The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  A colleague of mine from The Guardian was shown the thirteen prisoners early in the morning. They begged for blankets and water. One man, shivering uncontrollably, had a cardboard box on his head in an apparent attempt to find some warmth. Another lay shaking on the floor, part of his face shot away. At 8 o’clock that morning, wounded, starving, and close to collapse, the remainder of the fighters surrendered. We watched them emerge from the basement like cavemen, soaking wet, with blackened faces and matted hair. There were dozens of them. At least twenty were carried out by stretcher. “We gave up because there was nothing left, we had no ammunition, no weapons, no food,” said one, who had been shot through the foot. He told me his name was Abdul Jabar, age twenty-six, from Tashkent in Uzbekistan. “Our commander made the decision to surrender, and we all agreed.”

  In the end, eighty-five men came out of the basement alive, although not all of them survived their wounds and the onset of hypothermia. We called out to them as they were led out. One Arab spoke some English and said he was born in the United States, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A large number, with long black curly locks, said they were from Yemen. One who remained silent would turn out to be John Walker Lindh, the “American Talib,” who had gone to study Islam in a madrassa in Pakistan and ended up being trained by al Qaeda and fighting in northern Afghanistan.

  The wounded lay in the mud, asking for food and water as Dostum’s fighters backed in two trucks to take them away. Red Cross officials arrived with dressings, and fed bananas, oranges, and water to the prisoners, whose hands were bound. One prisoner, Mohammad, said that they had wanted to surrender two days ago but that a group of seven Arab fighters had refused to let them. A thin Pakistani boy, Ijaz Latif, said he was sixteen or seventeen and had been in Afghanistan only two months.

  Abdul Jabar, who was from Uzbekistan, spoke to me in Russian, and told me the Uzbek fighters had begun the jail uprising. They belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group that opposed the repressive regime of President Islam Karimov, the longtime Communist leader of Uzbekistan, and had sought refuge in neighboring Afghanistan. The group had allied itself with the Taliban and al Qaeda in return for a safe haven. They had genuine grievances. Karimov’s government was notorious for its religious and political repression and the use of torture in its prisons. In one documented case, a prisoner had been placed in a vat of scalding water and boiled alive. The Uzbeks had been sucked in by the aggressive proselytizing of Pakistani religious groups, which began missionary work in Central Asia in the 1980s and drew recruits to religious schools in Pakistan. Uzbek students went looking for an Islamic education and freedom to practice their religion and emerged as militant jihadists. Those networks are still active today and continue to attract young men from Central Asia toward violent jihad.

  The Uzbeks started the uprising in the fort that day because they feared deportation above all. Going back to Uzbekistan would mean almost certain execution, Abdul Jabar said. They had lost their charismatic leader, Juma Namangani, in the bombing, and facing an uncertain fate, presented the most unpredictable element of the foreign fighters. They had been told that if they gave up their weapons they would be allowed to go free and would be sent to the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. But when they were locked up in the fort as prisoners of Dostum, who was known to be ruthless and to have close relations with the government of Uzbekistan, some of their group decided to put up a last fight. “Our commander began it,” Abdul Jabar said. “He told us: ‘It is better to die a martyr than be in prison.’”

  Abdul Jabar was educated and had been working in the political office of the movement in Kabul. He accepted apples and water gratefully from Red Cross workers. “I am not against Americans,” he said, adding that he thought the attacks of 9/11 in New York were wrong because they targeted civilians. “Only God knows what will happen, but if they send us back to Uzbekistan that will be the end.”

  The survivors of the battle at Qala-i-Janghi were transferred to a prison in the nearby town of Shiberghan and the wounded to the government hospital there. After a few weeks, they were removed by American forces of the 10th Mountain Division and were among the first contingent to be transferred to the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba for indefinite detention. Most were to remain there for the best part of a decade. The six Uzbeks were eventually freed and allowed to settle in other countries.

  Even as the battle at Qala-i-Janghi was unfolding, thousands of other Taliban fighters were surrendering at Kunduz under the agreement between General Dostum and Mullah Fazel. They drove out in a long column, stirring up a trail of dust across the plain to Erganak, a low pass to the west of Kunduz. There, they were disarmed and loaded onto trucks for the ten-hour journey west to the prison in Shiberghan. After the prisoner uprising at Qala-i-Janghi, the mood of their captors was far from friendly. Wary of further suicide bombings, Dostum’s men bound the prisoners’ arms so tightly they could not move. The troops overloaded the trucks, and even locked some prisoners into airtight shipping containers for the journey. Hundreds died from asphyxiation on the way and were buried in mass graves in the desert. It would be the worst mass killing of the war. Dostum’s commanders admitted that forty prisoners died from war wounds during the journey but denied any massacre. Scores more went down with dysentery, tuberculosis, and malnutrition in Dostum’s prison in the months that followed. Within the year, the Red Cross had to intervene with an emergency feeding program to prevent yet more deaths.

  As the surrender progressed, Mullah Fazel and Mullah Noori drove out of Kunduz and gave themselves up to Dostum. The general escorted them back to his fancy guesthouse in the town of Shiberghan. There, they lived under guard but in the relative luxury of satin-covered beds, en suite bathrooms, and a terrace that overlooked fountains and a rose garden. They remained in the guesthouse for several weeks until one day when American forces came and arrested them. Whatever amnesty Dostum had offered them he did not deliver. Members of the Northern Alliance told me they had urged the American military to arrest the mullahs before they could escape.

  They were flown out of Afghanistan and held in prison cells onboard the battleship USS Bataan, and then they, too, were transferred to Guantánamo Bay prison. Eleven years later, they were still in prison, the longest serving inmates among a diminishing number of Afghan detainees, when their names reappeared in the news. As the Obama administration began exploring peace talks with the Taliban leadership, one of the first demands of the insurgent group was the release of the last five senior members of the Taliban still imprisoned in Guantánamo, among them Mullah Fazel and Mullah Noori.

  By the end of 2001, the Taliban’s grand scheme to establish an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan had come to an ignominious end. Whatever the intention of the foreign fighters at Qala-i-Janghi, the Taliban surrender at Kunduz was genuine. It was the only formal surrender of Taliban forces in the war, and the signal moment of their defeat. For the band of mullah-commanders who had swept all before them since 1994 and come close to ruling all of Afghanistan, it was an astounding collapse. It had happened in just weeks under the overwhelming force of American airpower and a vengeful opposition on the ground. The military weaknesses of the Taliban movement were suddenly exposed, as were the miscalculations of their Pakistani and al Qaeda advisors.

  They had misjudged the strength of the American attack. They had been greatly overextended in northern Afghanistan when the U.S. bombing began and were not able to retreat in good order. The Taliban also misread the strength of their standing with the Afghan population. They had ruled Afghanistan through a relatively small but oppressive force of commanders and officials, and had only temporarily co-opted influential regional and religious figures to help ensure the loyalty of the population. They mistook this command for popularity. They had expected the population to rally to their side in the event of an American attack, but instead, when the bombing began, local leaders urged them to negotiate to avoid further destruction. As the bombing smashed their bases and
forced them into retreat, the Taliban found the population turning away. Just when the whole of Afghanistan had seemed within reach, their power evaporated.

  December 2001. In the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, which had long been a center for Afghan mujahideen in exile, Taliban commanders convened a council of war. Unbeknownst to the West, this meeting foreshadowed a grim road ahead. A former militant commander who was present told me about the gathering a decade later. Over sixty men were present, including Afghan Taliban commanders, their Pakistani allies from the Pashtun borderlands, and Pakistani militant and religious leaders who had been active in Afghanistan. They gathered in a large meeting hall to discuss what they should do next.

  Watching from the sidelines were several well-known figures from the Pakistani military and intelligence services. Among them was the late Major General Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi, a former military and intelligence officer who served on the Afghan desk of the Inter-Services Intelligence in the 1980s, when he had helped run the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Army. He had also assisted the Kashmiri militants and was imprisoned for an attempted coup against the then-government of Benazir Bhutto in 1995. Abbasi was one of the most active supporters of the militant groups in the years after 2001. Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, would become the central headquarters of the resistance, and Abbasi would visit the place at least twice in the months that followed, according to the former militant commander who attended the meeting.

  Another figure at the meeting, well known and liked by generations of jihadi fighters, was the master trainer Colonel Imam. His real name was Brigadier Sultan Amir, a Pakistani special forces officer. Once a promising protégé of the United States, he underwent special forces training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1974, learning in particular the use of sabotage and explosives, and completed a master parachutist course with the 82nd Airborne Division. Imam had overseen the training of thousands of Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s and closely mentored the Taliban when they first formed. Mullah Omar had been one of his trainees, as had many members of the Taliban. Retired from the military in the mid-1990s, he had been posted as a diplomat to run the Pakistani consulate in Herat during the Taliban period. From there he helped direct their advance up through the country. He was in his post, confident of the Taliban’s overall victory, when 9/11 happened. He told me that he was recalled to Pakistan immediately afterward but returned to Kandahar to see Mullah Omar. The Taliban leader was refusing to hand over bin Laden and Imam advised Omar to resist the American campaign by retreating to the mountains and waging what the Afghans did best, a guerrilla war.8 Now the planning for that guerrilla war was underway.

  The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, was also present at the Peshawar meeting. A former fighter in his thirties, Mullah Zaeef became the face of the Taliban regime after 9/11, a short, stocky figure with black turban and spectacles who denounced the United States bombing campaign to the world’s media at press conferences in the embassy garden. A few weeks after the Peshawar war council, he would be detained by Pakistani police and transported to a cell on the USS Bataan, and then to Guantánamo Bay.

  Also attending the meeting was Mohammad Haqqani, a son of the powerful Taliban commander and minister Jalaluddin Haqqani. The presence of a representative of the well-connected Haqqani family was a signal to all that the fight would go on. Jalaluddin was one of the stalwart fighters of the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. He was a favorite of Pakistani intelligence and Arab donors, because he controlled large swathes of southeastern Afghanistan and had hosted militant training camps for groups of foreign fighters, including bin Laden. His preeminence in the border region led him to be named the minister for tribal affairs in the mujahideen and Taliban governments. His continuing support for the Taliban would be vital.

  For two decades, Pakistan had used proxy forces, Afghan mujahideen and Taliban in Afghanistan, and Kashmiri militants against India, to project its influence beyond its borders. General Abbasi and Colonel Imam were among the main players in executing this policy. The Peshawar meeting was as much a confirmation of longstanding policy as it was the start of a new chapter of war in Afghanistan.

  The meeting lasted several hours. Discussion focused on how to confront the American military in Afghanistan and their Afghan partners. The Taliban leaders divided Afghanistan into separate areas of operations, assigning command of each geographical region to different men who would direct an insurgency. The plan, they were told, was to “trip up America.” The Taliban comeback was underway.

  2

  The People Turn

  “You let Mazar-i-Sharif go, and you let Kabul go, and you surrendered all the other places, and now you cannot let Kandahar go and save it from destruction?”

  —senior Taliban commander Haji Bashar Noorzai to Mullah Omar

  October 2001. High in a mountain hamlet, surrounded by the brown jagged peaks of southern Afghanistan, a family of mujahideen fighters prepared for battle. Veterans of the ten-year war against the Soviet Army, the men were Pashtuns, the same tribal group as the Taliban, and lived in Uruzgan, a stronghold of the movement. Yet they had chafed under Taliban rule, and now, as the first American bombs fell, they were taking their weapons out of hiding and preparing a rebellion. The patriarch of the family, Mohammad Lal, had pledged to work against the Taliban two years earlier. The time for action had come. The Americans were threatening to topple the government, the United Front was regrouping in the north, and an old tribal associate, Hamid Karzai, was on his way.

  Karzai was a minor tribal politician from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan who had for several years been working on an alternative to Taliban rule. He had minimal military experience, yet two days after the U.S. bombing commenced, he left his home in Quetta, Pakistan, and slipped into southern Afghanistan on a secret mission to rally the Pashtun tribes to rise up against the Taliban. He had a promise of American support, and he knew many Pashtuns were weary of Taliban rule, but his first days in the country were proving difficult and dangerous.

  Karzai had traveled by motorbike into Kandahar on October 9, 2001, with a former mujahideen commander, Hafizullah Khan. They stayed two nights in and near the city, listening to the first heavy bombing by American jets on the military barracks and the airport. Their hosts were frightened and urged them to leave. When two other commanders joined them, they decided to head for the mountains. The four set off together by car, wearing local clothes and turbans, passing Taliban checkpoints on the edge of town at lunchtime when the guards were usually inside eating or taking naps.1

  The group stayed with a longtime tribal associate of Karzai’s father in the provincial town of Tarin Kot and began gathering supporters and weapons. But there, also, the elder soon told them it was too dangerous to stay longer. There were warnings the Taliban were looking for them, so they moved to another house on the edge of town. This was the Taliban heartland, and since the American bombs had started to fall, the mood was ugly. Anyone suspected of siding with the Americans or harboring an opposition leader such as Karzai could expect imprisonment or execution.

  Knowing his position was growing precarious, Karzai sent a message to Mohammad Lal, who offered him shelter in his mountain hamlet of Durji. The valley was so remote that the Russians had never occupied it during their ten-year invasion of Afghanistan. Mohammad Lal was the only one of their hosts who was not scared of the Taliban, Hafizullah Khan explained to me.

  Karzai came on foot, walking five hours through the mountains from Tarin Kot. He was plainly worried. When his host invited him to sit down to eat, he insisted on talking first in private. The two men knew each other from the resistance against the Soviets, but they were not close. Karzai, forty-three, had worked in politics in Pakistan; Mohammad Lal, forty-six, had been a fighter in Uruzgan. Over the last two years, they had started working together to build support for an alternative to Taliban rule. Karzai had advocated convening a loya jirga, a traditional tribal assembly, which would form a broadly
representative government under the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah. Tribal leaders and landowners, such as Mohammad Lal, supported the idea; after over two decades of war, their role as the traditional leaders of Afghan society had been steadily eroded. First the Communists, then the warlords, and then the mullahs had usurped their position. “Since the Communists, the leading tribal families have suffered and that is why we supported Karzai, to bring people of intelligence and talent back into power,” Mohammad Lal told me.2

  Karzai’s father had been politically active until he was assassinated in July 1999, almost certainly by members of the Taliban. It only made the son more determined to resist the mullahs. He traveled in the months before 9/11 to consult with Ahmed Shah Massoud about starting a resistance movement in the southern mountains. The experienced guerrilla commander advised caution, warning Karzai that it would be extremely hard to fight the Taliban in their own heartland. Massoud told Karzai he needed to find an impregnable valley that he could defend and establish a sure supply route, which would be difficult since the Taliban and Pakistan between them maintained a strong grip over the south.

  Now, however, Karzai had U.S. support. He was carrying large sums of cash from the Americans and a satellite telephone with which he could call in weapons and supplies. This was the time to take up arms against the Taliban, he urged. The Americans would not let the Taliban government stay in power after the 9/11 attacks, he said. Mohammad Lal did not hesitate. He told Karzai that he and his sons were ready to fight. Finally, Karzai agreed to sit down and eat.