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22 Oct 2006 12:25:59 AM |
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In the Land of the Taliban, part 1, by Elizabeth Rubin |
In the Land of the Taliban, part 1, by Elizabeth Rubin
source: New York Times, http://tinyurl.com/y4g2ub
One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and
plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20's fresh
from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent
hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former
colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside
Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani
rendition of Georges Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" -
middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two
boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys
flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight
pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction.
He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many
others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.
And though Mullah Sadiq said they had lost many commanders in battles
around Kandahar, he and Abdul Baqi appeared to be in good spirits,
laughing and chatting loudly on a cellphone to Taliban friends in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. After all, they never imagined that the
Taliban would be back so soon or in such force or that they would be
giving such trouble to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and some
40,000 NATO and U.S. troops in the country. For the first time since
the fall of 2001, when the Taliban were overthrown, they were beginning
to taste the possibility of victory.
As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands
bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa
for rehabilitation and inspiration. Since 2002, the American and
Pakistani militaries have focused on North Waziristan and South
Waziristan, two of the seven districts making up Pakistan's
semiautonomous tribal areas, which are between the North-West Frontier
Province and, to the south, Baluchistan Province; in the days since the
9/11 attacks, some tribes there had sheltered members of Al Qaeda and
spawned their own Taliban movement. Meanwhile, in the deserts of
Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is just a few hours' drive from
the Afghan city of Kandahar, the Afghan Taliban were openly
reassembling themselves under Mullah Omar and his leadership council.
Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed,
funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.
In June, I was in Quetta as the Taliban fighters celebrated an attack
against Dad Mohammad Khan, an Afghan legislator locally known as Amir
Dado. Until recently he was the intelligence chief of Helmand Province.
He had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces and was despised by
Abdul Baqi - and, to be frank, by most Afghans in the south. Mullah
Razayar Nurzai (a nom de guerre), a commander of 300 Taliban fighters
who frequently meets with the leadership council and Mullah Omar, took
credit for the ambush. Because Pakistan's intelligence services are
fickle - sometimes supporting the Taliban, sometimes arresting its
members - I had to meet Nurzai at night, down a dark lane in a
village outside Quetta.
My guide was a Pakistani Pashtun sympathetic to the Taliban; we slipped
into a courtyard and behind a curtain into a small room with mattresses
and a gas lamp. In hobbled a rough, wild-looking graybeard with green
eyes and a prosthetic limb fitted into a permanent 1980's-era shoe.
More than a quarter-century of warring had taken its toll on Nurzai's
46-year-old body but not on his spirit. It was 10 at night, yet he was
bounding with energy and bombast about his recent exploits in Kandahar
and Helmand. A few days earlier, Nurzai and his men had attacked Amir
Dado's extended family. First, he told me, they shot dead his brother
- a former district leader. Then the next day, as members of Dado's
family were driving to the site of the first attack, Nurzai's men
ambushed their convoy. Boys, cousins, uncles: all were killed. Dado
himself was safe elsewhere. Nurzai was mildly disappointed and said
that they had received bad information. He had no regrets about the
killings, however. Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He
would tell me that Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted
plastic onto the stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men
had captured. Abdul Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that
ended with the Taliban's seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a
checkpoint where they "grabbed young boys and robbed people."
Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among
other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory
commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai's government,
these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American
financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were
unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many
enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to eradicate
them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul Baqi, had
accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban as a result
of harassment. Amir Dado's own abuses had eventually led to his
removal from the Helmand government at United Nations insistence. As
one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of personal safety
concerns, put it: "Amir Dado kept his own prison, authorized the use
of serious torture, had very little respect for human life and made
security worse." Yet when I later met Amir Dado in Kabul, he pulled
out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special Forces had written
requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense install him as
Helmand's police chief and claiming that in his absence "the
quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically
declined."
One Place, Two Stories
I went to Afghanistan and Pakistan this summer to understand how and
why the Taliban were making a comeback five years after American and
Afghan forces drove them from power. What kind of experience would lead
Afghans to reject what seemed to be an emerging democratic government?
Had we missed something that made Taliban rule appealing? Were they the
only opposition the aggrieved could turn to? Or, as many Afghans were
saying, was this Pakistan up to its old tricks - cooperating with the
Americans and Karzai while conspiring to bring back the Taliban, who
had been valued "assets" before 9/11?
And why has the Bush administration's message remained that
Afghanistan is a success, Iraq a challenge? "In Afghanistan, the
trajectory is a hopeful and promising one," Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post earlier
this month. Afghanistan's rise from the ashes of the anti-Taliban war
would mean that the Bush administration was prevailing in replacing
terror with democracy and human rights.
Meanwhile, a counternarrative was emerging, and it belonged to the
Taliban, or the A.C.M., as NATO officers call them - the
Anti-Coalition Militia. In Kabul, Kandahar and Pakistan, I found their
video discs and tapes in the markets. They invoke a nostalgia for the
jihad against the Russians and inspire their viewers to rise up again.
One begins with clattering Chinooks disgorging American soldiers into
the desert. Then we see the new Afghan government onstage, focusing in
on the Northern Alliance warlords - Abdul Rashid Dostum, Burhanuddin
Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul Sayyaf. It
cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing targets on
maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from planes and
missiles emblazoned with "Royal Navy" rocketing through the sky;
then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children. Message: America
and Britain brought back the warlords and bombed your children. In the
next clip, there are metal cages under floodlights and men in orange
jumpsuits, bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes of John
Walker Lindh and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with young
Afghan and Pakistani prisoners - Taliban, hundreds of whom would
suffocate to death in those containers, supposedly at the command of
the warlord and current army chief of staff, General Dostum. Then back
to American guards wheeling hunger-striking Guant=E1namo prisoners on
gurneys. Interspliced are older images, a bit fuzzy, of young Afghan
men, hands tied behind their backs, heads bowed, hauled off by
Communist guards. The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again;
Americans, Russians - no difference.
During the period from 1994 to 2001, the Taliban were a cloistered
clique with little interest in global affairs. Today they are far more
sophisticated and outward-looking. "The Taliban of the 90's were
concerned with their district or province," says Waheed Muzhda, a
senior aide at the Supreme Court in Kabul, who before the Taliban fell
worked in their Foreign Ministry. "Now they have links with other
networks. Before, only two Internet connections existed - one was
with Mullah Omar's office and the other at the Foreign Ministry here
in Kabul. Now they are connected to the world." Though this is still
very much an Afghan insurgency, fueled by complex local grievances and
power struggles, the films sold in the markets of Pakistan and
Afghanistan merge the Taliban story with that of the larger struggle of
the Muslim umma, the global community of Islam: images of U.S. soldiers
in Iraq and Israelis dragging off young Palestinian men and throwing
off Palestinian mothers clinging to their sons. Humiliation.
Oppression. Followed by the same on Afghan soil: Northern Alliance
fighters perching their guns atop the bodies of dead Taliban. In the
Taliban story, Special Forces soldiers desecrate the bodies of Taliban
fighters by burning them, the Koran is desecrated in Guant=E1namo
toilets, the Prophet Muhammad is desecrated in Danish cartoons and
finally an apostate, Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who was arrested earlier
this year for converting to Christianity, desecrates Islam and is not
only not punished but is released and flown off to Italy.
It is not at all clear that Afghans want the return of a Taliban
government. But even sophisticated Kabulis told me that they are fed up
with the corruption. And in the Pashtun regions, which make up about
half the country, Afghans are fed up with five years of having their
homes searched and the young men of their villages rounded up in the
name of counterinsurgency. Earlier this month in Kabul, Gen. David
Richards, the British commander of NATO's Afghanistan force, imagined
what Afghans are thinking: "They will say, 'We do not want the
Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life
that that might involve than another five years of fighting."' He
estimated that if NATO didn't succeed in bringing substantial
economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 percent of Afghans
would shift their loyalty to the Taliban.
Nation-Building, Again
In the middle of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, a metal
sign tilts into the road advertising the New York English Language
Center. It is a relic of the last American nation-building scheme. Half
a century ago, this town, built at the confluence of the Arghandab and
Helmand Rivers, was the headquarters for an ambitious dam project
partly financed by the United States and contracted out to
Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering company that helped build Cape
Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Lashkar Gah (literally, "the place of soldiers") was to be a model
American town. Irrigation from the project would create farms out of
the desert. Today you can still see the suburban-style homes with
gardens open to the streets, although the typical Afghan home is a fort
with walls guarding the family's privacy. Those modernizing dreams of
America and Afghanistan were eventually defeated by nature, culture and
the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980's. What
remains is an intense nostalgia among the engineers, cooks and farmers
of Lashkar Gah, who remember that time as one of employment and peace.
Today, Lashkar Gah is home to a NATO base.
Down the road from the base stands a lovely new building erected by an
N=2EG.O. for the local Ministry of Women's Affairs. It is big, white
and, on the day I visited, was empty except for three women getting
ready to leave. "It's so close to the foreigners, and the women are
afraid of getting killed by car bombs," the ministry's deputy told
me. She was a school headmistress and landowner, dressed elegantly in a
lime-colored blouse falling below the knees and worn over matching
trousers. She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms
of pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology. She said that she had
just wrapped up the case of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped by
Kandahari police officers, something that would not have happened under
the Taliban. "Their security was outstanding," she said.
Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. "Now the
governors tell the people, 'Just cultivate a little bit,"' she
said. "So people take this opportunity and grow a lot." The farmers
lease land to grow poppies. The British and the police eradicate it.
The farmer can't pay back the landowner. "So instead of paying, he
gives the landowner his daughter."
A few weeks before I arrived in Helmand, John Walters, the director of
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters
that Afghan authorities were succeeding in reducing opium-poppy
cultivation. Yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars being
allocated by Congress to stop the trade, a United Nations report in
September estimated that this year's crop was breaking all records
- 6,100 metric tons compared with 4,100 last year. When I visited
Helmand, schools in Lashkar Gah were closed in part because teachers
and students were busy harvesting the crop. A prosecutor from the
Crimes Department laughed as he told me that his clerk, driver and
bodyguard hadn't made it to work. They were all harvesting. It
requires a lot of workers, and you can earn $12 a day compared with the
$2 you get for wheat. Hence the hundreds of young, poor Talibs from
Pakistan's madrasas who had flocked to earn that cash and who made
easy converts for the coming jihad.
Walters had singled out Helmand for special praise. Yet just a short
drive from the provincial capital, I was surrounded by poppy farmers
- 12-year-old boys, 75-year-old men - hard at work, their hands
caked in opium paste as they scooped figlike pulp off the bulbs into a
sack tied around their waists. One little boy was dragging a long poppy
stem attached to a car he had made out of bulbs. Haji Abdul, a
73-year-old Moses of a man, was the owner of the farm and one of those
nostalgic for the heyday of the Helmand Valley project. He had worked
with Americans for 15 years as a welder and manager. He was the first
to bring electricity to his district. Now there was none.
"Why do you think people put mines out for the British and Italians
doing eradication when they came here to save us?" He answered his
own question: "Thousands of lands ready for harvest were destroyed.
How difficult will it be for our people to tolerate that! You are
taking the food of my children, cutting my feet and disabling me. With
one bullet, I will kill you." Fortunately he didn't have to kill
anyone. He had paid 2,000 afghanis per jerib (about a half acre) of
land to the police, he told me, adding that they would then share the
spoils with the district administrator and all the other Interior
Ministry officials so that only a small percentage of the poppy would
be eradicated.
When I asked Manan Farahi, the director of counterterrorism efforts for
Karzai's government, why the Taliban were so strong in Helmand, he
said that Helmandis had, in fact, hated the Taliban because of Mullah
Omar's ban on poppy cultivation. "The elders were happy this
government was coming and they could plant again," Farahi told me.
"But then the warlords came back and let their militias roam freely.
They were settling old scores - killing people, stealing their opium.
And because they belonged to the government, the people couldn't look
to the government for protection. And because they had the ear of the
Americans, the people couldn't look to the Americans. Into this need
stepped the Taliban." And this time the Taliban, far from suppressing
the drug trade, agreed to protect it.
A Dealer's Life
The Continental Guest House in Kandahar, with its lovely gardens,
potted geraniums and Internet access in every room, was mostly empty
when I arrived, a remnant of the city's recently stalled economic
resurgence.
To find out how the opium trade works and how it's related to the
Taliban's rise, I spent the afternoon with an Afghan who told me his
name was Razzaq. He is a medium-level smuggler in his late 20's who
learned his trade as a refugee in Iran. He was wearing a traditional
Kandahari bejeweled skull cap, a dark blazer and a white shalwar
kameez, a traditional outfit consisting of loose pants covered by a
tunic. He moved and spoke with the confident ease of a well-protected
man. "The whole country is in our services," he told me, "all the
way to Turkey." This wasn't bravado. From Mazar-i-Sharif, in
northern Afghanistan, he brings opium in the form of a gooey paste,
packaged in bricks. From Badakhshan in the northeast, he brings crystal
- a sugary substance made from heroin. And from Jalalabad, in the
east on the road to Peshawar, he brings pure heroin. All of this goes
through Baramcha, an unmanned border town in Helmand near Pakistan.
Sometimes he pays off the national soldiers to use their vehicles, he
said. Sometimes the national policemen. Or he hides it well, and if
there is a tough checkpoint, he calls ahead and pays them off. "The
soldiers get 2,000 afghanis a month, and I give them 100,000," he
explained with an angelic smile. "So even if I had a human head in my
car, they'd let me go." It's not hard to see why Razzaq is so
successful. He has a certain charm and looks like the modest tailor he
once was, not a man steeped in illegal business.
Razzaq's smuggling career began in Zahedan, a remote and unruly
Iranian town near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is
filled with Afghan refugees who, like Razzaq and his family, fled after
the Russian invasion in 1979. Razzaq apprenticed as a tailor under his
father and eventually opened his own shop, which the Iranians promptly
shut down. They said he had no right as a refugee to own a shop. He
began painting buildings, but that, too, proved a bureaucratic
challenge. He was paid in checks, and the bank refused to cash them
without a bank account, which he could not get.
Razzaq was newly married with dreams of a good life for his family. So
one day he took a chance. "I had gotten to know smugglers at my
tailoring shop," he told me over a meal of mutton and rice on the
floor of my hotel room. "One of them was an old man, so no one ever
suspected him. The smugglers asked me to go with him to Gerdi Jangel"
- an Afghan refugee town in Pakistan - "and bring back 750 grams
of heroin to Zahedan. The security searched us on the bus, but I'd
hidden it in the heels of my shoes, and of course they didn't search
the old man. I was so happy when we made it back. I thought I was born
for the first time into this world."
So he took another chance and managed to fly to Tehran carrying four
kilos in his bag. Each time he overcame another obstacle, he became
more addicted to the easy cash. When the Iranian authorities imported
sniffing dogs to catch heroin smugglers, Razzaq and his friends filled
hypodermic needles with some heroin dissolved in water and sprayed the
liquid on cars at the bus station that would be continuing on to
Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. "The dogs at the checkpoint went mad.
They had to search 50 cars. They decided the dogs were defective and
sent them back, and that saved us for a while." Eventually, he said,
they concocted a substance to conceal the heroin smell from the new
pack of dogs.
After the fall of the Taliban, Razzaq moved back to Helmand, built a
comfortable house and began supporting his extended family with his
expanding trafficking business. Razzaq's main challenge today is
Iran. While the Americans have turned more or less a blind eye to the
drug-trade spree of their warlord allies, Iran has steadily cranked up
its drug war. (Some 3,000 Iranian lawmen have been killed in the last
three decades battling traffickers.) To cross the desert borders,
Razzaq moves in convoys of 18 S.U.V.'s. Some contain drugs. The rest
are loaded with food supplies, antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers,
antitank missiles and militiamen, often on loan from the Taliban. The
fighters are Baluch from Iran and Afghanistan. The commanders are
Afghans.
Razzaq's run, as he described it, was a scene out of "Mad Max."
Three days were spent dodging and battling Iranian forces in the
deserts around the earthquake-stricken city of Bam. Once they made it
to Isfahan, however, in central Iran, they were home free. They
released the militiamen, transferred the stuff to ordinary cars and
drove to Tehran, where other smugglers picked up the drugs and passed
them on to ethnic Turks in Tabriz. The Turks would bring them home, and
from there they went to the markets of Europe.
Should he ever run into a problem in Afghanistan, he told me, "I
simply make a phone call. And my voice is known to ministers, of
course. They are in my network. Every network has a big man supporting
them in the government." The Interior Ministry's director of
counternarcotics in Kabul had told me the same thing. Anyway, if the
smugglers have problems on the ground, they say, they just pay the
Taliban to destroy the enemy commanders.
Razzaq has at times contemplated getting out of the smuggling trade, he
said, but the easy money is too alluring. Depending on the market, he
can earn from $1,500 to $7,500 a month. Most Afghans can't make that
in a year. Besides, he said, "all the governors are doing this, so
why shouldn't we?"
Losers Become Winners
In December 2001, not long after the Taliban were routed, I visited the
Shah Wali Kot district, several hours' drive on unpaved roads from
Kandahar, a Mordor land of rock mountains shaped like sagging crescents
and mud-baked houses melting into the dunes. The Taliban leaders had
fled, mostly to Pakistan. Gul Agha Shirzai, formerly a local warlord
and soon-to-be new governor, and his soldiers had swarmed into power
while the Americans set up their operations base in Mullah Omar's
Xanadu-like residence. I was with a large group of Populzai, the clan
of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
We were in a big guest room with more than a dozen men gathered in a
circle, all wearing the kind of turbans that look like gargantuan
ice-cream swirls. The ones in black turban swirls were giggling,
chatting and slapping one another on the back. The ones in white turban
swirls were sulking, grumbling or mute. In this group, the miserable
white turbans were Taliban men. They had just lost their pickup trucks,
weapons, money, prestige and jobs, all of which had gone to the gleeful
black turbans.
Today those miserable white turbans have taken to the mountains to
fight. The gleeful black turbans are under siege. I saw one of the
black turbans this summer, the Shah Wali Kot district leader, in the
garden of the Kandahar governor's palace. He was a mess. He chuckled
loudly when I asked him how it was back in Shah Wali Kot. "Frankly,
we are just defending ourselves from the Taliban," he said. "Our
head is on the pillow at night, but we do not sleep."
That small division among the Populzai in Shah Wali Kot echoes the
larger division of the Pashtun into two main branches: the Durrani and
the Ghilzai. The Durrani, Karzai's tribe, have dominated for the last
two centuries in Afghanistan and regard themselves as the ruling elite.
In the south, the Ghilzai were often treated as the nomadic, scrappy
cousins. With the exception of Mullah Omar, who had been a poor Ghilzai
farmer, the leaders of the Taliban tended to be Durrani. These days,
the perception among the southern Ghilzai is that they are persecuted,
that the jails are filled with their people, while the Durrani in the
south received all the Japanese, U.S. and British contracts and jobs.
From what I could gather during my weeks in Afghanistan, these
perceptions were mostly true. But even if they were exaggerated, such
perceptions, in an illiterate society, have a way of quickly morphing
into reality.
Take Panjwai, a district just outside Kandahar, where hundreds of
Taliban massed this summer, taking advantage of the changeover from
American soldiers to a NATO force of Canadian troops. One afternoon I
met a red-haired propagandist and writer for the Taliban in a Kandahar
office building. With his slight lisp, chain-smoking habit and eclectic
reading - French novelists and Arabic philosophers - he seemed more
a tormented graduate student than the landless villager from Panjwai he
was. Panjwai is a mishmash of tribes, and the Taliban were exploiting
the grievances of the Nurzai, a tribe that has felt persecuted and
unfairly targeted for poppy eradication. Traders in Kandahar, he said,
were donating money to the Taliban. Landowners were paying them to
fight off eradicators. The Taliban were paying poor, unemployed men to
fight. And religious scholars were delivering the message that it was
time for jihad because the Americans were no different from the
Russians. Just a few weeks earlier, the Taliban went on a killing spree
in Panjwai. They beheaded a tribal leader in his home, shot another in
the bazaar and hanged a man near a shrine with a note tacked on his
body: "SPY."
The Taliban were feeling bold enough that one afternoon Mullah Ibrahim,
a Taliban intelligence agent, dropped by my hotel for lunch. He was a
Ghilzai, from Helmand, and told me he had tried to lead a normal life
under the official amnesty program. Instead, he was locked up, beaten
and so harassed by Helmandi intelligence and police officers that his
tribal elders told him to leave for Pakistan and join the Taliban
there. Then, about a year ago, he decided that he was tired of fighting
and living as a fugitive and accepted a reconciliation offer from an
Afghan general. Pakistani intelligence got wind of this and imprisoned
him; upon his release, the Pakistanis gave him money and a motorbike
and pressured him to go back to war. He is still tired of war, but the
Pakistanis won't let him live in peace, and now if he tries to
reconcile with the Kabul government, he told me, the Taliban will kill
him.
When fighting broke out on the main highway near Kandahar, I saw that
the police had tied up a group of villagers - but the Taliban had all
escaped. One of those village men, his hands bound behind his back,
told me that he had peeped out from his house earlier that day and saw
some 200 Taliban with new guns and rocket launchers. They wanted food
and threatened him and other villagers. "But I am not afraid of
them," he said loudly. "I am only afraid of this government."
Why? "Look at what they do. They can't get the Taliban, so they
arrest us. We have no hope from them anymore. And when we call and tell
them Taliban are here, no one comes." As an engineer from Panjwai who
had been an Afghan senator during the Communist era told me: "We are
now like camels. In Islam, a camel can be slaughtered in two different
ways.
"The Taliban are using rivalries and enmities between people to get
soldiers, the same tactics as the mujahedeen used against the
Russians," the engineer continued. "Just like in Russian times they
come and say, 'We are defending the country from the infidels.'
They start asking for food. Then they ask the people for soldiers and
say, 'We will give you weapons.' And that's how it starts. And
the emotions are rising in the people now. They are saying, 'Kaffirs
have invaded our land."'
Qayum Karzai, the president's older brother and a legislator from
Kandahar, seemed utterly depressed when I met him. "For the last four
years, the Taliban were saying that the Americans will leave here,"
he said. "We were stupid and didn't believe it. Now they think
it's a victory that the Americans left."
With the Americans on their way out and the NATO force not yet in
control, the Kandahar Police were left on the front line:
underfinanced, underequipped, untrained - and often stoned. Which is
perhaps what made them so brave. One afternoon I ran into a group who
said their friends had just been killed when a Talib posing as a
policeman served them poisoned tea. A shaggy-haired officer in a black
tunic was standing by his pickup, freshly ripped up by a barrage of
bullets, and staring at my feet. "I envy your shoes," he said,
looking back at his own torn rubber sandals. "I envy your Toyota,"
he said and laughed. And then looking at my pen and notebook, he said,
"I envy you can read and write." It's not too late, I offered
feebly, but he tapped his temple and shook his head. "It doesn't
work anymore," he said. "I smoke hash. I smoke opium. I'm
drinking because we're always thinking and nervous." He was 35. He
had been fighting for 20 years. Four of his friends had been killed in
the fighting the other night. He had to support children, a wife and
parents on a salary of about $100 a month. And, he said, "we
haven't been paid in four months." No wonder, then, that the
population complained that the police were all thieves.
At Kandahar's hospital I met a 17-year-old policeman (who had been
with the police since he was 14) tending to his wounded friend. He was
in a jovial mood, amazed he wasn't dead. He said they had been given
an order to cut the Taliban's escape route. Instead they were
ambushed by the Taliban, ran out of bullets and had no phones to call
for backup. "We ran away," he said with a nervous giggle. "The
Taliban chased us, shouting: 'Hey, sons of Bush! Where are you going?
We want to kill you."'
Last month, NATO forces struck back around Panjwai with artillery and
aerial bombardments, killing an estimated 500 Taliban fighters and
destroying homes and schools. But unless NATO can stay for years,
create a trustworthy police force and spend the millions necessary to
regenerate the district, the Taliban will be back.
Deciding to Fight
Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive from
the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who
enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of
war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is a
place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets. Yousaf
Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia Ashrafia,
a Deobandi madrasa. He had recently announced a pledge by the
jewelers' association to pay $1 million to anyone who would kill a
Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself
offered $25,000 and a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a
low glass desk covered with papers and business cards - ambassadors,
N=2EG.O. workers, Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has
conversed with them all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the
walls displaying oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and
astrakhan caps. It was day's end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs
for his 51st book, called "The Benefits of Koran."
Qureshi told me that he meets with Pakistan's president, Pervez
Musharraf, about twice a year. Qureshi understands Musharraf's
predicament: "The heart of this government is with the Taliban. The
tongue is not." He didn't claim total insider knowledge, but he
said, "I think they want a weak government and want to support the
Taliban without letting them win." Why? "We are asking Musharraf,
'What are you doing,' and he says: 'I'm moving in both ways. I
want to support the Taliban, but I can't afford to displease America.
I am caught between the devil and the deep sea."'
Not long ago, Qureshi said, he received three emissaries from Mullah
Omar who wanted Qureshi to warn another religious leader to stop
preaching against the Taliban. "I refused," he said. Later Sheikh
Yassin, one of the messengers, was arrested by the I.S.I., Pakistan's
military intelligence service. So why, I asked, does Qureshi say the
I=2ES.I. is supporting the Taliban? "That is the double policy of the
government," he replied. Even in the 1990's, he said, Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif was supporting the official Afghan government of
Burhanuddin Rabbani while the I.S.I. was supporting his opponent,
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as he rained thousands of rockets upon Rabbani's
government and the citizens of Kabul. Qureshi told me that if he and
local traders didn't want Al Qaeda or the Taliban to flourish, then
they wouldn't. "We are supporting them to give the Americans a
tough time," he said. "Leave Afghanistan, and the Taliban and
foreign fighters will not give Karzai problems. All the administrators
of madrasas know what our students are doing, but we won't tell them
not to fight in Afghanistan."
The new Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are of three basic types. There
are the old war-addicted jihadis who were left out of the 2001 Bonn
conference, which determined the postwar shape of Afghan politics and
the carve-up of the country. There are the "second generation"
Afghan refugees: poor, educated in Pakistan's madrasas and easily
recruited by their elders. And then there are the young men who had
jobs and prestige in the former Taliban regime and were unable to find
a place for themselves in the new Afghanistan.
Coincidentally, there are also now three fronts. One is led by Mullah
Omar's council in Quetta. The second is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a
hero of the jihad against the Soviets who joined the Taliban. Although
well into his 80's, he orchestrates insurgent attacks through his
sons in Paktia, Khost and Paktika, the Afghan provinces close to
Waziristan, where he is based. Finally, there is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
the former leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the anti-Soviet fighters entrusted
with the most money and arms by the U.S. and Pakistan. He had opposed
the Taliban, living in uneasy exile in Iran until the U.S. persuaded
Tehran to boot him out; he sneaked into the mountainous eastern
borderlands. Since the early days of Karzai's government, he has
promised to organize Mullah Omar's followers with his educated cadres
and finance their jihad against Karzai and the American invaders. Old
competitors are coming together in much the way the mujahedeen factions
cooperated to fight the Russians. Hekmatyar adds a lethal ingredient to
this stew: his ties and his followers extend all through Afghanistan,
including the north and the west, where he is exploiting factional
grievances that have nothing to do with the Pashtun discontent in the
south.
An Afghan I met outside Peshawar - for his safety he asked me not to
use his full name - was typical of the 20-something Talibs who had
flourished under the Taliban regime. He was from Day Chopan, a
mountainous region in Zabul Province, northeast of Kandahar. When the
Northern Alliance and the Americans took Afghanistan, he escaped
through the hills on an old smuggling route to the North-West Frontier
Province.
It was familiar terrain. A.'s father had been a religious teacher who
studied in Sami ul-Haq's famous Haqqaniya madrasa near the Khyber
Pass and preached jihad for Harakat, one of the southern mujahedeen
parties whose members filled Mullah Omar's ranks. Those old ties
still bind and have provided a network for recruiting. A. grew up in
madrasas in the tribal Pashtun lands of Waziristan, where he learned to
fire guns as a child in the American-financed mujahedeen camps. As a
teenage religious student in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, he
would go door to door collecting bread for his fellow Talibs. Behind
one of those doors, he saw a girl and fell in love. When his father
wouldn't let him marry the girl, he threatened to go fight in
Afghanistan. His father would not relent, and A. signed up at the local
Taliban office in Peshawar. "We got good food, free service,
everything was Islamic," he told me. "It was the best life, rather
than staying in that poor madrasa." His father soon did relent, and
A=2E became engaged, but he was only 15 and had no money. So he went back
to the Taliban and was soon working beside the deputy defense minister.
"Of course, then there were bags of money," he said.
A=2E, now 28, was living in an Afghan refugee village that used to belong
to Hekmatyar's group. Weak with malaria, he was nevertheless plump
and jovial, even funny at times. Only when the Pakistani intelligence
services came up did his already sallow hues pale to old bone.
After fleeing the American bombardment in 2001, he told me, the Taliban
arrived in Pakistan tattered, dispersed and demoralized. But in the
months after the collapse, senior Taliban leaders told their comrades
to stay at home, keep in touch and wait for the call. Some Taliban told
me that they actually waited to see if there was a chance to work with
Karzai's government.
"Our emir," as A. referred to Mullah Omar, slowly contacted the
commanders and told them to find out who was dead and who was alive.
Those commanders appointed group commanders to collect the underlings
like A. Weapons stashed away in Afghanistan's mountains were
excavated. Funds were raised through the wide and varied Islamic
network - Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men,
Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military
and intelligence ranks.
Mullah Omar named a 10-man leadership council, A. explained. Smaller
councils were created for every province and district. Most of this was
done from the safety of Pakistan, and in 2003 Mullah Omar dispatched
Mullah Dadullah to the madrasas of Baluchistan and Karachi to gather
the dispersed Talibs and find fresh recruits. Pakistani authorities
were reportedly seen with him. Still, neither Musharraf nor his
military men in Baluchistan did anything to arrest him.
It was a perfect job for Dadullah, whose reputation for bravery was
matched by his savagery and his many war wounds, collected in more than
25 years of fighting. In 1998, his fighters slaughtered hundreds of
Hazaras (Shiites of Mongol descent) in Bamiyan Province, an act so
brutal it was even too much for Mullah Omar, who had him disarmed at
the time. Dadullah's very savagery, filmed and now often circulated
on videotape, coupled with his promotional flair, were just the
ingredients Omar needed to put the Taliban back on the map.
Today, Quetta has assumed the character of Peshawar in the 1980's, a
suspicious place of spies and counterspies and double agents. It is not
just the hundreds of men in typical Afghan Pashtun clothing - the
roughly wound turbans, dark shalwar kameez, eyes inked with kohl -
who squat on Thursday afternoons outside the Kandahari mosque in the
center of town, comparing notes on the latest fighting in Helmand or
the best religious teachers. Rather, as I wandered the narrow alleyways
of the Afghan neighborhoods, my local guides would say, "That's
where Mullah Dadullah was living" or "That's where Mullah Amir
Khan Haqqani is living." (Haqqani is the Taliban's governor in
exile for Zabul Province.) Mullah Dadullah is now a folk hero for young
Talibs like A. And all the Taliban I met told me that every time
Dadullah gives another interview or appears on the battlefield, it
serves as an instant injection of inspiration.
By 2004, A. said, he was meeting a lot of Arabs - Saudis, Iraqis,
Palestinians - who taught the Afghans about I.E.D.'s (improvised
explosive devices) and suicide bombings. "They taught us how to put
explosives in plastic," he told me. "They taught us wiring and
triggers. The Arabs are the best instructors in that." But now the
Afghans are doing fine on their own. Pakistani jihadis in Afghanistan
received their training, they told me, from Pakistani officers in
Kashmir.
The southerners have also forged ties with the Pakistani Taliban in
Waziristan. There is a free flow of arms and men between Waziristan and
the Afghan provinces across the border. According to A., even Uzbeks
from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have joined some of the
fighters now in A.'s home mountains in Day Chopan.
It was disheartening to hear A. describe his first encounter with
Americans, who were trying to set up a base in a remote region of
Zabul. Though they were building a road where no roads had gone before,
he could perceive that asphalt only as a means for the Americans to
transport their armored vehicles and occupy Muslim lands. A friend of
his joined us as we were talking. He had just arrived in Pakistan from
the Day Chopan region and said that the Americans were like a cyclone
of evil, stealing their almonds and violating their Pashtunwali (the
Pashtun tribal laws). In this instance, he meant the law by which even
a cousin will not enter your house without knocking first.
A=2E is now a media man in Pakistan, coordinating the editing of films
for discs, censoring them in case there are commanders who don't want
their faces seen and distributing them. He proudly offered me the
latest disc of Mullah Dadullah beheading some "spies for the
Americans." He said he had sold 25,000 CD's about the fighting in
Waziristan.
He was full of contradictions. He said that if he didn't have a house
in Day Chopan, he would never spend a single night there because there
was no education, no electricity, no power, nothing, just a heap of
stones. Yet he did not want America to change all that. "We don't
like progress by Americans," he declared. "We don't like roads by
Americans. We would rather walk on tired feet as long as we are walking
in an Islamic state."
Was it all just bravado speaking? Was an opportunity to build bridges
to young men like A. somehow lost or just neglected? It was hard to
tell. But when the I.S.I. subject came up again, his tone changed.
"They are snakes," he told me. He said that they were trying to
create a new, obedient leader and oust the independent-minded Mullah
Omar, and for that, the real Taliban hated them. Then he said: "I
told you that we burn schools because they're teaching Christianity,
but actually most of the Taliban don't like this burning of schools
or destroying roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use
them. Those acts were being done under I.S.I. orders. They don't want
progress in Afghanistan." An Indian engineer was beheaded in Zabul in
April, he said, and that was also ordered by Pakistan, which, from fear
of the influence of its enemy, India, was encouraging attacks on Indian
companies. "People are not telling the story, because no one can
trust anyone, and if I.S.I. knows I told you," he said, he would be
dead.
Pakistan's Assets
There are many theories for why Pakistan might have wanted to help the
Taliban reconstitute themselves. Afghan-Pakistani relations have always
been fraught. One among the many disputes has to do with the Durand
Line, the boundary drawn up by the British in 1893 partly to divide the
Pashtun tribes, who were constantly revolting against the British. The
Afghan government has never recognized this line, which winds its way
from the Hindu Kush mountains of North-West Frontier Province 1,500
miles down to the deserts of Baluchistan, as its border. Nor have the
Pashtun tribes. The Pakistanis may hope to force Karzai to recognize
the Durand line in exchange for stability.
Another theory is that Musharraf must appease the religious parties
whom he needs to extend his power past the end of his term next year.
Musharraf bought them off, gave them control of the North-West Frontier
Province and Baluchistan and let them use the Taliban. And finally, the
Pakistanis see Afghanistan as their rightful client. They want an
accommodating regime, not Karzai, whose main backers are the U.S. and
India, Pakistan's nemesis.
Pakistan's well-established secular Pashtun nationalist political
leaders remain distraught that their lands have again become
sanctuaries for the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani religious parties,
which, since elections in 2002, rule these provinces and are completing
a Talibanization of the region. The secular leaders point to another
layer in Pakistan's games: keeping the tribal areas autonomous
enables Pakistan's intelligence services to ward off the gaze of
Westerners and keep their jihadis safely tucked away.
One thing you notice if you visit the homes of retired generals in
Pakistan is that they live in a lavish fashion typical of South
America's dictatorship-era military elite. They control most of the
country's economy and real estate, and like President Musharraf,
himself a former general, they do not want to relinquish power.
Although there is a secularist strain in the Pakistani military, it has
been aligned with religious hard-liners since the army's inception in
1947. Many officers still see their duty as defending the Muslim world,
but their raison d'=EAtre has been undermined by the fact that though
Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia's Muslims, more
Muslims today live in India. They seem to envy the jihadis' clarity.
The militants had no identity crises. According to Najim Sethi, a
prominent Pakistani journalist, military officers often have "a
degree of self-disgust for selling themselves" to the Americans, and
they still bear a grudge against the United States for abandoning them
after the Afghan jihad and, more recently, for sanctioning Pakistan
over its nuclear program. The standard army phrase about the Americans
was, he said, "They used us like a condom."
Officers spoke to me as if they were simply translating the feelings of
the jihadis for a tone-deaf audience, but they sounded more like
ventriloquists. One retired colonel I spoke to was a relative of a
Taliban leader from Waziristan, Abdullah Massoud, who had earned both
sympathy and reverence for his time in Guant=E1namo Bay. Massoud was
captured fighting the Americans and the Northern Alliance and spent two
years there, claiming to be a simple Afghan Talib. Upon his release, he
made it home to Waziristan and resumed his war against the U.S. With
his long hair, his prosthetic limb and impassioned speeches, he quickly
became a charismatic inspiration to Waziristan's youth.
Since 2001, some of Waziristan's tribes have refused to hand over
Qaeda members living among them. Under intense American pressure,
Pakistan agreed for the first time in its history to invade the tribal
areas. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers were killed. American
helicopters were seen in the region, as were American spies. The
militants (with some army accomplices) retaliated with two
assassination attempts against Musharraf late in 2003. He struck back,
but as the civilian casualties mounted and the military began to balk
at killing Pakistanis, Musharraf agreed to a deal in the spring of 2004
whereby the militants would give up their guests in return for cash.
Pakistani officers and the militants hugged and shed tears during a
public reconciliation. But the militants did not relinquish their Al
Qaeda guests, and they took advantage of the amnesty to execute tribal
elders they said had helped the Pakistani military. The tribal
structure in Waziristan was devastated, and the Taliban took to the
streets to declare the Islamic emirate of Waziristan. Since Musharraf
signed a truce with the militants last month, attacks launched from
Waziristan into Afghanistan, according to NATO, have risen by 300
percent.
"Muslim governments are not able to face the Americans," the
retired colonel from Waziristan said, explaining the mujahedeen
mind-set. "If Muslim governments should stand up against duplicity
and foreign hegemonic designs, and they don't, who will? Someone has
to stand up to defend the Muslim countries, and it's this that gives
the jihadis the courage and zeal to stand up to the worst atrocities.
This is the core issue of the mujahedeen movement. You call it the war
on terror. The mujahedeen call it jihad." And so, essentially, did
he.
One afternoon, in the midst of a monsoon, I sought out one of the
founders of the pro-jihadi strategy, the retired general Mirza Aslam
Beg. He lived in Rawalpindi, the military capital half an hour from
Islamabad, in a brick and tile-roofed mansion with a basketball hoop,
flowing greenery and Judy, his one-eyed cocker spaniel. The house was
immaculate, with marble floors, rugs, fine china and porcelain on
display behind glass and an amusing portrait of Aslam Beg as a young,
Ray-Banned, pommaded officer. His mansion sits across the street from
Musharraf's.
Aslam Beg played a leading role in the military's creation of
"asymmetrical assets," jargon for the jihadis who have long been
used by the military as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. He was
chief of the army staff from 1988 to 1991, while the Pakistani nuclear
scientist A.Q. Khan was selling the country's nuclear technology to
Iran, Libya and North Korea. Beg held talks with the Iranians about
exchanging Iranian oil for Pakistani nuclear skill.
Aslam Beg likes to remind visitors that he was one of a group of army
officers trained by the C.I.A. in the 1950's as a "stay-behind
organization" that would melt into the population if ever the Soviet
Union overran Pakistan. Those brigadiers and lieutenant colonels then
trained and directed the Afghan jihadis.
In the 1980's, "the C.I.A. set up the largest support and
administrative bases in Mohmand agency, Waziristan and Baluchistan,"
Aslam Beg told me. "These were the logistics bases for eight long
years, and you can imagine the relations that developed. And then
Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Saudis developed family relations with the
local people." The Taliban, he said, fell back after 2001 to these
baselines. "In 2003, when the U.S. attacked Iraq, a whole new
dimension was added to the conflict. The foreign mujahedeen who'd
fought in Afghanistan started moving back to Afghanistan and Iraq."
And the old Afghan jihadi leaders stopped by the mansion of their
mentor, Aslam Beg, to tell him they were planning to wage war against
the American occupiers.
As the rain outside turned to hail, banging against the windows, Aslam
Beg ate some English sandwiches that had been wheeled in by a servant.
"As a believer," he went on, "I'll tell you how I understand
it. In the Holy Book there's an injunction that the believer must
reach out to defend the tyrannized. The words of God are, 'What
restrains you from fighting for those helpless men, women and children
who due to their weakness are being brutalized and are calling you to
free them from atrocities being perpetuated on them.' This is a
direct message, and it may not impact the hearts and minds of all
believers. Maybe one in 10,000 will leave their home and go to the
conflicts where Muslims are engaged in liberation movements, such as
Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Now it's a global
deterrent force."
The Authentic Jihad
The old city of Lahore, with its broad boulevards and banyan-tree
canopies, remains the cultural and intellectual heart of Pakistan. It
is home to a small elite of journalists, editors, authors, painters,
artists and businessmen. Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Friday
Times, and his wife, Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher, are popular fixtures
among this crowd. Like so many of Pakistan's intellectuals, they have
had their share of run-ins with government security agents. For pushing
the bounds of press freedom, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during
Nawaz Sharif's reign, beaten, gagged and detained without charge.
Musharraf, in his new autobiography, claims that Nawaz Sharif wanted
him to court-martial Sethi for treason, an act that seemed ludicrous to
him, and he refused.
I met him one afternoon at the newspaper's offices as he was
preparing his weekly editorial. He is a tall, affable man with smiling
eyes and large glasses. And he got right down to business, providing an
analysis of why Pakistan had decided to bring its "assets" - by
which he meant the Taliban and Kashmiri jihadis - off the shelf.
In the days following 9/11, when Musharraf gathered together major
editors to tell them that he had no choice but to withdraw his support
for the Taliban, Sethi raised the touchy issue of the other jihadis. He
said that if Musharraf was abandoning the Taliban, he would have to
abandon the sectarian jihadis (fighting the Shiites), the Kashmir
jihadis, all of the jihadis, because they were all trained in mind by
the same religious leaders and in body by the same Pakistani forces.
In January 2002, Musharraf gave an unusually long televised speech to
the nation. He reminded the people that his campaign against extremism
was initiated years before and not under American pressure. He vowed
that Pakistan would no longer export jihadis to Kashmir, that he was
again placing a ban on several jihadi organizations, that camps would
be closed and that while the madrasas were mostly educating the poor,
some were centers of extremist teaching and would be reformed. A month
later, Musharraf was at the White House next to President Bush, who
praised him for standing against terrorism.
Sethi characterized Pakistani authorities as believing that the U.S. in
Iraq "will be a Vietnam." He said: "Afghanistan will be neither
here nor there. So we cannot wrap up our assets. We must protect
them." The I.S.I. realized it could help deliver Al Qaeda to the U.S.
while keeping the Taliban and the jihadis on the back burner. At the
same time, Musharraf's moderate advisers were telling him that
holding on to those assets would eventually boomerang. And soon enough,
the assets began to come after Musharraf - while the people of
Pakistan were turning against him for being pro-American. "So going
after jihadis who were protecting the Taliban came to a halt," Sethi
said.
Meanwhile the landscape next door in Afghanistan was changing. The
warlords were back in action. The drug economy was surging. By 2003 and
2004, Musharraf's men were becoming hysterical about what they saw as
a growing Indian presence in Afghanistan, particularly the Indian
consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad, the Pashtun strongholds that
Pakistan considered its own turf. Karzai was doing business with
Indians and Americans and was no longer a Pashtun whom Pakistanis would
want to do business with.
As Sethi spoke, I recalled a meeting I had with one of Kandahar's
prominent tribal leaders. He recounted a visit from a former Pakistani
general who had been active in the I.S.I. The general invited
Kandahar's leaders to lunch and warned them not to let the Indians
put a consulate in Kandahar and to remember who their real benefactors
were. Today there is a consulate there, and Indian films and music are
sweeping through the Pashtun lands. What is more, many Pakistanis
believe India is backing the Baluch insurgency in Pakistan's far
south, clouding the prospects for the new, Chinese-built port in
Gwadar. The port is Pakistan's single largest investment in its
economic future and has been attacked by Baluch rebels.
In many ways, Pakistani policy is already looking beyond both Karzai
and the Americans; they believe it is prudent to imagine a future with
neither. That future will be shaped by the past: the past with India,
the past with the Soviet Union, the past with America. For Pakistan's
hard-liners, at least, the obvious choice was to take their assets off
the shelf and restart the jihad.
A Difficult Choice
On the wall outside the Eid Ga madrasa, in Kuchlak, a parched town near
Quetta, Afghan students and teachers were debating the merits of jihad.
One boy had just fled an American assault on Day Chopan in Zabul
Province. He had never been to Pakistan before. He was frenzied, in
shock. As a student from Kandahar led the others in dusk prayer, a
young boy whispered to me, "I like America." They were hardly a
unified group. One young Helmandi told me, "We want our traditions of
Islam and Sharia, not your democracy," while another argued for
peace. Then the Helmandi asked, with genuine confusion: "Why are
Muslims being tortured everywhere in the world, and no one is there to
stand up for them? But if you touch one Westerner, the sky is on your
head?"
Most madrasas in Pakistan are run by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the
religious-party alliance that has joined with Musharraf to keep the
popular parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from regaining
power. The J.U.I. madrasas usually endorse jihad, although even here I
met madrasa students who were against the war. They subscribed to a
vision of jihad as a struggle for self-improvement and the improvement
of society. Mawlawi Mohammadin, a cleric from Helmand, went so far as
to tell me that these are the true roots of jihad, though he confessed
that his is a lonely voice. He was afraid of everyone - Taliban,
Pakistani intelligence, even his pupils. "If we start openly
supporting Karzai, we could be killed by our own students," he told
me with nervous laughter. Only a month earlier, a Taliban official from
Helmand who had reconciled with Karzai's government was gunned down
by assassins on a motorbike in Quetta.
Mohammadin said that it is now open season for jihad in Afghanistan
under J.U.I. guidance. Government ministers were even attending
funerals to praise Pakistani Pashtuns who had died fighting in
Kandahar. He estimates that there are some 10,000 Taliban fighters in
Baluchistan. Despite the intimidation, he says he feels that his
mission is to steer his students away from war.
One of these was Mohamed Nader, who had just attended a cousin's
funeral and was wondering what it all meant. His cousin's family was
poor, and without their knowledge, he had gone to earn money first by
harvesting poppies in Helmand and then by fighting for the Taliban.
Finally he was killed. Among the biggest problems, Nader told me, was
that the cohesion of the Afghan family has been shredded by decades of
poverty and refugee life in Pakistan. In a typically strong Afghan
family, young adults obey their parents, even asking for permission to
go fight. But here, boys just run off.
Rahmatullah was one of those who had run off and returned. He was
skinny and disheveled, having just faced heavy fighting in Kandahar.
Though an Afghan, he had grown up in Baluchistan, near the border, in
an area where he said 200 fighters were now living. The mullah at his
madrasa told all the students that it was time for jihad. And the
I=2ES.I. was paying cash. But his father was old and against the war; he
pleaded with him to abandon fighting. So he sent Rahmatullah to his
friend Mohammadin, hoping he might open another path for his son.
Rahmatullah told me that he wasn't sure yet which mullah he would
listen to.
(Next week, Part 2: How U.S. and NATO forces have been battling the
Taliban and fighting for hearts and minds.)
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported
extensively about Afghanistan. Her last article from the region was
about the October 2005 Afghan elections.
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| Title: Taking the Fight to the Taliban, part 2, by Elizabeth Rubin |
04 Nov 2006 06:11:06 AM |
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Taking the Fight to the Taliban, part 2, by Elizabeth Rubin
Published: October 29, 2006
source: New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29taliban.html?pagewanted=3Dall
One morning this summer, I headed out with a U.S. Army convoy of
Humvees, a truck called a wrecker and a packed supply truck into the
Afghan mountains. I was among some two dozen American and Afghan
soldiers from Task Force Warrior, an infantry battalion based in Zabul
Province, just north of Kandahar. We trundled up a path fit for goats
because the nearby riverbed was perfect for concealing improvised
explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. Soon enough, the truck keeled over
into the riverbed anyway. To hoist it up, the wrecker had to crash
through wheat fields, and within minutes a gray-bearded farmer appeared
brandishing his stick. "Are you Afghan?" he shouted at Farooq, my
interpreter. "I have 30 members in my family. Why did you destroy my
wheat?" The old farmer then clasped my wrist with his ancient garden
tool of a hand. "You Americans are all friends of Bush the
persecutor. You see this area" - he swept his other arm in every
direction - "these are all Taliban. But they don't have power. As
soon as we find power, I will kill all of you."
Farooq tried to calm him, but the farmer was fixated on his crushed
wheat stalks until he spotted First Sgt. Ruel Robbins, a red-cheeked,
chest-first sort. Robbins looked the farmer over, then said, "Tell
him I'm real sorry to drive over his wheat, but I had to 'cause my
vehicle turned over." The farmer eyed the sacks in the supply truck;
Robbins gave him one of rice and two of flour.
The farmer watched us take off in a swirl of dust, and Specialist
Melissa Elliot, who was driving our Humvee, said to Farooq: "We're
not trying to hurt them. We're trying to protect their security.
Why'd he get so upset with us? Is their wheat part of their religion
or something?"
"It's the food for his family, ma'am," Farooq said patiently.
And so began our mission into the mountains of Zabul Province, 6,500
square miles of desert, farmland and 9,000-foot peaks with almost no
paved roads to link one patch to the next. It's a place where, just
decades ago, families lived as nomads, until King Mohammad Zahir Shah
gave them government land to settle on, and where national politics is
superseded by Pashtunwali - the Pashtun codes for tribal coexistence,
based on retaliation, mediation and hospitality. In 1994, when the
Taliban movement of young religious students swept into Zabul offering
an end to illegal road taxes and warlord rule, Zabul's leaders simply
joined hands with their Pashtun brothers. After the Taliban's fall,
President Hamid Karzai's nephew was dispatched to head the Zabul
Police; in July 2002, I found him besieged by locals, who put feces in
his food and threatened to kill him. For five years now American forces
have been chasing the Taliban in Zabul and attempting reconstruction.
The police buildings have improved. A new hospital (financed by the
United Arab Emirates) was finished. Roads were being laid in terrain so
remote that when the Americans turned up, the villagers thought they
must be Russians. The Americans opened a trade school in Qalat, the
capital. But the pace of progress has been painfully slow. These remain
the Taliban's mountains.
There are 42,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan today, trying to
secure a country that is a third again the size of Iraq, where there
are almost 150,000 U.S.-led troops. In the past two years, more than
300 American and NATO soldiers have died trying to stave off a
resurgent Taliban. Already this year, some 1,500 Afghans have been
killed. And while there were just two suicide bombings in 2002, there
is now one about every five days.
With the Taliban's alarming offensive, which began last spring,
American generals began speaking of a different war - not a war
against terror but a war of ideas. In military jargon this meant
balancing kinetic and nonkinetic activity. Or, in plain speech,
fighting the Taliban versus nation-building, two goals often at odds.
"This is the war for the people," Lt. Col. Frank Sturek, the
battalion commander of Task Force Warrior, told me. Sturek served in
Iraq under Lt. Gen. David Petraeus - one of the military's leading
thinkers on counterinsurgency - in Mosul, a city with 50,000
university students. In Zabul, by contrast, the literacy rate is 15
percent, at best. Sometimes Sturek couldn't tell if people wanted to
be catapulted to the 21st century or just left alone. On that he
deferred to Delbar Jan Arman, the governor of Zabul Province and a
former anti-Soviet mujahedeen, who mentored him on local ways -
distinguishing a Taliban killing from a tribal feud or a quarrel over a
boy lover. Arman explained cultural sensitivities: how pulling off a
man's turban or opening the clothing box of a woman could set off a
revolt. Sturek would nod. "The standard military play is, Land in,
round up the men, find someone who is nasty and mean and arrest him,
drop off supplies and split," Sturek told me. "We're trying to
humanize ourselves. It's uncomfortable. You train an infantry
battalion to kill the enemy, and it's hard to tone it down." The
governor's response was always: "The people are simple. We can win
this war if the Army stays nice with the people and if we embrace
them."
After many sweaty hours, we rumbled into the Alamo Bar and Grill in
Kharnay, elevation 8,000 feet. It was a fitting name for an outpost
fashioned from a mud schoolhouse - dusty, waterless and powerless
except for what the soldiers slurped off a Humvee battery. Charlie
Company, Fourth Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, had been based here
for nine weeks already when we arrived. They had been living on meals
ready to eat, or M.R.E.'s, patrolling the mountains with packs
weighing 60 pounds or more, befriending locals and being mortared and
ambushed once or twice a week. Their skin was burned, their uniforms
ripped. But for this evening, all suffering was suspended for barbecue
night. The Humvees had brought frozen slabs of beef from the United
States.
In downtime, the soldiers of Charlie Company would cram into a mud room
to imbibe American culture - "Shark Tale," "The Bourne
Supremacy," Lil Wayne, Toby Keith singing his "Taliban Song" -
all courtesy of Pvt. Dennis Taylor and his DVD and CD collection. A
teenager from Tampa's housing projects, Taylor grew up with the
Bloods. The Army has set him straight, even if his buddies teased him
because they couldn't decipher his lingo and he wasn't sure what
continent he was on or what the Koran was. "It's Islam's holy
book," said one soldier. "Man, how can you be fighting here and not
know that," another teased. Taylor laughed and shrugged.
At the other end of the spectrum was Cpl. Kyle Hayes, who had made
Taylor his project and, like Sgt. Jon Terry, a sentimental tough guy
from Louisiana, often shared meals with the Afghan soldiers
accompanying their unit to taste their culture and to bond. Hayes owned
a Web design company in New York City and until two years ago was
touring with his band, "Half Left." The band had a revelation while
producing a record near ground zero in Manhattan, and they all joined
the Army. Hayes's family was stunned. "I was the only guy at basic
training who voted for Kerry," he told me. Sometimes he felt weird on
leave in New York City, where people gawk at uniforms, though a few
older people thanked him. His life plan, as inscribed in his diary, is
to be a rock star, business mogul and founder of a Texan city by 35,
governor of Texas by 45 and president by 55.
Anticipation hung over the Alamo. Charlie Company's next mission was
a bit of deceptive theater intended to lure the Taliban into ambushing
the soldiers so they could counterattack. Part of the strategy involved
Lt. Nathan Shields - a smiling, easygoing officer from Rochester -
posing as a gullible new commander. Meanwhile, units hiding in the
mountains would block the Taliban's escape. That night, a few squads
hiked up a thousand feet, each soldier hauling water (temperatures in
the day are usually in the 100's), food, rifle, knife, flashlight and
first-aid kit, all atop 35 pounds of armor and ammunition. The Afghan
soldiers carried little besides a rifle and ammunition. The American
infantryman's burden is the Taliban's biggest advantage.
Fleet-footed, carrying little more than an AK and a walkie-talkie,
Taliban fighters could sail over the mountains.
The next morning we headed toward Solan, a village so unfriendly that
when American soldiers airlifted in a bridge months earlier, it was
burned down the next day. "We don't know if the Taliban burnt it or
the villagers," Lt. David Patton, a tall, circumspect Texan with Task
Force Warrior, said of the bridge in Solan. "Everyone believes in the
mission," he added, "but there's an underlying thought that when
we leave, it'll go back to the way it was." As Zabul's governor,
Arman, had told me, Zabul's religious leaders all supported the
Taliban, and in Afghanistan the most powerful platform is the minbar, a
pulpit where the mullah delivers his Friday sermon. So although
villagers were friendly when the Americans patrolled, they refused to
help rebuild a school and a bazaar, for example, fearing retaliation
from the Taliban who had destroyed them.
Shortly after we left the first village on our route to Solan, the
Afghan soldiers began picking up Taliban radio chatter about the new
Americans. Robbins was pleased. We were the bait, and the plan was
working. We spread out along the gorge for a long, edgy march. Outside
Solan, we met Sayed Ali Sheikh, an elder of the area, in whose compound
the Americans had stayed before. He said he couldn't guarantee that
the place wasn't rigged with explosives, but nevertheless he handed
Robbins the key, showed us shrapnel the size of a skateboard that had
ricocheted off a mountain when American planes dropped a 500-pound bomb
- and vanished. In no time, the soldiers transformed Ali Sheikh's
compound into a base of operations: satellite hookup to call the Air
Force for cover, mortar base near the well, sniper positions.
Ten lean men in turbans came to meet Shields, who played his role as
new commander somewhat awkwardly. A strange dialogue ensued, led by one
of the 10 men, Haji Gailani, whose oversize glasses, gabardine vest and
cane denoted authority. He said that they didn't deny Taliban
fighters were nearby. "If you can catch those people, thank you,"
he said. "If you want to slaughter my neck, please do." There was a
little nervous laughter. No, no, Shields said, of course not. Then
Gailani said: "You have planes. You can hear the Taliban on your
radios. And still you cannot force them out of here. How can we?"
Others began to speak up. Planes had attacked the mountains the night
before, the men said. They had heard about the bombing of civilians in
Kandahar. They wanted to know if they were about to be bombed. Robbins
advised them to stay near the thickest walls and shut off the lights.
Then they left.
And the waiting began. Pvt. Andrew Richards pulled out photos of his
family, who lived in Colombia. Specialist Jonathon Routledge, whose
voice still cracked and who couldn't believe he was roped into the
Army by some cool recruitment videos, poked at a chick that was pecking
at spilled tea. Shields and the medic climbed onto the compound roof to
give coordinates in case of a medevac. Pvt. Jason Belford was so itchy
that he played can-you-down-a-pack-of-crackers-in-two-minutes.
The radio began sputtering with Taliban voices. An Afghan policeman,
who went by the code name No. 5, had found their frequency. He heard
them discussing our compound. They knew everything: how many Americans
and Afghans, the location of the mortar, the sniper positions, the
satellite and the flower (code for me, the woman in the group).
Presumably one of our earlier visitors was an informant. No. 5 seemed a
little dodgy, too - perhaps working only for the troops, perhaps the
Taliban, perhaps both.
Shields, Sgt. Jeff Griffin, Belford and a few others moved out to check
the area around the compound for mines. Just as we neared the rock
garden, a detonation jolted us. A deafening sound. A black smoke
squall. Amazingly, no one was hurt. But something was wrong. They had
been out to that rock garden twice and found nothing. Suspicion fell on
No. 5.
"Fire a mortar," shouted one of the soldiers. Dan Guenther, a
sniper from Texas, spotted something. Everyone assumed an imminent
showdown. Someone threw a grenade into an outcropping to see if it was
booby-trapped.
"If you're gonna come to the party, come already!" shouted
Guenther. Then he suggested they should all run out in front of the
house, smack their butts and provoke a fight. It was 6:42 p.m., and the
light was fading. Shields and a few others popped out of the
compound's shelter, hoping to draw fire. As darkness fell, I climbed
up to talk to Specialist Tommy Glasgow, who was perched on the roof. He
said that there was no way the Taliban would pick a fight after seeing
all the U.S. fire power and listening to the bombers occasionally
buzzing overhead. We talked about the mission in Zabul, and Glasgow
said: "As bad as I don't want to be here, we should be. The
Romanians are coming to take over from us, and the Taliban are just
gonna cream 'em."
The fight never did come, and when we got back to the Alamo, the
Americans were packing, and the Afghan police and soldiers appeared
bewildered, convinced they would be dead in 24 hours. One policeman had
already defected to the Taliban, I was told. "We'll be bombing this
compound in a few weeks 'cause it'll be filled with Taliban,"
Hayes told me. He tried to find an hour every day to write in his
diary. On May 12, for example, he had written: "I killed some people
last night. Second squad is out looking for corpses right now. We got
mortared right around dark ... when I was getting all the last stuff
done for the day, and I got a hypoglycemic attack when I was doing
sit-ups. It was still a good day, though. I got a lot done. Everyday I
grow stronger."
A few days later, the Alamo was indeed abandoned by the Afghan forces.
The final draft of the U.S. military's latest counterinsurgency
manual, written under the direction of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and Lt.
Gen. James Mattis, emphasizes that if you skimp on resources, endurance
and meeting the population's security requirements, you lose. Yet for
the past five years, the Pashtun provinces have been plagued by a lack
of troops and resources. James Dobbins, President George W. Bush's
former special envoy to Afghanistan, blames the White House, which he
said had a predisposition against nation-building and international
peacekeeping. The Bush administration rejected Afghan and State
Department appeals to deploy a peacekeeping force in the provinces,
dismissed European offers of troops and had already begun shifting
military resources to Iraq, Dobbins told me, while U.S. troops in
Afghanistan were to be limited to counterterrorism. "In manpower and
money," he added, "this was the least resourced American
nation-building effort in our history." In Afghanistan, the White
House spent 25 times less per capita than in Bosnia and deployed
one-fiftieth the troops. Much of the money that was pledged didn't
show up for years. "The main lesson of Afghanistan is low input, low
output," Dobbins said. "If you commit low levels of military
manpower and economic assistance, what you get are low levels of
security and economic growth."
The draft counterinsurgency manual is thoughtful, full of details and
warnings like these: losing moral legitimacy means losing the war; the
more force is used, the less effective it is; provoking combat usually
plays into the enemy's hands; and building a government through
illegitimate actions like unlawful detention and torture is
self-defeating, even against fighters who conceal themselves among
noncombatants.
Yet while I was in the south, I saw how readily vicious practices are
condoned. An Afghan security official who insisted that I not use his
name but who was an aide to a prominent southern governor, told of an
instance when they couldn't find a boy suspected of plotting an
attack. "We sent out a command - arrest all his brothers, uncles,
cousins, relatives, all of them," he said. "When we arrested the
relatives, no one knew what that boy was doing. Still we beat them all
until they would shout, 'Write that we killed 5 or 10 people,
whatever you want, and I will say anything.' " In Zabul's
provincial capital, Qalat, the police proudly showed me three
"Taliban" they had just captured. One of them had been beaten so
badly he could hardly walk, and his feet were oozing puss. His eyes
were mere wrinkles in swollen tissue. An American intelligence officer
looked slightly embarrassed when he walked into the police station.
With a corrupt justice system, young Afghan men on the receiving end of
injustice have often felt their honor could only be restored through
acts of revenge. One night, a doctor introduced me to a young farmer
who asked me not to use his name. He had been shot by U.S. forces in a
gunfight a year earlier. Seven metal clamps were holding his leg in
place. Though deeply religious, he never liked the Taliban regime. His
family was relieved when Mullah Omar and the "Afghan Arabs" who
first came to fight the Soviets in the 1980's fled Kandahar. He
believed that Karzai and the international community would help build
the country. "But they didn't," he said in the dark little flat
where we met. "They just came to arrest the people." His father was
a tribal leader with pomegranate orchards, and relatives often appealed
to him to get their family members out of Afghan and American prisons.
He would urge the Americans not to be fooled by false reports naming
"Taliban." The real Taliban had mostly fled to Pakistan.
About a year and a half ago, he told me, a mine exploded next to an
American convoy. His father was sitting in a mosque when he was rounded
up by coalition troops. Twenty days later, his father's body was
dropped off at a hospital. "I couldn't control myself," the young
man said, nearly knocking over the gas lamp with his awkward,
pogo-stick leg. "I wanted to avenge. I knew where the Taliban
operated, because they would come at night, and so I found the
commander of a small group. He welcomed me warmly and told me: 'It is
the time of jihad. You are a lion and a hero.' "
Colonel Sturek, a powerfully built, blue-eyed Maryland man so
cleanshaven that he appeared bald, and Governor Arman, a heavily
bearded engineer, made an unlikely team. They shared a meal of sheep,
rice and melon four times a week to talk strategy. Sturek loved
Arman's vision of a network of roads by 2008, linking up Zabul's
remote districts, where they would build schools and markets. Zabul
straddled the most dangerous stretch of highway in Afghanistan. After 3
each afternoon, Taliban blocked the roads, looking for foreigners,
money, spies, satellite phones. Sometimes they would just burn up buses
or trucks. They even set loose a donkey on the path to an American
base, rigged with rockets, mortars and a detonation card.
Across Afghanistan's southern provinces, American and Afghan troops
were responding to the Taliban resurgence with Operation Mountain
Thrust. In Zabul, the focus was on Taliban fighters in the Day Chopan
mountains. Sturek's goal was to disable the Taliban leadership, allow
the Americans to find weapons caches, bring in aid and persuade people
that they had no intention of interfering with their religion. As the
full moon moved into place last May, enabling a predawn landing, Afghan
and American soldiers with Charlie Company, Special Forces and U.S.
doctors air-assaulted into the Day Chopan mountains, taking scattered
gunfire, and descended on the tiny village of Hazarbuz. Special Forces
soldiers with goggled sniffer dogs rounded up the men, numbered their
hands with markers and interrogated them. Some were arrested and flown
back to base camp. I followed Jeff Griffin and his squad, who were
dispatched to the villagers' homes with a message: Governor Arman is
coming here to find out what you need, and a medical team has come to
treat sick people and animals. This was typical of the American
balancing act in Afghanistan. The Village Medical Outreach unit
consists of reservist doctors who bring chests full of hygiene kits and
medicine to villages that have just been raided by fighting forces.
We climbed up a hill through apricot and almond orchards to reach the
scattered homes. We found a woman in a red velvet dress, who had beaded
necklaces and a pair of scissors dangling from her neck. She said that
the men were all sleeping. Then she said that they had left when we
came. Griffin told her about the doctors, but she seemed frightened and
said that she didn't want medical attention. We wandered from house
to house until a radio call came in from an observation unit. They had
seen a boy wearing black, possibly an informant, running toward one of
the houses.
More climbing, more rocks, until we reached a wind-swept mountain top
where an old crippled man emerged to hug Griffin, who hugged him back,
uncomfortably - after all, he had come to search his house. He then
ordered the boy in black to move to a clearing so the observation unit,
on a nearby mountain, could see if he was the runner. The soldiers
rummaged through the house, turning up small piles of paper and boxes
that seemed suspect. It turned out that the boxes were full of snuff
and the house was just a shop. As we were about to leave, the radio
blared out to Griffin: Don't forget to tell them about the Village
Medical Outreach.
As we rambled back down under the noonday sun, exhausted and thirsty,
plucking apricots, almonds and mulberries off the trees, I remembered
the Afghans I'd met complaining about Americans pillaging their
harvest. It wasn't hard to see how a few apricots could transmute
into theft or how speaking to a woman after you have rounded up all the
men could transmute into "Americans are abusing our women." One
afternoon, I had a car accident in Zabul. Within minutes, some 100 men
pulled over and began heaving the wreck out of the ditch. As I crouched
in the dirt wrapped in a tentlike Kuchi shawl, not a single man glanced
my way. Rather, they asked my wounded translator if his wife was O.K.
Someone must have sensed a foreigner, however, because 10 minutes after
we left for the hospital, the Taliban showed up. They pummeled the
driver, demanding to know what happened to the foreigner. He lied and
saved his life. But that moment, when not one person glanced my way,
offered a window into how seriously they abide by rules that are
utterly alien to a 19-year-old American soldier. Sturek constantly
struggled with pushing "cultural sensitivity" down the chain of
command. It was nearly impossible.
On our long walk back down the mountain, two privates were trying to
grapple with the contingencies of their lives, free will, U.S. history
and America's intangible objectives. They were having an existential
moment and craving a meal at Red Lobster. This valley in Zabul reminded
one of them, Specialist Joshua Pete, of canyons where the U.S. Army
once fought his Navajo ancestors. Pete thought he had had a calling,
that his country needed him. But because of Afghanistan, he had lost
both his scholarship to Dartmouth and his fianc=E9e. He didn't believe
in "this" anymore. Half the Afghans, he said, didn't even want
"our billions to build this country." He wanted to be home fighting
drug gangs in downtown L.A. or helping impoverished people in
Flagstaff.
Back in the village of Hazarbuz, I found Governor Arman in his white
robes, blazer and turban, sipping tea with Colonel Sturek. After one
week, the governor said, once we were all gone, the Taliban would
punish the people for sitting with Americans and the governor. Sturek
agreed, but added that if the Americans didn't come, the people would
have no idea there was an alternative.
Men and boys filtered down to meet the governor. They sat cross-legged,
skeptical, nervous. Arman was an earthy man, and while kind ("Tell
anyone who has run to the mountains to come talk, there'll be no
trouble. I am your governor. Why am I here? To hear your problems."),
he also let them have it.
"Look at your kids," he said, pointing to the boys. The men did,
and he winced. "Look at their hands and feet, the infections on their
skin, their bad education. Everyone looks sick. Don't they have the
right to be educated?
"Are the Punjabi kids in this situation?" he then asked, referring
to the children of the ruling ethnic group in Pakistan. "Why do
people call it jihad here in Afghanistan? Why don't they fight this
jihad in Quetta and Pakistan? We need to defend our country from the
Punjabis."
He told them that this war was a Pakistani drama. The Pakistanis were
sending Taliban to burn Afghan schools while their own children were
being educated. If America leaves, he warned, you will all be slaves of
Pakistan.
Over the three days we stayed, Arman's speeches grew harsher, and the
men who visited him and Sturek grew more numerous and more attentive.
The governor and the colonel could pick out the Taliban informants -
like the young man with good sneakers whom everyone deferred to. Jin
Kong radios, which work with solar power, batteries or a hand crank,
were handed out by the U.S. military to the locals. The elders got
bicycles; kids, school bags with pencils and other supplies.
Why did these Americans come here, the governor bellowed? Because the
Taliban had not been nice with the people of this country. The Taliban
beat the women, cut the heads off people, went to the north and made
tribal enmity for Afghan people. How many Hazara, he asked, were killed
in Shajoy (a district of Zabul)? Taliban had slaughtered hundreds of
Hazara, an ethnic group descended from the Mongols and primarily
Shiite. Arman repeated the accounts of Taliban cutting the throat of a
little girl in front of her mother, then killing the mother, of the
Taliban putting a gun in the mouth of a boy, who began to suck it and
then they shot him. "Don't you have sons?" he asked. Some of the
men averted their eyes, fidgeting in the dust.
On one occasion, Arman asked the men who had come if any among them
could read and write. He held up a paper with the word God written on
it. None of them could read. "If you can't read the name of God,
you are blind," he said. Trying to raise their Pashtun pride, he
pointed to one of the interpreters, a Hazara from the neighboring
district of Jaghori. "What is your district like?" he asked the
interpreter, who dutifully reported it had 72 schools, 32 of them high
schools, and that all boys and girls were educated. They had
electricity, radio stations, lawyers and engineers. "Why are we
Pashtuns always fighting?" asked the governor. "You will all be
laborers to the Jaghori people because you are illiterate and
uneducated."
Perhaps, but the men wanted to know when their relatives would be let
out of U.S. prisons in Kandahar and Bagram. And then a rocket exploded,
then another, then gunfire began to echo back and forth between the
valley walls. I trekked up to where snipers were perched on a small
slope in front of a boulder. On the radio, we could hear Shields, who
had taken some men and gone to patrol a valley. He was amazingly calm.
"We're under fire," he said. "We're in a riverbed on the side
of a hill." In fact, they were pinned down in an irrigation ditch
with bullets throwing up dust and rocks all around them. An A-10
Warthog screeched across the sky as a 500-pound bomb smacked the side
of the mountain.
We could still hear Shields breathing as he walked up the mountain. And
that oddly calm voice: "We're definitely putting ourselves at a
disadvantage. Pretty much anywhere I'm standing they could take us
out."
A donkey began braying as the full moon drifted up above the mountains.
Capt. Craig Johnson told Lieutenant Shields to watch out because
shadows would cast long with that moon.
The Taliban, judging from the radio communications we were monitoring,
seemed to be wounded and out of ammunition. One of them invited another
to prayer. The other demurred, saying he was worried that he would be
spotted. "O.K., then pray there, and I'll pray here," the first
man said. Later, when I met a Taliban commander in Pakistan, he told me
that they knew the Americans listened to their radios, so that the five
daily prayers were often used as code to signal anything from "I've
run out of food" to "Ambush them."
The next afternoon, we flew by helicopter to Andar, a nearby village. I
sat in the fields with a former teacher named Anwarjan. The governor
had appointed him district chief for all of Day Chopan, but Anwarjan
could barely travel. The entire province, he said, was Taliban. Still,
he was busy with Shields getting hundreds of kids to school in the
central town. He had convinced the parents that Pakistan wants their
children to stay wild and uneducated. "I have 300 students now," he
said. "They're changed. They are polite, greet people, treat their
mothers well. One man can change a generation."
But his efforts, he said, were being undermined by the constant
incursions of Taliiban from Pakistan. "The leader of Day Chopan,
Mullah Kahar, lives in Quetta," in Pakistan, Anwarjan said. "All
the heads are there. So why don't you do anything?"
U=2ES. intelligence knows the same thing. As Seth Jones, an analyst with
Rand, told The New York Times earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence
agents are advising the Taliban about coalition plans and tactical
operations and provide housing, support and security for Taliban
leaders. Sturek told me that the U.S. is well aware that the Taliban
heads are in Quetta. On one side, he said, most U.S. policy makers
argue that the Pakistanis are our friends. On the other side are those,
including some in the military, who say, "Let's just drive into
Quetta."
I often received updates from Charlie Company soldiers after leaving
Afghanistan. One of their platoon was killed heading up to an
observation post in Day Chopan. After they pulled out of Day Chopan,
one of the soldiers told me, they heard that things weren't going so
well and that the Taliban were using the fact that the Romanians had
taken over to claim the Russians were back. And another soldier wrote:
"Our platoon got sent to a National Guard unit to help them out.
They've lost like six people in the last week, but none of them were
from our platoon.We were in Kandahar for a little while to get
resupplied, and you're notkidding about the Canadians going down.We
kept having to go to the big ceremonies for their bodies to get loaded
on the plane.It seemed like they were getting messed up pretty bad. I
definitely don't get the whole 'success story' thing."
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported
extensively about Afghanistan. This is the second of two articles.
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| User: "Topaz" |
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| Title: Re: Taking the Fight to the Taliban, part 2, by Elizabeth Rubin |
04 Nov 2006 10:24:46 AM |
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"Jews always position themselves as mediators. These
nasties hold it cardinal they accredit and interpret *everything*.
Nothing has worth or meaning until it's pronounced upon by a generous
scoop of ***** in a hate hat. Nothing must be expressed save in jewish
terms. Invaders become undocumented workers. Queers become gays.
Freakins become African-Americans. Attack on Iraq becomes defense of
America. Nothing is legitimate save Big Kike stamp off on it.
BK doesn't like it when a Sheehan steps forward and foghorns facts to
fodder. Instantly, like mosquitoes at twilight, a flock of
bloodthirsty kikes appears, buzzing and sucking and whining. Have you
ever noticed that it is impossible to criticize jews and keep your
character? The jews have literally billions of enemies worldwide, yet
not a single one of them is an honest man of laudable motive. It is
impossible to carry off this charade without controlling the media
and a hell of a lot of other things too. The minute jew-criticism
appears, the ashkenazis and appeaser annies begin the smear. No one
ever opposed a loving kike except invidiously. Smear campaigns are
media control in action. There are other aspects of media control, but
day in day out, making horrible shrieks and gurgles to keep the goyish
herd away from the healthy green fields is the workaday business of
the controllers. Jews determine which issues may be debated, and in
what terms. Jews make up more than fifty percent of the experts on
both sides of these tiny debates. A few vetted goyim are allowed
through to keep up the charade of democratic discussion. The Internet
is the only medium that prevents the illusion of popular conformity
with jewthink being carried off. All that is necessary for jews to
maintain control is to create a congenial if bogus reality through
television and the main dailies, and relentlessly enforce this
orthodoxy through smear campaigns against any who breach it.
The death of a son is one of the few motives strong enough to drive
average goy fodder to breach etiquette and speak truth to kikes. She
must be shut down. How to do that? You can see the jews' uncertainty.
They attack her, at the same time, as both a lefty and a nazi.
Illogical, but in time they'll settle on an approach. Sometimes just
throwing ***** and see what sticks is the best way. How dare Sheehan
value her own son more than the interests of Israel?
I say my son died for LIES. George Bush LIED to us and he knew he
was LYING.
And none of the thick rancid honkings Limbaugh and the freeper
patriotards can gainsay it. Remember that bushy came out of manly
Barbara, the wizened maw who asked why she should trouble her
"beautiful mind" about the body bags coming back from Iraq. You know -
the ones you never see, because they have to show you endless pictures
of $440,000-compensated jews being "ethnically cleansed," sniff, yet
again. Only an anti-Semite puts his own life before Israel. The jews
are the one people on earth who routinely are absolved of guilt for
that for which they and they alone are guilty. Isn't that odd?
DaX
http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/
http://www.nationalvanguard.org http://www.natvan.com
http://www.thebirdman.org http://www.ihr.org/
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Taking the Fight to the Taliban, part 2, by Elizabeth Rubin |
09 Nov 2006 06:56:53 AM |
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Taliban fighters talk tactics - while safe in Pakistan
by Suzanna Koster | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1109/p01s03-wosc.htm
The 22-year-old doesn't look like the traditional turbaned Taliban
commander. His black hair shoots out at all angles from beneath a red
cap. He smiles easily and has a neatly trimmed beard.
But Hilal says he is the co-leader of 200 Taliban fighters who operate
across the border in Afghanistan. "Two years ago, we only attacked
Afghan officials, but now we have so many Talibs that we can attack
Americans," he boasts.
In a rare interview with a Western reporter, Hilal and three other
Afghan Taliban fighters describe how they slip into Afghanistan, attack
NATO and Afghan forces, and return to Pakistan to rest.
"Everybody in the neighborhood knows we are Talibs," says Noman, a
19-year-old fighter with a blue-white block-printed turban. "Paki-stan
is a little bit free for us."
The interview was conducted over two days in a small house made of
yellow mud in Pakistan's Balochistan Province. The fighters, who won't
give their real names, say they are here for a refresher course in
Taliban ideology in a Pakistani religious school.
"We are enormously organized," brags Mustafa, a 20-year-old wearing a
black turban usually favored by conservative Muslims.
"Even British defense officials say they face a lot of problems from
the Taliban."
A year ago, such confident talk from Taliban fighters could have been
chalked up to bravado. But with more than 50 suicide attacks in the
past six months, resistance by large Taliban units in the increasingly
volatile provinces of Kandahar and Helmand in the south, and a greater
willingness of Taliban fighters to come out into the open and speak
their minds are all indications that the Taliban resurgence is no
longer a matter of conjecture.
This year has been a difficult one for the US, coalition, and Afghan
forces. With US commanders handing control of the south over to its
British, Canadian, Dutch, and other allies in NATO, the Taliban are
making the transfer a bloody one. How NATO forces fare in the south
could determine whether the democratically elected government of
President Hamid Karzai - and indeed, the experiment in Afghan democracy
itself - succeeds or fails.
Commander Hilal says that currently 40 of his troops are in Afghanistan
fighting, and 160 are "refreshing their ideology" in Pakistan. Hilal
says that he discusses military plans by cellphone and satellite phone
with higher Taliban commanders who are all in Afghanistan.
Hilal says his fighters operate in groups of 20 to 25 men in the Afghan
provinces Ghazni and Zabul. There are 35 groups active in Zabul's
capital, Qalat, and 20 to 25 in the rest of by American forces
controlled province.
Mustafa, in the black turban, says that the Talibs cross the border
alone or in twos. Depending on the crossing point, he says - listing
Pakistan border cities of Chaman, Badini, and Torkham - it takes one or
two nights to join up with other Taliban fighters, he says. "The
majority have Pakistani identity cards, so crossing the border is no
problem," he says.
The Taliban fighters return to a different house in Pakistan every
month, but say that they must be very careful in Afghanistan, says
Noman, a gaunt-faced young man who says he wants to learn English. But
Mustafa adds that they are no longer in hiding in Afghanistan. "We are
now 200 to 300 at a time and can roam around freely," he says.
Prior to every mission, they get training in one of the many training
camps in the Afghan mountains, says the 22-year-old Ali, who is quiet
through most of the interview.
Afghanistan and NATO officials regularly accuse Pakistan of harboring
Taliban leaders. Pakistan officials say they are doing everything they
can to remove them.
On Wednesday, a suicide bomber killed 35 Pakistani soldiers in a brazen
attack at a military base in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province,
leaving the Army shaken and a Taliban peace deal in tatters.
"Never has there been so many military casualties in one attack," says
Ramiullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar-based journalist who has covered the
Pakistan military's campaign against militants since 2001.
Hours after the attack, an organization calling itself the Pakistan
Taliban, which had never come forward before, phoned Mr. Yusufzai to
claim responsibility. The caller told Yusufzai that the bomber prepared
a suicide video before carrying out the strike, suggesting a parallel
in tactics used by Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
The four fighters say they all studied at an Afghan madrassah
(religious school) before the American forces entered Afghanistan in
2001. Hilal fled to Pakistan when his fellow students at the madrassah
were arrested after the Taliban regime was toppled. In 2003, he says,
he joined the jihad.
In their Afghan camps, "we get training, even suicide education. There
are many groups saying how we suicide bomb, lay mines, or use
Kalashnikovs," he says. Suicide attacks are not for him, he says. "It
takes a lot of training. You have to think about target time, because
maybe you blow up yourself but nobody else."
All of their ammunition is inside Afghanistan and is used against
non-Muslims, says Mustafa. "There is a lot of ammunition in Afghanistan
to use against the non-Muslims. We hid it in depots after the fall of
the Taliban."
The Afghan forces are the targets are considered "non-Muslims" because
they work with the Americans. "All the checkpoints are covered by
Afghan troops, so we go for them first," he says.
A month ago, Hilal says his forces attacked a military convoy in
Zabul's provincial capital, Qalat. He says they killed 35 Afghan
troops. Two Taliban fighters were injured.
The Taliban fighters also pride themselves on blocking the main highway
between Kandahar and Kabul.
Mustafa says he's in favor of the international reconstruction work in
Afghanistan. But Noman interrupts, raising a finger. "We are not in
favor of reconstruction work, because it happens in the name of
Christianity. This is why we close the schools. The government
completely changed the books. A was for Allah, now it stands for Aass
[mule in Pashto], J was for Jihad, now it stands for Jawary [maiz in
Pashto]. With pamphlets, letters, and by taking the teachers "into
confidence," Noman says they try to close down the schools - if
necessary, by force.
More than 160 Afghan schools have been attacked this year, according to
The Associated Press.
The fighters say ordinary Afghans give them vehicles, fuel, food,
medicine, and information. "There are many business men who help us. We
were given 10 vehicles in Kandahar and 15 in Helmand. Sometimes they
give us security. They say, 'He is not a Talib, he is my family
member.' That is jihad," says Noman.
The interview has been watched by a silent little observer: an
11-year-old boy on a wooden seat. His parents have sent him to Noman
for religious training. He brings food to the Taliban fighters in the
house. When he is grown, he says shyly, he wants to be a fighter. "Now
I am still a kid, but when I have a beard I can join."
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| User: "Topaz" |
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| Title: Re: Re: Taking the Fight to the Taliban, part 2, by Elizabeth Rubin |
09 Nov 2006 07:42:18 PM |
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Tiptoeing around Our Problems
By Dr. William Pierce
"We've been talking about the very dangerous situation in the Middle
East recently, just because so much is happening there, and
undoubtedly we'll be talking about it much more in the future. For
that reason I want to make very clear what my motives and sympathies
are, lest I lead anyone astray and be thought a hypocrite for doing
so. First, regarding Palestine: although my sympathies definitely lie
with the Palestinians rather than with the Jews, it is not horror at
what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians that motivates me. What
motivates me is horror that my country is being used by the Jews in
their war against the Palestinians. If America were not involved at
all in the Middle East I still would sympathize with the Palestinians
and I would wish that they could be successful in driving the Jews
into the sea and annihilating the abomination that is Israel, but that
conflict between Jews and Palestinians would not be a major concern
for me. At least, my
concern there would be dwarfed by my concern for problems more
directly involving my own people in America and in Europe and in
southern Africa.
Even now, with money and weapons being supplied by America and used to
slaughter Palestinians, my concern is much less with monsters like
Ariel Sharon who are doing the slaughtering than it is with the filthy
creatures among my own people in America who are collaborating with
Jews here to keep the weapons and money flowing to Sharon -- and are
ready to do whatever else the Jews require of them here or abroad.
So when I tell you about Jews in occupied Palestine shooting
Palestinian children, and disapproval and anger are evident in my
voice, what I really am angry about is that the American people, my
people, are being used for this murderous activity. I am angry that
America's whole foreign policy has been perverted to serve Jewish
interests at the expense of American interests. I am angry that
America's political system has been perverted to ensure that we always
have so-called "leaders," whether Democrat or Republican, who are
dependent on the Jewish media or Jewish money or both for their
election and consequently will do the bidding of the Jews. I am angry
that our whole government is riddled with Jews -- Jews in our Defense
Department, Jews in our State
Department, Jews in our Immigration and Naturalization Service, Jews
in our Justice Department, Jews in the President's speech-writing
staff - who really set the policies of our government behind the
scenes, while the politicians are out front in the spotlight making
speeches and kissing babies - and doing as they're told by the Jews
behind the
scenes.
Did you know that it was a Jewish speechwriter, David Frum, who put
the phrase "axis of evil" in George Bush's mouth to justify America's
ongoing war against Israel's enemies? Did you know that a clique of
Jews in the Defense Department and among George Bush's foreign policy
advisers are the people actually running the so-called "war on terror"
in Afghanistan: a war that they intend to expand to Iraq and any other
Middle Eastern country that gets uppity, in order to make that part of
the world safe for Israel at American expense? Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld is a front man for his nominal subordinates, Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; and George Bush's official foreign
policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, helps him meet his Black quota for
the Cabinet, but it is the Jew Richard Perle, chairman of Bush's
Defense Policy Board, who gives him his foreign policy directives.
As I've said on more than one occasion, George Bush is a feckless
nincompoop who couldn't come up with a defense policy or a foreign
policy on his own if he had to -- which is why he's President. The
real policymakers behind the scenes certainly don't want a man in the
White House who has ideas of his own, because those ideas might
conflict with theirs.
And it is nothing but empty sophistry to make a distinction between
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