The Taliban jihad – by Steve Coll
Don’t Look Back
March 1, 2010
The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs.
Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level
relations with Pakistani intelligence.
While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I
tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.”
Earlier this month, outside Karachi, Pakistani security services, reportedly accompanied by C.I.A. officers, arrested the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Abdul Ghani Baradar, an action that has revived questions about the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban. The Taliban rose to power with extensive aid from the I.S.I.; the collaboration persisted, if less robustly, after September 11th.
More lately, the Pakistani military, of which the I.S.I. is a component, has seemed to waver, striking against some Taliban factions in Pakistan but tolerating or helping others. (As recently as December, U.S. intelligence was collecting evidence of mid-level contacts between the I.S.I. and Taliban factions fighting in Afghanistan.) Mullah Baradar’s arrest, which was followed, last week, by the arrests, in Pakistan, of two other significant Taliban leaders, suggests that the I.S.I. may be further reviewing its calculations. In any event, there are few strategic issues of greater importance to the
outcome of President Obama’s Afghan war.
Why might Pakistan consider modifying its strategy? In 2009, Islamist militants, mainly Taliban, carried out eighty-seven suicide attacks inside Pakistan, killing about thirteen hundred people, almost ninety per cent of them civilians, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. Last October, Taliban raiders staged an unprecedented assault on the Army’s General Headquarters, in Rawalpindi. Customarily, Pakistani officers have blamed “bad” Taliban for such domestic raids, while absolving “good” Taliban (who shoot only at infidels in Afghanistan). As the violence on Pakistani soil intensifies, however, it would be natural for Pakistan’s generals to question whether their jihad-management strategy has become mired in false distinctions.
American diplomats have been warning Pakistan for years, to little effect, that support for Islamist extremists would boomerang against its own interests. The Bush Administration made matters worse by delivering several billion dollars of covert aid to the I.S.I. for help against Al Qaeda without holding it to account for coddling the Taliban and other militant groups. The paranoid style of politics in Pakistan makes the American version look quaint. In recent days, there has been speculation that Mullah Baradar’s detention is evidence of some sort of diabolical I.S.I. conspiracy to thwart reconciliation talks between the Taliban and the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, or to manipulate such talks, or to split the Taliban. (A report in the Times indicates that Baradar’s arrest may have been accidental; in Pakistan’s national psyche, however, there are no accidents.)
The Taliban are a diverse, dispersed guerrilla force with multiple command centers and locally autonomous leaders. Nonetheless, the Afghan Taliban leadership group in which Baradar reigned, known as the Quetta Shura, has exercised significant authority in recent years, particularly over Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, where U.S. marines have been fighting house to house. Uncontested sanctuary for Islamist guerrilla leaders in Pakistan contributed to the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan; the elimination or even the reduction of such a sanctuary for the Taliban (and Al Qaeda) would ease American burdens in Afghanistan by no small margin. American strategists claim to see encouraging changes in Pakistan’s behavior; intelligence-sharing between the United States and Pakistan, severely constrained by mistrust eighteen months ago, has increased.
Unfortunately, the geopolitical incentives that have informed Pakistan’s alliance with the Afghan Taliban remain unaltered. Pakistan’s generals have retained a bedrock belief that, however unruly and distasteful Islamist militias such as the Taliban may be, they could yet be useful proxies to ward off a perceived existential threat from India. In the Army’s view, at least, that threat has not receded. Indo-Pakistani peace negotiations that have been in suspension since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack are only just re-starting. Absent a sudden breakthrough that charts the potential for normalizing relations between Pakistan and India—a framework settlement on Kashmir, freer trade, freer borders, and demilitarization—Pakistan’s rationale for preserving the Taliban and similar groups is not likely to change.
The I.S.I., by all accounts, is not a sentimental outfit. Although Zaeef witnessed its senior commanders wail over America’s plan to overthrow the Taliban (one I.S.I. general was “crying out loud, with his arms around my neck like a woman”), he was also savvy enough to take note of Pakistan’s “mixed signals.” Later, Zaeef defied the I.S.I.’s entreaties to break with Mullah Omar and lead a “moderate” Taliban movement; the Pakistanis arrested him, and handed him over to American soldiers, who transferred him to Guantánamo. (He was released in 2005 and has retired in Kabul.) In his memoir, Zaeef titles the chapter about his betrayal “A Hard Realisation.”
There will be more of those. The root problem in this murkiest theatre of the Afghan war is not Pakistan’s national character or even the character of its generals; rather, it involves Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani Army has learned over many years to leverage its grievances, dysfunction, bad choices, and perpetual dangers to extract from the United States the financial and military support that it believes it requires against India. At the same time, Pakistan’s generals resent their dependency on America. For the I.S.I. to repudiate the Taliban entirely, its officers would have to imagine a new way of living in the world—to write a new definition of Pakistan’s national security, one that emphasizes politics and economics over clandestine war. For now, many Pakistani generals imagine themselves masters of an old game: to be not so sweet that they will be eaten whole by the United States, but not so bitter that they will be spat out.
Source: New Yorker
Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.”
And Pakistan Army indeed fulfilled the Promise made with Mullah Zaeef:)
And who was the senior officer, with a flag on his jeep? My course-mate Ehsan — 41st PMA — was then heading ISI, the organization in overall command of such sensitive matters. Maybe he throws some light on this incident if he sits down to write his memoirs. The ordeal of Mullah Zaeef By Ayaz Amir September 22, 2006 Friday Sha’aban 28, 1427 http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20060922.htm
To say that the account is eye-opening would be an understatement. It is harrowing and mind-blowing. Can anyone bend so low as our government did? And can behaviour be as wretched as that displayed by American military personnel into whose custody Zaeef was given?
On the morning of January 2, 2002, three officials of a secret agency arrived at Zaeef’s house in Islamabad with this message: “Your Excellency, you are no more excellency.” One of them said, no one can resist American power, or words to that effect. “America wants to question you. We are going to hand you over to the Americans so that their purpose is served and Pakistan is saved from a big danger.”
Zaeef could have been forgiven for feeling stunned. From the “guardians of Islam” this was the last thing that he expected, that for the sake of a few “coins” (his words) he would be delivered as a “gift” to the Americans.
Under heavy escort he was taken to Peshawar, kept there for a few days and then pushed into his nightmare. Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was driven to a place where a helicopter was waiting, its engines running. Someone said, “Khuda hafiz” (God preserve you).
There were some people speaking in English. “Suddenly I was pounced upon and flung on the ground, kicked and pummelled from all sides. So sudden was the attack that I was dumbfounded… My blindfold slipping, I saw a line of Pakistani soldiers to one side and some vehicles including one with a flag…My clothes were stripped from my body and I was naked but ‘my former friends’ kept watching the spectacle. The locks on their lips I can never forget… The (Pakistani) officers present there could at least have said he is our guest, in our presence don’t treat him like this. Even in my grave I will not be able to forget that scene.”
Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.”
And Pakistan Army indeed fulfilled the Promise made with Mullah Zaeef:)
Pakistan’s chief spy Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad “was in the US when the attacks occurred.” He arrived in the US on the 4th of September, a full week before the attacks. He had meetings at the State Department “after” the attacks on the WTC. But he also had “a regular visit of consultations” with his US counterparts at the CIA and the Pentagon during the week prior to September 11. REFERENCE: Cover-up or Complicity of the Bush Administration? The Role of Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (ISI) in the September 11 Attacks by Michel Chossudovsky Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal Posted at globalresearch.ca 2 November 2001
AFTER 9/11.
In the afternoon, Mahmood was invited to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, where he told George Tenet, the CIA director, that in his view Mullah Omar, the Taliban chief, was a religious man with humanitarian instincts and not a man of violence! This was a bit difficult for the CIA officials to digest and rightly so as the Taliban’s track record, especially in the realm of human rights, was no secret. General Mahmood was told politely but firmly that Mullah Omar and the Taliban would have to face US Military might if Osama Bin Laden along with other Al-Qaeda leaders were not handed over without delay. To send the message across clearly, Richard Armitage held a second meeting with Mahmood the same day, informing him that he would soon be handed specific American demands, to which Mahmood reiterated that Pakistan would cooperate. {Bush at War by Bob Woodward, published by Simon & Schuster, 2002, New York}, p 32. {Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones, published by New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002}, p. 2.
General Mahmood on September 13, 2001, was handed a formal list of the US demands by Mr. Armitage and was asked to convey these to Musharraf and was also duly informed, for the sake of emphasis, that these were “not negotiable.” Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and the assisstant secretary of state, Christina Rocca, had drafted the list in the shape of a “non-paper”. It categorically asked Pakistan:
Stop Al-Qaeda operatives coming from Afghanistan to Pakistan, intercept arms shipments through Pakistan, and end ALL logistical support for Osama Bin Laden.
Give blanket overflight and landing rights to US aircraft.
Give the US access to Pakistani Naval and Air Bases and to the border areas betweeen Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Turn over all the intelligence and immigration information.
Condemn the September 11 attacks and curb all domestic expressions of support for terrorism.
Cut off all shipments of fuel to the Talibans, and stop Pakistani volunteers from going into Afghanistan to join the Taliban. Note that, should the evidence strongly implicate Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda Network in Afghanistan, and should the Taliban continue to harbour him and his accomplices, Pakistan will break diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime, end support for the Taliban, and assist the US in the aforementioned ways to destroy Osama and his network.
Having gone through the list, Mahmood declared that he was quite clear on the subject and that “he knew how the President thought, and the President would accept these points.” {Bush at War by Bob Woodward, published by Simon & Schuster, 2002, New York}, p 58-59. Interview: Richard Armitage, “Campaign Against Terror,” PBS (Frontline), April 19, 2002}
Mahmood then faxed the document to Musharraf. While the latter was going through it and in the process of weighing the pros and cons of each demand, his aide de camp that Colin Powell was on the line. Musharraf liked and respected Powell, and the conversation was not going to be a problem. He told him that he understood and appreciated the US position, but he would respond to the US demands after having discussed these with his associates. Powell was far too polite to remind him that he in fact was the government, but did inform him that his General in Washington had already assured them that these demands would be acceptable to the government of Pakistan. {Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism : Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror by Hassan Abbas, published by An East Gate Book , M.E. Sharpe Armonk, New York. London, England.}. NOTES/REFERENCES – Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones, published by New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Interview: Richard Armitage, “Campaign Against Terror,” PBS (Frontline), April 19, 2002; Bush at War by Bob Woodward, published by Simon & Schuster, 2002, New York. Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism : Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror by Hassan Abbas, published by An East Gate Book , M.E. Sharpe Armonk, New York. London, England
Are We to Blame for Afghanistan?
By Chalmers Johnson
Mr. Johnson’s latest books are Blowback (Metropolitan, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (Metropolitan, 2004), the first two volumes in a trilogy on American imperial policies. The final volume is now being written. From 1967 to 1973, Johnson served as a consultant to the CIA’s Office of National Estimates. 11-22-04 http://hnn.us/articles/8438.html
Steve Coll ends his important book on Afghanistan — Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001–by quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: “What an unlucky country.” Americans might find this a convenient way to ignore what their government did in Afghanistan between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal, incompetent, secret operations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, frequently manipulated by the military intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, caused the catastrophic devastation of this poor country. On the evidence contained in Coll’s book Ghost Wars, neither the Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been abolished.
It should by now be generally accepted that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 was deliberately provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly confirmed Gates’s assertion. “According to the official version of history,” Brzezinski said, “CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”
Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied:
Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’
Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?”
Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Even though the demise of the Soviet Union owes more to Mikhail Gorbachev than to Afghanistan’s partisans, Brzezinski certainly helped produce “agitated Muslims,” and the consequences have been obvious ever since. Carter, Brzezinski and their successors in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Colin Powell, all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. After all, al-Qaida was an organization they helped create and arm.
You are spot on, Aamir Sain!
Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad By SABRINA TAVERNISE and WAQAR GILLANI Published: February 27, 2010 A version of this article appeared in print on February 28, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Such jihadi groups had become part of mainstream society in Pakistan in the 1980s, when the United States was financing Islamic radicals fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and when an American-supported Pakistani general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, empowered hard-line mullahs and injected Islam into school textbooks.
By the 1990s, recruiters for jihad in Kashmir were holding rallies on public university campuses. After 2001, Lashkar was driven underground, but it continues to operate through a charity wing. American, Indian and Pakistani officials say it carried out the attacks on hotels and other landmarks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
It is the lower middle class in Pakistan that is most vulnerable to radicalization, according to Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. They consume virulently anti-American media. They are recruited aggressively by Islamic student groups in public universities, which are attended almost exclusively by lower- and middle-class youth.
“They’re politically conscious, but it’s not mature,” Mr. Rana said. “They have big problems, but when they try to solve them, they get confused.”
Mr. Kundi threw himself into Lashkar’s activities, working summers at an eye clinic in Kashmir, his friend Muhammad said. He held Koran-reading sessions. He developed a close relationship with the group’s spiritual leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Mr. Kundi was a skilled recruiter, even winning over a secular classmate whose family lived in Canada.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/asia/28youth.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/asia/28youth.html?pagewanted=2&partner=rss&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/asia/28youth.html?pagewanted=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/asia/28youth.html?pagewanted=4&partner=rss&emc=rss
Pakistan wipes out half of Quetta Shura Monday, March 01, 2010 By Amir Mir
http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=27544
LAHORE: In a major policy shift, the powerful Pakistani establishment seems to have decided to abandon the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan by agreeing to launch a massive crackdown against their command-and-control structure, which has already led to the arrest of nine of the 18 key members of the Mullah Omar-led Quetta Shura from different parts of Pakistan, and that too within a short span of two months.
According to well-informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad, the decision-makers in the powerful Pakistani establishment seem to have concluded in view of the ever-growing nexus between the Pakistani and the Afghan Taliban that they are now one and the same and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) could no more be treated as two separate Jihadi entities. Therefore, the establishment is believed to have revised its previous strategic assessment of the two Taliban groups, which have a common mentor (Mullah Mohammad Omar) and decided to proceed against the Afghan Taliban as well, considering them a greater threat for Pakistan now than in the past.
Diplomatic circles pointed out that the arrest of the Afghan Taliban leaders have come at a crucial juncture when the US-led allied forces are busy in launching a massive military offensive against the Afghan Taliban forces in the Marjah town of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, after President Obama’s new-year public declaration to kill or capture the top fugitive leaders of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda, both inAfghanistan and Pakistan. Since the beginning of February 2010, the Pakistan authorities have captured seven senior members of the Taliban Shura, including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy of Mullah Omar, and four Taliban shadow governors of Afghan provinces. These high-profile arrests, combined with the ongoing US-led military offensive in Helmand and the unending spate of drone attacks in Pakistani tribal areas, have adversely dented the command and control structure of the Taliban, thereby affecting its military might in Afghanistan.
However, well informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad maintain that American pressure alone could not have made Pakistan to act against the Taliban network. They claim the influence of the Saudi royal family, coupled with the US pressure, eventually compelled the Pakistani intelligence establishment to finally abandon the Afghan Taliban, who were earlier being protected as a strategic asset to be used in Pakistan’s favour after the exit of the allied forces from Afghanistan. These circles further claim that the Pakistan intelligence establishment was in fact persuaded to cooperate with the Americans by Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, the younger half-brother of King Abdullah. Being the chief of General Intelligence Presidency, which is the Saudi Arabian intelligence service, Muqrin reportedly conducted shuttle diplomacy between the key civil and military leadership of the two important Muslim countries, finally making Pakistan to proceed against the leadership of the Afghan Taliban.
Subsequently, in a swoop carried out against the well-entrenched network of the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani authorities first arrested Mullah Mir Muhammad, the shadow governor of Baghlan province, who was detained from Faisalabad on January 26, 2010. The next arrest was that of Mullah Abdul Salam, the shadow governor of Kunduz province, who was nabbed a few days later. The third arrest was that of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was nabbed on February 11, 2010 from the premises of a Sunni-Deobandi-run religious seminary in Karachi. The seminary, Khudamul Quran, is located 10 to 25 kms from the Toll Plaza on the Super Highway in the jurisdiction of the Lonikot police station in Hyderabad district.
The significance of Mullah Baradar’s arrest can well be gauged from the fact that he is credited by the Americans for rebuilding the Afghan Taliban into an effective fighting force besides coordinating its military operations against the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan. There are reports that Baradar represented Mullah Omar in all the peace talks with the United States, which were in fact mediated by Saudi Arabia, in the past two years. In a related development, the US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley stated on February 27: “Pakistan’s decisive action against the Afghan Taliban is already showing results and such measures would encourage the extremist militia to seek reconciliation. This is expressly the kind of decisive action that Washington has sought in its strategy from the outset, and that has been the basis upon which the United States has worked with Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Almost a week after Mullah Baradar’s arrest, the Pakistani authorities arrested Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the shadow governor of Nangarhar province on February 20 in Nowshehra. Three other arrested members of Quetta Shura include Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, who used to co-supervise the military affairs of the militia, Mullah Muhammad Hassan, a former foreign minister in the Taliban regime, Mullah Abdul Rauf, the former chief operational commander of the Taliban in northeastern Afghanistan, Mullah Ahmad Jan Akhundzada, the former governor of Zabul province and Mullah Muhammad Younis, an explosives expert who had served as a police chief in Kabul during the Taliban rule. However, the Pakistani authorities have so far only confirmed the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, since he was nabbed during a joint operation carried out by the ISI and the CIA.
The remaining nine members of the Quetta Shura who are still at large are believed to be Mullah Hassan Rehmani, the former governor of Kandahar province in Taliban regime; Hafiz Abdul Majeed, the former chief of the Afghan Intelligence and the surge commander of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan; Amir Khan Muttaqi, a former minister in Taliban regime; Agha Jan Mutasim, the Taliban’s head of political affairs; Mullah Abdul Jalil, the head of the Taliban’s shadowy interior ministry, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani and the commander of the Haqqani militant network; Mullah Abdul Latif Mansoor, the commander of the Mansoor network in Paktika and Khost; Mullah Abdur Razaq Akhundzada, the former corps commander for northern Afghanistan; and Abdullah Mutmain, a former minister during the Taliban regime who currently looks after the financial affairs of the extremist militia.
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