THE RETIRED Pakistani spy known as Col Imam revelled in his reputation as “father of the Taliban” but his recent death in the hands of a mutated version of the forces he helped spawn shows the dangerous extent to which Islamabad’s policy of “strategic depth” has unspooled.
Pakistani officials this week confirmed the passing of Brig Amir Sultan Tarar, who took the nom de guerreCol Imam while training – with CIA funding – Mujahideen to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The circumstances of his death, while being held by militants in Pakistan’s tribal badlands, remain unclear. Media reports in Pakistan claim he was killed by his captors; the Pakistani Taliban insist he died of a heart attack.
Tarar’s demise brings to an ignominious close several decades of involvement in cross-border intrigue, during which he encountered many of those who would go on to form al-Qaeda.
Working for Pakistan’s (ISI) spy agency, he nurtured a nascent Taliban under his former student and friend Mullah Omar, eventually helping to propel the movement to power in Kabul.
When I met him at his home in the garrison town of Rawalpindi in 2009, he recalled meeting Osama bin Laden and other leading figures of the Afghan jihad. His home was full of paraphernalia from that time, including a mounted Kalashnikov, an RPG launcher and missile casings decorated with verses praising the mujahideen.
But the most intriguing item was a glass case containing a graffitied chunk of the Berlin Wall, which Tarar said was a gift from US officials. The brass inscription panel read: “To Col Imam, with deepest respect to the one who helped deliver the first blow.”
Tarar, whom officials in Kabul accused of continuing to support the Afghan Taliban, was kidnapped last March along with a British reporter working for Channel 4 and Khalid Khawaja, another former ISI official.
The journalist was released last September; Khawaja was killed by his captors in April. A video, broadcast last summer, showed a gaunt Tarar flanked by two masked and armed men. “You know well what they’re capable of,” he intoned, urging that his kidnappers’ demands be met.
Before he was abducted, Tarar was a strong advocate of negotiations with the Afghan Taliban, insisting that his old disciple Mullah Omar would be open to talks with the US.
“For how many years have [the Americans] been fighting, spending billions . . . but yet they have failed? [They] must change their policy,” he told me. “[Mullah Omar] has no ambition beyond Afghanistan . . . He is not interested in power. He simply wants his country to be at peace. They can resolve this thing . . . If the Americans do that they will have a respectable retreat from this region.”
Tarar also praised the indigenous Taliban, who at the time held sway in pockets of Pakistan’s troubled northwest, arguing that they were fighting for justice.
But there were few degrees of separation between the swaggering Pakistani Taliban then cheered by Tarar and the militants who kept him hostage for almost a year despite reported entreaties from the likes of Mullah Omar. Tarar’s apparent error was to overestimate his influence and to misjudge the younger, more ruthless generation of militants that had sprung from the seed he helped sow.
Tarar’s death will discomfit his former colleagues in Pakistan’s security apparatus who still cleave to the decades-old policy of fostering militants for reasons of “strategic depth”. As an editorial in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper put it: “Here lies an uncomfortable truth . . . like Frankenstein’s monster, what once made sense in laboratory conditions has proved to be a terrible, endless nightmare, unleashed in the real world.”