‘Looking for the Enemy’: Bette Dam unravels the myth of Mullah Omar

Sandeep Dikshit

IT may not be coincidental but journalists from countries with marginal participation in the 20-year war in Afghanistan have been upturning the conventional, mainstream narrative set in stone by the Ayatollahs of Taliban reporting such as Ahmed Rashid and Steve Coll.

Bette Dam from the Netherlands emulates the Canadian Graeme Smith’s book on this war, ‘The Dogs Are Eating Them Now’, which examined the dirty underbelly of the fight against the Taliban. Both reporters forsook the safety of NATO army camps and sidestepped the spin masters of the Pentagon, ISI and the State Department to reveal a picture that cuts through the noise to present a sad, touching story of the elusive leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar.

Dam had just one grainy black and white photo of him, as did the CIA. But in a dogged pursuit of his roots that spanned guides and businessmen, Taliban leaders and intelligence chiefs, she uncovered more than the world’s premier spy agency and the huge army of on-ground reporters in Kabul.

This unvarnished portrait of Omar was never attempted. Dam proves that the Americans knew nothing about Omar during the dozen years he lived next to a US military base. He was retired and not in Pakistan sending suicide bombers daily, as we have been emphatically informed so far.

Omar also never set foot in the Akhora Khattak seminary in Pakistan, supposed to be run by the ‘Father of Taliban’, Sami ul Haq.

And, whom were the Americans killing? Dam establishes that many of those killed after 2001 in the name of the Taliban were rivals of the governors nominated by Karzai and later Ghani. Most of the governors were actually not the harbingers of democracy and rule of law, as we were told. Most were the same Mujahideen commanders whose greed and brutality had led to their ouster by the Taliban in 1996.

Also, it could have ended without a civil war. After the US bombings pulverised Afghanistan, Taliban commanders approached Hamid Karzai for amnesty, which he granted. But Karzai recanted after an angry phone call from the then US Defence Secretary. The breaking of a promise in Pashtun lands is the ultimate insult and the Taliban vowed to get back at that humiliation.

Here she lays out the actual backstory, with complete sourcing of people who gave them out. Of how, a troubled yateem (orphan) in a tiny, dirt-poor but lush green corner of Afghanistan was quite a comedian and stood tall and rangy at 6’5”. Omar knew no other world but as a mullah in a humble mosque, returning to his tiny, bare, mud-walled house every evening to spend time with his wife and children.

That was not to be when the mullahs and their students joined the resistance in 1979. When the Soviets left after 10 years, Omar went job hunting while his Mujahedeen commanders violently scrambled for territory and set up multiple toll extraction points on highways. The affected truckers’ industry and opium smugglers, whose shipments were also imperiled, sought help from a couple of spartan mullahs. One of them was Omar and another, Mullah Baradar.

Dam, again with the help of eyewitnesses of that era and recordings of Omar’s audio cassettes, veers from the established narrative on what went wrong when the US wanted the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden even before 2001 happened.

When the US sought Bin Laden in 1998, Omar specifically requested for evidence. Asked if they had submitted any evidence, a US diplomat who was involved in the talks said, “We didn’t really get the information we wanted from the intelligence agencies.”

Omar was as conservative as they come, especially on women’s rights. But this was a man forced to fight against his wishes. And when he lost in 2001, the tobacco-chewing man with one eye returned to a spartan life of a simple bed, a stove and a radio on which he heard BBC’s Pushto broadcasts, right in Afghanistan, sheltered by his loyal tribe which knew who he was but never informed on him.