Taliban (33 page)

It was a relief to learn that his equanimity was restored.

‘Excuse me, but I think you mean Little Satan?’ I replied with a mock show of offended Britishness. Hekmatyar actually laughed.

‘You may be smaller, but you are also quicker and cleverer,’ said an aide at his elbow, to knowing smiles all round.

The winter sun was beginning to set through a grubby window. Hekmatyar, as though bored, suddenly signalled that he wanted to pray. Everyone stood, a gunman appeared at my side, and I wondered how on earth I was to get back to my hotel.

‘Er, Mr Hekmatyar. The curfew . . . I wonder if I could ask your men to take me back?’

An imperious flick of his beard at his aide was all it took, and soon our convoy was thundering back down the frozen road to town, the muffled machine-gunner on the lead truck silhouetted against a western sky heavy with the promise of another snowstorm.

Whether or not Hekmatyar would ever give up his guns, the establishment of HIA, the non-violent wing of his movement, surely held promise for the future. However much Arghandiwal objected to his faction being compared to Sinn Fein, the Northern Irish model resulted in the eventual disarmament of the IRA and a working political settlement. HIA offered Hizb-i-Islami supporters an alternative to violent resistance, and many thousands of former fighters who might otherwise have taken to the hills with Hekmatyar had almost certainly chosen it since 2002.

Michael Semple, the former head of the EU mission, argued that HIA’s political engagement with Kabul offered ‘a case study of what reconciliation might have been like had the Taliban opted to develop a political organization parallel to its insurgency . . . [Karzai’s] handling of Hizb-i-Islami arguably constitutes the most successful example of a reconciliation strategy so far pursued since Bonn.’
¹
Semple, an Irishman who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, understood better than most how difficult the
process of reconciliation could be. In a bizarre diplomatic incident in 2007, he was expelled from the country following entirely false allegations that he had tried to broker a deal with the Taliban behind President Karzai’s back.

Not all Taliban were ‘No Surrender’ die-hards. Some of its leading members did in fact try to establish an HIA-style political wing after Omar’s regime collapsed. It was called Khadim ul Furqan, the ‘Servants of the Koran’, and was set up in Islamabad in 2002 with the specific aim of bridging the gap between Quetta and Kabul. Its founder was another former mujahideen commander, Arsala Rahmani, the Taliban’s one-time Minister of Higher Education; he had previously served as Deputy Prime Minister under Hekmatyar. Rahmani sought permission to set up a Khadim office in Kabul, but the Karzai government blocked his request for almost three years. Meanwhile in Quetta the hardliners were in the ascendant, and fixated on ridding Afghanistan of its foreign invaders through armed struggle. They did nothing to encourage his project either. Rahmani’s big idea for peace was effectively stillborn – although the man himself is very much alive.

Born in 1937, Rahmani was an old man by this country’s standards, with eyes that swam behind a big square pair of bi-focal glasses. He wore a striped, long-sleeved
chapan
over his shoulders, a garment favoured by rich northern wool-traders, and which Karzai has made famous. His teeth were bad and when he smiled, which was often, his hand flew to his mouth to hide them. He was one of the dozen senior Taliban figures who had reconciled with the Karzai government since 2002, and was perhaps the most statesmanlike Afghan politician I had ever met, with the clever trick of exuding gravitas and humility at the same time. In his present political incarnation he sat as a Senator in the Upper House, the
Mashrano Jirga, where he headed the Education and Religious Affairs Committee, with special responsibility for organizing the Hajj. As he well knew, these portfolios would be critical in any future settlement with the insurgents: ‘A key bridge to the Taliban,’ as he put it.

He thought the Taliban’s policy on girls’ education in the 1990s had been badly misrepresented by the West.

‘The Taliban were never against building girls’ schools. It was a problem of infrastructure. There was no ban; it was just that we couldn’t afford to build them then. I remember discussing with Omar a plan to allow trainee female doctors and nurses to return to work. It was no problem for him.’

‘So what about the burning of girls’ schools? If the Taliban returned, would that continue?’ I persisted.

Rahmani worked a set of prayer-beads with his fingers as he marshalled his response.

‘Those who burn down schools are not true Taliban. Everyone should know that education is the key to our future. It is not possible for a country to cut itself off from the rest of the world.’

Internal reconciliation with the Taliban, he acknowledged, would probably lead to a period of international isolation for the country, but that would pass eventually. ‘This country is ready to be a good international partner to the world, and it deserves that chance.’

Rahmani knew everybody that mattered: Mullah Omar, even bin Laden in the old days. As a native of Paktika province, he still had significant Taliban connections within the strategically critical south-east of the country. He had also met often with senior religious leaders in Pakistan such as Sami ul-Haq, the director of the famous Dar-u-Uloom Haqqania madrasah near Peshawar. Ul-Haq
was more than just a headmaster: he was also one of the founders of Pakistan’s Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, the MMA, the coalition of six Islamic parties that held the balance of power in the North-West Frontier province. Rahmani was convinced that any peace process would fail if the interests of such people, and those of the ISI who stood behind them, were not taken into account. His emphasis on the need for a
regional
solution to the war was rare among Afghan politicians, but it was surely correct. Washington acknowledged the importance of the broader approach in January 2009 when Richard Holbrooke, a diplomat famed for brokering peace in Bosnia in 1995, was appointed as the Administration’s first ever Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Britain quickly followed the American lead when its ambassador to Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, was recast in an equivalent role for Whitehall.

It was hard to think of a more useful adviser to both countries in the search for peace than Rahmani. And yet the senator, extraordinarily, had remained on the UN’s Consolidated List since 2001. Of the 142 ‘associates of the Taliban’ originally placed on the list, just twelve of any significance had agreed to a formal reconciliation with the Kabul government; and of those twelve, Rahmani, as a senator, was easily the most senior within the Karzai administration. It was a bizarre state of affairs: a statesman who was also an official pariah, lumped together with insurgents and terrorists, formally banned from foreign travel and from holding any assets abroad. Why?

‘Only the UN Security Council can answer that,’ he smiled. ‘I gave them all the documents proving that I was a member of Harakat, not the Taliban.’

Perhaps this distinction had been lost on the Security Councillors in New York. Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami was one of
the so-called ‘Peshawar Seven’ mujahideen organizations that had enjoyed American backing during the 1980s Jihad; the name Khadim ul Furqan was in fact a revival of the 1970s forerunner of Harakat. It was a traditionalist group from the south that had all but dissolved after the Soviet retreat, but the party had been reborn with the emergence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, when many Harakat fighters came out of retirement to join the new movement. Even Mullah Omar had been a member of Harakat once.

Rahmani was more sanguine than Mullah Zaeef had been about living under the Security Council’s shadow – ‘I really don’t have that many foreign bank accounts for them to freeze,’ he shrugged – and it also seemed that the travel ban was not always enforced in his case. With the UN’s permission he had in fact visited several countries: Saudi Arabia, France, Britain – even Kenya.

‘I went to Ireland once, with that strange airline of yours . . . Ryanair.’ He laughed, hand over mouth again. ‘Can you believe they charged me one pound for a cup of tea?’

He hadn’t lost his sense of humour, but deep down he minded very much that he remained on the Consolidated List, however laxly its attendant sanctions were applied, and he was still lobbying to have his name removed. His inclusion was a symbolic insult, a sign that America was still not sincere about wanting peace.

‘They will fight for another eighteen months, and they are building up the ANA and the ANP to continue their fight when they stop,’ he said.

Rahmani, I knew, had accompanied Mullah Zaeef on the first, fabled peace-talks trip to Mecca in September 2008. Was it not possible for the Saudis to drive peace talks forward while America took a back seat?

‘No. Only the Americans have the weight to make talks happen.
It is they who are fighting the Taliban. I remember a group of Pakistanis came here to talk peace in 2004. I told Karzai then that it was useless, and that if he really wanted peace he should make the Americans commit to the process. But nothing has changed.’

‘But would the Taliban ever accept a peace brokered by the Americans?’

‘I am not speaking for the Taliban here – I am speaking for the Afghan people. But if the conditions were right, then why not?’

The main condition, he confirmed, was the withdrawal of foreign troops.

‘The foreigners won’t stay here for ever. They never do. But there will be no peace here until they go.’

Rahmani’s old party, Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami, was a shadow of what it had been during the Jihad, but it still existed as a political entity and I was keen to discover what role, if any, it had to play in a future peace deal. The following day I visited its leader, Hajji Musa Hotak, at his run-down headquarters in a south-western suburb of the capital. He was yet another ex-mujahideen commander, and as his name indicated, a member of the same tribe as Mullah Omar, the Hotaki Ghilzai. These days he was an MP for his native Wardak province, and another ‘reconciled’ former associate of the Taliban who, unlike Zaeef and Rahmani, had just succeeded in having his name removed from the UN Consolidated List. He was, I noted, a cigarette smoker: a sign that he considered himself more ex-mujahideen than ex-Taliban, a movement that had banned the habit as a symbol of moral decay. It was cold in his office – he said it had been snowing in the passes that morning as he commuted in from Wardak – and we huddled around a small sputtering gas heater on the floor as he told his story.

Harakat, he confirmed, had been one of the two original mujahideen parties favoured by the ulema and other religious conservatives, with a powerbase in the Pashtun south. Hotak had served Harakat loyally for years, but it had gone into decline after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Harakat’s leader in those days, Mullah Mohammed Nabi, was offered the vice-presidency under President Rabbani, but declined on the grounds that he had not fought the Russians simply to take power himself. He did, however, encourage some of his commanders to take up political positions, Hajji Hotak among them. He worked in the Rabbani government Finance Ministry for two years but, disillusioned by the growing internecine violence, he quit in 1993 and returned to Wardak.

Harakat enjoyed a rebirth with the emergence of the Taliban. The movements shared the same constituency; they made a ‘natural alliance’. Hotak joined Omar’s revolt. As a former employee of the government, he proved a useful go-between in negotiations between the two sides, if not an ultimately successful one.

‘I really didn’t want the war to come to Kabul. The city had suffered enough bloodshed under the mujahideen. When the Taliban reached Wardak I
ran
between Omar and Rabbani to try to stop the fighting.’

The negotiations of 1996, he said, might have led to a coalition government being formed, and peace. But the Taliban demanded that the pro-government forces disarm before any talks – which Ahmed Shah Massoud refused to do.

Hotak was appointed Deputy Minister of Planning in the new Taliban government, with responsibility for the civil development budget. His budget, he said, was drawn from customs revenues,
zakat
(the Islamic alms tax) and
’ushr
(the Islamic tax on farm produce). The tax collection system, however, was in a terrible
state. The sums at his disposal were consequently tiny:
11 million in the first year,
18 million in the second, rising to a high of
75 million in the last year, 2000–2001.