'Taliban' author Rashid tackles Central Asia

It amazes me how easily suckered the boys in the Bush Administration are by foreign generals who speak passable English, slug down Scotch and play golf. All these shared, clubby pastimes blinded the Bushies to the fact that Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf was two-timing them with the Taliban.

I just finished reading Ahmed Rashid's excellent “Descent into Chaos”, an alarming account of how the U.S. in the crucial months after 9/11 blundered in Afghanistan and in all of Central Asia in its myopic pursuit of al-Qaeda. Rashid contends that the White House was so desperate for Osama bin Laden's scalp that they sign on tyrants and warlords throughout the region and that, in turn, has given rise to a deadly and perhaps unstoppable Islamic extremism.

And the Bush Administration's biggest blunder of all was trusting Musharraf. The Pakistani despot is now on the skids and may soon be casting around for a cushy exile abroad. (Maybe Rumsfeld will lend him a guest bungalow.) But Rashid contends that Musharraf played a double game with Washington, handing over a few al-Qaeda fugitives while secretly arming and training Taliban fighters who are crossing into Afghanistan to kill U.S. and NATO soldiers.

Author of ‘Taliban', which was required reading for soldiers, diplomats and Afghan-bound journalists after 9/11, Rashid delves far deeper than most into what happened since he's both reporter and a player who was privy to some of the innermost decisions in Washington and in the UN. It's also a heart-breaking book; the West had a chance to make the broken country of Afghanistan whole again –-after the Taliban were chased off, 90% of Afghans welcomed the NATO forces and aid workers, says Rashid-- and we failed the Afghans by backing the villains.

I'll never forget an exhilarating football game that took place in the early days between the Afghan national team and NATO soldiers, in a stadium where the Taliban had carried out executions and chopped off hands. One scrawny Afghan player scored a goal with a gorgeous, backwards scissor-kick and, at that instant, everything seemed possible in Afghanistan. But the euphoria didn't last, and Rashid explains why: Rumsfeld empowered hated warlords with guns and money; the U.S. diverted resources to Iraq; and the Pentagon was outfoxed by their golfer chum, Musharraf.

Rashid nails down one incredible story which at the time we reporters thought was too bizarre to be true: coalition forces had surrounded thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in northern Afghanistan, but among them were numerous Pakistani intelligence officers. Musharraf convinced the U.S. to let him airlift out his hundreds of officers, and Taliban leaders were also allowed to hop on board the flights. A few al-Qaeda men probably slipped on board too, since they had helped Musharraf train Kashmiri militants fighting India. By backing the Taliban, which Musharraf persists in doing until this day, he figures that once the U.S.-backed forces tire of Afghanistan and slouch away, bloodied and exhausted, a new Taliban regime will carry out Pakistan's bidding.

But as Rashid points out, in resurrecting the Taliban, Musharraf has also unleashed the forces of Islamic extremism in his own country. The despot could easily have encouraged the mainstream Pakistani parties but, no, he wanted to grasp power long after he should have gracefully departed. He may now be contemplating exile, with real estate brochures from Brazil or other faraway golf courses fanned out before him, but the general will still have to live with the mess he made of his country. It may even crimp his golf swing. And nobody tells the story of Musharraf's duplicity better than Rashid.

By Tim McGirk