The 9/11 Wars (12 page)

This time, Haq was not backed by Western intelligence services. The CIA did not believe that he was a credible candidate to raise the eastern tribes and had offered him only derisory help.
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Nor did the Pakistani security establishment have any intention of seeing one of their former enemies, a moderate with excellent connections in the West who was close to the viscerally anti-Pakistani exiled Afghan king in Italy, at the head of a broad-based revolt that might place a new leader in Kabul. So, though Haq’s men had found themselves hindered and even attacked by local tribesmen when buying weapons, they found the road to the border mysteriously clear of checkpoints when they finally headed into Afghanistan to lead what they hoped would become the revolt that would overthrow the Taliban.
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Haq’s operational security had been lamentable, with the whole of Peshawar aware that he had ordered leaflets and paper flags from local printers in preparation for an expedition across the border. The Taliban, who had their own spies moving throughout the frontier region, were naturally waiting for him. Within days of entering Afghanistan, Haq was in trouble, tracked by superior forces across the scruffy hills south-west of Jalalabad. Though the area was his tribal homeland, the communities Haq had hoped to raise remained uncommitted. Frantic calls by his backers in the US alerted the CIA and the Pentagon to his plight, but missiles launched from a CIA Predator drone – now finally operational – did little to hold back the Taliban fighters closing on his small band. Out of ammunition, outnumbered and cut off, cornered in a dry gorge that had once been one of the
mujahideen
’s favourite spots for ambushing Soviets, pinned down for most of a day, Haq eventually had no choice but to surrender. Within hours, Din Mohammed, Haq’s brother, received a call in Peshawar. It came from the satellite phone his brother had taken into Afghanistan three days earlier. The Taliban were on the line. They had captured his brother alive. Within twenty-four hours Haq’s mutilated corpse was hanging from a makeshift gibbet in Jalalabad bazaar.
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THE NORTHERN STRATEGY WINS OUT, THE FIRST VICTORIES AND THE RACE IN THE EAST

In Washington, Haq’s death did not help the protagonists of the ‘southern strategy’. By the end of October the senior members of the administration were beginning to worry about the approach of the brutal Afghan winter, the growing anger in the Islamic world sparked by a number of recent incidents involving civilian casualties killed by US bombs and the increasingly negative domestic press coverage. Much to the irritation of Bush, some pundits spoke of a ‘quagmire’ and even invoked the dreaded ‘Vietnam’.
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An attempted raid on a deserted airbase in the southern Afghan deserts had descended into farce, with special forces troops wounding themselves with their own demolition blasts. Bin Laden had not only succeeded in having a pre-recorded video broadcast by al-Jazeera within hours of the first raids on October 7, in which he made a series of points about the ‘humiliation’ the Islamic world had suffered for decades at the hands of the West, that resonated widely but also successfully met journalists subsequently. At home, the US population remained febrile, frightened, hurt and angry. Sales of flags soared. People stockpiled food. On October 17, a detector at the White House apparently found traces of a biological toxin known as botulinum. For twenty-four hours, the president and his top officials awaited the results of tests on mice that, if positive, could mean their own imminent deaths. The results were negative. Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, told Bush that there were 331 potential al-Qaeda operatives inside the United States.
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Successive scares of new attacks, misinformed and exaggerated reporting (as it later proved) of al-Qaeda’s destructive potential and the appearance of fatal anthrax-filled letters believed erroneously to have been sent by Islamic militants or even Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services to congressmen and media organizations all combined to increase the pressure.
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The emphasis thus began to shift. There was no sudden rejection of the ‘southern strategy’, but, once the Northern Alliance had promised the president himself not to enter Kabul, Rumsfeld asked General Franks to step up bombing of the Taliban frontlines in the north. Concerns about the consequences for the long-term stability of Afghanistan were brushed aside.
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Within a week 90 to 120 sorties a day were being flown, of which the vast proportion were in direct support of the opposition troops. Now guided in by small groups of American special forces operatives who, after being delayed by poor weather, had reached the northern end of the Shomali plains 40 miles from Kabul and the rolling steppe around Mazar-e-Sharif, the strikes quickly brought more impressive results.
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On November 10, Northern Alliance forces, who used some of the tens of millions of crisp new dollar bills given to them by the CIA to buy off key commanders around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and open a way through its defences, took the city after air strikes which saw B-52s using some of the heaviest arms in the American sub-nuclear arsenal on Taliban trenches. The next day, massive strikes broke the resistance of the Taliban troops defending Kabul, allowing opposition troops to surge across the battered villages, derelict orchards and mine-strewn fields of the Shomali plains. Though everyone along the decision-making chain from the Shomali to the White House was aware that theoretically it would be better to stop the Northern Alliance short of Kabul, the plans carefully drawn up to balance Pakistani and Afghan Pashtun sensibilities with those of the factions now advancing towards the capital were rapidly forgotten in the excitement and relief. The senior CIA man on the ground had raised no objections when told of their allies’ plans to advance into the city, and by the evening of November 13, the Northern Alliance was in possession of Kabul. A few Arabs were shot around the city, but the major force of foreign
mujahideen
which some feared would defend the city simply did not exist. Their putative commander, a senior Libyan militant known as Abu Laith, had spent the previous weeks arguing with the al-Qaeda senior commanders for more troops. First he had been promised 200 men, then told to make do with only fifty. When even these did not arrive, Abu Laith complained again, only to be told there were now no spare troops as the bulk of the Arab fighters were already heading east towards the Pakistani border.
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There was no resistance from the Taliban either. The vast bulk of the movement’s forces withdrew from Kabul the evening before the arrival of the Northern Alliance in long convoys of their trademark pick-up trucks. ‘We left at night like frightened women. It was a disgrace. We left in small groups and in any vehicle we could find. We did not know where we were going and we were scared of the missiles,’ remembered later one young Pakistani volunteer with the Taliban at the time.
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The Northern Alliance commanders would argue that, as they could not have left Kabul without any government whatsoever, there was no alternative but to move in. Their case had a certain logic – at least the capital was temporarily secure – but their seizure of the city was to cause major problems later on.
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The primary casualties of the war so far had been those civilians who had been unable to flee. Stray missiles and bombs in the capital had killed somewhere between 50 and 150 people. The family of Ali Shah, the young shepherd who had watched the preparation of the destruction of the Buddhas, had had a narrow escape. They had fled to Kabul and were lucky enough to find a room in a home of wealthier relatives. In one of the early strikes on the capital, bombs fell only a 100 metres or so away, hitting an old warehouse near by, where a small detachment of Taliban was based. The Taliban were killed, but so were a dozen refugees sheltering alongside them.

The most immediate effect of the fall of Kabul was to deprive Afghanistan of any kind of formal authority. The Taliban regime had been ramshackle but had provided a degree of overall government. Even if traditional tribal structures now filled the breach in many areas, the situation was fluid and chaotic. In the south fighting was continuing around Kandahar. In the centre, Hamid Karzai, the young exile who had travelled into Afghanistan with the CIA’s blessing early in the campaign and was protected by American special forces, was steadily overcoming the initial reluctance of local tribes in Oruzgan province to commit to a rebellion against the Taliban. But though he was gaining support, Karzai controlled no ground, and his position was tenuous.
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Towards the Pakistani border, in provinces such as Paktia, there was a confused struggle between former warlords and tribal leaders. In the north-east, Taliban and foreign fighters from various groups which had been based in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 – al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and others – were still fighting hard but were cut off from supplies and surrounded. In the west, Ismail Khan, one of the best-known veterans of the war against the Soviets and the subsequent civil conflict, was back in the city of Herat. Bamiyan had reverted to the Hazaran militias. All around the country, American airpower was now simply hitting any target of opportunity that presented itself. When accurate, their strikes were of devastating power and lethality, killing hundreds of Taliban fighters in hours.

In the east, three different forces were racing for Jalalabad. The main contenders in the race were Hazrat Ali, an illiterate and brutish minor warlord known for his involvement in the drugs trade and a brief alliance with the Taliban who had recently joined the Northern Alliance, and Haji Zaman Gamsharik, a Pashtun who had been expelled from a comfortable and lucrative position in eastern Afghanistan by the Taliban and forced into exile in France. Like Abdul Haq, he too had returned to try his luck after September 11. The only things Hazrat Ali and Gamsharik had in common were that they were both veterans of the jihad against the Soviets and were both receiving weapons, cash and logistic assistance from the Pakistani ISI, which was trying desperately to salvage something from the wreckage of its Afghan policy. Having lost both Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul to the Northern Alliance, the Pakistanis were now determined not to lose influence over Jalalabad. As ever, local competition for power and resources became overlaid with multiple regional – and in this instance global – dimensions.

The third contender in the race, Abdul Qadir, was the outsider. He was the late Abdul Haq’s second brother, and for him the new turn of events in Afghanistan represented an opportunity to return to power, wealth and influence. He too had fled the Taliban, to Germany, and was unwilling to travel to Pakistan and place himself under the dubious protection of the ISI. Instead he had entrusted his twenty-seven-year-old son, known as Haji Zaheer, with the task of spearheading his re-entry into the rude game of Afghan politics. Haji Zaheer, already a hardened veteran of the vagaries of Afghan politics and well aware of the price of failure even before the death of his uncle, was on a plane to Zahedan, the south-eastern Iranian desert city, within hours of his receiving his father’s orders.

Zahedan is one of the great smuggling centres of the Middle East and Asia, a key hub for the passage of narcotics to Europe. Zaheer knew that the ISI would be looking for him and was unwilling to risk the conventional border crossing. Instead he had himself smuggled over the Iranian border into the south-western corner of Afghanistan before cutting back into Pakistan across the unguarded desert. Keeping to remote back roads running across the arid mountain wastes of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, he headed east and then swung north, following much of the length of the 1,600-mile-long frontier and finally reaching Peshawar, at the foot of the Khyber Pass and just 25 miles from the Afghan border and 120 miles from his destination, Jalalabad, after three days of solid travelling. The already substantial population of Afghan refugees, parked for a decade or more in sprawling refugee camps on the outskirts of the city, had been swollen by new arrivals fleeing the American bombing, but otherwise little had changed since Zaheer had last been in the city five years before.

Zaheer’s father was one of the best-known and respected of all the local warlords, and his son was thus able to rapidly rally a makeshift force. Each local commander brought in a dozen or so men who themselves could answer for another score or so. Equally important, Zaheer was able to arm them too. Each commander, of whatever power and influence, knew that at some stage in the future his loyalty would be rewarded with cash, in drugs, a lucrative official post or in some other way. Each of their men expected the same: a few thousand rupees, a weapon, further employment.

One of the legacies of the Khyber region’s role in the 1980s as a rear area for the Afghan
mujahideen
were the numerous arms factories and dealers. When Zaheer cited his father’s name to one merchant in the town of Landi Kotal, high in the Khyber Pass, the man simply opened his warehouse doors and handed over 450 Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, light machine guns and ammunition. After receiving an admonitory call from his father, Zaheer led his men at night across a smugglers’ track from the top of the Khyber Pass and on to the main road leading from the official border crossing to Jalalabad, 10 miles inside Afghanistan. The march took until dawn. When the fighters reached the main road to the city, they easily routed a unit of fifty Taliban, teenagers mostly, still cleaning their teeth with neem sticks and making tea for breakfast when Zaheer’s men found them. The Taliban in Jalalabad itself had already melted away and Zaheer took control of the city. His father, having travelled from Germany on planes, helicopters and finally in a jeep, arrived at dawn. The other contenders in the race, Hazrat Ali and Gamsharik, drove in twelve hours later, each accompanied by thousands more fighters. Under pressure from the ISI and with significant amounts of Western cash on the table, the three commanders came to an uneasy power-sharing agreement, though the city rang with undisciplined gunfire for forty-eight hours.
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Jalalabad too had now fallen. Only Kandahar remained in Taliban hands.