The New York Review Abroad (59 page)

When I woke up I noticed that the windows of half the building were boarded over and that the ceiling was black. In fact it looked as if there had been a fire or explosion inside. My suspicions were quickly confirmed. I was sleeping just outside the room where the first deaths of this new war had happened. On September 9, two Moroccans posing as journalists had set up their television camera inside the room to interview the legendary Afghan Mujahideen commander Ahmed Shah Masoud. One of the Moroccans asked, “When you get to Kabul what will you do with Osama bin Laden?” Masoud
took a breath to answer but before he did so the Moroccan set off the bombs strapped around his waist; he was shredded, and body parts were scattered around the room. The second suicide bomber survived and ran down to the nearby river, where he was killed. According to one version, Masoud died in a hospital six days later. Another has it that he died within hours but that his death was covered up for six days so as to ensure a smooth succession.

Of course it is impossible to prove a link between the murder of Masoud and the attacks on New York and Washington two days later, but people here have few doubts about it. Osama bin Laden, they feel sure, was giving his Taliban hosts the head of their most implacable foe before moving on to bigger things.

1.

Ahmed Shah Masoud, an ethnic Tajik, was born in 1956, the son of a military officer. He attended Kabul’s French-run Lycée Istiqlal. In 1975 he fled to Pakistan because he had been involved in trying to begin an Islamic movement along with others, such as the engineering student Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. After the Soviet invasion in 1979 he became one of the founders of the Mujahideen resistance along with Hekmatyar and others. With Western backing, they were able to force the Soviet occupiers to retreat and thus played a major part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following the Soviet pullout the Russian-backed regime of President Mohammad Najibullah clung to power until 1992, when Masoud made a deal with General Rashid Dostum, a powerful ethnic Uzbek in Najibullah’s army, to switch sides and join his troops to Masoud’s against Najibullah. After that Kabul fell.

Michael Griffen, a British writer and journalist who is the author of the excellent
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in
Afghanistan
, quotes from an interview given to a US reporter by Najibullah just before the end:

The rival Mujahideen commanders and their armies now turned on one another. In 1993 the new president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, an Islamic scholar and poet, opposed Hekmatyar. Between January 1994 and February 1995 Masoud fought Dostum and Hekmatyar for control of Kabul, which had not been seriously damaged during the war with the Soviet Union but was now largely turned to rubble. Some 50,000 people are estimated to have died in these battles. Masoud was eventually forced to retreat from Kabul to the heartland of his support, the Panjshir Valley, the southernmost tip of which lies roughly thirty miles north of the capital. Rabbani also fled north from the Taliban.

Then Masoud formed a new alliance with Dostum and others because they had a new common enemy, the Taliban. According to Ahmed Rashid, the widely respected Pakistani journalist and author of
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
, Masoud’s reputation was at its peak in 1992, but “four years in power in Kabul had turned Masoud’s army into arrogant masters who harassed civilians, stole from shops and confiscated people’s houses, which is why Kabulis first welcomed the Taliban when they entered Kabul.”

The Taliban sprang from the
madrasas
, or religious schools, which
flourished among the Afghan refugees in Pakistan during the years of the Soviet occupation and indeed ever since. “These boys,” writes Rashid,

The main Taliban leaders came from the southern city of Kandahar. The driving force behind them was Mullah Mohammad Omar, who lost his right eye fighting the Soviets. Born in 1959, he came from a family of landless peasants and supported his family after his father died by becoming a village mullah and opening a
madrasa
. Different legends circulate about how Omar founded the Taliban because he was outraged by the sexual behavior of Mujahideen commanders; but we will probably never know exactly what prompted him to gather the religious students into a fighting force of their own, which would then go on to seize most of Afghanistan and subject it to its extreme version of Islam. What is clear is that religion here is entwined with the delicate ethnic politics of Afghanistan, which in turn is a factor manipulated by the country’s neighbors and others.

Today there are probably some 20 million or so Afghans, but of course,
after twenty-two years of war no one can be sure. According to the 1973 census, the last to be carried out, 43 percent were Pashtuns (also known by the anglicized name of Pathans), mostly Sunni Muslims, who live mainly in the south. The border, known as the Durand line, which was drawn in 1897 to demarcate the frontier with then British India, now of course, Pakistan, divides the Afghan Pashtuns from their Pakistani brothers. Pakistani governments have always felt the need to keep their Pashtun population of some 20 million happy; their enduring nightmare is a revival of Pashtun nationalism, which would seek to carve a Pashtun state out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Curiously, in view of the fact that Britain’s Royal Air Force has been bombing Afghanistan “shoulder to shoulder” with the US, it was this border question that was the reason for Britain’s last bombing of Afghanistan in 1919. After an Afghan-inspired attempt to raise a revolt among Pashtuns over the border, the RAF bombed Jalalabad (near the present Pakistan border), while a single plane made it to Kabul and bombed the royal palace and an arms factory. Martin Ewans, a former British diplomat who is the author of a highly readable new primer,
Afghanistan: A New History
, quotes a letter that an Afghan leader sent in 1919 to the viceroy of India; it sounds curiously reminiscent of the statements of Taliban and other Muslim leaders today:

Pashtun ethnic loyalty continues to be strong in Afghan politics today.
The Taliban themselves come from the Pashtun heartlands and all but a few of their leaders are Pashtuns, some of whom do not even speak Dari, the Persian lingua franca of Afghanistan.

Many ordinary Afghans, of whatever ethnicity, at first supported the Taliban because, after years of war and mayhem, they expected them to bring peace and law and order. But after the fall of Najibullah it had rankled Pashtuns that the new authorities in Kabul were dominated by Masoud and Rabbani, who were both Tajiks, and by an Uzbek general, Dostum, while Hekmatyar, the main Pashtun Mujahideen, had lost out. According to the 1973 census, Tajiks, whose language is close to Persian, made up 24 percent of the population. They are concentrated in the north, where the old border of the tsarist Russian Empire had cut them off from their cousins in what is now Tajikistan. Uzbeks make up 6 percent of the population, and are likewise cut off by the old Russian and then Soviet border from their cousins in what is now Uzbekistan. The next-largest ethnic group are the Hazaras, who live in the center of Afghanistan, and who are set apart from most other Afghans in that they are Shia Muslims, like Iranians. Their broad faces and slanting eyes also make it clear that their origins must lie far to the east, and some believe they are, at least in part, the descendants of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Hordes. Other Afghans have tended to look down on the Hazaras, and in turn there is no love lost between them and the Pashtuns in particular. In 1995 Masoud drove the Hazaras out of Kabul.

Even if Afghanistan did not have strategic importance for all of its neighbors, it is clear that these ethnic and religious links would have drawn the surrounding states into the country’s politics anyway, either for their own reasons or to help their ethnic or religious kinfolk. Iran has helped the Hazaras. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have helped the Tajiks and Uzbeks, and still do. And of course Pakistan wants to
support the Pashtuns. Russia too has its interests; its chief concern had been to stop the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Iran has made it clear it wants a weak and divided Afghanistan which could not threaten it. Pakistan has wanted Afghanistan to have a strong central government, dominated by Pakistan of course, which would then ensure open trade routes to Central Asia and allow the building of valuable gas and oil pipelines across Afghanistan and then into Pakistan. These were major considerations when Pakistan’s security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), poured money and arms over the border to build up the Pashtun Taliban.

2.

What the Taliban did when they took Kabul and indeed some 90 percent of Afghanistan is by now well known. They prevented women from working, closed schools for girls as well as many nonreligious schools for boys. They debated whether homosexuals should be killed under falling walls or whether another type of punishment was appropriate. They banned music, television, and just about any other type of entertainment. They also played host to Osama bin Laden, the rich Saudi dissident who had fought with the Mujahideen and who, after US troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, declared a jihad against the United States. Bin Laden is believed to have been a major source of funding for the Taliban, along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. But until last spring the Taliban also financed themselves through the production of opium for heroin, which was deemed acceptable because only infidels, i.e., non-Muslims, became heroin addicts. (For their part, the health authorities in Pakistan say that their country has a major heroin addiction problem.)

As the Taliban took towns that lay outside Pashtun areas they became more and more brutal, committing massacres against civilians,
especially Hazaras and Uzbeks. In return, thousands of Taliban prisoners were treated badly. The Taliban hope was not just to take all of Afghanistan, but to foment Islamic revolution throughout Central Asia and beyond. For this reason they welcomed thousands of Arab fundamentalists, as well as Chechen rebels and extremists from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and from among China’s Muslim minorities.

However, even with their foreign legions, the Taliban were never able to dislodge Masoud. They chased Dostum from his base at Mazar-e-Sharif, less than fifty miles from the Uzbekistan border, but could not crush resistance there either; nor could they defeat several other groups connected with the Tajiks and Uzbeks in at least half a dozen enclaves. Over the last year the front lines have not moved much but these groups fight under the common banner of what is widely called the Northern Alliance, although technically they should be known as the United Front. Most of these groups are not Pashtuns. When Masoud was killed, the Taliban’s leaders must have hoped that the troops led by the man they dubbed the Lion of the Panjshir would be so demoralized that the Northern Alliance would no longer be able to resist a knock-out blow. What they had not bargained for then was that the events of September 11 would set in motion a series of events which seem, thus far at least, to have had precisely the opposite effect.