For a Taliban commander fighting well-resourced foreign forces, help from the Pakistani intelligence service is a shameful necessity.
In a sign of how freely insurgents — or at least unarmed ones — can move around even the most heavily policed areas of the most sensitive parts of the Afghan capital, Kabul, the militant agreed to meet the Guardian in one of Kabul’s ritziest restaurants, in a hotel-shopping complex, where he bemoaned the influence of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
“Whoever disrespects your country and interferes in it is your enemy, but sometimes you need to ask for help from your enemies,” the wiry 52-year-old said as he scooped up food with bark-like hands, hardened by his day job as a farmer.
None of the well-heeled Afghan diners and foreign contractors batted an eyelid as the thickly bearded man — who cannot be named — helped himself to rice and barbecue chicken from the buffet.
Because of orders “from superiors” to talk to foreign media, he had been prepared to travel by taxi for several hours from his village. He passed easily through the extra security laid on for the second day of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s peace jirga — a gathering he said was controlled by the Afghan president’s foreign backers and was therefore pointless.
Two nights earlier, the commander and his band of a dozen insurgents in Wardak Province, just south of the capital, had attacked members of a local US-backed militia. They successfully blew up their Ford Ranger truck, killing one militiaman and wounding three others.
As with the nine Taliban field commanders who met the author of the London School of Economics report on the ISI’s connections to the Taliban [Editor’s note: see “Report slams Pakistan for meddling in Afghanistan,” June 14, page 1], he spoke freely about his unease at the role of Pakistan’s spy agency, which he blamed for attacks where ordinary Afghans were killed or hurt.
“We do everything we can to avoid civilian causalities. But there are different types of Taliban — there are those like me and there are those that follow direction from the ISI. Those are the kind that kill elders and attack schools. They don’t want to have schools in this society. They want to keep Afghanistan in the darkness of no education,” he said.
Some Western officials hope that such anti-Pakistani sentiment will encourage some insurgents to stop fighting as part of a “reconciliation” process. One senior diplomat recently said that the two greatest inducements to Taliban fighters were the opportunity to return home from Pakistan and to get out of the grip of the ISI.
The arrest in Pakistan of a former senior Taliban commander, Mullah Baradar, in February is now regarded by analysts as a bid by the ISI to prevent the Afghan Taliban from unilaterally opening peace talks with Karzai’s government.
The commander who spoke to the Guardian viewed things slightly different, but still saw it as an example of Pakistan’s untrustworthiness: “On the one side they are helping us, but on the other side when the Americans pay more money they hand him [Baradar] over.”
A former head of vehicle registration for Kabul during the Taliban regime of the late 1990s, he said he only joined the insurgency to “protect myself and my country against foreign troops.”
For a couple of years after the Taliban regime was toppled by the US-led invasion in 2001, he remained out of the fight. However, it was when people started being arrested during raids by US soldiers hunting for al-Qaeda and the Taliban that he felt he had no choice but to join the insurgents.
“I had no choice; where else could I get money and bullets to protect myself and my family? Imagine if I was taken during a night raid by the Americans to Bagram or Guantanamo? Then my honor and religion would be at risk,” he said.
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