Taliban Encroach on Kabul as Talks Begin

By Zach Warren

A rusting Soviet tank by a road in Afghanistan serves as a reminder of previous efforts to vanquish the country (Photo Z. Warren).

EIGHT AFGHANS were killed and nearly two dozen injured in an Oct. 30 suicide attack on the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the morning attack targeted “foreign experts,” without providing further information. Three men reportedly entered the ministry with gunfire, then one detonated his explosives belt in the first floor lobby. Earlier this year, the Taliban led a similar attack on the 5-star Serena Hotel, just adjacent to the Ministry of Information and Culture, when three men dressed in police uniforms infiltrated multiple layers of security, using both gunfire and successive suicide detonations.

The attack came after President Hamid Karzai appointed a new police chief, and after Taliban spokesmen offered to provide foreigners a “window of opportunity” to leave Afghanistan.

“There are Taliban and Taliban sympathizers everywhere,” Najibullah, an Afghan grape seller, told me, pointing up and down the street. It’s something I hear often from Afghans in the streets of Kabul, the capital city that NATO recently turned over to the newly trained Afghan army and police for security control. Some Afghan men in the urban center have begun regrowing beards, in anticipation of increased Taliban presence in the U.S. stronghold city.

This comes amid a string of high-profile kidnappings in the capital city, including that of a presidential candidate, and the Oct. 20 murder of Gayle Williams, a British Christian aid worker for blind children who was gunned down by two men on a motorbike. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, citing proselytized by Chrisian charities.

These events follow leaked reports in October that coalition forces have sought negotiations with the Taliban, through Saudi Arabia allies. King Abdullah, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal and other members of the Saudi royal family announced that they had hosted Taliban leaders in Mecca on Sept. 29, at the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, in an effort to hasten peace talks.

Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries to recognize Afghanistan’s Taliban government before it was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, following the Sept. 11 attacks, which were carried out by the Taliban’s al-Qaeda allies. Saudi Arabia also is a traditional ally of Pakistan, but has seen its preferred political leaders sidelined, while militants allied to the Taliban and al-Qaeda have gained strength in the unruly border region with Afghanistan.

Some in Kabul have become nostalgic for Taliban times. “At least, with the Taliban, we had security,” one mechanic told me after we haggled over the cost of my motorcycle repair. “No one would steal my tools. Now life is dangerous, the cost of food and gas are expensive, and the government does nothing for us. They work only for themselves, because they know this won’t last.”

Other war-weary Afghans fear another civil war and American abandonment. After the Afghan mujaheddin, using American military aid channeled through the conservative Islamist government in Pakistan, drove the Russians out in 1989, U.S. aid dried up. The Afghan economy and political situation tumbled into chaos, forcing many Afghans to flee as refugees into Iran and Pakistan. With help from Pakistan intelligence, Saudi Arabian money and Arab mujaheddin, the Taliban was formed out of the chaos. The coalition of mullahs enforced on Afghanistan a harsh brand of Sunni Islam, but also provided the first taste of stability in nearly two decades.

Many Afghans welcomed the change and accepted the Taliban’s unique rule of law through conservative interpretations of shariah, the Muslim judicial system based the Qur’an. The Taliban’s famous Ministry of Virtue and Vice prohibited women from working outside the home and men from cutting their beards. Also banned were kite flying, poppy cultivation and drugs, tattoos, bird keeping, dancing, television, printed images, and cock fighting, a favorite rural past time.

Even some would-be U.S. allies admit sympathies, though favoring liberal factions. One Kabul bookseller, Ludful Ahmad, drinking Heineken and smoking hashish, reflected on life under the Taliban. “The Taliban were not bad guys,” he explained, “but they burned every one of my books and postcards with pictures.” Then he showed me a tattoo on his right arm, and asked if I wanted some drumsticks from KFC (Kabul Fried Chicken, one of many fast food knock-offs here).

Others seem nostalgic about the Taliban government’s honesty and integrity, despite the harsh rules. One recent cartoon in The Kabul Times showed a $100 bill on a human body, pointing to an Afghan government ministry and saying, “If you need help, don’t go in there without me!”

According to one report, NGOs now dedicate an average of 7 to 8 percent of their budget to paying bribes—sometimes called “facilitation fees” or “marketing fees” on paper—many directly to government official coffers. USAID and military organizations seem able to avoid much of the corruption, but ordinary Afghans face it regularly. There are at least four phrases in Dari specifically for persons who demand bribes, my favorite being chor sat o bist, “420,” the code for corruption.

“It’s not that the system is corrupt,” the U.S. State Department’s new anti-corruption director told me in September, inside a heavily guarded compound in Wazir Akbar Khan. “It’s that corruption is the system.”

Because corruption means there is no rule of law, the Afghan attorney general’s office seems to be a swinging door, each judicial head facing greater challenges each year. It’s no news to U.S. intelligence, Afghan presidential staff and ordinary Afghans in the street, for example, that President Karzai’s brother is one of the country’s largest drug profiteers, now embroiled in a murder case and accused of covering his tracks after several trucks of his drugs were impounded, then released, by an Afghan agent paid by the DEA. Four years into Karzai’s presidential term, the Associated Press discovered that his head of anti-narcotics, Izzatullah Wasifi, served four years in a U.S. prison for trying to sell heroin to an undercover agent in Las Vegas for $65,000. Wasifi claims he was arrested after his then-wife bought cocaine for her own use and brought it to their Las Vegas hotel room.

Foreign efforts to intervene in the Afghan drug trade have been met with strong resistance. Anti-narcotics workers travel in heavily armed security SUVs and live in guarded compounds behind layers of concrete, sand bags, guard towers, and miles of barbed wire. When one South African and one British executive for DHL were gunned down outside the German shipping company’s headquarters in the Sher Pur area of Kabul on Oct. 25, the event was first thought a Taliban attack. But internal sources now suggest it may have been drug-related. Reportedly, DHL’s South African country director, Jason Breslow, requested drug dogs from the British Embassy in order to sniff packages suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, and had blocked at least three kilos of heroin. Internal staff members had been accused of knowingly shipping parcels with narcotics, and accepting kickbacks. Taliban spokesmen made no comment.

Along with corruption and lack of security, Afghans complain about civilian casualties in air raids. “Why would Americans kill children at a wedding party?” one Afghan friend asked me, referring to a U.S. air raid, operating independently of NATO, that killed over 90 civilians, the majority women and children, at a wedding party in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Aug. 22. It is one of dozens in recent months that have angered much of the Afghan Parliament and galvanized many to consider asking U.S. and NATO forces to leave the country. American officials asking to remain unnamed suggested that the problem has been bad intelligence and undertrained military personnel. Often, U.S. forces trust warlords or tribal khans for information on al-Qaeda, but these sources instead have provided names of their personal enemies, or competitors in the drug trade, telling the U.S. that they are members of al-Qaeda.

Good intelligence in the rural areas, particularly in the border regions with Pakistan, is particularly hard to come by. “We can control the towns, but not the villages,” said Rory Stewart, a British writer and philanthropist who hiked across Afghanistan in 2002 with a dog and a walking stick. Afghanistan has a long history of rural independence; in the past two centuries, the British and Russian armies both failed to conquer these regions for more than a few years at a time.

Barack Obama's victory in the Nov. 4 presidential election does not alter two important realities: that the war in Afghanistan will not go away, and that current U.S. military tactics are failing to win hearts and minds, even in Kabul city. More than a troop surge, what ordinary Afghans say on the street cannot be ignored.

“Roz ba roz bad tar ast,” one elderly beggar answered when I asked him if he felt safe. “Day by day, it’s getting worse.”

Zachary Warren is a Sheldon Research Fellow at Harvard University, living in Kabul, Afghanistan. He has volunteered for aid organizations in Afghanistan since 2005, focusing on children’s development, and also conducts local research on humor for Bob Mancoff at The New Yorker magazine.