The 9/11 Wars (5 page)

By 2000, many in Pakistan’s foreign ministry were expressing grave concerns about the diplomatic damage being done by their country’s support for their increasingly unpredictable and extreme allies.
³⁹
The Pakistani efforts to convince the Taliban to leave the Buddhas intact met with no success. Neither the interior minister nor retired senior Pakistani soldiers who had personally contributed to the movement’s early victories were able to influence their former students to change their mind.

Relations with the Saudi Arabians had also soured long before. Along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia had recognized the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan by 1997, seeing the movement as one of many vehicles for the propagation of the kingdom’s brand of rigorous Sunni Islam across the Islamic world that merited financial and diplomatic support. This early enthusiasm had quickly evaporated, however. Again it was the presence of bin Laden and other militants that most angered Riyadh. After a particularly ill-tempered exchange following the bombings of 1998, official support for the Taliban ceased, though of course private Saudi Arabian supporters of the movement and their project remained numerous.
⁴⁰
Unsurprisingly, Riyadh’s efforts to influence the Taliban when news of the decision to destroy the Buddhas broke met with no success either. Given the propensity of the Saudi religious establishment for iconoclasm within the kingdom, that such efforts were relatively feeble surprised few.

For a time, there was hope that where the Pakistanis and Saudis could not or would not succeed the United Nations might. The UN had been present in Afghanistan for many years, and the Taliban, recognizing that the humanitarian work done by the organization at the very least spared them the trouble and expense of trying to feed and house hundreds of thousands of urban and rural poor, had initially cooperated relatively well with senior international officials. But the United Nations’ values had often been difficult to reconcile with the Taliban’s vision of Afghanistan. The idea that the organization represented some kind of benign ‘international community’ had little currency in a country where, at least in living memory, almost everything from abroad, and particularly from beyond the Islamic world, represented a threat. Senior Taliban figures, unsurprisingly given the widespread view among them that the UN was a Trojan horse for moral corruption and an assault on ‘traditional’ Afghan and Islamic values, had always showed profound hostility to UN staff, and relations only deteriorated further as time passed.
⁴¹
There continued to be contacts between the special United Nations envoy, veteran Spanish diplomat Francesc Vendrell, and high-ranking Taliban moderates with a more worldly outlook, but none of Vendrell’s interlocutors had any real influence on Mullah Omar or on the direction the movement was taking. One of the last attempts to win a reprieve for the Buddhas saw an extraordinary meeting, organized by Vendrell, between Wakil Ahmed Muttawakel, the Taliban foreign minister, and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general. It took place in the five-star Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. Few encounters better encapsulate the gulf between the Taliban and the developed, Westernized world than this between the urbane New-York-based Ghanaian diplomat and the envoy from Kabul. The meeting was polite, indeed relatively convivial. But even as Muttawakel pledged on behalf of his government that no harm would befall the Buddhas, preparations for their destruction were underway.
⁴²

The final attempt to save the Buddhas came from within the mainstream conservative Muslim community, in the person of the senior Qatar-based Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This could perhaps have been expected to stand a greater chance of success. Known throughout much of the Islamic world for his extremely popular and influential television programme in which he drew on his deep religious knowledge to issue instant
fatawa
in answer to viewers’ queries about the correct Islamic response to topics as varied as oral sex and the plight of the Palestinians, al-Qaradawi travelled to Kandahar with a group of very senior conservative clerics intending to convince Mullah Omar to spare the Buddhas through a careful argument based on key Islamic texts, quotations and precedents. Classic diplomatic means involving bilateral relations and multilateral organizations had failed and this was an attempt founded in a long tradition in the Islamic world of debate and argument. However, not only were al-Qaradawi’s ideological roots very different from the neo-traditional revivalism of the Taliban’s religious culture but he was also seen as having ‘sold out’ to ‘apostate’ governments in the Arab world, not only by the international extremist clerics but also by their local Deobandi counterparts, to whom Omar was prone to listen for spiritual guidance. In many ways, al-Qaradawi’s world, that of the major Islamic universities, of televised religious advice with audiences of millions, of the core Arab Middle East, was as alien to the Taliban as that of Kofi Annan. From the start the visit went badly with the eminent cleric’s party ordered out of the cars bringing them from Kandahar airport and forced to pray in the sand by the side of the road by excited young Taliban fighters. Omar showed little interest in al-Qaradawi’s sophisticated, learned and utterly pragmatic argument that, though the Taliban were justified in their belief that the Buddhas should be destroyed, there was an equally strong argument that the act, though undoubtedly legitimate, should be postponed until a more favourable conjuncture of political circumstances. Al-Qaradawi and his delegation left empty-handed, vocally complaining about their hosts’ political immaturity.
⁴³

However, despite his apparent parochialism and mysticism, Omar sensed what effect the destruction of the Buddhas would have on the international community. Steps were taken to make sure that the audience overseas understood what was being said. His edict announcing the demolition was distributed to international journalists, the act itself was filmed by a cameraman, and its aftermath was later proudly shown to the international press.
⁴⁴
To underline the message, Taliban spokesmen briefed reporters, claiming that the rest of the world had no right to complain. ‘They give us nothing … Why should we listen to them?’ one senior Taliban official in Islamabad said. ‘They care more about old statues than Afghans starving.’

The destruction of the Buddhas started at dawn on March 1 and took at least ten days. The practical difficulties of demolishing such enormous objects, built on to a cliff face, had been grossly underestimated. Tank shells and rockets fired had little effect, simply sending showers of splinters into the air. The Taliban, who had originally thought they could destroy the statues in a few hours, were forced to resort to other means, eventually stacking shells and loose explosives found in the stocks held by the warlords they had defeated or co-opted in the valley around the base of the statues. This too failed, however. On the morning of the third day, Taliban fighters and coerced local men were lowered on ropes from the galleries around the sculptures and, dangling above the void, drilled holes into the now rock-hard ancient clay and straw mix into which they introduced explosives prised out of mines. This had more effect, and repeated blasts over the next twenty-four hours slowly reduced the two giant edifices to piles of yellow rubble. Footage showed huge explosions blasting dust out of the cavities housing the Buddhas high into the air as turbaned Taliban fighters cheered with shouts of ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great). Two great plumes of yellow dust and black smoke hung in the clear blue sky for many hours after the statues had ceased to exist.
⁴⁵

THE BAMIYAN BUDDHAS AND THE 9/11 WARS

The episode had given an early glimpse of a multitude of key strands that would mark the future course of the 9/11 Wars. First of all, there was the complexity of the environment, a thick matrix of overlaid and interwoven legacies of scores of conflicts over previous decades and indeed centuries, meshing the local, national and geopolitical with the tribal, ethnic and individual. It showed too the variety and division within entities often seen from the outside as relatively monolithic, whether that be the Taliban or even ‘Islam’. The episode had revealed at least five different tendencies within Muslim practice – the Taliban’s Deobandi neo-traditionalism, Gulf-style Wahhabism, the radically contemporary fusion of political Islam with ultra-conservatism of al-Qaeda, the internationalized orthodoxy of al-Qaradawi, the more moderate folksy traditions of the Hazara in Afghanistan – all competing for ideological and often physical space. All these elements, apart from the last, could be termed ‘Salafi’, in that they sought inspiration from the earliest generations, the
salaf
, of Islam and were part of a project to reproduce today the (imagined) society of the first Muslims on earth.
⁴⁶
But as the destruction of the Buddhas showed, their internal differences of practice and outlook were vast. The episode had demonstrated how Islam is no more a ‘religion of peace’ than any other faith but a repository of resources which can be creative and destructive, positive and negative, depending on how they are instrumentalized. The episode had also shown the uses of spectacular violence, something else that was to mark the course of the conflict to come. The Taliban’s iconoclasm was ‘shock and awe’ in a pure and raw form. It was a form of intimidation and of communication too, of ‘propaganda by deed’. It was effectively an act of terrorism, though directed at inanimate if valued objects, not living people. Then there was the agency of key actors. Mullah Omar had not acted because he was mad, in thrall to someone else or simply reacting to the West but had made independent decisions based on his own perception of his best interests in the situation in which he found himself. And the episode had also shown the deficiencies of the West in understanding, shaping and genuinely seeing what was happening elsewhere. The response to the destruction of the Buddhas also revealed something else that would be frequently apparent over the coming years: the international community’s chronic inability to focus on any one problem for a significant period. For after a week of well-ventilated shock and anger, attention drifted. Very quickly political leaders, reporters and editors turned to other stories, and politicians looked to other issues. There were suicide bombings in Israel and a riot in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tony Blair won a second term as prime minister in the UK and in the US President George W. Bush, who had taken office in January after a contentious election, saw his package of massive tax cuts signed into law. A G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, was marred by violence, and the United Nations sanctions imposed on Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War were extended amid acrimonious debates. Afghanistan was no longer news.

In April Ahmed Shah Massood, the Afghan opposition leader famous for his long and effective guerrilla war against the Soviets and resistance to the Taliban, travelled to France to raise funds and his profile but had little success with either goal. Others who made the trip to Europe included Hamid Karzai, a young Afghan exile whose father, leader of the southern Pashtun Popalzai tribe, had been murdered by the Taliban in 1999. Karzai visited London with two older experienced Pashtun leaders from the days of ‘the jihad’ against the Soviets but received a relatively frosty reception from senior officials at MI6, Britain’s foreign security service, who, though concerned about the situation in Afghanistan, were unconvinced of the need for urgent action.
⁴⁷
Another visitor to MI6 was Mahmud Ahmed, director of the Pakistani ISI spy agency, who made repeated attempts to convince both Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, and his deputy, Nigel Inkster, to help get British diplomatic recognition for the Taliban despite the recent ‘fuss’ over the destruction of the Buddhas. Over dinner one evening Ahmed insisted that Dearlove should travel to Afghanistan to meet Mullah Omar, whom he described as ‘a political visionary’. Dearlove declined.
⁴⁸

9/11

As the Taliban had been preparing to destroy the Buddhas, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni called Ali al-Bahlul was putting the finishing touches to a video. Watching it on a laptop computer in a house in Kandahar, he was proud of his handiwork. Carefully edited on a laptop computer with pirated software, the images flowed smoothly one after the other. In the longest sequence, a young, bespectacled, bearded man, with a red and white
keffiyeh
scarf around his shoulders vivid against a backdrop of dusty southern Afghan hills, poured bile on the West, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the ‘apostate regimes’ of the Islamic world, occasionally waving his finger at the viewer.
⁴⁹
The video had been specially commissioned, and though al-Bahlul had made many videos in the previous eighteen months none had been like this. He knew the young man on the screen personally as they had shared a house in Kandahar for many months the year before. Al-Bahlul did not know exactly what the video was for, though he was aware it was the last statement of someone who had been chosen to die for the cause. Al-Bahlul had left his home in the Yemeni region of the Hadramawt two years earlier, making his way to Afghanistan via Pakistan. It was his second trip to Afghanistan. On his first, like many such volunteers, his intention had simply been to find and fight for the Taliban. This time, inspired by the bombings in east Africa the year before, he wanted to find Osama bin Laden and, if possible, join al-Qaeda.
⁵⁰