Descent Into Chaos Page 5

  In the early months of 2002, no outsider, least of all myself, had any idea that Iraq rather than Afghanistan was the real focus of the Bush administration’s attention and that the “war on terrorism” would be fought in Baghdad rather than Kabul or Islamabad. The reluctance of the Pentagon to commit more American troops to Afghanistan should have alerted us that either the U.S. military was very stupid or it had preoccupations other than Afghanistan. Yet at the time few people I spoke to, including U.S. officials, could believe that the neocons would willfully give up tracking down al Qaeda leaders and would move on to Iraq. We now know that the chase was given up in March 2002—just three months after the fall of Kandahar—when the Arabic- and Persian-speaking U.S. SOF teams were moved out of Afghanistan to train for Iraq and surveillance satellites were pulled from the skies over Afghanistan and redirected to Iraq.

  The American failure to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq or to move Pakistan and Central Asia toward reform and democracy made it almost impossible for Muslim moderates to support the West’s struggle against Islamic extremism or to bring about change in their own countries. The U.S. campaign to eliminate al Qaeda had turned into a much larger American intervention across the Islamic world that had nothing to do with al Qaeda and that Muslims could not support or tolerate. The treatment of prisoners by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were symptoms of an ever-expanding war that alienated the entire globe. By 2007 a decisive shift had taken place in key countries such as Pakistan, where hatred for Musharraf and the Americans took precedence over hatred for al Qaeda, even as Pakistanis died in large numbers from al Qaeda- sponsored suicide bombings. This made fighting the extremists much more difficult.

  As the Bush era nears its end in 2008, American power lies shattered. The U.S. Army is overstretched and broken, the American people are disillusioned and rudderless, U.S. credibility lies in ruins, and the world is a far more dangerous place. The Iraq war has bankrupted the United States, consuming up to $11 billion a month.30 Ultimately the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9/11. There are now full-blown Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the next locus could be Uzbekistan. The safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is uppermost in the minds of Western governments. There are more failing states in the Muslim world, while al Qaeda has expanded around the world.

  The American people have understood the tragedy associated with Bush’s imperial overreach, and as the 2008 U.S. elections will doubtless show, they are no longer as naïve, ignorant, or scared as they were after 9 /11. However, it has taken the American people time to learn such lessons, and in the meantime American power has been squandered, and hatred for Americans has become a global phenomenon. Bush’s historical legacy will be one of failure. This book is an attempt to explain how that came about in Washington and on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia.

  PART ONE

  9/11 AND WAR

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Man with a Mission The Unending Conflict in Afghanistan

  Six weeks before 9/11, an old Afghan friend of mine came to spend the day with me at my home in Lahore. We had lunch and then began an intense discussion that went on until the evening, without reaching a conclusion. He had come to discuss a specific problem he faced. At issue was his future, his safety, and the fate of his country, which was inextricably linked to my life as a journalist for the past twenty-three years and to the fate of my own country, Pakistan.

  My friend was Hamid Karzai, chief of the Popalzai tribe centered near Kandahar. He had just been delivered an ultimatum by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, better known in Pakistan as ISI, the military’s all-powerful and much-feared intelligence agency, which for two decades had run Pakistan’s covert wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir, had harassed dissidents at home, and was now the principal supporter of the Taliban regime. The ISI told Karzai that he could no longer stay in Pakistan, his visa would not be renewed, and he must leave the country with his family by September 30. Karzai had resided in Pakistan since 1983, save for a brief stint in Kabul in the early 1990s. We both knew who had really ordered his expulsion: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban in Kandahar. The ISI was merely obliging the Taliban, who could no longer tolerate Karzai’s anti-Taliban politicking from his home in Quetta, in Balochistan province, just 150 miles from Kandahar. We both knew that the expulsion order was as much a death threat as it was a warning, and it could not be taken lightly.

  Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, had been murdered by the Taliban in 1999—an assassination that Karzai believes also implicated the ISI. The elder Karzai had been chief of the Popalzai tribe, a former deputy speaker of parliament, and immensely respected for his honesty and wisdom by all the southern Pashtun tribes. The Pashtuns were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and had ruled and dominated the country for 250 years. Mullah Omar, an itinerant preacher, could not claim the pedigree of the Karzais, and the fact that they hailed from Kandahar, as did much of the Taliban leadership, only incensed him further. After murdering the elder Karzai, the Taliban and their agents murdered more than a dozen prominent Afghans living in Pakistan who opposed the Taliban regime. The Pakistani police never caught any of the assassins because they were well protected by the ISI. As the Taliban regime became more internationally isolated and condemned because of its crimes against the Afghan people and the hosting of Osama bin Laden, it became more desperate to wipe out all opposition to it.1

  I, too, had earned the wrath of the ISI by criticizing the Taliban in my articles and exposing the considerable Pakistani support that kept them afloat. My book Taliban, published in 2000, led to threats by the ISI and their extremist supporters. The book was swiftly translated into Dari and widely distributed in Afghanistan, particularly by Karzai and Ahmad Shah Masud’s tribal network. Moreover, a speech I gave in Lahore demanding that Pakistan reconsider its Afghan policy and drop support for the Taliban had been widely circulated in Afghanistan after being broadcast by the Dari and Pushtu services of the BBC.2

  That day in Lahore, Karzai and I had a long discussion and determined that he had only two choices. He could leave for Europe to become just another émigré Afghan politician out of touch with his people and hovering around the entourage of the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah, now in Rome, where a new political effort was under way to oppose the Taliban. Or he could deposit his family abroad and then take his life in his hands and enter Afghanistan to rally the Pashtun tribes and foment rebellion against the Taliban. In fact, for the past three years Karzai had quietly been preparing for such a day, meeting in Quetta with dissident tribal leaders who came out of Afghanistan, collecting arms and money, and secretly distributing them to his supporters inside the country. Uppermost in the minds of his tribal supporters was whether Karzai could ever muster the international support crucial to his efforts.

  Unfortunately, Washington and London considered Karzai a political lightweight, and any success at fomenting rebellion in the Pashtun heartland of the Taliban was considered unlikely. Karzai had been a Mujahedin, a member of the Afghan opposition to the Soviet invaders, since the early 1980s, but he had never fought directly against the Soviets and he had no experience as a military commander. Karzai spoke six languages (Pushtu, Dari, Urdu, English, French, and Hindi), read voraciously, and was a snazzy dresser. Western diplomats considered him an intellectual but not a leader who could topple the Taliban. Moreover, the United States was not particularly interested in the future of Afghanistan or the Taliban regime. All they wanted was someone to deliver Osama bin Laden.

  “Our people are not yet ready for guerrilla war against the Taliban, and the Taliban are still very strong and ruthless, and they will carry out reprisals against the civilian population,” Karzai told me that day. “But how can I leave all my people and the anti-Taliban network I have created over these years and go abroad—I cannot betray or abandon them now.” He asked for m
y advice, and I bluntly told him that I could not imagine him joining the bickering émigré leaders in Rome trying to exert influence over Zahir Shah, who was now more than seventy-five years old. Whereas other Afghan leaders had settled abroad, including many of his brothers, Karzai had spent the last decade close to his people. The chronic lack of real leadership among the contentious Pashtuns had been a major factor in the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s. I was convinced that if he decided to do so, Karzai could fill the leadership gap among the Pashtuns.

  Hamid Karzai was born in Kandahar in 1957, the fourth of eight children born to Abdul Ahad Karzai and his wife, Durko. Subsequently all the children except two, Hamid and his younger brother, Ahmed Wali, were to emigrate and settle in the United States. It was a typically tragic tale of the Afghan diaspora after the Soviet invasion. The eldest brother, Abdul Ahmad, became an engineer in Maryland. Qayum and Mahmood set up a chain of Afghan restaurants in the United States. Shawali became a businessman in the Arabian Gulf city of Dubai. The youngest son, Abdul Wali, became a biochemist on Long Island, while a married sister, Faozia, settled in Maryland.

  Hamid Karzai went to primary school in his native city of Kandahar and then attended high school in Kabul. It was an unremarkable childhood for a member of the Pashtun tribal elite: a constant stream of visitors for his father arriving at their Kandahar home, long summer holidays in the hot city, picnics beside lakes and at mountain resorts outside Kabul. Hamid’s father supported King Zahir Shah, who attempted to set up a constitutional monarchy in the late 1960s but refused to yield power to a partially elected parliament. Finally the king was overthrown by his own cousin, Mohammed Daud, in 1973. Just before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Karzai gained admission to Himachal Pradesh University, in northern India, to study political science. As millions of terrified Afghans became refugees into Pakistan and Iran, and an anti-Soviet resistance began, he wished to join the guerrillas. His father urged him to finish his studies first.

  Karzai’s life was now to intertwine with the wars that had raged for more than two decades in his country, the forced migration of one quarter of the Afghan population, and the deaths of an estimated one million people. With such chronic breakdown and collapse, an international terrorist group found it easy to take over the country.

  Situated on the crossroads between Iran and India, Central Asia and South Asia, and Central Asia and the Middle East, Afghanistan has been a gateway for invaders since the earliest Aryan invasions from Central Asia into the Indian subcontinent six thousand years ago. Easy to pass through, the country has nonetheless been impossible to conquer. Several of the world’s largest mountain ranges and deserts make life difficult for the resident population and invaders alike. Modern Afghanistan is divided by the massive Hindu Kush mountain range, which stretches across the middle of the country. To the south live the Pushtu-speaking Pashtun tribes, intermingled with Persian-speaking ethnic groups; to the north live the Persian - and Turkic-speaking peoples: the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmen, and others. In the northeast corner the towering peaks of the Pamir Mountains, called the “roof of the world” by Marco Polo, continue into Central Asia, Pakistan, and China. In eastern Afghanistan, the Suleman, the Spin Ghar, and other jagged ranges straddle the border with Pakistan—and, after 9/11, provided impenetrable hiding places for al Qaeda’s leadership.

  Where there are no mountains there are deserts and steppe. To the north of the Hindu Kush, the immense Central Asian Steppe begins its long sweep all the way to Siberia, while in the southwest stretches the Iranian Plateau, a land of harsh desert and scrub with sparse population centers. Even though agriculture is the mainstay for 80 percent of the population, only 10 to 12 percent of the terrain is cultivable. Before the Soviet invasion, nomadism and the grazing of goats and sheep, carried out by Kuchi nomads, ensured a livelihood for several million people.

  Despite its harsh geography, Afghanistan was one of the major crossroads of the ancient world, an important part of the old Silk Route used by pilgrims and traders, who along its length and breadth carried new religions, inventions, and ideas. Nearly all of the world’s ancient religions found a home in Afghanistan, including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism, and Buddhism, with Islam the last arrival, in AD 654, when Arab armies invaded India and Afghanistan after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. Ancient invaders, such as the Persians, Greeks, and the Turkic tribes of Central Asians, Arabs, the Mongols under Genghis Khan in AD 1219, and the Moghals, either swept though Afghanistan on their way to India and Persia, or occupied it. Each invasion left behind social, cultural, or ethnic legacies that were to add to the mosaic of modern-day Afghanistan. Thus the Mongols, amid the destruction they wrought, left behind the Hazaras, who today inhabit the Hindu Kush mountains.

  In 1504 Babur, a prince from the Ferghana Valley in modern-day Uzbekistan, conquered Kabul and then India, establishing the Moghul dynasty that was to last until 1857. The Afghan state recognizable today arose from the Pashtun tribes at a historical juncture when the Moghuls in India, the Safavids in Iran, and the Uzbek kingdom in Central Asia were all in decline due to political turmoil and civil war. At that time, the words Afghan and Pashtun were interchangeable, and the Pashtuns were seen as the only true Afghans. (Pashtuns today consider themselves a Semitic race whose ancestors were companions to the Prophet Mohammed.) They were divided into two major sections, the Ghilzai and Abdali (later called Durrani) . A Ghilzai Pashtun revolt against the Safavids in 1701 led to a tribal confederation among the Abdalis. In 1747, all the tribes held a nine-day Loya Jirga, or grand meeting, in Kandahar, ultimately choosing a general, Ahmad Shah Abdali, to become their king. The tribal chiefs wrapped a turban around his head and placed blades of grass in the turban’s folds, signifying their loyalty.

  (The Loya Jirga was to become the source of all legal authority—a tradition that continues to this day and which legitimized Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s president in 2002.) Ahmad Shah, who changed his last name and that of his dynasty to Durrani, became the father of the nation, and Afghans still flock to pray at his tomb in Kandahar. The Durranis moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul in 1772 and conquered northern Afghanistan, incorporating other ethnic groups into the Afghan nation. Afghan means a people now, and not just the Pashtuns. Disputes and rivalries between the Ghilzais and the Durranis and between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns were to continue for the next two centuries, but the country was governable and sustainable, despite its extreme poverty.

  The threat from European empires was never far away. The British in India tried to conquer Afghanistan three times but were unable to occupy the country. Instead they paid off the Afghan amirs (kings) and tribal chiefs, turning Afghanistan into a client state rather than imperial domain. Tsarist Russia conquered Central Asia and encroached into northern Afghanistan, buying support in a bid to undermine the British. Both empires vied for influence in Kabul, sparking a clandestine war of wits, bribery, and secret agents dubbed “the Great Game.”

  At the end of the nineteenth century the two empires agreed to demarcate Afghanistan’s borders—in the north with Russia, in the east with India, and in the west with Persia—thus dividing tribes and ethnic groups among several states but also defining Afghanistan as a nation-state for the first time. King Abdul Rehman (1880-1901), named the Iron Amir, used British subsidies to establish the first standing army and bureaucracy. Using brutal methods that were later closely copied by the Taliban, he suppressed forty revolts by the Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks, thus ending their autonomy and bringing them under the control of Kabul. He enticed Pashtun farmers from the south to settle in regions in the north, hoping to dilute their ethnicity and weaken their opposition to a central power. However, neither Amir Rehman nor any subsequent Afghan ruler accepted the Durand Line—named after Sir Mortimer Durand—which divides Afghanistan from the Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.

  The two-hundred-year-old Durrani dynasty came to an end in 1973, when King Zahir Shah, who had ruled since 1933, was
overthrown by his cousin and brother-in-law, Sardar Mohammed Daud, supported by the nascent communist parties inside the country, and Afghanistan was declared a republic under a presidential form of government. Afghanistan had initially tried to avoid getting involved in the cold war and received aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union, although Moscow was by far the largest aid provider, especially for Afghan officers trained in Russia. Between 1956 and 1978, Afghanistan received some $533.0 million in economic aid from the United States and $2.5 billion from the Soviets in both economic and military aid. It was still a client state, dependent on foreign aid for up to 40 percent of its budget. Even today it cannot raise sufficient revenue to pay for the necessary elements of a modern state.

  Afghanistan had always tried to balance regional powers, taking money from the Soviets and the United States and balancing the demands of both Iran and Pakistan. However, Mohammed Daud overrode Afghanistan’s balancing act and tilted decisively toward the Soviets, thereby increasing the influence of the two rival communist parties Khalq (the Masses) and Parcham (the Flag). Daud’s tilt led to a crackdown on the country’s nascent Islamic fundamentalist movement, which in order to avoid arrest fled across the border to Pakistan in 1975. The Afghan Islamists were linked to the “Muslim Brotherhood” and Pakistan’s Jamiat-e-Islami, who gave them sanctuary. However, Pakistan’s intelligence services, infuriated by Daud’s support to Pakistani Pashtun and Baloch Marxists, decided to retaliate by enlisting the Afghan Islamists. They were trained by Lt.-Gen. Naseerullah Babar, the head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, and sent back into Afghanistan to launch a guerrilla movement against Daud, which was quickly crushed. The Islamists included Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Ahmad Shah Masud, who were to become more prominent in the subsequent war against the Soviet Union. Ironically it was Babar, interior minister in the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1994, who would be instrumental in launching the Taliban.