Oil. Did someone say OIL?
nationalpost.com
Ostensibly, the reason for the U.S. assault is the hunt for bin Laden. I doubt they will capture him. As much as Americans hate the man, their anger is nothing next to that of the Tajiks of the Panjshir valley. When their leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, was killed by a suicide bomber three days before the New York attacks, the Northern Alliance lost their George Washington.
By organizing the attack -- which everyone assumes he did -- bin Laden signed his own death warrant. The Panjshiris have been fighting for 20 years, and their graveyards are overflowing with jagged slate headstones of the young men who died fighting for Mr. Massood. They are really, really pissed off. There is not a man in the Panjshir valley that would not give his life to avenge him.
November 3, 2001
Fate of Afghan Elvis is sealed
Patrick Graham
National Post
Photo of Patrick Graham.
Patrick Graham
After weeks near the front lines, Patrick Graham of the National Post is home, reflecting on the long war ahead, pipeline politics, and the coming demise of Osama bin Laden.
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Osama bin Laden is the Elvis of Afghanistan. No matter where you go on the front line, the local commander swears the terrorist leader just left the opposite trenches, roaring away in a convoy of Datsuns on his way to Pakistan or a local cave.
On my way out of Afghanistan, I phoned Sayed Ikramuddin, the Northern Alliance commander of an obscure stretch of the front near the city of Kunduz. "Bin Laden was here two days ago," he insisted on his satellite phone, "visiting the Taliban front lines. But he left."
Of course he was. I'd heard the same claim a dozen times in five weeks crossing the country from the Pakistan border to Tajikistan by helicopter, horse and donkey.
It's not that I didn't believe Commander Ikramuddin. He had his sources. Just a few weeks before, I'd watched from a hilltop trench while he chatted in a blue pickup with a Taliban commander planning to defect. He was in daily contact over the radio with Taliban leaders he had fought alongside for 10 years against the Russians. It's just that after even a short stay in Afghanistan you stop believing anything you are told.
Bin Laden sightings aren't the only rumours floating around the bazaars. In Afghanistan, as with the Stalinist trials in the 1930s, everything is true but the facts. If anything, a visit to Afghanistan makes the war and its purpose less clear.
This is a country with no phone network, almost no roads, and few toilets outside the main towns. The main source of information is Radio Iran. Iran is the America of the region. By Afghan terms, it is democratic, sophisticated and religiously tolerant. Everything of quality, from fruit juice to information, comes from Tehran.
Western journalists scoffed at Radio Iran, but it was not noticeably less reliable than some of their own reports, which were often so wildly inaccurate or so fudged with qualifiers they never actually said anything at all.
Ostensibly, the reason for the U.S. assault is the hunt for bin Laden. I doubt they will capture him. As much as Americans hate the man, their anger is nothing next to that of the Tajiks of the Panjshir valley. When their leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, was killed by a suicide bomber three days before the New York attacks, the Northern Alliance lost their George Washington.
By organizing the attack -- which everyone assumes he did -- bin Laden signed his own death warrant. The Panjshiris have been fighting for 20 years, and their graveyards are overflowing with jagged slate headstones of the young men who died fighting for Mr. Massood. They are really, really pissed off. There is not a man in the Panjshir valley that would not give his life to avenge him.
When a dust storm last week shut down the border to Tajikistan, I had little to do for four days but drink tea with Mr. Massood's bodyguards, in a room next to the one in which the rebel leader was assassinated. My translator, Shoab, was a Panjshiri and most of the bodyguards were his cousins from the same village as Mr. Massood (the Northern Alliance is run by something of a Panjshiri mafia).
The assassins were posing as journalists, with the bomb hidden in a TV camera. When it went off, one of the Arabs hid behind a wall and survived. In the confusion he ran from the building, but was shot by a soldier as he fled down the road. The soldier is now a hero. The man who kills bin Laden will become a legend.
Like Cmdr. Ikramuddin, the Panjshiris have many contacts inside the Taliban. Bin Laden will be betrayed, probably for a few thousand dollars, and killed. I would put my money on those bodyguards who wished they had died defending their leader.
Wars in Afghanistan are bought more often than they are fought. For the price of a couple of U.S. bombs, the Taliban purchased the loyalty of most of the northern commanders a few years ago. Mr. Massood couldn't be bought, so they killed him.
Mr. Massood, the Tragic Tajik, was the Cassandra of this war. When he granted me an interview last spring, all he wanted to talk about was bin Laden. A few weeks later he went to France, a country that adopted Massood's cause years ago, and talked endlessly about the danger to the West of bin Laden. He was a bin Laden broken record.
Panjshiris aren't the forgiving kind. Unless bin Laden is hiding in a Pakistani madrassa, the religious schools that teach his brand of fundamentalism, he's already a goner. But chances are he is moving around in Afghanistan, busy trying to stay alive and waiting for his inevitable martyrdom.
The United States knows this and is thus in no hurry to end the war. The bombing raids are not designed to achieve a quick victory but to keep the Taliban and bin Laden busy while the United States hunts down his network outside the country. Behind the smokescreen they are rearranging the board of the modern Great Game.
The United States wants the war to go on so long the world grows tired of it. That will provide time to figure out how to reconfigure the geopolitics of Central Asia, an area still up for grabs following the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Underlying the war is an older geopolitical struggle, the same one that brought the Taliban to power: oil and influence over Central Asia. Like the war in Chechnya, the long-term strategy of the war on terrorism has a lot to do with pipelines. |
