Al-Qaeda (23 page)

The Taliban’s beliefs were avowedly and unashamedly anti-rational and thus anti-modernist. They did not attempt to engage, in the tradition of Afghani, al-Banna, Maududi and even Qutb, with the contemporary world but, rather, shunned it. This is not surprising, given that the experience of the modern world for many of the Taliban involved Soviet helicopter gun-ships, Communist edicts, refugee camps, poverty and exile. A slogan painted on the wall of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue in Kabul, the base of the Taliban’s ‘religious police’, in 1998 read: ‘Throw reason to the dogs. It stinks of corruption.’ ‘In every breath there is a taste of death. Nothing is permanent,’ said another. Again, this violent, anti-rational millenarianism was also shared by the new wave of Islamic militants who had emerged in the wake of the war against the Soviets.

However, the Taliban were rooted very specifically in the context of late twentieth-century Afghanistan. Even the failure of political Islamism, something occurring on a broad stage, was felt by the men who made up the early leadership of the Taliban in a powerfully local way. Of all Afghanistan, Kandahar and its immediate surroundings were the most violent and chaotic in the years following the fall of Najibullah’s Communist regime. The southeast was also one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan, largely because its agricultural infrastructure had been destroyed by the Soviets’ ‘scorched earth’ tactics in the 1980s.
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A consequence of this was that the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the area were unable to return to their homes. Political Islamists like Hekmatyar and Sayyaf had, as Ghilzai Pashtuns with urban, literate and relatively educated support bases, never had much support in the rural, largely illiterate, Durrani-Pashtun dominated southeast anyway. The situation in and around Kandahar five years after the Soviets had left was enough to discredit most of those senior leaders who had emerged during the war.

The Taliban did not just reject political Islamist figures but the more traditional leadership as well. As the traditional khans had eventually been rejected in the changed environment after the Soviet invasion, so the men who had replaced them as leaders of local communities were rejected in the circumstances that followed the Soviets’ withdrawal. In March 1996, Mullah Omar called a meeting of 1,200 religious figures in Kandahar to decide the future direction of the Taliban movement and to appoint a leader. He did not invite the local military commanders, the traditional tribal and clan leaders or political figures.
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Even among the ulema who attended the meeting those who were seen as tainted were rejected. The candidacy of Maulvi Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi, who had led many of those present during the war against the Soviets and was a distinguished scholar in his own right, was refused because he, like most mujahideen leaders, was felt to have sown fitna among the Afghans after the war. Only people without previous involvement in politics were acceptable. Mullah Omar was voted
amir-ul momineen
, leader of the faithful, and marked his appointment by taking a relic believed to be the cloak of Mohammed from its shrine in Kandahar and publicly wrapping it around his body.
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The rejection of the traditional leadership went further. Those ulema who came to fill leadership roles in the Taliban had rarely been more than sub-commanders in the war against the Soviets. Indeed their emir, Omar, was a simple mullah, albeit one with a distinguished war record. This was a radical break. In traditional Pashtun rural society the mullah was seen as far further down the social order than the alim. Even though villagers might respect them for their role in leading prayer and teaching children the fundamentals of piety and Islamic knowledge, any intervention in public affairs would be resented.
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Yet after the khans, the traditional religious leaders and the political Islamists had all failed, it was the mullahs who became the latest vehicle for the aspirations of southeastern Afghanistan’s suffering population.

A final point is that the Taliban were rooted very much in the ethnic and tribal struggle for dominance within Afghanistan. Since Ahmed Shah Durrani, a Pashtun warrior king, had first seized Kabul more than 200 years before, Pashtuns – and largely Durrani Pashtuns from sub-tribes that had substantial representations in the Taliban leadership
– had run the country, with only one short break between 1929 and 1931. In 1994, the Jamaat Islami of Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, dominated by Tajiks, was in power. For the Taliban, leadership and foot soldiers alike, any return to an imagined pre-war ideal society would necessarily involve a Pashtun in power in Kabul.
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Taken together, these factors show the Taliban’s deep local roots. The movement should not be conflated with other strands of Islamic militancy. But although these elements go some way to explaining the appeal of the Taliban movement in a relatively restricted area around Kandahar, they do little to explain their astonishing success further afield.

When Mullah Omar and his band began their quest for power in the spring of 1994, they had sixteen weapons between thirty men. By October 1994, when the Taliban launched an attack on the Hizb-e-Islami base at Spin Boldak near the border with Pakistan, they numbered 200. By December they were 12,000 strong.
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By the middle of the next year, when they launched an attack on the western (and non-Pashtun) city of Herat, they had nearly twice as many fighters. To understand how this astonishing growth was possible, one has to look across the porous, haphazard and artificial border with Pakistan.

The Taliban were a political, tribal and religious movement. The Pashtun tribes have never recognized the Afghan–Pakistan border and the war against the Soviets had created a massive Pashtun refugee population within Pakistan. Many refugees were studying in the newly constructed medressas in Pakistan, and this allowed the leaders of the Deobandi school to amass an unquestioningly loyal cross-border following that gave them considerable political power. They did not hesitate to deploy that resource when they felt fit, and a substantial number of the 12,000 fighters, and many of the leaders, who had gathered in Kandahar under the white flags of the Taliban in the autumn of 1994 were either current students or recent alumni of the Deobandi medressas of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province. Over the next five years, tens of thousands of boys from the medressas in Pakistan would cross to fight for the movement, providing a critical reserve of manpower. On some occasions, such as in August 1996, the schools would even be shut to allow reinforcements to be
drafted for specific operations or offensives. Senior Taliban leaders often returned to their alma maters to speak to students.
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The Pashtun chauvinism of the Deobandis reinforced that of the (overwhelmingly Pashtun) Taliban leadership and plugged the Taliban into a whole series of Pashtun-run networks within Pakistan, which were crucial in accessing assistance. That aid came both from actors within the Pakistani state and outside it.

The Pakistani state is not monolithic and did not relate to the Taliban in a uniform way. Until late 1995, for example, the ISI remained loyal to their (political Islamist) Hizb-e-Islami favourites. However, a number of factors compelled a variety of Pakistani interest groups to become involved with the Taliban once they became aware of the existence of Mullah Omar’s little band during early and mid 1994.

Much has been made of the potentially hugely lucrative trade routes that elements within the Pakistani administration hoped to open between their country and the new central Asian republics. Benazir Bhutto and her minister of the interior, Naseerullah Babar, certainly hoped that a route running from Quetta through Kandahar and Herat to Turkmenistan could be made safe. This was the same route that another project with huge potential to make money, an oil and natural gas pipeline, was planned to follow. Two rivals were interested in the construction of the pipeline: an Argentinian firm and an American– Saudi consortium.

But the key factor was not Pakistani pipe dreams but the addiction of key Pakistani officials and politicians to proxy warfare. One of the main aims of all Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan had been to secure ‘strategic depth’, which was understood to mean enough space west of the Indus for the Pakistani army to reform and rebuild if forced back behind the river by an Indian invasion. With Hindu nationalism on the rise this was felt to be of special importance. Babar, who effectively ran Islamabad’s Afghan policy, was the man who had, with the consent of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, trained, equipped and launched the very same Afghan Islamists who were now squabbling violently over Kabul on their failed bid to instigate an Islamic revolution in Afghanistan. Babar was not motivated by any religious fervour then, and had not obviously become any more devout in the intervening eighteen
years. He saw the Taliban as a perfect tool for the execution of Pakistani, rather than God’s, policy. The Afghans’ own interests did not enter into the equation.

Babar was doing more than just clearing trading routes and securing Pakistan’s strategic position. He was deliberately undercutting the ISI and much of the military, which, still full of Zia-era senior personnel, was supporting Zia’s protégés and allies like Nawaz Sharif, the Hizb-e-Islami (Hekmatyar) and the Pakistani Jamaat Islami. Benazir Bhutto, Babar’s political patron, had already cosied up to the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami, the political wing of the Deobandis, in order to outflank Sharif. Babar was doing the same within the Pakistani executive. His Afghan operations were run out of a special cell within the Ministry of the Interior and funded from the civilian budget. The ISI, who had recently been revealed to have bankrolled Sharif’s political campaigns, were cut out of the loop. The foreign ministry, as ever in Pakistani Afghan policy, was barely involved.

Such domestic considerations are important. Ethnic competition within Pakistan also played its part in securing Islamabad’s support for the Taliban. Babar was a Pashtun, and a degree of chauvinism undoubtedly influenced his calculations. Again, this ethnic consideration fitted the political strategy: the powerbase of Sharif, the ISI, the army and the Jamaat Islami was the Punjab. In the two crucial provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier, Pashtuns far outnumbered Punjabis in the local administrations. Their support was critical to Bhutto’s second administration avoiding the fate of the first. The shifting axes of power in Pakistan, each movement of which was projected into Afghanistan and Kashmir and further afield, thus had ethnic, political
and
religious dimensions.

Yet the links between the Pakistani state and the Taliban went beyond the Deobandis, proxy warfare, ethnic prejudice and political manoeuvring. The Taliban leadership had strong tribal and often personal ties to some of the key figures in the shadowy world of smuggling. Smuggling in Afghanistan involves more than a few extra bottles of duty free. In 1995, Afghanistan was producing 2,400 tonnes of opium and refined heroin each year. It was the biggest single producing country of the drug.
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Smuggling consumer goods to Pakistan
from Dubai and the Gulf was worth, according to a World Bank study, around $2.5bn each year.
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The huge sums involved bred corruption everywhere, from the predominantly Pashtun transport mafia who provided the trucks to move the goods around the region, to the officials who allowed their passage. The Taliban were as keen to profit as anyone. In 1994, their income from dues raised on smuggling reached $100m.
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Drug smugglers paid a set ten per cent tax on the value of any shipment of opium. The money, around $20m each year between 1995 and 1997, was crucial for the Taliban’s ongoing war effort.
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The Taliban also helped arrange heavily armed convoys which took the drugs from Kandahar across to the Dasht-e-Margo desert and into Iran. Major drug smugglers lived openly in Kandahar, Quetta and Karachi and maintained good social relations with senior Taliban and senior Pakistani soldiers, politicians and civil servants.
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The Taliban also showed themselves adept at playing their various allies off against each other when it suited them. In a sense they were doing what Afghans vying for power have always done. The continued weakness of the Afghan state has always made it vulnerable to intervention from overseas. This has been a two-way process with elements within Afghanistan keen to procure resources, material or symbolic, from outside the country and external actors keen to exploit the situation for their own ends. The situation in 1994 demonstrates many of these characteristics. The Taliban needed resources but could provide strategic, economic and political advantage in return. With the range and depth of cross-border contacts outlined above, plus many more that we look at below, Pakistan’s involvement in the Taliban was, if not inevitable, then certainly always likely.

The aid they received, albeit from a variety of different sources within Pakistan, was substantial. The medressa boys who travelled to Kandahar in the autumn of 1994 crossed the border in buses, something that would have needed the assent of the border authorities; the sudden development of relative tactical and organizational sophistication of the Taliban fighting forces reveals the hand of Pakistani army advisers; there is evidence of the provision of shells and other ammunition for the Taliban during their successful push on Herat in 1995; the Pakistanis have admitted construction of radio and telephone systems
and other logistical equipment for the nascent Taliban administration (they could hardly fail to given that the dialling code for Kandahar was the same as Quetta); in late 1995, Pakistani paramilitaries, acting on orders of the ISI, led the Taliban to huge former arms depots on the Afghan border; the substantial sums of money dispatched to Kabul at regular intervals throughout 1997 and 1998 to help the Taliban pay the bureaucrats’ wages was an open secret among Islamabad diplomats at the time. The fact that Pakistan was the first country to diplomatically recognize the Taliban, prematurely as it turned out, after their near-capture of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997, was another clear indicator of Islamabad’s position. So was the pressure they exerted on other nations’ diplomats in the city to follow suit.
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It was only with great reluctance, in the weeks and months after 11 September, that Islamabad abandoned the men they had been helping for so long and, with them, its interventionist Afghan policy.