[R-G] The new Taliban

[Anthony Fenton]

Focus
The new Taliban

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2190875,00.html

In a swath of territory across Afghanistan and Pakistan, a wild and  
lawless new state is being born. As warlords struggle for control and  
Islamic militants pour in, Jason Burke travels deep into the region  
to reveal hidden forces fuelling a growing conflict in the front line  
of the 'War on Terror'

Sunday October 14, 2007
The Observer

The bomb was far from the biggest seen on the North-West Frontier but  
it did its job well. Placed in a water cooler, it ripped through the  
Nishtar Abad music market, sending shards of glass and splintered CDs  
in all directions. 'Miraculously, no one was killed,' said Mohammed  
Azam, who was shopping for presents for the Muslim holiday of Eid  
this weekend. Twenty people were injured, three seriously, and a  
dozen shops gutted.

For the police chief of Peshawar, the dusty Pakistan city 40 miles  
from the Afghan border, it was clear who planted last Tuesday's bomb.  
'We suspect the involvement of those people who in recent months had  
sent letters to the CD and video shops, warning them to shut their  
businesses, saying it is against Islam,' Abdul Majid Marwat said.

The 'Pakistan Taliban' - or one of the various groups claiming the  
name - had struck again. Within hours the debris was being cleared  
away and the blood wiped off the walls. 'This is the life we lead,'  
said Azam.' We have no choice but to continue.'

The Pakistan Taliban's campaigns go way beyond bombing music shops.  
Fifty miles south of Peshawar last week, a full-scale pitched battle,  
complete with air strikes and artillery barrages, raged between the  
Pakistani army and local and international militants dug into  
fortified positions in remote tribal villages. By the time a fragile  
calm had settled on the rocky hills, scattered palm trees and  
desiccated fields of Mir Ali, 50 soldiers, a 100 or so militants and  
around 100 civilians had died. Given the inaccessibility of the  
battlefield and the conflicting claims of the military and their  
opponents, accurate casualty figures are simply not available.

What is not in doubt is the scale of the fighting. It was a bloody  
week for everyone as half a dozen ragged conflicts raged across a  
stretch of land the size of Britain, from the Indus river to the  
central highlands of Pakistan.

The weekend before had seen an American soldier and a handful of  
Afghans killed in Kabul; last Monday saw the latest in a spate of  
suicide bombings attributed to the Taliban in Afghanistan when a  
bicycle bomber hit a convoy of Nato troops moving through the British- 
held town of Lashkar Gah, injuring two civilians. Towards the end of  
the week, around 100 Taliban stormed a remote police post close to  
Afghanistan's border with Iran, sparking lengthy exchanges that left  
10 militants and a police officer dead. An Australian died when his  
armoured vehicle was hit by a massive remote-detonated mine, the  
192nd coalition soldier killed this year in Afghanistan.

The death of David Pearce, 41, made this year the bloodiest for  
foreign soldiers deployed in Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet  
occupation. The number of Afghan civilians who have died in the  
fighting this year is already higher than that for any year since the  
vicious civil war that tore the country apart in the early Nineties.

In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, analysts talk of an explosion of  
violence. Tensions were so high last week that when a gas cylinder  
exploded in an affluent suburb of Islamabad, already hit by a bloody  
series of suicide bombings, it was initially thought to be yet  
another terrorist blast.

For some, the ongoing violence in south-west Asia is simple to  
explain: the Taliban, reconstituted after the defeat of 2001, and  
with the help of al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants  
such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi, are battling their  
way back to power in Afghanistan and, perhaps worse, fast making  
progress towards seizing power in nuclear-capable Pakistan.

But the reality is far more complicated. It is hard to make sense of  
one of the most confusing conflicts of modern times, a war with no  
defined fronts, waged with tactics that range from those of the  
dynamite-throwing anarchists of the late 19th century to those of the  
Western Front trench stalemate in 1916, and sometimes to state-of-the- 
art 'fourth generation' 21st-century warfare.

Across an area that stretches through Pakistani cities such as  
Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi, through Kabul and Kandahar, to  
remote villages and Nato bases in southern Afghanistan, it is  
possible to unpick the intricate detail of the battle for the  
strategic centre of the War on Terror. What emerges is a picture not  
of a single movement or insurgency called 'the Taliban', but of a new  
state without formal borders or even a name, a state that is  
currently nothing more than a chaotic confederation of warlords'  
fiefdoms spanning one of the most critical parts of the world and  
with the potential to escalate into a very real presence - with  
devastating consequences for global security.

And this weekend, the 'centre of the centre', as one western official  
called it, was the small, scruffy town of Mir Ali.

In the lulls between fighting last week, soldiers and militants  
retrieved their dead. Among the corpses buried within hours according  
to Islamic custom were a couple of Arabs and several Uzbeks. The find  
confirmed the worst fears of Western intelligence services. Over  
recent years it has become increasingly obvious that bin Laden's al- 
Qaeda group has been able to rebuild a version of the terrorist  
infrastructure that existed in Afghanistan in the late Nineties.

Volunteers, many of them British, have travelled in a steady stream  
to training camps. They have included key members of the 7/7 London  
bombing plot and those convicted in the recent Operation Crevice  
trial. A new 'high command', including a high proportion of Egyptians  
and Saudis, has taken on the task of directing strikes around the  
globe, and into Pakistan (where President Pervez Musharraf remains a  
key target), and providing technical and financial assistance to  
chosen allies in Afghanistan.

The training camps are 'rudimentary', according to Pakistani  
government and Western intelligence sources, but despite steady  
losses - a missile fired from a Predator drone killed Abu Hamza  
Rabia, the al-Qaeda number three, in a house in Mir Ali last November  
- there is no shortage of militants to fill the gaps. 'The number  
three position in al-Qaeda, "director of external operations", is one  
of the jobs with the shortest life expectancies in the world,' said a  
UK-based intelligence source. 'But that does not stop people  
volunteering for it.'

Equally troubling is the renewed activity of al-Qaeda-affiliated  
groups such as the Uzbeks under Tahir Yuldashev, brutal commander of  
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and Pakistani militant  
groups that have moved into the hills after losing Islamabad's  
backing. According to Brigadier Mehmud Shah, there are several  
hundred Uzbek fighters in and around Mir Ali, all set on killing as  
many Pakistani soldiers as possible. 'In 2003, there were around 600  
Uzbek fighters, now there are more than three times that figure,'  
said Shah, a retired Pakistani officer who oversaw security on the  
frontier until last year. The influx has been fuelled by fierce  
repression in Uzbekistan itself, ruled by Stalinist dictator Islam  
Karimov.

Last month, a terrorist plot was uncovered in Germany after American  
intelligence intercepted emails from a breakaway faction of the IMU  
to German converts who had travelled to the North-West Frontier to be  
trained. The increasing internationalisation of the militant presence  
in the Pakistani tribal areas recalls the worst days of the late  
Nineties, when scores of different groups were based in Afghanistan,  
all plotting violence in the Middle East or the West. Already,  
British intelligence experts are describing the Pakistani tribal  
areas as 'the Grand Central Station' of modern Islamic militancy.

Again, however, the situation is complex. In many parts of the border  
country, the Uzbeks are far from welcome and have fought pitched  
battles with local tribes. An estimated 200 were killed in fighting  
between Pashtuns and 'foreigners' in the south Waziristan agency  
earlier this year. But few doubt that the Uzbeks - and al-Qaeda -  
have enough allies, enough respect and enough money to ensure a  
welcome in the hills around Miram Shah and Mir Ali for a long time yet.

The Torchi river snakes down from the high mountains along the Afghan- 
Pakistan frontier to the Indus and eventually into the Arabian Sea.  
Mir Ali lies where the river hits the flatlands. It is a ragged  
settlement of half a dozen villages grouped around a scruffy bazaar  
on a crossroads and a concrete ramp that serves as a bridge over the  
river.

Last week, Pakistani soldiers took heavy casualties as they tried to  
battle their way in. Despite air strikes reducing dozens of the mud  
houses to dust and fierce fighting between the low walls and across  
the dried-out fields and sparse orchards, they had made little  
progress by this weekend despite talk of a 'major push' before the  
Eid festival. Refugees fleeing the area spoke of a 'rain' of missiles  
and shells.

'We don't have any place to live,' said Mohamed Anwar. 'We have sent  
our children to other areas because we are scared that the bombing  
could start again.' With the fragile truce barely holding, renewed  
fighting is almost certain in the days that come.

Few observers were surprised at the lack of progress. Pakistan now  
has 101,000 troops deployed in the semi-autonomous badlands along the  
frontier, but they face daunting obstacles. Mir Ali is in the North  
Waziristan tribal agency, one of seven agencies stretching along the  
strategically crucial frontier area where the authority of the  
Pakistani government is, under an agreement concluded by British  
imperial administrators anxious to pacify the warlike and truculent  
Pashtun tribes, constitutionally limited to the roads and a narrow  
strip either side just 10 yards wide. There is no tax collection,  
justice system or police force.

A second difficulty is the terrain. On both sides of the highly  
porous border, there are very few roads, high ridges provide vantage  
points and frequent gorges are perfect for ambushes. Those forests  
that have yet to be stripped of their valuable timber give excellent  
cover. Even the houses are fortified. With its high hills and  
populated plains, the terrain is similar to that where British troops  
are deployed in southern Afghanistan.

As in the restive south and east of Afghanistan, the agencies are  
populated by self-ruling Pashtun tribes for whom war has been a way  
of life for centuries. 'A Pashtun takes his Kalashnikov out with him  
like a westerner takes his mobile phone,' said Latif Afridi, a local  
tribal leader. 'They learn to shoot when they learn to walk.'

Inter-tribal violence is a continual backdrop to life on the  
frontier. Last week, tribes west of Peshawar battled over rights to  
grazing, water and other scarce resources with mortars and machine- 
guns, oblivious to the global conflict unfolding around them. And  
experience gained in the war against the former Soviet Union in  
Afghanistan, when many Pashtuns in the region fought against the Red  
Army and its local auxiliaries, has forged a new style of warfare  
where combat is no longer seen as an extension of negotiation but as  
a bid to annihilate the opponent.

Finally, there is Islam. In recent years the radical new ideology of  
Middle Eastern militants such as bin Laden has spread among the  
Pashtun tribes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing a new  
language and justification for age-old resentments against central  
authority, buttressed by new ideas about 'the global attack on Islam  
by the West' and a powerful call to 'jihad'.

One powerful factor has been the massive growth in recent decades of  
the hardline Deobandi traditionalist school of Islam. With tribal  
leaders losing their authority in the new radicalised environment,  
the clerics are more influential than ever. 'The traditional  
structure with tribal chiefs, big landowners or merchants and  
religious figures sharing power has broken down,' Professor Zia  
Ullah, of Peshawar University, told The Observer. 'At the moment it  
is the mullah and the talib [religious student] who are in charge. A  
system that has lasted centuries has been overturned.'

It is these mullahs, whose religious education is often minimal, who  
are forming the private militias labelled 'the Pakistan Taliban'. In  
fact, they are little more than a fractious confederation of mini- 
states run by warlords. Together they have succeeded in expelling  
almost all representatives of any government authority from their  
territory and in doing so, some analysts fear, have laid the  
foundations for a state without borders or flags, but which has a  
justice system and a common ethnicity, ideology, culture and  
religion. And it was this fragmented, chaotic, embryonic state's  
soldiers that were fighting so hard at Mir Ali last week.

Carry on up the road that slices through Mir Ali bazaar, heading west  
into the mountains, and you will soon come to Miram Shah. Lying in a  
hollow below a crucial pass over the mountains, the small town was a  
crucial support base for the mujahideen who fought the Soviets. One  
of their leaders, an Afghan tribal chief called Jalaluddin Haqqani,  
held Miram Shah as a personal fiefdom for decades, building a mosque  
and a huge religious school on its outskirts. Haqqani, a senior  
cleric, or maulvi, in the Deobandi school of Islam, is now old and  
ailing - some intelligence sources believe him to be dead - but his  
son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has taken over and is as active as his  
father ever was. If anyone is going to be president of this new state  
it is he.

Little is known about Sirajuddin Haqqani. According to Brigadier  
Shah, the Pakistani army is 'currently fighting blindfold', and  
western intelligence agencies admit a 'lack of visibility' in the  
tribal areas. However, all believe that Haqqani is the dominant  
figure among the warlords hacking out their fiefdoms in the tribal  
areas.

'[Sirajuddin Haqqani] is at the top of the food chain,' said one  
western military official in Islamabad. 'He's one of the few people  
everyone listens to.' Sources told The Observer that it was Haqqani  
who, four weeks ago, brought three different warlords together to  
provide a big enough force to take on the Pakistani army around Mir Ali.

But Haqqani, who is believed to be in his forties, has another key  
role to play. He has inherited the influence his father built over 20  
years well beyond the tribal zones of Pakistan. That influence  
stretches across eastern Afghanistan as far as Ghazni and even into  
Uruzgan, where the Australian soldier was killed last week.

As in Pakistan, the Afghan Pashtun tribes do not unconditionally obey  
one commander but Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son have been able to  
draw together a complex web of links of allegiance, some based on  
tribal loyalty, others inspired by religious devotion to the senior  
Deobandi cleric that Haqqani is (or was), still more by a quasi- 
national response to what is perceived to be a 'foreign' invasion and  
occupation that threatens to change Afghan society for ever.

'We respect Maulvi Haqqani,' one tribal leader told The Observer by  
telephone from the Pakistani town of Kohat. 'He has always been a  
true mujahed [freedom fighter], fighting the Russians and the  
Americans and the British. And he has built many schools and mosques.'

Another reason the Haqqani dynasty is so powerful is its wealth. This  
allows them to buy the loyalty that their religious and jihadi  
credentials do not win them. That money comes from smuggling opium,  
weapons and timber out of Afghanistan as well as from quasi- 
legitimate businesses. It also comes in direct donations from backers  
in Gulf Arab states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - until 2001,  
Jalaluddin Haqqani was a frequent visitor to the Gulf and one of his  
wives is from a wealthy family in the United Arab Emirates - and from  
indirect donations via the scores of Islamic charities which gather  
the 10 per cent zakat levy that every devout Muslim gives to  
religious causes.

Cash is a critical commodity throughout the 'south-western Asian  
theatre'. Though not among the prime motivations for many Afghan  
fighters, money is necessary for weapons, equipment and for the  
tribal auxiliaries who will turn out to protect drug shipments and  
boost numbers for major one-off attacks. To bolster a recent, and  
rapidly broken, peace agreement in the tribal zones on their side of  
the frontier, Pakistani army commanders distributed sums ranging from  
£10,000 to £100,000 to five leaders of militant militias who promised  
to lay down their arms. The money, the men said, was needed to pay  
back advances given to them by 'al-Qaeda' to fight the Islamabad  
government's forces.

But the militias, like the Haqqanis, are not loyal to bin Laden,  
according to Peshawar-based analyst Ashraf Ali. 'Baitullah Mahsud  
[one of the key leaders of the militant militias on the Pakistan side  
of the border] recently said that neither bin Laden nor al-Qaeda was  
his leader,' Ali said. 'His leader was Mullah Omar [the ousted Afghan  
leader].'

In the sprawling multinational base in Kandahar there is one hangar  
riddled with rusty bullet holes and shrapnel marks. It stands in  
stark contrast to the pristine new constructions - including a Pizza  
Hut outlet, a Burger King and a full-sized chapel - elsewhere in the  
vast complex that the headquarters of Nato's Regional Command South  
in Afghanistan has become over the six years western forces have been  
fighting in Afghanistan. The hangar is known as the Taliban's Last  
Stand, and was left as a memento to the defeat of the hardline  
Islamic militia in 2001. It has since become something of an  
embarrassment.

The latest contingent of British troops to deploy in Afghanistan, 52  
Brigade, arrived last week. Most will be based in Helmand, the  
province to the west of Kandahar. From their bases in places such as  
Lashkar Gah and Kajaki, the activities of the Haqqanis and the  
Pakistan Taliban will seem a long way away.

Analysts are split over the links between the two wings of the  
Taliban. According to Brigadier Shah, 'the Afghan Taliban have no  
extraterritorial operations or ambitions'. 'Communications among  
senior leaders we intercepted showed us that [the Afghan Taliban]  
considered the Pakistan Taliban as a burden and requested them to  
fight Pakistan but not come into Afghanistan,' Shah told The Observer.

But others are less convinced. 'The situation is so complex that you  
cannot draw a line between the Afghan and the Pakistan Taliban,' said  
Ashraf Ali, the analyst.

Certainly Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who has led the Afghan  
Taliban since its creation in 1993, is respected by everyone on both  
sides of the border, including the Haqqanis. 'If there is one chief,  
it is him,' one official in Islamabad said. 'If Talibanistan suddenly  
came into being, he would be the president.'

But the links that tie the two halves of the Taliban together go way  
beyond shared allegiances. A United Nations report into the new  
phenomenon of suicide bombers in Afghanistan stated that 'much (but  
not all) of the recruiting and training happens' in Pakistan.

'While suicide attackers elsewhere in the world tend not to be poor  
and uneducated, Afghanistan's attackers appear to be young,  
uneducated and often drawn from religious schools in Pakistan,' the  
report stated. Government and military sources in Kabul told The  
Observer that many bombers came from the Haqqanis' madrassas  
[religious schools] around Miram Shah, others from the system of  
Deobandi madrassas around Quetta.

In Peshawar, The Observer found evidence that one bomber who killed  
himself in Kandahar last autumn was recruited in the small town of  
Charsadda north east of the Pakistani frontier city by a Pakistani  
group. The bomber, who had no previous involvement with radical  
Islam, had travelled nearly 500 miles, from one side of the border to  
the other, to attack western troops.

Equally, though substantial funding is generated within Afghanistan  
from taxes on the sale of opium and contributions from wealthy  
sympathisers, much of the funding of the Afghan Taliban comes from  
across the border. Weapons from stores in Pakistan or from gun  
factories such as that at Darra Adam Khel to the south of Peshawar -  
temporarily occupied in August by a group of Pakistan Taliban - cross  
the mountains to be used against Nato forces too.

And though much of the fighting in Helmand or in Kandahar is in part  
based on tribal rivalries, cross-border personal links, not least  
through the Deobandi religious network, play a key role. 'At the end  
of the day, it is all about who knows who,' said one Kabul-based  
intelligence official. Maulana Rahat Hussain, a senior cleric  
interviewed by The Observer in Peshawar last week, reeled off a list  
of his classmates at the massive Binoria madrassa in Karachi,  
Pakistan's largest city and commercial centre, who had all become  
senior figures in the Taliban.

'They were and are and will forever be my brothers,' Hussain, the  
deputy secretary of the Deobandi-linked political party that has run  
Peshawar for the past five years, said. 'They are fighting an  
occupying force and inshallah they will be victorious.'

On the ground, differences disappear. Hundreds of thousands of  
Afghans displaced in the Eighties and early Nineties grew up in  
refugee camps in Pakistan or studied in religious schools there.  
'Telling the two apart is impossible,' one British officer in Helmand  
told The Observer. 'We have found bodies with pockets full of  
Pakistani currency. But does that mean it's an Afghan or a Pakistani?  
Round here the distinction is meaningless. Nation states don't really  
exist in the way we imagine them to.'

And though British intelligence officers and diplomats who have  
served on both sides of the frontier stress that there are  
considerable differences between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban,  
cautioning that 'to conflate the two' would be a serious error, they  
admit that there are many links too. 'The short-term objectives may  
differ but if you are looking for shared long-term aims or a common  
world view, culture, language and so on, they are very close indeed,'  
one official, a veteran observer of the region, said last week.

Nato officers in Kabul dismiss the suicide bombings as 'not a  
strategic threat', but senior officers admit privately that there is  
a danger that the south and east of Afghanistan, already well beyond  
the authority of Kabul, will effectively translate 'de facto  
autonomy' into independence. That raises the spectre of the  
confederation of warlord states that is in the process of emerging on  
the Pakistani side of the border effectively trebling in size with  
the addition of the Taliban-controlled zones in Afghanistan.

'It would be the United Taliban Emirates and it would be a very nasty  
place indeed,' one said. 'It would be the biggest and most defensible  
terrorist safe haven the world has ever seen.'

Few are hopeful that a swift solution will be found to the problem  
posed by the emerging state without a state on the borders of  
Afghanistan. The Pakistani army, according to western defence  
officials in Islamabad, lacks the doctrine or the equipment or the  
will to take on the forces against them. 'They are demoralised. They  
are taking heavy casualties, having hundreds of guys captured. They  
are in real trouble up there,' said one.

Nor is the Pakistani army's will to fight unquestionable. 'The men  
and the officers are sick of fighting America's war,' said one  
recently retired general in Islamabad. 'Why should we kill other  
Pakistanis and other Muslims or sacrifice our lives for President  
Bush? It is not just the tribesmen who are anti-American. The whole  
country is.'

There are frequent allegations that the Pakistani intelligence  
services are helping the Taliban on both sides of the border. 'There  
is no institutional policy to provide support for the militants but  
it may well be happening at a low level with some individuals  
pursuing their own agendas,' said one Islamabad-based defence  
official. 'I have never seen a smoking gun though.'

There is general recognition that the Nato alliance and the Taliban,  
who are increasingly relying on amateurish suicide bombings, have  
fought each other to a standstill. Nato partners such as Germany, the  
Netherlands and France are tiring of a war that British commanders  
admit may take '30 years to win'. British ministers have suggested  
talking to the Taliban - something President Hamid Karzai of  
Afghanistan has offered to do. Earlier this month he made a personal  
plea to Mullah Omar to negotiate and stop 'the destruction of [his]  
country'.

But the confederation of warlords, Pakistan Taliban, Deobandi  
religious networks, businessmen and smugglers, the veterans such as  
Haqqani and the newcomers who have seized power in villages like Mir  
Ali will not give way easily.

'The loose, chaotic quasi-state which we are seeing emerging has been  
in the process of being built since the early days of the war against  
the Soviets 30 years ago,' said one western diplomat in Pakistan. 'It  
is going to take that long, if not longer, to dismantle.'

Rise of the radicals

Taliban literally means 'students'. Originally mainly ethnic  
Pashtuns, many footsoldiers came from radical seminaries in Pakistan,  
where two million Afghans sought refuge from two decades of war.

Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989. The pro-Soviet government  
fell in 1992; rebel factions took power but then began infighting.  
Thousands died in a vicious civil war. The Taliban emerged as a real  
force in 1994. In 1996 they captured Kabul. They were forced out in  
2001 by a US-led invasion, but staged a comeback last year.

The Taliban believe in a strict interpretation of Islamic law and  
last month produced a constitution. Executions are carried out in  
public. Women are fully covered and are not permitted education. Men  
should wear beards, and light entertainment - music, television and  
film - is deemed to be anti-Islamic.

Poppy production in Afghanistan rose dramatically after the 2001  
invasion destabilised a shaky economy, leading more and more farmers  
to turn to opium production to survive. The country provides 86 per  
cent of the world's supply of the drug.