Taliban (14 page)

‘For two or three years,’ Osman remarked, ‘I didn’t drink any tea at all.’

Just as much care had to be taken with one’s dress. Afghans all look much the same to Westerners in their ubiquitous uniform of waistcoat and shalwar qamiz. In Kandahar, the shape of a collar or the embroidery on a placket could be highly political; a square-cut rather than a tail-cut hem on a shalwar qamiz was specifically associated with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The inner circle of mullahs were ‘companions’ in name only, for
there was real political power to be derived from proximity to Omar. Although every edict issued from Kandahar had in theory to be signed by the Amir, Osman soon discovered that this was not always the case. Even at its most senior level, the regime’s command and control procedure was worryingly slack.

‘Every order for Kabul had to pass through the Special Office. They were drafted and sent to the Amir for signature; I was instructed to go each day at a certain time to collect them from a small, locked cupboard in the porch of the mosque next to the Amir’s house. I compared the “Mullah Omar” signature on several of these decrees and found there were at least four different ones.’

Who held the key to the cupboard? Was there more than one copy of it? For Osman, the different signatures explained a good deal about the inconsistency of some of the Amir’s decisions in those years.

One of the most puzzling, both to Afghans and to the rest of the world, was his apparent approval of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Recessed into sandstone cliffs 8,000 feet up in the mountains of central Afghanistan, the two Buddhas had been built in the late Kushan era in the early fourth century. The taller of the pair towered 165 feet above the Hazara town of Bamiyan, a staging post on the Silk Route for almost 2,000 years. The statues were one of the wonders of ancient times, and until their destruction were considered the most remarkable representations of the Buddha anywhere in the world.

I visited Bamiyan in 1998, soon before the Taliban’s second Hazarajat campaign, and took the narrow staircase carved into the cliff to emerge at last on to the head of the taller Buddha. There was an astounding view over the town to the fields and plains beyond, a giant dusty bowl tightly encircled by the jagged white
teeth of the Hindu Kush. The Buddhas had once been painted red, blue and gold, and the recess walls and the dozens of monks’ caves along the cliff were covered with rich frescoes. Traces of these could be seen as late as the 1970s. They depicted the Sun God in a golden chariot being pulled by snow-white horses through a dark blue sky, and maroon-robed monks conversing in flower-filled fields.
¹⁶

The Buddhas had been badly treated during the Jihad years. Hezb-i-Wahdat’s Hazaras had used the main recesses as an ammunition dump, and the surrounding caves to house families of refugees. In September 1998, Taliban fighters blew off the face of the smaller Buddha with dynamite, and fired rockets at his groin. Conservationist bodies including UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, begged Omar to issue a decree preserving what remained. In July 1999 he did so. Although the Taliban considered idolatry
haram
, he sensibly argued that because there were no longer any Buddhists in Afghanistan, there was no possibility of anyone worshipping these idols. He added: ‘The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors. The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but protected.’

The Buddhas were destroyed nevertheless, using dynamite, antiaircraft guns and artillery over several weeks starting in March 2001. It was the most potent symbol of a country in self-destruct mode: the equivalent, perhaps, of Egypt demolishing the pyramids, and an important measure of how far out of control the Taliban revolution had run. An Afghan refugee friend in London wept in despair when he heard the news. ‘These people,’ he said. ‘Do they intend to destroy everything?’

Various spokesmen scrambled to justify the move in the eyes of an outraged world. According to one explanation, the ‘Head Council of Scholars’ had decided to teach the West a lesson in moral priorities, following a meeting with a single Swedish monuments expert who proposed to restore the statues’ heads. Afghanistan was in the grip of a five-year drought, and the scholars were enraged when the Swede rejected their suggestion that the money he wanted to spend on repairing some old stone statues would be better spent on food aid for starving children. They had a point, perhaps. By the end of that year, the World Food Programme country director Khaled Mansur was reporting ‘pre-famine’ conditions in some areas, where people were surviving by eating animal fodder and grass.
¹⁷

Whatever the reason for the leadership’s decision, even some senior Taliban were appalled.

‘I was outraged when I heard about it,’ said Jalaluddin Shinwari, the Taliban’s Minister of Justice at the time. ‘There was no justification for destroying them.’

Shinwari argued that Omar’s head had been turned by a group of ‘infiltrators’ who were ‘influenced by al-Qaida and extremist mullahs working for the ISI – people who wanted to damage the Taliban’s reputation in order to isolate them internationally, to weaken them and to make them more dependent on Pakistan’.

This was a common suspicion in Afghanistan. A susceptibility to ‘infiltration’ was a kind of Pashtun national characteristic, a recurring tragic theme in their history. The poet Ghani Khan described how the British exploited it in the nineteenth century to implement their policy of divide and rule: ‘The Political Service supplied the tribes with divine-looking priests, who put on the uniform of Allah’s servants to serve the devil. They perverted the tribesmen’s
intense devotion to God into an intense hatred of his brother. They used his childish faith and honesty in the service of deceit and corruption. The British succeeded beautifully. The Pashtuns were too busy cutting one another’s throats to think of anything else. There was blood and darkness everywhere. The Empire was safe and the Pashtun damned.’

There were indeed people throughout the Taliban who were not true believers. Many ‘mullahs’ were in fact nothing of the sort but had simply adopted the honorific for a variety of reasons. Some were politically ambitious. Some acted out of prudence and the instinct to survive. Some were opportunists with private scores to settle, and some, no doubt, were on the payroll of the ISI. ‘Mullah’ Khalil Ahmed Hassani was an accountant before he joined the Taliban, and had received no religious education of any kind. As he explained to the journalist Christina Lamb, he was assigned to the movement’s secret police and ended up as one of their torturers.

‘Once, in Kandahar jail, I watched the prison superintendent Mullah Burki beat people so harshly that it was impossible to tell afterwards whether or not they had been wearing clothes . . . when they drifted into unconsciousness we put salt on their wounds to make them scream.’
¹⁸

The Taliban was not the kind of organization that vetted its recruits before they joined. Jalaluddin Shinwari tacitly admitted that this had been one of the movement’s gravest mistakes.

‘All those bad elements have been purged now,’ he insisted in 2010. ‘They are all living in luxury in Pakistan.’

It is tempting to speculate that one of the ‘bad elements’ who influenced the decision to destroy the Buddhas was bin Laden himself: a theory also advanced in
The Giant Buddhas
, an awardwinning Swiss documentary made in 2005. The intolerance of
idolatry is certainly strong in Wahhabism. In the eighteenth century, the movement’s founder Abd-al-Wahhab destroyed the graves of the Prophet and his Companions for fear that they might be worshipped; he also considered destroying the house where the Prophet was born.

As an information-technology specialist, Tariq Osman was considered an outsider too lowly to bother with by the Taliban hierarchy, and thus avoided the worst of Kandahar’s back-stabbing politics. He rarely left his office, where he slept on the floor at night. Many senior regime figures including the Foreign Minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, used to sneak in to watch Hollywood movies with him in the evenings. By day, Osman taught those Taliban who were interested how to configure and edit computer programs. The internet service he set up was provided, remarkably, by the British company Pipex. By Osman’s own admission, the Taliban IT operation was never very sophisticated. Internet traffic from the office was ‘very slow – we only had a 9.6KB per second landline. We used to send emails to the embassy in Islamabad, but we couldn’t to Riyadh. When I was asked to upload some sound files I had to report that it wasn’t possible.’ When Muttawakil sent him to the phone company to arrange an upgrade, he was told it would cost
130,000: far more than the Taliban could afford to spend on IT.

In the al-Qaida office just down the road in west Kandahar, matters were of course rather different. The staff there had access to as much high-speed internet as they liked, thanks to a 60,000KB per second satellite uplink that cost
25,000 a month. Osman learned this from one of al-Qaida’s IT specialists, a Libyan ex-mujahideen fighter known as Al-Makatala, who found Osman acceptable because he had formerly fought for Hekmatyar.
Al-Makatala visited the Special Office from time to time, where he would tease Osman for the paltriness of the Taliban operation. The two became friends, of a sort.

‘We spoke technology together,’ Osman said. ‘There were very few people in the Taliban who could do that, and he was pleasant towards me. He wore his black turban a little differently to the others.’

The relationship between Omar and bin Laden became increasingly fraught as US pressure on the Taliban grew. Between 1996 and 2001, there were thirty separate American requests to expel the Saudi dissident. The Taliban tried to rein in their guest in early 1999 by confiscating his satellite phone, and were particularly anxious to control his access to the media. When a Saudi journalist from
Asharq al-Awsat
, the international Arabic newspaper, arrived in Kandahar hoping for an interview with bin Laden, he was told that he would first need permission from the Taliban foreign ministry in Kabul. To Muttawakil’s fury, bin Laden tried to side-step the restriction by inviting the journalist to lunch. Osman found himself caught in an escalating war of faxes between the al-Qaida and Taliban offices, west versus north-west Kandahar; the
Asharq
interviewer eventually took fright, abandoned the lunch plan and scuttled back to safety in Quetta.

On the issues that really mattered, though, the Taliban failed to control bin Laden. Perhaps they genuinely could not. As one ex-Taliban told me years later, ‘If America could not control bin Laden, what chance did we have?’ In October 2000, an al-Qaida attack on the USS
Cole
in the Yemeni port of Aden killed seventeen sailors and injured thirty-nine. Bin Laden was unapologetic, piously informing his hosts that he answered to Allah, not to men. In early 2001, he convened a major international meeting to
formalize the establishment on Afghan soil of a new
qaida ul-jihad
: a ‘base for jihad’. It was attended by extremists from all over the world and yet Omar, Osman was astonished to discover, was not invited or even consulted on the meeting’s agenda. When Osman asked Omar’s Director of Media Operations why not, the director replied, with studied neutrality: ‘Because he is the Amir ul-Mu’mineen.’ It was a devious piece of office politics. The self-appointed Commander of the Faithful had just been kicked upstairs by the world’s most notorious Islamic terrorist.

Did Omar have prior knowledge of 9/11? Osman was certain that he did not.

‘We would have heard about something so important in the Special Office, and there was nothing. The Director of the Special Office, Mullah Tayeb, was close to bin Laden and he didn’t know. I’m sure there was no warning.’

Mullah Zaeef had certainly not known. He cried as he watched the towers burn on television in his embassy in Islamabad. His colleagues were puzzled: was America not their enemy, who had attacked Afghanistan with sanctions and missiles? He reminded them of the price that the Japanese ultimately paid for Pearl Harbor: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where ‘tens of thousands of civilians burned in the hellfire of the bombs. I told them I was sure that America would invade our country with equal vigour.’