The Wrong Enemy

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Prologue

  The Taliban Surrender

  The People Turn

  Pakistan’s Protégés

  The Taliban in Exile

  Al Qaeda Regroups

  The Wrong Enemy in the Wrong Country

  The Taliban Return

  The Suicide Bomb Factory

  Photos

  Militancy Explodes in Pakistan

  The Taliban Close Their Grip

  Karzai’s Turn

  Obama’s Surge

  Osama’s Safe Haven

  Springtime in Zangabad

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Carlotta Gall

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Gall, Carlotta, author.

  The wrong enemy : America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 / Carlotta Gall.

  pages; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-544-04669-6

  1. Taliban. 2. Afghan War, 2001– 3. Pakistan—Politics and government. 4. Afghanistan—Politics and government. 5. Pakistan. Inter Services Intelligence. 6. Qaida (Organization) 7. United States—Foreign relations—Pakistan. 8. Pakistan—Foreign relations—United States. 9. United States—Foreign relations—Afghanistan. 10. Afghanistan—Foreign relation—United States. I. Title.

  DS371.412.G35 2014

  958.104'7—dc23 2013044257

  eISBN 978-0-544-04568-2

  v1.0414

  For my father, Sandy Gall, who showed me the way in Afghanistan and encouraged me to write this book, and for my mother, Eleanor Gall, who gave me the spirit of adventure.

  And in memory of Sultan Munadi (1975–2009), best of friends and colleagues, kidnapped by the Taliban and killed in a rescue attempt.

  “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”

  —The late Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. special representative

  to Afghanistan and Pakistan

  Foreword

  I arrived in the town of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan on a cold evening in November 2001, just days after the Taliban had fled. Two months had passed since the attacks of 9/11 and one month since America had gone to war in Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force had been bombing Afghanistan since October 7, set on chasing down al Qaeda and toppling the Taliban government that harbored its leaders. I had crossed the strictly controlled border from Uzbekistan thanks to an Afghan friend. I had not seen him for six years, but he had helped my father travel into Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and decided to help his friend’s daughter cover this war. It was one of the reasons I came to love the Afghans. Friendship and loyalty mattered.

  I had visited Mazar-i-Sharif several times in the 1990s and knew it as a busy trading town, its streets spanning out from the glorious turquoise dome and tiled walls of the Shrine of Hazrat Ali in its central square. I was shocked at how impoverished the city and its inhabitants had become. They had suffered two terrible massacres in four years under the Taliban and lived under virtual blockade. Thousands of families, displaced by the war and Afghanistan’s worst drought in decades, had moved to the city in search of work and food. The streets were clogged with horsecarts, street stalls, and laborers pulling loads through the potholes. Families carrying children in their arms stepped through the mud to the central hospital. Scores of women begged on the mud-slicked streets, their faces hidden behind the lattice screen of the burqa, the head-to-toe pleated veil that turned women into soulless beings. The only part of their body visible was a calloused hand stretched out to passersby. Everyone was cold and hungry. The restaurants and tea shops were empty because of Ramadan. Street stalls sold imported fruit juice and stale biscuits, but there was not an egg to be had in the whole city.

  I was reporting for the New York Times, one of two dozen correspondents scrambled and sent to the region in the weeks after 9/11. I would end up staying for over a decade, engrossed in America’s struggle in Afghanistan. The Afghans would overthrow the Taliban and embrace peace, only to falter and slip back, dragged into a fight that few of them wanted. I packed up and left my previous post in the Balkans and went to live in Kabul, staying with the story even as the world’s attention was drawn away to Iraq. For me, Afghanistan was always the most important news story of the time. It was where 9/11 began and would finally be answered. It was where my reporting life had started, and from where rose this great wave of Islamism that has powered many of today’s wars.

  By 2001, I had been reporting on wars for nearly eight years: five in Russia where I covered the war in Chechnya closely, and three in the Balkans, chronicling the war in Kosovo and the fall of Slobodan Milošević for the New York Times. At the time of 9/11, I was reporting on NATO’s most pressing concern, an incipient guerrilla movement in Macedonia on the border with Kosovo. I watched the attack on the twin towers with fellow journalists in a hotel bar in Skopje. I knew immediately that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. I knew the story would lead back to Afghanistan, and I felt dread for the Afghans.

  Afghanistan had featured large in my life for nearly twenty years, ever since the early days of the Soviet invasion. As a Russian language student, I had met drunken Red Army soldiers back from Afghanistan in a Soviet bar. The war was never officially acknowledged, but those conscripts told hair-raising stories of Afghan guerrillas mutilating soldiers caught on the battlefield. I heard the other side of the story from my father, a British television journalist who was in Afghanistan with the mujahideen, and brought back pictures of refugees pouring out of the country along donkey trails, villagers taking up arms against Soviet jets and helicopters, and Russian prisoners talking about drug-taking and hazing in the ranks. It was the Soviet Union’s Vietnam—I was fascinated. In the 1990s, I traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan and saw for myself the harsh mountains and emerald valleys of the Hindu Kush, and met the Afghans, resilient and gracious even in the destitution of the refugee camps.

  I came across international jihadis in the Pakistani city of Peshawar then, too. We called them Wahhabis, after the fundamentalist Islamic sect that has its roots in Saudi Arabia. They were rough fighters, Arabs and North Africans who would run us off the roads, and Egyptian and Kuwaiti doctors who showed a hostile arrogance to us Westerners. We did not realize then, but they were the beginnings of bin Laden’s al Qaeda. They were often a menace to the Afghans with their militaristic ambitions. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, they were looking for a cause.

  I saw Wahhabis turn up in Chechnya in 1995 and watched how they transformed the Chechens’ deserving cause for self-determination into an extremist Islamist struggle. Determined to spark a greater conflagration across the Muslim North Caucasus, the Arabs set Chechens against each other and helped provoke the second war in the republic in 1999, bringing more disaster and destruction down on the small territory. They wrought even greater havoc in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They dreamed of creating an Islamic caliphate stretching across South and Central Asia, home to some 500 million Muslims. Pakistan, the first nuclear-armed Muslim state, would be at its core. Some of us saw and wrote about the extremist trend as it unfolded, but no Western government seemed concerned.

  Now, by going to war in 2001, the United State
s was walking into the Islamists’ trap. It was just what al Qaeda wanted: for Afghanistan again to serve as a battleground for Muslim fighters against a superpower. The Afghans once more were their unlucky pawns.

  It would become America’s longest overt war. Thirteen years later, there is no swift resolution in sight, and support at home has waned. Few Americans seem to care anymore about Afghanistan, and I decided I owed it to all those caught up in the maelstrom of Afghanistan to put down a record of events as I had seen them from the ground.

  The war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbors and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy.

  The U.S. and NATO response has always been behind the curve, “trailing” the insurgency, as the military terms it, and ignoring it to wage war in Iraq. It was a fatal error to allow the insurgency to grow so strong that defeating it would be brought into question and cost so many lives. Politicians and diplomats, barring the exceptional few, were mealymouthed, pleading that they had no leverage over Pakistan, and downright negligent.

  I watched the resurgence of the Taliban with mounting alarm and, ultimately, great sorrow since it could have been prevented. I witnessed many of the scenes in this book, met most of the participants, and heard their accounts firsthand. In retelling these events, I am offering a first brush of history. It is a partial record, as war reporting always is, but it is as I and many Afghans saw it. I lived in Kabul, with a foothold in Islamabad, from 2001 to 2011, traveling all over Afghanistan and through much of Pakistan too. I returned for nine months, from 2012 to 2013, to write this book. Over twelve years, I lost friends and acquaintances in suicide bombings and shootings, and saw others close to me savagely maimed. I do not pretend to be objective in this war. I am on the side of the victims. The human suffering has been far too great, and we have a duty to ponder the reasons for such a calamity.

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  May 2013

  Prologue

  “I’m in trouble here.”

  —Photographer colleague in Quetta

  December 2006. After five days of reporting in and around Quetta, Pakistan, I had somehow irritated the secretive but powerful Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI. I had been following the trail of several suicide bombers, calling on their families, visiting the madrassas they had attended, and interviewing government officials, Taliban sympathizers, and opposition politicians. I had been working with a Pakistani photographer and several different local reporters. We were followed over several days of reporting in Quetta by plainclothes intelligence men who were posted at our respective hotels and trailed us on motorbikes. That is not unusual in Pakistan, where accredited journalists are free to travel and report, but their movements, phone calls, and interviews are often monitored. But the Pakistani military has its own red lines. There are some subjects it does not want reported, and it has used intimidation to suppress the truth.

  On our fifth and last day in Quetta, four plainclothes men detained my photographer colleague at his hotel downtown. They seized his computer and photo equipment and brought him to the parking lot of my hotel. There they made him call me and ask me to come down to talk to them. “I’m in trouble here,” he told me. It was after dark. I did not want to go down to meet a bunch of ISI men, but I told my colleague I would get help. I alerted my editor in New York.

  Before I could reach any Pakistani officials, the agents raided my hotel room. I had earlier refused to admit them, but now they got the hotel staff to open the door with a key card, and then they broke through the door chain. The lintel splintered. They burst in in a rush, snatching my laptop from my hands. They were plainclothes intelligence, I realized. Among them was an English-speaking officer wearing a smart new khaki-colored fleece. The other three were the muscle, in bulky winter jackets over dark-colored shalwar kamize, loose-fitting shirt and pants. One of them had the photographer in tow.

  They went through my clothes and seized my computer, notebooks, and a cell phone. When one of the muscle men grabbed my handbag from me, I protested. He punched me twice, hard, in the face and temple, knocking me over. I fell back onto the coffee table, smashing the cups there, grabbing at the officer’s fleece to break my fall and nearly pulling him down on top of me. For a moment it was funny. I remember thinking it was just like a hotel-room bust-up in the movies.

  But then I flew into a rage and berated them for barging into a woman’s bedroom and using physical violence. The English-speaking officer who appeared to be in charge told me that I was not permitted to visit the neighborhood of Pashtunabad (as we had), and that it was forbidden to interview members of the Taliban (as we had tried to). He refused to show me any ID or say who they were—but he said we could apply to the Special Branch of the police for our belongings the next day. As they were leaving, I told them that the photographer should stay with me. The officer refused. “He is Pakistani, we can do with him whatever we want.” That was chilling. I knew they were capable of torture and murder, especially in Quetta, where the security services were a law unto themselves.

  They drove off in a white jeep. I took down the license number and later found it belonged to the Special Branch police service. The car was just a cover. In fact, the men were military intelligence. They drove to the Military Intelligence building in Quetta, the town’s most dreaded institution, which was behind a campaign of ruthless suppression of Baluch nationalists since 2006. Baluchistan is one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, and the indigenous Baluch tribes have fought repeated insurgencies demanding greater political autonomy and rights over the province’s rich natural resources.

  My foreign editor, Susan Chira, had been working the phones and had reached the minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim. He was dining with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz at the time and was able to tap him for the cell phone numbers of security officials in Quetta. With his intervention, my belongings were returned several hours later. The photographer was released after more than five hours in detention and ordered to leave town.

  It became clear later that intelligence agents had copied data from our computers, notebooks, and cell phones, and tracked down our contacts and acquaintances in Quetta. Most of the people I interviewed, I learned, were subsequently visited by intelligence agents, and some of the local journalists who had helped me were warned by Pakistan’s intelligence services not to work with foreign journalists again. Afghans were at most risk, and several had to leave town to avoid arrest. I was later told by a diplomat that the rough treatment was ordered by the head of the ISPR, the Inter-Services Public Relations, the press department of the Pakistani military, in order to discourage me in my reporting. Our photographer was severely threatened and told not to work with the New York Times in the future. The intimidation continued for months, and eventually he was forced to cut all ties with the paper.

  One Quetta journalist who had worked a couple of days with us came home late that night and saw a strange car parked near his house. It was a red Vigo SUV, with tinted windows and a special license plate with white writing on a black background. It looked like an intelligence agency car. “We journalists can smell their cars,” he told me years later. He remembered a message from me earlier in the evening, advising caution, so he walked straight past his house and went to stay with a friend. He turned his phone off for a week and stayed away from work for a day until he heard things had calmed down.

  Another journalist did not wait for anyone to call on his home. When he heard from a friend what had happened to us, he turned off his cell phone and removed the battery and SIM card. Pakistani journalists have learned that is the first thing they should d
o in times of trouble, since cell phone companies, and therefore intelligence agents, can track your location through the GPS in your phone, even when it is switched off. Then he left home, arranging with his father to relay a signal to him the next morning if there was trouble. He drove all night, heading hundreds of miles first south, then north, then east of the provincial capital without stopping. Any risk of breakdown or encounter with thieves on the roads was minor compared to being picked up by intelligence agents. At 9 a.m. the next morning, he came back into Quetta and looked for the signal from his father. All was quiet, so he returned home.

  The extreme caution of the two journalists was indicative of the pressures under which Pakistani journalists work. Few dared talk about it, but after several years working in Pakistan, I was learning that journalists who reported on taboo subjects, including the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan, ISI covert operations, Pakistan’s nuclear program, or issues within the military, risked intimidation and often physical abuse. In the worst cases, journalists had been killed.

  In Baluchistan, where the Pakistani military was waging a dirty war against Baluch nationalist rebels, disappearances of journalists and political activists were common. Hundreds of Baluch were missing or detained. Many turned up dead. Cases of extrajudicial killings by Pakistani security forces became so frequent from 2006 to 2013 that human rights organizations described the practice as “kill and dump.”

  The ISI in particular was responsible for picking up and threatening local journalists all over the country. Reporters were usually hustled into a car by plainclothes intelligence agents and disappeared for two or three days. Family and friends did not know where they were. There was never any judicial process. When they were released, they usually refused to talk about where they had been or what had happened, yet their colleagues noticed they were changed: they were quieter and their journalism became more cautious, avoiding controversial issues. During their disappearance they had, in fact, been beaten, strung up, and often sexually abused. They and their families were threatened, and they were warned to conform in their reporting or suffer terrible consequences.