Taliban (16 page)

Between three hundred and five hundred of them were taken to the Qala-i-Jangi, the Fort of War, a vast, mud-baked fortress to the west of Mazar. A dozen CIA men were tasked with interrogating the horde, but with typical Afghan laxity the prisoners had not been properly disarmed. A handful of Arabs among them led a suicidal revolt that took six days to put down, one of the bloodiest engagements of the whole campaign. Only eighty-six of them survived, and more than seventy of Dostum’s soldiers were killed.

The prisoners had captured the armoury before retreating into a deep basement complex. Dostum’s troops struggled to dislodge them from here despite the support of tanks, British and American Special Forces, guided bombs and a pair of Spectre gunships. Oil was poured into the basement and ignited, but still they fought on. Finally, freezing water was diverted in from a nearby irrigation channel. Dozens of the defenders drowned, and the rest at last
surrendered. Among them was Sulayman al-Faris, better known as John Walker Lindh, the famous ‘American Taliban’ who had been born in Washington, DC, and was baptized a Catholic. To many shocked Americans, the complexity and the truly global dimensions of the fight their country had taken on were perhaps revealed for the first time.

I visited the fort several months after the attempted break-out, although it felt as though it had just happened. The basement had an evil atmosphere, reminiscent of a hellish execution cell at Auschwitz I had once been in. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes and still black from the smoke of the burning oil; here and there I found religious graffiti, the final imprecations of Muslims who had vowed to die. Shell casings and unspent ammunition lay about. The earthen floors had not dried out from the flooding, and an organic, almost metallic odour hung over everything. Gingerly disturbing some rubble with my foot, I uncovered the sodden remains of a keffiyeh, its black and white cotton stained brown with blood. It was as appropriate a symbol as any of the Taliban’s terrible defeat. As many as 12,000 Taliban were killed in the campaign as a whole, with perhaps 20,000 wounded and 7,000 captured: well over half of their entire force.

The prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Jangi were shown no mercy by Dostum, who packed them with thousands of others into thirty shipping containers – up to 250 in each – and took them to his base at Shibarghan. Most of them were asphyxiated on the journey. In one container, according to UN officials, only six out of 220 survived. There were reports that when they cried out for air, their Northern Alliance guards obliged by machine-gunning the sides of the container until blood ran from the air holes. A mass grave was later uncovered nearby in the Dasht-i-Leili desert.

American silence in the face of such atrocities naturally fuelled Pashtun anger in the south, and would soon help to revive the Taliban movement. The Americans had formed an evil alliance in pursuit of their al-Qaida goal, and once they had taken sides in this way, the rest of the international community had little choice but to go along with it, including the UN. When Kofi Annan’s special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was questioned about Dasht-i-Leili in August 2002, he replied that his responsibility was to the living, not the dead, and that he didn’t have the resources to pursue an investigation.

‘I said what I said for those who wanted me to hang Dostum on the first pole,’ he told Ahmed Rashid later. ‘If we started doing that, where would we end up? My business was to talk to all the wrong people, the murderers and rapists and killers.’

Yet calls for Dostum’s role in the Dasht-i-Leili affair to be investigated have not gone away. The role of the US Special Forces, who apparently did nothing to ensure the prisoners were properly treated, is also in question. In 2009 a documentary by Jamie Doran,
The Convoy of Death
, prompted President Obama to order his officials to look into the matter once again.

The US’s reliance on proxy local forces had many other consequences, including the well-documented failure of the primary mission: the capture of bin Laden. Accompanied by several hundred al-Qaida fighters, he had retreated at the end of November to a fortified cave system in the Tora Bora mountains, 25 miles southwest of Jalalabad and close to the Pakistani border. Thousands of US troops were standing by on aircraft carriers waiting off the Makran coast. There were also a thousand battle-ready British marines stationed at Bagram airbase north of Kabul.

Instead of calling upon any of these, General Tommy Franks left
matters to three small-time commanders who were in the pay of the CIA. They included Hazrat Ali, a notorious brigand in his native Jalalabad. His role in bin Laden’s escape was never quite proved; he later became an MP. But the fact remains that the al-Qaida leader and some eight hundred Arab fighters were escorted to safety in the tribal areas of Pakistan by local Pashtun guides, who reputedly charged
1,200 per head for the service. The CIA argued even at the time that just a few hundred US Rangers deployed along the unguarded border would have prevented bin Laden’s escape.

Some of the Arab fighters made their way south through Pakistan to Karachi, from where they escaped back to the Gulf on board fishing boats. Others found sanctuary with Pakistani extremist groups in Punjab or Peshawar or Lahore. Still others, probably the majority and perhaps including bin Laden himself, melted into North and South Waziristan, where they were left unmolested for another three years. It was not until 2005 that the Pakistanis began to perceive them as agents provocateurs among the unruly tribesmen of the border areas.

The Americans also failed to capture Mullah Omar in Kandahar. The CIA’s placeman in the south was none other than Hamid Karzai, who rallied the Pashtuns of Tarin Kot, the tiny capital of Uruzgan province 60 miles to the north. It was the first organized Pashtun resistance in the southern belt, which the Americans always realized would be the key to overthrowing the regime. It was not until this moment that they decided they would back Karzai for the national leadership. On 18 November the Taliban sent a thousand fighters in a hundred Toyotas in a lastditch effort to kill him. When thirty vehicles were obliterated by guided bombs before they could even reach Tarin Kot, the
leadership knew that the game was up. But Karzai waited too long to move on Kandahar. By the time he got there, most of the leadership were in Pakistan. Omar himself escaped on a motorbike under cover of darkness.

In later years, Afghans would often allege that the CIA let their enemies escape deliberately, in order to propagate the war and justify a military occupation of Afghanistan. America, they theorized darkly, wanted a permanent presence in the region in order to pressurize Iran, as well as to ensure access to the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia; fighting terrorism had very little to do with it. The truth is that the Americans did let many of their enemies escape, although not for such devious geo-political reasons. It was not they who had an interest in propagating the war, but Pakistan.

Before 9/11 Pakistan was an international pariah, castigated for its nuclear programme and for its support for the Taliban, and labouring under US sanctions. After 9/11, President Musharraf was promoted to George Bush’s number-one ally in his War on Terror. Musharraf wrote in his autobiography that the US had threatened to ‘bomb him back to the stone age’ if he did not cooperate. Coerced or not, his eventual decision to side with the US was to be immensely lucrative for his country. In exchange for American military access to Pakistani ports and airbases, all sanctions were instantly waived and replaced by a raft of new loans. The Pakistani Army did particularly well out of the deal. More than half of a
700-million aid package announced by the White House in 2004 was earmarked for the military, compared to just
19 million intended for ‘improving democratic participation’.

Musharraf, however, was playing a double game. Alongside the
thousands of Taliban in Kunduz in November were dozens of ISI officers and hundreds of soldiers from the Pakistani Frontier Corps who had been sent to assist them. They had had two months to make their escape but had chosen instead to fight on. Now, embarrassingly, they were trapped. Musharraf asked Bush a favour: a pause in the bombing to allow a plane to extract his officers. Bush was desperate not to do anything to upset his new ally, and agreed. The top-secret operation was handled by Vice-President Dick Cheney; most of the US cabinet were not told. But Cheney was hoodwinked. What was supposed to be a minor extraction turned into a major airlift. As many as a thousand people boarded the Pakistani planes, including many Taliban and al-Qaida fighters who were subsequently allowed to vanish into the border areas of Waziristan. Some analysts believe that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than they did from Tora Bora. Bush was always naive in his dealings with Musharraf. At their first ever meeting, at which the American pledged
1 billion in aid to Pakistan, Musharraf asked: ‘How do we know the United States won’t abandon us again?’

Bush answered: ‘You tell your people that the President looked you in the eye and told you that he would stick with you.’

His underestimation of Pakistani duplicity was to have disastrous consequences for the War on Terror, and was one of the root causes of the Taliban’s resurgence in the years to come.

Despite the mauling they received on the battlefields, the Taliban were never quite broken. Thousands found sanctuary in Pakistan, or simply went home to their families and buried their guns. In Peshawar in October 2002, I met a fierce-eyed tribesman from Waziristan who was in no doubt that their time would come again.

‘We are waiting for a sign from Allah and then we will launch a war that will amaze the Americans,’ he said.

And yet the resurgence was not inevitable. The Waziri’s words sounded like bombast then. I had met him in the office of a friend of his, a Pashtun businessman I was also visiting, who raised his eyes to the ceiling and called him a dolt for always wanting to pick a fight. The Taliban were at their lowest ebb in the years after their overthrow, and the truth was that the Afghans, and even most Pashtuns, were delighted that they had gone. The people were desperately weary of the years of cruelty and war, and saw the US as liberators who would usher in a new era of peace and democracy. In many cities – even in Kandahar – the people literally danced in the streets.