In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER FOUR The Rise of the Taliban

IN APRIL 1996, Mullah Muhammad Omar orchestrated a propaganda coup that rippled across the mujahideen community in Afghanistan. Omar was the leader of the Taliban, an upstart band of Islamic students who began to conquer territory in the mid-1990s from their base in southern Afghanistan. By April, they had captured Kandahar and its surrounding provinces and were preparing their siege of Kabul. In order to establish his ideological credentials and attract new recruits, Mullah Omar turned to the legend of the Prophet Muhammad’s cloak. The cloak was supposedly in Kandahar, housed in a shrine with ornate walls inlaid with intricately crafted tiles of bright blue, yellow, and green. Referred to as the Khirka Sharif, the shrine was considered one of the holiest places in Afghanistan. Behind the shrine stood the mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani dynasty and, for many Afghans, father of the modern Afghan state.

For generations, Afghans in Kandahar had passed down legends about the cloak and Ahmed Shah. According to one version, Ahmed Shah traveled to Bokhara, a major center of Islamic scholarship and culture, and now a modern city in Central Asian Uzbekistan. He saw the sacred cloak of the Prophet Muhammad and wanted to bring it home. Ahmed Shah asked to “borrow” the cloak from its keepers, who politely refused, suspecting that he might not return it. After pondering for a few minutes, he pointed to a boulder in the ground and made a promise to the keepers. He said: “I will never take the cloak far from this boulder.” Relieved, the keepers let him take the cloak. Ahmed Shah kept his word, in a sense. He had the boulder taken out of the ground and carried back to Kandahar, along with the cloak, which he never returned. And he built a pedestal for the boulder next to the shrine. While the cloak has normally been hidden from public view, it has been worn on rare occasions. For instance, King Dost Muhammad Khan wore it when he declared jihad against the Sikh kingdom in Peshawar in 1834.

In April 1996, Mullah Omar, who had limited religious education but had fought with the Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islam during the Soviet War, attempted to legitimize his role as a religious leader.¹ He removed the cloak from the shrine and perched himself atop one of the buildings in the center of Kandahar City. As a large crowd gathered and the cloak flapped in the breeze, he wrapped and unwrapped the cloak from around his body. An Afghan legend decreed that whoever retrieved the cloak from the chest would be Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful). Others in the Muslim world, however, had adopted this title even without the cloak. Hassan II, for example, who ascended the throne in Morocco in 1961, claimed direct descent from the Prophet and adopted the title Commander of the Faithful.² For Mullah Omar, claiming the authority of the cloak gave him influence among some Afghans who would now support the Taliban as a legitimate Muslim entity. The cloak ceremony ended with a declaration of jihad against Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government, and those present swore bayat (allegiance) to Mullah Omar. For many Afghans and Muslims, however, it was an outrageous insult. Omar was a poor village mullah with no scholarly learning, no prestigious tribal lineage, and no connections to the Prophet’s family.³

Mullah Omar’s self-appointment as Commander of the Faithful was supported by a few other organizations, including al Qa’ida. In his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, al Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri warmly referred to Mullah Omar as the Commander of the Faithful.⁴ Zawahiri later wrote: “May Allah grant long life to the people of Jihad and Ribat in Afghanistan, and may Allah grant long life to the Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who didn’t sell his religion for worldly gain.”⁵ When Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid was announced as al Qa’ida’s new leader for the Afghan front, he began by pledging his personal allegiance to Mullah Omar as the Commander of the Faithful. Even Osama bin Laden swore allegiance, stating that the Taliban “are fighting America and its agents under the leadership of the Commander of the Believers, Mullah Omar, may Allah protect him.”⁶ This was perhaps done to ensure that the insular and xenophobic Afghans saw the insurgency as being led by Afghan mujahideen, and not by foreign Arabs.

Roots of the Taliban

The Taliban’s roots go back to Deobandism, a school of thought emanating from the Dar ul-Ulum madrassa in 1867 in Deoband, India, just north of Delhi. In some ways, the Deobandi approach was similar to that of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Deobandism followed a Salafist egalitarian model, seeking to emulate the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad. It held that a Muslim’s primary obligation and loyalty were to his religion, and loyalty to country was always secondary. Some Deobandis also believed they had a sacred right and obligation to wage jihad to protect the Muslims of any country. The Deobandi madrassas were prominent and well established throughout northwest India, notably in the territories that would later become Pakistan.⁷ The Deobandis trained a corps of ulema (Islamic scholars) capable of issuing fatwas (legal rulings) on all aspects of daily life. The ulema would monitor society’s conformity with the prescriptions of Islam and rigorously and conservatively interpret religious doctrine.

Following Pakistan’s independence in 1947, a variety of religious factions campaigned for full Islamization of the new nation. One faction was rooted in the works of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, whose first book, Jihad in Islam, was published in the 1920s. His family had a longstanding tradition of spiritual leadership, and a number of his ancestors were leaders of Sufi orders. Maududi, born in India in 1903, was homeschooled and became a journalist, writing for Indian newspapers such as Muslim and al-Jam’iyat. Maududi favored what he called “Islamization from above,” in which sovereignty would be exercised in the name of Allah, and sharia law would be implemented in society. He declared that politics was “an integral, inseparable part of the Islamic faith, and that the Islamic state that Muslim political action seeks to build is a panacea for all their problems.”⁸ For Maududi, the five traditional pillars of Islam—shahada (profession of faith), salat (prayer), sawm (fasting during Ramadan), hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and zakat (almsgiving)—were merely phases of preparation for jihad. To carry out jihad, Maududi founded Jamiat-e-Islami in 1941, which he saw as the vanguard of an Islamic revolution. The party envisioned the establishment of an Islamic state governed by Islamic law and opposed such Western practices as capitalism and socialism.

In addition to Jamiat-e-Islami, there were several political parties that gave expression to the special interests of their own professional groups and networks of pupils. One of the main groups was Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi offshoot. Established in 1945, it was the largest Deobandi-based party. Its two principal factions were led for a long time by Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Maulana Sami ul-Haq. The radicalization of the Deobandi movements was later nurtured by Pakistan to support militant Islamic groups in Kashmir and Afghanistan, as well as to counter Shi’ites in Pakistan.⁹ The Deobandis also benefited from Saudi bankrolling since the Saudis were keenly interested in helping build madrassas. Prominent Deobandis embraced an impoverished younger generation with little hope of climbing the social ladder, and violence became their main form of expression.¹⁰

Deobandi madrassas flourished across South Asia during this period, but they were not officially supported or sanctioned until Pakistan President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a fervent admirer of Maududi, assumed control of the Pakistan government in 1977. He remained president until August 1988, when he died in a mysterious plane crash that also killed U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel and General Herbert Wassom, the senior Pentagon official in Pakistan.

Zia made implementation of sharia law the ideological cornerstone of his eleven-year dictatorship. One of his most significant steps was the creation of the International Islamic University in 1980 in Islamabad, where the leading Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood gathered. Zia promoted Islamism to the status of an official state ideology, and Jamiat-e-Islami was rewarded with ministerial responsibilities and significant aid. Zia adopted several Islamization measures, including an examination of all existing laws to verify their conformity with sharia, the introduction of an Islamic penal code that included corporal punishment, and the Islamization of education.¹¹ In addition, Zia’s government levied a 2.5 percent tax on bank accounts each year during Ramadan for zakat. This “legalized” almsgiving had previously been treated as a private matter in most Muslim countries. The funds raised by zakat served to finance the madrassas, which were controlled by the ulemas, many of whom were linked to the Deobandi movement.¹² Indeed, Zia encouraged the financing and construction of hundreds of madrassas along the Afghan frontier to educate young Afghans and Pakistanis in Islam’s precepts and to prepare some of them for anti-Soviet jihad.

The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent jihad against Soviet forces, was critical to the further radicalization of Deobandi and other militant groups. First, the jihad provided a training ground for young militants. Second, Pakistan’s ISI supervised and assisted in the development of these movements to pursue its regional policies. From the hundreds of resistance groups that sprang up, the ISI recognized approximately half a dozen and established offices for them to channel covert support. Although most had a strong religious ethos, the groups were organized primarily along ethnic and tribal lines. Significantly, three of the seven were led by Ghilzai Pashtuns and none by their rivals, the Durrani Pashtuns, who were deliberately marginalized by the ISI. Third, following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Pakistani government officials had became concerned that the Iranian government was using the Shi’ites in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a “fifth column” to pursue its interests.¹³ Consequently, Shi’ites were targeted. In 1985, for example, a Deobandi militant group sprang up called Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan (Soldiers of the Companion of the Prophet in Pakistan), which pronounced all Shi’ites infidels and conducted a range of attacks against them. Several years later, another group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Army of Jhangvi) was established and waged jihad against Shi’ites.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia invested heavily in the region. It funded madrassas in Pakistan that sought to spread the conservative Wahhabi version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi money flowed to Saudi-trained Wahhabi leaders among the Pashtuns, producing a small following. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had temporarily settled in Saudi Arabia, moved to Peshawar and set up a Wahhabi party. Pakistan’s Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam also helped build a network of Deobandi madrassas to extend their influence. These madrassas would eventually serve as an important educational alternative for the refugees from the anti-Soviet jihad and the subsequent civil war, as well as for poor families along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier who could not afford the secular schools.

The Knowledge Seekers

In late 1994, a new movement emerged in southern Afghanistan. Many of its members were drawn from madrassas that had been established in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during the 1980s. Their primary objectives were to restore peace, enforce sharia law, and defend the integrity and Islamic character of Afghanistan. Since most were part-time or full-time students at madrassas, they chose a name for themselves that reflected their status. A talib is an Islamic student who seeks knowledge, which is different from a mullah, or member of the Islamic clergy, who gives knowledge. The new movement, called the Taliban, began by seizing control of Kandahar before expanding to the surrounding provinces.

The Taliban leaders who emerged in the mid-1990s were an odd lot. As Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out, the organization’s leadership could “boast to be the most disabled in the world today and visitors do not know how to react, whether to laugh or to cry. Mullah Omar lost his right eye in 1989 when a rocket exploded close by.”¹⁴ In addition, Nuruddin Turabi, who became justice minister, and Muhammad Ghaus, who became foreign minister, also had lost eyes. Abdul Majid, who became the mayor of Kabul, had lost a leg and two fingers. Mullah Dadullah Lang, a Taliban military commander (who was killed by U.S. forces in May 2007), lost a leg when fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The early Taliban were deeply disillusioned with the factionalism and criminal activities of the Afghan mujahideen leadership. They saw themselves as the cleansers of a war gone astray and a social and political system that had become derailed. Taliban leaders also sought to overturn an Islamic way of life that had been compromised by corruption and infidelity to the Prophet Muhammad.¹⁵ Indeed, Mullah Omar’s act of wrapping himself in the Prophet’s cloak symbolized the return to a purer Islam. The Taliban recruited primarily from Deobandi madrassas between Ghazni and Kandahar, as well as in Pakistan. These madrassas had become politicized and militarized during the war, but many were linked to the centrist conservative parties of the Afghan resistance, such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border became ever more porous as Afghan Taliban studied in Pakistan, Afghan refugees enrolled in Pakistani madrassas, and Pakistani volunteers eventually joined the Taliban.¹⁶

Beginning in late 1994, Taliban forces advanced rapidly through southern and eastern Afghanistan, capturing nine out of thirty provinces by February 1995. In September 1995, the Taliban seized Herat, causing great concern in nearby Iran.¹⁷ The Taliban then cut off Hekmatyar’s supply route to Jalalabad before zeroing in on his fortress base at Charasyab, south of Kabul. After a last-ditch attempt to rally his forces, Hekmatyar was forced to flee. In 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul and, despite temporary setbacks, conquered the northern cities of Kunduz and Taloqan in 1998. As the Taliban closed in on the gem of the north, Mazar-e-Sharif, Iran helped Hekmatyar travel there to negotiate with the Taliban. But this effort failed and the city fell.¹⁸

FIGURE 4.1 Taliban Conquest of Afghanistan

The Taliban’s strategy was innovative and ruthlessly effective. Unlike the Soviets, they focused their initial efforts on bottom-up efforts in rural Afghanistan, especially the Pashtun south. They approached tribal leaders and militia commanders, as well as their rank-and-file supporters, and attempted to co-opt them with several messages. Taliban leaders claimed to provide moral and religious clarity, since they advocated the return to a purer form of Islam; they offered to restore Pashtun control of Kabul, which was run by the Tajik Rabbani; and they tried to capitalize on their momentum by convincing locals that resistance was futile. They used their knowledge of tribal dynamics to appeal to Pashtuns and, when they didn’t succeed in co-opting locals, they often resorted to targeted assassination to coerce the rest. It was a strategy accomplished on a very personal level: Taliban leaders who spoke the local dialect traveled to the Pashtun villages and district centers. In addition, the Taliban didn’t need to deploy forces throughout the countryside, and in any event didn’t have enough forces to do so. The brilliant part of their strategy was that even while they focused on securing urban areas, they successfully cut deals with local commanders—or removed and appointed new ones—in rural areas.¹⁹

At first, the Taliban represented a rise to power of the mullahs at the expense of tribal leaders and mujahideen commanders, even though a number of mujahideen commanders later joined them. War-weary Afghans initially welcomed the Taliban. The group promoted itself as a new force for honesty and unity and many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, saw the Taliban as the desperately needed balm of peace and stability. The Taliban immediately targeted warlords who were deemed responsible for much of the destruction, instability, and chaos that had plagued the country since the outbreak of the civil war. The Taliban, however, took Deobandism to extremes that the school’s founders would not have recognized. They instituted a brutal religious police force, the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice (Amr Bil Maroof Wa Nahi An al-Munkar), to uphold its extreme and often unorthodox interpretations of Islam. “Throw reason to the dogs,” read a sign posted on the wall of the office of the police. “It stinks of corruption.”²⁰

Girls were not permitted to attend schools, most women were prohibited from working, and women were rarely permitted to venture out of their homes—and even then could not do so without wearing a burqa, an outer garment that cloaks the entire body. The Taliban decreed: “Women you should not step outside your residence. If you go outside the house you should not be like women who used to go with fashionable clothes wearing much cosmetics and appearing in front of every man before the coming of Islam.” It concluded: “Islam as a rescuing religion has determined specific dignity for women” and women “should not create such opportunity to attract the attention of useless people who will not look at them with a good eye.”²¹

The U.S. State Department characterized the Taliban as “harsh and oppressive. We continue to receive reports that the Taliban detain Tajiks, Panjshiris, and others indiscriminately, shipping at least some to a prison in Kandahar. Women are not seen as frequently on the streets” out of “fear of being accosted.”²² Zalmay Khalilzad wrote in an essay with fellow RAND analyst Daniel Byman that “Afghan women face a horrifying array of restrictions, among the most repressive in the world.” These problems, they argued, would only worsen. “‘Talibanism’—a radical, backward, and repressive version of Islam similar to the Saudi “Wahhabi’ credo but rejected by the vast majority of Muslims worldwide—is gaining adherents outside Afghanistan and spreading to other countries in the region.”²³

The Taliban enforced a stringent interpretation of the Islamic dress code for men as well. They were forced to grow beards and avoid Western haircuts or dress. The Taliban closed cinemas and banned music. Another Taliban decree ordered: “In shops, hotels, vehicles and rickshaws, cassettes and music are prohibited.” If music or a cassette was found in a shop, “the shopkeeper should be imprisoned and the shop locked.” The same was true if a cassette was found in a vehicle.²⁴ The Taliban also banned many forms of entertainment, such as television, videos, cards, kite-flying, and most sports. They punished theft by amputating a hand and often punished murder by public execution. Adulterers were stoned to death. In Kabul, punishments were carried out in front of crowds in the city’s former soccer stadium. And yet there was no revolt. A Canadian intelligence assessment surmised that while the Taliban imposed a harsh form of sharia law, “residents of Taliban-administered areas have accepted these harsh policies as the price to be paid for peace and social stability.”²⁵

The Taliban also destroyed hundreds of cultural artifacts that were deemed polytheistic, including the holdings of major museums and countless private art collections. Perhaps the most appalling was the Taliban’s destruction of the great statues of Buddha in the city of Bamiyan, roughly eighty miles west of Kabul. Bamiyan was once the center of Buddhism and an important resting place on the ancient Silk Road, which linked the Roman Empire with Central Asia, China, and India. Two magnificent statues, carved into a sandstone cliff face and surrounded by frescoes, dominated the approach to the town. One statue stood 165 feet high, the other 114 feet. In March 2001, Taliban fighters dynamited and fired rockets at the statues, which had stood for nearly 2,000 years and had withstood waves of invading armies. In one callous act, the Taliban destroyed one of Afghanistan’s greatest archaeological treasures. Mullah Muhammad Omar defended these and other actions by saying they were carried out to protect the purity of Islam.²⁶ While in power, the Taliban massacred thousands of ethnic Hazaras, who are predominantly Shi’ite.

The Taliban’s religious ideology was particularly apparent in Kabul, a city that most Taliban viewed as modern, implacably corrupt, and bubbling with apostasy. The Taliban banned women from work there, even though women ran one-fourth of Kabul’s civil service, the entire elementary-education system, and much of the health system. Girls’ schools and colleges in Kabul were closed down, affecting more than 70,000 students. On September 28, 1996, Radio Kabul announced: “Thieves will have their hands and feet amputated, adulterers will be stoned to death and those taking liquor will be lashed.”²⁷ The Taliban appropriately gave Radio Kabul a new name, Radio Shariat, to reinforce the importance of sharia law.

Despite their religious zealotry, however, the drug trade flourished during the Taliban years. In 1997, approximately 96 percent of Afghan poppy had come from areas under the Taliban control. The Taliban expanded the area available for opium poppy production and increased trade and transport routes through neighboring countries, especially Pakistan.²⁸ “Opium is permissible,” acknowledged Abdul Rashid, head of the Taliban’s counter-narcotics force, “because it is consumed by kafirs [infidels] in the West and not by Afghans.”²⁹ But the growing levels of poppy production caused some, including in the United States government, to protest. In 1998, a Taliban representative told U.S. officials that the drug trade was a “manageable problem” and that the Taliban would consider banning it once they “gained [international] recognition and a way was found to compensate poppy growers for their losses.”³⁰

In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Omar finally banned the cultivation of opium poppy, though not the trafficking from existing stocks. The ban caused a temporary decrease in the cultivation of opium poppy in 2001 and a significant rise in prices, but much of the damage had already been done. During the Taliban rule, Afghanistan had become the world’s largest producer of poppy, the source of 70 percent of all illicit poppy.

ISI Support

Much like during the anti-Soviet jihad, Pakistani support to the Taliban was critical, especially that from the ISI. Throughout the 1990s, Islamabad pursued a pro-Taliban policy. A 1997 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan explained that, “for Pakistan, a Taliban-based government in Kabul would be as good as it can get in Afghanistan,” adding that worries that the “Taliban brand of Islam…might infect Pakistan” was “apparently a problem for another day.”³¹ Another State Department cable concluded: “Pakistan has followed a policy of supporting the Taliban.”³² Two staple Pakistani exports to the Taliban were wheat and fuel, which the Taliban used to help feed their troops and run their vehicles.³³ In 1998, the Pakistan government provided more than $6 million in direct support to the Taliban in addition to the regular trade with their neighbors.³⁴

Pakistan’s ISI also played a key role. U.S. State Department officials understood that “ISI is deeply involved in the Taleban take over in Kandahar and Qalat.”³⁵ ISI officers were deployed to such Afghan cities as Herat, Kandahar, and Jalalabad—and stationed in Pakistani consulates—to provide assistance and advice.³⁶ Another U.S. intelligence assessment contended that the ISI was “supplying the Taliban forces with munitions, fuel, and food,” and “using a private sector transportation company to funnel supplies into Afghanistan and to the Taliban forces.”³⁷ Though the CIA knew about its involvement, the ISI was often effective in masking its activity. For example, its operatives utilized private-sector transportation companies to funnel supplies in convoys to Taliban forces, including ammunition, petroleum, oil, lubricants, and food. These companies departed Pakistan late in the evening and, especially if they had weapons and ammunition aboard, they concealed the supplies beneath other goods loaded onto the trucks. There were several major supply routes. One began in Peshawar, Pakistan, and passed through Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan on its way to Kabul. Another left Quetta and passed through Kandahar before ending in Kabul. Yet another began in Miramshah, Pakistan, and continued through Khowst and Gardez before entering the Afghan capital.³⁸

Sultan Amir, Pakistan’s consul general in Herat (better known by his nom de guerre of Colonel Imam), helped the Taliban take that city in 1995. “I had an emotional attachment with the Taliban,” he later recalled. “They brought peace, they eradicated poppies, gave free education, medical treatment and speedy justice. They were the most respected people in Afghanistan.”³⁹

Thus, a pro-Taliban lobby came into being in Pakistan, run by retired officers (such as Aslam Beg) and current officers (such as Colonel Imam, Fazlur Rehman, Sami ul-Haq, and General Hamid Gul). General Gul, who was defense attaché at the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul, supervised the training of Taliban militants. A number of senior ISI officers, such as General Said Safar and General Irshad, worked closely with the Taliban in the field.⁴⁰ Pakistan’s army and air force also cooperated with the Taliban. As one U.S. State Department cable concluded: “Pak Air Force officials are readying Kandahar airport for support of still larger military operations to include heavier fighting in Helmand and Kandahar.” ISI leaders appeared to support the Taliban partly because they believed that mujahideen forces, such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, could not conquer and hold Kabul, while the Taliban apparently could.⁴¹ In September 2000, barely a year before the September 11, 2001, attacks, Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth sent a particularly troubling “action cable” to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad:

Pakistan is stepping up support to the Taliban’s military campaign in Afghanistan. Department is particularly concerned by reports that Islamabad may allow the Taliban to use Pakistani territory to outflank Northern Alliance positions in Afghanistan. While Pakistani support for the Taliban has been long standing, the magnitude of recent support is unprecedented…. We have seen reports that Pakistan is providing the Taliban with materiel, fuel, funding, technical assistance, and military advisors. We also understand that large numbers of Pakistani nationals have recently moved into Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban, apparently with the tacit acquiescence of the Pakistani government. Our reports further suggest that direct Pakistani involvement in Taliban military operations has increased in the past few months.⁴²

Some U.S. government documents also contend that there was direct participation by the Pakistan government’s Frontier Corps, whose members were mostly Pashtun and could blend in more easily with the Taliban. The Frontier Corps, a federal paramilitary force, is stationed in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan Province of Pakistan. Unlike the ISI, which is run through the Army, the Frontier Corps operates under Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior, acting as the primary security force in these areas. “These Frontier Corps elements are utilized in command and control; training; and when necessary—combat,” concluded one U.S. intelligence report. “Elements of Pakistan’s regular army force are not used because the army is predominantly Punjabi, who have different features as compared to the Pashtun and other Afghan tribes.”⁴³

A number of Pakistani citizens, as well as prominent journalists, told senior American officials that Pakistan was supporting the Taliban. In a June 30, 1998, meeting with U.S. Embassy staff and Arnold Schifferdecker, a political adviser at the UN Special Mission for Afghanistan, one journalist acknowledged that “he had recently canvassed Pakistani government officials, including Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate sources, about the state of Pakistan’s Afghan policy.” According to a U.S. State Department cable that summarized the meeting, “what he heard surprised him: To a man the [Government of Pakistan] officials were strongly supportive of the Taliban.” The journalist added that the Pakistan government’s Coordination Committee for Afghan Policy “had decided to provide the Taliban 300 million rupees in the next six months at a rate of 50 million rupees a month,” and that “the money was earmarked to pay for the salaries of Taliban officials and commanders.” ⁴⁴

Despite the overwhelming evidence compiled by United States intelligence services, Pakistan officials repeatedly denied that the government provided support to the Taliban, as they would continue to do a decade later following the U.S. invasion and the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Even in private meetings with U.S. and UN officials, Pakistan officials denied their involvement.⁴⁵ In one meeting, for example, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Najamuddin Shaikh called in U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Thomas Simons to “dispel any notion that Pakistan is throwing its chips in with the Taliban.” Shaikh stressed that Pakistan’s only focus was to help establish a peace settlement with Afghanistan’s warring parties.⁴⁶ This duplicity had serious consequences for the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, since Washington’s trust in Islamabad gradually waned. U.S. government documents also indicated that Pakistan’s ISI had long supported Islamic terrorist organizations, which were used as proxies to target Indian forces in Kashmir. According to a CIA assessment, some of these groups, such as Harakat ul-Ansar, also used “terrorist tactics against Westerners and random attacks on civilians that could involve Westerners to promote its pan-Islamic agenda.”⁴⁷

A Fateful Bargain

By 2001, the Taliban controlled virtually all of Afghanistan. The only exception was a small sliver of land northeast of Kabul in the Panjshir Valley, where Ahmed Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance forces had retreated. During the Taliban era, the Afghan Army was an assortment of armed groups with varying degrees of loyalties and professional skills.⁴⁸ Mullah Muhammad Omar, as head of the armed forces, ultimately decided on military strategies, key appointments, and military budgets. The military shura sat below Omar, helped plan strategy, and implemented tactical decisions. Shura in Arabic means “consultation,” and it includes the ruler’s duty according to sharia, to consult his followers in making decisions. It also refers to the assembly that meets for this purpose. Individual Taliban commanders were responsible for recruiting men, paying them, and looking after their needs in the field. They acquired much of the money, fuel, food, transport, and weapons from the military shura.

While it was a detestable regime that committed gross human-rights violations, the Taliban was successful in establishing law and order throughout most of Afghanistan. “On the plus side,” acknowledged a U.S. State Department report, “the Taliban have restored security and a rough form of law and order in their areas of control.”⁴⁹ It was a brutal form of justice, but it was governance nonetheless. In his book Taliban, Ahmed Rashid explained that opposition tribal groups “had been crushed and their leaders hanged, the heavily armed population had been disarmed and the roads were open to facilitate…trade between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia.”⁵⁰ By the end of the century, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan. A CIA assessment concluded: “There was no Pashtun opposition.” Opposition groups “were totally disorganized, fragmented, disarmed by the Taliban.”⁵¹ A White House document composed in January 2001 remarked that “the Northern Alliance may be effectively taken out this Spring when fighting resumes after the winter thaw.”⁵² Massoud’s forces were so weak that foreign governments—including the United States—were unwilling to back them in any meaningful way.⁵³

But the Taliban had struck a dangerous bargain with Osama bin Laden and his international jihadist network. As a Taliban official explained to a U.S. State Department representative, the Taliban considered bin Laden a “great mujahid” and supported his residence in Afghanistan.⁵⁴ It was a fateful mistake. Bin Laden used his money and influence to support the Taliban regime and, in return, trained jihadists and planned operations on Afghan soil.⁵⁵ If Mullah Omar had been willing to shy away from a relationship with bin Laden, the United States might have left the Taliban alone. Instead, Afghanistan became a nexus for the Taliban’s radical Deobandism and al Qa’ida’s global jihad.