The road to Kandahar
by Michael Griffin
[ politics - january 03 ]
The heavily armed fighters who entered Kabul on 13 November were loyal neither to the Northern Alliance, which Massoud had painstakingly nurtured following the Taliban takeover of Kabul, nor to Jamiat-I Islami, the mainly Tajik party led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, whom the UN still recognised as Afghanistan's legitimate president, in spite of a political eclipse that became quite irreversible after the assassination of his nominal deputy. Kabul's new rulers were hard-bitten guerreros from Massoud's native Panjshir, which had filled the levies for the frontlines to the north of the capital, enduring the worst the Taliban could hurl at them. Their first allegiance was to themselves, their valley, the scarred plains of Shomali - and whatever political manifesto his successors chose to attribute to the lips of the martyred leader whose posters snapped above their guns as they entered the city, scattering afghanis as if they were rose petals. But the euphoria of the crowds owed less to their 'liberators'' arrival than the departure of the Taliban, the end of US air strikes and the hiatus that both allowed for the resumption of the rights to sing, shave, flirt and trade freely before the guns opened up yet again. Men and women in Kabul, after all, had been forced to hold their breath for half a decade.
Rabbani, vilified for the cruelty of his time in office and sidelined by the ascendant cult of Massoud, prudently chose to remain in Faizabad, as uncertain of his ground now as Zahir Shah was in Rome. A round of talks in Italy between the Northern Alliance and the former king in late October had centred on the creation of a 120-strong Council for National Unity to rule after the Taliban, an interim government that included members from all five parties in the Alliance's political wing, the United Front (UF), and representatives of Zahir Shah and the Afghan diaspora - but no "moderate Taliban" and only a sprinkling of the Pashtun leaders who had fought alongside the opposition. "The UF is following the vision of my late brother," said Wali Massoud, ambassador for Afghanistan in London. "What he wanted for Afghanistan was to move from these political parties to everything being decided by the people. To go from here towards the shura, to the Loya Jirga, the Unity Council and eventually elections. That was his aim. So if it is necessary that I relinquish my post, or President Rabbani, we must do it." [2]
But, on the face of it, the Unity Council was no more than a conclave of warlords and a dead man's vision no warranty for maintaining peace in the capital¸ particularly when the alliance over which he presided was splitting into parts after the flight of the Taliban. Dostum's Uzbeks and the Tajiks commanded by Mohammed Atta preserved a working relationship at the ramparts of Kunduz, the Taliban's last northern holdout, but this owed more to US bribes than communal tolerance. In Herat, Ismael Khan's Tajiks and the Shia Hizb-I Wahdat, both posing as liberators, growled at each other from checkpoints throughout the city, while 1,000 Hazaras, equipped with machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, advanced on Kabul in a bid to 'protect' its Shia minority. [3] The old faces - and the old vices - were also returning to Jalalabad, which the Taliban vacated without fuss on 14 November. However, after a Jirga that lasted three days, the Nangarhar elders agreed just such a hegemony of old and new that had eluded Pakistan in the early throes of the war and which the UN later failed to pin down. Haji Abdul Qadir, brother of the late Abdul Haq, was reappointed governor, with Haji Zaman Gamsharik again as military commander, but with the surreal addition of Hazrat Ali, a drug lord once aligned with the Taliban, as police chief in the country's second largest opium-growing province. [4] Hazrat Ali was one Darwinian step ahead of his colleagues in the new shura of Nangarhar, a poacher-turned-gamekeeper soon to evolve into an entirely separate, and more cunning, species, the "American warlord".
Rumours that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, exiled boss of Hizb-I Islami, was also back in the race, and vying to take his place in the ISI's post-Taliban affections, were given further credence by the news that four journalists, with Australian television, Reuters, Corriere della Sera and El Mundo, had been robbed and shot dead at his old stamping ground near Sorobi, 35 miles from Kabul, in the Silk Gorge. [5] On the fall of Kabul, Hekmatyar had contacted former commanders, rendered leaderless again by the collapse of the Taliban, and ordered them to rally Hizb veterans and seize his pre-Taliban stronghold at Charasyab in a first step towards again laying siege to the city. [6] Even as Kabulis reveled in the return to smooth chins, western dress, Bollywood films and nights free from aerial attack, the scene was set for a return to the nightmare before last in the days leading up to Ramazan.
The UN that had recognised Rabbani throughout the Taliban era was now powerless to impose conditions on the de facto UF government which, in view of the ex-president's absence from Kabul, appeared to have dispensed with his services altogether and was bent on consolidating the Panjshiri occupation of the capital in defiance of US opinion. But it was more averse to having to insert a peacekeeping force opposed by the UF, however loudly Kabulis cried out for the law and order last seen vanishing in the dust of Taliban's baggage train. Dr Abdallah Abdallah, the former Massoud spokesman now promoted to foreign minister, sent out disturbingly mixed messages. He first welcomed the UN's announcement that it would administer Kabul and send a security force, explaining away the Alliance's capture of the capital as sheer accident, but then denied any reason for one the day after. "After getting rid of the Taliban and the terrorists," he said, "there won't be war and won't be a need for international peacekeeping forces" [7] When 160 US and British special forces flew into Bagram a day later, the advance party for a far larger deployment of several thousand peacekeepers from various nations, Abdallah protested that the government had not been fully consulted and insisted the force be cut back to 15 men. For more than an instant, there was a danger that the guns so recently levelled at the Taliban were now taking a bead on troops in the coalition.
High above the vagaries of Afghan peacemaking - a subject in which President Bush expressed no interest in comparison to the hunt for bin Ladin - US planes continued to batter the Taliban's remaining positions in Kunduz and Kandahar. Reports arrived in Kabul of a mutiny by 200 loyalists of the former Jamiat warlord, Mullah Naqibullah, previously submissive to Mullah Omar, who had wrested control of Kandahar's airport. The ISI, meanwhile, warned of up to 3,000 Taliban and Al Qa'ida fighters crossing the border with the aim of mounting attacks on either US ground forces or Pakistani targets: the military advantages of "strategic depth", a concept long cited by Islamabad as justification for its own adventures in Afghanistan, had not been totally lost on Omar or bin Ladin either. [8] From Kandahar, Pashtun commanders issued chilling threats to the Alliance not to advance their forces into the south, a thought that had never entered its collective head in view of the far superior damage the Taliban could inflict on itself, given sufficient time. After intensive discussions with his commanders, Mullah Omar submitted to their 'advice' on 16 November and agreed to turn over control of his capital to Mullah Naqibullah and Haji Bashir, another pre-Taliban leader, in exchange for his freedom. The plan promised an imminent end to the US bombing and the creation of a Pashtun coalition qualified to negotiate in UN peace talks as equals, but it lasted only till bedtime on 19 November when the Leader of the Faithful, still in Kandahar, experienced a change of heart. "I have had a dream," he told his commanders on waking, "in which I am in charge for as long as I live." [9] The single thought that raced through their minds was quickly stifled by the rigours of pashtunwali.
Mullah Omar's uncharacteristic vacillation was due to pedigree as well as prophecy for he was being stalked by something he feared more than Spectres: royal blood. The Popolzai nobleman Hamid Karzai had slipped into Uruzgan in early October intending to foment an anti-Taliban uprising among his fellow khan in the Durrani tribe, and while he possessed a mere handful of guns, his most powerful weapon was legitimacy. The true details of his quest, probably the only adventure in the war likely to translate to celluloid, may never be known for Karzai was only too conscious as he travelled of spinning a contemporary legend of leadership to pit against those of Massoud and Mullah Omar. One of its most crucial ingredients, if it were to succeed, was that it must seem a wholly Afghan enterprise, free of foreign influence, and that was harder. Karzai had been guarded by an 11-man Special Forces team, 'Texas One Two', since first setting foot in Derawat. When the Taliban surprised his party in early November, his brother was at pains to refute Rumsfeld's tactless boast that US jets had bombed the assaulting force or that Karzai was removed from harm's way by an American helicopter. [10] Nothing would ever have been made public about what truly befell the Popolzai prince were it not for a tragic accident that allowed Texas One Two's leader, Captain Jason Amerine, a rare display of openness about his secret, behind-the-lines operation.
Karzai chose Derawat as his destination because it lay only two hours' drive from Tarin Kot, where Mullah Omar came to manhood, and it was, therefore, a fitting place to mount a challenge to his authority that came to resemble a duel between the two orders of Afghanistan, the customary - and the revolutionary fungus that came to feed upon it. "According to Hamid Karzai, Tarin Kot was the most important city in the psyche of the Taliban," Amerine said later. "It was the heartline of where the Taliban movement began." [11] Texas One Two spent three weeks drilling local Pashtun fighters in the art of US-style combat before the Taliban ambush compelled them to disperse. [12] "The message that he continued to spread was one of 'treat the prisoners well'," Amerine continued. "If we treated them well, they'd be willing to surrender and we'd be able to reintegrate them into society and the country could heal its wounds." This apparent magnanimity swayed the elders in Tarin Kot, then guarded by the lightest of garrisons, to evict the Taliban governor, at which point Karzai moved in his forces, numbering in the low hundreds. But Mullah Omar had already sent a column of 500 men in 80 pickups and trucks, chiefly Arabs from Al Qa'ida, with orders to "slaughter the town, kill the women and children, kill the men, leave them in front of their houses and [..] make an example of Tarin Kot." [13] It was nightfall on the first day of Ramazan when the Taliban convoy arrived on the outskirts, six hours after Karzai's men had made their own appearance
The men of Texas One Two were bidden to break their fast before going to the defence of the town. Almerine summoned Karzai's fighters and set up a firing line on a ridge looking over the main road into Tarin Kot where they waited until dawn. As the first vehicle came in sight, he called in air support. "It was kind of strange," he recalled, "because they just kept coming into the valley and we just kept bombing them." At a crucial point, Karzai's forces panicked and ran home, but they were cajoled back to the ridge and the Arabs, "an extremely motivated force", finally withdrew, leaving the valley strewn with the wreckage of bombed and burning vehicles. US intelligence estimated the Taliban had taken losses of more than 300 men. [14] "That night, all the religious leaders of [..] northern Uruzgan came to speak to Hamid Karzai," Amerine continued. "I was sitting there when they came in and he was very concerned that maybe they'd be speaking against the Americans being there, but they told [him] that, if it hadn't been for our presence, they'd all be dead. So, from then on, they pretty much had positive things to say about the Americans working with Hamid Karzai's forces... From then on, I'd say our relationship was sealed."
A day before the action at Tarin Kot, on 16 November, the US stepped up raids on Kunduz, where it reckoned 3,000 Taliban and Al Qa'ida troops still clung on, against Northern Alliance estimates of 10-20,000. [15] The figures were never made fully clear, but one third was repeatedly said to be of foreign origin, chiefly Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens and Pakistanis, many newly arrived after the call to jihad was raised in the tribal agencies. Billeted in the Takharistan mosque and the Spinzar, Kunduz's main hotel, each day they travelled to the frontline at Khanabad, 10 miles east of the city. The Taliban, Alliance commanders assured, would surrender gladly, given the correct treatment and guarantees of safe passage, but the foreigners, including the men of bin Ladin's Brigade 055, were expected to fight to the bitter end, fearing summary justice and with nowhere else to go. Their status as future prisoners was equally perplexing since they owed allegiance neither to a sovereign state nor a faction in the civil war, but an international organisation committed to terror; they therefore fell through the cracks between the clauses of the Geneva Convention. The gunning down by Al Qa'ida veterans of over 100 would-be Taliban defectors as they attempted to flee the city in the middle of the week reinforced the Afghan's existing prejudices against "foreigners". [16] "They don't care about life," one Alliance soldier said in disbelief, "only death." [17] In spite of this scorn, a superstitious awe seeped into the fighting spirit of the estimated 6,000 Alliance fighters at the frontline, as they weighed the moral enormity of an enemy who was prepared to die in a cause. Dostum and the Alliance's supreme commander, General Mohammed Fahim, protested their every intention of attacking Kunduz at any moment, but preparations somehow were never made. On some mornings, Alliance soldiers slept through the air strikes aimed at softening up Kunduz before their advance. [18]
The lack of courage was not the only setback delaying the Alliance assault on Kunduz; indeed, it was the symptom of a greater political malaise. The largely Pashtun city lay athwart the faultline that divided the Uzbek and Tajik spheres of interest and, once broached, this could only tear the Alliance to ribbons, seeding a new civil war in the north between members of the anti-Taliban opposition. Washington was eager that the city should fall as fast as possible. It would free up Alliance troops to fight its battles to the east and south, while delivering into US hands the supposed treasury of intelligence locked in the minds of the hundreds of Al Qa'ida fighters trapped there. But Kunduz was potentially the jewel in a new necklace of power stretching from Dostum's stronghold at Shiburghan to the fief of General Mohammed Daoud in Taloqan, the cornerstone of an expanded empire in the north. Neither warlord wanted to cast the first stone, preferring to resolve their differences without bloodshed if possible, but neither wanted responsibility for the bloodbath predicted if the Al Qa'ida commanders chose death over surrender.
Mullah Fazil, the most senior Taliban commander in Kunduz and a deputy defence minister, drove out of the city with 600 men in the second week of November determined to secure an armistice and an orderly withdrawal for his men. The negotiations were not easy. Fazil, and his deputy commander, Mullah Dadullah, were war criminals, instigators of the killing of 4-6,000 people in the Taliban conquest of Mazar in 1998, as well as the generals of an encircled foe. Dostum, ever the gentleman, listened attentively over tea and biscuits at Qala-I-Janghi, his 'Fort of War' on the road to Shiburghan. Fazil agreed to surrender Kunduz and his heavy weapons in exchange for a safe conduct for his fighters: the fate of the 2,000 foreigners was for Dostum to decide. Rumsfeld was less reflective: "My preference is that they will either be killed, or taken prisoner." The defence secretary undoubtedly had a war to win, but the truth was that his closest ally, Pakistan, also had up to 1,000 soldiers and agents fighting alongside Al Qa'ida in Kunduz, though this was too galling to raise publicly. On 21 November, the US halted air strikes, ostensibly to allow Mullah Fazil time to keep his side of the bargain, but Alliance commanders reported their astonishment at sighting Pakistani military planes landing by night to rescue their trapped co-nationals. At least five transports and helicopters flew safely in and departed by 24 November, evacuating two brigadiers, all military and intelligence officers seconded to the Taliban war effort, and as many enlisted men as they could fit in. In all likelihood, anyone from Al Qa'ida with enough influence at the ISI - or too dangerous to abandon to US interrogators - also secured a one-way seat to safety. [19]
The bombing of Kunduz and Kandahar ran alongside a campaign to kill as many Taliban and Al Qa'ida leaders as possible. Jalaluddin Haqqani, prospective candidate to head the "moderate Taliban" faction, was victim to the most gruelling persecution. Three satellite-guided bombs hit his family's compound in Wazir Akhbar Khan on the night the Taliban withdrew from Kabul, killing a sister-in-law who was drawing water; on 13 November, another bomb struck a relative's house in Gardez where he was believed to be sleeping; in a third incident, a Haqqani-sponsored mosque and madrassa in Khost were bombed on 16 November, killing 10 worshippers at their Ramazan prayers and 15 students of religion; and six of Haqqani's bodyguards, along with 12 members of the family that hosted him, were killed the following night in an attack on Tosha, in Paktia province. [20] Haqqani was cursed with a talent for tragic survival, but the week was not entirely without trophies. Bin Ladin's security commander, right-hand man and the alleged architect of the embassy bombings, Mohammed Atef the Egyptian, was killed in a bombing raid on 16 November at an undisclosed location near Kabul. [21] Three days later, Dostum reported that Juma Namangani, head of the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan and a close bin Ladin ally, had been mortally wounded in the fighting around Kunduz. [22] But of bin Ladin's whereabouts, not even the ghost of a whisper.
Mullah Fazil's offer to give up failed to materialise by 22 November, sparking a further round of daylight raids by B-52 and Alliance rockets that was met by sustained artillery fire from the still-defiant Taliban. After a second round of negotiations in Mazar, Dostum announced he had reached an "even broader" agreement with Mullah Fazil, under which all forces in Kunduz, including foreigners, would lay down their weapons at Chahar Darreh, a village seven miles from the city. The Taliban contingent, which included seven former governors and numerous senior commanders, would be free either to join the Alliance or return to their homes after being disarmed, but the 2,000 foreign fighters were to be taken away for special questioning. "The Arabs, Pakistani and Chechen mercenaries," said an Alliance spokesman, "will be put before a court." [23] Dostum wanted to transport the foreigners to hangars at Mazar airport, but his US advisors vetoed that proposal on the grounds it might be needed for military operations. Why not use the spacious stables at his citadel at Qala-I-Janghi, they suggested by way of compromise? [24] No UN representative attended this fateful meeting.[25]
The surrender of Kunduz on the weekend of 24-25 November began surprisingly well, with other pockets of Taliban resistance taking advantage of the opportunity to hand in their weapons, but the total fell far short of the Alliance's claim that there had been 15,000 troops in the city. One thousand gave themselves up on Saturday, followed by 450 near Pul-I-Kumri. Dostum allowed the Taloqan commander General Daoud the honour of being the first to enter Kunduz. [26] However, Mullah Fazil may have omitted to tell his Al Qa'ida allies, due to submit to Dostum's forces at an assembly point to the west of the city, that they were to be jailed and interrogated after being disarmed. Weakened by fasting and with night falling quickly, Dostum's men failed to body search all 400 of their prisoners before loading them onto trucks and setting off for Qala-I-Janghi in the dwindling light. In a foretaste of what was to come, one detonated a concealed grenade when the searches resumed the following morning, killing himself and Dostum's chief of police. The prisoners were herded into the stables where, during the course of that night, a further eight blew themselves to pieces, rather than face certain torture and execution at Uzbek hands. Realising the risk still posed by their captives, the guards resolved to bind their hands before submitting them to interrogation, confirming the foreigners' worst fears.
Two CIA agents, Johnny 'Mike' Spann and an Uzbek speaker, known only as 'Dave', had been specifically assigned to Qala-I-Janghi to seek the information that might help run bin Ladin to earth. When Mike and Dave asked the first in a string of eight prisoners what he was doing in Afghanistan, he reportedly replied "we are here to kill you," and lunged at Mike, who shot him and several others. In the melee that followed, foreign prisoners kicked, beat and bit him to death, as Dave shot his way to safety. [27] In other accounts, the prisoner had simply grabbed Spann and blew them both up with a concealed grenade; in either case, Spann was the first American to die in combat during the US war in Afghanistan. [28] The fracas quickly developed into a fully blown firefight after the prisoners broke open one of the fort's many armouries and seized mortar and grenade launchers. Dave called for air cover from US bases in Uzbekistan, but the missile and Spectre attacks only served to drive the mutineers deeper into the mud and timber fabric of Qala-I-Janghi. The fighting continued for four long days, growing in barbarism as Dostum's men, supported by Special Forces and British SAS fighters, first tried conventional firepower to dislodge their enemy, before resorting to dousing their hiding places with flaming oil and freezing water. [29] By 27 November, only three of the 400 men who had entered the fortress were thought still to be alive, one of whom had survived on horsemeat down in the cellars. In the clean-up after the battle, the International Committee of the Red Cross discovered the bodies of 170 foreign Taliban strewn around the fort, many ploughed in two by Dostum's tank tracks, while television audiences watched as Alliance soldiers stripped their clothes and shoes or prised out their fillings. "We are sorry that they were killed," said one fighter, unconvincingly, "because they were Muslims. But you also have to remember that they were terrorists." [30] A further 80 survivors finally emerged from the flooded cellars on 1 December, including a man known to his companions only as Abdul Hamid, but whose passport identified him as John Walker Lindh, aged 20, a Muslim convert from San Francisco. The "American Taliban", as he was swiftly dubbed, had suffered bullet and grenade wounds and had not eaten in a week. Dave and the late Mike Spann had interrogated Lindh minutes before the fighting erupted at Qala-I-Janghi. "He's got to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here," Dave told Spann during a lull in the questioning, "We're just going to leave him, and he's going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life. It's his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us." [31]
The massacre at Qala-I-Janghi could not have come at a worse time for the UF, graphically confirming a not entirely deserved reputation for viciousness that had fouled news reports of its previous spell in power, while failing to acknowledge the roles played in the earlier bloodshed by Pakistan, Hekmatyar and Dostum. Similarly, Washington's refusal to deploy sufficient forces on the ground to ensure a disciplined handover of the Taliban's foreign allies, ostensibly to protect the lives of American soldiers, conveniently absolved it of any direct involvement in the massacre that resulted, while ridding it of the vexing legal problem of what to do with 400 apparently committed - though not convicted - Al Qa'ida fighters. The Pentagon played fast and loose with the Alliance forces, building up their strength with weapons and dollars, while simultaneously castigating their human rights record through the press, even as it reaped the military benefits of their exactions. The atrocities in the Uzbek fort, it was universally inferred, were the fate in store for Kabul if left in Alliance hands, a thesis that faithfully echoed Musharraf's misgivings while portraying him as a caring and impartial spectator of events, which was very wide of the truth.
The Alliance custody of the capital since 13 November, in fact, fell little short of exemplary, considering its inexperience of maintaining security in an urban environment - and the excessive sense of entitlement that snares any rebel army presented with a sudden enemy retreat and a defenceless prize. This behaviour testified both to the soldiers' discipline and their leaders' unusual regard for world opinion, and not only in Kabul where scores of journalists itched to witness the violations they had so fulsomely predicted. The triumvirate that ruled Kabul with apparent unanimity - Yunus Qanuni, Abdallah Abdallah and General Fahim - appeared to share an awareness of how the world of diplomacy turned that was absolutely unique among recent Afghan politicians. Many analysts spent the days after the slaughter at Qala-I-Janghi trying to decide if the uprising had been a plan rather than an accident, an audacious plot to turn the tide of war that Mullah Fazil had hatched as he sipped tea with Dostum in his citadel. More ingenious still, however, was the prospect that Dostum himself had timed the massacre so that it exploded across the world's media on the very day that an 11-man UF delegation touched down in Germany to attend a UN-sponsored conference to determine the composition of the future government of Afghanistan. Whatever the truth of either theory - or neither - the killings at Qala-I-Janghi played straight into US and UN hands.
Yunus Qanuni, the man regarded as the real political power in Kabul, had his first taste of media attention on a tourist barge on the Rhine near the Konigswinter palace outside Bonn. He was a Tajik in his mid-40s, who walked with a cane and more closely resembled the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, than the hirsute mullahs and mujahedin who had spoken for Afghanistan for the previous 22 years of war. Until his meteoric rise in the Taliban twilight, Qanuni was Massoud's sole political advisor; but as the 'caretaker' government's interior minister, he was responsible for security, the issue that was expected to dog the conference until its closure. A week earlier, representatives from 21 donor nations met in Washington with the World Bank to discuss a rapid start to the task of rebuilding Afghanistan, a programme then estimated to cost up to $30 billion. The purpose of the talks in Bonn, which brought together representatives from Zahir Shah and two pro-peace coalitions, known as the Peshawar and Cyprus Groups, was to find an agreement on the shape, composition and strategy of an interim authority to fill the vacuum left by the Taliban and prepare for a Loya Jirga and general elections. "We need to get a transitional authority in the country as soon as possible," said Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for Lakdhar Brahimi, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Afghanistan. "All the parties agree that this is imperative, that speed is of the essence. We can't spend a lot of time on this. It has to be accomplished as soon as possible." [32] The framework for the political transition envisaged by the UN was virtually unchanged from proposals submitted to the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in earlier rounds of peace negotiation. All that was required was for the four groups present at the talks to whittle a shortlist of 150 candidates down to the 29 seats available in the cabinet, a comparatively easy task by Afghan standards even in Ramazan, that was achieved in a marathon 10-hour discussion on the final night of talks.
What had changed was the nature of the peacekeeping effort. It would take the UN months to obtain sufficient manpower from members to pose a credible military deterrent and it was reluctant to deploy 'Blue Helmets' without a genuine ceasefire agreement lest they be drawn into the fighting as combatants. A multinational force with a UN mandate was a second possibility, but the organisation's preference was for an all-Afghan force, if it were strong enough to defeat any challenge to its authority and sufficiently neutral to reassure ex-Taliban Pashtuns, whom the UN sought to attract into a new government. Security in Kabul remained stable, but Alliance authority stretched no more than 20 miles to the south, 35 miles in the east and 65 miles in the north and west, while local warlords and elders had elsewhere carved the country into more than 20 fractious fiefdoms. [33] With the capital undeniably in his pocket, Qanuni categorically rejected a UN proposal to deploy international peacekeepers. "We prefer that security is looked after by the Afghan security forces, composed of different ethnic groups and different parties," he said on 28 November, reiterating this rejection three times more in the face of repeated questioning. But his assertion was qualified a day later when the UF foreign minister, Dr Abdullah, told CNN: "Our preference would be for an Afghan force, composed of all ethnic groups. But if we have to go for a multi-national force, we would consider it positively ... we are flexible in that regard." Abdullah's counsel seemed to have prevailed the following day when Qanuni told a second press conference that the UF would no longer "oppose the deployment of foreign troops in Afghanistan". He blamed his earlier rejections on an error in translation, and called for a new interpreter.
Hamid Karzai, a candidate for the post of chairman in the interim administration, did not go to Bonn, though he called in a message by satellite phone from Uruzgan in which he described the talks as the "path to salvation". After the battle in Tarin Kot, Texas One Two escorted his fighters, now numbering around 600 men, to a village to the west of Kandahar called De Maymand, though it may well have been the village of Maiwand from whose obscurity Mullah Omar had broken free to lay the foundations of the Taliban movement in 1994. Finding the road clear, they pressed on to Seyyed Mohammed Kalay, 30 miles east of Omar's capital, as Karzai pummeled the keys on his phone with appeals to local commanders to join the Pashtun rebellion. [34] His legend was burnishing nicely and, besides, he had nothing to fear in Germany where the State Department was assiduously protecting his interests. "The Bonn conference was only for show," said one of the Pashtun delegates, Haji Attaullah, two weeks later, "the decisions had been made before." [35] Ex-president Rabbani, the UN's hangnail, was warned by both the US and Massoud's new class of tyros to bow out quietly and he never showed his face at the conference, which he described later as the "humiliation of the nation". [36] Certainly, the avalanche of reconstruction funds that depended upon the success of the Bonn talks were instrumental in molding their outcome, which reflected the UN priorities of a broad-based administration, secured by an international peacekeeping force, with a symbolic role reserved for the former king. More shocking, in view of Afghan sensitivity to foreign involvement and the make-or-break nature of the conference, was the blatant manipulation of the final list of members in the interim government, due to rule for six months. Abdul Sattar Sirat, an Uzbek and former justice minister until 1973 when he joined Zahir Shah in exile, was unanimous choice for chairman by the king's delegation and his appointment seemed a certainty after a deal with the UF that guaranteed its continued occupation of the defence, interior and foreign affairs ministries. But he was unexpectedly pipped at the post. "Members of a group representing the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, voted overwhelmingly to choose Abdul Sattar Sirat as head of the new government," complained Haji Attaullah. "Mr. Karzai, who has close ties to the king, received no votes. But all the delegates understood that the Americans wanted Mr Karzai. So, on 5 December, they finally chose him." A US diplomat at Bonn went further when he did not deny that Washington had "overruled" the appointment of Sirat. With Karzai's tenure assured, a doubt nagged as to whether the UN-approved and British-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), based around the hundred or so men still marooned at Bagram, were the core of a genuine peacekeeping force, or the palace guard of a new Pashtun leader with no domestic constituency, imposed on the country against the wishes of the UF and former Taliban equally.
On the day Kunduz fell to the Northern Alliance, Chinook helicopters ferried the first units of an eventual deployment of 1,200 Marines from the Arabian Sea to an airstrip 55 miles southwest of Kandahar in the first significant commitment of US ground forces to the Afghan war. The Pentagon said the purpose of Operation Swift Freedom, as it was named, was to force the Taliban to surrender their capital and to hunt down more vigorously bin-Laden and his network, but other sources said the dwindling supply of guided bombs and "troubles with Afghan tribal leaders" were major determining factors. [37] The operation centred on Dolangi, a rudimentary airstrip in the desert once used for falconry trips by an unidentified wealthy Saudi, which bin Ladin had since renovated for his own purposes. [38] As engineers set about upgrading the isolated airfield to accommodate 10 C-130 cargo flights a day, F-14s shot up a Taliban attack convoy of 15 tanks and troop transports and Marines in Humvees patrolled the vicinity in circles of ever widening radius. Camp Rhino was to evolve into something more than a forward base for the projection of US strength into the southern mountains where Al Qa'ida forces were then thought to be hiding. It was also designed to function as a high-security detention camp for captured Taliban and Al Qa'ida fighters, whose numbers would soar to 7,000 men by the end of December. [39] In the meantime, the sole and precious prisoner in the custody of the Marines battalion at Dolangi was the American, John Walker Lindh.
With the Taliban in disarray outside its last provincial outposts of Kandahar, Helmand and southern Uruzgan, the Pentagon was free to focus on the hunt for bin Ladin. His last public sighting was on 10 November in Jalalabad where he addressed a throng of 1,000 local leaders at the Saudi-funded Institute of Islamic Studies, distributing blessings and gifts of cash to the clan heads, in envelopes of $300 to $10,000, depending on the size of their tribal constituencies. Two days later, visibly nervous in spite of a 60-strong armed guard, he was seen at night driving east in a Toyota Corolla among a column of several hundred cars and military vehicles. [40] His true destination lay 25 miles southeast of Jalalabad in the Tora Bora massif on the Pakistani border where a complex of caves, bunkers and tunnels had been dug out of the limestone in the Soviet war as a mujahedin refuge and supplies store. Taken over by bin Ladin in the 1990s, he paid local workers up of $100 a day to renovate and elaborate the subterranean labyrinth until it was spacious enough to house up to 2,000 fighters and provide them with heat, light, sanitation and food. [41] Tora Bora and other known Al Qa'ida facilities had been bombed repeatedly since the outbreak of war to prevent them being used by the network to regroup, but the raids intensified after 16 November when Hazrat Ali, the reformed drug baron who had taken over policing Jalalabad, told his US liaison that bin Ladin had been seen on horseback near Malewa, a village close to Tora Bora.
The siege of Tora Bora raged on for four inconclusive weeks, its ferocity mounting incrementally as the 1,000 Al Qa'ida fighters allegedly trapped inside the mountain shelters withstood the Pentagon's heaviest conventional weapons, including laser-guided 5,000lb 'bunker buster' bombs developed for penetrating Iraqi command centres deep underground during the Gulf War. Unlike Kandahar, where Mullah Omar vowed never to surrender even as thousands of his subjects continued to flee the bombing, the slopes of Tora Bora were too remote to offer much risk of civilian causalties and, therefore, constituted fair game for a no-holds-barred assault. The Pentagon was desperately seeking an endgame by now, both to punish bin Ladin for the carnage of 11 September but, more urgently, to eliminate the possibility that he may have procured the technology for building primitive nuclear or biological weapons, as was suggestively indicated by the hundreds of incriminating documents, computer discs and plans uncovered in former Al Qa'ida safe houses in Kabul or at other locations. The quintupling to $25 million of the reward issued in 1998 for information leading to his capture had failed to elicit results, a sign of either the reverence in which bin Ladin was genuinely held - or the fear of initiating a Cain-like vendetta that would pursue the informant's every relative from generation to generation throughout eternity. But Pentagon thinking about how best to capture Tora Bora demonstrated a naïve faith in the relationship that had evolved between Special Forces units and their Afghan allies; it had worked efficiently enough with Uzbeks and Tajiks in the north, but that did not make it a reliable template for joint operations with Pashtuns, whose feelings about their former Taliban overlords - or their Arab friends - were both more ambiguous and more subtle.
With insufficient US troops on the ground for the job, CENTCOM and the CIA turned to Jalalabad's new commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman Gamsharik, paying them "several hundred thousand dollars" each, and over $1 million in $100 bills to recruit a force of 2,500 fighters to assault the Tora Bora complex. Lesser commanders received $30,000 to rent four-wheel-drive vehicles and buy supplies, according to an Afghan who handled the money. [42] Attempts by Gamsharik to negotiate the surrender of what was now calculated to be a force of 2,000 Chechen and Arab fighters at Tora Bora turned to dust on 29 November, but he had already achieved a good grasp of the new rhetoric. "I have always hated terrorism and will continue to hate it till the day I die," he told a journalist. "I also hate the prospect of war." [43] It remained to be seen, of course, whether the most wanted man of modern times would have so widely advertised his journey to a craggy cul-de-sac if he ever had any real intention of staying there.
Karzai's mission made quicker progress after 1 December when the BBC began a series of increasingly upbeat reports from Bonn which culminated in the announcement that the UF had finally agreed to cede power to the Popolzai, with the blessing of the former king. Publicly, Mullah Omar's defiance was unaffected, but he carefully opened back-channel contacts with the chairman-elect through an unidentified aide, a member of Karzai's clan. [44] To the west, a US-backed force led by Karzai's Quetta-based ally, the former Kandahar governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, was battling Al Qa'ida fighters at the airport and had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a suicide bomber. Meanwhile, former comrades in Jamiat-I-Islami telephoned Kandahar's pre-Taliban military commander, Mullah Naqibullah, with an invitation to return to the fold in exchange for a return to high office. Naqibullah had lived quietly at home in Arghandab since surrendering the city to the Taliban in October 1994. Under the combined pressure of two months of air attacks and an imminent shuffling of power at the top, Taliban ministers were quietly ebbing away. The first was Mullah Khaksar, the deputy interior minister, who remained in Kabul after it fell to the Alliance and then surprised his former colleagues with the news that he had all along been a spy for Massoud and the CIA. [45] By 3 December, 12 senior officials, including a deputy foreign minister, two former governors, a former education minister and the Taliban envoy to the UN, Mullah Hakim Mujahid, had escaped to North West Frontier Province while, in Chaman, Justice Minister Nuruddin Turabi said he was prepared to capitulate with another 20 ministers, shura members and commanders. [46]
Karzai denied any direct contact with Mullah Omar during his clandestine tour of the south, which had now lasted six weeks. If true, it was a uncharacteristic oversight for a future Afghan leader, particularly in the light of their shared backgrounds in Uruzgan, Karzai's inital empathy with the Taliban and their interlaced careers as the playthings of foreign powers, one in the ascendant now as the other slid down into the dark. Their positions could easily have been reversed, even at this late stage, as both were to discover as Karzai's objective drew near. After leaving Seyyed Mohammed Kalay, Texas One Two encountered sustained resistance at a bridge over the Arghandab river, which pinned the party down for two days despite continuous US air strikes. By the morning of 5 December, they finally cleared the bridge and moved to a nearby hill overlooking a wadi where Karzai was due to receive the formal surrender of a group of local Taliban. As the Bonn delegates prepared to read out the names of the members in the new interim administration, Texas One Two was hit by a satellite-guided bomb weighing 2,000lb, which killed three of the team and five of its Afghan allies, wounding 40 more, including its leader, Captain Amerine. Still at the foot of the hill, Karzai sufferered only minor cuts from a falling mirror. [47] The killing of Amerine's comrades by friendly fire, rather than in the heat of the battles they had fought with Taliban forces, was why the Texas team leader received permission to recount his unit's tale of courage.
Whether the US attack influenced Karzai's judgement or not, his first decision as prime minister-elect was to announce a general amnesty. "Let there be no revenge and no vendetta," he said almost regally. [48] Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban spokesman in Islamabad, sought to clarify the offer further, insofar as it concerned Mullah Omar. "His life will be saved and he will be allowed to live with dignity. He is a mujahid, he has worked for the people of Afghanistan and is not guilty." [49] When pressed to explain what the Taliban leader should do to qualify for amnesty, Karzai said that he must "completely distance himself from foreign terrorists." Karzai's first, well-meaning foray into the tangled world of Afghan diplomacy brought a swift tug on the leash from Rumsfeld. "I have not seen or heard anything that would suggest anyone is negotiating anything that would be contrary to what our interests are," he said. [50] Even if Karzai's offer were genuine, Mullah Omar surmised, America would never permit it to be honoured.
Before the supreme leader of the Taliban fled Kandahar on 7 December, he inserted a codicil into the last will and testament of the movement he had led for seven years. It said that the city that houses the robe of the Prophet Mohammed would revert to the same state of strife that had plagued it when the followers of Mullah Mohammed Omar emerged from the wilderness to impose peace and restore the law, a jurisdiction that swelled to include 90 per cent of Afghanistan until the events of 11 September turned the tide. In a considered parting shot at Karzai, a man of pedigree but with no prophetic power, he elected to surrender his capital to Mullah Naqibullah, one of three warlords who had fought over its spoils until the Taliban delivered Kandahar from violence in 1994. This guaranteed a spontaneous return to the state of armed rivalry Naqibullah had historically entertained against ex-governor Gul Agha Shirzai, still fighting to capture Kandahar airport with US air support. Within 24 hours of Omar's agreement to surrender, the two hostile camps seized the Taliban's tanks and vehicles, four of Gul Agha's men had been killed in street clashes and Mullah Naqibullah was once again under siege in Kandahar's bombed-out military headquarters. "Hamid Karzai [..] has made a very, very wrong decision in Kandahar by himself," complained Gul Agha's spokesman. "He gave equal rights to Mullah Naqibullah, which everybody opposes. It is not good enough for people to throw away their Taliban turbans and put on Naqibullah turbans. We cannot leave the city in the hands of the same people." [51] Amid the ensuing chaos, Mullah Omar quietly made his excuses and left.
Further north, the battle for Tora Bora was gathering pace, spurred by the recurrent sightings of bin Ladin in the vicinity, usually by commanders in the pay of Hazrat Ali, closest to the Pentagon of the three commanders who brought their fighters to the White Mountains. Ali had developed a shrewd appreciation of the west's obsession with bin Ladin, letting slip hints throughout the fighting that whetted the appetite for the chase or a headline, but never led further, usually, he explained, because of the greed and treachery of the soldiers hired by his rivals. Ali and Haji Zaman Gamsharik's men were at loggerheads throughout the operation, openly pulling guns on each other at the slightest suggestion that there had been some infringement of the other's territory. "It is a competition among rivals," conceded one of Gamsharik's commanders. "This is what Afghanistan is. We kill each other." [52] When the mainly Arab and Chechen fighters who clung so tenaciously to the heights throughout four weeks of punishing bombardment finally gave up on 17 December, only 19 ragged men stepped shamefacedly into the TV lights, 10 Arabs and nine Afghans. The US had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a military operation that snared a total of 54 of the reported 1,000 Al Qa'ida loyalists inside the Tora Bora fortress, and there was not a senior commander among them, let alone bin Ladin. [53]
But another reason for the abiding belief that bin Ladin was in the area was the sheer resilience of Al Qa'ida's loyalists, hemmed into the Agam and Wazir valleys, with Afghan troops and US special forces in front and the snow-capped peaks towering behind. While B-52s dropped 'bunker busters' to collapse their tunnels, Afghans used tanks and artillery to pound the enemy positions in the foothills, gradually driving them higher up the slopes to Tora Bora, a redoubt of increasingly lavish amenities according to newspaper graphics that portrayed it as a lair worthy of a James Bond villain. An effort to induce them to surrender at the end of four days of carpet-bombing came to nothing, according to a spokesman for Ali's chief rival at Tora Bora, Haji Zaman Gamsharik. "They said 'we want martyrdom, we will succeed'. They won't accept." [54] It was just such a message that two manhunters seeking to preserve a profitable monopoly could be expected to pass on from their prospective victim to a frustrated, but wealthy, paymaster. "The Americans poured money in their pockets," said the Jalalabad mayor, Engineer Ghafar, two months after the attacks petered out, "but it was not a real war. They were just doing these things for the money." [55]
And it wasn't even a local business. Ali and Gamsharik were US-backed interlopers from the plains, while the surrounding mountain villagers were indebted to bin Ladin for his generosity during the building of Tora Bora: after bombing errors killed 170 civilians in Talkhel, Balut and Agam in early December, they were scarcely minded to shift their allegiances unless they were compensated very well. [56] As the two warlords attacked Tora Bora from the north, local leaders arranged for mule trains and guides to escort Al Qa'ida fighters eastwards through the passes to the safety of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. Between 28 November to 12 December, around 600 of bin Ladin's men escaped, including entire families, at rates of $100 to $1,000 per head, depending on seniority. "Our main responsibility was getting people across the Kabul river to Laipur," said Malik Habib Gul, an elder in Upper Pachir village. "To do this, we had to cross the main road, but there was no one guarding it. To the south, [in the direction of Parachinar], only walkers, mostly young fighters, crossed. The snow was deep and the climb was difficult." Some of Ali's commanders were undoubtedly engaged in similar transactions. Ilya Khel, one of them, was given $5,000 and a satellite phone to interdict the paths east out of Tora Bora, but the Arabs paid him more to let them pass. [57]
Sightings of bin Ladin came almost daily even as his militants slipped away from the base. "I trust them like my mother or father," Ali said of sources who claimed to have seen the Saudi galloping by moonlight on 25 November, a lean silhouette seated high in the saddle. [58] A week later, he was spotted riding back from Malewa, accompanied by four bodyguards, while another commander said he had picked up a radio signal from Kandahar that absolutely confirmed his presence in Tora Bora. "How is the Sheikh?", the voice asked, and was told: "The Sheikh is fine." [59] "None of the three [sightings] by themselves is particularly convincing," commented a Pentagon official, "but all three coming together might mean something." [60] But the most reliable information on bin Ladin's movements would only emerge ten days later when the last defenders of Tora Bora eventually capitulated on 17 December. A group of Al Qa'ida prisoners from Yemen, bin Ladin's ancestral home, admitted they had seen their leader only once since entering the complex a month earlier, and that was on the "11th day of Ramazan" - 27 November, or fully six days before the Afghans launched their assault. They had drunk green tea together as bin Ladin exorted them to "hold your positions firm and be ready for martyrdom". Then he melted away into the pine forests. [61]This version of events confirmed a statement by Abu Jaffar, a senior Al Qa'ida member captured early in the battle after stepping on a land mine, who said that bin Ladin had fled to Pakistan in the first days of December, though he had later sent a son back to Tora Bora to command in his stead. [62]The constant sightings and the concentration of forces may well have been a ruse, however, ruthless in its disregard for the lives of Al Qa'ida personnel, but no less effective for that. "I think Tora Bora will prove to have been a strategic deception by Al Qa'ida," said retired US army general, Wesley K Clark. [63]
By now, a new apparition of bin Ladin had arisen to puzzle and taunt in the guise of a 60-minute 'home movie' uncovered in Jalalabad in November, whose release was delayed until 13 December to allow for proper authentication. Shot in mid-November, the amateur recording showed an affable bin Ladin and a taciturn Mohammed Atef at a dinner to honour a visit to Kandahar by Khaled Al-Harbi, a veteran of the Soviet war who had fought for Al Qa'ida in Bosnia and lost both legs in Chechnya. [64] Their obsequious visitor is clearly prostrated by the honour of conversing with "the Sheikh", lavishing praise and apologising for wasting his time, but bin Ladin is equally avid for news from home, particularly Al-Harbi's overly glowing accounts of the reactions to 11 September of some of Saudi Arabia's leading religious scholars. Indeed, bin Ladin's need for the moral approval of his peers and superiors in the dissident spiritual heirarchy of the kingdom is another telling feature of a video, whose verbal indiscretions, informal style and real-time presentation are so at variance with his previous filmic output one can only conclude that the cassette was intended for the Al Qa'ida leader's personal library, or as a souvenir for Al-Harbi, but never for outside consumption. Al-Harbi relates how he left the kingdom shortly after 11 September and was smuggled into Afghanistan by a member of Iran's religious police. After a brief exchange of news and Koranic verses, bin Ladin swiftly, and without being asked, interjects to reveal the innermost secrets behind what occurred that September morning.
"We sat down to calculate the amount of losses within the enemy and we expected the number to be those inside the plane, and for the World Trade Centre towers, the number of people that the plane would actually hit. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all, because of my expertise in this profession and this business. I said that the fuel on the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area the plane hit, and all the floors above it. This is all we had hoped for." Bin Ladin describes the "brothers"' mounting excitement as they listened to the radio on 11 September, alongside their chief and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. "That day the congratulations were coming on the phone non-stop. The mother was receiving phone calls continuously." After a further exchange of Koranic verses and historic parallels ("I'm sorry to speak in your presence," murmurs Al-Harbi, "but it is just thoughts, just thoughts"), a second segment begins in which the two Saudis stray into the wondrous terrain of vision and premonition. Bin Ladin recollects the dream of his close companion, Mohammed Atef, dead in a US bombing raid by the time this tape was screened. "He told me a year ago: 'I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!' He said: 'So I wondered if that was a soccer game or a pilot game? Our players were pilots.'" Bin Ladin then turns his attention to Mohammed Atef, "leader of the group", confirming that the majority of the suicide crews were not even aware of their objective, as many analysts suspected. "The brothers who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a maryrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America, but they didn't know anything about the operation. Not even a letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes. Those who were trained to fly didn't know the others." [65]
Washington thought long and hard about releasing the tape, before reaching the verdict that any further trauma caused to the relatives of victims of the 11 September attacks was justified by the renewed vigour bin Ladin's 'confession' would bring to the US-led coalition, and its continuing assault on Tora Bora. In a timely echo of the man last seen marvelling at the success of his endeavours in the video, bin Ladin's voice was picked up on short-wave radio, issuing orders to his men in the icy caverns of Tora Bora - though the Pentagon later discounted this testimony to his continuing presence as a cassette recording, designed to perpetuate the fiction that concentrating US firepower on the mountains would yield the ultimate prize. [66]Two days later, the Pentagon called off the attack on Tora Bora, launching an exhaustive search of the complex, even as the Stars and Stripes was raised over the US Embassy in Wazir Akhbar Khan for the first time since 1989.
Fresh from his tribulations in Kandahar, Hamid Karzai flew to Bagram just after midnight on 13 December, as the first snowflakes fell, to hold talks with General Fahim, ex-president Rabbani and the UN Special Envoy Francesc Vendrell in the Argh, while receiving visitors from France, Germany and Italy. A day earlier, Britain agreed to commit 1,500 men to an international peacekeeping force restricted to patrolling Kabul, headed by Major-General John McColl, with the lead elements due to arrive in the run-up to Karzai's inauguration as chairman of the six-month interim administration on 22 December. Rumsfeld, who personally called on Karzai and US forces at Bagram on 15 December, said he thought the maximum strength of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) should be in the range of 3,000-5,000 men, but the US was unenthusiastic about taking part while military operations continued elsewhere in the country. Further south, a company of US marines, accompanied by weapons disposal specialists, swept out of Camp Rhino on 14 December to establish a new operational hub at Kandahar airport, where even the toilets were said to have been booby-trapped by the evicted pro-Taliban garrison. [67]The marines were joined by an eight-man team from the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Unit, on orders to question detainees and thwart future terrorist attacks. Not many miles away, nine Al Qa'ida fighters, convalescing in hospital from injuries received before Kandahar fell, responded to all requests to surrender with threats to detonate grenades if anyone tried to enter their hideout in a second-floor ward. [68]
The growing confusion between the military and peacekeeping roles of the foreign powers engaged in Afghanistan - as well as the trustworthiness of their allies on the ground - came into deadly focus on 21 December when a convoy of 14 vehicles was repeatedly attacked by Spectre gunships and US Navy jets in Karezgay, 24 miles west of Khost. The Pentagon was fully satisfied that the convoy's passengers were members of the Taliban and Al Qa'ida 'leadership', fleeing along a back road when they were spotted by US pilots one hour after dusk When the aircraft turned back to base following a six-hour assault, the 65 dead bodies left behind were quickly recognised as tribal elders and commanders from Khost, who were to have been the personal guests of Hamid Karzai at his inauguration in Kabul the next morning. Two days after the incident, local sources claimed the air strike was ordered as a result of information supplied by a rival warlord in the province, Bacha Khan, who went on to lead the US-backed Afghan forces fighting to winkle Al Qa'ida remnants out from the mountains in the southeast. [69]There was much that was suspicious about the killings, and they would poison both US and Karzai's relations with the Pashtun of Paktia for months.
The convoy was heading for the provincial capital, Gardez, when it was forced to make a diversion to avoid a roadblock erected by the alleged supporters of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the influential warlord from Khost and Mullah Omar's former head of southern military command. Haqqani, it would transpire, was the only high-ranking Taliban leader to command district loyalty both before and after the movement's five-year reign and, though on the run from US forces, he continued to operate the levers of local political power through his surrogates on the Khost shura, including his brother Mohammed Ibrahim, who was among those killed when the convoy was attacked. [70] After the fall of the Taliban in Khost and Gardez, shura leaders in both cities backed calls for the return of ex-king Zahir Shah, a rallying figure for the Pashtun in the aftermath of Taliban rule and a vital adornment of the incoming Karzai administration, though persona non grata with Northern Alliance leaders.
The acceptance of Karzai's invitation by Pashtun leaders, once loyal to Haqqani, was indicative of a successful back-channel compromise over the future governance of Khost and Gardez and, perhaps, even a personal amnesty for Haqqani himself; despite the Pentagon's express intent to eliminate Haqqani, he remained supreme authority in Paktia, Paktika and Ghazni, and was more useful to the new government as a friend, rather than a martyr. The presence of Haqqani's brother among the convoy's warlords similarly argued against the account that it had been deflected from its path by Haqqani's own supporters. But Bacha Khan, the rising 'American warlord' in Khost, envisioned a new fiefdom in 'Greater Paktia' to match those of Dostum and Ismael Khan in the north. Enjoying close links with the Northern Alliance; each had as much as the other to gain were Haqqani's henchmen in Khost and Gardez, former Taliban stalwarts all, to meet an 'accidental' death as the victims of US fire. To label them as the 'leadership' was, after all, only a little lie, given Haqqani's links with Al Qa'ida, even if Karzai currently regarded them as vital partners in the search for a political and military settlement in the southeast. All it took was a phone call. The question facing the Pentagon was not how much it knew about the delicate diplomacy taking place thousands of feet below its planes, but how much it cared to know.
Karzai faced the prospect of assassination every moment he spent in Kabul, whether from Tajik, Uzbek or Pashtun was immaterial. Nevertheless, a rare reticence by the grizzled warlords and a genuine curiosity to see what Karzai's new order might bring in terms of power, patronage and money lured all but Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to Kabul to witness the inauguration ceremony in an interior ministry dominated by portraits of Massoud, who had been an enemy to so many of them. Even Dostum, who had threatened to boycott the government the day after it was announced in Bonn, thought it wiser to attend, taking his seat alongside Rabbani and an empty chair, filled with flowers, that was reserved for Massoud. He was later rewarded with the post of deputy defence minister in recognition of his "nuisance value", though he never again visited his office in Kabul. [71] Some 2,000 tribal leaders and international representatives, including coalition commander General Tommy Franks, jostled to get past the metal detectors and into the hall, while 40 Royal Marines patrolled outside, despite the absence of any official agreement with Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni on their status. Ismael Khan from Herat had also voiced objections to the new government but, recognising that the job of warlord was possibly neither dynastic nor long-term in the changed dispensation, he consented to his son's appointment as minister of labour and social affairs. But he still made his entrance an hour late, just as Karzai was about to swear the oath. Karzai interrupted his speech to hail Khan from the podium: "My brother!" [72] The ceremony ended with Rabbani signing a transfer of authority "certificate", marking the first peaceful handover of power in Afghanistan since 1973. In view of that history - and amid such company - how long could it be expected to last?
The inauguration of the new government marked the conclusion of one of the White House war objectives, the ouster and replacement of the Taliban as rulers of Afghanistan. But it was making far less progress in its priority goal of killing or capturing the Al Qa'ida and Taliban leaders, most of whom had escaped the military onslaught. Only six of the top 30 Al Qa'ida senior commanders on a US government list were confirmed as dead by mid-December, leaving at large 20 of the men who helped carry out the 11 September attacks. [73] For each of the 445 Al Qa'ida and Taliban fighters in US captivity in Kandahar, Bagram or on vessels in the Arabian Sea, dozens more had slipped across the border into Pakistan and Iran, or melted away into the hills. [74] 'Processing' the additional 7,000 Taliban and Al Qa'ida fighters held by Afghan commanders presented US intelligence with insuperable problems, given the shortage of trained personnel with language skills - and the absolutely desperate need for hard information that might lead to bin Ladin or prevent attacks on the US with weapons of mass destruction that were considered imminent on a daily basis. [75] US authorities had a special interest in questioning 150 Al Qa'ida fighters, taken into custody by Pakistani troops during the battle for Tora Bora, in the hope they would provide clues to bin Ladin's location. On the day Karzai was inaugurated, Musharraf expressed his conviction that bin Ladin had died at Tora Bora but, one week later, General Fahim, Afghanistan's new defence minister, said the Saudi was in Peshawar and the deputy intelligence chief in Kabul, Abdullah Tawheedi, named Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the Jalalabad commander who prosecuted the US assault on Tora Bora, as the man who had arranged his escape. The air was thick with accusations and denial. [76] As for the Taliban leadership, Mullah Omar was reported by Haji Gulalai, the new head of intelligence in Kandahar, to have taken refuge with 500 men at a former Al Qa'ida base near Baghran, in Helmand, a "mountainous region with many caves", 100 miles northwest of the the city. Gulalai expressed remarkably little interest in running him to ground, in spite of the $25 million reward on his head, prompting one US official to wonder if Afghans could possibly conceive of how much such a huge sum might buy. [77] Other leading figures in the movement, according to Mullah Khaksar, the former Northern Alliance mole in the Taliban interior ministry, were living in Peshawar or Quetta, or had gone quietly home. The ministers of culture and justice, Mullah Muttaqi and Mullah Turabi, were both in Pakistan; former interior minister Abdul Razzaq was at Spin Boldak; and Dostum had simply released Mullah Fazil and Mullah Dadullah, the two Taliban commanders at Kunduz, in exchange for ransom. "The new government could catch most of these people," said Mullah Khaksar. "It would not be so difficult as they don't have huge entourages of armed men. But obviously the political situation is not ripe for that." [78]
Christmas arrived and the US and ISAF forces celebrated with a few treats to add to their Meals Ready to Eat, but the white-bearded figure who appeared on Al Jazeera the next day was very far from seasonal. Seated in front of a burlap curtain, with the gunsight of a Kalashnikov visible at his side, Bin Ladin seemed gaunt and aged; apparently injured, his left arm hung lifelessly. It was "three months after the blessed attacks against world atheism", he said, suggesting the 30-minute tape was recorded in the first 10 days of December which, if true, confirmed he had made good his escape from Tora Bora. But he referred to the US bombing of Haqqani's mosque in Khost in which "156 worshippers" perished as "several days ago", though that strike took place on 16 November and the Pentagon had conceded it was in error. "All that you hear about mistaken strikes is a lie and a sheer lie," he continued, before launching into a denunciation of US aggression against Moslems in Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir and the Philippines that tended to cast him as raging, impotent and broken, rather than the omnipresent scourge that the western media portrayed. His voice floated up from a pit far beneath the cave of his mouth. Then he hit on a truth that could still hurt his US viewers. "These blessed attacks [..] have shown that this arrogant power, America, is based on a great economy which is fragile. Those who committed the act were not the 19 Arab countries. The armies did not move, and the foreign ministers did not move either. Only 19 high-school students, and I hope that God accepts them as martyrs... More than a trillion dollars lost, with the help of God. And with simple means, they used the enemy's airplanes, and studied in the enemy's schools. They don't need training camps." Shortly before the tape ends, bin Ladin turned to the US as a military power. "I'd like to stress the point that the fighting going on round the clock in Afghanistan against mujahedin and Taliban has clearly exposed the shortcomings and ineptitude of the American government and their fragile soldiers. Despite their advanced military technology, they have achieved nothing beyond that which depended upon Afghan collaborators." The tape stops sharply, a message set in glass from a man marooned in some indeterminate species of agony.
By way of confirming bin Ladin's principal message, US airplanes attacked the village of Qalai Niazi, 3 miles north of Gardez, in the early hours of 29 December, killing between 80-100 guests at the wedding feast of 15-year-old Inzar Jan, under the mistaken impression that Taliban and Al Qa'ida leaders were also present. A witness described the wads of bloody hair and flesh ground into the earth, torn party dresses of red, blue and yellow, and "tunnel-like holes, pierced almost vertically into the dry earth for more than 9 metres (30 feet)", the effect of bombs that drill deep into the ground in search of bunkers to explode. [79] In a seemingly unrelated development five days later in Khost, a 14-year-old boy was accused of killing a Green Beret sergeant, Nathan Chapman, in an ambush construed as an angry riposte to the imposition of the US-backed warlord, Bacha Khan, a man widely loathed for his corruption and cruelty. Chapman was the first US soldier to die in combat in Afghanistan, although 17 had already been killed in accidents. [80] But the incident underscored Afghans' mounting resentment of the Pentagon's disruption of local power relations that had successfully accommodated - and survived - the Taliban, and the implacable nature of war, American-style. When three former Taliban ministers, including Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund, head of defence, gave themselves up a few days later in Kandahar, the US-backed governor, Gul Agha, simply sent them on their way, more wary of arousing local enmities than the ire of his one-time sponsors. [81] The same held good for Mullah Omar, the man Karzai first thought fit to pardon, however roundly he was condemned in conversations between Afghan commanders and US officers or journalists.
However, the hunt for Mullah Omar could be delayed no longer. On 2 January, 20 US Special Forces drove with Haji Gulalai and his men to Musa Qa'leh, where they picked up Helmand's governor, Haji Shir Mohammed, and his men and continued on to Baghran, where the Taliban leader had been pinpointed three weeks earlier, under the protection of Abdul Ahad. Better known as Rais-i-Baghran, or the chief of Baghran, Ahad was described as a major powerbroker in the rise of the Taliban, though his name had never previously come to the fore. The surrounding villages had all been warned in leaflets to acquiesce and turn over Omar, or face airstrikes. The road led for eight hours along a dry riverbed, flanked by steep mountains. The forces of Gulalai and Shir Mohammed reportedly numbered in thousands, while US helicopters and fighter-bombers loitered overhead in case of resistance. "We will not let him go free," promised Gulalai, "he is a national criminal. He can't escape if he is in Afghanistan." [82]
Shir Mohammed entered Baghran first in a final attempt to negotiate with Abdul Ahad, a warrior with a fine appreciation of the code of pashtunwali. "The protection of Mullah Omar," he said later, gnomically, "if a person thought it could, may be a particular benefit for one man." [83] But he was never asked to pay the price for such loyalty. While the men were talking, or as the troops closed in - so worn down were US officers by Haji Gulalali's lying that he was never formally asked to elaborate his version of events - Mullah Omar and four of his bodyguards allegedly broke through the encirclement on motorbikes and accelerated into the hills where they vanished, in spite of all efforts to locate them. Less than 200 local Taliban eventually surrendered, but they were quickly released in exchange for their weapons; no evidence was ever found to prove Mullah Omar had been in the vicinity and the Rais-i-Baghran retained his position as chief.
"There aren't any Taliban and Al Qa'ida in Baghran now," Haji Gulalai told reporters when he returned from the mission. [84] And as far as the eye could see, what he said seemed to ring true for every other town and village in Afghanistan.
Notes
1 Guardian, 14 December 2001 [Back]
2 Personal interview, 6 November 2001 [Back]
3 3 BBC News, 15 November 2001 [Back]
4 Asia Times, 13 December 2001 [Back]
5 Associated Press, 20 November 2001 [Back]
6 The New, 20 Novemeber 2001 [Back]
7 Guardian, 15 November 2001 [Back]
8 New York Times, 19 November 2001 [Back]
9 Independent, 20 November 2001 [Back]
10 USA Today, 6 November 2001; Washington Post, 9 November 2001 [Back]
11 www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/Dec2001/r2001121401-185.html [Back]
12 Washington Post, 11 December 2001 [Back]
13 www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/Dec2001/r2001121401-185.html [Back]
14 Washington Times, 22 January 2001 [Back]
15 CNN, 17 November 2001 [Back]
16 Guardian, 21 November 2001 [Back]
17 Sunday Times, 25 November 2001 [Back]
18 CNN, 17 November 2001 [Back]
19 Hindustan Times, 22 November 2001; Times of India, 23 November 2001; New York Times, 24 November 2001 [Back]
10 The News, 19 November 2991; Guardian, 1 December 2001; The News, 12 December 2001; www.cursor.org/stories/jalaluddin.htm [Back]
21 Associated Press, 17 November 2001 [Back]
22 www.cacianalyst.org/November_21_2001/November_21_2001_Namangani.htm [Back]
23 Reuters, 22 November 2001; Washington Post, 23 November 2001 [Back]
24 Guardian, 1 December 2001 [Back]
25 CNN, 21 November 2001 [Back]
26 Independent, 26 November 2001 [Back]
27 The Times, 28 November 2001 [Back]
28 Guardian, 1 December 2001 [Back]
29 Guardian, 15 December 2001 [Back]
30 Guardian, 1 December 2001 [Back]
31 Newsweek, 7 December 2001 [Back]
32Press briefing by Ahmad Fawzi, 26 November 2001 [Back]
33Washington Post, 29 November 2001 [Back]
34Newsweek, 11 December 2001 [Back]
35New York Times, 15 December 2001 [Back]
36World Socialist Web Site, 22 December 2001 [Back]
37USA Today, 2 December 2001 [Back]
38South China Morning Post, 27 November 2001 [Back]
39Washington Post, 22 December 2001 [Back]
40 Christian Science Monitor, 4 March 2002 [Back]
41 Independent, 26 November 2001 [Back]
42 Boston Globe, 10 February 2002 [Back]
43 Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2001 [Back]
44 International Herald Tribune, 6 December 2001 [Back]
45 Washington Post, 1 December 2001 [Back]
46 Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2001; The Times, 4 December 2001 [Back]
47 Washington Post, 11 December 2001 [Back]
48 Dawn, 6 December 2001 [Back]
49 Reuters, 6 December 2001 [Back]
50 Guardian, 7 December 2001 [Back]
51 Reuters, 8 December 2001 [Back]
52 New York Times, 20 December 2001 [Back]
53 Guardian, 18 December 2001; New York Times, 10 February 2002 [Back]
54 Reuters, 13 December 2001 [Back]
55 Washington Post, 10 February 2002 [Back]
56 CNN, 1 December 2001; Independent, 3 December 2001 [Back]
57 Boston Globe, 10 February 2002; Christian Science Monitor, 4 March 2002 [Back]
58 Guardian, 26 November 2001 [Back]
59 Guardian, 8 December 2001 [Back]
60 Washington Post, 14 December 2001 [Back]
61 Boston Globe; Christian Science Monitor [Back]
62 Guardian, 13 December 2001 [Back]
63 Washington Post, 10 Febnruary 2002 [Back]
64 Washington Post, 18 December 2001 [Back]
65 Guardian, 14 December 2001 [Back]
66 Guardian, 15 December 2001 [Back]
67 Daily Telegraph, 15 December 2001; Washington Post, 14 December 2001 [Back]
68 Hindustan Times, 18 December 2001 [Back]
69 Guardian, 24 December 2001 [Back]
70 International Herald Tribune, 22 December 2001 [Back]
71 The News, 25 December 2001 [Back]
72 Agence France-Presse, 22 December 2001 [Back]
73 Washington Post,12 December 2001 [Back]
74 Time, 13 January 2001 [Back]
75 Washington Post, 22 December 2001 [Back]
76 Sunday Times, 30 December 2001 [Back]
77 77 CNN, 18 December 2001 [Back]
78 Guardian, 24 December 2001 [Back]
79 Washington Post, 10 January 2001 [Back]
80 Time, 8 January 2002; 27 January 2002 [Back]
81 Guardian, 10 January 2002 [Back]
82 Observer, 6 January 2002 [Back]
83 Time, 9 January 2002 [Back]
84 Observer, 6 January 2002 [Back]
