Descent Into Chaos Page 7
This single act of defiance redefined Hamid Karzai as a brave leader, equal to any in Afghanistan. The Popalzai tribal council chose him as their tribe’s new chief, even though he had several older brothers living in the United States. Mullah Omar, however, was furious with Karzai and began to plot his assassination.
In 2000 the clear indications that the Taliban and al Qaeda were partners in creating an international army for terrorism based in Afghanistan were still receiving little attention abroad. I wrote about this alliance in Foreign Affairs magazine and spoke about it in forums in Washington, but there was no visible change in U.S. policy.7 Al Qaeda now organized Arab and North African fighters into a special unit called Brigade 555, which backed the Taliban army in some of its bloodiest offensives against the Northern Alliance. Al Qaeda enlisted other extremist groups to fight on its behalf, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Chechen fighters from the breakaway republic of Chechnya, and Uighur Muslims from China’s eastern province of Xinjiang. Meanwhile, al Qaeda training camps were churning out thousands of terrorists from around the world, many of whom remained behind in Afghanistan.
Foreign fighters made a huge difference on the battlefield. In September 2000, when the Taliban finally captured Masud’s stronghold of Taloqan, in northern Afghanistan—after thirty-three days of heavy fighting and a siege in which some seven hundred of Masud’s men were killed and thirteen hundred wounded—more than one third of the fifteen-thousand-strong Taliban force besieging Taloqan was made up of non-Afghans. These included three thousand Pakistanis, one thousand fighters from the IMU, and hundreds of Arabs, Kashmiris, Chechens, Filipinos, and Chinese Muslims. The ISI provided more than one hundred Pakistanis from the Frontier Corps to manage artillery and communications. Pakistani officers were directing the Taliban campaign in league with al Qaeda and the Taliban, and for the first time people in the United States and Europe began to take notice.8
Al Qaeda struck again on October 12, 2000, attempting to sink the American destroyer USS Cole while it was taking on fuel in Aden’s harbor. A tiny skiff packed with explosives piloted by three suicide bombers rammed into the Cole, killing seventeen U.S. sailors and wounding thirty-nine others. The Clinton administration never blamed bin Laden directly for the attack, although officials in Washington later told me they had determined that al Qaeda was responsible. The simple fact was that Washington had few viable options for retaliation after the firing of cruise missiles on training camps had proved to be such a dismal failure.9
Instead, the United States tried to mobilize the international community through a series of UN resolutions, although these meant little to the Taliban. In October 1999, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1267, demanding that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and stop providing sanctuary to terrorists. The Taliban ignored the request. In December 2000, UN Resolution 1333 imposed a complete arms ban on the Taliban and closing of training camps, as well as a seizure of Taliban assets outside Afghanistan. The resolution was aimed at stopping Pakistan’s arms support to the Taliban. The Taliban reacted angrily, while Pakistan’s ISI put together the “Afghan Defense Council,” made up of forty Pakistani Islamic political parties, designed to resist UN pressure and register support for the Taliban. On July 30, 2001, as Islamabad continued to supply arms to the Taliban, the Security Council passed Resolution 1363, which authorized monitors on Afghanistan’s borders to ensure that the UN arms embargo was enforced. The Taliban and their Pakistani supporters said they would kill any UN monitors who arrived.
Increasingly isolated and reviled by the international community, the Taliban became more confrontational. At the encouragement of bin Laden, Mullah Omar ordered his troops to destroy the two giant eighteen-hundred -year-old-statues of Buddha that dominated the Bamiyan Valley, homeland to the Shia Hazaras. Despite international condemnation and demonstrations by Buddhists around the world, on March 10, 2001, the statues were blown up. The Taliban also escalated tensions with the UN and aid agencies, passing new laws that made it virtually impossible for such agencies to continue providing relief to the Afghan population. The Taliban shut down Western-run hospitals, refused to cooperate with a UN-LED polio immunization campaign for children, and imposed even more restrictions on female aid workers, such as preventing them from driving cars. The Taliban arrested eight Westerners and sixteen Afghans belonging to a German aid agency and accused them of trying to promote Christianity, a charge punishable by death.
Osama bin Laden had a clear strategy in mind: to isolate the Taliban from the outside world so that it would become even more dependent on al Qaeda. The Taliban leadership would then have no choice but to defend al Qaeda when greater U.S. pressure was exerted once the attacks on American soil had taken place. Bin Laden wanted the Taliban to take over the country and so offered to assassinate Masud, which was certain to lead to the defeat of the weakened Northern Alliance.
By now Afghanistan was not just a security threat; it was the world’s worst humanitarian disaster zone. A countrywide drought had entered its fourth year, destroying 70 percent of the country’s livestock and making 50 percent of the land uncultivable. The drought forced millions of people into the cities, where aid agencies were overwhelmed. In June 2001, the UN warned of mass starvation in Afghanistan. There were now 3.6 million Afghan refugees outside the country, constituting the largest refugee population in the world, while another 800,000 Afghans were internally displaced. The economic crisis was aggravated by the Taliban’s single success: the elimination of the poppy crop, from which opium and heroin is derived. Mullah Omar had banned poppy cultivation in July 2000, a ban that was rigorously enforced the following year, depriving farmers of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, UN agencies were too slow in providing funding for alternative crops or livelihoods.
Throughout 2001, Hamid Karzai held a series of meetings with other Afghan opposition leaders willing to join a revolt against the Taliban. He met with Abdul Haq, a prominent Pashtun commander from the Jalalabad region in eastern Afghanistan whose wife and daughter had been murdered by the Taliban in Peshawar. (Abdul Haq was to be killed by the Taliban when he entered Afghanistan after 9/11.) Karzai also met with Gulbuddin Hikmetyar at his base in Meshad, Iran, simply because Hikmetyar claimed to be opposed to the Taliban. His most significant meeting, however, was with Masud in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. Masud offered Karzai the choice of either joining him and the NA in the north or accepting weapons and ammunition if Karzai planned to take independent action in the south.
As international pressure against the Taliban mounted, other exiled Afghan leaders decided to return home and take up arms against the Taliban. General Dostum, Ismael Khan, and the Hazara leaders all returned to Afghanistan and resumed fighting. All of them nominally joined the Northern Alliance and accepted Masud as their leader. Iran, Russia, and India, which had traditionally funded and armed the Northern Alliance, stepped up their military support, although Masud still had to buy most arms with the cash he earned from the gems and drug trade. Tajikistan had allowed Masud to use air bases in the country for his helicopters, while India opened a frontline emergency hospital for his wounded NA fighters in southern Tajikistan.
Compared to a year earlier, the Northern Alliance dramatically improved its situation in 2001, with several new fronts opened against the Taliban and renewed supplies of weapons. It also came to an agreement with Zahir Shah to forge a common front against the Taliban. The former king’s efforts were now being supported by all Afghans opposed to the Taliban. There was agreement on convening an emergency Loya Jirga, or traditional tribal gathering, to elect a new government for Afghanistan.
Yet while neighboring countries were prepared to back their proxies to return to Afghanistan and take up arms against the Taliban, U.S. support for the Northern Alliance was still only lukewarm. As we see in later chapters, although several advocates within the Clinton and Bush administrations wanted U.S. arms to flow to the Northern Alliance, the State Department disliked Masud
intensely because of his association with Iran and Russia. U.S. officials also feared U.S. involvement in an arms race in Afghanistan, as this would put Washington at odds with Islamabad’s and Riyadh’s support for the Taliban. In August 2001, Hamid Karzai, along with two other prominent Pashtun émigrés, Abdul Haq and Gen. Rahim Wardak (who was to become Afghan defense minister in 2004), went to London to meet with British officials. Karzai’s message was simple: Osama bin Laden was making key decisions for the Taliban, and al Qaeda was fully embedded in the Taliban government. MI6, British intelligence, was keen to foment unrest in the Pashtun belt, but it remained skeptical of the capacity of these three visitors to do so.
Karzai had made several trips to Washington and was angered by the simpleminded and one-directional questions of American officials and lawmakers, who asked if he could capture bin Laden. Karzai, for his part, wanted to discuss the overthrow of the Taliban. Meanwhile, Masud, in the summer of 2001, made his first trip to Europe to address the European Parliament, and there were plans to invite him to speak at the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York that September.
In my last meeting with Masud a few months before he was killed, he had visibly aged. He was dressed in slacks, his much-used battle jacket, a beret, and army boots—even though we were seated in a house in downtown Dushanbe. His beard was now gray, and he was much slower in his actions than before. His intellectual inquisitiveness, however, had not dimmed. He was deeply angry with Pakistan—asking me repeatedly why Pervez Musharraf was pursuing what Masud described as “a suicidal policy of supporting the terrorists”—and even angrier with the United States and the international community for not stopping Pakistan’s support to the Taliban.10 He described to me how CIA agents had visited him in his Panjsher Valley stronghold and asked for his help in getting bin Laden, but he scoffed at them when they told him they were unable to offer him support or arms.11
It was clear to me that Masud was making a momentous transition from being a parochial local leader, often intolerant and sometimes ruthless, to becoming the most important national leader in the country. He had patched up things with the Uzbek and Hazara leaders, had met with Pashtun leaders whom he had distrusted in the past, and had compromised with Zahir Shah, whom he had disliked all of his adult life. He had also dropped his Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and become an Afghan nationalist, ready to embrace anyone who opposed the Taliban. He had, in short, developed a vision for a future Afghanistan at peace.
He was never to see that vision. At noon on Sunday, September 9, Masud was at his base in Khoja Bahauddin, in northern Afghanistan, when he granted an interview to two Tunisian television journalists carrying Belgian passports who had been pursuing him along the battlefront for several weeks. Masud’s oldest friend, Masud Khalili, the NA ambassador to India, was with him and advised him not to give the interview. Masud insisted, and the two men were shown in. They set up a camera on a tripod close to Masud. When it was switched on, the bomb inside it, and possibly a second device around the cameraman’s waist, exploded. Masud took the brunt of the blast and was fatally wounded. Khalili was badly wounded but survived. Asim Suhail, a young member of Masud’s team, was also killed, along with the cameraman, whose body was split in two from the waist. The second Tunisian walked out calmly past the guards but was caught in the street, arrested, and then escaped again before being shot by pursuing guards on the banks of the Panj River.
Masud was dead, but the fiction that he was still alive was maintained for several days so that NA morale would not collapse in the face of what was now feared—a massive Taliban and al Qaeda offensive. “The days after Masud’s death were the closest we ever came to a total debacle and defeat because morale had just plummeted and we were leaderless— everyone knew that Masud had died,” Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s first foreign minister after 9/11, told me in Kabul in December 2001 as he sat on Masud’s chair and wept throughout our long late-night conversation.
A week later, Masud was buried near his village of Jangalak, in the Panjsher Valley, on a hilltop with a magnificent view. His twelve-year-old son, Ahmad, and his successor, Gen. Mohammed Fahim, officiated. Some twenty-five thousand people—family, friends, soldiers, diplomats, and journalists—were mourning as one. At Masud’s new home, which he had designed and moved into only three weeks earlier, his wife, Parigul, and their five daughters, aged three to ten, grieved, surrounded by the women of the valley. It was the largest and most heartrending outpouring of grief for a commander that Afghanistan had witnessed in its twenty-five years of war.12
The murder plot had been meticulously planned by al Qaeda. The two assassins had been able to carry a bomb from Pakistan to Kabul and then across Afghanistan to explode in Masud’s face. If the attack had taken place a few weeks earlier, as planned, and the Northern Alliance had been destroyed by the Taliban offensive, the Americans would have had no allies on the ground after 9/11 took place. For the first time in more than a decade, the trajectory of Afghanistan’s sad, desperate history was to cross paths with a major international event, and Masud was not alive to take advantage of it. If he had lived, there is little doubt that many of the early difficulties faced by the Afghan interim government and the international community would have been mitigated.
Karzai was grief-stricken at Masud’s death, but he now knew he had to defy the ISI request that he leave Pakistan for Europe and instead enter Afghanistan to foment a revolt among the Pashtuns.
Karzai was in Islamabad walking on the Margalla Hills on the evening of September 11, when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. His younger brother Ahmed Wali Karzai called him from Quetta and told him to return to the guesthouse to watch TV. I spoke to Karzai several times that evening. We both knew that the attack had been the work of al Qaeda, and I joked to Karzai that I did not think Musharraf would be able to throw him out now.
Over the next few days, Karzai met with diplomats from all the major Western embassies, hinting strongly that he was preparing to go into Afghanistan. He was offered little immediate support—except from the British, in the form of a satellite phone, which he declined to accept. When he returned to Quetta, his house was crowded with tribal elders wanting to know his plans. The ISI sent around two officers also to try to discover his intentions. The latter were politely asked to leave without being offered even a cup of tea—a sure insult. Karzai told only a handful of people of his plans, his wife, Zeenat, and his brother Ahmed Wali among them.13 A few days later he asked Ahmed Wali to get a hold of some money because he had no funds. Then, packing an old satellite phone, whose number he gave to the Americans and British, he got onto a motorbike and, with a few friends, headed into Afghanistan.
CHAPTER TWO
“The U.S. Will Act Like a Wounded Bear” Pakistan’s Long Search for Its Soul
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Gen. Mehmood Ahmad, director-general of Pakistan’s clandestine military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), was on Capitol Hill meeting with Porter Goss, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and other lawmakers, explaining all that Pakistan was doing to persuade the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans. With his handlebar moustache, piercing eyes, and ramrod-straight figure, the general seemed to be a throwback to a whiskey-drinking officer from the British Raj. As one of the three generals who had played a critical role in the 1999 coup that toppled Nawaz Sharif and put Pervez Musharraf in control, Mehmood was both powerful and influential in the Pakistani army. As head of the ISI, he was now virtually running the country’s foreign policy. Since the coup, Mehmood had also experienced an epiphany that had turned him into a born-again Islamic fundamentalist. Within the military junta, he was now one of the most vociferous supporters of the Taliban and the Islamic militant groups fighting in Kashmir.
In Washington, Mehmood was a guest of CIA director George Tenet, who had secretly visited Islamabad that summer to urge Mehmood to put more pressure on the Taliban to hand
over bin Laden. Now Mehmood was doing the rounds in Washington, trying to convince the State and Defense departments and U.S. lawmakers of the sincerity of Pakistan’s efforts on the bin Laden front. The Pakistanis were well aware that the Bush administration was conducting a major policy review on al Qaeda and Afghanistan. They also knew that the most difficult question under review for the Bush administration, as it had been for President Clinton, was how the United States would deal with Pakistan. The current regime—with its unabashed military and financial support for the Taliban, its links to a network of Islamic extremist groups and madrassas (religious schools), which were churning out fighters for Kashmir and Afghanistan, and its public support for jihad as a legitimate foreign policy—was viewed with enormous suspicion by the international community. In January 2001, the UN Security Council had imposed sanctions on the Taliban regime that were directly aimed at stopping Pakistan’s weapons supplies to the Taliban.
The Pakistani military considered its support to the Taliban as part of the country’s strategic national interest. Since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the ISI had tried to bring its various Afghan proxies to power in Kabul in the search for a friendly Afghan government that would keep rival India out of Afghanistan. The Taliban had provided just such a government, even if their extremism was now an embarrassment. Pakistan also felt the need to support the Afghan Pashtuns because of the large Pashtun population in Pakistan and because the non-Pashtuns had sought support from Pakistan’s rivals—India, Iran, and Russia. The Pakistani military also determined that a friendly government in Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” in any future conflict with India—a theory that had been convincingly dismissed by Pakistani civilian strategic thinkers but which the military continued to espouse— refusing to acknowledge the destabilizing fallout from the Taliban inside Pakistan: the growth of extremism and sectarianism.