Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  The several thousand surviving Taliban prisoners were packed into container lorries—stuffed in like sardines, 250 or more to a container—so that the prisoners’ knees were against their chests and there was no air to breathe save for holes punched through by machine-gun bullets. The prisoners were driven to a jail in Dostum’s home town of Shiberghan. Only a handful of people in each of the thirty containers survived the journey—in one container only 6 out of 220 survived, according to UN officials. The dead were taken out to the Dasht-e-Leili desert and buried in huge pits dug by a bulldozer. Dostum’s spokesmen insisted that only a handful of prisoners suffering from war wounds died. Despite the presence of U.S. SOF in the region, what occurred was the most outrageous and brutal human rights violation of the entire war.

  Physicians for Human Rights later uncovered the extent of the atrocities by investigating the mass graves where the asphyxiated prisoners were buried, but the UN and the Afghan government declined to carry out any investigation against Dostum because the issue was too sensitive. Dostum was to be promoted to higher posts within the Karzai administration and was even allowed to stand for president in 2004. Uzbek eyewitnesses who had given testimony, such as the lorry drivers, mysteriously disappeared. Eyewitness accounts and video footage showed that U.S. Special Operations Forces were present in Kunduz, and the Pentagon was repeatedly asked why these U.S. soldiers did not try to stop the loading of the prisoners into the containers.22

  CENTCOM refused to answer any questions. Physicians for Human Rights sent a copy of their report to Donald Rumsfeld and General Franks in February 2002, but they received no reply. It was not until the U.S. magazine Newsweek wrote a cover story about the atrocities in August 2002 that Karzai, Brahimi, and Franks expressed support for an investigation into the mass graves.23 Ironically the same A team 595, led by Capt. Mark Nutsch, which had led cavalry charges against the Taliban, was also at Kunduz. Nutsch’s name became public when he was later honored by the Kansas state legislature. CENTCOM said it found no evidence of U.S. SOF complicity in the prisoners’ deaths.

  When Brahimi was questioned about the mass graves he said his responsibility lay with the living and not the dead, and he had neither the police nor the judicial system to pursue the investigation further.24 Brahimi subsequently told me that he did not regret those words, given the paucity of UN power. “I said what I said for those who wanted me to hang Dostum on the first pole. If we started doing that, where would we end up? My business was to talk to all the wrong people, the murderers and rapists and killers.”25

  The massacres of the Taliban and civilian Pashtuns in the north during the war led to ugly pogroms against them in the months ahead by the victorious Tajik and Uzbek warlords. Within a few weeks Pashtun farmers were being forced to flee their villages by Dostum’s troops. Human Rights Watch reported that Uzbek and Tajik troops were raping women, kidnapping civilians, looting, and seizing the farms and houses of Pashtuns. More than half of the one million Pashtuns in the north fled south. When I visited a refugee camp for Pashtuns set up by the UN near Kandahar in March 2002, the horror stories the refugees told me were appalling. Meanwhile 3,600 Taliban and Pakistani prisoners were to stay incarcerated in Shiberghan until May 2004, living in terrible conditions. Many Pashtuns died of starvation, cold, and disease while in prison. The atrocities committed against the Pashtuns by the NA commanders, while the Americans remained silent, were to fuel Pashtun anger in the south and help revive the Taliban movement.

  Kandahar was now left as the last Taliban redoubt. The ISI and the CIA recruited several former warlords from Quetta to invade Kandahar province from Pakistan. The main warlord was Gul Agha Sherzai, whose father had been prominent during the anti-Soviet jihad. Gul Agha was ousted by the Taliban in 1994 and since then had lived in Quetta under ISI protection. A huge, powerful man whose embrace sucks the breath out of your body, Sherzai is both jovial and cruel, with a penchant for a good fight. The CIA regularly loaded him with dollar bills, which he carried in the back of his jeep.

  On November 25 the first U.S. Marines landed in Afghanistan, deployed from U.S. battleships off the coast of Pakistan. They established forward operating base Camp Rhino, sixty miles southwest of Kandahar, in order to trap fleeing Taliban. On December 5, Sherzai’s men, accompanied by a U.S. SOF A team, captured Kandahar airport, where al Qaeda had a major training center.

  Karzai was still in Tarin Kot, from where he negotiated with Mullah Omar to abandon Kandahar. The Taliban made one last attempt to kill him. On November 18, one thousand Taliban in one hundred pickup trucks drove up the rough mountainous road from Kandahar toward Tarin Kot. On the last ridge before the town with a glorious view of the road snaking up away before them, they were hit by precision bombs from U.S. aircraft guided by U.S. SOF spotters. At least thirty vehicles were destroyed. The rest fled back to Kandahar. “We broke the back of the Taliban that day,” said Capt. Jason Amerine, who led the SOF group.26 The Taliban prolonged negotiations on the surrender of Kandahar so that Mullah Omar and the majority of fighters could escape. Omar drove out on a motorbike at night with a handful of bodyguards.

  On November 27, at Bonn, all the Afghan factions gathered for the opening of the UN conference that would choose an interim government and a leader, who was now certain to be Karzai. In a tiny room with mud-baked walls in Tarin Kot, the CIA rigged communications equipment so that Karzai could address the opening of the Bonn conference, thereby cementing his nomination as leader. A few days later, on December 5, he was nearly killed when a U.S. SOF target spotter misread his global positioning device and gave coordinates to a B-52 to drop a two-thousand-pound bomb on the exact position where Karzai was standing. Three U.S. soldiers were killed, along with seven Afghans, and many people were wounded. Karzai’s face took the blast, but he suffered no major injuries; Captain Amerine was wounded. A moment later the BBC’s Lyse Doucet telephoned Karzai from Bonn to say that he had been chosen as the interim president of Afghanistan. Half an hour later the Taliban arrived to surrender Kandahar. Karzai was forty-three years old. His first feeling was not elation, but stress, over the tremendous responsibility on his shoulders. He said he thought of his father.

  Karzai had promised the governorship of Kandahar to Mullah Naqibullah, a warlord with considerable political clout, but Sherzai, backed by the ISI and the CIA, also wanted the post.27 Kandahar deteriorated into a chaos of looting and disorder as Sherzai occupied the governor’s house and refused to accept the Naqibullah nomination, despite Karzai’s orders that he do so. Karzai’s indecisiveness was to now emerge for the first time for all to see. He had waited too long for the Taliban to surrender Kandahar, the seizure of which proved worthless because all the Taliban had escaped to Pakistan. Then he waited two more days, until December 9, before entering the city, and was forced to appoint Sherzai as governor. It was the first of many showdowns with the warlords that all too often ended in a humiliating compromise or a climbdown for Karzai.

  The Taliban regime had been routed and driven from power, but it was still not possible to say it had been fully defeated. Between eight thousand and twelve thousand Taliban, or 20 percent of their total force, had been killed, with twice that number wounded and seven thousand taken prisoner. Those remaining fled to their home villages or to Pakistan. Only one American and several NA soldiers had died. The use of new technology, tactics, and weaponry appeared to have empowered the United States at the very moment it launched its global war on terrorism. After the horror of 9/11, the easy victory seemed to trigger a deep emotional and intellectual catharsis for the American public and media. The media ran stories of future wars being fought in a similar way: cheap in dollar and manpower terms and driven by technology. The new laser-guided bombs, drones armed with Hellfire missiles, and the seventeen A teams on the ground were considered to be the wave of the future. The fact that there had been no major deployment of U.S. troops was trumpeted by Rumsfeld as a success, whereas in the months ahead it became clear that this decision would
lead to major disasters.

  The innovations in warfare that emerged from Afghanistan were major factors in convincing Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz that the same methodology could be used in Iraq—the use of SOF, the deployment of fewer U.S. troops, overwhelming air power, and the arming of local militias on the ground. Moreover, such wars were cheap. By January 2002, the Afghan war had cost just $3.8 billion—peanuts compared with the staggering sums to be spent later in Iraq.28 For the neocons, the most important political factor was the overturning of the Powell doctrine—concentrate the maximum number of troops and firepower before attacking the enemy—which for more than a decade, since the first Gulf War, had held sway. The doctrine involved such a massive commitment of U.S. troops that it had acted as a deterrent to the United States’ going to war. Now everything was different. “In the Pentagon there was no appetite for troops on the ground and they wanted it done with minimal cost—it was a complete reversal of the Powell doctrine,” said Ryan Crocker, the first U.S. diplomat in Kabul after the war.29

  However, the conditions in Afghanistan were unique—and were not to be found in Iraq. Without an active anti-Taliban resistance, the war could never have been won so quickly, and the Northern Alliance had opened new fronts against the Taliban just before 9/11 without American help. The real undermining of the Taliban was caused by dollars not bombs. Guided by Britain’s MI6, the CIA had bought every NA commander in sight and had then gone on to buy off the Taliban commanders. Pashtun leaders living in Pakistan took American money but never set foot in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke estimated that the CIA spent around $70 million in bribes to win the war, although the figure may have been as high as $100 million.30 The CIA’s open-ended budget of $1 billion plus is actually what won the war.

  Despite the easy victory, there were victims: Afghan civilians. Between three thousand and eight thousand Afghan noncombatants were killed or injured by U.S. bombing. Professor Marc Herold, of the University of New Hampshire and Human Rights Watch, put the number of Afghan civilian casualties at around four thousand between September and December 2001. This figure was four times higher than civilian deaths in the 1999 war in the former Yugoslavia. The United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs, which released a quarter of a million bomblets that continued to kill or maim civilians years later.31 The bombing caused massive dislocation as thousands fled their homes, the distribution of food aid to drought-stricken areas was halted, and there were widespread revenge killings. Up to twenty thousand Afghans may have died indirectly as a result of drought, hunger, and displacement.32 In the months to come, U.S. aircraft were to cause hundreds more civilian casualties by targeting the wrong villages.

  Many of the al Qaeda and some Taliban fighters retreated to the stark, inaccessible heights of Tora Bora, in the Koh-e-Sufaid (“Spin Ghar,” in Pushtu), or White Mountain range, which spans Nangarhar and backs on to the Khyber and Kurram tribal agencies in Pakistan. Tora Bora was just twenty-five miles southwest of Jalalabad. The Mujahedin had developed extensive cave systems in these mountains during the war with the Soviets, while al Qaeda had made their own preparations before 9/11 in order to sustain a long siege. There was food and water, and the sights of heavy machine guns and mortars had been fixed at predetermined ranges so that attackers could be eliminated as they climbed the heights.

  At the end of November, General Franks sent in three Afghan commanders and their militias, who were not backed by American troops. They were Hazrat Ali, a brutal minor NA commander who belonged to the Pashai minority ethnic group; Haji Zaman, an adventurer who had arrived from exile in France; and the young Haji Zahir, the inexperienced twenty-seven-year-old son of Haji Abdul Qadir, the elder brother of the murdered Abdul Haq. It was bitterly cold, snow covered the ground, and the attackers had to contend with the hunger pangs of Ramadan, the day-long fast.33 The three commanders were to spend as much time fighting one another as they were the Arabs. The only thing that united them was the wads of dollar bills the CIA paid them.

  Some thirty U.S. SOF arrived three days after the battle started—and, in reality, was already lost—while B-52s carried out heavy bombing of the mountains. The main force of Arabs had escaped with the help of Afghan commanders who had been bribed. Between six hundred and eight hundred Arabs were escorted out of Tora Bora by Pashtun guides from the Pakistani side of the border, at an average cost of $1,200 each. It was the cheapest getaway in modern history. The short battle had been staged by the Arabs to allow bin Laden and the main force of foreigners to escape.

  Bin Laden and a few bodyguards escaped on horseback into Parachinar, the administrative headquarters of the Kurram tribal agency in Pakistan. Kurram is one of seven tribal agencies that make up the semiautonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the writ of Pakistan’s central government has historically been limited. Having entered Pakistan and made sure that the news leaked out, bin Laden then doubled back into Afghanistan, to Khost, before once again reentering Pakistan. For some weeks he took refuge with Jalaluddin Haqqani, in a safe house between Khost and the Pakistani town of Miranshah, in North Waziristan. Pakistan had deployed troops in the Kurram and Khyber tribal agencies, but they were not on the mountaintops or deployed in the South and North Waziristan agencies through which the Arabs had escaped.

  Gary Berntsen, a CIA officer, wrote that on December 10 his Arabic-speaking operative Bilal heard bin Laden’s voice on a satellite telephone urging his men in Tora Bora to keep fighting—although by then bin Laden was speaking from the safety of Pakistan. Berntsen was one of several officers who had requested that General Franks deploy eight hundred U.S. Rangers along the border with Pakistan to prevent bin Laden’s escape, but Franks refused to do so. Berntsen described his frustration: “Day and night I kept thinking, we need U.S. soldiers on the ground! We need them to do the fighting. We need them to block a possible al Qaeda escape into Pakistan . . . Franks was either badly misinformed by his own people or blinded by the fog of war.”34

  A few days after his escape, bin Laden appeared on the world’s TV screens dressed in camouflage and holding a gun, and taunted the Americans who had let him escape. “We say that the end of the U.S. is imminent, whether Osama or his followers are alive or dead, for the awakening of the Muslim Ummah has occurred.”35 Franks had failed to deploy U.S. troops even though thousands of them were waiting offshore and one thousand British marines were at Bagram desperate to be deployed. By December there were only thirteen hundred U.S. troops spread out in seventeen different locations in Afghanistan.

  During the U.S. presidential election campaign of 2004, Franks, now retired, vehemently denied Democrat contender John Kerry’s claim that he had let bin Laden escape. He accused Kerry of “distortions of history,” saying that “bin Laden was never within our grasp.”36 Bush and Cheney cited Franks repeatedly during the election campaign. It was rare for an American general to become so partisan. Besides, it was Franks who had distorted history, to the dismay of U.S. officers at Bagram, who admitted to me that bin Laden had been at Tora Bora.

  Subsequently, the U.S. Army was to learn more about bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora as several captured Arab prisoners in Guantánamo were interrogated. One of bin Laden’s bodyguards and a Yemeni doctor told U.S. interrogators that bin Laden had been present at Tora Bora.37 The evidence clearly showed Franks to be disingenuous. Even he had admitted earlier to bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora: In an interview he gave at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida, on January 7, 2002, Franks said that while searching the caves after the battle, U.S. troops provided evidence that bin Laden had been in the area “at one point or another.”38

  In February 2002, Taliban and al Qaeda members gathered again, in the high valley of Shahi Kot, in the mountains near Gardez. This time the Americans launched a better-prepared attack, called Operation Anaconda, using some two thousand U.S. troops and Afghan militia.39 However, too many things went wrong. The enemy was thought to number two hundred when they actually numbered one thousand. The
battle started badly when a U.S. officer leading Afghan militia was mistakenly killed by U.S. jets and the Navy SEAL commandos dropped onto the snow-covered mountaintops were quickly surrounded by al Qaeda. U.S. forces had inadequate air support and no artillery. The battle raged for two weeks. Eight Americans were killed and eighty-two wounded. The Americans claimed that up to eight hundred militants were killed, but Afghans disparaged that number. The Taliban commander Saif ur-Rahman Mansur escaped.

  As the battle of Tora Bora raged, I returned to Kabul for the first time in two years, the longest period I had been away, having visited the city regularly since 1978 and seen it in its brightest and darkest colors. No regime had ever banned my entry, until the Taliban refused me a visa after my book Taliban was published in March 2000. None of the Taliban had read the book. Now everywhere I went I was warmly greeted by NA commanders whom I knew well and by ordinary people who had heard me interviewed on the BBC. Returning to Kabul was as much a liberation for me as it was for Kabul’s citizens.

  Under the Taliban, Kabul’s lights had gone out and a deafening silence descended upon the streets as people literally tiptoed their way to work. Kabulis described their city then as a living graveyard. Now Kabul’s narrow dusty streets were filled with rubble—the result of ten years of civil war and Taliban neglect—but that did not stop thousands of women from laughing, chatting, and pouring out of their homes to walk in the bazaars. For the first time in years, the proud, beautiful women of Kabul negotiated the muddiest of sidewalks in the highest of heels. Everyone wanted to see and be seen. Boys flew kites, girls gawked at the shops, which poured out music and noise. All these simple pleasures had been illegal under the Taliban. However, Kabul was still an island of hope in a sea of instability. Roads into the capital remained dangerous as the remnants of the Taliban, now turned into gangs of bandits, held the countryside hostage. At Maidan Shahr, just twenty miles south of the capital, twelve hundred Taliban held out for several weeks before surrendering their heavy weapons to the Northern Alliance in exchange for two hundred thousand dollars.