be arresting them,’ shrugged one US official. ‘Frankly there was no great interest on the part of the Pakistanis in catching Taliban, and it wasn’t our priority,’ said Bob Grenier, who was CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time. ‘I suppose we might have kicked and screamed and held our breath and demanded “By God you’ve got to get these guys,” but that might actually have undermined our efforts in what was for us the greatest priority, and where we already had their active cooperation, which was al Qaeda. I didn’t see any particular reason to do that.’
The lack of will to do anything about the Taliban was infuriating President Karzai. He told me he had even given the Americans the names and addresses of Taliban in Quetta. Both he and his Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah had used their visit to Washington in January to ask the Bush administration to pressure Pakistan. ‘I told the Americans I know the Taliban leaders are in Pakistan,’ said Abdullah. ‘But they were only interested in al Qaeda, and for that they believed they needed Musharraf.’
After going to Washington, Abdullah went to see Musharraf. ‘He told me, “ISI is now under my control, previous governments didn’t control it but I’ve sacked eighty people.” Then he told me his brother was visiting from the US, and said he’s a very free kind of person who likes to travel and wanted to go to Kabul. Musharraf said, “I told him no, it’s not safe,” but then said, “I’ll send him in a bus with my ISI.” I couldn’t believe he was so blatant.’
The very week I was meeting Taliban in Pakistan, Musharraf was being fêted in Washington on his second visit since 9/11. He met Vice President Dick Cheney and had lunch with President Bush at the White House. ‘President Musharraf is a leader with great courage and vision,’ said Bush. ‘I am proud to call him my friend.’
On 12 February 2002, while Musharraf was in Washington, the Pakistan government announced that it had arrested a British-born Pakistani called Omar Saeed Sheikh for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. A graduate of the London School of Economics, this was not the first time twenty-seven-year-old Sheikh had been involved in a kidnapping. He had served time in an Indian jail for the kidnap of four Western tourists in Delhi in 1994. Pretending to be a local, he had befriended the three British and one American travellers and invited them to what he said was his village. They were freed by Indian police and he was jailed till 1999, when he was released in exchange for 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane that had been hijacked to Kandahar.
Mysteriously, Sheikh turned out to have been staying with retired ISI brigadier Ejaz Shah for a week before being handed over to Pakistani police working with the FBI hunting for Pearl in Karachi. Nobody explained why Shah did not turn him in earlier. The CIA believed Sheikh had been working for ISI. Even once he was in police custody, it was a month before the FBI were allowed to interview him. By then it was too late. What we didn’t know when Sheikh’s arrest was announced was that the thirty-eight-year-old Pearl was already dead. Nine days later, on 21 February, a video was handed to the US Embassy entitled ‘The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl’. The horrific footage, showing a knife slitting Pearl’s throat and beheading him, was the first al Qaeda execution recorded on video.2 It ended with the captors demanding the release of all Muslim prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and warning that if their demands were not met they would repeat the scene ‘again and again’.
Pakistan refused to extradite Sheikh. When asked about this, Musharraf said, ‘Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over-intrusive. A media person should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas. Unfortunately he got over-involved.’
Pakistani generals were astonished that the US hadn’t committed more troops to Afghanistan, and that they had allowed bin Laden and so many al Qaeda fighters to escape. Throughout 2002, ISI sent memos to Musharraf saying that the Americans were clearly not interested in Afghanistan and would soon leave, and that the Taliban should be kept as an option.
In February 2003 Mullah Omar emerged from silence with a letter faxed to a Pakistani newspaper, calling on all Afghans to rise up against the Americans and the Karzai government: ‘The Afghans should abandon the ranks of America, the crusaders and their allies, and should immediately start a jihad. Vacate all offices, ministries, provinces so that the distinction between a Muslim and a crusader is made.’
A few weeks later I went back to Quetta, and found the Taliban were no longer in hiding. World attention had moved on to Iraq, where the US was poised to invade any day, and the city had become Taliban Central.
Umar took me to Mizan Chowk, a busy square. Men in black turbans, their eyes lined with black kohl, wandered about openly, exchanging the typical lengthy Pashto greetings. Newsstands openly sold Taliban CDs and tapes, including one of Mullah Omar’s speech.
We visited the New Muslim Speeches Music Shop, which displayed posters and stickers depicting grenades, handheld rocket launchers and other jihadi weapons of choice, imprinted with slogans calling for youth to rise up against the West. Inside were a group of younger men with tightly wound turbans and trousers cropped way above the ankle, which was typical of Taliban. They seemed galvanised by Mullah Omar’s call to arms. ‘We fought before to liberate our country, and we will fight again,’ said one. ‘Now it is time to expel these infidels from our land.’ They told us that they had been in Kandahar when the bombing started, and had come into Pakistan – white flags were flown near the border to tell them it was safe to cross.
One told us that ISI was giving them satellite phones, Toyota pick-ups and motorbikes. Once again the agency was running training camps, just as it had during the jihad in the 1980s, and bringing in arms shipments and funds from the Gulf.
I was fascinated and wanted to talk longer, but my presence was drawing attention, and Umar was growing nervous. He pointed out a car with dark-tinted windows that had stopped nearby.
Later we heard that Taliban commanders were being threatened that if they did not return to the fight, ISI would hand them over to the Americans, and they’d end up in Guantánamo.
After I wrote about what I had seen, Pakistan’s Embassies started excluding Quetta when they issued visas to journalists. ‘It’s for your own safety,’ said the smiling Press Minister at the High Commission in London. ‘But I have friends in Quetta who will keep me safe,’ I pleaded, to no avail. The handful of other journalists who sneaked in were beaten up or arrested, like my good friend Marc Epstein from the French magazine L’Express and his photographer Jean-Paul Guilloteau, who were picked up in December 2003 and held for almost a month. Their fixer Khawar Mehdi Rizvi was accused of sedition, conspiracy and impersonation of Taliban, and was tortured while in jail. He later went into exile in the US, as many Pakistanis have been forced to do.
Next time I got a visa it was stamped ‘Islamabad Only’. ‘No country in the world issues visas just for the capital city,’ I protested.
Back home, I met up with an old friend from ISI in a south-west London bistro full of yummy mummies and ladies who lunch. ‘We never had this conversation,’ he said as we started our soup. ‘What you have to understand is everything we do to cooperate with the Americans there are others who work in the opposite way.’ He referred to what he called ‘the shadow organisation’ – the first time I heard about the so-called ‘Sector S’ – explaining that Pakistan needed to keep its options open, so ISI had an entire group of people who were officially retired, perhaps heading ‘welfare organisations’, but were still training and advising Taliban. ‘It’s all about deniability,’ he said. If any of them were caught, they would be shrugged off as ‘rogue elements’.
My soup got cold as I sat open-mouthed, wondering if Pakistan really could pull the wool over the eyes of the world’s most powerful country. ‘Does Mullah Omar even exist?’ I asked.
‘There is a man with one eye and limited intelligence called Mullah Omar, if that’s what you mean,’ he chuckled. ‘You saw what happened to Danny Pearl,’ he said, as all around us the bistro tinkled with the laughter of gossiping women and small children and sunlight. ‘If I were you, I would know this: I would eat my lunch and I would investigate no further.’
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