Page 2 of 2 Deep in the land of the Taliban
By Anand Gopal
recover. One-legged Afghans, crippled by Hekmatyar's rockets, still roam the
city's streets. However, he was unable to capture the capital and his Pakistani
backers eventually abandoned him for a new, even more extreme Islamist force
rising in the south: the Taliban.
Most Hizb-i-Islami commanders defected to the Taliban and Hekmatyar fled in
disgrace to Iran, losing much of his support in the process. He remained in
such low standing that he was among the few warlords not offered a place in the
US-backed government that formed after 2001.
This, after a fashion, was his good luck. When that government
faltered, he found himself thrust back into the role of insurgent leader,
where, playing on local frustrations in Pashtun communities just as the Taliban
has, he slowly resurrected Hizb-i-Islami.
Today, the group is one of the fastest-growing insurgent outfits in the
country, according to Antonio Giustozzi, Afghan insurgency expert at the London
School of Economics. Hizb-i-Islami maintains a strong presence in the provinces
near Kabul and Pashtun pockets in the country's north and northeast. It
assisted in a complex assassination attempt on President Karzai last spring and
was behind a high-profile ambush that killed 10 NATO soldiers this summer. Its
guerrillas fight under the Taliban banner, although independently and with a
separate command structure. Like the Taliban, its leaders see their task as
restoring Afghan sovereignty as well as establishing an Islamic state in
Afghanistan. Naqibullah explained, "The US installed a puppet regime here. It
was an affront to Islam, an injustice that all Afghans should rise up against."
The independent Islamic state that Hizb-i-Islami is fighting for would
undoubtedly have Hekmatyar, not Mullah Omar, in command. But as during the
anti-Soviet jihad, the settling of scores is largely being left to the future.
The Pakistani nexus
Blowback abounds in Afghanistan. Erstwhile US Central Intelligence Agency hand
Jalaluddin Haqqani heads yet a third insurgent network, this one based in
Afghanistan's eastern border regions. During the anti-Soviet war, the US gave
Haqqani, now considered by many to be Washington's most redoubtable foe,
millions of dollars, anti-aircraft missiles, and even tanks. Officials in
Washington were so enamored with him that former congressman Charlie Wilson
once called him "goodness personified".
Haqqani was an early advocate of the "Afghan Arabs", who, in the 1980s, flocked
to Pakistan to join the jihad against the Soviet Union. He ran training camps
for them and later developed close ties to al-Qaeda, which developed out of
Afghan-Arab networks towards the end of the anti-Soviet war. After the attacks
of September 11, 2001, the US tried desperately to bring him over to its side.
However, Haqqani claimed that he couldn't countenance a foreign presence on
Afghan soil and once again took up arms, aided by his longtime benefactors in
Pakistan's ISI. He is said to have introduced suicide bombing to Afghanistan, a
tactic unheard of there before 2001. Western intelligence officials pin the
blame for most of the spectacular attacks in recent memory - a massive car bomb
that ripped apart the Indian embassy in July, for example - on the Haqqani
network, not the Taliban.
The Haqqanis command the lion's share of foreign fighters operating in the
country and tend to be even more extreme than their Taliban counterparts.
Unlike most of the Taliban and Hizb-i-Islami, elements of the Haqqani network
work closely with al-Qaeda. The network's leadership is most likely based in
Waziristan, in the Pakistani tribal areas, where it enjoys ISI protection.
Pakistan extends support to the Haqqanis on the understanding that the network
will keep its holy war within Afghanistan's borders. Such agreements are
necessary because, in recent years, Pakistan's longstanding policy of aiding
Islamic militant groups has plunged the country into a devastating war within
its own borders.
As Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants trickled into Pakistan after the fall of the
Taliban government in 2001, Islamabad signed on to the Bush administration's
"war on terror". It was a profitable venture: Washington delivered billions of
dollars in aid and advanced weaponry to Pakistan's military government, all the
while looking the other way as dictator Pervez Musharraf increased his
vise-like grip on the country. In return, Islamabad targeted al-Qaeda
militants, every few months parading a captured "high-ranking" leader before
the news cameras, while leaving the Taliban leadership on its territory
untouched.
While the Pakistani military establishment never completely eradicated al-Qaeda
- doing so might have stanched the flow of aid - it kept up just enough
pressure so that the Arab militants declared war on the government. By 2004,
the Pakistani army had entered the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a
semi-autonomous region populated by Pashtun tribes (where al-Qaeda fighters had
taken refuge), in force for the first time in an attempt to root out the
foreign militants.
Over the next few years, repeated Pakistani army incursions, along with a
growing number of US missile strikes (which sometimes killed civilians),
enraged the local tribal populations. Small, tribal-based groups calling
themselves "the Taliban" began to emerge; by 2007, there were at least 27 such
groups active in the Pakistani borderlands. The guerrillas soon won control of
areas in such tribal districts as North and South Waziristan, and began to act
like a version of the 1990s Taliban redux: they banned music, beat liquor store
owners, and prevented girls from attending school. While remaining independent
of the Afghan Taliban, they also wholeheartedly supported them.
By the end of 2007, the various Pakistani Taliban groups had merged into a
single outfit, the Tehrik-i-Taliban, under the command of an enigmatic
30-something guerrilla - Baitullah Mehsud. Pakistani authorities blame Mehsud's
group, usually referred to simply as the "Pakistani Taliban", for a string of
major attacks, including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud and his
allies have strong links to al-Qaeda and continue to wage an on-again,
off-again war against the Pakistani military. At the same time, some members of
the Pakistani Taliban have filtered across the border to join their Afghan
counterparts in the fight against the Americans.
Tehrik-i-Taliban proved surprisingly powerful, regularly routing Pakistani army
units whose foot soldiers were loathe to fight their fellow countrymen. But
almost as soon as Tehrik had emerged, fissures appeared. Not all Pakistani
Taliban commanders were convinced of the efficacy of fighting a two-front war.
Part of the movement, calling itself the "Local Taliban", adopted a different
strategy, avoiding battles with the Pakistani military. In addition, a
significant number of other Pakistani militant groups - including many trained
by the ISI to fight in Indian Kashmir - now operate in the Pakistani
borderlands, where they abstain from fighting the Pakistani government and
focus their fire on the Americans in, or American supply lines into,
Afghanistan.
The result of all this is a twisted skein of alliances and ceasefires in which
Pakistan is fighting a war against al-Qaeda and one section of the Pakistani
Taliban, while leaving another section, as well as other independent militant
groups, free to go about their business. That business includes crossing the
border into Afghanistan, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and independent
fighters from the tribal regions and elsewhere add to the mix that has produced
what one Western intelligence official terms a "rainbow coalition" arrayed
against US troops.
Living in a world of war
Despite such foreign connections, the Afghan rebellion remains mostly a
homegrown affair. Foreign fighters - especially al-Qaeda - have little
ideological influence on most of the insurgency, and most Afghans keep their
distance from such outsiders. "Sometimes groups of foreigners speaking
different languages walk past," Ghazni resident Fazel Wali recalls. "We never
talk to them and they don't talk to us."
Al-Qaeda's vision of global jihad doesn't resonate in the rugged highlands and
windswept deserts of southern Afghanistan. Instead, the major concern
throughout much of the country is intensely local: personal safety.
In a world of endless war, with a predatory government, roving bandits, and
Hellfire missiles, support goes to those who can bring security. In recent
months, one of the most dangerous activities in Afghanistan has also been one
of its most celebratory: the large, festive wedding parties that Afghans love
so much. US forces bombed such a party in July, killing 47. Then, in November,
warplanes hit another wedding party, killing around 40. A couple of weeks later
they hit an engagement party, killing three.
"We are starting to think that we shouldn't go out in large numbers or have
public weddings," Abdullah Wali told me. Wali lives in a district of Ghazni
Province where the insurgents have outlawed music and dance at such wedding
parties. It's an austere life, but that doesn't stop Wali from wanting them
back in power. Bland weddings, it seems, are better than no weddings at all.
Anand Gopal writes frequently about Afghanistan, Pakistan and the "war on
terror". He is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor based in
Afghanistan. For more of his information and dispatches from the region, visit
his website. This piece appears in
print in the latest issue of the Nation Magazine.
(Copyright 2008 Anand Gopal.)
(This piece is a joint project of TomDispatch.com and the
Nation Magazine, where a shorter version appears in print.)
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