By 2004, with the United States embroiled in the war in Iraq, Musharraf’s generals began to think that the Americans would soon leave Afghanistan. The prospect gave them reason to strengthen links with Pakistan’s main asset and former ally in Afghanistan, the Taliban. In October 2004, Musharraf appointed Lieutenant General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as the head of the ISI. Kayani was an advocate of formal strategic assistance for the Afghan Taliban. He couched it in terms of the need to maintain intelligence contacts with them. A taciturn, chain-smoking infantryman from the Punjab, Kayani had attended the U.S. Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and so was known and acceptable to the United States. Western diplomats and military officials described him as the brightest and deepest thinker of the top Pakistani generals. Yet it was under Kayani, first for three years as ISI chief and then as chief of army staff, that the Taliban received consistent protection and assistance from Pakistan, and came to threaten the entire U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.
Musharraf began to tell interlocutors that the Taliban were a reality and that Pakistan had no other option than to deal with them. The retired general Talat Masood noticed the shift in Musharraf’s stance around 2003 or 2004. “It was not that he wholeheartedly supported the Taliban, but because of his [strained] relationship with Karzai, he became indifferent. He would say of the Taliban: ‘At least they are our friends.’” A few years more and Musharraf would justify ties with the Taliban as a necessity. “He came to say the Taliban are here to stay, we have no option,” Masood said.7
Musharraf’s double dealing may have gone as far as helping al Qaeda’s top leaders escape capture. In 2005, a senior Pashtun tribal elder told Afghan officials that al Qaeda’s deputy leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, was staying as a guest at the house of a senior Pakistani government official in Kohat. The official was none other than the governor of the North West Frontier province, a retired general and Musharraf appointee.
The tribal elder who went to the Afghans with the information was sent by none other than an uncle of Nek Mohammad, the Pakistani tribesman who was the main facilitator for al Qaeda in Pakistan. Nek Mohammad’s family had themselves hosted Zawahiri until a rocket attack caused him to move. He left the house and went to stay in Kohat, a sizable town in an adjoining tribal agency. He traveled in a bulletproof car. In Kohat, he negotiated to stay for one month in the governor’s home. The al Qaeda leader paid forty thousand dollars for that protection. Nek Mohammad’s uncle, a man named Sadiq, accompanied Zawahiri on the trip, and it was he who sent a senior tribal elder to relay the information to Afghan national security officials. They regarded both the source and the man selected to carry the message so highly that they passed the information on to President Karzai.
I also learned of the information at that time but found it impossible to corroborate. I never published it. Several years later, Sadiq died, as did the elder who had relayed the message. One of his Afghan friends told me that they had not dared reveal the identity of the messenger at the time lest they endanger him, but he was an honorable man so they did not doubt the veracity of his account.
In those days, it was hard to believe that senior Pakistani officials would protect top al Qaeda members, yet we journalists occasionally heard such reports. Afghans and Pakistanis who were opposed to the Taliban and their supporters in the Pakistani establishment often warned us as much, and sometimes helped us to investigate reports. For years these reports were discounted as conspiracies by Pakistani officials and Western diplomats. Only after bin Laden was discovered living in Abbottabad, a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s foremost military academy, did many of these earlier stories make sense. I never doubted Sadiq’s account, but it was only after bin Laden’s death that two American counterterrorism officials told me that the account of Zawahiri’s hiding place was entirely possible and that they had seen similar such reports.
As for the man at the pinnacle of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, he spent three years in Pakistan’s tribal areas before disappearing from view in 2004. A video passed to the Arab news channel Al Jazeera in October 2003 showed bin Laden and Zawahiri picking their way down a rocky, tree-covered mountain trail amid scenery that resembles the terrain of the northern border areas.
One militant commander in Pakistan told me that he saw bin Laden in North Waziristan in 2003. The commander had spent many years fighting, and training fighters, in Kashmir and Afghanistan with the Taliban. He said he had met bin Laden twice, once before 9/11 in Afghanistan and the second time in the spring of 2003 in a village in the Shawal mountain range of North Waziristan. The commander said bin Laden was accompanied by a personal guard of Arab and Chechen fighters, and arrived unexpectedly at a large gathering of eighty to ninety fighters in the village. The commander was in a house meeting other fighters when bin Laden arrived. They greeted each other before the commander departed with his group.
The commander said that bin Laden was moving from place to place in the border areas for about three years after 9/11. “Everyone was aware in the region where he was.” It was a time when the Taliban and foreign militants were living relatively unmolested in the tribal territories. Pakistani’s forces were making occasional raids, but it was before the United States started its campaign of drone strikes and before the Pakistani military began its large-scale operations in 2004. People were aware there was a price on bin Laden’s head and that the United States was spending money to look for him, but the tribespeople stuck together and did not give up his whereabouts.
Then, when Pakistani military operations increased in North and South Waziristan, and Nek Mohammad was killed in a drone strike in June 2004, bin Laden dropped out of sight. Two former commanders I talked to assumed that he had been moved by the military to a safe house in a city. In December 2004 in Washington, D.C., General Musharraf announced that the trail had gone cold.8
Journalists in the region never saw the glimmer of a lead on bin Laden’s whereabouts after 2004. In fact, bin Laden had moved outside the tribal areas and then gone to live in Haripur, a small provincial town northwest of Islamabad, sometime in 2004. Bin Laden’s youngest wife, questioned by Pakistani intelligence officials after the 2011 raid that killed her husband, told investigators that they had lived in the Swat Valley for six months, then two years in Haripur before moving to their last home in Abbottabad in 2006. Each move happened under Musharraf’s watch, just as he was proclaiming to the world that the trail had gone cold.
6
The Wrong Enemy in the Wrong Country
“Our people were victims of al Qaeda, and it is not fair that they should be victims of the American campaign.”
—Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of Afghanistan
July 2002. Southern Afghanistan turns into an oven in the summer months. The heat is so dry it cracks your skin, and the light so blinding that it drives everyone inside by mid-morning. In the villages there is no electricity, and Afghans live in dark rooms, often underground, which offer cool relief from the heat as soon as you duck in through the low doorway. Farmers sleep in the day and work their fields after sundown. A fierce heat still bounces off the hard-packed earth at night, and people sleep on the flat roofs of their houses or sit up late to catch the cooler air.
So it was that Mohammad Sharif and his family entertained a large party of guests late into the night, celebrating the engagement of his sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Malik. They lived in the farming village of Kakrak in Uruzgan province. The villagers had been early supporters of Hamid Karzai in his stand against the Taliban. The brother of the groom, twenty-five-year-old Mohammad Shah, had joined Karzai, as had their uncle, who had since been appointed a senior army commander in Kandahar.
Over two hundred people from their extended family were gathered at their home for the party. Women and children were together in the inner courtyard while, as is the tradition at Afghan weddings, the men congregated separately in the outer courtyard. They had eaten a meal of soup, and mutton and rice palau. By one o’clock in the morning,
the women were seated on cushions on the long flat roof of the house, playing drums and singing the traditional wedding songs long banned under the Taliban regime. Young children were asleep in the rooms downstairs. Older ones were watching the dancing, eating sweets and dashing about. The men were relaxing after cooking cauldrons of food for the guests, sitting on rugs and chatting. “People were singing, we were drinking tea, small boys were going round pouring tea for people,” Mohammad Shah recalled.
Without warning, a fighter plane descended out of the black sky and slammed a missile into the roof where the women were sitting. A second later another explosion burst above the men’s courtyard, shredding guests with shards of metal. The women and children fled in panic through a garden door into the orchard as more rockets exploded around them. Cannon fire raked the compound walls. Eleven-year-old Saboor Gul was sitting up on the roof with her mother when the first bomb struck. They threw themselves down the stairs into the courtyard. A second explosion struck them, knocking Saboor Gul unconscious. She woke up in the hospital in Kandahar, a day’s drive away, her back and legs lacerated with shrapnel. She did not know that her mother had died in the attack. “The airplane was very big,” she told me. She was frightened to see a foreigner at her bedside.
“The children were running, they were scared,” said Chenara, a twenty-year-old sister of the groom who was watching the dancing in the courtyard when the planes struck. She was wounded but fled outside with everyone else.
The planes circled and attacked again, cutting down a group of women and children in the orchard. The grandmother of the family, Nazaka, had snatched up her grandson and pulled a wounded woman along by her shirt. They ran into the orchard and reached the far corner when another explosion showered them with shrapnel.
Sadiqa, a slim fifteen-year-old girl, unhurt by the first strikes, sprinted out behind the house through the fields. She hid in a dry river gully some distance away. Women were standing on the bank of the gully when the planes came round again and strafed their group. A bomb raised an enormous dust cloud in the field. Most of the women were killed. Sadiqa survived, wounded in both legs.
In the men’s courtyard, Laik, a thirty-five-year-old farmer, was drinking tea with two other guests when the first bomb hit. One of his friends was killed instantly. The other two men rushed up out of the compound but came under fire as they sought cover. Laik’s second friend was cut down as they ran. Laik reached the field in front of the house and dove into a small ditch. “The Americans were bombing the house and we could not believe it, we were running everywhere to hide,” he recounted. Unknown to him, his wife and three children had been killed. Laik lay in the ditch until dawn as the planes circled again and again, pouring fire onto the fields and the neighboring farmhouses.
Mohammad Shah, the brother of the bridegroom, was knocked off his feet by the first bombing but escaped into the fields. There he came under fire again and was badly wounded in the arm. He wandered back to the house and collapsed in a relative’s arms.
Abdul Khaliq, twenty-four, was not even at the engagement party but lived nearby. He was sleeping on his rooftop when the bombing began. He rushed downstairs and fled into the fields, thinking to get away from the houses that were the target. But planes were shooting into the fields, and he was struck in the hip and the arm. “I was frightened I was going to die and I was desperate for water,” he said. As the bombardment receded, he limped back home. Villagers were collecting the dead and carrying the wounded to the village mosque, and he made his way there too.
As the planes receded, Pir Jan stepped in to check a relative’s house across the street from the engagement party. He found seven children dead and wounded in the courtyard. Two boys—Ahmad, seven, and Shirin, thirteen—lay dead where they had been sleeping on the rooftop. Five more were wounded as they tried to hide.
Sahib Jan, a twenty-five-year-old neighbor, was one of the first to reach the groom’s house after the bombardment. Bodies were lying all over the two courtyards and in the adjoining orchard, some of them in pieces. Human flesh hung in the trees. A woman’s torso was lodged in an almond sapling. Cannon fire had gouged long scars into the mud walls of the compound. Missiles had blown wide holes in the flat rooftops of the buildings, and bodies lay in the dust and rubble of the rooms below. A mother and her five children were dead in one room. The groom’s parents were killed, as were thirteen children of the house. Seven children lay dead by the gate in the orchard. Sahib Jan knew every one of the dead. He named them at each spot as he walked us through the compound several days after the attack. He found a twelve-year-old boy lying under an archway in the men’s courtyard, slain by a piece of metal shrapnel in his head.
“His name was Shirin, he was the son of Zaher Jan,” he said, staring at the bloodstained ground. He had carried the dead boy to the mosque. The villagers collected dozens of bodies and carried scores of wounded to the mosque. They found body parts strewn about, human ears, teeth, a woman’s skull in one corner, a hand tossed aside. Fifty-four people died and more than one hundred were wounded that night. According to custom, the engaged couple were not present at the party and so they had survived, but their union was forever benighted.
As dawn broke, American and Afghan soldiers surrounded the village and advanced on foot, searching houses and detaining people. “When they came right into the village and saw the dead women and children they were very sad and their attitude changed towards us,” said Pir Jan, who was helping gather up the dead. “They told me through a translator that they had made a mistake. They said: ‘We are sorry but what’s done, we cannot undo.’” At the mosque, the American soldiers found the wounded men Abdul Khaliq and Mohammad Shah. “They came and asked: ‘Who was shooting?’ I said, ‘No one was shooting,’” Abdul Khaliq said.
Later, Afghan officials, including provincial governor Jan Mohammad Khan, arrived to investigate. “They were collecting body parts in a bucket,” the governor told us. I had driven from Kabul with a translator and driver for three days over dusty and rutted roads. A team from the Los Angeles Times had come with us. Four days after the bombardment, the place was still a scene of unspeakable gore. Blood stained the ground and putrefying flesh was still entangled amid the bright scarlet blossoms of a pomegranate tree.
Five miles away, a village called Siya Sang had also come under bombardment that night. Villagers told us six people had been killed. It was a poor settlement of small mud houses. A woman named Jamala wept as she showed us a pile of bloody clothes in her courtyard. She pointed to the blood on the wall where her teenage son had fallen dead, and a corner where she had found her daughter and grandson dead. A female neighbor had also died. “My grandson and daughter’s mouths were full of dust,” she said, pulling her veil across her face. “Write about this so it will stop, so they leave us in peace to pray and fast.”
These villagers lived simple lives. Their houses were unfurnished. Everyone ate and slept on the floor. The women tended cows and chickens in the yard and cooked on outdoor stoves fired by animal dung. The children ran around barefoot and played games in the dust. These people were not al Qaeda. They were not remotely connected to international terrorism. They were not even Taliban. They were not hostile to us foreign journalists even after such unspeakable killings. They answered our questions and patiently walked us through the ruins. I would leave, my heart full to bursting.
The men were angry. They warned that the U.S. military had made a grave mistake. The sixteen-year-old groom, Abdul Malik, veered wildly between declaring undying enmity to the Americans and intoning an acceptance of God’s will.
In the hospital in Kandahar city, we found four wounded men, including his sole surviving brother. “This is the third time the Americans have made a mistake in our district of Deh Rawud. And they did not kill any Taliban, or arrest anyone,” Mohammad Shah said. Twenty-five members of his extended family had been killed in the bombing. “We were the first to help Hamid Karzai, so we did not think they would bomb our villag
e.” The family was already receiving threats of revenge attacks from the Taliban who remained at large, he said.
“Why are they killing women and children? They are not al Qaeda or Taliban. If they want to arrest us men, they can, but not kill the women,” his neighbor Abdul Khaliq said. “And did they find any weapons caches in the village? No,” he added bitterly.
Laik, the farmer who lost his wife and three children, said they had been firing a Kalashnikov in celebration. “We were shooting from happiness,” he explained.
The villagers told us they did not want American forces to leave Afghanistan; they wanted them to continue to pursue al Qaeda and the Taliban. Yet there were already signs that they would not forgive the killing of family members. “Those people who bombed our women and children, they are our enemies now,” warned Khudai Nazar, forty-five, who lost several members of his family.
The attack on Kakrak was part of a large nighttime operation by U.S. forces involving several hundred troops in convoys of trucks and jeeps, and airborne assault teams. The target was a suspected Taliban position north of the village. When a U.S. unit heading toward the target spotted gunfire, they called in airstrikes on Kakrak even though it was not the intended target. Pilots had reported antiaircraft fire from heavy machine guns at several positions along the valley during reconnaissance flights. Ground forces moving up the valley also reported gunfire at several other places that night. Villagers used to fire their guns at night when they heard the American planes overhead, sending arcs of red tracer rounds into the blackness, residents told me later. Some were pro-Taliban and hated the Americans, some would do it for fun. In Kakrak, however, they had no antiaircraft gun. They had simply celebrated an engagement by firing a Kalashnikov into the sky, a favorite custom at weddings and parties.
The Wrong Enemy Page 12
