Descent Into Chaos Read Free Page A

strongest economies
    HT—Hizb ut-Tahir
    ICRC—International Committee of the Red Cross
    IMU—Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
    IOM—International Office for Migration
    ISAF—International Security Assistance Force
    ISI—Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate
    JCMB—Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (for the Afghanistan Compact)
    JI—Jamiat-e-Islami
    LJ—Loya Jirga
    LOC—Line of Control (between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir)
    LT—Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
    MI5—British secret service (domestic)
    MMA—Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal
    NA—Northern Alliance
    NATO—North Atlantic Treaty Organization
    NDS—National Directorate of Security (Riasat Amniat-e-Meli)
    NGO—Nongovernmental organization
    NWFP—North-West Frontier Province
    PRT—Provincial Reconstruction Team
    PUC—Person Under Control (category of prisoner)
    UN—United Nations
    UNAMA—United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan
    UNODC—United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
    UNSC—United Nations Security Council
    USAID—U.S. Agency for International Development
    U.S. SOF—U.S. Special Operations Forces

PART ONE
    9/11 AND WAR

CHAPTER ONE
    A Man with a Mission The Unending Conflict in Afghanistan
    Six weeks before 9/11, an old Afghan friend of mine came to spend the day with me at my home in Lahore. We had lunch and then began an intense discussion that went on until the evening, without reaching a conclusion. He had come to discuss a specific problem he faced. At issue was his future, his safety, and the fate of his country, which was inextricably linked to my life as a journalist for the past twenty-three years and to the fate of my own country, Pakistan.
    My friend was Hamid Karzai, chief of the Popalzai tribe centered near Kandahar. He had just been delivered an ultimatum by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, better known in Pakistan as ISI, the military’s all-powerful and much-feared intelligence agency, which for two decades had run Pakistan’s covert wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir, had harassed dissidents at home, and was now the principal supporter of the Taliban regime. The ISI told Karzai that he could no longer stay in Pakistan, his visa would not be renewed, and he must leave the country with his family by September 30. Karzai had resided in Pakistan since 1983, save for a brief stint in Kabul in the early 1990s. We both knew who had really ordered his expulsion: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban in Kandahar. The ISI was merely obliging the Taliban, who could no longer tolerate Karzai’s anti-Taliban politicking from his home in Quetta, in Balochistan province, just 150 miles from Kandahar. We both knew that the expulsion order was as much a death threat as it was a warning, and it could not be taken lightly.
    Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, had been murdered by the Taliban in 1999—an assassination that Karzai believes also implicated the ISI. The elder Karzai had been chief of the Popalzai tribe, a former deputy speaker of parliament, and immensely respected for his honesty and wisdom by all the southern Pashtun tribes. The Pashtuns were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and had ruled and dominated the country for 250 years. Mullah Omar, an itinerant preacher, could not claim the pedigree of the Karzais, and the fact that they hailed from Kandahar, as did much of the Taliban leadership, only incensed him further. After murdering the elder Karzai, the Taliban and their agents murdered more than a dozen prominent Afghans living in Pakistan who opposed the Taliban regime. The Pakistani police never caught any of the assassins because they were well protected by the ISI. As the Taliban regime became more internationally isolated and condemned because of its crimes against the Afghan people and the hosting of Osama bin Laden, it became more desperate to wipe out all opposition to it. 1
    I, too, had earned the wrath of the ISI by criticizing the Taliban in my articles and exposing the considerable