Impressions of Afghanistan

Now I have the last and most interesting of all my talks now to relate. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Taliban’s head of the central bank, deputy minister of finance, acting minister of defense and ambassador to Pakistan. In short, he was one of the most important men in the Taliban establishment. When Pakistan withdrew its recognition of the Taliban government in 2001, he was abducted and packed off to Bagram prison, to another prison in Kandahar and finally to Guantánamo. Among them, as he recounts in his autobiography, My Life With The Taliban, he was humiliated, repeatedly tortured, almost starved, sat upon, spat upon, cursed, almost always deprived of a chance to pray, had his Qur’an sullied and deprived of sleep for days on end. Finally after four years he released in 2005 without charges and allowed to return to Afghanistan. He now lives, more or less under house arrest, in Kabul.

Arranging to see him also brought back memories for me: many years ago in Cairo, I met and got to know Prince Abdul Karim al-Khatabi, the leader of the failed Rif war of liberation against the Spaniards and the French. He too was packed off to exile and held incommunicado by the French during the entire period of World War II. 22 Khatabi’s and Zaeef’s lives and personalities and social background were very different, as were their experiences – Prince Abdul Karim was treated with respect whereas Mullah Abdul Salam was tortured -- but both were leaders of their national revolts. So, I approached this opportunity with excitement. I thought I could learn a great deal from him.

By taxi, I went to see Mullah Abdul Salam with a translator. It took about an hour to reach his neighborhood. We wandered about for a long time, unable to find the house. The district had been virtually destroyed in the civil war and the area where his house showed all the effects of both war and Afghan poverty. The streets were flanked by the usual open sewers (juis) and almost blocked by rubbish and the remains of collapsed buildings. When we arrived, I went into the doorway past the usual collection armed guards and up a modest flight of cement steps, then, as custom required, after taking off my shoes, I went into Mullah Abdul Salam’s bare, but sofa-encircled reception room. Rising, Mullah Abdul Salam greeted me shyly. I was not surprised. After all, I was an unknown American and from his book and the comments of my journalist new friends, I expected that he would be at least wary if not hostile. I wasn’t sure what language we would use so I said to my translator to say how much I had looked forward to meeting him after reading his book. The translator spoke a few words to him, paused and then said, “sir, he wants to speak in English.” Since Pashto is Zaeef’s native language, my Farsi speaking translator was perhaps in as weak a language position as I.

So, during our talk, we went back and forth between English and Arabic which, as a religious scholar, he spoke very well. Mullah Abdul Salam is now 42 years old and was born in a village near Kandahar. His father was the imam of a village mosque and the family, probably even more than any of his farming neighbors, was very poor. His mother died when he was a baby, of what he does not know, perhaps in childbirth. His older sister died shortly thereafter and his father, when he was still a child. As he recounts in his autobiography, his youth was grim. He was shunted from one relative to another and had to struggle for the little education, both religious and secular, he got. When the Russians invaded in 1979, he joined the great exodus of millions – ultimately 6 million or about one Afghan in each two – to Pakistan where he lived in several of the wretched refugee camps. At 15, he ran away from “home,” if one can call a refugee tent that, joined the resistance against the Soviet invasion, fought as a guerrilla, was caught in some nine ambushes and was severely wounded. During this time, he joined the Taliban, as he told me, because it was more honest, less brutal and more religious than the other resistance groups. By the time, he joined it, Mullah Muhammad Umar had become the Taliban leader. At the end of the Soviet occupation, the various guerrilla factions split, fought one another and, in the desperate struggle for survival, becoming “warlords,” preyed upon the general population. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Taliban, as he recounted, had stood down or, more accurately, had returned to their schools and mosques. Finally, in reaction to the warlords’ extortions, rapes and murders, the Taliban coalesced and reemerged. Then began a period of negotiation, missionary activity in the name of Islam and finally fighting that led the by-then greatly expanded Taliban into control of most of Afghanistan and catapulted Mullah Abdul Salam into its most difficult civil tasks.

Today, those difficult times, and his even worse years in prison, hardly show. He has just been removed from the UN and US “blacklist,” and now, as I found, lives modestly in Kabul. He is a big man, not fat but portly, with penetrating black eyes and a modest black beard. I was at some pains to establish at least the beginnings of trust between us and must have succeeded because we spoke with some humor (always a good sign) and candor. In our talk, I found no sign of animosity toward me or even, as I expected from his autobiography, toward America and Americans. After preliminaries, I asked what he saw ahead and how the Afghan tragedy could be solved.

In reply, he said, “ it is very hard to devise a way, but we should know that fighting is not the way. It won’t work. And it has many bad side effects such as dividing the people for the government.”

Given his background I was surprised by his concern for Karzai’s government. But as we talked, it was clear that he was thinking in terms broader than Karzai. He meant that the Afghans must have an accommodation to government, per se, if they are heal their wounds and improve their condition.

The only realistic way ahead, he went on, “is respect for the Afghan people and their way whereas America is now relying wholly on force. Force didn’t work for the British or the Russians and it won’t work for the Americans.” (I doubt that Mullah Abdul Salam could have heard it, but his opinion was borne out by the commander of one of the US strike forces in southern Afghanistan, Lt. Col. David Flynn, a career officer who also had served in Iraq. He told a reporter from The Mclatchy Newspapers on August 19, “We’ve killed hundreds and thousands of Taliban over nine years, and killing another thousand this year is not going to be the difference.”) The word “respect” often figured in his remarks, as from my study of Afghanistan and the Arabs and Iranians, I knew it would.

But instead of working toward peace, he said and I paraphrase, America has created obstacles to peace which only it can remove. But here, he said, was a complete block: America has put the Taliban leaders on a black list, a “wanted” list, and they know that they will be killed if they surface to negotiate. Without their removal from the “capture or kill” list and a guarantee of safety from kidnap or murder, they cannot negotiate; trying to make contact with the Karzai regime is sure to get them killed. Perhaps they have even tried. He said that he did not know if Karzai and any of the Taliban leadership were in contact, but under these circumstances, he doubted it. While he admitted (and the Taliban have announced) that he is not authorized to speak for Mullah Muhammad Umar, he thought that the American troops did not need actually to pull out before negotiations could begin. If it was certain that they were going to do so, then negotiations could be got underway. That seemed to contradict some of the Taliban pronouncements, demanding withdrawal before negotiation, but it is, I believe, itself a negotiable issue.

So how do the Taliban see a post-US-controlled Afghanistan? I asked.

He replied that “it all depended on how it comes about. If it comes through negotiation, then probably the Taliban will be content with genuine participation in the government, but if it comes through force, then the Taliban will take everything.”

I asked about what he has been doing since his autobiography was translated. He perhaps did not quite understand my question and said that he was in Guantánamo until he was released. He suddenly asked me how old I am and, when I replied with my august status, he said “good. There was a man in Guantanamo who also was old and he was gentle with me. The younger men were not.”

That brought up the question of the American policy of targeting and killing the leadership. I said that I thought that such actions would open the way for younger, more radical men. Yes, he agreed, that would certainly happen but the senior, “old,” leadership is still intact, living, he said, off somewhere in Pakistan. The usual guess is in the city of Quetta, which historically was a part of Afghanistan.

I turned to the issue of al-Qaida, saying that their activities, their composition and their relationship with the Taliban was what really interested most Americans. He confirmed what the Russian ambassador had told me: Usama bin Ladin was already operating in Afghanistan before the Taliban came into power. Of course, Mullah Abdul Salam said, almost echoing the words of the Russian ambassador, the Taliban needed money and Usama was almost the only available source. All the Afghans, Mullah Abdul Salam emphasized, have the tradition of granting sanctuary (melmastia) to a guest. It is mandatory. Moreover, Usama was the enemy of the enemies of the Taliban. So there was an understanding. But after 2002, he said, “that understanding lapsed, asylum for Usama was withdrawn and the Qaida fighters, including Usama, are no longer in Afghanistan. [American military and intelligence sources have publicly confirmed this.] They will not come back. The Taliban will not allow them to return.”

When Mullah Abdul Salam returned to Afghanistan, he said, he three times met with President Karzai who asked him to participate in the great national assembly, the Loya Jirga. He said he told Karzai that it was not proper to have a Loya Jirga during occupation by foreign forces and urged him not to hold it. He also told Karzai, he said, he personally could not, under the circumstances, participate. I asked if he saw Americans. Yes, he replied an American general once came to call on him, asking what was the best way to arm Afghans to fight the Taliban.

He didn’t laugh, as I expected he would.

What about the American aid program? I asked. Granting aid, he said, had a bad effect “because it split families. If a man took American money, making him a traitor to Afghanistan and to Islam, his own brother was apt to kill him.” But, I said, in other circumstances would it not be good? “Oh, certainly,” he replied. So, I added, then we must change the circumstances. He nodded. Musing, he said he was often asked to compare the Russians and the Americans. On the good side, he said, the Russians came by invitation from an existing government whereas the Americans invaded. But, on the bad side, the Russians were far more brutal than the Americans, bombing whole villages, killing perhaps a million people. On their side, he went on, the Americans at least brought the UN with them and that was a good thing for Afghanistan. The Americans, however, were here only in opposition to the Russians and when there was no Russian threat they left. I was surprised by what I inferred was almost nostalgia in his remark. It was nearly what I had heard from Dr. Samar on the role America could have played in 2002.

I then raised the issue of the brutality of the Taliban. I did not mention the recent UN report on the injuries inflicted by the Taliban on Afghan civilians as I am sure he would think that these are inevitable in a guerrilla war. Instead, I raised the issue of the execution by stoning of an Afghan woman. I remarked that such barbaric practice gave a horrible image of the Taliban even though such execution was authorized by both the Old Testament and the Qur’an. But we no longer believed in it. Can the Taliban modernize? I asked.

He shrugged. “What can you expect now? The Taliban are completely isolated, under constant attack, and naturally this throws them back onto old ways. They cannot afford to relax even on such matters.”

I asked about his own religious observance. It being Ramadan, he was of course fasting. I asked if he went to the little mosque I had seen nearby in his capacity as a mullah. Oh no, he said, he was not allowed to for his own safety. That remark also surprised me. Was he afraid of the Taliban? I asked. He rather ducked that question, saying only that he did go to the mosque for the Friday congregational prayer. But, although he did not specify, it was clear that in the circumstances of Afghanistan today, as I saw everywhere I turned, almost anyone of any standing was unsure where danger might arise. Also, the government would not probably not approve his attendance at a place where he might influence the population. Better to pray at home.

He said he has written a second book, also in Pashto, somewhat like his first. The publishers of his autobiography, he said, refused to pay him royalties as he was on the black list. So he asked that they just hold the money, but, in the end, they refused to give him anything. I suggested that he should write an article on how to end the war and plan to contact Rick MacArthur to see if Harpers would be interested.

Abdul Salam has been invited, he said, by the European parliament to visit Europe. But he had not applied for a visa. He said he had only recently been free to do so, and he had to remember that he was a guest in the country and must not do anything that might embarrass his hosts. [WRP: I have discussed elsewhere the limits of refuge and the control of “guests.”]

As I was leaving, he said that he was expecting the German ambassador. And, indeed, as I went out, there were four big armored cars with a dozen or so men armed with wicked looking machineguns, eyeing me suspiciously, and a small group of German diplomats, waiting to go in.

I was amused that they did not even look sheepish when, by myself without armed guards, I walked passed them to my taxi.

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