AfghanWire Podcast #8
Welcome to the AfghanWire Podcast, a new feature to complement our existing services. Every fortnight we will be discussing the major news from Afghanistan, bringing together two weeks of reporting from around the world into a single digestible package. With exclusive interviews and in depth analysis, we are sure the AfghanWire Podcast will become essential listening for those with an interest in Afghanistan.
In this edition Vanni Cappelli discusses the implications of Mullah Dadullah’s death and we hear from Jere van Dyk, a journalist and researcher who has been traveling in Afghanistan since the 1970s. But first, a round up of the main news from Afghanistan over the last fortnight.
* The Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Dadullah, has been killed by coalition forces.
* Fighting has broken out between Pakistani and Afghan troops along the border of the two countries.
* Civilian casualties as a result of NATO operations continue to cause friction between the Afghan government and foreign forces in the country.
* An influential woman lawmaker is suspended from the lower house of parliament.
* And are former Guantanamo bay prisoners fighting NATO in Afghanistan?
Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban’s top military commander in Afghanistan has been killed by ISAF forces. His body was shown to reporters in Kandahar after his death was initially denied. Nato said Dadullah died in a clash with Afghan and Western forces in Helmand province. The Taleban commander was killed in an operation by the US-led coalition supported by ISAF, news agency AFP said. His death could prove to be a powerful blow to the insurgency in Afghanistan. Dadullah had a reputation as a brutal but effective leader, and he had achieved enormous status by conducting operations against the Coalition.
Afghan officials had claimed several times in the past that they thought they had killed Dadullah. But on all previous occasions, Dadullah later surfaced in Taliban videos released over the Internet.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar formally confirmed the death of Mullah Dadullah and nominated Mullah Bakht Mohammad as his replacement.
Afghan and Pakistani troops have repeatedly clashed on their common border. More than 50 Afghans have been killed or wounded in the fighting since May 13.
Local authorities said that Pakistani forces "are still attacking our positions with artillery and are threatening our security posts. Their artillery fire has damaged our villages, clinics, and schools, and civilians have suffered a lot. I must add that many people have been killed or wounded."
Afghan officials said the fighting broke out when Pakistani forces entered Afghan territory. But the Pakistani army spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad accused the Afghan army of sparking the battle with "unprovoked" fire at several of its border posts.
Karin Rahimi, Hamid Karzai’s spokesman, said that the clashes will have a negative impact on bilateral relations between the two countries. Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have cooled recently after Afghanistan accused Pakistan of not doing enough to secure its border.
The spectre of civilian casualties as a result of coalition operations continues to haunt Afghanistan’s relations with the West. According to a report in The New York Times “Scores of civilian deaths over the past months from heavy American and allied reliance on air strikes to battle Taliban insurgents are threatening popular support for the Afghan government and creating severe strains within the NATO alliance.”
There have been around 135 civilians killed by US or NATO action this year, a figure that could undermine support for operations in Western countries.
The paper says that the civilian deaths are exacting a heavy political toll on President Hamid Karzai, who has been openly critical of American and NATO tactics, and even of the entire international effort in Afghanistan.
Karzai told the Voice of America radio station that civilian casualties in the conflict threaten to set the country back and must be prevented.
"This is a very serious question. It's something that hurts us a lot," Mr. Karzai said, explaining that Afghanistan's government is working with NATO and coalition forces to end civilian casualties. "We have to find a way," he said.
The civilian deaths are also exposing tensions between American commanders and commanders from other NATO countries. Dan Everts, the senior NATO civilian in Afghanistan criticized the US led coalition: “The collateral damage and particularly the civilian casualties are seen as unduly high, certainly by the Afghan people. This is of concern to us," he told reporters.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer alluded to possible friction in the 26-member alliance at a joint news conference with President Bush. He said that Afghanistan is the front line in the fight against terrorism and “should not become a fault line."
Afghanistan's lower parliamentary house has voted to suspend an outspoken female lawmaker. Malalai Joya said in a recent interview with private Afghan station Tolo TV that the country's parliament was like a "stable or zoo."
The video was shown to the parliament, and outraged lawmakers voted to suspend her, said parliamentary spokesman Haseb Noori. Parliament's Article 70 forbids lawmakers from insulting one another, Noori said. Joya said the vote was a "political conspiracy" and that she had been told Article 70 was written specifically for her.
"Since I've started my struggle for human rights in Afghanistan, for women's rights, these criminals, these drug smugglers, they've stood against me,” she said.
Joya, a women's rights campaigner from Farah province, rose to prominence in 2003 when she branded powerful Afghan warlords as criminals. Joya's outspoken ways have earned her many enemies in Afghanistan.
A year ago, Joya called some lawmakers "warlords" in a parliamentary speech, prompting members of the house to throw water bottles at her. A minor scuffle broke out between her supporters and detractors, and Joya later said some legislators had threatened to rape her as payback.
Joya said that if she could not remain in the parliament, she would fight against "criminals" independently.
Human Rights Watch called for the immediate reinstatement of Joya.
"Malalai Joya is a staunch defender of human rights and a powerful voice for Afghan women, and she shouldn't have been suspended from parliament," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Joya's comments don't warrant the punishment she received and they certainly don't warrant court proceedings," he added.
Human Rights Watch noted that members of parliament have regularly criticized each other, but no one else has been suspended.
"The article banning criticism of parliament is an unreasonable rule that violates the principle of free speech enshrined in international law and valued around the world," said Adams. "The Afghan parliament should be setting an example by promoting and protecting free expression, not by stamping it out."
Joya has survived four assassination attempts, travels with armed guards and reportedly never spends two nights in the same place.
Former Guantanamo detainees have returned to Afghanistan to continue the fight against the coalition, the US military has claimed.
The former detainees were said to have been released from the prison at the Guantanamo Bay between 2002-2004 after claiming to be innocent.
The Pentagon gave brief descriptions of six detainees, including two it said were killed in fighting in Afghanistan.
"These former detainees successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years," said Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.
Last week, a Pentagon official, Joseph Benkert, testified to Congress that about 30 former detainees had rejoined the fight against the US.
Guantanamo critics say it is part of a US campaign to justify the detention of hundreds of men without charges at the remote base.
The military said two of the men were killed in Afghanistan: Mohammed Yusif Yaqub, a commander of Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan who died in May 2004 while fighting US forces, and Maulavi Abdul Ghaffar, a Taliban leader killed in a September 2004 raid by Afghan security forces.
A third man was taken prisoner during an attack on US forces near Kandahar.
Jere Van Dyk is a journalist and author. In addition to conducting interviews and writing for the Carnegie Council, he is currently a consultant on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and al-Qaeda for CBS News. He also teaches a course on the politics of Islam at New York University.
Mr. Van Dyk has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic. He has traveled in Afghanistan and other countries in the region since the 1970s and reported on them for CBS News (both radio and television), CNN, National Public Radio, and other broadcast organizations.
In 1981, while working as a correspondent for The New York Times, Mr. Van Dyk lived with the mujahideen as they battled the Soviet Army. His articles in The New York Times, which included a three-part story in the paper’s Sunday magazine, were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He later wrote In Afghanistan, a book on his experiences during that journey. In 2001, Mr. Van Dyk, working as a free-lance correspondent, covered the war in Afghanistan and the murder of Daniel Pearl.
We spoke to Mr Van Dyk in New York about his initial trips made to Afghanistan, and asked him about the background to those travels.
“I first went to Afghanistan in 1973. I was a graduate student in Paris. I convinced my parents to let my younger brother drop out of college. I bought a car in Frankfurt and we drove from Frankfurt to Afghanistan where we ran out of money. This was in 1973. July 1973, of course, there was a coup when former prime-minister Sadr Daud Khan overthrew his first cousin and brother-in-law, King Zahir Shah, setting in motion, I think, events which led directly – perhaps indirectly’s a better word – to 9-11.
“So I was there for about three to four months in Afghanistan in 1973. We drove through the country. I returned to the US, took a job working in the Senate for the Senator for the state in which I grew up – Washington state Senator Henry Jackson. Coincidentally, or interestingly enough, this is where the neocon movement started; Richard Perle and Eliot Abrams both worked in Senator Jackson’s office at the same time. At that time, Afghanistan was pretty much unknown to anybody outside those who paid close attention to it.
“I returned…I remember I was home watching television on Christmas Eve – December 24th 1979 – saw Soviet tanks in Kabul and said to myself, ‘I have to go back’. Two years later, or about a year and a half later, when I was able to I returned to Peshawar, where I had visited in 1973, and went around as a freelance correspondent.
“I had an arrangement with the New York Times – a very interesting arrangement. They gave me a letter, $500, and said from the very beginning, ‘you can take this money and can have the best time of your life in New York, or you can apply it to a plane ticket to Pakistan, go to the border and decide not to go. Do whatever you want with it.’ So I went there and hooked up with the New York Times correspondent for South Asia at the time, Mike Kaufman, based in Delhi, and he came over and he took me up to Murree, north of Islamabad, and we talked, and then we went out and we looked over the mountains towards Afghanistan and he said, - it was the first advice I’d got as a journalist -, he said, ‘Don’t worry about the story. It will come to you.’
“With that I went back to Islamabad, or we went back to Islamabad, and then took a train – […] – up to Peshawar. Stayed in Dean’s Hotel, which at the time was a British-built hotel leftover from the time of the British Raj. And it was dark, it was lugubrious. I remember there were about three or four of us in the dining-room, Pakistani waiters with old white starched jackets hovering around, and what I did was, I found a driver and went round to the various mujahideen leaders at that time – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Yunis Khalis, Gailani, Rabbani, and others – trying to find someone I felt comfortable with, someone I felt I could trust, and I would go with his men into Afghanistan.
“I remember at the time going to see Rabbani, and there were a number of Tajiks sitting outside, and they were terrific fellows. And they said, ‘come with us to Badakhshan. We’ll go up and we’ll meet Commander Massoud and then we’ll go north.’ And I said, ‘how long does it take to go there?’ They said, ‘it’ll take us a month.’ I said, ‘No. I don’t want to spend a month walking through the mountains to go up that way. I won’t go with you guys.’ But they were terrific, and so because of that I never went to the north and never met Massoud, not knowing anything about him or the north of Afghanistan at all at that time, because when I was there in 1973 I didn’t go there. Strictly Herat, Kandahar, Kabul and down to Peshawar.
“I went and I spent time with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and going to see him was like going into a monastery. They called him ‘brother Hekmatyar’, it was extremely quiet, everybody was very pious-like, spoke in very soft whispery voices. And I remember spending time with him talking, but I did not feel comfortable with him. And I had heard by that time – we all had heard – that he was the most radical of all the leaders, and so I didn’t feel…I hesitated.
“And so I went around and I talked to Gailani, talked to others. It wasn’t until I met with Yunis Khalis that I felt that this person represented – as he stood there with a bandolier of bullets across his chest and his deep voice with his barrel-chest at the time – he represented the archetypal Afghan poet-warrior to me in my youth, if you will. And I felt, ‘Yes. I can go with this fellow.’
“So what he did was, he wrote out something on a piece of paper, handed it to someone else and I went back to Dean’s Hotel. And then someone came – I don’t know exactly when, two or three days later – and we went into the bazaar in Peshawar and he had me fitted out for a shalwar qamiis, we bought a turban and sandals, and I went back to the hotel and he said, ‘wait’.
“Now during this time, there were a lot of Afghans in the streets, but still, Peshawar was completely different from the way it is today. It was very quiet, there was very little traffic, there was no pollution, the smog I can’t recall at all, a very peaceful place, easy to walk around in.
“Then, one morning, it was before dawn I think, three or four men came to the hotel – when I say hotel, it was like a motel, there was only one floor – and said, ‘Come on’, and they put me in the middle of the back-seat of a car. And there was a man next to me all bandaged-up, he had been shot by a helicopter, he said. He’d been in a hospital in Peshawar, but was anxious to get back and continue to fight. And I sat in the middle and there was another man on my left and then two men in the front. And we drove through a series of road-blocks, down through Miramshah (which is Waziristan today).
“At that time, just as today it was off-limits to foreigners. No one was allowed to go in. I had to keep my mouth shut, could not smile, could not show in any way that I was a westerner; I was trying to grow a beard, you know trying to appear that I was from that area.
“We saw Pakistani soldiers at numerous checkpoints and then after a time there were no more soldiers whatsoever. There was no indication that I was in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or…I had no idea where I would be. Of course I knew I was in Pakistan, or along the border, but there was no sense of government…anywhere.
“I remember, that day or that evening, they took me up to a house, a mud house, and they said, ‘sit here in this room and wait.’ Two things about it: one, I had to sit there all day long with flies buzzing around and I didn’t know what was going to happen, didn’t know where I was being led. And I noticed that the house or the room was filled to the roof with these pine boxes, filled with ammunition and small-arms.
“This was the absolute beginning of what would become the largest CIA operation in history. But there was no indication I was in any place. It was then simply a village, so they were storing the arms in this village because it was save as people didn’t see anything.
“At sun-down a man came with a rifle, and said, ‘follow me.’ Then we hiked up into the mountains, but first they gave me some food. We had some rice, it was very gritty rice. I think there was some meat in it, no vegetables. I ate a little bit. At sun-down he prayed and then we climbed up into the hills. I couldn’t stand this man, and the reason I could not stand him was because as it got dark he said, ‘you’re making too much noise. Take off your sandals, because we have to cross the border and we don’t want Pakistani soldiers to hear us.’
“He had a rifle. I was by myself, I had never been anyplace like this in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing, I had to follow his direction and listen to him. And as I walked through the night along the dry river-bed with my feet getting increasingly bloody, I asked myself what in the world was I getting myself into, and I hate Afghanistan, or I hate…this country that I love so much since 1973, I certainly did not like one bit in 1981, at the very beginning.
“We walked through the night. It was I don’t know how many hours. And then we came to a tent and I slept and ate. I went inside and I crowded in and there were five or six men in the tent, all extremely close together and I looked at my feet and they were bloody and I just gritted my teeth and fell asleep.
“The next morning we got up with another guide and walked for another day or so up into Paktya province, ending up going to a place called Shahi Kot and living for the next month or so with a young commander of the time named Jalaluddin Haqqani, who eventually became military commander of the Taliban many years later.
“That was my introduction to Afghanistan and the jihad of the 1980s.”
He spoke of his involvement with Afghanistan during the 1980s, where he worked in America on various projects including as executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan which was run by the National Security Council and the US State Department.
“I stayed in Paktya province. I eventually came out. By then my beard was long, I was skinny, darker from the sun, and I went straight to Peshawar airport and I bought a ticket to Kandahar. And I went to Kandahar….excuse me, I went straight to Quetta. And there it took a while, I don’t know how many days. I finally got somebody else. Because I was living in the mountains; the mujahideen were fighting in the mountains and I wanted to see what it was like in the desert.
“And also the battles that we had been in were not that significant. It was mostly guerilla warfare, it was hit and run. I wanted to go and see something more elaborate, if you will. So then I found somebody else in Quetta and went across this time on the back of a motorcycle across the desert into a place called Malijad [?], which was near Kandahar.
“And I was there for a while. […] There the war was much, much worse. Very severe…at one time in particular. So when I was finished with my time in Afghanistan in 1981/82 I came out, wrote a series, a six-part series, for the [New York] Times, and wanted to go back to the US. I went back to the US, and I stayed there for a time. And then, what happened was that shortly after that – and this is to answer your question about going back in the 80s – Zalmai Khalilzad, who is today US ambassador to the United Nations, at that time was a young […] professor at Columbia, and he and I met during a radio programme on Afghanistan.
“There were very few people at that time who were really interested in Afghanistan. There was Medecins Sans Frontieres, which was just starting out, so the French doctors were very involved. There were some activists, a few journalists, a few of us, a few photojournalists also. Other than that most people in the country or Western world really didn’t care that much in the early 1980s.
“And I was doing a radio programme one night with Zalmai Khalilzad, and he came up to me afterwards and he asked if he could stay in touch. He held a meeting one day at Columbia, and I noticed a lot of people from Washington D.C. there, including a former Afghan ambassador. And I thought that he was a little bit more involved in Afghanistan here than simply being a consultant.
“And they were starting an organisation which the government wanted to call Friends of Afghanistan. And I wanted to help because they had saved my life a few times and I felt that they were being, if you will, decimated in many ways. And I wanted to help the women in children particularly, and so I took this job as the Executive Director of Friends of Afghanistan, which was run by the National Security Council and the State Department.
“During that time, we became the liaison between the United States, Pakistan and the mujahideen government-in-exile. This is a long-winded way of answering your question about returning to Afghanistan. And so then they brought over one time the rotating government-in-exile, if you will, and the President was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who I knew from before, of course, and others.
“And various things happened, but I recall this one small incident in that we were sitting in a hotel, the Roosevelt Hotel here in New York owned by PIA, and I was sitting with him in the hotel when he turned down a invitation…I remember the invitation came from the Oval Office in the White House, and he was to meet with President Reagan. And the United States at that time was supplying the mujahideen with billions of dollars worth of arms, and he said, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ And I said to myself, ‘this fellow – whether I agree with him or not – is extremely strong, sitting there in a hotel in the major city in the country that is supplying you with arms and say, ‘No’, to meeting with its leader.
“What happened during this time was that it became clear in various instances in which various things happened that I was somehow in Hekmatyar’s mind associated with the government. And I had written these articles for the Times, and I’d written a magazine article for the magazine section of the paper, and I’d written a book, and I’d written an op-ed piece on Afghanistan, passing on – I had mixed emotions about doing it – but passing on pleas that I had gotten from people there to supply them with arms with which to shoot down helicopters. This is the first time that we began to talk about this publicly.
“Well what happened not long after that a few months after is that we had this huge reception at the UN plaza hotel across from the UN for delegates from the United Nations so that they could meet the government-in-exile, which was in New York and ordered to present its credentials as the alternative government – or in other words the real government of Afghanistan. And I went with Hekmatyar – just he and I – to the UN, and tried to present his credentials, those being those of the government.
“He was unable to do it. Of course, the communist government was the official government in the UN, and he gave a speech out there in front of the UN before a lot of Afghans-in-exile. And then we went to this reception. And at the time, I was the front person, if you will, for this, he came in – interesting thing – Hekmatyar came in and what I found fascinating was that he embraced the Iranians. And they all went and stood in the corner. They were very happy, getting on together. And I said wait a minute, he’s Sunni, they’re Shi’a, I didn’t know that there was a tie there but certainly very very close ties.
“This was 84/85. I was planning; I was thinking about Afghanistan all the time, my whole life was Afghanistan. I was director of this organisation, was completely involved in it.”
Mr Van Dyk returned to Khost last winter and we asked him how things had changed since he was there in the 1980s.
“I first went to Khost and that area in 1981/82 and during that time period, and then from 2001, 2002, 2003 I went down there, and then went again in 2006/2007. And I found it completely changed.
“One distinct difference is in the early 1980s, I recall very clearly walking with members of the mujahideen past a Soviet airfield and seeing the Soviet helicopters shining in the sun and feeling protected by the mujahideen but afraid of Soviet soldiers. This time, going back to Afghanistan with a beard and long Afghan clothes, trying to blend in, I was afraid of the Taliban, being up in the mountains, feeling far less secure this time than before, also knowing that we didn’t see Soviet convoys in the street of Khost or on the highway, on the road which still hasn’t changed anything – it was dirt then and it’s dirt today…in fact it was in better condition in the 1980s than it is today – and the airfield, which is now called Chapman Airfield, there’s American helicopters there.
“So what I noticed was two very different times, but still in many ways the same. Travelling from Khost and going up into the mountains, up along the border, what I felt was that nothing has changed; there’s still no electricity up here, there’s still no running water, the people are the same. Very very little, in my mind, had changed here.
“The difference was that I had to be careful because I didn’t know who would protect me. Before you always knew that the mujahideen were always on your side. The only thing you had to worry about would be a government spy, or anybody who was tied with the government or with KHAD, the Afghan intelligence agency. This time I felt far less secure, and that I felt in many ways that it was more dangerous.”
Part of his book, In Afghanistan, relates time spent in the company of Jalaluddin Haqqani, then a mujahideen commander fighting against the Soviets, now the deputy commander of the Taliban, second only to Mullah Omar. We asked him what his experience of Haqqani was.
“The day that I arrived, the afternoon that I arrived, at Shahi Kot in this compound – it was a bombed out compound and the family that lived there was gone and so the mujahideen had taken over led by Haqqani…incidentally on March 2002 was the site of the largest ground offensive by US troops since Vietnam, so it’s become somewhat of a illustrative area.
“But at that time, I remember going in and Haqqani had a room with windows – and almost none of the other rooms in that compound had any glass in it – and there was a carpet on the floor, the dirt floor, and going in and sitting down on the ground, and he was hovering over a map with some of his men, and I noticed that he had a Kalashnikov with a scope on it, which is really not necessary.”
“There were very few Kalashnikovs in the country at that time; most of the men wore or carried Lee Enfield rifles. And I sat down. I was tired. I didn’t know what of course was going to happen. And smiled, said Hello, shook hands, and someone brought me a glass of tea and then a plate of honey; honey to give me sustenance, to give me energy. And I felt extremely welcome at that moment by him, because for the months or the 5 weeks that we were together up there, we had very little to eat. We lived primarily on rice and tea. Very rarely did we have meat. And never did we have vegetables. It was mostly just bread and tea and then rice.
“So he was very very welcoming to me. We would go up into the mountains where they had hidden underbrush a captured T-55 Soviet Tank. They had various weapons and ammunition hidden up in the country, up the mountains there, and we would go up there…and I have photographs, a lot of photographs of him smiling, and we were together, and we went horseback riding together.
“He was stern – he was the leader – but he was very welcoming. I didn’t look upon him as my friend, no, but I felt comfortable in his presence, and I felt that he would protect me, which he would protect me under Pashtunwali and the fact that I was a guest there sent by his commander who was Yunis Khalis.
“I remember he would, before men went into battle, he stood on a rock one day and held out a Qur’an, and the men would walk under the Qur’an before they went off to attack an army post. And he was clearly seen as a religious leader and as a military leader.
“He wore a white turban, his beard was black then, it’s grey now. He had a thick beard then as he does now. He always wore a green sweater. White shalwar qamis. Never was he distant or was he difficult to talk to. If you wanted to talk to him all you had to do was talk to his bodyguard.
“In fact, I felt that…there was one time when I was there that we had a guest; an Egyptian army major came in, very heavy-set guy on a donkey. And he stayed with me in the room. And this was probably one of the first of what became ultimately Al-Qaeda. And I remember that we were both outsiders. He spoke English, so we talked a lot, argued a lot, discussed things a lot over the period of a week.
“And I felt in talking to him, that he felt as distant from Haqqani as I did. It did not feel necessarily any closer. He was Muslim, I was not. Just the way in which he reacted to Haqqani and the amount of time that he was able to spend with him. Haqqani was very open, very warm, very hospitable, very gracious.”
Now that Mullah Dadullah has been killed, some analysts have suggested that the focus of the insurgency will shift to eastern Afghanistan – Haqqani’s zone of control. We asked Mr Van Dyk how he saw the short-term outlook for the insurgency.
“When I was in Kabul in December, I found one of Jalaluddin’s former bodyguards, and I found another man who had worked with him. They both had now left him and turned, and now worked for the government, and they had bodyguards around them because they were afraid and refuse to leave Kabul.
“I asked them why did they leave. Obviously I was trying to find them because I wanted to find people that I knew from years before. And they said because Haqqani no longer wants older men around him. They want younger fighters. […] son had said, ‘No we can’t give you money any more. We want younger people to fight.’
“When I went down to Khost and went up into the mountains and was told that he is being protected by the Frontier Scouts in Miramshah, and that this is the base of his operations, and that he has become the head not just of the Taliban insurgency from Waziristan, but, I was told later, from all of the North-West Frontier Province. Is that true? I don’t know.
“What I read since the demise of Mullah Dadullah is that he has become the number 2 person under Omar, and that I think you have a very valid point that the insurgency may shift to most definitely along the eastern frontier.
“Everyone says, everyone I talked to, that he is in Pakistan, that he is not in Afghanistan. He still has a lot of support. The brand new mosque, the beautiful new mosque in Khost, is funded by Saudi Arabian money. That he still has close ties to the Gulf through other people. I’ve seen a very slick magazine put out by some of his people in Peshawar that goes out as a fundraising magazine throughout the Gulf region. He is very much in charge. He’s very active. I’m told that his sons are very active and that they’re looking for young fighters. He’s jettisoned, if you will, some of the older men who were around him…still very active.”
Finally we asked him about the longer-term perspective for Afghanistan. Did he see an end in sight for the foreign troops currently in the country?
“I…do not see an end in sight at the moment. A few things come to mind. I remember talking one time in Kabul with the religious affairs advisor to President Karzai, Maulavi [Muhayuddin] Baluch, who said to me, ‘we both know, you know, everyone knows that 85% of Afghanistan is people that live in the countryside.’ That, as he said, to a rural Afghan, there is no difference between a Soviet soldier and an American soldier. NATO and the US to them are one and the same: Christian infidels. The only different he said – and he was being very political – is that the United States came in, and that the people know that the United States came in, on a UN mandate.
“But the point is that for the people out in the countryside there’s really no difference. Very strong religious beliefs, their ideological and religious spiritual ties to the leadership of the mujahideen and to certain members of the Taliban I think are very similar. And I think because of US military tactics, because of the corruption.
“Then talking to a judge in Khost, he said, ‘under the Taliban we […] did not have to lock our doors. Today we do.’ Then security, corruption, and the fact that, for example, the one road from Gardez down to Khost is still not paved, is still dirt after the United States and its allies put 10 billion dollars into the country…shows the people, particularly in Paktya, Khost, along the…and as they would say to me: ‘where is the foreign assistance? Where is the help? We need a medical clinic here. We need this, or we need that.’ That has not come.
“So as a result of military tactics the fact that we’ve killed […] civilians. And what’s important to know, when I was here in the 1980s, every Afghan village had a radio. They listened to the BBC, they listened to VOA, and to much less a degree to Radio Moscow. They know what was going on in the world to a degree. Today to the same degree, today more so they know what is going on. So we cannot think for a minute that they can be manipulated or that they’re isolated. They understand full well. And I think that the United States and its allies have alienated a great number of people in the countryside and until such as time as we change our tactics that the Taliban are going to be received…and are going to be received well.
“When I was up in the mountains in Khost along the border, I was told that 80% of the people in the mountains were opposed to the US, and 20% support. The city of Khost itself it’s 50/50. Is that true? I don’t know. But that’s what they told me. I have to go back and find out some more later this summer.”
Finally, AfghanWire heard from Vanni Cappelli. He spoke about the implications of Mullah Dadullah’s death.
“The death in action on May 11th of Mullah Dadullah, the cruelly flamboyant member of the Taliban's central council who was popularly labeled in some quarters as "the Zarqawi of Afghanistan", has predictably been hailed as a major coalition triumph by American, ISAF, and Afghan government spokesmen. While the removal from the scene of such an infamous and capable commander should not be downplayed, the exaggeration of the significance of his being killed in battle by American forces acting on intelligence is indeed very similar to the optimistic prophecies of progress that attended the killing of Zarqawi in Iraq. The aftermath of a continued downward spiral in Iraq is more than evident after a year, and so assessments of the impact of Dadullah’s death on Afghanistan should be made with considerable caution and a great attention to context. In both cases, such sanguine estimations reveal a basic failure to grasp the underlying nature of the conflict at hand.
“Dadullah was very much a figure in the mold of the so-called "charismatic mullah", reactionary Pashtun religious leaders on both sides of the Durand Line such as the Mullah of Hadda in the 1890's, the Mullah-i-Lang in the 1920's, the Fakir of Ipi in the 1930's, and his own superior, Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself. Such personalities have always served the dual function of being inspirational rallying points for their jihadi movements and convenient bogeymen for their Western or westernizing opponents. In both dimensions, the idea that the turbulence that they create is co-extensive with the leader can be greatly exaggerated.
“A Kakar Pashtun from Charchino in Uruzgan province, Dadullah early developed a substantial reputation for bravery and resilience during the Soviet-Afghan War, a reputation that was only enhanced by his continuing his career after he lost a leg in that conflict. But it was not until the time of Taliban rule and its aftermath in the current insurgency that a double-edged legend arose of his cruelty.
“The basic building blocks of this personal myth are well-known: a brutal massacre of the Hazara inhabitants of Bamyan in 1999; the supervision of the destruction of the Buddhas there in 2001; the murder at his command of a Western Red Cross worker in 2003; the recent series of videos showing him beheading alleged Pashtun "American spies" -- all earned him the epithet of "wild butcher" used to describe him by Kandahar Governor Hajji Asadullah Khaled after his death.
“Two qualifications should be made to this image. If Dadullah was a flamboyantly cruel fighter, he was also a capable commander, entrusted with the charge of Taliban operations in the southwest of the country. This trust derived as much from him organizational skills and tactical competence as from his ability to inspire people to commit atrocities. His wild, bloody valor may have been an inspiration to his men, but it also profoundly alienated many Pashtun, rural as much as urban. Assessments of the significance of his death should move beyond that of the tired slaying of a monster clich�(c) to tactical, strategic, and psychological realities which are rarely brought into the mainstream Western discourse on Afghanistan.
“On a tactical level, the killing of the man entrusted with leading the Taliban's spring-summer offensive that was to have centered on his operational provinces of Nimroz, Helmand, and Uruzgan will undoubtedly cause a delay as a replacement is searched for and strategy reassessed. In the short term the insurgency is likely to rely on the stopgap measure of an increase in suicide bombings, which will be trumpeted by Taliban spokesmen as badal, or revenge, for the killing of Dadullah. Yet on a more profound level there has been speculation that his death will lead to a strategic shift towards attacks in the south and east of the country, where overall command is held by the darkly capable but much less brutal Jalaluddin Haqqani. This shift will be both a function of Haqqani seizing his opportunity to assert himself, and the necessity forced on the Taliban of acting where their most capable commander is currently situated. They will also gain an unintended boon of going forward with a less polarizing leader.
“But on a deeper level the disruptions and accommodations attendant on the death of Mullah Dadullah cannot alter the basic picture of what is happening on the Afghan frontier much. Afghan journalist Sayyed Anwer told the Italian newspaper, La Republica, that with Dadullah’s death, the Taliban "have lost fifty percent of their strength".
“Fifty percent of the Taliban's strength comes from Pashtun alienation, the other fifty percent from the backing of their insurgency by Pakistan. Given the international community's and particularly America's failure to address the multiple causes of this alienation and the superpower's oxymoronic support of the Pakistani military-security services complex, the insurgency, after taking a few breaths, will continue in force.
“For both Pashtun alienation and Rawalpindi's backing of the Taliban will survive Mullah Dadullah.”
That’s all from us at AfghanWire. A transcript of this podcast will be released onto our website shortly. Details of future podcasts will appear on the website at www.afghanwire.com. Until then, good bye.
AFGHANWIRE MEDIA BLOG
Friday, 1 June 2007
