Descent Into Chaos Read online

  The ISI justified its actions as stemming from fear of an Indian-controlled NA government in Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban. It also did not want to totally abandon the Taliban, its only proxy in Afghanistan. At the same time, the army wanted to keep the Americans engaged, fearing that once Kabul had fallen, they would once again desert the region. With one hand Musharraf played at helping the war against terrorism, while with the other he continued to deal with the Taliban.

  There was now enormous U.S. pressure on Musharraf to replace Gen. Mehmood Ahmad. India had attempted to defame Ahmad by linking him to the 9/11 hijackers, although there was never any evidence of that.33 However, the upsurge in violence in Indian Kashmir, which threatened to undermine the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, was placed at his door. On October 1, militants had exploded a car bomb outside the parliament building in Srinagar, killing twenty-nine people. Meanwhile, the Afghans feared that the Bush administration’s tolerance of ISI machinations could lead to a replay of the nineties, when the United States handed over policy jurisdiction on Afghanistan to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which led to the rise of the Taliban. Ashraf Ghani warned the Americans about “outsourcing the management of Afghanistan to Pakistan.”34

  A few hours before U.S. air strikes began, Musharraf made a move to reassert his authority in the army and reassure the international community about his intentions: he sacked his three senior-most generals, who had helped him carry out the coup in 1999 and were known for their hard-line Islamist views. All three had opposed his rapid acceptance of U.S. demands after 9/11. The ISI chief was forced to resign from the army and was replaced by Lt.-Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, a close confidant of Musharraf, who had previously headed up Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (MI), a smaller military intelligence service. Lt.-General Aziz, the former ISI officer who had run the Taliban in the 1990s and was now corps commander, Lahore, was kicked upstairs to a largely ceremonial job.35 The deputy chief of army staff, Gen. Muzaffar Usmani, resigned after he was replaced. Musharraf extended his own term as army chief, as his original three-year term had expired on October 7.

  U.S. and other Western embassies in Islamabad were ecstatic at the move, which showed that Musharraf was still very much in charge. The replacement of Ahmad allowed the new ISI chief to remove dozens of mid-level ISI officers who had been involved with the pro-Taliban policy. However, an organization that had trained and motivated hundreds of its officers to support extremist Islamic factions in Afghanistan and Kashmir for two decades could not be expected to change its views overnight. Some of these officers, deeply religious and vociferously anti-American, considered themselves more Taliban than the Taliban.

  Musharraf knew that as long as the Americans did not trust the ISI, they would not listen to his advice about the conduct of the war. Now he demanded that he be consulted on any future U.S. policymaking regarding Afghanistan. He wrote a four-page letter to Bush saying Pakistan would not accept an NA government in Kabul and that Pashtuns must be fully represented. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, signed on to it and agreed to carry it to Bush, accompanied by the new ISI chief. After flying on a plane lent by Prince Bandar, the influential Saudi ambassador to Washington, General Haq and Saud first handed the paper to Tony Blair in London, and then to Bush and George Tenet in Washington. However, the United States was going to make its own decisions regarding the conduct of the war and would consult with neither its NATO allies nor Musharraf.

  This became clear on the evening of October 7, on the Shomali Plain north of Kabul, which had been fought over for a decade. The CIA team there told Afghan commanders to ground their helicopters by sunset. The commanders in turn alerted some 250 foreign journalists camped out with the NA forces, who pointed their TV cameras toward Kabul, some thirty miles away as the sun set. Around the world people watched in anticipation. It was the best-advertised beginning of a war in recent memory— reassurance that nothing is secret in Afghanistan for very long. The first U.S. attack on the Taliban delivered fifty cruise missiles and dozens of laser-guided bombs on thirty-one military targets, hitting airports, antiaircraft defenses, and radar installations around all the major cities. The Taliban Defense Ministry, in the center of Kabul, received a direct hit that killed twenty Afghans.

  That night, the U.S. Air Force also dropped 37,500 humanitarian food packages to help refugees and to impress upon the population that the United States was not conducting a war against them. The U.S. military later said it exhausted its list of fixed Taliban targets in the first two nights of bombing, in which more than one hundred Afghans were reported killed.

  That same night, Osama bin Laden delivered a chilling message to the American people through a pre-recorded video aired on Qatar’s Al Jazeera television, promising more terrorist attacks on America. “Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed,” said bin Laden, shaking a finger at the camera.36 The next day, violent protests erupted in many Pakistani cities, although the Islamic students and mullahs involved were not joined by the general public. In Quetta, some fifteen thousand militants burned down cinemas, a shopping plaza, and UN offices. Musharraf told his countrymen that Bush and Blair had promised him that a government “friendly” to Pakistan would emerge in Afghanistan and the military campaign would be swift.

  The Taliban had massed an estimated sixty thousand troops on the battlefields stretching from the northeastern province of Takhar to Kabul, Herat province in the west, and Kandahar in the south. Every day, Taliban numbers were supplemented by foreign fighters arriving from Pakistan. Three thousand Arab fighters from at least thirteen Arab countries who had taken an oath of loyalty to bin Laden were on the Kabul front and in the north. More than nine thousand Pakistani militants, poorly armed and destined to be cannon fodder for the Taliban, had arrived from the tribal areas of Pakistan. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan had some twenty-five hundred Central Asian fighters defending three cities in northern Afghanistan. They were joined by hundreds of Chechens and Uighurs.37

  The most obvious plan for the Coalition and its NA allies was first to concentrate on the north, where the Taliban were most vulnerable, the population hostile, and U.S. supply routes to Uzbekistan close by. However, Mazar-e-Sharif was surrounded by the forces of three NA commanders who were bitter rivals—the Uzbek general Rashid Dostum, the Tajik general Mohammed Atta, loyal to Fahim, and the Hazara leader Mohammed Mohaqiq. They refused to cooperate with one another until the CIA placed separate teams alongside each general.

  From his base at Jabal ul-Saraj, on the Shomali Plain, Fahim’s twenty thousand largely Tajik infantry were now better armed, clothed, and fed thanks to the CIA. Fahim wanted to hold them back from attacking the Taliban until American bombing had softened up Taliban positions. However, Fahim’s commanders were impatient, insisting upon a ground attack, fearful that there was a conspiracy between the United States and Pakistan to deprive the Northern Alliance of taking Kabul. U.S. bombers were avoiding flattening Taliban positions outside Kabul, fearing a premature collapse of the Taliban while there was still no UN-sponsored alternative government in place. On October 17, Fahim held an NA commanders meeting in the Panjsher Valley, where he persuaded the Northern Alliance to hold off any attack on Kabul for a month.

  Although Western diplomats in Rome were urging Zahir Shah to move speedily to create an interim government when the Taliban fell, the bickering between the Afghans continued, and it became clear that only the UN could establish a new government. The key problem was that there were still no Pashtun leaders inside Afghanistan resisting the Taliban. While Pakistan and Saudi Arabia wanted a Pashtun-dominated future government, Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian states were adamantly opposed to any compromise with the Taliban. After meeting with NA leaders in Dushanbe on October 22, Vladimir Putin said he would never agree to any future role for moderate Taliban.

  Four weeks of bombing had weakened the
Taliban and made them unable to resist a determined ground assault. The first breakthrough came in the north, where the CIA teams had finally united Dostum and Atta and coordinated a single battle plan that involved a two-pronged pincer attack on Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum’s cavalry advanced on the left flank as CIA air traffic controllers guided U.S. aircraft to rain down bombs on Taliban positions. The Uzbeks, the bravest but among the cruelest fighters in Central Asia, were mounted on horses and led cavalry charges against fixed Taliban positions and tanks in a dramatic replay of eighteenth-century warfare. On the evening of November 9, some eight thousand Taliban troops were routed outside Mazar-e-Sharif. As they fled in their four-by-four pickups, U.S. bombers targeted them from the air. The entire north became a shooting gallery, and over the next few days several thousand Taliban were killed. The remainder fled to Kunduz, which they turned into the last redoubt.

  The capture of Mazar-e-Sharif held enormous strategic significance. It was just forty miles from the border with Uzbekistan, where two thousand U.S. troops were now based. Its large airport, six miles from the city, became a bridgehead for U.S. supplies and aircraft. UN relief agencies, which had stockpiled large quantities of food at Termez, on the Uzbekistan side of the border, could now set up the first refugee camps inside Afghanistan. Moreover, Mazar was the backbone of the country’s economy. Sixty percent of Afghanistan’s agricultural production and 80 percent of its former industrial, mineral, and gas wealth were concentrated in the north. One of the earliest casualties of the bombing was the IMU’s Juma Namangani. Critically injured at Cheshmai Shefa, near Mazar, on November 26, when his convoy was hit by U.S. aircraft, he was taken to Kabul, where he died— only thirty-two.

  With the death of Namangani, Uzbek president Karimov’s gamble of siding with the United States at the risk of annoying Russia seemed to have paid off. Yet he refused to open up the Friendship Bridge—a road and rail link across the Amu Darya River to Afghanistan that would have allowed supplies to flow easily. For several months Tashkent refused to budge, citing the fear of the Taliban or IMU retreating into Uzbekistan. There was tremendous resentment against Karimov among U.S. commanders and aid workers until Colin Powell visited Tashkent in early December and persuaded Karimov to open up the bridge.

  Just three days after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, the Northern Alliance captured the whole of northern, western, and central Afghanistan. While the NA captured the north, Ismael Khan’s forces pounced on Taliban troops trying to flee down the western side of Afghanistan. On November 13, Khan captured Herat after its six-thousand-strong Taliban garrison fled. In central Afghanistan, or the Hazarajat, Hazara fighters persuaded thousands of Taliban fighters to defect, and then captured Bamiyan, where the two ancient Buddha statues had been destroyed by the Taliban in April. The Taliban now held just a small pocket in the northeast, around the city of Kunduz, where there was a large Pashtun population.

  The issue of what kind of administration would supplant the Taliban now became paramount. Zahir Shah had appealed in vain to Dostum and northern commanders to set up a civilian administration loyal to the council the Rome group had set up. Instead, each warlord took control of what he had conquered. Mazar-e-Sharif was divided into two zones by the bitter rivals Generals Dostum and Atta. At the UN, where the General Assembly had just started, diplomats were pleased at the unexpected victories but aghast at the slow-moving plans to create a new government.

  Russia still insisted upon a major say in the makeup of the future Afghan government. Putin arrived in Dushanbe on October 22 to sign a pact with Tajikistan’s president Rakhmonov and the former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, recognizing Rabbani as the president of Afghanistan. Russian defense officials then began discussions with Rabbani as to what military aid he needed, in a bid to create a Russian-backed proxy. It was a blatant attempt to undermine the UN effort and create divisions between the Tajiks and the Uzbek warlords, who no longer recognized Rabbani as president.

  The Americans countered Putin by sending Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to Dushanbe a week later. He offered aid to Tajikistan, which agreed to allow U.S. forces to use three small air bases—Kulyab, Kurgun Tube, and Khujand, near the Afghan border. Rumsfeld made it clear that Rabbani was unacceptable as the new president. He delivered the same message in Tashkent the following day. In order to prevent further deterioration in their relations, Bush invited Putin to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on November 14, to discuss the future of Afghanistan. The same day, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1378 endorsing Lakhdar Brahimi’s efforts to bring the Afghan factions together and form a new government in Kabul.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Search for a Settlement Afghanistan and Pakistan at Odds

  On top of a cupboard in his bedroom in Kabul’s presidential palace, Hamid Karzai still keeps an old satellite phone. The phone is old-fashioned and bulky, shaped like a laptop computer. Its cover lifts to become the antenna. On the evening of October 7, 2001, the day after the U.S. bombing campaign began, Karzai packed this phone into a small bag, mounted a motorbike driven by a friend, and rode around the border town of Caman, Balochistan, to cross into Afghanistan. Other close friends followed. For the next few weeks, Karzai’s satellite phone was to be his only contact with the outside world. The American and British embassies in Islamabad knew he was going in, but he had made sure that Pakistan’s ISI would have no knowledge of his journey.

  He spent the first night near Kandahar, and two days later arrived in a small village close to Tarin Kot, the dusty, dirty, and isolated capital of Uruzghan province perched in the midst of formidable dry mountains. Uruzghan was the home province of Mullah Omar and a major recruitment center for the Taliban’s army, but Karzai also had friends here who had helped him smuggle in weapons months earlier. He stayed in the village for eleven days, until the Taliban got wind of his presence and sent up a strong force from Kandahar to capture and kill him. Before he fled into the mountains with sixty men, he met secretly with tribal elders from Tarin Kot, who told him that they were powerless to help him unless he had the support of the Americans. Only then would they be prepared to rise up. “It was then that I realized that the whole nation was ready for change, but people felt helpless,” Karzai told me.

  On the march escaping the Taliban and with his satellite phone battery running low, he called the American embassy in Islamabad asking for help. U.S. officials there moved swiftly, asking him to light fires on the hills around his position for two consecutive nights. On the second night they called to say they had found him, and the next morning U.S. aircraft dropped canisters with weapons and food. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, from London, and I, from Lahore, would alternately speak with Karzai by phone. “The Americans are finally taking me seriously because for the moment there is nobody else resisting among the Pashtuns,” he shouted into his satellite phone after the airdrop. After the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, Karzai reported that “there is a tremendous weakening of morale amongst the Taliban, who are loosing their repressive grip on the countryside.” On November 8, Karzai and his men were surrounded by Taliban forces, who had been trailing them through Uruzghan province. Later, Karzai recalled, “The first Taliban unit surrounded us before dawn and we broke up into several groups to escape. Then a second Taliban unit, consisting of Arabs and Pakistanis, arrived and we fought them until ten thirty that night. Our units lost touch with each other because we had no walkie talkies. We were walking for eighteen hours a day for three days to escape the encirclement.”1

  Later I heard that Mullah Omar was apoplectic with rage at Karzai’s escape. He issued a special decree ordering Karzai to be killed. Fearful that Karzai would be trapped, the CIA asked him to leave the region for a few days. Some U.S. officials insist that he was flown out to Quetta, although Pakistani officials and Karzai deny this. Karzai himself says he was flown to a deserted runway in southern Helmand. The flight took four hours, following a circuitous route, as it could not go over Taliban-controlled areas. Karzai spent four nig
hts at the Helmand runway guarded by his men and U.S. Special Operations Forces. On the second night a shepherd appeared telling Karzai that Tarin Kot had fallen to his supporters. Karzai sent a motorbike rider to confirm this and waited for his return.

  The next day, twenty Toyota pickup trucks loaded with Karzai’s men returned to the runway, waving flags, whooping, and shooting into the air as they saw their leader. Tarin Kot had indeed fallen, and the elders there were calling Karzai back. When he returned, on November 14, he was accompanied by a six-man CIA team, a twelve-man SOF team, and a three-man Joint Special Operations Command unit, code-named 574 and led by Capt. Jason Amerine. The Americans had decided to give an unprecedented commitment to Karzai as the only Pashtun fighting the Taliban and a potential leader of the country. A senior U.S. intelligence official now retired described to me how Karzai finally became acceptable to the Americans: “Karzai had it in his head that he could rally the Pashtuns. Nobody really believed him before 9/11. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad ignored him, and their reports back to D.C. were negative about him. Even after 9/11 he was not seen as the real guy, until he went inside without any support from us. It was only after we pulled him out from that first battle that we took him seriously. He was the only Pashtun fighting the Taliban and staying alive. After the CIA met up with him and reported back, George Tenet made a very quick decision that this is the guy we back—this is the guy who will lead a free Afghanistan.”2