Transcript for S4 Episode 5 - "We Can Live With That"

In February 1997, a scientist announced the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep and UN sanctions drove Iraq to the brink of collapse, someone in the State Department boiled a pot of tea for a certain foreign delegation. Washington's guest that day were representatives from the Taliban. The new Islamic rulers of Afghanistan. the Taliban on-voys were in town to discuss a promising and mutually beneficial plan for building a pipeline through their country.

Shortly after the meeting, a pack of journalists challenged a senior U.S. diplomat who explained the U.S. position on the Taliban. The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be pipelines, and a mere, no parliament, and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.

I can live with that I can live with that I can live with that I can live with that

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Coleman. And this is Season 4 Episode 5.

Last episode, we discussed the final phase of the Soviet War in Afghanistan. The Army, drug running, and battlefield success of the Mujahideen. And then in 1988, the beginning of the Soviet withdrawal.

quote, an extremist seizure of Kabul would plunge Afghanistan into a fresh round of warfare, which could affect areas of joining Afghanistan. Should Golbedeen Heckmet Yar get to Kabul? Extremists in the Arab world would support them in stoking Islamic radicalism in the region, including the Soviet Central Asian Republics, but also in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world.

No problem. March 1989. Afghan President Najibullah, by all accounts say competent and pragmatic communist, faced a broken nation. His capital was surrounded by rich, powerful and eager warlords that had been financed and feted by foreign powers for over a decade. Still against all odds, Najibullah showed a knack for hanging on to power.

Najibullah, Afghan leader with nine lives.

Quote the Soviet ship to an average of 250,000 tons of wheat per year to Afghanistan, and also furnished other essential commodities, including carousine for cooking and heating, tea, sugar, oil, soap, and footwear.

The USSR was not the only party that had left Afghanistan in 1989. Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia not long after. With the reputation now of a pious warrior from his time in Afghanistan, bin Laden's credentials put him in demand as a speaker in mosques and homes, despite his soft spoken, modest style, writes Anthony Shadeed, the late New York Times reporter. Cossets of Osama's sermons were passed around the kingdom in which he invades against the West and the non-Islamic world. In particular, the United States, but more on that later.

Hold on a minute, don't you think we ought to talk about how I'm going to run? Sure. How about how you manage to live as long as you have?

A special double issue of Rolling Stone magazine from July 1990. Tom Cruise climbs out of the ocean in a wet t-shirt and jeans. Depeche mode, the cover asks, as good as they look? And inside the issue, another question. and our key in the USSR. Quote, imagine the 60s, the Depression, Watergate, and the Civil War going on all at the same time, wrote music critic Anthony Dukertis, and you'll get some sense of what's happening in the Soviet Union. No one can sense where things are heading.

The administration of George H. W. Bush formed a collective grin as the Soviet Union's economy contracted by about a sixth. The White House that summer decided not to support a $250 billion aid package to the USSR, a so-called grand bargain. Instead, the Soviet Union would get pennies on the dollar.

Like anyone who wants to win these United Warlords called themselves the interim government of the country. They were all itching to carve up Afghanistan for themselves. Their ranks were by now swollen with several thousand so-called foreign fighters. Islamist radicals recruited from places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but also other regions including Africa and the Far East.

The CIA was keen to be a part of any looming Jalalabad operation, quote, suddenly it seemed that every commander within 100 miles of Jalalabad needed new Toyota double cab trucks to accomplish his part of the attack, and quote. And so that winter, the CIA paid for hundreds of the Japanese trucks so they could be used in the attack. The Soviets were gone, but the US backed Jihad was far from over.

All of this was background noise to the administration of H.W. Bush. The one-time CIA chief turned Vice President, turned President, had a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq on the horizon. The once laser-focused U.S. policy in Afghanistan was now disorganized, with some pushing for the warlords, others urging a moderating role, and still others uninterested entirely. The failure to capture Jalalabad was a major blow to the Majahadine and their state sponsors. How could these rich and powerful armies fail to take down this lame duck in Kabul? but in fact, time was on the side of the warlords. The Soviet lifeline to Najibullah would not last forever. The turning point came in 1991. The Majahadine-1 chunks of northern Afghanistan after a series of offensives led most notably by Ahmed Shama-sud. As shortages of goods surfaced, writes Shainay Smith, desertion rates of the Afghan security forces rose 60% over the previous year. That wasn't all. As the Soviet Union itself broke down, critical deliveries of aid to Afghanistan started coming up short.

Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, it took the Gulf War to end Osama bin Laden's stint as a celebrity, right to Anthony Shadeed. Osama denounced King Fad's decision to invite Western troops into the kingdom, following the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990. The presence of infidels on Islam's holiest land was sacrilege, an unforgivable sin, and quote. In early 1991, after the Saudi royal family clamped down on Bin Laden for his dissident activity, he slipped out of the kingdom, and by the next year, had taken up residence in Sudan. The African nation ruled by a Muslim military elite. Bin Laden was banished from Saudi Arabia after the fact, and officially renounced by his family. Exactly how cut off Bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia would remain an open question, as journalist John Charles Brassard and Geom Daskiye report.

In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time, and an era comes to an end.

The tricolor banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin.

By 1992, the USSR was no more. Gorbachev, the would-be reformer of the Soviet Union, and picked by Yuri Andropov to lead the USSR into the future, and instead overseen the death of the Soviet experiment.

And from the White House, President Bush salutes the man who presided over the end of the Soviet Union.

A hasty dismantling of the Soviet superpower was a fire sale for the Americans and the oligarchs inside the ex-union. But it was a devastating blow to third-world nations such as Afghanistan, who had relied on the Soviets for aid, trade, and stability. Had the U.S. Secretary of State in 1991 managed to look into a crystal ball, right Zubak? He would have seen the smoke, billowing out of New York's twin towers, and decades of American military occupation of Afghanistan.

The fall of the Soviet Union quickly fulfilled Obdu Hawks' prophecy. On March 18, 1992, Mohammed Najibullah announced over radio that he would resign, having decided there was no hope left for his government. A few weeks later on April 15, the Afghan President officially stepped down. If only it had ended there for him. Unable to escape the country, Najibullah was arrested by his own former general, the communist turned warlord, Rashid Dostum. Before the president's capture, as the Mujahideen closed in within rocketing distance, the president laid down a prophecy not unlike Abdul Haks. We have a common task, Afghanistan, the United States, and the civilized world, to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism. He told reporters in his palace office, If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs, turned into a center for terrorism.

The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan had left Islamabad.

The warlords' competition for Kabul had been whittled down to two main rivals. Golbedeen Hechmachar, approaching from the south, and Akmachar Masood, coming from the north.

Hechmet Yarr had the plans, the manpower, the money, and the guns. From a village south of Kabul, he set up a base of operations, reports Cole. Pakistani helicopters flew in and out, carrying ISI officers for consultations. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, and artillery rolled into the base. Lined up for the final thrust toward Kabul. From his command center, Hechmet Yar worked the radio, reopening talks with Afghan communists. Dozens of Arab Jihadist volunteers, allies of Hechmet Yar from the days of revolution in Pashawar, poured into the village, and with them came Arab journalists, prepared to document the final chapter of the Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan.

Even as he talked by Radia with Masood, Hekmet Yar's forces moved toward the gates of Kabul. Green flags were attached to his tanks, coal rights. The cars were washed, so they would gleam triumphantly when Hekmet Yar rolled into Kabul the next day. He dispatched his agents to Kabul that night, and he went to bed, believing that he would roll into the capital in a triumph the next morning. Afghans are weird, remembers an error reporter and bedded with Hekmet Yar. They turn off the wireless when they go to sleep, as if war will stop. So they switch the wireless off and we all went to sleep. The sun comes up again, they turn on the wireless, and the bad news starts pouring in.

The gangs of former Mujahideen sliced up Afghanistan into their own private kingdoms, with their own private armies, their own drug operations, and their own shikdown rackets. In Kabul, the government had been replaced with a Mujahideen regime allied with Masood, with one-time Jahadi, Bernardin Rabani serving as president.

Day-to-day reality was bloodshed, as it had been for 10 years already. And this time, Kabul was not spared. The one's bustling capital of Afghanistan was shredded by street fighting. All is highly motivated, patched in fighters, opposed to the Masood Coalition, bore down from the east.

We spoke with Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid about the nature of the warlord years from 1992 to 1996.

While Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Iran continued to back their respective proxies in Afghanistan, the Americans having achieved their goals pretty much packed up and went home, turning off the money spigot. With the exception of one program to buy back any stinger missiles still floating around Afghanistan.

Steve Cole calculates that by 1992, there were more personal weapons in Afghanistan than in India and Pakistan combined. By some estimates, more such weapons had been shipped into Afghanistan during the previous decade than to any other country in the world. Over the years, the USSR had supplied the Afghan army with tens of billions worth. The combined US Pakistani, Saudi, and Chinese aid to the much leaner, meaner, Majidin, was somewhere north of 10 billion. At least, that was what was on the books.

In June, the Guardian reported from an Afghan refugee camp, where more than 100,000 refugees were living in, quote, squalid conditions, short of food, water, and cooking fuel. Six miles east of the city of Jalalabad. Five months later, in November 1994, the Knight-Rider News Service reported that in Afghanistan, 400,000 homeless in Kabul live among the rubble of what was once a prosperous city of several million.

One of the many wars within the war was the campaign against ethnic minorities, such as the Hazara population in Kabul. In 1993, the Fundamentalist Warlord and Bin Laden ally, Abdul Rasul Siaf, on behalf of the government backed by Masood and Rabani, carried out a campaign of, quote, repeated human butchery, unquote, reported the BBC years later. Siaf's paramilitary forces, quote, rampaged through the off-shard district, murdering, raping, and burning homes. Eventually, you could map out which warlords owned which peace of the country. Dostum set up his own fiftum in the north, Ishmael Khan, controlled herat in the west, Masud, controlled most of the northeast, several militias ruled helmet in the south, but it was increasingly the fiftum of drug lords, Rites Artemicalanovsky. Kabul remained the ultimate prize, and so continued to burn year after year. With the anti-Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan all wrapped up, the U.S. government continued to cover up the tracks of their one-time clients at a major note in the Mujahideen's recruitment network, the Kifa Center in Brooklyn, New York.

What's more, the Kahana assassin and his associates had plenty of sermons from Brooklyn's blind shake, Abduhrahman, who ran the Kifah center. Federal prosecutors narrowed the case down to the gunmen, El Saeed, No Saeer. That reduced the chances for unwanted questions about the men's trainer, and Al Qaeda affiliated Afghan veteran named Ali Muhammad, who had both served in US special forces and served as an FBI informant.

It blew up at 12 noon, killing half a dozen people above the garage where the car was parked. Before long, a perpetrator had emerged. One of the bombers, a 24-year-old Pakistani named Ramsi Yusuf, wrote letters to the press, claiming responsibility. It would take about two years to catch Yusuf, who was arrested in early February 1995 at the Sukhasa guesthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan. After spending hours with UCF and evaluating their evidence, the FBI writes Steve Cole, found that UCF was KG about who had helped him bomb the World Trade Center.

an FBI report on Ramsey U.S. and his associates found that they had also, quote, discussed future attacks in the U.S. including flying a plane filled with explosives into the CIA building. In fact, one of the world trade center bombers said that, quote, in June of this year, he was able to travel to the U.S. and possibly attack a U.S. nuclear facility. How would U.S. have the funds to carry out these kinds of plots? Well, as investigators suspected, a man named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, knew a guy, who knew a guy.

The average fighters in the Majahadine during the 1980s were men who could quote recount their tribal and clan lineages, right-talked by Rashid. They could remember their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recount legends and stories from Afghan history. By the 1990s, however, a new generation had arrived on the scene. These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbors, nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war in the 1980s had thrown up, and, quote,

The original Taliban leadership forged over years of war was probably the most disfigured and disabled set of commanders in the entire world, Rashid writes, Its future foreign minister, the one-eyed Mola Muhammad Gals Muhammad Gals, recalled that the first crop of Taliban leaders, quote, would sit for a long time to discuss how to change the terrible situation in their country. Before we started, we had only vague ideas of what to do, and we thought we would fail. But we believed we were working with Allah as his pupils. The Taliban's Islamic creed had come from what was originally a reformist strain of Islam, born in British India, a century earlier. Dale Bondi Islam, which it survived over the years thanks to tightly-organized proponents, received a real shot in the arm during the religious revival in Pakistan under the late President Zia. As we've seen in the Zia years, the Pakistani state dulled out funds to madrosis of every denomination, including the Dale Bondi's. quote, the Dailbondis took a restrictive view of the role of women, opposed all forms of hierarchy in the Muslim community, and rejected the Shia, right, sokmit Rashid. But the Taliban were to take these beliefs to an extreme which the original Dailbondis would never have recognized, and quote. Inside the Madrasas in Pakistan and later Afghanistan itself, with funding from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the religious code of the Taliban reached its final form.

You participated the war. Therefore, I'm leaving the war and I want you to die in the war.

The spiritual, military and political leader of the Taliban was a battlefield in Nigma, named Mullah Muhammad Omar.

Like many of his comrades, the bearded severe-looking Omar wore his battle days on his face, having lost his right eye. Omar had a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic wit, writes Rashid, and he remained quote extremely shy of outsiders, particularly foreigners. But among his own cod rays, he was always accessible. Omar, according to reporter Carletta Gaul, was a hard-headed fighter who would never flinch from a challenge.

And in fact, wherever the Taliban started to pop up, it was difficult not to find ISI agents nearby.

President Rebani and Kabul offered to team up with the Taliban, so long as they aligned with him against the hated Golbedin Hechmet Yar. But the Taliban put their post to an identity first, refusing to submit to the Tajik Rebani. Meanwhile, Hechmet Yar, who had always been the cats' paw for his paymasters in Pakistan, had failed to take Kabul once again and wore the stench of failure. Late that October, the Taliban attacked an ISI convoy that had come in from Pakistan. After raiding it, they used their new resources to launch their own offensive to take over Kandahar from the warlords. The enemy commander, Rashid writes, was chased into the desert by the Taliban, captured and shot dead with 10 of his bodyguards. His body was hung from a tank barrel for all to see.

The Taliban pulled the rug out from under the warlords. First, neutralizing the forces of Hechmet Yar. Then, tangling with Akmitsha Masud. In the Taliban, acting with a unity unseen in the squabbling Majahideen, reinvested their spoils of war, their drug profits, and transport taxes from the tolls they had set up. Next, a prominent leader of the Hazara minority died in Taliban custody. Supporters claimed that he was pushed out of a helicopter on the way to a prison in Kandahar. This was an omen of things to come. A bloody ethnic and sectarian divide between Pashtun and Hazara, Sunni and Shia, bubbling below the surface.

The Taliban's campaign reached its climax in 1996. The Afghan President Rabani organized one last tour of Asia, asking for support against the Taliban from backers in Russia, India, and Iran. Even Hekmit Yar, after fighting Rabani for four years, had now joined the government, which in turn accelerated the Taliban's assault on Kabul. More and more Taliban rockets flew into Kabul as the year went on. All the while, Saudi and Pakistani leaders were clearing the way, bribing rival warlords, one as much as $10 million to simply let the Taliban through.

In fall of 1996, the Civil War was over. The Taliban stormed Kabul on the night of September 26, 1996.

Mullah Omar and his men, and their thousands of Toyota pickup trucks, originally paid for by the CIA, were now in control of Kabul. This meant that, despite holdouts in the north, they could and would call themselves the government. The new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And now that the Taliban wasn't charged, it was ready to conduct the business of government.

Let's start with the drugs. As we discussed last time, the four runners of the Taliban, the Mujahideen, had for decades now turned the Afghan hinterlands into opium country. After the arrest of a major Pashtun drug trafficker by the DEA in late 95, Benizir Budo's government in Pakistan tried to prove they were serious about cracking down on drugs, rights cooling. The government claimed it had dismantled 15 heroin laboratories and seized 6.3 tons of heroin. If true, this would be a world record for heroin seizures anywhere, and equal to the total amount of drugs of all kinds seized in Pakistan the year before.

Despite their medieval reputation, the Taliban actually had a pretty decent understanding of modern PR. Even before they seized Kabul, they had powerful advocates representing them in one place that really mattered.

Chief among them was Lately Helms, an Afghan-American, New Jersey suburbanite, political mover and shaker, and the niece of former CIA director, Richard Helms. Apart from her connection with the agency, the Afghan side of her family tree included former ministers to King Zahir. Leading up to the Taliban takeover, right French journalist Jean Charles Brissard and Guillaume Duskier. Lately, Helms had, quote, spearheaded several initiatives on the Taliban's behalf. She would work year after year, until September of 2001, to arrange TV broadcasts, media profiles, private consultations, and UN meetings with the men leading the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

In one encounter a few months before the Taliban entered Kabul, a mid-level bureaucrat at the State Department perched on his couch and tried to convince me that the Taliban was really not such a bad bunch.

And so the American government and its leading oil conglomerates worked hand in glove to court the Taliban, with the aim of building a pipeline across the Islamic Emirate. This may be, at least partly why the State Department bureaucrats were laughing so hard at the Taliban's jokes. Further messaging was massaged by Zalme Khalil Zad. Then a senior strategist at the Rand Corporation and one day to become the most powerful US agent in Afghanistan. Quote, based on recent conversations, I'm confident that the Taliban would welcome an American re-engagement. The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. It is closer to the Saudi model. And quote,

After the Taliban took over, you enlisted to become an underground teacher of other women and girls who were forbidden to do so by the Taliban. What was this job like? How did you and other women go about doing this?

You'd hide the the books in your burqa.

With Afghanistan devastated by civil war, the Sudanese capital of Cartoon took on new significance in the mid-1990s.

But despite their one-time collaboration in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Brooklyn, New York, the United States government saw Ben Laden very differently. Increasingly, the agency's cartoon station cabled evidence to Langley that Ben Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army, writes Steve Cole.

By early 1995, CIA analysts described Bin Laden's cartoon headquarters as something like a venture capital firm, rolling out terror grants, or as one analyst put it, as the quote unquote Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism. At the top of 1996, a approval came down at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center to create a new get-bin-laden team. Code-named Alec Station. Meanwhile, a new US ambassador to Sudan was still trying for talks with Sudanese leaders. Maybe there could be a way to get the Sudanese to give Bin Laden up.

Increasingly aware that cartoon was no longer safe, Osama made contact with some old friends in Jalalabad. Sedan's government leased a jet for two flights between Africa and Afghanistan, report Steve Cole, to move Bin Laden's family and furniture in the summer of 1996. Who did Bin Laden blame for kicking him out of Sedan? He made it clear in a now famous interview that took place about a week after his departure.