Descent Into Chaos (48 page)

In Quetta the JUI virtually handed over Pashtunabad, a large sprawling suburb, to the Afghan Taliban. Thousands of long-haired, kohl-eyed, black-turbaned Taliban roamed the streets. They forced or bought out the local residents and soon owned every home, shop, tea stall, and hotel in Pashtunabad. New madrassas were built to house a new young generation, who banned television, the taking of photographs, and the flying of kites, replicating Kandahar in the early 1990s. Local people, including the police and journalists, were too frightened to enter the suburb.

In the villages along the eighty-mile drive from Quetta to Chaman were more than fifty JUI-run madrassas, part of a well-organized cycle in which young militants were brought in for several weeks of religious training before being sent to the front line by Taliban recruiters, who often arrived with ISI officers. In the summer months—the fighting season inside Afghanistan—the madrassas provided accommodation to a majority of Afghan Pashtuns, while in the winter, Pakistani Pashtun students returned. Every month all the heads of the JUI madrassas met in Quetta with a senior ISI officer to work out their rotation of young men and their expenses.

The Taliban leaders treated Quetta as their new capital. Taliban spokesmen pretending to be in Afghanistan briefed Pakistani journalists on local mobile phones and threatened them if their newspapers did not carry Taliban propaganda. Mullah Dadullah’s extended family—some seventy people—lived openly in Kuchlak, a village just outside Quetta. In September 2003 he celebrated a family wedding in lavish style, inviting leading members of the Balochistan government, JUI leaders, and military officers. Quetta became the center for Taliban logistics. Vehicle dealers in Quetta told me that over the summer the Taliban had bought nine hundred motorbikes, which now became their favored mode of battle transport. For improved communication they imported hundreds of Thuraya satellite phones from the Arabian Gulf (Thurayas bought in Pakistan were monitored by the CIA) and long-range walkie-talkies. Arms and ammunition, bought locally or imported from the Gulf states, were trucked up to Quetta and dumped just inside the Afghan border.

In a dusty lane in Chaman, I met the family of a young Pakistani Pashtun who had been killed fighting with the Taliban. In early June a fierce battle had taken place near Spin Baldak in which forty Taliban and seven government troops were killed after Taliban were discovered to be lying in ambush along the main road. Twenty-two of the Taliban dead were Pakistani Pashtuns, including Nazar Mohammed, seventeen, and his cousin Fida Mohammed, fifteen, who had been recruited from a JUI madrassa in Chaman. When the Afghan authorities tried to hand over their bodies, Pakistani officials in Chaman refused to accept them—even though the boys’ families were there to claim the corpses. The corpses lay on the border crossing for several days while hundreds of family members held demonstrations against the army. Qadir Malizai, the father of Nazar, told me that a military officer had come to his home and told him not to hold remembrance prayers for his son or mourn publicly and not to speak to the media. He was never able to bury his son and he blamed the military for allowing the Taliban to brainwash the boy.

I had made the same journey through Balochistan and southern Afghanistan in the winter of 1994, when the Taliban had first arrived in Kandahar. What I now witnessed was history repeating itself in a worse way than before. In Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Karzai, echoed my worst fears: “The Taliban are gathering in the same places from where they started; it’s like the rerun of an old movie,” he said sadly.
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Governor Yousuf Pashtun listed the Taliban training camps in Balochistan: in Dalbadin, Chagai, Qila Saifullah, Kuchlak, Loralai, and two camps just a few miles from Quetta. “Do the Americans want to destabilize Afghanistan at the cost of keeping quiet about Pakistan’s support to the Taliban?” he asked. Afghans in Kandahar believed that the Bush administration’s silence on the role of the ISI was a larger conspiracy in which the United States would soon hand over Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt to the Pakistanis. Such conspiracy theories were far-fetched, but they had a lot of traction among Afghans.

What struck me was how little the Taliban had learned from their previous mistakes. Surely the second time around the Taliban would offer a more politicized agenda, either by exploiting Pashtun nationalism or offering a program to attract the people. Instead they had nothing new on offer—no program, no vision, and no political agenda. What they did offer was to drive out the foreigners, but it took several more years of abject failure by the United States and the Afghan government to reconstruct the country before that appeal took hold. Moreover, commanders such as Dadullah followed al Qaeda’s terror tactics and burned down schools and clinics, killing and mutilating aid workers. Never before had the Taliban terrorized their fellow Pashtuns in such a way.

In the summer of 2003 there was still no support for the Taliban among Afghan farmers and townspeople. The Pashtun tribes had reestablished their political identity in two Loya Jirgas, interethnic harmony had improved, Karzai was standing up to the non-Pashtun NA warlords, and a window of opportunity remained to rebuild the country. Yet systematically, as the insurgency took hold, and with insufficient funds for reconstruction and no international troops to provide security, the southern provinces were ignored.

After I published a cover story about the Taliban revival being directed from Pakistan, the military regime was furious and accused me of lying.
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Two weeks later the government flew Islamabad-based Western ambassadors to Chaman, where army bulldozers were throwing up a huge sand ramp in the desert along the Afghan border to demonstrate that it was being sealed off. None of the ambassadors bought this hopeless and futile gesture.

With presidential elections due in the United States and Afghanistan by the end of 2004, Rumsfeld and his generals insisted there was no insurgency. Yet behind-the-scenes policy changes were being made and there was a massive stepped-up effort to capture bin Laden. In the summer of 2004, Lt.-Gen. David Barno, the new head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, introduced new counterinsurgency tactics involving small groups of U.S. soldiers living in villages to win hearts and minds and collect better intelligence. Task Force 121, the top-secret military unit that had caught Saddam Hussein, was moved to Afghanistan. The Pentagon redeployed from Iraq its top-secret reconnaissance aircraft, the E-8 Joint STARS (Surveillance Target Attack Radar System), which could track targets on the ground in any type of weather, and the RC-135 Rivet Joint, a long-range, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. U2 spyplanes and satellites were already involved in the hunt. For two years now, from the spring of 2002 until the summer of 2004, the United States had ignored Afghanistan, depriving U.S. forces of the technical surveillance needed to catch bin Laden because everything had been shifted to Iraq. Those two years represented a huge gap in U.S. intelligence gathering and efforts to win the trust of the tribesmen along the border.

Al Qaeda put itself back on the world’s agenda in the March 11, 2004, bombings at a railway station in Madrid that killed 192 people and wounded more than 1,600, the most devastating terrorist attack in Europe since World War II. Al Qaeda Web sites had urged Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq and restore “al-Andalus” (southern Spain) to Muslim control. In the aftermath of the bombing, Spain’s Socialist Party won an unexpected victory at the polls. It was a chilling moment because suddenly al Qaeda seemed to have the ability to change governments and dictate political goals in Europe.
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With the war in Iraq and terrorist attacks, Afghanistan remained off the international radar. Afghanistan’s southern provinces were still unmapped and off the intelligence-gathering beat for U.S. forces, even though the Taliban had accelerated their attacks there. Nobody was looking for Mullah Omar. In June the Taliban assassinated two dozen Afghan officials and killed fourteen foreigners, including French doctors and Chinese construction workers. Twice the number of U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2004 than had been killed throughout 2003.
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Villagers reported how the Taliban were sleeping in mosques during the day and coming out at night to persuade, bribe, or terrorize farmers into helping them kill U.S. troops. Not only Zabul but also more than 50 percent of four southern provinces were deemed to be in Taliban hands.

After four U.S. SOF troops were killed in Zabul on May 29—the single biggest loss for U.S. forces since 9/11—American soldiers fought a large force of five hundred to eight hundred Taliban led by Mullah Dadullah. Once again the Taliban stood and fought, and then made good their escape back to Pakistan. The extent of the Taliban’s reorganization was evident with the capture in July of a minor Taliban commander, Mullah Sakhi Dad Mujahid. He had with him a satellite phone, telephone numbers including that of Mullah Omar, and a notebook of expenses showing that he had distributed $1.8 million in June for salaries and the purchase of supplies. An attempt to call Omar failed, but the number was for a Pakistani mobile phone.
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As the Afghan elections approached, the UN tried to persuade the Pakistanis to restrain the Taliban. In April the French diplomat Jean Arnault, who had replaced Brahimi as head of UNAMA, shared with Pakistani officials a dossier of hundreds of Taliban commanders who were regularly crossing into Pakistan, but Islamabad denied everything. On a visit to Washington in mid-June, Karzai again complained to Bush about Musharraf’s refusal to clamp down on the Taliban. However, the Americans were more concerned with the crisis generated by Dr. A. Q. Khan involving the sale of nuclear technology to several countries. The administration decided it could not pressure Islamabad on the Taliban issue while it was trying to extract information about Khan. There was slow realization in Washington of the double game Musharraf was playing with the Americans. Paul Wolfowitz told me, “One of the ways they [Pakistan] slice it is to cooperate regarding al Qaeda. . . . Some of them say that we have to hedge our bets with the Taliban because we don’t know about the future of Afghanistan. We have a government [Pakistan] which can’t deliver everything we would like to see and . . . we don’t have the ability to simply say, If you don’t do it, we’ll cut off our whole relationship with you and let you go under.”
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The United States remained complacent about the Taliban as long as Pakistan continued to appear to chase al Qaeda. “The Taliban were always considered a lower priority by the United States,” said a senior CIA official. “They had been defeated and only needed cleaning up, which was considered to be Pakistan’s job. Al Qaeda was the main priority for the U.S.”
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The CIA said that 70 percent of the al Qaeda leadership had been captured or killed since 9/11, while ignoring the fact that al Qaeda replaced every captured individual with someone new. “To take the two-thirds number as a yardstick is a fantasy—to say that they have only one third of their leadership left is a misunderstanding,” explained Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit. Islamabad invariably declared every captured al Qaeda leader as the “number three” man in the movement, confusing the public even further. Over the years dozens of “number three” figures were captured or killed.
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In the midst of the Taliban summer offensive, the Afghan government also had to contend with fighting between warlords in the west and the north. Yet in August 2004 Wolfowitz asked Congress to authorize $500 million “for training and equipping local security forces—not just armies— to counter terrorism and insurgencies.”
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The Pentagon wanted to hire warlords in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia to combat al Qaeda because it considered that its warlord strategy had worked so well in Afghanistan. It was an insult to the Afghans who had suffered so much under the warlords. In 2006, Somali warlords supported by the CIA were defeated and driven out of Mogadishu by radical Islamists who then established a Taliban-like regime. It took another CIA-backed invasion—this time by Ethiopian troops—to dislodge the Islamists.

Afghanistan’s first presidential elections were fast approaching. There was an intense debate in Kabul among the international community and the Afghan government about whether to hold the presidential and parliamentary elections together, as had been promised at Bonn, or separately. The Americans desperately wanted presidential elections to take place before the U.S. elections in November 2004 and were happy to see parliamentary elections delayed. European governments were divided, although several wanted to hold the elections together, to keep the momentum of the Bonn process going. Almost all NGOs and experts advised delaying both elections until the security situation improved, reforms were implemented, and DDR completed, so that Afghans could see tangible benefits. A report called “The Great Gamble,” by a Western-Afghan think tank in Kabul, warned that premature elections “could do more to promote instability and conflict rather than lasting peace.” One third of the country was unsafe for holding elections, and warlords posed a threat to free voting.
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The cost of the elections would be better spent on improving state capacity, while holding them early would divert the international community’s attention from reconstruction.

The diametrically opposed intellectual perspective on the value of elections was the European and UN approach, which asserted that a post-conflict country should be readied for elections slowly. The Americans wanted elections in a hurry, so they could show that the job had been done and move out. “Elections should come at the end of the stabilization process and not at the beginning like the Americans want them,” said Lakhdar Brahimi.
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Karzai wanted both elections on time. “I do not want to be like Rabbani and hang on to power without legitimacy,” he told me. In 1992, Birhanuddin Rabbani had hung on to his presidency for four years, when the presidency was supposed to rotate among the Mujahedin leaders every six months.
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However, Karzai’s office was slow and disorganized in issuing the decrees needed to hold both elections. UNAMA drew up an electoral law to allow for the existence of political parties, but it took eight months for Karzai to sign the decree. The government also failed to resolve disputed district and provincial boundaries in time. Despite all the Western funds spent on improving the president’s office, Karzai was becoming more disorganized and unfocused.