As many as 30 trucks a day crossed the border into Afghanistan
‘carrying artillery shells, tank rounds, and rocket-propelled
grenades’. The report also noted evidence ‘that Pakistani aircraft
assisted with troop rotations of Taliban forces during combat oper-
ations in late 2000’ (Human Rights Watch, 2001a: 23, 26).
Pakistan’s backing for the Taliban was explained in different
ways. Some commentators saw in it a relentless searching for
‘strategic depth’ in the event of a conventional war between
Pakistan and India. Others saw it as driven by economic concerns,
notably the belief that there were profits to be made from oil and
gas pipelines from Central to South Asia through a stable
Afghanistan. Still others defended the policy in terms of ethnic
factors, in terms of the alleged ‘need’ for Afghanistan to be ruled
by Pushtuns, but not Pushtuns of a nationalist stripe. This argu-
ment carried some weight with General Pervez Musharraf, who
overthrew Nawaz Sharif in a military coup in Pakistan on 12
October 1999: in an interview with the BBC, he claimed that ‘our
national security compulsion as far as Afghanistan is concerned is
that the Pakhtoons of Afghanistan have to be on Pakistan’s side’
(BBCTalking Point, 2 August 2000). With the exception of several
diplomats (Judah, 2002) and some courageous journalists – notably
Ahmed Rashid and Ejaz Haider (Haider 1998; Rashid, 2000) – few
Pakistanis seemed to have grasped just how perilous it was to
embrace a transnational force such as the Taliban, which had the
potential to cause enormous damage to Pakistan itself (Maley,
2001a). In September 2001, the Pakistan leadership finally came
face to face with the scale of its folly.
The composition of the Taliban
The Taliban were a military force. As Anthony Davis has demon-
strated, it is a myth that they came to power with scarcely a shot
being fired (Davis, 1998). But they did not originate from a stand-
ard military training programme, but from a complex mixture of
social and political contexts which went some way towards
explaining their character (Dupaigne, 1995; Moshref, 1997;
222 The Afghanistan Wars