(Part 2) Talking to the enemy: what can it bring?
Third Newsletter
Hello everyone, as promised here is the second half of the story which was shared earlier this week. We encourage you to comment your thoughts and initial reactions.
[Monday, October 17, 2016 (Published in Dutch at Vrij Nederland). Translated in December 2021 by Clare Wilkinson, Terra Translations for Bette Dam @ Substack].
UNACCEPTABLE FOR THE UNITED STATES
The news of the surrender was suppressed in Washington. After Karzai had announced his amnesty, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose not to start his daily briefing with this information. He talked about the military operations and how they would continue unabated, even though the Taliban had been defeated. “Nothing is taking place that's inconsistent with our interests,” he said when asked about this by a journalist.
PBS wrote about it on the same day, on 6 December, 2001, one day before the Taliban officially announced the surrender on the radio “The Force of Sharia”:
REPORTER:
“You don't think there will be a negotiated end to the situation?”
DONALD RUMSFELD:
“I don't not think there will be a negotiated end to the situation that's unacceptable to the United States.”
Furthermore, he denied there was evidence of Karzai’s comments in the press. Indeed, at that point, there were no journalists present in southern Afghanistan who would be able to repudiate Rumsfeld, allowing him to manipulate the truth as he wished. Rumsfeld was also asked by a journalist whether financial help to Afghanistan could be scaled back if the agreement went ahead. Rumsfeld repeated that nothing “is taking place that would be inconsistent with our interests.” The fact that Karzai was the de facto interim leader of Afghanistan at that point, as one of the reporters noted, and that the U.S. could not simply intervene did not bother Rumsfeld.
‘Diplomacy was rendered powerless by the Pentagon in the War on Terror’
From that date on, Rumsfeld held daily press conferences in which he told reporters how much progress his troops were making in driving out the Taliban and Al Qaeda. All that time, there were still no journalists on the ground who could back up Karzai’s story. Rumsfeld kept almost no one in Washington in the loop. Special Representative James Dobbins, tasked by President George W. Bush with setting out a new future for the country, knew nothing. He flew around the world but it turns out crucial intelligence was being withheld from him. “If this is true, it was a missed opportunity,” he told me in one of the interviews I did with him. (Dobbins wrote later ‘Time to Negotiate in Afghanistan, 2015, Foreign Affairs)
Zalmay Khalilzad, who had just been appointed Special Envoy to Afghanistan, also had no idea, as he disclosed to me when I paid a visit to Washington D.C. He later called the suppression of information about the peace agreement “a blunder”, when I met him in Brussels, where he was talking to NATO about the negotiations, but then in 2020. A political adviser to Joseph Dunford, the highest-ranked general in the American army, whom I also spoke to in Washington, said he was shocked by this information which was new to him too. “Diplomacy was rendered powerless at the time by the Pentagon in the War on Terror,” he told me, “and that’s incredibly dangerous.”
THE BEST OF A BAD JOB
The diplomatic corps working hard at the time in Bonn, Germany, on the formation of a new government for Afghanistan also never got to hear about Karzai’s agreement. The Taliban were excluded a priori. In fact, the people in Bonn were particularly ill-informed, as I discovered later in the course of my investigations. Many did not even believe that Karzai was in southern Afghanistan and trying to talk his way across the Taliban-controlled areas with the support of both the U.S. Special Forces and C.I.A.
One day later, the impact of Rumsfeld could be seen. Karzai spoke to the international press again but this time he had a very different account. The New York Times reported: “Asked directly whether the Taliban leader would be allowed to go free, Mr. Karzai replied: ‘I have offered amnesty to common Taliban. Omar must distance himself completely from terrorism, from the presence of foreign terrorists in Afghanistan, he must condemn terrorism. If he doesn't do that, he will not be safe.’”
Rumsfeld had intervened, Karzai informed me later. Rumsfeld had phoned the Special Forces and made it clear once again to Karzai via this route that the Taliban were “the common enemy. This time, Karzai made the best of a bad job and gave the press conference that would keep his friends in Washington happy. That meant telling quite a few lies. “The Taliban approached us in trucks. I was afraid they would attack us, but they ran away,” said Karzai, when in fact he had spent days calmly negotiating with them. When a journalist asked about Mullah Omar, Karzai lied again, saying he had “wanted to arrest him” but Omar had disappeared without a trace.
GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR
On the day he effectively killed the story about the surrender, Rumsfeld sent more troops to Afghanistan. Continuing the fight fit the Bush Administration’s views on the terrorist threat. While Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda consisted of five hundred to one thousand young men at most in a more or less informal alliance, after 9/11 this enemy was talked up in the United States to be extremely powerful. President Bush said he saw a threat of terrorism coming from at least 60 countries, all of which needed to be neutralized using military means (see his press conference here) Bush, Rumsfeld and his team included the Taliban in this umbrella term of the Global War on Terror. There was no room for a more nuanced viewpoint. When I spoke to Robert Grenier, the C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan in the period before and 9/11, he said that his C.I.A. team was unable to persuade Washington that the actual situation on the ground was very different. “Washington turned them into one word: Al Qaeda/Taliban. Sometimes we just had to laugh after putting down the phone from a call to Washington.”
And so the Taliban returned home one by one, without us hearing about it. “Victory was near,” writes Anand Gopal in his book. Mullah Berader, the Taliban’s second in command after Mullah Omar, was back in his hometown of Deh Rawod in Uruzgan. Mullah Mansour, the Minister of Aviation, was living half an hour’s drive from Kandahar city center. Others crossed the border, and tested out their future in Pakistan, something that didn’t always go well like in the case of mullah Zaeef who ended up in Guantanamo Bay because of Pakistan’s wish to also please the United States government (and groups in Pakistan who also offered Taliban a shelter, in Quetta and PEshawar and later Karachi)
MAKE SURE YOU GO INTO HIDING
Meanwhile, the Americans went into Afghanistan, a country without an enemy. The day after the surrender, they had already set their sights on Karzai’s negotiator who had brokered the deal on behalf of him and Mullah Omar, something Sarah Chayes described in her book in 2007 (she was one of the first journalists who hinted on the surrender and wrote about it). The Americans accused this negotiator, Mullah Naquibullah of ‘Talibanism’ and wanted him dead, Naquibullah’s son told me (the mullah himself died in 2008). Karzai had called Mullah Naquibullah and warned him, “The Americans are coming to kill you so make sure you go into hiding.” That was not the end of it either, as far as Washington was concerned. In 2002, the U.S. Congress sent around 5,200 more troops. In 2003, they doubled the number to 10,400 and the next year it increased to 15,200. And again in 2005. During this period, the Americans put pressure on the NATO countries: portraying an actual fake terrorism threat in afghanistan, the US told them they too had to send troops. Which they duly did. In 2006, European countries joined the war effort.
Who were these American and NATO troops going to shoot at? Who was the enemy?
“Where is the Taliban?!” screamed nervy Special Forces at the local governors, who they saw as their new allies (see Taliban County, a documentary on Uruzgan). The governors knew about the surrender and all the Taliban now sitting at home, but they were given the freedom to exploit the unsuspecting American soldiers to shore up their own positions as local leaders. Soon they were using the military power of the Americans to eliminate rivals or competitors that stood in the path of their self-enrichment. “They’re Taliban,” they would tell the Americans, who promptly went after these ‘insurgents’. Mullah Mutawakil, Mullah Omar’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, was one of the many Taliban who experienced this first-hand as his surrender ended in an arrest. “A major error,” according to C.I.A. boss Grenier in his book 88 days in Kandahar. In February 2002, the former minister of Finance, Mutasim Agha Jan tried to surrender (interview Mutasim, 2019). He wanted to do so through Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor in Kandahar, but the governor did not want to help.
ACTS OF REVENGE
And so the war spread, but with unnecessary clashes, often initiated by Western troops. Afghans caught up in these rivalries with Afghan government officials together with the US army organized themselves and fought back. Acts of revenge followed. Suicide attacks, roadside bombs, and group attacks were — and often still are — motivated by rivalries rather than being the work of ideological extremists. This was something the West (and the Americans in particular) did not acknowledge. The practice of governors such as Gul Agha Sherzai sending trigger-happy Special Forces to their rivals in the valleys of Panjwaye and Maiwand was precisely what fueled the war. The victims were not just prominent Taliban, rival families lost land when they were chased out in night raids. The number of attacks increased every year and ever more people joined the opposition, but it is too simplistic to call them Taliban. The enemy that the West saw in Afghanistan simply did not exist.
The media was complicit in this pro-war narrative. Journalists rarely, if ever, checked the claims of the governors. The editors-in-chief and their reporters felt no need to reach out to the Taliban and get their side of the story. That the Taliban surrendered was not properly part of the narrative of the The New York Times until 2021, when the Taliban had retaken power, and they wrote: “Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen?”
From my research I would say that former Taliban fighters started mobilizing again from 2005 and 2006 on. That is when Afghanistan slowly got the Taliban back in far-away areas. Many wanted revenge for what had been done to them after 2001. But they were still very weak and would remain so for years to come. When I asked C.I.A. boss Grenier, he confirmed this. “We could still have looked for a political solution before 2005 and the revival of the Taliban,” he says in an interview with me.
The first prominent voice addressing the issue of surrendered Taliban was heard in 2008 in the international media. It was Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN - diplomat who had headed the UN-Bonn conference, where the Taliban were not invited. Radio Free Europe interviewed him after he had written in the Washington Post about how the Taliban should have been included:
Brahimi: I think if we had gone to the Taliban then -- they were demoralized, scattered all over the place -- they would have appreciated that and many of them may very well have joined the political process. But we didn't, so that was one big mistake.
RFE/RL: So why didn't it happen:
Brahimi: That didn't happen because of the usual arrogance of the foreigners and because of course also the enemies of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, were very happy that, you know, [the Taliban] had been beaten roundly and here came the foreigners and put them back in power. And they didn't want to share power with anybody else. And I think the Iranians, the Russians, the Indians, and the Americans were all saying: "Remnants of the Taliban? What are you worried about? They're gone, it's finished, they'll never come back."
Brahimi: This nonsense about fighting terrorism in Afghanistan doesn't make any sense. If you help the people of Afghanistan, rebuild their state, international terrorism will disappear from Afghanistan overnight.
Years later, in 2014 also the diplomat James Dobbins put pen to paper and wrote an honest opinion piece for Foreign Affairs. In “Time to Negotiate in Afghanistan,” he spoke for the first time as a U.S. official about the surrender, citing Anand and myself as sources. But even then, no one picked up the story. James Dobbins was not interviewed about the surrender and how we missed this opportunity.
When I spoke to Karzai again in 2014, I asked him why he hadn’t pushed back in December 2001. The president did not want to say much on the subject. He was nearing the end of his time in office and would soon be leaving the presidential palace. Caving in had allowed him to come to power, said Karzai. He had intended to recognize the Taliban’s surrender later on. But it never came to that.
AFTERNOTE:
The description of this ‘suppressed knowledge’ or ‘silenced knowledge’ as they call it in Academic (for example in post-colonialism studies) led me to start a PhD investigating the sources which we use in the west when we write about ‘the other’. Through this newsletter, an outcome of the PhD, I will continue to reflect on the progress (or the lack of progress!). This newsletter is not intended to show what has gone wrong (though important to know), but mostly to provide our readers with the tools and understandings in order to follow news more critically.
That’s why we are almost finished with a Reading List - full of helpful sources, things to read, also more information on western biases in media, or the emphasis on selecting mainly pro-western-elite-sourcing.