The population was waiting for the government to act. “If the government enforces security then the people will come alongside,” said Abdul Qader Noorzai, the head of the Afghan human rights commission in Kandahar and a well-connected tribal elder. But as the summer wore on, the Afghans saw that the Taliban were more determined than the Karzai government and Western forces. After the United States had defeated the Taliban so decisively in 2001, the people could not understand why U.S. and NATO forces were failing to deal with the Taliban this time. They began to suspect a conspiracy.
Compounding the people’s sense of insecurity was a vicious campaign of suicide bombing that burst upon Afghanistan in 2006. Unheard of in Afghanistan before 2001, suicide bombings began in a trickle. In the first years, few were even particularly successful, sometimes killing only the bomber. But in 2006, a wave of 119 suicide bombers attacked Afghanistan, nearly one every three days. A high proportion of these attacks occurred in Kandahar. It had seemed as if Afghans had experienced every possible horror of war in the past twenty-five years, but these suicide bombers, detonating their explosives in the midst of crowds of shoppers or crashing into busy traffic, brought a new terror. They stunned Afghan communities, paralyzed the government, and sent NATO forces scurrying for their bunkers.
As in most religions, suicide is a sin in Islam, and so the method of killing was appalling to Afghans, as was the indiscriminate nature of the attacks. The Taliban and its al Qaeda and Pakistani mentors were wielding an instrument of maximum terror to destroy popular confidence in the Afghan government, to chase it from power and chase its Western allies from the country.
A group of us from the New York Times had a close encounter with a suicide bomber one day early in February 2006. We had driven up to the central police station in Kandahar, only a few blocks from the hotel where we often stayed. It was mid-morning. A crowd of people, papers in hand, was clustered at the gate. Their bicycles and motorbikes were parked in a huddle across the street. A few off-duty policemen were sitting on plastic chairs warming themselves in the winter sun and chatting with their friends. We pulled up at the barrier. Scott Eells, an American photographer, and I were sitting in the back seat, hidden from view behind black windows. Our Afghan reporter, Ruhullah, had insisted on putting on the black film even though it was illegal. Things had changed in Kandahar, he said. It was not safe for foreigners to be driving around, and for him and our driver to be seen with foreigners anymore. The police were expecting us and waved us through. An aide whisked us into the main building and up the stairs to the police chief’s office.
The moment we reached the landing, a wave of air punched the building and the windows shattered on all sides. The crack of a powerful bomb reverberated and made us all duck. We were used to hearing the sound of explosions, but this was very close. Momentarily stunned, I watched the aide in front of me run forward, then run back. I turned and saw Scott and Ruhullah racing down the stairs and followed them. In the courtyard, a policeman, his clothes on fire, was running from the gate and hurled himself into a ditch. The front gate was blown apart, and the ground strewn with burning debris. Bodies lay in awful poses, blackened, naked limbs splayed. Police began to haul them off the ground. The wounded were heavy and stupid with shock. A policeman, blood dripping down his face, stared dumbly as a younger colleague carried him on his back to a car. Two policemen pulled their burned colleague from the ditch. He was dead, his body covered in stinking black slime. Jamshed, our driver, appeared at my side, wide-eyed with shock but unhurt. He had just parked the car across the yard and had watched it all.
The bomber had blown himself up at the gate, in the thick of the crowd. There was a stench of burning. Motorbikes were twisted into tangled heaps. The men pressing around the gate with their papers had taken the brunt of the explosion. They had been thrown in all directions and lay face down in a rubbish heap; in a sewage ditch along the side of the street, some still clutched their documents in their hands. A Kandahari driver we knew, Abdul Hadi, who had been waiting for his boss, was pulled unconscious from behind the wheel of his car. Construction workers building new rooms beside the gatehouse were carrying out dead and wounded coworkers. The police were loading the dead into the back of a pickup truck now. “You see what we are up against?” one said to me. Others howled at the photographers to stop taking pictures of the dead.
Mullah Gul, a tough district police chief we knew well, came out. His clothes were grimy and his eyes bloodshot. “I lost five men and five wounded,” he told us as he climbed into the pickup to follow the casualties to the hospital. Two women in blue burqas arrived at the end of the street, screaming for relatives who worked in the police station. The police shouted at them to go home. Emotions were fraying. A police officer slapped a junior policeman across the face for not wearing his cap while on duty. The man’s commander started swearing at the official, who was a newcomer to the station.
An investigator wearing plastic gloves was squatting down by the gate examining the ground. “He was a suicide bomber. I found his head on the roof of the factory,” he said, nodding at the building opposite. He began explaining that if a bomber has explosives strapped to his chest, the blast usually blows the head clear off the body. “It happened at 10:20 a.m.,” he went on. “He came on a motorbike and ran into the people and the police.”
A police commander, Habibullah, said he had been on his way to the gate and had seen the bomber, a youth wearing a turban, talking to the men at the barrier before he detonated his bomb. “They are doing it in the name of Islam. They ask us why we have given our hand to non-Muslims,” he said. “They say we are the eyes for the foreign forces. So the enemy is saying they want to cut out the eyes, and then the foreigners will not be able to do anything and they will have to leave Afghanistan.” He paused. “If the foreigners leave, in three days the Taliban would be back.”
We drove across town to the hospital. People were clustered around a list of dead at the hospital entrance. The final death toll was thirteen, with fifteen wounded. Five of the dead were police, eight civilians. One, Najibullah, was only thirteen. They came from different places, in the city and the districts, one from Uruzgan province. Upstairs in the intensive care unit, some of the casualties were badly burned. Slathered in cream, they shivered violently. Our friend, the driver Abdul Hadi, lay motionless in a coma.
8
The Suicide Bomb Factory
“All Taliban are ISI Taliban. It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the ISI. Everyone says this.”
—brother of a Pakistani suicide bomber killed in Afghanistan
2006. Afghan investigators soon discovered that the suicide bombers and the networks supplying them were emanating from Pakistan. In January 2006, the Afghan intelligence service and police rounded up a group of Pakistanis and Afghans in Kandahar who, they said, were behind a string of suicide attacks. Three of those arrested were Pakistanis who said they had been shown jihadi videos and urged to go to Afghanistan and kill Americans to earn a sure way to paradise. One said he was a member of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and had been through militant training in the 1990s. He was stopped by police in a car rigged with explosives, which failed to go off.1 “I think there is a factory for these bombers,” Asadullah Khaled, the governor of Kandahar province, told me.
Khaled had worked in intelligence with the Northern Alliance during their resistance against the Taliban and was no novice when it came to tracking Taliban activities. Kandahar had received the highest number of suicide bombings of all provinces when Khaled decided to go public with some of the evidence Afghan intelligence was uncovering. “Most of the attackers are non-Afghans,” Khaled said at a memorial service for fourteen victims of a suicide bombing in Kandahar. “We have proof: we have prisoners, we have addresses, we have cassettes.”
Over the months the evidence accumulated. Those bombers that could be identified turned out to be mostly Pakistanis or Afghans living in Pakistan. They were being recruited through mo
sques and madrassas, and some through connections to Pakistan’s banned militant groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harakat-ul-Mujahedin. Others were organized by Afghan groups under the Taliban’s operational commander, Mullah Dadullah, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader of Hesbe-Islami and longtime proxy of Pakistan. These were the groups that forged a coalition with al Qaeda in Pakistan in 2003. Afghan sympathizers were bringing the bombers into Afghanistan, and providing them with safe houses, logistics, and vests and cars primed with explosives.
In Kabul in September 2006, Afghan intelligence operatives caught another suspect, Daoud Shah, a third-generation Afghan immigrant to Pakistan who was part of a suicide cell planning bombings.2 Daoud Shah was a thin twenty-one-year-old with a black prayer cap and scraggly beard. His father and grandfather were economic migrants from Paktia who struggled to make a living as cloth dealers in Karachi. His father sent his sons to the neighborhood madrassa when they moved there in the 1990s. Daoud Shah entered the madrassa at the age of ten and graduated as a Hafiz, one who has memorized the Koran. He returned to live with his family in a rough tenement in Karachi and earned money selling popcorn from a street cart. But he and his brother kept their ties with the madrassa, and they drifted into Islamist extremism under the influence of their teacher, Maulavi Abdul Shakoor Khairpuri. The elder brother, Zaher Shah, became a member of the militant Pakistani group Jaish-e-Mohammad. He left Pakistan to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and was captured and imprisoned by the Northern Alliance.3
Daoud Shah underwent weapons training when he was only fifteen years old in a Harakat-ul-Mujahideen camp near Mansehra in Pakistan in 2000, and briefly visited Afghanistan with the Taliban in Kunar province. He went back to his popcorn cart after 9/11 as the militant groups laid low. He married and had two children, and was living at home in Karachi. Then, in 2006, he had a falling-out with his father who yelled at him to find a proper job. He took off soon after for Afghanistan on a suicide mission. His old teacher from the madrassa set it up, giving him a letter for a contact in Kabul and promising to pay his family $1,400 if he was successful. He set off with three others. They traveled by bus via Quetta to Kabul. At the bus stop in Kabul, a man handed them a sack with four suicide vests inside. Soon after that Daoud Shah was detained by intelligence agents patrolling the bus station. One of his companions slipped away and blew himself up outside the Interior Ministry, killing twelve people and wounding forty-two.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan mujahideen leader who opposed the American intervention in Afghanistan, also organized a group of suicide bombers in 2006. The operation was traced by Afghan intelligence agents to a Hesbe-Islami group in Shamshatu refugee camp, on the edge of the city of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan. Hekmatyar had always been close to Pakistani intelligence and had controlled the Shamshatu camp through his party since the 1980s. Afghan intelligence managed to follow the movements of the bombing cell in 2006, when an informant living in Shamshatu tipped them off and helped thwart at least two suicide bombings and arrest seventeen people. The Afghans listened on the detainees’ cell phones to telephone calls from the organizers in Pakistan, who kept calling to urge the cell members into action and demanding why the bombings were not being carried out. NATO officials pressured the Afghans to share their information, but NATO then passed it to the ISI in Pakistan, naively expecting that the police would round up the Peshawar end of the bombing group. The Pakistanis made no move.
Instead, the informant who helped to unlock the entire cell was seized and killed. His body, cut up into eight pieces, was dumped in a black refuse bag in the refugee camp. Afghan intelligence officials accused the ISI of tipping off Hekmatyar’s people. “How come Hekmatyar runs bombing cells from the Shamshatu camp?” asked an Afghan intelligence official bitterly. “We strongly think the ISI leaked the information to him.”4
Taliban spokesmen, who were by now fielding scores of calls from journalists every day, readily claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings. Each time they insisted that the bombers were Afghan, and often gave their names and places of origin. It was propaganda, not always true. We started to hear of memorial ceremonies being held for the “martyred” bombers back home in Pakistan. It was evident too that the organization, recruitment, indoctrination, and funding of the bombers was being done by Pakistan’s militant groups.
One Pakistani, who gave his name as Mohammad Sohail, was caught in southern Afghanistan back in 2004 and held at the National Directorate of Security jail in Kabul. He was seventeen, a Pashtun from the Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan, who grew up in Karachi. He said he had joined up for jihad at his local mosque and had undergone a one-month weapons and explosives training in a camp in Mansehra in northwestern Pakistan, with the group Jamiat-ul-Ansar, a front for the banned organization Harakat-ul-Mujahideen. The leader of the group, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a notorious militant leader and supposedly a wanted man in Pakistan, gave a speech at Sohail’s mosque and personally selected the men to be sent to Afghanistan. “He decides where everyone goes,” Sohail said. “He told us: ‘Go and fight the Americans.’”
Suicide bombing, unknown in Afghanistan before 2001, seems to have been introduced by al Qaeda, but in the years after, it became a powerful weapon of Pakistan’s most extreme militant groups. The first suicide bombing in Afghanistan was the one conducted by two Tunisian members of al Qaeda, masquerading as journalists, who assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001. There were other signs of al Qaeda’s involvement in suicide bombings in the years that followed. Afghan intelligence caught an Iraqi with a suicide vest in Kabul in 2002, and a Yemeni man blew himself up in an attack outside an Afghan Army training base in 2005.
The longtime Pakistani trainer and mentor of the mujahideen, Colonel Imam, told me that some of the Arab fighters had wanted to use suicide bombers against the Soviet Army in the 1980s, but that the ISI and the Afghan mujahideen leaders rejected the idea since they thought it would damage the cause with the Afghan people. Pakistan seemed to have dropped that restraint in the ensuing years.
For their part, of course, Pakistani officials denied all knowledge of the suicide bombing networks in Pakistan and dismissed the idea that the attacks were emanating from their country or that they were part of government policy. Yet the Pakistani militant groups that were conducting the first suicide bombings, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Hesbe-Islami, were organizations that Pakistan’s ISI had created and sponsored for years. They were among those that Musharraf had told U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlain and Talat Masood that he would not dismantle.5 Musharraf instead paid off their leaders to go quiet for several years and wait out the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.6
The Afghan Taliban were divided in their support for the tactic of suicide bombing. Mullah Dadullah embraced it, appearing on video with bombers as they made their last vows of faith. Other members of the movement indicated the violence was hurting their cause. Even Hekmatyar tempered his involvement after that first cell, possibly because of the revulsion among the Afghan population.
The Pakistan government did little to investigate the suicide bombing networks organizing in Pakistan. Western officials found that their requests for cooperation were always dismissed. They complained that whenever they asked Pakistani military and ISI officials to arrest members of the Taliban or other figures suspected of orchestrating the attacks, the Pakistanis stonewalled them. A former Western diplomat described the impasse to me. “We would go to them and say: ‘We are worried about the Quetta shura,’ and they would say: ‘How do you spell that?’ So we would say, ‘Well Quetta, and shura,’ and then they would say: ‘Could you give us the names and addresses of the people involved?’ We were not going to do that, give them our sources.” Another frustrated diplomat complained that they would pass on detailed information of the location of a senior Taliban figure in Quetta, down to the street number and color of the gate. “The Pakistanis would come back saying: ‘The gate was blu
e, not green, so we did not go inside.’”
The evidence was piling up, though. There were 119 suicide attacks in 2006, and others that were thwarted. They were not militarily effective, but they were successful at driving a wedge between the people and the government, a United Nations report concluded. The aim was to reinforce the Taliban offensive to retake southern Afghanistan by undermining popular morale, and to turn the Afghan people against the government and Western forces, who were failing to protect them. The plan coincided with that of Pakistan’s military, which was to give NATO forces a bloody nose so that they did not linger in Afghanistan.
December 2006. The trail took me back to Quetta. I flew in from Islamabad and met up with a local reporter and photographer. We set out first for Pishin, a farming district that runs to the border with Afghanistan. The population is predominantly Pashtun, and virtually every village in the area had lost sons in the fighting in Afghanistan that year. The two adjoining districts, Qilla Abdullah and Qilla Saifullah, were the same. The landscape is not unlike that of southern Afghanistan—arid, with a narrow strip of irrigated fields, orchards, and mud-walled houses along the valley floor beneath stark, brown mountains.
The Wrong Enemy Page 18
