Killing ourselves in Afghanistan

From the time Muhammed arrived in North Waziristan in 2001 until his recent defection, he worked, he says, under Siraj Haqqani. Siraj, now the leader of the North Waziristan-based Taliban, is the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was one of the seven main Afghan mujahedin leaders of the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s, and a direct recipient of the U.S. and Saudi aid that was funneled to all seven of those leaders via the ISI.

Jalaluddin Haqqani had also fled into North Waziristan in late 2001. He had suffered serious wounds to his shoulder and leg. For six months after the fall of the Taliban, as the elder Haqqani recuperated, Haji Muhammed and his comrades did nothing, though they very much wanted to expel Afghanistan's new foreign occupiers, the Americans, and the American-installed government in Kabul. "We waited to see how the Americans were fighting," Muhammed told me. "And we waited for money and supplies. We had very little."

According to Muhammed, the fighters who regrouped in North Waziristan after the fall of Kabul were a complex and ever-shifting alliance of Afghan Talibs, al-Qaida of various nationalities, Pashtun tribal militias and Pakistani jihadists. Within the mix, he said, there were two main and distinct groups. One was largely domestic and made up of Afghan and Pakistani Talibs. The other one was, and is, led by foreign fighters -- Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens. This was Muhammed's organization.

Though he served under an Afghan Pashtun, Siraj Haqqani, he worked and trained with Abu Layth-al Libi, a Libyan national in his 40s who's considered by many in the U.S. intelligence community to be al-Qaida's No. 3. Abu Layth is best known for being the man who informed the world in July 2002 that bin Laden was still alive, and was also seen in video footage from 2004 leading an apparent attack on an Afghan military outpost. Abu Layth was reportedly killed by a CIA predator drone strike this January.

Despite fighting alongside Layth, Muhammed did not consider himself al-Qaida -- he insisted to me, quite forcefully, that he was Taliban -- but the goal was the same. All wanted to attack the Americans inside Afghanistan.

Some of the cash and weapons needed to carry the fight to the Americans finally appeared after Jalaluddin Haqqani reached out to his previous handlers in the ISI. Beginning in 2002, according to Muhammed, the Pakistani intelligence agents who had underwritten his struggle against the Soviets and had continued to fund him up until the U.S. invasion begin helping Haqqani again. Haqqani and his men were able to stockpile Russian and Chinese light arms provided by the Pakistanis, and Muhammed, not then a commander, helped organize small groups of fighters for additional training. In the winter months, Muhammed and the other fighters lived in the North Waziristan lowlands; when the snows melted, they headed for their training camps in the hills.

By 2004, Muhammed was a platoon leader. But supplies were still inconsistent and his platoon's efforts inside Afghanistan's eastern provinces against Afghan, U.S. and coalition forces remained sporadic. That changed later that year when Pakistan army trucks began arriving in Miran Shah to collect fighters. "We were put in the back of the trucks at night," Muhammed said. "There were about 40 or so men loaded into the trucks with the top covered. We were driven to Nowshera" -- a town far north of Waziristan in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province where the Pakistan army has many training facilities -- "and we stayed for a few days for training. After, they drove us back to Miran Shah." European and American analysts believe Pakistan stepped up aid to the insurgents in 2004 because the Musharraf regime saw that U.S. forces were achieving no better than a stalemate in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban's stronghold. The Pakistanis stepped into the resulting power vacuum by aiding the Taliban.

The ISI also began to provide assistance in the Taliban's own training camps. The training camps inside both North and South Waziristan, said Muhammed, required new recruits to go through all the same training. After the ISI began helping, the labor was divided. In addition to leading attacks inside Afghanistan, Muhammed helped train young Afghan and Pakistani men in basic weapons. "I was good at some things, like teaching how to fire weapons." While he did that, an Arab or Uzbek trainer might school a smaller group in remote-controlled bombs or IEDs. An ISI officer, meanwhile, might teach an even smaller group how to gather intelligence.

Combined, it was an excellent education in guerrilla warfare, the same methods and tactics taught in the camps in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. And Muhammed intimated that because of Pakistani protection, the fighters in the North Waziristan training camps didn't fear American air power. "We were never scared or worried about American airstrikes. We were only worried about the men who entered. We had very serious security. You had to have proper paperwork and permission to get inside the camps. We worried about spies, but not missiles."

Muhammed himself also received training from the ISI that allowed him to launch more sophisticated attacks across the border. During late 2005, Muhammed and his platoon operated on the Shawal mountain range in North Waziristan. From the Shawal peaks he and his men could see Afghanistan just a few miles away. An ISI captain named Asif Khan trained him to use a 6-foot rocket called the Sakar-20, a Russian-made device that is roughly 6 feet long and requires several days to perfect firing.

The rockets were delivered at night by an ISI logistics officer to a house in Miran Shah. The next morning, Muhammed's men would retrieve them and transport them to the Shawal peaks. Capt. Khan never wore a uniform and kept his beard long. The ISI and army personnel who worked with the Taliban, Muhammed said, almost never wore uniforms, the better to blend in. "From their looks they were mujahedin," he said.

Capt. Khan, who took orders from another ISI officer whom Muhammed knew as "Major Doctor Sajit," spent a week teaching Muhammed how to position the rocket on the Shawal's ridgeline to get its maximum range of 30 kilometers. Khan, Muhammed said, also gave the Taliban fighters GPS devices, taught the men how to calibrate them, and then paid Afghans to take the device across the border to nearby American and Afghan bases to pinpoint their locations. With those coordinates, Muhammed could fire the Sakar-20 with decent precision. "Once I was taught, then I trained my men."

In 2005 and 2006, Muhammed fired the Sakar-20's at U.S. and Afghan posts inside Khost, the Afghan province just across the border from North Waziristan. "We fired rockets inside Afghanistan whenever we could get supplied," said Muhammed. He did not tell me what he hit with the rockets. In late 2006, he began to consider defecting, and in 2007 he made the leap, fleeing to Kabul and the protection of the National Directorate for Security, or NDS, the Afghan government's intelligence agency.

On a second meeting in the same Central Kabul office, Muhammed and I again sat cross-legged on the red rug and drank tea. This time I spread before him some maps of Pakistan's Tribal Areas, so he could help me understand where he had been and what he had done.

He pointed out the mountain range where he used to fire rockets into Afghanistan, and the village where one of the training camps was situated, and from which he and Abu Layth led an attack on a small American fire base across the border.

I asked Muhammed why he really left the Taliban, why he had abandoned his friends and colleagues after 15 years. He sighed and looked at his feet for a few moments, suddenly looking much older than his years.

I joined the Taliban when I was young," he finally answered, "very young. They wanted to get rid of corruption and to end the fighting between the warlords. Afghanistan needed this and I wanted to help. I became a soldier, but when we fled to Waziristan we relied too much on the Pakistanis. And we were corrupted. Land disputes inside Afghanistan were settled by Pakistanis, and by the man with the most money. This isn't just. And fewer Afghans made decisions about how and where and when to fight inside Afghanistan."

Muhammed has come to terms with his new station in life. "I worked many years with Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens. I have accepted that they must be killed for Afghanistan's sake. I don't feel bad." But he still draws the line at helping those other foreigners. "I won't work for the Americans. Twice NDS has asked me to meet with them. I said no. If I do that I am surely a dead man."

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