The 9/11 Wars (3 page)

ALI SHAH

The winter had been hard, and in March 2001 the snow still lay thick on the passes. The only road open into the valley was a thin trace of black meltwater and icy mud. The small Afghan town of Bamiyan was virtually deserted. Men of working or fighting age had either fled or been forced out by the fighters who now walked down the single street of the bazaar, squatted by their pick-up trucks or sat on the grubby, threadbare carpets of the
chaikhana
.
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The sky was an icy blue overhead, and it was still very cold.
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To the south of the town, in a shallow river valley, almond orchards and slender silver-leaved poplars lay below low hills covered in cemeteries and fields desiccated as much by the freezing winter nights as by the summer heat. Behind, stretching to the horizon, were the higher mountains of Afghanistan’s central highlands banded in different shades of brown, ochre and sand like a beach at low tide and ending in snow. Through the slats of a stable door beside one small mud-brick and wood home in a stand of trees near the river, a young man, sixteen years old, carefully watched the fighters walking through the streets.

Ali Shah had left with his parents, two sisters and two brothers when the Taliban had first arrived in Bamiyan weeks earlier but had returned to check on the family home. He had slipped back, easily evading sentries on the paths through the hills. Years of guarding sheep on the hills around had given the teenager a deep knowledge of the remote tracks that crossed the apparently barren peaks. He watched through the slatted doors of the stables beside the locked house and waited.
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The town of Bamiyan lies at the intersection of four roads, 9,200 feet up on an outlying spur of the Himalayan mountains. One leads west across the snowy peaks and ridges of Afghanistan’s central highlands to the city of Herat and on to the Iranian frontier. A second leads south-east, across a high pass and through a narrow valley studded with small fortified villages and ribbed by terraced fields of wheat before dropping down to a shallow and fertile plain, where it joins the main road that runs from the Afghan capital Kabul down to Kandahar, the southern city that was the cultural and administrative centre of the Taliban. As this road drops off the high plateau of Bamiyan, it crosses the religious, ethnic, cultural and linguistic divide between the lands of the Shia Muslim Hazara, of central Asian ancestry, and the southern and eastern regions, where the ethnic Pashtuns, almost all Sunni Muslims, dominate.
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The third road that leads out of Bamiyan runs north to the grassy steppes and eventually to the Amu Darya river and the frontier with the former Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The fourth and final road leads east over yet another pass and down through a deep gorge to the fertile Shomali plains and the frontlines across which the fighters of the Taliban confronted the ragged troops of the Northern Alliance, the last remaining opposition to their rule over Afghanistan, firing desultory shells at Bagram airport and serving tea to the occasional visiting reporter.

Though in one of the poorest and most isolated provinces of Afghanistan, Bamiyan had once been a thriving and prosperous centre of trade and religion. In the fourth century, two huge Buddhas, one 175 feet high, the other 120, had been built into cavities hewn from the sandstone of the cliffs just to the north of the present-day town of Bamiyan. The statues themselves were not carved directly from the rock face but made of successive layers of mud and straw and finally painted plaster laid over a rock core. Beyond their religious purpose, they served too as giant landmarks for travellers on one of Asia’s great trade routes.
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With the vast statues, a monastery had been constructed, a mixture of wooden scaffolding built against the cliff face and caves. The Buddhist monks and believers who had once lived and studied there had long gone, as had the wooden passageways and façades, but even in 2001 the caves were still inhabited. The families who lived there were mainly destitute refugees who survived on thin earnings as shepherds and day labourers and ate stale bread scraps left over by the inhabitants of the town below their barely accessible and uncomfortable homes. The frescoes and murals on the inside of the monastic cells and pilgrims’ accommodation had long since been defaced in waves of iconoclasm or simply obscured by the soot from decades of cooking fires. It was these giant Buddhas that the Taliban had come to destroy. Ali Shah waited until nightfall and slipped away.

THE TALIBAN

In successive campaigns the Taliban had brought 80 per cent of Afghanistan under their nominal rule. The movement had its origins in a vigilante group founded by a mullah, the equivalent of a country priest or parson in clerical terms, near Kandahar in September 1994. The very fact that it was the mullahs, traditionally lowly figures in Afghan society, who were in charge signalled the revolutionary nature of the new movement. The new group’s innovatory style of fighting, which involved night combat and highly mobile ‘charges’ on the back of pick-up trucks, was another radical change.
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Though often described as ‘medieval’, the Taliban were thus profoundly contemporary. Ideologically they were radical too and ‘revolutionary’ in the sense of the word that would have been understood by rebels seeking a return to an imagined earlier era of social justice across the ages. A worldview and language heavily informed by a utopian vision of an idealized past hid the fact that they actually sought to create something that had never existed: an Afghan state and society that resembled in culture, government and religious practice the idea they had of a perfect Pashtun village. That idea may have been a myth, but it was very real to them, and so was the political project of creating it.

At the beginning the Taliban’s aim had simply been to end the anarchy and civil war into which Afghanistan had been plunged at the end of the decade-long Soviet intervention in 1989.
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But the movement very rapidly acquired a variety of different and sometimes contradictory agendas, each representing one of the myriad fracture lines of an Afghan society fragmented by decades of war and uneven development. Ethnic splits, cultural divides, resentments nurtured through a conflict in which the bulk of the fighting had pitted Afghans against other Afghans, as well as a host of external interests came rapidly into play. The name Taliban, an Arabo-Persian word which means seekers of knowledge or religious students, reflected the origins, leadership and project of the new movement.
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Initially welcomed in many parts by a population tired of war and insecurity, the Taliban had advanced rapidly, aided by their opponents’ lack of unity, by local traditions which encouraged rather than stigmatized changing sides at the right moment and, at critical moments, by logistic and technical aid from the main Pakistani military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).
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Skilfully exploiting all the fracture lines of Afghan society, Taliban leaders ignored urban areas and institutions and instigated an extremely effective rural grass-roots outreach programme.
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Using networks of association built up through family or tribal connections, in the refugee camps of Pakistan or among fellow veterans of the Soviet war, they approached tribal leaders, militia commanders, anyone who they felt could be co-opted, offering security, moral certainty, a restoration of social justice and order and personal advancement.
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Their uncompromising message was nonetheless carefully tailored to fit local needs and identities. Those Taliban leaders with particular knowledge of a specific district’s customs, history and dialects were sent there. Where a little encouragement was still needed, intimidation and selective violence usually sufficed.

Yet not only were the Taliban unable to turn their vision into reality but they proved incapable even of beginning to tackle the myriad problems of the country. In September 1996 the Taliban had captured Kabul, where their conception of an ideal Afghanistan and their literal reading of the Islamic holy texts was very alien to the better-educated urbanites of the city, many of whom had lived well under the Soviets.
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The latter, at least for the better-off and better-educated, had been modern and liberal rulers who cleared slums, built schools and polytechnics and offered employment in a new, sprawling bureaucracy and military. Though the depredations of the post-Soviet period when the various
mujahideen
factions had fought over the capital meant that the Taliban seizure of the city was welcomed by some Kabulis, the five years that followed had seen increasing repression, haphazard government, growing violence against opponents and dissidents, and, apart from the booming drugs industry, a moribund economy. It had also seen the failure of the Taliban’s early attempts to distance themselves from the rest of the world. Partly this was due to their own need for weapons, manpower and instruction, much of which came from across the border in Pakistan. Partly this was due to the fact that, as had been the case through the nineteenth century and before, Afghanistan was a ground across which the rivalries of bigger powers played out.

Some of these powers were formal states recognized by international law. The security establishment and successive governments of Pakistan had seen the Taliban as the perfect vehicle to project their own interests in Afghanistan and funnelled money, fuel, food, advice and ammunition to these new actors on the Afghan scene.
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Very significant numbers of young fighters came from the religious schools of Pakistan’s north-west frontier, where many Afghans, refugees or otherwise, were educated. Others sent over from the religious schools in Pakistan’s eastern province of the Punjab were easily recognizable. The author found squads of them doing star jumps on the frontline north of Kabul in 1999. Other overseas allies were non-state actors, though powerful nonetheless. Much of the movement’s money came through donations from clerical networks in Pakistan and further afield. Rich donors in the Gulf, devout and deeply conservative Muslim businessmen or royalty, contributed significant funds, happy to help to further the spread of the rigorous strands of Sunni Islam that they themselves followed.

If the web of alliances, funding streams and ideological strands drawn together in the Taliban was complicated so too were the networks that centred on the various factions opposed to their rule. Limited to the north and north-east of the country, denuded of material and men, each broadly representing a different ethnic minority, these groups were dependent on different regional sponsors for money and weapons and connected to different drugs or smuggling networks. The Hazara minority, for example, made up between 10 and 15 per cent of the overall Afghan population, and their factions were backed by the Iranians. This created a Shia axis that was a counterpart to the informal Taliban–Pakistani Sunni alliance on Afghanistan’s other flank. The Uzbeks constituted 5 to 15 per cent, and their militia were supported by Uzbekistan. The Tajiks, who made up around 20 or 25 per cent, got funding and weapons from Tajikistan and from India.
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Amidst all these frames of geopolitical and regional alignment, the enormous majority of Afghans simply tried to survive. A measure of the plight of the Afghan people was that in 2001 nobody knew how many of them there were as there had been no census since 1979. Around 5 million were estimated to be living outside the country, largely in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, and perhaps 15 million remained in Afghanistan. The population of Kabul was around half a million and, though it was by far the biggest Afghan city, its streets were empty, bazaars were bare, fuel was scarce and electricity rarer still. The only entertainments were executions and occasional football matches in the city’s sports stadium, woefully ill-equipped gyms and boxing clubs, which provided an outlet for jobless teenagers, and a motorcyclist who set up a ‘wall of death’ in the central Ariana Square. That most of the spectators at the executions the author attended were there simply because there was nothing else to do was ample testament to the desperation and meanness of their lives. Many hours each day were devoted to procuring enough fuel in the winter and clean water in the summer. Ministers with little more than a basic religious education sat in the corner of decrepit offices warmed by Chinese-made bar heaters. A handful of students walked through the derelict halls of the university and the polytechnic was too heavily mined to be used. On the wall of the offices of the religious police, who were largely composed of young men armed with sticks or lengths of rubber hose who harassed women whom they deemed immodestly dressed or men whose beards were under the regulation length of the width of a fist, a scrawled slogan read: ‘Throw reason to the dogs, it stinks of corruption.’ The rural areas were worse. In the north-eastern Badakshan province, communities stockpiled animal fodder for human consumption. Life expectancy was around forty-two years (one year more than it had been in 1990), literacy rates were no more than 30 per cent, and 18 in every thousand women who gave birth died, the highest rate in the world. The word that featured most frequently in conversation with ordinary Afghans in the years before 9/11 was
mushkil
, difficult. This was the backdrop against which the first encounters of the 9/11 Wars were fought.
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