Taliban (12 page)

The Taliban, for their part, still deny that they killed any Hazaras at all. Mullah Zaeef insisted that the Hazaras who died were the victims not of Taliban fighters but of rivals in the Northern Alliance. He even claimed that they were killed during the vacuum of power before the Taliban entered the city, and it was in fact the Taliban who had restored the peace.

‘There were accusations that our soldiers committed rape. But the very idea is outrageous! I challenge you to find one single woman who says she was treated that way by us . . . it is all Northern Alliance propaganda, and the West goes on using it as justification for the war now.’

He had an explanation, too, for the murders at the Iranian consulate. The victims there were not diplomats at all but Iranian Special Forces trainers who had been flown in to stiffen the Hazara resistance. The diplomats who should have been there had left the week before on a Red Cross plane – a fact later corroborated
by the Red Cross themselves, although it went unreported.

Did Zaeef protest too much? For all his insistence that the Taliban were blameless in the field, it was nevertheless Kandahar’s determination to subdue the non-Pashtun north that began the terrible violence there – the worst the region had seen in decades, and which initiated a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat killings around Mazar that is still played out today. In Zaeef’s view, a great many fighters had died needlessly as a result of the mishandled occupation of Mazar: the Taliban’s first and worst mistake. There were some in the movement who thought – privately – that it had been a misjudgement even to try to conquer the north, and that the Taliban should have restricted their mission to the Pashtun heartlands. Zaeef calculated that as many as 13,000 Taliban were killed in fighting and other kinds of blood-letting across the north. Vindictiveness had inevitably crept into the movement’s credo, tainting the idealism that underpinned it. Their struggle was in danger of turning into one more squalid ethnic vendetta. Zaeef was so troubled that in March 1999, after a year and a half at the Ministry of Defence, he once again resigned.

‘Several issues that I had been commanded to look into lay uneasy with me,’ he wrote. ‘I had been ordered to search through all the files in the ministry’s archives to filter out all Afghan communists who had received a medal of honour or other awards for the killing of Afghans during the communists’ rule.’

He was also unhappy with the Taliban’s tactics on the Shomali plains, a heavily irrigated farming region to the north of Kabul that the Taliban and Ahmed Shah Massoud’s forces had fought over for years. In 1997 the Taliban deliberately devastated the area, destroying the irrigation channels and poisoning wells, forcing 180,000 civilians to flee.

In an episode significantly left out of his published autobiography, Zaeef confided to a friend that he had confronted his old comrade Mullah Omar in private one evening, removing his turban and casting it down between them: a powerful gesture of sincerity.

‘I said to Omar: What are you doing? This fighting is not what we signed up for. Please: it was never supposed to be this way!’

Omar briefly turned away, and when he looked back his eyes were full of tears.

‘My hands are tied,’ he said. ‘What else can I do?’

Omar’s hands were indeed tied. The war had by now taken on a momentum of its own, and his revolution was being manipulated by Pakistan. He also had a growing al-Qaida problem. On 7 August 1998, truck bombs blew up outside the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding 4,500, and Osama bin Laden, who had headquartered himself in Afghanistan two years previously, was the main suspect. This was a turning point for the Taliban, the moment when the destinies of Omar and bin Laden became entwined. It spelled the end for the Kabul government’s hopes for any sort of normality in their relations with the outside world. In particular, the trans-Afghan pipeline project, the most potent symbol of a different Taliban future, was dead.

‘Unocal lost all interest after the embassy attacks,’ Thomas Gouttiere recalled. ‘They just cut their losses and ran.’

A Unocal official in Turkmenistan told me that his company’s policy was dictated not by Washington but by its share-holders, for whom absolute security in Afghanistan was a sine qua non if they were to support a
2-billion investment project.

On 17 August came what Gouttiere called the beginning of ‘Lewinsky Weekend’, when President Bill Clinton admitted in a
national television address that he had indeed had an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with the White House intern.

‘And so tonight,’ he said at the end of his address, ‘I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century.’

Three days later on 20 August, US warships launched seventy-five cruise missiles at four alleged al-Qaida training camps in the east of the country near Khost and Jalalabad. The camps were mostly empty: the missiles killed thirty-four people, only six of them Arabs, and bin Laden himself was nowhere near at the time.

The Taliban were predictably outraged at this attack on their sovereignty. Demonstrations were organized and several UN offices were attacked by mobs. A mad rumour circulated that Clinton had been tricked into the attack by Mossad, the Israeli secret service – an allegation based solely on the fact that Monica Lewinsky was Jewish, and therefore apparently a Mossad agent.

‘If the attack on Afghanistan is Clinton’s personal decision,’ said Mullah Omar, ‘then he has done it to divert the world and the American people’s attention from that shameful White House affair that has proved Clinton is a liar and a man devoid of decency and honour.’
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Omar had been under pressure for months to hand bin Laden over to the Americans for trial. Now he categorically refused, insisting that bin Laden was his ‘guest’. He added: ‘America itself is the biggest terrorist in the world.’

The countdown to war between the Taliban and the West had begun.

It was not the Western public’s fault if they made little distinction between al-Qaida and their Taliban hosts. They were led to think this way for many years after 9/11 by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, but most of all in America, where a conflation of terminology served to justify the new neo-con determination to get rid of Omar’s regime. ‘The Taliban and al-Qaida are one enterprise,’ a senior US diplomat announced at a conference organized by the British Foreign Office in July 2001. ‘President Bush is very serious and could declare the Taliban a terrorist group.’
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Our leaders still play upon the idea that they are indivisible. The West’s principal justification of the war, indeed, is that if the Western military were to leave before the Taliban are defeated, the conditions would soon be ripe for a return of al-Qaida and their terrorist training camps. There has, of course, been no significant al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan since 2002. Even Pakistan now admits that bin Laden’s regional base is on their side of the border. Western politicians have adapted their old rhetoric to this
inconvenient fact, although not by much. Ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown used to refer often to ‘a chain of terror running from the mountains and plains of southern Afghanistan and Pakistan to the towns and streets of Britain . . . People in Britain today are safer because of the courageous sacrifice of British soldiers.’
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The Taliban and al-Qaida, however, have always been very different beasts. Mullah Omar’s movement was filled with Afghan Pashtuns with an exclusively domestic agenda; bin Laden’s was manned by Arabs whose goals were international. He was driven by anger at the American occupation of the Saudi peninsula during and after the First Gulf War, and at the Saudi royal family for inviting them in. Killing Americans and their allies was, for him, ‘an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to’.
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The Taliban, by contrast, did not want to kill Americans but to build pipelines with them. Omar may have used terror tactics at home, but he never had any interest in exporting terrorism abroad. Indeed he issued many statements declaring that no foreign country should be attacked from Afghan soil – and continues to issue them today. His goal has never gone further than the establishment of the Taliban version of utopia within their own borders. To date there has not been a single Taliban bomb in ‘the towns and streets of Britain’ or anywhere else in the West.

Gordon Brown’s contention that British people are safer because of the war is highly debatable. Britain is home to at least 1.6 million Muslims
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and 1,500 mosques, more than half of which are affiliated with the same Deobandi school of thought that the Taliban embrace. The galvanizing effect of the war on such a community can only be guessed at. Since 2006 at least, the British military have detected the occasional ‘Midlands accent’ while eavesdropping on the Taliban’s radio traffic. It is arguable that the Afghan Taliban
have shown extraordinary restraint in not attacking targets abroad in the last sixteen years. In April 2010, by grim contrast, the Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud released a video message warning that ‘The time is very near when our fighters will attack the American states in their major cities.’ Hours later, they claimed responsibility for a failed car-bomb attack in Times Square in New York.
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It is also questionable whether al-Qaida would even want to re-establish themselves in the event of the Taliban’s return. Afghanistan is not the hiding place it once was. The West’s knowledge of the terrain is of a different order compared even to five years ago, while satellite and drone technology have made concealment vastly more difficult than before. Meanwhile, the focus of al-Qaida’s efforts has moved from the ‘Af-Pak’ region back to Saudi Arabia and the Horn of Africa. In January 2010, al-Qaida fighters were reportedly ‘streaming’ away from Pakistan towards Yemen.
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Even if bin Laden did want to set up shop in Afghanistan again, would Mullah Omar really welcome him back? It seems unlikely – and without some form of sanctuary provided by the Taliban, any attempt to re-establish a serious terrorist operation on Afghan soil would surely fail. Sheltering bin Laden after 1998 ended Omar’s most cherished dream, the establishment of a Sharia state. Why would he make the same mistake again? As a Taliban mullah bitterly remarked to me in 2007: ‘The West destroyed our government for the sake of just one man.’ From 2002 onwards, the Taliban’s exiled leaders and the remnants of al-Qaida in Pakistan became allies of convenience in the sense that they were both at war with the West. But their reasons for fighting the foreigners are as different as they ever were. There is also evidence that Omar has deliberately kept his distance from bin Laden since 9/11. In January 2007, Omar told
a journalist by email that he had ‘neither seen [bin Laden], nor have I made any effort to do so’ since December 2001.
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‘We have never felt the need for a permanent relationship in the present circumstances . . . They have set jihad as their goal, whereas we have set the expulsion of American troops from Afghanistan as our target.’

Their relationship was rooted in the Jihad of the 1980s. The son of a Yemeni who had grown rich in the construction business, bin Laden was among thousands of Arab volunteers who travelled to Afghanistan to fight the infidel Soviets. He settled in Peshawar in 1982, where he became well known as an organizer of the so-called ‘Arab-Afghans’, as well as a useful source of funds and engineering expertise for the Afghan mujahideen. Many Arab fighters remained in the region after the war. In 1992, several hundred of them fought alongside Hekmatyar against Massoud in the battle for Kabul, although bin Laden was not among them. Disillusioned by the internal squabbles of the mujahideen, he had gone back to Saudi Arabia in 1990, and from there to Sudan in 1992; he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996, arriving in Jalalabad in a chartered jet accompanied by dozens of Arab militants, bodyguards, three wives and thirteen children.
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The personal relationship between Omar and bin Laden has been the subject of just as much ill-informed speculation in Afghanistan as it has been in the West. It is widely held by Afghans, for example, that in the 1990s Omar cemented a medieval-style pact with al-Qaida by taking bin Laden’s eldest daughter as a wife – and even that bin Laden had also taken one of Omar’s daughters as a fourth wife.
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But according to every single former or present member of the Taliban I have ever met, including Mullah Zaeef, there is no truth in either story. Inter-racial marriage is not unheard of in Pashtun culture – for instance, Jalaluddin Haqqani, the leader of
the Taliban-allied Haqqani Network, numbers an Arab among his wives – but it is very rare in practice. Pashtun marriage partners are traditionally restricted to the same creed and class, and often the same tribe, much as they are in Saudi culture. The idea of a simple country mullah like Omar marrying into the wealthy (and royally connected) bin Laden family is socially almost inconceivable.