The 9/11 Wars (99 page)

  
15
.
Figures from the World Bank, data bank, accessed January 2011. Unicef lists the literacy rate for 2003–8 at 28 per cent.

  
16
.
A controversial veteran of the movement’s campaigns across Afghanistan over the previous six years, Dadaullah’s excessive violence had already led to his being removed twice from command. Born in a small village in the central province of Oruzgan in 1966, he had grown up in a Pakistani refugee camp, returning to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets during the 1980s before returning in the early 1990s to join the Taliban. On Dadaullah, see Jason Burke, ‘Hunt for the Taliban trio intent on destruction’,
Observer
, July 9, 2006; Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, ‘In the footsteps of Zarqawi’,
Newsweek
, July 3, 2006.

  
17
.
Author interviews in Bamiyan, March 2002, Kabul 2009. Human Rights Watch, ‘Afghanistan: Ethnically-Motivated Abuses Against Civilians’,
Human Rights Watch Backgrounder
, October 2001. Human Rights Watch Annual Report,
Massacres of Hazaras in Afghanistan
, February 1, 2001. Interviews with United Nations specialist, Kabul, 2009. See also Rory Stewart,
The Places in Between
, Picador, 2005, pp. 247, 263, 299 and 302. Author interview with Stewart, Kabul, March 2009. Stewart also gives a colourful account of the shifting allegiances of various commanders. Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, Allen Lane, 2008, p. 299.

  
18
.
Author interviews with senior former Taliban ministers, Kabul, March, 2009.

  
19
.
Author interview with Dr Said Omara Khan Masoudi, National Museum director, Kabul, March, 2009. Those against destroying the Buddhas included the education minister, Arsala Rahmani, the foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, and the culture minister, Qadrutullah Jamal.

  
20
.
Men like Mullah Mohammed Hassan Akhund, the governor of Kandahar and one of the most conservative of the Taliban leaders, and the deputy minister of culture, Mullah Nuruddin Turabi.

  
21
.
See United Nations Development Programme,
Afghanistan Annual Opium Poppy Survey
, 2001, p. ii for statistics.

  
22
.
Author interviews with Rahimullah Yusufzai, BBC, and Ekram Shinwari, VOA (Voice of America), both of whom had met Omar, Kabul and Peshawar, 1999–2001.

  
23
.
See US Embassy Islamabad cable, ‘Afghanistan: The Taliban’s decision-making process and leadership structure’, December 31, 1998, confidential, 15 pp., declassified 2009.

  
24
.
The last person to bring out the cloak was King Ahmed Shah Durrani in 1768. See Jos L. Gommans,
The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c.1710–1780
, Brill, 1995, pp. 65–6.

  
25
.
Many communities had been alienated by enforced conscription, by bans on popular local customs and by being progressively shut out of decision-making processes. There was armed resistance in the east of Afghanistan against forced conscription in 1999, for example, and small incidents, such as attempts by local Taliban to ban traditional pastimes such as ‘egg fights’, could spark violence. The Noorzai tribe in the south near Kandahar were only barely kept from outright mass revolt.

  
26
.
Author interviews with Wakil Ahmed Muttawakel and Arsala Rahmani, Kabul, March 2009. See also Ron Gutman,
How We Missed the Story
, United States Institute of Peace Press, 2008, pp. 235–9; and Peter Bergen,
The Osama Bin Laden I Know
, Simon and Schuster, 2006, p. 248. Author interview with Vahid Mojdeh, Kabul, August 2008.

  
27
.
Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum’,
The Art Bulletin
, December 2002.

  
28
.
See above and State Department memo, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Karl F. Inderfurth to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, ‘Taliban under pressure’, May 1, 2000, confidential, declassified 2009.

  
29
.
A good example of the legends created deliberately by Abdul Rahman can be found in the probably fictional or at least exaggerated account of his personal impromptu decapitation of an elderly Herati cleric who had legitimized a rebellion with a
fatwa
, Barfield,
Afghanistan
, p. 146.

  
30
.
Gutman,
How We Missed the Story
, pp. 238–40.

  
31
.
Author interview with a retired Pakistani military officer present at meeting between Omar and Mahsud Ahmed, ISI chief in Kandahar, Rawalpindi, November 2008. Gutman,
How We Missed the Story
, p. 239. ‘Lost Chance’,
Time
, August 12, 2002. Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars
, Penguin, 2005, pp. 554–5.

  
32
.
Multiple author interviews with senior Taliban ministers, officials, Kabul, Kandahar, 1998–2000. See Jason Burke,
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
, Penguin, 2004, pp. 116–35, 193–4. Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, ‘Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos’,
Wall Street Journal
, December 31, 2001. A Defense Intelligence Agency cable of October 2, 2001 predicted ‘eventually the Taliban and al-Qaeda will wage war with one another … Al-Qaeda has not integrated with Afghans in the Taliban.’

  
33
.
Author interviews with Mullah Nabi Mohammedi, Kabul 1998, numerous senior Taliban officials, Kabul, Kandahar 1999.

  
34
.
Militants from the international groups were warned against any contact with the Afghans. See the testimony of Abdurahman Khadr, broadcast in the PBS Frontline programme
Son of al Qaeda
, April 22, 2004, who said he had been punished for speaking to the Afghans while in a training camp. A copy of al-Qaeda guesthouse regulations included the prohibition on talking to the Afghans who did the cooking and cleaning. Author collection.

  
35
.
Excepting those who had participated in a delegation which had travelled to Sugarland, Texas, for consultations with UNOCAL, an American company interested in building a 1,300 km gas pipeline across Afghanistan. See ‘Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline’, BBC News Online, December 4, 1997. The relative lack of animosity among the Taliban towards the United States was implicitly recognized by a volunteer in one Afghan training camp who asked bin Laden in 2000: ‘Has al-Qa’eda under your command pledged [an oath] to the Islamic Imarah in Afghanistan? If so, how do you call for fighting the United States knowing that the Taliban did not hear of it for reasons concerning the security and stability of Afghanistan? We pray to God that He saves the Taliban.’ Harmony documents, Harmony Program, West Point, Combating-Terrorism Center, document ID: AFGP-2002-801138.

  
36
.
There are many other differences. Wahhabis belong to the Hanbali madhab, one of the most rigorous of the four schools of Sunni Islam, for example, whereas the Deobandis are part of the Hanafi madhab, an entirely different school of Islamic theology. Letters found by the author in Khaldan Camp, November 2001, revealed further animosity between Afghans and their foreign ‘guests’. See also Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 169–71. Bergen,
The Osama Bin Laden I Know
, p. 179. Harmony Documents, document ID: AFGP-2002-602181.

  
37
.
The recognition quote is from Abdul Salaam Zaeef, author interview, Islamabad, 2000.

  
38
.
Another factor was the Taliban refusal of Pakistani demands to hand over sectarian militants responsible for widespread violence in Pakistan itself who had sought sanctuary across the border.

  
39
.
Author interview with Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s then ambassador to Washington, March 2009. ‘The realization that Pakistan’s identification with the Taliban regime was increasingly becoming a diplomatic liability was there in the establishment and not just the civilian part,’ Lodhi said. See also Coll,
Ghost Wars
, p. 547. Jason Burke, David Rohde, Tim Judah, Paul Harris and Paul Beaver, ‘Al-Qaeda’s trail of terror’,
Observer
, November 18, 2001.

  
40
.
See Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, p. 186; Coll,
Ghost Wars
, pp. 400–402.

  
41
.
Michael Keating, ‘Dilemmas of Humanitarian Assistance in Afghanistan’, in Bill Maley, ed.,
Fundamentalism Reborn?
, New York University Press, 1998, p. 136. In the 1980s UN agencies had cooperated with Afghan Communist government programmes for the education of women and a variety of other empowerment projects focused on urban Afghan women. Pankaj Mishra,
Temptations of the West
, Picador, 2006, p. 365.

  
42
.
Author interview with Francesc Vendrell, London, February 2009, with Daniel Roggio, UN political adviser, Kabul, March 2009. Pamela Constable, ‘Annan appeals to Taliban to spare Buddha statues’,
Washington Post
, March 12, 2001. Vendrell himself had met Mullah Omar a year previously.

  
43
.
Gutman,
How We Missed the Story
, p. 239. Author interviews in Kabul, March 2009.

  
44
.
The cameraman concerned, Tayseer Ayouni of al-Jazeera, claimed in an interview in 2004 that he had filmed secretly. However, given his astonishing images of the destruction and its aftermath, this seems highly unlikely. Author interview with a Taliban official, Islamabad, 2001.

  
45
.
Author interviews with locals, officials in Bamiyan, March, 2002.

  
46
.
A school of religious thought and practice, rather than a specific group or strand, Salafism is, in literal terms, the emulation of the
salaf
, or the first three generations of Muslims. (Some say the first four generations should be included.) These, followers say, were the only believers to have truly lived according to Allah’s instructions to man as communicated via the Prophet Mohammed. Since those early days, the understanding of Allah’s message and thus Islamic religious practice and with it social practices too have become corrupted by innovation,
bid’ah
, by the return of the polytheism that pre-dated Islam,
shirq
, and by foreign influences. Only a return, through a rigorous implementation of a literalist and ultra-conservative reading of the Koran, to earlier practices can ensure the return of the just society of the time of the Prophet across the
ummah
, the global community of Muslims. At the centre of Salafism is the concept of
tawhid
, or the unity or oneness of God.
    Such views have proved attractive at regular intervals over the centuries. Ibn Tammiya, a key Salafi scholar and a major influence on modern ideologues including bin Laden and others among the al-Qaeda leadership, was writing in the thirteenth century after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, an event he blamed on the corruption and lassitude of the ruling Muslim dynasty and their subjects. In the nineteenth century, as Muslim societies and states came off worst in their one-sided battle with an expansionist West, new thinkers resurrected the idea of an Islamic renaissance based on a return to basics. With Salafis divided over how best to respond to the challenge posed by the technological, military and apparent cultural superiority of the invaders, various strands of thought emerged. Some called for a total rejection of all Western innovation and a harsh puritanism, others for its appropriation, a position which evolved towards the political ideology of Islamism, which calls for the appropriation of the modern state apparatus rather than its replacement by a model based on that believed to have been current in seventh-century Arabia and inevitably implies the formation of parties rather than a rigorous adherence to an individual relationship with God. Some thinkers justified violence, others called simply for spiritual renewal. From the Maghreb to the Far East, Salafi movements took hold, perhaps most spectacularly in Saudi Arabia, where Salafi clerics became an integral part of the new state of Saudi Arabia, and in Afghanistan, where the Taliban fused a mythic conception of Pashtun tribal culture with Salafi ideas to produce a revolutionary and potent new local strand.