The Circuit (36 page)

Not only did I have ideas – by that point, I had a list of Afghan contacts most journalists would kill for. I asked Nic what he’d already lined up. As usual, he was on a whirlwind tour. In addition to Kabul, he planned to travel to eastern Afghanistan to update the drugs story and then across to Pakistan. He had also submitted a request for a US military embed in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan.

I asked him if he planned to take security with him on any of these assignments. He said he’d like to take me – if I was still doing media work.

Ten days later I was back in Kabul working with Nic.

Through my local contacts in Kabul, I was able to land Nic the first world exclusive of his trip: an interview with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan. I had tried to meet with Zaeef in December 2006. I wanted to know if he agreed with Patcha Khan’s prediction that the Taliban would be running Kabul in a few years’ time. Zaeef would certainly have some unique insights. He was a founding member of the Taliban, and the movement’s public face.

As a high-profile Taliban, Zaeef was the object of special interest to the Americans. He had stayed in Pakistan following the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, but was soon handed over to US authorities and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay for three and a half years. Upon his release in 2005, Zaeef returned to Kabul where the Karzai government had a guest house waiting for him. The Afghan government claimed the house was part of an incentive programme aimed at reintegrating ‘reformed’ Taliban like Zaeef back into society. As I discovered, it was also a convenient way for Karzai and the Americans to keep tabs on the former Taliban ambassador.

Zaeef did agree to see me in 2006 but a pre-meeting recce revealed that the Afghan government had heavy surveillance on his house. I also suspected American intelligence was keeping an eye on who was coming and going. As much as I wanted to meet him face to face, I knew I’d be inviting trouble by visiting Zaeef without a good excuse (I doubted anyone would believe that I wanted to see him out of personal curiosity). A visit by a CNN crew, on the other hand, wouldn’t be the least bit suspicious.

You might think that three years or more in Guantanamo Bay would have left Zaeef a frail, broken figure. On the contrary. When we arrived at his house for the interview, we were greeted by a six-foot-three monster who still looked every bit the Taliban – from his long black beard to the spotless black turban on his head.

Detention may not have left a mark on Zaeef physically, but the interview revealed some deep mental scars. Nic questioned Zaeef at length about his arrest. You could tell by the way he recalled it that the experience had left him deeply traumatized, so much so that he had to stop several times and swallow before continuing his answer. Zaeef seemed to be choosing his words carefully, like a man still in hiding.

Zaeef said the most trying times of his captivity weren’t the years in Guantanamo Bay but the months preceding it. Following his arrest in Pakistan, he was shuffled from an American naval ship in the Gulf to a military base in Kandahar and then to Bagram Airbase outside Kabul. Zaeef claimed that while in Bagram, he was beaten, deprived of food, stripped naked and forced to stand in the snow. Zaeef also claimed the Americans shaved his beard – sacrilege to a devout Muslim.

Zaeef said throughout his detention the Americans kept asking him the same questions over and over again: where is Mullah Omar and where is Osama bin Laden? Zaeef claims to this day he hasn’t a clue where either man is hiding. He added that he kept telling his American captors that he was an ambassador and that they had no right under international law to detain him. The Americans would counter that since they’d never recognized the Taliban as a legitimate government, he wasn’t entitled to diplomatic immunity.

Fascinating as his past was, what most interested me were Zaeef’s thoughts on the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan. On this point, Zaeef was adamant that the Taliban he’d founded had been far less radical than the one which had regrouped. He said he could never get to grips, for example, with suicide bombings, a tactic embraced by the Taliban after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Zaeef felt suicide bombings were a clear indication that al-Qaeda was exerting a tremendous amount of influence over the movement.

As to whether the Taliban would return to power formally, Zaeef danced around the question. He did say, however, that the movement had got it wrong the first time around by being so strict and that if the Taliban were to join a unity government, they’d be much more moderate. Zaeef was understandably reluctant to comment at length about the Taliban’s possible return to power. But from Helmund to Nuristan, the writing was on the wall: the Taliban was getting stronger by the day. One reason the Taliban was regrouping so effectively was drugs money. By 2007, Afghanistan’s heroin trade was worth an estimated 3.1 billion US dollars, a fair portion of which was being funnelled into the Taliban’s ever-expanding war chest.

Following the interview with Zaeef, we headed east to Jalalabad, where Nic had arranged to check in on Afghanistan’s poppy eradication efforts. He would have liked to return to Helmund to update the story he’d reported in 2004, but the province had become far too dangerous to visit outside of a military embed. It didn’t matter because Jalalabad’s poppy eradication programme was pretty much a carbon copy of what we’d seen in Helmund two and half years earlier. Nic and his crew were taken to a token field to film a tractor ceremoniously ploughing through poppies. Just like Helmund, the local farmers had gathered to protest against the action and the local drug lords had assembled to make sure their fields weren’t touched. The only difference was the landscape; instead of Helmund’s flat valleys, the mountains of Tora Bora were visible in the distance.

Thanks to one of my local contacts, Nic was able to add a new element to his drugs coverage; an interview with a trafficker in Jalalabad. Not surprisingly, he told Nic it was very easy to run drugs out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan or up through China.

Between drugs and insurgency, it seemed the question was not if the Taliban would return to power formally but when. For years, the US-led coalition had been struggling to maintain the status quo in Afghanistan, let alone secure the ground and move the country forward. Afghanistan seemed dangerously close to plunging into warring autonomous regions; some controlled by ‘moderate’ Taliban, some by al-Qaeda-influenced Taliban and some by former members of the Northern Alliance. By that point, I was convinced that barring radical action by the coalition, civil war had become inevitable.

In that respect, Nic’s third interview of the trip would prove very telling. Nic secured a one-on-one with the new head of NATO in Afghanistan, US General Dan McNeill. McNeill had recently taken over from General David Richards, a British commander who at that point had overseen the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s fall in 2001.
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McNeill offered up a flannelling worthy of his rank. He dodged and weaved his way through the interview like a heavyweight champion. Whenever possible, McNeill would steer his answers back to the subject of reconstruction. NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan were primarily focused on hearts and minds reconstruction projects as opposed to dominating the ground through military force. Though I wasn’t in a position to tell him so, I disagreed with McNeill’s priorities. They were not at all in keeping with the type of strategy I believe a true soldier should embrace. In my view, a true soldier focuses all of his energies into winning and securing the ground before pouring resources into goodwill projects.

Experience has left me of the opinion that most generals are politicians first and soldiers second. McNeill was no exception. Why else would he accept a military task that was almost surely destined to fail? Even I, a lowly former warrant officer, knew there weren’t nearly enough NATO troops in Afghanistan to secure the ground. What’s more, McNeill wasn’t in full control of the soldiers under his command.

In order to be effective, a general must have the ability to move his troops around like pieces on a chessboard. The head of NATO in Afghanistan can’t do that because many NATO countries provide troops to Afghanistan with the caveat that they not be deployed to the southern or eastern provinces – dangerous places like Helmund where undermanned British forces had been bravely holding back the Taliban for over a year; and Kandahar, where Canadian soldiers had also been fighting courageously.

The Brits would have benefited tremendously, for example, if McNeill had had the authority to deploy New Zealand forces to Helmund. In my experience, Kiwis are some of the best infantry soldiers in the world. They are certainly one of the most professional fighting forces in Afghanistan. Yet in 2006 and 2007, instead of fighting alongside the British in Helmund where they were desperately needed, the Kiwis were up in Bamiyan, a soft province where the biggest enemy is poverty, not the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Nic did hold McNeill’s feet to the fire on the issue of caveats. McNeill admitted he was constrained by them but he claimed that some countries had suggested that ‘there may be ways’ for him to get around the deployment restrictions.

It sounded to me like political bullshit. Governments either agree to send their troops to hard areas or they don’t. It’s as simple as that.

After the interview, I was fairly certain that McNeill would probably preside over a worse year than his predecessor. Caveats are for the faint-hearted and McNeill (who had to contend with them) was fighting an enemy that was fully committed to achieving its aims by any means necessary, including suicide missions. In my view, it would be miraculous if McNeill even managed to maintain the status quo – no mean feat, considering that across the border Pakistan was in the throws of what some were calling ‘Talibanization’.

CHAPTER 36

The War on Terror will be won or lost in two countries – neither of which are Iraq or Afghanistan. I believe that if western governments are to achieve a decisive victory over Islamic terrorism, they must crush it at its source. In 2004, I visited what I’ve called the premier hub for al-Qaeda recruitment: Saudi Arabia. In spring 2007, I travelled to the country which in my view runs a close second: Pakistan.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are worlds apart economically and culturally but they are similar in two crucial respects: both have Muslim populations rife with anti-western sentiment yet both have governments that are allied with the west in the War on Terror. By 2007, Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite had managed to accommodate this contradiction by driving its radical Islamic elements underground. In Pakistan, the opposite was happening: Islamic militants were not only operating with impunity in the Afghan border areas; their influence was also growing in the moderate capital, Islamabad. Meanwhile, even moderate Muslims were calling for President Pervez Musharraf – the man charged with cracking down on extremism – to resign.

Though technically I had been to Pakistan previously, my experiences consisted solely of stopping over in Islamabad en route to Kabul. My trip with Nic and his crew would be my first proper assignment in Pakistan.

In addition to Nic and myself, our team included a seasoned cameraman named Scotty and a young British female producer I’ll call Susan. Sometimes news crews can be at odds with one another from the word go – a real nightmare from a security standpoint. Fortunately, Nic had assembled himself a close-knit group. Having worked with Scotty on several occasions, I knew he was as talented as he was easy-going. I had not worked with Susan before, but from her pre-trip preparations, she struck me as well researched and highly organized; both assets in a producer.

It was important that our team be on the same page at all times. The type of hostile environment we’d be operating in was one of the most hazardous in my book. Like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s dangers are largely concealed beneath a deceptively calm exterior. Take our accommodation, for instance. We were booked in at the Marriott Islamabad, one of the capital’s top international hotels. When guests pull into the Marriott’s gated entrance, they’re greeted by doormen with red uniforms and smart turbans. They are then ushered past a big set of glass doors into an opulent, marble-floored lobby. It’s easy to be blinded by the five-star luxury and forget that as a favourite destination for visiting diplomats and one of the few places in Pakistan with a licensed bar, the Marriott is a prime target for militants. In October 2004, an explosion in the hotel’s lobby injured several people including a US diplomat. In January 2007, a suicide bombing outside the hotel’s bar left two people dead.

The January attack on the Marriott had been carried out by Islamic extremists angered by Musharraf’s pro-western policies. But discontent was also rife among Pakistan’s moderate Muslims, who were growing increasingly frustrated with President Musharraf’s authoritarian rule. Prior to our arrival, Musharraf suspended Pakistan’s Chief Justice; a move viewed by many as an attempt to consolidate power before an expected election later that year. The Chief Justice had taken a tough line with Musharraf’s government, particularly on the issue of human rights abuses by Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Rather than bolster his position, Musharraf’s suspension of the Chief Justice galvanized the opposition. Pakistan’s legal community organized rallies throughout the nation calling for the Chief Justice to be reinstated and for Musharraf to step down. Some of the protests ended in violent clashes between police and members of Pakistan’s legal community. There were reports that Pakistani authorities had stormed two privately owned news channels and suspended transmissions after pictures were broadcast of blood-soaked lawyers at a rally in Lahore.

Nic’s first story in Islamabad had the potential to go the same way. The Chief Justice was scheduled to appear before the Supreme Court in Islamabad to challenge the legality of Musharraf’s decision. Throngs of protesters were expected to turn out for the occasion. Nic wanted to get to the Supreme Court early in order to interview the demonstrators. We arrived to find a handful of local media and opposition representatives gathering on the grounds outside the gated Supreme Court complex. A heavy contingent of male and female riot police wearing face shields and carrying long sticks was also on hand. They had formed a human barricade outside the main gate of the complex to keep the protesters from getting too close.