Taliban (30 page)

‘I was born in this house, right upstairs,’ he said at one point, indicating the ceiling. ‘My father was a senator. I well remember the day in 1973 when I came down to breakfast – I was a schoolboy then – and found him listening to the radio with a sad face. I was surprised that he hadn’t already gone to work. Then he said, “You’re not going to school today. There has been a coup d’état! It’s the communists . . . Parliament will be dissolved.” It made a big impression on me. That is why I joined the Resistance later on. I have always believed – Massoud believed, right up to the day he died – that without a system of one person, one vote, there will never be a solution to this country’s problems. When that system arrives, my job here will be done.’

All too soon an aide came in to announce the meeting was over. Abdullah stood, smoothed down his robe and swished off into the interior of his unusual home, while I was shown out by the other door.

In the days that followed I criss-crossed Kabul, meeting Afghan officials from across the political spectrum: so-called ‘reconciled’ Taliban, MPs, government ministers. Some were more outspoken than others, and there were significant differences of opinion about what should happen next, but all of them shared Mullah Zaeef’s underlying frustration with Washington – and they all agreed that unless America changed the direction of its policy soon, Afghanistan was heading for disaster.

I went to meet Abdul-Sattar Khawasi, the First Secretary of the Wolesi Jirga, the People’s Assembly or Lower House of Parliament, the institution whose recalcitrance over the President’s election-commission power grab had sparked the latest row between Karzai and the West. The chamber building was naturally heavily fortified with machine-gun nests on every corner, and it took half an hour to clear the chaotic security screening process at
the entrance. The corridors inside, by contrast, were dark and cool and meticulously swept; a few officials scurried about in ill-fitting Western suits, murmuring salaams as they passed each other.

The entrance hall was lined with the photographs of the country’s 249 MPs who were elected in 2005, the first democratically elected parliament in decades. The next parliamentary election was supposed to take place in May 2010 but it had been postponed for four months. Foreign donors, appalled by the fraud that marred the 2009 presidential election, feared that the next round could do more harm than good and so had withheld the necessary funding.

The portrait gallery made interesting viewing as I waited for my appointment: a perfect cross-section of the astonishing variety of the Afghan nation. Over sixty of the photographs were of women. The democratization of Afghanistan was a bold experiment in modern governance. The new Constitution, drawn up with the help of Western technical advisers, stipulated that at least 25 per cent of the members of Parliament as well as of the local government assemblies had to be female. It had proved a controversial measure, for in this misogynistic society the Taliban were not the only religious conservatives who objected to it. It was only in 1959, a mere fifty years ago, that Ariana Airlines had ordered its air hostesses out of their burqas: the first Afghan women ever to appear in public without them. The idealism behind the parliamentary quota was no doubt laudable, but the West’s insistence on it was always bound to cause trouble. It was also hypocritical. After the 2010 general election in Britain – a parliamentary democracy that has had centuries to mature – female MPs still accounted for just 22 per cent of the total: no better than fiftieth in the world league table for the proportion of women MPs.
¹

Some of the characters in the portrait gallery, I noted, were also
out and out rogues. Pacha Khan Zadran, for instance, one of the twenty-six signatories to the Bonn Agreement of 2001 that launched Karzai on the path to the presidency, was also a com-mander who notoriously shelled Gardez, the capital of Paktia, in a dispute over the governorship of that province in 2002. Once a target for US Special Forces who nicknamed him ‘PKZ’, he was little more than a bandit who had changed sides at the right time. There were many others with similarly dubious pasts – crooks and warlords, killers and thieves, the very people that Afghans had hoped would be banished from power for ever when the Americans arrived, and whose destruction the Taliban had sought from the start.

Khawasi had something of a firebrand reputation, an MP who was unafraid to speak his mind. A 37-year-old Pashtun from Parwan province in central Afghanistan, he had trained as a lawyer in the early 1990s before finding work as a civil servant, including at the Ministry of Justice under the Taliban. He had never been a hardliner, however – just a junior government official who knew how to keep his head down. He said he had never agreed with the Taliban’s war against the Northern Alliance. Violence, he explained piously, was seldom the answer to a problem: it was almost always better to try to bridge differences through dialogue. His past, at any rate, had evidently not impeded a stellar parliamentary career.

‘Obama is trying to paint and decorate my house without my permission,’ he said, adding that a majority of MPs felt the same, even if they did not all say so in public.

‘The international community say they want to help here, but Afghans are very independent-minded. They see armed foreigners as invaders – it is black and white to them, and hatred of them is on the increase.’

The hope of the Afghan people for a national ‘rebirth’ in 2001 had been traduced, in his opinion. Karzai’s proposals for peace talks at the London Conference in January 2010 were welcome, but they had been undermined by America’s huge war machine.

‘McChrystal pressured him to sign off on the new campaign in Marjah. It was 100 per cent pressure, and the timing was completely wrong! How can you announce a peace deal as you go into an attack? Karzai is more of a puppet than ever. The Taliban will never talk to him now.’

Like Zaeef, Khawasi was full of dire predictions. He said he had recently warned a senior American diplomat that Nato would suffer a defeat ‘worse than the USSR’ if the US continued with its present policy, and his eyes blazed at the memory of the diplomat’s response.

‘He told me this was “enemy talk”. He said this to me, the First Secretary of the Wolesi Jirga! What a stupid thing to say to any Member of Parliament! Are we supposed to express the will of the Afghan people here, or the will of Washington? The Americans cannot make up their minds. I think they are
mariz
,’ he added, touching his turban with a forefinger: psychologically ill.

The American surge in the south, he said, was a ‘childish’ strategy that would only lengthen the war. The threat of a resurgent al-Qaida that worried the West was ‘not real’. The military campaign was not just morally but financially unsustainable. As a technocrat, he was professionally galled by the money being wasted on it.

‘ISAF spend
60 million a year on bottled drinking water alone. Each US soldier costs
1 million a year: that is a thousand times more than an ANA one! And still, with all these soldiers, they can’t even secure Kabul. The Safi Landmark hotel, the Serena hotel, the Presidential Palace – they are all under attack.’

The solution, he thought, was for ISAF to announce a firm timetable for withdrawal: nothing less would satisfy Quetta now. Responsibility for national security should be handed to the ANA, and the government should in future be empowered to govern. We Westerners would be welcome to stay on as civilian ‘partners, helpers, observers’, but should have little or no role in the resulting settlement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. To avoid a repeat of the bloodshed of the 1990s, he thought, any peace deal should be brokered by the OIC, the 57-member-state Organization of the Islamic Conference, with the UN and Afghanistan’s regional partners sitting on the sidelines. And then fresh elections needed to be held.

‘The constitution will need to be changed, but that is a relatively minor thing. Peace must come first.’

His prescription for the future was of some interest. Khawasi, I knew, was one of a dozen MPs who had travelled in January to a hotel in the Maldives, the Bandos Island Resort, for a secret three-day peace conference that included representatives of the Taliban. There was something bizarre and delicious about Mullah Omar’s people sitting down to discuss high politics in a hedonistic diving resort. Bandos Island’s website displayed a tiny, sun-kissed coral reef of just 180,000 square metres, a Western honeymooners’ paradise where, according to the blurb, ‘the gentle lull of the sea, the whistling breeze, and the rustling of the palm fronds on the beach will help transcend you from the hurly-burly rigours of daily life’.

I had been trying hard to discover the significance of these talks, which had been organized by Humayun Jarir, a son-in-law of the Hizb-i-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – the famous former mujahideen leader (and former Prime Minister), now a ‘specially designated global terrorist’ with a bounty of
25 million on his
head. In contrast to his earlier openness, however, Khawasi was strangely reluctant to talk about his trip, and indeed seemed put out that I even knew about it.

‘Thanks be to Allah for raising such an important issue,’ he said, before immediately changing the subject.

I persisted, though. I had spoken by telephone to Jarir, who was keen to publicize the meeting after it had taken place, and had even sent me a list of the participants along with a press release. There had only been two Taliban present, Mohammed Zahir Muslimyar and Fazel Luqman Farooqi, whom another source had identified as members of the Peshawar shura, not the Quetta one that mattered most. But the list was quite impressive nevertheless. Almost every major player in the country had sat down with the people from Hizb-i-Islami, including representatives of two former presidents from mujahideen times, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Sibghatullah Mujadeddi. Kharim Khalili, the Hazara leader, and Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek one, were both spoken for. A UN official called G.M. Gulzai was also listed, suggesting that these talks had enjoyed some measure of international approval, although I was never able to establish who this Gulzai really was. A contact at UNAMA insisted he was not one of theirs. He thought he must have come from headquarters in New York, and that ‘G.M. Gulzai’ was most likely a pseudonym anyway.

The Jarir talks were interesting because they presented the possibility of a bridge between Karzai and the Taliban. Hekmatyar shared the Taliban agenda of getting rid of the foreigners and reestablishing Sharia, but disagreed with them on how the latter should be achieved. Unlike Mullah Omar, he was a deeply political animal who instinctively understood what could be gained through negotiation. He had been Prime Minister twice, and craved that
kind of power for himself again; some said that he had made common cause with the Taliban’s insurgency entirely in pursuit of that end. Khawasi was evasive, however, when I suggested that Karzai planned to draw in Hekmatyar as a first step towards reconciliation with the Taliban.

‘It is possible, although the President has no such strategy that I am aware of,’ he said.