Ghost Wars (51 page)

The Taliban delegation urged Qazi to withdraw ISI’s support from other Afghan leaders, including Hekmatyar. Young and thick-bearded, their faces marked and wizened beyond their years, they declared that all other Afghan leaders had brought destruction to the country. They wanted “to hang all of them—
all of them.”
They also asked ISI for logistical help. The Taliban wanted to import gasoline from Pakistan and sought an exemption from trade rules. Qazi agreed, as he recalled it.
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Bhutto said that in the months that followed this first meeting between ISI and the Taliban, the requests from Pakistani intelligence for covert aid to their new clients grew gradually. “I became slowly, slowly sucked into it,” Bhutto remembered. “It started out with a little fuel, then it became machinery” and spare parts for the Taliban’s captured airplanes and tanks. Next ISI made requests for trade concessions that would enrich both the Taliban and the outside businessmen who supplied them. “Then it became money” direct from the Pakistani treasury, Bhutto recalled.

Each time Pakistani intelligence officers asked for more covert aid during 1995, they said they needed the funds to attain leverage over the Taliban. The ISI brigadiers complained to Bhutto that the Taliban’s leaders were stubborn, that they would not follow the military and political advice Pakistan offered. By providing cash, military spare parts, and training, the Pakistani intelligence service told Bhutto, they could ensure that the Taliban stayed close to Pakistan as they began to challenge Massoud.

“I started sanctioning the money,” Bhutto recalled. “Once I gave the go-ahead that they should get money, I don’t know how much money they were ultimately given. . . . I know it was a lot. It was just carte blanche.”
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By the spring of 1995 these covert supplies were visible across southern Afghanistan. ISI sent exiled Pashtun military officers and guerrilla leaders to the Taliban’s cause. Former Afghan communist army officers loyal to Shahnawaz Tanai began to repair and operate Taliban tanks, aircraft, and helicopters. In eastern Afghanistan powerful local commanders such as Jallaladin Haqqanni declared for the Taliban. These political conversions were supported by money, weapons, pickup trucks, and supplies shipped across the Pakistan border. Volunteer fighters poured out of the border
madrassas.
When Herat fell to the Taliban in September, the die was cast. Omar and his Durrani militia now controlled all of southern Afghanistan. They announced their intention to march on Kabul.
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Benazir Bhutto felt that she was losing control of her new Afghan policy. She did not want Pakistani intelligence to back the Taliban in a military drive on Kabul. Bhutto argued that Pakistan should use the Taliban’s rising strength as a new lever in negotiations for a coalition Afghan government. Some in the army and ISI agreed with her, but the Taliban did not care for these Pakistani diplomatic nuances. They still meant what they said: They did not want to negotiate with other Afghan leaders, they wanted to hang them.

Bhutto began to wonder if ISI was telling her everything about its covert aid to the Taliban.When Bhutto traveled to Tehran, Iranian president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, who supported Massoud, lashed out at her in a private meeting, complaining angrily about covert Pakistani aid to the Taliban. Rafsanjani alleged that Pakistan’s army sent disguised troops into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Taken aback, Bhutto denied this, but later, when she heard that Massoud held Pakistani officers in his prisoner of war camps, she wondered about what she had not been told.
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Yet ISI’s ambition was greater than its purse. Pakistan’s army suffered from acute money problems during 1995. The army commanded the lion’s share of Pakistan’s budget, but with American aid cut over the nuclear issue, there was not much to go around. The country wallowed in debt. An arms race with India drained resources. As it had during the 1980s, ISI needed Saudi intelligence, and it needed wealthy Islamist patrons from the Persian Gulf.

EARLY IN 1995, Ahmed Badeeb, chief of staff to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the director of Saudi intelligence, descended toward Kandahar’s airport in a Gulfstream-2 corporate jet. As the plane was about to touch down, Badeeb saw a cow in the middle of the runway. His pilot pulled up suddenly, flew around, and tried again. The Taliban’s greeting party chased the cow away and crowded around Badeeb when he reached the tarmac.

“Don’t you remember us?” some of the bearded young Taliban asked. Badeeb stared at them and confessed he did not.

“We were students in your school!”
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During the anti-Soviet jihad Ahmed Badeeb had funded a vocational school for Afghan boys along the Pakistani border. The school was personal charity, funded from his Islamic
zakat,
or tithe.

The Taliban explained that they had since moved Badeeb’s entire school to Kandahar. One of the graduates was Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, a senior member of the founding Taliban ruling
shura
and a close associate of Mullah Omar. Rabbani (no relation to President Rabbani, Massoud’s ally in Kabul) expressed deep gratitude to Badeeb. He led the Saudi to a waiting car. They drove to meet Mullah Omar in central Kandahar.

Afghan colleagues carried the Taliban leader into the meeting; he was having trouble with one of his legs. But Omar stood long enough to offer Badeeb a long, warm embrace. Over tea and plates of food Omar told the story of the Taliban’s rise in Kandahar. As Badeeb recalled it, Omar told him the first weapons he received had come from Pakistan’s Interior Ministry.

The Taliban leaders asked Badeeb for guidance and support. They needed to learn from Saudi Arabia about how to run a proper Islamic government, they said. Omar asked Badeeb to send in whatever texts Saudi Arabian schools used so they could be handed out in Taliban schools. He asked for food and assistance that would allow Afghan refugees to return home. Badeeb presented Omar with a copy of the Koran as a gift, and Omar said he would follow its teachings always.

“Whatever Saudi Arabia wants me to do, I will do,” Omar told Badeeb, as Badeeb recalled it.
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Prince Turki had sent Badeeb on this mission to Kandahar. The Pakistanis were advertising the Taliban to the Saudis as an important new force on the Afghan scene. Babar referred to the Taliban as “my boys,” and he gave both Badeeb and Prince Turki the impression that he had helped create them and was now building them up steadily.
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Prince Turki flew into Islamabad and met with Mullah Rabbani, Badeeb’s former student. He wanted the Taliban to support an all-party peace proposal for Afghanistan. Turki remained personally involved in Afghan political negotiations. There was a sense among many Saudi officials when they looked at the Afghans that, but for the luck of Saudi oil, something like this might have been their fate. It bothered Turki greatly that the Americans had walked away from Afghanistan. A negotiated peace might deliver a modest success for Saudi foreign policy as well, checking rivals Iran and India, but Turki’s interest in the issue often seemed as much personal as professional.

The Taliban’s Rabbani was only in his twenties, but he seemed relatively sophisticated to Prince Turki, eager to learn about Saudi Arabia and international politics. Turki thought that Rabbani was someone the Saudi kingdom could and should help. “He told me that they are proud of having friendship with Saudi Arabia,” as Turki recalled it, “and that they considered King Fahd as their
imam,”
or spiritual leader.
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As the months passed, it became clear to both Turki and Badeeb that Pakistani intelligence had decided to back the Taliban at Hekmatyar’s expense. Saudi intelligence had no objection to this betrayal: Hekmatyar had angered Turki by denouncing Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War.
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As the Taliban grew in military strength, so did the breadth and depth of its leaders’ contacts with Saudi Arabia. Saudi intelligence maintained a close and direct relationship with ISI, allowing it to bypass the civilian government of Benazir Bhutto. Hamid Gul and other former ISI generals consulted with Prince Turki, traveled frequently to Saudi Arabia, and encouraged Saudi intelligence to support the Taliban. By one account Saudi intelligence paid annual cash bonuses to senior ISI officers designated by the Pakistani intelligence chief. Financial aid and discounted oil supplies from Riyadh buoyed the treasuries of Pakistan’s army and intelligence service during these lean years of American economic sanctions. The Saudi liaison strengthened ISI as a shadow government within Pakistan and helped it to resist civilian political oversight.
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ISI offered regular “situation reports” to Prince Turki and his staff as the Taliban conquered new territory. The reports outlined the Taliban’s plans and catalogued their problems and setbacks. Steadily the emphasis on peace talks faded and the emphasis on military victory rose.
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The scale of Saudi payments and subsidies to Pakistan’s army and intelligence service during the mid-1990s has never been disclosed. Judging by the practices of the previous decade, direct transfers and oil price subsidies to Pakistan’s military probably amounted in some years to at least several hundred million dollars. This bilateral support helped ISI build up its proxy jihad forces in both Kashmir and Afghanistan.
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Saudi charities and religious ministries also aided the Taliban’s rise during 1995 and 1996. Prince Turki has acknowledged providing “humanitarian” support to the Taliban during this period via Saudi charities such as the International Islamic Relief Organization. Wealthy Saudi individuals also made contributions, Turki has acknowledged: “We didn’t think we could control individuals who take their money and go and give it to them.”
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The
madrassas
along the Afghan border that had educated the Taliban’s leaders and now supplied them with new recruits also received funding. Many of the Pakistani clerics who ran these
madrassas
had been trained in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police, tutored and supported the Taliban as they built up their own Islamic police. The Taliban’s virtue and vice ministry—which enforced punishments under Islamic law, policed female modesty, and forcibly rounded up Afghan men for prayers—quickly grew richer than other arms of Taliban government. This almost certainly was a result of direct subsidies and training from Saudi Arabia’s Islamic establishment.
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Saudi Arabia still feared Iranian influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The Taliban were useful allies for the aims of Saudi statecraft, but they also promoted Islamic values in accord with Saudi theology. Although there were important differences between Saudi Islamic orthodoxy and the Taliban’s strange Deobandi rule making, there were also many similarities. There was a naïve purity about the Taliban that attracted Saudi missionaries.

For his part Prince Turki believed the Taliban would grow and evolve into a more normal, worldly, conservative Islamic political force. All revolutionary movements started out in a radical vein and gradually moderated, and so would the Taliban, Turki thought. In the meanwhile, the Taliban had much to recommend them: They were not corrupt, they brought order to Afghan cities, and they gratefully accepted Saudi and Pakistani patronage.

Saudi Arabia itself had been born seven decades earlier under the sword of a radical Islamic militia, the Ikhwan. Gradually the kingdom had grown up, stabilized, and partially modernized. More than any other previous Afghan militia or political movement, the Taliban presented themselves in the Saudi image. Surely, Prince Turki believed, they, too, would mature.
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AT THE U.S. EMBASSY in Islamabad the Taliban’s rise was evaluated as an isolated Afghan mystery. American diplomats in the Pakistani capital and in Peshawar sifted contradictory rumors and reports, unable to discern the Taliban’s supply sources. “The Taliban have been characterized as simultaneously Pakistani tools and anti-Pakistan,” the Peshawar consulate told Washington in a Confidential cable dispatched on November 3, 1994, as Mullah Omar consolidated control. The consulate said it was “very possible” that the Taliban had received aid from “a number of sources, including Pakistan,” but “their backers may find that they have created a tiger that is more than willing to take independent action and not be anyone’s tool.” The consulate reported ISI contacts with the Taliban but conceded that the movement’s “origins, goals and sponsors . . . remain unclear.” A second November 1994 cable from Peshawar to Washington, sardonically quoting the lyrics of the rock band the Who, asked about the Taliban: “Meet the New Boss. . . . Same as the Old Boss?” The movement’s military equipment, some of it freshly unpacked from crates, seemed “too much of a coincidence,” the Peshawar consulate initially reported, and probably suggested covert Pakistani involvement of the type that had previously strengthened Hekmatyar. Abdul Haq warned an American diplomat that same month, “It looks like Afghanistan was first destroyed by the communists, then by the fundamentalists, and now we might be destroyed by the mullahs.” But the State Department was not ready to leap to such conclusions. Its cables that autumn and winter of the Taliban’s rise described the militia as “an enigma” that was “certainly not acting to the exclusive benefit of any of the established vested interests,” and enjoyed widespread popular support. As the Taliban swept west from Kandahar in sophisticated military formations, the U.S. embassy reported that their “use of tanks and helicopters strongly suggested Pakistani tutelage or direct control.” Still, the extent and character of any Pakistani involvement remained “very much in doubt.” Two American diplomats traveled to Kandahar on February 13, 1995, to meet with the Taliban mayor. The session began with a prayer calling for the conversion by unbelievers to Islam. The mayor refused to answer questions from the Americans about the Taliban’s leadership or organization. The movement’s leaders “appeared coached and the overall impression was one of disingenuity and a degree of deception,” the American officials cabled afterward to Washington. It was the beginning of a long string of such lies and evasions—but the U.S. government had few resources in the region to dig beneath the surface. The CIA station and the Pentagon’s defense attachés had other priorities. Afghanistan’s civil war was no longer an important subject for intelligence collection.
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