Reaping the Whirlwind

"I chose this book because I think it provides a fascinating insight into the real nuances of political, religious and ethnic strife in Afghanistan through the period of the Afghan civil war and the rise of the Taliban . There are actually two editions of it. It was revised in 2003 but the original edition was written before the 9/11 attacks . What is really interesting is how it describes how the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, created and nurtured the Taliban to fill the vacuum created by the Afghan civil war, and how the organisation was fed by weapons and money from Saudi Arabia, foot soldiers from the Pakistani madrassas and revenue from the opium trade. It also highlights the blundering interventions, particularly from American and Argentine oil companies, and their dealings with the Taliban. It looks at the extent to which the Americans allowed the Pakistanis to get away with creating the Taliban, and this sense that when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 somehow this was a good thing and although clearly women’s rights were out the window the feeling was at least there was this opportunity where they could run pipelines through the country! Intriguingly, it suggests a falling-out between bin Laden and Mullah Omah in early 1999, which provides the pretext for my novel. Yes. There has been an issue of fear on the part of the Americans, fear that if it came out how closely linked al Qaeda and the ISI were it might have jeopardised the survival of so-called allies like President Musharraf. For example, one of the fascinating episodes is when Michael Griffin writes about the Kunduz airlift, just two months after the 9/11 attacks, when the US moved to spare its Pakistani allies from international embarrassment. On 21 November 2001, the US air force halted air strikes on the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, ostensibly so that Mullah Fazil, the Taliban commander in the city, could organise its surrender, but, according to Griffin and other writers, in fact to allow Pakistani military planes to fly in and rescue the more than one thousand Pakistani soldiers and agents who were fighting alongside al Qaeda in the besieged city. Apparently, the evacuation quickly slipped out of control and, as an unintended consequence, anyone from al Qaeda with enough influence over the ISI, or anyone who was considered too dangerous to abandon to US interrogators, secured a seat to safety. So much for the War on Terror!"