The New York Review Abroad (60 page)

3.

While you can see Masoud’s picture everywhere up here in the north, the curious thing is that people don’t talk about him unless you ask. After he was killed, a
shura
, or traditional council, of his commanders was called. They decided that they had to carry on the struggle or face death. Masoud’s successor as minister of defense for the Northern Alliance is Masoud’s deputy, General Mohammad Fahim, a man
who had fought by his side since the days of the war with the Soviets. By all accounts, and by appearances here, Fahim is doing a good job coordinating all the disparate semi-autonomous commanders and their troops that make up the armies of the Northern Alliance.

If the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been bombed then perhaps things would have been different. As it is, these small forces fighting in faraway Afghanistan are now being courted by the United States, with Russia and the Central Asian states all promising more aid. The US is mounting daily air strikes against their mortal foes. And just because Masoud has gone, this does not mean the Northern Alliance is unable to take advantage of the new situation. Evidence of preparations for an offensive are everywhere. By the banks of the Amu Darya, I came across hundreds of soldiers who had just been brought north from the Panjshir Valley to prepare to fight up here.

I went to Ai Khanoum, a majestic natural escarpment at the confluence of the Amu Darya and the Kokcha rivers. In 1963 French archaeologists discovered the remains of a fabulous and wealthy Hellenistic city, complete, Martin Ewans writes, “with a citadel, palace, temples and a gymnasium,” that “appears to have been sacked and burnt at the end of the second century BC.” It is once again in the middle of a war. Soldiers wait for the offensive to begin while a tank, dug into position, fires off odd rounds at the Taliban about a mile away. This is a rear position, but significantly the soldiers here, as everywhere else along these front lines, are both Tajik and Uzbek plus a sprinkling from other Afghan ethnic groups, including Pashtuns who have turned against the Taliban. They also include old enemies. I met former members of Mujahideen groups who were now fighting next to Afghans who had themselves years ago fought with the Soviets against the Mujahideen.

I caught a ride on the back of a truck loaded with soldiers going to
their positions. Some were in uniform but others were wearing baggy pajama-style outfits, with pinstriped or checked waistcoats. The sturdy Russian truck lumbered across the Kokcha River and took us first to another escarpment at Kuruk. Here a spotter was directing fire on Taliban positions from artillery on another hill. “Down a hundred meters! That’s it!”

Then I drove for miles down the dusty track that lies behind the Kalakata hills. Here the front line is strung along the hilltops. It was eerily quiet except for the desultory exchange of the odd tank or artillery shell. It was also clear that almost everything was now in place for a major push to try to break Taliban lines. In otherwise empty mud-brick villages hundreds of soldiers were living in small barracks compounds which would not have looked out of place on the set of a 1920s film about the French Foreign Legion. At the barracks of Mazar-e-Sharif 01 (“zero-one”) Brigade, the soldiers, refugees from Taliban-controlled territory, were making eight-foot-long rakes. When the offensive comes, the first troops to advance will be armed with these, which they will use to clear Taliban mines lying in their path. All of these men are full-time soldiers. They are housed and fed and paid between $12 and $20 a month.

As dozens of his soldiers crowded around General Abdul Manon, the leader of the 01 Brigade sat cross-legged on the floor. “We have been fighting the Taliban and terrorism for six years, but the world did not know about their dangers. Now we hope that the UN and the whole world will fight against them and soon peace will come.” On the wall behind him a slogan was written in charcoal: “We are waiting for tomorrow’s victory over the Taliban! Our Taliban brothers, the traitors, have sold our country to the foreigners!” General Manon said that his hope was that the US air strikes would “destroy their army—then only bin Laden will be left. He will be alone and have nowhere to hide.”

General Manon, who fought on the side of the Russians during the Soviet war, said he believed that desertions were diminishing Taliban ranks, a statement which was of course impossible to verify. “They want to fight America,” he said, “but they don’t have antiaircraft guns or good enough weapons.” Ten minutes’ walk from his headquarters, his men have set up positions at the top of a very steep hill. They have dug trenches and sandbagged their bunkers in readiness for action. Peering across the valley, you can see a landscape pockmarked with shell craters.

Less than a mile away two figures could be seen moving on the top of a facing hill. “
Dushman! Dushman!
” (Enemy! Enemy!) the soldiers shouted before loosing off rounds from heavy machine guns. Barely a minute later the Taliban fired back. As I sprinted for shelter and fell into the deep dust of the trenches, the crowd of thirty or so accompanying soldiers broke out in hysterical laughter, before taking cover themselves. As the firing died down they ran back down the hill to safety, whooping and screaming like kids plunging down a roller coaster at a funfair.

If they survive the coming storm General Manon says that he and his men, some of whom, like himself, have been fighting for the last twenty-two years without a break, want to go home to Mazar-e-Sharif. And then, he says, “if people agree, I hope we will have a good government. Our people are hungry for peace. We hope that then we will be able to put our guns away and grow food, build roads, build schools, and build hospitals.”

4.

For the last few weeks there has been speculation by Western analysts about whether the US and Britain will try to invade Afghanistan, using bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. An invasion with
sizable ground forces seems unlikely and may be doomed to repeat the lessons of history, which in this part of the world can be summed up, “Don’t invade Afghanistan.” I met a man who said, “Are your soldiers coming here to Afghanistan? They can help us for a while, OK, but not if they come to live here.” A well-informed Afghan intellectual, who asked not to be named, said, “I don’t think these soldiers will come. It would completely change the dynamic of the situation and it would bring people together to fight the foreigners.” Before I left London I had called Tom Carew, who led missions into Afghanistan for Britain’s special forces, the SAS, during the war with the Soviet forces, and asked him about the prospects of US and British troops. Carew is the author of the highly readable and revealing book called
Jihad: The Secret War in Afghanistan
. He said, “You can’t even look at an Afghan woman so you can imagine what it would be like bringing in your average squaddie [ordinary soldier] to Afghanistan! All the Afghans would go: ‘Whoa! Here come the infidels again,’ and all get together and jump on them.”

Chris Stephen, a friend of mine who writes for
The Scotsman
, and who shares the $10 tent with me, has been saying, “This is the first postmodern conflict because we are definitely at war but we don’t know who the enemy is.” If the aim of the war is to get rid of the Taliban, as opposed to trying to shut down Osama bin Laden’s network and camps, and arrest him, then it would seem that the Northern Alliance members are the West’s strategic allies. The Alliance is clearly ready to fight; but it is not certain if it is strong enough to take on even a weakened Taliban army spread out across the country. After all, the last time the people who lead the Alliance were in control, the country descended into bloody chaos, a fact that worries Western planners too. As for the size of the Northern Alliance forces, the estimates I heard—including one of ten thousand soldiers—are unreliable. Everyone over fourteen years old seems to have a gun;
there is no clear distinction between soldiers and civilians. In any case, no one can say how many fighters are being added to the expanding local units.

What the Alliance leaders and at least some of the Western strategists are hoping for is that after a couple of military defeats Taliban commanders will begin to defect with their troops, either because they want to be on the winning side in the war or because they would be well paid. Throughout the last decade money has had as important a part as force of arms in determining who wins and who loses. Once one or two commanders defect, runs the theory, then their fellow commanders will follow like dominoes. Indeed the hope here is that once that happens, the northern territories will fall first, followed by much of the rest of the country, where there will be no major fighting at all; there would instead be local coups to overthrow the Taliban leaders and take over the province.

According to the Northern Alliance, this is already starting to happen. On October 13 I got through to General Dostum by satellite phone. He is fighting south of Mazar-e-Sharif, far away across Taliban territory. He claimed that within the last twenty-four hours a Taliban commander called Kazi Abdul Hai had defected to him, bringing his four thousand men with him. This is probably a highly inflated figure. Still, if it proves to be true then it is possible that the strategy is working. If Mazar-e-Sharif falls, it is widely assumed that the Alliance will take control of the rest of the north, including the north–south road leading from Kabul to Uzbekistan, where US and British troops are reportedly being deployed.

“Of course,” says the Afghan intellectual I’ve mentioned, “when it is all over no one will admit to having been a Taliban. It is easy to shave off your beard and take off your turban. Actually I know several people who were not mullahs but who grew beards and now they are big mullahs.”

The opposition and the West could face a disaster if the Taliban are willing to continue fighting and don’t collapse; or if the Taliban is forced to retreat from non-Pashtun areas but stand firm in their ethnic heartlands, bolstered by support from the Pakistani Pashtuns. If that happens it is impossible to predict what the outcome might be, but then, as my Afghan intellectual source says, “It is impossible to predict what is going to happen in this country in an hour.”

5.

Who is running the Northern Alliance and what would happen if they did take over the country? In mud-built Khoja Bahaudin you will not find much by way of a reasoned answer. The Northern Alliance is, formally at least, the legitimate, internationally recognized government of the “Islamic State of Afghanistan,” which just happens to have been kicked out of Kabul in 1995. It still controls the country’s UN seat and most of its embassies abroad. Officially Burhanuddin Rabbani is still president, living in Faizabad, about forty miles from the Tajikistan border, but he is seldom heard from. On October 11, however, he said at a press conference in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, that representatives of all Afghanistan’s peoples should help determine the nation’s fate, “except terrorists and those who are up to their elbows in blood,” i.e., bin Laden and his organization and his Taliban allies.

Rabbani did not say so, but we often hear of the plan for a future government headed by the former king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, who is eighty-six, was overthrown in 1973, and lives in Rome. He is keen to return, and, crucially, he is a Pashtun, although his first language is Dari. There is a chance that this might work, especially now that Masoud, who loathed the monarch and was opposed to his having any political position, is dead. Zahir Shah’s advantage is that he
can claim to be above politics and is not associated with the internecine bloodletting of the past decade.

In mid-October Northern Alliance officials gathered in the Panjshir Valley to select sixty delegates to attend a
shura
with sixty partisans of the King; this meeting is supposed to select delegates to a Loya Jirga, or grand council, that would discuss the future shape of any post-Taliban government. The Northern Alliance now say that they are holding the door open to collaborating with at least a part of the Taliban if they defect now. What the Northern Alliance resists however is pressure from Pakistan, which in turn is pressuring the US, to accept what Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wants, which is a broad-based government “including moderate Taliban elements.” Pakistan is of course terrified that a hostile Northern Alliance government will come to power in Kabul and take revenge on Pakistan for supporting the Taliban.

When, on October 16, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the urbane Northern Alliance foreign minister, came to Khoja Bahaudin he said there was no such thing as a “moderate Taliban element,” adding: “Their objective is terrorism and fanaticism so who could expect us to join such a government with such people? This is against the objective of the international alliance against terrorism.” But Dr. Abdullah accepted that a future government did have to have a broader base than the Northern Alliance, which is code for saying that it did need to include some significant Pashtun representation.

Another senior leader in northern Afghanistan is General Atiqullah Baryolai, the deputy minister of defense. He says the “original” Taliban, that is to say Mullah Omar and his cronies, can have no say in the future of the country because they are nothing but Pakistani agents. “They brought foreigners here to kill Afghans. They educated boys of thirteen or fifteen in Pakistan to destroy our history, our museums and our archives.” Like the Afghan intellectual I met, General
Baryolai believes that there are many who became Taliban for opportunistic reasons and, especially if they defect now, they should be able to participate in decisions on how the country should be run.

Of course it is difficult to divine what will happen from Khoja Bahaudin, but it is possible that the UN will be drawn into a diplomatic process by which it would oversee a transitional phase in Afghanistan just as it did in Cambodia. The UN, which has its own special representative for Afghanistan, has formed a task force to consider this and other possibilities, but it is too early to say whether foreign governments would commit troops to bolster any such operation.