The Taliban soon consolidated their power into a successful military force, seizing Kandahar in the winter of 1994 and then rapidly spreading north and west, capturing Herat in 1995 and Kabul in 1996. Pashtun warlords threw down their arms rather than confront the Taliban, who appeared to be invulnerable. With its ties to the Taliban leaders, Pakistan persuaded Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to give support, cash, and recognition to the movement, money that was channeled through the ISI. The Taliban’s first defeat, in May 1997, when they were driven out of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif with huge losses, convinced many Afghans that the group was just one more warlord faction. By now the Taliban had dispensed with the idea of calling a Loya Jirga and determined that they alone would rule the country and enforce Sharia. Their definition of Sharia—influenced by extremist Islamic teachings in Pakistan and a perversion of Pashtunwali, or the Pashtun code of behavior—and its harsh enforcement across the country were utterly alien to Afghan culture and tradition.
The Taliban leaders’ intellectual shortcomings were later to allow them to come under the influence of al Qaeda’s global jihad philosophy. Al Qaeda’s conscription of thousands of young men to fight their wars created widespread public resentment, especially among the Pashtun tribes. The Afghan civil war had again become an openly ethnic conflict between the Pashtun Taliban and the non-Pashtuns of Masud’s Northern Alliance (NA), also called the United Front. Masud commanded his own Tajik troops, drawn largely from the Panjsher Valley and called Panjsheri Tajiks, but he also had the allegiance of other commanders, such as Herat’s Ismael Khan, the Hazara commanders in central Afghanistan, and Gen. Rashid Dostum, the commander of Uzbek forces in northern Afghanistan.
In 1998 the Taliban captured Mazar and northern Afghanistan, squeezing the forces of the Northern Alliance into a sliver of territory in northeastern Afghanistan and another front outside Kabul. Masud gallantly resisted the onslaught, but his allies in other parts of the country crumbled. Ismael Khan was defeated and fled to Iran, where the Hazara leaders had also taken refuge. Dostum fled to Turkey. The Taliban’s success, helped by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’s ability to lavish massive support to the movement, was due largely to Washington’s silence.
During this period the Clinton administration simply stood by, allowing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to pursue their own protégés in Afghanistan. Instead of putting forward peace plans to end the civil war, the U.S. State Department openly backed the American oil company Unocal in its plans to build an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Taliban-controlled southern Afghanistan to Pakistan. Unocal began to provide humanitarian aid to the Taliban, while inviting Taliban delegations to the United States. The Americans believed, rather naïvely, that a pipeline would bring peace between the warring factions.
6
U.S. policy regarding the Taliban shifted only in 1996, after the capture of Kabul, when the U.S. media focused on the Taliban’s brutal policies toward women, and Osama bin Laden arrived in the country.
The Clinton administration stopped well short of creating a strategic policy toward the region even when Taliban leader Mullah Omar invited bin Laden to live with him in Kandahar in the autumn of 1996. The CIA already considered bin Laden a threat, but he was left alone to ingratiate himself with Mullah Omar by providing money, fighters, and ideological advice to the Taliban. Bin Laden gathered the Arabs left behind in Afghanistan and Pakistan from the war against the Soviets, enlisted more militants from Arab countries, and established a new global terrorist infrastructure called al Qaeda.
The Taliban handed over to al Qaeda the running of the training camps in eastern Afghanistan that the ISI and Pakistani extremists had earlier run for Kashmiri insurgents. Bin Laden now gained control over all extremist groups who wanted or needed to train in Afghanistan. In return, he began to fund some of Mullah Omar’s pet projects, such as building a grand mosque in Kandahar and constructing key roads. Until then, the Taliban had not considered America an enemy and showed little understanding of world affairs. But now Taliban leaders began to imbibe the ideas of global jihad.
In his strategic alliance with the Taliban, bin Laden received an entire country as a base of operations. He was able to gather around him thousands of Islamic extremists and extend his operations around the world. His main logistical support came from Pakistani extremist groups, who could provide the kinds of supplies and means of communication with the outside world not available in Afghanistan. This support base in Pakistan was to prove critical to al Qaeda’s survival after 9/11. Between 1996 and 2001, al Qaeda trained an estimated thirty thousand militants from around the world.
From their separate perches, Masud and Karzai were the first to see the inherent dangers for the world in allowing al Qaeda control of Afghanistan, and both men repeatedly warned Western governments of this, especially the Americans. But nobody was listening. Less than two years after moving to Kandahar, bin Laden launched his first major attack on U.S. targets: the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, which killed 224 people and wounded nearly 5,000. Each terrorist attack was to spur the Taliban on to greater conquests. A day after the bombings, the Taliban captured Mazar-e-Sharif and much of northern Afghanistan, massacring more than four thousand Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. A few days later, when President Clinton retaliated by launching seventy-five cruise missiles on training camps in eastern Afghanistan, al Qaeda members had already fled. Some twenty-one people, mostly Pakistani militants and several ISI trainers, were killed.
The near-useless U.S. retaliation was only to further embolden al Qaeda and convince an already paranoid Mullah Omar that the Americans were scared of the Taliban. Washington now stepped up diplomatic pressure on the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. In their meetings with the Taliban, U.S. officials tried to drive a wedge between the Taliban and al Qaeda and to persuade Pakistan to do the same—but nothing seemed to work. The Taliban were promised everything, including at times formal U.S. recognition, if they handed over bin Laden. Meanwhile, Karzai, Masud, and other Afghans were openly critical of an American policy that offered no support to the anti-Taliban resistance, left the Taliban in place, and put no real pressure on the Taliban’s main sponsors, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Karzai joined his father around 1994 in Quetta, where both men ruefully watched as their country was taken over by al Qaeda. They understood that the key to saving Afghanistan was to undermine the Taliban’s grip in the Pashtun belt. At clandestine meetings in Quetta, the younger Karzai began to build an underground opposition among his own tribe and elders from other tribes. The Taliban swiftly reacted. In 1999, assassins shot dead Abdul Ahad Karzai in broad daylight as he came out of a Quetta mosque—a move that created revulsion among the Popalzai and other Pashtun tribes. Hamid Karzai was both shattered and energized by his father’s assassination. He took a daring step. Assembling a three-hundred -vehicle convoy of family members, mourners, and tribal chiefs in exile, he defied Pakistani and Taliban authorities and drove with his father’s body from Quetta to the family graveyard outside Kandahar. The Taliban scowled but dared not intervene, fearing that an all-out civil war could erupt.
This single act of defiance redefined Hamid Karzai as a brave leader, equal to any in Afghanistan. The Popalzai tribal council chose him as their tribe’s new chief, even though he had several older brothers living in the United States. Mullah Omar, however, was furious with Karzai and began to plot his assassination.
In 2000 the clear indications that the Taliban and al Qaeda were partners in creating an international army for terrorism based in Afghanistan were still receiving little attention abroad. I wrote about this alliance in
Foreign Affairs
magazine and spoke about it in forums in Washington, but there was no visible change in U.S. policy.
7
Al Qaeda now organized Arab and North African fighters into a special unit called Brigade 555, which backed the Taliban army in some of its bloodiest offensives against the Northern Alliance. Al Qaeda enlisted other extremist groups to fight on its behalf, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Chechen fighters from the breakaway republic of Chechnya, and Uighur Muslims from China’s eastern province of Xinjiang. Meanwhile, al Qaeda training camps were churning out thousands of terrorists from around the world, many of whom remained behind in Afghanistan.
Foreign fighters made a huge difference on the battlefield. In September 2000, when the Taliban finally captured Masud’s stronghold of Taloqan, in northern Afghanistan—after thirty-three days of heavy fighting and a siege in which some seven hundred of Masud’s men were killed and thirteen hundred wounded—more than one third of the fifteen-thousand-strong Taliban force besieging Taloqan was made up of non-Afghans. These included three thousand Pakistanis, one thousand fighters from the IMU, and hundreds of Arabs, Kashmiris, Chechens, Filipinos, and Chinese Muslims. The ISI provided more than one hundred Pakistanis from the Frontier Corps to manage artillery and communications. Pakistani officers were directing the Taliban campaign in league with al Qaeda and the Taliban, and for the first time people in the United States and Europe began to take notice.
8
Al Qaeda struck again on October 12, 2000, attempting to sink the American destroyer USS
Cole
while it was taking on fuel in Aden’s harbor. A tiny skiff packed with explosives piloted by three suicide bombers rammed into the
Cole,
killing seventeen U.S. sailors and wounding thirty-nine others. The Clinton administration never blamed bin Laden directly for the attack, although officials in Washington later told me they had determined that al Qaeda was responsible. The simple fact was that Washington had few viable options for retaliation after the firing of cruise missiles on training camps had proved to be such a dismal failure.
9
Instead, the United States tried to mobilize the international community through a series of UN resolutions, although these meant little to the Taliban. In October 1999, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1267, demanding that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and stop providing sanctuary to terrorists. The Taliban ignored the request. In December 2000, UN Resolution 1333 imposed a complete arms ban on the Taliban and closing of training camps, as well as a seizure of Taliban assets outside Afghanistan. The resolution was aimed at stopping Pakistan’s arms support to the Taliban. The Taliban reacted angrily, while Pakistan’s ISI put together the “Afghan Defense Council,” made up of forty Pakistani Islamic political parties, designed to resist UN pressure and register support for the Taliban. On July 30, 2001, as Islamabad continued to supply arms to the Taliban, the Security Council passed Resolution 1363, which authorized monitors on Afghanistan’s borders to ensure that the UN arms embargo was enforced. The Taliban and their Pakistani supporters said they would kill any UN monitors who arrived.
Increasingly isolated and reviled by the international community, the Taliban became more confrontational. At the encouragement of bin Laden, Mullah Omar ordered his troops to destroy the two giant eighteen-hundred -year-old-statues of Buddha that dominated the Bamiyan Valley, homeland to the Shia Hazaras. Despite international condemnation and demonstrations by Buddhists around the world, on March 10, 2001, the statues were blown up. The Taliban also escalated tensions with the UN and aid agencies, passing new laws that made it virtually impossible for such agencies to continue providing relief to the Afghan population. The Taliban shut down Western-run hospitals, refused to cooperate with a UN-LED polio immunization campaign for children, and imposed even more restrictions on female aid workers, such as preventing them from driving cars. The Taliban arrested eight Westerners and sixteen Afghans belonging to a German aid agency and accused them of trying to promote Christianity, a charge punishable by death.
Osama bin Laden had a clear strategy in mind: to isolate the Taliban from the outside world so that it would become even more dependent on al Qaeda. The Taliban leadership would then have no choice but to defend al Qaeda when greater U.S. pressure was exerted once the attacks on American soil had taken place. Bin Laden wanted the Taliban to take over the country and so offered to assassinate Masud, which was certain to lead to the defeat of the weakened Northern Alliance.
By now Afghanistan was not just a security threat; it was the world’s worst humanitarian disaster zone. A countrywide drought had entered its fourth year, destroying 70 percent of the country’s livestock and making 50 percent of the land uncultivable. The drought forced millions of people into the cities, where aid agencies were overwhelmed. In June 2001, the UN warned of mass starvation in Afghanistan. There were now 3.6 million Afghan refugees outside the country, constituting the largest refugee population in the world, while another 800,000 Afghans were internally displaced. The economic crisis was aggravated by the Taliban’s single success: the elimination of the poppy crop, from which opium and heroin is derived. Mullah Omar had banned poppy cultivation in July 2000, a ban that was rigorously enforced the following year, depriving farmers of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, UN agencies were too slow in providing funding for alternative crops or livelihoods.
Throughout 2001, Hamid Karzai held a series of meetings with other Afghan opposition leaders willing to join a revolt against the Taliban. He met with Abdul Haq, a prominent Pashtun commander from the Jalalabad region in eastern Afghanistan whose wife and daughter had been murdered by the Taliban in Peshawar. (Abdul Haq was to be killed by the Taliban when he entered Afghanistan after 9/11.) Karzai also met with Gulbuddin Hikmetyar at his base in Meshad, Iran, simply because Hikmetyar claimed to be opposed to the Taliban. His most significant meeting, however, was with Masud in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. Masud offered Karzai the choice of either joining him and the NA in the north or accepting weapons and ammunition if Karzai planned to take independent action in the south.