Anand Gopal

After the recent Reuters interview with Siraj Haqqani, I shuffled through my archives to see if there is anything new in what he said. Below are a excerpts of a few interviews I did with him in 2010. You’ll see he covers similar ground. The Haqqanis are quite pragmatic and have an established track record of exhibiting openness to a deal, although for legitimacy purposes it seems unlikely that such a development would come independently of the Quetta Shura Taliban.

Haqqani has been reticent in the last year–largely because, his people explain to me, of the fear of drone attacks. In fact, if I’m not mistaken this is the first time he has publicly surfaced in over a year. That it comes in the midst of heightened US accusations against the Pakistanis is probably not an accident: Islamabad has for some time been promoting the Haqqanis as responsible interlocutors in a potential peace process.

Your father worked with the U.S to defeat the Soviets. Is there any way you could talk with or work with the Americans to bring peace to Afghanistan?

At that time my father didn’t have a personal relationship with Americans. Back then the whole international community was supporting the Afghan Jihad, including Western and Arab countries. Also back then the Afghan freedom fighters were relying more on the assistance and aid of Islamic countries rather than Western countries. Like today, during the Soviet era the  Mujahidin were fighting an occupying force and believed that foreign forces are the only obstacle which prevents peace and stability in Afghanistan. This is why we wanted the immediate withdrawal of the occupying forces. Today too the withdrawal of the occupying forces is one of our main demands. Once the occupying forces leave Afghanistan the fighting will end and peace and stability will be restored.

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Kandahar & London
An Appeal for Funding

(This is a joint post by Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn and Anand Gopal)

I wouldn’t normally put something like this up on the blog, but after over a year or so of asking around (without success) we’re trying all options.

For several years now, Felix, Anand and I have been collecting old (and new) Taliban documents. Felix and I made a point of finding things that covered pre-2001, and Anand found things post-2001. Some of the research you may have read about on this blog or in books came from this material. For example, the poems written by Talibs in Poetry of the Taliban (published later this year) were all gathered together in this way.

Our collection is pretty wide and comprehensive. I won’t say too much about the kinds of sources we have, but suffice it to say that we have complete collections of most publications and books that the Taliban were associated with (and various other documents/videos/audiotapes). These sources date from the 1980s until the present day.

We are looking — we have been looking — for funds to translate these sources into English and place them (and scans of the originals) online so that researchers and anyone else can access them. Almost none of this material is used (or has been used) in the study of the Taliban (particularly pre-2001) and this project would allow a far deeper understanding.

If you are a donor and are interested in funding this project, please get in touch with me, Felix or Anand at the contact page.

On an evening this past spring, near midnight, a land cruiser pulled up to the house of a government official in Kandahar city. The vehicles carried a senior Taleban figure, sent by Mullah Omar, and some tribal elders. That night the group met secretly with a leading Afghan official and discussed the course of the war and the prospects for negotiations. After the meeting the Taliban figure moved to a hideout outside of the city, before eventually disappearing across the border into Pakistan.

It was typical of the types of contacts that have been occurring between senior Taleban leaders and Afghan officials for years. There have been scores of clandestine meetings between the warring sides, sometimes simply to establish a rapport and sometimes in an attempt to build a more substantive dialogue. These include leaders meeting Afghan officials on their own initiative in some cases, and in others Mullah Omar or the entire senior leadership sending representatives. Thus when NATO and US officials announced recently that there have been attempts by the Taleban to reach out to the Afghan government, it should not be seen as a shift in the insurgents’ approach. Rather, by recognizing these attempts, it is Washington that is changing course. Nor are the contacts a sign that actual negotiations are near; rather, their recognition merely signals Western fears that mission failure is afoot.

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On a balmy summer’s day in the village of Hiratian in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, locals found the body of eight-year-old Dilawar hanging from a tree of a small fruit farm. Taliban fighters had accused the boy of spying for the American forces and had kidnapped him, strung him up and left his body to sway in the wind for hours for all to see.

The murder was horrifying, yet few villagers would come to the defense of anyone charged with spying for the hated foreign forces. But slowly, the details of the story emerged. The Taliban in the area were involved in a weeks-long campaign to collect donations — money, food or weapons — from the local population. They had demanded either a large sum of money or a weapon from Mullah Qudoos, the ill-fated boy’s father. Qudoos, poor and jobless, had neither. So the insurgents took his son as revenge and killed him as an example.

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Wardak province, a rustic region of verdant dales and twisting streams that borders Kabul, is home to one of the untold stories of the Afghan war: over the last nine months, U.S. forces have quietly decapitated the Taliban’s leadership in the area. Through dozens of nighttime raids, U.S. Special Operations Forces have succeeded in killing or capturing a number of important Taliban commanders. Dozens of notorious insurgent leaders who have ruled Wardak for five or six years unmolested have suddenly been removed from the picture, marking one of the biggest setbacks the Taliban has faced on the ground in recent times.

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It was late November, 2001, and the Taliban were on the run everywhere in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance had captured Kabul and much of the rest of the country; only parts of the southwest—including the province of Helmand, remained in the Taliban’s hands. In Marjah, a quiet market town near the Helmand desert, the dying Taliban were making a last stand against a local tribal commander named Abdur Rahman Jan. The battle lasted for nearly two days, and many reinforcements came from the surrounding areas. But the Taliban, beleaguered around the country and bereft of public support, soon succumbed; Jan’s force overran Marjah and the Taliban fled in disgrace.

Jan went on to become Helmand’s police chief under the new government of Hamid Karzai. His close friend Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, a strongman with deep pockets and roots in the area, became the governor. The two quickly populated the seats of local government with their friends, family members and those from their tribes. The local government revenues became part of their personal piggy bank, locals say, and they became heavily involved in the opium business. They marginalized other tribes, destroyed the poppy fields of rivals, took bribes and kickbacks for government contracts and filled the ranks of the police with hated former mujahedeen commanders. One resident of Marjah told me, “The police were the biggest criminals. We were more afraid of them than of anyone else.”

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Just as the world’s eyes are turning towards Afghanistan once again, a few conservative Afghan lawmakers are trying to pass a law that would, amongst other things, legalize marital rape, prohibit women from leaving the home without permission, deny them the right of inheritance, force a woman to “preen for her husband as and when he desires,” and set the minimum female marital age to sixteen.

The draft proposal, which is aimed only at the country’s Shia minority, recalls for many the harsh strictures of the Taliban era and has been roundly condemned in the international community: Hillary Clinton said that she is “deeply concerned” about the law, Obama found it “abhorrent”, and others in the West have asked, “Is this what our soldiers are dying for?” The international condemnation has forced the Karzai administration to shelve the law for the time being, as the Afghan government pledges to look at the details of the bill more closely.

While the world buzzes about this latest setback for Afghan women, you might be wondering just what exactly the bill says about women’s rights in Afghanistan.

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Kabul, Afghanistan - Militants attacked a supply depot Sunday in Pakistan that serves Western forces in Afghanistan, increasing the pressure for US and NATO officials to find alternatives to their beleaguered supply lines.

In a predawn raid in the northwestern city of Peshawar, scores of Pakistani Taliban guerrillas torched trucks stationed at the supply terminal. The assault is the latest in a series that have targeted the Western supply convoys that run through Pakistan to replenish forces fighting in Afghanistan.

Attacks on convoys and depots increased dramatically in 2008 after militants gained a foothold in the Khyber Agency, an area bordering Afghanistan through which supply routes run. The guerrillas have torched more than 500 vehicles in the last year, and a number of times they even succeeded in temporarily halting the supply chain altogether.

Some 70 percent of Western supplies come through the militant-infested western Pakistan. To add to US and NATO difficulties, another major supply route via a base in Kyrgyzstan, is slated to close.

“This is strategically vital,” says Waliullah Rahmani, policy analyst with the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies. “For the Americans to win this war, it’s important to find another route.”

US officials are actively seeking such routes. A series of recently-inked agreements allow the movement of non-lethal materiel through the former Soviet Central Asian States. The Monitor recently reported on US efforts to open a supply route through Uzbekistan. Officials are also considering other, even more complicated routes that pass through the caucuses.

But the alternatives come with difficulties of their own. The new “northern route” utilizes a complex rail network through many different countries, taking longer and costing more than the Pakistani route. And American overtures to the former Soviet states, in what is widely considered Russia’s sphere of influence, might spark tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Still, Moscow fears the growing strength of Islamic militants on its flank, and may be willing to work with the US and NATO. Click here to read about it.

But replacing Pakistan supply routes completely won’t be easy. The American military uses jet fuel of a standard only produced in the Gulf States and Pakistani refineries. “This will make it hard for the US to abandon Pakistan even if the northern routes work out,” says Mr. Rahmani.

If there’s one rule of thumb when reading the Indian press, it is this: never believe a word it says.  At least when it comes to Paksitan.  The Times of India recently carried a real doozy, titled: Pakistani ISI Top Boss Met Osama Aide, which itself was based on “reporting” from the TV station TimesNow.

The report states that ISI officials met with Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqni network, a prominent Afghan insurgent group. “Highly placed intelligence sources”

said that the subject of discussion in the meeting was the shifting of Haqqanis operations from North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan to Afghanistan in exchange for ceasefire with Pakistan army and to halt military operations if the Haqqanis moves their operations from the NWFP into Afghanistan.

Another topic was the construction of the Khost-Gardez road being built by Indian company in Afghanistan. The ISI urged Haqqanis to sabotage efforts by the Indian government to help Afghanistan government to build the Khost-Gardez road.

Let’s give TimesNow the benefit of the doubt and assume that by “highly placed intelligence sources” they mean on the Indian side, not the ISI! The article says that the ISI was trying to get the Haqqanis to shift operations from NWFP to Afghanistan, which is absurd on many levels:

1) The Haqqanis have never operated in NWFP. No one has even accused them of this.  The Haqqanis operate out of Waziristan, which is in FATA, not NWFP.

2) They are trying to convince the Haqqanis to focus on Afghanistan–which is the only place they’ve ever directed attacks! There has never been a recorded instance of the Haqqanis attacking inside Pakistan.

3) They want a ceasefire with the Haqqanis–but the Haqqanis are not fighting with Pakistan! There has never been any record of the Haqqinis ever fighting with Pakistan. The author of the article might be confusing Haqqani with Baitullah Mehsud and the Pakistani Taliban.

This all is as absurd as saying India had a secret meeting with the Tamil Tigers to convince them to stop fighting in India and direct their fire against the Sri Lankan government.

“The Taliban want to expel foreign troops, not win power.”  So says Mullah Salaam Zaif, the movement’s former ambassador to Pakistani, who is now on good terms with the Karzai government.

The Taliban doesn’t want to win power?  Are we expecting the Talibs to just go back to their villages and plant wheat once the foreigners leave?  Zaif is either lying to Reuters or he is lying to himself.  Even most Taliban would probably laugh at this assessment.