Taliban (20 page)

It was an iconic moment for the insurgency. The Taliban had not forgotten the annihilation of their comrades who had tried to break out of the Qala-i-Jangi, six and a half years before. By pulling off an operation of such extraordinary skill and daring at Sarposa, they were able to prove to themselves and to the world that the new Taliban was a force to be taken very seriously indeed – another taste of things to come.

I met a group of Taliban commanders one winter’s night in early 2007, in a safe house in a village in Wardak province.
¹¹
Wardak was barely 30 miles from Kabul, yet in much of the province the writ of Karzai’s government ran only during the hours of daylight, when the Taliban slept before taking over completely at sundown. Abdullah, the group’s leader and the military commander for the province, was a man of about my age as well as a father of young children, although he was frighteningly pessimistic about his prospects of watching them grow up.

‘We are against war,’ he explained. ‘It creates nothing but
widows and destruction. But jihad is different. It is our moral obligation to resist you foreigners.’

They could not therefore stop fighting even if they wanted to, and even if there was no chance of success. The object was not necessarily to win, but to resist.

‘One year, a hundred years, a million years, ten million years – it is not important. We will never stop fighting. At Judgement Day, Allah will not ask, “What did you do for your country?” He will ask, “Did you fight for your religion?” ’

Over the next three years I followed Abdullah’s guerrilla career at one remove through an Afghan contact who kept in touch with him from London. By 2008, the shadow administration in Wardak was so well established that it was operating by day as well as by night. In some districts the government had ceded control completely to the insurgency. The official provincial government simply could not compete with the services the Taliban offered – particularly, I was told, when it came to the administration of justice. A villager involved in, say, a local land dispute, used to have to bribe every official and wait months before a resolution could ever be reached. By stark and shameful contrast, the judgements of the Taliban’s Sharia councils were instant as well as free.

In 2009 the Wardaki Taliban began to focus their attentions on the Kabul to Kandahar highway that runs through the east of the province, a vital supply route for the growing American counterinsurgency operations in the south. Abdullah, it seemed, had discovered a special talent for attacking ISAF’s convoys. On one occasion he was said to have burned three hundred trucks in a single night, a feat that brought him to the special notice of High Command in Quetta, who began to supply him with every resource he required. His bombs were often detonated by buried command
wires which were rumoured to stretch for miles on either side of the kill-zones. ISAF had set up a string of fortified checkpoints along the most vulnerable stretch of road, but still the attacks continued. The bombers were so elusive that the American infantrymen guarding the road took to calling them ‘ghosts’ – which was nothing new. The Russians had used exactly the same nickname,
dukhi
, for their assailants in the 1980s.

At the beginning of 2010, the frustrated Americans launched a series of night raids in the Wardaki interior in a bid to remove this thorn in their side. They succeeded in wounding and capturing Mullah Abdul-Basit, Abdullah’s spiritual mentor, a small, scholarly man whom I had also met in 2007. He was taken to the jail at Bagram, but of Abdullah himself there was no sign. I later learned that he was in Quetta, securing weapons and support for yet another counter-offensive against the Americans.

The Western strategy looked more and more like a recipe for endless war, and by the US military’s own admission, it wasn’t working. In the spring of 2010, according to a Pentagon survey, Afghans supported the Karzai government in only twenty-nine of the 121 districts considered the most strategically important. With government corruption at every level continuing to run out of control, this was hardly surprising. According to the UN, Afghans paid
2.5 billion in bribes in 2009: about a quarter of the country’s official Gross Domestic Product.
¹²
By May 2010, meanwhile, more than 1,780 foreign Coalition troops had given their lives in the effort to prop the regime up.

I had suspected in 2007 that the West’s military response to the Taliban was in trouble, and that negotiating with this enemy would be a better option than fighting them. The statistics alone suggested that negotiations had now become an imperative. In 2007 the idea
that the West might ever ‘talk with terrorists’ was still considered a heresy in Washington, but opinion has shifted since the coming of Obama. Even the new US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, seemed in January 2010 to accept that the West could not sustain this war for much longer, and hinted that reconciliation with the Taliban leadership was the answer.

‘I think any Afghans can play a role [in the government] if they focus on the future and not the past,’ he said. ‘As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting.’
¹³

Everyone could agree with that. For how much longer would the West really go on sacrificing the lives of its young men and women for a cause that looked so lost?

In May 2010 I received an email from Adrian Lucas whose son Alec, an assault engineer in the Royal Marines, became the 126th British soldier to die in Afghanistan when he was killed by an IED during a clearance operation in Helmand in November 2008. Alec was a football-mad 24-year-old, with a young daughter and a fiancée whom he had planned to marry that summer. Eighteen months later his father was still struggling with his loss, still visiting Alec’s grave each day in the cemetery near their home in Peebles.

‘The thing is . . . you NEVER think that you will outlive your kids,’ he wrote.

He had read my book
A Million Bullets
, which he said had helped him to understand the people who had killed his son.

His feelings about the war were complex. ‘It is important that the [bereaved] families have a say, and, believe it or not, most of us can’t stand the thought of a pull-out!’

The Taliban’s extremism appalled him. He had watched television reports of Sunday afternoon hangings in football stadiums
before 2001. He had also heard how in Helmand, the Taliban were so keen to bring down a ‘trophy’ Chinook helicopter that they would deliberately shoot a little girl in the leg, send her up to an ISAF base, then wait in ambush for the Emergency Response Team which they knew the soft-hearted foreigners would call in to evacuate her.

At the same time, Adrian insisted that he ‘got it’ that the conflict would not be won by military means alone, and that ISAF’s tactics were often counter-productive. He said that Alec, who was killed near the hydro-electric dam at Kajaki, had died believing that it was his mission to restore electricity to Afghanistan.

‘I feel your respect for these people, and I feel it too,’ Adrian wrote to me. ‘Alec always said in every phone call, “Dad, this place is beautiful and these people are wonderful, I really like them.” ’

This was the tragic paradox: Alec had been killed by a people he liked and wanted to help, for the simple reason that he was wearing a foreign soldier’s uniform. In 2007 when I put it to Mullah Abdul-Basit that the Taliban should stop fighting Nato because we were here to help the Kabul government to secure economic development, he replied: ‘Then why do you come here with guns and bombs?’

‘Are you saying that it would have been different if we had come here unarmed?’

‘But of course!’ said the mullah. ‘In that case you would have been our guests, just as you are our guest now. If your engineers and agriculture experts had come to us and explained what they were trying to do, we would have protected them with our lives.’

The West’s intent was good but the method was not. The Taliban were fighting for two things: a return of Sharia law, and the withdrawal of infidel soldiers from Afghanistan’s holy soil. Our
soldiers were therefore the last people we should have put in charge of the reconstruction, because they were forced by the insurgency in the meantime to do what they were trained and designed to do – which was to fight. Deeds could not possibly match the West’s fine words under such circumstances. The whole basis of our engagement was wrong.

The main objection to leaving Afghanistan’s future in the hands of civilians was the risk that the country might ‘become once again a sanctuary for al-Qaida’, as General Petraeus put it. But was this the reason for the West’s continued military presence – or a justification for it?

What if the Taliban leadership were prepared and able to guarantee to keep al-Qaida out in the future – would ISAF withdraw then? And what other areas of compromise might the Taliban be willing to consider in order to break the deadlock? In February 2010 I went back to Kabul to try to find out.

After a long night’s journey from London via Dubai, there was no sign of the car I had asked to meet me at Kabul airport – an inauspicious start to my first Afghan visit in three years. The reason soon became apparent. Two hours earlier a pair of hotels, the Safi Landmark and the Euro Guest House, had been attacked by a mixed force of suicide bombers and gunmen, some of whom were still shooting it out with the police. The hotel I was supposed to be staying in was barely a block away from the Safi Landmark. Many foreign guests had been killed, according to one of the few drivers hanging around by the airport, and much of the city centre was still sealed off. It was a sobering reminder that one didn’t need to travel to the provinces to find the war any more. These days it was right here in Kabul.

I hitched a ride with a government taxi-driver who claimed to have a special pass that would allow us into the secure zone. The mud-slicked roads were spookily empty of ordinary people.
Everywhere we looked there seemed to be heavily armed men – soldiers in green, policemen in blue, plain-clothed operatives of the National Directorate of Security, the NDS, about whom I was to hear a lot more in the coming days. The driver’s pass was useless when we reached the barricades. There was no way they were letting us through when they saw a foreigner in the back. The driver dropped me instead at the Intercontinental, a 1960s behemoth of a hotel that sits on a hill a couple of miles west of the centre. If nothing else this was a safe place to sit out the siege. There were three armed checkpoints on its access road alone, and soldiers patrolling with uncharacteristic alertness in the gardens round about. Kabul was much changed.

The inside of the Intercon, on the other hand, was as depressing as ever: cold, cavernous and under-lit. Porters and waiters mooched about, waiting for guests that never seemed to come. I settled down in the coffee room to wait for the all-clear. There was one other customer, watching pictures of the attack’s aftermath on a television in the corner.

‘This damn country,’ he said as I came in.

The Safi Landmark was a wreck of shattered glass and neon signage hanging in tatters, while the building opposite had collapsed entirely.

‘My wife is going crazy. She keeps phoning to ask when I’m getting out of here. But that’s easier said than done, you know?’

He was an Afghan-American called Mirwais, a Dubai-based businessman in town for a series of meetings with the US military. He was hoping to sell them ten armoured vehicles: ‘new-generation ones, all carbon-fibre underneath, very strong but very light’. The cost, he revealed, was
200,000 per vehicle; he complained that the Americans were keener on leasing rather than buying them.
He laughed in a worldly way when I teased him that
2 million might be better spent on ordinary Afghans rather than protecting Americans.