The man known as the father of the Taliban was also a key member of Pakistan’s intelligence service. In a rare interview, he says the only hope for peace is for the US to negotiate with Mullah Mohammad Omar – something he is willing to arrange
IF ANYONE CAN be said to epitomise the intrigues that have played out in Afghanistan over the last three decades, it is the man known as Colonel Imam. That is the nom de guerre of Amir Sultan Tarar, a legendary figure who worked for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s infamous spy agency. As a code name, it hints at the deeply held religious convictions that provided the ideological underpinning for a career whose mark is still felt in the region today.
In the decade after Soviet tanks first rolled into Afghanistan, Col Imam trained and nurtured, with CIA help, a resistance fuelled on heady notions of jihad that drew thousands of Muslims from across the world. He knew all the leading lights of the Afghan jihad, including Osama bin Laden. “A very humble man,” he remembers. “The first time I saw him he was quite nervous. He had never been exposed to fighting, bombing and all that but he became brave. When you live among brave people you become brave.”
In the 1990s, the colonel’s guiding hand helped propel the Taliban to power. He was a close friend of the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Today, Col Imam lives out his retirement at his modest home in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, close to Islamabad. “I am 65 but still fit to fight,” he chuckles during a rare interview. The man some refer to as “the father of the Taliban” cuts an imposing figure. Tall and rangy, he sports a long, grey-flecked beard and wears a pristine white turban with his salwar kameez, the traditional long shirt and trouser ensemble worn in Pakistan.
His living room is a veritable shrine to the Afghan jihad. On the walls hang paraphernalia, including a mounted Kalashnikov, an RPG launcher, and several daggers captured from Soviet troops in the 1980s. Metre-high missile casings, decorated with verses praising the mujahideen, lean against a cabinet. But the most intriguing item is a glass case containing a heavily graffitied chunk of the Berlin Wall, which the colonel says was a gift from US officials. The brass inscription panel reads: “To Col Imam, with deepest respect to the one who helped deliver the first blow.”
The colonel recalls his encounters with Charlie Wilson, the playboy Texas congressman who was instrumental in securing funding for Operation Cyclone, a CIA programme aimed at supplying the mujahideen with weaponry to fight the Soviets. Two years ago Wilson’s story was turned into a film starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
“The first time Charlie Wilson came I took him to a mujahideen training camp and he was delighted. He said: ‘I’ll get them Stingers, I’ll get them Stingers.’ The last time he came I said: ‘Look, you are abandoning them. They need help.’ He said: ‘What help?’ I said: ‘Rehabilitation.’ He told me dollars do not grow on trees. I responded by asking him if he thought the Afghan youth who fought the Russians grew on trees,” Col Imam recounts, running a string of amber prayer beads through his fingers as he speaks. “I didn’t like him. It was all about his own interests. When the interest was achieved, he just left.”
And that, the colonel argues, was the mistake the Americans made in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, one that they have been paying for ever since.
“The Afghan people were abandoned after the Soviet troops withdrew. Wasn’t that a criminal act on the part of the Americans? . . . There was a revengeful mood after that, against the power which had used and then abandoned you.”
COL IMAM’S TIES to Afghanistan ran deep, and he remained close to several mujahideen leaders. In the 1990s he returned, after being appointed Pakistan’s consul general in the western city of Herat, a position that proved a convenient cover for liaising with the nascent Taliban. “By the time he was engaging with the Taliban, he had become much more significant,” says Ahmed Rashid, author of a bestselling book on the Taliban. “He was one of the main instigators in getting the ISI to support the Taliban.”
Colonel Imam befriended Mullah Omar. “He is a very sincere and honest man, a good fighter,” he says, adding that the Taliban leader once told him he had no objection to girls’ education providing the curriculum did not contradict Islamic tenets and Afghan traditions.
The fall of the Taliban government in 2001 felt like a personal blow, the colonel says. “I was really hurt . . . They had brought peace to the country.” He was recalled to Islamabad after Pakistan’s then president Pervez Musharraf severed ties with the Taliban, having decided to back the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror. The colonel says he has not met Mullah Omar since.
In Kabul and Islamabad rumours abound as to how close he has remained to the Taliban. “He’s still very active indirectly, and he has a lot of friends in the Taliban, both the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban,” says one informed source in Pakistan. Security officials in Afghanistan go further, saying he has been spotted in Taliban strongholds there. Last year an Afghan general accused him of giving the insurgents “money for weapons, motorcycles, trucks – whatever they need”.
Col Imam laughs at the suggestion. “This is a complete lie. Believe me, if I had money I would give it to them. I wish I could help them. Write that down, if I could I would help them.”
Neither, he insists, do the Taliban in Afghanistan need help from the ISI. “The Afghan nation is addicted to fighting. It is impossible to defeat them,” he says. “Ask the Britishers – they went three times and they learned their lesson. The Russians came, they fought bravely, four times braver than the Americans, but ultimately they were defeated and soon after ceased to exist as a superpower.
“There are good reasons why Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires. I am hopeful that the right people with the right cause always succeed.”
Col Imam is equally supportive of Pakistan’s indigenous Taliban, members of which were recently allowed impose their own harsh version of Sharia law in certain districts in the country’s northwestern flank under the terms of a controversial peace deal. He likens the movement to a popular uprising, and acknowledges that his view will ruffle feathers within Pakistan’s establishment. “I am very happy with this situation,” he says with a smile. “This is fighting against a system that is a wrong system. These people are fighting for their rights because they feel they are deprived. They are liberating the country.”
He dismisses the suggestion that people in areas with a strong Taliban presence are fearful, with many fleeing their homes. “All propaganda. If the public is not with you then you cannot do anything.”
Col Imam goes on to accuse the US of carrying out indiscriminate attacks in Afghanistan and the tribal borderlands that lie between it and Pakistan.
“I was trained in the United States by its special forces. At that time their manuals advised the use of minimum force against the insurgents and stressed the importance of winning public support. Here they are using maximum force, indiscriminate force, and in the process they are killing the public support,” he says.
“America should have a realistic policy. They must not reinforce their errors. For how many years have they have been fighting, spending billions a year, in Afghanistan and Iraq but yet they have failed? The Americans must change their policy. Fighting is not the answer for them in this region.”
What Colonel Imam prescribes is what he calls “reconciliation”, by reaching out to elements within the Taliban, beginning with his old friend Mullah Omar. “Among all the leaders, contact with him will bring the most benefit. He has no ambition beyond Afghanistan, no ambition at all. He is not interested in power. He simply wants his country to be at peace.”
The colonel even volunteers to put a word in for the US, completing the circle that began when he worked with the CIA in the fight against the Soviets in 1980s Afghanistan. “I can help them out,” he says. “I can go to Mullah Omar and arrange a meeting and they can resolve this thing . . . If the Americans do that they will have a respectable retreat from this region. But they must realise they are only reinforcing their errors at the moment.”