Taliban (25 page)

Another of McChrystal’s problems was that not all forces in
Afghanistan came under his command: not even all the American ones. Many shadowy ‘private contractors’ – little more than mercenary units – were known to be at large. The CIA had over eight hundred operatives in the country complete with their own air force, yet they answered not to McChrystal but directly to head-quarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA programme of ‘targeted assassinations’ using Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles had been dramatically stepped up since Obama came to office, particularly in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In 2009, for the first time, the US Air Force spent more on training drone controllers than it did on conventional aircraft pilots. Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, called the programme ‘the only game in town’. It was no game for those living near the targets, however. For all the technical wizardry of the launch platform, a missile was still a missile and often anything but ‘surgical’ in what it struck. One respected Washington think-tank calculated that in Pakistan alone since 2004, fully a third of the estimated 800 to 1,200 people killed by drones were innocent civilians.
¹²

As the Pakistani lawyer (and the first Pakistani president of the Cambridge Union) Shahpur Kabraji wrote: ‘We know that elements of the civilian population in Pakistan and Afghanistan are harbouring militants. It is equally undeniable that this civilian population is unlikely to feel any sympathy whatsoever for the political aims of Washington when the only face of those aims they see is the business end of a Hellfire missile. These populations must be convinced that by harbouring terrorists within their community, they undermine their own chances for peace and prosperity . . . but when hundreds are also killed as “collateral damage”, it is not surprising that the message is lost. Kill one innocent farmer, create a village of anti-Americans.’
¹³

There was another problem with the ‘decapitation’ policy, even when Nato’s intelligence was accurate, which was that it seemed to have no effect on the insurgency. By 2010, half of the ten-man leadership council, or shura, appointed by Omar in Quetta in 2003 were captured or dead, including the Taliban’s greatest tactician, Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in fighting in Helmand in 2007. And yet the level of resistance had done nothing but increase. The Taliban had no shortage of people willing to step into dead men’s shoes. Most of them were younger men, a significant number of whom had been radicalized by the experience of Guantanamo – the kind of leaders who were even less likely to agree to the negotiation that McChrystal said he ultimately sought. The policy was therefore self-defeating: an effective tactic in the short term, perhaps, but potentially disastrous for the long-term strategy. Many senior Nato commanders understood this. One British general told me in early 2010: ‘Every time I hear about another hit on a Taliban leader, I wonder if we haven’t just killed a McGuinness or an Adams.’ But if McChrystal could not control the CIA, what chance was there for an officer in the British Army?

Finally, ISAF control over their most useful Afghan allies in the field – the agents of the Tajik-dominated NDS – was loose, at best. In Kabul it was hinted that it was Afghans who had spearheaded the disastrous Kunar night raid.

‘Incidents such as this do not reflect any conduct that ISAF would condone, and it is not the way ISAF trains any of our Afghan partners,’ a Nato spokesman commented.
¹⁴

That sounded like buck-passing to the average Afghan, however. It was McChrystal’s decree, after all, that had just put ISAF’s ‘partners’ in the lead on night raid operations. It seemed the general was damned whatever he did, because in most people’s eyes,
and certainly in Zaeef’s, it was always ‘the Americans’ who were at fault in the end.

My conversation with Zaeef turned, as it so often did in Afghanistan, to 9/11 and Osama bin Laden.

‘The war is all about America’s sense of security,’ I said. ‘If the West could be sure that al-Qaida will not return to Afghanistan, I’m sure we would leave.’

Zaeef nodded his agreement. ‘The US has only one right here: to receive a guarantee that no country will ever be attacked from within these borders. Just as we have the right not to be attacked by the US in future. Sovereignty should be respected. If there are to be negotiations, these guarantees should be their focus.’

‘And can the Taliban make such a guarantee?’

‘Mullah Omar would set it in stone.’

From the way he looked at me I had no doubt that Zaeef really believed this. Perhaps it was true. But it did not answer the West’s concern that the Taliban was such a disparate organization these days that Omar was no longer in full control of it. Taliban-allied groups such as the Haqqani Network in the central eastern districts were often said to operate almost autonomously of Quetta. If Omar promised to freeze out al-Qaida, would these groups necessarily follow? In the end, believers like Zaeef could only give their word for it.

‘The Taliban are more united than ever,’ he said levelly. ‘No one has ever disobeyed an order from the Amir ul-Mu’mineen. We know that the unity among us is our strength.’

This was as may be. There was plenty of evidence that Mullah Omar was concerned that his commanders were sometimes guilty of departing from the Taliban script. The leadership understood just as well as ISAF that the real battlefield was in the hearts and
minds of the people, and that cruelty or unIslamic behaviour among its own troops could only damage the Taliban cause.

In July 2009, almost simultaneously with General McChrystal’s
Counterinsurgency Guidance
, Quetta published and distributed its own notes on correct comportment in the field. This small blue pocket book, entitled
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s Rules for Mujahideen
, provided a fascinating insight both into how Mullah Omar saw his movement and how he thought the insurgency was going. The cover bore a splendid pictogram, almost a heraldic coat of arms, showing a tower with a staircase leading to a copy of the Koran that radiated light. The tower was flanked by a pair of curved scimitars and – more surprisingly – two large ears of wheat. The rulebook’s sixty-seven articles were arranged into thirteen chapters, and dealt with everything from civil administration and dispute resolution to the correct procedure in kidnaps, as well as regulations on dress, haircuts and smoking. It was a document specifically designed to stamp out any ‘freelance’ interpretation of the Taliban’s core values and thus to re-establish Quetta’s supreme authority over the movement: a powerful reminder of who was in charge of the insurgency.

While demonstrating that the Taliban certainly had internal problems, this was hardly the work of an organization on the back foot, as ISAF spokesmen so often claimed. Of particular interest was the section on ‘Unity’, which stated: ‘Creating a new mujahideen group or battalion is forbidden. If unofficial groups or irregular battalions refuse to join the formal structure, they should be disbanded.’ The section on suicide attacks and civilian casualties was also significant, not least for the similarity of its language to what the Americans were saying: ‘Governors, District Chiefs, line commanders, and every member of the mujahideen must do their
utmost to avoid civilian deaths, injuries and the destruction of civilian property. Great care must be taken. If they are careless, all persons will be punished.’

Zaeef and I talked for over an hour about what Afghanistan would look like if the Taliban were to have their way again. Their ambitions for government, he confirmed, were unchanged.

‘We never had the intention of running the country before, and nor do we now,’ he said. ‘We have no intention of destroying this government, either – only to
repair
it.’ It was a word that he and other Taliban I was to meet used often. ‘Mullah Omar issued a press release repeating this last year. First we want to get you foreigners out. Then we want to repair the Constitution.’

I argued that it was impossible for ISAF simply to withdraw as the Russians had done, because that would send a message around the world that Western arms had been defeated here, offering potentially disastrous encouragement to extremists everywhere. A withdrawal would therefore have to be negotiated, phased, carefully orchestrated.

‘This is about Western pride! As a Pashtun, surely you understand this. There has to be some kind of face-saving formula.’

‘It’s not for us to salvage the West’s reputation,’ he said sourly. ‘You started this war, not us.’

Crucially, Zaeef was candid about the ‘political mistakes’ the regime had made before it was ousted in 2001. ‘We didn’t know what we were doing then. We learned a great deal. It will be different the next time.’

The way he saw it, the Taliban were still in the process of completing their project, disarming the people and dealing with the warlords, when they were cruelly ejected from power. Far from being oppressors, an army of southern Pashtuns imposing their
customs and values on the reluctant minorities, he said the Taliban had diffused ethnic tensions and were the ‘uniters’ of Afghanistan. Given just a little more time, he argued, even the West would have seen the benefits of their revolution.

‘In 1995 the country was falling apart, splitting into minikingdoms. Look what Dostum was doing in the north. He was operating a different currency to the rest of the country! And look at all the tension and fighting and human misery then. The reality is that we rescued Afghanistan.’

‘But the Taliban committed many atrocities. In the Hazarajat, in Mazar, on the Shomali plains.’

‘That is Western justification for their war. It is the blackest propaganda! I challenge you to find a single Hazara in Kabul with proof that we slaughtered any of them.’

‘They might complain about Baba Mazari,’ I said.

Abdul Ali Mazari had been the revered leader of the Hazara Hizb-i-Wahdat party; a famous mujahideen commander as well as an ardent advocate of a federal solution for Afghanistan. He was popularly held to have been invited to talks with the conquering Taliban in 1995, betrayed, and thrown to his death from a helicopter over Ghazni.

‘Mazari was not murdered. We were taking him to Kandahar but he tried to refuse. He grabbed a gun and began shooting! What were our soldiers supposed to do?’

‘So would you be willing to share power with the non-Pashtuns next time?’

‘But we shared power with them the last time! Our Minister of Education was a Tajik. The Minister of Planning, even our Minister for the Hajj, were Uzbek. The Governors of Paktia and Khost –
Pashtun
provinces – were also Uzbek. The Governor of
Wardak was Badakshani! I promise you that we have no problem with other ethnicities, only with certain individuals who abused their own ethnic groups: the criminals, the warlords.’

It was true that the Taliban had never set out to ‘ethnically cleanse’ the country in the way that, for example, the Serbs had done in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Mullah Omar had in fact attempted to reach a compromise with Massoud and to put an end to the violence. Zaeef represented Omar at two separate meetings with the Tajiks, the first of them in 1998, when he met Massoud personally. The meeting took place in the middle of the night, deep in Tajik-controlled territory north of Bagram.

‘We spread out our
patus
with only the light of the moon to guide us, and sat down underneath a tree in the middle of nowhere,’ Zaeef recalled in his autobiography.

Omar respected Massoud as a fellow former mujahid from Jihad days, and recognized and was prepared to grant Massoud’s right to share political power with the Pashtuns. But this was not enough for Massoud, who wanted to share military power as well, through the setting up of a joint ‘military council’. This was a step too far for the Taliban: a recipe, as Zaeef explained, ‘for further clashes and bloodshed’. Unity, he told Massoud, ‘does not mean who is going to lead – the north or the south – but rather, unity means that the interests of the nation are at the centre of all decisions.’ The two sides never surmounted this obstacle, although the possibility of a negotiated peace remained open right up until 2001.

‘The most astonishing part of these talks for me was the knowledge that both sides in fact agreed that war was not the solution,’ said Zaeef. ‘We all knew that the Afghan people were tired of war and wanted peace, but nevertheless war continued and no solution was found.’

Zaeef in the end was a patriot, a believer in the Afghan nation, and his conviction on this point surprised me. The Taliban were often said to be fighting to re-establish Pashtun hegemony in Afghanistan, yet Zaeef was quite unambiguous about the need to share political power.

‘Afghanistan cannot be controlled by one group, it belongs to all Afghans,’ he said.

Federalism, he maintained, a solution often mooted by minority leaders like the late Baba Mazari, would lead to ‘deep chaos’, the disintegration of a country with a 5,000-year history, and the weakening and ‘enslavement’ of its constituent peoples by rapacious regional neighbours like Iran and Pakistan. He also rejected the creation of a separate Pashtun state, the fabled ‘Pashtunistan’ that would unite the Pashtun lands on either side of the Durand Line. Pashtunistan was a notion that had long terrified Islamabad, because if it ever came to pass, Pakistan’s borders would logically be pushed back as far east as the River Indus – a loss of thousands of square kilometres of territory. Zaeef, though, was adamant. The Taliban did not want a new Pashtun state, or even, necessarily, Pashtun domination of the existing one. What they stood for was the establishment of Sharia within the existing borders of their country, and nothing more.

There was, he insisted again, no threat to Western security interests in this ambition. The over-riding problem was Washington’s blindness to this fact.

‘They should draw a line. They should not be oppressors – they should not ask for so much.’

The war against the Taliban was, to him, entirely an American war. The fact that ISAF contained troops from thirty-seven other nations was merely window-dressing.