own to take the same position. First, for some months, he had been
verbally very critical of religious extremism, protesting that ‘reli-
gious groups are surfacing who are trying to spread their faith to
other countries and providing an opportunity to some nations to
declare Pakistan a terrorist country, thus tarnishing our image and
deterring foreign investments’ (Borchgrave, 2001). Second, a large
number of Muslims, some of them Pakistanis, had died in the
attacks on the World Trade Center. ‘These were capable Pakistanis’,
said Musharraf, ‘and I would like to convey my deep sympathy to
their family members’ (Dawn, 19 September 2001). On 28
September, Musharraf sent the ISI Director-General, Lieutenant-
General Mahmood Ahmed, to Kandahar to try to persuade the
Taliban to hand Bin Laden over (Burns, 2001), but nothing came of
the exercise, and amidst stories that ISI freelancers had visited
Kandahar without permission to offer advice to the Taliban (Rashid,
2001b; Frantz, 2001), Musharraf obtained his resignation two
weeks later (Jang, 8 October 2001), and replaced him with the
reportedly more moderate Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq.
The other types of allies required were organised military forces
on the ground in Afghanistan. Here, there was only one realistic
option, namely to work with the United Front forces based in the
northeast of the country and the northern reaches of the Shomali
Valley near Kabul. The claim that the Taliban ‘controlled’ large
tracts of Afghanistan was misleading, since the Taliban presence in
rural areas was light (Dorronsoro, 2000: 306–7), but the tribes in
those areas were fragmented and not organised for conventional
war against the Taliban. In a display of what one observer has
called ‘staggering negligence, or myopia’ (Davis, 2002: 7), the
United States had long kept the United Front forces at arms’ length,
and reasoned cases for supporting them (Gerecht, 2001) had fallen
on deaf ears. Several kinds of argument were advanced to justify
the arms’ length approach. One, mounted by the historian S.
Frederick Starr, seemed to come straight out of the Cold War: he
wrote of the anti-Taliban forces in dismissive tones, and maintained
that in opposing the Taliban, the United States had made itself ‘the
junior partner in a Russian-Indian crusade against Muslim
260 The Afghanistan Wars