Dr. Williams is an associate professor of Islamic History ...pscriminology.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/MullahOmarsMissil… · 27 WILLIAMS: SUICIDE BOMBERS IN AFGHANISTAN But we

26

MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XV, NO. 4, WINTER 2008

© 2008, The Authors Journal Compilation © 2008, Middle East Policy Council

MULLAH OMAR’S MISSILES: A FIELD REPORT ON

SUICIDE BOMBERS IN AFGHANISTAN

Brian Glyn Williams

Dr. Williams is an associate professor of Islamic History at the Universityof Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

GARDEZ, TRIBAL AREA OF EASTERNAFGHANISTAN, MAY 2007 —

On an unusually warm springday, my Afghan driver droveme out of Kabul, and we madeour way down a road known as

“IED alley” that leads to the Pakistaniborder.1 On the way he pointed outseveral sites where Taliban suicide bomb-ers had recently detonated themselves nextto U.S. and NATO convoys. With a grinthat concealed his fears, he informed me thata Taliban bomber had also hit a civilian SUVmuch like our own on this very stretch ofroad just a few weeks earlier. For thisreason, we tried to maintain a low profile aswe joined the dusty line of brightly decorated'jingly' cargo trucks, packed buses, beat-upToyota Corollas and Afghan Army vehiclesdisgorging from the capital.

Having made our way out of the city,we soon left the main road and turnedsouth. There we found ourselves on anewly built tarmac road that wound its waythrough clay-walled villages, dry fields andbarren mountains to the Pashtun triballands. But for all its stark beauty, theprovinces we were driving through wereamong Afghanistan’s most dangerous and

had recently been labeled a no-go “redzone” by most foreign nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) and the UnitedNations. This point was driven home by theAfghan National Police soldiers whostopped us at several checkpoints along theway. At the last one, Kalashnikov-totingparamilitaries warned us to turn back, asTaliban insurgents operating in the area hadjust attacked a UN vehicle.2

Sadly, such attacks were becomingincreasingly common in this region. Since2005, the Taliban had been making inroadsinto the Pashtun territories of the southeast,and the province we were aiming for,Khost, had become a hotbed for insurgentactivity. Alarmingly, the tiny border prov-ince of Khost had also become the num-ber-two target (after the Taliban’s spiritualcapital of Kandahar) for fedayeen, thedreaded Taliban suicide bombers. And,truth be told, it was my research onAfghanistan’s suicide bombers that haddrawn me from the safety of my world tothe Pashtun tribal regions that straddle thePakistani-Afghan border. For this reason, Iopted to press onward, hoping that our lowprofile would keep us out of harm’s way.

27

WILLIAMS: SUICIDE BOMBERS IN AFGHANISTAN

But we did not need to go all the way toKhost to study the toll the Taliban suicidebombers were taking on the Afghan people.As we pulled into the provincial capital ofGardez, we passed an Afghan NationalArmy base entrance that had just been hit bya suicide bomber. While the bodies of thevictims had already been taken away, theblackened detritus of the bombing was stillplainly visible from the road. Just hoursbefore, a Taliban terrorist had approachedthe entrance and blown himself and thosearound him to bits in a tactic that had cometo define the Taliban insurgency.

When I interviewed locals who werestill traumatized by the attack, I began tounderstand the impact that a single bomb-ing has on a community. As I talked tobewildered villagers who cursed thebombers as “bad Muslims who pervertIslam” or “enemies of Afghanistan,” theirshock and fear were palpable. It remindedme of the fear that struck America whenthe so-called Beltway Sniper roamed theWashington, D.C., area in 2002 killinginnocent victims at random.

But that comparison only went so far,because the Beltway sniper “only” killed10 people and had a relatively brief run ofit. In Afghanistan, hundreds of bombershave now detonated themselves, seeminglyat random, in the midst of average Afghansgoing about their daily lives. There seemedto be no pattern to the killing, or so Ithought when I first began my study.Hundreds were dying in the bloody car-nage that seemed to be part of a crueleffort to destroy the very optimism that thewar-weary Afghans had begun to tenta-tively build since 2001.

As I interviewed the angry and fearfulpeople of Gardez, one old turbaned elderasked me, “How could this evil have come

to us? What sort of humans blow them-selves up among people trying to go abouttheir lives? We never had these thingsbefore. Not even when the Soviets occu-pied our lands. What are these killers tryingto achieve?”

While I did not have all the answers tohis question of what motivated the suicidebombers or how this alien tactic hadarrived in this land, I told the elder that,inshallah (God willing), one day I would.The following is the result of my U.S.-government-sponsored study to understandthe mysterious origins, overall strategy,impact and distinct Afghan trajectories ofthis deadly phenomenon. Among otherthings, this study points to one of the firstexamples of the so-called “Iraq effect”(the transfer of terror tactics from the Iraqitheater of action to other zones) and to auniquely Afghan bombing campaign that,for all its Iraqi origins and inspiration, hasits own distinct targeting patterns.

“IRAQ EFFECT” COMES TOAFGHANISTAN

Prior to the summer of 2005, conven-tional wisdom held that Afghanistan was“tamed” and that the Taliban fighters whowere carrying out random terror attacks inthe southern Pashtun tribal regions were“dead-enders.” Having toppled the TalibanEmirate of Afghanistan in 2001 with aminimum of casualties, the victoriousAmericans could be forgiven for believingthat the Taliban’s days were over. Besides,all eyes were on Iraq. It was there that thereal war on terror was unfolding. By 2005,the “Forgotten War” in Afghanistan hadbeen relegated to the Central Command’sback burner as the U.S. military focusedon the suppression of a surprisingly viciousinsurgency in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle.3

28


But in a demonstration of the law ofunintended consequences, the Taliban, whohad found refuge in the Pashtun tribalareas of neighboring Pakistan, took heartfrom the successes of their Iraqi counter-parts. Al-Qaeda operatives who made theirway to the mountains of Pakistan’s tribalzones from the deserts of Iraq’s AnbarProvince brought inspirational tales of thefeats of Abu Musab Zarqawi’s American-hunting Iraqi insurgents. Far from beinginvincible, they argued that the Americankafirs (infidels) who had so disheartened theTaliban with their satellite-guided bombs,close air support and “Beeping Joe Dos” (B-52s in the local dialect) could be beaten.

But the al-Qaeda emissaries warnedthat Afghanistan’s “infidel occupiers” couldnot be beaten via frontal “swarm” attacksor traditional guerrilla warfare of the sortfavored by the Pashtun tribes who makeup the majority of the Taliban.4 TheTaliban needed an equalizer, much as theanti-Soviet mujahideen had with theirStinger ground-to-air missiles in the 1980s.If the Taliban wanted to resist the might ofthe Amriki (Americans), they needed to useterrorism to level the playing field. Andnothing, the Arabs argued, was as effectivein the pursuit of this goal as fedayeen(matyrdom) operations. The way to defeatthe seemingly invincible American occupierswas by sending young men strapped withbombs into police stations, crowded markets,military check-points, police recruitmentcenters and military convoys. The al-QaedaArabs claimed that these human guidedmissiles could infiltrate enemy positions andshred the fabric of the very society theAmericans and their munafiq (apostate)“stooge puppets” were trying to build.

While the Arabs realized that the localTaliban had deep-seated taboos against

suicide and such “unmanly” forms ofwarfare (the Taliban were predominatelyPashtun tribesmen who had a well-definedcode of honor and pride in their ability towage frontal combat), this would have tochange. The Arabs argued that those whoengaged in “martyrdom operations” werenot condemned to hell as “craven sui-cides.” On the contrary, they were “Allah’swarriors”; they were the true ghazis(fighters of jihad), and their heroic actionswere not only effective, they were sanc-tioned by the holy Quran.

While the Taliban’s reclusive spiritualhead, Mullah Omar, was initially opposed tothe employment of this “sinful” foreigntactic, many of his mid-level commanders,such as Mullah Dadullah, were willing toadopt it, especially after they were showngraphic DVDs of Iraqi insurgents usingsuicide bombings to kill Iraqi “collabora-tors” and coalition troops in places likeBaghdad, Baquba and Anbar Province. By2005, the first wave of Arab volunteers hadinfiltrated Afghanistan and begun to strikeat coalition and Afghan-government targetsin an effort to teach their Afghan hostsistishhad (suicide) tactics. The lesson theytaught was that even a few suicide bombingscould have a profound destabilizing effect.

While the Arab bombers (and first fewAfghans) carried out no more than 22attacks that first year, the impact thesebombings had on the Afghans, who hadnever seen anything like it before, wastremendous. By killing International Securityand Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, AfghanNational Army soldiers and even the policechief of Kabul, the bombers showed that noone who worked with the “infidel occupa-tion” forces was safe.5 As Western NGOspulled out of areas that had been hit bysuicide bombs and coalition troops became

29


skittish when on patrol, the Taliban cel-ebrated the deaths of their enemies throughwhat would ironically enough become knownas “Mullah Omar’s missiles.”6

In response, by 2006, the Deobandischool of Islam practiced by the Talibanappears to have endorsed the previouslyforbidden tactic of suicide bombing. Soonthereafter, scores of indigenous Afghansbegan to blow themselves up to kill “trai-tors,” “infidels,” “occupiers,” “stooges”and, most importantly, hundreds of innocentAfghans who were near these targets atthe time of the attacks. Astoundingly, byyear’s end, the Taliban and their al-Qaedaallies had unleashed 139 suicide bomberson targets across Afghanistan. By 2007,the number would rise to 160. In just oneyear, Afghanistan had gone from being aland that had never had a tradition of suicidebombings to being surpassed only by Iraq insheer numbers of suicide attacks.7

This chapter is the result of my fieldresearch analyzing the process wherebyIraqi-style suicide bombing came toAfghanistan and took on the uniquelyAfghan features that sharply differentiatedit from the Iraqi bombing campaign. Tounderstand this story, one must trace thegradual efforts by al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda Central (the core group around BinLaden in Pakistan) to graft this tactic andideology onto the Taliban insurgency.

THE GATHERING STORM, 2002-04In the aftermath of the U.S.-led

coalition’s overwhelming victory in Opera-tion Enduring Freedom, many of the so-called “village Taliban” were destroyed orsimply melted into the Afghan countryside.The hardcore Taliban, however, withdrewover the border into the Pashtun tribalregions of Pakistan to regroup. It was at

this time that Mullah Dadullah, a Talibanhardliner, Jalaladin Haqqani, a formermujahideen extremist, and several second-tier commanders, such as Nek Muhammadand Baitullah Mehsud, gradually took the leadin reunifying the Taliban in the FederallyAdministered Tribal Agencies of Pakistan.8

In a short time, the Taliban had estab-lished shuras (councils) in Quetta,Baluchistan, and Wana, Waziristan (aPakistani Pashtun tribal agency), and givencommand of local operations to a variety ofTaliban commanders. As in the earlier jihadagainst the Soviets, Arabs once againbecame a major source of funding for thejihad against the coalition forces. Only, on thisoccasion, the Arabs appear to have played agreater role as trainers and propagandaactivists as well.9 Both the Taliban and theArabs shared a common goal of waging jihadagainst the infidel occupiers, even though thelocal Talibs were often taken aback by theArab fighters’ willingness to die.

In light of the symbolic importanceArabs place on Afghanistan, the landwhere Bin Laden and the first Arabmujahideen unit had their baptism by fire inthe 1987 Battle of Jaji (in Paktia Province),it is not surprising that they chose to assistthe Taliban in resisting the formation of thepro-Western Karzai “puppet” government.That al-Qaeda chose suicide bombings as atactical response to their joint defeat iseven less surprising, considering thefailures of the Taliban and allied al-Qaedafighters (the so-called ansars, or “support-ers”) to hold ground in frontal combat withcoalition forces. Both the Taliban and al-Qaeda had seen the devastating effect ofU.S. close air support.

Al-Qaeda’s response to their enemies’overwhelming military superiority was torely upon a tactic that was central to its

30


overall strategy and ideology, istishhad(self-sacrifice). Stressing the premise that“we cherish death more than you cherishlife,” al-Qaeda began to promote the ideathat it was the true Muslims’ willingness tosacrifice themselves that gave them anadvantage over the “weak-willed infidels.”Yoram Schweitzer and Sari GoldsteinFerber have aptly summed up the impor-tance of suicide attacks to Bin Laden’sorganization as follows:

In al-Qaeda, the sacrifice of life is asupreme value, the symbolic impor-tance of which is equal to if notgreater than its tactical importance.The organization adopted suicide asthe supreme embodiment of globaljihad and raised Islamic martyrdom (alshehada) to the status of a principle offaith. Al-Qaeda leaders cultivated thespirit of the organization, constructingits ethos around a commitment to self-sacrifice and the implementation of thisidea through suicide attacks. Readinessfor self-sacrifice was one of the mostimportant characteristics to imbue inveteran members and new recruits.10

Despite initial reluctance from Talibanchief Mullah Omar, al-Qaeda had noproblem in finding support among suchincreasingly important operational Talibancommanders as Dadullah and Haqqani fora campaign based on these Arab principles.By 2003, the Taliban field commanderswere clearly interested in any strategy ortactic that allowed them to undermine theU.S.-backed Karzai government’s claimsto bring security to the long-sufferingpeople of Afghanistan. But there seems tobe little evidence that the rank-and-filePashtun-Taliban were willing recruits tosuicide terrorism at this early stage. Itwould be up to al-Qaeda to legitimize the

tactic and demonstrate the effectiveness ofa taboo act that was as alien to Pashtun.

Al-Qaeda’s 2002 Afghan suicide-bombing campaign began in the symbolicallyimportant capital of Kabul with two failedattempts on Afghan government targets. Al-Qaeda subsequently launched three suicideattacks in 2003 against two governmenttargets and a busload of German NATOtroops. They followed this up with threeattacks in 2004 against NATO troops.

I was in Kabul around the time of theattack in 2003 on the German NATOtroops that killed six soldiers, and I remem-ber its having an unsettling impact on bothAfghans and foreigners. But most people Imet passed it off as the work of “die-hards” who could not halt the general trendof rebuilding. And from the Taliban’sperspective, there was actually still little atthis stage to suggest that the suicide tacticsmost closely associated with the underdogPalestinians and Chechens resulted in anytangible benefits. On the contrary, suicidebombing seemed only to lead to morerepression. Most recently, it had actuallycost al-Qaeda its state-within-a-state inAfghanistan following the 9/11 suicideattack. But this perception would eventu-ally change as a result of external factorsrelated to another zone where suicidebombers were to subsequently demonstratethe effectiveness of suicide bombings.Most notably, it changed in response todevelopments in distant Iraq, a country thathad by that time become a magnet forjihadi extremists across the Middle East.

TERRORISM’S NEW TESTINGGROUND

As al-Qaeda’s initial suicide bombingcampaign of 2002-04 was tentativelyplaying out in Afghanistan, foreign fighters in

31


Iraq (many of them linked to Abu MusabZarqawi’s group Jamaat al Tawhid walJihad/Al-Qaeda in Iraq) launched an insur-gency that many counterterrorism analyststhought had the potential to destabilizesurrounding regions.11 Afghan specialists, inparticular, feared that the Iraqi jihadi incuba-tor might undermine progress achieved inAfghanistan, a country that had become ashowcase for the Bush administration.

Concerns increased when it becameobvious that the Iraqi insurgents wereintent on disseminating their cult of carnageto other zones where their Muslim brotherswere fighting “unbelievers.” It was knownthat many of the foreign jihadis in Iraq haddirect ties to the core al-Qaeda group hidingout in Pakistan. It was also widely suspectedthat al-Qaeda operatives had begun to passbetween these two theaters of action, sharinginformation, funds, strategies and tacticalinformation. And it soon became evident thatal-Qaeda in Iraq had a lot to teach thedefeated Taliban about insurgent tactics.

By fall 2003, the Iraqi insurgents had,for example, begun to employ suicidebombing of a scale and lethality not seenbefore in the Middle East. While thecoalition had proven unbeatable on the fieldof battle, there was little the Americansand their allies could do by 2004 to preventsuicide bombers from attacking a widerange of targets: a top UN representativein Baghdad; over 100 Shiites and theirleader, Grand Ayatollah al-Hakim; U.S.intelligence headquarters in Irbil; theTurkish embassy; the Red Cross; Kurdishparty headquarters; U.S. military bases(including the headquarters of the 82nd

Airborne Division in Ramadi); police stations;and an Italian compound in Nasariya.

The widespread calls for the with-drawal of Italian troops from Iraq, which

took place in Italy following the last-mentioned attack, vividly demonstrated theimpact that even one bombing could haveon a weak coalition government. Clearly,this terror tactic worked from both atactical perspective (as a leveler or equal-izer) and a strategic viewpoint (as a powerfulsocietal destabilizer and means to mobilizeanti-war sentiment in coalition countries).And, lest these lessons were lost on others,Zarqawi and his associates in Iraq launchedan unprecedented media blitz, saturating theInternet with snuff images of improvised-explosive-device (IED) and suicide-bombingattacks on U.S. military targets that werepreviously deemed impregnable.12 Forextremists everywhere, Zarqawi’s DVDsand online video images were electrifying.The era of cyber-jihad had begun.

By summer 2004, jihad videos from Iraqthat had been dubbed into Pashtun werereadily available in the tribal areas of Paki-stan. These “kill DVDs” were often spliced(presumably by techno-savvy al-Qaedaoperatives) with scenes from GuantanamoBay and images of U.S. “collateral damage”in Afghanistan. For the Taliban, who hadbeen stunned by their horrific losses against aseemingly invincible enemy in 2001, theimages of U.S. and coalition targets beingblown apart by Iraqi IEDs and suicidebombers that were captured in DVDs suchas “Slaughter of the Americans in Iraq” werenothing if not inspirational.13

But the Taliban needed more “theaterspecific” videos with local content toinspire their followers to engage in thepreviously forbidden tactic of suicidebombing. To answer this need, an al-Qaedaoperative named Abu Yahya al Libi beganproducing jihad videos for Afghanistanbased on the Iraqi models. These came toinclude such hits as “Holocaust of the

32


Americans in Afghanistan,” “Pyre for theAmericans in Afghanistan” and “TheWinds of Paradise.”14 The online versionsof these videos soon came to include all thehallmarks of Iraqi DVDs, including imagesof Afghan bombers reading their willsbefore blowing themselves up.

Another indicator of the borrowing ofIraqi horror tactics by the Taliban began toappear in the form of video-tapedbeheadings of the sort that had becomeZarqawi’s stock in trade. While the Talibanhad banned the Internet from the IslamicEmirate of Afghanistan as recently asAugust 25, 2001, al-Qaeda had alwaysbeen more media-savvy and willing to usethe Internet to broadcast its message.15

By 2004, Al Libi had convinced the Talibanto use this effective propaganda medium asInternet cafes sprang up in post-TalibanAfghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan.

In September 2004, a Taliban Internetsite known as Labaik posted a video of thegruesome beheading of a “Crusader spy”that appeared to be an imitation ofZarqawi’s videotaped beheadings in Iraq.One commentator at the time wrote, “Thislatest video reveals how the practice ofdecapitation initiated by al-Zarqawi and, inthe early days, resisted by the leadership ofal-Qaeda, has reached Afghanistan.”16

This Iraqi-inspired trend eventually led tothe unbearably gruesome 2007 beheadingof an “infidel spy” by a twelve-year-oldboy trained by Mullah Dadullah.17

Coalition forces also noticed anincrease in the use of Iraqi-style IEDs inAfghanistan at this time. A Westernmilitary analyst claimed, “The insurgency inAfghanistan has been very carefullystudying the lessons learned by the insur-gents in Iraq.…We’re starting to see moreorganized ambushes in Afghanistan and the

sort of roadside bombs that previously wewere just seeing in Iraq.”18 Clearly theexiled Taliban government was morphinginto a brutal terror group under the impactof a particularly virulent form of terrorismemanating from Iraq that was so bloodythat even Ayman al Zawahiri (al-QaedaCentral’s number two) originally resisted itsmacabre emphasis on butchery. Andcertainly the question of the destabilizingimpact that the invasion of Iraq has had onthe war in Afghanistan is one that ispolitically loaded in the United States.

Not surprisingly, many Afghans, whosecountry was suffering from the bombingcampaign, shared this perspective. As anofficial of the Afghan National Directorateof Security put it to me in Kabul, “Had theAmericans not invaded Iraq and created ajihadi training ground there, we wouldnever have had these bombers here. Thisall comes to us as a result of America’swar against (Saddam) Hussein.”19 Theimplication was that the U.S. invasion ofIraq directly contributed to the destabiliza-tion of his own country.

For this reason, members of the U.S.military with whom I spoke, includingLieutenant General Karl Eikenberry,commander of Combined Forces Com-mand-Afghanistan, were loath to acknowl-edge any direct link between suicidebombing in Iraq and Afghanistan. In May2006, Eikenberry went so far as to claim,“We have not seen conclusive evidence thatthere has been any migration from Iraq toAfghanistan of foreign fighters that arebringing with them skills or capabilities.”20

Until 2007, many sources in the mediaunquestioningly parroted the U.S. military’sagnostic approach, maintaining that theyhad seen “no direct evidence of linksbetween the insurgents in Iraq and in

33


Afghanistan.”21 Radio Free Europe, forexample, refuted the notion that there wereany direct ties between Iraqi and Afghaninsurgents, claiming, “While the neo-Taliban have acknowledged that there areforeign fighters among their ranks, there is noevidence to suggest concerted co-operationbetween al-Qaeda and the neo-Taliban.”22

But the rather coy words of theextremist Taliban commander MullahDadullah, given in a subsequent interviewto Al-Jazeera, tell a different story. In lightof their importance in pointing to directoperational ties between Iraqi insurgents,who perfected suicide bombing techniquesby 2003, and those in Afghanistan, who hadnever used this tactic, I have included aportion of Dadullah’s interview here:23

Mullah Dadullah: We like the al-Qaedaorganization. We consider it a friendly andbrotherly organization which shares our ideologyand concepts. We have close ties and constantcontacts with it. Our cooperation is ideal.

Interviewer: Do you coordinate with themin military operations in Afghanistan?

Mullah Dadullah: Yes, when we needthem, we ask for their help. For example,the bombings we carry out — we learnedit from them [emphasis mine]. We learnother types of operations from them aswell. We have “give and take” relationswith the mujahideen of Iraq. We cooperateand help each other.

Interviewer: Did Arabs from al-Qaedaparticipate in the recent operations in southAfghanistan?

Mullah Dadullah: Some may haveparticipated in the bombing operations….

Mullah Dadullah: We may have sent ourpeople to Iraq, and [the Iraqis] may have senttheir friends to us. We have continuouscontacts with them, whether by phone or byother means. Some of our brothers may havemet them, and they may have met with us too.

Interviewer: Do you send people fortraining? For example, do they come herefor training, or do you maintain contactthrough the Internet?

Mullah Dadullah: We have trainingcenters here in Afghanistan, and, as youknow, they have their own centers there. Ifwe discover anything new, they come hereto learn it, and if they discover anythingnew, our friends go to learn it from them.24

Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzadprovided a more detailed account of onesuch direct meeting between al-Qaeda inIraq fighters and Mullah Dadullah, whichtook place in 2005:

In March, a three-man delegation wassent by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq) to Afghanistan,where they met Osama bin Laden,Ayman Zawahiri and MullahOmar.…The delegation brought audioand video material justifying suicideattacks. There was no precedent for thisin conservative, observant Afghani-stan: suicide is strictly prohibited inIslam. There had recently been a fewsuicide operations, but they wereisolated incidents and never turned intoan effective strategy.

Dadullah set out to win hearts andminds in order to develop an organizedstrategy of suicide attacks for the 2006offensive. He showed audio and videomaterial from the Iraqi resistance whichexplained that suicide attacks were

34


permitted and demonstrated how theIraqis used them as their most effectiveweapon. He managed to convincegroups from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan andPakistan, as well as Waziristan. A firstgroup of 450 recruits came from theKunar Valley.…That was just the tip ofthe iceberg.25

While the U.S. military continued to denythat there was any evidence that Afghanbombers might be getting direct assistanceor inspiration from their Iraqi counterparts,a Newsweek reporter managed to uncoverthe following proof of such ties during thefollowing interview:

Mohammad Daud (a Taliban com-mander in the contested province ofGhazni) launches into a glowingaccount of where he spent the firstfew months of this year and what he’sdone since his return.

I’m explaining to my fightersevery day the lessons I learned andmy experience in Iraq. I want to copyin Afghanistan the tactics and spirit ofthe glorious Iraqi resistance.

Daud and other Taliban leaderstell Newsweek that the Afghan conflictis entering a new phase, with helpfrom Iraq. According to them, Osamabin Laden has opened an under-ground railroad to and from jihadisttraining camps in the Sunni Triangle.Self-described graduates of theprogram say they’ve come home toAfghanistan with more effective killingtechniques and renewed enthusiasmfor the war against the West. Daudsays he’s been communicating a “newmomentum and spirit” to the 300fighters under his command.

Worse yet, he says, there are“strong indications” that al-Qaeda hasbrought in a team of Arab instructorsfrom Iraq to teach the latest insurgent

techniques to the Taliban. “We haveinformation that the Taliban havereceived new weapons and explosivedevices,” says a European diplomatwho didn’t want to be named becauseof the sensitivity of the subject, “mostprobably because of increasedfinancial support from abroad andsome traffic between Iraq and Af-ghanistan through Iran.

One beneficiary of Al Qaeda’srenewed interest in Afghanistan isHamza Sangari, a Taliban commanderfrom Khost province.…Sangari spenthis time in Iraq being escorted toguerrilla bases in towns like Fallujahand Ramadi, and in remote desertregions. He says he was welcomedwherever he went. “I’ve never been sowell received,” he says. He wasimpressed with what he saw. “TheIraqi mujahedin are better armed,organized and trained than we are,” hesays. He stayed four weeks at aremote training camp called Ashaq alHoor, he says, where he saw adoles-cent boys being trained as suicidebombers [emphasis mine].

The big worry is that studying Iraqitactics will make the Afghan resistancesignificantly stronger and more lethal.During a recent sweep of pro-Talibansites along the Afghan frontier in northWaziristan, Pakistani troops collected amound of Arabic-language trainingmanuals, apparently copies of the onesused by insurgents in Iraq. Sangari sayshe was impressed by the way Iraqiinsurgents created combat videos tohelp fund-raising and recruiting efforts;now similar videos of Taliban attacksare showing up in bazaars along thePakistani border.26

Around this time, Dadullah was said tohave issued bottles of holy zamzam waterfrom Mecca to purify bombers and transport

35


them to paradise. A Taliban commandernamed Mullah Haq Yar, who had beendispatched to Iraq by Mullah Omar to learnthe Iraqi insurgents’ tactics, also returnedat this time and began to carry out aninsurgency strategy that resembled that ofthe Iraqis.27

The pieces were slowly being put intoplace for the indigenous Afghan militants tobegin a campaign that would deploy “humanguided missiles” against “infidel” targets acrossAfghanistan. In one of the most unexpectedturns of the war on terror, far from acting as acatalyst for democratization, Iraq had become adisseminator for new forms of insurgentterrorism that were about to make their impactfelt in the “Forgotten War.”

2005: THE CAMPAIGN BEGINSWhile the 2005 campaign started out

tentatively, with the attempted murder-by-suicide attack of the Northern AllianceUzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum,Afghanistan suffered its first Iraq-stylemass-casualty bombing on June 1. Thatbombing, which killed 21 people (includingthe Kabul police chief) in a mosque in theTaliban’s spiritual capital of Kandahar,stunned average Afghans. Many consideredthe fact that the bombing had taken place ina house of worship to be blasphemous. Oneof my Kandahari sources described it as “anobscenity, an insult to Islam.”

Perhaps as a result of this negativereaction, the Taliban denied involvement inthe blast.28 While it is impossible to saywhether the Taliban approved of thisparticular mosque bombing (which mighthave been carried out by al-Qaeda), itproudly took credit for the bombing spreethat shook the country in the followingmonths. Space does not permit an analysisof all the subsequent bombings of 2005, but

my study shows that suicide bombersstruck Afghan government targets ninetimes and foreign troops eight times beforethe year was over. Government targetsincluded provincial governors, a pollingstation, an election-oversight body in Kabul,a local police commander and the parlia-ment building in western Kabul — in otherwords, exactly the same sorts of targetsbeing hit by suicide bombers in Iraq, butwith one notable exception. Apart fromthe Kandahar mosque bombing (whichlocal officials believed was carried out byan Arab), there were no targeted killings ofcrowds of innocent civilians (in crowdedbazaars, schools, breadlines, religiousfestivals, etc.) of the sort that had begun toshred the fabric of society in Iraq.

It was the comparatively low numberof civilian targets that first led me toconclude that Taliban suicide bomberswere acting on a completely different setof targeting principles than their Iraqicounterparts. It became increasinglyapparent that, for some reason, the Talibansuicide bombers were more selective intheir targeting patterns than the Iraq-basedbombers. Far from going for “soft” civiliantargets, the Taliban seemed to be going for“hard” military targets. When I pointed outthis trend to Pashtun colleagues, theyexplained that this targeting was moreemblematic of the Pashtuns’ martial code(Pashtunwali), which does not condone thekilling of civilians. The Taliban’s Pashtun-style attacks on hard targets includedbombing strikes on U.S. convoys inHelmand and Kandahar provinces, AfghanNational Army (ANA) convoys inKandahar and a NATO convoy in Kabul.

But, for all the fear they inspired, thebombings of 2005 were clearly a means totest the waters and perfect the technique.

36


It was not until 2006 that the Taliban werefinally prepared to unleash a full-scalebombing offensive that would see waves ofhuman guided missiles go after an increas-ing array of targets. In the process, Af-ghans would begin to die in the hundreds asthe collateral damage of a bloody campaignthat ravished Afghans of all walks of life inan increasingly broad swath of Afghanterritory in the southeast.

2006: ANNUS HORRIBILISThe new year began with a failed suicide

bombing in Kandahar (January 5), which wasfollowed by a suicide-bombing assassinationattempt on the U.S. ambassador during a visitto local leaders in Tirin Kot, Uruzgan Prov-ince. Proving the maxim that suicide bombingusually results in more civilian than militarydeaths despite the best of intentions, on thisoccasion the suicide bomber missed his targetbut killed 10 civilians and wounded 50. Butat least the Taliban were able to claim thatthey were trying to kill a high-ranking Ameri-can, not civilians.

No such claim could be made about theattack on a wrestling match in the Pakistani-Afghan border town of Spin Boldak,Kandahar Province, on January 16, 2006. Thisbloody bombing proved to be Afghanistan’sworst attack thus far in terms of civiliancasualties. What made this attack so “un-Afghan” is that the suicide bomber seeminglytargeted a crowd of innocent civilians; therewere no government or military targets in theimmediate vicinity. For all intents and pur-poses, the Spin Boldak massacre, which killed23 spectators at a traditional Afghan wrestlingmatch, had all the hallmarks of an Iraqi-stylesuicide bombing.

The response to this bloody outrageseemed to catch the Taliban by surprise.Local Afghans closed their stores and

marched to protest the slaughter of somany of their countrymen, while they wereengaged in one of Afghanistan’s mostbeloved pastimes. The attack, which ledmarchers in Spin Boldak to chant “Deathto Pakistan, Death to al-Qaeda, Death tothe Taliban,” was clearly a public-relationsdisaster for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in atribal region where chants of “Death toAmerica” were the norm.29

While the Taliban initially claimedresponsibility for the bombing (as they hadwith all previous bombings in KandaharProvince), it is noteworthy that theysubsequently denied involvement in thisunpopular attack. Although one can see thedenial of responsibility as damage control,the fact that the nature of the targetdiffered so drastically from the Taliban’smodus operandi (i.e., a tendency to goafter military/government targets) mightlend some credence to their claim. Mystudy clearly shows that the Taliban hadavoided this sort of bombing for fear oflosing support among fellow Afghans whomight be on the fence. It is probable,therefore, that the suicide bomber whostruck in Spin Boldak was not an indig-enous Afghan (someone who would havequalms about killing so many of his coun-trymen). Rather, he was a foreign Arab-salafi extremist who would have found an“un-Islamic” activity like a traditionalwrestling match to be an affront to hispuritan beliefs. I have attended these sortsof events in Afghanistan; local Afghansusually bet on the outcome. Strict Wahhabifundamentalists from the Arab Gulfconsider any form of gambling to beharam (religiously forbidden) and viscer-ally dislike such activities.

For their part, many locals speculatedthat the horrific bombing had to be the

37


work of outsiders. One source claimed, “Ithink suicide bombings across Afghanistanare the work mainly of Arabs.…At timesthey are accompanied by Pakistanis.”Another Afghan claimed that, “Regardlessof their nationality, suicide bombers shouldbe condemned as cowards.…If suicidebombers were real men, they would comeout and fight openly.”30

Clearly chastised by the widespreaddisgust that the bombing had generated, theTaliban appeared to have learned their lessonfrom the Spin Boldak incident. While mystudy shows that there were a stunning 139suicide bombings in Afghanistan for the year2006, there was only one suicide bombingagainst what patently appeared to be civiliantargets that year. All the other bombings inthe terrible campaign of 2006 were againstmilitary-government targets.

That is not to say, however, that the Talibandid not kill scores of innocent bystanders as“collateral damage.” On the contrary, mystudies show that, for all their efforts to avoidcivilian casualties, it is innocent Afghans whoindisputably suffered the most deaths from the2006 suicide bombing campaign (only 14 foreignsoldiers were killed by suicide bombers in 2006).

This high rate of collateral damagestems in part from stepped-up defensiveprocedures on the part of the coalitiontroops and Afghan government. While Iwas able to photograph “soft-skinned” (un-armored) U.S. Humvees on the roads ofAfghanistan in summer 2003, by summer2005 they had begun to be replaced byheavily armored versions. Having learnedthe terrible lessons of Iraq, where 80percent of U.S. casualties came fromIEDs, coalition forces in Afghanistan hadbegun to deploy heavily armored LAVs(light armored vehicles) by the time theAfghan suicide-bombing campaign began.

Such armored vehicles were able todeflect much of the blast power of suicidebombings and allow those inside to survivemany attacks. This was especially true forthose carried out by bombers on foot, whocarry far fewer explosives than vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices(VBIEDs). But the civilians in the vicintityof the attacks had no such protection. Innumerous instances, suicide bombersdriving VBIEDs plowed into coalitionconvoys on crowded streets, and theexplosion, shrapnel or burning car rico-cheted off their armor into bystanders. Onother occasions, suicide bombers on foottrying to infiltrate Afghan government targetswere caught up in stringent security proce-dures. When they were apprehended, theyblew themselves up in lines of civilianworkers trying to enter through checkpoints.

An analysis of the major bombings for2006 clearly reveals the outlines of thistrend: On August 3, a suicide bomber drovehis car into a Canadian ISAF convoy inKandahar killing six soldiers and 19 civil-ians. Then, on August 28 in Lashkar Gah,Helmand, a BBIED (body-borne impro-vised explosive device) bomber blewhimself up next to a former police chiefand killed him and 16 civilians and wounded47 more. On September 8, a suicide bomberblew himself up next to a U.S. convoy inKabul and killed two U.S. soldiers and 16civilians. Again in Kabul, on September 18, asuicide bomber struck at a U.S. convoy andkilled two policemen and 13 civilians. On thevery same day, a suicide bomber triedassassinating the deputy head of police forHerat and succeeded in killing four police-men and seven civilians.

As the rampage year continued, onSeptember 26, a suicide bomber aiming forthe governor of Helmand killed nine soldiers

38


and nine civilians in Lashkar Gah. Finally,on September 29, a suicide bomber whowas noticed by guards in a line of workersas he attempted to infiltrate the InteriorMinistry in Kabul set off his bomb prema-turely and killed 12 civilians. The mayhemcontinued on October 13, as a suicidebomber who hit a U.S. convoy killed oneISAF soldier and eight civilians. The yearended on December 7, when a suicidebomber bounced off a U.S. military convoykilling no soldiers, but slaughtering 14civilians.31

When I broke down the civilian-to-military death ratio from bombings for2006, I found that Afghan suicide bombers,who were targeting government ormilitary targets in every one of theseincidents, actually succeeded in killing 114civilians and only 25 government militarytargets (4.6 civilians for every military-government target).

But, clearly, there was more to theTaliban’s terrible success rate than thelogistic difficulties involved in trying to takeout hard military targets protected byarmor, sand bags and blast barriers. In fact,by 2006, another tendency became notice-able as well. My study found a bizarretrend wherein dozens of Taliban suicidebombers (in some months the majority)succeeded in killing only themselves! Thehigh rate of victimless bombings led me toquestion whether the suicide bombers wereengaging in suicide bombing or simplysuicide.32

THE WORLD’S WORST SUICIDEBOMBERS?

As I analyzed the circumstancesbehind every suicide bombing for 2001-07,I noticed that time and again Talibansuicide bombers exploded their bombs

prematurely, killing themselves and no oneelse. This trend was to culminate in thefirst weeks of 2007, when I recorded 19bombings from January to the end ofFebruary.33 Astoundingly, of these 19bombings, the suicide bomber was appre-hended or killed in three instances and on 12other occasions succeeded in killing onlyhimself. In two bombings, the bomber killedonly one person other than himself, and inonly 2 bombings out of 19 did the suicidebomber kill more than one victim. Hardly aninspiring kill ratio.

Such underwhelming statistics stood instark contrast to Iraq, where the kill ratiowas much higher (it is common for eachIraqi suicide bomber to kill more than 60).These statistics also beg the question that Iasked Afghan National Directorate ofSecurity (NDS) leader, Yama Karzai:,“Why are Afghanistan’s suicide bombersso uniquely incapable of hitting theirtargets…with bombs?”

Mr. Karzai and several Afghan Na-tional Police (ANP) commanders whom Iinterviewed offered an unexpected expla-nation that seemed to account for much ofthe Afghan suicide bombing failures. ANPcommanders spoke of arresting bomberswho were often mentally unsound, de-ranged or retarded.34 Western journalistsand observers have similarly written of asuicide attack by a disabled man whoseonly motivation was the promise of pay-ments for his family in exchange formounting an attack. There was also thecase of bombers who were invalids andone who was a blind amputee.35

Far from being elite, white-collarterrorists like the 9/11 hijacking team, oneAfghan official has claimed that “at leastthree of every five (Afghan) bomberssuffer from a physical ailment or disability.

39


Adding those who suffer from mentalillnesses, the number of sick and disabledbombers climbs to more than 80 per-cent.”36

My own findings backed these sorts ofclaims. While I was initially skeptical of theNDS's claims (all too often victims of suicidebombing are prone to dismiss the bombers as“deranged,” “fanatical,” “on drugs,” or“brainwashed”), I found overwhelmingevidence to support the theory thatAfghanistan’s bombers were uniquely“challenged.”37

While it is increasingly accepted by theintellligence community that suicide bomb-ers are not brainwashed dupes, but intelli-gent self-conscious actors like 9/11 suicide-team commander Mohammad Atta, myfield work in the Afghan theater points toan entirely different paradigm. This Afghanparadigm points to the existence of bomb-ers who belong to a much lower stratumthan in other Islamic zones where bombingcampaigns have taken place.

One source from the U.S. militarystationed at Bagram Air Base described anincident that exemplifies this trend. Heshared his story of an incident in which ateenage suicide bomber threw his explo-sive-filled bomb vest at a U.S. patrol,wrongly assuming it would explode onimpact. Afghan National police sources saythey have had several calls from con-cerned citizens who had discoveredabandoned suicide vests on the streets ofKabul, perhaps indicating a last minutechange of heart.

In a similar incident, Craig Harrison,head of security for the UN mission inAfghanistan, told me that an Afghanemployee had come to him saying he hadnoticed, on his way to work, strange wiringin a car that had run out of gas. He grew

suspicious after helping the driver push thecar for a while and came to warn his UNemployers. When the police arrived on thescene with guns drawn, they found thesuicide car bomber pushing his car towardhis target!38

In another case that was widelyreported as the second of its kind in aweek, a suicide bomber on his way to histarget stumbled leaving his house and setoff his bomb prematurely, killing himselfand wounding two passersby.39 Anothercase, from January 2008, involved a groupof five terrorists who were preparing theirVBIED when it accidentally went off,killing them all.40 A UN source told me ofa suicide bomber who pulled up to a gasstation driving a VBIED. The attendantsaw a strange device in the car, and he andanother worker tackled the bomber, foughtwith him to prevent him from detonating hisdevice in a packed gas station, and eventu-ally subdued him. In this instance, thebomber failed simply because he forgot tofill his car up with gas in advance. U.S.military and ISAF seem to agree thatAfghan suicide bombers are far moreincompetent than their Iraqi counterparts,who have effectively used elaborate bombsto kill over 100 people on many occasions.The fact that the Taliban are deliberatelyusing those who are mentally unsound or oflimited intelligence might help explain thisphenomenon.

Below is a typical military account thathighlights the Afghan suicide bombers’strange failures:

When an 18-year-old from Pakistandismounted his bicycle a couple ofkilometers outside the eastern town ofKhost, his clothes flapped up,revealing a suicide vest to an alertfarmer nearby. Police soon surrounded

40


the teenager and ordered him toremove his vest. He refused, grewincreasingly agitated and eventuallyblew himself up, said Yaqoub Khan,police criminal director for Khostprovince. No one else was hurt.

(On another occasion) a suicideattacker waited on a roadside in easternPaktika province, apparently biding histime for a target to appear. When anAfghan army convoy approached, thebomber blew himself up — severalmeters ahead of the vehicles, said Gov.Mohammad Akram Akhpelwak. Hecaused no injuries or damage.

The nature of these two would-besuicide bombers’ deaths is strikinglycommon in Afghanistan. Maj. LukeKnittig, a spokesman for NATO’sInternational Security AssistanceForce, said NATO commanders havenoticed how often suicide attacks inAfghanistan fail. “We have certainlynoticed that there have been a fairnumber that are pretty poorly executedand bungled, and of course they’re allill-conceived,” he said.

A U.S. military spokesman, Lt.Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, said that com-manders do see trained, plannedmaneuvers in the field, but that manyTaliban attacks fail because of a lackof experience. “Certainly there are afair number of failed attempts, andthat’s OK,” he said. “I hope they don’tget better.”41

When combined with a propensity to goafter hard targets, such as fast-moving,heavily armored convoys or guardedinstallations, the unskilled nature of theTaliban bombers seems to have led to acomparatively ineffective bombing cam-paign. But I found something even moredisturbing that accounted for much of theshocking ineptitude in Afghanistan’s

bombers: the reliance on boys as young assix years old to carry out “martyrdomoperations.”

AFGHANISTAN’S CHILD BOMBERSMy work in the Pashtun areas east of

Kabul led me to the conclusion that manyyoung Afghan boys go to Pakistan formadrassa (seminary) training, oftenwithout their parents’ permission. Therethey join young Pashtun lads from thePakistani tribal regions in search of adven-ture, a sense of religious mission andprestige. They are also taught to emulatethose who die in the fight for the faith andto reject what few pleasures they enjoy inthis world for the pleasures of the next.Fed on a diet of jihad, hatred for infidels,and DVDs depicting the horrors of theforeign invasion of Afghanistan, these pooryoung men provide the perfect humanmaterial for “Mullah Omar’s missiles.”

Those who are “honored” to be chosenfor suicide-bombing missions are isolatedfrom their peers and indoctrinated, thentransported to their target. They are toldthat their family will receive a reward of upto $15,000 for their “martyrdom.” Addedincentive comes in the form of “passes toparadise” that Dadullah was filmed hand-ing out to suicide bombers-in-waiting in acave in Pakistan.42 The following case oftwo young Pakistani Pashtuns who leftschool without their parents’ permission tobecome suicide bombers sheds light on therecruitment process for Afghan suicidebombers and might help explain why theyyield such poor results on hard targets:

“We were told to fight againstIsrael, America and non-Muslims,” saidMuhammed Bakhtiar, 17, explaining whyhe wanted to become a suicide bomber.

41


“We are so unhappy with our liveshere. We have nothing,” he said.

“We read about jihad in books andwanted to join,” said Ahmad. “Wewanted to go to the Muridke madrassaso we would have a better life in thehereafter.”

“We were told it is our choice tobecome a freedom fighter or a suicidebomber,” explained Ahmad, who had aneat beard and wore a white Muslimprayer cap. “But we should never fightagainst Pakistan.”

“The jihadi man who brought usto Muridke told us we would becomegreat by fighting jihad,” said theclean-shaven Bakhtiar. “We knew wecould never become great if we stayedin Buner. I wanted to become great.”

(But) the tribal elders intervenedand now Bakhtiar and Ahmad are backin school in Buner. “My brother andmy uncle found me in Lahore,” saidBakhtiar. “The people at Muridke letus leave and said we could come backafter we finished our exams at home,”he said. But we asked them, “Do youwant to go back and learn jihad?” “Idon’t know” said Bakhtiar. “Maybe,maybe.” Ahmad agreed. “There isnothing for us here. Nothing.”43

I heard a similar story while meetingwith UN officials in Gardez, Paktia Prov-ince, in the aftermath of the bombing(described at the beginning of this article)that had taken place just a few hoursearlier. Local Pashtun villagers told me thatyoung men had been disappearing inneighboring Khost Province after receivingfunding from the Taliban to fight againstcoalition troops. The parents had littlerecourse in getting their sons back. On thecontrary, they often came to hear that theirsons had been killed only when the Talibanarrived at their house with money to

congratulate them on the “martyrdom” oftheir boys. In one tragic case, a motherfound out that her son had returned from amadrassa in Pakistan with the intent tobecome a suicide bomber (his family wouldhave received $3,600). When she desper-ately fought with him to prevent him fromcarrying out his mission, his bomb went offkilling her and three of his siblings.44

While Mullah Nazir, a powerful Talibanleader in Pakistan’s Waziristan Province,recently made an unprecedented request forthe Taliban to stop recruiting children, avideo of a suicide-bomber ceremony in theregion would seem to indicate that his appealhas been honored in the breach. In the videothat was obtained by ABC, boys as young as12 are shown “graduating” from a suicide-bombing camp run by Mullah DadullahMansour, the successor to Mullah Dadullah,who was killed in May 2007.

As disturbing as this video is, it pales incomparison to the discovery Afghan securityofficials recently made in eastern Afghani-stan. In an incident that caused tears of furyamong local villagers, a six-year-old streeturchin approached an Afghan securitycheckpoint and claimed that he had beencornered by the Taliban and fitted with asuicide bomber vest. They had told him towalk up to a U.S. patrol and press a buttonon the vest that would “spray flowers.”Fortunately, the quick thinking boy insteadasked for help, and the vest was removed.

While this case is obviously an extremeexample, it fits the trend and certainly goesa long way in helping to explain why almosthalf of Taliban suicide bombers succeed inkilling only themselves. Many Talibanbombers come from small backwatervillages and have to be taught how to driveon strange roads, travel beyond their localeor country and hit fast-moving, armored

42


coalition convoys with improvised explo-sives. Even in the best of times, suicidebombing is a task that involves consider-able resolve, determination, focus and adegree of intelligence. Clearly, such vitalingredients are often missing in the Afghancontext, where many of the bombers appearto be as much victims as perpetrators.

This sort of tragedy has created acertain level of tension between the Talibanand local tribes. On one occasion, a localchieftain in Khost threatened to attack theTaliban with his entire tribe when he discov-ered that Taliban commander JalaludinHaqqani had taken his son for a suicidemission. Bloodshed was averted only whenthe chieftain’s son was returned with theadmonishment that his father had denied himthe chance to become a martyr.45

I have collected many such stories, and itseems that the Taliban have been activelypreying on young men who are brought tomadrassas and convinced that suicidebombing offers them a route to honor and thepleasures of paradise. Although the Taliban’sclaims to have hundreds, if not thousands, ofsuicide bombers prepared to attack infidels inAfghanistan are exaggerated, they do seemto have a large recruitment pool made up ofimpressionable Pashtun youth on both sidesof the border. But I suspect that many ofthese young indoctrinated Pashtuns mighthave qualms about killing innocent fellowAfghan Muslims, especially if they arecarrying out the bombings with the aim ofacquiring much-needed financial paymentsfor their impoverished families. This mighthelp explain why so many Afghan suicidebombers detonate their bombs prematurelyand succeed in killing only themselves.

In one case that would seem toexemplify this trend, a young man with abomb strapped to his waist approached

security officials and asked for help inremoving it.46 As he tried to take off hisbomb, it detonated, killing him. One caninfer from such tragedies that many of thesuicide bombers who kill only themselvesare doing so not just because they areincompetent or up against hard militarytargets, but because they are genuinelyreluctant to kill others.

All these factors work to mitigate abombing campaign that could have beenfar worse and taken on the proportionsfound in Iraq, where thousands of civilianshave been deliberately targeted by suicidebombers. For all the havoc the Afghanbombers indisputably wreak, it seems that(through incompetence or choice) they arenot taking the same toll on innocent civil-ians that their Iraqi counterparts have.While the bombing inspiration and trainingclearly came from Iraq, the Taliban cam-paign reflects the unique Pashtun culturewhich has strict taboos on killing innocents.

Or so my findings led me to believe bythe time I finished my field research in 15of Afghanistan’s provinces in May 2007.As I ended my expedition, which had beentimed to coincide with the Taliban’s much-touted spring offensive, I was confidentthat my findings had highlighted a little-noticed facet of the Taliban campaign thatsharply differentiated it from the Iraqicampaign. But in the month after I left,this paradigm began to shift. It was at thistime that the Taliban appeared to shed theirconcerns about killing civilians and beganto unleash a new wave of mass-casualtybombings. The little hope I and countlessaverage Afghans had previously takenfrom the fact that the Taliban bomberswere not setting out to deliberately killunarmed civilians was to be dashed.

43


IRAQI-STYLE MASS BOMBINGCOMES TO AFGHANISTAN

The first sign of an increasingly deadlycampaign came in June 2007, when aTaliban bomber boarded a bus carryingpolicemen in Kabul and detonated anunprecedentedly powerful bomb. Theensuing explosion tore the bus apart, killing35 policemen on board.47 While there hadpreviously been a couple of bombings inAfghanistan that had surpassed 20 deaths(most notably the bombing of the wrestlingmatch in Spin Boldak and the attack onBaghram Air Base during Vice PresidentCheney’s visit), this was the first bombingto kill over 30. This attack was followedby a similarly powerful attack on a buscarrying Afghan soldiers in Kabul inSeptember 2007 that killed 30. These twounexpectedly powerful attacks left theAfghans reeling, but at least they fit theearlier Taliban pattern of hitting hardmilitary targets.

But this pattern also was to changedecisively with a deadly Iraqi-style bomb-ing on a civilian-packed event held in thetown of Baghlan, northern Afghanistan, inDecember 2007. This bombing massacrewas carried out at the opening of a sugarplant attended by scores of local students,parliamentarians and workers. Between 90and 100 people were killed, including sixparliamentarians.48 Tragically, the vastmajority of the victims were actually schoolboys who had come to the event with theirteachers, five of whom were also killed inthe explosion. Many of these innocentswere killed by the bomb itself, which waspacked with hundreds of ball-bearings, atactic that was previously rare in Afghani-stan. The sickening carnage causednationwide mourning and seemed todemonstrate that the Taliban were losing

their sensitivity to the issue of collateraldamage. Clearly, the Taliban had decidedthat the destabilizing effects of mega-bombings outweighed the negative publicityendangered by such slaughters.

This point was vividly driven homewhen the Taliban launched another mass-casualty suicide-bombing attack in a crowdof spectators gathered to watch a dog fightin Kandahar in February 2008. As many as100 were killed in this attack, whichappeared to be aimed at a pro-Karzaimilitia commander. Once again, many ofthe victims were innocent spectators(although the militia commander and 35 ofhis followers were also killed in the horrificexplosion). The following day, a Talibanbomber crashed into a Canadian ISAFconvoy in Kandahar and killed 38 bystand-ers with another unusually powerfulexplosive. The Taliban, it seemed, hadtaken off the gloves and were now wagingfull-scale Iraqi-style suicide-bombingwarfare in Afghanistan.

The rising death toll was caused in partby the Taliban’s decision to use much morepowerful bombs. Explosives expertsattributed the increasing carnage not just tosuch improvisations as adding ball bearingsand other forms of shrapnel to the bombs,but to the terrorists’ use of a highly explo-sive C-4 compound. At the time, a Talibanspokesman hinted at more carnage tocome: “All these bombs are stronger thanbefore, this is because of the growingexperience of our jihadi fighters.…We willcontinue to make these kinds of bombs toattack our enemies with.”49 FearfulAfghans seemed to realize that the Talibanwere now increasing the lethality of theirbombs and putting aside concerns aboutthe negative fallout from their attacks. OneAfghan professor claimed, “The attacks

44


show that the enemies of Afghanistan arechanging their tactics. Now they are notthinking about civilians at all. They wantedto cause such big casualties in theseattacks to weaken the morale of thegovernment and the international commu-nity, to show the world the Afghan govern-ment is too weak to prevent them.”50

Further high-casualty civilian attacksincluded the January 14, 2008, suicidebombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul andthe July 7, 2008, Indian embassy bombing,also in Kabul, which killed 58. The secondbombing seems to have been organized bythe Taliban with the help of Pakistan’snotorious Inter Services Intelligence andmay point to a Pakistani hand in theincreased suicide-bombing violence.

But it was not just Afghanistan thatbegan to suffer from a savage new waveof Taliban suicide bombings. By 2007,Pakistan, a country that, like its Afghanneighbor, had been largely spared from thisscourge, began to experience a bloodywave of bombings. These appeared to bedirected for the most part by a Talibancommander named Baitullah Mehsud, whohas close ties to al-Qaeda. And the bomb-ings in Pakistan have been deadlier thanthose in Afghanistan.

By year’s end, Pakistan had sufferedas many as 50 suicide bombings, includinga massive attack on former Prime MinisterBenazir Bhutto’s convoy, which killedapproximately 150 but missed its primarytarget, and a later one that succeeded inkilling her. The suicide bombers in Pakistanseemed to have had less compunctionabout killing civilians and struck at politicalrallies, religious festivals, hotels, funerals,jirgas (tribal meetings) and other softtargets. This especially holds true for Shiitecivilian targets, which were hit in large

numbers from 2002 to 2006. But, still, theoverall trend I have noticed in Pakistan(the Shiite targeting and attacks on Bhuttoand the recent Marriott bombing aside) is atendency to aim for army, police or govern-ment targets; it is just not as pronounced asin Afghanistan. The Pakistani bombers alsohave a higher death rate from their bomb-ings than their Afghan counterparts.

As in neighboring Afghanistan, thePakistani bombings demonstrate thatfedayeen suicide tactics have entered themilitary culture of the Pakistani Talibanextremists and have become a weapon ofchoice for destabilizing the government.For al-Qaeda and the radical wing of theTaliban that coalesced around such ex-tremists as Mullah Dadullah and BaitullahMehsud’s Pakistani Taliban Movement,these developments represent a clearvictory over the Taliban moderates. Thisdevelopment has unsettling ramificationsfor a region that is home not only tothousands of Taliban fighters, and BinLaden’s al-Qaeda Central, but to nuclearweapons.

As a new generation of Talibaninsurgents puts aside its cultural compunc-tions against killing innocent civilians, theinroads made by the Iraqi-inspired terror-ists become more permanent and may oneday threaten the West. Each and every oneof “Mullah Omar’s missiles” sends themessage that the Taliban have not forgot-ten the “Forgotten War” in Afghanistan northe new war in Pakistan. Before his May2007 death, Mullah Dadullah showed thathe was all too aware of the long-termstrategic implications of the Taliban’sadoption of “martyrdom” tactics, when hetriumphantly proclaimed, “The Americanshave sown a seed. They will reap the cropfor quite a long time.”51

45


1 IED (improvised explosive device).2 For photographs from this and other journeys in Afghanistan, see my website atwww.brianglynwilliams.com (under ‘Field Research’)3 The United States had shipped Predator drones, elite special forces, and other resources to Iraq, leaving asmall force of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a Texas-sized, mountainous country that is considerably largerthan Iraq.4 The Taliban insurgents took huge losses from 2004-06 when they attempted to wage frontal combat withthe technologically superior coalition forces.5 The Taliban and al-Qaeda subsequently tried to launch terror attacks against Spanish targets (Talibancommander Baitullah Mahsud) and German targets to punish them for providing troops to NATO inAfghanistan. See “Was Baitullah Mahsud Behind the Spanish Terror Operation?” and “German IntelligenceDescribes a “New Quality” in Jihadi Threats,” Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 7, February 20, 2008.6 Mullah Omar continued to publicly make calls for the Taliban to avoid killing civilians, but he seems to havecome to the conclusion that suicide bombings’ benefits outweighed its drawbacks.7 Iraq continued to surpass Afghanistan in total numbers of attacks and actually reached 67 in one month. See“One Month’s Toll in Iraq: 67 Suicide Bombers,” The Guardian, May 12, 2005.8 This mountainous Pashtun region had never been incorporated as a proper part of Pakistan. Rather it wasrun by government-appointed agents who acted as intermediaries with the largely autonomous Pashtun tribes.9 Brian Glyn Williams, “The Return of the Arabs. Al Qa’ida’s Military Role in the Afghan Insurgency,” WestPoint Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, Vol. 1, No. 3, February 2008.10 Yoram Schweitzer and Sari Goldstein Ferber, Al Qaeda and the Internationalization of Suicide Terrorism,The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Memorandum No. 78, November 2005, p. 26.11 For the destabilizing impact of Iraq, see Brian Glyn Williams, “The Failure of al Qaeda Basing Projectsfrom Afghanistan to Iraq.” Denial of Sanctuary. Understanding Terrorist Safe Havens, edited by MichaelInnes (Praeger, 2007).12 One has only to go to www.youtube.com and type in the words — jihad Iraq — to see how effective theIraqi insurgents have been in exploiting this medium.13 “Underground Jihad Videos in Pakistan Thrive on Beheadings, Hangings,” Vital Perspective, http://vitalperspective.typepad.com/vital_perspective_clarity/2006/05/underground_jih.html.14 See al-Qaeda al Jihad’s surprisingly sophisticated Afghan video at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=184_1201720200.15 “Taliban Enlist Video in Fight for Afghanistan,” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, November 2,2006, at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6423946. For the Taliban bomber’stestimony, see Hekmat Karzai, “The Logic of Afghan Suicide Bombing,” IDSS Commentary, March 27, 2006.16 “Beheading Video Reveals Zarqawi’s Touch,” Afghanistan Watch, January 6, 2006, at http://www.afghanistanwatch.org/newsletterarchive/listserv1-6-06.htm.17 “Child Be-Heading Uncensored,” Jawa Report, May 24, 2007, at http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/188003.php.18 “Improvised Explosives. A Growing Menace in Afghanistan,” Canadian Broadcast Channel, April 25,2006.19 Interview carried out with National Directorate of Security official in NDS headquarters, Kabul, April 2007.20 Pamela Hess, “Taliban Regrouping in Southern Afghanistan,” UPI, May 10, 2006.21 Ibid.22 For more on the Iraqi origins of Afghan suicide bombing, see Brian Glyn Williams, “Afghan SuicideBombing,” Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, August 13, 2007. Available under Publications atbrianglynwilliams.com.23 It should be noted that neither the Afghan mujahideen freedom fighters of the 1980s nor the pre-War onTerror Taliban used suicide bombing in the past.24 “Taliban Military Commander Mullah Dadallah: We Are in Contact with Iraqi Mujahideen, Osama binLaden & Al-Zawahiri,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series, June 2, 2006, No.1180, at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP118006.25 Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Taliban Resurgence in Afghanistan” Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2006.26 Ron Moreau, “Terrorism: An Iraq-Afghan Alliance? The Taliban Haven’t Quit, and Some Are Getting Help

46


and Inspiration from Iraq,” Newsweek, September 18, 2005.27 Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Osama Adds Weight to Afghan Resistance,” Asia Times, September 11, 2004.28 James Rupert, “20 Dead in Suicide Bomb at Mosque,” Peace Corps On-Line, June 1, 2005, at http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/467/2032507.html.29 “Afghans Protest at Bomb Attacks,” BBC.co.uk, January 18, 2006.30 “Afghanistan: Are Militants Copying Iraqi Insurgents’ Suicide Tactics?” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,January 17, 2006.31 There was also a suicide bombing in Urgun, Paktika (Nov. 26, 2006) Province aimed at a district police chiefand Afghan special force commander that killed 15 people. I have been unable to obtain specifics on thecasualties; all the most accounts claim that it was a mixture of civilians and militiamen.32 Brian Glyn Williams, “Taliban Fedayeen. The World’s Worst Suicide Bombers?” Terrorism Monitor, July19, 2007.33 Brian Glyn Williams, “Cheney Attack Reveals Taliban Suicide Bombing Patterns,” Terrorism Monitor, Vol.5, No. 4, Feb. 27, 2007.34 Others have noticed this trend. See for example: “Over 60 Percent of Suicide Bombers in Afghanistan ArePhysically Disabled,” The Mainichi Daily News, October 28, 2008.35 Daan Van Der Schriek, “New Terrorist Trends in Afghanistan,” Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 2, No. 22,November 18, 2004. See also Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Step Up Afghan Bombings and Suicide Attacks,” TheNew York Times, October 21, 2006.36 Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, “Disabled Often Carry Out Afghan Suicide Missions,” National Public Radio,Morning Edition, October 15, 2007.37 Marc Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Sageman’sexcellent work focused on the more elite al-Qaeda terrorist network.38 Interview with Craig Harrison, Director of UN Security in Afghanistan, UNAMA Compound, Kabul, April2007.39 “Jihadist Dies from Accidental Discharge. Suicide Bomber Falls Down Stairs,” Liveleak.com, January 24,2008.40 “Five Terrorists Die When Planting a Car Bomb in Afghanistan,” RIA Novosti (Russia), January 2, 2008.41 “Bombers in Afghanistan Usually Miss Targets,” St. Petersburg Times, November 23, 2006.42 B. Raman, “What’s Cooking in the Jihadi Kitchen? Entry Pass for Heaven,” Terrorism Monitor, Paper No.148, March 11, 2006.43 Mushtaq Yusufzai, “How Two Teens Were Recruited for Jihad,” MSNBC.com, March 28, 2007.44 “Afghan Suicide Bomber Kills Own Family,” Associated Press, October 16, 2007.45 Story relayed by Tom Gregg, Director of UNAMA Mission, Gardez, May 2007.46 “Afghan Suicide Bomber Kills Own Family,” Associated Press, October 16, 2007.47 “35 Killed in Kabul Suicide Bomb Attack,” Associated Press, June 18, 2007.48 According to some unsubstantiated reports some of the victims may have died in panicked gun fire fromguards who survived the explosion.49 “Taliban’s Bomb Expertise Grows as Regard for Civilians Cast Aside,” International Herald Tribune,February 20, 2008.50 “140 Afghans Killed in 2 Days of Bombings,” Associated Press, Feb 18, 2007.51 “Taliban Leader Says Suicide Army Ready,” UPI, March 1, 2007. [ The Writer, Dr. Brian Williams is a well-known US-author and expet on Afghanishan's issues. He can be reached at [email protected] ]

Documents

Dr. Williams is an associate professor of Islamic History ...pscriminology.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/MullahOmarsMissil… · 27 WILLIAMS: SUICIDE BOMBERS IN AFGHANISTAN But we