Taliban (29 page)

‘They were all Khalqi ex-communists,’ he recalled, referring to the revolutionary Marxist faction of the 1970s, ‘big men with fat moustaches. They accused me of being ISI, then of being a British spy. They even accused David Chater of being a British spy.’

Azimi knew he had a constitutional right not to answer these allegations – or thought he did. At one point one of his exasperated interrogators produced the infamous ‘Red Book’ of rules that had governed KHAD activities in communist times, and pointed to an
article stipulating that acts of enemy propaganda were punishable by death.

‘I said, but that’s an old communist law! Didn’t we fight a jihad together to get rid of those people? And this guy wagged a finger at me and said: “That just shows you how little you know. The Red Book might be old but it has never been replaced, and until it is, it remains the law in this country.” ’

Azimi was eventually released following strenuous protests from al-Jazeera. Karzai, who was on a state visit to Moscow at the time, at first believed the NDS and even issued a statement that Azimi was guilty of ‘promoting terrorism’. Four days later, however, four German ISAF soldiers were ambushed and killed in Kunduz, proving the truth of Azimi’s story.

‘Karzai is a friend now,’ he said. ‘He asks me for advice; I’ve had three private meetings with him. I think he’s a nice guy, but he’s kept in the dark by the people around him. It’s a mafia government. His friendship protects me, but I still worry about getting arrested again.’

One of the most troubling aspects of the NDS’s excesses was the West’s apparent indifference to them. Indeed, Amrullah Saleh, the NDS chief, enjoyed the respect of Western diplomats who saw him as an effective operator in the difficult and dangerous intelligence war against the Taliban. He had cooperated with American officialdom since at least 1997, when he was sent by Massoud to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to act as a liaison officer to the CIA. Although the diplomats privately acknowledged that his methods would be unacceptable in the West, they tended to excuse him on the grounds that the Afghan way of doing things was ‘different’; and that anyway, they had no business telling him how to do his job. Saleh himself remarked smoothly that: ‘If you want to work in the garden, you sometimes have to get your hands dirty.’

Out on the front lines in the south, ISAF commanders were often equally ready to turn a blind eye. The NDS men who operated alongside the troops, including British ones, were far more effective and trustworthy than their other local allies, the ANA and the Afghan National Police. Major Dan Rex, who commanded a detachment of Gurkhas at the platoon house in Now Zad in Helmand in 2006, recalled an incident when a Taliban company commander was captured and brought in for questioning by the resident NDS chief, whom the Gurkhas nicknamed ‘Hazmat’. His idea of interrogation was to fire an ‘empty-ish’ pistol at the prisoner’s head; the Gurkhas hurriedly dispatched their captive to Lashkar Gah for ‘more orthodox’ questioning.

Whether the prisoner was really treated any better there, however, was a moot point. In April 2010 a human-rights activist, Maya Evans, launched a High Court action in London alleging that as many as 410 Taliban suspects handed over to the NDS by British troops between 2006 and 2007 had been tortured. There were claims of beatings, electric shocks, sexual abuse, stress positions and sleep deprivation – part of a ‘dreadful and continuing story’ of abuse, according to Evans.
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Michael Fordham QC suggested that the MoD and the Foreign Office were seeking to protect their detainee-transfer policy by adopting an approach of ‘seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil’. Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary, maintained that ‘safeguards are in place to prevent mistreatment’, yet even the Ministry of Defence admitted that the UK had no jurisdiction to investigate allegations made against the NDS.
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Similar allegations had been levelled in Canada where a diplomat, Richard Colvin, told a parliamentary inquiry: ‘The NDS tortures people. That’s what they do. So if we don’t want detainees tortured we shouldn’t give them to the NDS.’
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Western support for Panjshiri Tajiks like Amrullah Saleh had its roots in the Jihad. Of all the mujahideen commanders of the 1980s, Ahmed Shah Massoud was easily the most Western-leaning. The politics of the party he belonged to, Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i-Islami, were at the liberal end of the mujahideen spectrum. He spoke a little French thanks to an early education at the progressive Lycée Esteqlal in Kabul, and understood the importance of a strong public image in the West. The journalists who flocked to the Panjshir to report on his genuinely brilliant guerrilla campaign against the Soviets were always made welcome. The Lion of the Panjshir, as he was soon known, seemed the romantic epitome of the charismatic rebel leader. In his famous Chitrali cap, and with looks a little like Bob Marley’s, he became a kind of Western poster boy in the style of Che Guevara. In the mid-1990s he was the only ex-mujahideen leader to succeed in resisting the Taliban, which made him the natural choice of ally for the Americans.

When Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaida two days before 9/11, his former lionization turned into a full-blown cult which his heirs in Jamiat-i-Islami were quick to exploit. Post-Taliban Kabul was filled with posters and photographs of the
Amir Sahib-i Shahid
– ‘Our Martyred Commander’ – with slogans to match, often in questionable English: ‘The Charismatic Martyre: Your way move forward!!!’ In 2002, Karzai designated Massoud an official ‘National Hero’, while the date of his death, 9 September, became a national holiday known as ‘Massoud Day’. And the West went along with this hero-worship. With funding from the French, plans had been drawn up for a large statue of Massoud in the middle of a major roundabout in central Kabul. He was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Not everyone was pleased about this, particularly in Kabul. Massoud’s forces were blamed as much as any other faction for the slaughter of civilians during the battle for the capital in the 1990s. For instance, Jamiat fighters were involved in the infamous attack on the Hazara suburb of Afshar in 1993, an operation notorious for the systematic rape and summary executions that took place. Bodies were mutilated and left piled in the street, and decapitated heads were mounted in windows.

‘The West has this really strange thing about Massoud,’ one experienced Western observer told me. ‘He’s still seen in one dimension only, as this great anti-Soviet liberator of Afghanistan.’

But history, as he remarked, was constantly being rewritten in Afghanistan, and in 2010 there was little sign that Massoud’s reputation or influence were diminishing.

The high priest of the cult was his former aide, Dr Abdullah, the Secretary General of the Massoud Foundation: an ‘independent, non-aligned, non-political’ organization, according to its website, although there was nothing apolitical about Abdullah himself. In 2009 he emerged as Karzai’s main challenger in the presidential election, and might conceivably have won if he had not pulled out of the second round of voting at the last minute.

He was known as Abdullah Abdullah, a name which by itself hinted at his long interaction with the West. Like many Afghans he didn’t actually have a second name; Western newspaper editors were reputedly so confused by this that they felt compelled to make one up for him.
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An ophthalmologist by training, his political career began when he was sent up to the Panjshir in 1985 by the Swedish Committee, a humanitarian organization concerned by the lack of medical care available to the mujahideen. He eventually became one of Massoud’s closest advisers; so close, indeed, that he
was still dogged by scurrilous rumours about the relationship. He was one of the few educated English-speakers around Massoud. On the latter’s death he was appointed spokesman for the Northern Alliance, and then – always just a short hop in Afghanistan – to Foreign Minister, under Karzai.

It was the weekend, so he was at home in the suburbs rather than in his office when I went to meet him, although the surrounding security measures were hardly less relaxed. A platoon of paramilitaries manned a barrier and chicanes of concrete at either end of his street. I was led through a high-walled courtyard set around neat rose-beds and a close-cropped lawn studded with crazy paving, and then into a reception room where I was told to wait. The room was more Hilton hotel than hujra: by some margin, the flashiest interior I had ever seen in Afghanistan. The furniture was repro eighteenth-century French in gilt and red. There were expensive carpets on the polished parquet floor, a large flat-screen television on the wall. Elegant wooden side-tables and a faux-antique writing desk were topped by small modernist knick-knacks and family photographs in silver frames. Abdullah had come a long way since the rebel hideout days, and he wanted everyone to know it.

Most revealingly of all, there was a floor-to-ceiling mural of Massoud sitting beneath a tree on a rock somewhere high in the Panjshir. In the background a sun-dappled Arcadia is glimpsed, a mountainside tumbling to a glinting river and a patchwork of tiny emerald fields. Massoud, one finger in the pages of a book he has just been reading, is gesticulating and smiling at five of his Chitrali-capped followers who sit cross-legged at his feet, gazing up at him like adoring disciples; and next to Massoud, on his right-hand side, is Abdullah. The future torch-bearer of the Panjshiri ideal looks nobly out of the painting with an expression of
ineffable sadness, as if afflicted with a premonition of the tragedy soon to befall his beloved mentor.

The man himself soon swept into the room. It was the third time I had met him, though he didn’t remember me. The first time was in 1998 when he was still in the Panjshir, sitting on a rock as he signed a document permitting me to travel further up the valley. In those days he was dressed rather as he was in the mural, in sandals and a simple shalwar qamiz. The second time, in Kabul in 2002, he had become the Foreign Minister and was wearing a pinstripe suit. He looked the part but seemed to be struggling in his new role, and didn’t like it one bit when I suggested that all the ‘Massoud worship’ going on in the capital was unlikely to play well with non-Tajiks, and the Pashtuns least of all.

‘It is
not
Massoud worship. It is not just Panjshiris who look up to him. His posters are not just in Kabul – I’ve seen them everywhere, even in Kandahar!’

Today Abdullah was wearing a rich brown cloak, a heavy gold necklace, and a black and white designer watch the size of a small alarm clock. His sartorial progress alone augured badly for reconciliation with the austere Taliban. He was like a character in a sequence of Hogarth’s satirical prints.

‘The Quetta leadership haven’t changed one bit,’ he said. ‘Some of the rank and file might be reconciled, but there is no possibility of compromise with the top. They are intimately linked with al-Qaida, there’s no doubt about it. And if you ignore the recent arrests in Pakistan, there is no pressure coming from there either.’

He had little sympathy for Mullah Zaeef’s suggestion that the Taliban wanted to ‘repair’ the Constitution rather than to destroy it. Although he conceded that power was over-centralized, and that this had been a mistake of Karzai’s, it was clear that he thought the
Constitution was fine as it was, a perfectly adequate vehicle for establishing what the Massoud Foundation called ‘an Afghan society garnished with moderate Islam’.

He also disagreed with the need to re-open the Bonn Agreement of 2001. The Taliban had not been invited to Bonn, and many Afghans thought the conference had done nothing but re-empower the old warlords. Pashtuns tended to complain that their interests had been particularly under-represented, a suggestion Abdullah flatly dismissed. ‘The Pashtuns
were
represented. The Supreme Court Chief Justice, the Attorney-General: all Pashtuns. The Taliban were not, but the Taliban do not speak for Pashtuns . . . Today we are losing the support of the people in the south, and thus the war, but that is not Bonn’s fault. After 2001 we missed an opportunity to isolate the Taliban leadership, but that was because Western attention was turned to Iraq.’

Just as in 2002, he was at pains to present himself as democracy’s most passionate advocate in Afghanistan – the antithesis of Karzai, he pointed out, but ‘just because Karzai isn’t a democrat doesn’t mean the people aren’t ready for democracy’.

Democracy nevertheless had been ‘the big loser’ in the stolen elections of 2009.

‘I knew there would be corruption, patronage, backroom deals, even before I became a candidate. I hoped an independent body would police the election, but the IEC [Independent Election Commission] was not independent.’

This, he explained, was why he had pulled out of the second round of voting: ‘There would have been more fraud, more lives lost, another
200 million wasted. I did it for the good of the country.’

This argument would not do. No one had complained more
loudly than Abdullah about Karzai’s outrageous ballot-rigging, yet according to Dimitra Ioannou, the EU deputy chief observer, some 300,000 of the votes for Abdullah were equally suspect. In the northern province of Balkh, people were allegedly forced to vote for him at gunpoint.
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I failed to pin him down on this, though. Our meeting, frustratingly, was more of a lecture than a conversation, and once started, Abdullah never seemed to stop talking. I had many other questions prepared – about Marshal Fahim, about the ethnic imbalance in the ANA, about the Panjshiris’ control of the NDS – but he brushed aside every interruption and returned again and again to his main theme: his role as the heroic defender of democracy.