As international pressure against the Taliban mounted, other exiled Afghan leaders decided to return home and take up arms against the Taliban. General Dostum, Ismael Khan, and the Hazara leaders all returned to Afghanistan and resumed fighting. All of them nominally joined the Northern Alliance and accepted Masud as their leader. Iran, Russia, and India, which had traditionally funded and armed the Northern Alliance, stepped up their military support, although Masud still had to buy most arms with the cash he earned from the gems and drug trade. Tajikistan had allowed Masud to use air bases in the country for his helicopters, while India opened a frontline emergency hospital for his wounded NA fighters in southern Tajikistan.
Compared to a year earlier, the Northern Alliance dramatically improved its situation in 2001, with several new fronts opened against the Taliban and renewed supplies of weapons. It also came to an agreement with Zahir Shah to forge a common front against the Taliban. The former king’s efforts were now being supported by all Afghans opposed to the Taliban. There was agreement on convening an emergency Loya Jirga, or traditional tribal gathering, to elect a new government for Afghanistan.
Yet while neighboring countries were prepared to back their proxies to return to Afghanistan and take up arms against the Taliban, U.S. support for the Northern Alliance was still only lukewarm. As we see in later chapters, although several advocates within the Clinton and Bush administrations wanted U.S. arms to flow to the Northern Alliance, the State Department disliked Masud intensely because of his association with Iran and Russia. U.S. officials also feared U.S. involvement in an arms race in Afghanistan, as this would put Washington at odds with Islamabad’s and Riyadh’s support for the Taliban. In August 2001, Hamid Karzai, along with two other prominent Pashtun émigrés, Abdul Haq and Gen. Rahim Wardak (who was to become Afghan defense minister in 2004), went to London to meet with British officials. Karzai’s message was simple: Osama bin Laden was making key decisions for the Taliban, and al Qaeda was fully embedded in the Taliban government. MI6, British intelligence, was keen to foment unrest in the Pashtun belt, but it remained skeptical of the capacity of these three visitors to do so.
Karzai had made several trips to Washington and was angered by the simpleminded and one-directional questions of American officials and lawmakers, who asked if he could capture bin Laden. Karzai, for his part, wanted to discuss the overthrow of the Taliban. Meanwhile, Masud, in the summer of 2001, made his first trip to Europe to address the European Parliament, and there were plans to invite him to speak at the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York that September.
In my last meeting with Masud a few months before he was killed, he had visibly aged. He was dressed in slacks, his much-used battle jacket, a beret, and army boots—even though we were seated in a house in downtown Dushanbe. His beard was now gray, and he was much slower in his actions than before. His intellectual inquisitiveness, however, had not dimmed. He was deeply angry with Pakistan—asking me repeatedly why Pervez Musharraf was pursuing what Masud described as “a suicidal policy of supporting the terrorists”—and even angrier with the United States and the international community for not stopping Pakistan’s support to the Taliban.
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He described to me how CIA agents had visited him in his Panjsher Valley stronghold and asked for his help in getting bin Laden, but he scoffed at them when they told him they were unable to offer him support or arms.
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It was clear to me that Masud was making a momentous transition from being a parochial local leader, often intolerant and sometimes ruthless, to becoming the most important national leader in the country. He had patched up things with the Uzbek and Hazara leaders, had met with Pashtun leaders whom he had distrusted in the past, and had compromised with Zahir Shah, whom he had disliked all of his adult life. He had also dropped his Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and become an Afghan nationalist, ready to embrace anyone who opposed the Taliban. He had, in short, developed a vision for a future Afghanistan at peace.
He was never to see that vision. At noon on Sunday, September 9, Masud was at his base in Khoja Bahauddin, in northern Afghanistan, when he granted an interview to two Tunisian television journalists carrying Belgian passports who had been pursuing him along the battlefront for several weeks. Masud’s oldest friend, Masud Khalili, the NA ambassador to India, was with him and advised him not to give the interview. Masud insisted, and the two men were shown in. They set up a camera on a tripod close to Masud. When it was switched on, the bomb inside it, and possibly a second device around the cameraman’s waist, exploded. Masud took the brunt of the blast and was fatally wounded. Khalili was badly wounded but survived. Asim Suhail, a young member of Masud’s team, was also killed, along with the cameraman, whose body was split in two from the waist. The second Tunisian walked out calmly past the guards but was caught in the street, arrested, and then escaped again before being shot by pursuing guards on the banks of the Panj River.
Masud was dead, but the fiction that he was still alive was maintained for several days so that NA morale would not collapse in the face of what was now feared—a massive Taliban and al Qaeda offensive. “The days after Masud’s death were the closest we ever came to a total debacle and defeat because morale had just plummeted and we were leaderless— everyone knew that Masud had died,” Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s first foreign minister after 9/11, told me in Kabul in December 2001 as he sat on Masud’s chair and wept throughout our long late-night conversation.
A week later, Masud was buried near his village of Jangalak, in the Panjsher Valley, on a hilltop with a magnificent view. His twelve-year-old son, Ahmad, and his successor, Gen. Mohammed Fahim, officiated. Some twenty-five thousand people—family, friends, soldiers, diplomats, and journalists—were mourning as one. At Masud’s new home, which he had designed and moved into only three weeks earlier, his wife, Parigul, and their five daughters, aged three to ten, grieved, surrounded by the women of the valley. It was the largest and most heartrending outpouring of grief for a commander that Afghanistan had witnessed in its twenty-five years of war.
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The murder plot had been meticulously planned by al Qaeda. The two assassins had been able to carry a bomb from Pakistan to Kabul and then across Afghanistan to explode in Masud’s face. If the attack had taken place a few weeks earlier, as planned, and the Northern Alliance had been destroyed by the Taliban offensive, the Americans would have had no allies on the ground after 9/11 took place. For the first time in more than a decade, the trajectory of Afghanistan’s sad, desperate history was to cross paths with a major international event, and Masud was not alive to take advantage of it. If he had lived, there is little doubt that many of the early difficulties faced by the Afghan interim government and the international community would have been mitigated.
Karzai was grief-stricken at Masud’s death, but he now knew he had to defy the ISI request that he leave Pakistan for Europe and instead enter Afghanistan to foment a revolt among the Pashtuns.
Karzai was in Islamabad walking on the Margalla Hills on the evening of September 11, when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. His younger brother Ahmed Wali Karzai called him from Quetta and told him to return to the guesthouse to watch TV. I spoke to Karzai several times that evening. We both knew that the attack had been the work of al Qaeda, and I joked to Karzai that I did not think Musharraf would be able to throw him out now.
Over the next few days, Karzai met with diplomats from all the major Western embassies, hinting strongly that he was preparing to go into Afghanistan. He was offered little immediate support—except from the British, in the form of a satellite phone, which he declined to accept. When he returned to Quetta, his house was crowded with tribal elders wanting to know his plans. The ISI sent around two officers also to try to discover his intentions. The latter were politely asked to leave without being offered even a cup of tea—a sure insult. Karzai told only a handful of people of his plans, his wife, Zeenat, and his brother Ahmed Wali among them.
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A few days later he asked Ahmed Wali to get a hold of some money because he had no funds. Then, packing an old satellite phone, whose number he gave to the Americans and British, he got onto a motorbike and, with a few friends, headed into Afghanistan.
CHAPTER TWO
“The U.S. Will Act Like a Wounded Bear”
Pakistan’s Long Search for Its Soul
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Gen. Mehmood Ahmad, director-general of Pakistan’s clandestine military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), was on Capitol Hill meeting with Porter Goss, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and other lawmakers, explaining all that Pakistan was doing to persuade the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans. With his handlebar moustache, piercing eyes, and ramrod-straight figure, the general seemed to be a throwback to a whiskey-drinking officer from the British Raj. As one of the three generals who had played a critical role in the 1999 coup that toppled Nawaz Sharif and put Pervez Musharraf in control, Mehmood was both powerful and influential in the Pakistani army. As head of the ISI, he was now virtually running the country’s foreign policy. Since the coup, Mehmood had also experienced an epiphany that had turned him into a born-again Islamic fundamentalist. Within the military junta, he was now one of the most vociferous supporters of the Taliban and the Islamic militant groups fighting in Kashmir.
In Washington, Mehmood was a guest of CIA director George Tenet, who had secretly visited Islamabad that summer to urge Mehmood to put more pressure on the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. Now Mehmood was doing the rounds in Washington, trying to convince the State and Defense departments and U.S. lawmakers of the sincerity of Pakistan’s efforts on the bin Laden front. The Pakistanis were well aware that the Bush administration was conducting a major policy review on al Qaeda and Afghanistan. They also knew that the most difficult question under review for the Bush administration, as it had been for President Clinton, was how the United States would deal with Pakistan. The current regime—with its unabashed military and financial support for the Taliban, its links to a network of Islamic extremist groups and madrassas (religious schools), which were churning out fighters for Kashmir and Afghanistan, and its public support for jihad as a legitimate foreign policy—was viewed with enormous suspicion by the international community. In January 2001, the UN Security Council had imposed sanctions on the Taliban regime that were directly aimed at stopping Pakistan’s weapons supplies to the Taliban.
The Pakistani military considered its support to the Taliban as part of the country’s strategic national interest. Since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the ISI had tried to bring its various Afghan proxies to power in Kabul in the search for a friendly Afghan government that would keep rival India out of Afghanistan. The Taliban had provided just such a government, even if their extremism was now an embarrassment. Pakistan also felt the need to support the Afghan Pashtuns because of the large Pashtun population in Pakistan and because the non-Pashtuns had sought support from Pakistan’s rivals—India, Iran, and Russia. The Pakistani military also determined that a friendly government in Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” in any future conflict with India—a theory that had been convincingly dismissed by Pakistani civilian strategic thinkers but which the military continued to espouse— refusing to acknowledge the destabilizing fallout from the Taliban inside Pakistan: the growth of extremism and sectarianism.
Moreover, in its support of the Taliban, Pakistan was indirectly strengthening al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Pakistani militants were providing manpower for both the Taliban and al Qaeda and running a vast logistics, communication, and transit network in Pakistan on behalf of al Qaeda. Most of the thirty thousand foreign militants trained at al Qaeda camps had traveled to Afghanistan and returned home with the help of this network. No U.S. plan to capture bin Laden could work without Pakistani cooperation and a reversal of Islamabad’s foreign policy. However, Mehmood was telling Goss—who in 2004 would head the CIA for a disastrously short spell—that any CIA-ISI cooperation would depend on a more positive U.S. attitude toward Pakistan.
Mehmood had been in Washington before, as had other ISI officers who continued to insist that the Americans misunderstood the Taliban.
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He knew that his American interlocutors remained deeply skeptical of what they had heard so far, and his visit was critical to ensuring that the Bush policy review on al Qaeda and Afghanistan not blame Pakistan. The Pakistanis were hopeful. The State Department had signaled that it wanted to engage with Pakistan rather than isolate it. While the Clinton administration had taken a tough, uncompromising line with Islamabad, and slapped more sanctions on the military regime while befriending rival India, the Bush administration seemed much more encouraging.
Mehmood had little new to offer. The ISI’s bottom line was that unless the United States lifted the multiple sanctions on Pakistan and improved relations, Pakistan would neither turn on the Taliban nor provide the intelligence or military support needed to snatch bin Laden. “If you need our help you need to address our problems and lift U.S. sanctions,” Mehmood said.
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Mehmood’s analysis only further obscured the reality on the ground. The Taliban’s response to greater international isolation was to become more extreme and threatening. Such extremist policies were openly encouraged by al Qaeda, who wished to make the Taliban leadership more dependent on them. Meanwhile, the ISI continued to pump money, arms, and advisers into Afghanistan to help the Taliban achieve victory over the Northern Alliance, even though the ISI’s influence over the Taliban leadership was waning. The ISI had proved powerless in persuading Mullah Omar to stop the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas or save the UN agencies on the ground in Afghanistan from humiliation.
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It was absurd for Mehmood to insist now that the Americans engage with the Taliban when Islamabad’s own influence over them was declining and al Qaeda’s was increasing.