The 9/11 Wars (57 page)

Much of 2007 and 2008 had thus been marked by repeated efforts of Mullah Omar to bring some order to his increasingly unruly troops. The ‘shadow governors’ appointed in key provinces were reshuffled – though not without resistance from some and resentment on the part of others.
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A book of rules for combatants was issued, prohibiting (and thus implicitly admitting) practices such as temporary marriage to women, the ransoming of prisoners, theft, cigarettes, the summary execution of spies and, in a society where pederasty is common, the ‘taking of young boys without beards to the battlefield or to homes’. Commanders were told that ‘using the jihad for their own personal profit’ was forbidden.
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Simultaneously previously rigorous restrictions on music, television and such pastimes as kite-flying or dog fighting were loosened. Decisions over the vexed issue of women’s education – many villagers wanted their daughters to be at least literate – were left to local commanders who were closest to individual communities and better placed to judge their preferences. In 2007, Mullah Omar himself said that implementing ‘social edicts’ was up to the discretion of local leaders. Often compromises were found with schools opening when elders approved by the Taliban were present to oversee teaching and strict segregation.
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Other issues where the military demands of running an insurgency conflicted with keeping the consent of local communities were harder to resolve. One was the difficult question of mobile phone coverage. Worried about spies reporting their whereabouts, many Taliban commanders had destroyed the masts necessary to relay signals, an act that was inevitably deeply unpopular with local people, for whom cheap telecommunications had often been one of the few tangible benefits seen since the invasion of 2001. The eventual deal reached in many places was that the masts would remain but the phone companies would switch them off at night, allowing any potential targets of coalition special forces to sleep without fear of a nocturnal tip-off and a 4 a.m. raid. The fact that the insurgents were able to extort significant sums as ‘protection money’ from the phone companies – as they did from businesses involved in the execution of coalition-funded development projects or even the transport of its military supplies – was also a factor. A good gauge of the extent of geographic influence of the insurgents at any given moment was the number of districts where there was twenty-four-hour mobile coverage. In the summer of 2008, only around half of all Afghanistan’s provinces could promise all their inhabitants uninterrupted use of the now ubiquitous phones.
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The effects of these various measures were variable. The chaotic structure of the insurgency necessarily impeded their application, and there were significant limits to the compromises the Taliban leadership were prepared to make. The strategy of suicide bombing continued despite its unpopularity among locals and the arguments it generated within senior Taliban ranks. A careful information campaign designed to mitigate the negative publicity surrounding particularly bloody attacks and to justify the continued use of the tactics was launched with DVDs and radio broadcasts extolling the courage and honour of the bombers all while minimizing any reports of ‘collateral damage’. The use of Pakistani rather than local Afghan suicide bombers was stepped up and the real PR disasters – attacks in which dozens of children were killed, for example – were simply disowned or blamed on the Americans.
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There was no shying away either from coercion or intimidation when deemed necessary. The Taliban had learned that targeted assassinations of officials in places like Kandahar was an extremely effective way of preventing the government developing any real capacity on the ground. Such killings were also deeply unpopular but, like the suicide bombing, were apparently considered worth continuing for the overall strategic benefits they brought.

Overall, the insurgents seemed to have recognized that effectively fusing their military and information strategies could overcome many of the challenges posed by their growth and the initiatives taken by the coalition. Not only were atrocity stories – some barely exaggerated accounts of experiences in Bagram or Guantanamo Bay – circulated to build animosity against the international forces but stories of the supposed moral degradation of Kabul were disseminated too. Anything that could enhance the sense of the honest, suffering rural communities betrayed by the decadent, exploitative self-interested urbanites was emphasized. Explicit ethnicity was avoided in the messaging, which often took on a strongly nationalist tone.
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Aware than their greatest advantage was perhaps the simple fact that they were Afghans and Muslims fighting largely white, Western, ‘Christian’ soldiers, the insurgents in their DVDs reinforced parallels with the ‘jihad’ against the Soviets, which was now portrayed as a rare victory against the international conspiracy of powers dedicated to destroying Islam and the Afghan ‘nation’. Above all, violence was deployed to serve the purposes of the information campaign not vice versa. The continuing low-level fighting around the country was united into a single narrative of resistance – even if most of it was anarchic and opportunistic and related to local factors – while the more high-profile insurgent attacks were carefully designed for maximum impact. So the suicide bombing and raid on the five-star Serena Hotel in the centre of Kabul in January 2008 was worth the risk of collateral damage and disapproval of the tactics because the target – a luxury complex favoured by the Kabuli rich and foreigners – had such resonance.
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The strike also showed the inability of the government – and ISAF – to protect even the centre of the capital. Equally, the spectacular Kandahar jailbreak of June 2008 was worth the risk of failure and high casualties. With hundreds freed for little loss and worldwide news coverage, it was a major success. A third example was the ambush of French troops in the valley of Uzbeen, north of Sorobi, in August 2008. Though the action itself was largely the result of a rivalry between three local armed groups all linked to Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, the ambush was rapidly and effectively exploited by the insurgents at a national level. Reporters in Kabul received text messages from Taliban spokesmen claiming exaggerated French losses even before the ISAF press office was apparently aware the fighting had taken place.
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It appeared unlikely that the Uzbeen ambush had been commissioned by the insurgent leadership in the way that the attacks on the Serena – probably the work of Haqqani’s group – and that in Kandahar had been. But it played firmly into a further new element of the insurgent strategy, which was to deliberately target public opinion in the West. Taliban media spokesmen boasted of closely monitoring Western press reports of both events in Afghanistan and the debate in the thirty-nine countries which had troops in the country. It was little surprise that news of the decision of President Sarkozy to fly to Kabul following the attack was posted on Taliban-linked websites, linked to translations of articles from French newspapers arguing for immediate withdrawal of the nation’s troops from the conflict, within hours of it being announced. On occasion too the insurgents appeared happy to admit that they had sustained significant casualties, presumably aware that their ability to absorb continued losses demoralized their opponents and turned domestic opinion in the West further against the war.

The final challenge posed to the Afghan insurgents by their expansion – and their relative success in fighting the new Western forces to a stalemate – was perhaps the most serious. For many years, one subject had been taboo among Western diplomats, soldiers and politicians: the support offered by Pakistani intelligence services to the Taliban. Yet that the insurgents, whether from the core Taliban or from Haqqani’s or Hekmatyar’s groups, had been receiving assistance from within the neighbouring state had been an open secret for a long time. This was a delicate matter for the Pakistanis, who had no intention of abandoning the policy launched in 2002 of at least tacitly tolerating the presence of the Afghan insurgents on their soil so as to be better positioned for the West’s inevitable eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan, but was potentially even more troublesome for the Taliban themselves. A misjudged local strike could therefore have damaging consequences that far outweighed any tactical advantage gained. So the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 may have been initially counted a tactical success but, after American intelligence reported monitoring conversations between ISI officers and the attackers in which the logistics for the strikes appeared to be discussed, it looked to be have been strategically counter-productive.
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The bombing galvanized the White House into paying much closer attention to the apparent role Pakistani intelligence was playing in the continuing success of the insurgents and thus threatened the one thing the Taliban could not afford to jeopardize: their safe haven in Pakistan.
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That the details of the overheard conversations were leaked at all was an indication of how concerned the American security establishment had become about Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan.

The perpetrators of the attack on the Indian embassy died as they were meant to do, in a sudden moment of spectacular violence designed to frighten and impress as much as kill and destroy. This naturally rendered a full investigation of their identity and how they came to be in Kabul with suicide vests strapped to them difficult. However, as with such attackers elsewhere in the various theatres of the 9/11 Wars, an idea of the process which led them to blow themselves up on the streets of the capital can be reconstructed from the stories of others who did not travel quite to the very end of the same road. Abit, a slim, handsome twenty-one-year-old baker’s son from Bahawalpur, in the south of the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab, had found himself strapped to a bomb in Afghanistan but had decided at the last minute not to die. He had been recruited by a friend who had, he said, suggested a ‘tour’ to a town close to the border with Afghanistan.
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The ‘tour’ had in fact taken the pair directly to a compound run by local Taliban, where Abit’s friend had swiftly disappeared, leaving him with a dozen other young men. Their days were spent reading the Koran, receiving specifically targeted religious instruction and viewing militant jihadi propaganda videos which had familiar themes.

‘We watched films of bombardments and fighting in Iraq. They told me the whole infidel world was coming to Afghanistan to invade and repress Muslims and that it was the duty of all Muslims to resist. They told me about the rewards of martyrdom,’ Abit said. Scared by tales of what might happen to him as an outsider if he went wandering in the local bazaar, he stayed within the compound’s confines, entirely isolated from the outside world.

Abit, speaking in the offices of the Afghan national intelligence service in Kabul with the windows open and birdsong for once audible over the sound of the city, said the process was ‘gradual’ but that after several months he was prepared to ‘sacrifice himself for Islam’. The men who ran the compound told him that everything was ready. The target – a US base on the frontier – had been selected.

‘They told me there were just Americans there,’ Abit said. ‘They told me not to think about what would happen to my body because Allah ensures martyrs suffer no pain. They told me to remember that a martyr takes his relatives with him to paradise and that was as important for me as the infidels committing violence and tyranny.’

Abit was driven over the border to within a mile or so of the base, where a truck stuffed with explosives was waiting with a detonator button wired to the dashboard. ‘I drove the truck towards the base,’ he said. ‘I was not thinking of anything. I just kept saying “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar”. I felt nothing.’

On reaching his target, however, Abit saw only Afghans. ‘I could see no Americans,’ he told the author. ‘The soldiers told me to stop the truck, and I got down and I gave myself up. I am very sorry and I am glad no one was harmed.’
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13
Pakistan

‘THE MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRY ON EARTH’

Of all countries that became major theatres of conflict in the 9/11 Wars, Pakistan was perhaps the most important. It was certainly the biggest, with a population of around 177 million in 2007 and another 3 million being added every year, more than that of Egypt, Turkey and Iraq combined.
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Pakistan was where al-Qaeda had been conceived and formed back in the late 1980s, where militant groups had proliferated through the 1990s with state support unparalleled anywhere in the Islamic world, where some of the most influential components of modern Islamist and Islamic militant ideology had been formulated and tested. It was where the Taliban leadership had found a safe haven following their fall from power in 2001 and where Osama bin Laden and other terrorist fugitives had been able to reconstitute a working terrorist operation the capacity of which had been amply made clear by successive bomb attacks in the region, in Europe and elsewhere, realized or thwarted. Pakistan was a nuclear power, with hostile relations with its neighbours that dated back decades and a range of social and economic problems that, though no means exceptional in the Islamic world or among developing nations generally, were nonetheless acute. In 2008, Pakistan was 141st out of 182 on the United Nations Human Development index.
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Infant mortality rates were on a par with those in sub-Saharan Africa and much of the population did not have access to clean water let alone health care. If outright chronic malnutrition was rare, many millions of people ate poorly. Pakistan’s size alone – often underestimated due to its proximity to giants India and China – and strategic position as a buffer state between the Middle East and south Asia contributed too to a strategic importance that few other countries involved in the 9/11 Wars could rival. In this the country was very different from its western neighbour. Afghanistan was only considered crucial because it had been a launchpad for the 9/11 attacks and was seen as having the potential to become so again. Otherwise, a fractured state with a small population, negligible economic activity in global terms and limited resources other than some natural gas, minerals and metals, it had never been, nor was unlikely ever to become, a crucial piece of the geopolitical jigsaw. The ramifications of a collapse of Iraq would naturally have had very grave consequences on the Middle East and thus on the world’s economy, spiking oil prices and releasing a wave of radicalism, but, appalling though such a prospect might be, the potential fall-out of such an eventuality would arguably be less than that of the catastrophic implosion of Pakistan. Reporting and analysis of Pakistan often reflected the deep fear on the part of Western policy-makers, analysts and strategists that the state’s oft-predicted failure inspired. In late 2007
Newsweek
, the American magazine, echoing the pronouncements of a range of Western, and particularly Washington-based, statesmen over the decade, bluntly told its readers that Pakistan was the ‘most dangerous country on earth’.
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