3
A War of All Against All
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.
—Thomas Hobbes
In Afghanistan there were more fingers than pie.
—John C. Griffiths
Afghanistan was a country seething with enemies. Not just Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but loads of ambitious warlords, commanding their own militias, who hated both the “infidel Crusaders” and each other. In 2003, with these multiple antagonisms unresolved, Afghanistan was perilously close to becoming a failed state. Given its long history of ethnic factionalism, corruption, and blood feuds, you could argue that this condition—a version of Hobbes’s famous “war of all against all”—had been chronic for centuries. The more immediate origins of the current mess, though, could be found in the Soviet intervention of the 1980s.1
In 1979, as part of the cold war’s new Great Game, the U.S.S.R. sent troops to Afghanistan at the request of its Marxist government, which was under attack from landowners and conservative Muslims. Beginning with a trickle of advisors, the Soviet support grew to more than a hundred thousand troops, of whom nearly fifteen thousand died either on the battlefield or later of their wounds. Antigovernment Afghan fighters lost several times that many, and civilian deaths may have topped a million—many of the victims killed by Russian mines.2
While resistance to the invasion came from many quarters, its public face was that of the mujahideen. These “fighters for God” were composed not just of native Afghans but also of volunteers from around the Muslim world, sworn to wage holy war (jihad) against the Soviets. Their guerrilla commanders attained legendary status, and one of them, a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden, would become the world’s most famous mujahid when he founded the terrorist network Al Qaeda. In fact many of the insurgents we faced in 2003 had drawn first blood as mujahideen—a grimly ironic fact given that their campaign had been heavily supported by our own CIA.3
One heartland of the resistance had been Kunar Province—our current area of operations. Since antiquity, Kunar had been a trap for foreign armies, both because its fighting men were famously fierce and because its mountains favored guerrilla warfare. In 1978, when the Kabul government attempted to introduce modern reforms, its tribesmen attacked police and army garrisons. The government’s response was the infamous “Kerala massacre,” the execution of hundreds of resisters and the forcing of their families into exile in Pakistan.4 That started a regional rebellion which drew in the Soviet troops, created hundreds of thousands of refugees, and made Kunar a center of mujahideen activity.
When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, they left behind a puppet government with limited popular support and a patchwork of competing troublemakers who wanted to remove it. The ensuing civil war raged until 1992, when a new regime came to power led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He governed for only four years, when a new player came on the scene.5 This was a group of bellicose fundamentalists with the seemingly innocuous title of Taliban, meaning “the Students.” (Many were the former students of a religious hardliner named Mullah Omar.)
Under Taliban rule, which lasted until 2001, the country was wrenched rudely back into medieval “purity.” The Students drove out Hekmatyar and his fellow warlords and replaced them with a dystopian paradise in which petty thieves had their arms cut off; music, dancing, and kite flying (a traditional Afghan pastime) were abolished; soccer matches featured mass executions at halftime; and women were obliged to cover themselves, head to toe, in pale blue tentlike garments known as burkas.
All of this nourished an American distaste for the Taliban. Their apparent shielding of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks turned that distaste into military action. When the Taliban refused to surrender him to U.S. justice, the Bush administration cobbled together a coalition that invaded Afghanistan, ousted the Taliban, and set about pacifying regions, such as Kunar, that had rarely in their history known a stable government. The U.S. mission, known as Operation Enduring Freedom, was entering its third year when our A-Team arrived in the troubled province.
And troubled it was. Despite two years of coalition presence, and despite the fact that the big-time mayhem-mongers like Hekmatyar seemed to have gone to ground, Kunar (and Afghanistan) were far from pacified. There was a nominal government in Kabul, headed by Hamid Karzai, who in 2002 had been chosen by a meeting of the loya jirga (grand assembly). Karzai was favored to win a national election set for the summer of 2004, but when we arrived in Asadabad, that was nine months away. A lot could happen in nine months. Officially the insurgent leaders had been driven into Pakistan, but judging from the extent of anticoalition and anti-Karzai activity, their banishment wasn’t a done deal. In September, when we arrived, explosions and rocket attacks were a nearly daily occurrence. As part of the ongoing attempt to bring security to Afghanistan’s volatile northeast, we had our work cut out for us.
If our aim in Kunar, broadly stated, was to hunt down bad guys, we also had more focused objectives—or at least aspirations. Although our target list could conceivably include anyone with Al Qaeda or Taliban connections, our government (and Karzai’s people) would be especially pleased if we managed to bring to heel the antigovernment commanders known as high-value targets, or HVTs—our “most wanted” list. At a September briefing by CIA officials, I was given the identities of those topping the list.
Number one, obviously enough, was Osama bin Laden, who had planned and executed the attacks of September 11, 2001. That act had shocked the world and brought the might of American arms to Afghanistan, where, it was believed, bin Laden was hiding out under Taliban protection. But 9/11 was not the first of his terrorist acts, and not the first time he had come to international attention.
In the 1980s, he gained prominence as a young mujahid who helped to fund the anti-Soviet resistance. In 1988, one year before the Soviets departed, he founded the jihadist organization Al Qaeda (“the Base”), devoted to purging Islam of modern influences and driving unbelievers, such as American troops, from his native Saudi Arabia. For the next decade he used his family’s wealth to support Islamic extremism around the world. In 1998, he engineered the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—acts that killed two hundred people and that made him, in the words of historian Ahmed Rashid, “a household name in the Muslim world and the West.”6
Well before 9/11, then, bin Laden had become a threat to U.S. interests everywhere. When the Twin Towers fell, he was the obvious prime suspect, and even though it took him until 2004 to admit it, both U.S. and British intelligence were convinced that he had ordered the attacks. The United States put a $25 million bounty on his head and demanded that the Taliban hand him over. When they refused, the U.S. response was Operation Enduring Freedom.
That operation drove the Taliban from power and forced them and their Al Qaeda allies underground. In some places they went literally underground, into caves along the Pakistan border. In December 2001, American forces, assisted by Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, bombed a cave complex at Tora Bora, killing a couple of hundred fighters but failing to capture bin Laden; he was thought to have escaped into Pakistan.
The hunt for the mass murderer continued, but by the time we arrived in Kunar in 2003, reports of sightings remained spotty and inconclusive. But he had relatives in the area—so it was said, anyway—so even though we weren’t betting any money on our chances of capturing the planet’s most wanted criminal, we realized that it was at least a possibility—something we might dream about when we were feeling lucky.
After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the military issued a deck of fifty-two playing cards, each one identifying a member of dictator Saddam Hussein’s political entourage. The aces were assigned to Saddam, his two sons, and his personal secretary. We didn’t have such a deck, but if we had, Osama bin Laden would have been the Ace of Spades.
The person who might have been the Ace of Clubs was not nearly as well-known globally, but he was infamous within Afghanistan itself. This was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. A native Pashtun, Hekmatyar founded the radical Islamist group Hesb-e Islami as a student in the 1970s, befriended and then fought the Soviets, and earned a reputation as a brutal, opportunistic commander. In the turmoil following the Soviets’ departure, he fought other Islamists for political position until becoming prime minister in 1992. He held that post for four years, proving to be anything but a benevolent despot.
Forced from power by the Taliban, Hekmatyar hid out in Iran and then, in 2002, issued a tape from an unknown location, calling for jihad against the United States. In February 2003 the U.S. government froze his American assets and declared him a global terrorist. This was an ironic honor for someone who in the fight against the Russians had probably received more CIA money than any other mujahideen commander.
Hekmatyar was known to operate often in Kunar, where military documents identified his followers as HIG, for Hesb-e Islami Gulbuddin. Our CIA briefers wouldn’t guess at his current location. But taking him, should we be so lucky, would bring sighs of relief to thousands he had attacked or betrayed.
Next in our hypothetical deck of cards, the Ace of Hearts might have been the Taliban’s shadowy leader, Mohammed Omar. Born into a poor Pashtun family, he too fought with the mujahideen, losing an eye in combat. After the war he taught in a Pakistani madrassa (religious school), acquiring the sobriquet mullah as respect for his learning. After the Soviet collapse, he returned to Afghanistan and pulled together some of his former students intent on ending the warlords’ corruption. In 1994, according to a local story, a woman appeared to him in a dream, asking him to end the chaos with God’s help.7 In response, he founded an armed group known as “the Students.”
The group started out as dispensers of rough justice, hanging a warlord who had kidnapped and raped two girls, then executing two others who were planning to sodomize a boy. In an era of widespread thuggery, these guys looked like an improvement. The Taliban, its ranks swelled by madrassa recruits and its coffers filled with aid from Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, became a militia, then an army. While disorder continued to reign in much of the country, Omar’s students captured the capital, Kabul. In 1997, with Omar as “commander of the faithful,” they renamed the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
As head of the nation, Omar preached moderation but set up a draconian legal system that made Taliban a byword for backwardness. The oppression of Afghan women in particular became a cause célèbre in the West, but it was Omar’s foreign policy that put him on America’s enemy list. After 9/11, when he refused to surrender bin Laden, American talk turned to action and the mullah, like his Al Qaeda guest, went into hiding. He was still in hiding when we got there in 2003. But hundreds of the students he had inspired were still taking his orders. Taking down Mullah Omar would have been a gold ring.
Even before we got to Afghanistan, we had heard the names of these three HVTs. A fourth leader—the one who might have been the final ace in our foursome—was an unknown quantity. His name, we learned in the CIA briefing, was Abu Ikhlas al-Masri. An Egyptian, he had been, like bin Laden, one of the many foreign nationals who had cut their teeth in the jihad against the Soviets. Little more was known about him. Like bin Laden he seemed to have relatives in the Kunar area, and from there was said to be running Al Qaeda cells and possibly a training camp. The CIA, which considered him the main Al Qaeda commander in the Pech Valley, had put a bounty on his head of $20,000. Not Osama bin Laden stakes, but in a dirt-poor country, not loose change, either.
In the briefing that day, I had a feeling that this Egyptian terrorist might become our main quarry. The other three HVTs were players on the global stage. Ikhlas was a regional commander, and the area that we were about to go hunting in was, in a sense, his backyard. If I had to bet on our best shot of bringing down an HVT, I would have put my money on Abu Ikhlas.
“Do we have a picture of this guy?” I asked the CIA briefer.
He shook his head no. “Everybody knows him,” he said. “But nobody admits to knowing what he looks like. Your A-Team, Captain, will be hunting a ghost.”
That was OK with me. I wasn’t afraid of ghosts. And we were ready for the hunt.