region had boomeranged to the world’s super power.

  As the planes ploughed into the World Trade Towers, I felt my experiences of terrorism resonate among Americans, for whom the battle had been brought to their doorsteps. When President George W. Bush took to the airwaves and challenged Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf to make a stark choice, “Either you are with us or with the terrorists,” I knew that my region would not be the same again.

  In November 2001, a Washington based institute commissioned me to travel to Pakistan and study the media. It was the beginning of the transformation of the region. The US military had invaded Kabul, following disagreements with the Taliban government of Afghanistan that they had sheltered Al Qaeda. Although the 9/11 hijackers were Arabs, the US had been sufficiently involved in Afghanistan to follow their footprints.

  As my plane flew over miles of contiguous rugged grey hills that stretch from Afghanistan to Pakistan, I saw why Al Qaeda had selected the settings. In this formidable moonscape, the militant Pashtun tribesmen who straddle the Pak-Afghan border had, in 1996, ousted the Afghan Mujahideen to form the Taliban government. They went on to host Al Qaeda Arab militants like Osama Bin Laden, as well as Chechens, Uzbeks and Uighurs, who had during the Cold War helped the US drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

  From Pakistan’s western city of Quetta, I traveled in a convoy of Western journalists through the dry winding hills to the Weish border of Afghanistan. We were headed to the tented city, set up by the United Nations for Afghan refugees. As our convoy wound around the hills under the bright November sky, Kalashnikov-hugging guards trailing us in open jeeps swung into view. It was like being part of a Western action movie, only this was real life.

  We passed the ramshackle huts of the tribal Taliban, where angry tribesmen stared at our motorcade with suspicion and hostility. At one point, our vehicles were pelted with stones. It forced our driver to gather speed and drive frenziedly through swirls of mountain dust. Later, when I saw British journalist, Robert Fisk at the Serena Hotel in Quetta, a bandage around his head and locals in tow, I guessed he had been part of our motorcade.

  My Australian colleague, Kathleen Reen and I stopped at the UN refugee tented city at the Weish border. Outside the tents were elderly Afghan men and children with dirty blond hair, green-gray eyes and runny noses. Their mothers wore voluminous burqas (encompassing veils) inside the tents. They were part of the Pashtun families who had fled US bombing in the southern Afghan town of Qandahar, walking for days to cross over to Pakistan.

  From afar, I saw swirling clouds of dust, created by what looked like people chasing a vehicle. Hordes of Afghan children – and even grown men – ran after the UN truck that carried food and rations for them. The truck stopped and we watched. As the driver jumped down to distribute rations, he was mobbed and practically carried on the shoulders of the hungry crowd.

  On the way, Kathleen and I stopped briefly at the home of a local journalist. If we had any hopes of meeting the family, these were dashed when the Pashtun women took one look at us and dashed out of the room. We were perplexed. Neither of us was veiled, yet neither did we look frightening.

  As we walked down the street, our male companions explained, “Now that the Taliban government has been ousted, they are terrified you will force them to unveil.”

  It was evidence of the deep social conservatism of the millions of Afghan Pashtun tribesmen who fled to Pakistan and resettled here after it was invaded by the former Soviet Union in 1979. In Afghanistan, Pashtuns had reacted to Soviet-backed reforms by killing social workers who taught literacy and education to women. These conservative Pashtun Muslims would lay the basis for the Mujahideen, funded by the US, to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

  The Mujahideen in Pakistan

  Seeing the Afghan refugees in 2001 was déjà vu for me, for I had visited the UN refugee camps in Pakistan during the 1980s after three million Afghans fled the Soviet invasion of their country. Then, the UN had resettled them in billowing white tents in the outskirts of Karachi in a settlement
called Sohrab Goth. Hordes of boys and fierce-looking, bearded men roamed the tented settlements. Growing increasingly restive in an overcrowded city, the refugees told me they longed to fight against the Soviet occupation of their country.

  In April 1988, I met a key Mujahideen leader and head of the Hezb-i-Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as he arrived at a rally at the refugee camp to speak about the Geneva Accord – in which the UN had set a timetable for the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan. He was then a key recipient of US aid, funneled by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

  Dressed in an immaculate white shalwar kameez (baggy tunic and trousers), Hekmatyar had a striking long face, tapering fingers and a beard. He spoke to me in well-articulated English, all the well that he kept an intent expression. “We Afghans have to unite in order to get rid of Russian occupation.”

  In mid April 1988, there were other Mujahideen leaders who had turned out to demand an early withdrawal of the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Dressed in Afghan gear, replete with a shawl across their shoulders, the leaders denounced the UN for laying out such a lengthy time frame for Russian withdrawal.

  Their speeches rang out in the air, “Even if the Americans stop assistance we will snatch weapons from the Soviet army and turn it against the government in Afghanistan.”

  The View from Soviet-Dominated Kabul

  In November 1989, I flew from Pakistan to Afghanistan as part of a delegation of journalists invited by the Soviet-backed Najibullah government – and saw the Mujahideen from the Afghan perspective.

  The Soviet Union had fulfilled the Geneva Accord and pulled out of Afghanistan that year. Still, there was no let up in the Mujahideen’s attacks on Najibullah’s government. Barely had we arrived at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul when we heard that rocket missiles had killed 13 members of two Afghan families across from the hotel. The victims’ families, who lived in homes atop the hills, were furious that the government failed to protect them and refused to meet us to tell their story.

  Still, with the departure of Soviet troops, many Afghans had begun to own the fledgling government. Our Afghan hosts took us to Kabul University, where we found women to be among Najibullah’s biggest supporters. Almost 60 per cent of the 9,250 students at Kabul University were women. Dressed mostly in long skirts and clutching notebooks, they imbibed modesty with modernity.

  Even so, the Mujahideen were never far away from the minds of the Afghan students. It was hard not to think about the Islamic militants, given the occasional gunfire and bomb blasts that rent the air. On that bright, sunny November day, the women’s spirits clouded over as one young Afghan said, “If the Mujahideen take over, they will force us to veil.”

  Under these circumstances, our hosts told us that Afghan women had volunteered to join the 200-member women’s battalion, set up by the government to combat Mujahideen attacks. A group of Afghan male trainers had been assigned in a residential home in Kabul to equip women to defend against Mujahideen attacks in Nangarhar, Khost and the Salang Highway – the routes charted by the Islamic militants to take over Afghanistan.

  The chief of the Women’s Battalion, Major Saleha – a tall, slender woman – told me that the women were trained to handcuff the Mujahideen and hand them over to the police if they were suspected of planting bombs in the market place. In one recent incident, she told me that when the Mujahideen attacked, “They were aghast to find that the entire area was defended purely by women!”

  We were flown to Qandahar, which shares a long border with Pakistan. I broke away from the main delegation to speak in Urdu to Afghan shopkeepers. The Qandaharis normally speak Pushtu, but their access to Pakistan’s open borders had made them familiar with its national language.

  A shop-owner in Qandahar, Abdul Ghaffar Waheedullah told me in halting Urdu, “Formerly, the Mujahideen would come out of their hide-outs to kill Kabul officials and get away with it because of support from the local families. But now they come like thieves.”

  The besieged President Najibullah invited our delegation of journalists to his imposing palace to appeal for an end to the Mujahideen’s attacks from Pakistan. Heavy-set and clean-shaven, he entered the room in full military uniform, looking calm but wary. Seated at the head of an elongated mahogany table, he spoke through an interpreter to say that the Afghan government had fulfilled its promise and negotiated the withdrawal of the Soviets nine months before.

  “Now it is up to the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to keep their promise and stop the Mujahideen from launching attacks on our territory from your country.”

  He made a prophetic appeal to Benazir Bhutto, who had barely been in office for a year. “If Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto allows her country to be used to launch attacks against our government, one day she will be ousted by the Islamic fundamentalists.”

  We were in Kabul when our hosts informed us that the Afghan military had foiled a major offensive in Jalalabad, south of Kabul. The prisoners were brought to Kabul, where we could interview them. We were taken to a huge hall in which the Afghan foot soldiers of the Mujahideen, dressed in army fatigues, squatted on the floor. These prisoners were a breakaway faction of the Mujahideen groups based in Pakistan – the Hizb-i-Islami and Mahaz-i-Milli. They looked dazed but ready to cooperate.

  Afghan Lt. Gen. Mohammed Anwar told us that the Mujahideen offensive in Jalalabad had been commanded by ISI’s Colonel Sultan Mir and assisted by Major Bashir from Kohat with the help of “foreign advisors.” These Mujahideen soldiers told us that they had been “brainwashed” into believing that Najibullah’s cabinet consisted of “kafirs” (infidels), who would have to be killed in order to bring Islam back to Afghanistan.

  It was a public image that President Najibullah struggled hard to dispel. The government had reconstructed many of the mosques destroyed during the war and one heard the azaan (call to prayer) during the day. A photograph of Najibullah, bent on a prayer mat, was pasted around Kabul to “prove” that the leadership consisted of God-fearing Muslims.

  A team of skeptical team of Western journalists was also on hand to cross-question the prisoners of war. “How much does Najibullah’s government give you to join them?” shot an English woman reporter. She was part of a British team that had filmed the Afghan Mujahideen in Pakistan’s refugee camps. One of the Afghan tribesmen captured by Najibullah’s army had identified her from that encounter.

  I had also come to know her as among the few European journalists we bumped into at breakfast in the otherwise empty Intercontinental Hotel. At times, I joined the British and Swiss reporters for coffee in the dining hall that overlooked the distant hills, which intermittently resounded with gunfire.

  The British woman was full of scorn for the “propaganda” put out by our Afghan hosts. “Najibullah is a Russian puppet,” she told me in her definitive tone. Seeing that I didn’t look fully convinced, she went on, “Did you know that he was the head of the Afghan secret police – KHAD – and has a reputation for torturing Afghan dissidents?”

  I didn’t know that. But her conversations convinced me she was among those who had cast their lot with the Mujahideen – then portrayed by the West as the “freedom fighters.”

  Knowing that in those days Western journalists were a rare breed in Afghanistan, it was my turn to ask the foreign reporters, “So why are you in Kabul?”

  They told me that they had arrived because there was a huge Mujahideen offensive underway, which given the massive US support funneled through Pakistan was expected to soon force out Najibullah’s government. I had correctly surmised that they had traveled from neighboring Peshawar where most foreign journalists based themselves during the Cold War.

  For the Western media, the Mujahideen were the key to dismantling the Soviet Union. The foreign media had begun the count down to President Najibullah’s downfall nine months earlier, as the Soviet Union complied with the Geneva Accord and withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan.

  That day – February 15, 1989 – I
flew from Karachi to Islamabad to witness the Afghan Interim Government outline its plans for the take-over of Kabul. Western reporters asked few questions from the bearded, turbaned Mujahideen commanders who sat on stage. Instead, photographers clicked away at the US’s unlikely allies – the seven-member coalition of Islamic political parties poised to form a Sunni Muslim state in Afghanistan.

  Looking at the Mujahideen commanders on stage, I felt my heart sink. My instincts told me that their take-over of Afghanistan would be bad news for Pakistan. It was a Western planted sapling for a fundamentalist Islamic movement that threatened Muslim sects and non-Muslims in the region and paved the way for the Taliban.

  After 1991, when differences emerged between the Mujahideen – and Gulbuddin Hematyar’s hardline Hezb-i-Islami party rained missiles on Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government in Kabul, the Pakistani military stepped in. They were aided by Islamic political parties like the Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam (JUI), who trained the young orphans of war in Pakistan’s refugee camps in madressahs (Islamic schools) on concepts of jihad that would serve the military’s strategic objectives in the region.

  In 1996, Pakistan’s military helped the Taliban to oust the Mujahideen and take Kabul. It was a government that was recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Over time, the Taliban would allow Al Qaeda to ensconce itself more firmly into Afghanistan and launch the 9/11 attacks.

  Fleeing Militants Massacre my Christian Friends

  As President George W. Bush blamed the loss of 3,000 American lives on the Taliban, Pakistan’s army, headed by Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, backed down from their overt support for the Taliban. Instead, Pakistan made a prima facie U-turn against the government that it had helped to establish in Afghanistan.