Descent Into Chaos (47 page)

The Taliban received another boost when the Iranian government unexpectedly allowed Gulbuddin Hikmetyar to leave his exile in Meshed. After secret talks with the ISI in Dubai, he arrived in Peshawar and went underground. Hikmetyar had been Pakistan’s most favored Mujahedin leader in the 1980s and was the ISI’s nominee to take power in Kabul in 1992, but Ahmad Shah Masud had beaten him to it. Hikmetyar then unleashed the civil war by bombarding Kabul, until the Taliban routed his militia in 1996 and he fled to Iran. Washington accused the Iranians of backing Hikmetyar, and in order to curry favor with the Americans the Iranians had simply let him go. The ISI let Hikmetyar set up a base in the sprawling Shamshatoo refugee camp outside Peshawar, where many of his former fighters lived. He became an ally of the Taliban and al Qaeda yet never fully merged with either movement.

During late 2002 the Taliban began to move weapons, ammunition, and food supplies into Afghanistan, adding to those stockpiles that they had stored away during their retreat. U.S. and Afghan forces began increasingly to unearth caches of new weapons. In November alone they uncovered 475 large and small weapons caches. In one cache, 2,100 brand-new AK-47 rifles were discovered along with 70,000 mortar shells and 43,000 rockets.
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Meanwhile, the Taliban were raising funds through Islamic networks in Pakistan and the Muslim world. Journalist Elizabeth Rubin described how “Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men, Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military and intelligence ranks” helped raise money for the Taliban.
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Hundreds of Arab and Central Asian fighters who were hiding out in FATA reenlisted with the Taliban.

Experienced Arab militants from al Qaeda set up training camps for the Pakistani and Kashmiri extremists who arrived from the cities to learn bomb making and other skills. Pakistan had withdrawn its troops from FATA to meet the threat from India, so al Qaeda and the Taliban were free to move around at will. Posters and pamphlets exhorting people to throw out U.S. forces began to appear regularly in Afghan villages. On September 5, 2002, Karzai was nearly assassinated in Kandahar, and a bomb exploded in Kabul city, killing fifteen people.

The Taliban began their military campaign in earnest in the spring of 2003 by launching guerrilla attacks in Helmand and Zabul provinces, where there was hardly any U.S. presence. The first major battle took place at the end of January 2003, when some eighty Taliban near Spin Baldak were surprised by a U.S. patrol. In the ensuing twelve-hour gun battle, in which B-1 bombers dropped twenty-one bombs, dozens of Taliban were killed. “It is without doubt the largest concentration of enemy forces that we’ve come across since Operation Anaconda,” said a surprised U.S. officer.
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In February there were rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. army fire bases in eastern Afghanistan and on the U.S. compound at Bagram. With the American invasion of Iraq imminent, the sudden escalation worried the Americans, and General Franks arrived in Islamabad to try to persuade the Pakistanis to do more to rein in the Taliban. The CIA arranged for Lt.-Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, the head of the ISI, to meet with his Afghan counterpart, Engineer Arif, in Rome in mid-February to try to iron out their differences, but there was little progress and increasing distrust.

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, bin Laden issued a taped message to his followers on what was expected of them in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We advise the importance of dragging the enemies’ forces to a long, exhausting and continuous battle,” he said. “The worst fear of the enemy is street and city fighting. . . . We stress the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy.”
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Hikmetyar also issued a message encouraging suicide bombings.
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As the U.S. attack on Iraq began on March 20, U.S. forces launched an offensive in Kandahar province to keep the Taliban off-balance. The Taliban swiftly retaliated by killing four Westerners.

On March 27, a two-jeep convoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross with Ricardo Munguia, thirty-nine, a Salvadorian hydraulics engineer, on board was held up by Taliban gunmen in Uruzgan province. The Taliban commander checked with his superior, believed to be Mullah Dadullah, on a satellite phone. “We have three Afghans, one foreigner. Do you want four bodies or one?” he asked Dadullah, according to a survivor.
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After receiving the reply, the Taliban executed Munguia and set fire to his body. Two days later two U.S. SOF soldiers inspecting a school near Gereskh, in Helmand province, were shot dead by Taliban gunmen mounted on motorbikes. On April 8 an Italian tourist was killed in Zabul province. The cold-blooded murder of the ICRC official had an enormous impact nationwide. Every Afghan knew that the ICRC had continued to provide medical care to Afghans during the Taliban regime when other Western NGOs had left. In killing an ICRC official the Taliban had delivered the uncompromising message that they had no compunctions about terrifying the local the population and Westerners.

Once again after the killings Zalmay Khalilzad traveled to Islamabad to try to encourage the Pakistanis to restrain the Taliban. “Success of Afghanistan’s new stability is in America’s interests and any effort that undermines that stability, that threatens it, is a challenge to America’s interests,” he warned. Pakistan rebuffed him and derided his comments as “totally ridiculous and baseless.”
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A few days later, on April 22, Karzai visited Islamabad to urge Musharraf to arrest Taliban leaders living in Quetta. He handed over a list of Taliban to Musharraf. When I met him, Karzai was very specific: “We have given the names of some top Taliban leaders for the Pakistani authorities to take action on,” he told me that same day. “Pakistan has to address this issue of extremism—the actions of these extremists if they continue will have implications in Pakistan.” The list included Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his senior commanders, Mullahs Dadullah, Usmani, and Barader—all believed to be living in Quetta. When I wrote up the story about the list, the military regime reacted strongly, denouncing Karzai and denying there was any such list. Washington declined to back Karzai publicly, even though the U.S. embassy in Kabul had helped draw up the list. The Americans were already deeply involved in Iraq and wanted no distractions such as a cat fight between the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Washington was unwilling to push the Pakistanis, and the Afghans were angry that the Americans had allowed Karzai’s credibility to suffer. The Afghans did not consider it in the context of Iraq but saw it as yet another example of Washington being willing to push Islamabad on capturing al Qaeda leaders but unwilling to do the same regarding the Taliban.

With Iraq on his mind, Rumsfeld was tone-deaf to the regrouping of the Taliban and to rising Afghan-Pakistani tensions. Just a week after the debacle of the Islamabad meeting, he arrived in Kabul to declare “the end of combat operations” against the enemy, even as a new war in Iraq was under way. His own commanders offered a totally different assessment. General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, the U.S. commander in Bagram, told me that al Qaeda and Hikmetyar were offering incentives of between five thousand and one hundred thousand dollars to kill or capture U.S. soldiers. “There are large numbers of Taliban coming back into southern Afghanistan from the Quetta region,” he said. “There are three groups of between twenty-five and one hundred Taliban operating in Helmand province facilitating the drugs trade.”
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In June, Mullah Omar constituted a ten-man Taliban leadership council, creating four new committees dealing with military, political, cultural, and economic affairs.
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The reorganization provided the impetus for more coordinated attacks on soft targets such as Afghan aid workers and officials. In the summer of 2003 one or two attacks by the Taliban occurred every other day. August proved to be the bloodiest month, with more than 220 Afghan soldiers and civilians killed. On a single day, August 13, 50 people were killed in multiple attacks in three provinces. The UN suspended travel for its officials in the south, and aid agencies fled Kandahar and Helmand. Whereas in April there were twenty-two Western NGOs working in Kandahar, by August that number had dropped to just seven.

Zabul province—the main entry point for Taliban based in Balochistan—became a major battleground as the insurgents tried to secure a base area where they could assemble troops and supplies. Securing Zabul province was essential for pacifying the area along the Kabul-Kandahar highway, which passed through the province and was about to be rebuilt by the United States. In early September, U.S. forces launched Operation Mountain Viper to clear out some five hundred Taliban led by Dadullah. For the first time the Taliban stood and fought for nine days. Despite heavy air and artillery bombardment that killed more than one hundred of them, by the winter of 2003 the Taliban controlled 80 percent of Zabul and remained popular; the pro-Taliban tribal and clerical network in the province had hardly been touched as a result of the war. Moreover, they were able to pour men, weapons, and money into the province from neighboring Balochistan.

The worsening security situation in the south delayed the political process set out at Bonn. The date for the Constitutional Loya Jirga, due to be held in October 2003, was pushed back to December, while the start of voter registration for the presidential elections was also delayed. Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) was also delayed, with the warlords saying it was too dangerous to disarm their militias. Karzai’s first attempt at offering the Taliban an amnesty to return home was derided by NA cabinet ministers, who said it would mean a surrender to the extremists.
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Increasingly pessimistic reports by UNAMA failed to move the international community to greater action. Brahimi warned the UN Security Council in December that “the international community must decide whether to increase its level of involvement in Afghanistan or risk failure.”
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In those critical days in the autumn of 2003, a few thousand more U.S. troops on the ground, more money for reconstruction, and a speedier rebuilding of the Afghan army and police could easily have turned the tide against the Taliban and enhanced the support of the population for the government. It was a moment when even a little could have gone a long way, but Washington’s preferred reaction to the Taliban resurgence was a blanket denial that anything was wrong. When Afghan leaders ruefully suggested that the war in Iraq might have diverted U.S. resources away from Afghanistan, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemed to be one remove away from reality in his answer: “I don’t think the war in Iraq has taken any of the resources away from the fight against international terrorism, especially al Qaeda. In fact I think the effort in Iraq has been very complementary. What we’re doing here in Afghanistan and what we’re doing in Iraq is in many cases the same thing.”
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Tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan intensified. Angry demonstrators broke into the Pakistan embassy in Kabul and ransacked it after reports of Pakistani troops intruding fifteen miles into Afghan territory along the border. Karzai quickly apologized and offered to pay for rebuilding the embassy, but Islamabad could now claim that it was being victimized by Kabul.
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Meanwhile, India’s successes in Afghanistan had stirred up a hornet’s nest in Islamabad, which soon came to believe that India was “taking over Afghanistan.” India had implemented a $500 million reconstruction strategy that was one of the best planned from any country. It was designed to win over every sector of Afghan society, give India a high profile with the Afghans, gain the maximum political advantage, and of course undercut Pakistani influence. Indian companies were directly favored and won major road-building contracts, including the contract for the road from Kandahar to the Pakistani border. When India reopened two consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad that had been shuttered since 1979, Pakistan accused the Indians of using them to undermine Pakistan by funding Pashtun, Baloch, and Sindhi dissidents.

There was no doubt that the Indians were buoyant at their successes and aggressively trying to take advantage of Pakistan’s lack of influence in Kabul. Excessive Indian arrogance provided the complaints that Musharraf used with Western leaders to explain away his reluctance to befriend Karzai. The ISI in turn generated enormous misinformation on India’s role, such as briefing Musharraf that forty-two Indian agents were based at its consulate in Kandahar or telling Pakistani journalists that there were not two but six Indian consulates along the border. “If Pakistan is worried about the role of India, let me assure you, I have been very specific in telling the Indians that they cannot use Afghan soil for acts of aggression against another country,” Karzai said.
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Musharraf preferred to believe that Karzai was lying. Meanwhile, Pakistan evolved no coherent reconstruction strategy for Afghanistan. There were no high-profile Pakistani-funded projects that Afghans could see, although Pakistan’s private sector traded massively with Kabul. Bilateral trade increased from $100.0 million in 2001 to $1.0 billion in 2004 and $1.6 billion in 2006.

In the summer of 2003, I made several trips through the border regions to see the extent of the Taliban resurgence through FATA, the NWFP, Balochistan, and southern Afghanistan. JUI leaders in both provinces made it clear that they openly supported the Taliban. Other religious figures openly supported al Qaeda. Javed Ibrahim Piracha, a member of parliament from Kohat, helped secure the release from jail of hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who had been arrested by the Pakistan authorities. He hired lawyers to challenge their arrests in court and claimed to have returned 350 Arab fighters and their families to their countries of origin, paying all their travel expenses.
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Piracha also set up the World Prisoners Relief Commission, which acted on behalf of extremists—all without any hindrance from the ISI or any questions about where his funds came from.