In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

Directorate sources, about the state of Pakistan’s Afghan policy.” According to a U.S. State Department cable that summarized the meeting, “what he heard surprised him: To a man the [Government of Pakistan] officials were strongly supportive of the Taliban.” The journalist added that the Pakistan government’s Coordination Committee for Afghan Policy “had decided to provide the Taliban 300 million rupees in the next six months at a rate of 50 million rupees a month,” and that “the money was earmarked to pay for the salaries of Taliban officials and commanders.” ⁴⁴

Despite the overwhelming evidence compiled by United States intelligence services, Pakistan officials repeatedly denied that the government provided support to the Taliban, as they would continue to do a decade later following the U.S. invasion and the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Even in private meetings with U.S. and UN officials, Pakistan officials denied their involvement.⁴⁵ In one meeting, for example, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Najamuddin Shaikh called in U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Thomas Simons to “dispel any notion that Pakistan is throwing its chips in with the Taliban.” Shaikh stressed that Pakistan’s only focus was to help establish a peace settlement with Afghanistan’s warring parties.⁴⁶ This duplicity had serious consequences for the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, since Washington’s trust in Islamabad gradually waned. U.S. government documents also indicated that Pakistan’s ISI had long supported Islamic terrorist organizations, which were used as proxies to target Indian forces in Kashmir. According to a CIA assessment, some of these groups, such as Harakat ul-Ansar, also used “terrorist tactics against Westerners and random attacks on civilians that could involve Westerners to promote its pan-Islamic agenda.”⁴⁷

A Fateful Bargain

By 2001, the Taliban controlled virtually all of Afghanistan. The only exception was a small sliver of land northeast of Kabul in the Panjshir Valley, where Ahmed Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance forces had retreated. During the Taliban era, the Afghan Army was an assortment of armed groups with varying degrees of loyalties and professional skills.⁴⁸ Mullah Muhammad Omar, as head of the armed forces, ultimately decided on military strategies, key appointments, and military budgets. The military shura sat below Omar, helped plan strategy, and implemented tactical decisions. Shura in Arabic means “consultation,” and it includes the ruler’s duty according to sharia, to consult his followers in making decisions. It also refers to the assembly that meets for this purpose. Individual Taliban commanders were responsible for recruiting men, paying them, and looking after their needs in the field. They acquired much of the money, fuel, food, transport, and weapons from the military shura.

While it was a detestable regime that committed gross human-rights violations, the Taliban was successful in establishing law and order throughout most of Afghanistan. “On the plus side,” acknowledged a U.S. State Department report, “the Taliban have restored security and a rough form of law and order in their areas of control.”⁴⁹ It was a brutal form of justice, but it was governance nonetheless. In his book Taliban, Ahmed Rashid explained that opposition tribal groups “had been crushed and their leaders hanged, the heavily armed population had been disarmed and the roads were open to facilitate…trade between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia.”⁵⁰ By the end of the century, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan. A CIA assessment concluded: “There was no Pashtun opposition.” Opposition groups “were totally disorganized, fragmented, disarmed by the Taliban.”⁵¹ A White House document composed in January 2001 remarked that “the Northern Alliance may be effectively taken out this Spring when fighting resumes after the winter thaw.”⁵² Massoud’s forces were so weak that foreign governments—including the United States—were unwilling to back them in any meaningful way.⁵³

But the Taliban had struck a dangerous bargain with Osama bin Laden and his international jihadist network. As a Taliban official explained to a U.S. State Department representative, the Taliban considered bin Laden a “great mujahid” and supported his residence in Afghanistan.⁵⁴ It was a fateful mistake. Bin Laden used his money and influence to support the Taliban regime and, in return, trained jihadists and planned operations on Afghan soil.⁵⁵ If Mullah Omar had been willing to shy away from a relationship with bin Laden, the United States might have left the Taliban alone. Instead, Afghanistan became a nexus for the Taliban’s radical Deobandism and al Qa’ida’s global jihad.

CHAPTER FIVE Al Qa’ida’s Strategic Alliance

OSAMA BIN LADEN was fond of telling his students a parable, comparing the anti-Soviet War with the Christian assault against Mecca in 570 AD. The much-better-equipped Christian army employed war elephants, and their attack was fearsome enough to warrant mention in the Qur’an, appropriately enough in the chapter Al-Fil (“The Elephant”). The Christians tried to destroy the Ka’aba shrine in Mecca and divert pilgrims to a new cathedral in San’a, located in modern-day Yemen. But birds showered the invading Christian army with pellets of hard-baked clay, and the Arabs eventually defeated the invaders. To bin Laden and other al Qa’ida leaders, the episode exemplified that God would be on their side when they united against a common enemy.¹

“In the training camps and on the battlefronts against the Russians,” Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, “the Muslim youths developed a broad awareness and a fuller realization of the conspiracy that is being weaved” by Christians and Jews. They “developed an understanding based on shari’ah of the enemies of Islam, the renegades, and their collaborators.”² The Afghan-Soviet War triggered an epiphany among these fighters, who had trekked to Afghanistan from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and other parts of the Arab world. Inspired by the defeat of the Soviet Union, they began to dream about internationalizing the jihad. The defeat had emboldened them, and many believed they were invincible.

“The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri wrote, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions.”³ Saudi Arabia was crucial to the jihad, as significant amounts of money from Saudi government officials and private donors poured into Pakistan and Afghanistan. But, no matter who funded the movement, no country in the Middle East was more important to the birth of al Qa’ida than Afghanistan.

Ideological Origins

In 1745, in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn Saud allied with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). Inspired by a number of scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), Wahhab criticized the virulent “superstitions” that had adulterated Islam’s original purity. According to Wahhab’s reading of the Qur’an, the Ottoman pilgrims who traveled across Saudi Arabia each year to pray at Mecca were not true Muslims. Rather, they were blasphemous polytheists who worshipped false idols. They were Allah’s enemy, he said, and should be converted or eliminated. In its simplest form, Wahhab preached that the original grandeur of Islam could be regained only if the Islamic community would return to what he believed were the principles enunciated by the Prophet Muhammad.

The Saudis began to export Wahhabi philosophy by distributing money to build mosques. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the Arab oil-exporting nations declared an embargo on oil destined for Israel’s Western allies, Saudi Arabia found itself in an enviable economic position. Its growing oil wealth could finance a wide-ranging proselytizing campaign among the Sunnis in the Middle East and in the broader Muslim world.⁴

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 came at an opportune time for the Saudis. Under the stewardship of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, Saudi Arabia began active campaigns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with the CIA and the ISI to fund the Afghan mujahideen.

One of Saudi Arabia’s key facilitators in Afghanistan was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from Jenin. Azzam was born in 1941 and studied sharia between 1959 and 1966, in Damascus, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Over time, he became an inspiring organizer, leading one writer to call him the “Lenin of international jihad.”⁵ After completing his studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1973, Azzam became a professor of sharia at the University of Jordan, while supervising the university’s youth sector for the Muslim Brotherhood. He was later evicted from his university post and moved to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where he taught at King Abdulaziz University. Osama bin Laden was one of his pupils.

In 1984, Azzam moved to Peshawar, a Pashtun city in Pakistan thirty miles from the Afghanistan border. A