Taliban (31 page)

All he would say about the Maldives meeting was that it was a ‘first step towards a negotiated settlement’, for which ‘the establishment of intra-Afghan dialogue’ was ‘essential’. I was sure he was right about that: peace could never be imposed from outside Afghanistan, and would only grow from internal consensus. But this was really no more than Jarir’s press release had said, a statement of the very obvious. I wondered who had funded such an expensive conference. Khawasi claimed the delegates had paid their expenses themselves. He had gone to the Maldives, he said, ‘not as an MP, but as an individual’. Then he let slip that he had in fact been the leader of the dozen-strong parliamentary delegation, who had charged him with approaching Karzai and asking him for a meeting to discuss the Maldives talks.

‘And what did Karzai say?’

‘We haven’t found a time to meet up yet.’

‘But the Maldives meeting was six weeks ago! Isn’t the peace process a priority?’

‘Well,’ said Khawasi, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, ‘the President is a very busy man. I’m not suspicious of him. You shouldn’t . . . read anything into that.’

And then he changed the subject again.

I read two things into that. The first was that it showed how broken the President’s relationship with his Parliament was. It did
not seem credible that his diary was so full that he had no time for the Wolesi Jirga’s First Secretary. Karzai was commonly portrayed as an isolated leader, aloof and paranoid in his Presidential Palace, and Khawasi, who clearly
was
suspicious of him, seemed to confirm that view. The second was that it sounded as though Karzai was not properly interested in the Maldives talks at all – and one likely reason for that, it seemed to me, was the man who organized them, Humayun Jarir.

Being his son-in-law did not necessarily mean that he was authorized to speak for Hekmatyar. Indeed, Jarir had fallen out badly with him when he was accused of going abroad with a large amount of Hizb-i-Islami party funding in his suitcase. He claimed the row was based on a misunderstanding and had been patched over, but others I spoke to told me that the pair were still estranged. Without rapprochement, Jarir was effectively a nobody and the Maldives meeting was almost pointless – unless, as a delegate, you happened to fancy spending three days in a top-class diving resort. ‘Afghans love to talk, and they will do anything for a free lunch,’ as one Kabuli contact cynically remarked. ‘The Maldives was just punching in the air.’

There was, in addition, a question mark over Jarir’s relationship with Karzai, who once threatened to have him arrested should he ever set foot in Kabul again – which was one reason why his conferences never took place in Afghanistan. All this meant that Khawasi would need to tread very carefully if he was to succeed in selling the Maldives talks to his President – who in any case had just publicly backed a different horse at the London Conference with his appeal to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to act as peace-broker.

The Maldives meeting was the third such conference arranged
by Jarir. The usual venue was Dubai, but this time the delegates had run into ‘visa trouble’ with the Emirate and been forced to find an alternative at the last minute; the advantage of the Maldives was that it was one of the few countries in the world that did not require a visa to enter it. The reason for Dubai’s sudden change of heart was unclear. Either they were genuinely worried about the security implications, or they feared US disapproval. According to Jarir, both the Americans and the British had been forewarned of the meeting via ‘diplomatic channels’, although he had received no response from either. He complained that the US and the UK consistently ‘looked the other way’ while people like him tried their best to make reconciliation a reality. But had they looked the other way?

Although the delegates were prevented from holding their meeting in Dubai, they still had to change planes there to reach the Maldives; and as an intelligence source told me, ‘Nobody moves through that airport without the CIA knowing about it.’ If this was true then maybe the Americans approved of the meeting after all, and were deliberately keeping out of the process in order not to taint it. The weight of public US endorsement could easily kill something as delicate as a round of exploratory peace talks. On the other hand, Jarir’s talks looked an outside bet compared to the Saudi-brokered ones that Karzai apparently favoured; and with General McChrystal’s campaign in the south under way, there was no obvious reason why the CIA would want to promote reconciliation with Hekmatyar. Who knew? These waters were deep, and Khawasi had done little to help me fathom them.

A month later, however, some evidence emerged that Karzai was indeed interested in striking a deal with Hekmatyar. On 28 March, for the first time, he met a delegation led by Ghairat
Bahir, commonly described as Hekmatyar’s ‘favourite’ son-in-law, and an altogether more serious Hizb-i-Islami personality than Jarir. Bahir, who served as ambassador to Islamabad during the Rabbani presidency, was arrested by the ISI in 2004 and handed over to the Americans, who detained him at Bagram. He was transferred to Kabul’s infamous Pul-i-Charkhi jail, before being released on Karzai’s orders in June 2008. Karzai offered Hizb-i-Islami control of some key ministries if Bahir agreed to act as a power-broker between him, Hekmatyar and the Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, although nothing then came of the proposal.
²
Had Karzai’s gambit finally paid off? When Obama flew in to rebuke him for his failure to tackle corruption, Karzai reportedly tried to turn the conversation to a less awkward topic by offering a briefing on his recent meeting with Bahir. Obama, unhappily for Karzai, was less than impressed.

‘In talks with militants,’ Obama replied, ‘we need to proceed from a position of strength. In my judgement we’re not there yet.’
³

He might almost have been reading from General Petraeus’s
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
. But what did that catch-all word ‘militant’ really mean in the Afghan context? Washington had a long habit of dividing the world into goodies and baddies – ‘You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror,’ as President Bush famously remarked in 2001 – but in a country with a history like Afghanistan’s, few politicians could be described as truly ‘clean’. Hekmatyar was no doubt an unsavoury character with a reputation for appalling violence, but was everyone who had come into contact with him to be tarred with the same brush? As Karzai well understood, the Afghan political landscape was not black and white but grey. I had yet to meet an Afghan who rejected
everything
the Taliban stood for. There was good and bad in all people, and
unless America found a way to focus on the good in the people who might be able to help them, there was a risk that the war would never end.

Hizb-i-Islami’s status was certainly grey. The party founded by Hekmatyar had split into factions in 2003. His one, known as Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin or HIG, was soon designated a ‘group of concern’ on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The other, Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan or HIA, was led by the new Minister of Economy Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, and was not just legal but arguably the most powerful grouping in Parliament. As the non-violent wing of Hizb-i-Islami, HIA was to HIG what Sinn Fein was to the IRA in the 1990s. As in Northern Ireland, the precise relationship between the two factions was obscure, although it was assumed by most Afghans that it was privately a lot friendlier than either would, or could, publicly admit.

Arghandiwal himself objected to the Sinn Fein parallel when I put it to him later – so quickly, in fact, that you could tell he was sick of hearing it drawn by the countless British and American diplomats and journalists who had interviewed him in the past.

‘No!’ he said. ‘We are entirely separate organizations. Hekmatyar was a friend of mine, but we are not following his orders – and 90 per cent of Hizb-i-Islami agrees with that and think as we do. It is not necessary that the party is led by the same man for ever. He is not happy about the HIA. He never wanted a strong Hizb-i-Islami party here in Kabul, and he fights because he does not agree with my approach.’

He spoke excellent English, the result of a higher education in the US in the mid-1970s. Cynics sometimes suggested that English-language skills had become the main criterion for membership of
this Western-backed government, but that criticism didn’t seem quite fair in this case. Arghandiwal was qualified for his job. His career had begun in the Planning Ministry more than thirty years before, and he had briefly served as Finance Minister in pre-Taliban Afghanistan. He looked comfortable in his office, which was sunny and large, in keeping with his new ministerial status, and his arguments were sophisticated and refreshingly clear. On election to the chairmanship of his faction in 2008, he had spoken unambiguously about wanting to bring security to the country by negotiating with all armed opposition groups. Everything about him seemed calculated to project the idea that here was a man with whom the West could do business.

Hizb-i-Islami, the ‘Party of Islam’, had long been a part of the country’s political mainstream. It had grown out of the Muslim Youth organization, which was founded by students and teachers at Kabul University to counter Afghan communism in the late 1960s. Hekmatyar was among those students, and had an evil reputation even then for hot-headed extremism. The most infamous allegation was that he ordered his followers to throw acid in the faces of female students who were not wearing the hijab. He founded his party in 1975 in Pakistan. During the Jihad, Hizb-i-Islami became the West’s favourite proxy mujahideen group. At least
600 million was channelled directly to Hekmatyar through the CIA and their ISI counterparts in Pakistan. The party became the main rallying point for Pashtun resistance, and its members still regarded themselves as the mujahideen elite, the natural inheritors of political power.

While acknowledging that they didn’t control the country yet, Arghandiwal argued that their time was coming again, and that they were already the ‘king-makers’ in the current parliament.

‘It is difficult for Karzai to appoint any minister without our support,’ he said.

In local elections the previous year, Hizb-i-Islami candidates had won 75 of the country’s 420 Provincial Council seats: enough, he claimed, to have exerted serious influence in the presidential election that took place at the same time. Of the two million votes for Karzai that were counted as valid, he estimated that half had been delivered by Hizb-i-Islami through the Provincial Councils. It might not have been pretty, but democracy was at least functioning in Afghanistan. Westerners often argued that it was pointless as well as foolish to try to impose such a system on a country that had no tradition in it. Arghandiwal perhaps provided ammunition for optimists.

Ideologically, he explained, there was little to separate Hizb-i-Islami from the Taliban: ‘They are Muslims like us. All Muslims are the same before Allah. Islam must be taken as a whole – it cannot be broken into bits. We all believe in the Muslim way of life.’

Both Hizb-i-Islami and the Taliban saw the foreign troops as ‘invaders’, and wanted them out. They just disagreed on how their goals should be achieved.

‘The way the Taliban implemented their plans was not entirely in accord with Islam,’ he said. ‘Islam is a peaceful religion. Hekmatyar believes in the implementation of Islamic law, but he also believes strongly in democracy for Afghanistan – although not necessarily under the present constitution and Karzai.’

A more accurate definition of Hekmatyar’s ideology was ‘theo-democracy’, a term coined by one of his political heroes, Syed Abul A’ala Maududi, who founded the vanguard Islamic Revivalist Party (Jamiat-i-Islami) in Lahore in 1941. However peaceful Islam
was as a religion, there was nothing notably non-violent about Maududi, whose pursuit of a ‘pure’ Islamic Sharia society was uncompromising, and whose rejection of Western ideologies was absolute.

Arghandiwal didn’t think that Hekmatyar was about to lay down arms any time soon. Nor did he see much prospect of Hizb-i-Islami reaching a political accommodation with the Taliban, whom he regarded as incorrigible.

‘They say they have changed their position on women and so on, but do you believe them? I do not. We can’t go back to all that. A clever man does not get bitten by a snake from the same hole twice.’

This was a well-known Afghan aphorism; I had last heard it on the lips of a Taliban mullah who was puzzled by the British Army’s return to Helmand, a place where, after all, they had been defeated before, at Maiwand in 1880.

The Taliban, Arghandiwal said, had ‘a plan, but not the wisdom to distinguish between what is in Afghanistan’s interests and what is in our enemies’ interests. They kill educated people. They burn schools. We Pashtuns allow ourselves to be the hostages of the Taliban, but the Taliban are themselves the hostages of our regional neighbours. That’s why I always tell youngsters not to let themselves be tools. They must learn to think for themselves.’