Blowback - S4 Episode 5 - "We Can Live With That"

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

The warlord years, and the rise of the Taliban.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In February 1997, as scientists 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 guests that day were representatives from the Taliban. the new Islamic rulers of Afghanistan. The Taliban envoys were in town to discuss a promising and mutually beneficial plan for building a pipeline through their country, courtesy of the California petroleum giant Unicau.

Though the meeting with state went fine, this was a delicate situation. Women's rights groups had been protesting the liberal Clinton administration's rather cordial relations with the Taliban, whose government, after all, had eradicated most traces of political, civil, and social rights for women, and imposed one of the most draconian patriarchies on the planet. Shortly after the meeting, a pack of journalists challenged a senior U.S. diplomat who explained the U.S. position on the Taliban, quote, the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be pipelines, an emir, 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. I can live with that. I can live with that.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 4, Episode 5. We can live with that. Last episode, we discussed the final phase of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The arming, drug running, and battlefield success of the Mujahideen. And then in 1988, the beginning of the Soviet withdrawal. Now we're going to look at what came next. at how Afghan President Najeebullah's government held on with surprising vigor,

how the warlords took over when he fell, and how the period of outright civil war in Afghanistan paved the way for the rise of the Taliban. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union would no longer exist. And even if it had survived, Secretary of State James Baker had already negotiated an end to Soviet assistance to the Afghan government. The American Special Envoy in Afghanistan sent cables home, predicting what would happen if Najibullah's regime fell to the Mujahideen. Quote, an extremist seizure of Kabul would plunge Afghanistan into a fresh round of warfare, which could affect areas adjoining Afghanistan. Should Golbedeen Hekmet-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. Despite the end of the Cold War and the onset of the so-called end of history, the 1990s would plunge Afghanistan into what may be its bloodiest phase yet. We met President Najee Bull at the presidential point, palace in Kabul. The Soviet army has finally left. Is your government going to be able to stand up on its own? Surely. No problem. No problem. Uh-huh. March 1989. Afghan President Najibullah, by all accounts a competent and pragmatic communist, faced a broken nation. His capital was surrounded by rich, powerful, and eager warlords that had been financed

and fedded by foreign powers for over a decade. Still, against all odds, Najibullah showed a knack for hanging on to power. A headline in Newsday summed it up. Najibullah, Afghan leader with nine lives. President Bush has announced that he's going to continue to support the opposition. Would you give back all your arms to the Soviet Union if we would bring about peace and the cessation of the arm struggle? Yes. The Soviets had left behind significant reasons.

resources at Najibullah's disposal that provided a necessary lifeline to the Najibullah regime, writes historian Shane A. Smith. And these included military weapons, property, and other equipment worth billions of dollars. But despite Soviet assistance, the material conditions in Afghan cities remained quite dire. Quote, the Soviets shipped an average of 250,000 tons of wheat per year to Afghanistan, and also furnished other essential commodities, including kerosene for cooking in heating, tea, sugar, oil, soap, and footwear. Although keeping people fed was a significant factor for stability, Najibullah's highest priority was keeping the Mujahideen from taking Kabul.

The Soviets would not come to the rescue anymore. The Afghan rebels, the Mujahideen, had suffered heavily. But when we began filming in February, the picture seemed clear. It would be a race between the various Mujahideen groups to capture Kabul. With its Soviet defenders gone, the city lay helpless and vulnerable. No one expected it to hold out long. 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 Shadid, the late New York Times reporter. Cassettes of Osama's sermons were passed around the kingdom in which he invaded against the West and the non-Islamic world, in particular, the United States. But more on that later.

Back in Afghanistan, with no more Soviet troops in the country, the first trial by fire for the Najibullah government came weeks after the withdrawal. The top mujahideen warlords had hatched, a plan with Pakistan to deliver what they believed would be the finishing blow to a weak Afghan government. You have a message that you'd like to give to the people of the United States? The last Soviet soldier has left Afghanistan.

What the people of Afghanistan need is more sympathy in economic assistance, not more bombs in cancer. Hold on a minute, don't you think we ought to talk? What about how I'm going to run? Sure. 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. Anarchy 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 DeCurtis, and you'll get some sense of what's happening in the Soviet Union. No one can sense where things are heading. Rolling Stone may have been over-egging the pudding a bit, but the USSR was in free fall. In 1989, amid a global economic slowdown, the Soviet bloc was entering an economic crisis. The Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, were now home to growing anti-communist movements.

The leaders of the Soviet system, writes Vladislav Zubak, didn't understand that the new creations of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, they didn't generate more consumer goods. They had simply cannibalized government revenue just when the USSR needed it most. The economic crisis translated into high inflation, prolonged shortages, and lengthy queues. 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. Despite this, Gorbachev believed that more American aid would be forthcoming.

After all, what would have been the point of the last few years of diplomacy and negotiated reform if not to get American support when it really counted? What Gorbachev failed to understand was that the Cold War was still on, from the Soviet Union all the way to Afghanistan. On February the 10th, as the Russians were leaving, seven Mujahideen groups amid scenes of characteristic disorder gathered in Pakistan to form an interim government. During the Soviet withdrawal, the different factions of the Mujahideen agreed to a shotgun marriage, an alliance funded lavishly by Saudi intelligence. This excluded many from the Shia minorities, most notably the famous Ahmed Shah Masoud. The dominant figure in the interim government was a religious hardliner, who ruled.

He was subtle and unforgiving, and anyone who crossed him was liable to be branded a traitor or a heretic. 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. It was Pakistan that most often called the shots on the ground, and the shot called in March 1989, after the Soviet soldiers had exited the scene, was for an assault on the city of Jalalabad, a heavily defended eastern Afghan city, just miles from the border with Pakistan.

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," end 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 U.S.-backed jihad was far from over. The resistance attacks were not coordinated, and they faltered. resistance took heavy casualties. What ensued was a disaster, not for the weak Afghan government,

but for the warlords. Najibullah's forces repelled one Mujahideen assault after another. I think it was about then that it became evident that the regime was going to survive longer than others anticipated. The bodies kept piling up well into the summer of 1989. By the winter, it was clear that after a near decade of fighting, Afghanistan was now lurching towards civil war. Good evening in his first interview with an American reporter, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, told Anne Rather tonight that Kuwait must remain a part of Iraq, but he went on to say he wants a dialogue about everything. 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.

the sains 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 Majahedin 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 Mujahideen won chunks of northern Afghanistan after a series of offensives led most notably by Ahmed Shah Masud. As shortages of goods surfaced, writes Shane A. 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. With no new official armed shipments scheduled for the warlords, the Americans turned to their campaign in the Persian Gulf, against their former allies Saddam Hussein. In the first instance of an unholding, bond between wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The spoils from the war against Saddam were captured and then shipped to the Mujahideen. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, it took the Gulf War to end Osama bin Laden's stint as a celebrity, writes Anthony Shad. 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 holy land was sacrilege, an unforgivable sin, end 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 Jean-Charles Brassard and Guillaume Dasquier report,

several large Saudi-funded banks, some with connections to BCCI, transferred money to bin Laden over the years, before and after his exile. In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lured for the last time, and an era comes to an end. I am ceasing my activities in the post of President of the USSR. 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, handpicked by Yuri And

off to lead the USSR into the future, had 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. His legacy guarantees him an honored place in history and provides a solid basis for the United States to work in equally constructive ways with his successors, successors, successors. 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, writes Zubach, he would have seen the smoke billowing out of New York's twin towers and decades of American military. occupation of Afghanistan.

It was at this moment that Peter Thompson, the top-ranking diplomat handling Afghanistan, began sending urgent cables home. One ex-warlord Abdul-Hawk wrote to Thompson, saying that, quote, Afghanistan now runs the risk of becoming 50 or more separate kingdoms. Foreign extremists may want to move in, buying houses and weapons. Afghanistan may become unique in becoming both a training ground. and munitions dump for foreign terrorists. And at the same time, the world's largest poppy field. Once Thompson left Afghanistan in 1992, it would be almost a decade before the U.S.

had an ambassador or a CIA station there. Not until the year 2001. Afghan rebels officially took over the government of Afghanistan today, replacing the defeated Moscow-supported regime. But fierce fighting is. is still going on in some places against a holdout fundamentalist Muslim rebel faction. The fall of the Soviet Union quickly fulfilled Abdu Haq's prophecy. On March 18, 1992, Mohamed Najibullah announced over radio that he would resign, having decided there was no hope left for his government. A few weeks later, on April 15th, 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 Dostam. Before the president's capture, as the Mujahideen closed in within rocketing distance, the president laid down a prophecy not unlike Abdul-Hawks. 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. Najibullah, Steve Cole writes, could see the future.

But there was no one to listen. The United States stood to the side. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan had left Islamabad. Washington had just announced a new policy. Hands off. India had planned to spirit Najibullah out of the country, but then abandoned him, worried it would cause a military standoff with his captors. Najibullah was imprisoned, and power was officially on its way to the Mujahideen.

Much of Afghanistan has been devastated by this war, and until the fighting stops, rebuilding will have to wait. Terry Phillips for CBS News, Kabul. The Alliance of Warlords, known informally as the Seven, wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. The Warlords competition for Kabul had been whittled down to two main rivals. Golbadine Hekmajar, approaching from the south, and Ahmed Shah Masoud, coming from the north. Some shops have reopened today. However, most people are staying off the street. saying it's still too dangerous to leave home. Even that is risky.

Many rockets are landing in residential neighborhoods. Heckmanjar 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, Hekmatyar worked the radio, reopening talks with Afghan communists. Dozens of Arab jihadists volunteers, allies of Hekmatyar from the days of revolution

in Peshawar, poured into the village, and with them came Arab journalists, prepared to document the final chapter of the Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan. Hekmityar's benefactors from the ISI, CIA, and Saudi intelligence rushed to Peshawar, the longtime Pakistani haven for the Majahedin, bargaining with the hot-headed Hekmatyar about how best to put together in Islamic government that everyone could be happy with. One of the power brokers was none other than Osama bin Laden. The Saudi bad boy attempted to talk Hekmatyar into sharing power. Go back with your brothers, bin Laden implored his colleagues.

But Hekmatyar had zero intentions of sharing anything, let alone sharing power with his hated Tajik rival, Ahmed Shah Masud. Even as he talked by radio with Masud, Hekmatyar's forces moved toward the gates of Kabul. Green flags were attached to his tanks, Cole writes. The cars were washed so they would gleam triumphantly when Hekbatyar rolled into Kabul the next day. He dispatched his agents to Kabul that night, and he went to bed, believing that he was. would roll into the Capitol in a triumph the next morning. Afghans are weird, remembers an Arab reporter embedded with Hecmetyar. They turn off the wireless when they go to sleep, as if war will stop.

So they switched 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. Two rival factions are still fighting in and around the Capitol. Early this morning, the airport was shelled. Throughout the day, heavy artillery thundered in the hills around Kabul. The Kabul airport now belonged to Massoud, who had bribed enough ex-communists to join him in a preemptive strike against the hated and feared Hekbatyar. Transport planes poured into Kabul, carrying hundreds of Rashid Dostom's fierce Uzbek militiamen. They seized strategic buildings all across the Kabul Valley, writes Steve Cole. Hackmityar scrambled to regain his

ground, but Massoud proved the superior commander, dividing his forces, encircling Hakmityar's militia in the city, and squeezing. On the morning of Hakmityar's imagined triumph, tank battles and street-to-street fighting erupted on Kabul's wide avenues, writes Cole. Fires burned on the grounds of the presidential palace. The president-turned prisoner Najibullah sought shelter in a small, walled UN compound. And when the dust settled, Massoud entered Kabul triumphantly from the north of the war. on a tank strewn with flowers. That night, hundreds of his Mujahideen fired their assault rifles into the air in celebration,

their tracer bullets lighting the sky like electric rain. Angry and desperate, Steve Cole notes. Hecabediar began to lob rockets, blindly at Kabul. Once a city of roses and minarets. Now a scene from hell. This is Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal. 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 shake-down rackets.

In Kabul, the government had been replaced with a Mujahideen regime allied with Masud, with one-time jihadi, Bernahdin Rabani, serving as president. It was a devastating psychological blow, because for the first time, in 300 years, the Pashtuns had lost control of the capital, writes journalist Ahmed Rashid. Day-to-day reality was bloodshed, as it had been for 10 years already. And this time, Kabul was not spared. The once-bustling capital of Afghanistan was shredded by street fighting, all as highly motivated Pashtun fighters opposed to the war.

the Massoud coalition bore down from the east. And between the bullets flying between Hekmatyar and Massoud, Dostum, and Sayyaf, quote, Afghanistan was in a state of virtual disintegration. We spoke with Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid about the nature of the warloid years from 1992 to 1996. Each side had various commanders from the Mujahideen period who now wanted to control Kabul. And so there was a very bloody bitter four or five ways struggle between the Pashtuns, the non-Pastoons, tribes, etc., to control Afghanistan.

It was the most destructive period. Kabul itself was almost destroyed by the internal fighting. the internal fighting. And it unleashed, of course, many extremist groups. You had, you know, Al-Qaeda, you had other extremist groups developing under the umbrella of these warlords. The Saudis continued supporting the Pashtuns because they thought that these Pashtuns would knock out the Iranians.

The Iranians were supporting the Shia Azaras because they thought this would knock out the Saudis. And so there was this real dogged attempt to gain the maximum advantage. The Afghan politician Malala Ijoia, who would go on to become the country's youngest woman MP, was a teenager at this time. And she spoke to us about the warlord years. Each of these extremist fundamentalists, they wanted to come in power, and they belonged to different ethnic. And first they destroyed our... national unity in Afghanistan, and then they banned women from their rights. They raped even young girls and grand mothers, and they committed massacres, countless massacres.

They looted our museum, and they, alone in Kabul, there is reports, more than 65,000 people they killed in Kabul. If we call that period what the crimes that they committed from 92 to 96 when they come in power, the small Holocaust even is not enough to explain. 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.

The Stingers, you'll recall, were the mascot of the Afghan War in the 1980s, a sign of how valuable American assistance was to the Mujahideen and how instrumental those missiles were in defeating the Soviets. But even before the Soviet departure, the Stingers had begun to start. dispersing to the four corners of the earth, writes investigative journalist Ken Silverstein. The surface to air beauty had already made it to Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Chechnya, and Algeria. Stingers inevitably turned up for sale on the international black market, end quote.

Other nations who acquired them, either through sales, smuggling, or blueprints include the United Arab Emirates, Somalia, Iraq, Qatar, Zambia, and North Korea. And in 1990, quote, two Colombian drug dealers were arrested in Tampa, Florida, after attempting to arrange the purchase of Stingers for the Medelline cartel. In the early 90s, Silverstein adds, Stingers were used in a flurry of attacks against military and possibly civilian aircraft. The CIA embarked on a $65 million campaign to buy back the missiles. They began tracking them down and offering double for what they'd sold them for years earlier.

Quote, they were offering so much that sellers on the black market could take the money and buy themselves cheaper anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry, reads one study on Stingermania. 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 U.S., Pakistani, Saudi, and Chinese aid

to the much leaner, meaner, Mujahideen, was somewhere north of 10 billion. At least, that was what was on the books. Hickmacher is also into his second year of reigning massive rocket and artillery. military attacks on the citizens of Kabul. Among this sea of weapons lived Afghan civilians, about 500,000 of whom, in Kabul alone, depended on coupons for food in 1992.

In the countryside, millions more lived with malnourishment, far from any reliable food source, coal rights. In the unfolding civil war, between the one-time Mujahideen, only further strained supply lines across the country. And alongside the warlords were the so-called foreign or Arab fighters, who were in reality a mixture of Islamist fighters still coming into the country from places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, as CIA cables at the time noted, supported by Pakistan and Saudi intelligence. 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 Ritter News Service reported that in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, 400,000 homeless in Kabul live among the rubble of what was once a prosperous city of several million. To the south in Kandahar, quote, international aid agencies were fearful of even working there as the city itself was divided by warring groups, writes Ahmed Rashid. The warlord seized homes and farms throughout their occupants and handed them over to their

own supporters. And the commanders abused the population at will, kidnapping young girls and boys. boys for their own sexual pleasure, robbing merchants in the bazaars and fighting and brawling in the streets. Instead of refugees returning from Pakistan, a fresh wave of refugees began to leave for Pakistan. 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 Sayyaf, on behalf of the government backed by Massoud and Rabani, carried out a campaign of, quote, repeated human butchery, unquote, reported the BBC years later.

Sayov's paramilitary forces, quote, rampaged through the Afshar district, murdering, raping, and burning homes. Eventually, you could map out which warlords owned which piece of the country. Dostom set up his own fiefdom in the north. Ishmael Khan controlled Herat in the west, Masoud controlled most of the northeast, several militias ruled Helmand in the south, but it was increasingly the fiefdom of drug lords, writes Artemi Kalinovsky.

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 node in the Majahadine's recruitment network, the Kifah Center in Brooklyn, New York. In November 1990, for example, investigators looking into the murder of right-wing activist Mayor Kahana turned up, quote, manuals from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, marked top secret for training, along with classified documents belonging to the U.S.

Joint Chiefs of Staff, writes investigative journalist Peter Lance. In addition, scholar Peter Dale Scott notes, quote, the police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and the World Trade Center. What's more, the Kahana assassin and his associate, had plenty of sermons from Brooklyn's Blind Sheikh, Abdul Rahman, who ran the Kifah Center. Federal prosecutors narrowed the case down to the gunman, El-Said Nosayr. That reduced the chances for unwanted questions about the men's trainer, an al-Qaeda-affiliated

Afghan veteran named Ali Mohamed, who had both served in U.S. special forces and served as an FBI informant. While only Nosair went down for the killing of Kahana, his Al-Qifa associates would be tried for a different crime. A car seemed to explode in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in Tower A. Last winter, the FBI was praised for its speed in cracking the case of the World Trade Center bombing and bringing four suspects to trial. Now, there is some evidence that the FBI may have known of the plot in advance through an informant and might, might even have stopped the bombing that kills six people. Correspondent Jacqueline Adams has the story.

FBI agents might have been able to prevent last February's deadly explosion at New York's World. World Trade Center. They discussed secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, but they didn't, according to the FBI's own informant, Imad Salam. Unbeknownst to the FBI at the time, Salam recorded many of his conversations with his handlers. 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 Ramsey Yusuf, wrote letter 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 Yusuf and evaluating their evidence, the FBI, writes Steve Cole, found that Yusuf was cagey about who had helped him bomb the World Trade Center. Cole continues. In a Manila apartment,

where Yusuf had hidden as a fugitive, investigators found a business card belonging to Muhammad Khalifa, a relative by marriage of Osama bin Laden. Yusuf said only that the card had been given to him by his colleagues as a contact in case he needed help. The agents asked if Yusuf was familiar with the name Osama bin Laden. He said that he knew bin Laden was a relative of Khalifa. He refused to say anything more. Pakistani investigators eventually learned that for many months after the world Trade Center bombing, Yusuf had lived in a Pakistani guesthouse funded by bin Laden, and they passed this information along to the FBI and CIA, end quote.

An FBI report on Ramsey Yusuf 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 Yusef 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. We have people getting injured in the marketplace,

trying to do shopping, trying to find something to eat. just a normal, what we would call a normal life, go out of your house, go shopping, take your bicycle, go to school, and a rocket can hit at any moment. The rocket came and hit the wall, and all the pieces hit me. The average fighters in the Mujahideen during the 1980s were men who could quote, recount their tribal and clan lineages, writes Ahmed Rashid. They could remember their ability. 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. had thrown up." End quote. Largely teenagers to men in their 20s. These were a mixture of refugee camp youth and madrasa students,

or sometimes both. In time, all they had come to know was a life defined by Sharia and lived by the sword, with many of them never having even lived with the opposite sex. Male Brotherhood offered these youngsters not just a religious cause to fight for, but a whole way of life to fully embrace and never. make their existence meaningful, end quote.

Though they were raised on stories of the jihad against the Russians, most had, quote, no firsthand knowledge about it. They were boys raised in madrasas, often children of parents who had been killed, writes historian Ardemy Kalanowski. These students, or Taliban, would be the foot soldiers of a new Islamic movement brewing in the south of Afghanistan. The leaders of that movement were the actual veterans of the war against the Soviet Union. and Najibullah.

Quote, we all knew each other because we were all originally from the same province in South Central Afghanistan and had fought together, one early Taliban leader told Rashid. And they would now fight together with their younger, fanatic followers, under the banner of a militant religious revival. 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 Mullah Muhammad Gauz Muhammad Gauz, 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, from what was originally a reformist strain of Islam, born in British India, a century earlier. Deobandi Islam, which had 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 doled out funds to madrasas of every denomination,

including the Deo Bandis. quote, the Daobandis took a restrictive view of the role of women, opposed all forms of hierarchy in the Muslim community, and rejected the Shia, writes Ahmed Rashid. But the Taliban were to take these beliefs to an extreme which the original Daobandis would never have recognized, end 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 funds. final form. In the violent, corrupt, and debased reign of the warlords, the Taliban's simple and direct code of law appeared even to some secular Afghans, like one guy named Hamid Karzai, as a possible cleansing force, at least if you were part of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority.

Another future Taliban minister told Rashid that, quote, many people were searching for a solution in Madrasas across Afghanistan. And so, this Taliban official said, we came to Kandahar in the south to talk with Mullah Omar. You will participate at the war. Therefore, I'm doing the war, and I want to die in the war.

When do you think the war will be over? When all the cruel people of Afghanistan has been punished, I mean, they have been take out from the country, and the war will be ended. The spiritual, military, and political leader of the Taliban was a battle-scarred enigma 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 cadres, he was always

accessible. Omar, according to reporter Carletta Gall, was a hard-headed fighter who would never flinch from a challenge. He'd grown up in a poor household, orphaned at a young age, and raised by his uncle, who himself was a village Mullah. Some saw him in a less cinematic light. Quote, Mullah Omar was not even street smart, said one major landowner who protected Omar in the early 90s.

He was so stupid, it was easy for the ISI to use him. This notion that the Pakistani Central Intelligence Agency, the ISI, essentially organized the Taliban, like putty in their hands, is widespread

in the region. And in fact, wherever the Taliban started to pop up, it was difficult not to find ISI agents nearby. Quote, the Taliban do not have minds of their own, according to one Pakistani journalist who spent time with them. As the brother of one suicide bomber put it, years later, quote, all Taliban are ISI Taliban. The incredible story of Omar's origins, according to Rashid, goes like this.

In the spring of 1994, Omar's neighbors came to tell him that a warlord commander had abducted two teenage girls. Their heads had been shaved, and they had been taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped. Omar enlisted some 30 Taliban, who had only 16 rifles between them, and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank. And, importantly, capturing arms and ammunition in the process, end quote. And months later, a reported dispute between two Kandahar commanders over who had the right to sodomize a boy escalated into a fight in which civilians died, and after which, quote, Omar's group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local

disputes. Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system, end quote. President Rabbani in Kabul offered to team up with the Taliban, so long as they aligned with him against the hated Golbodin Hekhmayar. But the Taliban put their postune identity first, refusing to submit to the Tajik Rabbani. Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who had always been the cat's 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 ten of his bodyguards. His body was hung from a tank barrel for all to see. Thousands of young Afghan Pashtuns from all over rushed to Kandahar to join the Taliban, and by the end of 1994, some 12,000 Afghan and Pakistani students had joined the Taliban in Kandahar. Although Benazir Budo's government denied supporting the Taliban, Pakistan stood by their Afghan clients, quote, as they immediately implemented the strictest interpretation of Sharia ever seen in the Muslim world, writes Rashid.

And this was a cut above the thuggishness of even people like Gulbadine Hekmityar, who, as we've discussed, once threw acid in women's faces. The Taliban pulled the rug out from under the warlords. First, neutralizing the forces of Hekmatyar, then tangling with Ahmed Shah Masoud. And 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 sictarian divide between Pashtun and Hazara, Sunni and Shia, bubbling below the surface. Kabul is surrounded by an army of Islamic fundamentalists, the Taliban, committed to its takeover or its destruction. The Taliban's campaign reached its climax in 1996. The Afghan president, Rabani, organized one last tour of Asia, asking for support. report against the Taliban from backers in Russia, India, and Iran. Even Hekmetyar, 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, won as much

as $10 million to simply let the Taliban through. And soon enough, it happened. In fall of 1996, the Civil War was over. The Taliban stormed Kabul on the night of September 26, 1996. Although Massoud was able to flee, ex-Afghan President Mohamed Najibullah, who was still under house arrest, was not so lucky. Living in the UN compound since his resignation in 92,

Najeebullah reportedly refused an offer to evacuate from his old foe, Ahmed Shama Sued. A proud and stubborn man, writes Ahmed Rashid. He probably feared that if he fled with the Tajiks, he would be forever damned in the eyes of his fellow Pashtuns. And so he paid the price. Quote, the Taliban walked up to Najibullah's room, beat him and his brother senseless, and then bundled them into a pickup and drove them to the darkened presidential palace.

There, they castrated Najibullah, dragged his body behind a jeep, and then shot him dead. His brother was similarly tortured, and then throttled to death. The Taliban hanged the two dead men from a concrete traffic control post just outside of the palace, only a few blocks from the U.N. compound. 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 was in charge, it was ready to conduct the business of government. The three major areas where the Taliban could do deals were the drug trade, good old-fashioned pipeline politics, and its connections with the ever-increasing forces of militant Islam. Let's start with the drugs. As we discussed last time, the forerunners 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, Benazir Budo's government in Pakistan tried to prove they were serious about crack. tracking down on drugs, writes Cooley. 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. Now, these implausible show raids were par for the course in the 1990s. And despite their pious message, the Taliban had in fact kept Afghan poppy production

alive. And over the next several years, Afghanistan would double its production of opium, mobilizing land, labor, and capital to overcome its enormous poverty, and ultimately produce 75% of the world's heroin, writes Al McCoy. This is the car, the number nine Ford Thunderbird, Bill Elliott's race car. This is Bill Elliott's motor oil. Unicau 76. It's one every grand national race he's won. It's the same oil you can buy for your car at 76 stations. And this, this is Bill Elliott. Ready boys. Go with the spirit. Try Bill's motor oil. 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. Washington. Chief among them was Lely 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 Zaire. leading up to the Taliban takeover, write French journalist Jean-Charles Brissard and Guillaume Daschier,

Lely 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. Her efforts paid off. One reporter from the New Republic recalled,

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. You get to know them, the state official said, and you find that they really have a great sense of humor. Much to the chagrin of human rights and women's rights groups inside of the United States, the Taliban now policed a very valuable patch of law.

land in Central Asia, and the U.S. wanted in. Now, one thing certainly the Americans did encourage was there was large quantities of gas and oil in Central Asia. Most prominently it was Turkmenistan, which was a neighbor of Afghanistan on its western flank, and had enormous quantities of gas, which it could sell anywhere, because it was landlocked. So when the Soviet Union broke up and these Central Asian states became independent, they all tried to cut deals with their various neighbors to sell their oil in gas.

And the Turkmen said, you know, to the Afghans and to the Americans, buy our gas and ship it to Pakistan and India by pipeline where it's very badly needed. And the Americans like this idea very much and supported an American company. With the Soviet Union six feet under, former Soviet republics, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan were being treated very nicely by massive Western oil concerns, such as Chevron and the aforementioned Unicou.

The only problem was that Russia, now friendly with the U.S., but still interested in protecting its own economic lifeline, was stubbornly guarding access to its pipelines to transport oil. Meanwhile, Iran, sporting its own oil reserves and decisively anti-Taliban, remained a thorn in the side of the world's sole remaining superpower. 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 Khalilzad,

then a senior strategist at the Rand Corporation and one day to become the most powerful U.S. agent in Afghanistan. Quote, based on recent conversations, I am confident that the Taliban would welcome an American re-engagement. The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. It is closer to the Saudi model. End quote.

And so, upon taking power, the Taliban welcomed a bidding war to take on the contract for Afghanistan's Islamic oil pipeline Bonanza. In one corner, the good folks at UNICAL with connections to the chief of Saudi intelligence, and in the other corner, Brightus, a Brazilian competitor, but with connections to Pakistan's ruling click. This was a tricky thing to navigate, because word began to spread quite quickly of the massacres, and swift elimination of all women's rights in Afghanistan. But the Taliban could always count on friends like Lely Helms.

Her efforts on their behalf continued, right Prasard and Daschier, even after 1997, when the Taliban welcomed the now infamous Saudi terror financier Osama bin Laden. 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? So it was very dangerous. It was risky to be underground teacher as the burqa at that time seemed like today gave safety to the world. woman, especially activist women. You would hide the books in your burqa.

Yes, I carried books under the burqa, and I was teacher for elementary classes and also for Delta High School. They just don't look to women as a human. They believe that women are only to be used to satisfy their sexual less than their children anyway, but fortunately, the woman of Afghanistan, in the past until today, in different ways, showed their resistance. With Afghanistan devastated by civil war, the Sudanese capital of Khartoum took on new significance in the mid-1990s.

In 1992, from his homeland, Osama bin Laden laid down roots in Sudan, which, like Afghanistan, is a historic crossroads of world civilization. African and Arab civilizations meet there, anchored on the Nile by the capital cartoon. With no more communists left to kill, bin Laden soon put his money to work in Sudan, quickly becoming part of the country's political elite. As the Sudanese Islamic revolutionary, Hassan al-Turabi put it, quote, He was a hero in those days. But despite their one-time collaboration in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Brooklyn, New York,

the United States government saw Bin Laden very differently. Increasingly, the agency's Cartoon station cabled evidence to Langley that bin Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army, right, Steve Cole. We have focused our declaration of jihad on striking at the U.S. soldiers inside Arabia, the country of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina. By early 1995, CIA analysts described bin Laden's Khartoum headquarters as something like a venture capital firm doling out terror grants, or, as one analyst put it,

as the quote-unquote Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic Terrorism. At the top of 1996, approval came down at the CIA's counterterrorism center to create a new Get Bin Laden team, codenamed Alec Station. Meanwhile, a new U.S. 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. The U.S. ambassador negotiated with the Sudanese in March 1996 to see about surrendering bin Laden to the Americans. Years later, Steve Cole writes, the question of whether Sudan formally offered to turn bin Laden over to the United States became a subject of dispute. Sudan's government has said it did make such an offer.

American officials say it did not. In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stand. in Arabia. Therefore, even though American civilians are not targeted in our plan, they must leave. We do not guarantee their safety. Increasingly aware that Khartoum 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, reports 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 Sudan? He made it clear in a now-famous interview that took place about a week after his departure.

In a remote mountainous area of Afghanistan's Nanggarh province, to which he has returned from Sudan with hundreds of his Arab Mujahideen guerrillas, the 40-year-old Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden declared that the killing of 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia last month marked, quote, the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States. Thank you.