The Great War for Civilisation (175 page)

There was a children's doctor I met in Peshawar, who provided considerable insight into the Taliban's mentality at war. “After the Taliban radio went off the air . . . the next day I saw them assembling a new antenna. The Taliban always did this. Every time something was destroyed, they replaced it at once. They would go round and collect up all the wrecked equipment. This was very fast action. The Taliban were very relaxed about this. I'm trying to describe the Taliban reaction to the bombing. You know? They weren't
interested
in the attacks. It was very intriguing—and strange—for me to see this.” But the doctor was no disinterested observer. “Most people, neutral people who're not connected with political groups, they hate the American policy—and if the Taliban would change just 20 per cent of their policy against the people, then the people would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. We are waiting for an end to the Taliban policy against women and against education. People will never forget what Pakistan has done to undermine Afghanistan—they see Pakistan as the eternal enemy. Among educated people, September 11th created a new situation. We knew that America helped to create the Taliban and Osama and we call them the ‘kids' of America and Pakistan.” And, he might have added, Saudi Arabia.

On 22 October, the Americans killed Saifullah of Turungzai, MA in Arabic and MA in Islamic Studies (Peshawar University), BSc. (Islamia College), B.Ed. and Certificate of Teaching, M. Phil. student and scholarship winner to Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest university in the Arab world. He spoke fluent English as well as Persian and his native Pushtu and loved poetry and history and was, so his family said, preparing a little reluctantly to get married. His father, Hedayatullah, was a medical doctor, his younger brother a student of chartered accountancy. No one outside Pakistan—and few inside—had ever heard of Saifullah. In these Pashtun villages of the North West Frontier, many families do not even have proper names. Saifullah was not a political leader; his fifty-year-old father said that his son was a humanitarian, not a warrior. His brother Mahazullah said the same. “He was always a peaceful person, quiet and calm, he just wanted to protect people in Afghanistan who he believed were the victims of terrorism.” But everyone agreed how Saifullah died. He was killed when five American cruise missiles detonated against the walls of a building in the Darulaman suburb of Kabul where he and thirty-five other men were meeting.

His family now called him a “martyr.” Hedayatullah embraced each visitor to their home of cement and mud walls—including me—and offered roast chicken and
mitha
sweets and pots of milk and tea and insisted that he be “congratulated” on being the proud father of a man who died for his beliefs. I dutifully ate the vast mounds of chicken that Hedayatullah tugged from the braziers of food on the floor. Hens clucked in the yard outside; an old coloured poster, depicting a Kalashnikov rifle with the word “jihad” above it, was pasted on the wall. But “peace” is the word the family uttered most. Saifullah had only gone to take money to Kabul for the suffering Afghans, said Mahazullah, perhaps no more than 20,000 rupees—a mere $350—which he had raised among his student friends.

That wasn't the way the Americans told the story. Blundering through their target maps and killing innocent civilians by the day, the Pentagon boasted that the Darulaman killings targeted the Taliban's “foreign” fighters, of whom a few were Pakistanis, Saifullah among them. In Pushtu, his name means “Sword of God.” Mahazullah dismissed the American claims. Only when I suggest that it might not be unusual for a young Muslim with Saifullah's views to have taken a weapon to defend Afghanistan does Mahazullah say, very quickly, that his brother “may have been a fighter.” He never imagined his brother's death. A phone call prepared the family for the news, a friend with information that some Pakistanis had been killed in Kabul. “It has left a terrible vacuum in our life,” Mahazullah said. “You cannot imagine what it is like without him. He was a person who respected life, who was a reformer. There was no justification for the war in Afghanistan. These people are poor. There is no evidence, no proof. Every human being has the right to the basic necessities of life. The family—all of us, including Saifullah—were appalled by the carnage in New York and Washington on September 11th. Saifullah was very regretful about this—we all watched it on television.” At no point did the family mention the name of Osama bin Laden.

Turungzai was a village of resistance. During the Third Afghan War in 1919, the British hunted down Hadji Turungzai, one of the leaders of the revolt, and burned the village bazaar in revenge for its insurgency. Disconcertingly, a young man entered Saifullah's home, greeted me with a large smile and introduced himself as the grandson of the Hadji, scourge of the English. But this was no centre of Muslim extremism. Though the family prayed five times a day, they intended their daughters to be educated at university. Saifullah spent hours on his personal computer and apparently loved the poetry of the secular Pakistani national poet Allama Mohamed Iqbal of Sialkot (Sir Mohamed Iqbal after he had accepted a British knighthood), and, according to Mahazullah, was interested in the world's religions. When Saifullah left for Afghanistan, “Trust me” were the last words he spoke to his father. Perhaps he was remembering one of Iqbal's most famous verses:

Of God's command, the inner meaning do you know?
To live in constant anger is a life indeed.

To children, death also came. Mullah Mohamed Omar's ten-year-old son died in the third week of October. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city's broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and “Emir of the Faithful,” but the boy—apparently travelling in Omar's car when it was attacked by U.S. aircraft—died of his wounds. No regrets, of course. Back in 1986, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Ghadafi's six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets on our part then, either. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizballah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi's ten-year-old. Again, no regrets.

And so the casualties in Afghanistan began to mount. From Kandahar came ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. When a few television crews were able to find eighteen fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad, the U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld ridiculed the deaths as “ridiculous.” If each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom had a familiar trademark—the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of “command and control centres,” radar capabilities—each had an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. For the Afghan refugees who were turning up in their thousands at the border, it was palpably evident that they were fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles. The refugees spoke vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fell on their cities. These people were terrified of our “war on terror,” victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Despite the slavish use of the phrase on the BBC and CNN, this was not a “war on terror.” We were not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or ETA killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Indeed, the United States had spent a lot of time supporting “terrorists” in Latin America—the Contras sprang to mind—not to mention the very same Taliban whom we were now bombing in Afghanistan. This was a war on America's enemies. Increasingly, as the date of September 11th acquired epic status, we were retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we were not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible.

And what was going to happen when the deaths for which we were responsible in Afghanistan approached the same figure as September 11th? Once the UN agencies gave us details of the starving and the destitute who were dying in their flight from our bombs, it wouldn't take long to reach 3,000. Would that be enough? Would 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they had nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? Sure, we would blame the Taliban for future tragedies, just as we had been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban–drug linkage. And all we had to do to believe this was to forget the UN Drug Control Programme's announcement in October 2001 that opium production in Afghanistan had
fallen
by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar's prohibition of drug production in Taliban-controlled areas of the country. Most of Afghanistan's current output came from our allies in the Northern Alliance.

And what of Pakistan? By allying himself with America's “War on Terror,” General Musharraf had secured de facto international acceptance of his 1999 coup. Suddenly, all he had wished for—the lifting of sanctions, massive funding for Pakistan's crumbling industry, IMF loans, a $375 million debt rescheduling and humanitarian aid—had been given him. Of course, we had to forget that it was Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) outfits—the highest ranks of the country's security agencies—that set up the Taliban, funnelled weapons into Afghanistan and grew rich on the narcotics trade. Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the ISI had worked alongside the CIA, funding the mullahs and
mawlawis
now condemned as the architects of “world terror.” Most Pakistanis now realised that the ISI—sanctioned by Washington rather than Pakistan's own rulers—had turned into a well-armed and dangerous mafia, and while money was pouring into its smuggling activities, Pakistan's people lacked education, security and a health service. No wonder they turned to Islam and the madrassa schools for food and teaching. Pakistan's military was now more important than ever, an iron hand to maintain order within the state while its superpower ally bombed the ruins of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the United States—unable to bomb the Taliban into submission— cosied up to the murderers and rapists of the Northern Alliance. The Alliance's bloodiest commander, Rashid Dostum, who first visited Washington in 1996, was now a good friend of the Bush administration. Here for example is how Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid met the man:

The first time I arrived at the fort to meet Dostum there were bloodstains and pieces of flesh in the muddy courtyard . . . the guards . . . told me that an hour earlier Dostum had punished a soldier for stealing. The man had been tied to the tracks of a Russian-made tank, which then drove around the courtyard crushing his body into mincemeat, as the garrison and Dostum watched.

Surely now the Americans would send in ground troops. First came the hopeless U.S. raid on Mullah Omar's office in Kandahar. They didn't find him. Then came the dispatch of U.S. Special Forces to the ruthless thugs of the Northern Alliance. If the Taliban had anyone to fear, it was the Alliance's Shah Massoud. But he had been murdered by the two Arab suicide bombers on 9 September. Then Abdul Haq—a U.S. favourite who opposed the Taliban—was hanged while trying to arrange a regional coup in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. So what did our new “friends” in the Northern Alliance have in store for us?

The capture of Kabul, of course. They arrived to liberate the capital on 12 November 2001 after originally promising not to enter it. The Alliance was supposed to enter, at most, Mazar-e-Sharif and perhaps Herat, to demonstrate the weakness of the Taliban, to show the West that its war aims—the destruction of the Taliban and thus of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda movement—were going to be accomplished. Captured Taliban men were executed or beaten in front of television cameras. Was it not Colin Powell who had assured General Musharraf that the Alliance would be kept under control? In the end, it did not matter to the Americans. The pictures of jubilation, of a single Afghan woman unveiled among her still burqa-ed sisters, were enough. Kabul had been freed. Western democracy was at hand. The misogynist Taliban had been crushed.

We so idolised the Northern Alliance, were so infatuated with them, supported them so unquestioningly, pictured them on television so deferentially, that now we were immune to their history. Nor would you have thought, listening to the reports from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul, that the Northern Alliance was responsible for more than 80 per cent of the drug exports from the country in the aftermath of the Taliban's prohibition of drug cultivation. Why, I wondered, did we always have this ambiguous, dangerous relationship with our allies? For decades, we accepted the received wisdom that the “B” Specials were a vital security arm of the Northern Ireland authorities against the IRA on the grounds that they “knew the territory”—just as we now relied upon the Northern Alliance because it “knew the land.” The Israelis relied upon their Phalangist militia thugs in Lebanon because the Christian Maronites hated the Palestinians. The Nazis approved of their Croatian Ustashi murderers in 1941 because the Ustashi hated the Serbs.

There were brave men in the Alliance. Its murdered leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was an honourable man. But it remained a fact that from 1992 to 1996, the Northern Alliance was a symbol of massacre, systematic rape, and pillage. Which is why we—and I include the U.S. State Department—welcomed the Taliban when they originally arrived in Kabul. The Northern Alliance left the city in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind it. Now its members were our foot-soldiers. Better than bin Laden, to be sure. But what—in God's name—were they going to do in our name? We were soon to discover.

As soon as the U.S. Air Force bombed Mazar-e-Sharif, our Afghan allies moved into the city and executed up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report was a footnote on the television satellite channels, a nib in journalistic parlance, perfectly normal, it seemed. The Afghans have a “tradition” of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed. Journalists watched the Mazar-e-Sharif prison “revolt” in the third week of November, in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. U.S. Special Forces—and, it quickly emerged, British troops—helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN told us that some prisoners were “executed” while trying to escape. It was an atrocity. British troops were now stained with war crimes. Within days,
The Independent
's Justin Huggler had found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.