Ghost Wars (58 page)

The Taliban burst into Najibullah’s house on September 27 while his brother was visiting. Judging by the conditions of their bodies when they were strung up above a traffic circle hours later, the brothers died slowly and painfully under blows from fists, stones, and sticks. The former president of Afghanistan—whose career began in the torture chambers of the secret police and ended at roundtables with international diplomats—probably expired before the wire tied around his neck pulled him up the ten-foot gallows pole selected by the Taliban for its visible location in central Kabul. “We killed him because he was the murderer of our people,” Mullah Omar declared.
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The capital’s new laws were announced as edicts on Kabul Radio, quickly renamed the Voice of the Sharia, or Islamic law. Toothpaste should be abandoned in favor of the natural root favored by the Prophet, the radio announcers declared. Their lists of banned items and activities unfurled as a roll call of life’s small pleasures: marbles, cigarettes, dancing, music, singing, homing pigeons, kite-flying, television-watching. Businessmen and traders were warned that they should no longer wrap their goods in paper in case they inadvertently used pages from the Holy Koran. The Saudi-inspired Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announced a ban on both sorcery and American-style haircuts.

Taliban leaders ordered women to disappear. “All of those sisters who are working in government offices are hereby informed to stay at home until further notice,” the radio announced on the first day. Also: “Since
satar
[Islamic dress] is of great importance in Islam, all sisters are seriously asked . . . to cover their faces and the whole of their body when going out.” Eight thousand female undergraduate students at Kabul University lost their places at the school. A similar number of schoolteachers lost their jobs. Thousands of women who worked as civil servants in bloated government ministries, contributing meager but steady salaries to their extended families, were banned from their offices.
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Six weeks later the Taliban announced a numbered list of regulations that would be enforced by their religious police. Number one said that to prevent “sedition and uncovered females,” taxi drivers could not stop for any woman who did not wear a full Iranian-style
burqa.
Number twelve announced that all women found washing clothes in any river would be picked up by the religious police in a “respectful and Islamic manner” and returned to their homes, where their husbands would be severely punished. Number fifteen listed jail terms for tailors who took female body measurements or displayed fashion magazines.
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The State Department greeted these announcements with little protest. Its diplomats hoped to appease Kabul’s new rulers. “We wish to engage the new Taliban ‘interim government’ at an early stage,” declared a classified instructions cable sent from Washington to embassies abroad on September 28. In official meetings with the Taliban, American diplomats should strive to “demonstrate [American] willingness to deal with them as the new authorities in Kabul; seek information about their plans, programs, and policies; and express [U.S. government] views on areas of key concern to us—stability, human rights, narcotics, and terrorism.” Bin Laden ranked last on the cable’s more detailed list of issues for discussion. Washington’s confidential talking points suggested two very gentle questions for Taliban leaders. One was: “We welcomed your assurances that you were closing the terrorist and militant training camps formerly run by Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, or Arab groups. Can you tell us the current status of those camps?” The second: “Do you know the location of ex-Saudi financier and radical Islamist Osama bin Laden? We had heard previously that he was in the eastern provinces. His continued presence here would not, we believe, serve Afghanistan’s interests.” Taliban leaders telephoned American diplomats in Islamabad and said they had no idea where bin Laden was.
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Ambassador Tom Simons met at the shaded Islamabad embassy compound on November 8 with Mullah Ghaus, the Taliban’s acting foreign minister, who like Omar had only one eye. “I wish to say some things about America,” Simons announced, according to notes taken by an American diplomat at the meeting. “The Americans are the most religious people in the Western world. They have great respect for Islam, which is now the fastest growing religious community in America. There are, in fact, now more American Muslims than American Jews,” he added, as if this might assuage Taliban attitudes toward the United States. Yet Americans, Simons continued, “have learned that it is very difficult to discern the will of God. Their experience has taught them that it is dangerous for one group to try to impose its interpretation of the will of God on others, and especially dangerous to try to do so by force.” Ghaus listened politely. He said the Taliban hoped for peace—but they would never yield to their enemies, especially not to Massoud and his allies to the north. On December 6 Simons’ deputy relayed a letter to the Taliban from Secretary of State Warren Christopher offering engagement, but adding: “We wish to work with you to expel all terrorists and those who support terrorism” from Afghanistan. Robin Raphel handed the original to the man the Taliban hoped would agree to represent them at the United Nations: Hamid Karzai.
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Raphel outlined American policy to a closed meeting of the U.N. Security Council in New York. For the sake of peace, she argued, all nations should engage with the Taliban. “The Taliban control more than two-thirds of the country; they are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated their staying power,” Raphel said. “The real source of their success has been the willingness of many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with severe social restrictions.”

The Taliban were now a fact of international life, Raphel argued: “It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.”
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19

“We’re Keeping

These Stingers”

ISLAMABAD STATION CHIEF Gary Schroen’s secret flight into Kabul in September 1996 and his midnight discussion with Ahmed Shah Massoud about Stingers and bin Laden marked the rebirth of unilateral CIA engagements in Afghanistan after a four-year hiatus.
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The agency managed three secret programs that provided resources for Schroen and his Islamabad case officers. The National Security Council’s decision early in 1996 to fund and approve the Counterterrorist Center’s new “virtual” station to track Osama bin Laden meant there were now funds, analysts, and case officers dedicated to collecting intelligence on the Saudi and his operations. A walk-in defector from al Qaeda, Jamal al-Fadl, revealed to the bin Laden unit late in 1996 that they had been underestimating their target—bin Laden, the CIA now learned, had planned multiple terrorist operations and aspired to more. The virtual station needed help from Islamabad. Schroen’s group maintained the agency’s liaison with ISI, which had multiple connections to bin Laden’s world. Schroen had also opened a dialogue with Massoud. Cables flowed steadily between the bin Laden station in Virginia and the Islamabad station even after Massoud retreated from Kabul. In addition, from inside Langley headquarters the Counterterrorist Center maintained a full branch dedicated to finding Mir Amal Kasi, the fugitive Baluchi who had attacked CIA headquarters in 1993. The Kasi branch authorized funds for the Islamabad station to recruit paid unilateral agents—some of them Afghans—to look for Kasi. Most richly funded of all was the program Langley operated that had been the main impetus for Schroen’s clandestine September visit to Massoud in Kabul: Stinger missile recovery.
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By the time the Taliban took Kabul, an estimated 600 of the approximately 2,300 Stinger missiles distributed by the CIA during the anti-Soviet war remained missing. There was an active market for the missiles across Central Asia and the Middle East. The Iranians were buying as many as they could. CIA officers estimated very roughly that Tehran had acquired about 100 Stingers. Most of the remaining inventory was believed to be in Afghanistan. Some Afghan warlords correctly saw possession of a batch of Stingers as a better financial investment than many of the local paper currencies. Through its intermediaries the CIA offered to buy not just the warheads for hard cash but also the tubes from which they were fired. A secondary market grew up in Afghanistan for empty tubes. Con artists tried to imitate the missile’s design and sell fakes to middlemen. Prices for complete missiles soared from $70,000 to $150,000 as sellers hoarded their wares. The agency turned to allies across the Middle East for help. Prince Turki’s chief of staff, Ahmed Badeeb, flew as far as Somalia to pick up Stingers that had been smuggled into Africa. But much of the program was run out of the Islamabad station where the Stingers had first been distributed. Until 1996 the CIA maintained a B-200 Cessna twin-engine turboprop airplane in Islamabad dedicated to Stinger recovery. CIA pilots flew it around the region to pick up missiles. They were then stored in Islamabad until a larger transport plane could ferry them to the United States, where they were turned over to the U.S. Army for destruction. Occasionally, if CIA officers bought missiles in some place where transport was impossible, they would dig a pit and blow them up with plastic explosives, taking photographs to document their destruction.
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After the Taliban took Kabul, the CIA decided to make a direct offer to the militia’s leaders to buy back Stingers from them. The agency had been informed that Mullah Omar possessed fifty-three Stinger missiles that had been collected from various Pashtun warlords loyal to the Taliban. Early in 1997, Gary Schroen sought permission from headquarters to fly into Kandahar and make a cash buyback offer to senior Taliban mullahs. Langley agreed. With help from diplomats in the Islamabad embassy, Schroen contacted the Taliban
shura
in Kandahar. They sent back word that they would welcome an American delegation.
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At going rates a CIA repurchase of all the Taliban’s Stingers would provide the militia force with an instant cash infusion of between $5 million and $8 million, about double the amount later reported to have been provided to the Taliban by bin Laden to aid the conquest of Kabul. (At the time of Schroen’s request to travel to Kandahar, the United States had little evidence that bin Laden had connected with the Taliban.) While not a large amount by U.S. aid program standards, such a payment would still be a sizable infusion of unrestricted cash for a militia whose leaders daily announced new codes of medieval conduct. Yet a presidentially authorized covert action policy at the time encouraged the CIA to buy Stingers wherever they could be found.

It was unclear during the fall of 1996 whether the United States regarded the Taliban as friend or foe. In the weeks after the fall of Kabul, midlevel American officials issued a cacophony of statements—some skeptical, some apparently supportive—from which it was impossible to deduce a clear position. American diplomats in Islamabad told reporters that the Taliban could play a useful role in restoring a strong, central government to Afghanistan. The Taliban themselves, worried about rumors that they received support from the CIA and were a pro-American force, refused to receive a low-level State Department visitor to Kabul. “The U.S. does not support the Taliban, has not supported the Taliban, and will not support the Taliban,” the spurned envoy, Lee Coldren, announced in reply. Within days then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright denounced the Taliban decrees in Kabul as “impossible to justify or defend.” But just three weeks after that Robin Raphel outlined the Taliban’s claims to legitimacy before the U.N. Security Council and pleaded that they not be isolated. It was difficult to tell which of these State Department officials spoke for themselves and which spoke for the United States.
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Raphel’s call for engagement with the Taliban attracted support outside the Clinton administration, especially from Unocal. Marty Miller and his colleagues hoped the Taliban takeover of Kabul would speed their pipeline negotiations. Within weeks of the capital’s capture, Unocal formed a new financial partnership to build the pipeline, announced the creation of an advisory board made up of prestigious American experts on South and Central Asia, and opened a new office in the Taliban heartland, Kandahar. Marty Miller insisted publicly that Unocal remained “fanatically neutral” about Afghan politics, but it was clear that the Taliban’s military victory would be helpful in reducing the number of parties to the Unocal pipeline talks.
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Republican and congressional experts also declared that America should give the Taliban a chance. “It is time for the United States to reengage,” wrote Zalmay Khalilzad, one of the American government’s leading Afghan specialists, soon after the Taliban takeover of Kabul. “The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. It is closer to the Saudi model.”
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This remained a common prism of American thinking about Islamist political movements: Saudi Arabia was conservative, pious, and non-threatening, while Iran was active, violent, and revolutionary. As doctrinaire Sunni Muslims, the Taliban vehemently opposed Iran and its Shiite creed, and in that sense they were allied with American interests. Khalilzad was soon invited to join Unocal’s advisory board, along with Robert Oakley, the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

In this atmosphere of drift and desultory debate about the Taliban’s meaning, Gary Schroen and a team of embassy diplomats flew into Kandahar in February 1997, on a scheduled United Nations charter. They circled down to a vast mud-baked plain laced by eroded riverbeds. The American team rolled from the airport through a dry, flat, treeless expanse where sagebrush hopped and tumbled in the desert wind. Shadowed rock hills rose to the west. On the buckled highway to town they passed state-owned farming cooperatives, green orchards, and walled farming villages. Amid smoky bustle, horse carts, and scooters they entered Kandahar city through a painted arch called “Chicken Post,” protected by armed Taliban guards. Pedestrians crowded into the roadway—almost all of them tall, bearded Pashtun men in colorful turbans and loose, cool cotton robes. The city itself was a flat expanse of market stalls and mud-walled compounds. Mullah Omar’s modest house lay behind a wall on the Herat Bazaar Road in the center of town, near Kandahar’s university, which the Taliban had converted into a religious
madrassa.
In the city’s central square the militia occasionally staged mock executions of radios and televisions, bashing them to pieces and hanging them by their cords. Schroen and his colleagues bunked overnight in a United Nations guest house, a small enclave of foreigners, fluorescent lights, and canned Coca-Cola. They contacted the Taliban foreign ministry to arrange their appointment. Omar declined to see them since they were not Muslims, but they were granted an audience with the local governor and Omar’s chief aide, Mullah Wakil Ahmed.
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