Pakistan - News and Discussion 6

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>An eyewitness to the Taliban </b>
FT
Khaled Ahmed’s  A n a l y s i s 
There are definitely many ways of looking at the Taliban interregnum in Afghanistan. There is a clear government-opposition divide on the post-2001 chain of events, which is absurd simply because it is political rather than real. In addition, among liberals and conservatives, there are divisions of all kinds. For those who hate America, it doesn’t really matter what the Taliban stood for and what they did. There is a general dissatisfaction with the new dispensation in Afghanistan which is dominated by the warlords allied to the Northern Alliance. Everyone ends up drawing a black and white picture of the situation, which merely indicates Pakistan’s own extremist mood. Any policy ‘correction’ in the future therefore runs the risk of a pendulum swing to the other extreme.

If you don’t want to think in Manichaean terms, you run the risk of being ambivalent and self-contradictory. If the Taliban were bad medicine for Afghanistan after 1994, how come they have become good after Karzai and the Northern Alliance took over in 2001? Islamabad is seen practising an ambiguous policy towards the post-Taliban Afghanistan. It seems to verbalise in one direction and act in another. It has helped the United States catch some of the major Al Qaeda activists in Pakistan, but it is seen to be sheltering the Taliban and those who work for Al Qaeda. Is it ambivalence or internal division? This lack of clarity is the opposite end of the certitude of the black-and-white vision.

<b>Mullah Umar’s hubris:</b> Kathy Gannon was the Associated Press correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1986 to 2005 and was witness to what happened in these troubled years when Pakistan was managing two Afghan wars and their two blowbacks and allowing the Pakistani mind to be formed in the light of its policy meanders. She saw the Taliban rule and didn’t like what they were doing, but her persistence and her presence made it possible for her to become the only western journalist allowed back into Afghanistan by the Taliban before their eventual retreat from Kabul in November 2001. Her book ‘ I’ is for Infidel: from Holy War to Holy Terror, 18 Years inside Afghanistan (Public Affairs New York 2005) tells a nuanced eyewitness story of what happened in Afghanistan. If you want to get away from a black-and-white portrayal of events this is the book to read.

No one comes out shining from this book, least of all the two major actors of the war, the United States and Pakistan. If you leave the common Afghan citizen out, who suffered over two decades of the nightmare, most of the dramatis personae are people you can only describe as evil, the cruelty of the label being intensified by the fact that all of them professed a level of piety said to be reminiscent of the exemplary Caliphate of the Companions. Ms Gannon met Mullah Muhammad Khaksar when he had been demoted from the job of intelligence chief - and Mullah Umar’s constant companion - in the Taliban government in 1999. He saw Mullah Umar being flattered by Pakistani clerics as the True Caliph in 1994 and was put off to see that Mullah Umar was being seduced out of his normal humble character by it.

<b>Isolation equals defeat:</b> Khaksar probably didn’t say who these clerics from Pakistan were – or maybe she couldn’t recall – but he saw quite early that this flattery would isolate Afghanistan internationally and finally destroy it. He thought Pakistan had planned it, but even if Pakistan didn’t plan Afghanistan’s downfall by making Mullah Umar take out the cloak of Prophet Muhammad PBUH and put it on, its policy achieved the same end. For the Taliban, like most small nations, international isolation was another name for defeat and death. Mullah Umar was too witless to understand that he was making a dishonest use of the Holy Cloak just like King Amanullah in history. If Amanullah disclaimed something (modernism) through the cloak, Mullah Umar claimed it (tradition); but both did the insincere thing for which they were punished. Isolation came because of Mullah Umar’s hubris and unfortunately the Holy Cloak caused it.

The clerics who were sent by the ISI to greet Mullah Umar are well known and their remarks about the man can still be collected from the Urdu press of those days. They compared him to the Prophet and Caliph Umar to his face and came home saying the Caliphate of the Companions had been revived. A retired chief justice went to see him after growing a flowing beard on his face. A very popular TV cleric predicted that under Mullah Umar the army of Imam Mehdi was taking shape, who will soon conquer the world with it and Islamise it. Ms Gannon mentioned only one big cleric (later assassinated), but the one she didn’t mention was putatively the teacher and mentor of Mullah Umar in his seminary near Peshawar. As a senator in early 1990s, the man hired prostitutes in Islamabad and fornicated with them while being sodomised by his driver, thus earning the sobriquet of Maulvi Sandwich. (In this connection, the writer listened to the famous Madam Tahira Tape sent him by Nawaz Sharif’s IB chief, Imtiaz ‘Billa’.) No one from Pakistan could go to Afghanistan to meet Mullah Umar without being ‘vetted’ by him.

<b>Bamiyan Buddhas and Pakistan’s ‘hard’ Islam:</b> Such were Mullah Umar’s antecedents. Like most intelligence men - barring those of Pakistan, for which there is a reason – Mullah Khaksar was a connoisseur of realpolitik. He also liked sifting falsehood from the truth. He told her that Mullah Umar didn’t know Osama bin Laden before he arrived from Sudan in 1996 and was given in Jalalabad in the safe hands of Maulvi Yunus Khalis by the ISI. Osama himself courted Umar with a wheedling letter which worked - and by now we know Umar’s weak point - he loved being flattered. They met finally after the Taliban had captured Kabul. Ms Gannon tells us how the Taliban began by securing the Bamiyan Buddhas against vandalism by issuing edicts from Mullah Umar describing them as Afghanistan’s cultural heritage in 1999 (p.78). In 2001 Osama had bribed Umar’s deputy prime minister and defence minister into convincing him to issue another edict for their destruction!

The Taliban, contrary to what most Pakistanis think, seemed to be religiously tentative. The hard Islam they adopted came from two sources: the Pakistan army and its active arm the ISI and the Wahhabi warriors of Osama bin Laden. And the most persuasive factor here was not religious conviction but money. After the Buddhas were destroyed the Islamabad ministry for religious affairs issued a statement saying the destruction was according to Islamic principles. Pakistan was harder in faith than the Afghan medieval marauder Mehmood Ghaznavi who spared the Bamiyan Buddhas but destroyed some of the most prominent temples of India. Later, President Karzai – whom Ms Gannon assesses favourably unlike most Pakistanis – said that ‘hard Islam’ came from Pakistan and proceeded to appoint Maulvi Shinwari, a fanatic from a seminary in Peshawar, as chief justice of Afghanistan!

Taliban and General Mahmood: Pakistan’s ISI chief General Mahmood Ahmad was in Washington when Osama struck his US targets on 11 September 2001. He is supposed to have accepted President Bush’s ‘terms’ in consultation with General Musharraf back home. Washington told Musharraf to tell Mullah Umar to hand Osama over to the US or be prepared to be invaded. General Mahmood Ahmad was asked to go to Kandahar together with a group of ‘hardcore’ clerics from Pakistan and do the persuasion. Kathy Gannon writes: ‘The general was a religious zealot very much like Mullah Umar. He had been central to the military takeover of Pakistan in 1999 by General Pervez Musharraf. A hawk with pan-Islamic visions, he had been a staunch supporter of jihadis both from Pakistan and elsewhere. This was the man Musharraf sent to negotiate with Mullah Umar.

‘People present at the meeting and within the ISI revealed that General Ahmad had a message for Mullah Umar quite different from the one that Washington had pressed his government to convey. He took the slow-talking leader aside and urged him to resist the United States. He told Mullah Umar not to give up bin Laden. General Ahmad travelled several times to Kandahar, and on each visit he gave Mullah Umar information about the likely next move by the United States. By then General Ahmad knew there weren’t going to be a lot of US soldiers on the ground. He warned Mullah Umar that the United States would be relying heavily on aerial bombardment and on the Northern Alliance…Neither Osama bin Laden nor Pakistan’s ISI chief explained to him the extent of the devastation that would be linked to his name and his movement (p.93)’.

<b>Is Pakistan playing a double game?</b> General Mahmood Ahmad went and met Jalaluddin Haqqani too, the warlord of Khost where Osama bin Laden had his Al Qaeda training camps. The entire Al Qaeda network was in his territory and had he wanted it, he could have handed it over to the United States, but General Ahmad warned him against it. Haqqani was called to Rawalpindi where the ISI chief told him to hold out against the Americans and that ‘he had friends across the border’ (p.94). The ISI was two-faced about cooperating with the US right from the start. The man who seemed not to hesitate in Washington when the terms were read out to him had determined to resist in Afghanistan. (One State Department official told this writer that Mahmood tended to lose his cool. This was confirmed by Pakistani diplomats who had to listen to his Islamic harangues in Islamabad. Finally when Musharraf fired him, his tendency to throw tantrums was mentioned in the press – KA.)

<b>Today’s big question is:</b> is the ISI now sincere in what it says it is doing against terrorism? Ms Gannon doubts it and has only her experiences to relate. She tells us about a Moroccan Muhammad Hakim and his Jaish-e-Muslimeen that had broken away from the Taliban and had kidnapped three UN workers in 2004 to put themselves on the terrorist map. Hakim first demanded release of Taliban prisoners then focused on the money. The hostages were later freed but she met him in Peshawar much before that. The man was holding UN personnel but was allowed to walk in Peshawar by the ISI. What is more, he was driving around in a car whose number plate began with the digits 83, a sign that the vehicle belonged to the agency, a kind of ‘diplomatic plate’ ensuring immunity from capture. She writes: ‘On the one hand, Musharraf had sent his soldiers into the violent South Waziristan tribal areas, where nearly 200 were killed trying to flush out suspected terrorists, and on the other hand, his intelligence agency protected men who had kidnapped international UN workers’ (p184).

<b>A black-hole of evil:</b> Can the US complain? Ms Gannon thinks not. Not after it decided to take on board people who had done murderous things as part of the Mujahideen government 1992 onwards, then as part of the savage Taliban movement 1996 onwards, and now as part of the Northern Alliance since 2001. If Kathy Gannon knows what the Americans are up to in Afghanistan, why can’t Musharraf see it and hedge his bets? But this moral black-hole most Pakistanis associate with Islam sucks in good people and makes them evil. We are told the ISI created all the seminarian devils that the Pakistanis have now grown to love, but when in 2004 Musharraf was nearly killed by Harkat Jihad Islami, he recalled its chief Qari Saifullah Akhtar from Dubai and locked him up. Akhtar was the man army let off from the 1995 unsuccessful military coup case, and then helped him escape the daisy-cutters in 2001 and packed him off to its Gulf friends for safe-keeping.

Afghanistan is an evil place where men slit the throats of mothers and kill their children. Most of this evil comes from religion which radiates from Pakistan. Pakistan simply can’t understand why it can’t stop being overwhelmed by it in the shape of pious massacres. Yet, I is for Infidel gives us glimpses of ordinary Afghans whose innocence and beauty move one to tears and whom Pakistan and America and even the UN have, by turns, made to suffer for no fault of theirs
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