America and Post 9/11 Afghanistan

In February 2020, the US and Taliban concluded a historic peace deal in Doha to bring an end to the longest war America has been embroiled in. The deal was made at a time when,  according to Resolute Support– the NATO-led train, advice and assist mission– almost 10.8%  of Afghanistan was directly controlled by the Taliban and more than 70% of Afghanistan had the presence of the militant group along with exercising almost full control in few provinces such as Helmand, Kandahar etc. By 2018, the Taliban was in control of more territory than ever since the 2001 US-led invasion and 75 districts out of a total of 375 with a strong presence in 133. It is conspicuous that the US is on the losing side and with the election nearing,  President Trump wanted to fulfil his poll promise to get the country out of needless wars, the  US is now on the back foot. But this wasn’t always the case. 

With the backdrop of 9/11, the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was invaded by the  United States-led NATO forces in October 2001. Within two months, the NATO forces were able to drive out the Taliban from Afghanistan. They played a crucial role in holding the Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002, Constitutional Loya Jirga in 2003, conducting Presidential elections in 2004, conducting first ever parliamentary elections in 2005, and most importantly, starting nation building of Afghanistan. But due to completely avoidable factors, the Taliban started to resurge in 2002-03 which was to jeopardize every US effort to sustain stability in the region. The obsession of the Bush administration with Iraq proved tremendously pernicious to order and stability in the region. Moreover, in Iraq, the US was unknowingly creating the monster of ISIL that saw Afghanistan as a perfect place to grow and has become a new headache for the Afghan government. Also, the Bush administration was eager to show the American people the success of the invasion which elicited successive severely miscalculated decisions and haphazard implementation of reforms without having a deep understanding of the place, its history, the roots of the problems and much more.  

The US has also failed to learn from its past mistakes in Afghanistan. It got its priorities wrong. It hadn’t taken Nation building seriously focusing excessively on winning the war and capturing Osama bin Laden. President Bush was first dismissive of nation-building in Afghanistan only to later hand it to the United Nations. The invasion of Iraq in  2003 would further divert the administration’s attention from showing direction to the war-torn Afghanistan. What is remarkable over here is all this ignorance existed despite the unpreparedness regarding the administrative future of Afghanistan on the side of America. 

 However, it would be unfair to solely blame the Americans for the resurgence of the Taliban.  In my opinion, the larger burden of blame should be conferred on the Pakistani Establishment which was at the time of invasion at the helm of power in Pakistan. Pakistan was complicit in giving refuge to Taliban fighters who had fled Afghanistan. Pakistan’s support to the Taliban was  

inevitable. Over the years, as a result of the policies of General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan’s institutions, such as the ISI, had prevailed in religious intolerance and hate towards  America, Israel and India. As a result, in terms of journalist-author Ahmed Rashid, the ISI  officials regarded themselves as ‘more Taliban than the Taliban’.

This article will deal with the causes and events that led to the Taliban’s resurgence. 

The CIA-led Invasion of Afghanistan

After the attack on the Twin Towers in Manhattan, the US acted, in terms of President Musharraf,  ‘like a Wounded Bear’. Bush planned to launch a blitz of cruise missiles but Al Qaeda had abandoned its camps. Bush then gave a deadline to the Taliban to hand over Laden in order to buy some time to plan the invasion. The CIA was given a task to draft a plan of invasion and its follow-ups. It soon came up with a plan to avoid a major deployment of American Troops in Afghanistan. The plan was to pay the existing forces in the country and those in exile in return for using their private armies to occupy the areas where the Taliban was soon to be dragged out. The biggest stakeholder in this was the Northern Alliance(NA) which had tasted the power after the fall of the Najibullah Government in 1992. Its famous leader Ahmed Shah  Massoud had been assassinated just two days before 9/11 by the Taliban. The NA was led by a predominantly Tajik group called Jamiat-e-Islami which was now led by Massoud’s successor warlord General Mohammed Fahim. Other NA leaders such as the Hazara Shia leaders Karim Khalili of Hizb-e-Wahadat and Asif Mohseni of Harkat-e-Islami, Herat’s  Ismael Khan, Abdul Rashid Dostum of Junbish-e-Milli, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf of Ittehad-e Islami etc were also to play a crucial role in post-invasion Afghanistan. Many of them have been living in exile since 1998 when the Taliban was a rising force and was occupying major cities in the North. Just weeks after 9/11, the CIA unleashed its officers to travel to Panjsher Valley in  Afghanistan to meet Fahim and other NA leaders and to dispense $3 million to them. The  CIA had reportedly been allocated a total of $900 million to $1 billion for the covert operations. In October, General Tommy Franks- the CENTCOM commander- met with Fahim and handed him $5 million for ‘NA’s military operations to take the north but promise to stop short of Kabul’. Millions of dollars were also paid to warlords of other ethnic groups. $10  million was brought into Afghanistan to pay Pashtun leader Sayyaf and the Uzbek leader  Dostum. The CIA was finding it difficult to find Pashtun warlords willing to risk fighting against the Taliban- a fellow Pashtun-dominated organization. It found a few Pashtuns residing in  Peshawar in exile whom it paid to return to Afghanistan after the invasion. According to Ahmed  Rashid, ‘for the next two years, the agency was to run Afghanistan not by democratization or nation building but by paying off warlords to maintain peace’. The invasion was being prepared by just one hundred and fifteen CIA officials. 

The CIA was supplying money and arms through various bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Hence the attack on Taliban-controlled areas began from the north. Various militia stakeholders were being advised to capture the areas as soon as the bombings stopped. By  November NA had captured the entire northern and central areas and some western areas. By minimizing cost CIA was paving the way to anarchy in post-invasion Afghanistan. With three ethnic groups- namely Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks- as stakeholders, it was clear that the priority of the US was not order and stability in Afghanistan but merely to capture Laden and his associates, and to end the Taliban regime. In southern states, Pashtun leaders were recruited to capture Pashtun majority states. The most famous of them was a former governor of Kandahar province Gul Agha Sherzai. These stakeholders carried their own weapons, had their own armies, framed their own laws and controlled the trade by installing checkpoints along the border. The warlords were to become super rich attributing to CIA  funds, tolls at the checkpoints and drug trade. Hitherto institution building was nowhere on the cards. The CIA distributed the sovereignty to warlords to drive out the Taliban. Even after the Bonn Agreement and the selection of Karzai as president, the major power was exercised by warlords and not Kabul. Ismael Khan who was ruling areas centred around  Herat, used authoritarianism to rule his subjects. Though the authoritarian rule of the ethnic  Tajik warlord had turned Herat into the most peaceful it was also the most repressed. Uttering any words of support to Karzai or King Zahir Shah were not allowed. Many people feared that if America forcefully didn’t remove NA from power history of repression of Pashtuns would be repeated.  

 The first step towards institution building was undertaken by the UN. In November 2001, Lakhdar Brahimi- UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan planned a meeting to convince Afghan warlords for a provisional two-year government and deployment of UN forces. The meeting took place in Bonn, Germany. On 6^th December an agreement was concluded. Hamid Karzai was selected as the President of the provisional government. Given the unpopularity of NA amongst Pashtuns who constituted the majority of  Afghanistan, the president chosen was an ethnic Pashtun. The Pashtuns had ruled Afghanistan for much of its history. But in 1992, Tajiks formed a government in Kabul after centuries. A  factor in the rise of the Taliban in 1996 was the traditional Pashtun-Tajik animosity. To defeat the  Taliban, the president needed to be a Pashtun. 

But NA had become too powerful to ignore. They were given seventeen cabinet positions including crucial posts of defence, foreign affairs, interior etc. They also received three out of five posts of deputy president. NA warlords were extremely unpopular among ordinary  Afghans. It was on this unpopularity and their prevalent corruption that the Taliban had sold themselves to the public.  

 The UN was far more pragmatic than the US in dealing with Afghans to secure a better future for Afghanistan. Bonn’s agreement also stipulated the creation of the Afghan Constitution  Commission and holding an emergency Peace Jirga by July 2002. Though the US was to play a crucial role in the implementation of both of them, it had already created many hurdles incorporating of overwhelming number of Tajiks in government and reliance on warlords being the primary ones. Although the Americans had liberated Afghans from the evil of the Taliban, it had created another evil: the Warlords. On the other hand, Bush was adamant on no nation-building until April 2002. And when suddenly he made a U-turn calling for a  Marshall plan for Afghanistan, he was refuted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  The State Department, led by Collin Powell, was pressing Bush for nation-building but the Defense Department took over reconstruction of Afghanistan from it. 

 The warlords were extremely corrupt. Their daily income was in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, much of them earned by charging tolls on vehicles entering their region and drug trade. While the US were present in Afghanistan, some of them halted their drug trade since they were already benefiting from being on CIA payroll. Equally corrupt were their militias, upon whom the CIA relied heavily, and who were enticed to bribes paid by fleeing Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. Also, it was extremely difficult for the warlords to get rid of their old habits of fighting amongst themselves over control of tolls, drug trade and cache of weapons left by the Taliban that were being unearthed. In the spring of 2002, Abdur  Rehman- the minister for civil aviation and tourism was stabbed by men of another warlord. In his first nationwide radio address, Karzai stressed the need to disarm the warlords. 

The Great Double Game

 Meanwhile, Pakistan was planning its own strategy of wait and see. According to many ISI officials, the lack of US forces on the ground would sustain the Taliban at least until the spring of 2002 and when the Taliban were to lose its grip in Afghanistan, they would start to wage war against the Afghan forces using highly successful guerrilla warfare. Hence Musharraf continued to the crucial oil and ammunition supplies to the Taliban through Chaman,  Balochistan directly defying UN sanctions. Pakistan was unwilling to abandon the student movement (Taliban) which was its major proxy in Afghanistan that had gained quick success in the Afghan civil war. Musharraf wanted to maintain the ‘strategic depth’ that Pakistan had gained in 1996 when the Taliban captured Kabul. He certainly wanted to prevent a comeback of  NA rule in Afghanistan to prevent Indian influence in the Northwestern neighbour of  Pakistan. Since 1996 NA had developed an intimate relationship with India which supplied limited support to wage war on the Taliban.  

 After the Taliban was pushed out of Kabul in November, its fighters fled to two areas in opposite directions – Kandahar in the south and Kunduz in the north. Surrounded by NA  fighters on three sides, a faction of the Taliban wanted to surrender to US forces to escape death. 

They were ready to surrender to anyone but NA. In a blunder, the State Department and  CENTCOM refused to accept surrender while the UN said that it didn’t have the capacity and resources for such a massive surrender. Along with Taliban fighters there were stranded hundreds of ISI officers and soldiers of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in Kunduz. In such a circumstance Musharraf asked Bush for a huge favour. He asked him to allow an airlift of the stranded Pakistanis in Kunduz. In a top-secret operation all the bombings were ceased and on  15^th November began the airlift campaign. The US didn’t bother to monitor the evacuation. It was a fatal mistake. Along with ISI and Frontier Corps officers ‘hundreds of Taliban fighters,  foot soldiers belonging to Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes’. What was sold as a minor extraction turned out to be a major air bridge.  Later the event was dubbed as the ‘airlift of the evil’. Later when the Taliban forces of Kunduz finally surrendered to the NA, only 3300 of them were there out of the expected 5000-7000  fighters.  

 There was another escape from the south, through the famous Tora Bora mountains. Many Al Qaida and some Taliban members retreated to the Koh-e-Sufaid (the White Mountain range) which lies at the Afghan-Pakistan border. During the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, the mujahedeen had built an extensive cave system in Tora Bora where arms,  ammunition, bombs etc had been hidden. It is here when immediately after the invasion Osama bin Laden hid himself. Soon Laden was to escape to the tribal region of Pakistan unhindered by any presence of Pakistani soldiers by bribing some Pakistani Pashtun guides. The lack of US  troops on the ground was now hurting the Americans.  

 The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) was a place where the Pakistani government has been reluctant to exercise its full control. Constitutionally FATA was governed by the governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on behalf of the President of Pakistan who on its behalf appointed seven agents, one for each agency. Though it used to hold elections for the National Assembly and Senate, it was governed by the Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1901. Successive Pakistani Governments had left the inhospitable region to its own. There had seldom been any presence of the Pakistani Army in the area. This region soon turned out to be a perfect place for terrorists to prosper. In 2018, FATA was formally merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa through a constitutional amendment. 

NA led by Fahim had moved six thousand soldiers in Kabul soon after the Taliban fled severely annoying the Pakistanis. Musharraf was furious with the Americans and accused them of betrayal. As soon as the NA got hold of Kabul, many Taliban surrendered. They were taken to  Qala-i-Jangi, Dostum’s castle near Mazar-i-Sharif. The Afghan warlord, who had old scores to settle with the Taliban, mercilessly killed thousands of Taliban foot soldiers. He was known for such tendencies, but on this occasion, he did it on the payroll of the CIA. This episode didn’t go well with the Pashtun population. Many such human rights violations were committed on the part of NA. 

 In 2002, Pakistanis went to poll two times- one for a referendum to let  Musharraf continue his rule and the second for provincial elections. Both elections were rigged.  In Northwest Frontier Province, a conservative religious coalition called Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA)came to power. MMA was soft on the Taliban and its main leader Maulana Fazlur  Rehman had even played a crucial role in establishing the Taliban in 1994. This was a disaster for the anti-Taliban regime in Kabul. Considering the ethnicity of the Taliban and  MMA’s government it was further disastrous. MMA soon started implementing Taliban-like policies in NWFP like banning alcohol and music mandating hijab and implementing  Sharia law. It was during the MMA regime when Mullah Fazlullah- the future leader of Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan(TTP) started his famous Mullah Radio. Several MMA mullahs had fought with the Taliban in the 1990s. Maulana Fazilullah, a minister in the Balochistan government, had fought along with Mullah Omar in Kandahar in 1994. 

More importantly, MMA formed a coalition government in Balochistan. Balochistan was the place where most of the Taliban’s top leaders had obtained religious education. Now after the Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan, they were back. Yousuf Pashtun, who served as governor of Kandahar, listed the Taliban training camps in Balochistan: in Dalbadin, Chagai,  Qila Saifullah, Kuchlak, Loralai and two camps just outside Quetta. Quetta, the capital of the province, was eventually turned into mini Kandahar. People with Black Turbans were ubiquitous in the suburbs of the city. Taliban leaders had set up a separate council to direct the militants who had begun to attack the Afghan and US forces in Afghanistan. The ‘Quetta  Shura’, as it was called by journalists, was led by top Taliban commanders including Mullah  Abdul Ghani Baradar who was residing in Pakistan. The primary purpose of Quetta Shura was to manage the renewed insurgency in Afghanistan. All this was happening under the tacit approval of Musharraf and ISI. By 2004 the NATO intelligence officers had confirmed reports of ISI running training camps for Taliban recruits north of Quetta with arms and funds arriving from gulf countries. In 2003 and 2004, the American soldiers watched through drones as Pakistan army trucks delivered Taliban fighters to the border at night to infiltrate  Afghanistan and then recovered them on their return. Pakistani border soldiers gave the infiltrators covering fire. JUI had virtually handed over Pashtunabad, a large suburb of  Quetta, to the Afghan Taliban. In villages near Quetta, there were more than 50 JUI-run madrassas that were part of a well-organized cycle in which young militants were trained for several weeks and in summer months were sent across the border while in winter were housed in the same madrassas.

 Quetta Shura within a decade had reached the point where it used to “run  the show.” From managing neighbourhood security to investing in hospitals where militants returning from Afghanistan are treated and in real estate as far as Karachi, it has become the face of destabilization in Pakistan. It is from here in 2003 that where planning of insurgent attacks on southern Afghanistan began. The insurgency began in Zabul province in the south and  Paktika province in the southeast. The insurgency was expanded to Uruzgan and Kandahar in  2004 and to Helmand in 2005. Quetta Shura also started appointing shadow governments of the provinces that were being attacked and captured by militants. Shadow governments helped to better coordinate with militants fighting on the ground to recruit more people from across the border and to establish a centralized structure to communicate with other Taliban leaders in the region. By 2005 11 shadow governments had been appointed by Quetta Shura in the provinces where Taliban attack was under way. 

 Another place that became the hub of Taliban and Al Qaida was FATA. Just as the Taliban was being bombed, al Qaeda and a few Taliban militants were crossing the border to enter FATA.  Initially, parts of South Waziristan became de facto bases for the regrouping of al-Qaida. They were also used as training camps for attacks across the border. By May 2003, some 5000  militants were operating in these camps. The Interior Ministry of Pakistan had been told by the ISI to ignore them. America started to slowly build up some pressure regarding these camps.  Later Musharraf moved some troops in there but the lack of seriousness on the part of Pakistan was conspicuous. Pakistan was very confident since the very beginning that what the CIA wanted was ‘Al Qaeda not Taliban’…. ‘Arabs not Afghans’. The ISI was clearly distinguishing while catching the terrorists in south and later north Waziristan. They were arresting Arabs and letting Afghans operate freely. It was only when Musharraf was himself attacked multiple times that Pakistanis realised the seriousness of the situation. In  December 2003, there were two attacks on Musharraf’s convoy in a week. The perpetrators of the second attack had received explosives from al Qaeda training camps in south Waziristan.  

 In response, the Pakistani army launched the Kalusha operation near Wana in South  Waziristan in March 2004. The army suffered a setback when it was confronted by nearly  3000 militants – some 500 of them foreigners, the rest 2500 local- in Wana. The Pakistani forces were finding it difficult to operate in an area where it hadn’t been in its entire history. Hence  Musharraf started a detrimental trend- signing peace deals with militants of Waziristan. Three years back to back three deals were concluded. In 2004, after the debacle of Wana, the Shakai  Agreement was signed by Pakistan and the charismatic militant Nek Mohammed. The next year another agreement, the Saragoha Agreement, was inked between Pakistan and militant  Baitullah Mehsud- who would later become the first emir of TTP. In 2006 when militancy had spread to North Waziristan, the Miranshah Agreement was signed. All three agreements had the same secret stipulation- to end terrorist activities in Pakistan in return for continuing the training camps. In other words, Pakistan had no problem with the militants operating on their soil as long as they targeted only US and Afghan forces. First SOF celebrated the deal but soon realized that they were being backstabbed once again.