Taliban (37 page)

The young policemen at the guesthouse were all livid at the recent news reports of botched night raids. Cover-ups, they said, had become very common, and they gave many examples.

‘They plant a few weapons and call it a cache,’ said one. ‘Or if they accidentally kill a driver, they drop a bomb on his vehicle to destroy the evidence and they call him a suicide-bomber. Such things have become a trademark now.’

I asked him if he felt comfortable, operating alongside allies who behaved in this way.

‘What, do you think we are not human? Are we to go on doing this until Doomsday? If they kill fifty people, they create five hundred Taliban. If they did something to my family, I wouldn’t stand by, I’d take revenge. I hate the Americans.’

The US military, he thought, were playing a very dangerous game that risked alienating all the ANA and ANP. Two American soldiers had been killed by a rogue policeman in Wardak a few months previously, as had five British ones in Helmand in November 2009.

‘Najibullah Zazi was caught in the US trying to detonate a suicide bomb. He admitted it. He said he was avenging his family who the Americans killed.’

He made it sound as though Zazi was another disaffected Afghan policeman, but in reality his empathy was disturbingly misplaced. Zazi, arrested in 2009 for attempting to blow up the
New York subway, had been radicalized by a jihadist imam, and was trained and armed by al-Qaida in Pakistan. There was no evidence that the US military or any other American had ever harmed his family, who emigrated to New York in 1999 when he was fourteen.

I wondered how much if any distinction they made between the British and the Americans.

‘You are cousins: the same. We hate you all,’ said one.

‘The black Americans are the worst. They have no manners. They are like animals,’ said a second.

‘English very gooood!’ said the third. ‘The black dogs have white cousins, ha ha ha!’

‘There are good and bad,’ said their sergeant, more thoughtfully, ‘like the fingers of the hand: some long, some short.’

The sergeant’s name was Sahil. He was twenty-one and he came from Laghman province between Jalalabad and Kabul.

‘What can I tell you about the Taliban? You know more than I do. All I can say for certain is that the more you oppress the people, the more the Taliban will emerge. But if you are kind and humble, they will go away.’

At every meal in the guesthouse, about sixty of us sat down at a single long table in the Afghan style, the policemen in their blue serge uniforms and kepis at one end, everyone else at the other. The guesthouse was a busy gathering point for lobbyists seeking an audience with Shirzai in his governor’s residence around the corner. One breakfast time, a meal of hot milk, stale bread and a carton of long-life cream each, I found myself sitting with a delegation of elders in full tribal regalia: beautiful dark robes decorated with complex needlework, and immense broad turbans in a variety of pastel hues. They were from Zabul province, the northern
neighbour of Kandahar province, 250 miles to the south. It was interesting that Shirzai’s connections were considered powerful enough to risk such a long and dangerous journey. Some of them stared at me with open hostility, something I had rarely encountered in Afghanistan in the past. They thought I was American, and I had a hard job persuading them otherwise.

‘You Americans and English are all the same.’

‘But I’m from Scotland.’

‘Scotland? Never heard of it.’

‘It’s near England.’

‘England? You
are
American!’

‘England and Scotland are as different as Panjshiri Tajiks and Kandahari Pashtuns.’

‘No!’ protested a Tajik voice from down the table. ‘You are all cousins, all the same!’

The Zabul Pashtuns thought this was very funny. And yet the more hostile among them remained sullen towards me and soon left the table. Only one stayed behind to talk, as sociable and curious as Afghans normally were. ‘If you’ve been bitten by a snake, you’ll be scared of a rope,’ he shrugged, by way of explaining the behaviour of his friends.

His name was Hajji Noor Gul. They had come to beg Shirzai to intercede with the Americans on behalf of another elder, who had been arrested and detained by US Special Forces during a night raid – the result, once again, of false information passed to them by an aggrieved party in yet another land dispute.

‘It’s running out of control in Zabul. I have never seen the situation so bad. I’ve sent my whole family abroad, and many Zabulis have run to the tribal areas [of Pakistan] . . . Some of them have joined the Taliban. The situation is intolerable.’

Hajji Noor had recently met the Police Chief of Wardak province, where he had previously lived.

‘I said to him: aren’t you ashamed of bringing the Americans here? But he had no shame. He is a communist – a brutal man. The whole government is communist, and they hate us for destroying communism. The Americans don’t seem to realize the danger of allying themselves with the communists. Many people have changed sides because of this.’

All his talk was driven by the past, the memory of the Jihad. Although ideologically inconceivable in the West, it did not seem strange to him that America appeared to have embraced communism since the end of the Cold War. ‘Changing sides’ was a routine tactic in Afghanistan, the way things had always been. As a motive for fighting, ideology came a distant second to the imperative of survival for traditionalists like Hajji Noor. Such men were the backbone of Pashtun society and, now, the bedrock of Taliban support.

In his resignation letter in 2009, Matthew Hoh, the senior American administrator in Zabul province, wrote: ‘In both Regional Command East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul . . . Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.’

Later I was approached by another man, the young mullah of a mosque on the road that led to Torkham, the border with Pakistan.
His robes and his turban were daffodil yellow, and his beard and the ends of his moustache had been sculpted into tidy points beneath his huge hooked nose. He looked more like a Turkish Grand Vizier than an Afghan from Nangarhar.

‘My name is Mullah Allah Mohammed,’ he began, with a splendid twist of his hand above his head, ‘like “God Jesus”. Yes!’

He was humorous, but I was wary of his eyes which glittered with a manic intensity. I thought at first that he was merely an eccentric, passing the time by practising his English on me, but it turned out that he too had an important story to tell. He was another victim of a Special Forces night raid, and was the clearest example I had ever met of a man radicalized by the experience.

‘I am Taliban. Yes, yes! Genghis Khan was more brutal than the Americans. The Russians were more brutal than the Americans. And look what happened to them!’

One night in January 2009, US Special Forces blew up the gates of his house, dragged him from his bed, beat, handcuffed and blindfolded him and hauled him off to the local base.

‘I run a madrasah as well as a mosque – but only for students, not for fighters. Everyone knows it. It is in Marko district, right beside the main road. As if anyone could train fighters there! But the Americans do not understand.’

Until that moment he had been entirely apolitical: a well-known figure in his community, an educated man of the cloth like his father before him. He was more than a simple mullah. He was a bright and highly charismatic member of the ulema, who had come to the guesthouse to offer Shinwari advice on the new party he was setting up.

His arrest was only the beginning of an experience that, he wanted me to know, had left him deeply traumatized. He showed
me his watch, the ceramic strap of which was shattered: the result, he said, of a blow from the butt of an American gun. He kept it in this state of disrepair as a memento of that night, a talisman of injustice. (The watch was a remarkably fancy one, a Swiss-made Rado ‘Sintra Jubilé’, the sort one saw on sale in the duty-free shops at Dubai airport for thousands of dollars. Watches are important status symbols among Afghans, who like to wear them even when they are old or no longer tell the right time.) The strap was only an outward sign of damage. He also produced a little plastic bag full of pills, Alprazolam, Flunarizine and Inderal: medication, he said, for the psychological problems he still experienced, depression, panic attacks and flashbacks. He also suffered recurrent back problems from his maltreatment.

In the local army base, and later when he was transferred to the US headquarters at Bagram, north of Kabul, Mullah Mohammed was interrogated by ‘a US general called John’.

‘He said, “Why are you fighting a jihad against us when we are here to help build this country?” but I didn’t answer. I said, “Where are you from?” He said, “California.” So I said, “OK. California is far from here. Why are you really helping this country?” He said, “I’m here to keep my kids safe.” So I said, “OK. Now imagine if I came to California and put my foot on
your
head, and shackled and blindfolded
you
, and shot up your house and terrified your children – what would you do?” He said, “I would seek revenge.” So I said, “OK! We are the same – except that we call revenge jihad.” ’

General John, whoever he was, was not used to captives who argued back. The fact that Mohammed spoke English, combined with his fighting spirit and, no doubt, his unusually grand appearance, convinced the Americans that they had landed a big fish – although they had no idea from what tribe or terrorist organization.

‘They were scared of my turban. They pointed at it and said, “What is the meaning of this?” I looked them in the eye and said: “It’s called
a turban
.” ’

The questioning became more intense as the Americans’ frustration grew.

‘I was asked my name ten times by ten different people. They said, “You say you are a mullah, but mullahs don’t speak English. Who are you really?” I could not understand this. I speak Pashto, Persian, Urdu and Arabic as well as English. Do they think all Afghans are stupid? I told them, “You are like kids! And yet you have so much money, so much technology. Kids should not be permitted to play with such expensive toys.” ’

The interrogators gave up in the end, unable to pin anything on their captive. No specific allegation was ever made. Instead of releasing him, however, they decided to send him to Guantanamo. He was stripped of his clothes and ordered into an orange jumpsuit in preparation for the long flight. He was sitting shackled to a chair when General John brought ‘a big pastor’ to see him – presumably the senior army chaplain at Bagram.

‘I said to the big pastor, “Are you fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida, or are you an enemy of Islam?” And the big pastor said, “No, no, we mean your religion no harm!” But I said, “Why are you lying? Our Koran, for example: has it attacked you in any way? And yet your people have burned it, and shot it, and peed on it, here at Bagram and elsewhere. And there were cartoons of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, in that Danish newspaper . . . You
know
this.” ’

Mohammed had been speaking at this point through a local interpreter, a young woman, who protested in a Pashto aside that the Americans couldn’t possibly have done such things to the Koran at Bagram.

‘I said to her, “Why are you defending them, you slave-girl? You probably shagged some white guy in a night club.” And then General John admitted that these things
had
happened to the Koran at Bagram! I said to him, “I see you have great respect for your big pastor. But I too am an imam of a mosque, yet you treat me with disrespect. How do you think this will look, in the eyes of the people?” ’

General John had his answer soon afterwards, when a large group of armed Shinwaris protested against Mohammed’s arrest by blocking the main road to Torkham. Governor Shirzai, according to Mohammed, telephoned Karzai in a panic, warning him that Jalalabad could fall if Mohammed was not released.

‘But Karzai has no influence with the US military. So he called Bush, in Washington!’

This was in President Bush’s last month in office, and although it was hard to imagine that the White House really had been involved, Mohammed was nevertheless released from Bagram the same day.

‘They were going to fly me home, but a doctor inspected me and said my blood pressure was too high to get on a helicopter. That was true. I had been wearing a hood for twelve hours, and the straps were so tight I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head. So they brought me back to Jalalabad in a tank. And then Shirzai drove me back to the village personally.’

Mullah Mohammed finished his story with a warning that I had heard again and again in Afghanistan.

‘I just can’t understand the Americans,’ he said. ‘What they are doing makes no sense – and if they go on as they are, the whole country will rise against them.’

As this book went to press in summer 2010, Operation Moshtaraq in the Helmandi district of Marjah was over, and the next phase of the campaign against the Taliban was under way: Operation Omid, the domination of greater Kandahar. The Americans seemed pleased with the way Moshtaraq had gone – at least initially.

‘In many ways,’ General Stanley McChrystal said, ‘[it] is a model for the future: an Afghan-led operation supported by the Coalition, deeply engaged with the people.’

Moshtaraq involved a combined force of 15,000 Nato and Afghan troops, the largest operation of the war. But even as they moved on to the main objective in May, it was increasingly clear that they had achieved only partial success in Marjah. The Taliban were still there, killing the occasional ISAF soldier with sniper fire and threatening local contractors who cooperated with the Americans, while the locals – however much they appreciated work clearing canals at
5 a day for ISAF’s Civil Affairs unit – had yet to throw in their lot with the central government. According to
one opinion poll, 95 per cent of Marjah residents thought that more young men had joined the insurgency over the previous year than in the year before, and 68 per cent thought the Taliban would eventually return.
¹