IT WAS nearly five years to the day since I had last seen Gul Haider. Sitting in a Kabul garden with the trilling of caged songbirds drifting across the rose beds, that last encounter seemed a lifetime away. Then, on the morning of November 13, 2001, the Mujahidin commander was about to lead his victorious Northern Alliance forces to recapture Kabul from the Taleban.
There were no trimmed beards or birdsong in that battle. Instead, clothed in a grimy combat smock, his head wrapped in a dismal scarf, Gul sat on the wall of a shelled strongpoint on the Shamali frontline. His peg leg stuck out accusingly toward the Taleban positions — like so many Afghans he had his foot blown off by a mine. Binoculars around his neck, radio in hand, he looked like a raiding pirateer, a Makarov pistol in place of a cutlass.
“Go, go, go,” he screamed at his men as the Taleb lines broke beneath the punches of airstrike and artillery fire. “Don’t let them escape.” And from the walls beneath him thousands of Mujahidin had swept forward to fight. It was all over within 24 hours. Dawn of Kabul’s liberation day revealed dead and dying Taleban on the heights above the city, as the Mujahidin regrouped to enter the capital. “For years we had waited for that moment,” he recalled. “It was all we had wanted, and it was a great day: my finest fight. I thought at last we may have a broad-based government and peace in Afghanistan.”
His optimism was shared. It seemed at last, that after nearly a quarter century of war, Afghanistan may be about to find peace. The Taleban were finished, foreign troops welcomed, and billions of dollars assigned to reconstruct the shattered country. But after five years of squandered opportunity and missed chances, Gul is no longer sure that he has fought his last battle against the Taleban.
His Mujahidin fighters were disarmed and demobilised nearly two years ago, replaced by fledgeling units from the Afghan National Army, and technically Gul has no more command. But he sits and waits, looking at the situation with increasing doubt.
“Believe me, I haven’t closed my eyes to what is going on. I study it every day,” he said. “And I am worried. It all seems open to question again. A weak Afghan Army, weak police, governmental corruption, burning schools, enemies everywhere, instability in the provinces. Once more it feels like it is coming into our homes. Next year, if the mistakes continue, it will be even worse.”
Last month in Washington Nicholas Burns, the American Under Secretary for Political Affairs, said that the Taleban posed no strategic threat to the Kabul government. While correct in the assumption that the Taleban remain militarily weak, and that the majority of Afghans have no natural desire to see them return, Mr Burns appeared to have forgotten that the Taleban first appeared in 1994 as an apparently insignificant force of little more than a few hundred men along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
Their subsequent rise to power originated not from force of arms or rapturous popular support, but owing to the stability they offered to an exhausted population sick of corruption and tired of their criminalised local leadership.
In southern Afghanistan now, those same dynamics are in play, illuminating Gul’s fears. Foreign officials share his concerns. “Everywhere we’ve gone downhill here,” said Talatbek Masadykov, head of the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan’s southern headquarters in Kandahar.
“We’ve never improved the situation. The security issue isn’t just to do with the Taleban — it’s to do with bad, weak governance. Fifty per cent of this problem is internal. People don’t naturally want the Taleban back, not at all, but they increasingly think the Government offers them nothing but insecurity, and that though the Taleban offer them nothing either, they may perhaps give them some stability and an end to corruption.”
Pakistan bears a strong degree of responsibility in the resurrection of the Taleban, but the Kabul Government carries equal blame. Dithering and inefficient, its corruption is legendary, and the country’s leadership is riven with druglords and profiteers. Efforts to create a police force have produced an organisation regarded as predatory and cruel, not dissimilar to the bandit officialdom toppled by the Taleban.
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And riding the uneasy raft of its alliance with these stained authorities, Nato is beset by problems of its own. On paper its forces may look strong, but the Italian, French, German and Turkish contingents in Afghanistan are shy of fight, reluctant to go south, and governed by their own unilateral rules of engagement prioritised by force protection concerns.
Reconstruction has taken a back seat in the deflated hopes of most Afghans. Though Kabul is a relatively stable and affluent oasis, its post-Taleban experience is shared by few other centres of population.
Kandahar still has only enough electricity for a maximum six hours in every forty-eight. Bad roads, open sewage systems, and a lack of fresh water are seen in the city as inconveniences very low down on the list of complaints. Kidnapping, banditry and police corruption rank much higher.
“When we saw the Taleban go and the foreign soldiers come we were so full of hope,” said Abdul Shakoor, a 24-year-old shopkeeper. “We were 100 per cent sure that, with the world behind it, our Government would improve our lives. But now our hopes are crushed.
“Since then, in this city we have had three different governors. None of them has done anything for us. Our problems are getting worse. Now we are not interested any more in reconstruction. We don’t need roads, schools, and buildings. All we want is peace.”
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The Taleban still have a huge credibility problem. More than 4.7 million Afghan refugees have flooded back into the country from Pakistan and Iran since the Taleban’s downfall, demonstrating the strength of the remaining hopes of Afghans for a future without their ultra-fundamentalist Government. Yet the Taleban know that they have time on their side, and that it is much easier to destabilise than stabilise, and that instability brings power. Interviewed by The Times in the province of Ghazni last month, one Taleban commander, Mullah Safurrahman, made a telling remark.
“We are in no hurry,” he said. “But look at how far we have come from nothing. We’re in a guerrilla war. It isn’t a matter of two or three years. It might take us ten, even thirty-five years. Will the foreign soldiers last that long here?” Gul insists that he will join celebrations on Monday for the fifth anniversary of Kabul’s liberation, but he has reservations. “The Taleban are almost knocking on the door of Kabul. They are not so far away from us as we sit here,” he concluded, looking around the peaceful garden. “There is sometimes fighting now in districts right at the edge of this city. But if they get too close my Mujahidin will not tolerate it. We would take up our guns and fight for Kabul again. And right now it feels like we will have to.”
CHANGING TIMES
