Afghan blogger Sanjar writes of the ongoing infiltration of the Taliban into Peshawar:
Since late June, the Taliban has been present in all the surrounding regions – namely Khyber Agency, Darra Adam Khel, Mohmand Agency, Shabqadar, Michni, Mardan, and Frontier Region Peshawar. Even in the city itself and in its environs, there have been reports of violence and destruction: electricity pylons and power substations have been vandalized, shops selling CDs and DVDs in the center of Peshawar have been bombed, and the Peshawar military base has come under rocket fire – leading some to speculate that the city may soon fall to the Taliban. The business community in the NWFP has expressed its concern over this possibility. Inayat Khan, vice president of the NWFP Chamber of Commerce and Industry, noted that both residents and investors were worried about the increasing “Talibanization” of the Peshawar area.
This is actually an old story, in the sense that it has happened before. Days earlier Steve LeVine wrote his recollection of a series of pieces he wrote for The Washington Post in 1993 trying to uncover, with Steve Coll of Ghost Wars fame, the Islamic terror networks the war in Afghanistan had spawned.
We split up the Afghan Arab world as we knew it. I went off to Sudan, and Steve to Jordan and elsewhere. In Khartoum, I found the house to which bin Ladin shifted after leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan in disgust. The scene was straight out of Peshawar — the mini-trucks, the men dressed in shalwar kameez, the over-sized houses, and of course the dust. I left several notes for Bin Ladin.I never met him. At one point, a Sudanese intelligence man pulled up in a car behind us and called aside my assistant. Stop trying to see Osama, he warned my assistant; it’s dangerous for him. People want to kill him.
In late summer, we produced a long story for the Post on the network of these militants that had sprung up, starting in Afghanistan.
Peshawar today looks a lot like it did in those days — a base for foreign Muslims in a war against a foreign invader. Only the perceived invader has changed.
That “late summer” was August 3, 1993, to be exact, and the full text of that piece is available here. This is one of those forgotten pieces of journalism that turn out, in hindsight, to be of extraordinary importance: not only was it a massive international undertaking to complete, it highlighted many of the dangers associated with Osama bin Laden, including his early presence on American targeting lists (and, not coincidentally, the danger of conflating al-Qaeda-ish terrorism with Iran’s brand of terrorism, which even then was almost exclusively focused on its immediate neighborhood, and not global jihad).
The Coll/LeVine piece came out just a few weeks before a classified State Department INR report on the same group of people. Its warnings, too, were similarly dire:
The perception that the US has an anti-Islamic foreign policy agenda raises the likelihood that US interests increasingly will become targets for violence from the former mujahidin… These veterans also possess a wide range of technological knowledge. Their experience with high-quality computers, faxes, and telecommunications equipment during the war enables them to share propaganda ideas and strategies with even the smallest Islamic opposition groups worldwide… Among private donors to the new generation, Usama Bin Ladin is particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial largess.
Curiously, the INR report asserts that Tehran actually was involved in supporting Afghan Arabs, namely by the Revolutionary Guard’s training regimen in Sudan (“according to various reports,” it says, so who knows how reliable that is). But the important bit here is that very early on in the “war” between the U.S. and al-Qaeda, it was not only the U.S. that knew they were seeing a very serious problem growing from the fighters they had helped to fund and support… and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region was at the epicenter of this growing movement.
Which of course begs the question: what were they doing about this area in the 1990s? In Coll’s book, he strongly implies very little. And if the past six years have been any indication, the answer has not changed… no matter how many Predators we orbit over Kurram.
As a side note: Comparing the two reports also raises a point that is both comforting and a bit troubling: there is very little real qualitative difference between classified and open-source reporting, with a great many virtues to the open-source side. While this is obviously not a hard-and-fast rule, the comparability, and in the case of Iran superiority, of Coll and LeVine’s piece speaks legions both about the state of American intelligence work (it’s not as bad as some people say it is, but also not as as good as some people say it is), and the value of strong, well-sourced, knowledgable journalism. High-quality investigative journalism will produce work of an equal or superior quality to classified intelligence reports. Which is why current reporting out of Peshawar must be examined much more closely: much of it is based on supposition, “tourism”-style reporting trips, and very little independent verification; as such, it is still unclear if the problem facing Peshawar is as life-and-death serious as its been made out to be. Nevertheless, the threat cannot be ignored, which makes contextualizing it properly—something good journalism does, and bad journalism does not—so vitally important.
Providing that sort of contextualization for news from the entirety of Central Asia, and not just the conflict zone along its southern border, is one of our primary missions at Registan.net, and we hope we perform it adequately.
*Title explanation here.
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