After the scare of 2002, India refused to hold talks with Pakistan, although the Bush administration tried to convince New Delhi that in order for India to play a larger role in the region it needed to put the Pakistan problem behind it. “It is simply a fact of life that India will not realize its immense potential on the global stage until its relationship with Pakistan is normalized,” Richard Haass told an Indian audience in Hyderabad in January 2003.
33
Such appeals to India’s sense of self-importance seemed to work, as in April 2003 Prime Minister Vajpayee offered to talk to Pakistan.
A back channel for secret talks had already been opened by both sides. Tariq Aziz, a national security adviser to Musharraf, and Brajesh Mishra, Aziz’s Indian counterpart, began a series of meetings in London, Dubai, and Singapore. Relations began to normalize as diplomats returned to take up their posts and both sides took small steps to rebuild mutual confidence. The ISI made greater efforts to stop militants from crossing into Indian Kashmir. A full year later the back-channel dialogue led to the two leaders’ meeting on January 5, 2004, in Islamabad, at a regional summit. This time there was no rush to judgment as there had been during the Agra summit. This summit had been well prepared and nothing was left to chance, especially as in the previous month there had been two attempts on Musharraf’s life in Islamabad.
Vajpayee, now seventy-nine and ailing, arrived saying this was his last attempt to make peace. Musharraf echoed similar sentiments.
34
In the negotiations, Pakistan wanted India to announce a date for the start of a structured dialogue on the Kashmir issue, while India wanted stronger commitments from Pakistan on controlling “cross-border terrorism.” In the end, both sides got something of what they wanted. Pakistan assured India that it would not allow its territory to be used for terrorism—exactly what Musharraf had promised but never implemented earlier, in his January 12, 2002, speech. Vajpayee promised to negotiate on settling the Kashmir dispute.
35
It had taken nearly three years since 9/11 for relations between the two countries to normalize.
India held general elections in May 2004, and the results jolted Pakistan as the Bharatiya Janata Party lost to the Congress Party and its allies. Congress had not been in power for twelve years, and it would now move very cautiously in its relations with Pakistan. Instead of substantial dialogue on Kashmir the Congress government launched a blitz of small confidence-building measures with Pakistan, which deeply frustrated the Pakistanis. When Musharraf met with Congress Party prime minister Manmohan Singh for the first time at the UN General Assembly in September 2004, Singh told him that India would not accept any redrawing of its borders. India remained wary of any new arrangements in Kashmir.
36
Talks between the two countries limped along for the next three years. The militants continued to launch periodic attacks in Indian Kashmir, but New Delhi acknowledged that infiltration was down. India’s counterinsurgency efforts were also proving to be more effective. Musharraf became increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of progress in the talks. He told his aides that he wanted a major breakthrough in 2006, so that the following year he could get elected as president for the second time on the back of having “resolved” the Kashmir dispute. Yet the Indians told interlocutors that they would never dream of obliging a military dictator in such a way, even if a solution were possible.
Pakistan had also lost the war of influence in Washington, as the United States built a new and long-lasting relationship with India, which had become the main U.S. ally in the region. In the summer of 2007, an Indo-U.S. deal that legitimized India’s civilian nuclear program removed a fundamental roadblock between the two countries and was to promote even closer cooperation in all fields. India had become Washington’s major geostrategic ally in combating the rising power of China, and was considered a responsible nuclear power, while Pakistan was still considered a pariah.
It was Musharraf who had gone to war in Kargil and had upped the ante after 9/11, and he now found himself reaping the bitter harvest he himself had sown. Since Kargil, Musharraf had followed a continuous policy of brinkmanship by using extremists, in the belief that they could force India to the negotiating table. His policies were opportunistic and dangerous, and ultimately damaged his political credibility at home and abroad. Musharraf got away with so much for so long simply because the Bush administration did not want to jeopardize Pakistan’s cooperation in chasing al Qaeda leaders.
The years of conflict had also given enormous powers to the intelligence agencies of both countries, which waged a nonstop proxy war, funding and arming dissidents in each other’s territory. “The intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan have fed paranoia about each other and have engaged in cross-border interference. Theirs is a dangerous game,” warned Bush administration official Shirin Tahir-Kheli.
37
In 2005 and 2006, Afghanistan became a new battleground for their rivalries as Musharraf accused Karzai of giving Indian agents access to Pakistan’s western borders. The ISI accused India’s Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, of funding the insurgency by Baloch tribes in Balochistan, while RAW accused the ISI of funding Maoists and other dissidents in northeast India.
For five decades Pakistan’s army had used the threat from India as the principal reason for building a national security state in Pakistan and to justify long bouts of military rule and large expenditures on the army. Every attempt by elected civilian leaders to make peace with India had been deliberately undermined by the army. Now Musharraf used making peace with India as a rationale for consolidating his power, insisting that only the army could sustain peace and hoping the international community would look favorably upon his continuing in power now that he led an army whose ostemsible goal was peace with India.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The One-Billion-Dollar Warlords
The War Within Afghanistan
In the spring of 2002, some forty American U.S. Special Operations Forces and CIA agents were ensconced in a huge, white-domed marble palace perched on a hill overlooking the city of Herat, in western Afghanistan. The palace had been lent to them by the warlord Ismael Khan. At the bottom of the hill was the Iranian consulate, and farther along were the offices of the paramilitary Sipah-e-Pasadran, or Army of God, extremists who were loyal to Iran’s fundamentalist supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and who tended to ignore the moderate government of President Mohammad Khatami. The Americans considered Herat the front line in the war against the newly coined “axis of evil,” which Bush had delineated in his January State of the Union address as comprising Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. From being a good and helpful interlocutor during the Bonn talks, Iran had suddenly been demonized by the U.S. president. The team on the hill was concerned that al Qaeda leaders were escaping to Iran through Herat.
In a typical Afghan ploy, the wily Ismael Khan made sure that the Iranians and the Americans spent most of the time watching each other rather than him, as he fed them tidbits of misinformation and gossip that kept their daggers drawn. In a country where all the institutions of state and civil society had been destroyed by war, the resulting vacuum was filled with heavily armed militias and warlords. Ismael Khan was a genuine warlord in that he was both ruthless and popular, a provider of essential services to the people and a perpetrator of terror. He commanded territory—five western provinces—and an army of some twenty thousand men, who lived off the land. Khan was the epitome of the warlord who learns the art of survival by being extremely flexible. “Iran has been supporting us militarily for many years against the Taliban but it is not supporting us now,” he told me. “And I am a friend of the U.S. because it supported us in the war against the Taliban.”
1
As the Iranians clandestinely provided spare parts and ammunition for Khan’s Soviet-era tanks and built roads for him, the Americans tried to reciprocate with canal-cleaning projects and ego-building gestures. On his first trip to visit a warlord outside Kabul, Donald Rumsfeld described Khan as “a very interesting, deep man.”
2
Now age fifty-six, with a bushy snow-white beard that covered his chest, Khan had been a young Afghan army captain when he led a revolt against the Soviet garrison in Herat in 1979, killing some fifty Soviet officers and their wives while they slept. In retaliation, the Soviets bombed half the city, killing more than fifty thousand Heratis. I visited the city a few months later, and the rubble still smelled of dead bodies. Khan had liberated Herat twice, once in 1992, after the fall of the communist regime, and then again after the fall of the Taliban. In the meantime he had spent two years in a Taliban jail.
I had known Khan for nearly two decades and we had got on well. In the 1990s he ran the best warlord fiefdom in Afghanistan, which educated girls and set up industry. His authoritarian rule had turned Herat into the most peaceful and cleanest city but also the most repressed, where 75 percent of children went to school but nobody could utter a word in support of President Karzai or Zahir Shah. The time Khan spent in a Taliban jail had turned him into an insomniac and changed him from a religious conservative into a fanatic. Now he insisted that all women wear the burqa, and human rights advocates allege that he tortured his opponents. A Persian-speaking Herati, he persecuted the Pashtuns living in his territory.
On my first trip to Herat after its liberation I was ushered into Khan’s presence in the governor’s palace well past midnight, bypassing the hordes of petitioners waiting to see him. Like many insomniacs, Khan preferred doing business at night. I had come to interview him but also to ask for a favor. With some of the earnings from my book
Taliban,
I had started a small NGO to provide start-up funds for new print media in Afghanistan. The Taliban had destroyed journalism in Afghanistan, shutting down presses and exiling most journalists. Now the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan offered any credible Afghan group a cash grant to start a publication. In Herat, an extraordinary group of men and women, all with university degrees, had formed the Shura, or Council of Professionals, to help nation-building efforts. They were led by Mohammed Rafiq Shahir, who brought out a monthly magazine called
Takhassos (Experts),
which offered professional and technical advice on reconstruction projects.
3
It was the only magazine of its kind in Afghanistan, and Khan had just banned it. He saw the Shura as a political threat and Shahir as a potential rival. I asked Khan if he would allow the magazine to be published, as it was non-political, and leave Shahir alone. He promised to do so as a favor to an old friend. The magazine came out, but Shahir was arrested twice in the next few months and severely tortured—once just before the Loya Jirga to which he had been elected as a delegate. It took direct intervention from the U.S. military, the American embassy in Kabul, the UN, and Karzai before Khan deigned to free him.
Khan’s source of income made him especially important. He earned between three and five million dollars every month in customs revenue from the crossing point at Islam Qila, on the Iran-Afghanistan border. Here every day hundreds of trucks arrived loaded with Japanese tires, Iranian fuel, secondhand European cars, cooking gas cylinders from Turkmenistan, and consumer goods from the Arabian Gulf. Khan refused to share any of this income, let alone hand it over to the central government. The most powerful and richest warlords commanded border posts with Pakistan, Iran, or Central Asia, where they could gather customs duties, but none earned as much as Ismael Khan.
Warlords such as Khan had emerged as result of the civil war in the 1990s, when they divided up the country into fiefdoms, until being swept out of power by the advancing Taliban. Now they had defeated the Taliban, and felt stronger than ever. Empowered by, but not necessarily loyal to, the Americans and Karzai, they dominated the political landscape. Often rapacious, corrupt, and ruthless, they hired large militias that terrorized the population but also kept a kind of peace. Their income came from road tolls, the drug trade, or the patronage they received from their foreign backers. Afghans hated them most because, invariably, they were the cat’s paw for neighboring countries. In fact, the Taliban’s initial popularity with the Afghan people had come from the group’s hatred of the warlords.
Just before he died, Ahmad Shah Masud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was trying to create a new disciplined political structure out of the loose alliance of warlords in his group. A few months before 9/11, the most important warlords, Rashid Dostum, Ismael Khan, and Karim Khalili, who had been defeated and driven out by the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan and took up arms under Masud’s leadership.
The routing of the Taliban by the Americans had left the warlords in place and immeasurably strengthened. They were now considered U.S. allies and were all on the CIA’s extensive payroll, but they were a motley bunch. In the north, the Uzbek chief, Gen. Rashid Dostum, protected former Taliban commanders for a price even as his soldiers carried out widespread pillaging and looting against the minority Pashtun population, making it impossible for UN agencies to start humanitarian relief operations there. By February 2002, a few weeks later, fifty thousand Pashtun farmers fled the north. Turkey and Russia were supporting Dostum, but exercising little pressure on him to cooperate with Karzai.
4
Dostum’s main rival was the Tajik general Mohammed Atta, who was loyal to Fahim and also armed by the Americans. Another Tajik warlord, General Daud, held sway over Kunduz and three northeastern provinces.
In the east, Abdul Qadir, the governor of Nangarhar province and the brother of slain commander Abdul Haq, had received lavish CIA funding during the war to mobilize thousands of Pashtun fighters against the Taliban. Yet he failed even to clear the strategic road between Jalalabad and Kabul of bandits. Convoys of relief supplies and foreign aid workers were frequently ambushed as they traveled from Peshawar to Kabul, and three Western journalists were killed on this road. Qadir’s control of four eastern provinces—Nangarhar, Laghman, Nuristan, and Kunar—was fiercely contested by Hazrat Ali, thirty-eight, a small-time tribal leader directly recruited by the CIA and now elevated to warlord.
5
Hazrat Ali belonged to the Pashai ethnic minority, whom the Pashtuns considered an under-class, so inadvertently he became the symbol of Pashai assertion. Barely able to write his own name, he was given so much money by the CIA that he quickly created an eighteen-thousand-strong militia. At Tora Bora his men had allowed bin Laden to escape.