Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  The United States did not create the Taliban or fund them directly, as some critics later charged. They only kept funding their ally Pakistan, ignoring the fact that Pakistan was nurturing the Taliban. The United States also took Pakistan’s advice to stop supporting Massoud and his allies. In fact, the United States tried to ensure that no aid of any kind reached Massoud from any Western source.

  MASSOUD, HOWEVER, WAS FAR FROM BEATEN. WHILE THE TALIBAN WERE securing Kabul, Massoud was regrouping in Panjsher. That November 1996, he convened the leaders of many former anti-Soviet groups and formed a coalition called the United Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which included the Uzbek warlord Dostum, the Hazara militias of central Afghanistan, the Ismaili Shi’a Tajiks of the northeast, and representatives of virtually all other non-Pushtoon minorities, plus a few Pushtoon “moderates” from the south. It was Afghanistan’s first truly multiethnic political entity.

  I call it an entity because it was more than a party but less than a government. Ostensibly, this Northern Alliance—as it later came to be called—sought independence for Afghanistan from all foreign powers including Pakistan, and they promised to set up a modernist, multiethnic Islamic state. The alliance could broadcast such a program now because the extremism of the Taliban had created room for a more liberal interpretation of Islam to compete for credibility.

  The Northern Alliance chose Rabbani as its president and Massoud as its commander in chief. Rabbani toured neighboring countries seeking military help from anyone but Pakistan, and the aid came flowing in, from Iran, from India, and even from Russia. The Russians contributed because they wanted to block Taliban-style Islamist fundamentalism from spreading to their country. The Iranians worried that Taliban-style hatred of Shi’as would infect the region. India saw Afghanistan as a chip in its struggle with Pakistan.

  For the next four-plus years, the Taliban launched one assault after another on the Northern Alliance. They took territory, lost territory, took it back, lost it, and took it again. In the spring of 1997, they captured Mazar-i-Sharif, the major city of the north, and proceeded to massacre the Hazaras of the city. Their learned scholars came along to sanction the ethnic cleansing on the grounds that Hazaras were not Muslims. They opined that killing a Hazara might even help a man get into heaven, so long as it was not the only good deed to his credit.

  Pakistan picked this moment to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates quickly followed suit. Every other country including the United States (as well as the United Nations) held back, but, in general, attitudes about the Taliban remained ambiguous. In this period, Unocal flew top members of the Taliban’s inner council to Dallas to talk about the pipeline. The Taliban opened an office in Washington, DC, to conduct business, and Taliban well-wishers in DC hired a public relations firm to burnish the group’s image in America.

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  Al Qaeda

  THE MUSLIM WORLD HAD LONG BEEN RIPE FOR REVOLUTIONARY activism, because virtually every Muslim-majority country from Pakistan to Morocco had an authoritarian government propped up by police power. Militant anti-Western sentiment had been rising since the 1970s as the entrenched elites of Muslim countries kept getting guns and money from Western imperialist powers to help them stay entrenched. Development in these countries had widened the gap between haves and have-nots, and, ominously enough, that gap had come to mirror a cultural gulf between Westernized elites and the masses they ruled—the same gulf that had begun to open in Afghanistan in Abdu’Rahman’s day and had been growing ever since.

  During the Cold War, some Muslim malcontents espoused Communism, simply because by doing so they could get aid from the mighty Soviets. But Marxism had never been a good fit for the Islamic world, and, once the Soviet empire was gone, Muslim revolutionaries had nothing to gain from clinging to Communist doctrine. Many now turned to an indigenous revolutionary ideology with deep roots in Muslim soil. This was Islamism, a political program derived from Islamic sources. Afghanistan became a nexus for Islamism because its anti-Soviet war of independence attracted so many thousands of Islamist activists from around the Arab world. They came to Afghanistan as radicals; they left as hardened revolutionaries comfortable with violence. These Arab veterans of the Afghan war came to be known as the “Arab Afghans.”

  One of these Arab Islamists was Osama Bin Laden, the seventeenth of fifty-plus children born to a billionaire Yemeni businessman who had close ties to the Saudi ruling family. Most of the Bin Ladens were high-stepping jetsetters, but Osama went the other way: in reaction to his family’s dissolute splendor, he embraced extreme “piety.” In the mideighties, he joined the thousands of Arab ideologues flocking to Afghanistan. There he used his wealth to help fund the jihad, which gained him many Afghan friends. He also took part in the fighting, which gained him some respect, although his military exploits were rather more modest than later legends would suggest. Early on, he established a guesthouse in Peshawar for Arab radicals coming to fight in Afghanistan, a base from which they could sally into battle and then come back for a hot shower and a good meal. The guesthouse was known as al Qaeda, the Arabic word for “base.” In 1988, with the war winding down and the Arab Afghans going home, Bin Laden transferred this name to a new organization he had founded, an organization dedicated to helping Arab radicals overthrow their home countries’ regimes.

  Bin Laden went home plumped up with self-importance about his exploits in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait and had positioned his army on the Saudi border, but Bin Laden told the Saudi government not to worry. He would lead an army of Arab Afghans in a jihad against Hussein. The Saudi government didn’t take his offer seriously. They dismissed the hero of the Afghan Jihad and then, as if to rub salt in the wound, asked the United States for help instead. They even let the American-led coalition use Saudi soil as its base. Osama cursed the Saudi royals for all this, and they responded by asking him to leave the country.

  Bin Laden moved to Sudan, where he continued to rage against the Saudi royals publicly, which drove them finally to revoke his citizenship. By then he was busy building up al Qaeda and studying the political possibilities of terrorism—that is, of exploiting the very weakness of his group, its very lack of numbers and resources and territory, to wreak terrible carnage on civilians by sneaking individual saboteurs and suicide bombers into “enemy territory.” In November 1995, al Qaeda agents tested his method with a bombing at an American compound in the capital of Saudi Arabia that killed several dozen American engineers and support staff.

  The CIA now took notice of Bin Laden. They pressured Sudan to do something about this guy, and the Sudanese government reluctantly asked Bin Laden to go somewhere else. In 1996, Bin Laden moved back to the snake pit that Afghanistan had become, but for him it was like alighting in a nest: he was home.

  He renewed his friendship with the ISI folks he had gotten to know during the anti-Soviet jihad, and he set to work cultivating the Taliban. Mullah Omar’s minions were expanding across Afghanistan just then, and Bin Laden gave them $3 million to help them buy off warlords south of Kabul, which made him one of their favorite Arab Afghans. Five months later, the Taliban took Kabul, a sunny development for Bin Laden, because everything he embraced, the Taliban espoused. Bin Laden pleased Mullah Omar by proclaiming his Afghanistan the world’s only true Muslim community.

  Warlords allied to the Taliban gave Bin Laden a complex of irrigation tunnels at a place called Tora Bora, near the city of Jalalabad. Bin Laden retrofitted this cave complex into a formidable underground military installation not only with his own money but with covert support from rich Wahhabis around the world. Mullah Omar liked what Bin Laden was doing and gave him more land along the country’s southern border, near the border city of Khost. There, Bin Laden built a string of training camps, a West Point of terrorism, so to speak: would-be soldiers for the global jihad came here to learn the same skills taught to US Navy SEALS and Army Rangers.
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  The Taliban also gave Bin Laden a large compound near the city of Kandahar, a former agricultural co-op called Tarnak Farms. Bin Laden made that place his headquarters. He brought his wives and children to live with him, and it was there that he huddled with his associates to plan his global campaign.

  On February 23, 1998, Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts issued an in-your-face statement declaring war on Israel, the United States, and the West. He had published a similar statement two years earlier, but it had gone unnoticed because it was long and rambling; this one was shorter, bolder. He quoted passages from the Qur’an (about fighting unbelievers), laid out a list of grievances against Jews and “Crusaders” (meaning any Westerner engaged in any project in the Islamic world), and delivered the following edict:

  The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.

  Bin Laden called his declaration a fatwa. A fatwa is not, as is commonly thought, an assassination order or a declaration of war. It is a religious ruling about a case not covered by existing precedents. When a novel situation crops up, a religious authority must decide how the Shari’a applies to this situation, a ruling that adds another precedent to the ever-growing body of established (Shari’a) law. Because this is a very serious matter in Islam, only the highest religious authorities may issue fatwas. Was Osama Bin Laden such an authority? Not really. He had no religious training and no standing among mainstream Muslim scholars. He was just a rich man who had fought in a jihad.

  Islam has no pope-like figure or clerical hierarchy to formally disqualify anyone from issuing a fatwa. Certification comes, ultimately, from the consensus of the community. If someone says he’s issued a fatwa and the Muslim community accepts it as a fatwa, then it is a fatwa. Bin Laden issued his declaration as if he had the authority to do so, and, because he had followers, at least some Muslims accepted the “religious duty” he imposed.

  This would probably have been a good moment for US policy makers to step back and develop a broader view of the problem. They might have studied what Jihadism was, where it came from, to whom it appealed, why it appealed to them, and how it had gotten into the culture of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They might have tried to identify religious intellectuals with credibility among Muslims who were offering alternative interpretations worth supporting. They might have explored how Jihadism and its rivals were intertwined with social and political undercurrents in Muslim societies to craft policies that would undercut the seductions of Jihadism far upstream from actual crises. Finally, they might have worked out how to distinguish long-standing local contentions from global arguments and dealt with them separately.

  But US policy makers went the other way. They narrowed the scope of their approach, excluding social, political, cultural, and economic factors from consideration to focus tightly on Islamism as a military problem. They also narrowed down their definition of the military problem finally to one man: Osama Bin Laden. By implication, neutralizing him would end the threat.

  There was, to be sure, some truth in this simplistic analysis: Bin Laden was a dangerous and determined man. US president Clinton recognized the menace he represented and wanted someone to do something—but who should do it? So many agencies had people dealing with terrorism. Until now they had mostly been concerned with spotting and foiling isolated plots: a hijacking here, a bombing there. A transnational organization of unknown scope declaring war on a state was something new. Whose jurisdiction was it to counter this? The CIA? The Pentagon? The NSC? The FBI? Army intelligence? Naval intelligence? The marines? President Clinton appointed a White House terrorism czar to coordinate all counterterrorism efforts and gave this man, Richard Clarke, cabinet rank. In the end, Clarke only added one more voice to the dissonant clamor about the terrorist threat.

  The State Department complicated the matter. Experts such as Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Pickering said that only a Pushtoon from the south could really rule Afghanistan, and the United States must not hitch its wagon to any other star on the Afghan scene. To Pickering, only the Taliban fit the profile, because they were Pushtoons from the south. Hence, the United States had to let them complete their takeover. Whatever was done about Osama Bin Laden, it must not hinder the progress of the Taliban. The State Department was also locked into Pakistan as its indispensable ally in this region. After all, Pakistan had been so good about funneling US aid to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, and, during the Cold War, Pakistan had served America’s policy so well by completing the containment fence around Communism. Whatever new trouble was looming here, the United States must partner with Pakistan to combat it. Whatever the United States did about Osama Bin Laden, therefore, must not ruffle Pakistani sensibilities.

  Unfortunately, Bin Laden was in bed with the Taliban and under the protection of Pakistan—who were thoroughly intertwined with each other. The question became, how to extract Bin Laden from this tangle without “altering the battlefield.” Just when a panoramic engagement was needed, American policy narrowed down to one narrow obsession.

  The CIA hatched plans for a “snatch operation.” They would swoop in, grab Bin Laden, and lift him out of Afghanistan without leaving a ripple behind. The snatch-op would be easy because everyone knew where Bin Laden lived: at Tarnak Farms, an isolated compound surrounded by nothing but desert and brush. The CIA worked out a plan to drop a thirty-man strike team into that desert one night. The men would creep into the compound through drainage ditches, drag Bin Laden out, stuff him into a helicopter, and fly away.

  At the last moment, however, President Clinton got cold feet. Jimmy Carter had tried something very much like this in Iran during the hostage crisis of 1980, and the operation had gone catastrophically wrong because of a dust storm. Carter had never recovered politically. Then too, in a satellite photo of the Tarnak Farms compound, Clinton saw a child’s empty swing set, and the worst-case scenario occurred to him: what if the operation failed and Bin Laden escaped and . . . children were killed? Clinton could not afford the fallout from such a failure. He called the whole thing off.

  The CIA was disappointed but put together a new plan. They would kill Bin Laden by bombing one of those training camps at Khost when Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts were there. Again, however, at the last moment, Clinton backed out. He received word that the people in that camp weren’t Bin Laden and his associates but the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, who came here every year to do some falcon hunting. The last thing Clinton needed was the flak he’d face if he tried to kill Bin Laden and instead killed the royal family of the UAE. So again he called off the operation. (Carping about Clinton’s indecisiveness should be tempered by the fact that he made the right decision: the report was correct, it turned out. The strike would have missed Bin Laden and killed the royal family of a US ally.)

  Meanwhile, Bin Laden was plotting his next move. He had sleeper agents around the world, including Africa, and he decided the time had come to wake some of them up. On August 8, 1998, at ten thirty in the morning, al Qaeda operatives blew up a truck behind the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 213 and wounding more than 4,000, of whom 300 later died. The casualties included twelve Americans. Nine minutes later, a truck loaded with explosives drove into the American Embassy in Dar al Salaam, Tanzania, killing eleven Tanzanians and injuring eighty-five.

  Crimes like these demanded an immediate and strong response from the American president. Bill Clinton, however, had to react amid a hobbling and quite unrelated domestic crisis. Long before he became president, Clinton and his wife had lost money in some ill-fated Arkansas land deal peddled by the Whitewater Development Corporation. As soon as Clinton became president, his opponents called for an investigation, and Congress appointed a special prosecutor, Ken Starr, to look into the case. He went after the Clintons with the tenacity of Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert. He couldn’t define any exact charges related to Whitewater,
but during his investigations a woman named Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against the president for sexual harassment dating back to his days as governor.

  Her suit was eventually dismissed, but by then Ken Starr had absorbed it into his investigations, and in the Jones testimony he found hints of a recent sexual liaison between President Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Starr’s relentless probing turned up evidence that this intern may in fact have fellated the president in the Oval Office while he was conducting government business. Starr leaked the most lurid details of his findings to the media in the weeks before the Africa bombings, setting all of America abuzz. On the day of the bombing, Monica Lewinsky was testifying to a grand jury about her sex acts with the president. On August 17, Clinton went on TV and admitted his sexual transgressions. From that humiliating TV appearance, he went directly into a secret meeting with his military and intelligence experts to discuss how America should respond to the embassy bombings in Africa. That day he gave an order that was carried out on August 20: the United States fired sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles at the terrorist training camps near Khost and another dozen or so at a chemical plant in Sudan that was said to be manufacturing chemical weapons.

  The strike cost $55 million. It didn’t kill any important al Qaeda figure. Bin Laden had left the camp just a few hours before the missiles struck, which is no surprise, since Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif knew about the impending strike the day before it happened. As for the chemical plant in Sudan, al Qaeda propagandists quickly claimed it was actually an aspirin factory. This claim remains disputed, but only perception mattered at the time, and al Qaeda won that battle of perception.