Taliban (18 page)

The Americans, for their part, seemed at times almost willing to have the wool pulled over their eyes. US intelligence in Islamabad consistently underestimated the extent of ISI involvement with the Taliban, and attributed the problem to a few ‘rogue’ agents. Then, at the end of April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld came to Kabul to announce ‘the end of major combat operations’. One week later President Bush said the same thing about Iraq, on board the USS
Abraham Lincoln
beneath a banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished’. It was the height of neo-con hubris. Bloody insurgencies were getting under way in both countries even as they spoke.

The Taliban had hidden away large stockpiles of weapons as they retreated, and from the end of 2002 they started moving in additional supplies. The undermanned forces of Operation Enduring Freedom could not hope to prevent all of this traffic. Nor could ISAF be expected to do much, since their jurisdiction was not extended beyond Kabul until October 2003. By November 2002, even so, 475 weapons caches had been discovered, containing 2,000 AK-47 rifles, 70,000 mortar rounds and 43,000 rockets.
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Omar’s counter-attack began in the spring of 2003 in four southern provinces: Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul. They were the obvious place to start. Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace, was the spiritual and historical capital of the Pashtuns. They had successfully defended their home territory many times over the centuries, and their deep knowledge of the terrain would play to their strengths again. The choice was made easier by the almost total absence of American troops, who were focused on the
north-east of the country in their bid to root out al-Qaida. When the first Nato troops at last deployed to the south in late 2005, they were to discover that the US had not even been watching the region by satellite. For four years Omar and his commanders were free to come and go as they pleased, entirely unmonitored by US intelligence.

In a warning of things to come, a force of eighty Taliban was intercepted in January 2003 by a US patrol near Spin Boldak. Much to the Americans’ surprise, the Taliban stood and fought for twelve hours, and were defeated only with the help of airpower. An American firebase in the east of the country came under mortar and rocket attack, as did the main US airbase at Bagram. Afghan aid workers and other soft targets were assassinated. So was Ricardo Munguia, a Salvadorian engineer working for the International Committee of the Red Cross – a killing that sent a chill through the whole country. Almost alone among Western NGOs, the ICRC had stayed on during the Taliban regime to provide public medical care. Until Munguia’s death, the organization had been considered untouchable.

Meanwhile, Omar was getting organized. In June 2003 he appointed a ten-man Leadership Council and four new committees dedicated to military, political, cultural and economic affairs. It was the birth of the famous ‘Quetta shura’. In a conscious attempt to regain the sense of brotherhood that had served the movement so well in its early days, the appointees to the Council were exclusively Pashtun, eight of them from the south. They included Mullah Obaidullah, Mullah Zaeef’s former boss at the Ministry of Defence, as well as Mullah Dadullah, a Taliban war hero who had marshalled the defence of Kunduz: ‘A brave young man who never knew fear,’ according to Zaeef. He was famed for leading his
troops from the front despite having only one leg. He was also known for shooting with a pistol anyone who retreated; and he was thought to have approved the murder of the ICRC engineer from El Salvador.

The only two non-southerners on the council, Saifur Rehman Mansur and Jalaluddin Haqqani, were eastern Pashtuns. Haqqani had been Omar’s Minister of Tribal Affairs before 9/11, and would go on to found the so-called Haqqani Network, which today operates in six eastern provinces, with headquarters suspected to be over the border at Miranshah in North Waziristan. His operation differs in important respects. Haqqani, who counts a Saudi Arab among his wives, was always ideologically much closer to al-Qaida, and is thought to maintain personal links with bin Laden even now. He – and now his son, Siraj – are less fussy than Omar about who fights for his network, as well as less scrupulous about how his fighters fund themselves. His forces, which numbered perhaps 12,000 in late 2009,
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have been associated with frequent acts of extortion, kidnapping and other crimes.

However wicked he sounded, Jalaluddin Haqqani was also a genuine hero of the Jihad, famed for his capture in 1991 of the city of Khost: the beginning of the end for President Najibullah’s puppet communist regime. The Americans revered him in those days. The US Congressman and fund-raiser for the Jihad, Charlie Wilson, called him ‘Goodness Personified’. He is even thought to have met Ronald Reagan at the White House. Perhaps understandably, Karzai’s attitude towards Haqqani was ambivalent. In an early attempt at political reconciliation in the spring of 2004, he even suggested Haqqani should become Prime Minister – although the offer was stoutly rebuffed.
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By the summer of 2003, Taliban attacks were an almost daily
occurrence. On one day, 13 August, fifty people were killed in simultaneous attacks in three different provinces. The date for the all-important Constitutional Loya Jirga envisioned at Bonn was pushed back because of security concerns. The public had begun to deride their new President as ‘the mayor of Kabul’ for his inability to extend his remit beyond the capital, but there was little he could do to stop the violence. ISAF’s peace-keepers were restricted to Kabul until a new UN resolution was passed in October 2003. In the meantime, Karzai had neither a national army nor a police force with which to enforce his jurisdiction. Western nations had offered to train up these crucial institutions at Bonn, but had so far proved astonishingly slow to make good their promise – particularly Germany, which had agreed to take responsibility for the new police. Between 2002 and 2006 they spent just
89 million on the project, and sent out just forty-one trainers to train 3,500 officers over three years.

Critics later argued that if ISAF had moved faster to douse the fire now smouldering in the south, the insurgency might never have taken hold. But the generals were still under-resourced because of Iraq, or else because many Coalition partners were reluctant to commit troops to what was widely perceived as an American fight. Moreover, until ISAF command passed to Nato in August 2003, they were guided by an administration in Washington that kept insisting that the insurgency was not expanding. In December 2005 Rumsfeld, now seriously bogged down and short of manpower in Iraq, actually signed an order reducing the number of US troops in Afghanistan from 19,000 to 16,000. Instead of heading straight for the trouble spot, ISAF unveiled a plan to extend its footprint gradually. ISAF started with the least challenging region – the north – before working its way
around the country in four separate phases. It was not until the winter of 2005 that Western troops deployed in any force to Kandahar, and by then they were too late.

‘Regional Command South’, as the southern ISAF sector was known, was divided up among the three Coalition partners besides the US who were prepared to do any serious fighting: the Dutch, who were assigned to Uruzgan, the Canadians, who went to Kandahar, and the British, who got Helmand. None of them sent enough troops. Britain, the largest contributor of the three, initially sent a task force of just 3,300 men, only about 650 of whom were what the army call ‘bayonets’, with the rest engaged in the long logistics tail. And yet Helmand, the largest province in the country, was almost three times the size of Wales.

Whitehall did not anticipate the battle that ensued. Nato intelligence had estimated that there were no more than about two thousand Taliban in the whole of the south. In April 2006 the Defence Secretary, John Reid, notoriously remarked that: ‘We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot.’ His optimism was wildly misplaced. The British presence was like a jam-jar to a swarm of wasps. By March 2007 the army had fired at least 1.8 million bullets, in fighting described by General David Richards, who took command of all international forces in July 2006, as the fiercest the British had experienced since the Korean War.

There were several factors that ensured the battle for Helmand would be a hot one. The first was the drug trade. Poppy production in the province rose 169 per cent between 2005 and 2006, accounting for almost half of all the opium produced in the world. With so much money at stake it was clearly in the criminals’ interests to align themselves with the ideologues from Quetta in resisting the foreign invasion.

Then there was what General Richards called ‘the Maiwand thing’: a reference to the Battle of Maiwand of 1880, when a brigade under General George Burrows was driven back from the banks of the Helmand river by a force under Ayub Khan, resulting in almost a thousand British killed. Memory of that battle remains deeply entrenched in local folklore. Every Pashtun in the province claims that his forefather had fought for Ayub Khan. In view of Helmand’s history, a task force from almost any other nation in the world would have been a more appropriate choice for a mission intended to conquer hearts and minds. Instead, to the Afghan mind, the return of the Brits in 2006 was an Allah-driven invitation to a punch-up: round four of a conflict between two nations that had been at it intermittently for 170 years. As a Taliban commander told me in 2007: ‘Fighting the British feels like unfinished business for many of us.’

Operation Herrick 4 in the summer of 2006 opened a new chapter of violence that has deepened ever since. And yet the conflagration in Helmand was not inevitable – at least in the view of one British SAS officer who spent several months in 2005 reconnoitring the southern provinces in advance of the main deployment. He operated in what were called ‘light footprint’ patrols that were arguably far more effective in winning Afghan hearts and minds than the gloves-off approach taken later by the conventional military.

‘If they’d listened to our advice I don’t think we’d have the insurgency problem that we do now,’ he told me in 2010.

The Special Forces’ secret weapon was a medical civic assistance programme known as MEDCAP: a lightly guarded field hospital that travelled to suspected trouble spots all over the province. Helmand’s 1.45 million people only had one proper hospital, in
Lashkar Gah, which charged for its services. MEDCAP was of course free.

‘We found there was a direct and unambiguous correlation between the number of IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices] planted and the number of patients we treated, particularly children,’ the SAS man recalled. The first field hospital was set up as an experiment near the site of what was to become Camp Bastion, ISAF’s town-sized base in Helmand.

‘The people would find us through the bush telegraph. Wherever we went, we’d attract a line of burqas two hundred yards long. We treated hundreds of children. We dressed up our intelligence officers as nurses, men and women, and they would chat up the parents who would tell us where the bombs were. Or else the mothers would go home, tell their husbands how we’d saved their child’s life, and the bombs would just stop. We had a policy that no patient would go away empty-handed, even when there was nothing wrong with them. Our stocks of Haliborange vitamin pills were enormous.’

The British had other simple tricks, such as distributing windup radios with a Union Jack painted on the back, and which could only be tuned to a radio station that broadcast pro-British propaganda in Pashto. But nothing won the locals around as effectively as the MEDCAP programme, which allowed the British to enter communities that were innately suspicious of outsiders, and to meet their elders.

‘Softly softly was the only way to do it. We held dozens of shuras across the province. We’d ask if there were any Taliban locally and they would very often tell us.’

British soldiers and doctors were welcome enough to travel about in small numbers. But the elders at these shuras also begged
the British not to come back in any force, warning that there would be a big fight if they did because it would be perceived as a threat to their poppy-farming livelihoods.

‘That’s the thing that bothers me most,’ said the SAS officer. ‘In 2006 when the fighting started, we called everyone who resisted us “Taliban”. But they really weren’t, necessarily. They were just the community’s warrior class who had always defended their community against outsiders, and were bound to do so again. The “Taliban” in that sense were an enemy of our own creation. That was why, in 2005, we sent a memo to John Reid at the Ministry of Defence saying, “If you want an insurgency here, you can have one.” ’

The SAS officer later helped in the reconquest of Musa Qala in 2008, an operation celebrated as an ‘iconic’ victory over the Taliban by John Reid’s successor at the MoD, Des Browne. But the SAS officer didn’t believe that the ‘Taliban’ who had resisted and then melted away as the British re-took the town could honestly be defined as such.