A Different Place

These lines from a poem written by Shin Gul Aajiz and published on the Taliban’s website sometime in late 2007:

The river of your love took me, I am going

If I am a drop, you are the sun of beauty

I am a garden of flowers because of your love’s spring

It’s one of the poems that Felix and I are editing together for a collection to be published by Hurst Books in early 2011. Lots of different styles, forms and subject matter. The one above is about yearning for his ‘beloved’. Many are political (motivational anthems angry with the ‘kuffar’) but these by no means dominate the collection we’ve kept since 2006.

I compiled this chronology of significant events relating to Kandahar province last year. The primary source for these dates/events was the New York Times’ archive, but then (almost) everything has been double-sourced. Everything from about 2008 onwards was while I was here in Kandahar so that then is my own observations and event listings. Perhaps someone will find it useful and it will save someone somewhere some time.

Here is the file:

LINK

As part of the NYU study, I’ve been doing some delving into the ages of various key members of the Taliban and those affiliated with ‘Al Qaeda’ and the various associated groups. While doing this, I came across a whole host of differing accounts of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s age and birthplace. I thought I’d list some that I came across as a way of showing how the ‘scholarly community’ is often deeply divided on really basic issues.

• Sana Haroon (in Frontier of Faith) says that his ‘hometown’ was Uruzgan
• John Cooley (in Unholy Wars) says that he was born in Maiwand district, Kandahar province
• Bruce Riedel (in the execrable The Search for Al Qaeda) says that he comes from Uruzgan province
• Kamal Matinuddin (in The Taliban Phenomenon) states that he was born in 1961 in “Nauda village of Panjwayi district”, Kandahar province; that he later moved with his family to Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan province, and then later migrated back to Sangisar in Kandahar province. Matinuddin’s account is frequently cited.
• Rohan Gunaratna (in Inside Al Qaeda) states that he was born in 1962 in Uruzgan
• Steve Coll (in Ghost Wars) states that he was born in 1950 in Nodeh village in Kandahar province
• Dexter Filkins (in The Forever War) dances around the issue and states merely that he was based in Sangisar
• Ahmed Rashid (in Taliban) says that he was born in 1959 in Nodeh village near Kandahar and that he moved with his family during the 1980s jihad to Tirin Kot in Uruzgan province
• Michael Griffin (in Reaping the Whirlwind) states that he was “from Maiwand” in Kandahar province
• A hagiographical Arab jihadi account of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s life (“The Giant Man”, published by Al-Tibyan Publications) states that he was born in 1962 in Uruzgan
• Another Arab jihadist profile on Azzam.com states that he was born in 1960 in Noori village in Kandahar province
• Mullah Zaeef (in My Life With the Taliban ) says that he was born in Uruzgan around 1962
• The French review Politique Internationale says — in the introduction to one of the few interviews made by a western news outlet with Mullah Mohammad Omar — that he was born in 1965 in a village near Kandahar.

That’s a variance of 15 years in the different estimates, and I haven’t even included the various speculations in newspaper and magazine print — of which there are volumes.

It all goes back to issues of information and openness among the Taliban. I’m reading Philip Short’s excellent biography of Pol Pot in the evenings here in Kandahar, and I came across this passage:

Even then, he did so reluctantly. For two decades he had operated under multiple aliases: Pouk, Hay, Pol, ’87′, Grand-Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother – to be followed in later years by ’99′ and Phem. “It is good to change your name,” he once told one of his secretaries. “The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy.” Then he added, in a phrase which would become a Khmer Rouge mantra: “If you preserve secrecy, half the battle is already won.” The architect of the Cambodian nightmare was not a man who liked working in the open.

I’m wary of drawing comparisons between the Khymer Rouge and the Taliban, if only because it seems easy to do so on the surface, but secrecy over basic points is certainly something that they shared.

Please let me know if you come across any ‘interesting’ citations of where Mullah Mohammad Omar was born; I even vaguely recall reading somewhere that he was born in Kunar province, but can’t remember where I read it.

UPDATE: Someone very helpfully suggested I read this Dutch report from 1999 as to the childhood and early years of Mullah Mohammad Omar. Go to Google Translate if you don’t understand Dutch.

Just a short shout-out to three blogs also posting from Kandahar for those who don’t already follow them. Not everything is always interesting, but given the dearth of information they’re worth keeping up with.

Kandahar Diary – PSC Contractor based down in Kandahar, managing operations all over the south it seems.

Knights of Afghanistan – Observations from an Expat Country Manager for an Afghan PSC, based down in Kandahar

Free Range International – Most of you will already read these guys, but now they’re increasingly posting from Kandahar rather than just from Nangarhar.

I’m looking forward to this book, just reviewed (below) by Publisher’s Weekly. Quite apart from the whole survival-memoir thing, Jere knows a lot about the Haqqanis (having spent time with them during the 1980s).

“Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban” (Jere Van Dyk)

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban Jere Van Dyk. Times, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8827-4

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the “freedom fighters” in the ’80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he “was afraid of everybody, including the children.” Van Dyk’s claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan’s grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)

I’m with the short-termers on this one:

Convinced that expanding the electricity supply will build popular support for the Afghan government and sap the Taliban’s influence, some officers want to spend $200 million over the next few months to buy more generators and millions of gallons of diesel fuel. Although they acknowledge that the project will be costly and inefficient, they say President Obama’s pledge to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011 has increased pressure to demonstrate rapid results in their counterinsurgency efforts, even if it means embracing less-than-ideal solutions to provide basic public services.

…

U.S. diplomats and reconstruction specialists, who do not face the same looming drawdown, have opposed the military’s plan because of concerns that the Afghan government will not be able to afford the fuel to sustain the generators. Mindful of several troubled development programs over the past eight years, they want the United States to focus on initiatives that Afghans can maintain over the long term. (excerpted from The Washington Post)

I wrote about this a few weeks back, suggesting that it would probably be better just to pay for fuel and generators so as to deliver something tangible and real for people in Kandahar City. Martine van Bijlert (one of the co-founders of AAN) just posted a must-read commentary from her recent trip down to Kandahar in which she notes that:

I have returned from Kandahar shaken. Not because of the blasts and the warnings and the feelings of apprehension, but because of how dark the future looks when I listen to what people have to say. I fear that all the shiny plans will do very little to change that.

Electricity would, at the very least, be something that the government and foreigners could point to as having improved — only, that is, if it can be maintained past just a few months. The last two times we had regular and reliable electricity — just after Governor Torialai Weesa was appointed to the post for a month or so, and in the run-up to the Presidential and Provincial Council Elections — nobody benefited from the provision of the service because (a) there was very little follow-up in terms of publicising and trying to advertise and remind people it was there and (b) because it soon stopped and people went back to moaning about how useless the government and foreigners are.

Today I heard for the third time that Mullah Mohammad Omar (i.e. Taliban leader) was captured by Pakistanis three weeks ago in Karachi. I don’t really believe it, but since everyone’s talking about it I thought I’d post something here. You know. Just in case…

This is a pretty useful survey to read through. I have my usual concerns about how it was conducted, who they spoke to, who did the interviews, where people were interviewed, how they managed to get through all these long lists of questions etc etc, but there are some general trends here which reflect things said by people I speak to.

The conclusion presents a bleak picture:

This survey’s findings indicate endemic corruption, along with a lack of security and basic services, in Kandahar Province. Collectively, this sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.

We should keep in mind, though, that this survey was carried out between December 23-29, 2009, a period that — compared to now — was and felt much safer. The exponential increase of insecurity, particularly in Kandahar City, since then would surely give more pause for thought. Next time they’re doing these surveys I’d be interested to see some data collected on whether people are sending family members outside the province in anticipation of the coming summer; I’ve heard mountains of anecdotal evidence that this is the case, but something concrete would be useful to confirm this.

[h/t to Nathan Hodge at Wired's Danger Room Blog for distributing this survey online]

I’m running out of ways to describe how difficult Kandahar is becoming, and more so each day. A good friend was just a little over 100 metres away yesterday evening when the foreign offices were attacked. Lucky guy. With him was someone else I interviewed a few months ago for an article I’m writing for The National. The commander of a group of men in a private security company, he had told me how dozens of his friends had died over the course of his work. Last night while he was out with friends, the group that he works with now were all killed in the blast.

We’re only at the beginning of the summer. Four or five months to go before we realise that the surge didn’t really work. If only we could fast-forward to that point and avoid all the deaths to come.

Heard this morning about a bus travelling on the Herat-Kandahar road which was shot up by NATO troops. Above you can hear one of the victims explaining what happened. He seems to be the only one in the Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar City; the rest were taken to the main base at Kandahar Airfield (KAF).
A couple of pictures follow: