Long Way Back

Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace

Christopher Alexander

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781554688005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443409124
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Christopher Alexander was sent to Afghanistan in 2003,
charged with supporting the NATO-led International
Security Assistance Force, part of the global response to 9/11. Primarily covering the years 2001 to 2011, The Long Way Back tells the story of the historic achievements and bitter disappointments encountered on the road to political stability in Afghanistan.

But this is much more than a first-hand account of recent events: it is a clear-eyed take on what has been achieved, the triumphs and failings of Afghans and foreigners alike, and why the country is still mired in conflict. Alexander guides us through the intricacies of the cross-border insurgency—showing that Pakistan continues the campaign begun under the British frontier policy and scaled up by the U.S. for jihad against the Soviets. With Alexander's direct access to and experience
with the country's leaders, the international players and
ordinary Afghan citizens, a unique portrait of Afghanistan is
revealed and an argument is made for what it will take for the country to achieve a lasting peace.

PART ONE

TREADING LIGHTLY

Equip man with a sword, remove his infirmities,
and see what he will be: a brave knight or a devious thief?

—Rumi, The Mathnawi

CHAPTER ONE
PRICE OF ENTRY

Put out a fire today while you can, for when
it blazes high it will burn the world.

—The Baburnama

For Americans, the 9/11 attacks began when Mohamed Atta took the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 and flew it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. But al Qaeda’s autumn terrorist offensive actually began two days earlier, in the furthest place imaginable from New York’s financial district: a remote militia headquarters deep in northeastern Afghan. What happened there on 9/9 would fundamentally alter the balance of power in Afghanistan on the eve of the subsequent American invasion.

One of the few surviving witnesses to the event was Afghan poet-turned-diplomat Masood Khalili. In 2010, eight years later, I learned his story as the two of us shared a car trip through central Turkey en route to the shrine of the great Sufi poet Jalal ud-Dīn Balkhi, or Rumi.

It was early September 2001 when he’d got the call on his satellite phone, Khalili told me. He was in Delhi, working as an ambassador for the shadow government of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, which by that time was the only serious force still fighting the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies. The caller summoned him to Khwaja Bahauddin, in Afghanistan’s Takhar province, near the Tajikistan border, to discuss the Northern Alliance’s increasingly difficult campaign.

The news that Khalili received there wasn’t good. Foreign fighters were swelling Taliban ranks. No longer a mere circle of fanatics, Osama bin Laden’s organization had become part of Afghanistan’s power structure—a missionary force to export jihad to neighbouring countries. Why was the West doing nothing? Khalili wondered. How could the Northern Alliance make the world understand Afghanistan’s plight? Then Khalili and his hosts spoke of more banal things, grousing about money as they ate chocolate.

The next morning, a tray containing a breakfast of grapes and Nescafé was waiting for Khalili. After his meal, he learned there were new visitors at the compound. Two Arabs had arrived—journalists, they said—to interview Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary anti-Soviet mujahidin leader who now served as military commander of the Northern Alliance. Such outsiders did not come often.

It was a rare opportunity for Massoud to argue his case to the world.

“For whom do you work?” Khalili asked the Arab men. “A newspaper?”

“We belong to Islamic organizations based in London, France—all over the world,” one replied vaguely.

Islamic organizations … Khalili laughed at the euphemism. “They belong to the other side,” he whispered to his host. Nevertheless, Massoud went ahead with the interview.

Khalili and a group of others sat down to watch as one of the Arab visitors, a giant of a man, set up a camera. Then his partner, a smaller Tunisian, leaned in close to Massoud and began methodically asking questions in Arabic.

Most of these questions concerned bin Laden. “Why did you say in Paris that Osama bin Laden was not a Muslim?” “Why did you say that he was a terrorist?” “What is moderate Islam?” “Why have you not joined the Taliban?” And so on. The burly Arab cameraman rolled his tape as his partner put his questions to Massoud.

Then, suddenly, a question in English, a language Massoud did not understand: “What is the situation of Islam in Afghanistan?” Khalili began to translate the words for Massoud’s benefit. He remembers that it was precisely when he got to the Dari word for “situation”—waza—that a bright light flared.

The whoosh of the blast filled the air. The room was burning. A vest of explosives had ripped the interviewer into three parts. The second Arab, the cameraman, tried to flee but was caught. Khalili was heavily sprayed by the rain of shrapnel. One fragment, he remembers, seemed aimed at his heart but was blunted by the passport Massoud had earlier slipped into his breast pocket.

But Ahmad Shah Massoud, the bomb’s intended target, was dead. So, it seemed, was the fragile Northern Alliance movement that this legendary warrior—the Lion of Panjshir—held together by force of fear and personality. For a few weeks, at least, until the Americans arrived, the Taliban would have Afghanistan all to themselves.

Massoud’s multi-ethnic Northern Alliance had represented Afghanistan’s last hope for a decent and moderate government. After his death, one of his commanders, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, took charge. But all expected the Taliban to exploit the transition with a final military offensive into the small rump of northeastern Afghanistan still controlled by Northern Alliance forces.

Across the border, in Pakistan, there was rejoicing. For years, Massoud had been the main thorn in the Taliban’s side—he was a man with friends in India and Iran, even Russia and the United States. Now he was gone.

Then, two days later, came 9/11—a tragedy for America but a potential deliverance for Afghanistan. At least 2,669 American citizens perished, as did 329 foreign nationals from fifty-three countries. By 3:30 p.m. that same day, President George W. Bush was satisfied al Qaeda was behind the attacks. In his evening TV address, he pledged to “find those responsible and bring them to justice.” Crucially, he said the United States would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them.”

The next day, the United Nations Security Council condemned the attacks as a “threat to international peace and security.” NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—deeming 9/11 to be an attack against all its members. With the eyes of the world on al Qaeda’s base of operations in Central Asia, no one could ignore Afghanistan any longer.

The Pentagon had no off-the-shelf plan for war in Afghanistan. But Washington had been in touch with Massoud since 1996, modestly supporting his anti-Taliban United Front since 1998, mostly in the service of its half-hearted campaign to capture or kill bin Laden. On September 14, the CIA ordered operatives to the Panjshir Valley to partner with their Northern Alliance contacts against the Taliban. The first CIA team, code-named Jawbreaker, landed on September 26, armed not only with guns but also with stacks of cash for Fahim and his lieutenants.

Two weeks later, air strikes began, and the enemy’s morale began to slacken. By November 11, just two months after the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban and al Qaeda were abandoning Kabul, withdrawing east toward Jalalabad. The first US personnel entered the Afghan capital the next day.

All at once, Kabul sprang back to life. Despite dead bodies in the streets and a few cases of lynching, there was no looting. The atmosphere was one of liberation. Commerce resumed, with music CDs, videos and other once-banned consumer items flowing into the city. Northern Alliance forces took up policing functions, as well as the levers of political power. Some American officials worried that Fahim’s men, a force dominated by Uzbeks, Tajiks and other minorities, would alienate the majority Pashtun population. Yet there was little protest on the ground: events were moving too quickly for any coherent opposition to form. In any case, the rule of the Northern Alliance was to be temporary. An international conference would decide permanent power-sharing arrangements. Already the name of Hamid Karzai, a prominent Pashtun militia leader who’d been operating across the Pakistani border, in Quetta, was being put forward as a potential leader.

On November 13, the UN negotiator for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, briefed the Security Council. He called Afghanistan a collapsed and destitute state and raised the challenge of creating a legitimate Afghan government, noting the “special role” of Iran and Pakistan in stabilizing the country. Two ingredients were essential, he said: regional consensus and “a massive commitment, politically and financially, to the long-term stability of Afghanistan.” He called for an interim government, followed by a transitional administration. Brahimi informed the council that a conference would be convened to bring together “a wide cross-section of Afghan parties.”

The conference took place in Bonn and included twenty-eight Afghan delegates. In a dramatic gesture, Hamid Karzai addressed the meeting by satellite phone. “We are one nation, one culture; we are united and not divided,” he said. “We all believe in Islam, but in an Islam of tolerance.”

Expected to last five days, the conference ran to December 5—a total of nine days. The final agreement was signed by twenty-three Afghan participants, witnessed by Brahimi. It provided for an interim administration headed by Karzai, with five vice-chairmen and twenty-four members who were to function as ministers.

The next day, the Taliban began to withdraw from Kandahar city. British prime minister Tony Blair declared the Taliban regime “effectively now disintegrated.” As for bin Laden, he and his entourage headed east, making a stand in an area called Tora Bora—“black dust” in the Pashto language—whose foothills contained a cave complex the young Saudi had built in the 1980s during the war against the Soviets. As bombing intensified, bin Laden was overheard giving a December 10 radio address, expressing regret that he had allowed his followers to be trapped and granting them permission to surrender. On December 12, his side proposed a ceasefire, which was rejected by the United States. But his apparent desperation was a ruse. According to the report of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on or about December 14, bin Laden was able to walk unmolested into Pakistan accompanied by trusted Saudi and Yemeni guards—the same path followed by numerous Taliban commanders. General Tommy Franks, who led the US war effort, later took responsibility for declining to send a larger contingent of Rangers to encircle the al Qaeda leader’s position, having instead depended on local Afghan militia commanders.

With the Taliban routed, many of Afghanistan’s smartest and most successful exiles began to trickle back into the country to help with the rebuilding process. One of these people was Ashraf Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun who had travelled the world as an academic and World Bank official during the 1980s and 1990s. He returned to Kabul in December 2001 and would go on to become a cabinet minister in the early years of the Karzai government. Years later, he told me in an interview that he was shocked at the post-Taliban condition of his country. “Logar province, from which I come, bore no resemblance whatever to my childhood or youth years,” he told me. “I went to my village, embraced six hundred men: they were just bones.” As the month wore on, the political situation became precarious. The problem, as the Americans had feared, was that the power structure that took over was a loose collection of outsiders and old-guard Northern Alliance militia commanders—men who had little grassroots connection to the country beyond their isolated power bases. “The country was made a gift to people who had been ousted and who did not have any social base,” Ghani explained to me. “These people were brought in helicopters…. Whole provinces of Afghanistan were made gifts to them.”

Ghani joined the government, first as chief advisor to the president, on February 1, 2002, then later as finance minister. At the first Afghanistan Development Forum in April, he presented his country’s National Development Framework. At home, his ministry began the difficult task of trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern country. “Paper is more powerful than the gun, if you know how to use it,” he observed to me. “Monday cabinet meetings began with a report on finances—and an envelope with details for each minister. The budget began to steer policy. At first it was [just] me. By 2003, we had a team.”

Abdul Salaam Rahimi, Ghani’s deputy, was part of that team. Now a not-for-profit media mogul in Kabul, he remembers the period as one of institutional culture shock. “They had brought computers to the Treasury Department,” he recalled to me in an interview. “People literally started breaking them because they hated them. They [had never] touched computers.” In a country that had been carved up by warlords for decades, the strictures of accountable governance did not sit well with the old power brokers. “When we stopped a transaction from the Ministry of Defence, people came with armoured vehicles and big guns. They threatened to take me away from the ministry,” Rahimi told me. “The Ministry of Defence was huge—big people, bad people. The Ministry of Interior was another one,” he added. “Gul Agha Sherzoi [a Soviet-era mujahidin leader and governor of Kandahar] was so powerful, he was promising he would throw Ashraf Ghani out of a plane window.” Fahim, who now served as defence minister, was another bully. In one case, Rahimi recalls, one of Fahim’s associates stormed in and declared, “You are stopping my money. I will cut you in pieces, like meat in a butcher shop.” (He later apologized.)

Amid such threats, the management team at the Finance Ministry chose its battles and phased in its reforms. In just two months, they managed to computerize the revenue and budget departments—small miracles in a country where accounts typically were unsteadily kept with ink and paper.

But at first the bureaucrats in Kabul could not at first control the provinces, where local governors, many of them Soviet-era mujahidin who’d retained their own loyal militias, would impose their own customs duties on trade in and out of their jurisdictions, remitting little or nothing to Kabul.

Eventually, however, some progress was made even on this front. With the arrival of Jilani Popal as deputy minister for customs, annual revenue climbed in three years from $200 million to over $700 million. For the first time in Afghan history, treasury and budget departments were headed by women.

Much of their work concerned institutions that just about every other country on earth takes for granted—like a unified national currency. Officials of the International Monetary Fund, the US Treasury and other Western bodies advocated a two-year process of conversion to the greenback. But Karzai’s political instincts were sound on this. He knew the Afghan public wouldn’t accept it. In the end, an Afghan-led plan was implemented, and four unstable currencies were unified into a newly minted Afghani. The exchange rate has remained stable ever since.

Afghanistan’s first full year without the Taliban, 2002, is remembered for the new freedoms that Afghans enjoyed. But life remained difficult. Everything was in short supply, including food and basic construction materials for homes and schools. The reconstruction support pledged by the international community arrived in paltry quantities. Under a resolution passed by the Security Council in March 2002, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployed to Kabul under British major general John McColl, who had been in the country since December. His troops began to patrol Kabul, training the first local Afghan army and guard units. But scattered violence continued unabated. In several cases, US bombing attacks against suspected Taliban remnants struck innocents. An attack on a convoy carrying elders to the inauguration of President Karzai killed dozens. On February 14, Civil Aviation Minister Abdul Rahman was killed at Kabul Airport, allegedly by angry pilgrims, but more probably by a warlord he had crossed.

Amid all this, Afghanistan was taking important diplomatic and symbolic steps toward becoming a member of the community of nations. President Karzai made his first visit to the United States and United Kingdom in January 2002. The next month, he travelled to Abu Dhabi, Tehran and Delhi. The new Afghan flag had been raised over the presidential palace on February 5. Women’s Day was celebrated in Kabul on March 9, and a nationwide back-to-school campaign brought 3 million children, including an unprecedented number of girls, back into the education system at the start of the school year on March 21. A week later, the Security Council authorized the establishment of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), to be led by Brahimi, which would bring together its existing political and humanitarian operations under one structure. On April 2, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf arrived in Kabul—the first visit by a Pakistani leader since Nawaz Sharif a decade earlier. “We have also vowed that we will not allow each other’s countries, ever, to be used against interests of ours,” he said, pledging support for Karzai’s efforts. “Our plan is his plan,” Musharraf said. In early March, elements of the US 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain divisions, supported by soldiers from nine allied nations, undertook Operation Anaconda against over five hundred Taliban and foreign fighters in the Shahi-Kot mountains above the Zurmat Valley in Paktia province. Hundreds of Taliban were killed; others escaped eastward into Pakistan. At the time, it was seen as a mere mop-up operation. The Americans, believing the war to have been largely won, began withdrawing units, a prelude to the invasion of Iraq a year later.

Afghanistan’s loya jirga (grand assembly) began in June 2002 under a huge tent near the Soviet-built Polytechnical University of Kabul. It was opened by Mohammad Zahir Shah, a unifying figure who’d served as Afghanistan’s monarch from 1933 until he was deposed and exiled by Mohammad Daoud Khan in 1973. Such was the nostalgia for that golden age that many of the 1,500 delegates in Kabul actually supported naming the returned eighty-seven-year-old as head of state. Zahir Shah himself seemed oblivious, and nothing came of it, but the development threw a mild panic into the organizers.

After 6 p.m., June 11, Aziz Ahmad, head of the jirga secretariat, kissed His Majesty’s hand as he alighted from his vehicle. The king walked slowly into the main tent. When he appeared before the delegates, the room burst into loud shouts of “Zahir Shah, zindabad!”—“Long live Zahir Shah!” There was deafening applause. The king waved his hand in the movie-star gesture he had used when visiting the Kennedy White House. He then sat down behind a microphone. “Hello?” he said. But the sound was dead, switched off to pre-empt impromptu remarks. What’s more, Zahir Shah had nothing to say: the official who’d been charged with carrying the transcript of his speech had gotten delayed at the security post. Finally, the text was placed in His Majesty’s frail hands. At first Zahir Shah paused, as if reviewing it for accuracy. Then he began, “Bismillah-i rahman-i rahim …”At that point, some in the audience expected him to claim the role of head of state with his own lips. Instead, His Majesty said: “I introduce Hamid Karzai as my son, I respect him, and as president of Afghanistan.” The air was sucked out of the room, as if a feast had been followed by a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• CONTENTS
• DRAMATIS PERSONAE
• Maps
• PREFACE: SIX WINTERS IN KABUL
• INTRODUCTION: BABUR’S GARDEN
• PART ONE: TREADING LIGHTLY
• PART TWO: HANGING FIRE
• PART THREE: BOLDER STROKES
• CONCLUSION: THE SEVENTH ROOM
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Photo Insert
• About the Author
• Praise for THE LONG WAY BACK
• Copyright
• About the Publisher