Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“The Americans are blind in Afghanistan,” Yusuf said. Afghanistan would be a graveyard for them. But when the foreigners left, the Taliban could negotiate with the Afghan army and police, instead of continuing to fight. “They are brothers, Muslims,” he said. He fought with them now only because they were with the Americans. President Karzai would flee to America when the foreigners left, he said. When the foreigners left, girls could go to school and women could work, he added. I asked about the killing of aid workers. If foreigners didn’t fight the Taliban, he said, he didn’t fight them. The Afghans needed help, and it didn’t matter if aid workers were Muslims or infidels, but “the UN is with the Americans, so I fight them.”

A year before, in a big attack in Andar, the Americans killed a senior commander named Mullah Mu’min. Yusuf had been his deputy and assumed leadership after he was killed. Yusuf received his orders from his own commanders. The mujahideen always wanted to attack the Americans, he said, but their commanders told them when to attack. Mullah Yusuf operated only in Ghazni. Mullah Omar was the top commander, he told me, but only Yusuf’s most senior commanders could communicate with the one-eyed former leader of Afghanistan, who called himself the “commander of the faithful.”

Yusuf told me he would stop fighting when the foreigners left Afghanistan, but then he would go to other places like Chechnya, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, and Somalia to fight. I doubted it was more than bravado; he knew little about the world outside Afghanistan and his refuge in Pakistan. Still, the pre-September 11 Taliban were much less connected to other struggles in the Muslim world. Globalized jihadism was penetrating even the remote Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. While most Afghan Taliban fought only for Afghanistan, the longer the Americans remained, the more links the Taliban might forge. Out of curiosity, I asked Yusuf what he thought about Hizballah. Throughout the Muslim world, tensions between Sunnis and Shiites were increasing. In Pakistan the Sunni groups backing the Taliban were bitterly anti-Shiite and often murdered innocent Shiites. At first my hosts were confused between Libya and Lebanon. Shafiq said they didn’t like Shiites but they liked Hizballah because they fought America, though this was not exactly accurate. “Hizballah are mujahideen,” Yusuf said. “It is no problem that they are Shiites. They are our brothers. The Americans made problems between Sunnis and Shiites. All Muslims are one.”

Muhamad, Yusuf’s eighteen-year-old companion, was also from Ghazni but had gone to an Islamic school in the Pakistani city of Quetta, which borders Afghanistan and sheltered many Taliban leaders. The school was called Mahmadiya, and education was in Pashtu, the only language Muhamad knew. Room and board had been free. In Quetta he had joined the Taliban, he said, because they were Muslim and his whole village had joined, and because he didn’t like the Americans entering his village. His parents did not know he had joined; they thought he was still studying in Pakistan. He had been a fighter for only fifteen days but had received two or three months of training in Ghazni. The training was not difficult, he said, but he had taken part in only one attack so far, against a police checkpoint in Ghazni. He had used an AK-47, and his friend had used an RPG. The Afghan police were not good fighters, he said. Shafiq added that the Afghan army was very good, and soldiers hit their targets when they shot. Referring to Muhamad, Shafiq proudly said, “All our boys are Mullah Omar and Osama.”

After we finished eating we walked to a mud shed. Shafiq opened its wooden doors to reveal a white Toyota Corolla. The men loaded the RPG launcher and four rockets into the car, along with the PKM and the AK-47. We drove under the moonlit desert on dirt paths to the village of Kharkhasha, where Shafiq lived. Shafiq put a tape of Taliban chants on. They were in Pashtu and without music, which was officially forbidden by the Taliban. We walked over a short wooden footbridge, and Shafiq’s older brother opened the door to greet us.

We entered the guest room in darkness and sat down on the thin mattresses that lined the walls. A small gas lamp was brought out as well as grapes and green tea. Shafiq belonged to the Jalalzai tribe, which was the biggest in Andar, he said. He fought the Soviets alongside Maulvi Muhamad Younes Khalis’s hardline Hizb-e-Islami, a splinter group with the same name as the one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Shafiq was jailed for five years in the Communist era, and he bore tattoos on his wrist from that time. During the jihad against the Soviets, he worked with Arab doctors who volunteered to help the mujahideen. He picked up some Arabic from a Lebanese doctor called Sheikh Aqil, whom he described as a big, strong man. Following the Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen started to fight one another, Shafiq said he saw that the mujahideen had become robbers. He joined the Taliban in 1994 because they wanted peace and Islam.

When the American forces left, Shafiq said, he would be willing to negotiate with the Taliban’s Afghan rivals—but not with President Karzai, who was not a Muslim but a Jew. “I cannot make a deal with Karzai because he is American,” he said. Shafiq wanted a Sharia government, meaning one where Islamic law was imposed, and he hoped that Mullah Omar would return to rule the country. Girls could attend school, he said, and women could work, as long as they wore a hijab that covered them appropriately. Women could even serve as Parliament members and as governors, but not as the president, he said. Shafiq had a seven-month-old daughter; he said he would send his daughters to school, but only if the teachers were women. He was wary of giving too much freedom to women. They could go to cinemas only with their brothers or fathers, he said, not with other boys. There weren’t many cinemas in Afghanistan, so I didn’t know what he was so worried about. “If you give women freedom, they will go with boys and get HIV,” he said. One of my favorite views in Kabul was of kites fluttering high above homes in Kabul. The Taliban regime had forbidden kite flying in the past, and I asked Shafiq what he thought. Kites are not good, he said; it was better to work or study, and flying a kite was not even a sport. Soccer was also bad, but exercise and martial arts were good. Even the boys we passed playing with fire were doing something that was haram (forbidden).

Shafiq wanted help from Saudi Arabia or Iran; he and his men needed money for ammunition. They received help from Saudi individuals, as well as Pakistanis, but he did not know of any state assistance. Iran did not help them, he said. “Whoever is fighting with America,” he said, “he is my brother.” Shafiq had a friend called Mullah Agha Jan, who was killed while fighting in Baghdad. They had benefited from the Iraq experience when remote-controlled bomb techniques were imported to Afghanistan. Shafiq had heard of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had run a training camp in western Afghanistan before leading Al Qaeda in Iraq. “He is a big mujahid,” Shafiq said, “famous in Afghanistan.” Shafiq had met Osama bin Laden twice: once before the Taliban took over and once during its reign. He had been impressed by bin Laden’s knowledge of Pashtu. (He must have had a better book than I did.) Shafiq had met Mullah Omar as well. He thought both Mullah Omar and bin Laden were very friendly. Arab, Pakistani, and Uzbek fighters had come through the Andar district, Shafiq said, mostly as suicide bombers but also as fighters. Some Afghans from Kandahar had also come to fight in Andar. The Kandaharis were the best fighters he had seen; they were not afraid. The Russians had fought fiercely, like dogs. He did not have a high opinion of his American foes. “Pakistan and Iran are not friends of Afghanistan,” Shafiq said. “They want to take Afghanistan, they don’t want peace.” In this he was representative of most Afghan Taliban, who despite their extremely conservative views were fundamentally nationalists. Like most Afghans, he was against suicide bombings as well. “Suicide attacks are not good because they kill Muslims,” he said.