Come from the Shadows. Terry Glavin
were claiming the same back in the late 1990s. It’s true that the Taliban have had a lot of the stuffing knocked out of them since September 11, 2001. But it was only about six years before September 11 that the Taliban began as a Pakistan-financed project to hijack Afghan sovereignty, and it quickly leveraged itself into a multinational joint venture and crime syndicate involving several foreign jihadist organizations, only one of which was al-Qaida. By the early months of 2001, China, Russia and all the Central Asian states were girding themselves for a renewed wave of terrorist attacks launched from Taliban-held Afghanistan. In the days leading up to September 11, Pakistan was still sending convoys of free supplies and armaments to camps in Taliban-controlled districts where thousands of Algerians, Yemenis, Turks, Palestinians, Lebanese, Filipinos, Jordanians, Uzbeks, Chechens and others were studying, training and preparing for their assignments in the Maghreb, the Levant, the Philippines, the Caucasus, Kashmir and beyond.
Afghanistan’s so-called civil war did not come to an end because war-weary Afghans welcomed the Taliban. Most of the country was stable and at peace by the time the Taliban began their reign of terror in 1994. By then, the Saudi, Pakistani and Iranian proxy armies had fought each other to a standstill and had been collectively fought to a draw by the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had remained loyal to the embryonic Islamic State of Afghanistan. Kandahar was a free-for-all of Pashtun gangsterism and internecine warlord feuding, but life in most of the tentatively constituted Islamic State of Afghanistan—Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, Hazarajat, Kunduz, the Shomali Plains, the Panjshir Valley and so on—was trundling along in a fairly orderly fashion before the Taliban showed up. The Taliban had to bomb, bribe and bully their way across Afghanistan. Christian Bleuer, a leading Afghanistan analyst with the Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, has looked long and hard for evidence to support the fable of war-weary Afghans welcoming the Taliban. He hasn’t found any, outside parts of the Pashtun belt, and neither has anyone else. “I call it a ridiculous lie,” says Bleuer, “because the ‘pre-Taliban chaos’ myth is basically Pakistani ISI and Taliban propaganda.”
The fiction that the Taliban eliminated opium production also originates in propaganda. The Taliban first claimed to have banned opium farming in 1997, but the UN Office on Drugs and Crime database shows an upward trend in Afghan opium production straight through the Taliban years. The Taliban ran profitable protection rackets in the transport and export of opium and heroin, and brought in more cash through their 10 percent zakat tax on farmers. The Taliban’s July 2000 fatwa against opium farming accrued a measurable propaganda value; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration data show an immediate surge in the price of stockpiled Afghan opium that year, from $44 a kilo to $350, and on a good day, $700. Whether that benefit was intentionally gained or not, the fatwa was especially cunning in the way it opened up a speculative stream of revenue from U.S. drug war coffers and lucrative UN Drug Control Program disbursements. The only year Afghan opium production actually fell was 2001, which was a rather busy year for the Taliban, as things turned out. But they were soon back in the drug trade. The Taliban subsidized their post-2001 mayhem not just with racketeering and strong-arm taxation but through the direct ownership and operation of heroin refineries.
Nor did the Taliban tackle corruption. They just monopolized it in the areas they controlled. Pashtun Taliban commanders stole thousands of non-Pashtun farms for themselves and their cronies. For the crime of not being Pashtun, tens of thousands of Afghans were robbed, dispossessed of their homes or simply put to death. The Taliban murdered aid workers, extorted enormous sums of money from international aid agencies and murdered and robbed each other. A bag of cash and the wink of an eye could often get you anything you wanted. You could buy a woman from the Taliban for as little as $100, but the price might depend on who you were. A wealthy Arab jihadist in Khost was reported to have paid $10,000 for a slave girl. In Parwan province alone, the Taliban captured hundreds of women to sell into the slave markets that supply Pakistani brothels.
As for the code of Pashtunwali that is so strict it binds Afghans to protect even guests like bin Laden (as its name suggests, this code applies to Afghanistan’s minority Pashtuns, when it applies at all), it is a fiction that the Taliban were prepared to hand him over after September 11 if only evidence against him had been produced. Osama bin Laden had been Mullah Omar’s most-valued partner in crime since 1996. By September 11, the Taliban had already laughed off numerous and elaborately detailed international warrants for bin Laden’s arrest, not least an October 1999 demand from the UN Security Council. In the three years leading up to September 11, U.S. officials met with Omar’s envoys and intermediaries more than twenty times in Bonn, Islamabad, Kandahar, New York, Tashkent and Washington.
The Taliban persisted in their refusal to give up bin Laden, but less than two weeks after al-Qaida had so dangerously enraged the Americans on September 11, the pantomime of Pashtunwali was dropped. The Pashtun-dominated religious council ruled: If the Americans want Osama, they can have Osama. The High Council of the Honourable Ulema met in Kabul, uttered the usual high-pitched threats of jihad against any crusaders or infidels who were thinking about attacking Afghanistan and rendered their decision: Osama, please go; Mullah Omar, please make him go away. Mullah Omar said no.
It isn’t true, in any conventional meaning of the term, that the United States or its NATO partners “invaded” Afghanistan. By September 11, there was no sovereign country left to invade. At the time, while the multinational jihadist joint venture known as the Taliban did control most of Afghanistan, Pakistan was the only country that formally recognized the regime. The only other countries that had ever recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government were the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but they’d bailed long before September 11. Afghanistan’s seat at the UN in New York was occupied by the Islamic State of Afghanistan, led by the Northern Alliance chief Berhanuddin Rabbani and the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud. They’d been pleading for military help for years. Immediately after September 11, even Pakistan was scrambling to give the appearance of disowning its Taliban progeny, and Rabbani’s government was loudly reiterating its long-standing invitation to the Americans to help chase the Taliban out.
Strictly speaking, it isn’t even true that the Taliban were overthrown by the United States, or by the United States and its NATO allies. The Northern Alliance would have remained dug in up in the mountains had it not been for a U.S. bombing campaign, American arms and supplies drops and all the Special Forces soldiers skulking around. But the Taliban, al-Qaida and their sundry jihadist brothers-in-arms had been driven out of Kabul by a ragtag assemblage of Afghans before any regular American troops arrived. The Taliban were even chased out of their legendary heartland of Kandahar by the locals before any U.S. combat troops showed up.
Neither is it true that the White House rallied NATO to America’s side in Afghanistan. Immediately after September 11, the NATO countries invoked the all-for-one clause in the NATO charter. Washington only begrudgingly acknowledged the move and made it plain that NATO’s help wasn’t particularly wanted. As late as 2005, the United States was still only lukewarm to the idea of an expansion of the international military and reconstruction effort in the country.
The NATO coalition did not quickly sink into a quagmire of Afghan hostility. That happened neither quickly nor slowly, because it didn’t happen at all. At least fourteen major national opinion polls and focus group surveys were undertaken by various independent agencies across Afghanistan in the decade following 2001. All the available data show unambiguous Afghan support for the so-called U.S. occupation of their country and for the military intervention overseen by the UN’s poorly resourced, forty-three-nation NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The polls do show Afghans to be impatient about the paucity and ineffectiveness of American and NATO troops, however. The United States deployed a mere 7,000 troops to Afghanistan during the first two years after September 11—this was before the White House could use Iraq as an excuse—and almost all the U.S. troops in Afghanistan were dispatched in a “war on terror” exercise known as Operation Enduring Freedom, mostly in the country’s remote southeastern borderlands. As late as the autumn of 2005, ISAF had extended its reach to only half of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and there were only about 40,000 ISAF troops in the whole country. It took until 2009 for the combined ISAF troop strength to reach roughly 150,000.
Paul D. Miller, who served as Afghanistan