The Pushtun want you!

>> Threats, bargaining and patriotic appeals are common recruiting techniques among Afghanistan's warring parties.

by KEN HECHTMAN

Hyatabad, Peshawar--Oct. 23 It's one thing to march down Ste-Catherine chanting, "1-2-3-4 we don't want your fucking war!" It's quite another to tell the Taliban's recruiting officer he can't have the 1,000 men he demanded from your tribe and if he doesn't like it he can go perform an un-Islamic act on himself, and furthermore, you plan to advise all the other tribes in Afghanistan to do the same. The latter was this April's expression of the Kharoti Tribal Council's policy of neutrality in Afghanistan's civil war. Perhaps even more impressive than the gesture of defiance is the fact that they got away with it. The Taliban made some threats but never followed through and since this spring, the Kharoti have provided no troops for either the Taliban or the Northern Alliance.

The 2-million strong Kharoti tribe is one of the biggest and best organized in the Pushtun ethnic group, spread all over the country but with the biggest concentration in Parvan province, on the front lines between Taliban and Northern Alliance territory. The town of Bagram, location of the Bagram air base, which has changed hands several times in the civil war, is also their tribal centre.

Conscription in Afghanistan, at least among the Pushtuns, is levied at the tribal level. Both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance periodically order each tribe in their territory to provide a quota of soldiers. The Kharoti lands straddle the front lines and both sides look to the Kharoti men to replace their losses in the continuing conflict. "We do not want Kharotis to kill Kharotis in a war that has nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan. We will not let the Taliban and Shomali Tahid [Northern Alliance] fight their own war down to the last Kharoti," says Haji Haris Khan, the 26-year-old general secretary of the Kharoti Tribal Council.

Haris Khan also has a correspondence scrapbook including a letter to the U.S. State Department, describing the Taliban's troop levy, the Kharoti refusal, the Taliban's threats and the current Kharoti request for support. The answer they got was a blow-off letter from the state department, signed by an Acting Assistant Deputy Secretary, redirecting them to the UN High Comission for Refugees. Once again, the Americans are asleep at the switch. Since 1995, Haris Khan's project to revive the old tribal structures has been taken up by three of the six large tribes and around 20 of the 100-plus small tribes, though not all share the Kharoti's committment to neutrality at any cost. The Americans are never going to see a better possibility for a bottom-up, popular, locally based government, if not pro-U.S. then at least not hostile. Haris Khan walked in the front door and was sent away with a form letter.



Networking the recruitment

horsetrade

Everything I need to know I learned watching the Sopranos. You don't just walk into Tony's office uninvited and ask for a favour--you wouldn't even get in the front door. You talk to the guy who knows the guy who knows The Guys. It works the same way here. That's how I started at the front gates of the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad and six introductions later, I'm having dinner here in a mansion in the rich Peshawar suburb Hyatabad with a Taliban cabinet minister and the Northern Alliance official he's trying to induce to defect.

In the last few days there have been a lot of meetings between regional Taliban commanders and their opposite numbers in the Northern Alliance. The Western press must have played up the 12 Taliban commanders who went over to the NA, and probably glossed over the six NAs who defected to the Taliban, Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayaf and the 15,000 men of Itihad-i-Islam-i-Afghanistan (Union of Islam of Afghanistan) probably being the most significant. There's a lot of horsetrading going on both ways and they all come to Peshawar to do it because this is neutral ground.

The fault lines that divide Afghanistan are changing: some Talibs want to get themselves on the winning side and some NAs can't stomach being the advance guard for foreign invaders. Less idealistically, a lot of money is changing hands. There's a lot of speculation about these sit-downs in the Pakistani press but nobody really knows anything. Haris Khan is brokering one tonight so I have a seat at the table.



The blood-feud drive

The Talib was Akhun Zada, a cabinet minister (transportation, I believe) and only 28 years old. Revolutionary governments have great promotion tracks, but lousy retirement plans. The object of the recruiting pitch was Mia Mohammadin, a 55-year-old NA civilian administrator from Parvan province. Mia says he was betrayed when his friend General Baba Jan (I thought I was doing well to know all the groups and their leaders--the people I talk to expect me to have heard of everyone down to the level of regimental commander) attacked his cousin's wedding and killed four Taliban guests. There's that "sanctity of the guest" thing again. It comes up a lot here. The minister must have heard that story, but wasn't told that the Taliban killed Mia's two brothers in revenge. Bottom line: The guy's not happy with the NA, but he says he's not putting on the black turban any time soon. Neither of which explains why he's even listening to a recruiting pitch, but there are some things you don't ask.

I told the minister about my visa problems and launched into my (now well-rehearsed) speech. "This is who I am. This is who I work for. This is what I want to do. This is how I want to do it." He cut me off less than a quarter of the way through and said, "I'm going back tomorrow. I can take you with me. Do you want to come stay with me?" If there's one thing I ought to have learned by now, it's to be careful what I ask for, because I just might get it. This guy's gotta be on the first or second page of the American shit list; do I really want to be riding in his car and sleeping in his house? Also, he doesn't speak a word of English and we never established if there's anybody on his staff that does. After his recruiting pitch failed, he stormed out of the house, said he'd come back and never did. Probably just as well. This way he gets to say he made the invitation, I get to say I accepted it and neither of us actually had to go through with it.

Later, a senior Taliban intelligence officer (How senior? Senior enough to drop the party line that September 11 was an Israeli frame-up and freely describe it as "our operation.") announced another major attack on either the U.S. or the U.K. or both scheduled for Friday, November 9. The operation, which he described as, "forced retaliation for the bombing of civilians," was orginally scheduled for Monday, October 30 but was postponed for unspecified reasons.

When asked for the source of the information, the officer answered that he got it from Mullah Fazil, the executive director of Taliban Intelligence, who got it in a conference with Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. He described the upcoming attack as "having something to do with airplanes again" and offered reassurances that there were no plans to target Canada as "Canada and other non-Muslim countries have not committed acts of terrorism against Afghanistan."

Flipping through Haris' brother Fareed's English-Pushtu dictionary after supper, I see it's organized by subject, not alphabetically. There's a section for Police and Crime, a big one for Military and War, another big one for Disasters and, just in case all that wasn't enough, a section at the end for Death in general. This does not fill me with confidence.