Descent Into Chaos Read online

  Orakzai, Ali Jan—Corps commander, Peshawar, from 2001 to 2004, before becoming governor of the NWFP. Responsible for many of the peace deals with the Pakistani Taliban, he was removed as governor by Musharraf in 2008.

  Pakistan Muslim League—Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q), the ruling party, loyal to the military regime.

  Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)—Led by the Bhutto family and often in opposition to military rule.

  Panjsheri Tajiks—Tajiks from the Panjsher Valley, north of Kabul, and followers of Ahmad Shah Masud and later General Fahim.

  Parcham—The Flag, one of the communist parties of Afghanistan.

  Pearl, Daniel—American journalist murdered by al Qaeda in Karachi in 2002 after being kidnapped by Ahmed Omar Sheikh.

  Popalzai—Pashtun tribe in southern Afghanistan headed by Hamid Karzai.

  Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT)—Group of 100 to 150 Western soldiers and civilian advisers based in a province to help improve security and governance.

  Punjab—Province of Pakistan.

  Pushtu—The language of the Pashtun tribesmen.

  Qanuni, Younus—Leader of the Northern Alliance, former minister, and currently speaker of the Afghan parliament.

  Rabbani, Burhanuddin—Tajik leader who was president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 and a leader of the Northern Alliance.

  Rehman, Abdul—King known as the Iron Amir, 1880-1901.

  Rice, Condoleezza—National security advisor, 2001-2005; U.S. secretary of state, 2005- .

  Richards, David—Lieutenant-general and commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, 2006.

  Rocca, Christina—Assistant secretary of state for South Asia at the State Department, 2001-2005.

  Rome group—Group of Afghan exiles around the former king Zahir Shah.

  Sayyaf, Abdul Rasul—Pashtun warlord, member of the Northern Alliance, and Wahhabi leader close to Saudi Arabia.

  Scheffer, Jaap de Hoop—Former Dutch foreign minister who took over as NATO secretary-general in January 2004.

  Schröder, Gerhard—Chancellor of Germany, 1998-2005.

  Shah, Zahir—King of Afghanistan, 1933-1973.

  Sharia—Islamic law.

  Sharif, Shabaz—Younger brother of Nawaz Sharif.

  Sheikh, Ahmed Omar—Kidnapper of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

  Sherzai, Gul Agha—Warlord who captured Kandahar and became governor of the province.

  Sindh—Province of Pakistan.

  Singh, Jaswant—Indian foreign minister.

  Sipah-e-Pasadran—Army of God, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard paramilitary force.

  Sipah-e-Sahaba—Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet, a militant Sunni group opposed to all Shias.

  Talbott, Strobe—Deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

  Taliban—Pashtun extremist group that ruled Afghanistan before 9/11.

  Taraki, Nur Mohammed—First communist president of Afghanistan, in April 1978, from the Khalq Party; murdered by his successor, Hafizullah Amin, in September 1979.

  Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM)—Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, led by Maulana Sufi Mohammed; founded in 1989 and fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan; tried to take over the Swat Valley in Pakistan in 2007 under his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah.

  Tenet, George—Director of the CIA during the September 11 crisis.

  Termez, Uzbekistan—NATO military base close to the border with Afghanistan that was run by the Germans.

  Tora Bora—In the Koh-e-Sufaid, or White Mountain range, which spans Nangarhar province, where Osama bin Laden fought his last major battle in 2001.

  Uighurs—Chinese Muslims mainly from Xinjiang province.

  Ulema—Islamic religious leaders and scholars.

  Uruzgan—Province in southern Afghanistan.

  Vajpayee, Atal Bihari—Prime minister of India, May-June 1996; second term, 1998-2004.

  Wahhabism—A deeply conservative sect in Sunni Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.

  Wali, Abdul—General and son-in-law to former king Zahir Shah and influential leader of the Rome group.

  Wardak, Rahim—General and defense minister of Afghanistan, 2004- .

  Yuldashev, Tahir—Leader and ideologue of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; sought shelter in Pakistan after 9/11.

  Zawahiri, Ayman al-—Egyptain doctor and second to bin Laden in al Qaeda; still at large.

  Ziauddin, Khwaja—Lieutenant-general and former head of ISI; deposed by Musharraf coup.

  Zubaydah, Abu—Head of al Qaeda’s overseas operations; captured in Faislabad in March 2002.

  ACRONYMS

  ADB—Asian Development Bank

  AMF—Afghan Militia Force

  ANA—Afghan National Army

  ANP—Afghan National Police

  CENTCOM—U.S. military’s Central Command

  CIDA—Canadian International Development Agency

  CND—Counter Narcotics Directorate of Afghanistan

  DART—Disaster Assistance Response Team (part of USAID)

  DFID—Britain’s Department for International Development

  DOD—U.S. Department of Defense

  ETIM—East Turkistan Islamic Movement

  EU—European Union

  FATA—Federally Administered Tribal Areas

  GAO—U.S. Government Accountability Office

  G-8—Group of countries with the strongest economies

  HT—Hizb ut-Tahir

  ICRC—International Committee of the Red Cross

  IMU—Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

  IOM—International Office for Migration

  ISAF—International Security Assistance Force

  ISI—Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate

  JCMB—Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (for the Afghanistan Compact)

  JI—Jamiat-e-Islami

  LJ—Loya Jirga

  LOC—Line of Control (between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir)

  LT—Lashkar-e-Tayyaba

  MI5—British secret service (domestic)

  MMA—Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal

  NA—Northern Alliance

  NATO—North Atlantic Treaty Organization

  NDS—National Directorate of Security (Riasat Amniat-e-Meli)

  NGO—Nongovernmental organization

  NWFP—North-West Frontier Province

  PRT—Provincial Reconstruction Team

  PUC—Person Under Control (category of prisoner)

  UN—United Nations

  UNAMA—United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan

  UNODC—United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

  UNSC—United Nations Security Council

  USAID—U.S. Agency for International Development

  U.S. SOF—U.S. Special Operations Forces

  INTRODUCTION

  Imperial Overreach and Nation Building

  Everyone, everywhere, will always remember the moment when he saw or heard about the airliners striking the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. It is a historical event that will be embedded in our emotional psyche for all time and will mark our era as much as the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Japan or the Vietnam War marked earlier times. Later, as terrorist bombs exploded around the world, we all momentarily thought of what it could mean to become a terrorist’s target. We have had to get used to the idea of living with the possibility of sudden death and a new world of bloody violence, unprecedented if not in its scale then in its randomness. While suicide bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq were entirely predictable, the suicide attacks in London, Madrid, Istanbul, and Bali were not.

  Initially it seemed that 9 /11 would ensure that the world addressed the social stagnation and state failure in South and Central Asia—what in this book I call “the region.” Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways and listen to their alienated and poverty-stricken citizens. Iran had to be made part of the international community
. The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education, and unresolved conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Afghanistan, which it had ignored for too long and which could no longer be allowed to fester. The West and democratic-minded Muslims had to help each other counter this new and deadly form of Islamic extremism.

  The attacks of 9 /11 created enormous trepidation in the region as America unsheathed its sword for a land invasion of Afghanistan, but they also created enormous expectations of change and hope for a more sustained Western commitment to the region that would lift it out of poverty and underdevelopment. Surely the three thousand American dead lying in the rubble on the Hudson, as well as in Pennsylvania and Washington, had not died in vain? Surely we would remember them not for the revenge that the United States was about to take on al Qaeda but for the hope that their deaths had brought to a neglected corner of the globe?

  Instead, seven years on, the U.S.-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001. Rather than diminishing, the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates has grown, engulfing new regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe and creating fear among peoples and governments from Australia to Zanzibar. The U.S. invasions of two Muslim countries, billions of dollars, armies of security guards, and new technology have so far failed to contain either the original organization or the threat that now comes from its copycats— unemployed young Muslim men in urban slums in British or French cities who have been mobilized through the Internet. The al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden—now a global inspirational figure—is still at large, despite the largest manhunt in history.

  In the region that spawned al Qaeda and which the United States had promised to transform after 9 /11, the crisis is even more dangerous. Afghanistan is once again staring down the abyss of state collapse, despite billions of dollars in aid, forty-five thousand Western troops, and the deaths of thousands of people. The Taliban have made a dramatic comeback, enlisting the help of al Qaeda and Islamic extremists in Pakistan, and getting a boost from the explosion in heroin production that has helped fund their movement. The UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi had promised what he termed “a light footprint” for the UN presence in Afghanistan, while some U.S. officials eventually promised that they would carry out “nation-building lite.” In fact, barely enough was done by any organization in the first few years when 90 percent of the Afghan population continued to welcome foreign troops and aid workers with open arms. The international community had an extended window of opportunity for several years to help the Afghan people—they failed to take advantage of it.

  Pakistan’s military regime, led by President Pervez Musharraf, has undergone a slower but equally bloody meltdown. The military has refused to allow a genuinely representative government to take root. In 2007 Musharraf, after massive public demonstrations, suspended the constitution, sacked the senior judiciary, imprisoned more than twelve thousand lawyers and members of civil society, and muzzled the media in an attempt to stay in power and ensure that any elections favored him rather than the opposition. The country is beset by a major political crisis and the spread of Islamic extremism that now sees its chance to topple the state. Musharraf’s plunge from hero to villain was compounded by the assassination of the country’s larger-than-life opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007, followed by a wave of suicide bombings and mayhem.

  Across the five independent states of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—dictatorships have ruled continuously since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The lack of basic political freedoms, grinding poverty, huge economic disparities, and an Islamic extremist political underground are set to plunge Central Asia, despite its oil and gas reserves, into ever greater turmoil.

  The consequences of state failure in any single country are unimaginable. At stake in Afghanistan is not just the future of President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people yearning for stability, development, and education but also the entire global alliance that is trying to keep Afghanistan together. At stake are the futures of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and of course America’s own power and prestige. It is difficult to imagine how NATO could survive as the West’s leading military alliance if the Taliban are not defeated in Afghanistan or if bin Laden remains at large indefinitely. Yet the international community’s lukewarm commitment to Afghanistan after 9/11 has been matched only by its incompetence, incoherence, and conflicting strategies—all led by the United States.

  What is at stake in Pakistan is even greater. A nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive and double-dealing policies after 9/11, even under the watchful eye of the CIA. The recent blow-back from these policies is now threatening the state, undermining the army, decapitating the political elite, and drowning the country in a sea of blood. In 2007 there were 56 suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed 640 people, compared to just 6 bombings in the previous year.

  President Bush’s embrace of Musharraf and the military, rather than of the Pakistani people and the development of state institutions and a democratic process, has created immense hatred for the U.S. Army and America, hatred that penetrates all classes of society. Ninety percent of the $10 billion in aid that the United States has provided Pakistan with since 9/11 has gone to the military rather than to development. Moreover, anti-Americanism has hit Pakistani society’s core values, undermining people’s understanding of democracy, secular education, modernization, and civil society—because all these facets of society are deemed to be American. When the Bush administration continued to back Musharraf in late 2007, despite the general’s rampage against the judiciary and civil society, Pakistan’s middle class was overtaken by feelings of anti-Americanism, making it impossible to persuade Pakistanis to resist the extremists. Neither was it possible to convince people that the struggle against extremism was not just America’s war but equally Pakistan’s.

  With a population of 175 million, Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world. Its society is riddled with deep ethnic, social, and economic fissures. Quite apart from the Islamists, there are grave dangers of secular separatist movements in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh that could divide the nation, just as ethnic nationalism did in 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh. With such threats, is it surprising that foreign experts are worried about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

  My three books before 9/11 dealt with the problems of failed states, the rise of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the failure of U.S. policy in the region, topics I have covered as a reporter and analyst since the late 1970s. What I term “the region”—Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the five Central Asian Republics—is even more vital to global stability now than when I first wrote about it. When I wrote about the Taliban and called for greater international commitment to help the Afghans, I did not expect any response. Today nobody can plead ignorance about what is at stake, the worsening state of affairs, or the risks involved in once again letting this region stagnate.

  As with my other books, this one is a mixture of reportage, analysis, and the accumulation of decades of knowledge and experience traveling in the region and to Western capitals. For many of these major events I was on the ground personally, and almost all the interviews with key political actors were conducted as events and crises were unfolding, rather than afterward. This book is an attempt to define history in the making rather than a scholarly reappraisal years after the event.

  My previous books were based on reporting about people, movements, and events that surrounded the rise of Islamic extremism and that few people seemed particularly interested in at the time. It proved immensely difficult even to get these books published. Now there is a vast literature on 9/11 and its co
nsequences in the region. I have absorbed all this literature, but that has not distracted from the fact that I was intimately involved as a reporter or an adviser or an onlooker to most of the events in this book.

  I have also resisted the temptation to delve too deeply into the past. This book is not about the causes of 9/11 or the story of al Qaeda or the history of specific individuals and countries in the region. There are other, better books for such information. This book will not tell you where bin Laden is hiding. Nor is this book about Iraq—although the war in Iraq serves as a vital backdrop to everything. This book shows how the United States ignored consolidating South and Central Asia—the homeland of global terrorism—in favor of invading Iraq. American resources and military manpower that Afghanistan should have received went to Iraq. “Iraq was more than just a major distraction to Afghanistan,” says Kofi Annan in retrospect. “Huge resources were devoted to Iraq, which focused away from nation building in Afghanistan. The billions spent in Iraq were the billions that were not spent in Afghanistan.”1 Moreover, the U.S. attack on Iraq was critical to convincing Musharraf that the United States was not serious about stabilizing the region, and that it was safer for Pakistan to preserve its own national interest by clandestinely giving the Taliban refuge.

  What makes the war in Iraq, and the enormous human losses there, even more tragic is that all the mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq had already been made in Afghanistan—yet nothing was learned. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, not enough U.S. troops were deployed, nor were enough planning and resources devoted to the immediate postwar resuscitation of people’s lives. There was no coherence to U.S. tactics and strategy, which led to vitally wrong decisions being taken at critical moments—whether it was reviving the warlords in Afghanistan or dismantling the army and bureaucracy in Iraq.

  The bitter divisions that surfaced within the administration as the neoconservatives clashed over power and prerogative effectively paralyzed decision making as both wars were being fought. The cabinet system of the U.S. government virtually collapsed, ruinous laws were enacted that flouted the U.S. Constitution, and torture became the norm for U.S. security agencies. Foreign policy became the prerogative of the Department of Defense, which was unaccountable to the U.S. Congress or the public, rather than the domain of the State Department. Insufficient regional alliances were forged to neutralize Afghanistan’s neighbors before, during, and after the invasions. An invasion force that does not first politically neutralize all potential sources of trouble in its rear does not understand either military strategy or diplomacy. Above all, arrogance and ignorance were in abundant supply as the Bush administration invaded two countries in the Muslim world without any attempt to understand the history, culture, society, or traditions of those countries.