Taliban (34 page)

‘
75 million for a country as big as Afghanistan – can you imagine? That is what it costs to keep seventy-five American soldiers in Helmand for a year. But a little went a long way then, because there was no corruption: as different as land and sky today.’

This was a common enough perception in Kabul. Hotak was clearly proud of what he had achieved at the Planning Ministry. The capital’s electricity grid and road system had been fixed during his tenure. ‘And just look at the roads now,’ he added. In Mazar, piped gas was restored to every home, although the system had since fallen into disrepair and there had been ‘no domestic gas in Mazar for the past eight years’. He also took credit for securing two major joint-venture contracts with foreigners, one with a Pakistani company to extract granite, another with the Chinese to explore natural gas deposits in Jowzjan province – although the arrival of the
Amriki
had brought a swift end to both.

His memories of the Taliban times were mixed.

‘They brought security and there was no corruption. At the beginning, there was a wonderful atmosphere of trust. But the Taliban were also too extreme in some aspects: the Office of Vice and Virtue, the television thing, the way they treated women. And then their idealism was corrupted. The movement was infiltrated by all the mujahideen parties – twenty-nine of them! – and there was foreign interference, and the Northern Alliance, and the communists. They gave the Taliban a bad name. The same thing is happening now, to Karzai.’

Hotak did not flee to Pakistan when the Taliban were overthrown, or take up arms with the insurgency.

‘I was tired of the fighting. Enough was enough.’

He also had a strong survivor’s instinct. Throughout the Taliban campaign to take over the country, he had maintained discreet contacts with Karim Khalili, the Hazara leader, even during the period of the latter’s resistance towards the Taliban. As the regime collapsed, he sought safe haven in the Hazarajat.
²
With a leader as powerful as Khalili behind him, he was safe from American retribution – at least for a while. In December 2003 he was even among the 502 delegates who endorsed the new Constitution at President Karzai’s Loya Jirga in Kabul. But then, disaster came.

Under the Taliban, Hotak had been the kind of government minister who double-hatted as a military commander. Hundreds of fighters remained loyal to him even in 2003, and he maintained a significant arsenal of heavy weaponry in Wardak. He judged that the time had now come to surrender his weapons, and he did so in good faith under DDR, the new government’s Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration programme. This was no small matter for him, for his arsenal included as many as thirty-five Stinger missiles – a potent status symbol in Afghanistan as well as a valuable one. The Stinger, a shoulder-held anti-aircraft weapon, had been supplied to the mujahideen by the CIA in the 1980s to take down Soviet helicopters, and was widely credited with turning the tide of that war. The US subsequently tried to buy back any unused ones, offering more than
180,000 for each,
³
and yet Hotak had given them up for free.

He was promptly rewarded for his gesture with a US Special Forces night raid on his home. ‘I still get flashbacks,’ he said. ‘They broke down doors, smashed every window. I was clubbed, and bitten by dogs. My sons and nephews were hooded and shackled.
My aged father was dragged out. No human being would do the things those animals did.’

Hotak would have ended up in Bagram, but the Americans were prevented from taking him there by his neighbours, who surrounded their Humvees and refused to move out of the way.

‘Even they couldn’t drive over the people. So they took my brother to Bagram instead. They kept him there for two and a half years.’

Despite that bitter memory, Hotak’s greatest hope was that a peace could be negotiated. Harakat these days, he insisted, was a ‘neutral’ political party which could have a vital broking role to play in a settlement. This, he explained, was because it was still the party of the ulema, the religious scholars, just as it had been in the 1980s.

‘It was us who set the Jihad against the Soviets,’ he said. ‘The ulema are silent now, but if they were to endorse Mullah Omar’s war against America as a true jihad, the whole country would rise.’

This was another version of Mullah Zaeef’s Cassandra-like warning. The ulema, it was true, had dictated the spiritual direction of the country often enough in the past. The modernizing King Amanullah had tried to push through his reforms without their support, and ended up paying for his presumption with his throne when, in 1928, Pashtun tribesmen from Jalalabad marched on the capital with the support of the ulema; Amanullah’s army chose to desert rather than to resist. Mullah Omar knew he could not afford to alienate the ulema. When, for example, they declined to endorse his call for jihad against the Rabbani government in 1995, he did not insist on the point. President Karzai also understood the impossibility of ruling Afghanistan without at least their tacit approval. This was why, according to Hotak, Karzai had
come to Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami before the presidential election, asking to be appointed the party’s official candidate.

‘And what did you say?’

‘We agreed, on two conditions. First, we told him he had to make peace with the Taliban, and second, to stop killing our Muslim brothers.’

‘And now?’

‘And now he is trying to start talks, as he promised. His appeal to the Saudis at the London Conference was all about this.’

‘But the killing of your Muslim brothers has not stopped.’

‘It is the Americans who are doing that. Karzai has tried to stop them, but his government has no power. He was forced to agree to the Marjah campaign.’

Hotak offered the same solution as the others I had spoken to: empower the government, tear up the UN Consolidated List, close Guantanamo, ‘and stop asking us to disarm – we are not crazy!’ Just like Mullah Zaeef, he insisted that the Taliban did not want to destroy the government or the Constitution; they only wanted to repair it. As one of the original Loya Jirga delegates of 2003 he knew something about this. The wrangling over the new Constitution’s 160 articles was so intense at times that the public took to describing the gathering as a loya
jagra
– ‘a big fight’. Nevertheless, the document that emerged from the process was by no means a uniformly bad one.

‘There are no more than eleven articles that need to be changed – that were put in by the international community, and are not in Afghanistan’s interests. These are not mountains. The Taliban wants to discuss them in a reasonable way.’

Hotak was despondent, however, about the recent arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who had been picked up by the ISI
in Karachi at the beginning of February and, along with his two teenage sons, reportedly subjected to severe torture. Baradar was Omar’s number two and a founding member of the Taliban. The ISI’s motive for the arrest was not yet clear. Nato officials in Kabul initially heralded the event as a ‘turning point’ in the war – evidence, perhaps, that Pakistan was at last bending to US pressure to crack down on the Taliban leaders known to be hiding there. Hotak, however, thought the opposite. Baradar, he claimed, was at the dove’s end of the spectrum of views within the Taliban leadership. He had spent almost two years trying to persuade Baradar to come to the negotiating table, and now all his efforts were wasted. He suspected the ISI had targeted Baradar because they were not consulted on his secret communications with Kabul, and did not approve of freelancers within what they still saw as ‘their’ organization. Like Arsala Rahmani, Hotak was certain that there would never be peace in Afghanistan unless the ISI’s interests were taken into account. The ISI’s continuing manipulation of the movement for their own ends was just an unfortunate fact of life.

‘The ISI could arrest Mullah Omar tomorrow if they wanted to,’ Hotak insisted.

He said the main block to progress, as ever, was the Americans. The people no longer trusted them; they were not sincere about peace; the renewed military campaign in the south proved it. Their actions shaped everything that happened in the region – even, he implied, the arrest of Mullah Baradar – and it was their fault if progress on reconciliation had stalled. Karzai, according to Hotak, had ‘given up’ on getting the Americans to agree to talks. But he was undecided about the British, whose true attitude towards reconciliation was something of a mystery to him – as indeed it was to Hotak.

In late 2008, he claimed, a British embassy official had approached him asking if they could arrange a meeting with the Taliban – and requested that this be done without the knowledge of either Karzai or the US.

‘I told him that would be difficult, but I did as he asked.’

Three meetings eventually took place in the spring and autumn of 2009, all of them in Dubai, involving ‘input from MI6 in London’ and ‘ministry-level Taliban’. Among the latter, he revealed, was Maulawi Delawar Shahabuddin, a former High Court Chief Justice for the Taliban. The British, however, refused to entertain the idea of a fourth meeting, and Hotak was at a loss to explain why.

‘My reputation with the Taliban suffered because of this. Maulawi Shahabuddin said to me, “Where are your British friends now?” ’

A British intelligence official later disclosed that the Dubai meetings had been stopped because the main Taliban interlocutor had turned out to be ‘the wrong man’; and it was true that Shahabuddin – current whereabouts unknown, according to the UN Consolidated List, but ‘believed to be in the Afghanistan– Pakistan border area’ – was not the influential figure in Omar’s circle that he had been in the early days of the movement. Nevertheless, a promising negotiating back-channel had been closed off, and that seemed a great pity. For reasons of history, there was a level of understanding between the British and the Afghans – including at least some Taliban – that the Americans could never hope to achieve.

‘The British are special to us,’ Hotak confirmed. ‘Our relationship with you was so good during the Jihad. You have been coming here for 170 years. We feel we
know
you.’

And yet by closing down the Dubai track, MI6 had surely weakened this British advantage. The distance between the sides was left a little wider than before; trust, that rarest of precious commodities in Afghanistan, had been wasted.

Hotak understood that Britain could not by itself dictate international policy, but he still could not understand our silence. Did we not sit on the UN Security Council? Were we not the second largest foreign troop contributor to ISAF? And were we not one of America’s most important allies, her truest friend in Europe, the beneficiaries of a famous Special Relationship? In short, what country in the world was better placed than Britain to influence Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan?

‘The British should encourage talks, not block them,’ Hajji Hotak concluded. ‘The ulema will back you if you do. And the reputation of your country will not just be left intact – it will be enhanced.’

Kabul was a bubble, divorced from the reality of life in the rest of Afghanistan, and I was anxious to find out what was happening beyond the capital. Jalalabad, ninety miles to the east, seemed a good place to look. It was only the country’s sixth city by size, but it was the capital of the important eastern Pashtun belt, while its position on the main road between Peshawar and Kabul, a crucial artery for armies and international traders alike, lent it a strategic and economic significance out of proportion to its size.

Even the drive there revealed something about the state of the country. In 2002 on my last visit to Jalalabad, the road from Kabul was in a disastrous state. The tarmac had been destroyed by a decade of passing Soviet armour, and hardly a single bridge was intact, so that what should have been a two-hour drive took a full day to complete. The bridges had since been rebuilt and the road repaved, yet my journey still took almost five hours. Beyond the awesome gorges that guarded Kabul, my car ran into a traffic jam that blocked the road in both directions for a distance of ten miles.
There were many tunnels on this mountain road, most of them too narrow to allow two heavy trucks to pass each other. The policemen who were supposed to control the traffic instead took bribes from the truckers, who were always in a hurry and wanted to go first. When the trucks met in the middle of a tunnel, they were each prevented from reversing out again by the weight of traffic behind. The result was an entirely avoidable impasse that my driver said happened almost every day: an object lesson in social stupidity and short-sightedness, as well as in the corrosive effect of petty corruption among policemen.