Al-Qaeda (33 page)

In April 1998, the Taliban received a high-level American delegation in Kabul. In retrospect, this was the highpoint of relations between Washington and the movement. Two months later Mullah Omar met Prince Turki al-Faisal, the veteran head of Saudi intelligence, and agreed a secret deal to hand over bin Laden for trial in Saudi Arabia
for treason, a crime punishable by death. Mullah Omar asked only that a joint commission of Afghan and Saudi Arabian ulema be set up to formulate a correct legal justification for the expulsion.
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The press conference a month earlier, during which bin Laden publicized his World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders, had particularly annoyed Mullah Omar, not least because he only learned of it from a report on the BBC Pashto-language service.
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In July, the Taliban leaders sent an envoy to Saudi Arabia to reaffirm the deal and replaced bin Laden’s team of Arab bodyguards with Afghans loyal to Mullah Omar.
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But Operation ‘Infinite Reach’ changed everything. Three weeks after the missile strikes, two Saudi Arabian jets landed on the Kandahar airstrip. One carried Prince Turki, the other, full of commandos, was there to carry bin Laden back. In a stormy meeting, Mullah Omar reneged on his promise to hand over the Saudi dissident. Prince Turki asked Omar to remember the substantial financial assistance Riyadh had given his movement, enraging the Taliban leader, who accused the prince of doing the Americans’ dirty work for them. Though Turki returned to Saudi Arabia empty handed, Omar was still profoundly aggrieved with bin Laden too.
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The ambivalence of the Taliban’s position is amply demonstrated by a news item in their magazine,
Nida-ul-Momineen
(‘The Call of the Faithful’), published from Karachi, which described yet another press conference held by bin Laden in September 1998. The headline for the article was ‘bin Laden calls Mullah Mohammed Omar Leader of the Faithful and says that he will obey him as a religious duty’. The author, Maulvi Obaidur-Rahman, repeatedly stressed that ‘the guest Mujahid’ denied having any link to the east African bombings. The magazine also reproduced what it called ‘Osama bin Laden’s written pledge to [the] Amir-ul-Momineen’. It took the form of a traditional bayat, similar to that Jamal al-Fadl and others have said they swore to bin Laden:

Hazrat Amir-ul-Momineen, Mujahid Mullah Mohammed Omar (May Allah protect you and keep you safe). As Salaam-o-’Alaikum.

Hazrat Amir-ul-Momineen! Allah has blessed you with fresh glorious victories in… Afghanistan. This is an auspicious moment for us, to heartily
congratulate you and pledge ourselves anew [to] stand by you, to render all possible assistance to you for the supremacy of Islam, for the stability of the Islamic government, for the enforcement of the law of Allah till the time that all dissension, conflicts come to an end and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.

On this occasion we renew our pledge too that we consider you to be our noble Amir and that obedience, allegiance and assistance to you is as compulsory upon us as it is to an Amir appointed by Shariat. We invite all Muslims to render assistance and co-operation to you, in every possible way they can.

Wasallam-o-’Alaikum,

Your brother, Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden, 15/09/1998.
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The show of loyalty did little to pacify Mullah Omar. According to
al-Quds al-Arabi
, Omar made bin Laden wait several hours before seeing him when the Saudi came to offer his respects at
eid
celebrations to mark the end of Ramadan.
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The Taliban’s solution to the problem was to have bin Laden ‘disappear’ and claim, fairly implausibly, they did not know where he was. Given that I was able to locate him at Farm Hadda, the former Soviet collective farm, in June 1999,
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it is likely that US and other intelligence agencies were not fooled either. The Taliban then issued a series of announcements claiming that they had taken away bin Laden’s satellite phones and that he had promised not to involve himself in any overseas activities. Bin Laden’s tactics had been impeccable. The missile strikes meant that the Taliban could not expel him without appearing to be either frightened of America or stooges of the Saudi Arabians. His base, though uncomfortable, was secure. The next step would be to turn the Taliban from reluctant hosts into allies and partners.

There were other dynamics forcing the Taliban and bin Laden closer together. Towards the end of the decade, Pakistani support for their chosen proxies in Afghanistan began to wane. By 1998, there was increasing concern in Islamabad about the effect the example set by the Taliban in Afghanistan was having on Pakistan’s volatile and lawless border areas and the haven they were offering to violent Pakistani groups that had begun targeting the Pakistani state. Taliban-style
militias were springing up in towns and villages throughout the tribal areas and attacking video stalls and cinemas, smashing televisions, harassing ‘immodest’ women and teachers and pledging jihad against the government. Islamabad’s involvement in Afghanistan was causing problems elsewhere too. Pakistani intelligence agencies attributed a fresh wave of sectarian violence in the Punjab to the ongoing tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the latter’s support for the Taliban. Both states had released fresh funds to Shia and Sunni militias within Pakistan to extend the proxy war being fought in Afghanistan to Karachi and the cities of eastern Pakistan. A crackdown by Pakistan’s new civilian government, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, complete with new anti-terrorist courts and a government-approved policy of targeted assassination of militants, foundered on the simple fact that key individuals could flee to Afghanistan whenever they wanted.
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The problems caused by the welcome extended by the Taliban to the Pakistani radical groups, most of whom had offices and camps in Kabul and elsewhere, was evident. It was Pakistani Sipa-e-Sahaba (SSP) militants who shot dead the Italian colonel in Kabul in August 1998 while I was waiting for evacuation from Kandahar. Conspirators involved in the January 1999 attempt by the newly formed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group to blow up the prime minister, included a bomb-making instructor at a Harkat-ul-Mujahideen camp in eastern Afghanistan.
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In June 2000, the Pakistani military government gave the Taliban a list of eighteen camps where sectarian militants were believed to be training. In response, the Taliban closed three.
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Three months later, Islamabad unsuccessfully demanded the extradition of fifteen militants.
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That Pakistanis were training in the Afghan camps was an open secret. The exact number of casualties inflicted by Operation ‘Infinite Reach’ is still unclear, but it appears that around twenty-five people were killed. The dead included three Yemenis, two Egyptians, a Saudi and around twenty Pakistanis. At an HUM press conference soon after the bombing, it was claimed that another forty Pakistani volunteers were injured.
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Only two of the camps hit by the missiles, Abu Jindal and al-Farooq, were exclusively used by Arabs. The rest were, to a greater or lesser extent, run by HUM.
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But even while Islamabad was
complaining vociferously to the Taliban about the sanctuary senior SSP cadres had found in Kabul and about the training camps, HUM fighters were being deployed into Kashmir along with militants from Lashkar-e-Toiba. The ISI, the Pakistani military senior command and the politicians were all keen to keep their supply of paramilitary proxies to use to destabilize India in Kashmir. In the summer of 1999, hundreds of HUM fighters were used as auxiliaries in the Kargil operation, Pakistan’s most audacious border incursion for decades, which involved hundreds of Pakistani troops seizing and holding a series of key ridges well over the Line of Control and deep inside Indian-held territory.
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The positions were only relinquished after fierce fighting and under massive international pressure. I spent several weeks on the frontlines during the conflict, saw the militants running supplies under shellfire up to the Pakistani soldiers in the forward positions and later spoke to many HUM fighters who had been deployed alongside the Pakistani Northern Light Infantry on the high peaks. Many had been trained in Afghanistan. Several had fought alongside the Taliban before being redeployed to the Indian border.

And so the Pakistani policy began to fall apart. Different groups within the country continued to relate to the Taliban in different ways. Though the civilian politicians began to move away from the increasingly radical movement, the ISI, and the Deobandi religious and political groups with whom they were now aligned, maintained their support. The result was to bring the most radical elements on all sides closer together.

For the Pakistani militants were as useful to the Taliban as they were to the hardliners in Islamabad. By the summer of 1999, the supply of fighters from the Deobandi medressas in the NWFP and Baluchistan had been exhausted and even powerful Afghan commanders with tribal authority, longstanding reputations and deep pockets, like Jalaluddin Haqqani, were finding it hard to mobilize troops. As the politicians began to get leery of the Taliban, the logistical support offered by Islamabad diminished and the HUM cadres, and others who were less directly linked to the Pakistani government, became increasingly important to the movement. The medressas of the Punjab, which had closer links to the harder-line sectarian groups, became prime sources
of cannon fodder. In the summer of 1999, I watched scores of teenage Pakistani boys doing star jumps in clean, new white and blue shalwar kameez at a base a mile or so behind the frontlines north of Kabul. HUM, SSP and LeT cadres were increasingly used as shock troops. The close relation between the Pakistani radicals and the Taliban that had developed as a result was most obvious when an Air India jet was hijacked by HUM militants on its way out of Kathmandu and flown to Kandahar in December 1999. The hijackers demanded the release of Maulana Massoud Azhar, the cleric and founder member of the group, from prison. Five years after the first attempts to free Azhar, the HUM was trying again. This time the aim was to liberate all those who had tried to free him previously but failed. Among them was Omar Saeed Sheikh. After the Indian government had met the hijackers’ demands, the Taliban helped them flee to Pakistan. Sheikh and Azhar disappeared into Pakistan too. The Taliban were swiftly being inexorably sucked into the broad international movement of international militancy, whether they liked it or not.

Along with HUM, Arabs also began to play an increasingly important role in the fighting. In the summer of 1998, it had been a group of Arabs who had forced their way up the strategic Ghorband valley, opening the way into central Bamiyan. On occasion, if required, bin Laden or Mohammed Atef would deploy, for short periods, brigades composed of highly skilled, highly motivated men drawn from the specialized training camps that they ran. The Arabs were very effective, fighting in a way that was entirely at odds with the ritualized, and largely casualty-free traditional mode of Afghan combat and the Taliban became increasingly reliant on them.

But the Arabs, whether or not connected to bin Laden, and the HUM were far from the only source of auxiliaries for the Taliban. As previously mentioned, thousands of young men from all over the Islamic world came to fight for them. One major source of troops was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU had established itself in Mazar-e-Sharif and the north of Afghanistan. Like the HUM, the IMU supplied the Taliban with fighters in return for sanctuary. From around 1997, the IMU, under its charismatic leader Juma Namangani, provided around 600 fighters for each campaigning season.
Their total strength was somewhere between three and four thousand.

There is no space to examine the roots of the IMU in detail here but several elements are worth noting. Many are familiar from the development of radical Islamist groups elsewhere. Central Asia’s Sufi-influenced and tolerant Islam was repressed by the Soviets for ideological reasons. The Bolsheviks were well aware that a series of anti-imperialist revolts over the previous century had taken a religious form. They themselves faced major uprisings, which were, at least in part, religious. Islam continued to be a discourse of dissent throughout central Asia under Soviet rule. On the break-up of the Soviet Union, Islam Karimov, a party apparatchik, maintained his grip on power in Uzbekistan by brutally repressing any free speech or practice of religion. He failed to deal with the appalling economic and environmental problems bequeathed by the Soviets. And in the early 1990s, Salafi literature and hardline Wahhabi preachers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Pakistan flooded central Asia and easily swamped indigenous forms of worship that had been weakened by decades of repression. There had been central Asian Muslims fighting on both sides during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and many had been radicalized as a result. During the early 1990s, more militants were trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, some with the help of the ISI, and their return also fuelled the radical movement in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. The IMU emerged in 1992 in one of the most deprived, and most heavily proselytized, regions of central Asia, the Ferghana valley. Its leaders publicly challenged the secular government on a religious platform. The government in Tajikistan, at odds with Karimov, gave sanctuary to the IMU allowing it critical time to grow until international pressure forced the movement to leave its bases in the anarchic northern part of the country, which the poverty-stricken Dushanbe government was unable to rule, and set up new bases in the north of Afghanistan which the Taliban had just conquered. I was given a taste of quite how incapable the Tajik leadership was of running its own country when I was held up and robbed at gunpoint by bandits three times in six hours on a road only a few miles north of the capital in 1999. Namangani first met bin Laden some time in 1997, though it is unclear whether the IMU leader requested or was granted any aid.
Namangani had his own lines of funding from the Gulf and elsewhere and may not have needed bin Laden’s assistance. The IMU’s cadres, who were to play a key part in the war in autumn 2001, were largely drawn from Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens and southwestern Chinese Uighurs but included some Arabs as well. The bulk of their strength was deployed in a series of increasingly audacious military attacks in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzystan though, as mentioned, a sizeable force was lent to the Taliban, sometimes commanded by Namangani in person.
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