bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 29–30
It’s been 10 years since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, when the world stood as one with the United States. The Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, offering instead to put him on trial in Afghanistan or before a court in an Islamic country. The offers were refused and war was declared.
Much has happened in the past 10 years. Canada has lost 157 soldiers. The combined coalition has a sad casualty figure of more than 1,700. Thousands of Afghans have also been killed, nearly a third of them by coalition forces. The benefit of anniversaries is the opportunity they provide to reflect.
To that end I embarked on a trip last October that took me from Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, to Baghlan, the Panjshir Valley, Kabul and Kandahar. The mission was to discover how Afghans felt about Operation Enduring Freedom — a decade on. Had their lives improved? Did they feel more secure? Was life looking up for them? The answers were sadly uniform and in a word they all said: “No. No. No.”
It’s not for lack of good intentions on the part of the international community that Afghanistan resembles the chaotic country of nearly 15 years ago, embroiled in much the same mayhem that gave rise to the Taliban. Let me offer some insight into Afghanistan that comes from more than 20 years in the region and which might provide clues as to why it is in the condition that it is and what warning signs were evident at the outset of all this.
It was October 2001. The Taliban had let me return to Kabul. The US was heavily bombing Taliban positions. Their Northern Alliance allies were hunkered down in the small northern corner of the country that they controlled, waiting for the bombing to clear the way for them to move in. The first city to fall was northern Mazar-e-Sharif. It fell to Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, a close western ally at the time. Dostum’s history and reputation was one of brutality and mass murder. True to form he eventually massacred hundreds of prisoners whose bodies were found with their hands bound and tied. That should have provided some clues of what was to come. But it was missed — or ignored, and there was more.
Sitting in Kabul hunkered down in the dark basement — the Taliban ordered a citywide blackout thinking that if the aircraft overhead couldn’t see them they couldn’t hit them — I listened as the planes roared overhead. Tanks and armored personnel carriers, piled high with black turbaned Taliban and the occasional Arabs were the only vehicles rumbling down the darkened streets. Inside the lantern-lit basement I kept contact with Northern Alliance leaders via Satellite telephone. I knew most of them from their last stint in power between 1992 and 1996.
It was their bitter internecine fighting that killed 50,000 people in Kabul alone, devastated vast swaths of the city and gave rise to the Taliban. Then they had divided the city into neighbourhoods and the rest of the country into fiefdoms. I remember a particularly brutal day in 1993 when I went to a neighbourhood of ethnic Hazaras after an attack by militias loyal to Abdur Rasool Sayyaf, a key Northern Alliance leader and current powerbroker in today’s Kabul. On that day in 1993 a sobbing elderly looking man threw a large shawl filled with bloodied hair at my feet and dragged me into a foul smelling room. There lay five women, all of whom had been raped and scalped by Sayyaf’s militiamen.
A Human Rights Watch report called some of the Northern Alliance leaders (allied with western forces), including Sayyaf, “ some of the world’s most serious human rights offenders.” The report, (which documented thousands of deaths in a single year of their rule prior to the Taliban coming to power), chastises the international community for its often used excuse that “no one has clean hands” to justify its choice of allies. “There are literally millions of Afghans without
headed by the Northern Alliance.
‘blood on their hands.’ And many of them would be eligible to serve as officials in Afghanistan’s government, or run for office. Some have, and have served with distinction,” says the report. “Yet many qualified Afghans are today afraid of taking part in governance, fearful of more powerful militia leaders whose hands… are indeed stained with blood. The truth is that most Afghans want these factional commanders and officials involved brought to justice.”
Anyone looking at Afghanistan’s sad history would have found no end of clues pointing to the turmoil and deception that would follow their coming to power once again. I was aware, in October 2001, that these leaders had promised the United States that they would keep their militias out of Kabul once the Taliban were eventually routed. All the Northern Alliance leaders, Sayyaf included, had militias. I called Sayyaf to find out what he would do with his fighters. It was just two days before the Taliban would flee Kabul. I mentioned that Washington was saying it had received assurances from the leaders that their fighters would stay out of Kabul. He laughed: “We will all be there. No one can keep us out.” That lie and the flood of militiamen who rampaged into the city, taking over houses, killing some of the few Taliban stragglers, throwing their bodies into a nearby park, should have warned everyone of worse to come.
By December 7, 2001 the Taliban were routed and an agreement known as the Bonn Agreement was signed, establishing President Hamid Karzai’s first interim government. Everyone signed on to it yet the Northern Alliance commanders ignored key provisions within it. The United Nations that brokered the agreement was silent. The Agreement was clear: No international soldier of the newly formed International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) would come to Kabul while militias were present within the city limits. Yet in late December 5,000 ISAF soldiers were in Kabul along with thousands of heavily armed militiamen. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative at the time, said they were unable to enforce that provision of the agreement, but he added they had at least managed to get some of the militia out of the homes they had arbitrarily confiscated when they roared into town a month earlier.
The Bonn agreement drove a deeper wedge between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups and marginalized the majority Pashtun ethnic group, driving many back into the mountains and into the ranks of the Taliban, the backbone of which had been Pashtun tribesmen. The Bonn Agreement also put into positions of power ethnic minority leaders, all of whom had militias. Pashtuns meanwhile were represented by Hamid Karzai, who had no militia. Marshall Mohammed Fahim, an ethnic Tajik, Mohammed Mohagik, an ethnic Hazara and Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, used their positions and their militias to harass and marginalize ethnic Pashtuns. A deputy police chief in Zabul told me he sent 2,000 young Pashtun men to Kabul to join the security forces. They were harassed and humiliated. All but four have joined the Taliban he said. Zabul province is now mostly in the hands of the Taliban.
When the grand jirgas or councils were held to decide an interim government, there were those in Kabul, many of them strong willed women, who wanted the warlords like Sayyaf, Dostum, Fahim, Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, who died recently in a suicide bombing, excluded from the proceedings. What happened? Instead of being banished, they were given front row seats, embraced and hailed as heroes. One woman who tried to challenge them had to go into hiding.
The terrorist training camps that flourished in Afghanistan did not come with the Taliban. They were there throughout the government headed by the Northern Alliance. In fact Sayyaf, and not Mullah Mohammed Omar, featured prominently in Washington’s 1995 annual report on terror. It warned of Sayyaf, for whom the Indonesian terrorist group Abu Sayyaf is named, and his links to terrorist training camps. It was also Sayyaf and Northern Alliance leaders in power in Kabul at the time who allowed bin Laden to settle in Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, not the Taliban. It was Rabbani, who was president at the time, that gave Afghan citizenship and passports to more than 600 Arab nationals. And it was Hajji Mohammed Qadir, a minister in Karzai’s first interim government, who gave a welcome speech at a lunch for bin Laden in eastern Nangarhar province soon after his arrival in Afghanistan. Today Qadir’s son Hajji Zahir sits in Parliament and his brother, Din Mohammed sits on the High Peace Council tasked with negotiating peace with the Taliban.
In Afghanistan the international community is seen by many as either being in bed with the Taliban or contributing to the instability that characterizes their country. Is it really any wonder if the police chief and a key western ally in southern Kandahar is Abdul Razik, a former warlord suspected of large scale drug trafficking, or if an official at the Kandahar Air Base, home to thousands of Canadian soldiers until recently and now to tens of thousands of US and NATO troops, is self-declared Maj. Gen. Abdul Razik Sherzai, another Afghan kingpin? What worries many analysts in Afghanistan is that reconciliation will be a devil’s deal between a corrupt government controlled by warlords and kingpins and the Taliban. Or worse a civil war. Caught in the middle — again — will be Afghans, who struggle to find hope for the future.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 29–30. Read the rest of this issue →
