Thus, a pro-Taliban lobby came into being in Pakistan, run by retired officers (such as Aslam Beg) and current officers (such as Colonel Imam, Fazlur Rehman, Sami ul-Haq, and General Hamid Gul). General Gul, who was defense attaché at the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul, supervised the training of Taliban militants. A number of senior ISI officers, such as General Said Safar and General Irshad, worked closely with the Taliban in the field.40 Pakistan’s army and air force also cooperated with the Taliban. As one U.S. State Department cable concluded: “Pak Air Force officials are readying Kandahar airport for support of still larger military operations to include heavier fighting in Helmand and Kandahar.” ISI leaders appeared to support the Taliban partly because they believed that mujahideen forces, such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, could not conquer and hold Kabul, while the Taliban apparently could.41 In September 2000, barely a year before the September 11, 2001, attacks, Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth sent a particularly troubling “action cable” to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad:
Pakistan is stepping up support to the Taliban’s military campaign in Afghanistan. Department is particularly concerned by reports that Islamabad may allow the Taliban to use Pakistani territory to outflank Northern Alliance positions in Afghanistan. While Pakistani support for the Taliban has been long standing, the magnitude of recent support is unprecedented…. We have seen reports that Pakistan is providing the Taliban with materiel, fuel, funding, technical assistance, and military advisors. We also understand that large numbers of Pakistani nationals have recently moved into Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban, apparently with the tacit acquiescence of the Pakistani government. Our reports further suggest that direct Pakistani involvement in Taliban military operations has increased in the past few months.42
Some U.S. government documents also contend that there was direct participation by the Pakistan government’s Frontier Corps, whose members were mostly Pashtun and could blend in more easily with the Taliban. The Frontier Corps, a federal paramilitary force, is stationed in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan Province of Pakistan. Unlike the ISI, which is run through the Army, the Frontier Corps operates under Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior, acting as the primary security force in these areas. “These Frontier Corps elements are utilized in command and control; training; and when necessary—combat,” concluded one U.S. intelligence report. “Elements of Pakistan’s regular army force are not used because the army is predominantly Punjabi, who have different features as compared to the Pashtun and other Afghan tribes.”43
A number of Pakistani citizens, as well as prominent journalists, told senior American officials that Pakistan was supporting the Taliban. In a June 30, 1998, meeting with U.S. Embassy staff and Arnold Schifferdecker, a political adviser at the UN Special Mission for Afghanistan, one journalist acknowledged that “he had recently canvassed Pakistani government officials, including Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Inter-Services Intelligence 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.