It took the Taliban all of five days to track down Haq, try him in a two-hour kangaroo court and execute him as a spy. Journalists widely assumed that Haq had been sent into Afghanistan as a bagman for the CIA. Not so, says Robert C. (Bud) McFarlane, Reagan’s former national-security adviser, who was acting as a kind of informal adviser to Haq. Far from backing Haq, the agency had turned down his requests for weapons, a helicopter airlift and a field radio. The agency did offer to provide the seasoned Afghan rebel leader with a satellite phone, but Haq dismissively replied that he already owned several. (U.S. government sources say the CIA was wary of Haq, considering him a maverick and a bit of a self-promoter–one old company hand called him “Hollywood Haq.”) When Haq fell afoul of the Taliban on his secret mission last week, McFarlane spent an agonizing two hours trying to get the United States government to rescue him. Learning from a source in Pakistan that Haq was being chased into the mountains by the Taliban, McFarlane urgently appealed for help from Central Command, the Florida-based U.S. headquarters of the campaign against the Taliban. By the time U.S. warplanes got to the scene, Haq had been captured.
The dispiriting tale of Haq serves to illustrate some of the complexities and pitfalls of the war in Afghanistan. After a month the fight appeared to be going slowly and not well. U.S. officials were disappointed by the slow pace of defections from the ruling Taliban. The battle for Afghan hearts and minds was not made easier when carrier-based U.S. planes mistakenly bombed a Red Cross warehouse full of food and medical supplies for starving Afghans in Kabul. It was the second time the Navy had hit the Red Cross warehouse, and the strike came only a couple of days after a meeting between Pentagon officials and relief workers to identify buildings that should not be hit in Kabul (on the same raid, another Navy plane missed the warehouse and bombed a residential neighborhood). Meanwhile, at a Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters that he was “surprised” by the “doggedness” of the Taliban. The admiral came off sounding naive: the Taliban may be wretched rulers, but they are fight-to-the-death fanatics. Knowing American scruples about killing civilians, the Taliban army has been parking its tanks next to mosques and using hospitals as barracks.
Better-aimed smart bombs may not suffice to overcome such devilishness. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to offer more-creative war plans, Central Command has proposed what one informed source characterized to NEWSWEEK as a “roll the dice” raid against the Taliban leadership. Assuming that U.S. Special Forces can find the Taliban leaders (no mean feat), the commandos may be in for a tough fight. Administration sources told NEWSWEEK that, contrary to earlier public reports, the Special Forces raid on Oct. 21 met surprisingly swift and well-organized resistance. As for the ultimate target–Osama bin Laden–Rumsfeld last week told USA Today that the terror mastermind may never be found. The next day the secretary felt obliged to sound more upbeat. “I think we’re going to get him,” he told reporters–but he did not predict when. The obstacles ahead are daunting: the Afghan winter, rugged mine-strewn battlefields, the near-impossible task of waging all-out war against Islamic extremists without offending Islamic sensitivities. But the biggest trap may be dealing with Afghanistan’s notoriously fickle warlords.
It has become a cliche that beating the Taliban would be easier with bribes than bullets. “Afghan commanders naturally respond to money,” said retired U.S. diplomat and Afghan expert Edmund McWilliams. “They can be bought off. That’s the way things work in Afghanistan.” Maybe so, yet Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired chief of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, offers a more nuanced rule of thumb: “They say you can always rent an Afghan. But you can never be sure you own them.” During the long struggle against the Soviets and the ensuing civil wars, some warlords survived by transferring their allegiances to whichever side was winning–at that moment. One commander switched sides no fewer than six times; another was jokingly said to practice a kind of seasonal loyalty: in the brutal summers he escaped Kandahar in the south, while in the equally rugged winters he defected from Kabul in the north.
Buying an Afghan warlord requires a complicated courtship. Offering a bag full of cash is deemed to be offensive. First must come much talking and many cups of tea and promises of good works and, most important, some kind of job security, like the governorship of a province. Often, go-betweens are required. Various shadowy middlemen have cropped up in Peshawar and Quetta, cities of intrigue and rumor on the Pakistan-Afghan border, offering to help broker deals. One such would-be fixer, an Afghan-American businessman named Kabir Mohabbat, proposed to turn over no less a prize than bin La-den himself, according to U.S. government sources. Mohabbat told CBS News that he had met secretly with U.S. and Taliban officials at a hotel in Quetta, Pakistan. State Department officials denied any such meeting and, in any case, bin Laden is still in his cave, and the middleman has returned home–to Texas.
The agency in charge of lining up the right warlords is the CIA. Talking with NEWSWEEK last week after his friend Haq perished, McFarlane was biting. The CIA, he says, “has failed miserably. There’s an appalling lack of intelligence skills. I haven’t yet found one Dari speaker in the agency–or anyone who speaks any other Afghan dialect, for that matter. Or any analyst with real knowledge of Afghanistan’s history, its tribal cultures, the networks that exist there.” (Acknowledging a dearth of language skills and regional experts, the CIA is now busily recruiting.)
The CIA has been counting on Pakistani intelligence to lure some Taliban defectors. But the ISI, which helped create the Taliban to bring stability to civil-war-torn Afghanistan, cannot be easily spun around to subvert its old clients. The CIA is understandably suspicious of ISI agents playing a double game. Indeed, some U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Taliban sympathizers in the ISI tipped off the Taliban to Haq’s ill-fated mission to Afghanistan. American officials are also wary of former Afghanistan chieftains who suddenly appear offering to produce miracles, for a price. Just a month ago a former Afghan commander, Haji Zaman Ghamshirik, returned from exile in Dijon, France, where he had been cooling his heels for four years. He spruced up his guesthouse in Peshawar where turbaned Pashtuns crowd the shady lawn, bodyguards with assault rifles lurk by the gate and large locked trunks–stuffed with arms?–can be seen stacked in a corner. Ghamshirik recently offered to play “Let’s Make a Deal” with U.S. officials. “He phoned at 9:50 one night saying he could deliver Osama bin Laden and bring down the Taliban,” a knowledgeable foreign diplomat told NEWSWEEK. “He just wanted a guarantee that he would get the $5 million reward, a satellite phone and the governorship of Nangarhar province.”
Some warlords hope to start a bidding war. Jalaludin Haqqani, a former mujahedin commander who is the Taliban’s minister for frontier and tribal relations, may be for sale. Haqqani is a brutal fighter–known for his “ethnic cleansing” campaign against northern tribesmen–but his Islamic extremism is more opportunistic than sincere, say U.S. intelligence officials. Haqqani was recently named the Taliban’s southern regional military commander (giving him control over lucrative drug- and people-smuggling networks). His promotion was widely seen as a move to cement Haqqani’s loyalty with a reward of spoils. And yet Haqqani was recently spotted across the border in Pakistan. Was he there to drum up support among fundamentalist hard-liners? Or to sell out the Taliban? “Probably, he was working both sides of the street,” said a U.N. analyst who knows him. “That’s the Afghan way.”
Taliban leaders looking to switch sides are faced with a basic problem: there is no one to defect to. No Taliban leader can afford to be seen openly handing his sword to the Americans, and in any case U.S. officials do not want to be in the position of openly favoring one set of warlords over another. Before the bombing began on Oct. 1, various national-security officials in the Bush administration–and many outside experts–argued that it would be a mistake to launch the war before setting up a political alternative to the Taliban. These concerns were pushed aside by George W. Bush and his top advisers, who wanted to bomb before international support ebbed and the terrorists hit again. As a result, many potential defectors have rallied to the Taliban against the outside “invaders.”
Early attempts to patch together some kind of opposition government have bordered on the farcical. Last week Pir Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, known as the leader of the “Gucci Mooj” for his $1,500 suits, organized a “peace and unity” conference in Peshawar. To make the auditorium look full he had to pack it with various camp followers and entrepreneurial middlemen. The main attraction–envoys of Afghanistan’s 87-year-old former king, Mohamad Zahir Shah, who lives in Rome–was a no-show. The king and his court are a “disaster,” one diplomatic source told NEWSWEEK. “There are incredibly important issues at stake and the people around the king are squabbling over who gets to sit where at the Pavarotti concert–literally.”
On the only real “front” of the war, the battleline between the Taliban and the forces of the Northern Alliance outside Kabul, progress is slow, and sometimes backward. America’s important new ally, Pakistan, bitterly opposes allowing the Northern Alliance to seize control of Kabul, the Afghan capital. Pakistan wants an Afghan government run by Pashtuns, the ethnic group that dominates in the south. The Northern Alliance is stitched together from different tribes–Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens and assorted others. Some of the Northern Alliance warlords are serious-minded military commanders. Ismail Khan, self-possessed and charismatic in his flowing white robes, managed to keep a semblance of order in his province during the Afghan civil wars of the early ’90s. But then there is Rashid Dostum, a vain and sadistic monster out of a novel by Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad. In the ’80s Dostum ran the vicious secret police in the pro-Soviet puppet government in Kabul. Then, when he sensed the Soviets collapsing, he switched sides and became a predator in the civil war. An Afghan surgeon then living in Kabul remembers soldiers from Dostum’s militia storming the wealthy Microrayon neighborhood looking for women to rape. “They were violating women and girls, then some women and girls jumped from the fifth floor of apartment buildings.” Dostum’s marauders chopped off breasts and tied the toes of women behind their heads, said the doctor, who now lives in the Netherlands. No wonder that no one wants Dostum to win the race for Kabul.
It’s a very slow race in any case. The bombing campaign has picked up in recent days with the use of cluster bombs, a particularly lethal munition that spews little man-killing bomblets. But the United States has held off from staging the sort of mammoth B-52 raids that rained iron and terror on dug-in forces in Vietnam and during the gulf war. For the most part the Americans are still using precision weap-ons to take out individual targets. (Some bombs are not so precise; on Saturday an errant airstrike killed at least 10 civilians and wounded 20 in Northern Alliance territory.) During the gulf war, U.S. pilots talked of “tank plinking” with their laser-guided bombs. Now they are reduced to “pickup plinking.” Indeed, while America was reluctant to hit the Taliban forward positions outside Kabul for fear of appearing to favor the Northern Alliance, Taliban terrorists intentionally parked their souped-up pickups along the front line, figuring they’d be safe there. The “front” remains extremely fluid. Abdul (who asked that his real name not be used, to protect against Taliban reprisals), a portly middle-aged Afghan interviewed by NEWSWEEK, commutes between his job in Kabul and his family in Jabal os Saraj, 35 miles away on the other side of the Northern Alliance lines. “I just came from Kabul a week ago,” said Abdul, “and I’ll go back there in a week to get my salary.” Abdul joins a procession of businessmen, spies and war profiteers routinely passing between the lines. Ask a Jabal shopkeeper where he gets his cans of Iranian Pepsi, and he’ll answer, “From Kabul, of course. Where else?” Most Afghans still feel they have more in common with each other than they do with the infidel foreigners. “A guy lets his beard grow out, he’s a Talib. He trims it, he’s a friend,” says a Northern Alliance official. “Either you foreigners finally solve this mess or we’ll get together again and send you all to hell.”
No one is putting a timetable on “solving this mess.” In Pakistan, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has beseeched the Americans to end the bombing campaign by the beginning of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, in mid-November. In an interview with NEWSWEEK and other publications, he warned that a drawn-out air war could breed more civil unrest in Pakistan–threatening his own regime and raising the specter of a takeover by Islamic extremists. Yet British defense officials have been forthrightly predicting that the war could easily drag on into next summer and beyond. President Bush has talked about using the United Nations to rebuild Afghanistan, but it’s unlikely that many, if any, member nations will be willing to send troops to keep order in the volatile country. That could mean that American soldiers will have to do the job.
They would be entering a hellish world. First, there are the mines that already claim several Afghans a day: the “bounding frag” that jumps up and spits fragments, waist high, and the “butterfly,” which floats to the ground and looks like a toy, often drawing the attention of children who pick them up and get their hands blown off. Then there are the diseases: dengue, cholera, sand-fly fever, amebic dysentery and even a rare Ebolalike killer called Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. The snakes and spiders in Afghanistan are said to be especially virulent, but the most lethal threat is the people. NEWSWEEK interviewed several Uzbek veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. “You will never feel safe. You can be ambushed at any time,” said Daniyar Guliamov, a sergeant in a security unit based in Kabul. “The people in Afghanistan are quite dangerous because during the day they are kind, hospitable, friendly. At night they sneak out, pick up their weapons and attack you.” After losing an army in the 19th century, the British learned that the best way to run Afghanistan is from a distance, through surrogate rulers. In the 21st century the United States may need to heed the lessons of the past. But that means finding warlords that America can trust–and helping them stay alive.
