The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Over the years a number of senior Taliban members were detained by the Pakistani authorities in such circumstances, always under secret conditions, with no public judicial procedure and no transparency, which has raised intense suspicions on all sides. The detentions ostensibly complied with U.S. and Afghan requests for Pakistan to crack down on Taliban cross-border activities, but Pakistan never cooperated in handing over the Taliban suspects to the Afghan government or American forces. The detentions were clearly part of a Pakistani program of internal control of the Taliban.

  Some, such as the Taliban defense minister Mullah Obaidullah, who was held by the Pakistanis for years without trial and eventually died in custody in 2012, were thought to be detained to prevent them having contacts with the Karzai government. Another younger Taliban commander, Mullah Yassar, a former Sayyaf commander from the eastern provinces, also died in Pakistani custody.11

  Pakistan’s determination to control the Taliban was exposed as U.S. and Afghan efforts to reach out to the Taliban increased from 2009 onward. Pakistan detained several dozen Taliban members that the Karzai government was trying to talk to. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban operations chief who was often described as Mullah Omar’s second-in-command, was the most prominent. He was seized in early 2010 in a joint U.S.-Pakistan operation. Mullah Baradar had become the man to go to in the Taliban for a growing number of international organizations, from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations, to other aid groups and Afghan government officials. It was his extensive contacts with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother and representative in southern Afghanistan, that Pakistan most distrusted.

  Baradar was a member of the Populzai tribe, the same as the Karzais, and although he seemed to have used Ahmed Wali Karzai and given little in return, the suspicion that he was making his own deals with the Karzai government would have angered Mullah Omar and the ISI. Afghan and UN officials, including Kai Eide, the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan at the time, accused Pakistan of coordinating Baradar’s detention to prevent peace negotiations. Despite public denials, Pakistani officials admitted to my New York Times colleague Pir Zubair Shah months later that they had acted in order to stop Baradar’s direct talks with Kabul. Despite repeated requests from the Afghan and U.S. governments, Pakistan restricted access to Mullah Baradar and for years refused to hand him over or allow him to contribute toward negotiations. He was too valuable a player in the ISI’s plan to dominate affairs in Afghanistan.

  It was only toward the end of the decade that U.S. intelligence and military services began to examine more closely Pakistan’s relationship with its militant proxies. As U.S. forces began to monitor the links and level of contacts, and to intercept phone conversations, they came to realize that Pakistan was pulling the strings of the Taliban and actually involved in promoting terrorist attacks.

  “We always sensed that they were using the relationship as leverage,” a retired senior U.S. counterterrorism official told me. The Taliban were used as leverage against Afghanistan, and the Pakistani militant groups as leverage against India. “Part of it was to keep the situation in Afghanistan off-balance so that Pakistan could play a larger role in deciding what happened ultimately in that part of the world,” the official said. “It is something that I came to understand that their approach was not to rely on diplomacy or engagement as the key way to resolve issues. Their approach was to operate using chaos as a principal weapon to try to get things moving in their direction.”12

  Taliban prisoners in Shiberghan prison, in northern Afghanistan, after the mass surrender at Kunduz, December 2001. Among them were foreign fighters and survivors of the battle of Qala-i-Janghi. Alan Chin for the New York Times

  Some of the prisoners inside Shiberghan. The two men wearing embroidered caps appear to be Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan. Alan Chin for the New York Times

  Village elders in Baghran, northern Helmand province, who were rounded up and handcuffed during a raid on their homes by American troops in February 2003. “We hate them for this,” one told us. “In our culture, we hate it when someone enters our house without our permission.” Hiromi Yasui

  Shepherds eke out a living with their herds in the most remote corners of Afghanistan. We met these men on a road in Baghran as airstrikes shattered the mountain stillness. During the raid a few days earlier, American jets had bombed a mountain ridge, killing a shepherd and wounding six villagers. Hiromi Yasui

  Asaldin, whose son Dilawar died in U.S. military custody at Bagram Airbase in December 2002. Asaldin told his family not to seek revenge against the Americans. “I am angry with them, but this was the will of God,” he said. “God is great, and God will punish them.” At his home in Yakubi, Khost province, May 2005. Keith Bedford

  Bibi Gul receiving government compensation for the loss of her husband and two children when their village, Granai, in western Afghanistan, was bombed by U.S. planes in May 2009. The bombing of Granai, eight years into the war, caused the highest civilian death toll of any single incident, 147 dead. Joao Silva for the New York Times

  Haji Arbab Daulat Khan inside a classroom that was destroyed during a U.S.-led operation in April 2007 in the village of Parmakan, in western Afghanistan. After meeting resistance in the village, U.S. troops called in airstrikes that night and killed fifty-seven civilians, nearly half of them women and children. Joao Silva for the New York Times

  Haji Mir Gul seeks treatment at a British army post in Sangin, in southern Afghanistan, for his two-year-old grandson, Bashir Ahmad, wounded in the abdomen by an American airstrike in May 2007. Bashir had been treated in an Afghan hospital, but two months later his health was deteriorating. Joao Silva for the New York Times

  A policeman carries a wounded colleague from the scene of a suicide bombing at Kandahar police station in February 2006. We narrowly missed the bomber, who blew himself up at the gate, killing thirteen people. A wave of suicide bombers hit Kandahar in 2006, most of them recruited and dispatched from Pakistan. Scott Eells

  Hamid Karzai, while interim leader in 2002, meets with tribal elders from the province of Paktia to resolve a dispute between two rival Pashtun clans. A clever negotiator of tribal politics, Karzai nevertheless lost the support of many of his fellow Pashtuns for failing to secure the country. Kate Brooks

  Members of the Taliban settled in Pashtunabad, an ethnic Pashtun neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan, after escaping Afghanistan in 2001. They run madrassas and recruit Pakistani and Afghan boys from the neighborhood to fight in Afghanistan. December 2006.

  Students at the Jamia Darul Ulum Islamia, a madrassa run by former Taliban officials in Pashtunabad. Several former students conducted suicide bomb attacks in Afghanistan in 2006. A sign in the courtyard salutes the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and the Pakistani politician Fazlur Rehman, longtime partners with the ISI in running the Taliban movement.

  Afghan Taliban supporters, recognizable by their faces and clothes, were a common sight in Quetta by 2006. The town in southwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border, became the base of the Taliban leadership for the length of the war.

  American soldiers with the Psychological Warfare unit speak through an interpreter to a farmer in Khan Neshin in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, in August 2009. The job of counterinsurgency involved relentless patrolling to provide security and engage communities, but the cultural divide often remained insurmountable. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

  A soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division takes up a perimeter position in the mountains above Kandahar against Taliban fighters in the ravine below. The soldier had survived an IED attack on his vehicle two days earlier. Kate Brooks

  The son of an Afghan security guard killed on a U.S.-Afghan outpost arrives for the funeral and collapses crying into the arms of an Afghan army soldier. His father, Nezamuddin, was killed in a Taliban mortar attack on Combat Outpost Lowell in Nuristan, northeastern Afghanistan, October 2008. Tyler Hicks for the New York Ti
mes

  9

  Militancy Explodes in Pakistan

  “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”

  —former Pakistani intelligence official

  2007. After eight years at the helm, President Pervez Musharraf was struggling to hold on to power. He faced legal challenges from the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and massive street demonstrations when he removed the judge from office. He faced political challenges too from Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who both returned from exile to huge rallies of their supporters ahead of the 2008 parliamentary elections. He was further weakened by silent resistance within the army to his long tenure at the top, and a more vociferous opposition from former army officers, including some of those who had helped him to power in the coup of 1999. At this moment of political upheaval, al Qaeda unleashed a deadly campaign of suicide bombings and subversive attacks that shook the country and the armed forces to the core.

  One of the most calamitous events of 2007 began innocuously enough that spring. On a leafy street in the heart of the capital, Islamabad, just a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, female madrassa students staged a sit-in at a children’s public library adjoining their seminary. Dressed in full-length black burqas with only their eyes showing, the students came from the Jamia Hafsa, a girls’ seminary attached to the Red Mosque, a large mosque and madrassa complex known for its jihadist leanings. They were protesting the demolition of several mosques that the city authorities said had been illegally constructed. As the world was to see, this was the opening act in an orchestrated plan. Male students armed with batons appeared to guard the perimeter of the library. The Red Mosque had staged similar protests before, and the government had avoided confrontation, fearing outrage if it used force against female religious students. This time would be different.

  The Red Mosque stood at the center of Pakistan’s support for jihad in Afghanistan and further afield. It was founded by a famed jihadi preacher, Maulana Abdullah Ghazi, who had enjoyed the patronage of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. It had supplied thousands of students over the years for Pakistan’s religious establishments and militant groups. Ghazi had also claimed friendship with bin Laden. The preacher was assassinated in 1998, not long after visiting bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda blamed the killing on the Pakistani government of the time.

  Ghazi’s sons inherited the complex and continued its expansion and extremist teachings. The elder son, Maulana Abdul Aziz, served as the chief cleric, delivering fiery Friday sermons in support of global jihad and the Taliban, excoriating Musharraf for his stance in the war on terror, and calling for the imposition of Islamic law in Pakistan. Aziz’s wife, Umme Hassan, ran the girls’ seminary in a similarly fanatical spirit. The younger brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, took over the administration of the mosque. Despite an earlier reputation as a nonreligious, secularly educated bureaucrat, the younger Ghazi steadily adopted the same extremist rhetoric of his father and brother. He spoke of undergoing a conversion after meeting bin Laden. He adopted the trappings of jihad, wearing the pakul, the roll-brim wool hat of the Afghan mujahideen, or a checkered keffiyeh over white robes. He even acquired armed bodyguards, who would appear beside him wearing scarves across their faces and wielding Kalashnikovs. By 2007, he never left the Red Mosque compound for fear of arrest. He warned that ranks of suicide bombers would retaliate if the government moved against the students occupying the library.

  With such leaders behind them, the students grew bolder. They began staging vigilante actions in the shops and streets around the mosque. They berated owners of music stores for selling movies and pop videos the students deemed immoral. They accused beauty salons of serving as brothels. They began inquiring about the inhabitants of houses in the neighborhood, which alarmed Western embassies that had diplomatic staff living nearby. The students were radical and obsessive. The female students appeared highly emotional, vowing to die rather than give up their protest.

  The government’s inaction only encouraged them. Male students disarmed and kidnapped two policemen after an altercation in May, forcing the government to send in a cabinet minister to negotiate their release. The following month, a group of female students made a midnight raid on a Chinese massage parlor and abducted several Chinese women, accusing them of running a brothel and taking them back to their seminary in a protest. The workers were released after twenty-four hours only after China made a stern protest to the Musharraf government.

  Remonstrations from China, Pakistan’s most important regional ally, pushed Musharraf to take action. Police and soldiers moved in to surround the mosque on July 3, with orders to try to prevent further vigilante raids from the students. Army rangers occupied a school across the street, and police cordoned off the mosque entrance with barbed wire. Immediately students rushed the police lines and clashes broke out. Among the students and burqa-clad women who carried sticks, armed fighters appeared for the first time. Their faces hidden behind scarves and gas masks, they carried rockets and assault rifles and took up sandbagged positions on the mosque walls. The mosque loudspeakers told the students that this was the time for bravery. A female student took over the microphone. “Allah, where is your help?” she asked in a quavering voice. “Destroy the enemies. Tear their hearts apart. Throw fireballs on them.”1

  The students set a government building across the street ablaze, and torched cars in its parking lot. An army ranger was shot by madrassa students in a struggle to seize his weapon. In hours of clashes, five people were killed, and thirty-seven wounded.

  So began an extraordinary siege in the heart of Pakistan’s normally placid capital. Set beneath the Margalla Hills, Islamabad is a green and tranquil home for civil servants and diplomats, but for several days in July 2007, it resounded with gunfire and explosions. Crowds of worried parents arrived from all over the country to try to retrieve their children from the madrassa as the government set up a tight cordon around the complex and enforced a curfew. Over one thousand students filed out of the mosque complex over the next days, but at least one hundred refused to come out, including a group of women and girls. One father from Kashmir had to order his two teenage daughters to leave the complex. The Red Mosque leaders had tried to make them stay. “They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” he told me. I realized the militant leaders wanted to spark some kind of revolution.

  I spoke to a farmer who had traveled from southern Punjab to collect his young daughters. He trembled, uncomprehending, as angry residents lambasted him for supporting militant jihadists and bringing war to their neighborhood. I stopped a woman in full black niqab, only her eyes showing, who emerged from the mosque to ask her about the conditions inside. She demurred, then raised her hand to her face, and I realized it was a male hand. He was in female disguise to evade the police. He walked away with a female relative down a side street and disappeared from view. The chief imam, Abdul Aziz, was caught by police a few days later, also trying to escape in a woman’s burqa and was paraded before the television cameras. His wife remained behind with a number of female students. Ghazi stayed to the end, with his elderly mother. He negotiated with government officials by phone, breaking off repeatedly to talk to television stations.

  The government insisted it was showing restraint, but the presence of police, rangers, and special forces units kept the tension high. Musharraf’s most senior officials joined a procession of intermediaries to try to negotiate an end to the standoff. The government even brought in the highest religious cleric from Saudi Arabia, the imam of the Holy Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul Rehman al-Sudais, to appeal to the protestors. They remained intractable.

  On the sixth day of the siege, a sniper inside the mosque killed the commander of the special forces unit, a colonel. Ministers made one last effort at negotiations, talking through the night to Ghaz
i, even promising him free passage to his home village. They gave up on the morning of the eighth day. As they drove out, explosions rent the dawn air. An operation to storm the compound was underway.

  It was a ferocious battle. Commandos from Pakistan’s elite Special Services Group (SSG) rappelled from helicopters into the mosque and met raking gunfire from militant machine-gun positions inside the compound. Five commandos were cut down before they reached the ground. Perched in the mosque’s minarets and throughout the seventy-five rooms of the madrassa, the militants fought for ten hours. They hurled grenades from bunkers and basements, and suicide bombers thew themselves at their attackers. The commandos found the female students hiding in bricked-up spaces under the stairs and led fifty women and girls, including Umme Hassan, out to safety. Ghazi retreated to an underground basement in the women’s madrassa with his mother. They both died there as the last surviving fighters battled around them.