Taliban (3 page)

Among the people Zaeef went to consult in 1994 about standing up to Saleh and his like was one Mullah Mohammad Omar, a former fighter born in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan to the north, but who was now living at Sangisar, a village community 25 miles west of Kandahar. In the 1980s Sangisar was home to an important mujahideen base, and both Omar and Zaeef had taken part in a desperate battle with the Soviets in the district in 1988, the type of close combat where they had picked up live grenades and tossed them back at their assailants. Zaeef was 20 metres from Omar when their position was attacked by MiG fighter jets. Omar, looking around the corner of a wall, was struck by shrapnel from a
bomb – a wound that would later prove terminal to his sight in one eye.

That same night, even as Omar was bandaging himself up, Zaeef recalled how the defenders celebrated the success of their resistance with an
attan
, a physically intense Pashtun war-dance performed to the beat of a double-headed drum called a
dhol
. The men gathered in a large circle, leaping and spinning faster and faster and firing their guns in the air. It was, according to Zaeef, ‘a marvellous party . . . May God be praised! What a brotherhood we had among the mujahideen! We weren’t concerned with the world or with our lives; our intentions were pure and every one of us was ready to die as a martyr. When I look back on the love and respect that we had for each other, it sometimes seems like a dream.’

Omar had returned to the Sangisar base after the war, and converted it into a madrasah where he now preached and taught. He was a pious, conservative man with a reputation as a courageous but taciturn military commander. He was something of a southern Pashtun archetype in this respect. He kept himself to himself and avoided the petty politics and self-advancing turf wars that preoccupied some of his peers. As a consequence he had never been a very prominent figure in the Jihad, but he was also a clean slate, a man who had no enemies because he had crossed no one in the past, and no scores to settle on his own behalf. In the view of Zaeef and others, this was precisely the kind of man that the reconstituted band of veterans now needed as a leader. Memories are long everywhere in Afghanistan, but nowhere more so than among the Pashtuns, who traditionally put great emphasis on
badal
, the obligation to seek revenge.
¹

Omar’s wife had just given birth to a son when Zaeef went to see his old comrade. His friends and the local imams had all gathered there for the traditional celebration ceremony – lengthy recitations from the Koran – and Zaeef and two other mullahs who had accompanied him joined in. After supper, they took Omar to a separate room to talk business. The plan they proposed to him was beguilingly simple: the disarmament of the people in two provincial districts west of Kandahar – Maiwand and Panjwayi – and the establishment there of Sharia law, as articulated by the Prophet Mohammed in the early seventh century.

‘We told him that he had been proposed as a leader who could implement our plan,’ Zaeef recalled in his autobiography. ‘He took a few moments to think after we had spoken, and then said nothing for some time. This was one of Mullah Omar’s common habits, and he never changed this . . . Finally he said that he agreed with our plan and that something needed to be done. “But, I cannot accept the leadership position,” he said . . . “Why did you not accept it yourself?”’

Zaeef understood Omar’s misgivings, for the job would certainly be a dangerous one.

‘He asked us what guarantees he could have that everyone wouldn’t just abandon him if things became tough. We assured him that all those involved were true taliban and mujahideen.’

He was persuaded eventually. Others had come to see him, asking for the same thing.

‘In the end everything that happens depends on God,’ he said.

Within six weeks of the first discussion about killing Saleh, some forty or fifty people gathered in Sangisar at a small, crumbling mud-brick building known as the White Mosque to discuss the foundation of what became known as ‘the Taliban’. Omar agreed
to be their commander and took a solemn oath of allegiance, a
beyat
, from all those present. No mission statement was drawn up, no articles of association written down. There didn’t seem any need. No name for the movement was ever discussed, either:
taliban
was simply what Omar and his followers were. The term in its present sense, with a definite article and a capital T, was probably coined by the BBC Pashto service, which aired a report about the Sangisar meeting twenty-four hours after it happened. It was never clear how the BBC learned about the meeting, since no press release was ever issued, nor any interview given. No one, least of all Omar, ever suspected that ‘the Taliban’ would one day become a kind of global brand name.

Very soon afterwards the Taliban set up their own checkpoint near the village of Hawz-i-Mudat on the main road west of Kandahar. They had a few weapons but almost no money. Zaeef donated 10,000 Afghanis, which was all he had: enough, as he said, ‘to buy lunch for ten people in a good restaurant in Kabul’. The group’s sole means of transport was an old Russian motorbike with no exhaust pipe, a machine that could be heard coming from miles away, and which they nicknamed ‘the Tank of Islam’. The movement would have folded almost before it had begun were it not for the extraordinary support of the locals. Scores of villagers came out to see the new checkpoint for themselves. They provided bread and milk and, crucially, volunteers. Within a few days the movement had over 400 new members. Money was soon no longer a problem either, thanks to donations from businessmen, particularly truck-company operators whose livelihoods depended on being able to use the road without hindrance. One man appeared at the checkpoint dragging a sack that contained 90 million Afghanis. Zaeef did not ask where such an enormous sum had come from.

The Talibs began by moving against the nearest checkpoints up and down the road. The first was operated by an ex-mujahideen commander called Daru Khan, who fled after a short firefight. The next three bandits, Yaqut, Bismillah and Pir Mohammed, fled without any resistance at all. The fifth, Saleh, fought back at first but then also ran away, and was caught in a secondary ambush. So it went on – and with every victory, the Taliban’s ranks swelled with fresh volunteers. The justice they meted out was as harsh as it was swift. Some bandits were lynched, their bodies left dangling from gibbets at the side of the road with money stuffed into their mouths to serve both as a symbol of their crime and a warning to others.

To begin with, the Taliban’s ambitions stretched no further than the two districts nearest their original checkpoint, Maiwand and Panjwayi. But on 12 October, some 200 of them hid themselves in trucks and drove into the centre of Spin Boldak on the border of Pakistan, 60 miles east of Kandahar. Jumping out in front of the police station, they took control of the town in fifteen minutes. This takeover was significant. Spin Boldak was a customs post in the lucrative international trucking trade. It had been garrisoned by Mullah Akhtar Jan, a Hizb-i-Islami militiaman loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the top three mujahideen leaders and, until four months previously, the Prime Minister. Akhtar Jan escaped but, in a development that boded ill for the power-brokers in Kabul, many of his men now switched sides and joined the Taliban.

The local strongmen around Kandahar could see which way the wind was blowing. Switching allegiance to the stronger side was common practice in Afghanistan, a survival tactic learned over centuries in a region where war and internecine violence are the norm. When Mullah Naqib came over to their side, unexpectedly
handing over his base at Hindu Kotai on the outskirts of Kandahar city, there no longer seemed any limit to what the Taliban might achieve. Naqib was the leader of the influential Alikozai tribe and perhaps the most respected warlord in the region with an impressive reputation from Soviet times. More to the point, the warehouses at Hindu Kotai were full of heavy weaponry, including tanks. Kandahar city fell on 5 November after four days of fighting that cost fifty lives.

By now the entire country was talking about the Taliban phenomenon. News of them had spread to Pakistan, too: on 1 January 1995, 3,000 volunteers for the cause arrived from Peshawar. Ordinary Afghans tended to speak in a whisper about these turbanned avengers. Some felt repulsion at their methods, but most felt relief that here, at last, was a group who looked like they might restore some semblance of social order. The proof of the public’s hunger for this was in the speed of the Taliban’s success. By February 1995, just four months after setting up a single rural checkpoint, this mullahs’ revolt had become a national movement that controlled nine of the country’s thirty provinces.

1
The English proverb, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, is a direct translation of a Pashto one that was imported into British phraseology in the nineteenth century.

My first encounter with the Taliban was not in Afghanistan but in Peshawar in Pakistan, in August 1996. They were big news by then, for Omar’s troops had captured half the country and were poised to take Kabul – although my original reason for being in the region was more prosaic. I was a 29-year-old freelancer, broke and scrabbling for work as usual. So when the
Sunday Express
showed an interest in a piece about Jemima Goldsmith, the English It-girl who had just married the cricketing star Imran Khan – and offered to pay for a trip to Lahore if I could secure an interview with her – I grabbed the opportunity.

This part of the trip didn’t go well. I had no introduction to either of the Khans, who turned out to be in no mood to talk to the press after a honeymoon embarrassingly spoiled by a paparazzo with a telephoto lens. Their home in Lahore was a virtual fortress. I spent two tedious days loitering outside, trying to persuade a gang of
chowkidar
, or watchmen, to pass a message to their employers – and then admitted defeat.

Fortunately there was another story to pursue, although it was nothing the
Sunday Express
would be very interested in: a general election had just been called in Pakistan. Imran Khan, indeed, was contesting it with his own newly founded political party, the Tehrik-i-Insaf, or Movement for Justice, although he never got very far with it. The front-runners were Benazir Bhutto, leader of the left-of-centre Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), who had unexpectedly been sacked from the prime ministership following allegations of corruption; and her main challenger, the Pakistan Muslim League’s Nawaz Sharif.

I spent an extraordinary fortnight following these two around on the campaign trail. Bhutto was an electrifying orator. She was indignant at the accusations of corruption and outraged at her removal by the President, Farooq Leghari. At one point I found myself standing behind her on an open-air platform in Lahore as she whipped up a crowd of a couple of thousand, imperious and magnetically beautiful, her trademark silk headscarf billowing, somehow glacially cool in the sweltering summer sun. I assumed her self-confidence was dynastic. The Bhuttos were Pakistan’s version of the Kennedys, a political family blessed with talent, tainted by scandal, cursed by assassination. Both her brothers were killed in suspicious circumstances; her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who served as both President and Prime Minister, was hanged by a political rival in 1979.

It was Nawaz Sharif, though, who won the 1996 election. With his curly hair poking from beneath a Western-style pale flat cap, he looked disconcertingly like the singer Paul Simon. One day I secured a place on his helicopter for a campaign tour of the Punjab. It was a lordly way to see the country. We clattered low over vast dusty plains that shimmered in the heat. A sparsely inhabited land,
I thought at first: not many votes to be had among the goatherds here. But the villages out here were all towns; by European standards, large towns. We visited four or five of them and they all seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

Some were clearly expecting the visit: we would land and be led to a stage in some makeshift football stadium that was already packed with thousands of people, all roaring their approval. The Punjab had long been the Pakistan Muslim League’s heartland. Elsewhere the pilot would circle the town two or three times before landing, a technique that drew the inhabitants to their doorways and windows, pointing and clapping in anticipation of a big event. These were not places where helicopters appeared every day. In one town a crowd of several hundred suddenly swarmed on to our intended landing zone, a cricket pitch. We hovered over a sea of upturned faces, and watched their expressions turning from excitement to doubt and then horror as the machine dropped relentlessly lower. I glanced across at Nawaz Sharif, but his face was a mask of indifference. Only at the last possible moment did the crowd part and scatter, abandoning bits of shopping, a sandal or two, a bicycle with a wheel still spinning.

The day as a whole was a strange experience, thrilling and dispiriting at the same time. From the porthole of the helicopter it was hard not to view the people of Pakistan as a seething, barely controlled mass, permanently teetering on the edge of a Malthusian catastrophe. The population was in fact growing exponentially – and it still is. Since 1996 their numbers have risen by 50 million, to 176 million. By 2020 the figure is predicted to be 220 million, or about six times the number who lived here in 1950. It seemed improbable that any political system could bring order to such a society, let alone democracy. It wasn’t just that the swelling
population meant the voice of the people was forever being diluted. In 1996 about two-thirds of Pakistanis were illiterate, obliging politicians to campaign with pictures rather than slogans. Sharif’s symbol was a lion, Bhutto’s an arrow. It seemed to me that the raw enthusiasm that greeted Sharif in Punjab had less to do with his policies than with tribalism. It was politics in its crudest form.

Beyond the campaign hoopla, Pakistanis had reason to feel deeply disillusioned with their government in Islamabad. The politicians who claimed to represent them were serial abusers of the power entrusted to them. Nawaz Sharif was no better than Benazir Bhutto, for he too had been sacked from the prime ministership for corruption, three years earlier in 1993. When polling day finally came in February 1997, voter turn-out was around 30 per cent: close to a record low for Pakistan and a statistic that told its own story.