The 9/11 Wars (121 page)

  67
.
Author interviews with British and American anti-narcotics officials, military intelligence, Kabul, Kandahar, Lashkar Gah, January 2007, August 2008.

  68
.
Author interviews with British officials, Kabul 2007, 2008. Author interview with Christine Orguz, country director Afghanistan, UNODC, Kabul, 2008. Classified/NoForn RC South briefing on Narcotic Trafficking, PowerPoint presentation and documents, May 2005. See also Testimony of Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.) before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives, February 15, 2007.

  69
.
Author interviews with British government counter-narcotics officials, London, 2008.

  70
.
The British estimates were based on those of the United Nations. See UNODC,
Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007,
September 2007, p. 7.

  71
.
Author interview with Orguz. See also UNODC (Doris Buddenberg and William Byrd),
Afghanistan’s Drug Industry, Structure, Functioning Dynamics and Implications for Counter-Narcotics Policy
, 2006.

  72
.
Anthony Loyd, ‘Corruption, bribes and trafficking: a cancer that is engulfing Afghanistan’,
The Times
, November 24, 2007. See also Elizabeth Rubin, ‘In the land of the Taliban’,
New York Times
, October 22, 2006.

  73
.
‘The policy of being nice to farmers was a complete failure. The British army position was completely unacceptable. We never had a yelling match and did have some frank discussions but we always went for dinner afterwards,’ said Thomas Schweich, former State Department narcotics official, 2006–7, author telephone interview, September 2008. One major argument was over the use of chemical spraying. Schweich and the American ambassador in Kabul, William Wood, were both fierce proponents of the technique. The Afghans and the Europeans were very much opposed. ‘It would have handed the Taliban a huge PR victory and lost the consent of the Afghan people. There were practical issues with low-flying planes – they would have got shot down – and even if it works one year the next year they’ll just mix their crops,’ said a senior British Foreign Office specialist, author telephone interview, September 2008.

  74
.
Author interview, Helmand, July 2006.

  75
.
Graeme Smith, ‘Talking to the Taliban’,
Globe and Mail
, March 2008.

  76
.
Author email exchange with Brigadier Andrew McKay, January 2008.

  77
.
Author interview with Chris Alexander, UNAMA, January 2007.

  78
.
Figures from an ISAF briefing, Kabul 2009.

  79
.
Brigadier Andrew McKay told his troops in October 2007: ‘I do not want to see a single PowerPoint slide presented to a single visitor that articulates enemy Killed In Action. We may analyse the value of attrition but not as a sign of success.’ ‘COIN in Helmand, Task Force Operational Design’, restricted ISAF brief, October 30, 2007, author collection.

  80
.
In all 103 UK soldiers died in Afghanistan between June 30, 2006 and July 1, 2008. Helmand Province accounted for 60 per cent of the casualties in the country for that time period. There had been 370 coalition fatalities in Afghanistan (hostile and non-hostile) from January 2002 to May 2006.
icasualties.org
.

  81
.
Over the previous twelve months civilian casualties had risen between 40 and 56 per cent, according to the United Nations. ‘Top Afghan policewoman shot dead’, BBC News Online, September 28, 2008. Attacks on Afghan government employees in 2008 were 124 per cent higher than in 2007.

  82
.
Stuck on a dusty wasteland without any resources on the outskirts of the city, the refugees’ accounts of life in places like Musa Qala and Kajaki were among the most upsetting the author had heard in well over a decade of visiting the country. Millions had had similar experiences. Jason Burke, ‘Destitute and confused: bleak future for Afghan refugees caught in the crossfire’,
Guardian
, October 3, 2008.

  83
.
70,000, according to Mohammed Nader Farhad of the UNHCR. Author interview, Kabul, July 2008.

  84
.
Author interview, Kabul, July 2008.

  85
.
Author interview, Maiwand, July 2006.

  86
.
Rahman had no time for Osama bin Laden either. ‘He too is a foreigner. He is not an Afghan. We Afghans are strong. We do not need Osama.’

  87
.
Author interviews with General David Richards, ISAF commander, senior ISAF officials, Kabul, January 2007. Officially NATO claimed that 512 insurgents had been killed. Unofficially, senior officers said they thought the number of casualties inflicted was at least 1,000, possibly more.

  88
.
The question of the influence of Iraq on the tactics of the Taliban is an interesting one. There was evidence of at least some cooperation between insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Militants in Iraq were reported to have provided information and tips over the internet. Members of the Taliban, Hekmatyar’s group and others may even have made their way to Anbar, Mosul and elsewhere to experience the fighting in Iraq first hand, at least until the turning of the Sunni tribes made such ventures perilous. Analysts believed that the more effective use of IEDs, suicide bombs and other tactics by the Taliban was at the very least influenced by what was happening in Iraq if not actually taught by Iraqi insurgents arriving in Afghanistan as the failure of the al-Qaeda project in ‘the land of the two rivers’ became apparent. By 2008, some Taliban units – though very few – did include Arab or other fighters with Iraqi or other experience. There were also reports that the Taliban had acquired new commercial communications gear and field equipment from Iraqi groups as well as tips on camouflage and the use of snipers. The posting of execution videos on the internet by a handful of the most extreme Taliban commanders was also clearly influenced by what had been happening in Iraq. Author interview with Defence Minister Abdur Rahim Wardak, Kabul, January 2007. Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 292. Testimony of Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.) before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives. Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, ‘Afghanistan on the brink: Where do we go from here?’ February 15, 2007. ‘Taliban gets help, inspiration from Iraq’,
Newsweek
, September 26, 2005. Senior militants certainly travelled from Afghanistan to Iraq. One was Omar al-Farooq, who escaped from the prison at Bagram airbase and made his way to Basra, where he was eventually killed.

  89
.
One was Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, the man who had met Bob Grenier, the CIA Islamabad station chief, in the Serena hotel in Quetta a week or so before the bombing started in 2001. Dadaullah was killed in a British special forces raid in May 2007, probably after his location was given away by rivals within insurgent ranks worried about his growing influence, personal following and extremism. Jason Burke, ‘Hunt for “traitors” splits Taliban’,
Observer
, May 27, 2007.

  90
.
The estimate is Michael Semple’s, the former deputy to the EU special representative to Afghanistan and one of the most knowledgeable experts on the country. Semple spent more time than perhaps any other Westerner meeting Taliban commanders in Helmand. Author telephone interview, August 2009.

  91
.
One was the British journalist James Fergusson, in 2006. See James Fergusson,
A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan
, Transworld, 2008. The other was Nir Rosen, working for
Rolling Stone
, in Ghazni in August 2008.

  92
.
Even in 2006, a commander known as Mullah Sabir had told one reporter: ‘We have about 15,000 men. Forty per cent are not really Taliban, have not graduated from any religious school; they are youngsters who join our ranks in sympathy [with our cause].’ Interview with Mullah Sabir, quoted in ‘The new Taliban codex’,
Signandsight
, 28 November 2006, quoted in Anne Stenersen, ‘The Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan – Organization, Leadership and Worldview’, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), February 5, 2010, p. 30.

  93
.
In southern Wardak, a well-known hardliner was replaced as governor by a more moderate figure, to the relief of many locals. Author interview with Roshana Wardak, MP, Kabul, 2008.

  94
.
Copy of 2006 ‘Laheya’, author collection.

  95
.
Author interview with Antonio Giustozzi, London, August 2009.

  96
.
This research was undertaken in a fairly unscientific fashion by the author and two researchers in Afghanistan in August 2008 and in March 2009.

  97
.
Jeremy Page, ‘Children and MPs killed in worst Afghan suicide bomb’,
The Times
, November 7, 2007. Author interview with Taliban spokesman ‘Zabibullah Mujahed’, by email. November 2007.

  98
.
See International Crisis Group,
Taliban Propaganda: Winning the War of Words?
, July 24, 2008.

  99
.
In May 2006 it had been attacked by a mob rioting following a traffic accident involving an American convoy.

100
.
Including the author.

101
.
According to a cable obtained by WikiLeaks and subsequently made available online, within weeks of the attack, British diplomats were talking to American counterparts of ‘a growing body of [intelligence] reporting suggesting … that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) was possibly involved in the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul – though likely without the knowledge of the civil elements of the GOP [Government of Pakistan]’. Cable, id: 162707, date: July 18 2008, source: Embassy London, origin: 08LONDON1887.

102
.
See David Sanger,
The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,
Crown, 2009, p. 250. A United Nations study in 2007 found that more than 70 per cent of suicide bombers in Afghanistan came from across the border. UNAMA (C. Christine Fair),
Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan, 2001–2007,
2007.

103
.
The Afghan government was keen to underline the role that they said Pakistan – or at least some Pakistanis – played in the ongoing violence in Afghanistan. Foreign journalists who struggled through the bureaucracy and could call in a few favours could, at least in 2008, get interviews with detainees, in the company of their jailers.

104
.
Abit had probably been beaten by Afghan interrogators in prison and almost certainly on his arrest. He was equally likely to have edited his story, minimizing his own responsibility and exaggerating his current repentance. But his account was nonetheless largely credible, matching the picture revealed by studies by the United Nations. A second interview with a would-be suicide bomber in Kabul – that of a destitute, illiterate and clearly mentally unstable shepherd captured near Khost with a suicide bomb strapped to his body – showed how recruiters for extremist networks often target the most marginal elements in society and particularly those who have slipped out of traditional social networks of support and authority. Author interviews, Kabul, August 2008.

CHAPTER 13: PAKISTAN

    1
.
The population of Pakistan in 2010 was 177 million, according to the CIA Factbook.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/pk.html
. For the Pew Research Center, it was 174 million. See Pew Research Center,
Mapping the Global Muslim Population
. The rate of population increase in Pakistan is dropping. It was 3 per cent in 1990, 2.5 per cent in 2000 and 2.2 per cent in 2008, according to Unicef. The USA, with 400 million, Indonesia, with 270 million, and India, with 1.1 billion, cannot be considered primary theatres of conflict like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan or countries such as Saudi Arabia. Secondary theatres would also include European countries and many other Middle Eastern or Maghreb states.