Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition

by Ahmed Rashid

  But it was Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the original sponsors of the Arab-Afghans, who suffered the most as their activities rebounded. In March 1997, three Arab and two Tajik militants were shot dead after a 36-hour gun battle between them and the police in an Afghan refugee camp near Peshawar. Belonging to the Wahabbi radical Tafkir group, they were planning to bomb an Islamic heads of state meeting in Islamabad.

  With the encouragement of Pakistan, the Taliban and Bin Laden, Arab-Afghans had enlisted in the Pakistani party Harkat-ul-Ansar to fight in Kashmir against Indian troops. By inducting Arabs who introduced Wahabbi-style rules in the Kashmir valley, genuine Kashmiri militants felt insulted. The US government had declared Ansar a terrorist organization in 1996 and it had subsequently changed its name to Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin. All the Pakistani victims of the US missile strikes on Khost belonged to Ansar. In 1999, Ansar said it would impose a strict Wahabbi-style dress code in the Kashmir valley and banned jeans and jackets. On 15 February 1999, they shot and wounded three Kashmiri cable television operators for relaying Western satellite broadcasts. Ansar had previously respected the liberal traditions of Kashmiri Muslims but the activites of the Arab-Afghans hurt the legitimacy of the Kashmiri movement and gave India a propaganda coup.21

  Pakistan faced a problem when Washington urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to help arrest Bin Laden. The ISI's close contacts with Bin Laden and the fact that he was helping fund and train Kashmiri militants who were using the Khost camps, created a dilemma for Sharif when he visited Washington in December 1998. Sharif side-stepped the issue but other Pakistani officials were more brazen, reminding their American counterparts how they had both helped midwife Bin Laden in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s. Bin Laden himself pointed to continued support from some elements in the Pakistani intelligence services in an interview. ‘As for Pakistan there are some governmental departments, which, by the Grace of God, respond to the Islamic sentiments of the masses in Pakistan. This is reflected in sympathy and co-operation. However, some other governmental departments fell into the trap of the infidels. We pray to God to return them to the right path,’ said Bin Laden.22

  Support for Bin Laden by elements within the Pakistani establishment was another contradiction in Pakistan's Afghan policy, explored fully in Chapter 14. The US was Pakistan's closest ally with deep links to the military and the ISI. But both the Taliban and Bin Laden provided sanctuary and training facilities for Kashmiri militants who were backed by Pakistan, and Islamabad had little interest in drying up that support. Even though the Americans repeatedly tried to persuade the ISI to co-operate in delivering Bin Laden, the ISI declined, although it did help the US arrest several of Bin Laden's supporters. Without Pakistan's support the USA could not hope to launch a snatch by US commandos or more accurate bombing strikes because it needed Pakistani territory to launch such raids. At the same time the USA dared not expose Pakistan's support for the Taliban, because it still hoped for ISI co-operation in catching Bin Laden.

  The Saudi conundrum was even worse. In July 1998 Prince Turki had visited Kandahar and a few weeks later 400 new pick-up trucks arrived in Kandahar for the Taliban, still bearing their Dubai license plates. The Saudis also gave cash for the Taliban's cheque book conquest of the north in the autumn. Until the Africa bombings and despite US pressure to end their support for the Taliban, the Saudis continued funding the Taliban and were silent on the need to extradite Bin Laden.23 The truth about the Saudi silence was even more complicated. The Saudis preferred to leave Bin Laden alone in Afghanistan because his arrest and trial by the Americans could expose the deep relationship that Bin Laden continued to have with sympathetic members of the Royal Family and elements within Saudi intelligence, which could prove deeply embarrassing. The Saudis wanted Bin Laden either dead or a captive of the Taliban – they did not want him captured by the Americans.

  After the August 1998 Africa bombings, US pressure on the Saudis increased. Prince Turki visited Kandahar again, this time to persuade the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden. In their meeting, Mullah Omar refused to do so and then insulted Prince Turki by abusing the Saudi Royal Family. Bin Laden himself described what took place. ‘He [Prince Turki] asked Mullah Omar to surrender us home or to expel us from Afghanistan. It is none of the business of the Saudi regime to come and ask for the handing over of Osama Bin Laden. It was as if Turki came as an envoy of the American government.’24 Furious about the Taliban insults, the Saudis suspended diplomatic relations with the Taliban and ostensibly ceased all aid to them, although they did not withdraw recognition of the Taliban government.

  By now Bin Laden had developed considerable influence with the Taliban, but that had not always been the case. The Taliban's contact with the Arab-Afghans and their Pan-Islamic ideology was non-existent until the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. Pakistan was closely involved in introducing Bin Laden to the Taliban leaders in Kandahar, because it wanted to retain the Khost training camps for Kashmiri militants, which were now in Taliban hands. Persuasion by Pakistan, the Taliban's better-educated cadres, who also had Pan-Islamic ideas, and the lure of financial benefits from Bin Laden, encouraged the Taliban leaders to meet with Bin Laden and hand him back the Khost camps.

  Partly for his own safety and partly to keep control over him, the Taliban shifted Bin Laden to Kandahar in 1997. At first he lived as a paying guest. He built a house for Mullah Omar's family and provided funds to other Taliban leaders. He promised to pave the road from Kandahar airport to the city and build mosques, schools and dams but his civic works never got started as his funds were frozen. While Bin Laden lived in enormous style in a huge mansion in Kandahar with his family, servants and fellow militants, the arrogant behaviour of the Arab-Afghans who arrived with him and their failure to fulfil any of their civic projects, antagonized the local population. The Kandaharis saw the Taliban leaders as beneficiaries of Arab largesse rather than the people.

  Bin Laden endeared himself further to the leadership by sending several hundred Arab-Afghans to participate in the 1997 and 1998 Taliban offensives in the north. These Wahabbi fighters helped the Taliban carry out the massacres of the Shia Hazaras in the north. Several hundred Arab-Afghans, based in the Rishkor army garrison outside Kabul, fought on the Kabul front against Masud. Increasingly, Bin Laden's world view appeared to dominate the thinking of senior Taliban leaders. All-night conversations between Bin Laden and the Taliban leaders paid off. Until his arrival the Taliban leadership had not been particularly antagonistic to the USA or the West but demanded recognition for their government.

  However, after the Africa bombings the Taliban became increasingly vociferous against the Americans, the UN, the Saudis and Muslim regimes around the world. Their statements increasingly reflected the language of defiance Bin Laden had adopted and which was not an original Taliban trait. As US pressure on the Taliban to expel Bin Laden intensified, the Taliban said he was a guest and it was against Afghan tradition to expel guests. When it appeared that Washington was planning another military strike against Bin Laden, the Taliban tried to cut a deal with Washington – to allow him to leave the country in exchange for US recognition. Thus until the winter of 1998 the Taliban saw Bin Laden as an asset, a bargaining chip over whom they could negotiate with the Americans.

  The US State Department opened a satellite telephone connection to speak to Mullah Omar directly. The Afghanistan desk officers, helped by a Pushto translator, held lengthy conversations with Omar in which both sides explored various options, but to no avail.25 By early 1999 it began to dawn on the Taliban that no compromise with the US was possible and they began to see Bin Laden as a liability. A US deadline in February 1999 to the Taliban to either hand over Bin Laden or face the consequences forced the Taliban to make him disappear discreetly from Kandahar. The move bought the Taliban some time, but the issue was still nowhere near being resolved.

  The Arab-Afghans had come full circle. From being mere appendages to the Afghan jihad and the Cold War in the 1980s they
had taken centre stage for the Afghans, neighbouring countries and the West in the 1990s. The USA was now paying the price for ignoring Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996, while the Taliban were providing sanctuary to the most hostile and militant Islamic fundamentalist movement the world faced in the post-Cold War era. Afghanistan was now truly a haven for Islamic internationalism and terrorism and the Americans and the West were at a loss as to how to handle it.

  Part 3

  The New Great

  Game

  ∼ 11 ∼

  DICTATORS AND OIL

  BARONS: THE TALIBAN AND

  CENTRAL ASIA, RUSSIA,

  TURKEY AND ISRAEL

  In Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, a massive new international airport was completed in 1996. The enormous, luxurious terminal building, was built to meet the expected flow of Western airlines to this oil- and gas-rich desert Republic, but it echoes with the sounds of silence. Within months, half of it was closed down, because it was too expensive to maintain and the rest – with only a few weekly flights arriving – was barely used even in 1999.

  In 1995 at Sarakhs, on the Turkmenistan-Iranian border, a spanking new railway station with marbled walls and ticket counters was completed. The howling red sand and shifting dunes of the Karakum or Black Sand desert lapped the building and the heat was stifling. The station was the Turkmen end of a new railway line built by the Iranians, which connects Meshad in north-eastern Iran with Ashkhabad – the first direct communications link between Central Asia and Muslim countries to the south after 70 years of being cut off from each other. Yet with only two goods and passenger trains arriving from Iran every week, the station is closed for much of the week.

  Communication links with the outside world were a top priority for all the Central Asian Republics (CARs) after they achieved independence in December 1991, but nearly a decade later it appeared that there was more camel traffic on the fabled Silk Route than today. These monuments to extravagance, grandiose ambition and unrealized dreams were the handiwork of Turkmen President Saparmurad Niyazov, who spends little of his country's dwindling finances on the upkeep of his country's 4.2 million people but much on his thriving personality cult. But these desert mirages also represent the still unfulfilled hopes of Turkmenistan becoming, as Niyazov put it to me as early as December 1991, ‘the new Kuwait’.1

  Since independence Turkmenistan, like other oil rich CARs, has waited in vain for its oil and gas riches to reach outside markets. Landlocked and surrounded by potentially jealous and hostile powers – Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan – the Central Asian states have man-oeuvered relentlessly for pipelines to be built that would end their isolation, free them from economic dependence on Russia and earn hard currency to refloat their economies after the devastation wrought by the break-up of the Soviet Union. For 70 years all their communication links – roads, railways and pipelines – were built heading east to Russia. Now they wanted to build links with the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and China.

  The energy resources of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, (which we shall now call the Caspian region and includes Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan), have been described with breathless hyperbole over the past few years. In the early 1990s the USA estimated that Caspian oil reserves were between 100 to 150 billion barrels (bb). That figure was highly inflated and possible reserves are now estimated to be less than half that or even as low as 50 bb. The Caspian region's proven oil reserves are between 16 and 32 bb, which compares to 22 bb for the USA and 17 bb for the North Sea, giving the Caspian 10-15 times less than the total reserves of the Middle East.

  Nevertheless, the Caspian represented possibly the last unexplored and unexploited oil-bearing region in the world and its opening-up generated huge excitement amongst international oil companies. Western oil companies have shifted their interest first to Western Siberia in 1991-92, then to Kazakhstan in 1993-94, Azerbaijan in 1995-97 and finally Turkmenistan in 1997-99. Between 1994-98, 24 companies from 13 countries signed contracts in the Caspian region. Kazakhstan has the largest oil reserves with an estimated 85 bb, but only 10-16 bb proven reserves. Azerbaijan has possible oil reserves of 27 bb and only 4-11 bb proven reserves while Turkmenistan has 32 bb possible oil reserves, but only 1.5 bb proven reserves. Uzbekistan's possible oil reserves are estimated at 1 bb.

  Proven gas reserves in the Caspian region are estimated at 236-337 trillion cubic feet (tcf), compared to reserves of 300 tcf in the USA. Turkmenistan has the 11th largest gas reserves in the world with 159 tcf of possible gas reserves, Uzbekistan 110 tcf, Kazakhstan 88 tcf, while Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan have 35 tcf each.2

  Central Asian leaders became obsessed with projected pipelines, potential routes and the geo-politics that surrounded them. In 1996 the Caspian region produced one million barrels per day (b/d) of oil of which only 300,000 b/d was exported – mainly from Kazakhstan. However only half that (140,000 b/d) was exported outside the former Soviet Union. Caspian production still represented only about 4 per cent of total world oil production. The region's natural gas production in 1996 totalled 3.3 tcf, but only 0.8 tcf was exported outside the former Soviet Union – mostly from Turkmenistan. There was an urgent, almost desperate need for pipelines.

  The scramble for oil and influence by the big powers in the Caspian has been likened to the Middle East in the 1920s. But Central Asia today is an even larger complex quagmire of competing interests. Big powers such as Russia, China and the USA; the neighbours Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey; the Central Asian states themselves and the most powerful players of all, the oil companies, compete in what I called in a 1997 seminal magazine article, ‘The New Great Game’. The name seemed to stick and was taken up by governments, experts and the oil companies.3

  I had first visited Central Asia in 1989 during President Mikhail Gorba-chov's perestroika reform programme. Convinced that the ethnic issue in Afghanistan was going to become explosive after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, I wanted to understand the ethnic origins of the Afghan Uzbeks, Turkmens and Tajiks and see their original homelands. I returned to the region frequently, exploring the vast vistas and the ethnic and political soup in the region that became more complex and volatile as the Soviet Union fell apart. By chance I was in Ashkhabad where the Central Asian leaders gathered on 12 December 1991, to discuss the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and their independence.

  They were all reluctant nationalists, full of fear at the prospects of losing the security and support of the Soviet state system and the prospects of facing the outside world on their own. Within a few months, as their economies crumbled, the importance of their oil resources and the need for pipelines became evident. They began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron. My subsequent visits resulted in a book on Central Asia but with Afghanistan disintegrating into civil war, I concluded that its repercussions would rebound on Central Asia and the issue of pipelines would determine the future geo-politics of the region.4

  The label – the new Great Game – resonated with history. In the late nineteenth century the British in India and tsarist Russia fought an undeclared war of competition and influence to contain each other in Central Asia and Afghanistan. ‘Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia – to many these words breathe only a sense of utter remoteness, or a memory of strange vicissitudes and of moribund romance. To me, I confess they are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world,’ wrote Lord Curzon, before he became the Viceroy of India in 1898.5 These were expanding empires -the British pushing across India into Afghanistan and the Tsar's armies conquering Central Asia.

  The centre of gravity for both powers was Afghanistan. The British feared that a Russian thrust on Herat from the Turkmen region could threaten British Baluchistan, while Moscow gold could turn Kabul's rulers against the British. The Russians feared that the British would undermi
ne them in Central Asia by supporting revolts by the Muslim tribes and the rulers of Bukhara and Kokand. As it is today, the real battle was over communication links as both empires indulged in massive railway projects. The Russians built railway lines across Central Asia to their borders with Afghanistan, Persia and China, while the British built railway lines across India to their border with Afghanistan.

  Today's Great Game is also between expanding and contracting empires. As a weakened and bankrupt Russia attempts to keep a grip on what it still views as its frontiers in Central Asia and control the flow of Caspian oil through pipelines that traverse Russia, the USA is thrusting itself into the region on the back of proposed oil pipelines which would bypass Russia. Iran, Turkey and Pakistan are building their own communication links with the region and want to be the preferred route of choice for future pipelines heading east, west or south. China wants to secure stability for its restive Xinjiang region populated by the same Muslim ethnic groups that inhabit Central Asia, secure the necessary energy to fuel its rapid economic growth and expand its political influence in a critical border region. The Central Asian states have their own rivalries, preferences and strategic imperatives. Looming above this is the fierce competition between American, European and Asian oil companies.

  But as in the nineteenth century, Afghanistan's instability and the advancing Taliban were creating a new dimension to this global rivalry and becoming a significant fulcrum for the new Great Game. The states and the companies had to decide whether to confront or woo the Taliban and whether the Taliban would impede or help pipelines from Central Asia to new markets in South Asia.