Taliban (5 page)

The department had grown powerful during the 1980s, when they functioned as the CIA’s main conduit for dollars destined for the mujahideen. Peshawar was the nerve centre of an enormous support operation. The ISI did not just provide arms to the insurgents over the border, they also trained them how to use them: perhaps as many as 95,000 fighters over the decade. Out of the seven main mujahideen groups, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami was the one they most favoured, though all of them benefited from ISI largesse at one time or another, including many future Taliban – even Mullah Omar. The ISI had carried on supporting Hekmatyar after the Soviet retreat, hoping that he would establish a friendly and stable regime to their west, but by 1994 it was becoming all too obvious that their protégé had failed. As a consequence, the ISI had switched horses to an organization that
appeared to have a much better chance of restoring stability: the Taliban.

Quite when the ISI switched horses is still hotly debated. Some Afghans believe the revolt was an ISI-sponsored project from the very start. Others say that it was as spontaneous and home-grown as Mullah Zaeef claimed, and that the ISI did not become involved until later when the odds on the Taliban succeeding had shortened to a near certainty. Either way, their approval of the movement was implicit in the mere existence of the Taliban’s Old Bara Road office in August 1996.

ISI sympathy for the Taliban cause was not in itself surprising. The relationships forged on the training grounds in the heat of the Soviet war were not easily dismantled. Indeed, the former ISI chief Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, who headed the department from 1987 to 1989, is known in Pakistan as ‘the father of the Taliban’ and remains openly supportive of their cause to this day. He heads a generation of ISI officers who continue to make a distinction between Omar’s organization and the so-called ‘Pakistani Taliban’, who are bent on the overthrow of the Islamabad government: a goal never shared by Mullah Omar, whose ambitions have always been confined to his own country. Omar was among those trained by ‘Colonel Imam’, the nom-de-guerre of Brigadier Amir Sultan Tarar, who had in turn been taught his guerrilla skills by US Special Forces on a course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He still remembers his former protégé with fondness. Now sixty-five and living in retirement in Rawalpindi, the garrison town that abuts Islamabad, Tarar told a British reporter in January 2010 that Omar was ‘a good man. He is for his country, not for any mischief.’
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If certain military hearts were with the Taliban in 1996, so were many minds, for there were some sound strategic reasons for
backing them. The first of these was that Pakistan was still hosting at least 1.4 million refugees from the Soviet war.
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A source of growing social tension in the border areas, these Afghans were understandably reluctant to return to a country of lawless violence. With their promise of restoring stability, the Taliban appeared to offer the best chance of luring them home again.

The second reason was to do with India. Since 1947 Pakistan has fought no fewer than four wars with its vastly stronger southern neighbour, most of them centred on the disputed territory of Kashmir. India was a Pakistani obsession, the prism through which all military strategy was and is still seen. The ISI was convinced that India sought to encircle them by seeking power and influence in Afghanistan. This fear was not wholly without foundation. India does take a close interest in Afghanistan, spending
1 billion in direct aid there in 2009 alone. Helping an overtly Sunni Muslim – and Pashtun – regime into power in Kabul promised to eliminate the encirclement threat once and for all. The policy was part of what Pakistan’s generals call ‘strategic depth’ which, at its most literal, offers somewhere for their forces to fall back upon in the event of an Indian invasion, a mountainous hinterland ideal for conducting a prolonged guerrilla resistance campaign.

This was always a high-risk strategy. It was popularly said that the ISI had given birth to a tiger when they created the Taliban; the question was, did they have that tiger by the head or by the tail? The Islamic revolution the ISI sponsored was supposed to be confined to Afghanistan, but it ended up spreading to the Pakistani side of the porous Durand Line. The ISI could not have anticipated al-Qaida’s attack on New York, or the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, or the resulting displacement of al-Qaida into Pakistani territory. Forced to deal with this domestic terrorist
threat, from 2004 the Pakistani Army found itself drawn into a vicious counter-insurgency of its own.
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If anyone today enjoys ‘strategic depth’ in the region it is the Afghan Taliban in north-west Pakistan, not the other way round: a classic case of the biter, bit. In April 2010, as if to underline that point, Omar’s former trainer Colonel Imam was briefly kidnapped while travelling in the border areas by members of a formerly unheard-of militant organization, the Asian Tigers, who were reportedly hoping for a high-level prisoner exchange; one of his travelling companions, the ex-ISI agent Khalid Khawaja, was murdered before Colonel Imam was released.

But all this was unimaginable in the summer of 1996. Few in Peshawar had even heard of al-Qaida then, let alone the Pakistani Taliban – a phrase unknown before 2002 when the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the umbrella movement of the Pakistani Taliban, was founded. Instead, naturally, the bar-chatter was all about Mullah Omar. His movement was on the cusp of taking over the whole of Afghanistan. How would the international community deal with his strange new regime – and vice versa?

The mainstream development community’s politically correct, gender-aligned culture couldn’t have been more starkly opposed to the Taliban worldview. The West’s initial response to the Taliban was shaped – hijacked, almost – by outrage over their treatment of girls and women. Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, led the charge in November 1995 when it cancelled all its education programmes in areas under Taliban control, arguing that the
Taliban’s insistence on segregated classrooms was a violation of schoolchildren’s human rights. The
burqa
was becoming a potent new international symbol of female oppression, and a string of powerful American women began to speak out against it: Barbara Bush, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton. Mavis Leno, wife of NBC’s top-rated nightly news-show anchor Jay Leno, donated
100,000 to an anti-Taliban lobbying campaign.

But among some aid workers there was a whispered, alternative view that intrigued me. Stuart Worsley, for instance, a programme director with Care International who had begun working in Afghanistan in early 1991, thought the Taliban represented an opportunity for greater cooperation with the West.

‘There is a big difference between what the Taliban say and what they actually do,’ he told me. ‘Some of the edicts that come out of the madrasahs are pure Monty Python, and very often the guys on the ground choose not to enforce them.’

He had been all over Taliban-held Afghanistan, and observed that women were not always automatically beaten for showing their faces. Nor, he said, was the education of girls over the age of eight universally banned, as had almost constantly been reported. In their rush to demonize the Mullahs, in other words, it seemed the West was guilty of greatly oversimplifying what was going on.

The key to the Taliban’s astonishing recent success, Worsley thought, was that they generally sought to govern by consensus – imposition being a tactic that seldom worked in Afghanistan, as the Russians found to their cost. He recalled that in the eastern town of Ghazni recently, the populace had complained about a Taliban proposal to convert a local school into a madrasah. The Talibs had immediately backed down.

‘The enforcement of rules usually depends on local tradition,’ he said.

For the NGOs, developments over the border were far from negative in practice. It was true that the rights of girls and women were being trampled on, which was unacceptable to anyone who believed those rights to be universal and absolute. Yet at the same time, even female aid workers admitted that the Taliban had dramatically improved security in many rural districts. The mullahs were not against foreign development projects per se. In many areas, indeed, they actively encouraged the foreigners and their work. It was therefore possible now for aid workers to travel to the remotest villages, in some cases for the first time in years, without fear of rape, murder, or having their expensive 4x4 vehicles stolen at gunpoint.

Worsley was effectively agreeing with Amruddin’s claim that the Taliban had ‘imposed nothing but peace’. The Afghans were exhausted by war; he confirmed that their enthusiasm for the order and security brought by the Taliban was largely genuine. Talking to Afghan shopkeepers and others in the markets of downtown Peshawar over the previous days, I had come to much the same conclusion. Most striking was an encounter with a taxi-driver called Mahmud Amin, a former Hizb-i-Islami supporter who said he had once worked as a driver for the party leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar himself. These days, however, Amin was defiantly pro-Taliban.

‘All Afghans are – except for some educated Kabulis who still think like the communists.’

Amin lived in Nasir Bagh, an Afghan refugee camp of 100,000 on the edge of Peshawar. He said he intended to return to Afghanistan as soon as the Taliban had unequivocally conquered
the country, an outcome of which he and apparently everyone else in Nasir Bagh had little doubt. The harshness of the edicts streaming from Kandahar was a small price to pay for the improvements in security the Taliban had brought about.

‘They were quite right to ban music,’ he said. ‘People had learned some very bad habits.’

He went on to define two kinds of music: the kind where men play instruments and women dance, which was ‘disgraceful’, and the kind where men play and young boys dance: ‘That’s perfectly OK.’

This was a weird inversion of Western norms, but I was beginning to grasp that it wasn’t the Taliban who had invented it. Their strange attitude towards boys, towards sex, towards cosmetics, even, was part of a tradition far older than what the West had labelled ‘Islamic extremism’. It was in fact as much to do with the ancient culture of the Pashtuns as with Islam; and the Taliban creed was a grass-roots marriage of both. An enlightened handful of aid workers in Peshawar, Stuart Worsley among them, understood almost instinctively that in the long run it would be more productive – at least in terms of furthering the work of the development agencies – to work with the Taliban rather than against them, because they were part of the grain of society.

The racial origin of the Pashtuns is still hotly debated by genealogists. They have almost certainly occupied Afghanistan for longer than any other of the country’s peoples; the Greek historian Herodotus referred in the fifth century BC to a race of ‘Pactyans’ who had lived in the Kandahar area for five hundred years even then. Some scholars believe Pashtuns have ancient Greek ancestry. Another popular and persistent theory is that they are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel who were scattered by the
Assyrians in the eighth century BC. With their large and frequently hooked noses, many Pashtuns certainly resemble the Jewish archetype. The idea is taken seriously enough that, in early 2010, a team of geneticists from the Institute of Technology in Haifa began studying blood samples taken from members of the Pashtun Afridi tribe in a bid to demonstrate a link. The effect on the Muslim world if the scientists succeed can only be guessed at.

Pashtun warriors had banded together for military purposes since at least the thirteenth century, when they conquered much of northern India, but they were not politically united until the early eighteenth century, when the Kandahar-based Hotaki dynasty rebelled against the Persian Empire. They remained in control for the following three hundred years, a period when almost every ruler of Afghanistan was a Pashtun. Other races were regarded as interlopers, and therefore as intrinsically inferior. The Dari-speaking Tajiks – Dari is a dialect of Farsi – remain forever associated with the Persians whose rule the Pashtuns had rejected. The Turkic-speaking Uzbeks were merely settled nomads from the Asian plains to the north. The Hazaras, who today account for perhaps 9 per cent of the population, were particularly discriminated against. With their pronounced Asiatic features they were said to be descended from the Mongol army of Genghis Khan who invaded in the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, a camel’s life was set at six times that of a Hazara, while a Pashtun’s life was worth 1,000 camels.
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