Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  What Clinton got out of his decisive move was ridicule. In America, few potential voters believed he did it to save America from terrorists. Pundits and late-night TV comedians agreed that this was all about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They referenced the hit movie from the summer before, Wag the Dog, in which a fictional US president fakes an invasion of Albania to distract voters from his sexual peccadilloes.

  Bin Laden, by contrast, got everything he wanted from the bombings with his target constituency: disgruntled Muslims attracted to militant Jihadism and open to recruitment by al Qaeda. His grandiloquent fatwas had served notice that he didn’t wish to be categorized with Carlos the Jackal and the Gambini brothers, but with the Clintons and Yeltsins of the world. Now, the only remaining superpower validated his image by hitting him with the sorts of weapons usually reserved for wars between states. And not only did Bin Laden live to tell the tale, but he quickly released a videotape crowing about his triumph. In Pakistan, two flattering biographies of Bin Laden hit the bookstores and turned into immediate best sellers. (In America, nonfiction best seller lists around this time featured a book about Princess Di and another about Monica Lewinsky.)

  That fall, Congress began talking about impeaching Clinton for lying about his sex life. The impeachment drama further hampered Clinton’s ability to take military action against bin Laden, and, in any case, the military approach had not really worked, so the US government changed tack and decided to ask the Taliban to arrest Bin Laden and turn him over for trial. Such feelers from the United States only pumped up the Taliban’s sense of self-importance. They exulted in saying no, Osama Bin Laden was their guest. The code of Pushtoonwali obliged them to protect a guest with their very lives. Besides (they claimed) they had no idea where Bin Laden might be staying.

  The United States tried to get some help from Pakistan. Clinton personally appealed to Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif to capture Bin Laden for the United States. Sharif wheedled that he’d try but couldn’t promise anything. He lamented that he didn’t have the elite team of highly trained military experts it would take to catch such an elusive terrorist mastermind. Thereupon, the CIA gave Sharif the money, materiel, and consultants he needed to create exactly such a strike force. Once it was operational, the new strike force didn’t go after Bin Laden. It went after his enemies. In January 1999, this team was implicated in the murder of the wife and children of Abdul Haq, the most prominent anti-Taliban Pushtoon warlord—quite a setback because Pushtoons who opposed the Taliban were as precious as platinum.

  The truth is, Pakistan’s top officials were no longer in a position to help the United States, even had they wanted to, because Pakistan no longer controlled the Taliban. When Pakistani military and intelligence officials first began nurturing the Taliban, they were thinking of their own regional and global interests. They wanted a government in Afghanistan through whom they could control Afghanistan’s foreign policy. In exchange, they would let the Taliban pursue whatever domestic policies they wanted.

  But the Pakistani architects of the Taliban had failed to take a few things into account. They had failed to consider the appeal Talibanism might have to the countless disaffected Muslims in their own country. They had failed to note that the Taliban were not only Islamists but Pushtoon chauvinists and that Pakistan had millions of Pushtoon citizens whose relationship with the Pakistan state had always been contentious. They had failed to predict that these Taliban, these case-hardened, battle-tested, radically religious Pushtoon chauvinists, who were no longer boys but men, had the wherewithal to forge closer links with powerful, potentially rebellious elements of Pakistani society than the country’s own ruling military aristocracy could—closer even than top ISI officials. The Taliban had gotten cozy, for example, with Pakistan’s radical religious parties, with the smuggling mafias that operated across the Durand Line, with the mosques and madrassas that had so much influence among the conservative, impoverished masses, with the rural clerics who railed and raged against secular values, with bazaar merchants in the border provinces, and with tribal chiefs in areas like Waziristan. And why wouldn’t they? They spoke the same language, they shared a culture, and in many cases they were tribally related.

  Pakistan sent the Taliban into Afghanistan, but Talibanism came seeping back across the border, disrupting Pakistani society. By 1999, Pakistan’s military and intelligence officials knew they had created a monster, but it was too late. The border between the two countries was vanishing, and Pakistani territory from Karachi to Kashmir was awash in Talibanism. The lower and middle ranks of the army and of ISI were Taliban loyalists just as much as they were Pakistanis. As a result, the top officers of these outfits, especially political appointees, no longer dared order their subordinates to move against the Taliban for fear that the orders would be disobeyed—because if the lower ranks realized they could disobey their superiors with impunity, all bets were off.

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  America Enters the Picture

  IN AMERICA, MEANWHILE, CLINTON’S TEAM DEFEATED THE IMPEACHMENT attempt. He would be allowed to finish his term, but the scandal had weakened him, and his anointed successor, Al Gore, had to deal with the electoral consequences. The Democrats desperately needed to shore up the women’s vote in the United States. This political imperative made the White House pay heed to a whole new voice about the Taliban. Feminist activists in America had discovered what sort of society the Taliban were creating, and they were appalled. While Clinton was battling his critics for getting a blowjob at work, Radio Shari’a in Kabul was proudly announcing how many hundreds of women had been beaten on the streets each day for letting their hands or faces show in public.

  A group called the Feminist Majority began to broadcast information about the Taliban as vigorously as it could. The information added up to a compelling horror story that was true enough in broad outline. Comedian Jay Leno’s wife Mavis Leno donated money to the cause. The Feminist Majority circulated an e-mail reporting grim facts about Taliban social policies, and this e-mail, one of the first to go viral, introduced the term “gender apartheid” into the American political conscience.

  The efforts of these feminist activists would have been futile had they been aimed at shaming the Taliban into altering their policies. Mullah Omar had total control of his territory and didn’t care what American women thought about him. But the feminist activists had targets that did matter. They picketed Unocal’s offices in the United States, which sent a warning to Western companies and governments: dealing with the Taliban might cost them. Unocal put its pipeline project on hold (although the company denied they were responding to the picketing). US policy showed traces of change as well. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made statements critical of the Taliban, and in 1999 the United States supported a United Nations resolution to impose economic sanctions on the Taliban.

  To say the Taliban were unmoved would be understating the case. Their policies turned even more virulent. Mullah Omar issued a fatwa that Hindus had to carry yellow identification stickers—reminiscent of the Nazi directive about Jews. In Mazar-i-Sharif, a woman charged with adultery was triumphantly stoned in a sports stadium for a huge audience of men. Mullah Omar also flexed his muscles with a curt message to the prime minister of Pakistan: begin enforcing “Islamic law . . . step by step,” he ordered the president of Pakistan, or “there could be instability in your country.”

  In the central valley of Bamiyan, Taliban soldiers used explosives to destroy the largest sculptures in the world, two ancient standing Buddhas carved into the face of a cliff there over a thousand years ago. Of all their deeds, this one drew the broadest international attention and condemnation, prompting a puzzled Mullah Omar to ask what everybody was crying about. “We’re just blowing up stones,” he said.1

  Even as the United States grew less friendly to the Taliban, however, it continued to hold the Northern Alliance at arm’s length. The marks against Massoud’s group remained unchanged: too many of them were not
Pushtoons, and the US State Department was still sure that non-Pushtoons could play no part in ruling Afghanistan. Never mind that Massoud’s inner council now included Hamid Karzai, scion of Kandahar’s Durrani Pushtoons, who had turned against the Taliban after they assassinated his father. It also included Hajji Qadir, prominent among the Ghilzai Pushtoons of Jalalabad and brother to the famous commander Abdul Haq. (Also included were Uzbek leader Dostum, Hazara leader Karim Khalili, and Herati leader Ismail Khan among others—it was a broad coalition.) America’s real objection to Massoud’s alliance might have been the support it received from Iran. The friend of America’s enemy could only be America’s enemy.

  Even so, US strategists did see some value in the Northern Alliance. If the Northern Alliance were extinguished, the Taliban would lose all incentive to turn over Bin Laden. As long as they kept fighting, the Taliban might feel some need for outside help. Therefore, the CIA began delivering just enough aid to Massoud’s group to keep it alive, though not enough to let it gain ground. The CIA did hint that it would give Massoud more help if he would capture Osama Bin Laden alive and turn him over to America without hurting him.

  This was a truly clueless demand. As a practical matter it was asking the impossible, but politically it was even less feasible. Massoud was a Muslim leader, competing for the same hearts and minds as Bin Laden. He could have killed Bin Laden in battle without losing any prestige, but capturing Bin Laden at America’s behest and turning him over to the United States for trial would have marked him as a stooge and lost him all his standing with Afghan Muslims. His cooperation with the United States would thereafter have been worthless to the United States.

  Clinton’s term was running down and a US presidential election was coming up. Although the Clinton administration may have had tunnel vision with regard to Afghanistan, the Bush team viewed the country and the problems it posed through a blindfold. The Clinton crowd was obsessed with Bin Laden. The Bush crowd scarcely noticed Bin Laden, much less the storm clouds of which he was but a drop. During the presidential election campaign of 2000, when George Bush was asked about the Taliban, he thought the interviewer was asking about a rock band.2 Bush’s foreign policy expert, Condoleezza Rice, dismissed the Taliban as a front for Iran—the Taliban’s most implacable regional enemy. As for al Qaeda and its ilk, the Bush team promised to put together a master plan eventually, but it didn’t want to fuss about individual threats. “I’m tired of swatting flies,” Bush told Rice. Terrorism was important, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed, but “it isn’t tomorrow.”3

  George Bush and his team had other fish to fry. They were neoconservatives with a new global vision. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left a single superpower astride the planet, and American neoconservative intellectuals (originally called neoliberals) argued that the new circumstances gave the United States an opportunity—nay, a mission, even—to reshape the world in its own image. To neoconservatives, this meant establishing electoral democracies wherever possible, promoting American social values, pushing for free-market capitalism around the world, tearing down barriers to free trade, and reducing the ability of governments to regulate private enterprise. Meddling with the economy was the Communist prescription, and look what it got them; now it was time to see what private capital could do when liberated from all restrictions.

  As it happened, the decade just ending had also seen a technological revolution so sweeping and sudden, it made the Industrial Revolution look like the Stone Age. Just as the Mujahideen were pulverizing Kabul, the computer and its implications were hitting a tipping point in the industrialized West. Even as the Taliban were marching into Kabul, the PC was making its way into millions of middle-class homes, and e-mail was starting to render postal services obsolete. The cell phone, which didn’t even exist in 1989, was evolving into a cassette-sized device that would soon unmoor communication from fixed locations in space. By the time the Taliban got traction dragging Afghanistan back to the seventh century, the Internet was expanding at the speed of thought, and by 2001 anyone with a modem hooked up to the grid anywhere in the world could access a universe of information unparalleled in history.

  The new technology and the neoconservative vision dovetailed with a growing trend toward globalization, which meant, among other things, that large corporations could distribute their operations across national borders in whatever ways maximized profits. Because workers in “less developed countries” commanded lower wages, production was moving to places such as China, India, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, while the executive functions of those same enterprises were coalescing in places where life was rendered comfortable by developed infrastructure, such as Western Europe and the United States. Financial and accounting functions, meanwhile, were moving to “sovereign” countries where taxation was light.

  Afghanistan provided the starkest contrast to these developments. Along with Somalia and other “failed states,” it seemed so irrelevant to these great new developments, it was hardly worth noticing. And yet it was here that the vast disparity between the most and least advanced parts of a rapidly globalizing planet would reach not the tipping point but the ripping point.

  The presidential campaign of 2000 deadlocked. At the end of the year, as the two candidates were arguing about “hanging chads,” Arab students attending Al Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany, were drinking in the fulminations of radical Muslim cleric Zammar, a veteran of the Afghan jihad. Four of these students, Mohammed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ramzi Binalshibh, had gone to Afghanistan to meet with top Al Qaeda leaders and present a plan they had conceived: to use hijacked airplanes as suicide bombs. Bin Laden listened with interest.

  In the summer of 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud made his first and only visit out of Afghanistan. He traveled to France, at the request of a Belgian diplomat, to address the European parliament on the danger posed by al Qaeda. There, he told the assembly that Afghanistan was an occupied nation. The Taliban, he said, were a front for yet another foreign invader—Pakistan, this time. He said that the Taliban and al Qaeda had turned the territory they controlled into one gigantic training camp for terrorists whose only aim was to harm the West and that if the West did not help Massoud and his alliance, it would suffer terrible consequences. The delegates applauded politely.

  Massoud went home a failure. His alliance had lost most of the country by this time. They had been squeezed into northeastern Afghanistan and were fighting doggedly to survive in even that small pocket. Massoud spent the hot nights remaining of that summer on the roof of his house, reading classical Persian poetry, of which he had hundreds of volumes. His hair had turned gray, his back was in constant, excruciating pain, and his life’s work was in a shambles, but he had not given up. The tide, he believed, was turning. Muslims would come to realize the cruelty and ignorance of Talibanist “Islam” and then they would open up to the interpretation that ethical, rational Muslims favored. Someday, he believed, Afghanistan would be a prosperous, modern, educated country whose practice of Islam would provide an example to the world of how just, gentle, and democratic Islam could be. He needed only to get his message out to Muslims around the world to trigger a turning of the tide. He needed to break out of the shell of isolation into which Pakistan, the Taliban, and the United States had cooped him.

  He was delighted, therefore, when he received a request from a London-based television station, asking for an interview. The station said they were sending two journalists to film him. A tentative ally of Massoud’s, Pushtoon warlord Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, who was much indebted to Saudi money and Wahhabi support, claimed to have vetted the journalists and sent word to Massoud that these two were legitimate. Whether he spoke with nefarious intent or was himself fooled, no one knows.

  On September 9, the two “journalists,” Karim Touzani and Kasem Bakkali, visited Massoud in his sparsely furnished office. They asked a few questions to disarm suspicion, and then the cameraman activated the bomb hidden in his camera. He himself die
d in the explosion, Massoud’s face was blown away, and his aide, son of the famous poet Khallili, was badly injured. The second “journalist” escaped through a window, but Massoud’s men caught him and beat him to death on the spot. Some have seen this killing as suspicious. Why not hold the man for questioning, they ask? Was it because he had some incriminating information about a traitor on Massoud’s staff? Was it because some member of his inner circle was actually . . . a CIA agent? . . . Or an ISI agent? . . . Or an al Qaeda operative? . . . Or? . . .

  Personally, I laugh at such theories. Here was a man who had penetrated to the heart of Massoud’s headquarters and killed the mythic hero in his very home. Of course the killing unleashed a blind rage in his followers, grizzled warriors all. No explanation is needed for the carnage of the next few moments. Had the assassin gotten out alive, a theory would be needed.

  Just two days later, as all the world knows, twenty-two men associated with al Qaeda, four of whom had actually trained for this exact mission at one of Osama Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan that summer, hijacked four civilian jetliners and flew one of them into the Pentagon, two into the World Trade Center, and one into the ground near Pittsburgh, killing some three thousand people total. It was the most horrific single act of terrorism the world had ever seen.

  WHEN THE NEWS HIT AFGHANISTAN, SOME UPPER-ECHELON TALIBAN exulted. They didn’t know who had done this thing, but it made them glad: America was the enemy and the enemy had been damaged. They never dreamed the deed could blow back on them. After all, Washington was so far away. What could Americans do to Kabul?4