Free Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou Page A

Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
    We got back into the car as night fell. Bachrom picked up speed, braking and easing his car to the right as we approached every blind turn and then accelerating when the road opened up briefly ahead. We rounded one corner, and Bachrom slammed on the brakes. A column of expensive cars was ahead of us, driving in the same direction.
    â€œMilitary command,” Ali said, while Bachrom cut his speed and coasted. “They are bad, dangerous people.”
    Conversation didn’t resume until after the convoy had disappeared. We rounded another corner, and our headlights picked up a roadside hut and two soldiers pacing outside, their young, smooth faces shadowed by the stiff green peaked caps above them. One waved at us to stop. Bachrom rolled down the window a couple of inches and passed out a tightly folded bill. I looked over at Ali. His face was buried in his hands.
    By the summer of 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks, the Taliban had taken over almost all of Afghanistan, driving the Northern Alliance into an ever-shrinking pocket in the north, and in the traditional resistance fighter redoubt of the Panjshir Valley. Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, was fighting another seemingly hopeless war. He was a master of guerilla tactics, but the odds against him were as long as they had ever been when facing the Soviets. The Taliban still had the firm backing of Pakistan’s largest and most powerful spy agency, and their depleted ranks were continuously refilled with recruits from Pakistan’s madrassahs. Their most notorious guest, Osama bin Laden, provided them with cash, international connections, and the guns, muscle, and ideological zeal of the foreign, mostly Arab, jihadists in al-Qaeda.
    Massoud’s allies were much more fickle. He received some support from Russia, Iran, and India. His agents cooperated closely with the CIA. But while America recognized that the United States and Massoud shared a common enemy in Osama bin Laden, there was little interest in confronting the Taliban under the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. America wanted to narrow the scope of its terrorist problem. And one man was much easier to deal with than a movement that controlled millions of people and most of a country.
    Massoud tried to change this. He sent envoys to America to meet with State Department officials to try to convince them that the Taliban should be considered part of a larger Islamist network funded by bin Laden and other wealthy Gulf sheiks. Simply getting rid of bin Laden wouldn’t solve the problem. As recently as August 2001, Massoud dispatched his longtime friend and foreign minister, an ophthalmologist named Abdullah Abdullah, to Washington, where the Northern Alliance’s resident lobbyist managed to book a few appointments at the State Department and on Capitol Hill. Abdullah went with Qayum Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai, who was then a leader among anti-Taliban Pashtuns from Afghanistan’s south. They got nowhere. As Steve Coll documents in Ghost Wars , a history of the CIA in Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks, “the members they met with could barely manage politeness.” Even arguments based on the oppression of women under the Taliban found little traction. Instead, the two Afghan envoys heard counter-arguments about “moderate” and “non-moderate” Taliban. They left after a week, completely dejected.
    It wouldn’t take long before bin Laden demonstrated how closely al-Qaeda co-operated with its Taliban hosts. On September 9, 2001, two Arab television journalists with Belgian passports arrived in the village of Khodja Bahuddin, where Massoud kept a base in northern Afghanistan. Hidden inside their camera was a bomb that they had carried with them from Pakistan, to Kabul, and finally to Massoud’s compound. When it exploded in Massoud’s face, he was fatally wounded and died soon afterwards.