afghanistanfought alongside militias loyal to Yunus Khalis and Gulbudin Hikmatyar,
individuals who were noted for their Islamic extremism and anti-Western
views, and who had been accused of many war crimes. Khalis was also a
personal friend of bin Laden, while the State Department would later place
Hikmaytar on its list of most wanted terrorists.
America supplied cash and weapons to former mujahidin commanders
of the Nangahar shura to assist in the storming of bin Laden’s stronghold
at Tora Bora, a complex built partly with cia money, even though these
individuals were some of the principal beneficiaries of Nangahar’s vast
opium trade. Having accepted the cia cash and guns, some of these allies
then took an even greater sum of money from bin Laden and let him
slip across a conveniently unguarded Pakistan frontier. u.s. and British
forces in Afghanistan as well as the International Security Assistance Force
(isaf), established under the Bonn Agreement of December 2001, later
employed the same Pakistani Pushtun trucking mafia to supply fuel and
other supplies for their military that had previously provided financial
and logistical support for the Taliban’s conquest of southern Afghanistan.
The other major beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks was Pakistan, and
the fact that the isi had armed and funded the Taliban and accorded the
government diplomatic recognition was conveniently ignored. Pakistan
once again came in from the political wilderness and became the linchpin of
Operation Enduring Freedom, with American and Coalition planes over-
flying Pakistan airspace, while Karachi became the main transit port for
most of the American and isaf supply. The about-turn could not have been
timelier for Pakistan’s latest military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf,
as the country was suffering from international sanctions following its first
nuclear tests in May 1998. A year later Pakistani forces backed by jihadist
militia had occupied Kargil on the Indian side of the Line of Control in
Kashmir, which led to a brief war in which Pakistani forces were defeated
and withdrew back along the Line of Control. A few months later, Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif tried to sack Pervez Musharraf, chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, for authorizing the Kargil expedition, only for Musharraf
to stage a military coup that triggered yet more u.s. sanctions.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President Musharraf realized Pakistan
had little choice but to support America’s War on Terror and ditch its
alliance with the Taliban, at least publicly. Even so, when Musharraf ’s
military council met to debate their response to 9/11, it took nine hours
of heated discussion before the council accepted America’s demands,
which included unrestricted overflights of Pakistan airspace and access
to ports and military facilities for the campaign in Afghanistan. 11 President