Taliban (22 page)

The campaign planners had got their numbers wrong in the past. In early 2006, for instance, it was confidently stated by the British that there were ‘no more than a thousand’ Taliban in the whole of Helmand province. Yet twice that number were killed in the summer of that year alone, since when the insurgency had done nothing but intensify. The distinction between ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘reconcilable’, Tier One and Tier Three, also seemed questionable, because to be a Taliban fighter was as much a state of mind as it was to be a member of an army. A fighter could be Tier Three Taliban one day, Tier One the next, Tier Two the day after that. All people change their minds – though few, arguably, are as fickle as Afghans. Changing to the side of whoever seems strongest was a survival tactic learned over centuries.

This, it seemed to me, was the greatest flaw in the Americans’ plan: they had misunderstood the nature of the people opposing them. In particular, they had underestimated how strongly Pashtuns had always felt about infidels meddling in their land – especially armed ones – and on that level, none of them was truly reconcilable. For all McChrystal’s brave talk, the number of IEDs laid by the Taliban had increased by 263 per cent in the twelve months to April 2010, according to the Pentagon.
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Resistance was hard-wired into the Pashtun psyche, and it was almost always successful: two truths brought home to me on a visit to Ustad Rafeh, a professor of Pashtun history at Kabul University.

‘Two thousand five hundred years ago, Darius the Great came here from Iran. The Pashtuns resisted and never surrendered. Then Alexander the Great arrived from Macedonia. His advance from the west was like the wind – until he got to Afghanistan. He was stuck here for many years. Then fifteen hundred years ago, the Arabs came. We accepted their religion, but not their traditions, and we refused to be colonized. Nine hundred years ago, it was Genghis Khan. We killed his grandson. Then you British came, 150 years ago. You had 60,000 troops and the best artillery, but it was
Pashtuns
who surrounded Kabul and killed 17,000 of you as you tried to escape. The rulers of your Empire thought this was an accident: they couldn’t accept such a defeat, so they attacked again, in 1880. We killed 12,000 of you that time, at Maiwand. The same with the Soviets in 1979: most of their original army was destroyed. What makes you think that it will be any different for America this time?’

The success of the ‘clear, hold and build’ strategy was predicated on an assumption that Afghans understood they needed foreign assistance, and that they would therefore welcome it. This, after all, was a country where more than one in three subsisted on less than 30p a day, where more than half of all pre-school children were stunted by malnutrition, and one in five died before the age of five.
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This was why the US military leadership all thought that ‘soft power’ – the sinking of wells, the building of new roads or schools – would be a more effective battle-winner in the long term than the killing of insurgents.

History showed, however, that such foreign help was not necessarily welcome. The Afghans knew from experience that civic action programmes, however altruistic in appearance, tended to come with strings attached. The Soviets had used soft power as a counter-insurgency tactic, and the Americans were no different.
Had General Petraeus not said as much in Iraq with his remark that ‘money is my most important ammunition in this war’? The work of Matiullah Tarab, an angry young poet from Jalalabad, expressed the distrust of many Pashtuns. His verse was taken so seriously by the authorities in Kabul that in 2008 he was locked up for sedition for six months. He wrote:

Ustad Rafeh’s suspicion of American motives was certainly common in Kabul. ‘The US did not come here to help or rescue Afghanistan,’ he told me. ‘They are here for their own strategic reasons. They want a permanent military presence here, to encircle Iran and to gain access to the oilfields of Central Asia. Their talk of peace and stability is just an excuse.’ School-burning looked like fundamentalist nihilism to the West, but in such a climate of paranoia and mistrust, it was all too easy for the Taliban to present it to the people as a legitimate act of war.

Perhaps McChrystal was right that some insurgents could be bribed to stop fighting. The technique had a long track record in Afghanistan. But there was also an old saying, often repeated by the British in the nineteenth century, that ‘you can’t buy an Afghan. You can only rent him for a while.’ Afghan attitudes towards
foreigners were coloured by the Koran, certain passages of which can be interpreted as actively endorsing such fickleness. Sura 3:28 advises that ‘believers should not take the unbelievers as friends rather than the believers. Whoever does that has nothing to do with Allah.’ It is, however, all right to ‘befriend them with the tongue, not in the heart, if you have fear of them’ – and there were of course many Afghans with every reason to fear the armed might of Nato. The effect of offering such people dollars for their weapons was likely to be very temporary; and if Pashtun pride was insulted in the process, it could even make matters worse.

McChrystal himself was not without subtlety. He was well respected by Kabul’s diplomatic community, some of whom considered him one of those rare generals who ‘got it’ in Afghanistan. As a man who runs eight miles every morning and who likes to eat just one meal a day – to avoid ‘sluggishness’, it is said – he was almost as ascetic as the Taliban who opposed him. In March 2010 he was reported to be reading Winston Churchill’s
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
.
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Although over a hundred years old, some of Churchill’s observations on the resident Pathans (the old British word for Pashtuns on ‘their’ side of the Durand Line) are still relevant: ‘Tribe wars with tribe. Every man’s hand is against the other and all are against the stranger . . . the state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity.’

Churchill also laid out three options for dealing with this fractious region: imposing the rule of law at gunpoint, pulling out and leaving them to it, or working through and with the tribal system. McChrystal told the veteran Afghan correspondent Robert Kaplan of
Atlantic
magazine: ‘The third choice – Churchill’s choice – is really the only one we have.’

His problem was that Washington was still fixated on the first choice. In March 2010 Barack Obama paid a surprise visit to his troops in Afghanistan, his first since becoming President in January 2009. ‘We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al-Qaida and its extremist allies,’ he told them. The alliteration might have been fancier, but the message behind it was no different in substance from anything his predecessor George Bush might have said. It seemed that at the leadership level that really counted – and certainly for the cameras and the American public watching at home – it was business as usual for the War on Terror.

In the end it was no good for McChrystal to remind his troops, as he did in his
Counterinsurgency Guidance
advice distributed to them in 2009, that ‘this is their country and we are their guests’. As he knew,
melmastia
, the showing of hospitality and respect to all visitors, is a vital part of Pashtunwali. But the quid pro quo of that tradition is that the visitor must come unarmed; and for reasons of Pashtun history, infidels with weapons tend to be seen as enemy invaders rather than as guests. For an American soldier to appeal to melmastia as McChrystal did was a bit like trying to saw a piece of wood with a hammer.

The prognosis for 2010 seemed gloomy, but there was one ray of light: the prospect of a negotiated settlement with the Quetta leadership that might bring an early end to the war. At the London Conference in January, and again in a speech in Munich in February, President Karzai felt sufficiently confident of Western support for negotiations with what he called his ‘disenchanted brothers’ that he used his address to appeal publicly to ‘my brother the King of Saudi Arabia, His Majesty Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz’, to help mediate them.

The Saudis were the best and most obvious choice for this role. As the ‘Guardians of the Holy Places’, Mecca and Medina, they had a status in the Islamic world that no other country could match. They enjoyed good relations with the Americans, thanks to the oil reserves beneath their feet. And while King Abdullah was circumspect about the Taliban in public, it had hardly been forgotten that Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries – along with Pakistan
and the UAE – who had formally recognized their regime in the 1990s. King Abdullah had a strong motive to help mediate a peace, for he had his own troubles with al-Qaida at home. It was also an opportunity to check the regional ambitions of the Saudis’ most feared rival, Iran.

Talks with senior Taliban members had in fact been going on intermittently for at least three years. There were so many talking shops in operation, indeed, that one experienced diplomat described them, in a tone between derision and despair, as ‘an industry’. At different times and in many different places – Mecca, Dubai, Oman, even on an atoll in the Maldives – senior members of the Taliban had sat down with MPs from Kabul, with United Nations officials, with representatives of Karzai, and of all the main ethnic and political parties in Afghanistan, including Hizb-i-Islami. In addition, private or semi-private initiatives were said to have been organized by the British, the Norwegians, the Swiss.

Trying to keep track of so many concurrent peace plans was a bewildering business, for information on who was saying what to whom was invariably sketchy or inaccurate. Those participating in dialogue did not always admit to it. Many Afghans had a habit of saying one thing and doing another, or of telling whoever it was they were speaking to whatever they thought they wanted to hear. It was the future of their country they were debating, and with the stakes so high there was inevitably much disinformation in circulation. Rivalry between the organizers of the various talking groups, as they jockeyed for power and influence over the outcome and pushed their own agendas and vested interests, was intense. There was so much dialogue going on, one suspected, that the energy and unity of purpose necessary if genuine progress were to be made had been disastrously diluted. There seemed to be willingness for
peace on both sides, but the process urgently needed to be grasped.

For all the talking so far, two parties had been conspicuous by their absence from the negotiating tables: any senior US representative, and Mullah Omar himself. The true intentions of both were subject to much speculation in Kabul. From remarks made by the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Islamabad in January, it was evident that even he was still in two minds about the Taliban. On one day, Gates publicly described them as a ‘scourge’ and a ‘cancer’; the next, he said that they were clearly ‘a part of the political fabric of Afghanistan’ these days. Imtiaz Gul, Chairman of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad, remarked: ‘Herein lie the contradiction and duplicity on the part of US policy. Are they a cancer or part of the political fabric? You can’t apply this principle selectively.’
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Divining what Omar really thought about a political settlement was no easier. The delegates from Quetta who turned up at the secret meetings never claimed to speak for him; the best they could offer was to go back and speak
to
him. How much influence they really had over their leader was difficult to gauge, not least because they probably didn’t know themselves. A contact who had seen the Quetta shura in action described an ‘inner circle’ and an ‘outer circle’ of lieutenants whose portfolios were forever being exchanged. They were liable to be brought back from or sent into Afghanistan at any time to fight and organize the war, or to take up civil positions in what now amounted to a shadow government, complete with its own systems of administration and Sharia justice. Even the Pentagon admitted that these alternative administrations existed in most of the country’s thirty-four provinces.
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Omar was virtually the only constant in this organization, the spider in the centre of a ceaselessly evolving web. The lieutenants’ closeness to Omar,
and hence their status in the movement overall, was always in flux.

Some thought this was a deliberate tactic of Omar’s, an astute piece of personnel management designed to prevent the formation of factions and the emergence of challengers to his rule. Others said that he was not so devious, and that he was only trying to copy the distinctly non-hierarchical management style of the Prophet, whose followers in the campaign against the non-believers in the 680s are traditionally described as the
sahabah
– the ‘companions’. One of the few journalists who has met Omar, the Peshawar-based BBC correspondent Rahimullah Yusufzai, described an encounter with the leader at his house in Kandahar in 1997, a year after the Taliban had taken Kabul. Omar was ‘tall, with a fair complexion for an Afghan and a Grecian nose, prominent above his unkempt black beard’. He sat on a rickety iron bed in a simple room partitioned by a dirty torn curtain, with Taliban coming and going as they pleased. Rahimullah ‘sat on the carpet among the Taliban, watching as Omar chatted, joked, signed letters and at one point unlocked the padlock on a box to give some money to two fighters who had arrived in town with nowhere to stay’.
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Omar may have been the Amir ul-Mu’mineen but he had no throne, no crown, no badge of office of any kind; he wore the same large black turban, shalwar qamiz and a ‘cheap, European-style polyester jacket’ as all his colleagues.