Talking to the enemy: what can it bring?
Second Newsletter
Hello everybody, hope you are well. A lot of media attention now goes to the latest war in Ukraine. And I understand that. But in a way, I think the coverage of Afghanistan can still be a relevant topic to read about, especially now that we are all closely watching the current war in Ukraine.
And that’s why I am sharing this story with you today. It was published earlier - in Dutch - but I think it’s worth a new read, and that’s why I had it translated for this newsletter.
Below I describe how I stumbled upon a story of what we call in academia suppressed knowledge. I am not an expert on Russia or Ukraine, but I do see - from a far distance - a potential similar problem where leaning on mostly Ukrainian sources (often officials) is indeed happening again.
Not to say that the wars are comparable, but our coverage of the post 0911 situation in Afghanistan by the Western agenda-setting media (who are now also in Ukraine) is worrying.
I only include the first half of the story as the entire piece is too long for one single newsletter. The second part will be shared later this week.
At the end, I have included a list of past events, including links, where I continue to discuss and elaborate on this issue of media bias.
Talking to the enemy: what can it bring?
Monday, October 17, 2016 (Published in Dutch at Vrij Nederland).
Translated in December 2021 by Clare Wilkinson, Terra Translations for Bette Dam @ Substack.
Summer 2008
In the summer of 2008, I was in Uruzgan, a province in Southern Afghanistan. The war against the Taliban was raging all around me. Sixteen hundred Dutch NATO-troops and an unknown number of American (and briefly Emiratie) Special Forces were fighting in the mountains. The military action was not limited to Uruzgan; soldiers were fighting all over Afghanistan, with daily reports in the media of fatalities, night raids, and air attacks, all with one goal — to wipe out the abhorrent Taliban and Al Qaeda.
It was back then, during that hot summer, that I first heard the news. I learned that the war I was in the middle of could in fact have been avoided and that the West had been talked into the war in Afghanistan by the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. That the Taliban had apparently laid down their arms after 9/11 and the combatants had returned home. I still feel queasy whenever I think about this. Of course, it could have gone wrong later and war may have broken out again anyway, but an opportunity had arisen then to stop the fighting and negotiate instead. Thousands of deaths could have been avoided.
ON A MOTORCYCLE
I ran into this story when I was far away from the city of Kabul, working in the villages, interviewing tribal affiliates of the then president Hamid Karzai - most of them had never been interviewed before.
The first person to tell me about the Taliban’s surrender after 9/11 was Aziz Agha, a prominent tribal leader in Uruzgan. I spoke several times to him for my book A Man and a Motorcycle, in which I try to give a day-by-day account of the post-9/11 rise of Hamid Karzai, the man who went on to become president. After the collapse of the Twin Towers, Karzai conceived a plan to seize power in Afghanistan. It was quite straightforward: he and three relatives rode by moped into southern Afghanistan, helped by a team of American Special Forces and a few C.I.A. agents. Using a combination of daily talking and occasional fighting, they captured one town after another. It was clear by that point that many lower-ranked Taliban commanders were throwing in the towel.
The internationally known account is that after their defeat, the Taliban militants started a guerilla war against Karzai and his American allies, but according to Aziz Agha the story was very different.
“Didn’t you know the entire Taliban leadership had surrendered?” asked Aziz. “Mullah Omar’s secretary Tayab Agha surrendered, as did Mullah Berader, the most important military commander (now in the top leadership of the Taliban). Then there was Mullah Obaidullah, the Taliban’s Minister of Defense (killed in Pakistan).” Aziz was talking about the feared lieutenants of the one-eyed terrorist Mullah Omar. The men who were hated in the West, who appeared on the Most Wanted list and thought to be involved in the 9/11 attacks. I looked at Aziz in amazement, unable to believe what he was saying. I assumed it was another one of those conspiracy theories I was hearing so often, so I did nothing with the story.
WHAT WAS GOOD FOR THE COUNTRY
Not long after this conversation with Aziz, I had an appointment with Hamid Karzai in the presidential palace in Kabul. I spoke to him regularly during this period and he cooperated fully with my investigations for the book. He confirmed Aziz’s story. The Taliban had indeed laid down their arms and had not carried on fighting. Once again, I found it hard to believe. He said: “I received a letter announcing that the Taliban wanted to surrender to me,” said Karzai. “But I’ve lost that letter, which is a shame.” A shame indeed.
He told me more about the Taliban’s surrender. It happened in the district of Shah Wali Kot[T1] , an hour drive north of the city of Kandahar. He sat there in a yard adjoining an abandoned school, with about a dozen Special Forces and an unknown number of C.I.A. agents. “I met the Taliban leaders in the yard,” he said. They paid two visits, on December 5 and 7. The second time, they came with a letter in which their leader Mullah Omar gave his government permission to do “what is good for the country.”
In handing over that letter, Mullah Obaidullah — who Mullah Omar had appointed his representative — was signaling the surrender of the Taliban leadership. Karzai promised the men that there would be no more American attacks and that they would be left in peace after returning home. “Take this letter back with you and announce on your radio stations that I am the new leader of Afghanistan,” Karzai told the Taliban Minister of Defense.
THE SHAH WALI KOT AGREEMENTS
I only mention this surrender in passing in A Man and a Motorcycle. So little was known at that point about how Karzai had come to power that I wasn’t sure - even insecure about publishing a story that would go against the master narrative of the War on Terror.
Shortly after the Dutch edition of my book was published (the English edition appeared later), I received an email from the American diplomat Barney Rubin. He was at the U.S. Department of State for a long time and was one of the leading advisers to a series of American administrations. He wrote to me stating he could not disclose the reason, but wanted all the information which I had on something that he coined “Shah Wali Kot agreements.” He added that it would be “extremely useful” if I could send him a translation of the relevant passage from my book. Rubin was a prominent voice in the debate, but did he not know about this important event? He had never mentioned any of this, specifically the Shah Wali Kot agreements, in his articles or opinion pieces.
What was going on? I suspected that my American friend, the journalist Anand Gopal had pointed the diplomat to my book. Anand and I had shared a house in 2009 and he had read my book; the English translation was ready at that point but I had not yet found a British or American publisher willing to publish it. Anand did some investigating of his own and talked to the Taliban Ministers of Finance and Education. They confirmed the story, as did the later Taliban leader Akhtar Mansour. It was only in spring 2014, when Anand published his book No Good Men Among the Living, that the statements by the Taliban commanders received some media attention and the story of the surrender in December 2001 acquired more body.
But Anand and I are just two of the voices in the Afghanistan debate. Right to this day, the dominant narrative is that the fight against the Taliban after 9/11 had to continue until the very last man standing and that there was no other option. In 2011, Donald Rumsfeld confirmed that version of events in his memoirs. At The Center of the Storm by the former head of the C.I.A. George Tenet also contains plenty of tough talk about sending C.I.A. units to Afghanistan after 9/11 to track down Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents, but does not utter a word about the ‘Shah Wali Kot agreements.’
NOT SO PRO-AL QAEDA AT ALL
In 2013, I started working on a new book about the ‘terrorist’ Mullah Omar. As part of my investigations, I spoke to numerous witnesses about the surrender. It was through these conversations that I discovered a new fact: Mullah Omar had called Hamid Karzai by satellite phone to negotiate the surrender back in November 2001. This was confirmed by Mualim Haider Qader and Ibrahim Akhundzada, and by Jason Amerine of the U.S. Special Forces, who were all part of Karzai’s entourage. Two Taliban combatants, who wish to remain anonymous, also confirmed this phone call. They were present at the meeting where Mullah Omar gave permission to surrender.
Karzai was not surprised by the Taliban’s desire to negotiate. I discovered that less than four years earlier, he had been a sympathizer and became involved in the Taliban movement. Karzai was motivated primarily by personal interests. He belonged to a prominent family that had been thrown out of government before the Taliban came to power, and he wanted to set that right.
When the Taliban came, the Karzai family supported them as a way of regaining access to money and power. Hamid Karzai, still a young man then, suggested he should become the Taliban’s ambassador to the U.N. That never happened because Mullah Omar was afraid of losing power to the Karzai family. By 2001, they were on opposing sides but that did not mean Karzai wanted to exclude the Taliban categorically. “Everyone can play a part” was his motto, as he often used to tell me. Many Westerners don’t realize that Karzai was first and foremost a leader used to the constantly changing alliances between tribes and families, each with their own survival strategy. In Afghan society, when power changes hands it is traditional for large groups to capitulate without firing a shot in the hope of benefiting from the new regime. You bet on whoever you think is the strongest group and stick with them for as long as it pays off. That was what happened in Kandahar in December 2001.
In addition, no one in the West mentioned what had long been clear to Karzai and other Afghans, namely that the Taliban were not that pro-Al Qaeda. This is a difficult message for many Westerners to accept. Presidents like Obama maintain to this very day that Western troops needed to remain in Afghanistan to prevent the return of the Taliban. If the Taliban regain power, the argument goes, then Al Qaeda would establish a new base and launch attacks on the United States from Afghanistan.
9/11 MASTERPLAN
This line of reasoning is why Mullah Omar has always been linked to Osama bin Laden ever since 9/11. Under the slogan ‘Global War on Terror’, Western politicians and policymakers treated the two men as if they were one and the same, an evil alliance that had to be destroyed by the American military and its NATO allies such as the Netherlands. Those Islamic groups were all alike, surely? So they all presented a threat, didn’t they?
But that evil alliance never actually existed. Mullah Omar was always averse to Osama bin Laden’s presence in his country. He was not remotely interested in Bin Laden’s international jihad and found the Saudi’s aggressive anti-Western fatwas infuriating. Mullah Omar may have had a reputation for being anti-Western but that is not entirely correct. While he was critical of Western norms and values regarding homosexuality or relations between men and women, he did want to be on friendly diplomatic terms. Long before 9/11, he asked the Americans to open an embassy in Kabul so that he could keep in contact with them directly rather than via neighboring Pakistan, which he never really trusted.
Meanwhile, Bin Laden, who was much cannier, realized only too well that Mullah Omar did not want him in Afghanistan. He told his followers — and his son Omar bin Laden, whom I interviewed — that they should keep quiet about his activities to Mullah Omar. His 9/11 masterplan in particular was supposed to remain a secret. When the Twin Towers were attacked, Mullah Omar had no idea Bin Laden had been planning this.
A PEACEFUL SOLUTION
It was clear from early November 2001 that the Taliban would not hold out for long in the face of the constant attacks by the U.S. Air Force. But Rumsfeld was not willing to consider a strategic pause or to ask the Department of State to explore political solutions for Afghanistan. No capitulation was to be accepted, no amnesty to be granted to Mullah Omar, and unconditional surrender was out of the question, Rumsfeld said to Jason Amerine of the Special Forces, who was tasked with passing on the message to Karzai. Amerine told Anand Gopal this was what happened.
Initially, Karzai took his own course of action because he did want a deal. On Thursday, December 6, 2001, he reached an agreement with the Taliban on the surrender of the city of Kandahar in the south, the last stronghold still under the control of the movement. After the Taliban delegation had left, he remained behind at the place where they had held the talks in an upbeat and optimistic mood, he later told me. He did not expect any further serious problems. Karzai ignored the instructions from Washington and spoke to the international press that same day. “Mullah Omar may live in dignity,” said Karzai. He added that Mullah Omar was “a free man,” but 650 Al Qaeda fighters would still be hunted down and brought to justice.
Karzai’s announcement that the Taliban had surrendered was reported in all the news media, from Reuters to The Guardian. The War on Terror initiated by the Americans had been going on for less than three months and it already seemed to be drawing to a close, with the Taliban defeated and Osama bin Laden on the run. Peace had never been so close. This was an unprecedented opportunity to stop the war and see whether a peaceful solution could be found for Afghanistan.
But something essential happened that same December 6 which explains why this peace-offer very quickly became suppressed knowledge, and with that disappeared from our master-media-narrative.
[Read the rest of the story in the upcoming newsletter.]
[T1]This spelling is not the same as in the source, but seems to be the one generally in use, e.g. in Dawn newspaper (and Google in general).
EVENTS
Jaipur, India
The Jaipur Literature Festival 2022 is a prominent international book festival. I spoke alongside Christina Lamb, known for her brilliant books on Afghanistan notably I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, and William Dalrymple, a New York Times bestselling author.
Link:
Delhi, India
Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a think tank based in Delhi, organized a discussion on my book.
Link:
Copenhagen, Denmark
The Danish Institute for International Studies hosted a seminar which sought to provide a broad insight into what the Taliban movement in Afghanistan stood for in its early years and what it is today. I was invited to speak about Mullah Omar, his life and the Taliban he helped shape.
Link: https://www.diis.dk/en/event/talebanbevaegelsen-afghanistan-mullah-omar-dag
Perugia, Italy
I attended this year’s International Journalism Festival where there were lots of talks on diversity in media and de-constructing the narrative, which I recommend to watch online. In 2020, I was previously scheduled to partake in the panel titled “Code orange: why mainstream media (unintentionally?) promotes war”, together with Jessica Donati (The Wall Street Journal) and Declan Walsh (The New York Times)—unfortunately canceled due to Covid.
London, United Kingdom
One of my book talks was at The Frontline Club in discussion with BBC journalist Sana Safi.