Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  42 They asked the Court for a judgment on whether the accession of Balochistan to the Pakistan state in 1947 was legitimate—thereby questioning the very creation of Pakistan.

  43 Two weeks before his death, Bugti had privately asked Karzai for political asylum in Afghanistan, which Karzai was sorely tempted to grant but declined, fearing greater tensions with Pakistan. The army said Bugti’s killing had sent a strong message to India and Afghanistan that “Indian proxies” would not be in Balochistan.

  44 Research carried out by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, at Monterey Institute of International Studies. See Humayun Akhtar, “China Fully Supports Pakistan Nuclear Plans,” September 7, 2000.

  45 Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001.

  46 General Beg apparently “thought in terms of ‘democratizing’ the global nuclear non-proliferation order and moving to a multipolar world.” See Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A. Q. Khan Network, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  47 See note 14 of chapter 2.

  48 Khan once explained succinctly how he made the bomb and put together his network: “Being an engineer has its own advantages. You do not have to do much. You just have to put a few parts of a machine together and you have done your job. This is how the nuclear program was done. We just picked up a few pieces, joined them together and it became a centrifuge producing enriched uranium and there you have an atom bomb.” “Government Assures Dr Khan of Support, Islamabad,” Dawn, December 24, 2002.

  49 Much of this information comes from the most comprehensive book on Pakistan’s nuclear program: See Corera, Shopping for Bombs.

  50 David Sanger, “In North Korea and Pakistan, Deep Roots of Nuclear Barter,” The New York Times, November 21, 2002.

  51 Powell assured a skeptical world that Musharraf “gave me 400 percent assurances that Pakistan has not supplied any nuclear know-how to North Korea,” but he added, “I cannot talk about the past.” Masud Haider, “Nuclear Material Not Supplied to North Korea,” Dawn, October 21, 2002.

  52 Reuters, “Pakistan Nuclear Scientist Seeks Clemency for Leaks,” Dawn, February 4, 2004. Text of Dr. Khan’s statement, Dawn, February 4, 2004.

  53 Josh Meyer, “Officials Say Pakistan Has Secretly Bought High-Tech Components for Its Weapons Program from U.S. Companies,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2005.

  54 Interview with Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, Washington, D.C., February 19, 2004.

  55 Just before North Korea’s nuclear test, the Americans publicly demanded that they be allowed to speak to Khan directly. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said, “I do not think any of us have the whole story. That is important for Pakistan to know, that is important for us to know and it is important for the international community to know, as we face the ongoing proliferation of Iran and North Korea.” See “Let’s Have the Whole Story: US Envoy,” The News, October 3, 2006.

  56 Carlotta Gall and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Rules Out a Nuclear Deal with Pakistanis, ” The New York Times, March 5, 2006.

  57 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. The Wall Street Journal described the book “as a highly selective auto-hagiography, by turns self-congratulatory, narcissistic and mendacious.” Quoted in Hussain Haqqani, “Talking Without Thinking,” The Nation, December 13, 2006.

  58 Fouad Ajami, “With Us or Against Us,” The New York Times, January 7, 2007. Ajami was reviewing Musharraf’s book.

  59 Stephen Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution, 2004.

  Chapter Fourteen. America Shows the Way: The Disappeared and the Rendered

  1 Gabor Rona, “Interesting Times for International Humanitarian Law: Challenges from the War on Terror,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Summer/Fall 2003.

  2 Bob Woodward, Bush at War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

  3 Madeleine Albright, “Confidence in America: The Best Change the Next President Can Make,” The Washington Post, January 7, 2008.

  4 David Rose, Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights, London: The New Press, 2004.

  5 For the full text of the memos, see Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, Moreton, Eng.: Arris Books, 2004.

  6 See Rose, Guantánamo.

  7 This chapter is a result of interviews with many figures, including U.S., European, and NATO military officers and diplomats, officials from the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other humanitarian and aid agencies. Many of them had visited jails in Guantánamo, Kandahar, and Bagram. Due to the highly sensitive nature of their information, I cannot quote them by name or organization. As a result, I have usually defined their information as coming from “a Western official,” unless I can give readers a more specific identity.

  8 Interview by my researcher Abu Bakr with Noor Habibullah on June 2, 2004, in Sholana village, twenty-five kilometers south of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan.

  9 See Chris Mackey, with Greg Miller, The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda, London: John Murray, 2004. For the abilities of the U.S. SOF, see Robin Moore, The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger, New York: Random House, 2003.

  10 Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, New York: Crown, 2002.

  11 Mackey, with Miller, The Interrogators.

  12 Human Rights Watch, “US Systematic Abuse of Afghan Prisoners,” New York, May 13, 2004.

  13 This list has been compiled from documents from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the U.S. Defense Department.

  14 Tim Golden, “In US Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths,” The New York Times, May 20, 2005. Golden published long extracts from the two-hundred-page military file.

  15 Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt, “US Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide, ” The New York Times, March 16, 2005. Also Douglas Jehl, “Some Abu Ghraib Abuses Are Traced to Afghanistan,” The New York Times, August 25, 2004.

  16 Douglas Jehl, “Army Details Abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq,” The New York Times, March 12, 2005.

  17 Elise Ackerman, “Blows That Led to Detainees’ Death Were Common Practice,” Knight Ridder newspapers, March 25, 2005. See also Carlotta Gall and David Rohde, “New Charges Raise Questions on Abuse at Afghan Prisons,” The New York Times, September 17, 2004.

  18 The autopsy was performed by Lt.-Col. Elizabeth Rouse, who testified in the trial. Associated Press, “Medical Examiner Testifies Beaten Afghan Falling Apart,” Washington, D.C., August 16, 2005.

  19 Tim Golden, “Years After Two Afghans Died, Abuse Case Falters,” The New York Times, February 13, 2006.

  20 Conversation with Nader Nadery, August 24, 2005. The minor punishments received by the fourteen men on trial were documented by the Associated Press, “A Look at the Afghanistan Prisons Abuse Scandal,” September 28, 2005.

  21 His case was well documented by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Kabul and by The New York Times. See Carlotta Gall, “An Afghan Gives His Own Account of US Abuse,” The New York Times, May 12, 2004. Also Hamida Ghafour, “Afghan Held by US Troops Recounts Agony of Interrogation,” Globe and Mail, May 15, 2004.

  22 Craig Pyes and Kevin Sack, "Two Deaths Were a ‘Clue That Something’s Wrong,’ ” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2006.

  23 Dana Priest, “Salt Pit Case—What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?” reprinted in Daily Times, March 4, 2005.

  24 Scott Shane, “CIA Contractor Guilty in Beating Afghan,” The New York Times, August 18, 2006.

  25 The other two men were Brent Bennett, also a former soldier, and a New York journalist Edward Carabella, who appeared to be recording Idema’s activities. Idema and Bennett we
re each sentenced to ten years in jail, a term later cut to five years. Carabella’s original sentence of eight years was reduced to two years in 2005. They were both freed in 2007.

  26 Cabinet Office, “The Handling of Detainees by UK Intelligence Personnel in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and Iraq,” London, March 10, 2005.

  27 “Rendition” is the capture or abduction of alleged terrorists. The prisoners are then sent to third countries, where they can be interrogated by foreign intelligence agencies who are known to use torture.

  28 ICRC statement, Geneva, January 16, 2004.

  29 Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2005.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Rose, Guantánamo. Black was speaking to the House and Senate intelligence committees, September 26, 2002.

  32 Human Rights Watch, “All Our Hopes Are Crushed: Violence and Repression in Western Afghanistan,” New York, November 2002. One young Afghan in Herat described the torture of a friend: “Then they gave my friend electricity shocks. They used a crank generator. They had to crank it very fast to produce the shock. They tied two electrical lines to each of his big toes. Three or four times they shocked him. . . . Each time, my friend’s body would be thrown by the shock. After that, my friend signed the confession paper. Then I signed it also so that I would not be beaten.”

  33 Some months earlier I had met with Ismael Khan, whom I had known for fifteen years, and asked him to grant freedom of the press in Herat so that an NGO I had set up could fund new magazines and newspapers there. Shahir’s NGO received the first grant to publish a magazine, but he was arrested and beaten up.

  34 Peter Beaumont, “UK Aid Funds Iraqi Torture Units,” The Observer, July 3, 2005.

  35 Human Rights Watch, “Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention,” New York, February 27, 2007. See also Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate, “New Light Shed on CIA’s Black Site Prisons,” The Washington Post, February 28, 2007.

  36 Salman Masood, “Kin and Rights Groups Search for Pakistan’s Missing,” The New York Times, January 14, 2007.

  37 Craig Murray, Speech at Freedom House, British embassy, Tashkent, October 18, 2003.

  38 Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, “Diplomat: US, UK Used Torture Information, ” April 23, 2006.

  39 Craig Murray, “Her Majesty’s Man in Tashkent,” The Washington Post, September 3, 2006.

  40 Reuters, “US Adds Eleven Islamic Groups to Blacklist,” Washington, D.C., April 30, 2003.

  41 Josh White, “Lawyers Demand Release of Chinese Muslims,” The New York Times, December 5, 2006.

  42 Rose, Guantánamo.

  43 ICRC press conference by Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations, Geneva, May 8, 2004.

  44 Isabel Hilton, “Held in Contempt,” Financial Times, August 29, 2004. Hilton’s account of the lawyers’ attempts to obtain justice is the most comprehensive published thus far.

  45 Evan Thomas and Michael Hirsh, “The Debate over Torture,” Newsweek, November 21, 2005.

  46 U.S. Senate, “Are American Interests Being Disserved by the ICRC?” June 2005. Kellenberger responded on June 17 in Geneva.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Human Rights Watch put together a list of thirty-eight prisoners whose whereabouts were unknown, but said there were certainly more. See Human Rights Watch, “Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention,” New York, February 27, 2007.

  49 Associated Press, “27 Iraqis, Afghans Killed in US Custody,” March 25, 2005.

  50 Karen DeYoung and Peter Baker, “Bush Detainees Plan to Add to World Doubts of US, Says Powell,” The Washington Post, September 19, 2006.

  51 David Johnston, “Rice Ordered Release of German Sent to Afghan Prison in Error,” The New York Times, April 22, 2005.

  52 The fourteen countries involved in unlawful interstate transfers were Bosnia-Herzegovina, Britain, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. David Rennie, “Britain Helped CIA Kidnappers,” The Guardian, June 8, 2006.

  Chapter Fifteen. Drugs and Thugs: Opium Fuels the Insurgency

  1 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia, London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.

  2 We interviewed Khan and several poppy farmers. Abubaker Saddique, “In Afghan Province, Poppy Planting Has Strong Appeal,” EurasiaNet.org, October 11, 2003.

  3 I give considerable detail about the involvement of the ISI in drug trafficking in my book on the Taliban. Also in Tom Carew, Jihad: The SAS Secret War in Afghanistan, London: Mainstream, 2000, the author describes how in the 1980s he saw Hikmetyar’s Hizb-e -Islami bring opium out of Afghanistan and then deliver the opium to ISI offices on the border.

  4 Rashid, Taliban.

  5 Graham Farrell and John Thorne, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Evolution of the Taliban Crackdown Against Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan,” International Journal of Drug Policy, March 2005.

  6 Under salam contracts the farmer agreed to provide the drug dealer or moneylender with opium after the harvest and in return got paid half the value of his future harvest in cash at the market prices prevalent at the time of loan.

  7 Ahmed Rashid, “Flood of Afghan Heroin Expected,” The Daily Telegraph, September 26, 2001. I was told by UNODC officials that the Americans knew far more about drug labs than they claimed to know, and the failure to bomb them was a major setback to the counter-narcotics effort. See also James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, New York: Free Press, 2006.

  8 Barnett Rubin, Road to Ruin: Afghanistan’s Booming Opium Industry, Washington, D.C., and New York: Center for American Progress and Center on International Cooperation, New York University, 2004. See also Michael Von der Schulenburg, “Briefing Paper on Revenues Generated by Illicit Drug Trafficking in Afghanistan,” internal paper written for UNODC, 2000.

  9 Quoted in David Rohde, “Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure,” The New York Times, September 15, 2006.

  10 See ibid. Rohde quotes a 2006 statement by the UNODC chief Antonio Costa that names Sher Mohammed as being allegedly involved in drugs. Also Paul Watson writes that Sher Mohammed was caught with ten thousand kilograms of opium in his office in 2005. See Paul Watson, “US Military Secrets for Sale at Afghan Bazaar,” Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2006.

  11 Steve Shaulis headed the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), a for-profit aid agency carrying out agricultural reconstruction.

  12 Ahmed Rashid, “Drugs Are Good for War,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October 16, 2003. See also Ahmed Rashid, “Unequal Forces Line Up in Struggle over Afghan Heroin Trade,” The Daily Telegraph, October 16, 2003.

  13 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry, Structure, Functioning Dynamics and Implications for Counter-Narcotics Policy,” edited by Doris Buddenberg and William Byrd, 2006.

  14 Ashraf Ghani, “Where Democracy’s Greatest Enemy Is a Flower,” The New York Times, December 11, 2004. For the World Bank, see William Byrd and Christopher Ward, “Drugs and Development in Afghanistan,” Washington, The World Bank, Social Development Papers, Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Paper no. 18, Washington, D.C., December 2004.

  15 Donald Rumsfeld visited Kabul on September 7, 2003.

  16 James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, New York: Free Press, 2006.

  17 Barnett Rubin et al., “Too Early to Declare Success: Counter-Narcotics Policy in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan policy brief by CARE International and the Center on International Cooperation, March 24, 2004.

  18 In 2003, the United States had committed only $130 million for counter-narcotics. Risen, State of War. See also Sonni Efron, “Afghan Quandary for US,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2005.

  19 UNODC, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry.”

  20 Carlotta Gall, “Afghan Poppy Growing Reaches Record Level,” The New York Times, November 19, 2004.


  21 Personal communications with Western diplomats in Kabul.

  22 Associated Press, “US Military Denies Report on Karzai’s Brother’s Drug Ties,” Kabul, June 23, 2006. See also Ron Moreau and Sami Yousufzai, “A Harvest of Treachery, ” Newsweek, January 9, 2006.

  23 See Mark Shaw, “Drug Trafficking and the Development of Organized Crime in Post-Taliban Afghanistan,” in UNODC, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry.”

  24 Judy Dempsey, “General Calls Drugs Biggest Test for Afghans,” International Herald Tribune, May 22, 2006.

  25 Reuters, “UN Says Afghanistan Addicted to Own Opium,” New Delhi, May 24, 2006.

  26 Carlotta Gall, “Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, September 3, 2006.

  27 Quoted in Moreau and Yousufzai, “A Harvest of Treachery.” Wilder did the study for the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.

  28 UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey, 2006, Vienna.

  29 U.S. State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 2006, Washington, D.C., March 1, 2006.

  30 Editorial, “The Poppies of Afghanistan,” The New York Times, May 27, 2005.

  31 Eurasia Insight, “Arrest of Tajikistan’s Drug Czar Stirs Political Tension in Dushanbe, ” EurasiaNet.org, August 9, 2004.

  32 Rustem Safranov, “Turkmenistan’s Niyazov Implicated in Drug Smuggling,” EurasiaNet, March 29, 2002.

  33 Robert Ponce, “Rising Heroin Abuse in Central Asia Raises Threat of Public Health Crisis,” EurasiaNet, March 29, 2002.

  34 IRIN (news service), “Bitter-Sweet Harvest: Afghanistan’s New War,” July 2004. See also Byrd and Ward, “Drugs and Development in Afghanistan.”

  35 State Department, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2006, Washington, D.C., March 1, 2006.

  36 Three outstanding reports on the parliamentary elections are International Crisis Group, “Afghanistan Elections: Endgame or New Beginning?” Kabul, July 2005; Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, “A Guide to Parliamentary Elections in Afghanistan, ” Kabul, August 2005; and Human Rights Watch, “Afghanistan on the Eve of Parliamentary Elections,” Kabul, September 2005.