Tea with the Taliban

Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef is an angry man. I know this from reading snatches of his forthcoming book, “My Life with the Taliban”.  But I would never guess it from the affable, bearded giant before me, hunched over his Compaq computer in his multi-storied home in a remote Kabul suburb.

 

I can’t really blame the man for his rage. I myself am a bit irritated after being rudely accosted by the government security men at the door, who screen all visitors and prevent Zaeef from leaving his home without permission. An Afghan friend who visits Zaeef frequently is often followed when he leaves.

 

Zaeef, of course, has more serious reasons to despise what he terms the Afghan “puppet government” and the “American invaders” who held him in various detention centers, including Guantanamo, for over four and a half years.

 

He was the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan when the twin towers fell in 2001. For weeks he was a fixture on the media scene in Islamabad, holding daily press briefings and trying to get some dialogue going with the Taliban leadership. Then, in early January, 2002, the government of Pakistan handed him over to the Americans, and his life, in his own words, turned into an endless round of humiliation and degradation.

 

Now Zaeef is not exactly a prisoner, more like a prize insect in a jar. He lives in a comfortable but modest home in Khoshal Khan, in a western corner of Kabul. To get there, you have to skirt an ancient cemetery, which lies, oddly, in the middle of the road, a relic of bygone days when this part of Kabul was not inhabited. The neighborhood has grown up around the graves, many with tattered green martyr flags flapping in the breeze.

 

We sit in Zaeef’s sunny living room, with standard-issue velvet furniture and a machine-made carpet on the floor. A man brings us tea, but there is no sign of Zaeef’s wife and eight children, who live with him. The house is being renovated: the smell of paint and the sound of hammering provide an accompaniment to the interview.

 

The repairs, and the house itself, are being paid for by friends, according to Zaeef. He has no bank accounts and no money of his own, thanks to the sanctions imposed on him in January, 2001 when he was included in a U.N. blacklist.

 

The list is just one facet of U.N. Resolution 1267, which sought to hamper the ability of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to operate by restricting their movement, freezing their assets, and forbidding the sale of arms to them or persons associated with them.

 

The results have been unimpressive: two years after the original list was published in 1999, Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, seemingly unruffled by the fact that they were not supposed to be able to travel. The militant Taliban have not needed an account at Barclay’s to wage their seven-year war on the international troops in Afghanistan, nor do they seem to be hurting for weapons, which come from over the borders with Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan, in return for opium or heroin.

 

“It was a pipe dream of the U.N.,” said one Taliban expert. “They thought the Taliban would operate like the United States or Europe, with banks and things.”

 

Instead, the blacklist has kept people like Zaeef from being able to present their point of view outside the handful of countries that ignore the travel ban.

 

With permission from the Afghan government, Zaeef can visit Saudi Arabia, Dubai, or Qatar. But he will not be part of the Afghanistan strategy review in Washington, nor will he be present when the new plan is unveiled in The Hague.

 

It’s a shame, really. Zaeef is rational and articulate about the problems confronting the Taliban and the international community in Afghanistan. He can put a human face on what too many people consider a movement of whip-wielding, hate-spewing, infidel-bashing radicals who will have to be thoroughly defeated before any settlement can begin.

 

“You cannot talk to the Taliban from a position of strength,” he says, curled up in his light-colored patu, or wool shawl. “We are Afghans. If we are in a lower position, and the enemy acts tough, we will act ten times tougher.”

 

Zaeef does not address me directly, focusing instead on a friend who is interpreting. He slides a look in my direction from time to time, but I am uncomfortably aware of my three shortcomings in his book: I am a woman, I am an American, and I am a journalist.

 

 

But he is not your average fundamentalist. He agrees to sit for photos, while the Taliban banned pictorial or artistic representation of the human face and form. He has an amazing array of technology, including an iPhone, and spends part of each day online. He is intent on producing his memoirs, which, while dishing a huge helping of bitterness to the United States, reflect a thoughtful and kind soul behind the surface acrimony.

 

He is someone you can talk to, or even argue with, and Alex Strick van Linschoten, who co-edited Zaeef’s book, calls him “one of the sweetest men I know.”

 

In spite of his nightmare experiences in American prisons, Zaeef is an advocate of a peaceful settlement to the current crisis. He may not be brimming over with love for the foreign soldiers who toppled his government, stomped on his values and killed many of his friends and comrades, but he does not want a prolongation of war.

 

“Don’t bother trying to befriend the Taliban,” he told me. “For God’s sake, just put an end to the enmity.”