The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  “What is wrong with you?” Haji Bashar berated the Taliban leader. “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?”

  Mullah Omar was studied in his reply. “I have known you a very long time and I know you very well,” he said. “If it was not you saying this, I would have shot you right here.”10

  It was only then that Mullah Omar sent emissaries to negotiate his exit with Karzai, who was camped with his band of followers and a unit of American special forces an hour north of Kandahar, in the saw-toothed mountains of Shah Wali Kot. Karzai had just been named the interim leader of Afghanistan at a conference, organized by the United Nations, of anti-Taliban groups gathered in the German city of Bonn. Karzai was a compromise candidate, a moderate with no blood on his hands who had the backing of the United Nations and Western powers. Above all, he was a Pashtun who could continue the tradition of Pashtun rule in Afghanistan, but was also known and acceptable to northern groups. For Mullah Omar, Karzai was at least a known quantity. He had promised that all Afghans had the right to live in their own homes, and all Taliban fighters would be offered amnesty if they gave up their weapons and went home in peace. The message appealed to many Afghans, even if the higher-ranking Taliban did not trust it.

  It was not the first time that Mullah Omar had reached out to Karzai. Several weeks earlier, just after Mazar-i-Sharif had fallen, Omar had put a call through to Karzai. An assistant had spoken for the Taliban leader, asking Karzai about his intentions and how he saw the conflict ending. Karzai had told him what the United States was demanding: unconditional surrender of the Taliban regime. The assistant said Mullah Omar would call again.11 Now, three weeks later, the balance of power had shifted. Tribesmen were rallying to Karzai’s side, and the Taliban had fallen back to a few districts around Kandahar city with just three thousand men left under arms. The Taliban leader sent a delegation to Karzai to negotiate the surrender of Kandahar and the safe withdrawal of the Taliban leadership. To lead the negotiations, Mullah Omar chose Abdul Waheed Baghrani, a senior Taliban leader who was an important tribal figure and respected mujahideen leader.12 Among those with him were Amir Mohammad Agha, a father-in-law of the Taliban leader, and Tayeb Agha, Mullah Omar’s close assistant. They proposed that Mullah Naqibullah, a powerful opposition figure who was nevertheless acceptable to the Taliban, should take charge of Kandahar. They came to the negotiations with a signed letter of surrender from Mullah Omar agreeing to hand over the city in three days’ time.

  According to a member of the Taliban delegation, Karzai gave certain promises in return: to free the Taliban prisoners who had surrendered in northern Afghanistan and to allow each Taliban commander five armed guards for his personal security at home.13 Yet Karzai refused to accept Mullah Omar’s letter, perhaps in a gesture of conciliation. His close friend Hafizullah Khan was infuriated, judging that Karzai had passed up on an important historical document that could have been used to seal the peace. If Karzai had presented proof that Mullah Omar had ceded power in an agreement, then the Taliban could not have justified their subsequent insurgency, Khan contended. “He did not understand,” he said later of Karzai. “This was a very important document.” Sure enough, a decade later, when Karzai sought to negotiate an end to the insurgency, the Taliban denied that Mullah Omar had ever offered a formal surrender.14

  Mullah Omar did not wait for Karzai’s answer anyway. When Baghrani returned to Kandahar from his second negotiating trip, he found the city abandoned, the Taliban forces and their leaders gone. It was December 6, 2001. There remained a few wounded Arab fighters, barricaded into a wing of the hospital, who fought a weeklong siege. Some reports said Mullah Omar had left in a beat-up station wagon, driving west toward his home area of Maiwand and narrowly escaping a U.S. missile attack. In the months afterward, American officials suspected he was sheltering in Baghrani’s district in mountainous northern Helmand. The consensus of Afghan officials, who took over after the fall of the Taliban, is that he went to his father-in-law’s house in the village of Sangesar. It had been home for Mullah Omar for most of his adult life. From there he probably headed south, across the Registan Desert and into Pakistan, a route he knew intimately from ten years of fighting against the Soviet Army.

  For months U.S. forces conducted raids in parts of southern Afghanistan, pursuing smugglers and tribal figures with connections to the Taliban, including Baghrani, with little result. The word in Pakistan is that Mullah Omar left on the back of a motorbike, driving to the border town of Chaman, with the Pakistani militant Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a man who could ensure him protection in Pakistan. Gradually Afghan officials and ordinary residents reported sightings of Mullah Omar from the Afghan refugee community in and around Quetta, Pakistan. A number of sources, including a major in the Pakistani army, told me that he was living under Pakistani protection in a military camp near the border.

  The fall of Kandahar and the end of the Taliban regime was, as so often in Afghanistan, a negotiated pullout. Even as he made plans to escape, Mullah Omar had tried to arrange for a transition that would allow many of his followers to remain in Afghanistan and for the leadership to withdraw in good order. His choice of Mullah Naqibullah, a leader who was acceptable to all sides, was one such attempt. His offer of a written agreement opened the door to reconciliation and showed him to be a more experienced statesman than Karzai.

  Several years later, as the Taliban resurgence grew, critics began to question why there had not been a greater effort by the Western and Afghan forces fighting the Taliban to find a more inclusive settlement to the conflict and even a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban that could have prevented a return of hostilities. The veteran Algerian diplomat and peacemaker Lakhdar Brahimi, who headed the UN mission in Afghanistan and chaired the Bonn conference in 2001, concluded several years later that the Taliban should have been included in the Bonn settlement and not left out in the cold.

  Baghrani said the strength of the opposition, American and Afghan, ranged against them left the Taliban with no option but to retreat. “At the time it was the right move considering the concentration of all the factions,” he told me later. “That was a move for peace and stability. Things went wrong, turned out differently, but at the time it was in the interests of Afghanistan and the Afghan people.” Mullah Omar was right to escape and not give himself up or try to negotiate a position in any future government, he added. “If you look at what happened in the north, the Taliban surrendered in a peaceful movement. Yet, even though it was a peaceful gesture, they were deceived, and they were killed and tortured.”15

  A week after Mullah Omar gave up Kandahar, Osama bin Laden made his escape too. For days, American B-52 bombers had pounded the caves and Taliban positions in Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in a terrifying but vain attempt to kill him. His forces took heavy casualties, but he managed to leave, probably on horseback, and made his way across the Pakistani border to North Waziristan. He knew the region, which had served as a training base for him in the 1980s and was controlled by a close ally from the jihad days, the Afghan mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.16 U.S. Delta Force members tracking him at Tora Bora caught a last intercept of a radio message from bin Laden to his men on December 13. “Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire,” he said, his voice apparently showing signs of stress and even despair. “We didn’t receive support from the apostate nations who call themselves our Muslim brothers. Things might have been different.” Apparently giving up on any vow to fight to the death, he ended, “I’m sorry for getting you involved in this battle, if you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.”17 The attacks of 9/11 cost him everything: his bases, his followers, and eventually his life, but he achieved one aim—dragging the United States into war on Muslim lands and creating a great conflagration between the Western and Muslim worlds.

  By the spring, the Taliban were almost all gone fr
om Afghanistan. In a last stand in April 2002, a group in southeastern Afghanistan, a mix of Taliban and some Arab and Central Asian fighters, fought a ferocious battle in the mountains of Shahikot in Paktika province. For American troops, it was their deadliest fight so far. Eight Americans dropped in by helicopter were trapped on the snow-covered mountain bowl and died fighting off an encirclement of insurgents. It was a sharp lesson in how the Taliban’s well-trained foreign fighters could battle in the forbidding terrain of Afghanistan’s mountains when they chose to make a stand.

  The Taliban vanished after that. The survivors were seen trekking out along the well-worn mujahideen trail through the border village of Shkin, into Pakistan, by villagers living there.18 In May 2002, British Marines made a painstaking sweep through the mountain range of Shahikot and found the insurgents were gone. The commander of the British task force, Brigadier Roger Lane, declared the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan “all but won.” The Taliban were not showing signs of regrouping for offensive operations, he added. The British units packed up and left Afghanistan, and did not return in large numbers until 2006.

  It was the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, a resounding defeat for the radical Islamist movement and its leadership. It was also a defeat for Pakistan’s scheme to control Afghanistan by proxy. Several thousand Taliban fighters were killed in the six months after October 2001, and thousands more fled, badly mauled, hunted by vengeful opponents, and shell-shocked by the accuracy and power of American bombs.19 Those escaping from the north faced an arduous journey overland through hostile regions where opposition groups were seizing power and arresting opponents. It took some of the Taliban fighters weeks to make their way out across the border. Even in Pakistan, they were unsure of their welcome. The Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf, had supposedly sided with the United States in the war. The Taliban had no choice but to go to ground, seeking medical help in private hospitals and shelter in the Afghan refugee community.

  Yet they still had many friends in Pakistan, some of whom were highly placed and influential. Their adopted homeland proved more welcoming than threatening.

  3

  Pakistan’s Protégés

  “He was not even street smart. He was so stupid it was easy for the ISI to use him.”

  —Hafizullah Khan about Mullah Omar

  Mullah Omar never seemed marked for leadership. People who knew him as a young man wonder to this day how he became the driver of the great wave that swept the Taliban to power in Afghanistan from 1994 to 2001. The main attribute that people recall about him was that he was short on intelligence. That he was a brave and dogged fighter was undisputed, but that was hardly unusual in Afghanistan. Every family in the countryside gave heroes to the jihad. But there was ambition beneath the stolid villager’s exterior. He was poor, landless, and an outsider from another province, and so was easily underestimated.

  He came from a family of village mullahs. His father died when he was young, and Omar was raised by his uncle Maulavi Muzafer. His uncle took in the children and married Omar’s mother. The custom is common in parts of Afghanistan to ensure that the widow and offspring are provided for and kept within the family’s embrace. The family belonged to the Hotak tribe, which made them Ghilzais, underdogs in Afghanistan’s tribal politics where the Durrani tribal confederacy had long dominated.

  Omar grew up in the village of Deh Wanawarkh in Deh Rawud, the same mountainous area of Uruzgan where Karzai would raise a force against the Taliban in 2001. He attended his uncle’s mosque for a few years of basic religious education and later was sent to continue his studies at a madrassa in Kandahar. From there, soon after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, he ran off to join the mujahideen. He never completed the religious training to become a mullah—but like all Taliban commanders and officials, he came to use the title as an honorific, although he always told acquaintances that he preferred the title of mujahid: holy warrior.

  Omar joined a mujahideen group led by a commander, Faizullah, who commanded about 150 to 200 men in Maiwand west of Kandahar.1 Their main base was in a village called Sangesar, which became Omar’s adopted home. A mujahideen commander, Mohammad Nabi,2 who came from a village near Sangesar, knew Omar well and often fought alongside him. He remembers him as a brave and good fighter but dull-witted. Omar was strict on moral issues and stubborn to a fault, once even refusing to leave the battlefield despite the fact that their ammunition had run out. “He would stick to his argument even when he was proved wrong,” he told me.

  It was that rigid stubbornness that brought Omar to lead the Taliban at the age of thirty-five. In the years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, after fourteen years of struggle in the mountains, the mujahideen took power. Many commanders began seizing land and businesses for themselves. Omar had an argument over land with his subcommander and was thrown out of his particular group of mujahideen. The commander complained that he was a troublemaker, like a “virus.”3

  The whole country was going through similar upheavals. The seven main mujahideen parties established the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and formed a coalition government, but within months the alliance had fallen apart. Afghanistan slid into civil war as the different factions vied for power in Kabul, and armed militias across the country turned to brigandry. In the countryside and provincial towns, already decimated by war with the Soviets, mujahideen established their own mini-fiefdoms. In Kandahar, militias fought each other for control of the highways and set up checkpoints where they hung chains across the roads to stop vehicles and extort money and goods. By the spring of 1994, the criminality was annoying even the most powerful commanders of Kandahar whose own businesses and smuggling rackets were being disrupted. The militias had splintered into a plethora of criminal gangs. Every man with a gun was stepping onto the roads to steal cars or demand money from the local population.

  A group of the most powerful commanders west of Kandahar gathered in the spring of 1994 and decided to organize a force to clear the worst offenders. They agreed to support a stern judge, Maulavi Pasanai, who presided over an Islamic court in the village of Zangabad to move against the checkpoints and help bring order to the chaos. Three commanders drove the plan: Haji Bashar, who wanted to clear impediments to his lucrative transport and drugs network; Haji Berget, a tribal leader who controlled smuggling routes; and Hafizullah Khan, a major landowner alarmed at the lawlessness. He would later accompany Hamid Karzai into Uruzgan in 2001. They gave Judge Pasanai half a dozen guards each for his protection so he could crack down on the worst criminals as both judge and enforcer.4 The aim was to clear fifteen checkpoints between Maiwand and Kandahar, and fifteen on the other, east side of Kandahar up to the Pakistani border.

  Mullah Omar was one of the men sent to work with Pasanai. At that point Omar was just an ordinary fighter living in Sangesar with ten followers. The commanders saw him as a religious man and a fighter with a clean reputation. As an outsider from Uruzgan province, he could act freely, unhampered by tribal loyalties. Hafizullah Khan, who lived near Pasanai’s court, dealt with Omar regularly in 1994. “He was studying with a mullah in my village. He would work, building a wall, and then he would study,” he recalled. “He was a very stupid man” but “he was a good man, and very humble.”

  Soon Omar became Judge Pasanai’s trusted emissary, carrying letters back and forth and coming to Hafizullah Khan for money, food, and support for their work. With vehicles donated by the big commanders and court orders from Pasanai, the group began moving against militias and criminals west of Kandahar. Justice was harsh. A particularly notorious checkpoint commander, Nadir Jan, resisted arrest, so Mullah Omar killed him on the spot with a pistol shot to his head.5

  The Taliban had begun with barely a penny among them. Pasanai would send Mullah Omar out with requests for money, and Hafizullah Khan would gather people together to drum up resources for the group. Khan remembers giving Omar vegetables and yogurt from his farm. Yet within months, Pasanai’s men
had seized enough weapons and gained such stature that people were volunteering money and assistance. At some point, Pasanai replaced his commander of operations, Abdul Samad, because he had executed a former Communist without authority. Pasanai gave the top job to Mullah Omar. From that moment, his power began to grow. He talked of clearing checkpoints and subduing militias all the way to Kabul.6

  In September 1994, in a lightning strike, Mullah Omar cleared the main highway and swept up to Kandahar city in just twelve days. Some of the most fearsome commanders had supported his appointment since they knew him as a good mujahid and a religious man, and they let him advance without opposition. The most powerful commander in Kandahar, Mullah Naqibullah, pledged not to resist Omar’s advance and even handed over the military barracks in the city. Over the next six weeks, Omar steadily neutralized the different militia groups in and around Kandahar city. It was a masterful action, ruthlessly removing petty criminals; amassing popular support, weapons, and men; and gaining overwhelming moral momentum before turning on the most powerful commanders.

  So the Taliban movement was formed. Mullah Omar was now the one calling meetings of mujahideen commanders back at his old base in Sangesar. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served with him from the beginning and later became the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, recalled forty to fifty mujahideen commanders gathering at the white mosque in Sangesar in the autumn, each taking an oath of allegiance to fight against corruption and criminality.7 The group came to be known collectively as the Taliban, which means “religious students” or “seekers of knowledge” (Taliban is the plural of “Talib”), since most of them had religious training.