ISLAMABAD, 14 November 2006 — Five years ago the Taleban vanished from Kabul and a liberated city exploded with joy. As the turbaned Islamists scurried, whooping residents rushed on to the streets. Men queued to have their beards shaved, some women removed their burqas and Radio Kabul played music for the first time in years — announced by a woman. There was savage vengeance too — some Taleban stragglers were lynched and dumped on the roadside.
But not everyone was celebrating. Sultan Amir, a Pakistani intelligence agent who helped to propel the Taleban to power, watched in dismay. “I was hurt,” said Amir, better known under his nom de guerre Col. Imam, during a rare interview in Islamabad. “I had an emotional attachment with the Taleban.”
Although reviled by many the Taleban were really a force of “angels”, claimed the 62-year-old agent. “They brought peace, they eradicated poppies, gave free education, medical treatment and speedy justice. They were the most respected people in Afghanistan,” he said. Pakistani officials claim that men like Imam are relics of a bygone era. Although Islamabad supported the Taleban in the 1990s, when Imam was posted to the western city of Herat, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf severed all links with the group after September 2001. But this year’s hurricane of Taleban violence — a succession of thumping battles and suicide bombings that has killed more than 4,000 people — has given Western officials reason to believe that some connection remains.
The insurgency’s high level of sophistication has aroused suspicions that Pakistan has quietly reactivated its old alliance through its powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The accusations ring loudest in Afghanistan, where the embattled president, Hamid Karzai, says Pakistan is up to its decades-old policy of dirty tricks and meddling in Afghan affairs.
Western military officials share his skepticism. Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation, an American think tank that works closely with the US military, said his government believes the ISI is providing training, money and sensitive information to the Taleban. “Information is being passed from the ISI to Taleban units about movements of US and NATO forces, in some cases very tactical information,” he said, citing “clear indications from intelligence sources”.
Across the border in Islamabad, Western diplomats describe themselves as concerned agnostics on the issue. One senior official said that while he believed the ISI leadership supported Musharraf, there was evidence of regular meetings between low and mid-level officials and the Taleban. “Whether these contacts are to stop attacks in Afghanistan or to encourage them is hard to know,” he said. Another diplomat described the difficulty of collecting intelligence in the tribal belt, where the Taleban’s bases are concentrated. But the volume of evidence was persuasive. “So much of what we have is second-hand,” he said. “But there is so much of it.” Pakistani officials angrily deny the allegations, dismissing them as a convenient smokescreen for the failures of Karzai and his Western allies. “We all know the situation in Afghanistan is very bad. Someone has to be blamed, so why not Pakistan? Frankly speaking, it’s quite tiresome,” said Tasnim Aslam of the Foreign Ministry.
The military points to its mounting death toll. Last week a suicide bomber killed 42 soldiers at a training center in an attack later claimed by the “Pakistani Taleban”. “Would we get our own people killed? Or sabotage our economic interests? I assure you we are not suicidal,” said Aslam.
Analysts agree that internal conditions play a large role in Afghan instability. Corrupt governors and police chiefs, powerful drug lords and outgunned police chiefs have hobbled Karzai’s authority, particularly in the south. In the cities billions of dollars in foreign aid have had limited effect, with most Afghans still living short, harsh lives while watching a tiny minority grow fabulously wealthy.
Yet suspicions of Pakistani support for the rebels as part of a complicated “double policy” persist — fueled in part by the admission by Musharraf last month that some retired ISI officers who served in the 1980s may now be helping the Taleban. “I have some reports that some dissidents, some retired people ... may be assisting. We are keeping a very tight watch and we’ll get all of them.”
Subsequent reports said the president had ordered an investigation of men such as Imam, who in the 1980s ran a network of secret camps that armed and trained 95,000 Mujahedeen to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Afghan fighters respected him because he ate, slept and fought with them, said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent. “He was not a guy you’d want to cross,” he said. A decade later, he added, Imam was “a major part of putting the Taleban into power”.Imam insists he is now fully retired. Reeling off the names of Afghan warlords he described as his “students”, Imam defended the Taleban’s use of suicide bombers and criticized the British deployment to Helmand. “You ruled us for 200 years and we respected you. But now you have made a big mistake. You have ruined yourselves.” The Taleban need no help from the ISI, he insisted. “We sent three million guns into Afghanistan [in the 1980s,” he said. “I am doing just one thing — I am praying for them.”
These days such sentiments embarrass the ISI. Two weeks ago the agency’s current chief, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Zakki, called a meeting of Western ambassadors in Islamabad to assure them the agency no longer had any “ownership” of the Taleban. The ISI also started monitoring its former chief, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who ran the agency from 1987 to 1989 and is another Taleban supporter.
Denied entry into the UK, he boasted of meeting Osama bin Laden twice. Three weeks prior to Sept. 11, he was in Kabul as a guest of the Taleban. “I met the Cabinet and they hosted a dinner for me,” he said proudly.
Although the government wants Gul to shut up — one official described his statements as “verbal diarrhea” — he taps into a strong vein of fear. Islamabad is anxious about Karzai’s relationship with India and claims Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad are stoking the insurgency in Western Balochistan province. “We have evidence and we have told them,” said Aslam.
The ISI declined to comment on the controversy. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, five years after their ignominious ouster, the Taleban have never looked stronger. The insurgents can never push US troops from Kabul, Imam admitted, but they could make life very uncomfortable. “The Mujahedeen can prolong the stalemate until the public at home gets frustrated,” he said, citing last week’s US elections. “That is the start of defeat. That is the victory of [Taleban leader] Mullah Omar.”
In some ways life was revolutionized after US warplanes and their Afghan allies toppled the Taleban on November 13, 2001. The hated medieval laws — bans on kite-flying, movies and lipstick; gory public executions, closure of girls schools — are now a distant memory, and two elections have passed remarkably peacefully. But greater liberties have not been matched by increased prosperity. Although the elite enjoys gleaming mansions and expensive vehicles — many financed through corruption or drugs — most Afghans scrape through on pitiful salaries, live in mud-walled houses, and on average die at age 41.
Women in dirty burqas beg food from drivers caught in giant traffic jams. Taleban suicide attacks have shaken confidence in President Karzai. Despised warlords sit alongside women’s activists in the new Parliament. And many wonder where the aid has gone — as winter closes in, Kabul will remain in the dark, a city without electricity.
