Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  44 Reuters, “Bonn Conference opens,” Bonn, November 27, 2001.

  45 Communication with Fatemeh Zia, August 10, 2007.

  46 James Dobbins, “How to Talk to Iran,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2007.

  47 Interview with Lakhdar Brahimi, Paris, April 26, 2006.

  48 Interview with Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the UN, Oslo, June 27, 2007.

  49 Eighteen members of the Special Independent Commission for the Convening of the Loya Jirga would be appointed by Karzai and the UN. The chairman was Ismael Qasimyar, a lawyer and expert in constitutional law from the Qizalbash community in Herat who had lived in exile in Iran. The vice chairperson was Mahbooba Hoquqmal, a Tajik and a professor of law at Kabul University who had taught in exile at the Afghan University in Peshawar. Another vice chairperson was Abdul Aziz, a Pashtun and the dean of the Sharia faculty of Kabul University.

  Chapter Six. A Nuclear State of Mind: India, Pakistan, and the War of Permanent Instability

  1 Shirin Tahir-Kheli, India, Pakistan and the United States: Breaking with the Past, Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1998.

  2 Jammu is predominantly Hindu, but one third are Muslims. Ladakh is dominated by Buddhists, but its Kargil region has a large number of Shia Muslims. The most popular Kashmiri Muslim leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, the head of the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, was closer to India than to Pakistan and favored independence. See Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

  3 The three UN resolutions were passed on January 20, 1948; April 21, 1948; and August 13, 1948.

  4 The APHC emphasized the nationalist ideology of Kashmiriyat, or Kashmiri identity, which was an amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures. Its Islamic component included Sufism, which had a mass following in Kashmir and Shia Islam, as many Kashmiris were Shias. Kashmiris believed in a tolerant view of Islam, and over time resentment against the outsider jihadis increased.

  5 Even though the State Department documented these abuses, it put little pressure on India to rectify them. Harsher documentation of these abuses came from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—even though they and the International Committee of the Red Cross were all barred from visiting Kashmir for more than a decade.

  6 On December 5 Jordan had arrested thirteen Arab extremists suspected of trying to organize a terrorist bombing campaign of Jewish and Christian holy sites. The terrorists had received training in Afghanistan and had arrived in Jordan from Pakistan.

  7 Ahmed Rashid and Sadanand Dhume, “Price of Surrender,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 13, 2000.

  8 Pakistani journalists who visited the destroyed camps after the missile attacks said that between five and ten ISI officers were killed in the raid. Later U.S. diplomats confirmed this to me. See Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, New York: Free Press, 2004. See also Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb—A Memoir, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. Both books make the same claim.

  9 Azhar’s diary, written in prison in India, described his experiences in Somalia in 1993 and the deaths of American soldiers. The sixteen-hour battle in Mogadishu on September 25, 1993, resulted in the deaths of eighteen Americans and some five hundred Somalis. Three Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. The FBI interviewed Azhar in his Indian jail in 1995, 1996, and again in 1998. Paul Watson, “Somalian Link Seen to al Qaeda,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2000.

  10 Bin Laden’s bodyguard Abu Jandal later admitted that al Qaeda had carried out the hijacking because bin Laden admired Azhar and needed his help. Bin Laden threw a lavish party for Azhar when he was freed in Kandahar. Agence France-Presse, “Osama Guard Says Indian Plane Hijacked for Azhar’s Release,” Islamabad, September 17, 2006. Abu Jandal had given an interview to Al Jazeera TV.

  11 On January 7, India issued a list of the five hijackers, naming them as Ibrahim Azhar (from Bahawalpur), Shahid Akthar Sayed (Karachi), Sunni Ahmed Qazi (Karachi) , Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim (Karachi), and Shaqir (Sukkur). “India Names Hijackers,” Dawn, January, 7, 2000.

  12 Reuters, “US Issues Stern Warning to Pakistan,” The Nation, January 6, 2000.

  13 Tahir Mirza, “Kashmir May Provoke War,” Dawn, February 8, 2001.

  14 “Pakistan Does Not Want War,” The News, December 30, 2002.

  15 Associated Press, “President Asks Blair for Help in Defusing Crisis,” Washington, D.C., December 30, 2001. White House spokesman Scott McClellan gave an account of Bush’s conversation with Musharraf.

  16 “Terrorism has always been Pakistan’s state policy. The face of Afghanistan has been changed and that of Pakistan will change too,” Vajpayee told reporters in Lucknow. Agence France-Presse, “Vajpayee Accuses Pakistan,” Dawn, January 3, 2002.

  17 Ahmed Rashid, “Give Peace a Chance,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 17, 2002. I carried out several interviews with U.S. diplomats and Pakistani generals.

  18 Agence France-Presse, “Situation not defused says Bush,” The News, January 6, 2002.

  19 Ayaz Amir, “Excelling at the Aim of the Strategic U Turn,” Dawn, January 17, 2002. The quote from Musharraf’s speech comes from the text published in all the newspapers, January 12, 2002.

  20 The ruling BJP was routed in four state elections in late February, demonstrating that the talk of war had also not gone down well with the Indian public. Hundreds of Muslims were slaughtered by Hindu right-wing extremists in Gujarat state. The massacres were to turn Muslims decisively against the BJP at the next general election.

  21 Gen. Tommy Franks, with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier, New York: Regan Books, 2004.

  22 Reuters, “US Urges Restraint on Pakistan,” St. Petersburg, Russia, May 25, 2002.

  23 Interview with senior U.S. diplomat in Islamabad visiting from Washington, June 2001.

  24 “President Musharraf wants to do this keeping intact the honor and dignity of the nation and the armed forces, I think we got a very good basis on which we can proceed,” Armitage said in Islamabad. Agence France-Presse, “Armitage Satisfied with Pakistan Assurances,” The Nation, June 7, 2002.

  25 Agence France-Presse, “Powell for all Parties’ Participation in Elections,” The Nation, July 29, 2002.

  26 In answer to Musharraf’s charge that the elections had been rigged, Vajpayee replied, “If the elections are a mere fraud, why are terrorists being trained and infiltrated into India under the command of the ISI to kill election candidates and to intimidate voters. How can it [Pakistan] continue to use terrorism as an instrument of state policy against India.” See Afzal Khan, “Vajpayee Says India Will Use All Means to End Terrorism,” Dawn, September 13, 2002.

  27 I am grateful to Graham Allison’s excellent summary of bin Laden’s intentions in her article “The Ongoing Failure of Imagination,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, October 2006.

  28 Interviews with senior U.S. officials, Washington, D.C., January 2006.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Amjad Siddiq, “Pak Scientist Regrets Meeting Osama, Omar,” The News, March 19, 2002.

  31 Douglas Frantz, “CIA Chief Urges Pakistan to Take Harder Line on Muslim Militants, ” The New York Times, December 3, 2001.

  32 The best study of what happened after 9/11 is Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  33 Jawed Naqvi, “India Must Hold Talks with Pakistan,” Dawn, January 7, 2003.

  34 Ahmed Rashid and Rahul Bedi, “Peace Hopes Rise as India Joins Pakistan Summit, ” The Daily Telegraph, January 3, 2004.

  35 To Pakistan’s satisfaction, the statement also read, “The two leaders are confident that the resumption of the composite dialogue will lead to a peaceful settlement of all bilateral issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides.” Ahmed Rashid, “Planned Kashmir Talks as ‘Bi
g Leap Forward,’ ” The Daily Telegraph, January 7, 2004.

  36 “Let’s agree to greater autonomy to both sides of Kashmir so the Kashmiris can better manage their affairs, but let’s avoid formal agreements which involve new political arrangements,” a senior Indian official told me in New Delhi. Interviews in New Delhi with J. N. Dixit, national security adviser to the prime minister; Shyam Saran, foreign secretary; and Salman Khorsheed, general secretary of the Congress Party, October 31 and November 1, 2004.

  37 Shirin Tahir-Kheli, India, Pakistan and the United States: Breaking with the Past, Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1998.

  Chapter Seven. The One-Billion-Dollar Warlords: The War Within Afghanistan

  1 See my articles: “Iran and US Vie for Influence on the Front Line,” The Daily Telegraph, May 2, 2002, and “Warlord, Profiteer, Ideologue, Chief,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 23, 2002. In May 2002, I was told by several Afghan officials in Ghaurian, on the Iranian border, that Arabs, Pakistanis, and Central Asians would come through Ghaurian at night, heading for the Iranian border. Two Iranian intelligence generals met with Khan regularly in Herat. He had now become a jihadi. “More urgently than reconstruction we need the spirit of jihad. Jihad is just one word to describe freedom; it’s a holy word meaning independence, and we must keep the memory of the war against the Soviets and Taliban alive,” he said.

  2 Donald Rumsfeld visited Herat on April 29, 2002.

  3 The Shura had ten separate associations under its umbrella, including those for lawyers, economists, teachers, engineers, painters, calligraphers, poets, sportsmen, and even a group that promoted “Agriculture, Livestock and Veterinary Medicine.” Its charter said that “the Shura provides authorities and international aid agencies with professional consultations through its associations.”

  4 Ahmed Rashid, “Setback as Warlords Return to Old Ways,” The Daily Telegraph, January 12, 2002.

  5 Gary Berntsen, Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and al Qaeda, New York: Crown, 2005. He describes how he hired a Pashai commander from eastern Afghanistan, code-named Barkat, to track down bin Laden without even meeting him. It is clear that Barkat is Hazarat Ali.

  6 Sarah Chayes explains the situation in the south in great detail in Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

  7 Afghanistan National Human Development Report, Kabul, 2004.

  8 Interview with Ryan Crocker, Islamabad, February 7, 2006.

  9 This term was popularized by Human Rights Watch. See their “Afghanistan’s Bonn Agreement, One Year Later, a Catalog of Missed Opportunities,” December 1, 2002.

  10 Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer, “Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide,” The Washington Post, October 22, 2004.

  11 The war cost $17 billion between October 7, 2001, and May 1, 2002, according to congressional documents; $1.37 billion was spent on classified surveillance and intelligence, $1.76 billion for munitions, and $4.7 billion for deploying troops that were never used.

  12 Interview with Ryan Crocker, Islamabad, February 7, 2006.

  13 The full text of Joseph Biden’s speech reported in “Biden Promises $130 Million for Security in Afghanistan,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2002.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Jan Goodwin, “An Uneasy Peace,” The Nation, April 29, 2002.

  16 Editorial, “Warlords and Allies,” The Washington Post, February 25, 2002.

  17 The New York Times said in its editorial on March 27, 2002, “Rescuing Afghanistan will take more than defeating Taliban holdouts. . . . It will also require establishing the authority of the central government and the rule of law throughout the country. That can only be done with expanded international help and more effective American leadership.” Editorial, “Afghanistan at Risk,” The New York Times, March 27, 2002. The International Crisis Group urged that the “the immediate priority in Afghanistan has to be an expanded ISAF from 4500 to 25,000 troops.” ICG, “Securing Afghanistan,” March 15, 2002.

  18 Ahmed Rashid, “Keeping the Peace in Afghanistan,” The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2002.

  19 William Durch, “A Realistic Plan to Save Afghanistan,” International Herald Tribune, July 31, 2002. Durch was the director of peace operations at the Stimson Center.

  20 John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, London: The Free Press, 2003.

  21 Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue.

  22 Interview with Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., August 21, 2002.

  23 The president’s spokesman Ari Fleischer had repeated the mantra on February 25, saying that “the president continues to believe that the purpose of the U.S. military is to be used to fight and win wars, and not to engage in peacekeeping.” International Crisis Group, “Securing Afghanistan.”

  24 James Dao, “Bush Sets Role for US in Afghan Rebuilding,” The New York Times, April 18, 2002. The United States had spent a total of $13 billion, or $90 billion in today’s money, on the Marshall Plan for Europe.

  25 David Rohde and David Sanger, “How the Good War in Afghanistan Went Bad,” The New York Times, August 12, 2007.

  26 The Rumsfeld quote is from ibid. The Wolfowitz quote is from Fred Hiatt, “Underachieving Afghanistan,” The Washington Post, May 20, 2002. “Just think of the history of the British in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century or even the Soviets in the last century. It is a place that is notoriously hostile to foreigners, notoriously difficult to govern. And it is huge,” said Wolfowitz. Such an argument was never applied to Iraq.

  27 See my articles “Iran and US Vie for Influence” and “Warlord, Profiteer, Ideologue, Chief.”

  28 In the first stage, towns and villages representing 380 districts in the country were to choose 16,000 delegates. In the second stage, these delegates would hold further elections, whittling down their number to 1,050 delegates representing the 32 provinces.

  29 Wali Masud told me that “if there is any such move for the king to become president, we would counter it by putting up our own candidate for the president, and there could even be a walkout from the LJ.” The NA leaders had conveyed this threat to Khalilzad and Brahimi.

  30 I reported extensively on the Loya Jirga in Kabul for The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Telegraph in day-to-day articles from which these quotes have been taken.

  31 Interview with a senior European diplomat at the Loya Jirga.

  32 A Hazara, Simar Samar was the popular minister for women’s affairs who had stood up for women’s rights and was despised by the fundamentalist warlords. She was later removed from her post by Karzai.

  33 Interview with Lakhdar Brahimi, Paris, April 26, 2007.

  34 Dexter Filkins, “Flaws in US Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead,” The New York Times, July 21, 2002.

  35 Interview with Robert Finn, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., November 22, 2005.

  36 Interview with Hamid Karzai, Kabul, December 23, 2002.

  37 The conference in Cordoba was attended by major donor countries and held June 28-30, 2002. I attended the conference and came away with the distinct impression that there was growing frustration among the Europeans as to how the United States was handling Afghanistan.

  Chapter Eight. Musharraf’s Lost Moment: Political Expediency and Authoritarian Rule

  1 Text of President Pervez Musharraf’s speech, The Nation, January 13, 2002. Five extremist organizations were banned, including Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed—two of the largest groups fighting in Kashmir and closely linked to al Qaeda. The Sunni group Sipah-e-Sehaba and the Shia party Tehreek-e-Jafria were also banned, as was the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, led by Maulana Sufi Mohammed. Another Sunni extremist group, Sunni Tehreek, was put on a watch list.

  2 Powell said, “The US applauds the banning of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and welcomes President Musharraf’s explicit statements against terrorism and particularly notes his pledge that Pakistan will not tolerate terrorism un
der any pretext, including Kashmir.” Text of Powell’s statement, Dawn, January 13, 2002.

  3 Poll carried out by the Office of Research, U.S. State Department, February 19, 2002.

  4 “Religious forces have always aligned themselves with the military’s views with regard to the defense budget and the Kashmir and Afghan policies,” boasted former ISI chief Gen. Hameed Gul. Interview with Gen. Hameed Gul, Herald, December 2001.

  5 “Bush Promises to Facilitate Pakistan India Talks,” The Nation, February 14, 2002.

  6 Ahmed Rashid, “Musharraf Announces Referendum,” The Daily Telegraph, April 6, 2002.

  7 The European Union had signed the agreement with Pakistan in November 2001 to help Pakistani exports, but the agreement needed to be ratified by the European parliament. The referendum was “wholly inappropriate and in conflict with the Pakistan constitution, ” stated the EU parliament. “EU delays Cooperation with Pakistan,” Dawn, April 26, 2002.

  8 These comments were made to me after the referendum.

  9 Musharraf’s interview with the editors of The Washington Post, February 9, 2002. See also Mariane Pearl, with Sarah Crichton, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl, London: Virago Press, 2003.

  10 This accusation was made by several ministers and police officials, including Syed Kamal Shah, the inspector general of police in Sindh province. “Daniel Was Over-intrusive, Says IG,” The Nation, March 13, 2002.

  11 The New York Times reported that an ISI officer, Brigadier Abdullah, the head of the Kashmir cell, who had helped create Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2000, had also helped Sheikh in his frequent travels between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abdullah had been replaced in the shake-up of the ISI after the removal of Gen. Mehmood Ahmad. Douglas Jehl, “Death of Reporter Puts Focus on Pakistan’s Intelligence Unit,” The New York Times, February 25, 2002.