Taliban (35 page)

In October 2002 I had stayed with two Pashtun businessmen, Aziz and Basir, in an abandoned ice factory that one of them owned.
¹
Omar’s regime had been gone for less than a year. They had shaved their beards and were glad to have their television back. On the other hand, they were nostalgic for the days when they could go out of their house without locking the front door, for there was no security in post-Taliban Jalalabad. Karzai’s initial appointee to the governorship of Nangarhar province of which Jalalabad was the capital, Hajji Abdul Kadir, had been in office for less than eight months when he was assassinated in Kabul. The resulting power vacuum had been filled by the militiaman Hazrat Ali, whose men had begun to run amok, shooting and looting almost at will. Of the many stories from that time, one of the most infamous concerned a town centre bureau-de-change, which contained a large night safe reputedly stuffed with rupees. Hazrat Ali decided to burgle it, but was unable to crack the lock by conventional means. So he returned with a tank, drove through the shop front, tied the safe to the back of the vehicle and towed it off down the street, wall and all, until the safe burst.

To the dismay of Aziz and Basir, the American military had
repeatedly turned a blind eye to this gangsterish behaviour, probably because Hazrat Ali had assisted the US Special Forces in the fight against al-Qaida at Tora Bora in December 2001. Or so they suspected. In 2003, astonishingly, Karzai appointed him as Jalalabad’s Chief of Police, before sacking him the following year over allegations that he was in league with the Taliban. Hazrat then became an MP. He still was one in 2010.

I was keen to see how, or indeed whether, matters had improved for the people of Jalalabad since 2002. The provincial governorship had passed in 2004 to another strongman with a dubious history, Gul Agha Shirzai. In his previous role as governor of Kandahar province, Shirzai by his own admission had received a million dollars a week in kickbacks from the opium trade, amassing an alleged private fortune of
300 million.
²
The son of a champion dog-fighter, Shirzai was a powerful, rough man with a communistera moustache and a reputation for ruthless ambition. He revelled in his best-known nickname, ‘the Bulldozer’, though probably less so in another one, ‘Jabba the Hutt’, the obese and sadistic crime lord in
Star Wars
.

Shirzai had been appointed the governor of Nangarhar because he was a Karzai loyalist, who with ISI assistance had led the military campaign to oust the Taliban from Kandahar in 2002. He was also widely considered a darling of the Americans, who had even mooted his name as a contender for the presidency in 2009, even though it was Western pressure that had forced Karzai to remove him from his post in Kandahar. For all his alleged villainy, Shirzai was far from being a bad provincial governor. However imperfect, he was seen by Western diplomats as a man who could get things done, and he operated with a certain cheeky style. He had even proposed building a luxury tourist hotel with US funding near the
caves of Tora Bora, the site of bin Laden’s last stand in Afghanistan. Ironically, considering the allegations that he had profited from the drug trade in Kandahar, he was credited with dramatically reducing Nangarhar’s once formidable poppy harvest. Jalalabad’s infrastructure, particularly its roads, had also seen great improvements during his tenure, and he was popular among the poor, to whom he was a generous and sometimes wildly spontaneous donor. He ran the place like the overlord of a fief, and although this was an affront to democracy, his dictatorship was at least a relatively benign one.

Beneath the surface, however, not all was well in Jalalabad. Violence was on the increase in the city. A council official had been killed by a suicide bomber just ten days before. ‘It’s like 1994 all over again,’ said Mufti Mohin Shah, the Deputy Leader of the Provincial Council. ‘Warlordism and insecurity have returned, and the people are fed up. They are ready to welcome the Taliban back again. In fact, it is a reality now: they are already coming. And I’m not worried about that.’

The mufti – a title denoting an expounder of Sharia law, the equivalent of a canon lawyer in Chaucerian times – was thirty-three years old, a member of that generation of Afghans just too young to have fought in the Jihad. His family had returned from refugee exile in Pakistan when Karzai was elected, full of hope for their country’s future. A radio producer by training, he had found his way into politics by accident when he helped to set up a local station, Radio Spinghar, which was dedicated to religious programming. Its Sharia law discussion slot, he said proudly, had been so popular that it had been rolled out nationally. Radio Spinghar had even won an award.

I was speaking to him in the Provincial Council assembly hall,
the main entrance to which bore a plaque proclaiming that it had been built with funding from the People of the United States in 2006. Under the new constitution, power was supposed to have devolved to local assemblies like this one. The trouble, explained the mufti, was that there had been no such shift of power in practice. Karzai was anxious, and indeed under pressure from the West, to strengthen the authority of central government. He had therefore altered the constitution so that he – or his placeman in the province, Gul Agha Shirzai – retained the power of political appointment, even down to the level of the district councils. The result was outrageous local government corruption everywhere.

‘Until we are properly empowered, there is nothing we can do. We are just observers,’ said the mufti sadly. ‘We did a survey of the district councils recently and we were shocked by what we found. Our business people are regularly paying bribes of
100,000 or more to get things done. You even have to pay something in order to pay: for a building licence, for car tax, for domestic telephone bills – everything!’

I asked him if Kabul was fully aware of what was going on in Nangarhar.

‘Of course they are! I named all the corrupt district governors in the local newspaper recently. Look,’ he said, producing a copy from under his seat. It was called
Narai
, the ‘Globe’. The front page carried a large photograph of the mufti, surrounded by Arabic script that I couldn’t read.

‘Shirzai went mad when he saw this. He telephoned Karzai to say he wanted the Provincial Council arrested! Then Karzai called us. He told us not to worry, that we should just keep quiet for the next three months because he was planning to send Shirzai to govern another province then. But I think he was lying.’

His stand against corruption must have taken courage. The chair-lined chamber where we were speaking was filled with officials and members of the public on business, and it was clear that not all of them could be trusted. When I asked if the influence of Hazrat Ali was still being felt in the city, he briefly broke into English to explain that they ‘still had some problems’ with him. Two men connected to Hazrat Ali, I learned later, were sitting twenty feet away and listening to every word of our conversation.

‘The Provincial Council has been infiltrated by criminal networks, and Shirzai does nothing to stop them,’ he explained when the pair had moved off.

No wonder he ‘wasn’t worried’ by the prospect of a Taliban comeback. Nothing and no one else seemed willing or able to offer him the protection he needed.

I recalled the three-wheeled tuk-tuk taxis I had seen in the town centre on my way to the Provincial Council. There were none of these vehicles in Kabul but they were common here – a reminder of how close we were to Pakistan, where every city swarmed with them. Some of these tuk-tuks carried portraits of matinee idols from ‘Pollywood’, Peshawar’s homegrown cinema industry. The archetypal Pollywood hero is a hunky Pashtun warrior, while the villains – because this is the Raj’s former North-West Frontier province – are always perfidious Brits. The films are cartoonishly bloodthirsty, the kind where the machine guns never seem to need reloading. One tuk-tuk I saw displayed a gunman in a Rambo-style bandanna sipping a wineglass full of blood. The faces on several other tuk-tuks, however, had been scratched out. Had idolatry-hating Taliban supporters wielded the penknife? Or had the tuk-tuk owners themselves been sniffing the wind and taken precautionary measures? It was equally hard to tell if the iconoclasm
was fresh or whether it dated back to the
ancien regime
. Still, tuk-tuk artwork provided an unusual barometer of religious opinion in Jalalabad that I thought would be worth keeping an eye on in future.

I went across town to the government guesthouse to meet my fifth ‘reconciled’ Taliban official on the UN Consolidated List, Jalaluddin Shinwari, who had been the regime’s Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs and ultimately its Minister of Justice, a position that in those days incorporated the role of Supreme Attorney-General. I presumed Mullah Omar had filled such an important post with yet another madrasah-educated Koran-basher, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Shinwari was a mild-mannered, quizzical man with a Puckish smile, a diabetic who tired easily and who walked with a hobble that made him seem older than his forty-three years. He looked like a scholar with his glasses and sparse beard, and in fact he was a senior judge who had trained in secular as well as Sharia law at the elite Sharia Academy in Kabul. This automatically made him a leading voice among the country’s ulema, as well as one of the former regime’s rare intellectuals.

‘The foreign perception that the Taliban are all terrorists like al-Qaida is quite wrong. It has been fed by a handful of Northern Alliance leaders – Fahim, Atta, Dostum, Mohaqeq. But the Taliban are not monsters. Yes, we made lots of mistakes, and I pointed some of these out to Omar. He said he was busy with the war, but he promised on God’s word that he would sort it all out when the war was over. Even so, we made progress in government, and the people appreciated that. If you held a ballot today amongst the civil servants at the Ministry of Justice or the Attorney-General’s office, I would win 90 per cent of their votes, I swear. This government is just abusing power for its own ends.’

His line was familiar by now. The Taliban deserved the benefit of the doubt and should be given a second chance. The mistakes of the past were the result of inexperience and ‘bad influences’ on the movement, which had now been purged. It would not be the same the next time – particularly when it came to women’s rights, which he acknowledged were ‘the most emotive issue’ in the West. ‘Afghan women have no rights now, under Karzai,’ he said. ‘The government pays lip service to the idea – just look at all the sloganeering on Women’s Day – but the reality is that women are still treated as sex objects. Under Sharia, by contrast, women will be genuinely respected. They will have the right to an education, and to work. But,’ he added, holding up a finger, ‘they must also wear the hijab. You shouldn’t let your fear of cultural traditions get in the way of the main strategy! We must be allowed to do things our way – not Hillary Clinton’s way.’

For all his objections to foreign interference, Shinwari was no xenophobe. He said that the Taliban’s greatest mistake, the one thing he would have changed had he been in charge before 2001, was the international isolation embraced by its leadership.

‘International partnership is the key to prosperity. Afghanistan needs to be more outward-looking, to engage with the outside world. The Europeans are more willing listeners than the Americans . . . Learning foreign languages is very important. Learning English is very important.’

He regretted that his own English was so bad, a fault he was determined to rectify in his children. I met his son, a diffident 25-year-old who greeted his father with a respectful kiss of his hand. He was dressed in Western-style jeans and jacket, an outfit explained when he revealed that he was on a short visit from South Yorkshire where he had been living and studying for the last eight
years. He hadn’t learned as much as his father might reasonably have expected after such a time – ‘My English not so well,’ he admitted – but he was fluent enough to explain that he found the town he lived in ‘a bit small’, and that he liked to go into Sheffield for big city action at weekends. I asked him what he thought of the Taliban. He said he thought there were ‘good and bad people in every village’. I wondered if his father’s background had ever caused him trouble with the authorities but he said not: ‘I don’t mention his job with the Taliban, and no one has ever asked me.’