Haste is a relative concept in Pakistan, and it was four hours before the car arrived to pick me up. We drove past the bus station, where a man was holding a muddy pelican on a string, and through the bazaar. I was told to go inside a tailor’s shop with shelves lined with giant rolls of dress material. A door at the back led out onto a rubbish-strewn alley where a man on a motorbike was waiting. We sped down a few roads and into a small mud-walled compound, the home of a local religious leader. I was beckoned into the women’s quarters, where a couple of women lifted my burqa over my head. Finally a bearded old man in a swan-white turban summoned me through the dividing curtain into a room with a large roaring fire. Inside, two men were sitting on floor cushions – the two Taliban Ministers who had agreed to meet me.
It was the strangest feeling. For most of the five months since 9/11 I had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan writing about the evil Taliban regime and meeting one after another of its victims. I had met Hazara women whose husbands had been burned to death in front of their eyes, a Kandahari footballer whose hand was cut off in a public amputation at which officials then discussed whether to also chop off a foot, and a man who had worked as a torturer and was trying to devise ever more cruel tortures.
For a moment I was taken aback. These were some of the world’s most wanted men, but with their beards trimmed short, they looked surprisingly young. I knew the Taliban leadership were mostly in their thirties, but somehow I had thought of them as bigger and older – and more malevolent.
One of the pair, Maulana Abdullah Sahadi, the former Deputy Defence Minister, was only twenty-eight, and looked vulnerable and slightly scared, greeting me with a wonky Johnny Depp-like smile. He told me it was the first time he had ventured out of his hiding place since escaping Afghanistan after the fall of Kandahar two months earlier.
The other Minister, a burly man in his mid-thirties who had agreed to meet me only on condition of anonymity, was responsible for some of the acts that have most horrified the Western world, and looked defiant. After a while we were joined by the Director General of the Passport Office who had issued Afghan visas to some of the Arab fighters who were on America’s most-wanted list.
‘You see, we don’t have two horns,’ said the older Minister with a smile as he poured me tea from a golden teapot and offered me boiled sweets. ‘Now anyone can say anything about us and the world will believe it. People have been saying we skinned their husbands alive and ate babies, and you people print it.’
We started off talking about how they had joined the Taliban. Maulana Sahadi told me his family had moved to a refugee camp in Quetta when he was just five after his father, a mujahid with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, was killed fighting the Russians. The family was very poor, surviving much of the time on bread begged or bought with money earned from sewing carpets, so his mother was pleased when he got a place at a madrassa at the age of eight. His food, board and books were all provided. At some point he learned to use a Kalashnikov, though he would not say at what age, claiming, ‘A gun is such a thing, one day you use it, the next day you master it.’
In mid-1994 a delegation of elders and ulema, or religious scholars, from Pakistan came to the madrassa. ‘They issued a fatwa telling us we must join the Taliban and fight jihad. I joined with a group of friends from the madrassa, so we were there right at the very beginning, in the first attack on Spin Boldak that October. At that time we were only about a hundred people. We were killing men and many of our companions were martyred, but we were happy because we were doing it for Islam. We were the soldiers of God.’
Sahadi went on to fight in battles all over Afghanistan, including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and Bamiyan, commanding five hundred men, then 2,500, then becoming Director of Defence. ‘I would motivate my troops before fighting by telling them that if they were martyred they would go to paradise and could take with them seventy-two of their family members.’ He got on well with Mullah Omar, whom he described as ‘a very nice, good-natured person with good morals. He treated me like a son. Whoever came to him, he treated with respect.’
Eventually, in 1999, Sahadi became Deputy Defence Minister to Mullah Obaidullah. As such he had frequent personal contact with bin Laden, though he insisted that ‘the Arabs were not controlling things. Anyone who supports Islam was welcome in our country – we had British, Americans, Australians.’
Sahadi told me how during the American bombing offensive, he and his colleagues had to keep changing houses in Kandahar to avoid being hit. But he said the Taliban leadership never contemplated handing over bin Laden to save themselves. ‘He was a guest in our country, and we gave him refuge because hospitality is an important part of our code of behaviour. Besides, he was supporting us, giving us money, when no one else was.’ He also complained that the Americans had not given the evidence they had asked for to show bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks: ‘The Taliban leadership do not believe the Twin Towers attack was carried out by al Qaeda. According to my own opinion, the attack was wrong. It is not Islamic to kill innocent people like that.’
The other Minister interjected. ‘What this war is really about is a clash between Islam and infidels. America wants to implement its own kafir religion in Afghanistan. We are the real defenders of Islam, not people like Gul Agha [the Governor of Kandahar] and Hamid Karzai. They are puppets of America.’
But why, then, did the Taliban collapse so easily? ‘We’re not broken, we’re whole,’ insisted Sahadi. ‘We weren’t defeated, we agreed to hand over rather than fight and spill blood. Our people went back to their tribes or left the country. Now we are just waiting. Karzai cannot even trust his own people to guard the presidential palace, but has to have American troops. We are regrouping. We still have arms and many supporters inside, and when the time is right we will be back.’
How had they escaped Afghanistan? ‘We shaved off our beards, changed our turbans from white Taliban to Kandahari [green or black with thin white stripes], got in cars and drove on the road across the border. My beard was as long as this,’ he said, gesturing down to his chest. Among those who had headed across the border were Mullah Turabi, the Justice Minister; Abdul Razzak, the Interior Minister; Qadratuallah Jamal, the Culture Minister; Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the Defence Minister; and Mullah Baradar, deputy to Mullah Omar. The local Pakistani authorities, he claimed, not only turned a blind eye but helped.
‘Thank God this war happened, because now we really know who is with us and who is against us,’ added Sahadi. ‘Karzai went to the other camp. Once he pretended he was with us, but now we see he just wanted power. They will all be brought before justice and punished according to Islamic law. The Americans are celebrating victory, but they have failed. They have not caught bin Laden or Mullah Omar. All they have done is oust our government. We never did anything to them. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan [between Uruzgan and Helmand], and will stay there making contact with those commanders unhappy with the new government. You will see Islam will win out and we will break the Americans into pieces as we did with the Russians and, inshallah, bring back the name of the Taliban.’
I was intrigued, but feared lingering longer in case word of my presence got back to the authorities. The nameless Taliban smiled as I left. ‘You see, unlike you people, we are not in a hurry.’
A week later I was back in Kabul, and went to the headquarters of the ISAF peacekeeping forces, then under the command of the British general John McColl. I asked what they thought about Taliban living freely in Pakistan. They weren’t much use, pointing out that they weren’t allowed outside Kabul, and their job was ‘stabilisation’, not to hunt down militants – that was down to Operation Enduring Freedom, the US forces.
So I went to see the Americans. If I could find Taliban Ministers, then surely they could. Yet by that point only one senior Taliban had been arrested – Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil, the Taliban’s Foreign Minister; and that was only because he surrendered to Afghan officials in Kandahar. He had actually offered to cooperate with the US forces, but instead they imprisoned him in Bagram, which no doubt deterred other Taliban from coming forward.1
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