Descent Into Chaos (21 page)

He spent the first night near Kandahar, and two days later arrived in a small village close to Tarin Kot, the dusty, dirty, and isolated capital of Uruzghan province perched in the midst of formidable dry mountains. Uruzghan was the home province of Mullah Omar and a major recruitment center for the Taliban’s army, but Karzai also had friends here who had helped him smuggle in weapons months earlier. He stayed in the village for eleven days, until the Taliban got wind of his presence and sent up a strong force from Kandahar to capture and kill him. Before he fled into the mountains with sixty men, he met secretly with tribal elders from Tarin Kot, who told him that they were powerless to help him unless he had the support of the Americans. Only then would they be prepared to rise up. “It was then that I realized that the whole nation was ready for change, but people felt helpless,” Karzai told me.

On the march escaping the Taliban and with his satellite phone battery running low, he called the American embassy in Islamabad asking for help. U.S. officials there moved swiftly, asking him to light fires on the hills around his position for two consecutive nights. On the second night they called to say they had found him, and the next morning U.S. aircraft dropped canisters with weapons and food. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, from London, and I, from Lahore, would alternately speak with Karzai by phone. “The Americans are finally taking me seriously because for the moment there is nobody else resisting among the Pashtuns,” he shouted into his satellite phone after the airdrop. After the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, Karzai reported that “there is a tremendous weakening of morale amongst the Taliban, who are loosing their repressive grip on the countryside.” On November 8, Karzai and his men were surrounded by Taliban forces, who had been trailing them through Uruzghan province. Later, Karzai recalled, “The first Taliban unit surrounded us before dawn and we broke up into several groups to escape. Then a second Taliban unit, consisting of Arabs and Pakistanis, arrived and we fought them until ten thirty that night. Our units lost touch with each other because we had no walkie talkies. We were walking for eighteen hours a day for three days to escape the encirclement.”
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Later I heard that Mullah Omar was apoplectic with rage at Karzai’s escape. He issued a special decree ordering Karzai to be killed. Fearful that Karzai would be trapped, the CIA asked him to leave the region for a few days. Some U.S. officials insist that he was flown out to Quetta, although Pakistani officials and Karzai deny this. Karzai himself says he was flown to a deserted runway in southern Helmand. The flight took four hours, following a circuitous route, as it could not go over Taliban-controlled areas. Karzai spent four nights at the Helmand runway guarded by his men and U.S. Special Operations Forces. On the second night a shepherd appeared telling Karzai that Tarin Kot had fallen to his supporters. Karzai sent a motorbike rider to confirm this and waited for his return.

The next day, twenty Toyota pickup trucks loaded with Karzai’s men returned to the runway, waving flags, whooping, and shooting into the air as they saw their leader. Tarin Kot had indeed fallen, and the elders there were calling Karzai back. When he returned, on November 14, he was accompanied by a six-man CIA team, a twelve-man SOF team, and a three-man Joint Special Operations Command unit, code-named 574 and led by Capt. Jason Amerine. The Americans had decided to give an unprecedented commitment to Karzai as the only Pashtun fighting the Taliban and a potential leader of the country. A senior U.S. intelligence official now retired described to me how Karzai finally became acceptable to the Americans: “Karzai had it in his head that he could rally the Pashtuns. Nobody really believed him before 9/11. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad ignored him, and their reports back to D.C. were negative about him. Even after 9/11 he was not seen as the real guy, until he went inside without any support from us. It was only after we pulled him out from that first battle that we took him seriously. He was the only Pashtun fighting the Taliban and staying alive. After the CIA met up with him and reported back, George Tenet made a very quick decision that this is the guy we back—this is the guy who will lead a free Afghanistan.”
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By now the Pakistanis were deeply concerned that the Pashtun insurrection in the south was not under their control. Musharraf arrived at the UN in New York for his first-ever meeting with Bush, telling him to dissuade the Northern Alliance from taking Kabul and to let the ISI run the Pashtun insurrection. Musharraf showed abject contempt for the NA leaders, describing them to U.S. officials as “a bunch of thugs.” At their meeting, which took place a day after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, Bush pledged $1 billion in aid to Pakistan. Musharraf said this was not enough and instead asked for F-16 fighter aircraft for his air force. He said that only the delivery of F-16s would show that the United States was seriously committed to Pakistan. “It would be the most visible sign of your support, to blunt domestic criticism,” he reportedly told Bush. “We are not ready to talk about F-16s now, but this is a long friendship,” Bush replied. Musharraf asked, “How do we know the United States won’t abandon us again.” Bush replied, “You tell your people that the president looked you in the eye and told you that he would stick with you.”
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Musharraf asked Bush not to pressure him about democratization, or criticize what he would do politically. He received carte blanche from the Americans.

The fate of Kabul was also of major concern to Musharraf. After meeting with Bush, the two leaders stood in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel before reporters. “We will encourage our friends to head south, across the Shumali Plains, but not into the city of Kabul,” Bush said. He knew then that it was too late to stop the advance of the Northern Alliance. On the night of November 12, 2001, the Taliban began to loot Kabul, and by the next day they had abandoned the city, stealing more than eight hundred cars and taxis to escape south. One Taliban group had hit the city’s money exchange and another the state bank, emptying both. Now there was nothing to stop the victorious NA troops and hundreds of foreign reporters from walking into Kabul unhindered. The city celebrated with noise, music, dancing, and, for the men, the shaving off of beards.

Pakistan’s worst fears were realized when NA general Mohammed Fahim immediately moved six thousand soldiers into the city, ensuring total control. Musharraf put on a brave face, but Pakistani commentators were stunned, especially after Bush’s assurances. Pakistani newspapers called it “a strategic debacle” for the army and quoted ISI officials as saying “Pakistan’s worst nightmare has come true” with NA control of Kabul.
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The ISI told the Pakistani media that Bush had double-crossed them, that Fahim and other NA leaders were Indian agents, and that India now controlled Kabul.

However, the military victory was quickly giving way to chaos from region to region, as NA forces could not move south or east due to their lack of support in the Pashtun areas. Warlords and former Taliban commanders took control of the eastern provinces. Three separate militias claimed to be in control of Nangarhar, the key eastern province, where Osama bin Laden had fled.
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Between Kabul and Kandahar was a vast, chaotic no-man’s-land ruled by commanders, criminals, and former Taliban. The vacuum in the east might never have been created, however, if the Americans had earlier backed another Pashtun leader who had entered Afghanistan to fight the Taliban: Abdul Haq.

Charismatic, charming, and lionized by his followers, Abdul Haq was a legendary commander from the Afghan war against the Soviet Union with powerful tribal connections.
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He had been wounded sixteen times, including losing his right foot after stepping on a mine. We had been good friends since 1982, when to our mutual amusement I spent hours in his Peshawar office watching Western intelligence agents offer him plans and explosives to carry out another bombing of Soviet facilities in Kabul. The ISI labeled Haq a playboy because he refused to do their bidding.

In 1999 the Taliban had killed Haq’s wife and daughter in Peshawar, and he had moved to Dubai. Now he was back in Peshawar to persuade tribal elders to join him in a rebellion against the Taliban. Haq’s aim was to avoid the bloodshed that was sure to follow an American invasion. “I am meeting secretly with Taliban commanders and elders, telling them the only way to minimize the bloodshed is to join in a national resistance led by the king against the Taliban,” he told me in Peshawar. “Some Taliban are good people who can stay on in any future setup,” he added. Haq received no help from the ISI or the CIA, who considered him unruly and unwilling to be directed. He had requested a meeting with Musharraf, who had declined, even though Haq was trying to mobilize the moderate Taliban whom Musharraf claimed to support. The CIA station chief in Islamabad refused to help Haq for fear it would annoy the ISI.
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Colin Powell insisted that the CIA do nothing without consulting the ISI, in case Pakistan’s support flagged.
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Instead, Haq was supported by an American millionaire options trader from Chicago named Joseph J. Ritchie and his brother, James, who before 9/11 had lobbied the Bush administration to listen to Haq’s plans for an anti-Taliban revolt.
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Now they were in Peshawar supporting Haq’s venture. I warned Haq several times not to rush into Afghanistan, but he was convinced the Taliban were cracking. Ignoring all advice, an unarmed Haq, now age forty-three, entered Afghanistan on a white horse on October 21, 2001. Four days later, he and his group of nineteen men were surrounded in Logar province by Taliban forces.

Ritchie desperately contacted CENTCOM, which belatedly sent a Predator drone to fire a missile on the Taliban. But it was too little too late. Haq was captured and taken to Kabul, where he was tortured and then hanged, along with two companions, in the rubble of a house where earlier twenty-two Pakistani militants had been killed by a U.S. cruise missile.
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Haq’s murder was revenge for the killing of the Pakistanis. I heard the news of Haq’s death while giving a TV interview, and I burst into tears. I was inconsolable, feeling both extreme grief and enormous anger at the Taliban, who had killed a peacemaker. His death was the saddest of moments, and all over Afghanistan people were in mourning.

I attended Haq’s funeral in Peshawar. “I can cope with my son being killed—I have other sons who can take his place—but my brother was a national leader who was known across the country and he can never be replaced,” said Din Mohammed, Haq’s elder brother, whose twenty-two-year -old son, Izzatullah, was hanged alongside Haq. Many mourners openly blamed the ISI for Haq’s death, saying the ISI had betrayed his location to the Taliban. Pakistani officials denied the allegations. With the murder of Masud and now Haq, the Taliban were killing off every Afghan leader with a national standing. People feared that Hamid Karzai was next.

It slowly dawned on Washington that the ISI had no intention of splitting the Taliban, creating a moderate Taliban, or supporting Karzai. The ISI kept telling U.S. officials that Karzai had no support in the Pashtun belt. The CIA had relied too much on the ISI’s promises, but now that it had a potential Afghan leader in place it needed the ISI far less. To the Americans, the ISI appeared to be drifting, rejecting all options suggested by others but incapable of coming up with a strategy or options of its own.

Nevertheless, there was a massive Western diplomatic effort to keep Musharraf on side. One after another Western head of state and foreign minister visited Islamabad to bolster Musharraf and offer him debt write-offs and aid. Almost all European leaders, followed by Asian heads of state and a string of top U.S. officials—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Armitage—came through Islamabad in October and November. Tony Blair advised allies to appoint special envoys to Afghanistan to coordinate aid and diplomatic initiatives and keep Pakistan under pressure. Aid flowed to Pakistan from all quarters, especially from the United States. On September 23, 2001, Bush had waived all sanctions against Pakistan and asked Congress to reschedule repayment of $379 million in earlier loans and give a fresh loan of $597 million and a cash grant of $50 million. Similarly, Japan and the countries of the European Union rescheduled debt repayments and offered fresh loans and grants.

In return, Pakistan had granted the U.S.-led Coalition forces enormous facilities. Unknown to Pakistanis at the time, 1,100 U.S. forces were based in Pakistan for the duration of the war, including Combat Search and Rescue Units, U.S. Special Ops and CIA paramilitary teams, Red Horse squadrons (engineering teams that repaired airfields in the midst of war), and aircraft from the 101st Airborne Division. Pakistan agreed to a list of seventy-four basing and staging activities, such as overflight facilities, medical evacuation, refueling, and the setting up of communication relay sites for U.S. forces inside Afghanistan. Each agreement was premised with a note that the U.S. campaign would not involve the Indian military.
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CENTCOM planes flew 57,800 sorties out of Pakistani air bases. Karachi’s seaport and airport were handed over to the Coalition, while U.S. naval operations at Pasni, off the Makran coast, were described as “the largest amphibious operations in size, duration and depth that the US Marine Corps has conducted since the Korean war.”
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Thus, despite the lack of cooperation from the ISI, the quick collapse of the Taliban would have been impossible without the massive cooperation extended by the Pakistan army to the Coalition, which is why Powell resisted any criticism of Musharraf or the ISI.

Moreover, Musharraf had weathered the protests by Islamic groups, which petered out after Mazar fell. The mullahs failed to spread the protests to the largest province of Punjab or to the metropolitan business capital of Karachi. Instead, several government-sponsored rallies supporting Musharraf drew sizeable turnouts. The military had closed the border with Afghanistan, but it turned a blind eye to anyone wanting to fight for the Taliban. The army was unwilling to confront fired-up Pashtun tribesmen and it also wanted to show Washington the risks Musharraf was taking on behalf of the United States. Thousands of Pakistani tribesmen were killed or captured after Mazar fell. The main culprit in mobilizing tribesmen was the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, led by a charismatic, fiery orator, Maulana Sufi Mohammed, from the Malakand region of the North-West Frontier Province.
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