Taliban (15 page)

In consultation with Mullah Muttawakil, the Foreign Minister, Zaeef issued a press release that ‘strongly condemned’ the attacks and called for all those responsible to be brought to justice. ‘And we want America to be patient and careful in their actions,’ it added.

He set off to Kandahar with a heavy heart soon afterwards, on a final ambassadorial mission to advise his leader what to do next.

America’s response to 9/11 was not the nuclear one that Mullah Zaeef feared, although it was certainly vigorous. ‘Go massive – sweep it all up, things that are related and not,’ Donald Rumsfeld told his aides, just hours after the Pentagon was attacked.
¹

The possibility of a holocaust was on many people’s minds at the beginning of the new millennium. ‘WMD’, Weapons of Mass Destruction, was the new expression on the diplomatic circuit, as Hans Blix’s UN inspection team began its fruitless search for them in Iraq, and preparations to invade that country got under way. Pakistan detonated its first nuclear bomb in 1998 in response to India’s expansion of its own programme, creating a troubling new dimension to the endless dispute over Kashmir. An opinion poll for
Dawn
newspaper found that over 90 per cent of the Pakistani public favoured a nuclear first strike on Delhi in the event of a conventional land invasion by India. The media was full of stories about stray fissile material turning up in countries like Nigeria and
Kazakhstan, presenting the possibility for the first time of a terrorist ‘dirty bomb’.

It is often forgotten that the US had decided to topple the Taliban before 9/11. An inter-agency cabinet meeting in Washington a week before the attacks agreed to provide the CIA with
125 million to arm Massoud and the Northern Alliance; the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the strategy would take three years to work. The seeds of Omar’s downfall were thus sown in his inability to finish the war in the north, because after 9/11, any enemy of America’s enemy was its friend. The likely consequences of taking sides in a 22-year-old civil war – a conflict that America is still struggling to extract itself from, nine years later on – were hardly considered then. Fury and fear swept reason aside. As Pakistan’s President Musharraf put it, America responded like a ‘wounded bear’.

The CIA’s failure to detect the 9/11 plot was blamed on its director, George Tenet, who tried to make amends by rapidly drawing up a covert invasion plan. In the absence of an alternative, conventional invasion plan from the Pentagon, President Bush accepted Tenet’s proposal. He signed an order giving the CIA what amounted to carte blanche in Afghanistan, along with up to another
1 billion in covert-operation funds.

The Taliban collapsed faster than Condoleezza Rice or anyone else expected. Kandahar itself was captured less than three months after 9/11. Bribery had been an effective military tactic in this part of the world since the fourth century BC at least, when Philip II of Macedonia remarked that ‘no fortress was impregnable to whose walls an ass laden with gold could be driven’. It certainly worked for his son, Alexander the Great, whose legacy of conquest includes Kandahar, a city he founded and whose very name is a corruption
of ‘Alexandria’. The British had used bribery to keep the Khyber Pass open in the nineteenth century. The Taliban had used it, too, in their brilliant northward advance in 1996. But now they were broke and couldn’t begin to compete.

One hundred and fifteen CIA operatives backed by three hundred Special Forces personnel fanned out across the country, eventually spending as much as
100 million in bribes to Northern Alliance commanders. Massive amounts of American airpower made sure that the battle was decisive. The campaign opened with a month-long air bombardment, starting with selected strategic targets in the capital – an event that was filmed by more than two hundred foreign journalists attached to the Northern Alliance troops watching from the Shomali plains. Just as it had been for the Soviet Army in 1979, the first US objective was to capture Mazar: a bridgehead for the two thousand American troops waiting across the Uzbek border at Termez, just 40 miles to the north.

With the CIA in a coordinating role, the region’s rival powerbrokers, Mohammed Atta and Rashid Dostum, mounted a pincer attack on the 8,000 Taliban troops dug in on the city’s perimeter. As I had seen in 1998, many of Dostum’s Jowzjan militia were mounted on horses, but there was to be no tragic repeat of the Charge of the Light Brigade. American Forward Air Controllers called down ordnance that included the fearsome 15,000-pound ‘daisycutter’, a bomb so large it has to be dropped by parachute. Daisycutters were designed to create instant helicopter drop zones in the jungles of Vietnam, and detonate with such force that all the oxygen is sucked from the air within a radius of 300 metres. Unlike the carefully choreographed bombardment of Kabul the month before, the press were not invited to witness this horror. But an Afghan journalist in London – a refugee from the fighting in
Mazar four years before – was able to telephone Dostum in the middle of the battle for a live update on the liberation of his city. The psychological impact of the daisycutter was evidently not confined to the Taliban trenches. ‘He was shouting with excitement,’ the journalist recalled. ‘I could hear the bombs going off in the background. He said he thought he would be back in Mazar within a few hours.’

Dostum was right. The Taliban survivors abandoned their positions and fled. By 12 November, just three days later, the north, west and centre of the country were in Northern Alliance hands. A British Special Forces officer later described watching the loadmaster of a C-130 Hercules that had landed at Mazar casually tossing out Dostum’s reward: four vacuum-packed bricks of
100 bills, each of them worth
1 million. In Kabul, the Taliban looted the national bank as they escaped southwards in a fleet of stolen cars and taxis. There would be a final stand at Kandahar, the Pashtun spiritual capital; the only other serious pocket of resistance was around Kunduz, a town with a large Pashtun population in the far north-east.

On the face of it, the CIA’s strategy had been an extraordinary success. The Taliban, with an estimated 60,000 troops in the field, were overthrown at the cost of just one American soldier killed, and in record time. It was a departmental triumph for President Bush’s neo-con wingmen, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who had embraced the CIA plan and taken their country to war without first mustering any of the major land forces that the generals at the Pentagon insisted would be necessary. The combination of covert dollars, Special Forces and airpower was to be tried again, though without the corresponding success, in Iraq. But for now, President Bush could crow about what a bargain the anti-Taliban
campaign had been: perhaps the cheapest war America had ever fought.

It was not so cheap for the Afghans. By December there were still no more than 1,300 US troops deployed in the whole country, and these depended heavily on airpower to act as a ‘force multiplier’. One study calculated that as many as 4,000 civilians were killed or injured as a result of US bombing over just twelve weeks.
²
The American troop contingent, furthermore, was nowhere near enough to keep order as the Taliban government collapsed. The jubilant Tajik and Uzbek militias were bent on revenge, and took it not just on the Taliban but on all Pashtuns, about a million of whom lived in the north. More than half of these now fled south, as the looting, raping, kidnapping and revenge killings of the early 1990s made an all-too-predictable comeback. Meanwhile, all aid operations to areas affected by drought were halted. According to one estimate, as many as 20,000 people may have died as a result of the intervention, either directly or indirectly through hunger, disease and displacement.
³

None of this was of much concern to the Americans at the time. ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, as the battle-plan was called, was focused on one thing only: the destruction of al-Qaida and the capture of bin Laden. They needed their Northern Alliance allies to help them achieve this, and the quid pro quo was to turn a blind eye to their excesses. From the very beginning, according to the International Crisis Group, ‘a culture of impunity was allowed to take root in the name of “stability”.’
⁴
For the next two years, the US’s main means of keeping the peace was to go on paying off the warlords who, when the CIA money began to run out, turned straight back to the drug trade. In 2002, 74,000 hectares of poppy were planted: almost ten times the amount in 2001. The villains
the Taliban had tried so hard to banish were all reinstalled in their fiefdoms, and the tone for the new Afghanistan was set.

The Northern Alliance’s abuse of their position took many forms, though perhaps none was so dreadful as Dostum’s treatment of the prisoners who eventually surrendered at Kunduz. Between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters were surrounded there after the fall of Mazar. The great majority were Afghan Taliban, but mixed in with them were hundreds of militants from Pakistan, Chechnya, Central Asia and the Arab countries. In a further sign of the profound difference between al-Qaida and the Taliban, the Arabs wanted to fight to the death, while the Afghans wanted to surrender – preferably to the Americans. There were, of course, no US troops on the ground for the Taliban to surrender to, so they surrendered to Dostum instead, hoping for a degree of leniency from a fellow Afghan that their Arab allies had been told not to expect.