After the story appeared, Taylor and Clarridge told me they worked for Furlong from November 2009 until the contract expired in May 2010. They said they did not work for the program while I was in captivity.
My family and newspaper had no contact with Furlong and were unaware of Taylor and Clarridge’s work for him until my two colleagues learned of it. Furlong played no role in our case. When this book went to press in September 2010, military officials were still investigating the program.
My suspicions regarding the Pakistani military’s relationship with the Haqqanis proved to be true. Some American officials told colleagues at the
Times
that the ISI provides money, supplies, and strategic planning to the Haqqanis. Other administration officials were more conservative and said there was no definitive proof of direct Pakistani military assistance to the Haqqanis.
But nearly every American official interviewed agreed that the ISI at the least turns a blind eye to the Haqqanis’ activities in North Waziristan. Pakistani officials told my colleagues and me that the contacts were part of the Pakistani military’s long-standing strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan to prevent India from gaining a foothold.
After our escape, the Pakistani army mounted major offensives in South Waziristan. To their credit, the town of Makeen—where the American drone strike occurred on March 25, 2009, just outside our house—was retaken by the Pakistani army. But Pakistani officials rebuffed a request from United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January 2010 that Pakistan launch a military offensive in North Waziristan, the stronghold of the Haqqanis. Pakistani officials said they did not have enough troops to carry out the operation, even though they later carried out a military exercise involving 50,000 Pakistani troops posted on the border with India.
When this book went to press, the Haqqanis continued to use North Waziristan to train suicide bombers and explosives makers who kill Afghan and American forces. From its base in the tribal areas, the Haqqani network has carried out a series of high-profile attacks in Kabul, including one in February that killed nine Indian development workers. To me, the attack appears to be an effort by the Haqqanis to please the Pakistani military. At the same time, Pakistani Taliban are using North Waziristan to carry out attacks in Pakistan and the United States. Faisal Shahzad, the failed May 2010 Times Square bomber, was trained in North Waziristan.
Pakistani military officials refuse to confront the Afghan Taliban inside their borders. They continue to differentiate between Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups and insist Afghan Taliban are proxies they can use to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan. My own experience in captivity shows that the Pakistani differentiation between the two Talibans is false. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban clearly work together, strengthening and supporting each other in myriad ways.
The Haqqanis and other hard-line Afghan Taliban will not agree to a negotiated peace settlement unless the surge of 30,000 additional American troops in Afghanistan coincides with a serious Pakistani military drive to pressure the Haqqanis on the Pakistani side of the border. The Haqqanis, as they have done for decades, will continue to curry support from multiple sides, playing along with both Al Qaeda and the Pakistani army. They may tell the Pakistani military they are willing to break with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, but use the time that buys them to build up all three groups’ strength in North Waziristan. They may even agree to expel Al Qaeda and claim they have done so but continue to harbor them in their territory as they have for decades.
Pakistan’s relations with the Haqqanis is the focus of debate in the Pakistani government, according to a senior Pakistani official. Some Pakistani civilian officials argue that they should be confronted militarily. While many army officials and Pakistani nationalists argue they can be moderated and relied upon.
“It’s an internal Pakistani policy debate,” said a Pakistani official who supports confronting the Haqqanis. “There are people in Pakistan who think that the Haqqanis are not reliable. We think that when the chips are down the Haqqanis will side with Al Qaeda.”
What happens next with the Haqqanis and other Afghan Taliban groups will be telling. If the Pakistani military can convince them to reconcile with Karzai’s government, it will give the lie to years of Pakistani military protestations and prove that the Pakistani army does control the Afghan Taliban. It will show that since 2001 Pakistan’s military—even as it received $1 billion a year in American aid—backed the Afghan Taliban as they killed 1,200 American soldiers.
If they show that they do, in fact, control the Haqqanis and the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani military will have cynically won the war in Afghanistan. They will have persuaded Washington to give them billions in aid while the ISI quietly supported militants the United States was trying to eradicate. The Pakistani military will have used those funds to bolster their own strength in Pakistan, frustrating the growth of civilian institutions there and thwarting Indian attempts to gain influence in Afghanistan.
Another more frightening possibility is that the Haqqani sons and other young Afghan Taliban will prove immune to Pakistani influence. The Afghan Taliban will rebel against the Pakistani military, as the Pakistani Taliban have already done. Pakistan’s generals will find that they do not have the control over the Haqqanis and other Afghan Taliban that they believe. A new generation of Afghan Taliban could emerge, one unwaveringly committed to the jihad being waged with their Arab, Uzbek, and Pakistani allies.
As in the past, India and Russia will back northern militias, Pakistan will back the Taliban, and regional rivalries will beset Afghanistan again. A civil war far bloodier than the one of the 1990s will emerge in Afghanistan. A hasty withdrawal by defeated American forces and the chaos that ensues will be a triumph for Al Qaeda, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, and jihadists worldwide.
The Taliban continue to abduct journalists. Three months after our escape, on September 6, 2009, fighters in the Afghan province of Kunduz kidnapped a
New York Times
correspondent, Stephen Farrell, and the Afghan journalist working with him, Sultan Munadi, as they reported on a NATO bombing that had killed dozens of civilians. Four days later, a raid by British commandos freed Stephen, but Sultan was killed, along with a British soldier and an Afghan woman. Sultan was the father of two and home on a break from studying public policy in Germany. After receiving his degree, he planned to return to Afghanistan and work to stabilize his country. He was also a wonderful colleague and friend.
British officials defended the military raid that killed Sultan. They said they had received intelligence that the Taliban planned to move Steve and Sultan to Pakistan’s tribal areas. Afghan journalists dismissed the British claim and accused
The New York Times
of approving the raid instead of taking more time to negotiate. In truth, the British government carried out the raid without asking Farrell’s family or
The New York Times
for permission. While the American military seeks family approval to intervene in such cases, the British military does not.
The discrepancy reflects the far broader problem of the lack of a coordinated international response to kidnapping by Islamic militants. The American and British governments refuse to pay ransoms, but the French, Italian, Dutch, and Korean governments reportedly pay them.
Around the world, Islamic militants are increasingly using kidnapping as a weapon of war. In Iraq, an estimated two hundred foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the American-led invasion of 2003. Some of the kidnappers were insurgents. Some were criminals. Many were kept quiet. At least forty hostages are believed to have been killed.
Islamic militants in Somalia, the Philippines, Yemen, and North Africa have adopted the tactic as well. Three weeks before our escape, a North African military group that calls itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb executed Edwin Dyer, a British tourist it kidnapped in Mali. The group released other foreign hostages it had abducted after their governments reportedly paid ransoms or members of the group were released from local prisons. Dyer was executed after British officials refused to release Abu Qatada, a hard-line preacher with close ties to Al Qaeda imprisoned in the U.K. In July 2010, the group killed a seventy-eight-year-old French hostage, Michel Germaneau, after a rescue attempt by the French military failed.
Today, dozens of people remain captives in the tribal areas of Pakistan, most of them wealthy Pakistanis. Tahir and I were extraordinarily fortunate to have escaped. Countless others in the tribal areas have not been—and will not be—so lucky.
American officials say a unified international approach will not stop Islamist militants from kidnapping, but could make it less lucrative and appealing over time. So far, attempts to broker an agreement among industrialized nations have failed. The lack of a coordinated approach to kidnapping makes it easier for families to be thrust into the murky world that we inhabited. Governments will say they are working closely with local officials to free hostages, but often be unable to do so. Contractors will continue to make promises that may be beyond their reach. And militants will continue to trade lives for ransom and executions for publicity.
Six years after I first journeyed to “Little America,” southern Afghanistan is the epicenter of what is now called “Obama’s war.” Over 20,000 American troops and 10,000 British soldiers battle the Taliban in Helmand, where twice as many American, British, and NATO troops have died as in any other Afghan province. As has occurred throughout the war, American troops are able to drive the Taliban out of districts but Afghan government troops and police are too weak to hold the areas on their own.
In phone conversations in July 2010, Fowzea and Andiwal—the two moderate Afghans I had followed in Helmand—apologized to me for the kidnapping. They also called on the Obama administration to not hurriedly withdraw American soldiers from Afghanistan when the eighteen-month deadline Obama set for his troop surge arrives in July 2011.
With the arrival of more foreign troops, security in Lashkar Gah improved in 2010, according to Fowzea. She reopened the women’s center she shuttered after the killing of her driver in 2006 and expanded programs for women. The amount of poppy produced in Helmand dropped by one-third in 2009, fueled both by a flooded market and a crackdown on growers. And the number of Americans assigned to training the Afghan army and police is beginning to finally reach the levels American commanders have requested for years. Some Taliban commanders in southern Afghanistan have reportedly expressed interest in a political settlement of the conflict. Both the Afghan government and the Pakistani military are now trying to broker peace agreements with the Afghan Taliban.
Enormous challenges remain. Fowzea’s department and the provincial government in Helmand are wholly dependent on American funding. In February 2010, more than 5,000 American marines and soldiers retook Marja—the district that Andiwal lost his job over—but the Taliban contine to mount ambushes and few Afghans are willing to join the area’s new police force. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, the Afghan central government remains a shell. Fairly or unfairly, it is widely viewed as ineffective and corrupt. At the same time, distrust of the United States is increasing among Afghans. Tahir says the United States was initially welcomed by Afghans in 2001 but did too little in the early years and has now lost the trust of the population. He believes all foreign troops should withdraw from Afghanistan and Afghans should be allowed to choose their own future without foreign meddling.
Clearly, a long-term American troop presence in Afghanistan is not sustainable. As Afghan history shows, foreign armies easily win control of the country’s cities. Over time, though, the population rebels against the foreign military. In the years ahead, the number of Afghans who see the United States as an occupier is only likely to grow. At the same time, simply walking away from Afghanistan and Pakistan and hoping for the best is not an option in an increasingly interconnected world. The Times Square bombing case showed that. Based on my experience in the tribal areas, a sweeping Taliban victory in Afghanistan would embolden hard-line militants who hope to forcibly impose sharia law across the Islamic world. Their belief that they can defeat Westerners who fear death and are unwilling to endure sacrifice will be reaffirmed. It will also send a signal to moderate Muslims that the United States will not stand by them. No clear answer has emerged to the question I posed in 2001: how can religious extremism be countered? But that does not mean the effort should be abandoned or the danger of what I saw in the tribal areas should be downplayed. It took decades to create the vexing problems there, and it will likely take decades to resolve them.
American, Afghan, and Pakistani analysts say the United States should pursue a political solution to the conflict in Afghanistan while placing as much pressure on the Pakistani military and the Taliban as possible. If the Pakistani army fails to aggressively attack the Afghan Taliban—or deliver a reasonable peace settlement with them—the United States should cut its military aid to Pakistan, they contend. As long as the Taliban continue to enjoy a safe haven in Pakistan, there is no chance of defeating them in Afghanistan.
The American troop surge should be allowed to play out for its full eighteen months, analysts argue. American troop levels should then be gradually reduced and the primary American military mission shifted to training Afghan security forces. At the same time, Karzai, the Pakistani military, and other third parties should be allowed to carry out talks with the Afghan Taliban.
Public opinion polls in both Afghanistan and Pakistan show negative views of the United States but they also show that the vast majority of Afghans and Pakistanis disapprove of the Taliban. For years, Afghans and Pakistanis have told me they want a third way—an effective, stable, and noncorrupt government that is not dictated to them by Western secularists or Arab militants. Security remains the single most important issue to Afghans and Pakistanis, followed by corruption. The competition for which system can deliver stability, jobs, and an accountable government continues. The United States should focus on helping train a strong, multiethnic national army in Afghanistan, according to analysts. It should try to aid the creation of strong political parties in Pakistan. The long-term solution in Afghanistan and Pakistan is strong, balanced national institutions, not a long-term foreign troop presence.