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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544538566 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2015 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The Taliban Surrender
"We should not wash blood with blood."
— General Abdul Rashid Dostum on the surrender of Mullah Fazel, the Taliban commander in the north
November 2001. Even in defeat the Taliban were ferocious. They came fast out of the darkness, in a convoy of muddy pickups and SUVs, hurtling through the old fortress gatehouse and skidding to a halt at the headquarters building. Black-turbaned guards armed with rifles and rocket launchers leapt from the backs of their vehicles and flanked their leader's car, a white Land Cruiser with blackened windows. They carried their weapons with the ease of long practice, and moved with an arrogance and sense of purpose that made us onlookers scatter. Two guards stayed atop their vehicles, manning antiaircraft guns. The remainder formed a perimeter, marking the opposition. It was 10 o'clock, a cold November night. The Taliban had driven into the heart of the enemy camp, inside the high walls and inner courtyards of the Qala-i-Janghi, the House of War.
The nineteenth-century fort lies southwest of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Its massive earth embankments, battlements, and mud-brick walls, twenty feet thick, were built by Amir Abdul Rahman, the creator of the modern state of Afghanistan. Until recently the fort had been a Taliban military base, but for the last month, U.S. bombers had been striking military targets in Afghanistan, and the Taliban had abandoned the fort and its arsenal of weapons. Now it was in the hands of their opponents, the American- backed fighters of the United Front, who had swept down from their mountain hideouts and seized power.
The men on guard were a mixed crowd. The United Front was a coalition of ethnic groups from northern and central Afghanistan. There were stocky Uzbeks with Asiatic features in long corduroy tunics and Uzbek police commanders in Communist-era uniforms, who wore mustaches rather than beards; small, wiry Hazaras wearing checkered headscarves, members of a Shiite group that had fought ferocious battles against the Taliban; and Tajik commandos of the Northern Alliance, in combat fatigues and army boots, the best-trained men of the anti-Taliban forces. The United Front was brought together by the late legendary resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. His own faction, the mostly Tajik Northern Alliance, made up the backbone of the fighting force, but he had sought to broaden the resistance to the Taliban with support from other ethnic and regional groups. The fighters were mostly illiterate farmers and laborers, hardened men from mountain villages who had fought for ten years as mujahideen, resistance fighters against the Soviet occupation, and then through another decade of Afghan civil war and Taliban offensives.
The United Front hated the Taliban. The Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks had been driven deep into the mountains over the last few years where they had struggled to survive. The Taliban were a predominantly ethnic Pashtun movement, whose fighters were mostly from southern Afghanistan and spoke Pashtu, a different language from the Persian-dialect Dari of the northerners. The northern fighters watched the Taliban warily but with weapons shouldered. Their leaders were inside the building, and the Taliban were expected.
The door of the Land Cruiser opened and a thickset, bearded man in loose white clothes appeared. Mullah Fazel Mazloom, deputy defense minister in the Taliban regime and commander of all Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan, scowled out from under his heavy black turban. He was a man with a fearful reputation for cruelty and for sweeping military offensives that spared no one. Behind him was Mullah Noorullah Noori, a slighter, younger man who served as the Taliban governor of Balkh and was the senior political figure in the north. The two men had led the Taliban's offensive across northern Afghanistan, conducting bloody reprisals against communities that resisted. They were feared across the region. Just the sight of their convoy speeding through the darkened streets of Mazar-i-Sharif on their way to the fort that night had started a rumor that the Taliban were returning to recapture the town.
I was among a group of Western journalists who jostled forward as the car door opened. A television cameraman switched on his camera light, illuminating the scene and momentarily blinding everyone. The Taliban leader drew back into his car and slammed the door. There was a short silence as everyone looked around, confused. Then the order came: "No lights! No lights!" Television was banned under the Taliban government, and its officials usually refused to be filmed. They were still insisting on this rule, even in defeat, so the cameraman turned off his light. The cleric emerged a second time, his face obscured by a woolen shawl wrapped round his head and shoulders. He stepped down into the crowd, hurrying into the building and up the stairs, followed closely by a coterie of commanders and guards. The jostling eased once they were gone. The journalists spread out, talking among themselves, switching on satellite telephones to report the arrival of the Taliban for talks. The Taliban guards turned their attention to the foreigners. They advanced on me and another female reporter with curious stares until the guards shooed them away.
Upstairs, in a long, low-ceilinged meeting room, Mullah Fazel was confronting his deadliest enemies. Assembled on dilapidated sofas and armchairs along the sides of the room were men who, in the last week, with U.S. air support, had smashed his dominion and grasped control of northern Afghanistan: General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the growling Soviet-trained Uzbek militia leader who had often played kingmaker in the wars of the last twenty-five years, switching sides at critical moments and precipitating coups; Atta Mohammad Noor, the tall, lean leader of the Northern Alliance fighters, a bitter rival of Dostum for control of the north when they were not fighting the Taliban; and Mohammad Mohaqiq, the leader of the Shiite Hazara forces in the north, whose people had suffered some of the worst sectarian violence at the hands of the predominantly Sunni Taliban.
Each of these men had been fighting for the last quarter century, ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, sometimes on opposing sides. They had come together in recent months to stem the Taliban advance across northern Afghanistan. Since its formation seven years earlier, the Taliban had sought to gain control over the whole country and establish a fundamentalist Islamist regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. By 2001, they had come close to achieving that aim. Then came the attacks of 9/11 against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and everything changed.
As we waited outside in the courtyard with the guards, we watched some of the United Front's new American allies enter the meeting room that night: a tall, broad-shouldered CIA operative who used the name Dave — or Daoud to the Afghans — wore a long Afghan tunic and hiking boots and spoke the local languages; and several bearded men in the plain fatigues of the U.S. special forces, who had been dropped in weeks earlier to assist the different groups of the anti-Taliban coalition. Several dozen Afghan elders and commanders had gathered too, among them a former Taliban commander, Amir Jan Naseri. An influential Pashtun mujahideen figure from the ancient city of Balkh, Amir Jan had fallen out with the Taliban and defected to the United Front six months earlier. His contacts on both sides allowed him to serve as an intermediary in bringing Mullah Fazel to negotiate.
The meeting was a severe turn of fortune for Mullah Fazel. He had commanded over ten thousand Taliban fighters along with hundreds more al Qaeda and other foreign fighters across several battlefronts in northern Afghanistan. He had come close to annihilating the men with whom he now negotiated. When two al Qaeda members posing as journalists assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001, they removed the most important opposition figure standing in the way of the Taliban advance. The United Front had seemed bound to collapse. Mullah Fazel was poised to overrun the last northern districts and complete the Taliban plan to conquer all of Afghanistan.
That was just two days before the attacks of 9/11. Within a month, U.S. missiles began demolishing Taliban frontline positions and military camps with a pinpoint accuracy that shook the Islamist fighters and awed ordinary Afghans. American special forces personnel in the mountains with the United Front called in strikes on Taliban positions. Afghans on horseback raced in after the strikes to seize villages and hilltops, and finish off stragglers. The Taliban were forced to abandon their command posts and take cover in civilian buildings. They smeared mud over their trucks and cars, covering every bit of glinting chrome in a vain attempt at camouflage. It was no protection against modern guided missiles. Even in the cities, missiles were finding the Taliban, guided by Afghan informers working undercover and equipped with GPS locators and satellite telephones. It took just over a month for Taliban rule to collapse in the north. The first major town, Mazar-i-Sharif, fell to United Front troops on November 9. Two other northern towns, Taloqan and Bamiyan, fell on November 11, and Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan, on November 12. The Taliban were suddenly on the run.
Mullah Fazel's forces fell back to the town of Kunduz, under fire from American missiles. Afterward we saw the detritus of their retreat: their vehicles, shredded into fist-sized pieces of metal, littered the desert from Mazar-i-Sharif. Farming villages were dotted with yellow canisters, lethal cluster bombs that had decimated the Taliban foot soldiers. In Kunduz, a market town of low, walled houses and horsecarts, the retreating fighters were quickly surrounded by advancing United Front forces. The Taliban were cut off from the rest of their army hundreds of miles away in southern Afghanistan with no chance of reinforcements. Among them were thousands of Afghans, mostly Pashtuns whose homes were in the south, and hundreds of al Qaeda and foreign fighters — Arabs; North Africans; Muslims from Central Asia, Russia, and China; and a few men from Western countries, including several British Pakistanis and the American Muslim convert John Walker Lindh. They had nowhere to go and were dependent on their Afghan hosts. There were also hundreds of Pakistanis: scores of military advisors and trainers, members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which was secretly assisting the Taliban; trained fighting men from Pakistan's militant groups, which had long used Kunduz as a base in northern Afghanistan to train recruits and support the Taliban campaign; and hundreds of illiterate villagers and religious students who had rushed to support the Taliban on the urging of their religious leaders when the United States began bombing.
The collapse in the north rippled through the country. Taliban soldiers, police, and government officials began deserting their posts and escaping south to their home base in Kandahar — or east into Pakistan. On the night of November 13, the Taliban withdrew from the capital, Kabul, slipping away under cover of darkness. United Front forces drove into the city with barely a fight the next day. Their fighters claimed Jalalabad, the main city in the east, on the same day.
Trapped in Kunduz, Mullah Fazel faced being overrun or, worse, massacred by Northern Alliance troops who had surrounded the town and were set on avenging the death of their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Their commanders threatened daily to storm the town and slaughter the Taliban and al Qaeda forces unless they surrendered.
Mullah Fazel's forces were depleted and badly shaken by the bombing raids. Dozens had been wounded. His units were struggling to hold the outskirts of Kunduz. Those who could were escaping the besieged town, bribing opposition fighters or using tribal contacts to smuggle themselves out. Most were ready to surrender, said one fighter who had been captured trying to escape Kunduz and who stood chained up in an underground pit guarded by Northern Alliance fighters when I interviewed him. "It is the bombing, there is no defense against it," he told me, shivering in his muddy hole.
As the Taliban lines disintegrated, Pakistan's leader, General Pervez Musharraf, put three telephone calls through to General Dostum, asking him to broker a surrender with the Taliban trapped in Kunduz. Musharraf did not want to approach the Northern Alliance, the followers of Massoud who had long opposed Pakistan's attempts to dominate Afghanistan. The Taliban, for their part, did not want to surrender to the Shiite Hazaras, fearing revenge for the two thousand Hazaras whom they had slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif three years earlier.
So Musharraf approached Dostum, a most treacherous and untrustworthy leader but an opportunist who could be expected to do a deal. Dostum was already cooperating with the United States, and he had an American special forces team at his side. Musharraf confided to Dostum that he had been wrong to support just one group in Afghanistan — the Taliban — and said he wanted to rectify that. It suited Dostum to be the dealmaker who ended the war in northern Afghanistan. It would let him emerge once again as an important power broker.
Musharraf's intervention came just in time for Mullah Fazel. Dostum sent Pashtun emissaries to Kunduz, men with tribal contacts who were able to approach the Taliban leaders. They offered the Taliban a straightforward way out: surrender your weapons and you will be allowed to go home. Most of the Taliban were from the south and wanted above all to get away from the north where they had vengeful enemies and feared a slaughter. The tribal leaders in Kunduz urged the Taliban to spare the town from American bombing, which was already causing heavy destruction in outlying villages.
Yet the Taliban despised Dostum. He had been trained by the KGB and had fought on the side of the Communists during the ten-year Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. His militias were notorious for their ruthless pogroms around the country, just as he himself was notorious for repeated betrayals of alliances. Mullah Fazel ultimately had no other choice. He was receiving orders from his leaders in the southern capital, Kandahar, and from his Pakistani mentors to make a tactical retreat and conserve forces for the future.
In testimony he later gave before a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay, Mullah Fazel denied receiving any orders and said it was his own decision to surrender to Dostum. The deal, he said, was that his forces would give up their weapons and then be allowed to go home. Yet according to American military prosecutors, he received orders from the Taliban defense minister to surrender. The Taliban leadership maintained command and control throughout their retreat.
That leadership, under the direction of Mullah Omar and his defense minister, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, had crucial support from Pakistan. During the Kunduz siege, Pakistan began evacuating its own people on secret military flights from the airfield on the edge of town. According to Afghan intelligence officials, there were two to three thousand Pakistanis trapped there, including trained military operatives. Pakistan had long boosted the Taliban's military campaign with its own troops and advisors but had always kept them hidden from international scrutiny, using retired officers on contract, civilians, and only occasionally active soldiers, never in uniform.
For ten to fifteen days in the second half of November, one or two Pakistani military flights had flown into Kunduz airfield every evening, airlifting a total of approximately two thousand people as well as weapons and communications systems, according to Afghans who were monitoring Taliban radio communications. Two battalions of Pakistanis, including special forces, artillery units, and hundreds of snipers, had controlled the airport and strengthened the Taliban frontlines in the north. Neither they nor their equipment were found when the town was finally captured by the Northern Alliance. Not everyone was so lucky. Hundreds of Central Asian fighters were killed in the U.S. bombing or drowned trying to ford the river north into Tajikistan. Nearly a thousand low-level Pakistani fighters were left behind to fend for themselves, ending up as prisoners of Dostum's troops. Pakistan was bowing to the superior might of the United States, pulling out of the fight in Afghanistan and advising the Taliban to change tactics to a guerrilla campaign.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Wrong Enemy"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Carlotta Gall.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword xi
Prologue xv
1. The Taliban Surrender 1
2. The People Turn 22
3. Pakistan’s Protégés 39
4. The Taliban in Exile 56
5. Al Qaeda Regroups 78
6. The Wrong Enemy in the Wrong Country 93
7. The Taliban Return 119
8. The Suicide Bomb Factory 147
9. Militancy Explodes in Pakistan 163
10. The Taliban Close Their Grip 182
11. Karzai’s Turn 200
12. Obama’s Surge 223
13. Osama’s Safe Haven 241
14. Springtime in Zangabad 265
Acknowledgments 291
Notes 295
Index 309