The 9/11 Wars (4 page)

BAMIYAN

The way into Bamiyan for the Taliban had been opened when a local commander had swapped sides in the classic Afghan fashion to allow his erstwhile enemies across the northern passes into the valley. Desultory fighting had continued for some months, however, and finally a specially constituted Taliban ‘taskforce’ was dispatched in January 2001 with the aim of subduing the central highlands and the Hazaras once and for all. Its young commander was Mullah Dadaullah Akhund, who had already acquired a reputation for brutality, atrocity and violence.
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Charged with establishing full Taliban control in Bamiyan, Dadaullah set to work with terrible efficiency. In two days alone, his troops, reinforced by international militants and hundreds of teenagers from religious schools in Pakistan, used bulldozers, explosives and their bare hands to destroy villages, schools, mosques, clinics and orchards, effectively replicating what the Soviets had done to much of the Afghan countryside in the 1980s. Around two-thirds of the local population fled. The family of Ali Shah, the young shepherd, was among them.
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With Bamiyan now securely in Taliban hands, the question of the future of the Buddhas was raised. A meeting of senior ministers was convened to decide their fate.
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It was not the first time that demolishing the great Buddhas of Bamiyan had been envisaged. The ‘destruction of icons’ in Afghanistan had been discussed for many decades in the conservative Islamic circles from which the Taliban drew their religious inspiration and had always provoked fierce debate. Early on the Taliban had seemed to value the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, allowing themselves to be convinced that they should protect the Buddhas and other remnants of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic past just as Egypt had worked to preserve the pyramids, and when Dadaullah’s request reached the Taliban ministers in Kabul many argued that the Buddhas should be left as they were as ‘cultural monuments’.
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But such voices had powerful opponents.
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There had long been bitter arguments between moderates and conservatives within the Taliban over a variety of issues: tactics of ethnic cleansing, the education of girls, engagement with the international community, the ban on opium that had been successfully implemented in 2000.
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This time the hardliners outmanoeuvred their opponents by the simple expedient of making sure the question of the Buddhas was referred to their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

In the spring of 2001 Mullah Omar was forty-two years old. Tall, dark-skinned, reclusive, of limited literacy, relatively inarticulate, he had recently swapped the cheap mass-produced Pakistani-made
shalwar kameez
he had worn previously for a higher-quality local version with traditional embroidery. His eye-patch had been replaced by a foreign-made glass eye.
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Yet these small concessions to comfort barely countered the overall impression of asceticism. Omar rarely appeared in public and gave few interviews but did not need to be seen or heard to keep command. The authority of the Taliban leader depended instead on his reputation for fierce probity, his war record from the days the Soviet occupation and his subsequent success at leading the movement to control much of his country.
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Whether receiving visitors sitting on a cheap prayer rug in the mud mosque of his village home or in the run-down residence of the governor in Kandahar, Omar, despite his modest appearance, remained unpredictable and independent-minded. The self-styled
amir-ul momineen
, leader of the faithful, was a charismatic and instinctive leader with a natural talent for spectacular symbolic gestures such as publicly wrapping himself in the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, a relic kept for more than 200 years in Kandahar and rarely shown in public.
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Even after several years in power, as the Taliban more generally had begun to lose the support of many of their key constituencies in the east and south of the country, Mullah Omar himself retained significant personal authority.
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Presented with the demand from Mullah Dadaullah for permission to destroy the Buddhas, Omar requested a judgement from the Afghan Supreme Court, which comprised senior religious scholars, or
ulema
. Courts were perhaps the only functioning institution in Afghanistan. They applied, with relative honesty, efficiency and speed, a rigorous and literalist interpretation of the Shariat, the body of law based on the Koran, the sayings and deeds of the prophets and centuries of interpretation, exegesis and precedent. The clerics of the Supreme Court, all extreme conservatives and all appointed by Omar, unsurprisingly ruled that the destruction of the Buddhas was not only in accordance with the teachings of Islam but also strongly recommended. On February 24 Omar personally radioed Dadaullah in Bamiyan with the news and personally gave his instructions for the statues to be levelled.
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Many different strands – from the cosmic to the brutally practical, from the parochial to the international – determined the decision. On one level, the destruction of the Buddhas was a carefully weighed and calculated political act which to many of Mullah Omar’s followers at the time seemed a logical response to the strategic and tactical challenges facing them. From this perspective, it was fanatical, perhaps, but far from irrational.
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Omar had many very mundane reasons to destroy the Buddhas. The first was rooted in the internal dynamics of the Taliban. In the months before the demolition, Omar had increasingly found himself under pressure from a faction of committed extremists among the senior ranks and the younger generation of extremely violent new leaders rising through middle ranks best represented by Mullah Dadaullah. Destroying the Buddhas was thus a useful way for Omar to marginalize any moderate challengers while rallying the hardliners behind him. Equally, with a new fighting season about to start and complete victory still distant even after nearly seven years of gruelling warfare, the destruction of the Buddhas would energize and radicalize a movement which was losing momentum in the face of growing discontent with their rule, even among constituencies which had previously supported them.
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Also, the demolition of the Buddhas was an act of communication in a predominantly illiterate land used to such public spectacles of violence. Successive rulers in Afghanistan recognized the importance of such gestures. The Mughals in the sixteenth century had built ‘pyramids of skulls’ of their enemies and made sure that potential opponents were kept well informed of the extreme violence they risked if they resisted. Abdur Rahman, known as the Iron Emir and widely credited with building the basis of Afghanistan as a nation state in the late nineteenth century, had publicized rather than hidden the excesses associated with his repeated campaigns of ethnic cleansing.
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The Taliban had always understood and exploited the symbolic and the ritual. Their public hanging of a corrupt, child-abusing warlord-cum-bandit in 1994 near Kandahar and subsequent dismantling of the ‘chains’, the roadblocks where armed groups extorted money and abused local traders and travellers, had been the foundational acts of the movement. With their delivery of justice haphazard, the Taliban relied on the visibility and violence of punishment rather than its inevitability to discourage crime. To have the desired deterrent effect, that violence had to be seen or, as very few Afghans had access to televisions, at least imagined.

Then there was a more mystic element. The destruction of the Buddhas was part of a continued violent campaign prosecuted by the Taliban to extirpate all that they saw as counter to their vision of the authentically ‘Afghan’ Afghanistan, whether that involved pre-Islamic artefacts, the presence of Shia Muslims such as the population in Bamiyan or on the Shomali plains, heresy and ‘modern’ or Western influences. The destruction of the Buddhas was also an act by which they would be doing God’s work. The order to demolish, Mullah Omar told some interlocutors, had come to him in a dream.
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‘If on Judgement Day I stand before Allah, I’ll see those two statues floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why, when I had the power, I did not destroy them,’ he told one visitor.
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Finally, there was the influence of the various international extremists who were based in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. The most prominent among them was the al-Qaeda group led by Osama bin Laden, who had arrived in Afghanistan in 1996 after being forced out of Sudan and who had, as the years had passed, become increasingly close to Omar.

Bin Laden’s relationship with Omar and other senior Taliban has been the subject of much debate. Often described as close, in fact it appears to have been characterized more by ambivalence and tension than complicity.
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The Taliban were constantly torn. On the one hand they admired the Saudi-born extremist’s apparent grasp of global politics, respected his piety and needed the money he could bring them through his contacts in the Gulf as well as the fighters he could supply. But they nonetheless remained irritated by the lack of respect this foreigner frequently showed them, their people and, despite his occasional praise, their country. Continually concerned about the damage that his ambitions might do to their own campaigns, senior Taliban figures repeatedly described bin Laden, whose arrival in Afghanistan had been the result of an invitation extended by a group of warlords who had been their opponents, as ‘a problem inherited from the days of the civil war’.
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The tensions were rooted too in the mutual wariness between the Afghans and the largely Arab international militants of al-Qaeda – predominantly Egyptian, Yemeni, Saudi or Algerian – and exacerbated by profound differences of outlook, worldview, religious practice and strategy.
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Bin Laden’s enemy was different from that of the Taliban, who were focused on conquering the pockets of resistance to their rule in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his associate, the veteran Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri, saw their primary targets as the regimes of the Middle East, particularly those ruling in their native lands, or, as they announced in a series of public statements, America. Few among the Taliban knew or cared much about the USA or were particularly preoccupied by the political situation in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
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A second difference was theological. The Taliban had been raised in the hierarchical Deobandi school of conservative Islam, a discrete south-west Asian strand of Islamic thinking and practices very different in crucial aspects from the Gulf-based schools of the international militants. One reason Omar had turned to the judges for a decision on the Bamiyan Buddhas was that, in the fiercely hierarchical tradition of Deobandism, a mere mullah such as the Taliban leader was simply not qualified to pass judgement on such a question. He and other senior Taliban figures were thus shocked and angered to see bin Laden giving interviews on television, which was banned in Afghanistan, and issuing
fatawa
, scholastic opinions which they believed should only be given by senior religious scholars, not autodidacts who had trained as civil engineers.
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Nonetheless the international extremists did have an influence. From late 1998 onwards, there is much evidence of a more internationalized outlook among the Taliban leadership. For the first time, their propaganda began to refer to Zionist spies and American Crusaders, phrases borrowed directly from men like bin Laden. If Mullah Omar had his own reasons, cosmic and mundane, for assenting to Dadaullah’s request to destroy the Buddhas he was at the very least encouraged by the foreign extremists who increasingly determined his perception of the world beyond the borders of his homeland.

THE WORLD TO THE RESCUE

The news of Omar’s decision broke rapidly, and, one after another, a whole range of international actors set out to dissuade the Taliban. The first to fail were the Americans. Though to start with Washington welcomed the Taliban as a potential stabilizing force, that initial positive sentiment towards the movement was rapidly dissipated. First, there was increasing concern over human rights abuses. Then came the double bombing in 1998 of two US embassies in east Africa by al-Qaeda teams sent from Afghanistan and the subsequent refusal of the Taliban to withdraw their protection of bin Laden. The attack and the shelter offered to the perpetrators had provoked unilateral American sanctions in 1999 and a series of acrimonious exchanges through 2000. The affable Taliban ambassador in Islamabad, the capital of neighbouring Pakistan, continued to be received at the embassy – ‘No one recognizes us but everyone recognizes me,’ he explained – but apart from frequent demands made by State Department officials that bin Laden be handed over and occasional conversations it was a dialogue of the deaf.
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With no leverage on the Taliban the Americans were forced to rely on the Pakistanis. Islamabad sent both formal and informal deputations to Kandahar and Kabul. Yet, though diplomatic as well as military assistance continued, Pakistan’s leverage over the Taliban was less than was often thought, particularly following al-Qaeda’s bombing of the embassies in east Africa and the messy battles around Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998 and 1999, during which widespread atrocities by both sides were widely reported.
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A series of incidents – such as the beating of the Pakistani youth football team, who had made the mistake of wearing shorts to play in Kandahar, by the Taliban’s religious police – had reinforced the impression that Islamabad was losing any grip it had once had on the movement.