On March 7, 1993, after more than eight months of starvation, economic blockades, and anarchic violence, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd sponsored the Islamabad Accord to reconcile the warring factions.
Under the agreement, Rabbani was made president for a term of 18 months and Hekmatyar was made prime minister. This appointment did not sit well with defense minister Ahmad Shah Masoud, and fighting between the two erupted two days later. On June 16, Hekmatyar was sworn in as prime minister, and Masoud resigned. Hekmatyar resigned a week later to launch an assault on Kabul. On Jan. 1, 1994, Uzbek warlord Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum joined Hekmatyar’s attack, and by the end of the year, the capital was reduced to rubble. The death toll in the city would reach 50,000, mostly civilians.2
The Islamabad Accord was put together by outsiders to serve their interests, not those of Afghanistan. The Saudi government wanted to keep political Islam from spilling over into other areas, and Pakistan and Iran wanted a quick end to the fighting so that they could take advantage of a new trade route to the newly independent Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.
Pakistan wanted peace, but on its own terms. It suspected Rabbani’s government of being too friendly with India, and was looking with apprehension at Afghanistan’s improved relations with Iran and Russia. In short, Pakistan foresaw an imminent loss of regional influence. It wanted its own man in Kabul. That man was supposed to be Hekmatyar, who was trained and nurtured in Pakistan-run training camps (with U.S. and Saudi backing), and who was integral to Pakistan’s guerrilla activity in Kashmir. Pakistan expected Hekmatyar and his Hizb-i-Islami to take power once the jihad was over, but Rabbani’s elevation to leader thwarted Pakistan’s grand design.
With Hekmatyar a lost cause, Pakistan searched for a new surrogate, and found the ideal candidate in Omar and his taliban. As the magazine Nida’ul
Islam (Call of Islam) reported:
1. Cited in Mary Pat Flaherty, David B. Ottaway and James V. Grimaldi, “How Afghanistan Went Unlisted as Terrorist Sponsor,” Washington Post, Nov. 5, 2001.
2. On Nov. 11, 1994, the United Nations appealed for $106.4 million to meet the humanitarian requirements of Afghanistan for the next twelve months. Fighting during the year killed 7,000, injured around 100,000 and made more than half a million people homeless, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Pakistan found in the movement the object of pursuit in that it preserves its interests represented by the route of trade with the nearby Islamic Republics. Accordingly, the Pakistani army supported the movement by providing fuel and food, and by facilitating the movement of students from Pakistan.3
A comprehensive history of the Taliban and their defeat of the mujahedin is beyond the scope of this book, but a few events are worth highlighting to give a sense of its popularity and rapid rise from obscurity. In October 1994, the Taliban took over Qandahar, and Omar called for 4,000 volunteers from Pakistan. By February 1995, the Taliban had captured half of the southern provinces without meeting any resistance, and forced Hekmatyar to lift the siege of Kabul.
On Sept. 5, 1995, the major western town of Herat fell, forcing warlord Ismail Khan to flee to Iran with 8,000 supporters. Capturing Kabul proved to be more difficult, as Rabbani’s forces put up fierce resistance. Rabbani continued to denounce Pakistan for meddling in Afghan politics and supporting the Taliban, but Pakistan consistently denied the charges. Nevertheless, rioting Afghans set fire to the Pakistani Embassy on Sept. 6. In October, the Taliban laid siege to the city and pounded it with rocket fire.
On June 26, 1996, the Rabbani government formed a desperate alliance with Hekmatyar, who resumed his post as prime minister, but the Taliban were already in command of most of the country. On Sept. 5, a year to the day after Herat fell, the Taliban launched an offensive in Eastern Afghanistan, capturing Jalalabad. Three weeks later, Rabbani and Masoud abandoned Kabul and headed north. On Sept. 27, the Taliban took Kabul, hanged Najibullah, and declared Afghanistan to be “completely Islamic.” The victory wasn’t complete, though: three of Afghanistan’s 30 provinces remained under mujahedin control, thus ensuring that hostilities and the suffering of the hapless civilian population would continue.
BI N LA D E N A N D T H E TA L I B A N
After he arrived from Sudan in the spring of 1996, bin Laden set up his headquarters in Nangarhar province, just across the Khyber Pass from Pakistan. The area and its capital, Jalalabad, were under the control of minor Pashtun warlord Yunis Khalis, who split from Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami to form his own group of the same name.
Bin Laden was on good terms with all factions and could count on universal protection despite the chaos. With the coming of Taliban rule, bin Laden’s position strengthened. He and Omar were both Islamists, and each needed the other. Bin Laden needed refuge, and the Taliban needed cash.
3. Abu Abdul Aziz Al-Afghani, “The Islamic Taliban Movement And The Dangers of Regional Assimilation,” Nida’ul Islam, April–May 1997, <www.islam.org.au/articles/18/taliban1.htm>.
10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”
185Bin Laden gave Omar $3 million, and with that money the Taliban took Jalalabad on Sept. 5, 1996. When the Taliban entered the city, they paid their deepest respects to bin Laden:
O Sheikh! Our lands are not the lands of the Afghans, but it is the lands of Allah; and our jihad was not the jihad of the Afghan, but it is the jihad of the Muslims. Your martyrs that are in every region of Afghanistan, their graves testify to that. You are between [among] your families and kinsmen, and we bless the soil that you walk upon.4
However, even in Afghanistan bin Laden had to stay on guard. A failed Saudi kidnapping attempt in early 1997 pushed him into the Taliban stronghold of Qandahar. The Saudis had arranged with Pakistan’s ISI to bring mercenaries to the Afghan border, but bin Laden got wind of the plan from sympathetic sources in Pakistan’s military. When the Saudis paid an official visit to recognize the government, the Taliban representative refused to discuss turning over bin Laden.
Later that same year, the Americans planned a major commando-style kidnapping in which special forces would attack bin Laden’s new Qandahar residence. The plan was tested in the Pakistani desert but proved to be too dangerous. While the Americans were re-evaluating the project, news leaked to bin Laden from the same source, and he made the plan public in the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. The Americans had no choice but to cancel. Though they acknowledged the plan, they did not acknowledge that there was a leak.5
Bin Laden further entrenched himself with the Taliban by marrying his eldest daughter to Omar. As Omar’s father-in-law, bin Laden became a member of the Pashtun tribe, thus ensuring that the family would never give up one of their own, especially to a non-Muslim power.
Of bin Laden’s activities since the 1996 Khobar bombing, we know next to nothing, which is not surprising given his inaccessibility. Yet the myth of bin Laden as the demiurge of Islamist terrorism gets a boost during this period, due largely to the Zionist author Yossef Bodansky. As we saw in Chapter V, readers of his book Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on
America have no way to check the veracity of his assertions. However, one
passage stands out as glaringly absurd.
In October 1996, when bin Laden is supposed to be in Qandahar, Bodansky has him returning from a terrorism summit in Khartoum—a meeting that is not previously mentioned, or cited in the book’s index. Bodansky then has bin Laden, among other things, returning home via Tehran where he is supposed to have stopped for consultations with high- ranking terrorists like Abu Nidal: “Bin Laden’s visit to Tehran was significant
4. Ibid.
in the planning of the new wave of Islamist international terrorism that the ISI would support and benefit from.”6
Bodansky goes on to say that bin Laden is a high official in Hezballah; made frequent visits to Tehran; and acted as political go-between for Islamabad and Tehran.
Shooting down these assertions is child’s play. First, a Wahhabi would not be caught dead negotiating with Shi’ites. On this score, bin Laden and the Taliban are of one mind. Only moderate Sunnis like Hasan al-Turabi of Sudan could manage to establish a co-operative working relationship with Shi’ites.
Second, we have no independent evidence that bin Laden even left Afghanistan. Third, Bodansky’s claim that the ISI would benefit from such terrorism is asserted without evidence or logical foundation. Why should the ISI care what bin Laden did, save as it affected Afghanistan and the region? Given that Islamabad has a vested interest in promoting stability for the sake of economic gain, it is hard to understand why it would advocate terrorist activity.
Without access to Bodansky’s sources, this whole episode must be rejected as an attempt to exaggerate bin Laden’s importance in the Islamist movement and to give plausibility to the existence of “al-Qaida” with bin Laden at or near the top, as well as targeting Iran and Sudan as alleged “terror masters.”
Ironically, the one thing about bin Laden that can be said with certainty is that he and the U.S. had the same objective—supporting the Taliban because they promised to impose order.
“ TH E UN O C A L STAT E S O F AM E R I C A”
Soon after Kabul fell to the Taliban on Sept. 27, 1996, U.S. congressmen, State Department officials and representatives from Unocal (Union Oil Company of California) rushed to embrace the new government. Enthusiasm was so high that a precipitous offer of official recognition from the State Department had to be hastily repudiated, because Rabbani’s government was still recognized as the legitimate authority. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognized the new Taliban regime.7
As we now know, the Taliban were arguably the world’s most repressive and regressive anti-Western regime of their day. Some of the misanthropic absurdities of life under Taliban rule included:
• Banning women from the workplace, even hospitals, as well as all schools and university.
6. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on America (New York: Forum, 1999), pp. 196-197.
10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”
187• Requiring women to wear a head-to-toe garment (burqa), and prohibiting them from going out in public unless accompanied by a husband or male blood relative.
• Subjecting homes and apartments to arbitrary searches by the religious police, who confiscated western cultural materials (books, magazines, videos, records, CDs), and alcohol.
• Forcing men to wear their hair short, grow full beards and attend mosque five times a day.
• Permitting radios only for listening to the official Taliban Radio Sharia (“religious law”). Televisions were confiscated.
• Roving militias and religious police who executed a “street level” form of punishment that included whippings and public beatings. A married couple riding on the same bicycle on the way to the market was beaten for being physically too close in public.8
Despite these abominations, the Clinton administration actively pursued good relations with the Taliban from 1995 to 1997. In a speech at a November 1996 closed-door session of the UN, Asst. Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphael articulated the official, tolerant U.S. attitude:
The Taliban control more than two-thirds of the country, they are Afghan; they are indigenous; they have demonstrated staying power. The real source of their success has been the willingness of many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with severe social restrictions. It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.9
Contrary to Raphael, the interests of Afghanistan played no role in the U.S. decision to support the Taliban. So long as the U.S. got its pipeline, the Taliban could abuse their people as much as they wanted, because they could count on the U.S. to shield them from international criticism and scrutiny. An American diplomat said as much to veteran Pakistani reporter Ahmed Rashid: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be ARAMCO, pipelines, an emir, no parliament, and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”10
On Dec. 12, 1996, The New York Times gave the following account of the rosy U.S. scenario:
From early on, American diplomats in Islamabad had made regular visits to Qandahar to see Taliban leaders. In briefings for reporters, the
8. “Taliban Abuses Ignored for Oil, Money, Drug War,” American Atheists, July 19, 1998, <www.atheists.org/flash.line/taliban3.htm>.
9. Peter Symonds, “The Taliban, the US and the Resources of Central Asia,” World Socialist
Website, Oct. 24, 2001, <www.wsws.org/articles/2001/oct2001/tal1-o24.shtml>.
10. Cited in “Unocal & Afghanistan,” Oil and Gas International, Oct. 29, 2001, <www.oilandgasinternational.com/departments/from_editor/10_29_01.html>.
diplomats cited what they saw as positive aspects of the Taliban, which they listed as a capacity to end the war in Afghanistan and its promises to put an end to the use of Afghanistan as a base for narcotics trafficking and international terrorism.11
A bonus for the U.S. was the Taliban’s fanatical hatred of Iran, which was not only an enemy of the U.S. but also a rival transit country for the Turkmenistan gas pipeline. Congress granted the CIA a budget of $20 million to fund covert operations to destabilize Iran, which has alleged, over repeated U.S. denials, that the Taliban were one of the recipients of this money.12
It was impossible to tell where Unocal’s interests stopped and those of the U.S. government began. The government lobbied Pakistan to support the Unocal-led Central Asia Gas (CentGas) bid, and Unocal lobbied the government to recognize the Taliban. It even enlisted the services of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former special U.S. ambassador John J. Maresca, who would become Unocal’s vice-president of international relations.