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In June 2001, a couple of months before the infamous attack on New York which changed the world, I had traveled with a couple of colleagues from Kandahar to Kabul to do a series of reports on life under the Taliban for a foreign television channel.
It was there that, for the first time, I truly understood the tragedy that was Afghanistan and the circumstances that gave rise to the group whose name has now become shorthand for all that is myopic, literalist and extremist for most on the one hand, and for a brave indigenous resistance to a foreign occupation to some on the other. No amount of prior reading had the same revelatory effect on my understanding of the nuances of the Taliban movement as that trip.
When Nato attacked Afghanistan in October that year as a response to ‘9/11’, one of the things that completely bewildered them was how the supposedly fierce and resilient Taliban seemed to have disappeared into thin air. For most outsiders it seemed to prove the dictum — parroted by the Northern Alliance and ‘security’ pundits in India — that the Taliban were some sort of foreigner force propped up entirely by Pakistan’s ISI which had returned en masse to the foreign land it had come from.
The ISI certainly provided support and military know-how to the Taliban after Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1994 saw them as a solution to internecine warfare and warlordism among the former anti-Soviet ‘mujahideen’. But having interacted with most levels of the Taliban bureaucracy — except for the reclusive ‘Emir’ Mullah Omar — it was clear to me even then that they were very much an Afghan force.
While the leadership might have fled to Pakistan or elsewhere or while some commanders had opportunistically switched sides in the age-old tradition of the land, most Taliban fighters — which included the former ‘mujahideen’ — had simply melted away to their homes, indistinguishable from ordinary rural Pakhtun Afghans. Bizarrely, it seems it took Nato almost a further decade to understand this.
One of the people I got to know well on that trip was a senior member of the Taliban information ministry. He was only 24 then — youthful like most Taliban I met (even Mullah Omar’s right-hand man, Mullah Hasan Rehmani, the governor of Kandahar, was only in his early forties). A former law student at Kabul University, he had chosen to join the Taliban out of the necessity of choosing sides and in the naïve belief that they were actually a force for good compared to the warlordism he had seen growing up.
Now mortified by some of the Taliban’s extremes, he chose to confide his secret dissent to me, and his own remarkable story as the unsung protector of Afghanistan’s film heritage still remains to be told. When he fled Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul (more out of notions of honour than necessity since two of his brothers who were also Taliban commanders had simply switched sides), he landed up in Pakistan for a few months and I had the chance to interview him in a less guarded environment for the BBC Urdu Service. One of the questions I asked him was how it was that I had never seen any of the Arabs linked to Al Qaeda — who the West considered the real string pullers of the Taliban — in any government ministry during my time in Kandahar or Kabul. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single Arab the entire time I was there. He replied that, while there were some Arabs in Afghanistan and they may have had access to Mullah Omar (he himself had met Osama bin Laden once on the Kabul frontlines), they never interfered in the day to day running of government nor exerted any direct influence on the Taliban rank and file.
Most analysts with a far greater knowledge of Afghanistan than mine corroborated his words which pointed to the essential difference between the Al Qaeda Arabs and the Afghan Taliban: one had a global vision and “an agenda that stretches beyond borders”, the other mainly localised interests. It’s pertinent to remember that despite the fact that Al Qaeda had found refuge in Afghanistan, no act of international terrorism has ever involved an Afghan. In the heady days after driving the Taliban from power, Nato and its allies chose to ignore this distinction.
Syed Saleem Shahzad’s book, at its most persuasive, is essentially an explanation of how that crucial mistake and its resultant hubris allowed Al Qaeda to make “blood brothers” of those lumped with them and weave itself into the fabric of the Taliban far more than it ever had before 9/11.
Shahzad’s contention is that the West’s initial myopia in Afghanistan has become a self-fulfilling prophecy which has made it now impossible to separate Al Qaeda from the Taliban insurgency and which will thus lead to the West’s eventual defeat in that arena.
THIS review has been the most difficult one, by far, that I have ever had to write. And it is only very partially because of the denseness of the book under consideration. The author frequently uses the metaphor of the Arabic mythological epic, Alf Laila Wa Laila (A Thousand and One Nights), to give a sense of the multifarious interconnected stories of Al Qaeda, but the metaphor could as easily be used for this book itself. It is a series of stories about people who fought and died and were replaced, obscure histories and recent events that have ostensibly shaped the beast that is Al Qaeda.
In fact, the book would have benefited tremendously from some charts and diagrams to help readers keep track of the numerous jihadist characters and their often complicated and fluid relationships with various organisations without having to continuously flip backwards and retrace their steps.
But there are two far more primary reasons this has been a difficult book to review. The first has to do with the content. Most of the book is written without source citations and more often than not, assertions are made that are impossible to verify.
Obviously, one must take the author at his word if he asserts that Militant X or Al Qaeda Planner Y told him something in an exclusive interview; there is no way for a reader to corroborate or refute such information, especially if X and Y are now dead.
But as often, startling claims are made without reference to any information in the public domain that would substantiate them.
To give just a few examples of numerous such assertions, the book claims that after the 2003 military operation in South Waziristan, Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zwahiri were separately holed up in various valleys in the far-flung area of Shawal which falls at the juncture of South and North Waziristan and Afghanistan (if true, Shahzad was far more knowledgeable about their whereabouts than any of the various intelligence agencies hunting for them); that the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas was engineered by Al Qaeda in order to prevent an imminent recognition of the Taliban by China which, had it occurred, would have reduced the Taliban government’s international isolation and thus have worked against Al Qaeda’s “broader interests” to make the Taliban dependent on it; and that “Unlike [President] Musharraf, [General] Kayani was unconcerned about inflicting collateral damage” and was also unconcerned by the plight of millions of civilians made refugees in 2008 and 2009 in North and South Waziristan, Bajaur, Mohmand and Swat.
These are not small assertions for a journalist to make as throwaway “factoids”. Yet the book is littered with such claims. What makes such assertions particularly problematic is that they are presented along with other verifiable facts about well known events, quite possibly lulling the ordinary reader, with little independent knowledge of the region’s politics, into accepting them as the truth rather than highly contested ‘facts’.
The second reason making this a difficult review are the circumstances in which the book was published. It was launched in London only a few days before the author, Syed Saleem Shahzad, a fellow journalist who worked with the same media house as myself at one time, was kidnapped and found brutally murdered with the finger of blame pointing squarely towards the state’s intelligence outfits. The immediate assumption was that his senseless murder was connected in some way to his writings on the murky world of jihadist outfits and possibly to this very book.
This obviously attached a halo to his investigative pieces that he possibly never enjoyed in his lifetime. It is never easy to write critically of the work of a colleague (albeit a colleague I never met), but especially when that colleague has met such a horrific and thoroughly undeserved fate.
The Commission of Inquiry into Shahzad’s murder has yet to make its findings known. But irrespective of the results of that inquiry, and indeed it remains a fervent hope that Shahzad’s killers are identified and punished, the book must be judged on its content, which I have endeavoured to do with the caveats detailed above.
I have already pointed out one of the major issues with the content of the book being a lack of citations for rather startling claims. However, there also numerous assertions in the text which can actually be called out for their own internal contradictions and even misstatement of known facts.
As examples of the latter, Shahzad claims at one point that Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan (Afghanistan under the Taliban) “is recognised by a majority of Muslim scholars as an Islamic state”, which is just simply wrong. At another point he claims that General Tariq Majeed was General Musharraf’s choice to succeed him as chief of army staff in 2007 but that Musharraf was forced to accept General Kayani since the latter was the US choice. This is contradicted by the recent WikiLeaks disclosures of secret US documents that show that General Musharraf played his cards close to his chest and that US diplomats were left to speculate on who Musharraf’s successor might be.
As an example of the former, Shahzad claims at one point in the book that Al Qaeda’s leadership had become quite upset with its man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for his brutality and his policy of targeting Shias in Iraq since it felt this was alienating even moderate Sunnis from Al Qaeda. In fact, the author claims Al Qaeda was getting ready to quickly distance itself from Zarqawi before he was killed by US forces. Yet, at another point the author notes that Dr Ayman al-Zwahiri, who he calls the real founder of Al Qaeda, “awarded” Zarqawi the “Al Qaeda franchise for Iraq to stir up sectarian strife so that Iraq’s theater of war would be more complicit” and to make Iraq ungovernable. His claims about Al Qaeda’s alleged concern about Zarqawi’s sectarianism are also belied by his own telling of Al Qaeda’s intellectual lineage from the medieval ideologue Ibne Taymiyyah who declared Shias heretics, and how the virulently anti-Shia outfit, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, was welcomed into Al Qaeda with open arms and allowed to carry on its targeting of the Shia in Pakistan.
But perhaps the book’s greatest problem lies in Shahzad’s interpretation of Al Qaeda itself. Contrary to every other scholarly dissection of Al Qaeda as a loose-knit group of radical jihadis worldwide bound by a common ideology, Shahzad paints an organisation that seems not only to micromanage all affairs but which has a Nostradamus-like prophetic far-sightedness.
According to Shahzad, Al Qaeda not only “fashioned” the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2007-8 by spotting and nurturing young radicals such as Baitullah Mehsud, Qari Ziaur Rehman and Swat’s Ibne Ameen (who was later notorious for his throat-slitting brutality) early on, it did so because it had foreseen that Pakistan’s tribal areas would become the real battleground against the Americans.
Shahzad also claims that the Lal Masjid episode of 2007 was precipitated by Al Qaeda on whose advice Maulana Abdul Aziz, the mosque’s infamous khateeb, had in 2004 issued a fatwa forbidding Muslim funerals for army personnel killed in the South Waziristan operation. Before the actual military operation against Lal Masjid, “The Al Qaeda shura (council) met in North Waziristan and, after prolonged discussion and debate, agreed that the high point of their struggle in Pakistan would come when the foreseeable military operation against Lal Masjid began,” writes Shahzad. “Open war against the US-Pakistan designs was now unavoidable.”
Al Qaeda also knew in 2006 (!) that Barrack Obama would be elected president of the US, according to Shahzad, and therefore the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was timed to unsettle US plans for Pakistan during a transition phase from a Republican to a Democrat administration. And its 9/11 attacks were orchestrated knowing that the US would then attack Afghanistan, thereby “sucking the US into their trap” and leading to a Muslim backlash which would precipitate a confrontation between the West and the Muslim world. This supposedly fulfilled a Hadith about the beginning of “End of Times” battles in ancient Khurasaan comprising the current areas of Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan and India. The belief in this Hadith is explained as the motivator for bin Laden’s decision to return to Afghanistan in 1996, even though the actual circumstances of bin Laden’s flight of necessity from Sudan are well known.
It is one thing to disabuse some silly liberals of their notions of the jihadists as unthinking automatons. It is quite another to do what Shahzad seems to have done: delineate Al Qaeda as some sort of all-seeing, all-knowing entity that is able to plan far ahead of mere mortals. In fact, his far more credible focus on Al Qaeda’s “uncanny ability to exploit unfolding events” is undercut by this constant awe at the ‘prophetic’ nature of the group’s leadership. In all probability, many of these stories were probably revisionist takes on past events by jihadists Shahzad had access to, such as the notorious Ilyas Kashmiri (killed in a drone strike a few days after Shahzad’s own murder). But for the author to take these at face value betrays a strange gullibility for a seasoned journalist.
The book is at its best where Shahzad clearly cites his sources of information, usually mid-tier and lesser known figures of this shadowy world that he personally met, and which then provide a fresh insight into the workings of terror outfits. Characters like the former army commandos turned jihadis, Captain Khurram Ashiq, Major Abdul Rehman and Khurram’s brother, Major Haroon Ashiq are among the most fascinating to emerge from these stories.
Major Haroon, who the author claims personally killed the former SSG commander Major General (retired) Faisal Alavi in Islamabad in retaliation for the 2003 special forces operations in Angoor Adda, in particular, is singled out as one of the real architects of Al Qaeda’s new military strategy. This included, among other things, the November 26, 2008 attack on Mumbai (Shahzad claims it was planned by Haroon who “cunningly manipulated” a “forward section” of the ISI and the Lashkar-i-Taiba and was designed to take pressure off militants on the Afghan border by causing an India-Pakistan conflagration), the focus on cutting off Nato supply lines and the kidnapping-civilians-for-ransom strategy (including of the Karachi-based filmmaker, Satish Anand) to raise funds.
He also claims that the attack on the touring Sri Lankan cricket team in March 2009 was actually aimed to hold the team hostage to negotiate the springing from prison of Haroon, who had been arrested during a bungled kidnapping in Rawalpindi.
Incidentally, it should be noted that Carey Schofield in her recently published book Inside the Pakistan Army hints strongly that Alavi’s murder may have been motivated by the personal animosity of two senior generals who Alavi felt had reason to hold a grudge against him, who poisoned his longtime supporter General Musharraf against him and against whom he had filed a formal complaint for misrepresenting facts that led to his dismissal from service. She also repeats Alavi’s family’s claims (which she could not verify) that Major Haroon, who was charged with Alavi’s murder, was acquitted and walked out of prison in the summer of 2011.
Shahzad is also good where, through recounting his own experiences of navigating the difficult terrain of the Pak-Afghan border, he is able to convey how militants are able to manoeuvre militarily undetected by both Nato and Pakistani forces.
And because of his wealth of information on mid-level jihadists, he is also able to provide a snapshot of the increasingly fluid membership structure of militant outfits. With the book citing an estimated figure of 600,000 militants trained between 1980 and 2000, it paints a grim picture for analysts who believe they can turn a blind eye to some groups while targeting others.
Most importantly, the book also details the nuances of the extremely murky fight against militancy and terrorism in which nobody has any roadmaps and there is a constant push-and-pull over whether to employ force or divide-and-conquer tactics.
Shahzad points out, for example, that Nato initially mis-assessed Sirajuddin Haqqani’s loyalty to Mullah Omar, hoping to use him to displace Omar from the leadership of the Taliban (according to the book, the US also attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up the Jaishul Muslim, as a rival outfit to the Taliban). They did not realise, Shahzad says, that unlike his father Jalaluddin Haqqani, Siraj had become very close to Al Qaeda and, in fact, Al Qaeda’s man in the Taliban shura, and would never betray Omar because this would jeopardise Al Qaeda’s own interests. In fact, he had also assisted the TTP against the Pakistan army, which might explain recent rumours that the Pakistanis were willing to help the US track him down in exchange for the Americans not touching the elder Haqqani.
Similarly, he also puts down the failed treaties between the Pakistan army and militants, such as those of Shakai (April 2004), Srarogha (February 2005) and with the Utmanzai Wazirs (September 2006, which also resulted in money being transferred to militants as ‘compensation’ and other arrested militants being freed) not so much as Pakistan playing double games with the US, as desperate tactical strategies to contain militarily untenable situations. In 2007, for example, the Pakistan army also supported the TTP South Waziristan commander Mullah Nazir, with success, in order to wipe out the Al Qaeda-related Uzbek fighters, who Shahzad claims were the ones who introduced brutal tactics, such as the cutting of throats, to Pakistani militants.
The author also mocks those who allege any nexus between the ISI and Al Qaeda in the Mumbai attacks laying the blame unequivocally on Major Haroon, Major Abdul Rehman and their Al Qaeda cohorts. If anything, Shahzad accuses the army of creating more jihadis through the “unnecessary persecution” of militants and through torture tactics, neither of which seems to fit into the current discourse of US allegations of double-dealing against Pakistan. If indeed state intelligence agents were
responsible for Shahzad’s murder, the irony is that they have silenced a voice that could have bolstered their arguments against the American accusations.
IN early 2000, a few months after General Musharraf took power in a coup, he participated in a question and answer session with a large audience in Karachi. He was asked a question about the army’s concept of “strategic depth” and whether it realised that its support for the Taliban in Afghanistan was encouraging similar literalist interpretations of religion and militancy in Pakistan. At that point, reports had just begun to filter in of bands of Pakistani militants imposing Taliban-like strictures, such as banning television, music and girls’ education, in parts of the tribal areas. His answer surprised many of those present. Musharraf spoke about how four years earlier, when his army officers used to visit the Taliban, they were forced to eat sitting on the ground, usually from one large communal plate. Now, he said, when they visit, they sit at tables and chairs with the Talibs and have separate plates and even cutlery.
Although his answer sounded absurd then, particularly in relation to the question that was asked, I suppose what he meant was that the Taliban were also ‘evolving’.
If Syed Saleem Shahzad’s hypothesis about Al Qaeda is correct, the Taliban have certainly changed, though not in the way General Musharraf envisioned. And the repercussions of their ideological influence can be felt all over Pakistan. While it is questionable whether Al Qaeda actually foresaw and pre-planned the so-called “Af-Pak” theatre of war or not, and the US may have taken too long to decide that a common strategy was called for, Pakistan’s establishment it seems has yet to understand this fully. Whatever the merits of tactically supporting the Taliban as a hedge against a potentially hostile Afghanistan after Nato withdraws, the long-term strategic consequences for Pakistan’s own social fabric are disastrous.
Even more ironically, while the Pakistan military may have officially abandoned their ideas of “strategic depth”, Al Qaeda and the Taliban it seems are the ones who have managed truly to achieve “strategic depth.” In Pakistan.
The reviewer is a freelance journalist
