Taliban (13 page)

For all their undoubted prowess as fighters, the Arabs were never popular in Afghanistan. They were richer and more sophisticated than their hosts, whom they tended to treat with lordly disdain. The Afghans, for their part, despised the arrogance with which they drove about in their shiny new 4x4 vehicles, which were conspicuous by their blacked-out windows and the Dubai number plates their owners couldn’t be bothered to change for local ones. The Arabs were adherents of Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative offshoot of Salafism, which was viewed with suspicion even in Kandahar. Wahhabis take their name from Muhammad ibn Abdal-Wahhab, an eighteenth-century Arab scholar who believed in the purification of Islam from heretical ‘innovations’ through violence; and the Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia most closely follows the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, a tradition alien to the Hanafi Islam embraced by Afghans.

Bin Laden was a liability for the Taliban from the start, for American intelligence had begun to monitor his activities even before his arrival in Jalalabad. In early 1997, a CIA snatch squad convened in Peshawar in a bid to capture bin Laden, although the mission was aborted. Omar, already suspicious of bin Laden’s intentions in Afghanistan, responded by ordering his guest to move his operation down to Kandahar where he could keep a closer eye on him. ‘It is beyond justice,’ as Omar later complained, ‘that today no distinction is drawn between terrorists and mujahideen in the world.’
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The West’s mistake was to assume that Omar’s Afghanistan was a terrorist-sponsoring state, when in reality it was a state sponsored by terrorists. In one close observer’s view, the relationship between Omar and bin Laden was always ‘90 per cent about money, only 10 per cent about shared ideas and ideology’. Bribery was one of the most important weapons in the Taliban’s arsenal as they took over the country, and bin Laden provided much of the ammunition for it, reputedly donating
3 million of his own fortune within four months of his return to the country, just for the Taliban’s assault on Kabul. He continued to lavish money on his impoverished hosts once he reached Kandahar, where he built a house for Omar’s family, imported fleets of Toyota Hi-Lux trucks from Dubai, and promised to build mosques and schools and to repave the road from the airport.

He also became an important conduit for donations from the Gulf States. The sheikhs liked to combine pleasure with business, and the well-connected bin Laden excelled at arranging hawking and hunting trips for them. A quarry particularly prized by falconers was the Houbara Bustard, the provincial bird of Baluchistan, the meat of which is considered an aphrodisiac in Arabia. The sheikhs would fly in by private jet or military transport, bringing weapons, vehicles and other equipment, which they would leave behind for their hosts. On one such ‘hunting trip’, the UAE Defence Minister Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum flew in from Dubai with a hundred brand-new Toyota Land Cruisers all fitted with field radios.
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Despite such largesse, and despite Omar’s public protestations of support for bin Laden, the relationship between the two took a turn for the worse after the US embassy bombings in 1998. An intense debate began among the ulema and the leadership over how to deal with their wayward ally – a debate that was still not
resolved when al-Qaida attacked New York three years later. One of the main sticking points was the Pashtunwali tenet of
nanawatai
, the offering of sanctuary to anyone who asks for it. Nanawatai also confers an obligation to help the weaker party in a feud by mediating its resolution. This was the principle behind Omar’s insistence that bin Laden was his ‘guest’, and therefore couldn’t be touched.

Nanawatai has long baffled the West. According to a Pashtun folk story, the Shah of Afghanistan was out hunting one day when he wounded a stag with an arrow. As the chase neared its inevitable end, the stag bolted into a peasant hut. The shah, delighted, dismounted from his horse and prepared to enter the hut, but his way was blocked by its owner.

‘Do you not know who I am?’ said the shah.

‘Whoever you are,’ said the peasant, ‘you may not enter my house. This stag has looked for my protection and I must grant it.’

The shah, impressed by the peasant’s steadfastness, went on his way empty-handed.

Nanawatai was not just folklore. In 2005 Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell, a sniper in a US Navy SEAL team, was injured during a firefight with the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan. He crawled seven miles – in the course of which he managed to kill six pursuers – before finding shelter with tribesmen from the Pashtun village of Sabri-Minah, who treated his wounds and refused all Taliban demands that they turn him over to them.
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There are, however, conditions to nanawatai, the first of which is complete submission to the host. The most obvious act of submission is the giving up of one’s weapons; not to do so is to demonstrate distrust of one’s host, the gravest insult to a Pashtun’s
ghayrat
, a man’s honour and personal dignity. In Waziristan in the
mid nineteenth century, a tribesman seeking sanctuary would sometimes be required first to humiliate himself by wearing a halter made of grass around his neck.
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Bin Laden never gave up his weapons, and he wasn’t the type to wear a grass necklace. There were many senior ulema who believed that the Saudi had thus breached the terms of nanawatai, and advised Omar that he could hand him over with a clear conscience. Others, however, argued that to do so would breach the forgiving
spirit
of nanawatai – and in the end, Omar agreed with them. According to one ex-Taliban member who knew him, Omar was ‘more Pashtun than Muslim’ – by which he meant that it was entirely typical of him to adhere to the moral position that two wrongs do not make a right.

And yet the decision to go on protecting bin Laden was not taken quite as easily as that characterization implies. Omar was astute enough to realize that bin Laden was also his most valuable international bargaining chip. Even as the ulema deliberated, he was exploring the possibility of exchanging his guest for official American recognition of his regime – something the Taliban had craved from the moment they captured Kabul. He spoke to the US State Department by satellite phone several times on this issue, though without result. The US wanted bin Laden handed over unconditionally. Omar countered that they should first show him the evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in the Africa bombings – evidence that, as the
New York Times
reported, had so far proved ‘difficult to obtain’.
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In any case, he was not prepared to see bin Laden tried in the US. Instead he offered to try him in an Afghan court if America could produce enough evidence; and if that was unacceptable, he proposed sending him to be tried in another Islamic country. These offers continued right up until 7 October 2001, the day the American and British bombing campaign began.

Washington insisted throughout that bin Laden should be tried in America. Even the possibility of a trial at the International Court in The Hague was ruled out. As Mullah Zaeef explained: ‘America’s demands . . . implied that there was no justice in the Islamic world, and with it no legal authority of Islam to implement justice and law among the people. This stands in direct opposition to Islam itself.’

It was deadlock – and perhaps one of the great ‘what if’ moments in history. It could be argued that with just a little more patience, diplomacy and understanding from the US, bin Laden might have ended up in a courtroom, al-Qaida might have lost its figurehead, and 9/11 and the entire War on Terror might never have happened.

Omar, to be sure, was no diplomat either. In late August 1998 he appeared to torpedo his own second alternative for bin Laden – trial in another Muslim country – when Prince Turki al-Faisal arrived in Kandahar expecting the Saudi dissident to be delivered to him. Omar bluntly accused him and the Saudi royal family of being American stooges, an insult so grave that, according to legend, Prince Turki returned to Riyadh ‘without even staying for lunch’. The Saudis subsequently suspended diplomatic relations with the Taliban – although they did not withdraw recognition of their government.

The civil war did not end with the fall of Mazar, as every Afghan had hoped. The Tajik leader Massoud refused to compromise with the Taliban, who had proposed a power-sharing arrangement, and instead chose to fight on from his base in the impenetrable Panjshir valley. The tide of war swept back and forth across the north-eastern provinces with further devastating consequences for the inhabitants. The rhetoric between Washington and Kandahar
became ever more entrenched as America’s obsession with bin Laden grew. UN sanctions were tightened in December 1998, and again in October 1999, hurting trade and banning all commercial flights to and from Kabul. The people’s suffering was increased in 2000 by a widespread drought. Appeals for international help went largely unanswered since donors were discouraged by the Taliban’s refusal to call a ceasefire. Food prices increased by 75 per cent, and the Afghani currency lost half of its value.
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An earthquake killed 5,000 in Badakhsan, and a plague of locusts descended on Baghlan. It was hardly surprising if the Taliban leader felt embattled. He needed every friend he could get, and the only two he had were very uncertain ones: Pakistan, and bin Laden.

Tariq Osman, who worked as a computer expert in Mullah Omar’s ‘Special Office’ in Kandahar from 1998 to 2001, experienced the regime’s growing bunker mentality in these years at first hand. Omar’s compound at Chowni, just to the north-west of the city, had been heavily fortified with several feet of sandbags arranged on the roof to protect against air attack; construction workers were said to have been diverted from a giant new mosque in the city centre in order to build it.

‘There were two kinds of Taliban,’ he recalled. ‘Illiterate peasant mullahs from rural areas like Helmand and Uruzgan who had actually very little knowledge of Islam; and the educated mullahs, mostly former refugees in Pakistan, who tended to be far more tolerant. The mullahs around Omar had very limited knowledge of anything.’ Omar himself was ‘a low-level scholar and a very poor public speaker – as were most of his spokesmen, because he chose them.’

Despite an immense beard, Osman himself belonged to neither category. I met him not in Afghanistan but in London at
the beginning of 2010, when he was preparing to start a short course in international development at Wolverhampton University. Since 2002 he had done a lot of research work for various international organizations – the East–West Institute, the Asia Foundation, the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute – while privately pursuing Islamic studies. His ambition was to set up his own Islamic education centre in Afghanistan. He believed that the best way to combat Islamic extremism was not less but more, and better, religious education: a strikingly Afghan solution to his country’s troubles.

‘A lot of what went on in Kabul in the 1990s – beating people for having short beards, or for showing their ankles – was against Islam. The Prophet preached respect for life and property and human dignity. The problem now is that kids are joining the Taliban without any knowledge of Islam at all. A new radicalization is creeping into the cities. People are being branded infidels just for working for an NGO. This is purely down to ignorance of Islam.’

During the Jihad he had fought across seventeen different provinces for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami, an experience that had cost him most of his fingers following an accident with a shell detonator. He quit the mujahideen in 1993, went to study English in Peshawar, taught himself how to use a computer, and ended up back in Kabul in 1998 with a job as the Foreign Ministry’s website and internet manager with the rank of Third Secretary. When Mullah Omar let it be known that he was establishing a Special Office in Kandahar – effectively an internet and communications hub for the movement – Osman was seconded southwards to help set it up.

His role gave him a unique insight into the tensions within the
leadership, as well as the mad contradictions inherent in a system trying to run a modern state according to rules designed for the late seventh century. Even the existence of the Special Office was controversial. It was also hypocritical. In June 2001, Omar issued a decree forbidding Afghans to use the internet – with the specific exception of himself and his Special Office.

‘Mullah Abdul Salaam Helmandi told his own brother that he wouldn’t let him into his house if he defiled himself by even entering the internet office,’ Osman recalled. ‘Yet I was ordered to write up the decree banning the internet on a computer so that it could be emailed to Kabul!’

It took sensitive antennae just to survive at Omar’s court, a paranoid world where everyone’s past was subject to scrutiny, and signals of factional allegiance were spotted in the smallest of things. The hadith one referred to in everyday speech and even a man’s choice of tea was important. Black tea, for instance, was associated with Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami, or the Islamic Revolution Movement, the tanzeem Omar had once fought for. Drinking green tea, supposedly the preferred beverage of the Hizb-i-Islami (Khalis faction), or even hot water (Hizb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin)) could be very dangerous for one’s career.