Taliban (26 page)

‘America’s partners have been told this is a war of necessity for the international community, when in reality it is a war of choice.’

Everything, in his view, was ultimately the fault of America. The US was not only opposed to Afghan interests directly, by waging war against the Taliban, but also indirectly through its involvement in the three proxy wars going on in his country. These he identified as Pakistan versus India, the US versus Iran, and al-Qaida versus the World. If America carried on in this way, he warned, then the Taliban insurgency could develop into something much more serious for them.

‘I wrote to President Obama last year, and to your Gordon Brown. I explained that it wasn’t arms that defeated the Soviets, it was the people’s sense of foreign oppression – and it will be the same for you.’

Contrary to common belief, the Taliban were not yet fighting an anti-Western jihad – at least, not technically. The correct interpretation of the Koranic concept of
jihad
, literally ‘striving’ or ‘struggle’, but often translated as ‘Holy War’, is still much debated by Islamic scholars.
Al-jihad fi sabil Allah
, ‘striving in the way of Allah’, can denote an internal struggle of the conscience as well as the external fight against infidels. Either way, it becomes the religious duty of all Muslims once it has been declared in its external sense – as of course it was against the Soviets in the 1980s. A Muslim engaged in it is called a
mujahid
, a ‘struggler for freedom’. In Afghanistan, thankfully, jihad can only be declared with the agreement of the ulema, the country’s foremost religious scholars – a Pashtun-dominated group numbering perhaps four thousand, and who traditionally do not take lightly their responsibilities as the nation’s ultimate moral arbiters. The criteria for jihad are strict. When Mullah Omar called for one against the Kabul government
in 1995, the ulema refused, principally on the grounds that a jihad should not be waged against other believers, let alone one’s fellow countrymen. In the end they compromised and sanctioned a jihad against what the Taliban called
shar-i-fasad
– evil and corruption.

The point was that, according to Zaeef, the ‘Taliban’ were increasingly abandoning that label in favour of an older one: they were beginning to call themselves ‘mujahideen’ again, or as the title of the new blue rulebook more accurately had it, ‘the Mujahideen’ of ‘the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’, with Mullah Omar as the Emir. The very word ‘mujahideen’ remains a highly emotive term for Afghans, recalling as it instantly does the glory days of the 1980s. Soon, Zaeef was implying, Omar might not need the endorsement of the ulema. Public anger at the West’s presence was reaching such a pitch that the insurgency could become a jihad against the Americans almost by osmosis – and if that happened, he said, all the country, not just the Taliban, would unite to eject the infidels, just as they had the Russians. America was in danger of waking a sleeping monster.

‘The mood is changing now. The window of opportunity, the last chance for peace, is closing.’

This wasn’t just rhetoric. Different types of Afghan were indeed already making common cause against the foreigners. Back in Britain earlier that month, Channel 4’s
Dispatches
had aired a remarkable report by the Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who had embedded himself with a group of insurgents operating in the northern province of Kunduz. He lived with them for days as they planned and then executed an IED attack on an American convoy on the main road that runs south from Tajikistan – an increasingly important supply route for ISAF because it is considered ‘safer’ than the traditional one from Pakistan through the Khyber Pass.

Quraishi’s hosts were not Taliban. They wore the clothes and turbans of northern Pashtuns, and when pressed they professed loyalty not to Mullah Omar but to the fugitive Hizb-i-Islami leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. And yet they shared precisely the same principal motivation for fighting.

‘We have to resist,’ a commander explained to Quraishi. ‘Jihad has become the duty for all Afghans, because the foreigners and unbeliever countries have attacked us.’

The conviction in his eyes was unambiguous. This was a man fighting what he believed really was a war of necessity, not of choice. And his followers, strikingly, described themselves as mujahideen. An Afghan friend in London, an old refugee from Mazar, also saw the
Dispatches
programme and recognized the commander of the Kunduz group as the son of a friend of his. ‘I know that boy!’ he told me. ‘I knew his father! We fought the Russians together. The son is doing exactly what the father did, liberating Afghanistan from the infidel invaders. There is no difference.’

It wasn’t hard to understand why Zaeef felt as he did towards the Americans. The pages of his newly published autobiography burned with righteous anger. And yet there was an odd tendency among some Westerners to dismiss Zaeef’s book, as though the emotion he displayed somehow negated the message within it. One senior diplomat told me he thought the power of its arguments had been ‘spoiled’ by the anti-American ‘rant’ towards the book’s end. Ambassadors, it is true, do not normally describe the most powerful nation on earth as ‘dogs’ and ‘slaves’. But then, ambassadors are not normally treated like Zaeef, who still has trouble walking properly thanks to the beatings he received. So long as President Obama’s 2009 election promise to close Guantanamo remains
unfulfilled, criticizing Zaeef’s intemperate language missed the point.

The tough line taken against ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantanamo seemed almost designed to crush their spirit of resistance, but if anything it has had the precise opposite effect. Even American intelligence officials estimated that 20 per cent of repatriated prisoners had rejoined the insurgency; they also admitted that the number of ex-inmates in the insurgency was steadily increasing.
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One Afghan Taliban expert suggested that up to half of the insurgency’s mid-level commanders were former Guantanamo inmates. These were members of a younger generation who had not necessarily had anything to do with the movement before 2001: people who, as the expert put it, had ‘looked into the belly of the beast’, experienced the ‘reality’ of the American system, and been so appalled by what they had seen that they had come home to take up arms against it.

Among these people was Mullah Zakir, also known as Mullah Abdul Qayyum, who was released from Guantanamo in December 2007.

‘I want to go back home and join my family and work in my land and help my family,’ Zakir reportedly told his captors.

Two weeks after my meeting with Zaeef, however, Zakir was revealed as the new Taliban military commander in the south of the country, responsible for operations in six provinces. His deputy, former corps commander Abdul Rauf, had also spent time at Guantanamo.

Zakir was a well-known hawk: ‘smart and brutal’, according to one Helmandi who knew him.
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It was not insignificant that at the end of 2008, on behalf of Mullah Omar, Zakir led a delegation to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the umbrella movement of
the Pakistani Taliban, in a bid to persuade them to put aside differences and help the Afghan Taliban to combat the US presence in Afghanistan.
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Omar had traditionally been wary of the TTP, whose overt anti-Islamabad agenda was not only different, but dangerous to the Afghan Taliban. Omar’s headquarters were in Quetta, and his ability to operate there depended on keeping in with the ISI. Now, however, there was renewed speculation that military expediency was driving the TTP and the Afghan Taliban together again – and Zakir’s re-emergence in the south tended to confirm that.

The radicalizing experience of Guantanamo was at the root of so many of Afghanistan’s troubles. Two days after Zakir’s appointment became known, arrest warrants were issued for a number of high-profile ex-Guantanamo inmates living in Kabul – including Zaeef. It was not a subtle response, and Zaeef was predictably enraged. Only the Americans, he thought, were capable of so clunking a reminder of who was really in control. He was saved from being thrown in jail once again by a last-minute intervention from someone high up in the government, perhaps by Karzai himself. Nevertheless, the ambivalence of his status, the tenuousness of his freedom, was once again all too obvious. No wonder he hated the Americans so much.

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UN Resolution 1267, which established sanctions against the Taliban government as a whole in 1999, also contained a list of specific individuals to whom sanctions applied. Around the same time, the US developed its own ‘blacklist’ of people it wanted to detain, which overlapped with the UN list but contained more Taliban military leaders and people associated with al-Qaida; the two lists were later ‘consolidated’.

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Makhdoma village, Chak district, Wardak, 01.00, 10 March 2010.

The year 2009 will likely be remembered as a turning point for the West in Afghanistan – or perhaps as a year of opportunities to alter our failing strategy tragically missed. The first of these was the Afghan presidential election in August. Since early 2007 at least, Western leaders such as David Richards, the new head of the British Army, had looked forward to a successful exercise in democracy which would demonstrate, both to Western capitals and to the Afghans themselves, that the Coalition was at last making progress. Better governance and an end to the corruption in Kabul were seen – as they still are – as the key to turning Afghan hearts and minds away from the insurgency. If President Karzai was so bad, the people would surely speak, and remove him from office; the benefits of democracy, the West’s great gift to the world, would be proven once and for all.

This totemic election was an almost unmitigated disaster. The polls, organized at a cost to the international community of at least
300 million,
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were marred by massive fraud on all sides, though
most of all by Karzai, who was definitively revealed as a man far more interested in retaining his position than in the principles of democracy. Nearly a quarter of all votes cast, some 1.26 million of them, were thrown out as fraudulent. Voter turn-out, at about 30 per cent nationally, was low enough to bring Karzai’s mandate into question even before adjustments were made for the cheating. In parts of the south, where ISAF mounted a major security operation codenamed Panther’s Claw – the pre-stated aim of which was to allow voters to go to the polls unmolested – the turn-out was almost non-existent. In Babaji district in Helmand, four British soldiers died for the sake of just 150 votes.

In any Western democracy, the results would have been scrapped and the voters sent back to the polls. Not in Afghanistan. Security, logistics and credibility considerations ensured that plans to rerun the election were quickly scrapped – and when Karzai’s principal challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, declined to enter a runoff, Karzai was returned to power with the West’s reluctant support, on condition that he tackled what he called ‘the cancer of corruption’ within his administration. Six months later, however, Karzai had failed even to form a government, after the nominations for his Cabinet were twice rejected by the Majlis, or Lower House. This at least demonstrated that the country’s democratic institutions were functioning, but did not alter the fact that instead of better governance and a programme of reform, the 2009 election brought governmental paralysis.

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. The West handed Karzai the tools to entrench democracy in his country, and he squandered them. Seventy per cent of the electorate also declined, for whatever reason, to take up the offer of a say in how they are governed. If ever there was a moment for the West to
admit that its Afghan nation-building strategy was not working and to try a different approach, the failure of the 2009 election was it. Indeed, the world spent much of 2009 waiting for Barack Obama, who at the end of 2008 replaced George Bush and his neocon administration that had begun the whole sorry saga with their invasion in 2001, to announce exactly that. But the US military had other ideas, and persuaded Obama to go for a troop surge instead. With this decision, a second opportunity for a real change of strategy was missed.

In March 2010, President Obama and the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, flew into Kabul to upbraid President Karzai for his lack of progress in tackling corruption. According to Mullen, the long-term success of the military campaign in the south was entirely dependent on the issue, particularly in Kandahar, ISAF’s next publicly announced objective, where the Provincial Council was headed by the President’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai.

Ahmed Wali had long been accused of controlling the local heroin trade, as well as of flagrant ballot-rigging to help the reelection of his half-brother in 2009. Since 2006 at least, every Western plea to remove Ahmed Wali from office had been rebuffed by the President, who doggedly demanded ‘evidence’. The West seemed unable to produce anything other than anecdotes, however, which naturally gave rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories in Kabul. It certainly did not help the Western case that Ahmed Wali was said to have been on the CIA payroll for years.
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