Authors: Jason Burke
Several factors in the rise of militancy in Uzbekistan are worth swiftly highlighting, as they are shared by so many other radical movements. These include a history of anti-imperialist religious revivalism, the influence of hardline Islamic propaganda from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, simultaneous repression and severe economic problems and support for local militancy by outside powers for short-term, pragmatic reasons.
The Taliban were also pushed further towards bin Laden by the attitudes and actions of the international community. Only Pakistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia ever recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and the country’s United Nations seat remained in the hands of the shifting opposition elements that comprised Burhanuddin Rabbani’s ‘Northern Alliance’. This was an issue that was frequently raised by Taliban ministers in conversation and throughout the seven-year existence of the Taliban it was the question of relations with the outside world, whether represented by the USA, the UN, NGOs, Prince Turki or bin Laden, that most divided senior Talibs.
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A faction of relative moderates, led by Mullah Mohammed Rabbani before he died of cancer in the spring of 2001, wanted a pragmatic engagement with the international community and favoured the expulsion of bin Laden. Their hope was that recognition would bring public and private international finance in its wake, allowing the development of the country and the consolidation of Taliban rule. However, their position was consistently undercut by the attitude, particularly after 1998, of the West, which made little genuine attempt at diplomatic engagement. The US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Karl Inderfurth, met frequently with Taliban representatives
but opted to hector them rather than actually talk to them. By February 1999, Inderfurth was telling senior Taliban ministers that they would be held responsible for bin Laden’s actions. In July 1999, the US imposed unilateral sanctions to punish the Taliban for their refusal to hand over the Saudi.
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The critical moment for the moderates came in the autumn of 1999, when Mullah Omar agreed to ban opium. Omar had been deeply ambivalent about the move, not least because a very substantial proportion of the Taliban’s revenues depended on the drugs trade, but was convinced by more moderate elements that it would gain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan international recognition. The ban was duly promulgated and was effectively enforced. Some Taliban leaders profited by some clever insider trading, but on the whole the ban was a genuine measure and opium production dropped from around 4,000 tonnes in 1998–9, two thirds of the world’s total annual production, to a negligible amount in Taliban-held territories. However, the West ignored the move and ‘security sources’ briefed journalists that it was a sham, despite clear satellite evidence to the contrary. Critics pointed to the stockpiles of opium that remained, forgetting that in rural areas the storage of opium acts as an informal banking sector. To have destroyed stored opium would have meant wiping out the savings of millions of farmers with devastating results in a land already suffering under a severe drought. Instead of recognition, as the moderates had hoped, the United Nations, despite the advice of their own expert agency, the United Nations Drugs Control Programme, imposed their own sanctions to punish the Taliban for refusing to give up bin Laden.
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Car-bomb attacks on Mullah Omar and his close aides increased their sense of isolation.
I was in Kabul when the UN sanctions came into force (a month after the opium ban was announced) and can remember the mood of sadness and disappointment among ordinary Afghans. A small demonstration was organized by the Taliban, a UN office was attacked, but overall the mood was one of resignation and resentment, not anger. Ironically, after three years of rule in Kabul, the Taliban appeared at the time to have marginally relaxed their regime. Though women outdoors still had to wear the burqa, the laws which had made it an
offence to travel anywhere without a close relative were widely flouted. Children played with kites (once banned) and men had begun to wear their beards far shorter than regulation length. In Jalalabad, hundreds of covert girls’ schools had opened with the tacit assent of the governor of the city.
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But the sanctions effectively destroyed the credibility of the moderates and the increasingly combative rhetoric on both sides allowed bin Laden to increase his influence on Mullah Omar. From the beginning of 2000, the Taliban became heavily influenced by the new ideology of which bin Laden was the most prominent, but by no means the only, proponent in Afghanistan. Having been rejected by one international community, the Taliban turned to an alternative international community, the Islamic international radical fringe, which was far more welcoming. In an interview with visiting Pakistani clerics in early 1996, Mullah Omar had described the Taliban as ‘that part of the Afghan mujahideen whose purpose right from the start has been to enforce the commands of the Shariat
in the country of Afghanistan
and to banish evil and atheism
from this country
’ (my emphasis).
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The contrast with a second document, the first issue (of only two) of
Islamic EmirateMagazine
, published in July 2000 in English from Kandahar, is stark. ‘The real issue,’ Mullah Omar says, ‘is not terrorism but Islam.’
We ourselves are victims of terrorism. Sometimes we are harassed by Russia, sometimes hit by American cruise missiles and sometimes devastated by car bombs and sabotage. Other countries constantly interfere in our internal affairs and we are subjected to international sanctions. In regards to Osama bin Laden, he was once championed as a mujahed but now he has become a ‘terrorist’. The issue is… Islam. There is a power struggle in progress between Islam and kufr.
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Omar goes on to explain that ‘the ongoing competition for global domination is destabilizing the world, leading to persecution of entire peoples and violation of their rights to self-determination’.
In language and tone the magazine is a classic text of modern Islamic militancy. Its rhetoric is almost identical to bin Laden’s own. Bin Laden had said that the ‘American bombardment has only shown that the world is governed by the law of the jungle’.
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The magazine’s editorial
announces that ‘Afghanistan’s real problem’ is the United States, ‘creator, director and star of its own dramatic production, known as The New World Order’. The UN, according to the editorial (and to bin Laden), is ‘a pawn’. In Iraq, the magazine stresses, ‘millions’ have died ‘due to American-sponsored policies’. Echoing bin Laden’s call for radical action by a vanguard, it calls on ‘the Muslims’ to ‘awaken from their slumber and assume their rightful position as leaders of humanity’.
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Increasingly, as bin Laden had hoped, the various groups in Afghanistan were beginning to unite under the very broad banner of ‘jihadi Salafism’. In January 2001, Arif Ayub, the Pakistani ambassador to Kabul, listed, in a paper that he was preparing for a conference, the various groups of ‘militants’ in Afghanistan. They included 500 Arabs left over from the war against the Soviets, 500 Chechens, 100 Uighurs, 100 Tajiks, 100 Bengalis, 100 Filipinos and 5,000 Pakistanis. Ayub noted that distinguishing the different groups in Afghanistan was increasingly hard.
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The story of John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’, gives an insight into the increasingly symbiotic relationship of bin Laden’s group, the Taliban and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
Lindh grew up in Marin Country, an affluent area about 20 miles north of San Francisco, California, though his family were not wealthy. Lindh suffered from an embarrassing intestinal disorder and moved from school to school. For several years he was taught at home, studying with a tutor and rarely venturing outside to play. Family life was strained with his parents’ marriage in difficulties. Lindh left school at 16, developing an interest in conspiracy theories and religion and spending hours researching both on the internet. By his late teens, the tall, awkward teenager was wearing Islamic dress and, in late 1997, converted to Islam at a small Salafi mosque near his home.
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Lindh became more deeply involved in Islamic activism after meeting followers of Jamaat Tablighi. In 1997 he travelled to the Yemen to learn Arabic at a secular language centre but dropped out to study at a Salafi university. Though Lindh’s lawyers deny that he travelled there, it is possible that he found his way to Sheikh Moqbul al-Wadai’l’s medressa at al-Dammaj in the north of the country. By December 2000, Lindh was in Pakistan, at the Saudi-funded Iltimas’ Madrasah
al-Arabia in the North West Frontier Province.
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By May 2001, he was in an HUM training camp in northwestern Pakistan where, according to his US indictment, he asked to fight for the Taliban. He was sent across the border to Kabul where he presented himself at the HUM office with a letter of introduction.
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Lindh spoke Arabic and no Urdu and had no combat experience, so the HUM passed him on to the Arabs. He travelled to a guesthouse in Kandahar and was sent to a training camp west of the city, described as an ‘al-Qaeda facility’ in the indictment. There he underwent the standard basic battlefield course and in June or July met bin Laden personally who thanked him and other volunteers for ‘taking part in the jihad’. Obviously taking an interest in an American with an American passport, Mohammed Atef approached Lindh shortly afterwards and asked if he was interested in travelling outside Afghanistan ‘to conduct operations against the USA and Israel’. Given the timing, it is possible that Atef was considering him for some role in the 11 September attacks. Lindh declined in favour of going to the frontlines with the Taliban, which he did, some time in August 2001, travelling with a group of around 150 ‘non-Afghan’ fighters to Takhar in the northeast, where his group was placed under the control of Abdul Hady, an Iraqi.
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Bin Laden, as always, was doing everything he could to encourage the growing symbiosis between the groups. By March 2001, Mullah Abdul Jalil, the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister, was buying boxes of antacids for him when in Dubai.
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Mullah Omar’s decision to destroy the huge statues of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, built in the third and fourth centuries, appears to have been taken after a concerted lobbying campaign by foreign militants inside Afghanistan supported by a series of fatwas from Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia.
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Pakistani diplomats, in confidential memos to Islamabad found after the fall of Kabul, lamented that the Taliban seemed addicted to ‘international jihad’.
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For his part, bin Laden had embarked on a massive programme of arms buying. Dealers in Landi Kotal, the rough and scruffy town at the top of the Khyber Pass, began receiving large orders for guns and ammunition, which were then trucked (with ISI consent) into Afghanistan. In June, with stocks in the tribal areas exhausted, further purchases were made from dealers in Peshawar. According to one
dealer, men linked to bin Laden were offering 200,000 Pakistani rupees for Stinger missiles. One dealer sold $800,000-worth of weapons, mainly AK47s, which were sent over the border and dumped at a site near Jalalabad.
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Bin Laden and his associates had one final sweetener for the Taliban. Some time in May 2001, a polite letter in bad French was typed, probably by al-Zawahiri, on a computer later found in an office in Kabul by looters during the fall of the city. It was addressed to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military leader of the Afghan opposition. The writer had worked for 97 minutes, according to the computer’s internal record, then printed out his work. It was a request on behalf of ‘one of our best journalists, Mr Karim Touzani’ for an interview.
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On 9 September, Massoud agreed to see two French-speaking Arabs who had come to interview him. Both were in fact Tunisian, not Moroccan as they claimed. They were carrying stolen Belgian passports, one in the name of ‘Karim Touzani’. The cameraman was wearing a belt full of explosives. He and his target died almost instantly.
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The Millennium Plot
It was 6pm on 14 December 1999 and the last car, a rented Chrysler 300, had just driven off the Coho ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and drawn up at the customs checkpoint at Port Angeles, Washington, United States of America. As Diana Dean, an American customs official, questioned the driver, a young Algerian who gave his name as Benni Norris, she noticed that he was sweating despite the chill and that his hands were shaking. When Dean and her colleagues opened the boot of the car they found out why. Where the spare wheel should have been were four timing devices, 118 pounds of urea crystals, 14 pounds of sulphate powder and 48 ounces of nitroglycerine. The driver’s real name was Ahmed Ressam, he was 33 and he was on his way to plant a bomb in Los Angeles International airport.
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