Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Most of Kabul felt differently. Educated Afghans saw America as an overwhelming power, and they didn’t have to wait for Bush’s speech to know that this juggernaut was coming. Indeed, within days of the mass murders (within hours, according to the New York Times)5 the United States was on a war footing.

  On October 7, 2001, the attack began. Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships in the Arabian Sea hit Afghan cities with deadly accuracy. Long-range bombers, British and American, rained destruction upon hapless Afghanistan. Global news stations such as CNN provided continuous reports about the attacks, illustrated with animated graphics. What viewers saw was a stream of arrows arcing from the Arabian Sea to small circles representing the cities of Afghanistan, where explosion icons bloomed repeatedly.

  Newscasters fleshed out these images with words, but only English-speakers knew what they were saying. Scores of millions of Muslims watching the broadcasts understood only what they gleaned from the graphics: explosives hitting Afghanistan, boom, boom, boom.

  Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden was taping a video of himself speaking from the mouth of a cave, dressed in stately white robes, quoting Koranic verses in a grave voice. This too was broadcast globally. Bin Laden was speaking Arabic, and, because most Muslims don’t speak Arabic any more than they speak English, they didn’t know what he was saying either, but they understood the iconography. He was evoking the most resonant scene in the Muslim imagination, that moment when Prophet Mohammed transformed from an ordinary man into God’s personal spokesman. In addition to the military battle, in short, a message-battle raged in the mediasphere. The West won the “ground” war, but bin Laden may have won the first stages of the “air” war, especially if his goal was to provoke a global showdown between Islam and the West and to position himself as a leader in that clash.

  After a few weeks, the United States ran out of significant targets to bomb in Afghanistan and switched to a two-pronged new strategy. Prong one: entrust the actual fighting to the Northern Alliance and only provide them with air support. Prong two: put pressure on Pakistan to cut its support for the Taliban.

  The pressure consisted of financial and diplomatic measures that had been available to the United States for years. As soon as they were tried, they worked. Without support from Pakistan, the Taliban turned out to be nothing. With military support from the West, the Northern Alliance proved unstoppable.

  On November 8, Pakistan ordered the Taliban to vacate their consulate in Karachi. Just three nights later, Taliban leaders slipped quietly out of Kabul under cover of night. The next day, the city was without a government. Northern Alliance forces hovered just a few miles outside the city, but US commanders ordered them to stay put until “the international community” (read: the United States) drew up a plan for a new governing authority. Perhaps US policy makers wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1992 debacle. Or perhaps the fix was in: perhaps Pakistan had agreed to support the US intervention only in exchange for assurances that its proxies would remain in control of Afghanistan. In the week before the flight of the Taliban, the media did buzz with speculation based on leaked reports that there were actually two kinds of Taliban—the bad kind who oppressed women and made common cause with the likes of Osama bin Laden, and the good kind who were merely conservative Afghans devoted to their country’s traditional Islam.

  The Northern Alliance, led now by a rather ramshackle cluster of Massoud’s former aides and associates, decided not to wait for the “good Taliban” to dig in. They knew that only by taking possession of the city could they secure any say in the future of the country. If they didn’t have Kabul, they would be sidelined. On November 13, therefore, the diverse troops of the many formerly-warring Mujahideen parties marched back into the city they had abandoned five years earlier. This time, no violence broke out. For one thing, Hekmatyar’s group was missing from the equation. Kabul welcomed the Mujahideen, the troops behaved themselves, and residents of the city poured into the streets to celebrate. People were downright euphoric, and no wonder: everyone thought the war had ended finally: America had come to save the day!

  On December 7, just two months after the bombing of Afghanistan began, Mullah Omar and his cohorts fled their real stronghold, which wasn’t Kabul but Kandahar. They hightailed it for the Pakistan border, melting into the population as they moved. The last of them disappeared finally into the border belt where most of them had lived as refugee children during the anti-Soviet war.

  PART V: THE STRUGGLE RESUMES

  On the face of it, when Afghans took up arms to expel the Soviet invaders, they were waging a patriotic war of independence. In reality, the anti-Soviet war mapped onto many preexisting conflicts of Afghan society. The Afghan Communists were not just puppets of the Soviet Union: they were The City. The Mujahedeen were not just anti-Communist “freedom fighters.” They were The Country. This war resumed the campaign of conservative Muslims against Amanullah in the 1920s. It resumed the ferocious contention within Afghan culture about the proper role of women in society. It was a war between the secular modernist impulse and the all-governing religion of Islam.

  The political dominance of Pushtoons had been a given of Afghan society ever since a Pushtoon warrior founded the country, but the anti-Soviet war reopened that old can of worms. It put the question of power relationships among ethnic groups back on the table. When Ahmad Shah Massoud fought the Communists, he wasn’t just fighting against the Soviets but for the Tajiks. The Hazara militias were fighting as Hazaras, the Uzbeks as Uzbeks. The Taliban capture of Kabul marked a triumph for Pushtoons against the other ethnic groups, and, within Pushtoon society, it represented a triumph for the southern Pushtoons of the area straddling the Durand Line over their sophisticated northern rivals, the aristocratic Durannis. With this victory, old Afghanistan looked to have beaten the new one decisively; the rural forces had defeated The City; the emancipation and empowerment of Afghan women had been halted for good; Amanullah’s revolutionary reform program was dead at last.

  In fact, everything the House of Dost Mohammed had built was in ruins. Kabul was not even the single, unquestioned capital of Afghanistan anymore. Kandahar was the real seat of Taliban power, Herat was in play again, Mazar-i-Sharif was the capital of an independent ministate in the north, and most parts of the country were ruled by autonomous, local warlords. In the south and southeast, even the border was dissolving. Was Afghanistan really a country? For some people, even that question was back on the table.

  But when al Qaeda used this territory as its base for attacking the Twin Towers in New York, it drew the United States into the Afghan story. The United States quickly toppled the Taliban, but what did this portend for Afghanistan? Would Kabul stage a comeback? Would the urban elite now come back from exile? Would the old technocracy rise again? Was Afghanistan back on course to becoming a centralized modern nation-state with a democratic, constitutional government? Such were the questions Afghans were facing now.

  28

  The Bonn Project

  THAT DECEMBER THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENED A CONFERENCE IN Germany to hammer out a plan for Afghanistan. It wasn’t the usual sort of postwar peace conference, at which winners sit down and dictate their terms to the losers. The losers were not even at the table here. This conference was held to negotiate peace among the winners—that contentious array of Afghan factions and forces that had fought the Soviets. The Bonn Conference of December 2001 was, in fact, the meeting that probably should have taken place in 1992, right after the Soviet pullout. It brought together all the key players from that era (except the Communists, who were irrelevant now).

  The delegates came to the meeting as individuals but could be sorted into four identifiable groups. There was the Northern Alliance, representing the minority ethnic parties of the north. There was “the Peshawar group,” Pushtoon Mujahideen who had operated out of offices in Pakistan. There was “the Cypress group,” delegates affiliated with the various groups supported by Iran, including the Hazaras and Heratis l
ike Ismail Khan. Finally there was “the Rome group,” the allies, associates, and supporters of former king Zahir Shah. These were the urban elite of prewar Afghanistan, including the educated technocrats who had been living in the West all these years. The Rome group represented the hopes of Afghan expatriates in Europe and the United States; to them, these were the men and women who would take Afghanistan back to the future.

  The tribal Pushtoons of the rural south and southeast were excluded from the meeting, because the Taliban had sprung from among them and American management felt that, if they were given a voice, the Taliban might sneak back into power incognito. The trouble was, the excluded Pushtoons were a key segment of the country’s population. Excluding them could not help but expand the existing fissures of Afghan society, such as the rivalry between Ghilzai and Durrani Pushtoons, whose contention went back to the days of Ahmad Shah Baba. Excluding them also mapped onto the festering sore of Afghan history, the Durand Line, which split the territory of the very Afghans who were shut out of Bonn. The exclusion of these Pushtoons also emphasized the chasm between the wealthy cities of the north, especially Kabul, and the impoverished rural tribal south. This exclusion and its consequences would come back to haunt the country.

  At the time, however, the delegates at the Bonn Conference went about their work with energy and optimism. “Guided” by the Western powers, they came up with a four-step plan:

  1. First they would cobble together an interim government to manage the country for six months.

  2. Next, they would convene a loya jirga—a Grand Tribal Assembly—to forge a two-year “transitional government” and elect a good man as its head.

  3. Third, during that two-year transition period, a commission of learned Afghans would draft a new constitution.

  4. Finally, presidential and parliamentary elections would be held, thereby completing Afghanistan’s metamorphosis into a normal parliamentary democracy.

  This plan had one telling flaw. It assumed an end point. The delegates at Bonn felt they could mandate presidential and parliamentary elections based on a constitution that had not yet been written because they already knew the constitution would set up a government with an elected president and parliament. The Bonn plan might have been perfect for a country being formed from scratch. Here, however, a story was already in progress, the story of a long-standing struggle between contrary impulses that kept pulling this society in opposite directions, polarities that included city versus countryside, change versus stasis, new versus old, state bureaucracy versus tribal relationships, secular institutions versus religious establishment, national military versus spontaneously self-organized local guerillas, and a central government operating out of Kabul versus an amorphous universe of village-republics without any center, the original Afghanistan versus Abdu’Rahman’s Afghanistan. The history of the country was the story of the pendulum swinging back and forth between these camps. In recent decades, each swing of the pendulum had taken the country further in each direction. The Communist regime represented the country’s most extreme swing toward an urban centralized state imposing secular authority over all the land; the Taliban regime had been the most extreme swing toward a conservative-religious Afghanistan ruled by clerics turned feudal warlords.

  What came out of Bonn was not a plan to reconcile these extremes but a mustering of international support for one side of the struggle. The conferees mapped out a vision of Afghanistan rebuilt as a secular nation around a core of Western values. Many Afghans would sincerely love to see that plan succeed. I include myself in that number. But then, we would: we’re products of the modernist impulse in Afghan history. So are most of the Afghans known to most Americans, because we’re the ones who made it to the West when the Soviet invasion drove Afghans into exile.

  The Bonn plan represented a comeback for the Afghan technocracy and the old Afghan aristocracy. It marked a resumption of the oft-interrupted Afghan project launched by Dost Mohammed, enlarged by Abdu’Rahman, and radicalized by Amanullah. There was never any doubt that the other side would regroup and fight back, because the pendulum has never stopped swinging in Afghanistan, between a temporary victory for one side, followed by a backlash and a temporary victory for the other side.

  The Bonn Conference completed its work smoothly. With pronounced and perhaps heavy-handed guidance from the United States, the delegates shaped their interim authority and selected a compromise candidate, Hamid Karzai, to head it up. Karzai was a logical choice for America, even though he had never done much to prove himself a leader of men. He had relatives living in the United States—his brother Mahmoud had built the first significant Afghan restaurants in the United States, including the Helmand of San Francisco, which had won acclaim from Gourmet Magazine. Karzai was friends with Reagan’s Afghan advisor Zalmay Khalilzad and through him had connections to the Republican insiders who had engineered the election of George Bush. He was rumored to have worked for Unocal, the Dallas-based oil company, although the exact relationship remains ambiguous (and Karzai himself denies there ever was one). A worldly sophisticate, Karzai understood the priorities of global business, spoke fluent English, and could be trusted not to sow social discomfort at diplomatic gatherings.

  On the other hand, Hamid Karzai had some good, old-fashioned Afghan tribal cred as well. He was a Pushtoon; his father was a khan of the Popalzais, a leading (Durrani) Pushtoon tribe; the Popalzai were a leading clan in Kandahar, the most Pushtoon of Afghan cities. And although the Karzais had supported the Taliban early on, Karzai Senior was assassinated by the Taliban, which made Hamid credible as an opponent of the ousted regime.

  It’s true that Karzai had no personal following in Afghanistan, but this meant he had no die-hard enemies there either. He had no legendary anti-Soviet military exploits to his credit, but, then, every leader who had distinguished himself in that war had also disgraced himself in that war and its aftermath. With no following, no enemies, and no war crimes marring his résumé, Karzai looked like an ideal man to oversee the building of a new country utterly severed from its past.

  The Northern Alliance could not be ignored, however, because they occupied Kabul, so the three key ministries—defense, interior, and foreign affairs—went to Massoud’s three chief aides, General Fahim, Younus Qanouni, and the man with the name so nice they gave it to him twice—Dr. Abdullah Abdullah.

  The Bonn Conference differed from most peace parlays in another way as well: it began before the fighting ended. In fact it began before the fighting even peaked. As the Afghan delegates were making their way to Germany, US Special Forces and Northern Alliance warriors were attacking the Tora Bora cave complex near Afghanistan’s southeastern border. US forces fired incendiary devices into the caves and incinerated everyone inside, but Osama Bin Laden somehow escaped.

  In the north, Northern Alliance troops continued to battle hard-core contingents of Arab and Pakistani Jihadis. Hundreds of the latter were captured, but most of them were later killed during an attempted prison break. As many as seven thousand Taliban militants and hard-core al Qaeda operatives were cornered in the north, but the United States allowed Pakistan to airlift the several thousand Arabs and Pakistanis away in Pakistani airplanes before Northern Alliance forces could get to them.1

  In the south, after Tora Bora, the fighting moved to the valley of Shahikot. Eight soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash there, America’s first major casualties. I saw the news on the big-screen satellite TV in a Peshawar guesthouse where I happened to be staying at that moment, a TV that could get fifty or sixty channels, from CNN to Al Jazeera to dozens of local stations that usually broadcast cricket or soccer games. That day all were covering the death of the eight Americans, nonstop.

  An Afghan villager who had recently crossed the border was sitting next to me, staring at the TV in awe: “Who were these great generals?” he asked.

  “They weren’t generals,” I told him. “They were regular soldiers.”

  He was puzzled. “
In my village, people are killed every day, sometimes ten or twenty in a single day, and it’s never on the news. You must be wrong. These men must have been very important.”

  At Shahikot, the Taliban fought savagely but went down to utter defeat in a week. On March 18, US general Tommy Franks declared that the major fighting was over and America had won. Contrary to all the “graveyard-of-empires” talk, conquering Afghanistan had been easy. A few thousand troops would remain along the border to “mop up” “Taliban remnants,” but the Bonn process could now proceed.

  Step two was scheduled for June. Backstage managers had arranged for this step to run smoothly too. Old King Zahir Shah had agreed not to reassert his former authority. In return, ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the powerful Northern Alliance, had agreed not to bid for any office. This deal cleared the way for the man who was now widely perceived as a suave international fashion plate, Hamid Karzai, to take charge of the transitional government.

  Then came a glitch. In the week before the jirga, one of the king’s grandsons gave an interview. He said that actually, His Majesty might want to play a more active role after all. The next morning the walls of the city were papered with posters of Rabbani, which sent a chilling message. If the king ran, Rabbani would run, and, if he ran, the streets of Kabul might soon run red with blood in a horrifying replay of 1992. Zalmay Khalilzad swooped in to smooth things over, and he managed it: the king said he’d been misquoted, the posters of Rabbani vanished. The jirga opened on June 11 as scheduled and went smoothly. Very smoothly.

  Too smoothly, perhaps. At a real jirga people would have been arguing for days, roaring out speeches, and cutting deals on the perimeters. The outcome would have been unknown at the start, and the group’s decision would have represented an actual and hard-won consensus. This jirga was stage-managed to the max, its conclusions preordained. Everybody knew Karzai was America’s choice and would win.