The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Mohammad Lal set to work to gather other commanders and fighters in the region. He could count on twenty-six men from his own family—uncles, brothers, cousins, and three of his eldest sons. But they needed more. He sent word to former mujahideen commanders whom they both knew. Tribal allegiances are everything to the Pashtuns. When these men received a message to gather at Mohammad Lal’s house, they came. Over the next two nights, Karzai sat on the floor of Mohammad Lal’s farmhouse meeting with fifteen commanders. They wore the traditional turbans of the region, with shawls wrapped around their shoulders against the cold.

  One of those present was Mohammad Rahim, a burly former soldier who had fought the Russians from these same mountains. He now relished a chance to fight the Taliban who had destroyed his poppy crop earlier that year. Yet not all the men gathered at that meeting were convinced. They said the Taliban were too strong and that a small group of fifteen commanders could not stand up to them. Of the group, only four commanders agreed to join Karzai, with some thirty or forty followers.3 The others took the cash and departed. Some of them went to the Taliban to report what had happened. Nevertheless, Karzai was encouraged. Mohammad Lal’s son took him back to Tarin Kot by motorbike to fetch eighty additional fighters. They pitched camp at Kharnai, an upper valley with a spring, deeper in the mountains above Durji.

  Karzai had been in Afghanistan for two weeks, and already reports had begun to filter in that the Taliban were mobilizing a force of seven hundred men against them. Hafizullah Khan warned Karzai the men could not fight if attacked. They had no food, few weapons, and only two magazines of bullets each. It was cold in the mountains, and some of the men were just wearing sandals. He sent men off to buy shoes and urged Karzai to call his American contacts for an arms drop. That night they lit fires on the mountainside. They heard planes overhead but nothing came. Hafizullah Khan’s mood darkened. He knew they could not fend off a large force. “Karzai did not know how to make plans to fight, he was just acting on emotions,” he recalled.

  As more reports came in of Taliban approaching, men drifted away. Some of Mohammad Lal’s commanders went down into the valley to find out more news. Another group of fighters left in another direction, promising to return with more friends. In fact they were spies who gave the Taliban details of Karzai’s position. On the second night, American planes dropped three hundred Kalashnikov rifles, rockets, machine guns, and grenades. “I was very happy,” Hafizullah Khan recalled, laughing. They collected the weapons, armed everyone, and spread out in positions throughout the two valleys. It was just in time. On the third night, the Taliban attacked.

  Mohammad Lal had posted his twenty-two-year-old son, Abdul Wali, as a lookout watching the lower approaches of the camp. It was his group who first heard the Taliban approaching in the night. He challenged them, and the Taliban opened fire. The defenders poured machine-gun and rocket fire down on the Taliban in the dark. Up in the camp, Mohammad Lal rushed out to steady his men. “I was trying to explain that this man, Karzai, had come to our village, and we had to protect him,” he recalled later. “It was night, it was very difficult fighting,” he said. As the battle raged, two Taliban fighters broke through and reached close enough to fire on the camp. “Bullets were hitting our turbans they were so close,” Rahim recalled. A mortar landed among them but by fluke did not explode.

  In the next valley, Hafizullah Khan and his men were nearly overrun. The Taliban attacked the arms dump and firefights broke out all over the mountainside. A group whisked Karzai up to safety in a cave in the mountainside. At morning light, Taliban reinforcements arrived and the attacks intensified. The fighting raged for twelve hours but the defenders managed to hold the two valleys. By afternoon the Taliban had pulled back. American military officials had been monitoring the battle from the air but had not intervened. They later congratulated the Afghans on how they had resisted the attack.

  Although the group had beaten off the Taliban, they remained in a precarious position with little food. Karzai announced he wanted to move on to another district to build more support, but his commanders were reluctant. Mohammad Lal insisted that they were safest remaining where they were, since the valley had good natural defenses. Hafizullah Khan warned that they should ready themselves for another attack or ask the Americans to pick them up. Yet Karzai was determined to move on. Finally, they sent most of their fighters back to their homes, and a small core of ten commanders hiked north with Karzai. They headed toward Char Chine district, but the inhabitants were nervous and Taliban spies were everywhere. “No one would even give us food, let alone help,” Mohammad Lal said. A nomadic herder, a Kuchi tribesman, fed them on the way, and the group slept in abandoned shepherds’ huts. They could not raise supporters.

  They retraced their footsteps. The Kuchi tribesman warned them that a Taliban search party had come through, and he advised them to go higher into the mountains. Mohammad Lal urged them to return to Durji where he could protect them. Hafizullah Khan urged Karzai to call his American contacts for help. The Taliban knew where they were and wanted to kill him, he told Karzai. They chose a rendezvous and lit fires in a clearing. Two nights later, helicopters swooped in in the dark. They ferried Karzai and seven of his commanders away to the safety of a Pakistani airbase at Jacobabad that the Americans were using for their operations.4 The burly fighter, Rahim, and a few others stayed behind. They stashed the weapons and hid in the mountains, awaiting the call to regroup.

  The future president was lucky to escape. Another resistance leader, Abdul Haq, had attempted a similar campaign, traveling into eastern Afghanistan on his own mission to rally followers. He found the Taliban hold over the population insurmountable. Haq was one of the most dynamic Pashtun personalities from the 1980s resistance and well known to American CIA officials. Like Karzai, he was a potential national leader. His family was prominent in eastern Afghanistan and had ruled Jalalabad during the mujahideen government. Haq had also seen the growing popular dissatisfaction with the Taliban and had been working to raise support to replace the Taliban with a more broadly acceptable form of government under the former king. He had organized several conferences to bring Afghan groups together, and his discussions had accelerated in the three months before 9/11 as terrorist threats escalated. The CIA had renewed its contacts with the main opposition figures and urged them to cooperate in tracking bin Laden and al Qaeda. Haq believed in the power of the Afghan tribal system and the old mujahideen networks from the resistance, and was convinced that many Afghans were ready to turn against the Taliban, his close friend Habib Ahmadzai told me.5

  When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, Haq feared that a U.S. bombing campaign would anger the Afghan people and push them back into the arms of the Taliban. He also saw the danger of the Northern Alliance gaining power alone and alienating the entire Pashtun south and east. He and his brothers, who were also influential figures in the resistance, had always maintained close relations with the Northern Alliance and had joined the United Front for this reason. “He did not want American forces nor one side gaining power because this would be a cause of revenge and bloodshed,” his brother Haji Din Mohammad told me.6 “This country should be led through a big council,” he said. “We wanted slowly to dissolve the Taliban administration and the Northern Alliance and bring them into one administration. That was Abdul Haq’s plan to prevent bloodshed and revenge, and so there would not be an excuse to bring foreign soldiers into this country.”

  Abdul Haq sensed this was the moment to rally the Pashtun population. Pashtuns were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and for centuries had ruled the country. Haq knew that his fellow Pashtuns were tired of the mullahs but would not accept a victory by the northern tribes over the Taliban, a predominantly Pashtun force. There had to be a Pashtun opposition movement to provide a counterbalance for the Northern Alliance. Haq wanted to lead it. Above all, he insisted, it had to be a peaceful movement.

  His plea for a nonviolent movement was ignored. Within a month of 9/11, t
he United States began its bombing campaign in Afghanistan. Twelve days after Karzai had slipped into Afghanistan, Abdul Haq did so too. He took a small group with him—including his close friend Ahmadzai and his handsome twenty-one-year-old nephew Izzatullah. They headed into a belt of territory southeast of the capital, Kabul. It was strategically important terrain, where the Taliban and their Arab allies ran training camps and military bases, and maintained control over the population through a network of intelligence informers. Like Karzai, Haq was greeted by old associates but warned that it was too dangerous for him to stay. The Taliban were close by and would not tolerate his presence. Haq and his companions stayed the first night in Azra, a remote and hilly district of Logar province, with a venerable tribal elder and longtime ally. Within hours, the elder received threats from the Taliban. He warned Ahmadzai that their mission was premature. The small party left for Alisher, on the border with Abdul Haq’s home province of Nangarhar. There they stayed three days with elders of the Naser tribe. News came that the Taliban were preparing an advance against them. Although the elders of the tribe had agreed to protect Haq, the villagers were nervous. The Taliban would kill them and their families and burn their houses if he remained, they said. They could see Taliban vehicles ranged in the valley below. A Taliban commander sent a message asking them to leave the area or expect to fight. He was offering them an escape.

  As darkness fell, the Taliban began advancing up the valley, and Abdul Haq’s group left the village and climbed a rough track toward a pass into Pakistan. They were on foot, unarmed. At some point they found a horse for Haq, who wore a prosthesis after losing part of his foot on an antipersonnel mine in the 1980s. He had been struggling with the climb.

  From the top of the pass, they saw the lights of dozens of Taliban cars snaking up the valley after them. They trekked through the dark until they approached a village called Tank, at around nine at night. They sent scouts ahead. One man returned running, saying the Taliban were in the village. Ahmadzai moved off the path to set up the satellite phone and call for help. Abdul Haq had refused to call earlier, saying it would be shameful to request American assistance. He especially did not want to be seen as relying on American firepower, but now they were in danger of being caught. Ahmadzai and Izzatullah decided to make the call, covering the phone with a shawl to hide the light.

  They telephoned an American businessman friend and supporter in Peshawar, and gave him the coordinates of their position. They were closing down the telephone when suddenly the Taliban were upon them, ordering them to halt. The men split and ran as the Taliban opened fire. Ahmadzai leapt up the hillside as fast as he could, shouting to Izzatullah to follow, bullets ripping past him. He kept running until he realized he was alone. He found a hiding place by a rock and pulled his shawl over him. He could hear the Taliban shouting: “Sons of Americans, where are you? Where are you running to?” Taliban fighters climbed the hill, and he heard them pass within yards of his hiding place. “I thought it was the last moment of my life and they would capture me,” he later recalled.

  Then he heard shouting and recognized Abdul Haq’s voice. The fact that he was shouting meant one thing: he must have been caught. The Taliban fired a rocket-propelled grenade, a signal that they had caught their prey. Ahmadzai crouched behind his rock without moving, long into the night. At first light he moved up to a narrow uninhabited valley where he hid for four days, eating dried mulberries, until a shepherd found him and took him to his house. Village elders had realized that one of the group was unaccounted for and sent the shepherd to him. He led Ahmadzai for six days through remote reaches of the mountains to safety.

  That same night, the Taliban took their captives down the valley. Izzatullah had escaped to a village but was handed over to the Taliban. His body was found the next day, some distance away, shot and thrown down a well. Abdul Haq was beaten but survived the night. The next day, he was put in a jeep with several others from the group and driven toward Kabul. The Taliban interior minister, Mullah Abdul Razzaq, a man with an ugly reputation, stopped the jeep just south of the city, at Charasiyab.7 He ordered the group out of the car. Haq knew what was coming and asked Razzaq not to harm his companions, among them his security advisor, his horseman, and a family retainer.

  Haq was shot dead by a ditch just below the road. The date was October 25, 2001. It was an unworthy end for a brave and clever man in the dying days of the Taliban regime. His brothers blamed the CIA for pushing Haq to enter Afghanistan when conditions were still too dangerous. Those close to him claimed to see the hand of Pakistan in his assassination, too, since the interior minister was especially close to the ISI, and Haq was a strong, charismatic leader who opposed Pakistan’s policies toward Afghanistan.

  Abdul Haq was just one of scores of opposition leaders slain by the Taliban before and after 9/11, part of a ruthless strategy to remove potential leaders.8 One of his brothers, Haji Abdul Qadeer, Karzai’s vice president, was gunned down nine months later. At its time of greatest need, Afghanistan had lost its best military commander in Ahmed Shah Massoud and its strongest advocate for national peace and reconciliation in Abdul Haq. The United States had lost its two best potential allies. Afghanistan’s future might have been brighter, and far fewer people might have died, had these men lived.

  Within two weeks of Abdul Haq’s death, Taliban rule collapsed. Their forces crumpled under the relentless bombardment, and the latent Afghan opposition, that Karzai and Abdul Haq both knew was there, began to emerge. By November 14, Kabul and Jalalabad, Abdul Haq’s hometown, had fallen. American helicopters flew Karzai back into Uruzgan province with a U.S. special forces team to protect him. The next day tribesmen in Uruzgan rose up and seized Tarin Kot and called on Karzai to join them.

  In Kandahar Mullah Omar and his lieutenants were in hiding as bombing raids hit the Taliban leader’s home, along with barracks, police stations, and Osama bin Laden’s farm near the airport. A group of Arabs went to camp in the desert outside the city for safety; they, too, were bombed. Mullah Omar made one last attempt to hold on to the south, dispatching a force to Uruzgan to retake Tarin Kot and capture Karzai. The Taliban streamed up in a long convoy of pickups and SUVs, forging into action in their signature mode of fighting, using reckless speed and large numbers that usually sent their opponents scattering.

  But they had not counted on the American special forces, who coordinated airstrikes from positions on a ridge just south of Tarin Kot. The airstrikes demolished most of the vehicles heading toward the town, and more as they tried to flee back down a narrow pass. That was the last time the Taliban government mobilized troops into battle in southern Afghanistan, and it was a turning point in the war in the south. The demonstration of U.S. airpower broke the fear that had kept the population from supporting Haq and Karzai in those first weeks. The Taliban were in flight. Tribal elders, mujahideen commanders, and opposition groups rushed forward to join the winning side.

  In many Pashtun areas, the Taliban handed over the keys of offices and vehicles to community elders or mujahideen groups and were allowed to leave unharmed. It was a typically Afghan change of power, where the possession of vehicles and weapons took precedence over anything else. In Kabul, the Taliban left under cover of darkness, abandoning homes and, in some cases, wives, as well as the nation’s gold reserves—a last-minute attempt by some Taliban members to empty the government vaults was prevented by a quick-thinking bank official who broke a key in the main vault door. Despite their unruly image, neither the Taliban nor the mujahideen government before them had looted the country’s treasury and the priceless museum collection stored there. Incoming officials found the treasure under the palace as they had left it in the early 1990s.

  The leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, held on for another three weeks in his home province of Kandahar, but from then on his forces were scrambling for cover. The Taliban commander in the north, Mullah Fazel, trapped in Kunduz, was negotiating his surrender, and his forces began handing over th
eir weapons. In the south, Mullah Omar faced a similar choice: a humiliating surrender or death under American bombs.

  The one-eyed Mullah Omar was a hardheaded fighter who would never flinch from a challenge. He had grown up in a poor household, orphaned at a young age, and raised by his uncle who was a village mullah. A fighter since his teens, he had a reputation for toughness on the battlefield matched by an uncompromising adherence to Islam, in particular to a fundamentalist version of his religion taught by clerics of the Deobandi sect in madrassas in Pakistan and increasingly in Afghanistan.

  While Afghans are famous for their tribal code of hospitality, Mullah Omar always explained his refusal to give up bin Laden to the United States in terms of his loyalty to his religion. He did not want to be known as someone who betrayed a fellow Muslim to infidels. In a speech he reportedly gave to his followers the day before the U.S. bombing began, he urged them to sacrifice themselves in the coming fight rather than become a friend of non-Muslims. “I know my power; my position; my wealth; and my family are in danger,” he said. “However, I am ready to sacrifice myself and I do not want to become a friend of non-Muslims, for non-Muslims are against all my beliefs and my religion.” He was prepared to give up everything, he said, and “to believe only in Islam and my Afghan bravery.”9

  Finally, toward the end of November, a large group of commanders came to see Mullah Omar where he was sheltering in Maiwand, thirty miles west of Kandahar city. The daily bombardment had become so heavy that there was a consensus among the leaders that it was time to pull out of Kandahar. No one wanted to say it to Mullah Omar. It took his longtime supporter and mentor, the powerful commander Haji Bashar Noorzai, who finally spoke.