Taliban (4 page)

After all this my trip to Peshawar was almost an afterthought. I had British friends who lived and worked there for the aid agency Oxfam, and I was looking forward to staying with them. Peshawar today is a dangerous place, plagued by suicide bombers and officially off-limits to foreign journalists, but it was different then. It was still possible to wander the maze of bazaars for hours, shopping for carpets and jewellery and trinkets like any tourist. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the city, close to the border at the eastern end of the famous Khyber Pass, became what the author Peter Bergen called ‘an Asian Casablanca, awash in spies, journalists, aid workers and refugees’, and it still had that edge to it. It remained the principal gateway to Afghanistan for Westerners, since there were no direct international flights to Kabul in those days. The foreign aid community was consequently huge. Some of the wide, leafy streets of University Town, the district they
favoured just west of the city centre, seemed to contain nothing but NGO offices. After work the foreigners descended on the American Club, where they swapped special coupons for beers and hamburgers and, in the summer months, partied late into the night beside the club’s most popular asset: a swimming pool, well shielded from the prying eyes of an easily offended public.

Peshawar was a Pashto-speaking city, and quite unlike any other in Pakistan. It had been a commercial and cultural hub for the Pashtuns since ancient times, a major crossroads on the Silk Road between China and Rome, and they still regard it as ‘theirs’. The fact that it lies within modern Pakistan is considered by many as an accident of recent history, a blip in the natural order of things. The 1,600-mile Durand Line, as the Afghan–Pakistan border is known, is named after Sir Mortimer Durand, the Foreign Secretary of British India who delineated it only in 1893. The border is not just ‘porous’, as Nato’s hard-pressed commanders still describe it. In the Pashtun mind, it is non-existent: a line drawn on a map long ago by foreigners who did not consult them on the splitting in half of their ancestral homeland.

There was little discussion of the Pakistani elections at the American Club in Peshawar that August. Instead the bar was buzzing with talk about events over the border. In Kandahar that spring, the Taliban leadership had met with a thousand religious leaders and elders to discuss policy. It ended on 4 April with a call for a new jihad against President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government in Kabul.

To cement his position as leader, Mullah Omar had a brilliant idea. In a green-marbled shrine near the centre of Kandahar lies one of Islam’s most sacred relics: a plain brown cloak said to have belonged to the Prophet Mohammed himself. This ancient
garment is stored in the centre of a series of locked boxes, like the tiniest in a set of Babushka dolls, and is traditionally taken out only in times of crisis; the last time had been in 1935 when a special religious service was held to counter an epidemic of cholera. At the head of a crowd of some 1,200 followers, Omar now went to the shrine, ordered the cloak to be taken out again, and climbed to the building’s roof where he held it up for all to see. The crowd below was duly transfixed. They began to chant deliriously, declaring Omar ‘Amir ul-Mu’mineen’ – the Commander of the Faithful. Then they snatched off their turbans and hurled them at the cloak in the hope that their headgear might come into contact with it. There were so many turbans in the air that for a moment Omar almost disappeared beneath them.

It was an inspired piece of political and religious drama. The title of Amir ul-Mu’mineen had not been adopted by anyone in Afghanistan since 1834, when the ruler Dost Mohammed declared jihad against the Sikhs. By associating himself so directly with the Prophet, Omar was asking to be called the commander not just of Afghanistan’s faithful, but of Muslims everywhere. For Pashtuns, there was additional meaning in the gesture. Omar was also associating himself with Ahmad Shah Durrani, whose mausoleum the shrine abuts and who acquired the cloak from the Amir of Buhkara in 1768. Durrani, still popularly known as ‘Baba’, the Father of Afghanistan, once ruled from Kandahar a Pashtun empire that stretched as far as Delhi.

‘In his time,’ according to the ornate lapis lazuli inscription that runs around the roof of his mausoleum, ‘from the awe of his glory and greatness, the lioness nourished the stag with her milk. From all sides in the ear of his enemies there arrived a thousand reproofs from the tongue of his dagger.’
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The whole fantastic episode was filmed by the veteran cameraman Peter Jouvenal, who happened to be in Kandahar that day looking for footage to use in a BBC
Newsnight
programme. It remains one of the very few pieces of footage of Omar in existence, and the programme that resulted was an award-winning one. Jouvenal was 150 yards away in the back of a Toyota van that had been brought to an unscripted halt by the dense crowd around the shrine. The driver, his fixer and his Taliban minder were sitting in the front. Photographing Omar was strictly forbidden, even then, but with all eyes fixed ahead Jouvenal was able to shoot the scene through the van window, peering surreptitiously through the viewfinder set at a right-angle to the camera on his lap. Omar did not put the cloak on but held it up gingerly, and for no more than a minute or so – which was only sensible considering the garment’s great antiquity. It was quite a windy day, according to Jouvenal, who couldn’t help wondering how different history might have been if the cloak had disintegrated in Omar’s hands. He had one other wicked thought: the chanting and the turban-throwing seemed to him to amount to idolatry, a sin in Islam that the Taliban were later notoriously keen to eradicate from Afghan society.

Omar’s rooftop theatrics achieved their goal. Nine months earlier, in November 1995, the Taliban’s first assault on Kabul had been repulsed despite the supporting fire of some 400 tanks. This was the first significant setback Omar’s troops had suffered on the battlefield, and the Kandahar gathering provided just the morale boost his troops now needed. The spring and summer of 1996 saw some dazzling military successes in eastern and western Afghanistan. The keys to the Taliban’s early success in Kandahar had been surprise and speed: old guerrilla skills learned in mujahideen times but abandoned by many commanders as the
country sank into civil war, and static trench warfare around the urban strongholds became the norm. Replicating their tactics in the south, the Taliban now developed a version of Blitzkrieg, with lightly armed fighters travelling in fast fleets of Toyota Hi-Lux trucks. And when this didn’t work they used bribery, usually to equally good effect.

The Taliban soon renewed their attack on the capital, this time with barrages of rockets. In June, President Rabbani formed a hasty alliance with his main political rival, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was appointed Prime Minister for a second time. In return, thousands of Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami troops were brought in to stiffen the defence. They were experienced and well-equipped fighters who, it was assumed, were itching to avenge previous humiliations at the hands of the Taliban back in Spin Boldak and elsewhere. In the American Club, therefore, there were some who predicted that Hizb-i-Islami would prove too great an obstacle for the zealots from the south, and that the assault on the capital would fail once again.

Pakistan’s role in the war to their west was obscure. It certainly wasn’t a public election issue on the campaign trail in Islamabad and Lahore, where the talk had all been about the economy and political corruption. On the other hand, it was widely suspected that the Taliban were being supported in their revolution by the ISI, Pakistan’s mighty Inter Service Intelligence wing and, it was inferred, by the government too. Two years previously, after all, Benazir’s Pashtun Interior Minister, General Nasirullah Babar, had publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘our boys’.
²
Nevertheless, Benazir evaded the question when I asked her about Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban, saying only that she was ‘monitoring events in Afghanistan closely’ and that we ‘would all have to wait
to see what happened’. I took this to mean that support for the Taliban was, at most, a small and possibly experimental covert operation orchestrated by the ISI. It was also clear that she considered it no business of foreign journalists to pry into sensitive matters of national security. So I was surprised to discover that the Taliban were not just lurking in the refugee camps outside Peshawar, as I expected, but were operating quite openly in the city centre. They had even opened an office recently on the Old Bara Road in University Town.

Their appearance in Peshawar had sent a frisson through the foreign aid community, particularly its female members. An Australian aid worker I met described how a black-turbanned young man had squared up to her the previous week as she came out of a bakery opposite their new office. He hadn’t said anything, but stared and deliberately blocked her way when she tried to step around him on the pavement. His meaning was clear: there were to be no unveiled women in
their
street. Many similar stories were doing the rounds in University Town that summer, when Western outrage at the Taliban’s misogyny in general would reach new peaks. It was widely suspected that their office’s location, highly visible and in the heart of the NGO district, had been chosen for its symbolic value as much as for any practical reason. Western NGOs were in practice responsible for all social welfare in Afghanistan in those chaotic days, so this was taken by some as a direct challenge to that status quo, as if to say: ‘We’ll be running Afghanistan
our
way now.’

Were they serious? One morning I borrowed an interpreter from the Oxfam office and went to the Old Bara Road to find out. The Taliban office was small and dilapidated: a hastily converted shop, I guessed. Three or four men with beards and black turbans squatted by the entrance watching the passers-by in the street,
like so many perching crows. They rose and followed me inside, where another half-dozen men loitered. It was hard to make out what their purpose here was, for there appeared to be no work going on. There was one desk with a telephone on it but no other obvious office equipment, no paperwork, computers or even typewriters. I glimpsed a rack of Kalashnikovs locked behind a grille in a cupboard in a corner, but otherwise the atmosphere was strangely like that of an underworked East London minicab office.

My interpreter and I were shown to some grubby floor cushions. Tea was brought and eventually their leader appeared. His name, he said, was Amruddin; like nearly all the men here, he was from Kandahar. He was a young man with a straggly beard, clad head to toe in black and outwardly indistinguishable from the others – until you looked at his eyes. These shone with the light of religious conviction so intense that you sensed at once that he needed no other badge of authority. Their clarity was startlingly emphasized –
italicized
, perhaps – by dashes of thick black kohl painted on the lids beneath. He sat down cross-legged on the carpet, and the others all copied him until they had formed a semi-circle around us, silent and expectant, like schoolboys waiting for a story from their teacher. I supposed that as former madrasah students, they gathered this way almost by default.

Despite his transcendent piety, Amruddin was evidently not a senior figure. He took a long time to answer my questions, and when he did it tended to be with the shortest of platitudes. I came away with the impression that he understood almost as little as I did about what they were really doing in Peshawar. The ostensible reason was to ‘help our Afghan brothers’ still living in the refugee camps that surrounded the city: ‘The religious duty of every Muslim,’ he said.

I asked if their mission was supported by the Pakistan government.

‘The Pakistanis are our brothers – they are Muslims like us.’

‘And the ISI – are they also your brothers? Are they giving you money and weapons for your fight against Kabul?’

‘The ISI are Muslims too.’

‘But you are trying to impose Sharia law in Afghanistan. Not everyone wants that in your country. Is it what the ISI wants?’

‘We have imposed nothing but peace on the people of Afghanistan,’ he replied. ‘Our success is due only to the fact that the people want us to succeed.’

Amruddin’s words were polite, yet the crowd round about him were increasingly unnerving. Their initial curiosity about who I was and what I might want had given way to barely suppressed impatience. Our encounter was not going to be a long one. They were young men, all of them, and there was an almost bovine quality to their stares, a passive-aggressive
hauteur
that I could not quite fathom. I wondered if I was being subtly mocked. I had no beard then, which must have seemed freakish to them. They were foot soldiers in their movement, simple people who I was sure had seen few if any Westerners before coming to Peshawar. For my part it was the first time I had seen men wearing eye-liner – actors and drag queens excepted. It was only much later that I realized how common the practice was among Pashtuns, and that wearing it was not necessarily an exercise in male vanity.
²
Only
one thing was clear to me: they believed with total certainty that they were the coming power in the region – and that the West had better watch out. But what were they really doing here in Peshawar?

Pakistan’s corrupt political climate had more to do with their presence than the foreign aid community imagined. In times of political weakness it was the leaders of the enormous armed forces – the seventh largest in the world – who had always stepped up to fill the void of leadership. The generals saw themselves as the guardians of the nation: its soul, its backbone, its only real source of moral fibre – and their country’s body politic was undoubtedly lacking that in the mid-1990s. In 1999, Pakistan was to experience its third military coup in half a century when General Pervez Musharraf seized power from Nawaz Sharif. The Taliban could only have opened an office in Peshawar with the permission and collusion of the ISI.