Taliban (38 page)

‘The local residents don’t trust we will provide security,’ said Naimatullah, Marjah’s acting District Governor. ‘They are taking a wait-and-see attitude . . . they are worried that the Taliban will return and punish them for supporting the government.’
²

Some 23,000 Coalition troops are now engaged in the Kandahar operation. But will they really succeed in establishing true security there when so many questions remain about Marjah – a district of just 80,000 compared to Kandahar’s population of 1 million? The indications are not good. Notional front lines are already disintegrating and being replaced by random IED kill-zones. It was reported in May that the Americans had secretly trained and armed an assortment of tribal militias in the hope that they might police their own communities,
³
but it remains to be seen if the US are really in control of them. Locals complain that the new militias are already operating above the law. If they are right, then the American policy is in serious danger of playing into the insurgency’s hands. It was precisely to get rid of militias such as these that the Taliban came into being in 1994.

Meanwhile the Taliban’s new commander for the region, the former Guantanamo inmate Mullah Zakir, has launched a counter-offensive codenamed Operation Al-Fath, or Victory. Al-Fath is the name of the forty-eighth sura of the Koran, the sixteenth verse of which states: ‘Say to those of the dwellers of the desert who were left behind: You shall soon be invited to fight against a people possessing mighty prowess. You will fight against them until they submit; if you obey, Allah will grant you a good reward, but if you
turn back as you turned back before, He will punish you grievously.’

McChrystal began to downplay expectations for the Kandahar campaign even before it had started, with a warning in May that it could be the end of the year before any progress would be seen: one more extension of the battle for the south that has already lasted longer than the Second World War. Some 1,900 Coalition troops have lost their lives since 2001, more than three hundred of them British, along with untold numbers of Taliban. The toll of civilians caught up in the fighting has been even more disastrous: over 6,500 killed since 2006, over 2,000 of them by ISAF or their Afghan allies.
⁴

The clock is ticking for the administration in Washington. Mid-term Congressional elections are due in November, and President Obama has promised to review his Afghan strategy before the end of the year. If, as seems likely, it is apparent by then that it is not working, what will he do? A withdrawal of troops in 2011 will be highly unpopular with Republicans. To muddle on with the McChrystal plan will seriously weaken his Democrat base. Pursuing either policy on its own could easily cost him the presidency, the campaign for which begins in 2012.

Probably his only option will be to call for a ceasefire and to start talking to Quetta about sharing political power. It will take nerve to explain this to the American public: ‘as massive a U-turn in US policy as it was for the British government to talk to the IRA’, as one journalist put it.
⁵
But the more important point is that ordinary Afghans themselves are ready for it. The majority of those I spoke to in Kabul regarded the return of the Taliban as the lesser of two evils. Apart from the crime lords, who would not choose political compromise and the possibility of peace over continued war, poverty and corruption?

At the beginning of June in Kabul, President Karzai convened a ‘peace jirga’ of 1,600 MPs, tribal and religious leaders and other representatives of civic society, in order to discuss ways of reconciling with the Taliban. The meeting got off to a bad start when the opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah denounced the gathering as ‘unrepresentative’, and refused to participate in what he called ‘a PR exercise’. The Taliban, once again, were not invited – and responded during Karzai’s opening speech with a salvo of rockets and a suicide attack, although none of the delegates was harmed. Blame for the security breach was pinned on the Minister of the Interior, Mohamed Hanif Atmar, and the NDS Chief, Amrullah Saleh, whose resignations Karzai swiftly accepted. Both men had been favourites of the West, who regarded them as key figures in the war against the Taliban. To foreign diplomats, their removal looked like one more piece of politicking by the mercurial Afghan President.

The Western military mission was dealt a far greater shock a fortnight later when General McChrystal, the principal architect of the surge strategy, was summoned to Washington and relieved of his command. His crime was insubordination. In an astonishing series of informal interviews in
Rolling Stone
magazine, McChrystal and his entourage were shown to have maligned not only the Vice-President, Joe Biden, and the US Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, but also their Commander-in-Chief, President Obama himself. McChrystal, it seemed, had forgotten why and for whom he was conducting the war. The episode demonstrated that the debate over strategy that convulsed Washington in the autumn of 2009 was still not resolved. The Taliban were naturally jubilant.

‘If they don’t leave Afghanistan in the coming years, most of their soldiers will die or go crazy,’ said a spokesman.
⁶

The new commander in Afghanistan is McChrystal’s superior, the Central Commander General David Petraeus, who reportedly intends to continue with the McChrystal plan. The troop surge is not due to reach its peak until the autumn of 2010. But with the ISAF campaign already stalling in Kandahar, and the cost in lives and money climbing ever higher, some observers believe the
Rolling Stone
debacle could spell the end for the US military approach.

‘McChrystal was a military champion,’ a former SAS officer explained to a reporter, ‘but Obama sees the military’s effort as being beyond its culminating point. Marjah was the test for McChrystal’s surge. That was the moment Obama thought, “Stan, it’s not working. We’re not going to resource the effort you asked for any more. We’ll draw down.” . . . What we’ll discover now is that the military has had its day in Afghanistan: you’ve had your day, boys – it’s time for the politicians.’
⁷

Was the ex-SAS officer right? His analysis had a distinctly British flavour to it. Despite the London government’s repeated public expressions of complete support for the McChrystal strategy, some senior British politicians, such as the former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, have been trying for some time to nudge Washington towards the obvious alternative.

‘Now is the time for the Afghans to pursue a political settlement with as much vigour and energy as we are pursuing the military and civilian effort,’ Miliband said in a keynote lecture in March 2010. ‘Afghanistan will never achieve a sustainable peace unless many more Afghans are inside the political system, and the neighbours [nearby countries] are onside with the political settlement . . . Dialogue is not appeasement, and [granting the Taliban] political space is not the same as veto power or domination.’

The venue for this lecture – the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where Miliband once studied – was carefully chosen. Was Washington listening? More to the point, will Britain’s new coalition government continue to push America in this enlightened direction?

Although David Cameron, the new British Prime Minister, moved quickly to announce that he supported Obama’s decision to remove McChrystal, and that Britain’s Afghan policy remained in lock-step with America’s, he also remarked that British soldiers ‘cannot be there for another five years, having been there for . . . nine years already’. It is not yet clear what he thinks about negotiating a settlement with Mullah Omar. But it is evident from his remarks that he is just as anxious as Obama to find an honourable way out of the Afghan morass; and that the clock is ticking for the British military mission, too.

Whatever Cameron’s government decides to do, it is likely to count. As the second largest troop contributor, Britain is better placed than any other ally of America to influence Obama’s strategy. If Washington does change direction, then the British – a people that for reasons of colonial history the Afghans feel they ‘know’ – are in a unique position to help.

Everything I heard from the ‘reconciled’ Taliban suggests that Mullah Omar has learned from the mistakes he made when in power, and that his movement’s agenda has softened with the passage of time.

‘We don’t have much problem with the Taliban in Wardak,’ said the Swedish Committee’s Anders Fange, an aid official with twenty years’ experience of Afghanistan. ‘They accept girls’ schools and women doctors. They just ask for two hours of Islamic education in schools, and that teachers grow beards and do not spread propaganda against the Taliban.’
⁸

The Taliban do not want to destroy or replace the government per se, but to make ‘repairs’ to the Constitution’s few faulty articles that, as Hajji Hotak said, are ‘not mountains’. They argue convincingly that it is the warlords who they want out of government, not the non-Pashtun minorities that they spring from. Most important of all from the Western point of view, Mullah Zaeef swore that Omar would never allow al-Qaida to re-establish its base in Afghanistan, and would ‘set in stone’ a guarantee that no foreign country would be attacked from its soil in future.

With thorough preparation and the right kind of international support, it would not be so hard to re-open the disastrous Bonn Agreement of 2001 and, this time, to invite the Taliban. Ignoring the insurgents’ demands risks condemning the Afghan people to further years of suffering, as well as increasing the threat to Western security.

To go on supporting the Kabul government as it is, and to persevere with the war as America at present seems determined to do, could lead both Afghans and the West into a crisis potentially far more dreadful than the one we are in now. In the interests of peace, don’t the Taliban deserve the benefit of the doubt?

1
     
Channel 4 News
, 28 January 2010.

2
     Bernd Debusman, Reuters, 14 May 2010.

3
     Jonathan Steele,
Guardian
, 5 May 2010.

1
     David Loyn,
Butcher and Bolt
, p231.

2
     Christina Lamb,
The Sewing Circles of Herat
.

3
     For some of the detail in this section, as elsewhere throughout this book, I am indebted to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef and his excellent
My Life with the Taliban
.

4
     Quoted in David B. Edwards,
Before Taliban
.

1
     Nancy Hatch Dupree,
An Historical Guide to Afghanistan
.

2
     Christina Lamb,
The Sewing Circles of Herat
, p14.

3
     Declan Walsh,
Guardian
, 30 January 2010.

4
     Amnesty International.

5
     AFP, 19 June 1999, quoted in Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind
, p221.

6
     CIA World Fact Book.

7
     CIA World Fact Book.

8
     Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, p236.

1
     Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind
.

2
     Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind
, p66.

3
     
New York Times
, 30 September 1997.

4
     Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban
, p207.

5
     Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban
, p111.

6
     Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind
, p67.

1
     Gretchen Peters,
Seeds of Terror, p81
.

2
     A. Ghani Khan,
The Pathans
.

3
     Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban
, pp74–5.

4
     Reuters, 21 August 1998.

1
     Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, p60.

2
     G8 Summit Press Conference, 9 July 2009.

3
     Fatwa quoted by Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban
, p134.

4
     2001 Census.

5
     Zahid Hussain,
The Times
, 4 May 2010.

6
     James Hider,
The Times
, 10 January 2010.

7
     
New York Times
, 5 January 2007.

8
     Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban
, p133.

9
     E.g.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550419.stm

10
   AFP, 11 October 1999, quoted in Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind
, p234.

11
   Gretchen Peters,
Seeds of Terror
, p88.

12
   Patrick Robinson,
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
.

13
   Hugh Beattie,
Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan
.

14
   
New York Times
, 13 April 1999.

15
   Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban
, p79.

16
   Nancy Hatch Dupree,
An Historical Guide to Afghanistan
.

17
   Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
.

18
   Christina Lamb,
The Sewing Circles of Herat
.

1
     For some of the detail in this chapter, I am particularly grateful to Ahmed Rashid and his masterly study,
Descent into Chaos
.