Ghost Wars (50 page)

MOHAMMED OMAR was an unlikely heir to Pashtun glory. He reflected the past through a mirror cracked and distorted by two decades of war. For a man destined to make such an impact on global affairs, remarkably little is known about his biography. He was born around 1950 in Nodeh Village in Kandahar province. His small and undistinguished family clan occupied a single house in the district, according to a biographical account given to U.S. diplomats by the Taliban early in 1995. His was an impoverished, isolated boyhood dominated by long hours in dim religious schools memorizing the Koran. From religious texts he learned to read and write in Arabic and Pashto only shakily.He never roamed far from Kandahar province. If he ever flew on an airplane, slept in a hotel, or watched a satellite movie, he gave no indication of it. In later years he had many opportunities to travel abroad but refused even a religious pilgrimage to holy Muslim shrines in Saudi Arabia. He declined to travel as far as Kabul except on very rare occasions. Kandahar was his world.
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During the anti-Soviet jihad, Omar served as a local subcommander with the Younis Khalis faction. He followed a prominent trader, Haji Bashar, who also funded a religious school in the area. He showed special ability with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and reportedly knocked out a number of Soviet tanks. By one account, he eventually became Khalis’s deputy commander for Kandahar province, a relatively senior position, despite his being neither “charismatic nor articulate,” as a Taliban colleague later put it.
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Exploding shrapnel struck Omar in the face during an attack near Kandahar. One piece badly damaged his right eye. Taliban legend holds that Omar cut his own eye out of the socket with a knife. More prosaic versions report his treatment at a Red Cross hospital in Pakistan where his eye was surgically removed. In any event, his right eyelid was stitched permanently shut.
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By the early 1990s, Omar had returned to religious studies. He served as a teacher and prayer leader in a tiny, poor village of about twenty-five families called Singesar, twenty miles outside of Kandahar in a wide, fertile valley of wheat fields and vineyards. In exchange for religious instruction, villagers provided him with food. He apparently had no other reliable source of income, although he retained ties to the relatively wealthy trader Bashar. He shuttled between the village’s small mud-brick religious school and its small mud-brick mosque. He lived in a modest house about two hundred yards from the village
madrassa.
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The only known photographs of Omar depict him as a relatively tall, well-built, thin-faced man with a light complexion and a bushy black beard. He spoke Pashto in a peasant’s provincial accent. In meetings he would often sit silently for long periods. When he spoke, his voice was often no louder than a whisper. He modestly declined to call himself a
mullah
because he had not finished all of his Islamic studies. He sometimes talked about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in someone else’s story.

He believed in the prophecy of dreams and spoke about them in political and military meetings, drawing on them to explain important decisions. During 1994, as the Taliban gathered influence around Kandahar, Omar repeatedly said he had been called into action by a dream in which Allah appeared before him in the form of a man and told him to lead the believers.

As he began to meet with Pashtun delegations around Kandahar, he would often receive visitors outside, seated on the ground. By one account, in an early Taliban organizational meeting, he was selected as leader of the movement’s supreme council because unlike some of the more seasoned candidates, Omar did not seem to be interested in personal power.
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The story was another plank in the Taliban’s myth of Pashtun revival: The humble, quiet Mullah Omar echoed the silence of young Ahmed Shah Durrani at the Sher Surkh
jirga.

He spoke rarely about his ambitions, but when he did, his language was direct. The Taliban was “a simple band of dedicated youths determined to establish the laws of God on Earth and prepared to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that goal,” he said. “The Taliban will fight until there is no blood in Afghanistan left to be shed and Islam becomes a way of life for our people.”
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When they sprang from Kandahar in 1994, the Taliban were a tabula rasa on which others could project their ambitions. The trouble was, as the French scholar Olivier Roy noted, the Taliban were different from other opportunistic Afghan factions: They meant what they said.
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BENAZIR BHUTTO also charted the future from the past. Pakistan’s sputtering democracy had shuddered through another minor miracle—a semi-legitimate national election—and voters had returned Bhutto to office as prime minister. Before her swearing-in she took long walks in Islamabad parks with old political allies. She wanted to talk candidly about her plans where Pakistani intelligence could not listen. She told her colleagues that she wanted to learn from the errors of her first term. She was determined to stay close to the Americans. She wanted to keep the Pakistani army happy as best she could—she would not pick unnecessary fights. She would have to keep watch on ISI, but she would try to listen to their demands and accommodate them. In this way she hoped to survive in office long enough to revive Pakistan’s economy. Only if she created wealth for Pakistan’s middle classes could Bhutto ensure her party’s long-term strength, she and her advisers believed.
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Pakistan suffered from widespread poverty, low literacy rates, and a weak natural resource base. Yet it also had a strong business class, international ports, and thriving export industries. How could the country create sudden new wealth through external trade the way other Asian countries had managed to do during the 1980s? To the east lay India, the Pakistan army’s reason for being and a foreign policy problem Bhutto could not hope to solve on her own. But to the west and north lay new possibilities for commerce and influence. Bhutto wanted, as she said later, to “market Pakistan internationally as . . . the crossroads to the old silk roads of trade between Europe and Asia.” Like every young student on the subcontinent, she had grown up with history texts that chronicled invasions across the Khyber Pass. These ancient conquests had been inspired by lucrative trade routes that ran from Central Asia to Delhi. “So I thought, ‘Okay, control of the trade routes is a way to get my country power and prestige.’ ” She imagined Pakistani exporters trucking televisions and washing machines to the newly independent Muslim republics of former Soviet Central Asia. She imagined cotton and oil flowing to Pakistan from Central Asia and Iran.
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But when she and her advisers looked at the map in 1994, they saw Afghanistan in the way, an impassable cauldron of warlords, a country engulfed by a civil war fueled by Pakistan’s own intelligence service. Bhutto called in the ISI brigadiers, and, as she recalled it, they told her they wanted to keep pressure on Massoud because his government was “too pro-India.” This seemed to her a dead-end policy, but she had pledged to go slowly with the army this time in office, to defer to them where she could. She wanted to create a discussion about an alternative Afghan policy that would include the views of the army and Pakistani intelligence.
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She organized an interagency group on Afghanistan. Beside her at the conference table sat a retired septuagenarian Pakistani general, Naseerullah Babar, who had agreed to serve as Bhutto’s interior minister. A Pashtun notable, Babar had organized covert guerrilla training for Hekmatyar and Massoud when they first fled to Pakistan in the 1970s. He had been loyal to Bhutto’s father, and Benazir trusted him. Babar had friendships inside the notoriously independent Afghan bureau of Pakistani intelligence. He brought some of the ISI brigadiers he knew to the early working sessions on Afghan policy. They argued about the risks of pulling support from Hekmatyar. Without his pressure on Massoud, the ISI’s officers maintained, ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks might lock up control of Kabul for many years. They would deepen ties with India and remain hostile to Pakistan and stir up trouble in its large Pashtun population. How could Bhutto pursue her dream of Central Asian trade in that case?

“Why do we need Kabul anyway?” Babar asked, as Bhutto recalled it. They could reach Central Asia by the southern route, through Kandahar and Herat. Bhutto thought this idea had promise. Her government could build roads, telephone lines, and other infrastructure right through Afghanistan’s Pashtun country, all the way to Central Asia, bypassing Kabul and the ethnic gridlock to its north. Bhutto endorsed the new approach “if it could be done by paying local warlords” for free commercial passage via southern Afghanistan. Pakistani intelligence had no objection.
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Babar spearheaded the effort. In October 1994 he arranged a heavily publicized trial convoy carrying Pakistani textiles that he hoped to drive from Quetta to Turkmenistan, to demonstrate Pakistan’s new ambitions. The convoy arrived on the Afghan border above Kandahar just as Mullah Omar and his Taliban
shura
opened their preaching campaign in the area.

Pakistani trucking interests had already begun to supply money and weapons to the Taliban, hoping they could unclog Kandahar’s highways. It may have been these trucking overlords rather than Pakistan’s government who aided the Taliban in their first military breakthrough. An Afghan commander in the border truck-stop town of Spin Boldak, loyal to Massoud on paper, handed the Taliban the keys to an enormous ISI-supplied weapons dump near the town, apparently in exchange for a large payment. The dump had been created in 1991 to receive weapons and ammunition rushed across the border by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence officers who were trying to comply with a deadline to end outside supplies to the Afghan war. The Spin Boldak dump’s seventeen tunnels held enough weaponry for tens of thousands of soldiers.
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The Taliban broke it open in mid-October, issued public calls for volunteers from local
madrassas,
and handed out assault rifles still wrapped in plastic. Whether Babar or local ISI officers endorsed or aided this handover of weapons is not clear. Babar did capitalize quickly on the Taliban’s new strength. When his demonstration convoy was blocked at rogue checkpoints twenty miles outside of Kandahar in early November, he waved the Taliban on to free his trucks.
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They did so with ease. Mullah Naqibullah and other long-feared Kandahar warlords who were allied with Massoud had terrorized the region without challenge for years. Suddenly, in just twenty-four hours, the Taliban moved into central Kandahar and captured the entire city. Mullah Omar took control of the provincial governor’s arched sandstone headquarters, across from the tomb of Ahmed Shah Durrani. Naqibullah and his allies, unable or unwilling to resist their youthful and highly motivated attackers, simply melted away.
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By mid-November the Taliban’s six-member
shura
ruled not only Kandahar but its airport, where they captured six MiG-21 fighter jets and four Mi-17 transport helicopters. They seized tanks and armored personnel carriers.
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They announced that all highway roadblocks would be dismantled, all non-Taliban militia disarmed, and all criminals subject to swift Islamic punishments. They lynched a few resisters to make their point.

Benazir Bhutto was suddenly the matron of a new Afghan faction. The Taliban might provide a battering ram to open trade routes to Central Asia, as she hoped, yet they also presented complications.

Pakistani intelligence already had one Pashtun client, Hekmatyar. The ISI Afghan bureau was in turmoil. The Rawalpindi army command had recently appointed a secular-minded, British-influenced general, Javed Ashraf Qazi, to take charge of ISI. Qazi’s immediate predecessor, the bearded Islamist missionary Javed Nasir, had led the intelligence service toward overt religious preaching. The army brass now told Qazi to “put ISI right,” as he recalled it, by purging the most open Islamists. Qazi systematically removed officers who had been promoted by Nasir. In doing so he shook up the Afghan bureau. Its relations with Hekmatyar were already a mess. Nasir’s ardent personal beliefs had led him into obscure theological arguments with his putative client. ISI was supposed to be helping Hekmatyar pressure “the fox of Panjshir,” as Qazi called Massoud. Instead, Javed Nasir picked fights over religion.
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ISI had even deeper interests at stake than Hekmatyar’s fate. By 1994, Pakistani intelligence relied on the Islamist training camps in Hekmatyar-controlled Afghan territory to support its new covert jihad in Indian-held Kashmir. The political-religious networks around Hekmatyar trained and shipped foreign volunteers to Kashmir. Bhutto recalled that during this period, Pakistani intelligence officers repeatedly told her they could not fight the clandestine Kashmir war with Kashmiris alone; there just weren’t enough effective native guerrillas to bleed Indian troops. They needed Afghan and Arab volunteers, and they needed the sanctuary of guerrilla training camps in Afghan territory.
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This complicated ISI’s new relationship with the Taliban. Mullah Omar was determined to challenge Hekmatyar for supremacy among Pashtuns. If Pakistani intelligence suddenly shifted its support to Omar, it might put the covert Kashmir war at risk. Pakistani brigadiers working from Peshawar, close to Hekmatyar for years, wanted to stick with their longtime client. But ISI’s Quetta and Kandahar offices, responsible for covert policy in southern Afghanistan, became intrigued by the Taliban, according to accounts later assembled by the CIA.

Qazi’s “chap in Kandahar” urged that the ISI chief meet some of the new militia, as Qazi recalled it. He invited a Taliban delegation to ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi. Mullah Omar refused to travel, but a senior group arrived. They picked up their dirty, sandled feet and sat cross-legged on top of the sofa cushions, as if they were sitting on the floor. Some of them were limbless. Others had been fitted with artificial legs or arms. “I was horrified to see they had emerged literally from the villages,” recalled Qazi, a product of Pakistan’s British-designed higher education system. “They had very little clue about international affairs or anything like that. They had their own peculiar set of ideas. The only thing I found was that they were well intentioned.”