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Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop by Antonio Giustozzi [Kindle Edition]:

Although the central earning region for opium is in southern Afghanistan, the system for tax collection and the way in which drug income filters through the insurgent hierarchy function in much the same way across the other two central fronts of the Afghan insurgency - the east and the southeast. In these zones there is far clearer evidence that networks linked to top leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani have long collaborated with foreign jihadis linked to Al Qaida, Pakistani traffickers and individuals within Pakistan's intelligence services to move narcotics and other contraband out of Afghanistan. This is precisely where Hizb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin) reaps extensive income from smuggling timber and gemstones, while Haqqani's group earns the majority of its profits smuggling weapons, according to local residents and Afghan and Western officials. Both Hizb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin) and the Haqqani group have been deeply involved in smuggling of all sorts since the days of the Soviet resistance, and little has changed in their operations since then.

… The [Taliban] military effort was initially strongest in the southeast, probably due to the local leadership and charisma of expert guerrilla leaders like Jalaluddin Haqqani, who had played an important role in the jihad of the 1980s. However, much of the southeast turned out to be a not so welcoming place for the insurgents. By 2006 they had only been able to find sufficient sympathy to establish a support infrastructure in Ghazni province, the southeastern districts of Paktika, like Bermal and Gomal, and the Zurmat district of Paktia. Paktia and Khost remained largely hostile to the rebels, even if by then there were signs that the support of the tribal leadership for Karzai and the government was waning because of its inability to provide security. The fact that no particular tribe or individual dominated the local authorities suggested the emergence of disgruntled or alienated communities. The majority of the few local insurgents seemed to have a Hizb-e Islami background more than a Taliban one. Using his own personal influence among the Zadran tribe and the madrassa network he built in the 1980s, Haqqani was able to maintain a relatively high degree of violence in the districts populated by this tribe. By the end of the summer of 2006 his men were beginning to threaten the road crossing the mountainous Zadran territory started becoming dangerous. Still, he had not been able to establish real strongholds there. The fact that that road, which had been nearly impassable to Soviet and government troops in the 1980s, was regularly open until at least 2005 and still not closed although somewhat dangerous in 2006 is a clear sign of the weak penetration of the insurgency until then. However, the relentless attacks across the border with Pakistan were by early 2007 beginning to dent local opposition to the Taliban in some districts of Khost province.

By contrast, the areas of the southeast where the influence of tribal leaderships was weaker and that of the clergy stronger, such as southern Ghazni, much of Paktika and Zurmat of Pakia, saw a much more rapid expansion of Taliban influence. Here the mainstay of Taliban recruitment was the local conservative religious networks, which openly supported the insurgents, but there is evidence that support for the Taliban spread well beyond the clerics and their immediate followers. Unsurprisingly, the Taliban established their influence first where the government was weaker. Central-eastern Paktika, which is also on the border with Pakistan, was one of the first areas to fall under them. Although Paktika was heavily infiltrated by non-Afghan volunteers, according to US officers "everybody" was fighting against their troops. One explanation might be that the local population had been turned against the government by the mistreatment inflicted by the local authorities. Southern Ghazni, slightly more remote from the border, followed in 2004. By 2005-2006 even eastern Ghazni was falling under the influence of the Taliban. During the summer of 2006 locals were reporting that the population was increasingly sympathetic with the Taliban, even if in most cases they did not dare to openly side with them. At about the same time recruitment of locals started. Local support was acquired by such actions as eliminating a notorious local bandit, Bismillah Khan, who had been active on the main highway. In 2006 the government presence had been sufficiently weakened in northern Paktika (Jaji) and, had it not been for the significant US military presence there, the region appeared well on its way to falling to the insurgents.

... One example of what could amount to difficult relations between the two Shuras and within the Peshawar Shura was the sometime hesitant commitment of Saifullah Mansoor, a key political figure of the insurgency in Paktia and particularly Zurmat. Having been very active militarily in the latter part of 2004 and during 2005, leading to rumors that he might have split from the Taliban or even that he might be negotiating with Kabul. The rumors were strengthened by the fact that he was dropped from the Rahbari Shura. He might have resented the appointment of the other leading figure in the southeast, Jalaluddin Haqqani, as regional military commander. However, the impact of these differences, if they ever existed, should not be exaggerated. During 2006 Mansoor became active in the insurgency again, possibly due to better funding coming through the Peshawar Shura.

... According to Taliban sources there were headquarters in Baghran from where operations in the south were run, which did not play much of a role in the war up to early 2007, but was supposed to become of key importance once the "final offensive" started. The most significant development appears to have been the appointment of Haqqani as overall military commander in 2006, a role earlier played somehow by the badly matched Dadullah/Osmani couple. The appointment seemed to have stemmed from Mullah Omar's dissatisfaction with the military performance of the southern fighters, which Haqqani, the most experienced of the Taliban commanders in terms of guerrilla operations, was supposed to improve. Haqqani had previously been in charge of military operations in the southeast. Although sources in NATO sometimes see Haqqani as the leader of a separate insurgency element, most sources agree that he remained loyal to Mullah Omar even if the relationship between the two went through a period of crisis in the law few years of the Taliban regime.

Decoding the New Taliban by Antonio Giustozzi [Kindle Edition]: Although the central earning region for opium is in southern Afghanistan, the system for tax collection and the way in which drug income filters through the insurgent hierarchy function in much the same way across the other two central fronts of the Afghan insurgency - the east and the southeast. In these zones there is far clearer evidence that networks linked to top leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani have long collaborated with foreign jihadis linked to Al Qaida, Pakistani traffickers and individuals within Pakistan's intelligence services to move narcotics and other contraband out of Afghanistan. This is precisely where Hizb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin) reaps extensive income from smuggling timber and gemstones, while Haqqani's group earns the majority of its profits smuggling weapons, according to local residents and Afghan and Western officials. Both Hizb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin) and the Haqqani group have been deeply involved in smuggling of all sorts since the days of the Soviet resistance, and little has changed in their operations since then.

… In contrast [to HIG's propaganda campaign], Jalaluddin Haqqani's network in the southeast has not been nearly so self-promotional, despite being regarded as closely involved in the more complex and high-profile attacks. The widely publicized March 2008 video of the veteran mujahiden fighter, alive and defiant albeit with labored breath, was brought out under the joint imprint of the cultural affairs commission of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and Manba al- Jihad ("The Source of Jihad" in Arabic). The latter was the name of the Haqqani's glossy monthly magazine during the early years of war, although links with the studio, which maintains a fairly steady stream of DVDs, remains unclear. His son Sirajuddin has recently sought a somewhat higher profile with a few interviews in 2008. In these he portrays the network as part of the Taliban, while seeking to publicly distance it from foreign backers, despite his father's well-known long-time relationship with Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri, he claims they have not met "because we are very busy in our own war" but that "we are in contact with one another."

… Within the post-2001 insurgency, Loya Paktia (Greater Paktia) represents a quasi- autonomous region. Its three constituent provinces, Paktia, Paktika, and Khost, are one of the three major Pashtun regions of the country, along with southern (sometimes called southwestern) Afghanistan around Kandahar and eastern Afghanistan around Jalalabad. Located a relatively easy two and a half hours' drive southeast of Kabul, with only one pass to cross, it is the Pashtun region closest to the Afghan capital. During the regime of the Soviet- backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and the subsequent mujahideen and Taliban regimes, the three provinces constituted a semi-official administrative unit, a "region" (Dari/Pashto tanzima) or "zone."

Loya Paktia is inhabited by a number of Pashtun tribes, the most important ones being the Ahmadzai, Zadran, Zazi, Kharoti, Mangal, Sabari, Suleiman Khel, Tani, and Wazir and the smaller tribes of the Khost basin, sometimes put under one label as Khostwal. There are also small Tajik and Sikh minorities, mainly in urban areas, as well as small Shi'a groups, among both Pashtuns and Tajiks. Most southeastern Pashtun tribes are distinct from their southern and eastern brethren. Except for the Ahmadzai, the Kharoti, and the Suleiman Khel who are Ghilzai, they belong to neither of the two most famous Pashtun tribal "confederations," the Durrani and the Ghilzai.

The non-Ghilzai tribes of the southeast live mainly in mountain valleys. The limited space for settlement provides that they are relatively small and closely knit. Their traditional tribal institutions - the tribal leaders (the khan), the tribal intermediaries with government (the malik), the tribes' egalitarian (but male-only) decision-making body, the jirga, and their enforcement organ, the volunteer-based arbakai (plural: arbaki) - are significantly stronger than those of the lowland tribes. However, even among the southeastern Pashtuns these institutions have been partly weakened and superseded by powerful newcomers during almost 40 years of violence, coups d'etat, civil war, occupation and resistance, mainly by former mujahideen commanders. The southeastern Pashtuns strongly adhere to their ancient code of behavior, the Pashtunwali, although it might differ slightly from tribe to tribe.

The Pashtuns of the southeast consider themselves as the traditional kingmakers in Kabul and are in fact deeply pro-government. This is mainly due to two historical events. First, the southeastern tribes, who in 1929 had just contributed to the overthrow of the reform-minded King Amanullah, revolted against his successor Habibullah II, a Tajik and the first non-Pashtun ruler since modern Afghanistan's emergence in 1747, and resurrected the Pashtun monarchy by helping General Nadir Khan (ruled 1929-34) to ascend to the throne. Secondly, historiographers from the region claim that the uprising against the PDPA regime started in Loya Paktia. As a reward for their services to the kings, the tribes of Loya Paktia have been exempted from paying taxes and conscription by central governments for over 100 years and have also been free from most other forms of state influence. This feeling of power has contributed to an extremely strong sense of independence and self-confidence among the Loya Paktia Pashtuns.

Loya Paktia was never a stronghold of the Taliban movement, neither during their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (1996-2001) nor in the phase of its new incarnation, the post-2001 neo- Taliban insurgency. As a movement that had emerged from the southwestern region ("Greater Kandahar"), it was alien to Loya Paktia. Furthermore, the leadership around Mullah Mohammad Omar, made Amir ul-Momineen by a gathering of ulema in Kandahar in 1996, had jealously protected its superiority in the movement, only allowing a few token non-Kandahari into their inner circle that really takes the decisions. The Taliban did not have to conquer most of Loya Paktia on their advance towards Kabul in 1995. They took Paktia, Paktika, and Khost without a fight in the last days of January. Paktika's large Suleiman Khel tribe called them to take over the province's center, Sharana, after they had conquered Ghazni (on 20 January 1995) from a particularly abusive mujahideen commander, Qari Baba. Khost town followed on 15 February. The mujahideen-led administration of the province went to receive the Taliban advance party at the Seta Kandao pass in neighboring Paktia, stepped down and handed over provincial affairs to the newcomers. Lacking a consistent supra-tribal leadership, the Loya Paktia tribes were hoping that the Taliban would put an end to the post-1992 political chaos in their region, and also assumed that they would support them in escaping the influence of the mainly non-Pashtun Northern Alliance that ruled in Kabul. In some areas, however, the Taliban had to fight local forces like those of Hekmatyar's Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Party of Afghanistan) in eastern Khost in August 1996.

The post-2001 insurgency in Loya Paktia has not been homogenous. It is composed of four different strands. There are two networks led by the Haqqani and the Mansur families respectively. Besides them, there are Taliban groups acting independently from these two networks, led directly by the Taliban Rahbari or Ali Shura (Leadership or Supreme Council) or by individual influential commanders in Quetta. Organizationally even further apart, separate structures of Hizb-i Islami have an insular operational base in Loya Paktia. While Taliban and Hizb structures are distinct from each other, the leadership of the former reportedly has instructed its fighters not to attack the fighters of the latter early on after 2001. All insurgent operations field a number of small armed groups headed by local commanders who operate mostly in their own tribal areas. Some control only a dozen men, others up to a few hundred. For Khost province alone, a number of some 150 commanders is given, 95 percent of them linked to the Haqqani network.

In contrast to the Taliban's and Hizb's country-wide structures, the Haqqani and Mansur networks are regionally based and traditionally have not operated outside the southeastern region (including Ghazni province which is not part of Loya Paktia). Afghan security organs, however, claim that this changed. They point to a number of commando-style operations in Kabul in 2008 - the attack on the Serena Hotel on 14 January, the sniper attack against the VIP stand during the 7 Saur (27 April) National Day parade, and the suicide car bomb attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on 7 July. For these extremely daring operations, the Haqqani network also claimed responsibility. The same network seems now to be operating in Logar, eastern Ghazni, and, to a lesser extent, Wardak too, co-opting other jihadis. These developments were preceded by an expansion of the Haqqani networks in Loya Paktia at the expense of other insurgent structures. It took over parts of Taliban structures that were operated directly from Quetta before, and at least a part of the Mansur network's ulema base. Prominent Taliban commanders from the region like Mullah Kabir, the deputy chairman of the former Taliban Emirates' Council of Ministers and governor of Nangarhar - a Zadran from Nika district - left the region. While there were still two parallel Taliban structures in Loya Paktia in 2003 - one run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the head of the Haqqani network, the other led first by the Taliban Emirate's former Minister of Finance and Economy, Taher Anwari from Kulalgo village (in Zurmat district of Paktia province), and later by Kabir - this competition was decided in Haqqani's favor by October 2007, when Kabir was appointed head of the Taliban forces in eastern Afghanistan. Apart from Haqqani's military strength, the fact that Kabir had been one of his subcommanders during the jihad was supposed to have influenced the decision. Also other southeastern Taliban commanders like Mawlawi Sedrazam, Kabir's deputy as governor, moved to the East. This also could indicate that the Haqqani network asserts some influence in Eastern Afghanistan now.

The Haqqani and Mansur networks divided operational areas in Loya Paktia among themselves, with one exception: both use the mountainous Shahikot area (in Zurmat) as a hideout and staging area. In contrast, there are overlaps between the different Taliban strands and Hizb-i- Islami. For example, the Haqqani network also carries out operations in Sabari (aka Yaqubi) district (Khost province) which has a larger Hizb presence. But it is not clear whether this is the result of some coordination or not. Furthermore, both the Haqqani and the Mansur networks and Hizb-i-Islami have established influence across the border in Pakistan, in the Pashtun-inhabited region called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). From the 1970s, they developed extensive links with the local tribal population, the Pakistani authorities - first of all the army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - and various Islamist political parties. These links were reactivated after 2001 by the neo-Taliban and other insurgent groups that had only temporarily been paralyzed by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11.

There has been a lot of argument about whether the Haqqani network is an integrated part or a distinct organization within the Afghan insurgency. A Pentagon report issued in June 2008 talks of a "potential for two distinct insurgencies in Afghanistan:" apart from "a Kandahar-based insurgency dominated by the Taliban in the south ... a more complex, adaptive insurgency in the east," described as "a loose confederation of affiliates such as the Haqqani Network [note the capital "N" in the Network - the author] and like-minded groups that are prepared to cooperate" with the mainstream Kandahari Taliban like al Qaida, Hizb-i-Islami and the Pakistani groups Jaish-i-Mohammad, Lashkar-i-Tayba, and Tehrik-i-Nafaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi. Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation speaks about "a range of insurgent groups such as ... the Haqqani network." Already in late 2004, Kucera had quoted an anonymous US defense official along the same lines, adding that these "two insurgencies ... definitely talk ... have a common cause ... coordinate at the strategic and operational level ... They've kind of broken the country up and operate in one area and the other operates in a different area."

According to UN analysts in Kabul, the insurgency consists of "several distinct groups" with "numerous fault-lines" among each other (among them what they call the "Haqqani tribal organization or HTO"), while other UN officials in southeastern region call Jalaluddin and his son Sirajuddin Haqqani "Taliban commanders." The UN Sanctions Committee also labels Haqqani an "active Taliban leader." These analyses have informed the Policy Action Group (PAG), a body formed in 2006 by the representatives of countries with troops in southern Afghanistan (Canada, Netherlands, UK, US) and Afghan top politicians to develop a counter-insurgency strategy. PAG documents seen by the author also speak of the Haqqani Network as a separate entity in the insurgency. A British analyst concluded that the different insurgent groups are only under a "certain degree of central leadership."

Exactly how big this "certain degree" is remains uncertain. The background for this uncertainty is that Taliban structures in general remain extremely secretive and elusive. For obvious reasons, they are not very transparent, there is no regular contact with leading figures, and if they speak publicly they give a lot of contradictory information, so that it is not clear what is truth and what is propaganda. Afghan and international analysts largely agree that there are four insurgents' councils (shura) below the leadership level - the Amir, Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid, and the Leadership Council - that direct day-to-day operations in certain geographic areas: the Quetta Shura for "Greater Kandahar" and the areas further west up to Herat, the Peshawar Shura for Eastern Afghanistan, the Haqqani-led Miramshura Shura for Loya Paktia and provinces north towards Kabul, and a separate shura for the north and northeast. Often the Leadership Council and the Quetta Shura are confused because they are based in the same area. There also seems to be a significant overlap of the membership of both.

Although it is mentioned often, it seems far from clear (at least to this author) whether Jalaluddin Haqqani is really a member of the Taliban Leadership Council, and if so, whether this council can convene so regularly that it really counts in decision-making. Also a report from May 2006 that Jalaluddin Haqqani has been appointed the overall Taliban "head of military operations" contradicts what is known about the general Taliban structure and might have been deliberately placed to boost Haqqani's standing. Some Taliban leaders reject the notion that Jalaluddin Haqqani is the commander of all Taliban fighters, call Sirajuddin Haqqani "a main commander" (not the main), and insist that he "always coordinates his actions with the Taliban and is completely subject to the Taliban's [supreme council's] discipline." The last part, however, sounds more like wishful thinking; other reports speak a different language. According to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan and currently one of the most prominent "reconciled" insurgents, "Jalaluddin Haqqani and Abdul Latif Mansur both listen to Mullah Omar," i.e. respect him as their spiritual leader, the Amir ul-Momineen. It has to be noted that he talks of "respect" towards a spiritual leadership, not about obedience to a commander in the military sense. The veteran Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai reported that major commanders of the network endorsed Sirajuddin Haqqani's leadership role in 2005 and also "reiterated their trust in the leadership of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar." Note again: "trust," not "subordination." Even one Western intelligence source accessed by this author says that Jalaluddin "always stood outside the Taliban chain of command." Another US-based author describes the Haqqani network as based on "a more ethnically diverse fighter corps (Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Chechens, and foreign Arabs) that is operating out of Peshawar and Waziristan." The body directing its operations, the Miramshah Shura, appears to be composed not only of Afghans, but also of Pakistani Taliban and, possibly, foreign fighters. This makes it more of a transnational jihadi body that transcends the mainly national orientation of the Kandahari mainstream Taliban. Consequently, this shura has the capability to operate independently of the Taliban Leadership Council. Its exact composition, however, remains largely unknown.

The Haqqani network is strongest insurgent structure in Loya Paktia and is responsible for most of the armed activities there. An increasing number of analysts agree with those US and Afghan officials quoted in a US magazine report that Sirajuddin Haqqani has become "the most active, aggressive and powerful [insurgent] commander along the border" between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A US commander in Afghanistan says: "Siraj[uddin] Haqqani is the one who is training, influencing, commanding and leading ... Kidnappings, assassinations, beheading women, indiscriminate killings and suicide bombers - Siraj[uddin] is the one dictating the new parameters of brutality associated with Taliban senior leadership." The US military put a bounty of $200,000 on his head and published this on posters distributed all over the area covered by its Regional Command East.

The Haqqani network's main area of operations is the Zadran territory that stretches over nine near tribally homogenous districts at the border triangle of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost provinces. This so-called Zadran Arc has direct access to the staging area in Zurmat district, and in fact constitutes a corridor to it from Pakistan through Spera, Gayan, and Zurmat and further on to Ghazni and Logar provinces. The Shahikot area of Zurmat, theater of the 2002 Operation Anaconda, and possibly the non-Zadran Sabari district - with small guerrilla groups led by the commanders Mohammad Khan Gurbuz and Khenjo - are the only areas inside Afghanistan where Haqqani fighters are constantly present. In late 2007, US forces identified the Zambar area in the northern part of Sabari as the "main insurgent safe haven" in Khost province "for some time." There are even not any permanent bases in the Zadran Arc, including the Haqqanis' home village of Srana in Gerda Tserey district. Instead, most of the network's operations are carried from temporary staging areas set up by cross-border "patrols," from safe houses in Loya Paktia villages or completely as cross-border attacks.

The network itself is led by the veteran Afghan Islamist and mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Zadran Pashtun from Gerda Tserey area, an unofficial district of Paktia province, and one of his sons, Sirajuddin (aka "Khalifa"), born to the elder Haqqani's Arab wife. Owing to old age (he was probably born between 1930 and 1938) and illness, Sirajudding Haqqani has taken over the responsibility for day-to-day operations from his father. In February 2005 he identified himself as the head of the Taliban military committee for the provinces of Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Ghazni, and Logar.

Sirajuddin is often described as less ideological, but more radical (or ruthless) than his father; however he clearly lacks his standing. Jalaluddin Haqqani is still lending the authority of his familiar name and his long-standing resistance credibility to his son. This is meant to stabilize the network vis-a-vis possible challengers to the young Sirajuddin's leading role. Indeed, Sirajuddin's takeover was not accepted unanimously, even within the family. There were reports coming from the Afghan intelligence community that Ibrahim Omari, one of Jalaluddin Haqqani's three brothers - and as such senior to his nephew Sirajuddin - unsuccessfully tried to take over control over the network fronts in the summer of 2007. Since then, he seems to have withdrawn from the insurgency, but still lives in Pakistan. Until then, reports had suggested he was responsible for the network's liaising with Arab and Chechen fighters in Miramshah.

Other members of the wider Haqqani family play a leading role in the network also. Among them is the second brother, Hajji Khalil. Some intelligence sources call Hajji Mawlawi Abdurrahman Zadran, a cousin of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the network's head of operations. The second son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Badruddin, seems to be a commander in the network while the third, Nasruddin (also from his Zadran wife), is called a commander by some sources. There are some individuals that are reported the network's deputy commanders: Sangin Zadran operating in Spera, Mawlawi Bakhta Jan, also a Zadran from Gian district, operating from Urgun (Paktika), and Hakim Khan. None of them seems to belong to the Haqqani family.

Beyond this, there is very scarce information about how exactly the network is led. It is clear only that the operational planning is done by the so-called Miramshah Shura. But again, the composition of this body is not known - including whether there are only the Haqqani subcommanders or also representatives of the wider Taliban movement or even other insurgent groups. Reportedly, Janbaz Zadran heads the Haqqanis' office in Miramshah. Together with Mawlawi Gul Badar, a Wazir, he is said to be responsible for coordinating suicide attacks. Another Wazir, Mawlawi Sadiq Nur, supposedly coordinates the deployment of car bombs. There is only one report from early 2005 that mentions some other of the network's commanders' names - in connection with the endorsement of Sirajuddin Haqqani as their commander; they are Malim Jan, Ghani Mohammad, Mawlawi Naebsalar, Mawlawi Abdurrahman Zadran, Mawlawi Zaman, Hajji Darin, Sher Mohammad. Also Sher Khan Mangal, a former provincial head of the Taliban intelligence, is reportedly among the most influential commanders.

Jalaluddin Haqqani was one of the earliest Afghan Islamists. He obtained his education first in a private madrassa in Afghanistan and later in the famous Dar ul-Ulum Haqqania of Akora Khattak, situated halfway between Peshawar and the legendary Khyber Pass, in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. With the first group of Afghan Islamists, he went to Pakistan a few months after Daud's 1973 coup d'etat to get military training in order to take up weapons against the new regime. He settled in Miramshah, barely 15 kilometers inside Pakistan and less than 50 kilometers from his home in Srana. Among the 500 "fighters and commanders" who were trained in Pakistan by the Frontier Corps led by Nasrullah Babar (who, in the 1990s, as Interior Minister under Benazir Bhutto became the first mentor of the Taliban) at that time, were future prominent mujahideen leaders like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud.

On 22 July 1975, some groups from this contingent started an uprising simultaneously in different parts of Afghanistan. It was suppressed quickly because of its lack of popular support. Jalaluddin Haqqani led the most vicious attack. A small band of fighters under his head ambushed the convoy of the governor of Urgun Loy Wuluswali in the Mandzkai Gorge in Ziruk district of today's Paktika province. The governor, one of the Parchamis allied with President Daud, survived but twelve members of his administration were killed. This incident established Haqqani's jihadi credentials. From 1976 to 1979 he was a member of the executive committee of Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan when it still was the unified Islamist organization with most future tanzim leaders as members, including Hekmatyar, Khalis, and Rabbani. In an even more spectacular operation in early 1979, he lured the PDPA Minister for Tribal Affairs, General Faiz Mohammad, into a trap in Paktia and killed him. Ostensibly inviting him for negotiations, Haqqani served the minister and his team a rich meal, after which the guests fell asleep and were slaughtered. At that point, Haqqani already belonged to Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan-Khalis (Islamic Party of Afghanistan - Khalis faction), a loosely structure tanzim that mainly relied on the eastern Afghan Khogiani tribe and was led by conservative tribal ulema. In January 1979, the Paktia tribes held a jirga in Miramshah, Waziristan, where they allowed the different tanzim to operate on their territories. Haqqani became the only significant commander of Khalis's party in the southeast and was virtually independent of it. His main base inside Afghanistan then was already situated in the Shahikhot Mountains.

Haqqani's rival Hekmatyar was still the ISI favorite among the Afghan mujahideen at that time. On 31 March 1991, two years after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, the mujahideen captured their first important provincial capital, Khost, from the Najibullah regime. Haqqani's fighters were the backbone of this attack but ISI made sure that Hekmatyar was able to present himself as the real victor. Haqqani inherited Hekmatyar's position only after the latter had taken an anti-US position in the first Gulf War.

After the fall of Dr. Najibullah's regime in March 1992, Jalaluddin Haqqani was appointed Minister of Justice in the first mujahideen cabinet led by Interim President Professor Sebghatullah Mojaddedi (the same in which the current President Hamid Karzai served as Deputy Foreign Minister later). Under the subsequent government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan under Rabbani, he was the quasi-warlord in the Khost-Paktia area. When the Taliban marched towards Kabul, he first opposed them taking over the area but soon joined them in 1995, allegedly prompted by ISI. He became one of their strongest battle commanders, taking part in the conquest of the eastern region and the fighting against Massoud's forces in the Shamali plain north of Kabul in the winter of 1996-1997. When the Taliban made him Minister for Border and Tribal Affairs in 1998, this was mainly a symbolic gesture. They honored Haqqani's firepower but kept him away from the real decision-making process in Kandahar at the same time; the cabinet in Kabul only had limited governing authority. Even on the military side, Haqqani was kept on the sidelines. When he raised troops to attack Mazar-i Sharif again after the Taliban defeat in 1997, he nevertheless was "powerless to take military decisions" because "Kandahari officers" had the supreme command at that front. After 9/11 but still in September 2001, Mullah Omar appointed Haqqani to lead all Taliban forces in their effort to resist the expected US attack. The Kandahari core forces, in the meantime, started to melt away into their villages or across the border to Pakistan.

Between 9/11 and the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan that started in late November 2001, there apparently were attempts to encourage a "moderate" faction of the Taliban to break away from the mainstream movement and to become part of the following political process. It was reported that US and British agencies saw Haqqani as the possible leader of such a group and offered him a leading role in a future Afghan government. A spokesman of the Pakistani Foreign Ministry confirmed that Haqqani had visited Islambad "as part of a search for a 'broad-based government' to succeed the Taliban's, and that his meetings involved at least one with representatives of the former Afghan king. It can be assumed that this idea had been planted by ISI, which counted Haqqani among its most reliable allies in Afghanistan.

This initiative failed, but it remains unclear why. Possibly it was a case of lack of coordination between different US authorities: one report indicates that Haqqani's younger brother Ibrahim Omari was arrested by the military while other agencies negotiated with him. After a visit to Pakistan from 17 to 21 October 2001, Jalaluddin Haqqani rebuffed any such plans and declared that he would start a guerrilla war against the expected US invasion. He even became the "key organizer" of the al Qaida escape.

After the fall of their regime and their retreat from Kabul on 13 November 2001, the Taliban's leadership went into hiding or exile in Pakistan. It had suffered a defeat and was not sure whether the movement could be sustained. Some groups and individuals changed sides, gave themselves in to the US-led Coalition or stretched out feelers towards the new Karzai administration in Kabul. Among them were protagonists of the Haqqani and Mansur networks, the latter ones reemerging in the form of a political party, Jamiat-i Khuddam ul-Furqan (Society of the Servants of Providence), established in Pakistan in January 2002. Its participation in the Loya Jirgas of 2002 and 2003 and its registration as a political party were rejected by the Karzai administration. Currently, it exists in the form of a circle of some 30 "reconciled" Taliban lodged in government guest houses in Kabul and consulted by the President on reconciliation issues from time to time.

Jalaluddin Haqqani also retreated to Pakistan, where he resided in Danday Darpakhel, a suburb of the town of Miramshah in North Waziristan (FATA) in the neighborhood of the Pakistani Army's 11th Corps HQ with its ISI office. In the 1980s, he had built a mosque and a madrassa there, the Manba ul-Ulum. Afghan sources allege that in those years he resided under the protection of the Pakistani military or even in a compound reserved for Pakistani army officers. The Haqqani network was not represented at the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in late 2001. Instead, Jalaluddin Haqqani's archenemy Pacha Khan Zadran, a commander from a rival Zadran subtribe and a US ally with 600 of his men hired as auxiliary troops, was invited there - as the only member of the royalist Rome group delegation based inside the country. When, as a result of the conference, Pacha Khan's brother Amanullah Zadran was awarded the Border and Tribal Affairs portfolio - the same that Jalaluddin Haqqani had held under the Taliban - in the new Karzai-led Interim Administration, he was likely further alienated from the political process. By mid-2002 however, Haqqani's followers among the Zadran still had not broken their links with the UN mission in Kabul. His cousin Hajji Abdurrahman Zadran, today said to be the network's head of operations, still participated in a delegation of Loya Paktia tribal elders meeting high-ranking UNAMA staff in April 2002, complaining about US bombings of villages. From then onwards the Haqqanis slowly drifted back into the insurgency, soon becoming known as "the Haqqani network." As a result, the security situation in Loya Paktia was gradually to deteriorate every year. It started in Paktika province, which had already become volatile by 2003. When UNAMA undertook a security assessment mission to the province in September that year, it was able to visit only ten out of 22 districts; twelve were already inaccessible. The paucity of effective government presence there had led to Taliban influence in various degrees; at least one district (Bermal) was already without even a symbolic government presence and completely in the hands of the Taliban. Elsewhere in the province, their forces were becoming more aggressive and extended their activities beyond border districts, setting up embryonic parallel administrations in some area, mainly Bermal, Gayan, and Terwa districts, sometimes with the tacit support of some district officials. Ten of the 12 Paktia districts and all districts in Khost were still accessible for the UN then. However, the UN reported operations by anti-government elements "throughout the region with high infiltration [rates] at [the] border areas with Pakistan," and coordinated attacks on police posts often involving more than 100 fighters, also mainly in areas close to the border, as well as regular attacks against Coalition forces, government installations, and NGOs, including IED attacks on Coalition vehicles in Gardez. Attacks on US supply convoys on the road between Sharana and Ghazni province had started by 2003.

In January 2003 the Taliban's radio De Shariat Ghag (Voice of Sharia) had temporarily started broadcasts for the southeastern region. On 19 June 2007 it came back with a daily 30-minute FM program of better quality that, however, could be received only in some areas of the region. It was not clear whether it transmitted from one of the dozens of Islamist-run FM stations just across the border or from a mobile base inside Afghanistan.

In June 2003, Taliban spokesman Mohammad Mukhtar Mujahid announced that a new 10- member Supreme (or Leadership) Council had been established that included Jalaluddin Haqqani and Abdul Latif Mansur from the southeast. One month later, in July 2003, reports came in about a new command structure of the Taliban in the southeast and a visit by Jalaluddin Haqqani to villages in the Zadran Gorge in Spera district. In Khost the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Hizb were reported to have divided the districts into distinct operational areas among themselves. Towards the end of that year, increasing infiltration of Haqqani fighters into Paktia was noticed, in particular through Chamkhani district, just about ten kilometers from the Afghan border and the Pakistani town of Parachinar, a major insurgent base.

In 2004 the Haqqani network was "waging small-unit, small-arms, hit-and-run attacks on US bases just a mile or two across the border" from Pakistan. In April 2005, 50 Taliban showed up on 30 motorbikes in Paktika. However, UNAMA still spoke of "extremely high levels of support for Karzai" during the elections process of 2004-2005. In early 2005 the governors of Khost and Paktia - Merajuddin Pattan, a Western educated liberal businessman, and Assadullah Wafa, a conservative tribal elder from Kandahar province close to President Karzai - publicly claimed to be in contact with Haqqani commanders or even Jalaluddin Haqqani himself for reconciliation efforts, a fact strongly denied by the latter. At approximately the same time, some Afghan officials reported that communities in the Panjshir Valley had started to sell government-owned weapons stocks to the Taliban, including those in Loya Paktia.

When this author visited the region in April 2006, the Haqqanis and Mansurs had consolidated their networks for broader operations. The regional Taliban amir Tahir Anwari - there were still two different Taliban networks in the southeast then - and other Taliban commanders moved freely in the region, without being involved in direct combat operations. They were mainly networking and conducting propaganda activities. These included a call from Jalaluddin Haqqani to all those working in the government, the Afghan army, the occupation forces, and the administrative system to terminate their involvement. Pro-insurgency propaganda, particularly in two border districts of Paktia, also was increased by mullahs in official mosques, who incited the population against "foreign occupiers" and openly justified the killing of pro- government locals and government employees. Newly recruited Taliban groups became visible in the Zadran areas. In the first week of April, Taliban shot at the convoy of the newly-arrived UNHCR country director when it passed Gerda Tserey district, the Haqqanis' area of origin. A first suicide attack occurred in Paktika, in Bermal district, against an ANA checkpoint, while a larger Taliban group tried unsuccessfully to take over Dila district center, also in Paktika. A mission from the EU Special Representative's office in Kabul in July 2006 still assessed Khost and Paktia as "relatively secure and stable, despite intense efforts by insurgent commanders to mobilize former networks and increase attacks against government and international targets." But the number of incidents had already doubled in relation to the previous year, from 87 in the whole of 2005 to 97 between January and June 2006 alone. According to to this report, the southeastern insurgency was still "in the hit-and-run phase." It also noted that the government tried to stem this rise through the creation of arbaki. By early 2006, the governor of Paktia had agreed with the main tribes of the area to appoint 30 arbaki members per district, which were supposed to be paid $50 per month from his operational funds. This was later increased to $200 per district. But at that point, most of the arbaki already were unpaid for four months, which might help to explain why the number of attacks doubled themselves.

On 10 September 2006 a suicide bomber sent by the Haqqani network succeeded in killing the highest-ranking Afghan official by then, Paktia governor Hakim Taniwal. When insurgents also bombed the governor's funeral in his home village of Tanai the next day, killing seven more people, the Haqqanis' reputation suffered a significant setback among the population. A UN report in March 2007, however, saw the situation further deteriorated. Areas most affected by the insurgency were Zurmat in Paktia and the border districts of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika. The groups operating there, it stated, were still "not beyond the scope of dialogue." A month later, a UN official in the southeast summarized the state of the insurgency there as follows: "The networks are already there and only need to be mobilized." According to him, they drew on "a class of disenfranchized, jobless, frustrated young men, and there are incentives [for them] to fight; but there are very few incentives not to fight." Still, there were no open, large-scale attacks. There was more distribution of pro-Taliban propaganda, but most of the still relatively few IEDs planted were recovered with the help of the local population. UNAMA was working intensely with the Zadran tribe, in particular with Jalaluddin Haqqani's subtribe in Gerda Tserey, and there was still hope that an indirect dialogue could be maintained. Even the US troops in the area seemingly held themselves back vis-a-vis the Haqqanis. To describe the situation, Paktia governor Rahmatullah Rahmat quoted a Pashtun proverb: "The bear doesn't climb down from the mountain; the hunter doesn't climb up on the mountain." The above-mentioned UN official stated that this district's shura, with some close Haqqani relatives as members, "has never been closer to the government than now."

However, the shortcomings of the government were already too visible. A local UN official summed up the reasons for the growing insurgency at this time follows: "the non-existence of visible reconstruction projects of significant scope, weak and resource-starved province administrations, increasing threats to the presence of district administrations on the ground and the almost complete non-presence of foreign NGOs [that] led to the perception among the tribal population that the peace process has no impact on their lives and that the central government doesn't care about them." Governor Rahmat, a former UNAMA political officer, was kept at arm's length by the Kabul government. When he took over his position, he was not paid the operational his predecessor had received. This deprived him of crucial means in counter- insurgency, like public outreach, contact and hospitality as well as pay for arbaki. While in Paktia the arbaki were still in being, hoping for a resumption of payments, those in Khost already had dispersed around the same time. Corrupt and openly criminal members of the administration did their share to discredit the reputation of the Kabul government and its local representatives. In one striking example the Zurmat chief of police, a former Khalqi, raided a mosque during prayer in the district in February 2007. His men robbed the congregation of money and watches. When those being robbed staged some resistance, one of the policemen was killed. The police chief radioed to Kabul that he had been attacked by Taliban and had lost one man. Although UNAMA reported the incident, the police chief was still not removed when the author visited Gardez in October of the same year. In late 2007, there were reports from Paktia that the wuluswal and the police chief of one district were setting up illegal checkpoints and dividing the "taxed" money between them on the basis of a daily quota.

During 2007, the situation deteriorated drastically. According to UNAMA, the outreach for civil servants declined in 34 of the 43 official southeastern districts between March and June 2007. Paktika was described by a tribal elder from neighboring Paktia as "lost" and "a black hole." But now also Paktia and Khost were deteriorating rapidly. By April 2007, groups of Haqqani fighters were regularly operating in non-Zadran districts like Dand-e Pattan and Zazi Aryub (Paktia). Insurgents' ambushes were better prepared and coordinated and resulted in a higher number of casualties. Khost province experienced the biggest increase in security incidents in the whole southeast and had the third highest suicide attack rate in all Afghanistan. July 2007 saw a 250 percent increase in security incidents along the Gardez-Khost road, a reflection of Sirajuddin Haqqani's intention to destabilize the road's construction that had been delayed at least since 2003 for the lack of sufficient funds. The US PRT had subcontracted an Indian company to carry out the work - a welcome target for the Pakistani-backed Haqqanis. Towards the end of the year there was an increase in direct attacks on district centers and police posts, civilians involved in the political process were targeted more often. There were "large concentrations" of insurgents in western and northern Paktia and "prolonged combat situations" on the rise in Paktia and Paktika. The Haqqani network was more and more effectively able to constrain governmental space in Loya Paktia and, from there, in Wardak and Logar since the end of 2006. It still relied, according to UNAMA, on small, relatively isolated cells and mainly carried out cross-border attacks.

A non-governmental organization with good contacts in the region registered more Taliban visibility and contacts with tribal elders in October 2007. As a result, elders were increasingly intimidated; many moved into urban centers. That reduced the inclination of local tribes to prevent the insurgents from using the twelve infiltration routes that led through Khost province alone. At approximately the same time, in September 2007, UNAMA found out that 35 percent of the 7,000 police officers in the southeastern region's structure were there on paper only, with commanders pocketing the salaries of the ghost policemen. In the problematic district of Zurmat, only 25 out of a theoretical 174 were on duty.

In the summer of 2008, the deterioration in Paktia and Khost continued. Local families warned relatives working for NGOs not to travel to the area any more; more NGO and UN personnel moved their families out of the region. Afghans from the region reported shabname in Pakistani- colored Pashto sanctioning the "execution" of US troop translators as "Islamic" and warning teachers and officials that if they continued working for the government it would be "their own responsibility" if they were hurt. Youths on motorbikes openly intimidated government officials by following them to their homes. Propaganda video cassettes and DVDs proliferated, although the insurgents were not able yet to openly use mosques for propaganda as in Paktika or southern Afghanistan. According to Afghan newspaper reports, mullahs in Khost, enraged by US airstrikes causing civilian casualties (among them a member of the celebrated Afghan cricket team), had started a "campaign" that appealed to the local population no longer to cooperate with Coalition forces trying to identify insurgents. In June 2008, insurgents attacked the US-ANA base in Laka Tiga at a strategic bridge on the Khost-Gardez road. Haqqani groups that had infiltrated the margins of Paktia's provincial capital Gardez (including the area just outside the local UNAMA office) were carrying out a series of armed raids, kidnappings, and executions around the town throughout 2008. In their boldest attack yet they entered Khataba village mosque in a suburb of Gardez, selected five men from the assembled worshippers and took them with them on 23 September (they were released later). Since the spring of 2008 in particular, the Haqqanis' fighters had been reinforced by a large number of Pakistani Taliban from the Wazir, Dawar, and Mehsud tribes. Some sources speak of up to 4,000 of them, mainly based in the Zadran Arc.

District centers started being targeted more aggressively. According to the governor of Khost and local Afghan intelligence officials, there still was not a single attack on a district center in that province by the autumn of 2007. In neighboring Paktia there had been only one, on Shwak in June. In Paktika the situation was much worse: in June, insurgents temporarily held the center of Yahyakhel district, and on 30 August they even tried to storm the provincial center of Sharana. The district center of Dila was abandoned by government. This changed in 2008. During this year, Haqqanis' fighters also attacked the district centers of Waza Zadran, Shwak (both in Paktia), Spera (Paktika), and Zazi Maidan (Khost) and temporarily took over those of Gayan (Paktika), Gerda Tserey (Paktika) and Sabari and Qalandar (Khost).

Meanwhile, the operations also affect the main road between Kabul, Gardez, and Khost. There are also frequent attacks on both main passes along this road, Tera Kandao and Seta Kandao. Construction sites for secondary roads to the district centers and the workers on them are attacked. In May 2008 the Haqqani network issued a decree banning any road construction in Zurmat district (Paktia) altogether. Shahname ("night letters" or leaflets) are distributed in order to intimidate government officials and civilians who sympathize with the government or work for international actors, both military and civilian. In late 2005, local sources reported that premiums of 15,000 Pakistani rupees were being offered for the assassination of Afghan officials and 100,000 ruppees for a foreigner. In April 2007 a UN official said that the Haqqani network "researches international organizations in the southeast" for their internal structures in order to identify possible targets. These threats did not remain empty ones. In 2008 alone, insurgents killed the spokesman of the Paktika governor, the head of the Khost appeals court, the district attorney of Zurmat, three security officials in Khost (among them the provincial security head), and tribal elders in Alisher (also known as Terezai, Khost), Wormamay, and Urgun (Paktika). On 13 August 2008 Taliban killed three female international staff members of the NGO International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Logar province, on the Gardez-Kabul road. After this incident, the UN stopped all its personnel in the southeastern region moving bt road except for larger convoys for well-prepared missions.

The coherence of the Haqqani network is based on a combination of tribal and ideological loyalties. The initial core of its fighters was recruited from the Haqqanis' subtribe among the Zadran, the Mezi. Immediately after the Soviet invasion, it was described as "very tribal in character." Its basis was broadened during the anti-Soviet struggle when mujahideen were also recruited from other southeastern Pashtun tribes. A foreign observer noted in 1984 in Paktia how closely Jalaluddin Haqqani worked with local tribal leaders, "sharing jurisdiction with them and allowing them to apply customary tribal law to resolve internal disputes." Another speaks of "some tribally mixed fighting groups" in Paktia under Haqqani's command by 1985. It also became known that a commander from Keshm (Badakhshan) in northern Afghanistan, a Tajik, fought alongside Haqqani in Paktia during the 1980s. After 2001, but possibly earlier also, the Haqqani network additionally included Zadran and other Pashtuns from across the border in Pakistan. One of them, Darim Sedgai, acted as his liaison to Baitullah Mehsud's Pakistani Taliban. He was reported as killed in January 2008 but the fact was rejected by Taliban sources. Another was Id Niaz Borakhel, killed in late 2007. According to recent reports from the area, the Haqqanis still give financial support strategically to tribal leaders (khans and maliks) in Loya Paktia.

As of late, fighters with a background in nomad (kuchi) tribes are gaining more prominence among Haqqani's fighters in Khost and Paktia.

The tribal base of the Haqqani network, though, is also a cause of one of the major fault lines in the insurgency: the lack of inter-tribal confidence between the Kandaharis and the Paktiawal (those from Paktia). The Haqqani network draws its support mainly from the latter. In contrast, from the onset in 1994, the Taliban leadership was mainly made up of "Kandahari" Pashtuns, i.e. Pashtuns from the provinces of "Greater Kandahar," comprising Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul, and Kandahar itself. They belong to either of the two most well-known Pashtun tribal "confederations," the Durrani and Ghilzai. Although there were some representatives of other Pashtun tribes and ethnic groups in the official Taliban leadership (the Leadership Council in Kandahar and the cabinet in Kabul), the closest circle around Mullah Omar was dominated by brothers-in-arms from his home province of Uruzgan whom he knew and trusted from their common anti-Soviet struggle. The others had difficulties in gaining Mullah Omar's full confidence. On the all-Afghanistan level, this Kandahari-Paktiawal fault-line within the Taliban seems to be much stronger than the much-discussed Durrani-Ghilzai gap. During the Taliban regime, occasionally Loya Paktia tribes openly resisted what was perceived as Kandahari dominance. There were at least two revolts in 2000 when Taliban officials tried to suppress a local tradition to celebrate the new year, the so-called "egg fighting," perceived by them to be un-Islamic - a conflict followed that evolved into open fighting. Seeking appeasement, the Taliban were forced to take recourse to the same means as other regimes who did not want to alienate the local tribes: convening local ulema, tribal leaders and people's representatives who were persuaded to voice their support for the government in return for the government's tacit climb-down on the issue.

It seems that the elder Haqqani owed his rise to become one of the strongest mujahideen commanders more to his military prowess (and his political and supply links in Pakistan) than to his religious status. It was his firepower that allowed him to oust and replace the traditional Zadran khans from the Babrakzai family. His (rather formal) membership in Hizb-Khalis mainly ensured that he had direct access to Western and Arab military and financial supplies distributed through ISI as a monopolist. One can only speculate about Jalaluddin Haqqani's motivation to continue his fight with the Taliban. Although he is one of Afghanistan's Islamist pioneers and an Islamic scholar, and has founded a number of madrassas, some people who have met Haqqani over the past decades doubt that he is mainly motivated by religious feelings. Some also claim that he runs his madrassas more for fundraising then for Islamic purposes, knowing their attraction for Arab donors.

The elder Haqqani is undoubtedly a religious conservative who does not see much of a difference between the current US-led NATO intervention in his country and the Soviet occupation before. His growing intransigence, however, can possibly be explained by a series of political about-faces for which he might feel victimized. In 1989, Haqqani was one of the central figures in the anti-Soviet resistance. For the US, he was among the "less publicized CIA favorites" located "at the center of [the] border nexus" of "interlocking networks of Pakistani intelligence officers, Arab volunteers, and Wahhabi madrassas." He "was seen by CIA officers in Islamabad and others as perhaps the most impressive Pashtun battlefield commander in the war," had "the CIA's full support," received payments and supplies and was entrusted with testing new weapon systems and tactics. According to Steve Coll, he was a so-called "unilateral asset" of the CIA in 1988 and 1989. His switch to the Taliban, however, turned him into an enemy of the US. As a Taliban minister, he was included on the UN sanctions list against al- Qaida and the Taliban already before 9/11, on 31 January 2001.

Today, Haqqani's fight might be increasingly motivated by feelings of revenge. During various bombing raids and Predator drone attacks against his houses and madrassas, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, starting in early 2002 and with the latest strike on 23 October 2008 on his madrassa in Danday Darpakhel near Miramshah, many of his family members, among them women and infants, and students lost their lives. In early July, his youngest son Omar was fatally injured during a skirmish at Sata Kandao Pass at the border between Paktia and Khost provinces, which, it was reported, he had been videoing.

The Haqqani network is definitely on the rise. It has expanded its area of operations further north, towards Kabul. There are reports that the Haqqanis are trying to reach out to "some Northern Alliance groups" and Hizb-i Islami. This is quite possible. As one of the major resistance commanders and later a minister in the mujahideen government, Jalaluddin Haqqani has good personal relations with many former mujahideen leaders. Such relations count a lot in Afghan society. Former Haqqani subcommanders are members of post-2001 institutions, like the Khost Mujahideen Shura, the Shura of Khost's three unofficial urban districts (Matun, Lakan, and Shamal), and even of the lower house of the Afghan parliament. Moreover, many northern commanders who are officially part of the new Afghan institutions harbor bad feelings towards Karzai and his external backers because of their perceived exclusion from the political set-up. Being religious conservatives, and often even Islamists, they secretly reject the (far from blameless) international involvement in their country as an occupation and an attack on Afghan culture.

On the military side, the Haqqani network's main modus operandi is still asymmetrical warfare, using means of terrorism and guerrilla warfare including the use of IEDs, mines and suicide attacks. Spectacular operations aim at showing that it is able to "hit everywhere" and to catch international media attention. Meanwhile, open military combat operations remain sporadic and an absolute exception. Apart from some insular bases, it has not been able to organize permanent fronts on Afghan territory and does not control any district center or even village full time, as the mainstream Taliban in southern and eastern Afghanistan do. The use of terrorist means is a copy of Islamist militant tactics elsewhere and perhaps puts the Haqqani network much closer to al-Qaida than even most of the Kandahari Taliban leadership. This increasing ruthlessness carries the message to Afghans: we are not trying to win hearts and minds any more, like the Taliban of the 1990s. It is "shock and awe" a l'afghane. It might also represent the attempt of hawkish Taliban elements to sabotage possible negotiations.

However, this also deepens rifts within the insurgency. There are more and more reports that old-time, "pious" Taliban commanders internally express abhorrence at the bloodshed among the Afghan civilian population caused by car bombs and suicide attacks. Some of these reports emanate from Loya Paktia. This is perhaps reflected by Mullah Omar's Eid address of 2008 which also is distributed as a layha (instruction) among Taliban ranks:

"I once again give you the same guidelines, to stand in front of the enemy like steel. But be very careful when you face the general people and your innocent countrymen. Don't go for an attack which has a possibility of harming the general people. All your operations must be in the light of the sayings of Allah and the way of Mohammad (Sallaho Alaihe wa Salam). Always leave your personal and emotional feelings behind.

"Every act which is not in harmony with the teachings of Islam or is not according to the Islamic civilization or does not look good with the Muslim Ummah ... like blasts in [mosques] and where there are a gathering of the general people, looting of the properties on the highways, cutting noses and ears in the name of [sectarian] differences which Islam forbids ... or the burning of Islamic books must be strongly countered."

This seems to be an attempt by the Taliban leadership to indirectly distance itself from Haqqani's practices (although some of its commanders like the late Mullah Dadullah also used them) and remedy growing concerns in its own ranks. Whether leaflets bearing Haqqani's signature and criticizing Mullah Omar for jeopardizing the future of the Taliban, which appeared in eastern Afghanistan in mid-2008, really originate from this source or are part of the psy-ops battle cannot be finally answered. It can be said, though, that such open and personal criticism, even putting Mullah Omar's Islamic credentials in question, would be very unusual in Pashtun society.

Significantly, Haqqani was the first Afghan mujahideen commander who welcomed and incorporated Arab jihadi volunteers into his groups. This happened as early as 1987. Already before that, he had established durable connections with wealthy Saudis during hajj pilgrimages, as well as with the Saudi intelligence service, and run fundraising offices in Persian Gulf countries. One of Haqqani's two wives comes from the United Arab Emirates. All this laid the ground for his extremely close relationship with Arab sponsors, including Osama bin Laden personally, whom he met during the construction of the Zhawara base in Khost province (carried out by bin Laden and his company), as well as ISI and the later al-Qaida network. According to some sources, the Arab influence on the Haqqani network might have even increased recently with the younger Haqqani's rise. He has no personal experience of the anti-Soviet resistance and mainly grew up in the FATA's radicalized environment. It can be assumed that most of the no more than "150 to 500 hard-core al-Qaida fighters" in Pakistan's tribal areas "financing, training recruits, and facilitating attacks into Afghanistan" are closely linked to the Haqqani network.

The second pillar of the Haqqanis' support - their symbiotic relations with Pakistani power structures, the military, ISI, and the Islamist parties - largely remained intact after 2001. A high- ranking police officer in Loya Paktia says that ISI has maintained an extensive contact network amongst the region's tribal leaders since the 1980s. The Haqqani network today uses these connections to bribe those elders with "cash payments, passports, houses in Pakistan and trips to the Gulf," to recruit fighters and to request that those tribes reject access to their territories for fighters of other groups (and the government). A US news magazine reported in September 2008 that American officials "say they have evidence that some elements of Pakistan's ISI are protecting and even helping the Haqqani network." It carried a story of how a Haqqani subcommander traveled in a five vehicle convoy to Pakistan to get supplies and instructions from Sirajuddin Haqqani, passing various Pakistani military checkpoints just by calling an apparent minder of the Haqqanis. The commander concluded that the younger Haqqani "seems to feel invulnerable" in Pakistan and that "[the] ISI protects him." Senior Pakistani officials still hold their hands over the Haqqanis. They are quoted in the same report as saying that "now is not the time to move against [them]." In July 2008, US military and CIA officials confronted their Pakistani counterparts with evidence of ISI links to the Haqqani network at least in two meetings. "Pakistan is like your shoulder that supports your RPG," said a Taliban commander quoted by Time Magazine.

Obviously Haqqani is still seen as a valuable ally by the Pakistani Taliban sympathizers within the ISI and the Frontier Corps. They repeatedly used his influence among the Pakistani Taliban to pressure them to cease attacking the country's security forces - and attack Afghan and Western forces in Afghanistan instead. Afghan sources also reported a meeting between representatives of Haqqani, Hekmatyar's Hizb, and Arabs in Parachinar in the early spring of 2007 that was protected by Pakistani military. In 2006, ISI requested Jalaluddin Haqqani and the famous Kandahari Taliban commander Dadullah (killed in May 2007) to mediate in bloody clashes in South Waziristan between factions of Pakistani Taliban, one of which supported militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) of Qari Tahir Yuldashev. More than 2,000 Uzbeks, including families, were living on the Dawar tribe's territory around Mir Ali alone. This conflict reflected the rivalry about who would lead the still diverse Pakistani Taliban movement and was, at the same time, an ISI-instrumentalized tribal conflict between a part of the local Wazir tribe and the Mehsud tribe from outside the area. Haqqani sent in his son Sirajuddin and the former head of the Taliban Supreme Court, Nur Mohammad Saqeb. Their involvement led to the North Waziristan peace agreement of 5 September 2006. After its conclusion, Jalaluddin Haqqani issued a declaration in the name of the Islamic Emirate (i.e. Mullah Omar) "not to fight against Pakistan, because this is in the interest of the US." This clearly served Pakistani interests.

Behind this ISI initiative stood a broader aim: "to marshal the different tribal Taliban chieftains into a movement coherent enough to abide by a truce." The initiative succeeded when on 14 December 2007 the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was founded. Its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is a close ally of the Haqqanis. The Haqqanis gained considerably from these events. Their successful intervention strengthened their hand on all sides. They managed to save their Uzbek allies, whom Jalaluddin Haqqani had earlier asked Mehsud to harbor. And they proved their influence on both sides of the Pakistani Taliban rivalry: on Mehsud's TTP and on its rival, the ISI-financed splinter group of Hajji Mawlawi Nazir. Nazir, from the Kakakhel subtribe of the Ahmadzai Wazir in Waziristan, is particularly close to the Haqqanis. He owns property not only in Paktika but also in Kandahar. After a stint with Hizb-i Islami during the anti-Soviet jihad, he had joined the Taliban after they established their regime and fought alongside the Haqqanis.

Another part of the Haqqanis' Pakistan link is their involvement with Kashmiri and sectarian Punjabi jihadis. Fighters of the Kashmiri Harakat ul-Mujahideen (HUM) were running a training camp in Afghanistan, most probably the Yawar [Zhawar] camp in Khost province, as early as the mid-1980s when it initially was under the authority of Hizb-i Islami-Khalis and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Haqqani admitted that he trained Kashmiri fighters in an interview in 1991. This and another HUM camp were attacked by US cruise missiles in 1998 after al-Qaida commandos had bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. The Kashmiri-Haqqani connection still operates. It was reported in early June 2008 that about 300 fighters from jihadi groups had secretly gathered in Rawalpindi and "agreed to resolve their differences and commit more fighters to ... Afghanistan." A HUM leader was quoted as saying that the jihad in Kashmir was "not the most important right now" but Afghanistan was "the fighting ground, with the Americans there." According to this report, the sectarian terrorist groups Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar- e-Taiba were also present at the meeting.

Most foreign elements linked with the Haqqani network inside Afghanistan are based in Mata Khan (Paktika), the Kulalgo area of Zurmat district where they maintain a supply base and eastern Ghazni. One of the last reports of Uzbek IMU fighters active inside Afghanistan came from Sarobi district in Paktika province in October 2007. Many Arabs and Uzbeks have married local wives, bought land, settled down and learned the Pashto language. Also, the obscure Uzbek-Turkish Islami Cihad Ittehadi (Islamic Jihad Union) seems to operate - at least partly - under the Haqqani network. When one of its members, Cuneyt Ciftci, also known as Saad Abu Furkan, a German of Turkish origin, blew himself up in front of a US military installation in Sabari (Khost) on 3 March 2008, his last statement was published together with a video message from Jalaluddin Haqqani. In its statements, however, the group refers to the leading al-Qaida member Abu Laith al-Libi as its sheikh instead of Haqqani, so that it might be closer to al-Qaida itself. Its leader is said to be an Uzbek (possibly of Tajik ethnicity), Najmiddin Jalolov.

The Haqqani network's links to the Arabian Peninsula and to Pakistan provide the bulk of its financial supplies. These money flows are reportedly collected in Parachinar (Pakistan) by a religious figure linked to the network. Additionally religious taxes (zakat and ushr) are raised from businessmen, shopkeepers, and also government officials in Khost and other areas. Income from the drug trade also plays a role, mainly from transit shipments originating in southern Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan Wars by William Maley [Kindle Edition]

Pakistan and Saudi Aabia manipulated the [interim Afghan government] proceedings shamelessly, with Saudi intelligence reportedly spending US$26 million per week in an effort to secure its desired outcome (Rubin, 1991, p. 81). Prominent commanders within Afghanistan were severely underrepresented, and Ahmad Shah Massoud later stated that he had received an invitation to send representatives to the shura only two days before it started (Afgha News, 15 May 1989, p. 7). In the face of deep divisions within the shura, a committee headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani devised seven groupings of offices for the "Interim Islamic Government of Afghanistan," to be apportioned between the seven Sunni parties in accordance with the outcome of balloting. The balloting saw Mojadeddi elected "Head of State," Sayyaf as "Prime Minister," Mohammadi as "Head of the Supreme Court," Hekmatyar as "Defense Minister," and Rabbani as "Foreign Minister." However, Mohammadi then used a procedural device to opt for the "Defense Ministry," which led an enraged Hekmatyar to claim the "Foreign Ministry," displacing Rabbani to the position of "Minister of Reconstruction." This outcome verged on the farcial, for it marginalized the parties whose commanders were most effective in Afghanistan, and left as the external face of the "Interim Islamic Government" one of the most unappetizing mujahideen figures, namely Hekmatyar, who later in the year was to be named in the British press as the likely owner of the world's largest heroin factory (Teimourian, 1989).

... Not all was bleak as far as the resistance was concerned. On the ground, there were some military achievements, such as the capture of Khost in March 1991, which saw a resistance force under Jalaluddin Haqqani capture not only the town, but a number of senior regime generals, including Deputy Defense Minister Mohammad Zahir Solamal. However, the resistance proved unable to build on this gain: the ISI tried to claim it as a victory for Hekmatyar, and the political rewards of the conquest were entirely dissipated. This reflected a new line of tension: between the parties and their backers in Pakistan, and field commanders in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, Arms, and Conflict by Michael Vinay Bhatia and Michael Sedra [Kindle Edition] In spring 2006, the Taliban unified their internal command structure under Jalaluddin Haqqani and supplied both funds and arms stockpiles, as well as fighters trained in Iraq, for guerrilla warfare. Bergen argues that there are approximately 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters operating in small training camps in Pakistan. He describes how the Taliban "have increasingly identified as part of the global jihadist movement, [so that] their rhetoric [is] full of references to Iraq and Palestine in a manner that mirrors bin Laden's public statements." The Taliban also apply tactics previously unseen in Afghanistan, including suicide bombings and beheadings. Unofficial estimates indicate that approximately 1,700-2,000 Taliban militants have been killed since 2005. The March 2006 report of the UN Secretary-General notes that the number of suicide bombings has increased from five from 2002-2004 to 17 in 2005 and 11 as of February 2006, with each attack costing twice as many lives. During 2005, according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, the number of roadside bombings increased by 40 percent, with these bombings then accompanied by ambushes by insurgents employing small arms.

... In September 2005, Pakistan captured a major Afghanistan/al-Qaeda weapons cache in North Waziristan, with the cache under the direction of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of the prominent Hezb-e-Islami Khalis commander and Zadran tribal leader Jalaluddin Haqqani. At the base, which was composed of 18 compounds and a madrassa, Pakistan discovered 15 truckloads of ammunition, as well as anti-aircraft guns, rockets, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), communication equipment and military fatigues.

... While comparatively little information is available on those individuals with communist affiliation, it appears that individuals without tribal status joined the Khalq and Parcham government. In the 1980s, the Najibullah government was able to establish pro-government militias near Jaji, which involved the distribution of weapons to children and other community members living near government outposts for protection against other tanzims. In 1985, an increase of weapons supplies allowed Jalaluddin Haqqani to attack government outposts in Ali Khel (near Jaji) and in Khost, which was followed by a major Soviet offensive against Jaji and Chamkani. In May 1988, government forces were expelled from their base in Chamkani, Jaji, with the weapons stockpiles distributed "on a percentage basis" to the local mujahideen (with the captured heavy weapons prohibited from being removed from the district). The tribe then established a joint administration composed of a council of scholars, a tribal council, and a military council.

The effect of conflict on the various qawms has varied considerably. In some cases, conflict did weaken the community of elders. As noted by Hajji Sirdar of the Ahmadzai nation:

"The Ahmadzai nation had no leader. The nation needed vehicles, cars, and equipment ... From the beginning, the qawm was more powerful than these tanzims. When the tanzims came, people divided into different groups. At that time, the tanzims became more powerful than the nations, because the tanzims had more weapons, artillery, and money. And also we needed the material to defend ourselves. But of course when we came back to our country, we had good respect inside our nation, but in reality we needed material from the tanzims."

As noted by the qawmi mashar of Jaji:

"From the beginning, the qawm had big force and respect. After that, when the tanzims came, and the Khalqis/Parchamis, it was so bad. No one listened to the community of elders. All the people were divided by the communists and the tanzims. During the civil war, the arbakai was still weak but growing stronger. But now it is strong, and everybody listens." Commander Daoud Jaji asserts that this "conflict of ideas" in the qawm-e-shura was due to "money." As a consequence, one elder of the Mangal tribe describes the community of elders as being caught between the communist government and the mujahideen, asserting that the Mangals were the "victims" of both groups, with the communists taking the elders to prison and with Hizb-e Islami Hekmatyar killing 120 Mangals. Hizb-e Islami Hekmatyar also attempted to gain control of the Ahmadzai tribe through the assassination of prominent tribal elders in Peshawar.

The shifting distribution of power away from the qawm and towards the tanzim directly contributed to the instability that occurred during the civil war. The period following the collapse of the Najibullah government is locally described as a period of anarchy and absence of law, characterized by insecurity and disorder, checkpoints and extortion. The primary contenders for power in the province were Hizb-e Islami Khalis (led by Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani of the Zadran tribe, who later became the Taliban's Minister for Tribal Affairs) and Harakat (Mawlawi Nusrullah Mansour). During the civil war, while Hizb-e Islami was able to transit through Paktia, the tribes did not participate in or contribute soldiers to the fighting in Kabul. During this period, some of the tribes - including both the Jaji and the Mangal - mobilized their arbakai in order to protect their localities from other tanzims. Commander Daoud argues that the Jaji qawm-e- shura prevented the various commanders from fighting, although the commander kept his own soldiers mobilized, "of course, because I didn't want to leave Paktia to the other mujahideen." As discussed in Chapter 1, some of those combatants used for the protection of localities also engaged in predatory activities against others, particularly the Muqbal and Tutakhel tribes. Predatory approaches migrated from Kabul, as newly empowered commanders were able to regain their power, stabilizing their villages and localities. Other communities were too weakened by displacement, and commanders empowered by the parties remained unchecked by traditional structures.

Indeed, one Pashtun of the Muqbal tribe's account displays just how varied dynamics were within one province alone during the civil war:

"The problem was that we needed to collect some money for home, this was the big issue for us. I don't know for which reason [that I joined to become a soldier]. This was the situation in the civil war, all people belonged to different nations, they gave us a card, this was a visa for life. If you don't have this card, maybe someone can kill me ... Old people had old commanders from their nation, and young people had young commanders. Our commanders liked young people to make criminal activity, for stealing, for crime, for prostitution and for sexual abuse. During that time, we never took off our shoes, we were so crazy about money. We spent our first year in Kabul and our second year in Paktia, so we stole everything in Paktia. At the time, I knew it was not good for me, but we had no other opportunity, it was a crazy time for us.

"In Kabul, when I couldn't find a job, I took the gun. We had no job, so we took the weapon to make money from local people to steal by force ... Many foreigners helped Sayyaf, and he gave more money than other tanzims ... I received 1,000 Pakistani rupees per month, plus any additional money taken from people. We fought against other groups for money. For money we could do anything - destroy abridge or school or kill people. If they gave us money, we would make everything. It cost 10,000 Pakistani rupees to kill someone ... Later in Sayed Karam [when he returned to Paktia], night time or daytime we went to the highway to take money from the people. "The commander (Faiz Mohammad of the Tutakhel qawm) was able to acquire so much power that even though the qawm wanted to do good ... the soldiers did not want to."

Due to this insecure situation, the various tribes initially welcomed the arrival of the Taliban. The movement immediately disarmed many of the more prominent commanders, clearing out weapon depots and acquiring both heavy weapons and small arms. Yet, by 2000, elders were beginning to resist Taliban authority over issues such as taxation, marijuana eradication, disarmament and local conscription. The Taliban were accepted as long as they respected the autonomy and authority of tribal elders - their increased assertiveness undermined that tolerance. Eventually, the strength of the qawms was enough to deter certain Taliban policies. Particularly in Jaji, the Taliban district administrator was overpowered by the local community shura.

When they first captured Paktia, the Taliban recruited 200-300 combatants throughout Paktia, demanding that each qawm had to provide 50-60 combatants for deployment to Kabul for 20-30 days. The Taliban developed a formal levy system, which certain Pashtuns and their qawms began to chafe under.

"At first the Taliban came and wanted people from us. Then the qawm from all Loya Paktia made a lottery to send people for a short time for one month and then we stopped. Three years later, all the Mangal resisted the Taliban - we never wanted to give people and we didn't like their law."

The current district administrator of Zurmat noted:

"When the Taliban came here, first they asked for weapons from me and the qawm. So I gave all my artillery to the Taliban and then I went home. The Taliban made a new government. When the Taliban reached Kabul and started fighting, they wanted people from all of Paktia, from whatever nation. From each woleswali they needed 50-300 people. So the woleswali selected people to go. They were chosen by force, if not they [the Taliban] took money to substitute. The Taliban spoke one thing and then did another."

Only one combatant who joined the Taliban was interviewed. He joined independently (without elder selection) in order to receive 400-500 afghanis per month plus wheat and personal food. In Jaji, where he was based, local Taliban recruits were intermixed with Pashtuns from other provinces and a commander from neighboring Logar province.

Transitions in government typically mark new periods of insecurity in Paktia. This again occurred with the Taliban's evacuation. During these periods, the negative actions associated with warlords were described by combatants, to include checkpoints, taxation, abuse, and kidnapping. Local insecurity following the collapse of the Taliban prompted one Gardezi to argue that: "The Taliban were dangerous for the world but they were better for us because they brought security ... When the Western forces drove them out, we were left in the middle of local conflicts like before." This period was also referred to as a period of anarchy, when "no one knew who belonged to the government." Another combatant argued that:

"When the Taliban left, we knew from experience that whenever the government changed, sad news would come, looting and stealing wood from our home. So we didn't want this to happen again and I became a soldier to protect my family against violence." For this reason, the communities of elders, among both the Gardezi Tajiks and the Ahmadzais, convened village militias and arbakai in order to prevent insecurity. Among some of the Tajik qawms, the mobilization was fairly miniscule, with only five people sent by the 150 family Tajik Mirek qawm. Weapons were taken from the Gardez Bala Hissar, some of which would be handed in during the DDR program, while others were sold to traders.

In and around Gardez, however, initial mobilization for the purpose of securing the center in a period of political transition evolved into the use of this standing force for predatory purposes, with the Gardez force converted into an AMF unit. Zaiuddin and Abdullah (with their subcommanders Momin and Matin) were selected as Chief of Police. AMF commander Abdullah's bodyguards were his son, brothers, and cousins. Those combatants, initially mobilized through elder authority, were then kept on either through force or through the provision of a basic salary and were used upon the discretion of the commander.

Driven now by economic incentives rather than by elder authority for protection, one new combatant recalled that he "didn't have activities but to give problems to the people. Without reason we took the money, without any law. If something was correct, we told him it was not the law. We took money and gave it to Abdullah." These forces were accused of confiscating the salary of the 1,000 soldiers in the division, establishing checkpoints, stealing and kidnapping for ransom and child abuse. A combatant indicated that 10-15 checkpoints were established between Shar-e Naw and the Pakistani border, with ten people stationed at each, and with combatants receiving between $10 and $80 per month.

There was a broad disparity in the economic incentives provided to combatants. For many, the scale of incentives was not significant for anything but survival, with occasional handouts of 100 afghanis and the provision of food sufficient only due to the lack of other economic opportunities. Eventually, General Atiqullah Lodin, Zaiuddin, and Matin were all removed from power. Abdullah was captured by American forces and sent to Guantanamo; Zaiuddin is currently incarcerated in Bagram.

A total of 41 combatants were interviewed in Paktia, primarily in the city of Gardez but also in Jaji and Mangal areas. Approximately ten of these were elites, serving either as the qawmi mashar, as a saar group commander (small commander of 10-20 men) or as an officer in the current Afghan army. Of the 31 remaining combatants, four served with the Afghan militias created by the Coalition in late 2001, with three of these four combatants undergoing their first mobilization experience. One of the combatants had served with the Taliban in 2001. The combatants came from diverse backgrounds, with differences in education, labor and livelihoods between elites and common soldiers. The average age of first mobilization was higher than in other regions. Nevertheless, almost one third first began fighting under the age of 16. Elder authority only played a dominant role in the protection of the local community, particularly during the civil war and following the collapse of the Taliban. In the absence of community mobilization, other motives shaped mobilization, from obedience to a religious authority to family selection and economic incentives. Particularly striking is the complete absence of narratives of force in descriptions of combatant mobilization in this region as are ideological exposure and commitment to a political-military organization. This is not to say that these motives are not present but simply that they did not occur in the admittedly small set of interviews conducted in this province.

The tribal system is considered most entrenched in Paktia province, although its strength various considerably among the various tribes. Even though the various qawms and tribal elders remain intact near Gardez (both among the Ahmadzai or the Tajik Gardezi population), proximity to the provincial capital complicates (and potentially weakens) the relationship between the community of elders and the people. While the initially defensive militias organized around Gardez were compromised by their adoption of predatory behavior, the tribal police continue to be utilized by other tribes (Mangal, Jaji, and Zadran) and are seen to fill a critical security gap (due to the under-resourcing and small size of the ANP) with little complaint from either the local community or from the provincial authorities.

A list created by the Tribal Liaison Office in Kabul in September 2005 indicates a total of 61 arbakai groups in Paktia province, ranging in size from 30 to 400 members. The majority were established in the summer and autumn of 2004 in order to secure the voting centers and voter registration teams. Others were organized in order to protect communal forests, district roads and sources of drinking water. These forces are meant for use only within the tribes' manteqa (area) to punish members for infractions (with the most common sanction being the destruction of a house). Both the Jaji and the Mangal also utilize the arbakai to prevent infiltration by neo- Taliban into their communities.

Both provincial governor Taniwal and police chief Hai Gul have sought to use tribal jirgas in order to solve local land disputes, with the government now providing 50 percent of the salaries and with UNAMA employing these groups during elections. Facing a deficit of security personnel in the province, the provincial governor has also made attempts to make the arbakai an official provincial body, although this has been met with resistance by many community leaders. Still, while the arbakai are increasingly receiving government salaries, the tribes remain reluctant to formalize the tribal police, under the belief that "formalization of the arbakai will erode its legitimacy, it will become another militia with cellphones and weapons." As noted by Talib Zadran, "if we take a uniform, we become a part of the government, and we don't want this."

In Jaji, the arbakai are recruited according to family selection, while Commander Daoud also previously maintained an AMF border force (16th Border Brigade), which was recruited independently and was composed of 100-150 soldiers. The decision to join "belongs to the family;" "each person can go by themselves, nobody can force them." Among the Zadran qawm, "in one year, every [extended] family must give one son, whether there was or was not a government, this was the soldier from our nation."

Zadran arbakai soldiers were employed to close checkpoints and solve internal disputes. A standing force of 20 is permanently housed at the district headquarters, with 800-1,000 able to be mobilized in a few hours in the face of a crisis. The arbakai are commanded by a mir (chief), who is selected for six months by the elders and renewed depending upon behavior. With approximately 400 arbakai, the Mangal qawm has a rotating system, whereby one person from each family must come for between 20 days and one month and must provide his own weapon. In the Mangal, Jaji, and Zadran, while the arbakai is permitted to carry his weapon while in the mountains and for the security of community meetings, he is not permitted to carry it in the village or in public areas.

Throughout Paktia, the community of elders does not call for mass mobilization except for local defense or tribal police service. While the qawmi mashran would identify individuals for arbakai service, sources indicated that the community of elders neither selected nor demanded that individuals participate in the jihad. Instead, it only recommended that an individual join a tanzim (a moderate or traditionalist group rather than a fundamentalist group). Endorsement is considered distinct from selecting individuals directly to participate in armed groups. Thus, for the individual tribal member, some forms of mobilization are mandatory, and others discretionary. Individual commanders were still able to mobilize individuals, yet they were generally not able to use the call of the qawm or to utilize community/elder authority.

As noted by a Mangal member of the Afghan Army during the communist period:

"The community of elders (qawmi mashran) can recommend that people go to different groups, but the decision belongs to the individual. The final decision rests in the individual to choose the government or the tanzims. But if there is a major problem, like after the time of the Taliban, when there was no government, the community told us in a jirga that we must provide security in our city to prevent looting. In that time, we all made our choice. In that time, the community asked us. They cannot, however, tell us to go to certain tanzims. [They can ask us] only with major problems when we sit together."

Yet, while the elite tribal figures from the Jaji and Ahmadzai tribe denied the use of the tribal system, two combatants from the Alikhel subtribe of the Jaji tribe, who began fighting in 1980 and 1984, respectively, at approximately 13 years of age, indicated that:

"The qawmi mashran said we must start the jihad, as the Soviets did not belong to our nation or religion. I didn't know the meaning - I was so young - the important thing was the qawm. So when they said, we went. It was not a problem [that all members of family went] - it was the way to paradise and to be a good patriot. So my father said we would all go to Paradise and start the jihad.

"When the Russians came, the qawmi mashran said we must start, and we went. In the system of the qawm, one person must go from the family."

This indicates that, while the community may not endorse the selection of combatants in their name, individuals may not be able to distinguish between the commander's authority and the authority of the qawm. Jalali and Grau's account of the jihad period echoes this with regard to the Zadran tribe (Jalali and Grau, 1994, pp. 151, 168). Still, in general, the ability of the community of elders to mobilize individuals directly is restricted to certain types of fighting and service. In communities with a strong community of elders, their authority will be used almost exclusively for recruiting arbakai service. The focus is on preserving autonomy and internal security, rather than on participating in national level conflict.

Through Our Enemies' Eyes by Michael Scheuer [Kindle Edition]

Bin Laden first visited Pakistan and Afghanistan in early 1980; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has said in his excellent book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamantalism in Central Asia, that bin Laden went with his family's blessing, all of whom "responded enthusiastically" to his decision to support the Afghans. The initial visits were information- gathering endeavors to see what the insurgents needed and how he could help meet the requirements. They also were occasions for meeting leaders of established and nascent mujahideen groups and for donating funds to them. At this point, bin Laden was on good terms with the al-Saud regime. He has said he was working with Saudi authorities in the first years of the Afghan war, and Jeune Afrique has reported that at this time bin Laden was the point man in Pakistan for Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief. During these early visits, bin Laden also renewed contact with Rabbani and Sayyaf and arranged to meet other Afghan leaders as Ahmad Shah Masoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Yunis Khalis, and Jalaluddin Haqqani. In other visits, bin Laden may have seen his first combat with Sayyaf's Islamic Union party. ... Until 1982, bin Laden made regular but relatively brief trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan to assess the fighters' material needs, donate personal funds to Afghan guerrilla chiefs, and carry money to them from wealthy Saudis and Gulf Arabs. He also presumably oversaw the dozen health centers in Peshawar sponsored by his family's business. In the first of a series of shifts in the focus of his efforts in Afghanistan - really a series of expansions - bin Laden in 1982 decided to enhance the aid he was providing by bringing to bear his own and his family's engineering and construction skills. According to ABC correspondent John Miller, bin Laden brought "his own bulldozers and dump trucks" to Afghanistan "to assist the mujahideen by building shelters, roads, trenches, tunnels, and underground bunkers." In May 1997, bin Laden told CNN's Peter Arnett that "When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing mujahideen positions ... we transported heavy equipment from the country of the two Holy Places estimated at hundreds of tons that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches ... We dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places and in some others we built a hospital."

... A number of accounts, some by eyewitnesses, state that bin Laden trained and led the first construction operations of what can be described as a small unit of Arab combat engineers. "We were 11 brothers," bin Laden later recalled, "and we worked to build roads, tunnels in the belly of mountains, and shelter to protect the Afghan mujahideen." The initial construction work took place near the city of Khost, capital of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. The city was then held by a garrison of Afghan government troops, surrounded by the mujahideen, and supplied by air. The area's major insurgent commander was Jalaluddin Haqqani - from Yunis Khalis's Hizb-i Islami party and a close associate of Shaykh Azzam - and bin Laden cooperated with him; in the early 1980s,

Haqqani had built some military infrastructure at Khost, primarily staging areas and training camps. These sites were picked for bin Laden to fortify because in April 1986 Afghan regime forces, including an elite commando brigade, and Soviet Special Forces (Spetznaz) fought their way into Haqqani's "complex of guerrilla base camps at Zhawar Khili, [which is] wedged hard against the Pakistan border, southwest of the Afghan town of Khost. The battle lasted for three weeks and the [mujahideen] suffered hundreds of casualties." Although the Soviet and Afghan units eventually withdrew, the air support that effectively covered their attack and withdrawal convinced Haqqani and bin Laden to strengthen the insurgents' positions." Bin Laden and his assistant, an Iraqi engineer named Mohammad Sa'ad, led the engineers that managed the job. The new construction included a "huge tunnel" that "contained a number of hospitals, depots, and warehouses." It is interesting to note that the bin Laden company's web site stresses the firm's unique experience in building tunnels. Since its inception, the company claims to have built 8,000 meters of tunnels, a total that presumably does not include the many meters built by its youngest partner in Afghanistan.

... Two enduring themes emerge from bin Laden's formation and leadership of the engineering effort. The first is that the projects were professionally designed and built - per Time magazine and other sources - and gave the mujahideen stronger, better-protected base camps, storage facilities, and fighting positions. In April 1991, for example, Haqqani's fighters captured Khost after their construction of successive trench lines brought them close enough to the town's airfield to shut down aerial resupply, and the Afghan air force was unable to neutralize the bunkers and revetments bin Laden had built for Haqqani's artillery, rocket launchers, and heavy mortars.

Marching Toward Hell by Michael Scheuer [Kindle Edition] On the Afghan side of the border, bin Laden began in about 1985 to cultivate ties with Yunis Khalis's Hizb-e Islami faction, which had earlier split with Hekmatyar, and this gave him access to Nangarhar province and the adjacent areas in Pakistan; like Hekmatyar, Khalis and his commanders would be instrumental in facilitating bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora in 2001. At the same time bin Laden built a durable relationship with Khalis's top commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in the area around Khost in Paktia province and the adjacent areas of Waziristan controlled by Haqqani's Zadran tribe. Indeed, bin Laden appears to have gained his first combat experience by leading a team of combat engineers in support of Haqqani's fighters. The team used construction equipment brought to Afghanistan from the bin Laden family's company in Saudi Arabia. It also appears that bin Laden made some of his first contacts with Kashmiri insurgents - fighters who later formed the Harakat ul-Ansar and Lashkar-e-Taiba - at the Khost area training camps run by Haqqani. In addition, by the mid-1980s bin Laden enjoyed a strong relationship with the Islamic Union party of Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, who currently is a member of the Afghan parliament. Bin Laden first trained some of his Arab fighters at Sayyaf's Sada Military Academy in northern Waziristan on the Pakistani side of the border, and he later built a camp of his own in an area controlled by Sayyaf's group in the Jaji area of Paktia province.

Finally, throughout the Afghan jihad bin Laden worked to ingratiate himself in Kunar province and the area known as Nuristan, the northernmost Afghan sections of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Toward this end, he took advantage of Hekmatyar's presence in the area and of the close ties Sheikh [Abdullah] Azzam had with Ahmad Shah Massoud's forces and the Afghan Jamaat-e Islami party, to which Massoud belonged. Bin Laden built on the latter by sending funding and military trainers and advisers to Massoud; al-Qaeda's first military commander would use the nom de guerre Abu Ubaydah al-Panjshiri, a name he earned while serving with Massoud and operating out of the Panjshir Valley. Bin Laden also took advantage of the work Saudi Salafi NGOs and missionary organizations had long been doing on both sides of the border in the Nuristan-Kunar-Chitral (Pakistan) area, efforts that have made the area the most thoroughly Salafist region in Afghanistan. Bin Laden has said that he would have preferred to move in May 1997 from the Jalalabad area to Kunar because of its remoteness and the prominence of Salafism there but decided that it was politically necessary to accept the Taliban's invitation to move to Kandahar.

Taliban by Ahmad Rashid [Kindle Edition]

The Taliban were also forced to recruit increasing manpower from the Ghilzai Pashtun tribes of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. But they demanded a political price which the Taliban were not prepared to pay. The Ghilzais, who had dominated the anti-Soviet war effort were not prepared to be used as cannon fodder by the Taliban without adequate representation in the Durrani-dominated Taliban shuras. They would come if they were given a share of power. Ghilzai commanders with the Taliban were extremely critical of Taliban tactics in Mazar-e- Sharif. "There were too many mistakes made in Mazar. The initial agreement between Malik and the Taliban happened in too short a time. They should have discussed the agreement for a longer time and built up a dialogue with each other. They also made many military mistakes," Jalaluddin Haqqani, the leading eastern Pashtun commander with the Taliban told me in Kabul in July 1997.

Haqqani, who commanded Taliban troops on the Kabul front, was a veteran Pashtun commander from Khost in Paktia province who had joined the Taliban in 1995. He was one of the most celebrated commanders from the anti-Soviet war. Although Haqqani was made a minister in Kabul, he and other non-Kandaharis remained extremely bitter that they were kept out of the decision-making process that took place in Kandahar under Omar, rather than in Kabul. After the Mazar defeat the Taliban gave Haqqani a large sum of money to recruit 3,000 Ghilzai tribesmen. Haqqani arrived with his men on the Kabul front, but being powerless to make military decisions and the fact that they were led by Kandahari officers at the front led to mass desertions. Within two months Haqqani had only 300 of his new recruits left. Even more disturbing was that villages around Kandahar were refusing to send their sons to enlist with the Taliban. For the first time the Taliban had a recruitment problem and a manpower shortage.

Descent into Chaos by Ahmad Rashid [Kindle Edition]

Bin Laden and a few bodyguards escaped on horseback into Parachinar, the administrative headquarters of the Kurram tribal agency in Pakistan. Kurram is one of seven tribal agencies that make up the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the writ of Pakistan's central government has historically been limited. Having entered Pakistan and made sure that the news leaked out, bin Laden then doubled back into Afghanistan, to Khost, before once again reentering Pakistan. For some weeks he took refuge with Jalaluddin Haqqani, in a safe house between Khost and the Pakistani town of Miramshah, in North Waziristan. Pakistan had deployed troops in the Kurram and Khyber tribal agencies, but they were not on the mountaintops or deployed in the South and North Waziristan agencies through which the Arabs had escaped.

... The ISI gave refuge to the Taliban leadership after it fled Afghanistan and to its allies, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hizb-e Islami party, who arrived from exile in Iran and operated freely in the NWFP under ISI protection. Hekmatyar opened an office in the Shamshato Camp for Afghan refugees, near Peshawar, which was swiftly turned into a Hizb-e Islami base. Jalaluddin Haqqani, who the ISI had promoted as a possible "moderate" Taliban, was given sanctuary in North Waziristan, where he rebuilt his network on both sides of the border. The remnants of other foreign groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), settled in South Waziristan.

... In Afghanistan's eastern Pashtun provinces the Taliban's reorganization was headed by Saif ur-Rahman Mansour, the charismatic young commander from the Anacoda battle, Jalaluddin Haqqani, the former Taliban minister, and his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani. They operated out of Miramshah, in North Waziristan, one of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Haqqani, a tall strapping Pashtun and an old protege of the ISI, was leader of the Zadran tribe around Khost. In the 1980s he was a major recipient of CIA money and arms routed through the ISI. After 9/11 the ISI promoted Haqqani as a possible moderate Taliban, and he visited Islamabad under ISI protection to talk to the CIA, just before the war began. During the war, the ISI asked the Americans not to bomb Khost and Haqqani's home, saying that a deal with him was still possible, but Haqqani was a firm believer in al-Qaeda. He now gathered around him fighters who had escaped, providing them with accommodation and money. In 2002 US SOF made at least three attempts to kill him, including bombing a mosque near his home, an attempt that killed seventeen people - but he always seemed to be well tipped off before any US attacks.

... After 9/11, FATA became the escape hatch for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as we see in Chapter 6. "Safe passage was provided to al-Qaeda by not deploying Pakistani forces on the border in South and North Waziristan, although troops were deployed in Khyber and Kurram agencies," says Afrasiab Khattak, a veteran Pashtun nationalist politician. "Thousands of al- Qaeda and Taliban were allowed to settle in Waziristan, create bases, and restart military operations." Jalaluddin Haqqani, the former Taliban minister, became the key organizer by hiring FATA tribesmen to provide sanctuary or safe passage out of the region. Young Wazir and Mehsud tribesmen who had guided al-Qaeda out of Tora Bora became rich as they provided logistical services for a price. Within a few years these guides had become commanders of the armed groups that emerged as the "Pakistani Taliban."

... The Pakistani army's corps commander in Peshawar, Lieutenant General Ali Jan Orakzai, a close friend of Musharraf, was in charge of Pakistan's complex policy of minimally satisfying American demands, not interfering with the resettlement of militants in Waziristan, all the while assuring the JUI-led provincial government in Peshawar that the army would not stop their pro- Taliban policies. Pakistan's army conducted a massive public information campaign, denying there were any terrorist camps in FATA - even though the Pakistani media were reporting their presence. Quite separately, the ISI maintained a high-profile presence in the FATA. Wazirs who fled the agency reported how ISI officers in civilian clothes met frequently with Taliban leaders such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, Tahir Yuldashev, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and the new crop of young local commanders. Confident of their safety, the Taliban and al-Qaeda began to run their own fiefdom in South Waziristan, killing tribal elders considered to be spying on them for them the Afghans or the Americans and forcing others to flee with their families.

Pashtun bureaucrats in Islamabad and Peshawar told me of the ISI's internal debates, whose subjects included some officers' intentions to create a broad "Talibanized belt" in FATA that would keep the pressure on Karzai to bend to Pakistani wishes, keep US forces under threat while maintaining their dependence on Pakistani goodwill, and create a buffer zone between Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns. According to this view, a Talibanized Pashtun population along the border would pose a threat to Karzai and the Americans but no threat to Pakistan, which would be in control of them. Whether such a strategy was ever formally adopted is doubtful, but Pakistan's policies certainly created the same effect. For two long years, from January 2002 until the spring of 2004, the military did nothing to stop extremists from consolidating their bases in South Waziristan. Yet the idea that such bases would not affect Pakistan was overturned when it became clear to the ISI that the twin assassination attempts on Musharraf in 2003 had been planned from South Waziristan.

... Starting in South Waziristan in 2002, the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda had progressively occupied one agency after another, moving to North Waziristan, Bajaur, and Mohmand. Each army attack led them to find new territory to occupy and to spread their message. In each agency they introduced their harsh code, killing or driving out tribesmen who opposed them. In May 2006, Musharraf had appointed the now-retired Lieutenant General Orakzai as the new governor of the NWFP and tasked him with striking peace deals in FATA that would stop the militants from attacking the army. The government enlisted the help of Maulana Fazlur Rehman and other leaders of the JUI party and covertly asked Afghan Taliban leaders Mullah Dadullah and Jalaluddin Haqqani to help persuade the Pakistani Taliban to agree.

General Orakzai was a slippery character for Musharrad to embrace so closely. As corps commander in Peshawar from 2001 to 2004, he had allowed al-Qaeda and the Taliban to settle down in FATA undisturbed and was now advocating peace deals with them. A tribesman from FATA who boasted of his inside knowledge of the tribal mind, in fact Orakzai appeared totally insensitive to tribal needs. Posing as an enlightened general, he was opposed to any democratic reforms in FATA and disliked the Americans and NATO intensely, while demonstrating a grudging sympathy, if not admiration, for the Taliban. He enlarged on the myth, advocated by Musharraf and the ISI, that the Taliban were just Pashtun nationalists opposed to foreign occupying armies but with no connections to al-Qaeda. ... Now [Baitullah] Mehsud was in regular contact with al-Qaeda, which increasingly seemed to be giving strategic direction to the Pakistani Taliban movement. Although uneducated, Mehsud resorted to rhetoric laden with references to the global jihad ideas of al-Qaeda, as he threatened the United States and Europe with destruction. He said, "The main objective of this coalition is 'defensive' jihad." In mid-December 2007, forty extremist militia commanders in FATA and the Northwest Frontier Province met to set up an umbrella organization, the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or Movement of the Taliban, in Pakistan, appointing Mehsyd as their amir, or leader.

The ISI had no inkling of the meeting until it was well over. Other key commanders who took part in the meeting included Mullah Fazlullah, thirty-two, who had become an important figure after the insurrection he led in Swat Valley; Faqir Mohammad, based in the Bajaur tribal agency, who worked closely with al-Qaeda; and Sadiq Noor, another young and powerful leader from North Waziristan, who is closely allied to the veteran Afghan fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani. Together these commanders now led some forty thousand heavily armed tribesmen and militants, who had joined them from the cities.

Holy War, Inc by Peter Bergen [Kindle Edition]

Afghan commanders in the field understood the importance of Arab funding. Peter Jouvenal, the British cameraman who traveled into Afghanistan dozens of times during the war against the Soviets, described visiting a base in Pakistan built during the early 1980s by Jalaluddin Haqqani: "He decided to build [it] so he could show off to Arab donors," Jouvenal recalled. "When I visited there were underground bunkers. You could have been inside a house. There was wallpaper, carpets, toilets, and a generator for electricity. The bunker I was in slept four people. It was built into a cliff. The complex was spread out over a five kilometer radius. In 1982 I saw a raid by the Russians on the base. It lasted about ten minutes. Four or so planes dropped high explosives, but no one was killed. The base had its own PR department. They shot videos of executions of Russians and sent them to Saudi Arabia for fundraising purposes." This base would be used by al-Qaeda in the 1990s.

Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad by David B. Edwards [Kindle Edition]

These claims and counterclaims [over leadership of the original leadership of the Afghan Islamist movement] will never be resolved conclusively since most of the principals are dead and those still alive are entangled in political arrangements that compromise their neutrality. However, the relative merits of the different positions aside, the dispute demonstrates the importance given to history and lineal succession as different parties jockeyed for position in Peshawar. In a politically turbulent and uncertain environment, Hekmatyar and Rabbani each made claims of precedence, rooting these assertions in their connection to venerated ancestors who were dead and could not contest claims made in their names. For Hekmatyar in particular, the issue of precedence was vitally important because he had little else to offer by way of justification for his leading the jihad. Still in his twenties, from an insignificant family and tribe, and without any substantial religious education or even a college degree, the only basis he could offer for leadership in the jihad was his connection to an obscure student group, most of whose members were now dead. Rabbani had better credentials. He was older, a respected scholar familiar with both the traditional madrassa and the university, a man of experience who had studied abroad and spoke numerous foreign languages.

The fact that Rabbani's partisans were forced to assert their leader's historical link to [Professor Ghulam Mohammad] Niazi can be seen, at least in part, as an indication of Hekmatyar's success in dictating the terms of the debate over the right to leadership. It is also, however, a demonstration of the importance that lineality plays in Afghan culture. Lineality is the primary basis of tribal relations, just as it is in Sufi orders and madrassas, where claims to rights and privileges are premised on connections to respected mentors. In this light, the fact that both Hekmatyar and Rabbani wanted to prove their relationship not to a Sufi saint or traditional religious scholar but to a little-known university professor speaks to the marginalization of the clerical establishment and the decline of the great saintly families. Regardless, this was one of the principal grounds on which Hekmatyar and Rabbani contested their claims to authority, and their inability to resolve their differences led to the first major rupture in the Peshawar-based community of Muslim refugees, as Hekmatyar and Rabbani became the heads of separate parties.

This split occurred in the winter of 1976, at a time when Peshawar was beginning to fill up with Afghan religious leaders, among them Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani from Paktia, Mawlawi Husayn from Pech, and Qazi Amin. The Afghan ulema in Peshawar were upset over the Hekmatyar-Rabbani rupture and as Qazi Amin indicates, joined together to try to heal this rift in their ranks:

"We appointed a council of six people to try to find a compromise between Hekmatyar and Rabbani that would unite them. The council worked for about two months. The members of the council talked separately with each of them and asked them which one should be the leader. According to their own declarations, neither of them was ready to accept the other's leadership, so the neutral members of the delegation, who had more authority, proposed that there should be a third choice for amir ... The delegation said that they didn't want to choose the third person themselves. They had to confer with both sides to find a person that both of them would agree on. First, they asked Engineer Hekmatyar, and he mentioned two or three names. My name was among the names he mentioned. When they asked Rabbani to choose a third man, my name was again among the suggestions. Since my name was on the list of both of the opposed leaders, I was selected, and the dispute was solved."

In this way on May 11, 1976, Qazi Amin was selected as the amir of the unified Islamic movement, which was given the name Hizb-e Islami Afghanistan. Both Hekmatyar and Rabbani agreed in the presence of the council to accept his leadership and merge their own factions within the unified party. Both were also included as members of the executive committee of this newly constituted party. Though still small at this point, the Islamist movement that first developed at Kabul University seemed to have resolved its difficulties and put itself in a position to spearhead efforts against the Daud regime. Between them, Rabbani and Hekmatyar represented the faculty and student wings of the Islamist movement. That Rabbani was a Persian-speaking Tajik and Hekmatyar a Pashtun was also significant for building a national front. So too was the fact that the executive council of the party included Mawlawi [Jalaluddin] Haqqani and Mawlawi Nasrullah Mansour, who were more traditional clerics from Paktia province, where earlier anti-government movements had successfully developed, and Mawlawi Husayn of Pech, the most important and visible representative of the reformist Panj Piri movement, which was influential in Kunar province.

... [Mawlawi Yunis] Khalis's reasons for refusing to join Harakat are obscure, and my own interview with him did not clarify matters. When I discussed the matter with [Mohammad] Nabi, he indicated that he went to Khalis to ask him to join Harakat, but Khalis refused. Khalis, in response to the same question, stated, "I and some of my friends didn't accept him because he couldn't he lead this union. He is a good scholar and can teach, but he can't do this work." Khalis may have had other reasons for his refusal, but it is also the case that, despite having secured the support of some excellent military commanders, Harakat had gained the reputation as one of the more corrupt and least well-organized parties, in part because of the abuses attributed to Nabi's son, who was his principal lieutenant. By contrast, Khalis's group maintained a relatively positive reputation, mostly on the strength of its commanders, especially Abdul Haq in Kabul and Jalaluddin Haqqani in Paktia.

The relationship between Khalis and Hekmatyar is also ambiguous. In part because of his son's involvement with the Muslim Youth Organization, Khalis was more supportive of the students' efforts than were most older clerics, so much so in fact that Khalis stored arms at his home in Nangarhar for use by Muslim Youth activists in the abortive uprisings in 1975. Once in Peshawar, Khalis quietly threw in his lot with Hizb-e Islami, before using the occasion of Nabi's ascendance to announce the formation of his own Hizb-e Islami. Khalis had long been known for his independence and idiosyncrasies, but apparently the principal factor in this decision to establish his own Hizb-e Islami was his resentment at being subordinate to younger and less experienced men ... To Khalis, Hekmatyar and his followers were "unripe" (kham), and he questioned how Hekmatyar could claim to lead an Islamic jihad when he had only a rudimentary understanding of Islamic scripture. The term most commonly applied to Hekmatyar and the other erstwhile student revolutionaries by Khalis and other older clereics was maktabian, or "schoolboys," which had gone to state schools rather than madrassas. Some clerics were willing to forgive the maktabian their lack of training because their hearts at least were with Islam, but increasingly that sympathy was strained as the political environment in Peshawar became more polarized.

... Another of Khalis's strengths in comparison with Hekmatyar was that he was as much a man of the tribe as he was a party leader. For Hekmatyar, the party was all-important, and as the events in Pech Valley illustrated, he and his subordinates never hesitated to undermine tribal alliances if it was advantageous for the party to do so. One of the marks of Khalis's wing of the Hizb-e Islami, conversely, was its ability to work with tribal leaders and to accommodate tribal customs, even if it meant contravening the formal dictates of Islamic law. I experienced this personally in the summer of 1984, when I visited mujahideen bases in Paktia province that were run by Haqqani, Khalis's chief deputy. Khalis's local commanders worked closely with tribal leaders, sharing jurisdiction with them and allowing them to apply customary tribal law to resolve internal disputes. In areas controlled by Hekmatyar's Hizb, local commanders generally insisted that all disputes and criminal proceedings be handled according to Islamic law under supervision of party leaders. Khalis's commanders took a different approach, which helps to explain the considerable military and political success his groups enjoyed in the early 1980s in the areas under their jurisdiction; in comparison, the early victories of Hekmatyar's Hizb-e Islami were more modest.

... The impetus for the creation of a national jirga began in 1979 in Miramshah, where representatives from a number of Paktia tribes gathered to discuss the conduct of the jihad in their territory. Resistance against the government had begun in Paktia within days of the Khalqi coup. The mountainous terrain had allowed opponents of the regime to take control of most of the roads and villages and had forced government troops to hole up in the fortified town of Khost and a few outlying forts that had to be supplied by helicopter. Relative to other areas of the country, Paktia had tribes with well-developed legal codes and traditions of collective action in defense of its lawsand customary practices. When the conflict with the government began, the tribes instituted their own procedures for ensuring order in their territories and succeeded in working cooperatively with the Islamic political parties that had established fronts in the province. Thus, in contrast to the situation in Pech, where tribal and party leaders were working to undermine each other, many tribal and party leaders in Paktia had come to accept a division of authority. Party leaders did not insist on adjudicating internal tribal disputes and often accepted the authority of the tribal police force - the arbakai - to enforce tribal law and apprehend lawbreakers. In response, the tribes allowed the parties (principally Gailani's Mahaz and Khalis's Hizb under Haqqani) to establish bases, recruit local tribesmen, and conduct military operations.

... The clerical parties - Nabi's Harakat and Khalis's Hizb - were less centralized than the Sufi parties. No special status was invested in the heads of these parties, and business did not have to go through them. Consequently, they tended to be somewhat more efficient and less subject to bottlenecks than the Sufi groups, where major and minor decisions always had to await approval from on high. Khalis, in particular, had a number of trusted lieutenants and commanders (for example, his deputy, Hajji Din Mohammad, and commanders Abdul Haq of Kabul and Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani of Paktia) who were able to act independently and effectively. In essence, the clerical parties were networks of mawlawis and mullahs, some of whom knew each other already, but all of whom had in common their educational experiences and their commitment to a particular vision of Qu'ran-centered existence. If there was an "old boys network" in Afghanistan, a network of men who didn't necessarily know each other individually but who acted on each other's behalf because they knew "where they were coming from," it was probably this group.''

In addition, and in contrast to the Sufi parties, the clerics also had effective avenues of recruitment. Thus, while neither Gailani or Mujaheddi had any way to recruit new devotees except through the resources they were prepared to hand out - the Sufi orders associated with their families being largely scattered or inactive - the clerical parties had madrassas, which enjoyed a booming renaissance during the jihad years. By 1984, there were 3.5 million refugees in Pakistan, and, beyond the primary schools available in the camps and a handful of secondary schools in Peshawar, the only educational alternative for refugees was to go to religious schools. Prior to the Marxist revolution, mullahs and mawlawis had limited prestige in Afghanistan. Mostly poor and lacking in influence, clerics generally did not inspire emulation, and few young people, except the genuinely devout, were attracted to religious parties, however madrassas became a surer path to advancement than secular schools, whose graduates found a paucity of jobs available to them. The madrassa thus replaced the school as the place to go to get ahead, and the clerical parties first, and later the Taliban, benefited by having this institution at their disposal.

Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan by Mary Anne Weaver [Kindle Edition]

One US government official told me in the summer of 2009 that the Obama administration was increasingly alarmed - some officials outraged - by Islamabad's dogged support of not only the militants inside Pakistan, but also of at least three major groups - all of which came to prominence during the jihad, and all of which were fighting US forces inside Afghanistan now: the Afghan Taliban, now headquartered in Quetta, Baluchistan, where the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had found refuge from the Afghan war, and the armies of the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Both men were heavily funded by the CIA - and by the ISI - during the jihad, and the S Directorate of the ISI reportedly funds them now.

Indeed, US communications intercepts between Haqqani and the ISI coincided with a suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, in July 2008, in which fifty-four people, including the Indian military attache, died. Haqqani, according to US intelligence sources, was responsible for that attack, and the ISI was complicit in it. ... By the last days of April 2002, an odd assortment of peasants and students and tribal chiefs - along with the mullahs of Miramshah - were furious with the United States. Two to three hundred Pakistani troops, assisted by a dozen or so Americans, had raided a madrassa there, and it was not just a madrassa but one that belonged to the powerful Mullah Jalaluddin Haqqani, an ISI protege and the kingmaker of Khost, who had been closely allied with the CIA during the jihad and, after it, with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Shops closed in fear or protest as Pakistani helicopters hovered overhead. But well before the sprawling complex was turned upside down, the al-Qaeda fighters who had been there left. It appeared that they had been alerted in advance. After the

Americans and the Pakistanis withdrew, the students and the mullahs and the tribal chiefs gathered in Miramshah's tiny square, where they sat on rope charpoys and sipped sweet, milky tea. The mullahs announced to everyone assembled that, from that day, they should kill Americans on sight.

Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen [Kindle Edition]

Soviet estimates placed the number of mujahideen combatants at around 130,000, scattered in over 3,000 separate "detachments." American intelligence gauged the number of active mujahideen fighters at 150,000, although this number of insurgents was never in the field at any one time. Less than a dozen mujahideen personalities received significant international attention. The Pakistani media lionized Ghilzai Pashtun extremists Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani based in Pakistan. The Western press gave more coverage to moderate commanders such as pro-Zahir Shah Durrani Pashtun Hajji [Abdul] Latif in the south, Tajik Ismail Khan in the west, Panjshiri Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud in the north, and Ghilzai Pashtun Abdul Haq in the east.

... A huge Soviet-Afghan regime offensive overran Jalaluddin Haqqani's base at Zhawar Kili in Paktia province in April 1986, but the Soviets could not hold it. Soviet military intelligence reported that Massoud's forces were on the move in northern Afghanistan, "expanding their territory." The assessment advised that launching attacks on Massoud's bases "would not give practical results either from a military, or moreover, from the political point of view." In April 1987, Massoud's mujahideen captured the large Kara Munjan Afghan regime base, opening the way to the Pakistan border 25 miles away.

... In late 1987, bin Laden's bulldozers were working both sides of the border. He built a "military academy" for Sayyaf at Sada in the Kurram Tribal Agency, called the "Parrot's Beak" because of its geographic protrusion into Afghanistan, east of Tora Bora in Nangarhar and west of Khost. He befriended Jalaluddin Haqqani, the wiry Ghilzai Zadran commander and mullah from Paktia, and expanded Haqqani's bases in North Waziristan and at Zhawar Kili across the border in Paktia. He strengthened Khalis's Tora Bora cave complex south of Jalalabad and built roads to assist poverty-stricken Pashtun mountain villages on both sides of the Durand Line in the Tora Bora area. The local popularity he reaped from these projects later facilitated his escape from Tora Bora and disappearance into Pakistan's tribal agencies after 9/11. Bin Laden also enlarged an existing Hekmatyar base near Khost, built a second base for Sayyaf near Jaji in Paktia, and established one for himself nearby, calling it "the Lion's Den." In late 1987, a combined Soviet- PDPA attack on bin Laden's base forced him and his men to pull back into Pakistan.

The first phase of the Soviet withdrawal, beginning in May 1988, allowed freer movement of Afghan mujahideen and Arab militants into eastern Afghanistan. There, Egyptian terrorists Ayman al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel Rahman coordinated with the ISI, bin Laden, and Hekmatyar to establish small operating bases for Arab militants in Nangarhar, Paktia, and Kunar. A whiterobed Afghan Wahhabi, Jamil al-Rahman began to build a Wahhabi emirate with Saudi money in Kunar province. About this time, bin Laden stepped up efforts to bring non-Arab Islamic militants to Pakistan. Bin Laden's brother-in-law Mohammad [Jamal] Khalifa, head of the Saudi Islamic Relief Charity office in Manila, sent Filipino members of the radical [Abu] al- Sayyaf group to Pakistan for training. Over one hundred Burmese Muslim separatists of the Rohingya Solidarity Group were trained at camps run by Hekmatyar and Haqqani in the tribal agencies.

... The mujahideen leaders passed the next 13 days denouncing each other and the shura. No more votes were taken, and no progress was made toward choosing a government. Each of the seven delegations insisted that their party leader be AIG [Afghan Interim Government] president. Abdul Haq ceased attending; Zahir Shah-era moderates walked out. Finally, probably under ISI's tutelage, Zadran commander Jalaluddin Haqqani intervened to break the deadlock. The delegates were aware of Haqqani's record as a fierce mujahideen commander, his close ties to the ISI, and the large amount of Saudi patronage sustaining his madrassas in North Waziristan.

Guided by [Hamid] Gul and Prince Turki behind the scenes, Haqqani broached a formula to break the salemate. The bandolier of bullets crossing his chest and the holster housing an Enfield pistol indicated he meant business. Haqqani suggested that two delegates from each party, not including the seven leaders, accompany him to his house in Islamabad. He proposed sequestered them there until they came up with a mechanism to distribute the AIG cabinet portfolios among the seven leaders. Haqqani insisted that the leaders agree on the spot to accept his formula.

After another bout of mutual recrimination, the seven agreed. At this point, Haqqani unexpectedly reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper describing his procedure. He asked the leaders to sign. Six did. Hekmatyar refused, arguing that the process violated Islamic law. Haqqani grabbed the handle of his revolver and thrust the paper into Hekmatyar's hand, thundering that Hekmatyar either sign or go into Afghanistan and see how much popular support he really had among Afghans. Hekmatyar signed the agreement, writing out an objection next to his signature.

Haqqani locked the group in a boiler room at his home. He allowed no phone or other contact with the outside world. It took two full days for the committee to agree that the election would be conducted by secret ballot. They accepted Haqqani's procedure for the balloting the next day.

... [Hamid] Gul's choice of Jalalabad, Afghanistan's fourth largest city, seemed a logical one. Jalalabad was readily accessible from mujahideen bases in Pakistan approximately 30 miles away. It was situated on a major road artery connecting Peshawar through the Khyber Pass to Kabul and was closer to Pakistan than to Kabul. It lay in the heart of mainly Ghilzai-populated eastern Afghanistan, surrounded by commanders affiliated with Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, Khalis, and Haqqani and their knots of Arab fighters. With a Napoleonic flourish, Gul declared that the battle would last less than a week, "If the government was prepared to allow for a certain degree of bloodshed."

There was plenty of bloodshed. Most of it was suffered by 15,000 ill-prepared, disorganized, and divided mujahideen guerrilas attempting a conventional assault on a well-fortified city. ... After a day of briefings at the American consulate in Peshawar, America's Afghan-watching post on the Frontier, we set out for Miramshah in North Waziristan to meet Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. The three-hour journey took us through the Kohat Pass into Pashtun hilltribe territory. The bare, nearly treeless rock-strewn hills of North Waziristan were criss- crossed by countless goat trails. Little wonder that the Waziri tribes inhabiting this wasteland turned to plundering the fertile valleys of the Indus basin below. We stopped for lunch with a district political officer at his cozy colonial-era bungalow. He described the recent application of Pashtunwali to two young adulterers in his district. The boy and girl were thrown into a hole and stoned to death by angry Waziri tribesmen.

Bidding farewell to our host, we climbed steadily upward through more brush-covered hillsides toward the snowcapped Suleiman range pinpointing the Afghan-Pakistan border. The house- fortresses fencing in reclusive Pashtun families dotted the mountainsides, ridges, and valleys – a common sight on both sides of the Durand Line. Their high stone walls surrounded brownish white rectangular homes made of stone and hardened mud. A tower rose at one of the corners, irregularly punctuated by holes so that the inhabitants could monitor the approach of tribal foes – or fire down on them. We saw few people during our early afternoon drive, even though North and South Waziristan are the most populated of the seven tribal agencies.

Haqqani received us in his family compound outside Miramshah. Wiry, long-haired, and wild- eyed, he fit the colonial-era image of the charismatic mullah of the Frontier. Our discussion took place in his tiny living room over green tea. The furniture was Spartan. Outside, about a dozen mujahideen cradling shiny AK-47s loitered about. Haqqani wore a secondhand US Army camouflage shirt over his baggy pants. His turban was spun abnormally high for a man of medium height. Originally white, it had faded into a dirty gray. Haqqani’s black, stringy beard – uncut, per strict Wahhabi tradition – hung down from the lower reaches of his coarse, thin face.

The meeting with Haqqani lasted an hour. He spent most of the time complaining that the CIA’s reductions of arms shipments beginning in late 1988 had weakened his military capability. He opened a notebook and showed me his weapons inventory. His voice rising, he asked how he could fight if he had not received any arms or ammunition for eight months. Haqqani protested that the cut-off had compelled him to purchase ammunition and arms at the Pakistani arms bazaar at Teri Mangal near Parachinar, in nearby Kurram tribal agency. He was down to 2 Stingers and only 400 heavy Spanish 120-mm mortar rounds. He was also out of mine-clearing belts. I responded that 5,000 were stored in an ISI warehouse in Islamabad. “They are probably the Pakistanis,” he announced. I told Haqqani that I would look into his complaints.

Haqqani’s demands for more weapons, ammunition, and money would become a constant refrain that I would hear from both moderate nationalists and radical Islamist mujahideen for the next three years. The moderates inevitably levied an additional demand on me – to force the ISI to evenly distribute American aid between them and the extremists. This was beyond my authority. Aside from ISI, the Saudi charities on the Frontier and the Saudi government also transferred millions in cash to Haqqani and other Afghan Islamists. Haqqani’s collection boxes were stuffed at Friday mosque services in the Saudi kingdom. Scores of young Arabs signed up to fight alongside his mujahideen bands.

While we spoke, Haqqani’s CIA-purchased Chinese rockets were landing on Khost. The regime- controlled capital of Paktia province, less than 10 miles away and about 80 miles from Kabul, still held out. Afghan army units and pro-regime tribal militias drove each of Haqqani’s ground attacks off the Khost plain and back across the Afghan-Pakistani border, their resolve stiffened by Haqqani’s well-known cruelties against captured prisoners. Urban youth unwillingly impressed into the Afghan army off Kabul streets hoped they would be sent to garrisons in the north facing Massoud rather than to Khost, where capture meant certain death. A VOA reporter on assignment in Paktia was once asked by Haqqani to interview some captured regime soldiers. One of the trembling young POWs, desperately reaching out for any lifeline, told the reporter, “I’m not guilty. So if they kill me, you’re going to become guilty.” When the interview ended, Haqqani tossed the reporter an AK-47 and invited him to execute some of the prisoners. The reporter declined. The prisoners were each given a last meal of a banana, taken behind a large rock, and shot.

The ISI prediction that Khost would fall proved overly optimistic. Haqqani lacked local mujahideen allies from other tribes, and his ISI, CIA, and Saudi sponsors could not spend enough to shift the complicated tribal landscape in Paktia to his side. The province’s confusing patchwork of hundreds of small, independent tribal qawms contending for position against one another defied management from outsiders. The constant infighting among the seven party leaders in Peshawar added fuel to the incessant local tribal rivalry. If one tribal group affiliated itself with one of the Peshawar seven, its tribal competitors joined a competing party.

Influential Ahmadzai commanders to the north and east of Khost might have made the difference between victory and defeat for Haqqani. But they were not interested in delivering the isolated communist outpost to the Zadran fanatic. The moderate Ahmadzai khans disliked Haqqani’s religious extremism. ISI payments occasionally brought their temporary coordination with his attacks on Khost, but never for long. Naim Kuchi, one of Sebghatullah Mojaddedi’s commanders in Paktia, considered Jaqqani a bigger threat to his Ahmadzai tribe than [communist ruler] Najibullah, also an Ahmadzai from northern Paktia.

Najibullah’skillful manipulation of tribal divisions among the mujahideen helped keep the isolated Khost outpost on the Pakistani border in the regime column. The Afghan president’s Ahmadzai clan was in Paktia. He was well-versed in the crosscurrents of tribal animosities in his native province. His bribes turned tribal chiefs against Haqqani or bought their neutrality. Defense Minister Shahnawaz Tanai and Interior Minister Aslam Watanjar used their tribal connections in the province to throw back Haqqani offensives. The stray parachute drops of food and ammunition from PDPA aircraft falling outside of Khost’s defensive perimeter, purposeful or not, offered an additional inducement for local tribes not to capture the city.

… Abdul Haq became the commander’s shura’s de facto Afghan founder, fundraiser, and administrator as well as the main point of contact between the commanders and the Pakistani, American, and Saudi officials. He and his cohort made spectacular progress in launching the commander’s shura. Hamid Karzai and his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, encouraged Durrani commanders in the south to participate. IsmailKhan sent his deputy, Allaudin Khan, from western Afghanistan, to take part in the proceedings. Jalaluddin Haqqani joined as well and offered his Zhawar Kili bastion across the border from his Miramshah headquarters in Paktia for gatherings of the shura inside Afghanistan.

In May 1990, Abdul Haq and his associates held an organizational meeting of forty commanders at Zhawar Kili. Later in the month, about a hundred commanders attended the shura’s first conference at Zhawar Kili. The second commanders’ shura meeting took place at Zhawar Kili on June 22-24 with more than three hundred commandersfrom around Afghanistan in attendance. Three SCUD missiles fired by regime gunners at the Zhawar Kili cave complex did not interrupt the discussions. … The ISI’s tolerance of the commanders’ shura was important to its further development. The participation of Haqqani and other commanders close to the ISI provided insurance that the shura would not grow hostile to Pakistan. So was ISI’s control of weapons supplies to most mujahideen commanders. The lack of a central political-military control mechanism inside the shura exposed it to ISI manipulation. There was no command post from which to plan and manage military operations. There was no discipline except self-discipline. There were no membership qualifications to attend meetings, other than claiming to be a commander. One of the shura organizers, Hazara sayyid Jaglan, told me, “You have to let everyone walk through the gates of the city, bad with the good.” The nonexistent membership criteria made it easy for the ISI to infiltrate the shura and to “pluck” commanders out of it through intimidation tactics or offers of material support.

… The March 31 attack on Khost, billed as the kickoff of the commanders’ shura 1991 military campaign, was neither planned nor organized by Afghan commanders. It was an ISI operation from start to finish, geared to enhance the position of the Afghan Islamists in the aftermath of the battle. The leading moderate Ahmadzai tribal chief in Paktia, Hajji Naim, was a prominent member of the commanders’ shura and the head of the Ahmadzai tribal shura. The ISI armed his tribals but assigned them a combat role subservient to Jalaluddin Haqqani’s and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s forces.

Khost was defended by more than 3,000 men from the regime’s regular army and militia. An equal number of mujahideen were in the attacking force. An equal number of mujahideen were in the attacking force. Before the attack, I wrote to six party leaders asking that they treat prisoners humanely. The Afghan population would turn against the mujahideen if the massacres at Jalalabad were reenacted at Khost.

Pakistani Special Services Group (SSG) commandos and artillery and communications specialists, attached to the mujahideen assault groups positioned around Khost, coordinated the command and control, artillery, and communications functions during the fighting. On the morning of March 31, 1991, the mujahideen attacked Khost from multiple directions. When Hekmatyar’s fighters failed to take the main Khost airport, Hajji Naim’s Ahmadzai tribals stormed and seized it, taking heavy casualties. Mujahideen attacking forces west of the city were thrown back by the regime’s tough 59th Commando Group and Khost tribal militia. By mid-afternoon, however, the Ahmadzai tribals were fighting their way into the city. Haqqani’s mujahideen followed them, capturing the garrison’s command post. Soon after, more than 2,500 regime troops in the city surrendered. Hundreds more escaped to Gardez, 40 miles away on the road to Kabul. About 500 regime troops were killed and 400 wounded during the fierce fighting. In addition, 160 mujahideen died, 121 of them Ahmadzai. A regime deputy defense minister and two KHAD generals were among the captives. The ISI took control of the heavy weapons captured: 25 tanks, 12 of them working, and more than 50 artillery pieces.

The fall of Khost was a major defeat for the regime. Najibullah, regime defense minister Aslam Watanjar, and numerous army officers had tribal ties to the province. In the past, mujahideen disunity and Najibullah’s bribes of tribal chiefs in Paktia had protected the remote regime outpost on the Pakistani border. Haqqani told me at the US consulate in Peshawar that he believed that mujahideen unity was the reason for the victory and that the commanders’ shura had created that unity. He proudly informed me that regime prisoners had been turned over to the Swiss International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). … The ISI stopped supporting the commanders’ shura after the victory at Khost. It began to lay the groundwork for Hekmatyar-Tanai led attacks on Jalalabad and Gardez, Paktia’s capital. Gardez lay only 35 miles from Kabul. Its capture would open the road to the Afghan capital. The Agency followed the ISI’s lead in drawing down its assistance to the commanders’ shura after Khost fell. A meeting I suggested between the deputy station chief and Abdul Haq broke up following an angry exchange between the two.

The ISI’s cutoff of support to Hajji Naim and the Ahmadzai tribes that had done most of the fighting at Khost underscored the Pakistani Army’s return to degrading Afghan moderates in the resistance and exclusively backing the extremists. Haqqani removed Ahmadzai representatives from the Khost shura set up under his leadership after the battle. In May 27 meeting in Peshawar, an Ahmadzai tribal leader told me that the ISI, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar were prohibiting moderate members of the commanders’ shura, including Hajji Naim, from entering Khost. He accused Hekmatyar’s mujahideen of raising Hizb party flags in Khost neighborhoods, looting the Khost weapons armory, and occupying key government buildings. The pillaging of Khost and the regime’s Scud attacks on the city drove 20,000 more refugees into Pakistan.

… The ISI’s central front for the new proxy war inside Afghanistan was North and South Waziristan. Pakistani Waziri and Mehsud tribesmen allied to Arab, Uzbek, Chechen, and other foreign fighters who had fled the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan crossed the border to attack coalition forces and Afghan military and police outposts and assassinate Afghan government officials. A “Waziristan Islamic Emirate” declared holy war on the Afghan government and the US-led coalition across the Durand Line. Old ISI warhorse Jalaluddin Haqani and his son, Saudi-educated Sirajuddin Haqqani, operated from the Miramshah area of the central front. Khalis’s son and al-Qaeda representative in Nangarhar province, Anwar ul-Haq Mujahid, based himself in the Kurram Tribal Agency. Their networks carried out attacks in Paktia, Khost, and Nangarhar provinces. They also specialized in suicide bombings in Kabul.

Triple Agent by Joby Warrick [Kindle Edition]

[CIA analyst Elizabeth] Hanson was skimming classified cables for the names of [Baitullah] Mehsud lieutenants in late June, when Pakistani informants reported that a kind of pan-jihadist strategy session had taken place near Baitullah Mehsud’s ancestral home of Makeen, in South Waziristan. The eleven-member guest list included a top al-Qaeda emissary, Abu Yahya al-Libi, as well as Sirajuddin Haqqani, the charismatic young commander who presided over the powerful Haqqani network, and Baitullah Mehsud himself. The reputed purpose of the gathering was to persuade the Taliban leader to negotiate a truce with Pakistan; Haqqani and al-Qaeda leaders were watching the army’s advance through South Waziristan and worried that their territory might be next … The groups had maintained informal contacts for years. But this was something more.

… The CIA caught a break in its search for Baitullah Mehsud and the weapon he was feared to be hiding: a mid-level commander in Mehsud’s organization was spotted in Taliban country. A plan was quickly hatched to strike Baitullah Mehsud when he attended the man’s funeral. True, the commander, a trusted aide named Khwaz Wali Mehsud, happened to be very much alive as the plan took shape. But he would not be for long.

Before sunrise on June 23 a lone Predator drone circled high over tiny Lataka, a mountain hamlet in Taliban country, forty miles northeast of the provincial capital of Wana. Two missiles sliced through the humid predawn air, racing ahead of their own sound waves, sensors locked onto a mud-brick building on the village outskirts. Anyone watching from the street would have seen only a small impact flash and then an eruption of rock, dust, and smoke as the house burst apart from the inside. Neighbors clambering over broken walls and singed furniture and bed mats found the mangled bodies of five Taliban fighters and their leader, Khwaz Wali Mehsud.

It was a significant hit, but it was only the prelude to what CIA officials hoped would be a much bigger score.

The Mehsuds, like other Pashtun tribesmen who live along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, attach great significance to funerals, which often surpass weddings as social occasions. The passing of a prominent member requires a show of respect from his relatives, and often large crowds of mourners gather around the body to wail and chant prayers. Village elders and other prominent citizens then fall in line to escort the shrouded corpse to the gravesite.

As the smoke cleared in tiny Lataka, spy agencies watched and listened when Mehsud notables began pouring into the villages to recover the bodies and organize a hasty burial. Among the names gleaned from phone intercepts was Qari Hussein Mehsud, Baitullah Mehsud’s top deputy and heir apparent. Qari Hussein was among the most ideological of the Mehsud clan, a man with deep hatred for Pakistan’s secular government and a vision for a broader alliance between the Pakistan Taliban and other jihadist movements. He had founded suicide bomber camps for young boysand was behind several deadly attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The second big name on the guest list was a surprise: Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a military commander in the Haqqani network. Sangeen was a top deputy to Sirajuddin Haqqani, Jalaluddin’s son, and a man with a bounty on his head. The Pentagon had targeted him twice during raids inside Afghanistan, but he slipped away both times. Now his presence at a Mehsud clan funeral reinforced US fears of a deepening alliance between the Mehsuds and the Haqqanis that would surely benefit al-Qaeda as well.

… The successful targeting of Mehsud had only served to underscore the urgent nature of the work that still lay ahead. For one thing, Mehsud’s “devices” remained unaccounted for. All summer, as the CIA searched for the Taliban leader, thousands of Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships swept the Taliban’s valley strongholds, picking off forts and hideouts one by one. By the time the campaign ended, the Pakistanis were sitting on a mountain of small arms and enough explosives to supply a madrassa full of suicide bombers. But they found no trace of a dirty bomb. The radiation detectors never sounded at all. The CIA’s counterterrorism chiefs puzzled for weeks over the meaning of the missing devices. Many Taliban survivors had fled into neighboring North Waziristan to take shelter with that province’s dominant militant group, the Haqqani network. Had they taken their bombs with them? Had it all been some kind of trick? On this, classified reports were silent. There was no further talk of devices in the agency’s intercepts, and back in Washington, Obama administration officials made no mention of the dirty bomb scare. Publicly, it was as though the threat never existed.

… The first order of business was deciding how to deal with the region’s largest militant group. Local warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani had spent years on the CIA’s payroll when he served as an Afghan rebel commander during the war against the Soviets, and he now controlled thousands of fighters along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He had nominally allied himself with the Taliban after that group’s rise to power in the 1990s. But Haqqani was a free agent, more interested in perpetuating his own smuggling empire and protection rackets than in theology or conquest. Haqqani also was loyal to his friends, including his former comrade-in-arms Osama bin Laden. The two men had cemented their reputations in the 1980s fighting the Soviets in the mountains around Khost, a region that repeatedly proved impervious to Russian assaults. Bin Laden, the son of a wealthy construction magnate, used Saudi money and engineering connections to help the mujahideen guerrillas build a complex of tunnels and cave fortresses in the hills. Haqqani became a legendary military commander, personally leading his fighters into improbable David and Goliath victories against Soviet commandos and helicopter gunships. The Soviets occupied and expanded the airfield at Khost mainly in a failed attempt to bomb Haqqani and his allies out of their mountain redoubts.

Thus, when SAD teams and pro-US Afghan forces closed in on bin Laden in late 2001, the al- Qaeda leader sought protection of the tall, bushy-bearded warlord who had fought with him against the Soviets. Haqqani offered his friend sanctuary in a house outside Khost until it was safe to cross back into Pakistan to rejoin his followers.

Haqqani remained behind. He had been sanguine about the Taliban’s defeat and was prepared to switch loyalties, as he had done so often in the past. Pakistani officials who had dealt with him for decades strongly urged the Americans to accommodate him and perhaps even give him a token role in the new Afghan government.

But in Washington, Bush officials in the Defense Department were not in a mood to bargain. Haqqani had abetted the escape of Osama bin Laden and might still know his whereabouts. Two rounds of secret talks were held with Haqqani’s emissaries, in Islamabad and then in the United Arab Emirates, according to a former senior US official intimately familiar with the events. But at both meetings, the official said, the US side offered the same terms: unconditional surrender, including Haqqani’s personal acquiescence to donning an orange jumpsuit and joining the other detainees at the newly opened US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After a reasonable interval – presumably after Haqqani had told military interrogators everything he knew about bin Laden – he would be allowed to return home.

Haqqani’s refusal to accept such an offer was a given, the former intelligence official said.

“I personally always believed that Haqqani was someone we could have worked with,” the official said. “But at that time, no one was looking over the horizon, to where we might be in five years. For the policy folks, it was just ‘screw these little brown people.’”

Haqqani did refuse. Jalaluddin Haqqani had bedeviled the Russians over nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare in the 1980s. Now, at the age of fifty-one, he would go to war against the Americans. In time the so-called Haqqani network, led by Haqqani’s son Sirajuddin, became one of the greatest threats to US forces in all of Afghanistan and it was Haqqani’s fighters who now woke Matthews and her colleagues at all hours, firing rockets at the walls of the base at Khost.

Architect of Global Jihad by Brynjar Lia

[Abu Musab] Al-Suri claims to have fought in several battles during the Afghan liberation war. As a rule, he used to take his trainees for a “graduation ceremony” that included a tour to the front lines and active participation in combat inside Afghanistan. He also said he took part in the combat in and around Jalalabad before the city was captured and in the battles before the fall of Khost. For a while he fought under the Afghan warlord Sheikh Jalaluddin Haqqani. There are very few details of his relationship with Haqqani, except that he attended meetings and other gatherings in Haqqani’s house in Peshawar.

… For example, the training camp for Arab mujahideen in the Ansar al-Islam controlled enclave in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2002-3 went by the name al-Ghuraba Center (Markaz al-Ghuraba). Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was known to use the term as his nom de guerre (al-Gharib in singular). The term al-Ghuraba Brigade (Kateebat al-Ghuraba) was also the name of the first Arab Afghan combat unit which had been formed in Afghanistan in the early 1980s and which fought together as a group. According to one account, the unit was hurriedly created in response to the Soviet capture of the Zhawar Kili camp, which was a key rebel base, commanded by the Afghan mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and his Hizb-e Islami. A group of Afghan Arabs led by bin Laden then bought weapons and received extra equipment from Haqqani, and at the offices of Hizb-e Islami they swore an oath of loyalty to Abdullah Azzam to fight. This small group of fighters was initially called Kateebat al-Ghuraba. According to the diary of Abu Hajir [al- Iraqi], then Emir at the “Service Bureau”(Maktab al-Khidmat [the proto-al-Qaeda]), Abdullah Azzam had told them that “we called you by this name because you are strangers (ghuraba).” The unit was apparently dissolved after its first operation inside Afghanistan. Several militant groups in Europe have also used the term ghuraba about themselves. In 1997 a GIA splinter faction issued a bulletin from Europe entitled al-Ghuraba, claiming to represent the true GIA and accusing GIA emir Antar Zouabri of acting under the influence of the Algerian security services.

The Fragmentation of Afghanistan by Barnett Rubin

Immediately after the Soviet invasion, as increasing numbers of refugees swarmed across the borders, “every day about 1,000 Afghans led by community elders, mujahid commanders and former members of parliament [from the New Democracy period]” met in mosques in Peshawar. Mohammad Umar Babrakzai, a French-educated former Supreme Court justice, became chairman of the Loya Jirga. Babrakzai was typical of the leaders who emerged from the Jirga – educated members of the old regime elite, nearly all Pashtun with strong tribal backgrounds. Many of the assembled leaders had ties of kinship or patronage to various social networks inside the country, but unlike the tribal leaders who had met in jirgas to elect the Durrani monarchs or summon the tribes to fight the British, they generally did not lead the battle themselves. Babrakzai, for instance, came from the clan recognized by the old regime as leaders of the Zadran tribe in Paktia. He organized a Jirga in Peshawar and helped French activists convene a session of the International People’s Tribunal in Paris, but in Zadran territory itself the jihad was being led by a charismatic mullah, Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani.

… More typical of Khalis’s fronts was that of Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani in Paktia, the core of the resistance in that mountainous, tribal province. Haqqani was one of the seven commanders cited by Najibullah in his April 1988 speech. Mawlawi Jalaluddin, like Mawlawi Khalis, was educated in the Northwest Frontier Province, at the Haqqani madrassa in Peshawar. He wrested leadership of the Zadran tribe from the Babrakzai lineage recognized as khans by the old regime.

Mawlawi Jalaluddin both led his own forces and acted as coordinator of other forces of the Zadrans, including the many small units affiliated with NIFA [National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, the followers of Mojadeddi]; for large offensives, he included other tribes as well. He was the main local leader of the offensive that took Khost in March 1991. At the orders of the ISI, Mawlawi Jalaluddin had a huge base built in Zhawar Kili along the Durand Line. The base, which had electric generators, flush toilets, and large storage areas for weapons and other supplies, was built by a Pakistani construction company paid with Saudi money.

Haqqani’s front was a traditionally organized, religiously led tribal coalition with many elements of modern infrastructure. Its compact supply lines and excellent relations with both ISI and CIA (which appreciated the high body counts that Haqqani obtained) enabled it to expend ammunition freely in numerous offensives. Haqqani traveled abroad like Abdul Haq, but to Saudi Arabia rather than the West. Other Khalis fronts (like that of Mullah Malang among the Ghilzais of Kandahar) were similar. Because of a Pashtun tribal composition and ready access to weapons supplies, Hizb-e Islami Khalis was the party to which dissatisfied Pashto-speaking commanders from NIFA and, less commonly, Harakat, tended to repair.

… Paktia and Paktika are nang tribal provinces par excellence. More PDPA leaders came from these provinces than from anywhere else in Afghanistan (except perhaps Kabul City), and a number of combative militias and army units were stationed in Khost, Gardez, and Urgun. Here the leadership of the tribes passed to the fighting mullahs. In Paktia, the Hizb-e Islami Khalis commander Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani of the Zadran tribe, with aid from Pakistan and the Saudis, constructed an enormous base along the Durand Line and led continual attacks on Khost. In Paktika Mawlawi Arsala Rahmani of Ittehad-e Islami also built a large base, where hundreds of Arabs trained. Both commanders had started jihad without party affiliation, and both eventually joined parties that could provide enough ammunition and weapons to support their aggressive style of cross-border raiding.

Although a loose military shura emerged in Paktia, there were no other political or administrative institutions in either province. Most of the population not living under government control had taken the short trip to Pakistan, a traditional temporary home for large numbers of nomads.

Haqqani could at times bring together a powerful tribal coalition of commanders from various parties. His military pressure against Khost helped to keep open important mujahideen supply lines that passed through Paktia. He also enjoyed a certain personal prestige; he headed the committee at the February 1989 Rawalpindi shura that came up with a formula for choosing the interim government.

Nonetheless, even militarily the Paktia shura had no formal organization or headquarters other than Haqqani’s base. Sometimes the shura consulted with tribal elders, but these elders were living in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and there was no formal institutional mechanism for this consultation.

… ISI officers tried to gain influence over the NCS [National Commanders Shura] through this campaign, organizing the offensive in a way that seemed consistent with NCS strategy. The ISI convened several tribal shuras or jirgas and reached elaborate agreements before the assault about the distribution of booty. The garrison finally fell to tribal forces led by commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, a prominent figure in the NCS. In the aftermath, however, the coalition broke apart. Although Hekmatyar’s forces had played only a minor role in the fighting, Hizb-e Islami managed to seize the radio station and most of the garrison’s heavy weapons, in violation of pre-campaign agreements, and the ISI prevented Haqqani from recovering the loot. Hekmatyar, General Durrani of ISI, and Qazi Hussein Ahmad, leader of Pakistani Jamaat-e Islami, paid well-publicized visits to Khost, broadcasting the Pakistani role to an increasingly nationalist Afghan public. … Many radical Arab Islamists continued to train in Jalalabad. They were widely suspected of responsibility for the assassination of four UN personnel, two expatriates, and two Afghans, near Jalalabad in February 1993. This attack led the United Nations to terminate programs in the area and to withdraw all expatriates from Afghanistan. In Gardez a tribal shura led by Mawlawi Jalaluddin took over.

How We Missed the Story by Roy Gutman

The first successful attack on a provincial capital was the capture of Khost in March 1991, with fighting led by local Ahmadzai tribes and forces of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a member of Yunis Khalis’s hard-line Islamist Hizb-e Islami, and with support from the ISI and CIA. As many as one thousand guerrillas died in the battle, but mujahideen forces captured approximately two thousand government soldiers. However, guerrilla forces were unable to set up a government; instead they systematically pillaged the town. When the fighting was over, Hekmatyar’s well- organized political cadres went in, put up their flags, and claimed victory. The ISI’s promotion of Khost as a Hekmatyar victory undercut any propaganda advantage for the NCS.

… Bin Laden said Omar solicited his advice: “You give me a commander; we are ready to fight under your commander.” Bin Laden offered the services of Mohammad Atef (Abu Hafs), his military chief and third in command after Ayman al-Zawahiri. A former Egyptian police officer who had fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and a co-founder of al-Qaeda, Atef was a co- director, along with Abu Ubaydah al-Panjshiri, of bin Laden’s military committee. The main function of the committee was training. After Panjshiri died in a drowning accident in 1996, Atef became military chief. He had helped bin Laden reconnoiter the US military in Somalia in 1993 and would help plan every subsequent major operation. Now his task was to prepare a major military operation for Mazar-e-Sharif. Astutely, bin Laden did not accept Omar’s offer to put Atef in command of the troops but teamed him up with Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former mujahideen commander who Omar had put in charge of the training camps. Bin Laden has his own agenda, which would become apparent in time.

Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban by Syed Saleem Shahzad

The October 2003 military operation [against al-Qaeda in South Waziristan] forced the al-Qaeda leaders to act quickly. Al-Qaeda now understood that the only useful function of the old Taliban cadre was to play host to its members. Commanders like Jalaluddin Haqqani had only survived because of their Pakistani connections. They did not have the backbone to stand up to the Pakistani establishment. Al-Qaeda had been on the lookout for new young blood with no connections to Pakistan’s security establishment. It had been interacting with dozens of such young tribesmen, and its trained eyes spotted Nek Mohammad as the man of the hour. This was the beginning of the Neo-Taliban – the new generation of South Asian youths born of al- Qaeda’s ideology and strategic vision.

... With al-Qaeda having planted its feet firmly in South Waziristan, some of the top Arab ideologues moved to the town of Razmak, situated at the crossroads between North Waziristan and South Waziristan. Close by is the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. The opportunities to launch operations from North Waziristan were better than those in South Waziristan. South Waziristan was more a Taliban outpost of Helmand province, directly under the influence of the Afghan Taliban. North Waziristan was different. Most of the militants there were stand-alone operators. Therefore North Waziristan provided much more space for al-Qaeda to use as its international headquarters. Jalaluddin Haqqani had been a legendary fighter against the Soviets. He pledged his allegiance to the Taliban, but was not part of the Taliban movement when it emerged, in 1994, as a student militia against the warlords of Afghanistan. Even after the US attack, Haqqani remained attached to the Taliban, but he still personally micro-managed his strategies in his fight against NATO troops. His sons Nasruddin Haqqani and Sirajuddin Haqqani, however, were very close to the Arab fighters.

Unlike South Waziristan, where despite ideological unanimity the Mehsud and Wazir tribes often had differences with each other, North Waziristan was a united Wazir domain. The Dawar tribe also lives in North Waziristan, but is subservient to the Wazirs, and thus has never taken a stand against them.

Al-Qaeda understood that US pressure would obligate Pakistan to launch more operations, and ultimately the theater of war would expand to other Pakistani tribal areas where the United States would engage directly with al-Qaeda followers. Al-Qaeda therefore sought to establish a series of strong ideological “forts,” so that the conquest of one fort by the United States would not end the struggle. The aim of the al-Qaeda exercise was to convince the tribesmen to forge a united front against the Pakistani government.

Jalaluddin Haqqani was the leading Taliban warlord in North Waziristan. Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service had contacted him and assured him that the military operations in North Waziristan were superficial, and that once the situation changed, Pakistan would support the Taliban again. Haqqani believed this and so he was not ready to take up arms against Pakistan. However, al-Qaeda knew on the basis of its previous experiences in 2002 and 2003, that given the rising influence of the United States in Pakistan, one day Pakistan would have to fight a real war against the Taliban. That understanding took Sheikh Essa al-Masri (al-Qaeda’s ideologue), then in his seventies, to North Waziristan.

Essa did not speak to any of the major mujahideen leaders. Instead he picked up two clerics from the Dawar tribe, Maulawi Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq Haqqani, and convinced them that there was no difference between Pakistan’s establishment and that of the United States. Rather, the Pakistan armed forces were worse, because although they had been born Muslims, they were supportive of the US and Israeli agenda.

Mawlawi Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq Haqqani’s Friday sermons against Pakistan’s armed forces turned the towns of Mir Ali and Darpa Khel in North Waziristan into al-Qaeda fortresses. These were just microcosms of the wider situation. There were hidden hands macro-managing higher developments. At one level some al-Qaeda ideologues were winning the hearts and the minds of the local clerics and warlords, but at another level al-Qaeda strategists covertly advised local warlords to gather strength from the Mujahideen Council and cement relationships on the basis of ideology, rather than tribal customs.

… Sirajuddin, the son of legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, was in North Waziristan, and Baitullah Mehsud and Hajji Omar in South Waziristan were the representatives of Mullah Omar there. The men they commanded were committed to the Afghan resistance movement only. Scattered in various nooks and crannies of the two Waziristans, these pro- Taliban factions sheltered in Bermal, in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, Shawal, in North Waziristan, and Shakai and Angor Ada, in South Waziristan, in the belt that runs along the Durand Line. The mountains here were filled with global jihadis. The terrain facilitated their efforts as these men fought ferociously against the Pakistani security forces, aiming to leave the Pakistani troops exhausted in impossible-to-follow “hide and seek” games.

… These developments [the 2006 Taliban spring offensive] came about when spring had started and the Taliban had initiated a sporadic armed struggle, with a scattered strength of a few thousand and with the help of local warlords in various Afghan districts. They would be able to call on the 40,000 men in the two Waziristans. The Taliban had appointed veteran Jalaluddin Haqqani as its commander-at-large for the spring offensive.

The decision to install Haqqani as commander-at-large was in line with the unfolding Taliban strategy, which was to destabilize the government in Kabul in the north, even before they managed to seize control of southwest Afghanistan. They intended to first mobilize their strength in the southeastern provinces, then move on to Kabul.

Meanwhile, a command council comprising ten commanders responsible for specific regions was put in place. Mullah Omar’s former minister of defense, Mullah Obaidallah Akhund, was appointed as the emissary to take directions directly from Mullah Omar and pass them on to the commanders for feedback before a final decision was taken. Again, while all the commanders, especially Dadullah, had the primary task of eradicating the writ of the government in the southwest and southeast of Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani was assigned to exploit the situation and drive the enemy, north, south, east, and west by employing so much terror that the Karzai administration would fall before the arrival of the Taliban troops.

An aging, thin, and short man, commander Jalaluddin Haqqani had kept a record of every victory against the Soviet army, including the first, the mujahideen victory in 1991 when they defeated the communist government and seized control of Khost, the home town of the-then president of Afghanistan, Najibullah. The Khost submission had been a major milestone in the fall of Kabul to the mujahideen.

When the Taliban emerged, unlike all the other leaders and commanders of Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani was the first and only example in Afghanistan who unconditionally surrendered (in this case Khost) to them. Haqqani was not a Talib or student, and nor had ever previously been part of the movement, so the Taliban never accorded him much importance. He was minister for border areas, but never consulted on any policy matters. Despite this, when the Taliban decided to retreat in December 2001, the veteran commander advised them to retain their control over Khost, Paktia, and Paktika provinces, and make Gardez their front line against US forces. The Taliban leadership, however, paid no heed to his advice and evacuated all of the provinces. Yet Jalaluddin Haqqani remained loyal to Omar, even when Pakistan and the United States called him to Islamabad before the US invasion and asked him to carve out a structure for a “moderate” Taliban, become its head, and rebel against Omar.

All the foreign fighters who fled Tora Bora, Kabul, and the other places where they had been fighting, looked to Haqqani for sanctuary. And Haqqani provided it to all of them in his adopted home in North Waziristan. For those who wanted to stay with him, he arranged accommodation, and for those who wanted to go back to their native lands, he arranged safe passage. Haqqani once again came into the limelight in 2006 when Mullah Omar recognized his worth. He was provided with money, men, and all the material resources he needed, and was also delegated the power to carry out actions in any region of Afghanistan. Today, after Mullah Omar, he is the most respected person in Taliban circles. Jalaluddin Haqqani dyes his hair and beard to help him look younger; he has connections with all the Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, whether Uzbek, Tajik, or Pashtun; and he controls the main suicide squads, as he hammers out a two-pronged strategy to destabilize the political heartlands of Afghanistan: Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, Kunduz, and Jalalabad. His strategy was to employ suicide attacks and reconnect with veteran commanders from the Soviet era to help in manpower mobilization when the Taliban-led resistance started from southwest Afghanistan.

… Al-Qaeda operatives found safe passage on [Jundallah leader Abdul Malik] Rigi’s smuggling routes. However, on February 2010, Rigi was arrested by the Iranian authorities after a tip-off provided by Pakistan. But Rigi’s arrest did not prove to be the end of the world for al-Qaeda. A few more events took place that normalized al-Qaeda relations with Iran. Of these, the abduction of Iranian diplomat Heshmatollah Attarzadeh from Peshawar in November 2008 was perhaps the most pivotal event. Tehran set about trying to get its emissary home, starting with official Pakistani channels. This included appeals to the Foreign Office and Pakistan’s powerful ISI. Nothing happened. The Iranians then turned to their Afghan contacts in Zabul province, who in turn used their tribal connections to make contact with the top Taliban commander Sirajuddin Haqqani (the son of veteran mujahid Jalaluddin Haqqani). Through Sirajuddin, Tehran negotiated the release of its diplomat and swapped him with several high-profile figures who had been held in Iran, including Abu Hafs al-Mauritani and Suleiman Abu Ghaith, as well as two frontline figures: Iman bin Laden, the daughter of Osama bin Laden, and the Egyptian al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel. The process of negotiation ran several months, and in the course of that time, al-Qaeda and Iran grew to be on reasonable terms. Iran once again allowed al-Qaeda members safe passage through the country into Turkey, Central Asia, and Iraq.

… [Former PAKMIL major] Haroon then went to North Waziristan and gave his presentation to senior al-Qaeda commanders. He laid out two models of insurgencies, one related to Vietnam guerrillas operating against the United States and the other to the Tamil Tigers operating against the government of Sri Lanka.

He advocated that a start be made in the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika, with a three-pronged Tet-type offensive strategy, similar to the one that General Giap had used in North Vietnam in the 1960s to defeat the United States. He proposed that the first phase of operations involve armed opposition to the NATO forces in these provinces. In the second phase, the militants would target isolated security posts and military personnel. Militants would capture and hold these isolated posts for 24 to 48 hours and then melt away. In the third phase, they would spread the insurgency to urban areas and the federal capital.

Haroon emphasized that the central idea of General Giap’s strategy was to catch the enemy by surprise, and he placed emphasis on the training of select warriors for special operations. They were to use sophisticated arms acquired by insiders. The Arab militants paid close attention to Haroon’s presentation and discussed it with regional commanders such as Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Nazir. (The strategy was later successfully employed in Pakistan’s tribal areas against Pakistan’s armed forces.)

… Sirajuddin Haqqani is the son of the legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. He is considered the most dangerous Afghan Taliban commander fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan. His network is responsible for some of the effective attacks against the occupation forces in Afghanistan. I met Haqqani in April 2004 at his base in Dande Darpa Khel in North Waziristan. This was the first interview he had ever given to any correspondent. At that time Sirajuddin was thought of as no more than just a son of the legendary Jalaluddin. His mettle had not been tested in the battlefield as a commander. When I was granted an interview with him, he was sitting in a small room in front of Manba ul-Uloom, an Islamic seminary founded by his father Jalaluddin Haqqani. The seminary was forcibly closed by the Pakistani authorities after the Taliban’s defeat in Afghanistan in 2001. When I entered the room some youths sitting in the room quickly covered their faces, but I could see from their eyes and their foreheads they were neither local tribesmen nor Pashtuns. I was not surprised to discover they were Punjabis, as Punjabi fighters were known as the real strength of the Haqqani network.

Jalaluddin Haqqani was a graduate of Dar ul-Uloom Haqqania, a religious seminary in Akora Khattak near Peshawar, but he relied largely on Punjabi fighters for his jihadi ventures. Although he came from the Zadran tribe of Paktia, he drew his strength from Pakistani jihadi organizations, especially Harakat ul-Mujahideen and Harakat ul-Jihad-e-Islami.

Khost is the hometown of former President Najibullah. In North Waziristan, all credit for its fall to the mujahideen in 1991 is given to the Punjabi militants of the Harakat ul-Mujahideen fighting under the command of Jalaluddin. The Punjabis led by Jalaluddin were the first to defeat the communist army in any urban center. At that time the Afghan tribesmen under the command of Haqqani were far fewer than their Pakistani counterparts.

After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, like all other Taliban commanders, Haqqani lost influence in Afghanistan. He had to migrate to North Waziristan to raise another army. Most of his Afghan followers disappeared into the Afghan fabric of society. In North Waziristan, the local tribesmen were organized under their own tribal commanders. Haqqani was thus left with no choice but to fall back, once again, on fighters from the Punjab to wage his war on NATO troops.

Sirajuddin Haqqani’s allies, the Punjabi fighters (in Afghanistan all non-Pashto speaking Pakistanis are called Punjabis) had survived an ordeal in Pakistan after 9/11. The jihadi outfits were banned after 9/11 under US pressure, and then after the attack on Musharraf’s life in 2003 hundreds of jihadis were rounded up and detained for several months without trial. Naturally that also influenced Sirajuddin Haqqani’s attitude, and he gradually leaned towards anti-military thinking. From 2006 onwards he took a track different from the traditional Afghan Taliban (Afghan Taliban commanders, like Sirajuddin Haqqani’s father Jalaluddin, had always been close to Pakistan and Arab countries).

Although Jalaluddin Haqqani had been a favorite of the ISI during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the situation changed dramatically from 2007 onwards. Earlier, the al-Qaeda led operation reached its climax in Pakistan, and in retaliation Pakistani security agencies conducted across the board crackdowns against militant organizations such as Jaish-e- Mohammad, Harakat ul-Mujahideen, and Harakat ul-Jihad-e-Islami. Hundreds of their members were put on the wanted list and were left with no choice other than to seek refuge in North Waziristan. They made Jalaluddin Haqqani’s base their home and the jihad against NATO their mission. They brought an anti-military establishment mindset with them to North Waziristan.

From 2005 to 2007 the migration of jihadis to North Waziristan was huge. Thousands of Punjabi jihadis fled to the territory. Although most of them were connected to the Haqqanis’ network, al- Qaeda was the source of their inspiration, even before their arrival in North Waziristan. They had felt privileged to sit with Arab ideologues like Sheikh Essa, Abu Walid Ansari, and Abu Yahya al-Libi. They often invited them to their camps, where the Arab ideologues had frequent interactions with Sirajuddin Haqqani.

Interactions with the Arabs had a deep and penetrating influence on Sirajuddin, but this process came about so gradually that perhaps he himself was unaware of the spell they had cast. Jalaluddin fell ill in 2007 and was compelled to hand over his command to Sirajuddin. That was the turning point in the internal dynamics of the Haqqani network. Soon afterwards, Jalaluddin became completely bedridden. He was no longer in any position to give directions to Sirajuddin, who was then in his mid-thirties. Al-Qaeda commanders seized the opportunity and developed strategic ties with Jalaluddin’s heir. His assault on Bagram in February 2007, for instance, was recognized as being guided by Abu Layth al-Libi. This Arab ideologue made all his expertise available to Sirajuddin to carry out the attack. Subsequently, several other operations carried out by the Haqqani network in Ghazni, Khost, and Kabul were coordinated by al-Qaeda. Within months the Haqqani network was considered the most effective Taliban group in Afghanistan.

His interaction and coordination with the Arab ideologues drew Sirajuddin deeper into the al- Qaeda net. Pakistan’s military operations in North Waziristan, and the CIA’s repeated Predator drone attacks on the Haqqani’s home in Dande Darpa Khel in 2008 and 2009, added fuel to the fire. Several of his family members were killed during that period, and this wrecked Sirajuddin’s connections with Pakistan’s military establishment. Pakistan’s military was blamed by the militants for feeding information to the CIA regarding their hideouts. Jalaluddin had always kept at a safe distance from the al-Qaeda influenced Pakistani militant groups, but from 2007 onwards, Sirajuddin felt his own interests might be better served were he to develop closer links with al-Qaeda and its Pakistani associates. His plan was to rise to the position of the most important commander in the Afghan national resistance against NATO forces.

Sirajuddin’s main handicap was the nature of relations between the Taliban and his father. Jalaluddin had been on his own during the Taliban-led Afghanistan resistance. For example, although Mullah Omar had appointed him his deputy and commander in chief for the spring offensive in 2006, the Kandahari clan of the Taliban, who came from southwest Afghanistan, fought independently of him. Commanders like the slain Mullah Dadullah kept coming to the two Waziristans to recruit local tribesmen to fight NATO in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. This intrusion into Haqqani territory naturally upset Jalaluddin, but he did not utter a word in reproach. Nor, if truth be told, was he in a position to. After all, he had never been a Taliban in the true sense of the term.

When the Taliban rose in the mid-1990s Jalaluddin was the first mujahideen leader to accept them. He pledged allegiance to the much younger Mullah Omar, who was then a little-known Taliban commander. Despite this, and notwithstanding that he was one of the most celebrated resistance figures in Afghanistan, Jalaluddin was not accorded any importance. Only the talibs (students) were assigned important portfolios. After Jalaluddin passed on his command to him, Sirajuddin would have considered these background facts before diving into the waiting arms of al-Qaeda. Still, his relations with al-Qaeda were circumspect.

The NATO command in Kabul could see new developments taking place in the Haqqani network. They had been evaluating Sirajuddin’s distancing him as an independent operator. They drew the wrong conclusion. In their media releases Sirajuddin was noted as a possible rival to Mullah Omar. This erroneous assessment came from little understanding of the crucial relations between Sirajuddin and al-Qaeda. In fact, Sirajuddin had always been loyal to Mullah Omar. Al-Qaeda had approved of this as it wanted Sirajuddin to tighten his ties with the Taliban to ensure they did not deviate from al-Qaeda’s broader aims and strategies. Al-Qaeda also did not want him to be disloyal to Mullah Omar. They wanted this most important Taliban commander to sit tightly with the Taliban as their man, and ensure the al-Qaeda agenda was kept on track. Sirajuddin’s network was in a position to do this as it was the most influential Taliban-led group of the Afghan national resistance against NATO. Sirajuddin was seen to move out completely from his father’s shadow.

During the Shi’a-Sunni riots in Pakistan’s Kurram Agency in 2007-2008, Sirajuddin sent his men to support the Sunnis. He developed strong ties with the anti-Pakistan commander of TTP, Baitullah Mehsud. In 2009 when the Pakistani security forces arrested Sirajuddin’s brother Nasruddin, he was released only after Mehsud agreed to swap him with Pakistani soldiers he had captured.

Sirajuddin might not have put much effort into wondering how he had been pulled into the al- Qaeda camp, but factually it had much to do with extraneous factors like his having to take into consideration the views of his Punjabi fighters, all of whom had turned anti-establishment because of the government crackdowns on them, on suspicion of their interaction with al-Qaeda in North Waziristan. Then there was his father Jalaluddin’s illness, and finally al-Qaeda and its associates’ unconditional support of him. In fact, so committed did Sirajuddin become to the al- Qaeda cause that during Pakistan’s military operation against TTP (an anti-Pakistan government group) in 2009, he not only provided sanctuary, but also helped the militants fight the Pakistan Army.

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