Taliban (11 page)

Perceptions matter in Afghanistan; and the Taliban at least established in the minds of the people the principle that the opium trade is morally wrong according to Islam. Drug money today corrupts the Karzai government as never before, and threatens to ruin the West’s mission to stabilize the country. In the future, poppy-growing looks just as likely to be suppressed by fatwa as by Western-funded ‘alternative livelihood schemes’. Afghans used to argue that heroin was exclusively a Western vice, and therefore a problem for the West to solve alone; selling heroin to infidels was sometimes seen almost as an act of war. Not any more. A 2007 survey for the UN identified nearly 50,000 heroin users in the country, and an additional 150,000 who use opium: a new and persuasive reason for the Afghans to address the poppy issue for themselves.

It is fascinating to speculate how Taliban Afghanistan might have developed had fate and al-Qaida not intervened. Given more money, and perhaps even the support rather than the enmity of the international community, what might the regime not have
achieved? However incredible it now seems, there was a time when even the United States saw the positive in the Taliban.

‘They control more than two-thirds of the country, they are Afghan, they are indigenous, and they have demonstrated staying power,’ the US Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphael told a closed-door UN session in New York in November 1996. ‘The real source of their success has been the willingness of many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with several social restrictions. It is not in the interest of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.’

The US were even ready to do business with the regime – always the ultimate seal of American approval – via the giant American oil firm Unocal. Zaeef himself oversaw a contract competition between them and another oil firm, Argentina’s Bridas, involving the construction of an 890-mile,
2-billion pipeline that would carry natural gas from newly discovered fields in Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the lucrative markets of Pakistan and beyond.

Unocal’s engagement with the Taliban was no secret. To this day, many Afghans believe that the CIA colluded with the ISI in the creation of the Taliban, and even that Unocal secretly provided weapons for Mullah Omar’s assault on Kabul, purely in pursuit of American energy interests – although there is no evidence for this. Washington’s support for Unocal was, in fact, overt. In 1996, Unocal opened an office in central Kandahar, along with a
900,000, 56-acre training camp for the local workers who would build and operate the pipeline; similar camps were established in Herat and Mazar. They were assisted in this by the Rand Corporation’s Zalmay Khalilzad, an Americanized Pashtun from
Mazar who later became the most senior Muslim in George Bush’s administration and, from 2003 to 2005, the US ambassador to Afghanistan. Unocal also hired Thomas Gouttiere, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan in the 1960s who had gone on to found an influential Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska.

In December 1997, and with the full approval of Washington, a delegation of Taliban officials travelled to Unocal’s headquarters at Sugar Land, Texas, where they stayed in the home of one of the company’s vice-presidents, Marty Miller. This visit represented the high-water mark of US–Taliban relations. Miller treated them royally. They were taken to the zoo and the Nasa Space Center, and went on a shopping expedition to the Super Target discount store. They reportedly played with a Frisbee in Miller’s garden and, because it was Christmas time, asked searching questions about the meaning of the star on the top of the Miller family tree.

The delegation was led by Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, the acting Foreign Minister. In 2010 Gouttiere, who helped arrange the visit, remembered Ghaus as a ‘relatively reasonable guy’ who ‘felt the government under the Taliban should be like any other gov-ernment, with a responsibility towards the rest of the world’. There were many Taliban who thought like Ghaus in Kabul: the acceptable, outward-looking face of the movement. The Sugar Land meetings proved that there was common ground between the Taliban and America, and that dialogue between the two sides had once been possible.

‘It is always better to talk than to fight,’ Gouttiere said.

The pipeline deal failed, though. Many forces were militating against its success. The first of these was that the project was dependent on the Taliban establishing peace in the north – and this
they were still struggling to do. The Taliban had taken over the southern two-thirds of the country with relatively little bloodshed, but as they moved northwards into the traditionally non-Pashtun areas, resistance increased and their progress was dramatically slowed. In the spring of 1997 I hitched a ride on an army helicopter to the Northern Alliance’s western front. The hold was filled with teetering crates of Iranian-made mousetrap mines, small, cheap, plastic contraptions powerful enough to take a man’s leg off below the knee.

The mines were destined for Ismail Khan, a Tajik mujahideen leader and the former governor of Herat, who had taken to the hills with his followers, vowing to recapture the fief from which he had been ousted by the Taliban. I met Khan, an impressive guerrilla figure in his snowy-white shalwar qamiz and a beard to match, in his field headquarters near the Murghab river in Badghis province close to the border with Turkmenistan. If the Taliban tried to build a pipeline, he told me fiercely, he wouldn’t hesitate to blow it up. Khan was later betrayed and captured by the Taliban, who transported him to Kandahar, where he was said to have been kept buried up to his neck in a pit. (He escaped in 1999, and later regained the governorship of Herat and joined the Karzai government; today he is the Minister of Energy.)

It was allegations of brutality such as this, almost all of them associated with the war against the non-Pashtun northerners, which today raise the gravest doubts about what might happen if the Taliban were allowed to return to power. The war became more vicious as it went on, and as it did so the tenor of the revolution began to change. What started out as a movement for national peace and security looked increasingly like one more militia bent on establishing ethnic hegemony. The Taliban were a Pashtun
movement, and for all the overlay of Sharia idealism, killing and vindictiveness were a historical characteristic, a part of the Pashtun psyche.

‘When the Pashtun is a child his mother tells him: “The coward dies but his shrieks live long after,” and so he learns not to shriek,’ the poet Ghani Khan wrote.
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‘He is shown dozens of things dearer than life so that he will not mind about dying or killing. He is for-bidden colourful clothes or exotic music, for they weaken the arm and soften the eye. He is taught to look at the hawk and forget the nightingale.’

A string of accusations that Taliban soldiers committed serious human rights abuses have never been satisfactorily answered. The worst of these concern the Hazaras, the people with the longest history of persecution by the indigenous Pashtuns. As Shi’as rather than Sunnis they were always marked out for discrimination, and it seems certain that some Taliban now took their supposed apostasy as a reason for killing them. A massacre in Yakaolang district in January 2001 went on for four days. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the Taliban had detained about three hundred civilian men, including staff from local humanitarian organizations, before herding them to assembly points around the district where they were shot by firing squad in full public view.

The most serious flashpoint was Mazar, the stronghold city of the ethnic Uzbek leader Rashid Dostum. Being so close to the old Soviet border, Mazar had escaped the worst of the disastrous physical and psychological effects of the Jihad. Its ethnically mixed population – which included a large number of Hazaras – had known little sectarian strife, and its culture and values were wholly different from those of the south. I spent much of April 1997 on the Northern Alliance front lines, and it seemed inconceivable to me
that the Taliban would be able to fight or bribe their way to power here. The morale of Dostum’s troops looked too strong. By day they patrolled their lines on tanks, and even on horses specially trained not to flinch when an RPG was fired at the gallop over their heads. By night they sat around their camp-fires, exchanging insults over their field radios with the Taliban sentries posted a mile or two away.

I reckoned without Dostum’s ally, General Malik Pahlawan, who suspected his boss of murdering his brother, and wanted revenge. At the end of May, in a deal secretly brokered by Pakistan, Malik changed sides by betraying Ismail Khan to the Taliban. The Northern Alliance’s western flank abruptly collapsed, some 2,500 Taliban fighters poured through the breach, and Dostum fled. The last city in the country to withstand the Taliban’s advance was now in their hands. Various regime leaders flew in to declare victory. So did the Pakistani Foreign Minister, who on 25 May called a press conference to announce his country’s first formal recognition of the Taliban government. Saudi Arabia and the UAE immediately followed suit.

The celebrations were premature. Much to the embarrassment of the Pakistanis and Arabs, the Taliban occupation of Mazar lasted just one week. The invaders apparently forgot how far they were from their southern home, and the degree to which their previous territorial gains had depended on public consent. Soon after they arrived, a Taliban mullah called a public meeting to announce the familiar terms of the new regime: women to be banished to their homes, mosques to be taken over, all schools to be shut down, along with Balkh University – the last one functioning in the country, with a student body that included 1,800 emancipated young women. There was no concession in any of this to the city’s special
status as the most liberal in the country. The mullahs even wanted to ban partridge-fighting, a particularly popular sport in the north. There were angry murmurs of protest as the audience dispersed. Later, when squads of Taliban spread out into the suburbs to collect weapons, the Hazaras refused to be disarmed. A firefight began that quickly spread to every neighbourhood. Some six hundred Taliban, many of them fresh recruits from the madrasahs of Pakistan and wholly untrained in urban warfare, were killed.

When Mazar fell for the second time in September 1998, it was in the Hazara neighbourhoods where the Taliban allegedly took their worst revenge. Mullah Niazi, a man implicated in the killing of President Najibullah, and who led the new attack on Mazar and subsequently became the city’s governor, declared: ‘Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shi’a. They are kafir [infidels]. The Hazaras killed our force here, and now we have to kill Hazaras . . . If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses, and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan . . . wherever you go we will catch you. If you go up, we will pull you down by your feet; if you hide below, we will pull you up by your hair.’

The Taliban also entered the Iranian consulate in Mazar where, to howls of international protest, they murdered eleven diplomats. Tehran responded by massing an army of 200,000 on its eastern border; Ayatollah Khomenei warned of a ‘huge war’ that could engulf the entire region.
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The 1998 massacre is often held up as the worst of several examples of Taliban atrocities during the struggle to subdue the north. According to a United Nations estimate at the time, some 5,000–6,000 Hazaras were put to death. And yet the number of Hazaras killed is still hotly disputed. Like so many incidents during those violent times, the killings were never formally
investigated. The headline figure of 6,000 dead was first released to the world by the United Nations in Islamabad, who based it on about half a dozen eye-witness statements taken from refugees who had fled the city for Pakistan. But these had reported seeing handfuls of dead, not thousands; and when Western journalists attempted to verify the UN figure on the ground in Mazar, they found they could not.

‘Everyone always exaggerates everything in Afghanistan, and the truth tends to get lost in all the shouting,’ one of these reporters told me. ‘The Hazaras all said things like, “I didn’t see it myself, but if you speak to so-and-so in the street around the corner, they saw hundreds of people being shot: they’ll tell you.” But when it came down to it there was very little evidence. In my experience, the true figures are usually about a tenth of what gets reported.’