Ghost Wars Part 9

Their prisoner explained that some Muslim leaders had philosophies similar to his own, but he considered himself an independent operator. Muslim leaders provided inspiration, but none controlled his work. Garrett asked which leaders Yousef was talking about. He refused to answer.20 Yousef said he took no thrill from killing American citizens and felt guilty about the civilian deaths he had caused. But his conscience was overridden by the strength of his desire to stop the killing of Arabs by Israeli troops. "It's nothing personal," he said, but bombing American targets was the "only way to cause change." He had come to the conclusion that only extreme acts could change the minds of people and the policies of nations. He cited as one example the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1984, which ultimately led to the withdrawal of American troops from that country. As another example he mentioned the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki, a shock tactic that forced j.a.pan to surrender quickly. Yousef said he "would like it to be different," but only terrible violence could force this kind of abrupt political change. He said that he truly believed his actions had been rational and logical in pursuit of a change in U.S. policy toward Israel.21 He mentioned no other motivation during the flight and no other issue in American foreign policy that concerned him. He mentioned no other motivation during the flight and no other issue in American foreign policy that concerned him.

He told them about his desire to topple one of the World Trade Center towers into the other, a feat he thought would take about 250,000 lives. But he lacked the money and the equipment to make a bomb that was strong enough to bring the first tower down, and he complained about the quality of his confederates. The FBI agents asked why one of Yousef's partners had returned a rental car to pick up a deposit after the bombing, a move that had led to his arrest. "Stupid," Yousef said with a weary grin.22 He mentioned that when he escaped to Pakistan, he bought a first-cla.s.s ticket because he had discovered the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers received less scrutiny than those in coach.

He was cagey when he talked about those who had aided him. In a Manila apartment where Yousef had hidden as a fugitive, investigators found a business card belonging to Mohammad Khalifa, a relative by marriage of Osama bin Laden. Yousef said only that the card had been given to him by one of his colleagues as a contact in case he needed help.

The agents asked if Yousef was familiar with the name Osama bin Laden. He said he knew that bin Laden was a relative of Khalifa. He refused to say anything more.23 Pakistani investigators eventually learned that for many months after the World Trade Center bombing Yousef had lived in a Pakistani guest house funded by bin Laden. They pa.s.sed this information to the FBI and the CIA.24 On the plane that night Yousef asked several times whether he would face a death sentence in the United States. He expected to be put to death, he said. His only worry was whether he would have enough time to write a book about his exploits.25

FROM THE START the plan was to try Yousef in open court. Mary Jo White, the United States attorney overseeing terrorism prosecutions in Manhattan, presented evidence against Yousef to a federal grand jury. As these and related investigations unfolded, the FBI and CIA gathered new facts about Yousef's multinational support network. Among other things they discovered that in the two years since the World Trade Center attack, Yousef and his coconspirators had focused heavily on airplanes and airports.

The evidence of these aerial plots surfaced first in the Philippines. Police responded to a fire at the Tiffany Mansion apartments in Manila on January 7, 1995. The apartment belonged to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Baluchi Islamist who was Yousef's uncle.26 Inside the apartment police found one of Yousef's cohorts, Abdul Hakim Murad. They also found residue from bomb-making chemicals and laptop computers with encrypted files. Murad confessed that he had been working with Yousef on multiple terrorist plots: to bomb up to a dozen American commercial airliners flying over the Pacific, to a.s.sa.s.sinate President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines, to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Pope when he visited Manila, and to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the headquarters of the CIA. Inside the apartment police found one of Yousef's cohorts, Abdul Hakim Murad. They also found residue from bomb-making chemicals and laptop computers with encrypted files. Murad confessed that he had been working with Yousef on multiple terrorist plots: to bomb up to a dozen American commercial airliners flying over the Pacific, to a.s.sa.s.sinate President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines, to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Pope when he visited Manila, and to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the headquarters of the CIA.

The plot to bomb American pa.s.senger planes over the Pacific was far along. Yousef had concocted a timing device fas.h.i.+oned from a Casio watch and a mix of explosives that could not be detected by airport security screeners. He planned to board an interlocking sequence of civilian flights. He would place the explosives on board, set the timers, and exit at layover stops before the bombs went off. He had already killed a j.a.panese businessman when he detonated a small bomb during a practice run, planting the device in an airplane seat and exiting the flight at a stopover before it exploded. If his larger plan had not been disrupted, as many as a thousand Americans might have died in the attacks during the first months of 1995.

The plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters was described in a briefing report written by the Manila police and sent to American investigators. Murad said the idea arose in conversation between himself and Yousef. The Filipino police wrote that winter that Murad planned "to board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary pa.s.senger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its c.o.c.kpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is simply a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute."27

THESE WERE NOT the only indications early in 1995 that the United States faced a newly potent terrorist threat in the Sunni Islamic world. Islamist violence connected to Arab veterans of the Afghan jihad surged worldwide.

The attacks were diverse and the perpetrators often mysterious. Suicidal attacks became a more common motif. Increasingly, the attacks came from insurgent groups in North Africa, Egypt, Sudan, and Pakistan. Increasingly, evidence surfaced that Islamist terrorists had experimented with weapons of ma.s.s destruction. Increasingly, Osama bin Laden loomed in the background of the attacks as a source of inspiration or financial support or both.

In August 1994 three hooded North Africans killed two Spanish tourists in a Marrakesh hotel. The attackers and their handlers had trained in Afghanistan. Bombings of the Paris Metro later that year were traced to Algerians trained in Afghan camps. In December 1994 four Algerian terrorists from the Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France jet. They planned to fly to Paris and slam the plane kamikaze-style into the Eiffel Tower. French authorities fooled the hijackers into believing that they did not have enough fuel to reach Paris, so they diverted to Ma.r.s.eilles where all four were shot dead by French commandos. In March 1995, Belgian investigators seized a terrorist training manual from Algerian militants. The doc.u.ment explained how to make a bomb using a wrist.w.a.tch as a timer, and its preface was dedicated to bin Laden. In April, Filipino guerrillas swearing loyalty to the Afghan mujahedin leader Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf sacked the Mindanao island town of Ipil. They killed sixty-three people, robbed four banks, and took fifty-three hostages, killing a dozen of them. On June 26, 1995, Egyptian guerrillas with the Islamic Group, equipped with Sudanese pa.s.sports, unsuccessfully attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia. A month later a member of the Egyptian extremist group al-Jihad said in a published interview that bin Laden sometimes knew about their specific terrorist operations against Egyptian targets. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb loaded with about 250 pounds of explosives blew up near the three-story headquarters of the office of the program manager of the Saudi Arabian national guard in Riyadh. Five Americans died, and thirty-four were wounded. Months later one of the perpetrators confessed in a Saudi television broadcast that he was influenced by bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamist groups, and that he had learned how to make the car bomb because of "my experiences in explosives which I had during my partic.i.p.ation in the Afghan jihad operations." One week after the Riyadh bombing, Islamist terrorists drove a suicide truck bomb into the Egyptian emba.s.sy in Islamabad, killing fifteen people and injuring eighty.28 Imprinted in these events was an outline of the future. The CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the FBI's a.n.a.lytical units recognized essential parts of the new pattern, but they did not see it all.

Murad's confession about a plan to hijack a civilian airliner and crash it into the CIA received little attention at the FBI because that plot was not part of the evidentiary case the bureau was building for courtroom prosecution. The FBI was distracted. Domestic terrorism overshadowed Islamist attacks during 1995. In April, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and wounding hundreds more. The bombing galvanized the Clinton administration to focus on terrorism, but the long investigation drained FBI resources. The bureau never followed up with a detailed investigation of the airplane kamikaze plan.29 The CIA remained focused on Iranian and s.h.i.+te terrorist threats. Late in 1994 the CIA station in Riyadh reported on surveillance of American targets in the kingdom by Iranian agents and their radical Saudi s.h.i.+te allies. Woolsey visited the kingdom in December and huddled with Prince Turki. They discussed joint plans to monitor and disrupt the Iranian threat in the months ahead. CIA reporting about Iranian-sponsored terrorist threats inside Saudi Arabia continued at a high tempo throughout 1995. In October the White House received intelligence that the Iranian-backed, s.h.i.+te-dominated Hezbollah terrorist organization had dispatched a hit squad to a.s.sa.s.sinate National Security Adviser Tony Lake. He moved out of his home temporarily and into safehouses in Was.h.i.+ngton. Because the Saudi intelligence service was so heavily focused on the s.h.i.+tes, Prince Turki recalled, the Riyadh bombing in November by bin Ladeninspired Afghan veterans came "out of nowhere." Even after that attack, Iran remained a major threat, drawing attention and resources away from bin Laden and his followers.30 The CIA's Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations, responsible for much of the Sunni Muslim world, also was distracted by Iraq. Its ambitious covert operations to overthrow Saddam Hussein from bases in northern Iraq were collapsing that spring.

All of this turmoil swirled in the weeks and months after Yousef's arrest, presenting investigators with a rich cache of evidence. The essential a.n.a.lytical questions remained the same as they had been for several years. Were terrorists like Ramzi Yousef best seen as solo entrepreneurs or as operatives of a larger movement? Where were the key nodes of leaders.h.i.+p and resource support? Was CIA a.n.a.lyst Paul Pillar's notion of ad hoc terrorism adequate anymore, or did the United States now confront a more organized and potent circle of Sunni Muslim jihadists bent on spectacular attacks?

Hardly anyone in Was.h.i.+ngton or at Langley yet saw the full significance of bin Laden and al Qaeda. When President Clinton signed Executive Order 12947 on January 23, 1995, imposing sanctions on twelve terrorist groups because of their role in disrupting the Middle East peace process, neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden made the list.31 These blind spots among American intelligence a.n.a.lysts partly reflected the fragmentary, contradictory evidence they had to work with. Cofer Black's cables from Khartoum showed the diversity of bin Laden's multinational allies. Clearly bin Laden's network did not operate as a conventional hierarchical group.

Many American a.n.a.lysts clung to preconceived ideas about who in the Middle East was an ally and who was an enemy. American strategy in 1995, ratified by Clinton's National Security Council, was to contain and frustrate Iran and Iraq. In this mission Saudi Arabia was an elusive but essential ally. It was an embedded a.s.sumption of Amerian foreign policy that Iraq and Iran could not be managed without Saudi cooperation. Then, too, there was the crucial importance of Saudi Arabia in the global oil markets. There was strong reluctance in Was.h.i.+ngton to challenge the Saudi royal family over its funding of Islamist radicals, its appeas.e.m.e.nt of anti-American preachers, or its ardent worldwide proselytizing. There was little impetus to step back and ask big, uncomfortable questions about whether Saudi charities represented a fundamental threat to American national security. The Saudis worked a.s.siduously to maintain diverse contacts within the CIA, outside of official channels. Several retired Riyadh station chiefs and senior Near East Division managers went on the Saudi payroll as consultants during the mid-1990s.32 American Arabists had studied the Middle East for decades through a Cold War lens, their vision narrowed by continuous intimate contact with secular Arab elites. American spies and strategists rarely entered the lower-middle-cla.s.s mosques of Algiers, Tunis, Cairo,Karachi, or Jedda, where anti-American ca.s.sette tape sermons were for sale on folding tables at the door.

Despite all these limitations, American intelligence a.n.a.lysts developed by mid-1995 a clearer picture of the new terrorist enemy. For the first time the image of a global network began to emerge. The FBI and the CIA each produced ambitious cla.s.sified intelligence reports during the second half of 1995 that sifted the evidence in the Yousef case and pushed strong new forecasts.

As part of a long review of global terrorism circulated by the FBI, cla.s.sified Secret, the bureau's a.n.a.lysts a.s.sessed the emerging threat under the heading "Ramzi Ahmed Yousef: A New Generation of Sunni Islamic Terrorists."33 The Yousef case "has led us to conclude that a new generation of terrorists has appeared on the world stage over the past few years," the FBI's a.n.a.lysts wrote. Yousef and his a.s.sociates "have access to a worldwide network of support for funding, training and safe haven." Increasingly, "Islamic extremists are working together to further their cause." It was "no coincidence" that their terrorism increased as the anti-Soviet Afghan war ended. Afghanistan's training camps were crucial to Yousef. The camps provided technical resources and allowed him to meet and recruit like-minded radicals. Pakistan and Bosnia had also become important bases for the jihadists. The Yousef case "has led us to conclude that a new generation of terrorists has appeared on the world stage over the past few years," the FBI's a.n.a.lysts wrote. Yousef and his a.s.sociates "have access to a worldwide network of support for funding, training and safe haven." Increasingly, "Islamic extremists are working together to further their cause." It was "no coincidence" that their terrorism increased as the anti-Soviet Afghan war ended. Afghanistan's training camps were crucial to Yousef. The camps provided technical resources and allowed him to meet and recruit like-minded radicals. Pakistan and Bosnia had also become important bases for the jihadists.

The FBI's report noted the vulnerability of the American homeland to attacks. It specifically cited Murad's confessed plot to hijack a plane and fly it into CIA headquarters as an example.

"Unlike traditional forms of terrorism, such as state-sponsored or the Iran/Hezbollah model, Sunni extremists are neither surrogates of nor strongly influenced by one nation," the FBI's a.n.a.lysts wrote. "They are autonomous and indigenous." There was now reason to "suspect Yousef and his a.s.sociates receive support from Osama bin Laden and may be able to tap into bin Laden's mujahedin support network." In addition, they may also have been able to draw on Islamic charities for support. The FBI a.n.a.lysis listed the huge semiofficial Saudi Arabian charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, and the largest government-sponsored Saudi religious proselytizing organization, the Muslim World League, as important resources for the new terrorists. The cable concluded: "Yousef's group fits the mold for this new generation of Sunni Islamic terrorists. . . . The WTC bombing, the Manila plot, and the recent [Islamic Group] attack against Mubarak demonstrate that Islamic extremists can operate anywhere in the world. We believe the threat is not over."34 The CIA also saw Yousef's gang as independent from any hierachy. "As far as we know," reported a cla.s.sified agency cable in 1995, "Yousef and his confederates . . . are not allied with an organized terrorist group and cannot readily call upon such an organized unit to execute retaliatory strikes against the U.S. or countries that have cooperated with the U.S. in the extradition of Yousef and his a.s.sociates." That same year, working through the National Intelligence Council, the CIA circulated to Clinton's Cabinet an annual National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism cla.s.sified Secret. The estimate was t.i.tled "The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States" and drew on cables and a.n.a.lyses from across the American intelligence community. Echoing the FBI's language, the estimate called Yousef's gang a "new breed" of radical Sunni Islamic terrorist. This "new terrorist phenomenon" involved fluid, transient, multinational groupings of Islamic extremists who saw the United States as their enemy, the estimate warned. It then speculated about future attacks inside the United States. "Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street," the estimate predicted. "We a.s.sess that civil aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the United States. This stems from the increasing domestic threat posed by foreign terrorists, the continuing appeal of civil aviation as a target, and a domestic aviation security system [whose weaknesses have] been the focus of media attention."35 It was now clear that Yousef and his colleagues had developed their terrorist plans by studying American airline security procedures. "If terrorists operating in this country are similarly methodical, they will identify serious vulnerabilities in the security system for domestic flights." The National Intelligence Estimate made no mention of Osama bin Laden.36

16.

"Slowly, Slowly Sucked into It"

THE MAN WHO BECAME KNOWN as Ahmed Shah Durrani, a celebrated king of Afghanistan, began his career as an unsuccessful bodyguard. His liege, the Persian emperor Nadir Shah, had conquered lands and treasure as far east as India, but he grew murderous and arbitrary even by the standards of a tyrannical age. Angry courtiers attacked him in his royal desert tent in 1747. Durrani found his ruler's headless torso in a b.l.o.o.d.y pool. Sensing they were now on the wrong side of Persian court politics, Durrani and his fellow guards mounted horses and rode east for Kandahar, homeland of their tribes, known to the British as Pashtuns.1 Kandahar lay uncomfortably exposed in a semiarid plain between the two great Islamic empires of the day: Persia, to the west, and the Mughal Empire, ruled from Kabul to the north. In the Pashtun homeland luscious orchards and farms dotted the banks of the snaking Helmand River. Mud-walled villages unmolested by outside authority nestled in fertile valleys. Swift snow-melt rivers in the surrounding hills seemed to invigorate the strong-boned, strong-willed pathwalkers who drank from them. The desert highways crossing Kandahar carried great caravans between India and Persia, providing road taxes for local governors and loot for tribal highwaymen. Yet Kandahar's fractious tribes lacked the administrative and military depth of Persia's throne or the natural defenses of Kabul's rock-mountain gorges. The region's two great tribal confederations were the Ghilzais, whose dispersed members lived to the north, toward Jalalabad, and the Abdalis, centered in Kandahar. They marauded against neighbors and pa.s.sing armies. Chieftains of lineage clans consulted in circle-shaped egalitarian jirgas, jirgas, where they forged alliances and authorized tribal risings as cyclical and devastating as monsoons. But they had yet to win an empire of their own. where they forged alliances and authorized tribal risings as cyclical and devastating as monsoons. But they had yet to win an empire of their own.

Ahmed Shah Durrani changed their fortune. His story recounts an inextricable weave of historical fact and received myth. In the standard version, when Durrani reached Kandahar from the scene of Nadir Shah's murder, he joined a council of Abdali tribal leaders who had been summoned to a shrine at Sher Surkh to choose a new king. In the first round many of the chiefs boasted about their own qualifications. Ahmed, only twenty-four and from a relatively weak subtribe of the Popalzai, remained silent. To break the deadlock a respected holy man placed a strand of wheat on his head and declared that Ahmed should be king because he had given no cause for anger to the others. The tribal chiefs soon put blades of gra.s.s in their mouths and hung cloth yokes around their necks to show they agreed to be Ahmed's cattle. Presumably the spiritual symbols cloaked a practical decision: The most powerful Abdali chiefs had elected the weakest among them as leader, giving them flexibility to rebel whenever they wished. This was a pattern of Pashtun decision-making about kings and presidents that would persist into the twenty-first century.2 Durrani proved a visionary leader. He crowned himself king in central Kandahar, a flat dust-caked city constructed from sloping mud-brown brick. Its mosques and shrines were decorated by tiles and jewels imported from Persia and India. He called himself the Durr-I-Durrani, or Pearl of Pearls, because of his fondness for pearl earrings. From this the Abdalis became known as the Durranis. His empire was launched with an act of highway robbery near Kandahar. A caravan from India moved toward Persia with a treasure trove. Ahmed seized the load and used it as an instant defense budget. He hired a vast army of Pashtun warriors and subsidized the peace around Kandahar. He struck out for India, occupied Delhi, and eventually controlled lands as far away as Tibet. The Ghilzai Pashtun tribes submitted to his rule, and he united the territory that would be known during the twentieth century as Afghanistan. He summered in Kabul, but Kandahar was his capital. When he died in 1773 after twenty-six years on the throne, the region's proud and grateful Durranis erected a decorated tomb with a soaring turquoise dome in the town center. Signaling the unity their king forged between Islam and a royal house, they built his memorial adjacent to Kandahar's most holy site, a three-story white mosque inlaid with mosaics. The mosque housed a sacred cloak reputedly worn by the Prophet Mohammed.

For two centuries Ahmed Shah Durrani's legacy shaped Afghan politics. His reign located the center of Pashtun tribal and spiritual power in Kandahar, creating an uneasy balance between that city and Kabul. His vast empire quickly disappeared, but its legend inspired expansive visions of Pashtun rule. His unification of Pashtun tribes in a grand royal house laid the foundation for future claims to royal legitimacy in Afghanistan. Many of the kings who followed him came from a different tribal branch, but they saw themselves as his political heirs. King Zahir Shah, overthrown in 1973, exactly two hundred years after Durrani's death, was the last ruler to claim the heritage of the jirga jirga at Sher Surkh. at Sher Surkh.3 By 1994 the Kandahar Durranis had fallen into disarray. Many prominent leaders lived in scattered exile in Pakistan, Europe, or the United States. Pakistan's army and intelligence service, fearing Pashtun royal power, squeezed out Durrani leaders who might revive claims to the Afghan throne. The mujahedin leaders most favored by Pakistani intelligence-Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Sayyaf, and Khalis-did not include any Durrani Pashtuns. Also, the geography of the anti-Soviet war sidelined Kandahar and its clans. The conflict's key supply lines flowed north from Kabul to the Soviet Union or east toward Pakistan. None of this was Durrani territory. Kandahar knew heavy fighting during the Soviet occupation, but in the war's strategic geography, it was often a cul-de-sac.

After the Soviet withdrawal the Kandahar region dissolved into a violent checkerboard-less awful than h.e.l.lish Kabul, but awful still. Hekmatyar's well-armed, antiroyal forces, backed by Pakistani intelligence, lingered like a storm cloud on the city's outskirts. Trucking mafias that reaped huge profits from the heroin trade and other smuggling rackets propped up local warlords. Any group of young Pashtun fighters with a few Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers could set up a checkpoint and extort payments on the highways. By 1994 the main road from Quetta in Pakistan through Kandahar and on toward Herat and Iran was choked by hundreds of extralegal roadblocks. So was the road from Kandahar to Kabul. Shopkeepers in the ramshackle markets cl.u.s.tered around Ahmed Shah Durrani's still magnificent tomb in central Kandahar-now a fume-choked city of perhaps 750,000-battled ruthless extortion and robbery gangs. Reports of unchecked rape and abduction, including child rape, fueled a local atmosphere of fear and smoldering anger. One of the most powerful Durrani warlords in Kandahar, Mullah Naqibullah, had fallen into a state of madness later diagnosed as a medical condition that required antipsychotic drugs. "I was crazy," Naqibullah admitted years later. "The doctors told me that I had a heavy workload, and it had damaged some of my brain cells."4 The birth and rise of the Taliban during 1994 and the emergence of the movement's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, were often described in the United States and Europe as the triumph of a naive, pious, determined band of religious students swept into power on a wave of popular revulsion over Kandahar's criminal warlords. The Taliban themselves emphasized this theme after they acquired power. As they constructed their founding narrative, they weaved in stories of Mullah Omar's visionary dreams for a new Islamic order for Afghanistan. They described his heroic rescue of abducted girls from warlord rapists. They publicized his yen for popular justice, as ill.u.s.trated by the public hanging of depraved kidnappers. "It was like a myth," recalled the Pashtun broadcaster Spozhmai Maiwandi, who spoke frequently with Taliban leaders. "They were taking the Koran and the gun and going from village to village saying, 'For the Koran's sake, put down your weapons.' " If the warlords refused, the Taliban would kill them. "For us it was not strange," Maiwandi recalled. Religious students had meted out justice in rural Kandahar for ages. "We knew these people still existed."5 Much of this Taliban narrative was undoubtedly rooted in fact even if credible eyewitnesses to the most mythologized events of 1994, such as the hanging of notorious rapists from a tank barrel, proved stubbornly elusive. In the end, however, the facts may have mattered less than the narrative's claims on the past. The Taliban a.s.sembled their story so that Pashtuns could recognize it as a revival of old glory. The Taliban connected popular, rural Islamic values with a gra.s.sroots Durrani Pashtun tribal rising. They emerged at a moment when important wealthy Pashtun tribal leaders around Kandahar hungered for a unifying cause. The Taliban hinted that their militia would become a vehicle for the return to Afghanistan of King Zahir Shah from his exile in Rome. They preached for a reborn alliance of Islamic piety and Pashtun might.

Taliban, which can be translated as "students of Islam" or "seekers of knowledge," had been part of traditional village life in Kandahar's conservative "Koran belt" since even before the time of Ahmed Shah Durrani. Taliban were as familiar to southern Pashtun villagers as frocked Catholic priests were in the Irish countryside, and they played a similar role. They taught schoolchildren, led prayers, comforted the dying, and mediated local disputes. They studied in hundreds of small which can be translated as "students of Islam" or "seekers of knowledge," had been part of traditional village life in Kandahar's conservative "Koran belt" since even before the time of Ahmed Shah Durrani. Taliban were as familiar to southern Pashtun villagers as frocked Catholic priests were in the Irish countryside, and they played a similar role. They taught schoolchildren, led prayers, comforted the dying, and mediated local disputes. They studied in hundreds of small madra.s.sas, madra.s.sas, memorizing the Koran, and they lived modestly on the charity of villagers. As a young adult a Talib might migrate to a larger memorizing the Koran, and they lived modestly on the charity of villagers. As a young adult a Talib might migrate to a larger madra.s.sa madra.s.sa in an Afghan city or across the border in Pakistan to complete his Koranic studies. Afterward he might return to a village school and mosque as a full-fledged in an Afghan city or across the border in Pakistan to complete his Koranic studies. Afterward he might return to a village school and mosque as a full-fledged mullah, mullah, a "giver" of knowledge now rather than a seeker. In a region unfamiliar with formal government, these religious travelers provided a loose Islamic civil service. The Taliban were memorialized in traditional Afghan folk songs, which sometimes made teasing, skeptical reference to their purity; the students were traditionally regarded as so chaste that Pashtun women might not bother to cover themselves when they came around for meals. a "giver" of knowledge now rather than a seeker. In a region unfamiliar with formal government, these religious travelers provided a loose Islamic civil service. The Taliban were memorialized in traditional Afghan folk songs, which sometimes made teasing, skeptical reference to their purity; the students were traditionally regarded as so chaste that Pashtun women might not bother to cover themselves when they came around for meals.6 After the communist revolution in Kabul in 1978, Islamic students and mullahs fervently took up arms in rural Pashtun regions. At the village level, far removed from the manipulations of foreign intelligence services, they fortified the anti-Soviet jihad with volunteers and religious sanction. But the war altered the context and curriculum of Islamic studies in the Pashtun belt. This was especially true just across the border in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia's World Muslim League, General Zia's partners at Jamaat-e-Islami, Saudi intelligence, and Pakistani intelligence built scores of new madra.s.sas madra.s.sas in Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi, and in between. Scholars introduced new texts based on austere Saudi theology and related creeds. One of the most influential and richly endowed of these wartime in Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi, and in between. Scholars introduced new texts based on austere Saudi theology and related creeds. One of the most influential and richly endowed of these wartime madra.s.sas, madra.s.sas, Haqqannia, located along the Grand Trunk Road just east of Peshawar, attracted tens of thousands of Afghan and Pakistani Talibs with free education and boarding. The students included many exiled Pashtuns from Kandahar. Haqqannia, located along the Grand Trunk Road just east of Peshawar, attracted tens of thousands of Afghan and Pakistani Talibs with free education and boarding. The students included many exiled Pashtuns from Kandahar.7 Haqqannia's curriculum blended transnational Islamist politics with a theology known as Deobandism, named for a town in India that houses a centuries-old madra.s.sa. madra.s.sa. During the nineteenth century the Deobandis led a conservative reform movement among Indian Muslims. Many Muslim scholars updated Islam's tenets to adapt to changing societies. The Deobandis rejected this approach. They argued that Muslims were obliged to live exactly as the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed had done. Deobandi scholars drew up long lists of minute rules designed to eliminate all modern intrusions from a pious Muslim life. They combined this approach with a Wahhabi-like disdain for decoration, adornment, and music. During the nineteenth century the Deobandis led a conservative reform movement among Indian Muslims. Many Muslim scholars updated Islam's tenets to adapt to changing societies. The Deobandis rejected this approach. They argued that Muslims were obliged to live exactly as the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed had done. Deobandi scholars drew up long lists of minute rules designed to eliminate all modern intrusions from a pious Muslim life. They combined this approach with a Wahhabi-like disdain for decoration, adornment, and music.8 Nearly all of the Taliban's initial circle of Kandahar Durrani leaders had attended Haqqannia during the 1980s and early 1990s. They knew one another as theology cla.s.smates as well as veteran fighters in the anti-Soviet jihad.9 The Taliban leaders.h.i.+p had no special tribal or royal status. They first surfaced as a small militia force operating near Kandahar city during the spring and summer of 1994, carrying out vigilante attacks against minor warlords, backed by a security fund of about $250,000 raised by local small businessmen. But as the months pa.s.sed and their legend grew, they began to meet and appeal for backing from powerful Durrani Pashtun traders and chieftains. As these alliances developed, their movement was transformed.

Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai ran lucrative transportation and manufacturing businesses from Pakistan to Central Asia. He was also a leader of the huge Ahmadzai tribe. He had known some of the Taliban's leaders as strong fighters around Kandahar during the anti-Soviet jihad. When he met them in late 1994, "the sell was very practical, and it made sense. They were saying, 'Look, all these commanders have looted the country. They're selling it piece by piece. They've got checkpoints. They're raping women.' And they wanted to bring in the king. They wanted to bring in national unity and have the loya jirga loya jirga process," a grand a.s.sembly that would ratify national Afghan leaders.h.i.+p. "It was not something you could turn down." Ahmadzai threw the Taliban his support. process," a grand a.s.sembly that would ratify national Afghan leaders.h.i.+p. "It was not something you could turn down." Ahmadzai threw the Taliban his support.10 So did the Karzai family, the respected and influential Kandahar-born leaders of the Popalzai, the tribe of Ahmed Shah Durrani himself. Their decision to back the Taliban during 1994 signaled to Afghans that this student militia stood at the forefront of a broad movement-an uprising aimed at the enemies of Islam and also at the enemies of Pashtuns.

ABDUL AHAD KARZAI was the family patriarch. He and his son Hamid, then thirty-six years old, had been moderately important figures in the anti-Soviet resistance. As a boy Hamid Karzai had grown up in bucolic comfort on prewar Kandahar's outskirts. He and his brothers played in dusty lanes they shared with chickens and goats. Their family owned rich farmland; by local standards, they were wealthy. After the Soviet invasion they fled to Quetta.11 A lively, thin, bald, elflike man with bright eyes and an irrepressible voice, Hamid Karzai worked during the 1980s as a press, logistics, and humanitarian aid coordinator for the royalist mujahedin faction of Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. He spoke English fluently and maintained many American contacts, including diplomats such as Ed McWilliams and Peter Tomsen. They and other State Department emissaries saw Karzai as an attractive, reasonable royalist, a wily talker and politician. Two of his brothers operated Afghan restaurants in the United States. His royal Pashtun heritage and ease with foreigners allowed him to mediate across Afghan political and ethnic lines after the Soviet withdrawal. He was a born diplomat, rarely confrontational and always willing to gather in a circle and talk. He was appointed deputy foreign minister in the fractured, Ma.s.soud-dominated Kabul government during 1993.

Karzai tried to st.i.tch his own fratricidal government back together. For months he shuttled between besieged Kabul and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's hostile encampment at Charasyab. Karzai sought to mediate between the Kabul cabinet and its estranged prime minister even as they fired rockets at each other.

Early in 1994, Ma.s.soud's security chief, the gnome-faced Mohammed Fahim, received a report that Hamid Karzai was working with Pakistani intelligence. Fahim set in motion a bizarre chain of events that led the Karzais to offer their prestige and support to the Taliban.

Like all of Ma.s.soud's most trusted commanders, Fahim was an ethnic Tajik from the northeastern Panjs.h.i.+r Valley. By 1994 the Panjs.h.i.+ris were seen by many Pashtuns in Kabul as a kind of battle-fighting mafia. United by a decade of continuous war under Ma.s.soud's charismatic leaders.h.i.+p, the Panjs.h.i.+ris were close-knit, tough, secretive, and a government within the government. The Kabul cabinet remained multiethnic on paper, but as the civil war deepened, the power of Ma.s.soud's Panjs.h.i.+ri-run defense and intelligence ministries grew. Relations with Pashtun leaders deteriorated.

An important cause was the unfinished war with Hekmatyar. Ma.s.soud saw Hekmatyar as an unreformed creature of Pakistani intelligence. He and his aides felt they could never be sure where the next ISI-backed conspiracy, fronted by Pashtun leaders, might be coming from. They were bathed in wartime rumors and had few reliable ways to sort fact from fiction. They were under continual bombardment in their candlelit Kabul offices. The war's chronic violence and deceit shaped their judgments about friend and foe.

Acting on a tip that he was plotting against the government, Fahim sent intelligence officers to Hamid Karzai's Kabul home. They arrested the deputy foreign minister and drove him to an interrogation center downtown, not far from the presidential palace. For several hours Fahim's operatives worked on Karzai, accusing him of collusion with Pakistan. Karzai has never provided a direct account of what happened inside the interrogation cell. Several people he talked to afterward said that he was beaten up and that his face was bloodied and bruised. Some accounts place Fahim himself in the cell during parts of the interrogation. It is not clear whether Ma.s.soud knew about the interrogation or authorized it, although his lieutenants denied that he did.

The session ended with a bang. A rocket lobbed routinely by Hekmatyar into Kabul's center slammed into the intelligence compound where Karzai was being interrogated. In the ensuing chaos Karzai slipped out of the building and walked dazed into Kabul's streets. He made his way to the city bus station and quietly slipped onto a bus headed for Jalalabad. There a friend from the United Nations recognized Karzai walking on the street, his patrician face banged up and bruised, and helped him to a relative's house. The next day Hamid Karzai crossed the Khyber Pa.s.s into exile in Pakistan. He would not return to Kabul for more than seven years.12 He joined his father in Quetta during the spring of 1994. Within months he heard about the Taliban's rising. He knew many of the Taliban's leaders from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad. "They were my buddies," he explained later. "They were good people."13 They were also a way to challenge a Kabul government whose officers had just beaten him into exile. Karzai was not especially wealthy by Western standards-his hard currency accounts were often precariously low-but he contributed $50,000 of his own funds to the Taliban as they began to organize around Kandahar. He also handed them a large cache of weapons he had hidden away and introduced them to prominent Pashtun tribal leaders. Separately, the Taliban met with an enthusiastic Abdul Haq and with many Durranis who maintained close ties with the exiled king Zahir Shah. The Durrani Pashtuns hoped now to achieve what the United Nations and American envoys such as Peter Tomsen had earlier failed to deliver. Urging their new white-bannered, Koran-waving rural militia forward, they plotted a return of the Afghan king.14

MOHAMMED OMAR was an unlikely heir to Pashtun glory. He reflected the past through a mirror cracked and distorted by two decades of war. For a man destined to make such an impact on global affairs, remarkably little is known about his biography. He was born around 1950 in Nodeh Village in Kandahar province. His small and undistinguished family clan occupied a single house in the district, according to a biographical account given to U.S. diplomats by the Taliban early in 1995. His was an impoverished, isolated boyhood dominated by long hours in dim religious schools memorizing the Koran. From religious texts he learned to read and write in Arabic and Pashto only shakily.He never roamed far from Kandahar province. If he ever flew on an airplane, slept in a hotel, or watched a satellite movie, he gave no indication of it. In later years he had many opportunities to travel abroad but refused even a religious pilgrimage to holy Muslim shrines in Saudi Arabia. He declined to travel as far as Kabul except on very rare occasions. Kandahar was his world.15 During the anti-Soviet jihad, Omar served as a local subcommander with the Younis Khalis faction. He followed a prominent trader, Haji Bashar, who also funded a religious school in the area. He showed special ability with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and reportedly knocked out a number of Soviet tanks. By one account, he eventually became Khalis's deputy commander for Kandahar province, a relatively senior position, despite his being neither "charismatic nor articulate," as a Taliban colleague later put it.16 Exploding shrapnel struck Omar in the face during an attack near Kandahar. One piece badly damaged his right eye. Taliban legend holds that Omar cut his own eye out of the socket with a knife. More prosaic versions report his treatment at a Red Cross hospital in Pakistan where his eye was surgically removed. In any event, his right eyelid was st.i.tched permanently shut.17 By the early 1990s, Omar had returned to religious studies. He served as a teacher and prayer leader in a tiny, poor village of about twenty-five families called Singesar, twenty miles outside of Kandahar in a wide, fertile valley of wheat fields and vineyards. In exchange for religious instruction, villagers provided him with food. He apparently had no other reliable source of income, although he retained ties to the relatively wealthy trader Bashar. He shuttled between the village's small mud-brick religious school and its small mud-brick mosque. He lived in a modest house about two hundred yards from the village madra.s.sa. madra.s.sa.18 The only known photographs of Omar depict him as a relatively tall, well-built, thin-faced man with a light complexion and a bushy black beard. He spoke Pashto in a peasant's provincial accent. In meetings he would often sit silently for long periods. When he spoke, his voice was often no louder than a whisper. He modestly declined to call himself a mullah mullah because he had not finished all of his Islamic studies. He sometimes talked about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in someone else's story. because he had not finished all of his Islamic studies. He sometimes talked about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in someone else's story.

He believed in the prophecy of dreams and spoke about them in political and military meetings, drawing on them to explain important decisions. During 1994, as the Taliban gathered influence around Kandahar, Omar repeatedly said he had been called into action by a dream in which Allah appeared before him in the form of a man and told him to lead the believers.

As he began to meet with Pashtun delegations around Kandahar, he would often receive visitors outside, seated on the ground. By one account, in an early Taliban organizational meeting, he was selected as leader of the movement's supreme council because unlike some of the more seasoned candidates, Omar did not seem to be interested in personal power.19 The story was another plank in the Taliban's myth of Pashtun revival: The humble, quiet Mullah Omar echoed the silence of young Ahmed Shah Durrani at the Sher Surkh The story was another plank in the Taliban's myth of Pashtun revival: The humble, quiet Mullah Omar echoed the silence of young Ahmed Shah Durrani at the Sher Surkh jirga. jirga.

He spoke rarely about his ambitions, but when he did, his language was direct. The Taliban was "a simple band of dedicated youths determined to establish the laws of G.o.d on Earth and prepared to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that goal," he said. "The Taliban will fight until there is no blood in Afghanistan left to be shed and Islam becomes a way of life for our people."20 When they sprang from Kandahar in 1994, the Taliban were a tabula rasa on which others could project their ambitions. The trouble was, as the French scholar Olivier Roy noted, the Taliban were different from other opportunistic Afghan factions: They meant what they said.21

BEn.a.z.iR BHUTTO also charted the future from the past. Pakistan's sputtering democracy had shuddered through another minor miracle-a semi-legitimate national election-and voters had returned Bhutto to office as prime minister. Before her swearing-in she took long walks in Islamabad parks with old political allies. She wanted to talk candidly about her plans where Pakistani intelligence could not listen. She told her colleagues that she wanted to learn from the errors of her first term. She was determined to stay close to the Americans. She wanted to keep the Pakistani army happy as best she could-she would not pick unnecessary fights. She would have to keep watch on ISI, but she would try to listen to their demands and accommodate them. In this way she hoped to survive in office long enough to revive Pakistan's economy. Only if she created wealth for Pakistan's middle cla.s.ses could Bhutto ensure her party's long-term strength, she and her advisers believed.22 Pakistan suffered from widespread poverty, low literacy rates, and a weak natural resource base. Yet it also had a strong business cla.s.s, international ports, and thriving export industries. How could the country create sudden new wealth through external trade the way other Asian countries had managed to do during the 1980s? To the east lay India, the Pakistan army's reason for being and a foreign policy problem Bhutto could not hope to solve on her own. But to the west and north lay new possibilities for commerce and influence. Bhutto wanted, as she said later, to "market Pakistan internationally as . . . the crossroads to the old silk roads of trade between Europe and Asia." Like every young student on the subcontinent, she had grown up with history texts that chronicled invasions across the Khyber Pa.s.s. These ancient conquests had been inspired by lucrative trade routes that ran from Central Asia to Delhi. "So I thought, 'Okay, control of the trade routes is a way to get my country power and prestige.' " She imagined Pakistani exporters trucking televisions and was.h.i.+ng machines to the newly independent Muslim republics of former Soviet Central Asia. She imagined cotton and oil flowing to Pakistan from Central Asia and Iran.23 But when she and her advisers looked at the map in 1994, they saw Afghanistan in the way, an impa.s.sable cauldron of warlords, a country engulfed by a civil war fueled by Pakistan's own intelligence service. Bhutto called in the ISI brigadiers, and, as she recalled it, they told her they wanted to keep pressure on Ma.s.soud because his government was "too pro-India." This seemed to her a dead-end policy, but she had pledged to go slowly with the army this time in office, to defer to them where she could. She wanted to create a discussion about an alternative Afghan policy that would include the views of the army and Pakistani intelligence.24 She organized an interagency group on Afghanistan. Beside her at the conference table sat a retired septuagenarian Pakistani general, Naseerullah Babar, who had agreed to serve as Bhutto's interior minister. A Pashtun notable, Babar had organized covert guerrilla training for Hekmatyar and Ma.s.soud when they first fled to Pakistan in the 1970s. He had been loyal to Bhutto's father, and Ben.a.z.ir trusted him. Babar had friends.h.i.+ps inside the notoriously independent Afghan bureau of Pakistani intelligence. He brought some of the ISI brigadiers he knew to the early working sessions on Afghan policy. They argued about the risks of pulling support from Hekmatyar. Without his pressure on Ma.s.soud, the ISI's officers maintained, ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks might lock up control of Kabul for many years. They would deepen ties with India and remain hostile to Pakistan and stir up trouble in its large Pashtun population. How could Bhutto pursue her dream of Central Asian trade in that case?

"Why do we need Kabul anyway?" Babar asked, as Bhutto recalled it. They could reach Central Asia by the southern route, through Kandahar and Herat. Bhutto thought this idea had promise. Her government could build roads, telephone lines, and other infrastructure right through Afghanistan's Pashtun country, all the way to Central Asia, bypa.s.sing Kabul and the ethnic gridlock to its north. Bhutto endorsed the new approach "if it could be done by paying local warlords" for free commercial pa.s.sage via southern Afghanistan. Pakistani intelligence had no objection.25 Babar spearheaded the effort. In October 1994 he arranged a heavily publicized trial convoy carrying Pakistani textiles that he hoped to drive from Quetta to Turkmenistan, to demonstrate Pakistan's new ambitions. The convoy arrived on the Afghan border above Kandahar just as Mullah Omar and his Taliban shura shura opened their preaching campaign in the area. opened their preaching campaign in the area.

Pakistani trucking interests had already begun to supply money and weapons to the Taliban, hoping they could unclog Kandahar's highways. It may have been these trucking overlords rather than Pakistan's government who aided the Taliban in their first military breakthrough. An Afghan commander in the border truck-stop town of Spin Boldak, loyal to Ma.s.soud on paper, handed the Taliban the keys to an enormous ISI-supplied weapons dump near the town, apparently in exchange for a large payment. The dump had been created in 1991 to receive weapons and ammunition rushed across the border by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence officers who were trying to comply with a deadline to end outside supplies to the Afghan war. The Spin Boldak dump's seventeen tunnels held enough weaponry for tens of thousands of soldiers.26 The Taliban broke it open in mid-October, issued public calls for volunteers from local madra.s.sas, madra.s.sas, and handed out a.s.sault rifles still wrapped in plastic. Whether Babar or local ISI officers endorsed or aided this handover of weapons is not clear. Babar did capitalize quickly on the Taliban's new strength. When his demonstration convoy was blocked at rogue checkpoints twenty miles outside of Kandahar in early November, he waved the Taliban on to free his trucks. and handed out a.s.sault rifles still wrapped in plastic. Whether Babar or local ISI officers endorsed or aided this handover of weapons is not clear. Babar did capitalize quickly on the Taliban's new strength. When his demonstration convoy was blocked at rogue checkpoints twenty miles outside of Kandahar in early November, he waved the Taliban on to free his trucks.27 They did so with ease. Mullah Naqibullah and other long-feared Kandahar warlords who were allied with Ma.s.soud had terrorized the region without challenge for years. Suddenly, in just twenty-four hours, the Taliban moved into central Kandahar and captured the entire city. Mullah Omar took control of the provincial governor's arched sandstone headquarters, across from the tomb of Ahmed Shah Durrani. Naqibullah and his allies, unable or unwilling to resist their youthful and highly motivated attackers, simply melted away.28 By mid-November the Taliban's six-member shura shura ruled not only Kandahar but its airport, where they captured six MiG-21 fighter jets and four Mi-17 transport helicopters. They seized tanks and armored personnel carriers. ruled not only Kandahar but its airport, where they captured six MiG-21 fighter jets and four Mi-17 transport helicopters. They seized tanks and armored personnel carriers.29 They announced that all highway roadblocks would be dismantled, all non-Taliban militia disarmed, and all criminals subject to swift Islamic punishments. They lynched a few resisters to make their point. They announced that all highway roadblocks would be dismantled, all non-Taliban militia disarmed, and all criminals subject to swift Islamic punishments. They lynched a few resisters to make their point.

Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto was suddenly the matron of a new Afghan faction. The Taliban might provide a battering ram to open trade routes to Central Asia, as she hoped, yet they also presented complications.

Pakistani intelligence already had one Pashtun client, Hekmatyar. The ISI Afghan bureau was in turmoil. The Rawalpindi army command had recently appointed a secular-minded, British-influenced general, Javed Ashraf Qazi, to take charge of ISI. Qazi's immediate predecessor, the bearded Islamist missionary Javed Nasir, had led the intelligence service toward overt religious preaching. The army bra.s.s now told Qazi to "put ISI right," as he recalled it, by purging the most open Islamists. Qazi systematically removed officers who had been promoted by Nasir. In doing so he shook up the Afghan bureau. Its relations with Hekmatyar were already a mess. Nasir's ardent personal beliefs had led him into obscure theological arguments with his putative client. ISI was supposed to be helping Hekmatyar pressure "the fox of Panjs.h.i.+r," as Qazi called Ma.s.soud. Instead, Javed Nasir picked fights over religion.30 ISI had even deeper interests at stake than Hekmatyar's fate. By 1994, Pakistani intelligence relied on the Islamist training camps in Hekmatyar-controlled Afghan territory to support its new covert jihad in Indian-held Kashmir. The political-religious networks around Hekmatyar trained and s.h.i.+pped foreign volunteers to Kashmir. Bhutto recalled that during this period, Pakistani intelligence officers repeatedly told her they could not fight the clandestine Kashmir war with Kashmiris alone; there just weren't enough effective native guerrillas to bleed Indian troops. They needed Afghan and Arab volunteers, and they needed the sanctuary of guerrilla training camps in Afghan territory.31 This complicated ISI's new relations.h.i.+p with the Taliban. Mullah Omar was determined to challenge Hekmatyar for supremacy among Pashtuns. If Pakistani intelligence suddenly s.h.i.+fted its support to Omar, it might put the covert Kashmir war at risk. Pakistani brigadiers working from Peshawar, close to Hekmatyar for years, wanted to stick with their longtime client. But ISI's Quetta and Kandahar offices, responsible for covert policy in southern Afghanistan, became intrigued by the Taliban, according to accounts later a.s.sembled by the CIA.

Qazi's "chap in Kandahar" urged that the ISI chief meet some of the new militia, as Qazi recalled it. He invited a Taliban delegation to ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi. Mullah Omar refused to travel, but a senior group arrived. They picked up their dirty, sandled feet and sat cross-legged on top of the sofa cus.h.i.+ons, as if they were sitting on the floor. Some of them were limbless. Others had been fitted with artificial legs or arms. "I was horrified to see they had emerged literally from the villages," recalled Qazi, a product of Pakistan's British-designed higher education system. "They had very little clue about international affairs or anything like that. They had their own peculiar set of ideas. The only thing I found was that they were well intentioned."

The Taliban delegation urged Qazi to withdraw ISI's support from other Afghan leaders, including Hekmatyar. Young and thick-bearded, their faces marked and wizened beyond their years, they declared that all other Afghan leaders had brought destruction to the country. They wanted "to hang all of them-all of them." They also asked ISI for logistical help. The Taliban wanted to import gasoline from Pakistan and sought an exemption from trade rules. Qazi agreed, as he recalled it. They also asked ISI for logistical help. The Taliban wanted to import gasoline from Pakistan and sought an exemption from trade rules. Qazi agreed, as he recalled it.32 Bhutto said that in the months that followed this first meeting between ISI and the Taliban, the requests from Pakistani intelligence for covert aid to their new clients grew gradually. "I became slowly, slowly sucked into it," Bhutto remembered. "It started out with a little fuel, then it became machinery" and spare parts for the Taliban's captured airplanes and tanks. Next ISI made requests for trade concessions that would enrich both the Taliban and the outside businessmen who supplied them. "Then it became money" direct from the Pakistani treasury, Bhutto recalled.

Each time Pakistani intelligence officers asked for more covert aid during 1995, they said they needed the funds to attain leverage over the Taliban. The ISI brigadiers complained to Bhutto that the Taliban's leaders were stubborn, that they would not follow the military and political advice Pakistan offered. By providing cash, military spare parts, and training, the Pakistani intelligence service told Bhutto, they could ensure that the Taliban stayed close to Pakistan as they began to challenge Ma.s.soud.

"I started sanctioning the money," Bhutto recalled. "Once I gave the go-ahead that they should get money, I don't know how much money they were ultimately given. . . . I know it was a lot. It was just carte blanche."33 By the spring of 1995 these covert supplies were visible across southern Afghanistan. ISI sent exiled Pashtun military officers and guerrilla leaders to the Taliban's cause. Former Afghan communist army officers loyal to Shahnawaz Tanai began to repair and operate Taliban tanks, aircraft, and helicopters. In eastern Afghanistan powerful local commanders such as Jallaladin Haqqanni declared for the Taliban. These political conversions were supported by money, weapons, pickup trucks, and supplies s.h.i.+pped across the Pakistan border. Volunteer fighters poured out of the border madra.s.sas. madra.s.sas.When Herat fell to the Taliban in September, the die was cast. Omar and his Durrani militia now controlled all of southern Afghanistan. They announced their intention to march on Kabul.34 Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto felt that she was losing control of her new Afghan policy. She did not want Pakistani intelligence to back the Taliban in a military drive on Kabul. Bhutto argued that Pakistan should use the Taliban's rising strength as a new lever in negotiations for a coalition Afghan government. Some in the army and ISI agreed with her, but the Taliban did not care for these Pakistani diplomatic nuances. They still meant what they said: They did not want to negotiate with other Afghan leaders, they wanted to hang them.

Bhutto began to wonder if ISI was telling her everything about its covert aid to the Taliban.When Bhutto traveled to Tehran, Iranian president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, who supported Ma.s.soud, lashed out at her in a private meeting, complaining angrily about covert Pakistani aid to the Taliban. Rafsanjani alleged that Pakistan's army sent disguised troops into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Taken aback, Bhutto denied this, but later, when she heard that Ma.s.soud held Pakistani officers in his prisoner of war camps, she wondered about what she had not been told.35 Yet ISI's ambition was greater than its purse. Pakistan's army suffered from acute money problems during 1995. The army commanded the lion's share of Pakistan's budget, but with American aid cut over the nuclear issue, there was not much to go around. The country wallowed in debt. An arms race with India drained resources. As it had during the 1980s, ISI needed Saudi intelligence, and it needed wealthy Islamist patrons from the Persian Gulf.

EARLY IN 1995, Ahmed Badeeb, chief of staff to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the director of Saudi intelligence, descended toward Kandahar's airport in a Gulfstream-2 corporate jet. As the plane was about to touch down, Badeeb saw a cow in the middle of the runway. His pilot pulled up suddenly, flew around, and tried again. The Taliban's greeting party chased the cow away and crowded around Badeeb when he reached the tarmac.

"Don't you remember us?" some of the bearded young Taliban asked. Badeeb stared at them and confessed he did not.

"We were students in your school!"36 During the anti-Soviet jihad Ahmed Badeeb had funded a vocational school for Afghan boys along the Pakistani border. The school was personal charity, funded from his Islamic zakat, zakat, or t.i.the. or t.i.the.

The Taliban explained that they had since moved Badeeb's entire school to Kandahar. One of the graduates was Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, a senior member of the founding Taliban ruling shura shura and a close a.s.sociate of Mullah Omar. Rabbani (no relation to President Rabbani, Ma.s.soud's ally in Kabul) expressed deep grat.i.tude to Badeeb. He led the Saudi to a waiting car. They drove to meet Mullah Omar in central Kandahar. and a close a.s.sociate of Mullah Omar. Rabbani (no relation to President Rabbani, Ma.s.soud's ally in Kabul) expressed deep grat.i.tude to Badeeb. He led the Saudi to a waiting car. They drove to meet Mullah Omar in central Kandahar.

Afghan colleagues carried the Taliban leader into the meeting; he was having trouble with one of his legs. But Omar stood long enough to offer Badeeb a long, warm embrace. Over tea and plates of food Omar told the story of the Taliban's rise in Kandahar. As Badeeb recalled it, Omar told him the first weapons he received had come from Pakistan's Interior Ministry.

The Taliban leaders asked Badeeb for guidance and support. They needed to learn from Saudi Arabia about how to run a proper Islamic government, they said. Omar asked Badeeb to send in whatever texts Saudi Arabian schools used so they could be handed out in Taliban schools. He asked for food and a.s.sistance that would allow Afghan refugees to return home. Badeeb presented Omar with a copy of the Koran as a gift, and Omar said he would follow its teachings always.

"Whatever Saudi Arabia wants me to do, I will do," Omar told Badeeb, as Badeeb recalled it.37 Prince Turki had sent Badeeb on this mission to Kandahar. The Pakistanis were advertising the Taliban to the Saudis as an important new force on the Afghan scene. Babar referred to the Taliban as "my boys," and he gave both Badeeb and Prince Turki the impression that he had helped create them and was now building them up steadily.38 Prince Turki flew into Islamabad and met with Mullah Rabbani, Badeeb's former student. He wanted the Taliban to support an all-party peace proposal for Afghanistan. Turki remained personally involved in Afghan political negotiations. There was a sense among many Saudi officials when they looked at the Afghans that, but for the luck of Saudi oil, something like this might have been their fate. It bothered Turki greatly that the Americans had walked away from Afghanistan. A negotiated peace might deliver a modest success for Saudi foreign policy as well, checking rivals Iran and India, but Turki's interest in the issue often seemed as much personal as professional.

The Taliban's Rabbani was only in his twenties, but he seemed relatively sophisticated to Prince Turki,