The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  The Red Cross was widely known and respected by most Afghans. The organization had been providing free medical care and humanitarian assistance across the nation and in refugee camps throughout the last two decades of war. When the Afghan employees explained to the Taliban who they were, the leader of the group answered that he knew the Red Cross very well and had been to their clinic. He pulled up his pant leg to show that he was an amputee wearing an artificial leg, which he said was from the Red Cross. But then he took out his satellite telephone and called someone for instructions.

  “What shall we do with the foreigner?” he asked.

  “Kill him,” came back the reply.

  The gunmen did not hesitate. They walked Munguia off away from the cars, behind some rocks. A burst of automatic gunfire shattered the air. Twenty bullets ripped into Munguia, killing him instantly.7

  The Taliban warned Munguia’s colleagues and the other Afghans standing at the roadside that if they found them working for foreigners again, or for the Karzai government, they would also be killed. Then they set one vehicle alight and headed off in two stolen cars into the mountains.

  The murder of a civilian was shocking. Most chilling, however, was the order over the satellite telephone. The Taliban government, despite its collaboration with al Qaeda and brutal treatment of its own people, had always allowed international assistance groups to work in Afghanistan. While it had imposed restrictions on the organizations, the Taliban leadership had recognized the services of humanitarian groups and the needs of the Afghan population. The murder of Munguia appeared to end that. The Red Cross suspended its work in southern Afghanistan, and other aid groups pulled out or cut back their operations.

  The commander on the other end of the satellite telephone was Mullah Dadullah, often called Mullah Dadullah Lang, Dadullah the Lame. He too was an amputee. Dadullah gave an interview to BBC radio the following day, bragging that his men had detained sixty-five Afghans and killed two Americans on the road at Dar-e-Noor. It became common for the Taliban to announce the damage they had inflicted on others, and they rarely missed a chance to claim responsibility for attacks. They knew how to play the media to increase their notoriety and often inflated the numbers of their victims. Dadullah said the Taliban were starting to wage jihad against the “Jews and Crusaders” who had invaded Afghanistan. “You know that the Russians were also saying that they would stay for a long time. The ground became hot for them, and so maybe the ground will also become hot for the Americans,” he taunted.8

  Dadullah was emerging as one of the most energetic organizers of the Taliban resurgence in those early days in Quetta. A native of Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan, he was one of the younger batch of Taliban commanders who had joined up to fight the jihad against the Soviet occupation as teenagers. He was about thirty-six in 2003, with all the drive and religious fervor of a young madrassa student. He also had the brashness of someone who had cheated death—he had evaded capture at Kunduz and transfer to Guantánamo in 2001—and the ruthlessness of one who had killed with his own hands. People in northern Afghanistan talked of him as the most brutal of all commanders, known by the way he killed people. “He used to thrust his fingers up a man’s nostrils, jerk his head back, and then slit his throat,” one villager told me in 2001.

  The governor of Kandahar reacted to the killing of Munguia with fury. Gul Agha Shirzai was a bear of a man in both physique and temperament. The son of a famous mujahideen leader, he was better known for his love of music and parties, some of them notoriously debauched. He had grabbed power in Kandahar as the Taliban fell and claimed the governorship against the wishes of Hamid Karzai, who had negotiated with the Taliban for the city of Kandahar to be handed over to Mullah Naqibullah, a man of greater military and tribal standing. But Shirzai wanted power and seized it; Karzai the conciliator let it go. Now, after Munguia’s death, Shirzai led a force up the road into Shah Wali Kot, raiding houses and arresting some former members of the Taliban. On his return to Kandahar, he announced that Taliban members had ten days to leave the southern provinces unless they could provide endorsements from their village elders. All Taliban working in the government or army had to leave their posts, he added. “I have ordered my commanders not to allow any Taliban in the villages; if they are caught they are to be punished severely. I will fill the prisons with them.”9 Shirzai was rising to Dadullah’s bait. Many former Taliban members, even ordinary fighters, left for Pakistan.

  Dadullah the Lame did not let up. He deployed assassins to hit prominent figures in Kandahar, attacking senior clerics who supported the government and Afghan aid workers who worked in rural communities. Dadullah himself was following orders. In June 2003, Mullah Omar announced the appointment of a ten-man leadership shura, or council, to organize the resistance.10 The council came to be known as the Quetta Shura, as intelligence reports filtered out that the Taliban council meetings were held in and around that city. The Taliban appointed a spokesman who over the next few years maintained a steady barrage of phone calls and press statements that made us think he was sitting in an Internet café rather than on the top of a mountain. Mullah Dadullah even gave an interview to a Pakistani television station in 2005, prompting Zalmai Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, to question why the Pakistani authorities could not detain Taliban members. “If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country, which has nuclear bombs, and a lot of security and military forces, not find them?”11

  In July 2003, representatives of the Taliban leadership came together with the longtime Pakistani asset, mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and members of al Qaeda. It was another critical council of war, and a level up from that of December 2001. Former deadly foes, Hekmatyar and Mullah Omar, agreed to cooperate in the fight against American forces in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, which had always pursued its own aims, was with them. They divided the country into areas of responsibility. Their calculation was that American forces were not going to increase their presence in the Pashtun areas, and since the United States was now heavily engaged in Iraq, it was an opportune moment to reassert control.12 The ISI was aware of the meeting. It had ties to all three parties. While some Pakistani officials warned of the danger of the new nexus, the agency as usual thought to co-opt the Afghan insurgency for its own interests rather than fight it.

  Dadullah did not have widespread support among Afghans. Most Afghans I met at the time were still hoping for peace and opposed the violence. Haji Emal Zhrak was a former employee of Afghanistan’s agriculture ministry during the Taliban regime, and was one of the elders among the refugee population in Quetta. His tribe had always been aligned to Hekmatyar and later to the Taliban, but when I met him, the elders of the tribe had just decided to withdraw their support for the insurgency since they were concerned it would drive away reconstruction projects from their districts. “People support the Taliban but they do not support the attacks they are conducting,” he told me.

  I was not the only one encountering this reaction. Talatbek Masadykov, a UN political officer in Kandahar at the time, received repeated warnings about the campaign that was building. Masadykov had worked in Afghanistan since the late 1980s when he was a young Soviet diplomat. He came from the Muslim Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan and spoke fluent Pashtu, and so had an immediate rapport with the Afghans. He passed through Quetta regularly in the years after 2001. On one such trip, a group of Taliban came to see him. They were former commanders and elders who said they did not agree with the new insurgency. “We were fighting on the side of the Taliban but we do not want to be part of the new campaign,” they told him. They said they wanted to return home to Afghanistan peacefully, and were looking for guarantees they would not be arrested. In the months that followed, Masadykov met with dozens of former fighters, low-level commanders, and pro-Taliban tribal elders. They warned him that the ISI was reorganizing the Taliban and pushing people to go and fight. ISI officials were threatening former fighters and
commanders and their families with arrest, telling them that they would be handed over to the Americans and sent to Guantánamo Bay if they did not start an insurgency in Afghanistan. The ISI was offering satellite telephones and motorbikes, and telling former Taliban members they had to go and fight. “This we heard many many times,” Masadykov told me.13

  For many Taliban members in exile, there were few options. The ISI was threatening to use force against them if they tried to avoid the insurgency. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, none of the main parties were interested in making peace. Karzai, despite many promises and public statements, never offered the Taliban a serious peace plan or safety for defectors. Karzai’s cabinet was also strongly anti-Taliban. Some members had been imprisoned by the Taliban or forced to flee their homes in the 1990s, and felt threatened by them still. They often warned that the Taliban had only one goal: to overthrow the government and ­return to power. The Bush administration showed it too was not interested in wooing the Taliban. In January 2002, the Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil had offered to cooperate with American forces. But instead of treating him like a valued ally, the Americans detained him in Bagram prison for two years. Such treatment deterred other Taliban members from coming forward and strengthened the ISI’s leverage over the rump movement. The Americans considered the Taliban irrelevant once they were defeated, according to Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who wrote a strategic review on Afghanistan for the incoming Obama administration in 2009. The Bush administration never gave instructions to its intelligence officials in Pakistan to follow the Taliban, he said. “The Taliban were defeated much more quickly than we expected. I was looking at them as a spent force,” the CIA station chief in Pakistan, Robert Grenier, recalled.14

  It was a lost opportunity. In the first months and years after their defeat, many Taliban members could have been persuaded to rejoin Afghan society if they had not been pursued and arrested. If handled skillfully, some of their leaders could have been used to bring the bulk of the Taliban movement to a negotiated peace. Instead, influential leaders were imprisoned and removed from the scene, leaving a vacuum for men like Mullah Dadullah to fill. Midlevel figures, men like Mullah Habibullah, the commander I met in Quetta in May 2003, who had served in the Taliban army and government, were at loose ends in those first years. They knew little other than their lives of fighting and religious instruction, were unable to support their families, and worried about survival. Habibullah lodged with friends for months and then moved into a madrassa where he met up with some old acquaintances. Some of the mullahs at the madrassa were from the Taliban and were reorganizing and recruiting for the insurgency in Afghanistan. They pushed Habibullah to go with them, his former host told me. Finally, Habibullah rejoined the Taliban because, with his madrassa training, he had no talent for business and no job, whereas the Taliban offered him money and status. Around 2005, he went back to southern Afghanistan and found as a commander that he enjoyed considerable respect in the community. By 2012, he had become one of the most powerful commanders in all of southern Afghanistan.

  In June 2003, coalition forces fought pitched battles with two groups of insurgents in southern Afghanistan. The guerrillas were easily defeated and fled across the border into Pakistan. “I never had any doubts that we had an insurgency on our hands, the breadth of which I was unable to measure. Most of that had to do with [the fact] we had so few people,” General Dan K. McNeill, who commanded the coalition force in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, told me. McNeill had 11,500 men in his force when he left in mid-2003, a tiny contingent compared to the 140,000 NATO-led forces and 300,000 Afghan security forces that would be deployed at the height of the war seven years later. He did not have the special operations forces under his command, nor did he have the concentration of intelligence and surveillance units he needed.

  Beyond weekly radio addresses, Karzai did little to galvanize popular sentiment. He relied on his personal appointees in the provinces to maintain support, the traditional Afghan way. Yet his governors and security officials were often inadequate, and in some cases grossly corrupt and predatory. They soon lost the support of large sections of the population. Governors who tried to manage more honestly were hamstrung by lack of money, infrastructure, and security. District officials had neither vehicles nor fuel to run them nor police to staff their offices. For years Kabul ignored their difficulties.

  For the next five years, the Taliban was quietly allowed to regenerate in Pakistan. Pakistan’s religious parties ruled in the border provinces after their 2002 election victories. Provincial ministers supported madrassas, spoke at funerals, and became a conduit for covert support for the Taliban. Residents of Quetta noticed that the rules guiding Friday mosque sermons were changed. In the first years after 9/11, sermons always emphasized Musharraf’s policy of “Pakistan First.” There were men from Pakistani intelligence present, and some mullahs were even arrested for talking out of line. But once the religious parties came to power, speakers began openly urging the faithful to go and wage jihad in Afghanistan. All throughout this period, the ISI steadily increased its ties and assistance to the insurgency.

  “America should have selected to crush al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, rather than go to war in Iraq,” the former senator and leader of the Baloch National Party in Quetta, Habib Jalib Baloch, told me in May 2003. He warned that the Taliban were being reorganized with funding from Arab countries, and that Mullah Omar and the top Taliban commanders were all in Pakistan, protected by their links to the Pakistani establishment. “You need to cut the funding,” he said. “You will not kill them with a hammer. You must cut the funding and the connection.”15

  5

  Al Qaeda Regroups

  “This regime has handed over the entire tribal belt to al Qaeda.”

  —Mahmood Khan Achakzai, Pashtun nationalist leader

  In January 2003, I set off with a driver and translator for Shkin, a village far down in southeastern Afghanistan on the border with Pakistan. An American soldier had been killed there while on patrol the previous month, the first U.S. casualty in Afghanistan in four months, and Afghans were telling me that al Qaeda fighters, based across the border in Pakistan, were behind the attack.

  It was a two-day journey to the border, over a snowy pass to the town of Gardez, through frozen, muddy villages of one province, across a desert into Paktika province, and then ten hours of bumping through riverbeds and along stony tracks to the border. It was the route that the last known group of foreign Islamist fighters had taken when they pulled out of Afghanistan in March 2002. They had put up a fierce fight. Seven Americans had died in Operation Anaconda, the heaviest toll of any battle in Afghanistan to that point. It was four months after bin Laden had fled Tora Bora, and the foreign fighters and Afghan Taliban had sheltered in hamlets in the Shahikot mountains through the winter. During the battle, they hugged the mountain ridges, pinning down U.S. forces for hours and bringing down two helicopters.

  A famous Afghan mujahideen commander, Mansour, led that fight. Yet the foreigners under him, thought to be Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, and other Central Asians, fought better than the usual standard of the Taliban.1 After the battle they retreated in good order to the border crossing and passed into Pakistan, villagers told us.

  Ten months later, there was no sign of Taliban on the road down. We passed groups of tribesmen in silk turbans sharing taxis to go to market or visit government offices. We did as they did, setting out before dawn to get an early start and never driving after dark when gunmen and thieves come out. We lodged in government offices and police stations on the way. Often the district offices were bullet-ridden ruins, with leaking roofs and sheets of plastic covering the windows and only a single warm room. We would fetch bread and kebabs from the bazaar for everyone and bunk down on the floor in our sleeping bags around the embers of a wood stove for warmth. The government was barely functioning in the provinces, and district officials frequently had no communication with the provinc
ial capital, much less with Kabul.

  The province did have telephone communications with Pakistan, however. From a public telephone office in the bazaar in some towns, you could call anywhere in the world. Paktika was still hooked into the Pakistani phone system, a leftover of the Taliban era when the Pakistani government extended telecommunications services into the main provinces of Afghanistan. It represented strategic assistance to the Taliban regime, but it seemed like annexation.

  By 2003 district police chiefs and administrators had been appointed by Karzai but had no budget and were managing largely on their own. Local police chiefs tended to use family members as bodyguards and drove their own cars. The most effective ones were former mujahideen commanders who had loyal networks of fighters and informants who knew the area and the population. In the years after 2001, these men were often criticized as predatory thugs. While there certainly were some who abused their power and preyed on the population, I met many in small communities who were natural and energetic leaders, with deep ties to their communities forged in times of war. They spent a lot of their time trying to make money to run their operations and keep their enemies at bay. Yet they also resolved many local issues, working with influential elders, and they were an important part of their communities.

  In Shkin, on the border, we discovered a village grappling with insurgency. The settlement was a miserably poor collection of mud-brick shops along a single dusty street, with adobe houses scattered beyond. Villagers were living under rocket fire, and officials were living under death threats. I realized this was the frontline. The Taliban and al Qaeda were just across the border, and still saw themselves at war. Their enemy, American special forces and CIA officers, had taken over the only substantial house in the village, a mud-walled qala, a fortress house on the edge of the village. On the road in front, we met Engineer Amin. That was how he was known to everyone. The title “Engineer” is often conferred on those with higher education. Amin was a tall, big-chested Waziri tribesman with a black bushy beard. He wore a jacket and waistcoat over traditional shalwar kamize and a pakul, the roll-brimmed wool hat worn by many mountain men in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was President Karzai’s representative in the area, and he was worried.