Descent Into Chaos (22 page)

The Taliban were now cornered at two extreme ends of the country: in Kandahar, where Mullah Omar held out, and in the northeast corner in Kunduz, where the Taliban were joined by surviving Arab, Central Asian, and Pakistani fighters—some eight thousand in all. The Arabs insisted on fighting to the death. The Taliban wanted to surrender to U.S. forces rather than to the NA commanders, who had surrounded them on all sides. Dostum and his Uzbeks were to the west of the city, and Tajik generals Atta and Daud to the south. There was intense rivalry between these two factions, as they both wanted to capture any al Qaeda leader for whom the CIA had promised large cash rewards. Dostum held secret negotiations with Mullah Dadullah, a senior Taliban commander, and offered to give the Taliban free passage to Kandahar—as long as Dadullah handed over the Arabs.

The Taliban feared they would be killed if they surrendered to the Northern Alliance. Speaking to anyone they could on their wireless, the Taliban commanders offered to surrender to U.S. forces, the UN, or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). They even offered to surrender to Karzai—anyone but the Northern Alliance. Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the ICRC, who was visiting Islamabad, was pressed by Musharraf to save the surrounded Taliban, but in Kabul, Kellenberger was unable to get any guarantees for their safety. He went to Washington to talk to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
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CENTCOM declined to accept the Taliban members’ surrender, while the UN and other international organizations said they had no capacity to accept such large surrenders. The Pentagon wanted it both ways: declining any responsibility for surrendered Taliban but wanting to interrogate any high-level al Qaeda prisoners.
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Gen. Tommy Franks could easily have put the U.S. troops waiting in Uzbekistan on the ground in Kunduz to accept an orderly Taliban surrender. The absence of U.S. troops, I believe, led to the deaths of thousands of Taliban prisoners at the hands of the Northern Alliance and the escape of top Taliban and al Qaeda leaders—an escape that was to be repeated in Tora Bora a few weeks later, when Franks again refused to deploy U.S. troops. Until the end of November, when some U.S. troops were deployed to help capture Kandahar, Franks did not deploy any American soldiers. It was a major strategic mistake, and it had awful consequences: it had resulted in the leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda escaping.

For Pakistan, the stalemate in Kunduz was turning into a disaster as hundreds of ISI officers and soldiers from the Frontier Corps aiding the Taliban were trapped there. They had been ordered to quit Afghanistan after 9/11 and had two months to escape, but instead they had stayed on to fight alongside the Taliban. Musharraf telephoned Bush and asked for a huge favor—a U.S. bombing pause and the opening of an air corridor so that Pakistani aircraft could ferry his officers out of Kunduz. Bush and Vice President Cheney agreed, but the operation was top secret, with most cabinet members kept in the dark.

On November 15, 2001, NA commanders outside Kunduz reported that Pakistani aircraft were flying into the city at night to airlift the Pakistanis. “Last night two planes, perhaps Pakistani, landed at Kunduz airport and we think they evacuated Pakistanis and Arabs from there,” said NA spokesman Mohammed Habeel. By November 23
The New York Times
was reporting that as many as five Pakistani air force planes had landed in Kunduz.
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The Pakistanis certainly hinted strongly that something was on. Maj.-Gen. Rashid Qureshi, the army’s chief spokesman, said that Islamabad was engaged “in negotiations” with the U.S. Coalition for the safe evacuation of Pakistanis from Kunduz.
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The Pentagon denied that any such flights were being allowed. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “the [Kunduz] runway is not usable, I mean there are segments of it that are unusable.”
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Rumsfeld reiterated on December 2 that “neither Pakistan nor any other country flew any planes into Afghanistan to evacuate anybody.”
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In fact, neither man was telling the truth. A former U.S. intelligence analyst, another senior U.S. official, and two ambassadors in the region confirmed to me that the airlift had taken place. ICRC and UN officials who were on the ground in the north also confirmed the airlift. The American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote about the airlift, reported that “the Pakistanis were indeed flown to safety, in a series of nighttime airlifts that were approved by the Bush administration.”
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Hersh said that Taliban and al Qaeda leaders also escaped with them. Hamid Karzai told me that the airlift took place but that he never asked the Americans who escaped because “even the Americans did not know who got away.” One senior U.S. intelligence analyst told me, “The request was made by Musharraf to Bush, but Cheney took charge—a token of who was handling Musharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State, including Colin Powell, until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan needed to save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tarmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders, and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU and al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge. The frustrated U.S. SOF who watched it from the surrounding high ground dubbed it “Operation Evil Airlift.”

Another senior U.S. diplomat told me afterward, “Musharraf fooled us because after we gave approval, the ISI may have run a much bigger operation and got out more people. We just don’t know. At the time nobody wanted to hurt Musharraf, and his prestige with the army was at stake. The real question is why Musharraf did not get his men out before. Clearly the ISI was running its own war against the Americans and did not want to leave Afghanistan until the last moment.”
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In fact the CIA could have insisted that it monitor all those who got off the planes in Pakistan, but it made no such demand. When the Kunduz garrison finally surrendered to the Northern Alliance on November 24, large numbers of people were missing. Only 3,300 Taliban came out, compared to the 5,000 to 7,000 believed to be there, implying that a large number had been airlifted out or had escaped the city by bribing top commanders of the Northern Alliance.

The “Great Escape,” as one Pakistani retired army officer dubbed it, would have enormous implications on the subsequent U.S.-led war on terrorism. It is believed that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than made their escape later from Tora Bora. In both cases, the foreign terrorists were allowed to stay in South and North Waziristan, the wildest of Pakistan’s tribal areas. In both cases CENTCOM could easily have placed U.S. troops on the ground on the Afghan side of the border, but it refused to do so. The ISI was now confident that it could play a double game with the Bush administration, as the Bush team was amenable to taking on board Pakistani desires and concerns. After helping the ISI escape from Kunduz, Cheney took charge of all future dealings with Musharraf and the Pakistani army.

More mistakes were to follow. The Taliban who surrendered at Kunduz were taken to Qala Jangi, the Fort of War, Dostum’s massive fortress of mud-baked walls outside Mazar, which looked like the set for a Hollywood film on the French Foreign Legion. There they were interrogated by a handful of CIA personnel, who had them sit down in long rows in the huge courtyard. On November 26, Arabs who had not been disarmed properly staged a revolt. They killed their Uzbek guards and a CIA officer, Johnny “Mike” Spann, who became the first U.S. casualty of the war. ICRC officials working inside the compound clambered over the walls to escape. Dostum sent in 700 of his crack soldiers to quell the rebellion while U.S. aircraft dropped bombs into the courtyard. It took six days to subdue the rebellion in which 230 prisoners and 100 of Dostum’s best fighters were killed. One of the survivors of the uprising was John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, who had held out in the basement of the fort.

The several thousand surviving Taliban prisoners were packed into container lorries—stuffed in like sardines, 250 or more to a container—so that the prisoners’ knees were against their chests and there was no air to breathe save for holes punched through by machine-gun bullets. The prisoners were driven to a jail in Dostum’s home town of Shiberghan. Only a handful of people in each of the thirty containers survived the journey—in one container only 6 out of 220 survived, according to UN officials. The dead were taken out to the Dasht-e-Leili desert and buried in huge pits dug by a bulldozer. Dostum’s spokesmen insisted that only a handful of prisoners suffering from war wounds died. Despite the presence of U.S. SOF in the region, what occurred was the most outrageous and brutal human rights violation of the entire war.

Physicians for Human Rights later uncovered the extent of the atrocities by investigating the mass graves where the asphyxiated prisoners were buried, but the UN and the Afghan government declined to carry out any investigation against Dostum because the issue was too sensitive. Dostum was to be promoted to higher posts within the Karzai administration and was even allowed to stand for president in 2004. Uzbek eyewitnesses who had given testimony, such as the lorry drivers, mysteriously disappeared. Eyewitness accounts and video footage showed that U.S. Special Operations Forces were present in Kunduz, and the Pentagon was repeatedly asked why these U.S. soldiers did not try to stop the loading of the prisoners into the containers.
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CENTCOM refused to answer any questions. Physicians for Human Rights sent a copy of their report to Donald Rumsfeld and General Franks in February 2002, but they received no reply. It was not until the U.S. magazine
Newsweek
wrote a cover story about the atrocities in August 2002 that Karzai, Brahimi, and Franks expressed support for an investigation into the mass graves.
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Ironically the same A team 595, led by Capt. Mark Nutsch, which had led cavalry charges against the Taliban, was also at Kunduz. Nutsch’s name became public when he was later honored by the Kansas state legislature. CENTCOM said it found no evidence of U.S. SOF complicity in the prisoners’ deaths.

When Brahimi was questioned about the mass graves he said his responsibility lay with the living and not the dead, and he had neither the police nor the judicial system to pursue the investigation further.
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Brahimi subsequently told me that he did not regret those words, given the paucity of UN power. “I said what I said for those who wanted me to hang Dostum on the first pole. If we started doing that, where would we end up? My business was to talk to all the wrong people, the murderers and rapists and killers.”
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The massacres of the Taliban and civilian Pashtuns in the north during the war led to ugly pogroms against them in the months ahead by the victorious Tajik and Uzbek warlords. Within a few weeks Pashtun farmers were being forced to flee their villages by Dostum’s troops. Human Rights Watch reported that Uzbek and Tajik troops were raping women, kidnapping civilians, looting, and seizing the farms and houses of Pashtuns. More than half of the one million Pashtuns in the north fled south. When I visited a refugee camp for Pashtuns set up by the UN near Kandahar in March 2002, the horror stories the refugees told me were appalling. Meanwhile 3,600 Taliban and Pakistani prisoners were to stay incarcerated in Shiberghan until May 2004, living in terrible conditions. Many Pashtuns died of starvation, cold, and disease while in prison. The atrocities committed against the Pashtuns by the NA commanders, while the Americans remained silent, were to fuel Pashtun anger in the south and help revive the Taliban movement.

Kandahar was now left as the last Taliban redoubt. The ISI and the CIA recruited several former warlords from Quetta to invade Kandahar province from Pakistan. The main warlord was Gul Agha Sherzai, whose father had been prominent during the anti-Soviet jihad. Gul Agha was ousted by the Taliban in 1994 and since then had lived in Quetta under ISI protection. A huge, powerful man whose embrace sucks the breath out of your body, Sherzai is both jovial and cruel, with a penchant for a good fight. The CIA regularly loaded him with dollar bills, which he carried in the back of his jeep.

On November 25 the first U.S. Marines landed in Afghanistan, deployed from U.S. battleships off the coast of Pakistan. They established forward operating base Camp Rhino, sixty miles southwest of Kandahar, in order to trap fleeing Taliban. On December 5, Sherzai’s men, accompanied by a U.S. SOF A team, captured Kandahar airport, where al Qaeda had a major training center.

Karzai was still in Tarin Kot, from where he negotiated with Mullah Omar to abandon Kandahar. The Taliban made one last attempt to kill him. On November 18, one thousand Taliban in one hundred pickup trucks drove up the rough mountainous road from Kandahar toward Tarin Kot. On the last ridge before the town with a glorious view of the road snaking up away before them, they were hit by precision bombs from U.S. aircraft guided by U.S. SOF spotters. At least thirty vehicles were destroyed. The rest fled back to Kandahar. “We broke the back of the Taliban that day,” said Capt. Jason Amerine, who led the SOF group.
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The Taliban prolonged negotiations on the surrender of Kandahar so that Mullah Omar and the majority of fighters could escape. Omar drove out on a motorbike at night with a handful of bodyguards.

On November 27, at Bonn, all the Afghan factions gathered for the opening of the UN conference that would choose an interim government and a leader, who was now certain to be Karzai. In a tiny room with mud-baked walls in Tarin Kot, the CIA rigged communications equipment so that Karzai could address the opening of the Bonn conference, thereby cementing his nomination as leader. A few days later, on December 5, he was nearly killed when a U.S. SOF target spotter misread his global positioning device and gave coordinates to a B-52 to drop a two-thousand-pound bomb on the exact position where Karzai was standing. Three U.S. soldiers were killed, along with seven Afghans, and many people were wounded. Karzai’s face took the blast, but he suffered no major injuries; Captain Amerine was wounded. A moment later the BBC’s Lyse Doucet telephoned Karzai from Bonn to say that he had been chosen as the interim president of Afghanistan. Half an hour later the Taliban arrived to surrender Kandahar. Karzai was forty-three years old. His first feeling was not elation, but stress, over the tremendous responsibility on his shoulders. He said he thought of his father.