Taliban (36 page)

Politically, Shinwari had always been a monarchist who hoped for the restoration of the Afghan King, Zahir Shah, who had been deposed by his republican cousin in 1973 and had gone into exile in Rome. Shinwari had fled Afghanistan during the Jihad, and was still living in Peshawar in 1994 when the Taliban emerged. Zahir Shah’s Chief of Staff asked him to join the movement as a kind of ambassador of the court-in-exile. ‘I became influential because I was educated in a modern academy, not a madrasah. Omar loved me for that, and needed me.’ He was even invited to address the thousand ulema who gathered in Kandahar in 1996 to endorse the war against the Rabbani regime.

Omar had nothing against the idea of a restoration per se. King Zahir was the scion of the Pashtun Barakzai dynasty who had ruled the country since the 1820s. His reign had lasted for forty years, and was remembered by all Afghans, not just Pashtuns, as a golden era of peace – which it was, compared to the mayhem that followed it. What Afghanistan desperately needed to end thirty-five years of civil war was a unity candidate, and even Mullah Omar could see that none was more plausible than Zahir Shah. When Kabul fell to the Taliban, Shinwari followed on, fully expecting to assist at the restitution of the King. ‘But there was no
restitution. Instead I was invited to join their government. They insisted, so I stayed.’ Omar calculated that the Taliban’s purification mission was incomplete in 1996, and that the country was therefore not ready for the King’s return.

When the Taliban fell, however, Zahir rushed back to Kabul amidst renewed talk that he could regain his throne. At the Loya Jirga in June 2002, he actually won more votes than Hamid Karzai to become the new head of state, but was forced by Zalmay Khalilzad, who was then George Bush’s Special Envoy, to withdraw his candidature at the last minute. The Europeans, Shinwari recalled, had been quite keen on Zahir’s candidacy, but were silenced by the Americans who ultimately insisted on Karzai and democracy instead. The Americans’ past experience of supporting monarchies in the region, he noted, had not been good – a reference to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the Islamic revolution that followed. Zahir was demoted to a figurehead role – he opened the Loya Jirga of December 2003, for instance – but his health was beginning to fail, and when he died in 2007 the possibility of a monarchist solution receded – although it had not entirely faded from view. Zahir’s heir, Crown Prince Mustafa, was running the country’s Environmental Protection Agency in 2010, a government appointment that kept the King’s Party close to the Karzai administration as a kind of insurance policy against the future; and even Mullah Omar is said still to consult with the Prince from time to time.

If Shinwari’s technical expertise had once been useful to Mullah Omar, his status as a leading member of the ulema was now just as important to Karzai. With the President’s blessing he was on the point of announcing a new ulema party; even during our meeting, a secretary kept reappearing with different drafts of a press release
for his boss’s inspection. It sounded like competition for Hajji Hotak, who claimed that his Harakat party already spoke for the ulema. The difference, Shinwari explained, was that his organization would be genuinely independent; Harakat, being an old mujahideen party, had military associations and was seen by many ulema as politically ‘tainted’. This was not the first time Shinwari had attempted to launch an ulema party. When he tried in 2007, he was picked up by the NDS and placed under house arrest for a month.

‘They put me in a very beautiful apartment in Kabul,’ he remembered, ‘but it was still house arrest. We were going to name the corrupt within the government, and they felt threatened. This time we have persuaded Karzai that it is a good thing. The ulema already meet every three to six months. This will simply formalize the movement.’

Like Hajji Hotak, Shinwari thought the ulema were the ‘key to peace in this Islamic society’. But he also argued that they were powerless to influence anything without the support of the international community, and even of Nato.

‘Our movement will not oppose the foreign presence. We will work as partners with you, so long as there is no interference with our cultural and religious traditions.’

As he acknowledged, this was a very different line from the one commonly heard in Quetta.

‘We do want the foreign troops to go, but not before we can defend ourselves, most of all against the intelligence agencies of our neighbours,’ he said. ‘Our country has a five-thousand-year-old culture. Pakistan has a sixty-year-old culture, and they are trying to colonize us . . . If the foreigners left now, the ANA would become the promoters of civil war, just like the Soviet Union’s National Army did.’

Omar, he was convinced, was ready to negotiate with the Karzai government. There had been no progress whatsoever on that front, however, whatever Karzai might have claimed in the past.

‘[Omar] has
25 million on his head. He cannot move, or meet anybody, or express himself directly. Nothing will happen until his name is removed from the UN list – and without him, all dialogue is fruitless.’

The ulema, he thought, were the most likely intermediaries for talks in the future.

‘Every negotiation needs a middleman, a guarantor. They must be knowledgeable and neutral, with nothing to gain from one outcome or another. The problem with the Saudis is that they had conditions: they wanted a guarantee that the Taliban would split with al-Qaida. That was never going to work.’

His point was that it wasn’t in Mullah Omar’s gift to guarantee such a thing, however willing he might be. America had accused the Taliban of sponsoring terrorism in 2001, when in reality it was al-Qaida who had sponsored the Taliban.

‘If the US couldn’t control al-Qaida, how do you expect the Taliban to? The leadership told bin Laden forcefully and repeatedly not to attack any foreign country from Afghan soil, but bin Laden wouldn’t listen: he said he obeyed the Koran, not men.’

Although Shinwari had no formal role in the Karzai administration, the President had sent him a few days before to mediate in a local tribal dispute over grazing rights that was still ongoing and, indeed, intensifying. Eighteen people had so far been killed, three of them that morning. The land in question, 10,000 acres of it, was in Shinwar district to the south-east of Jalalabad, and was contested by two Shinwari Pashtun sub-tribes, the Ali Sher Khel and the Mohmand. As the Chief of the district’s first family, Jalaluddin
Shinwari was an obvious choice of peace-broker. He wanted me to accompany him to see how a traditional tribal dispute resolution worked in practice: a jirga, a long lunch with the elders of both tribes, ending with an agreement symbolized by a ritual known as ‘the placing of the stone’ between them. We never made it to Shinwar, though. Instead we sat waiting in the guesthouse for two days as reports came in that the feud was going from bad to worse. The Mohmand accused the Ali Sher Khel of starting the fighting with weapons supplied by local policemen, many of whom were members of the Ali Sher Khel – and Shinwari suspected they were right.

‘Our police are supposed to be a national police force, but in this case it seems they have been partisan. All too typical these days, sadly,’ he said.

With no other means of defending themselves, the Mohmand had complained to the local Taliban, who had counter-armed them. A small dispute that should have ended bloodlessly was thus threatening to turn into a new flashpoint for the insurgency.

Shinwari was desperate to get out on to the ground, but was prevented by the interference of Governor Shirzai and a delegation of government officials who kept flying in from Kabul by military helicopter, intent on trying to fix things their way. This wasn’t working, not only because the government were responsible for the local police – and so were not seen as neutral by the Mohmand – but also because both sides considered the dispute to be the government’s fault in the first place. Some months before, the government, hoping to curry favour with both the Ali Sher Khel and the Mohmand, had short-sightedly granted both tribes the grazing rights to the same disputed patch of land. The Shinwari Pashtuns were a powerful group numbering perhaps 2.5 million people across six eastern provinces whose support, or at least
passivity, had always been important to Kabul. It was the Shinwari, indeed, who led the march on Kabul that ultimately toppled Amanullah Khan in 1929. The fact that they occupied a region straddling the border with Pakistan added to their modern strategic significance.

On day two of my stay, it emerged that the government officials had travelled to Shinwar for lunch with the elders, just as tribal custom dictated – but had only sat down with the elders of the Ali Sher Khel. The Mohmand elders inevitably suspected that the government was taking sides and, incensed by this insult, had ordered their fighters to return to their gun positions. Shinwari was naturally furious, most of all with Governor Shirzai who arrogantly refused to even answer his phone calls, but he hid his indignation well: he knew better than to challenge the authority of the Governor or the officials from Kabul. Impatience would only make matters worse, and he resigned himself to a long wait.

The affair amply illustrated the tensions beneath the surface of Pashtun society, and how quickly they could boil over into bloodletting. It was also a lesson in the failings of the central government system, its tangled line of command and control and the roughshod way it trampled on tribal tradition. The cost to Karzai was potentially disastrous. The only beneficiaries of the confusion were the Taliban, who knew better than anyone how to exploit the Mohmands’ sense of injustice.

The dispute would never have escalated if the local police had not armed the Ali Sher Khel – and it was the West, ironically, who bore the ultimate responsibility for that, since it was they who armed and trained the ANP. A detachment of forty policemen had been ordered to escort Shinwari on his peace-broking mission, and they were all waiting in the guesthouse too. They were easy to
approach as they lounged about on the sofas, smoking, joshing each other, desperately bored. The new ANP were just as important to the West’s exit strategy as the ANA was, but these policemen’s lack of discipline did not fill me with confidence. At one point, one of them accidentally directed his Kalashnikov at me.

‘So why do
you
point your guns at people whenever you come out of your bases?’ he glowered when I asked him nicely not to.

Another young policeman – and they were all very young – confided that he and three of his friends had already decided they would ‘disappear’ if there was any trouble on the mission to Shinwar. He was not a local but a Tajik, from Jebal os Seraj. He said they had no faith in their American-supplied weapons, which were cheap, East European copies of Kalashnikovs that were always jamming at the wrong moment. His training, he said, had lasted just three months.

They all agreed that they were in the job only for the money. The ID card sported on the Tajik’s chest turned out, on close inspection, to be a bank card. On the second day of my stay, a Thursday, the policemen were suddenly nowhere to be seen. When Shinwari asked why, he was told that Thursday was payday and that they had all gone to collect their salaries. Their pay didn’t amount to much, however keen they were to collect it:
300 a month for the officers,
200 for the juniors, or less than seven dollars a day. This was far more than it had been – in 2003, junior policemen were paid just
30 a month – but it was still nowhere near enough if the West seriously expected them to stand in future against an enemy like the Taliban, a force that in any case paid its conscripts more. Even General McChrystal described the movement’s foot soldiers as ‘ten-dollar-a-day Taliban’. The US had so far spent some
4 billion on the police-training programme. Where
were those billions going, if not on salaries? Underpaid policemen were more likely to turn to extortion and other crime to top up their income. They also had a worrying tendency to sell their equipment. According to one report, 87,000 weapons delivered to the new security forces by the US since 2001 could no longer be accounted for.
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