The Bard of Blood (7 page)

‘Now see this,’ Saleh continued, pointing to the TV screen that had had a static image on it for the past half hour.

Kabir looked at the screen and saw the hierarchy, in the form of a flow chart, of the Quetta Shura that Saleh had produced. It was an image that he had used consistently even during his days at the NDS.

‘The Quetta Shura leadership structure has two main bodies . . .’ he began. Kabir completed his sentence for him, ‘The Rahbari Shura and the Majlis-al-Shura. The Rahbari Shura, which translates to “leadership gathering”, is where Omar feeds his ideological spiel from. The latter is based more on the strategy of the Taliban.’

‘The Quetta Shura is the intellectual underpinning of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’ read a caption, as Saleh flipped to the next screen with the remote. It had maps, obtained through drone imagery, tiled up along with photographs.

‘This is the Madrasa Fayyaz-ul-Uloom that Mullah Baradar has set up. It’s nothing short of a fortress, but then it does have entry and exit points that are unguarded.’ He then flipped to another image. It was a large compound with high walls, with the hills around it forming natural barriers on three sides. Impossible had just gotten tougher.

‘This is where Omar’s training camp, where he operates from, is,’ Saleh said. ‘He resides here as well. If by any chance your compatriots are held captive here, you can forget about rescuing them.’

Kabir took in a deep breath. There were four of them in all, he recalled. To infiltrate this and get his people out would be a tactical nightmare. In a Hollywood film, the four of them would’ve come out unscathed with their spoils, but in reality, Saleh was right. This was mission impossible.

Saleh then flipped to another image. Another madrasa. ‘Dar-ul-Islam’, the caption below the picture read. ‘This one is where Omar works his magic with young boys,’ Saleh said, spewing contempt. ‘It is run by the Haqqani Network.’

The Haqqani Network, which, rather unsurprisingly, has the backing of the ISI and the Pakistani Army, was undoubtedly Afghanistan’s most sophisticated insurgency organization and terror syndicate. Needless to say, it’s now the most dreaded outfit in the world, since the death of Osama bin Laden. The Haqqani Network operates from their safe haven in North Waziristan. It is run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of the famous anti-Soviet fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani. Siraj is more ruthless than his father, and openly supports anti-India operations. Kabir wouldn’t be surprised if the captives were held in this madrasa, since Siraj would openly support and take responsibility for the ISI’s nefarious and extremist anti-India activities.

‘Technically, the Haqqani Network falls under the Quetta Shura umbrella,’ Saleh chipped in. ‘But they maintain a distinct command and control.’

Kabir swallowed. His throat had gone dry. So many elements, all coalescing to disrupt the peace amongst humanity. The coffee was over, even in the pot. Kabir got up to stretch, and walked up to the refrigerator. ‘Can I have a Coke?’

‘Of course,’ Saleh said with a chiding smile. ‘Too much caffeine, Mr Anand?’

Kabir smiled and glugged down a mouthful. He enjoyed the slight bite of the drink in his dry throat.

‘The Haqqanis,’ Saleh continued, ‘are the most vicious sons of bitches you’re ever likely to find. The Shura is relatively weaker than them at this stage. And with their momentum building and the Shura’s power diminishing, they may begin to co-opt the Shura.’

Kabir finished the Coke and crushed the can. Saleh moved to the next slide.

‘Should Omar die,’ Kabir said solemnly, ‘the Haqqanis will seize the overall leadership of the Quetta Shura. Omar, all said and done, was ideologically driven—unlike the Haqqanis, who are just power-hungry. Afghanistan will then be left to a terror network at the height of its power.’

Saleh shut his eyes and nodded. The thought always sent a chill down his spine. The inevitability of it seemed to trouble him even more.

He pointed at the screen that showed a vast expanse of relatively less hilly terrain. ‘The HQ of the Shura training camp,’ he said simply. He pulled out the pen-drive and tossed it to Kabir.

‘This is a relatively new training camp. The previous one was in another large madrasa,’ Kabir said, pocketing the pen-drive.

‘Yes, the one the ISI blew up themselves.’

Kabir was impressed at Saleh’s knowledge on this point. Kabir himself had been at the site when it had happened. It was where he had lost his friend Vikramjit Singh.

‘There is a lot more useful information in there.’ Saleh pointed at the pen-drive, indicating that he was done talking for a while. ‘I hope I’ve been of help to you.’

Kabir thanked him. They began walking out towards the door.

‘I have spoken to my friends at Al Jazeera,’ Saleh said. ‘I hold seminars at Doha often, and they’re well-wishers. Once you’re in Balochistan, your team will have the official cover of being reporters. And remember, the local Balochis tend to be a hostile bunch. There is a lot of infighting. But play your cards right, and they can be of help to you.’

‘This means a lot, Mr Saleh.’

‘People like you and I are few, Mr Anand. We need to make each one count,’ Saleh replied matter-of-factly.

‘I don’t know what Mr Joshi has told you about me, Mr Saleh, but I was in Balochistan myself when India was a part of the Northern Alliance. In many ways, I fought for the same cause as you and Ahmad Shah Massoud. That is one honour I’ll take to my grave.’

‘I remember my interactions with Lieutenant General Sadiq Sheikh. He was a good man. I’m told he’s the only reason you’re willing to go to Balochistan.’ Saleh smiled, as he opened the door for Kabir.

‘How much did Mr Joshi tell you?’

‘Not much,’ he replied. ‘But if there’s anyone who understands your situation, it’s me. For you, the driving force is Sadiq Sheikh. For me, it’s Ahmad Shah Massoud.’

1 September 2014

Quetta, Balochistan

‘It is very simple, my friends. I will not ask you any questions.’

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s voice echoed as he entered the dark cell. A blinding white light came on and two of the four prisoners looked up. They had their hands chained to their legs in an awkward position that limited their movement. They blinked hard as they saw an unfamiliar silhouette walk towards them. The other two were reeling between consciousness and unconsciousness.

The cell where the four prisoners were holed up wasn’t the typical dark dungeon with rats and cockroaches scampering all around the place. On the contrary, it was a surprisingly neat underground structure. It looked well-thought-out, and it was. Mullah Omar had insisted that they model their interrogation techniques on those of the United States, where the surroundings permitted them to. He had enough men who had experienced torture at the hands of the US to tell him what it was like, and he quickly issued orders to his men to construct similar cells in every madrasa and camp he ran in Quetta. Even though they lacked the infrastructure, they came as close to recreating the torturous experiences the US meted out. His directive was simple.
We break them the way they break us—except much harder.

These series of cells had one solitary commode, to which the prisoner was given access after every nine hours. The commode wasn’t flushed through the day and the stench was unbearable. They were given a scanty meal once a day, which was just about enough to make them revive the ravenous hunger they had learned to ignore after a point. It usually consisted of a few morsels of extremely dry rice and a spare part of a goat or cow. Since these particular prisoners were Indian, and primarily Hindus, they were tauntingly given small morsels of undercooked beef or other unsavoury entrails of a cow. None of the four Indians touched these and just ate the bland, dry rice instead.

Besides this, the torturers had learned to exhaust their prisoners mentally before carrying out a gruesome physical assault. They played with the prisoners’ natural biological cycles and sleep patterns. The prisoners had no clue as to what time of day it was. The tormentors would switch on a blinding white light for hours together—something that would make a man lose his mind if exposed to it even for twenty minutes. To add to that, they would simultaneously play a constant buzzing sound at a deafening volume, in the background. They would do this for hours at a stretch, and then suddenly switch the lights off along with the sound. Instead of this having even a remotely soothing effect on the prisoners, it would begin to play on the mind even more, leaving the prisoners fighting to maintain their sanity. They recorded all of this on a camera that was strategically placed to watch every move the prisoner made. The Taliban had learned to combine modern techniques along with their traditional brutality.

‘Rajveer Bharadwaj,’ Mullah Baradar read as he held up an Indian’s identification card and walked over to the sweaty man who lay on the floor. ‘Case attaché at the Indian embassy in Kabul. It is really worrying to know how negligent you Indians can be.’

Mullah Baradar was a tall man of about six feet two, and had a wild, black beard on his long face. His eyes were unforgiving, and he had prominent cheekbones that were set above a small mouth.

He grabbed a handful of the fifty-year-old Bharadwaj’s grey woolly hair, making him look directly at him. Bharadwaj’s eyes were bloodshot, his face gaunt. His breath smelled foul. He opened his mouth to say something, but words failed to find their way out.

‘You should be extremely sorry that the ISI wants to keep you and these men alive,’ Baradar continued. ‘Our Amir was more than happy to grant you kafirs an easy death. A lot easier than you deserve for trying to spy on us.’

On 25 July 2014, a senior Taliban member had received a call from an Indian source that four Indian intelligence agents, headed by the attaché of the Indian embassy in Kabul, were on their way to Quetta. The same source informed them that they were about to set up shop in a safe house that was being managed by the Americans to spy on the Quetta Shura. However, the reality was slightly different. The Indians had arrived in Quetta to fund the local Baloch rebels in their civil war against the Pakistani government and the ISI.

Balochistan, being a poor and neglected province, has been home to a radical insurgency orchestrated by ethnic Baloch leaders demanding separation from Pakistan. So far the Baloch tribes have rebelled at least five times since 1947. But each time their insurgency had been crushed brutally. Baloch militants have targeted the security forces with assassinations, ambushes, and landmines or ‘flowers’, but this led to large-scale collateral damage, that has also robbed non-Baloch settlers of their lives. The security forces retaliate by detaining, torturing and killing ordinary Baloch civilians and students. The assassination of Nawab Akbar Bugti and thirty of his men in 2006 by the ISI and the Pakistani Army triggered a wider spread of insurgency. The counter-insurgency in response, led by Pakistan, was and still is barbaric. However, Mullah Omar’s Taliban has been careful to maintain fairly decent relations with the Balochis, refusing to get involved in their civil war. But there have been instances, as in Bugti’s assassination, where the ISI used them as a silent force to get at the Balochis.

Soon enough, the four Indian agents who had arrived at the safe house had been compromised. After being tailed, they were picked up at gunpoint by Mullah Omar’s men. Omar had a simple policy:
Immediate death to spies.
But the ISI thought otherwise, and planned to use the Indians for leverage. And that is how the four RAW agents—Rajveer Bharadwaj, Suraj Agnihotri, Karan Bhatt and Tarun Singh—wound up here. Hanging in an abyss of uncertainty between life and death, fearing that their own country, in all likelihood, was about to disown them.

‘I feel surprisingly generous,’ Baradar said, smiling at Bharadwaj. ‘I am going to allow you to choose the way you want to die.’

‘F-fuck you,’ a frail voice came from behind. It was Suraj Agnihotri’s voice. He was still half unconscious and completely disoriented. ‘We will die for our country if that is what it takes.’

Baradar stormed up to him and punched him on the nose. Suraj’s face was already caked with blood, and the punch opened an old gash again. Blood dripped out and Suraj fell back into unconsciousness.

‘When the time comes, I’m not so sure we’ll be making such an offer. You’ll die a painful death.’ This time it was another agent, Karan Bhatt. He couldn’t seem to open his swollen eyes.

Mullah Baradar turned around and fixed his gimlet eye on Bhatt. He strode across to him and kneeled down. He punched him hard. Bhatt felt his tooth loosen, over the taste of blood. Baradar was about to launch another punch into his face when the door opened.

‘Enough!’

Mullah Baradar glanced slowly over his shoulder to see a tall man clad in a black salwar-kameez. He smiled.

‘
Salaam aleikum
, Amir al-Mu’minin. It has been a while.’

They found their way back to the large hall they had usually held their discussions in: the Fayyaz-ul-Uloom madrasa. This madrasa was primarily run by Mullah Baradar, before he was arrested by the ISI in 2010. He had begun to talk covertly to Hamid Karzai’s brother in Kandahar—Ahmad Wali Karzai, who had a local corrupt government running. In fact, the Karzais and Baradar both belonged to the Popalzai tribe of Afghanistan.

The ISI didn’t like the idea of the Taliban speaking to the Afghan President’s people, much less his brother, without notifying them. The ISI wanted to have control over all the meetings that took place between the Taliban and other groups that were willing to engage with them. The Taliban were their trump card. Therefore, when Mullah Baradar did speak to Karzai’s brother, they arrested him on accusations of being a spy for the Americans by taking five million dollars from the Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA. This, despite knowing that Abdul Ghani Baradar would never double-cross the man he loved like an elder brother, Maulana Mohammed Omar.

Baradar’s arrest infuriated Mullah Omar. They had fought together, serving in the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet-backed Afghan government in the 1980s. After driving the Russians out, Baradar and Omar jointly founded the Taliban in 1994.

In November 2001, the US pounded Kandahar with drones, killing almost all of Omar’s men. While the others were escaping, trying to save their lives first, Baradar ran directly into the line of fire and seized a motorbike. He zipped past the cloud of smoke and dust, towards Mullah Omar’s hideout, risking his life. He found a weakened Omar, who was in a state of asphyxiation, helped him sit pillion on the bike, and fearlessly drove him safely into the mountains. After this, they rebuilt the infrastructure of the Afghan Taliban in Quetta, where they now hide in plain sight.

Baradar has portrayed himself to the world as a loyal lieutenant to Omar, but the reality was slightly different. He’s almost as influential in the Taliban’s decision-making as Omar himself. Being Omar’s deputy, Baradar has a more modern and efficient way of handling matters. This doesn’t mean that he comes down softly on his enemies or avoids bloodshed, but he puts in the extra effort to figure out the alternatives. It wouldn’t be a far cry to say that Baradar, with Omar’s blessings, has made the Taliban the resurgent force that it is.

After his arrest in 2010, Omar made it clear that he still had access to Baradar when he needed it. The ISI realized that they couldn’t afford to rub Omar up the wrong way if they wanted to maintain their stronghold in the covert operations. They agreed, and even gave Baradar a comfortable safe-house with all amenities. After his release in September 2013, the ISI sent Baradar to the Gulf to lie low for a while. But he could sense that Omar needed him back, as his movements were anyway limited, owing to the ten-million-dollar bounty on his head.

‘It is good to have you back,’ Mullah Omar said in Pashto as he embraced Baradar tightly and planted a brotherly kiss on his cheek. ‘I hope the ISI hasn’t misbehaved with you. Words cannot explain how much we have all missed your presence.’

Mullah Baradar smiled as he embraced his Amir. Mullah Baradar was the only one who could look into Mullah Omar’s dead eye without flinching. They sat down together on the plush carpet. Omar ordered one of his men to bring in some food.

‘It is good to be back. I see not much has changed here, Amir.’

‘Quetta is safe as ever for me, Baradar. But it was rather difficult for me to operate without you. And with all that’s going on now, I need you to help me more with my cause.’

A young Hazara boy walked in with a large dish and left it in front of Mullah Omar. Omar pushed it towards Baradar. There was a large chunk of charred beef, with sliced lemon. Another boy came in with a large glass of sherbet. Omar asked them to leave and close the door behind them, after they served his loyal deputy.

‘It depends on the new President, Amir. Both of them have agreed, in principle, to let the Americans keep their troops in Afghanistan. Our battle has been in vain.’

‘The battle has only begun, Baradar. You know that as well as I do.’

‘We have to be very careful about your movements this year, Amir. Just because they move out doesn’t mean that they won’t try to capture you.’

Mullah Omar breathed in deeply. He stroked his wiry beard.

‘That is exactly what I have told the ISI. But these are going to be testing times for us. The ISI is nobody’s ally.’

‘Yes,’ Baradar consented. ‘Especially now that the Americans have stopped donating money to them, they might resort to ill means, such as handing you over to get into the good books of the Americans, and even collect the bounty.’

‘The Haqqanis are well aware of this, too. It is good to have them on our side.’

‘Indeed it is,’ Baradar said, wolfing down a piece of the meat. There was a sharp knock at the door. Omar looked over his shoulder and asked the person to come in. It was Brigadier Tanveer Shehzad.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have time for this now, Shehzad,’ Baradar spat out, annoyed.

After his arrest, Mullah Baradar naturally loathed the ISI.

‘You need not hold a grudge against me, Mullah Baradar. We did what we had to. We were pressurized into arresting you. If you ask me, it was hardly even an arrest. You were treated rather wonderfully at our hands.’

Baradar’s eyes widened in anger. Mullah Omar raised his hand, indicating him to calm down. He gestured Shehzad to sit down.

‘To what do we owe the pleasure, Shehzad?’ Omar said.

‘I’m here about the Indians,’ Shehzad replied.

Baradar had finished eating, and had lit up a cigarette rolled up with
afeem
—opium. He was still in the process of calming down, when Shehzad said these words: ‘I cannot believe this, Amir. Since when have we begun to let go of our principles? We kill the spies who are a threat to us! We do not use them to negotiate for our purposes, let alone the purposes of the ISI! If you ask me, we ought to behead them right away, before it’s too late!’