Andy Worthington: Basically, the problem
is that Pakistan has long regarded the control of Afghanistan
as an aim of its foreign policy, and elements within the Pakistani
administration – in government, in the military, and in the
intelligence services (the ISI) – were at least partly responsible
for supporting the Taliban, the very people the Americans were
pursuing after 9/11. In some ways it was a return to the situation
that had prevailed during the Soviet occupation, when the Americans
had poured billions of dollars’ worth of aid into the mujahideen
resistance, but only through Pakistani intermediaries, who,
of course, chose to support those who suited their own aims
rather than those of the Americans. So the wily and formidable
Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, who later became the leader
of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and was assassinated two
days before 9/11, received virtually nothing, because he was
not a Pakistani ally, whereas Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was virulently
anti-American, received the lion’s share of the Pakistani-directed
US aid. As for the Saudis, the oil
connection – whereby the US funded the Saudis and had to keep
the House of Saud sweet in return for their precious black
gold – overshadowed any possibility of an objective analysis
of Saudi motives. During the Soviet occupation, the Saudis
matched – or exceeded – American donations to the mujahideen
cause, giving them unprecedented political leverage, and this
largesse continued into the 1990s, after the Americans lost
interest in Afghanistan, when they obviously continued playing
political games for their own ends.
To sum all this up in one line, it’s worth
reflecting that, while the Taliban were in power, from 1994
to 2001, only three countries officially recognized the regime:
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Al-istiqamah: Chapter
2 of your book covers the Qala-i-Janghi massacre at a fort
in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. This infamous ‘uprising’
resulted in the killing of CIA agent ‘Mike’ Spann and the
capture of the ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh. As a
journalist yourself, what did you make of Shafiq Rasul’s statement
that the journalists present only seemed interested in ascertaining
if any of the surviving prisoners knew John Walker Lindh?
Andy Worthington: I think Shafiq was largely
correct. A number of journalists were present at Qala-i-Janghi
after the uprising – or the massacre, depending on how you
look at it – and many of them wrote very balanced reports,
but by the time the survivors reached Sheberghan (the prison
run by General Dostum, one of the Northern Alliance leaders),
word had got out – via an interview with Lindh that was broadcast
around the world – that an American was being held, and Sheberghan
was overrun, for the most part, by journalists, frantic to
cover the “American Taliban” story, who were completely untouched
by the suffering of the other prisoners. This was quite remarkable,
really. Sheberghan was meant to hold a few hundred prisoners,
whereas it was actually holding around 3,000 in dreadful conditions,
and it should have been evident to any capable journalist
that this was a story in its own right.
I should point out that there were exceptions.
Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, for example,
visited
the prison specifically to speak to some of the other prisoners.
This was clearly what other reporters should have been doing,
as she managed to speak to an Iraqi who was later sent to
Guantánamo, and, more distressingly, to an Uzbek, Abdul
Jabar, who never made it to Guantánamo, and who told
her, “They are going to send us back to Uzbekistan, and there
we will not survive prison.”
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