The 9/11 Wars (98 page)

Aatish Taseer, ‘The killer of my father, Salman Taseer, was showered with rose petals by fanatics. How could they do this?’
Daily Telegraph
, January 11, 2011.

Sabrina Tavernise, ‘A Shiite militia in Baghdad sees its power wane’,
New York Times
, July 27, 2008.

Atmane Tazaghart and Roland Jacquard, ‘La France en ligne de mire’,
Le Figaro
, November 5, 2005.

Time
, ‘Lost chance’, August 12, 2002.

The Times
, ‘We are firm on road of jihad’, September 25, 2001,

The Times Online, ‘Extracts from the Zawahiri tape Al’Zawahiri’, August 4, 2005.

Patricia Tourancheau, ‘La “menace majeure” gagne du terrain’,
Libération
, July 9, 2005.

Mark Townsend, ‘Rise in anti-Semitic attacks “the worst recorded in Britain in decades” ’,
Observer
, February 8, 2010.

Alan Travis, ‘Britain downgrades al-Qaida terror attack alert level’,
Guardian
, July 20, 2009.

‘Two-thirds of UK terror suspects released without charge’,
Guardian
, May 13, 2009.

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Wall Street Journal
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, July 10, 2009.

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, ‘Poll, more view Afghan war as “mistake” ’, March 16, 2009.

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.

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John Zogby, ‘How the poll results on Iraq were manipulated’,
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Notes

INTRODUCTION

    
1
.
Both World Wars, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and a host of other major conflicts share it too. The Second World War was much more than a straight fight between democratic states and repressive, fascist ones. It comprised equally significant ideological, economic and cultural contests as innumerable subsidiary conflicts, between states, communities, even families. The Cold War was also far from a simple Manichaean battle between two ideological blocs. Struggles for national liberation, ethnic and tribal wars, social conflict also made up its rich and varied fabric. My thanks to the late Professor Fred Halliday, who kindly shared his thoughts on the multidimensionality of this current conflict and sent me a draft of his essay ‘Global Jihad, “Long War” and the Crisis of American Power’, in Fabio Petito and Elisabetta Brighi, eds.,
Il Mediterraneo nelle Relazioni Internazionale: tra Euro-Mediterraneo e Grande Medio Oriente
, Fondazione Laboratorio Mediterraneo, 2007.

CHAPTER 1: THE BUDDHAS

    
1
.
Basic café serving tea and food.

    
2
.
Author interview with Ekram Shinwari, VOA reporter who travelled incognito to Bamiyan to film the scene, Kabul, March 2009.

    
3
.
Author interview, near Dunkirk, France, December 2009.

    
4
.
The split between Shia and Sunni dates back to the earliest generations of the first Muslims and a dispute over the inheritance of the moral and political authority of the Prophet Mohammed which in very general terms pitted those who believed that it should pass down the bloodline of the dead leader, the Shia, against those who believed in a more political and meritocratic choice of successor, the Sunni. Behind this superficially political division, historians have shown, lies a range of cultural, ethnic and tribal differences.

    
5
.
The date of the Buddhas’ construction has been various estimated between the third and seventh centuries. In 1989, the art historian Deborah Klimburg-Salter argued a seventh-century date but according to Dr Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist and National Geographic fellow, carbon dating of lumps of wood found in the debris of the destroyed statues reveals a fourth-century date. Holland Cotter, ‘Buddhas of Bamiyan: keys to Asian history’,
New York Times
, March 3, 2001. Author telephone interview with Dr Fred Hiebert, March 2009.

    
6
.
A change which many attributed to the advice of Pakistani military officers.

    
7
.
The last Soviet troops left in January 1989.

    
8
.
The word Taliban had been used to describe small groups of independent and relatively effective fighters from religious schools who had fought alongside the main groups of ‘
mujahideen
’ in the war against the Soviets. See Abdul Zaeef,
My Life with the Taliban
, Hurst, 2010, for an interesting account. The word ‘Taliban’ originated in Arabic. Its singular form is
talib
, which means knowledge-seeker. Over time a Dari ending –
alef
(a) and
noon
(n) – was added to create a plural, ‘Taliban’.

    
9
.
Pakistan has three major intelligence agencies. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is the main civilian intelligence agency and focuses on domestic intelligence, reporting to the prime minister rather than the minister of the interior. Military Intelligence (MI) compiles reports for the chief of army staff. The Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) draws together the intelligence capabilities of the three military service branches, as well as acting independently of all of them through its clandestine S Department or Branch. The ISI theoretically reports to the prime minister, but in practice has always reported direct to the chief of army staff.

  
10
.
Further assistance came from a large number of former members of some of the most extreme factions within the Afghan Communists who had learned to use artillery, armour and planes in Kabul’s armed forces in the 1980s, had then gone on to fight for various
mujahideen
factions and were both experienced and proficient. The role of these ‘Khalqis’, so-called for their allegiance to the hardline Khalq (the People) faction of the Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, has been often underplayed. For more on the Khalqis, see Thomas Barfield,
Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History
, Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 225, 259. Also Barnett R. Rubin,
The Fragmentation of Afghanistan
, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 82, 105. Many eventually resurfaced in the reconstituted Afghan National Army after 2001.

  
11
.
Much of the original leadership of the Taliban were former fighters – often junior commanders – of Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi’s Harkat-ul-Inqelabi-ul-Islam party.

  
12
.
‘We are seekers of peace and honour in the way of God. Our aim is to secure the peace and honour of our nation and our people,’ Mullah Hassan Rachman, the Taliban governor of Kandahar explained. Rachman, an arch conservative who had lost a leg fighting the Soviets and had the disconcerting habit of placing his artificial limb beside him on a sofa during interviews, did not often travel to Kabul, describing the capital as ‘a bad place’ from which ‘much wrongdoing and vice [had] come that poisoned the country’. Author interviews, Kandahar, August, October 1998. On the Taliban’s outreach programme in the mid 1990s see also Seth Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, Norton, 2009, p. 58; Abdul-Kader Sinno, ‘Explaining the Taliban’s Ability to Mobilize the Pashtuns’, in Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi,
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
, Harvard University Press, 2008.

  
13
.
Multiple author interviews with former senior Pakistani officers, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, 2002, 2005, 2008. US Department of State cable, ‘Afghanistan: Pakistanis to regulate wheat and fuel trade to gain leverage over Taliban’, August 13, 1997. US Embassy Islamabad cable, ‘Bad news on Pak Afghan Policy: GOP Support for the Taliban appears to be getting stronger’, July 1, 1998, National Security Archives. Some Pakistani paramilitaries appear also to have fought with them on occasion.

  
14
.
There is an enormous range in census data. Compare, for example, the CIA factbook of 2000 with the United Nations Afghanistan Information Management Systems estimates of 2003. The Taliban were almost exclusively drawn from Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes, who make up around 45 per cent of the population, though figures are contested. With no census since 1979 and ethnicity a deeply fluid concept, estimates can only be rough. In addition to the Pashtuns and the Hazara, Tajiks and Uzbeks there were around thirty other recognized discrete ethnic or linguistic groups including Aimaq, Pashai, ‘Arab’ as well as other population groups defined differently, such as Syeds, who claim to be descendants of the Prophet, his family or his immediate entourage.