Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Babar ordered that a convoy of trucks loaded with seductive merchandise enter Afghanistan and attempt to cross it. He wanted to see if the truck could make it all the way through this warlord-infested territory to Turkmenistan. If it could, Pakistan could open a trade route with central Asia, Pakistani products could flow north, and oil could flow south.

  Sure enough, near Kandahar, a gang of warlords hijacked the convoy and stole the merchandise. Then—a contingent of two hundred well-armed young men swooped down from the hills, fought a two-day battle with the hijackers, beat the hell out of them, hanged their leaders, and restored the merchandise to its rightful owners.11 The Taliban had arrived! The fact that some of the fighters spoke Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan, was noted at the time but not much discussed. The big story was Mullah Omar and his band of mirthless men. General Babar liked what he saw! He gave the go-ahead for Mullah Omar’s Taliban to be developed into a real force, and it was then that the legends about the Taliban began to circulate. And, although they may have been planted by Pakistani spies originally, they soon gained a life of their own.

  The legends “went viral” because Mullah Omar’s Taliban really did what they claimed they would. They cleared all the “checkpoints” between Kandahar and the border, for example, whereupon merchandise flooded into the bazaars of Kandahar—and at lower prices, too, because the traders no longer had to pay seventy-plus “tolls” between border and bazaar.

  Later that month, the Taliban captured an arms depot near the Pakistan border, which supposedly belonged to Hezb-i-Islam. They took it virtually without a fight, gaining some eight hundred truckloads of guns and ammunition.12 And if you think Pakistan put the arms there and arranged for the Taliban to “capture” it, you must be very cynical.

  Within two months, the Taliban had airplanes, automobiles, artillery, tanks, helicopters, sophisticated radio communications, guns, bullets, and money. Pakistan professed amazement at how quickly these plucky youngsters were progressing—and on their own, too—for Pakistan denied having anything to do with creating or arming the Taliban. According to Pakistani spokesmen, the Taliban captured all their materiel from the Mujahideen or acquired it from commanders who joined them.13 At the same time, Pakistani officials flung open the gates of those Afghan refugee camps and let thousands of recruits pour across the border to join the new force.

  In November, the Taliban decided to conquer Kandahar, the country’s second-biggest city, and took it with shocking ease, in part because Kandahar was the Afghan city most ravaged by Mujahideen gangsters. Its citizens had been living in fear. They were sick of violence and hated the “holy warriors.” They had not turned against Islam or the Shari’a—only against the Mujahideen. They welcomed the Taliban because these young men proclaimed themselves to be true, incorruptible Muslims on a mission from God: to disarm all militias, restore order, and enforce the Shari’a. Common folks believed them because they so fervently longed for a savior to believe in.

  The Kandahar victory energized the Taliban, and the boys went campaigning. They took Ghazni, took Wardak, took Logar; they acquired the image of an irresistible force. In September 1995, they reached the country’s third-largest city, Herat, which was ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, an ally of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s. Ismail Khan fled to Iran as soon as he saw the Taliban coming, and so this “Army of God” took Herat without a fight too.

  Six months after anyone had heard of them, the Taliban controlled nine of the country’s thirty-four provinces. Their growing mystique and the widespread public hatred of the Mujahideen contributed to their success, but they had another asset too: plenty of cash. They simply paid warlords to stop fighting, and, since most of the warlords were only in it for the money, they agreed. Cynics charged that no way could a ragtag band of supposed students have raised so much cash on their own: they must have gotten it from Pakistan. Pakistani officials were shocked to hear such an accusation. And, the thing is, throughout this first year, the Taliban were, in fact, true to their word. Wherever they took over, they did shut down militias, confiscate arms, and introduce a fragile sense of security.

  Even as they were conquering western Afghanistan, the Taliban were also pouring east across the landscape in fleets of brand-new all-terrain Toyota pickup trucks that had machine guns bolted to their beds, vehicles that made them fast and deadly, rather like the Mongols’ mobile cavalry of centuries past. The Taliban were headed for Kabul now, which was not only the capital but bigger than the next six biggest cities combined.

  They reached the suburbs in September 1995, around the same time they were conquering Herat. Hekmatyar warned them not to approach his stronghold, or else he’d show them what grown-ups did with guns. Absurdly enough, he also offered to take over their forces and be their boss. Even as he was issuing warnings and tendering offers, his men were defecting to the Taliban in droves. Hekmatyar appealed to his sponsors in Pakistan, only to find they didn’t love him anymore. Hekmatyar was forced to swallow his pride and join forces with Massoud (whom he soon betrayed).

  The Lion of Panjsher drove the Taliban back from Kabul, dealing this sudden army its first setback. But Mullah Omar simply issued a call for fresh volunteers, and thousands of new recruits came rushing from the madrassas and refugee camps in Pakistan. They had no trouble getting across the border: Pakistani border officials were just glad to be of any assistance. The Taliban set siege to Kabul, and over the next few months their bombardment drove half the remaining population out of the city and into IDP camps.

  25

  Taliban Versus Mujahideen

  IN APRIL 1996, AS THE SIEGE OF KABUL WAS STILL UNDER WAY, SOME thousand rural clerics gathered in Kandahar to acclaim Mullah Omar as the Amir al-Mu’mineen, the “Commander of the Faithful.” This was the title adopted by Prophet Mohammed’s second successor (also named Omar). By assuming this title, Mullah Omar was equating himself with the most revered religious personalities in the annals of Islamic history. Just in case anyone missed the symbolism, he appeared before the crowd holding up a garment said to be the cloak of the Prophet himself. It was the most precious relic in the main mosque of Kandahar and one that the public rarely saw, but the mosque officials gladly gave it to Mullah Omar now to use for his political purposes.

  Mullah Omar was claiming a status beyond that of any mere king. To his followers, he was God’s deputy on earth, like the immediate successors of Prophet Mohammed—this man who knew nothing of science, geography, mathematics, or economics, who spoke no language but Pushto, and who quite possibly had never read a newspaper.

  The first siege of Kabul failed, but the Taliban tried again in the fall, bringing four hundred new tanks into the fight as well as jet planes, helicopters, and heavy artillery—not bad for an army of schoolboys led by half-educated peasants. Dostum still had his disciplined fifty thousand crack troops, but he decided Kabul was not worth the fight and retired to the north to build a quasi-autonomous state. By then, defections had reduced Massoud’s forces from thirty-five thousand down to a scant ten thousand.1 The Taliban surrounded the city in force and strafed it daily. Finally, Massoud too decided that it was better to run away now and live to fight another day. He pulled back to his home valley of Panjsher, a sixty-mile crack in the mountains north of Kabul.

  On the morning of September 26, 1996, the people of Kabul woke up to find bearded young men with kohl-rimmed eyes and bulky, black turbans patrolling their streets. To the people of Kabul, this did not feel like a regime change but an occupation. These new conquerors looked as foreign to them as had the blue-eyed Russians. Mujahideen leaders such as Massoud, Rabbani, Sayyaf, Hekmatyar, and Mujaddedi were at least familiar figures from the tumults of the sixties and seventies. People knew them.

  The Taliban, by contrast, were the children of rural Pushtoons from the southwestern deserts and the mountains straddling the border with Pakistan. They truly hailed from the “other” Afghanistan, the one Abdu’Rahman had subdued but had failed to absorb. Long before the curre
nt war, a chasm of cultural separation had opened up between these folks and the sophisticates of Kabul. What’s more, most of the young men and teenagers stalking the streets with machine guns didn’t come directly out of the rural villages of the old Afghanistan. They came out of the refugee camps. Most had only distorted images or none at all of the traditional Afghan life their parents had enjoyed long ago.2

  The Taliban espoused the same doctrine as the Mujahideen, only more so. On every point, they were more literal, more simplistic, more extreme. In their own view, what they were was more pure. They had no interest in discussing what was best for Afghanistan because they already knew what was best: the Shari’a. They were here to enforce the law (as they understood it) without compromise or deviation. This is what the bulk of the cadre undoubtedly believed.

  On their first day in Kabul, the Taliban lured former Communist president Najibullah and his brother out of the United Nations compound, tortured them, beat them to death, castrated them, mutilated their bodies, and hung them from a lamppost in Ariana Square, where they used the corpses for target practice.

  The message was clear: the Taliban did not give a fig about world opinion. But if this was so, how come they took the trouble to lure Najibullah out of United Nations compound? What made these tunnel-visioned fanatics sensitive to the diplomatic consequences of violating the sanctity of the UN? The probable answer: they weren’t. Behind the ragtag cadre stood a corps of sophisticated military strategists and tacticians affiliated with the Pakistan government. The scruples in this instance probably belonged to them.3

  But why would high officials of the Pakistan government be interested in imposing the Taliban’s ideas of social order on Afghanistan? Why would they care whether Afghan women wore veils or Afghan boys flew kites? The answer is, they probably didn’t. As long as the Taliban served Pakistan’s global interests, officials in Islamabad probably didn’t care what domestic policies the Taliban pursued. The Great Game was back, and Pakistan had stepped into the shoes once worn by the British.

  Conversely, although Mullah Omar’s Taliban might have been willing tools of Pakistan with regard to Great Game considerations, they had their own agenda, separate from Pakistan’s needs and desires. As soon as the Taliban had the rudiments of a government in place, they announced their program.

  Only then did Afghans discover what Taliban-imposed security would cost them. Women were henceforth forbidden to show themselves in public. Women could not work outside their homes or go to school. Women could not leave their compounds unless they were wearing that oppressive head-to-toe covering known as the chad’ri (or burqa). Women could not be on the streets without a male escort. That male escort had to be a husband or a relative close enough to meet the mandate of the Shari’a. Taxis were forbidden to pick up unveiled or unaccompanied women. Shopkeepers could not sell goods to such women. Outside the home, women were to be treated as nonpersons—unless they were showing some skin, any skin, in which case they were to be beaten on the spot.

  The criminal penalties listed in the Shari’a were to be enforced exactly as prescribed. Thieves were to have their hands cut off. In specified cases, they must lose their feet as well. Doctors were called away from legitimate patients to carry out these surgeries. Relatives of murder victims were given guns and invited to shoot the murderers, if they were caught. Women charged with adultery were stoned in public. At least once, this was carried out in the city’s main stadium, where crowds had gathered in former times to watch entertainments such as soccer. Long trials were declared a thing of the past. Judgments were to be delivered swiftly, and sentences carried out on the spot.

  Music was banned. Movies were banned. Photography was banned. All representational art was banned. Theaters were turned into mosques. Video stores were burned down. Television sets still provided some entertainment—not the shows, the sets themselves: those were set up in the streets, and the cadre shot them to pieces with their machine guns. Anything that smacked of gambling was outlawed. Kite flying was therefore prohibited. Soccer and chess were heavily discouraged, because people might place wagers on those games. Afghans enjoyed keeping pigeons and other birds, but those days were over. Pets were banned.

  The celebration of any non-Islamic event (such as New Year’s or Afghan Independence Day) was criminalized. Everybody, both men and women, had to wear clothing that conformed to the mandates of the Shari’a. The national tribal dress—long shirt, baggy pants, turbans for men, headscarves for women—fit this description. Western clothes did not, so Western clothes were banned. Long hair was banned for men. Beards, by contrast, became mandatory. Anyone caught violating the dress code could be punished. Prayer was mandatory too. Anyone caught not praying at the prescribed times would be punished.

  It’s worth noting that this program, which sounds so unprecedentedly grim to modern sensibilities, was pretty much precisely the same one Bachey Saqao had imposed after he drove Amanullah out of power. This whole story had happened before.

  At least two men were dropped from second-story windows for skipping prayer. Those guilty of minor infractions, such as shaving, could be whipped with a braided cable. The punishments were meted out by minions of a new government agency called the Ministry of Vice and Virtue (it had a longer official name but hardly anyone used it). This ministry had cabinet status equal to such portfolios as foreign affairs and defense. The Iron Amir, Abdu’Rahman, had a department with a similar name, but its work was incidental to the affairs of state. Under the Taliban, by contrast, stamping out “vice” and enforcing “virtue” were the core purpose of the state.

  Although the Taliban believed they represented nothing but Islam in its purest form, they were an overwhelmingly Pushtoon party, and their program featured ethnic, racial, and religious hatred directed largely at the Shi’a Hazaras. Early in their tenure, they made sweeps through Hazara neighborhoods, drafting all the men and boys they could catch, to serve as cannon fodder in their campaigns. All who resisted were killed. Never before had the long-suffering Hazaras suffered as they did under the Taliban. What the Taliban carried out against the Hazaras in Afghanistan was exactly the same practice that was called ethnic cleansing elsewhere in the world.

  And yet, in those first few months and years, the world turned a blind eye to the Taliban’s activities. What kept most of the world neutral was the politics of oil. Indeed, oil was the subnarrative to the whole Taliban drama. Pakistan supported the Taliban from the start because they thought this group could make Afghanistan safe for an oil pipeline. Western oil companies came around to the same idea. As early as 1991, Carlos Bulgheroni, chairman of the smallish Argentinean oil company Bridas, flew into the region seeking to secure the rights to Turkmenistan’s oil and gas. He met with President Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s eccentric dictator, fielded the first proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan, and courted competing Afghan warlords to discuss deals. Bulgheroni actually believed his pipeline would bring peace to Afghanistan.

  The power brokers in Pakistan colluded with Bulgheroni, although they had exactly the opposite analysis: peace would bring the pipeline. Peace at any cost came first. Hence, the Taliban.

  Bridas executives talked to the Taliban but also to all the other factions in the country. They were hedging their bets. In early 1996, Bulgheroni negotiated a thirty-year deal with the Rabbani government for the right to build his pipeline across Afghanistan. He also got guarantees of protection. Rabbani was guaranteeing something he could not deliver. His government controlled virtually nothing outside of Kabul by then, and it would be driven even from Kabul within the year. Bulgheroni had signed a contract with a ghost.

  US oil companies had been skeptical about the pipeline at first, but once the news of Bridas’s negotiations got into the wind, the Texas-based oil company Unocal got interested. Unocal executives flew into Turkmenistan to talk to Niyazov, who decided that his deals with Bridas had been premature. He put the Argentinean company on hold while he invited the Unocal people to
tell him more.

  Unocal brought heavy artillery to the competition with Bridas. They had friends in the Republican Party, including power brokers such as Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, as well as Ronald Reagan’s erstwhile Afghan advisor Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad, in turn, had an Afghan associate by the name of Hamid Karzai. Khalilzad and Karzai, in concert with their neoconservative allies in Washington, DC, argued that the Taliban deserved US support because they could be a stabilizing force. Khalilzad predicted that the Taliban would develop into a regime much like that of Saudi Arabia, a refreshing contrast to those madmen in Iran.4 While Bridas was busy negotiating with the Mujahideen, Unocal put its trust in the Taliban.

  As soon as Unocal launched its bid, a host of US military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials got involved. They could be helpful because they had links to key figures in the Pakistan government. The US government naturally wanted to help an American company beat out foreign competition for access to Caspian Basin petroleum. To be sure, the American government did have some security concerns. Would American citizens be safe building the pipeline in Afghanistan or working there after it was built? Pakistani officials assured the Americans that the Taliban controlled much of the country and would soon have it all. They were the one force capable of ending the internecine warfare and making Afghanistan safe for business.

  This context explains why authorities in the West paid such scant attention to the Taliban’s social policies. They took the position that the Afghan government’s domestic policies were nobody’s business but their own. If the Taliban became a regime like the one in Saudi Arabia, would that be so bad? Americans didn’t have to like the Saudi way of life to do business with them. They were rational people. The only real question for America was—could the Taliban really stabilize their country? Khalilzad insisted that they could, and State Department officials figured he should know: he was after all an Afghan.