South Asian Studies

A Research Journal of South Asian Studies

BOOK REVIEW
My Life with the Taliban

Abdul Salam Zaeef *

Reviewed by Naheed S. Goraya

‘My Life with the Taliban’ is the autobiography (written in 21 small chapters along
with an epilogue and assisted by Character List in the beginning and a Chronolgyy
and Glossory at the end) of Abdul Salam Zaeef who was the Taliban’s ambassador
to Pakistan in 2001 and one of the most well-known faces of the movement
following the 9-11 attacks and a principal actor in its domestic and foreign affairs..
The book has been translated for the first time from the Pashto, which shares more
than a personal history of an unusual life. The recent history of Afghanistan is the
focus of this traumatic life story. It is an account about how a poor village boy
ended up being the ambassador of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and thus being
kidnapped; in defiance to all human and international conventions, and remained
under arrest in Guantanamo, returning to Kabul in 2005 as a so- called reconciled
Taliban to be used by the Afghan government as a conduit for talks. There he
regrew his long black beard, acquired an iPhone and wrote this memoir.
This is the story of the singing, dancing Mujahid that grew into an alarming
inquisition squad which ran Afghanistan for five years It gives us a valuable sight
of a man and his time; it draws back the curtain on a period about which we have a
very little aware of. The book gives answers to the very basic questions which are
not identified however; like is the Taliban one group or many? How organized are
they? What links do they have with Al Qaeda? Where does their money come
from? Why Mullah Omar can not be found? The author’s account of his early
years as a struggling Taliban official offers us a deeper and more realistic view of
a group that has been notorious with all sins of Afghanistan. Arguing against the
conventional accounts that the Taliban emerged in the 1990s, Zaeef upholds that
the movement existed as early as the 1970s. The book tells that Zaeef was born in

*
Translated from Pashto & Edited By Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
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1968, the son of local mullah in a poor village of Afghanistan where there was no
electricity or water. Both of his parents died at an early age. When he was 11, the
Soviets invaded. Like many Afghans, he and his family fled to Pakistan. There, he
attended a madrassah and at 15, he ran away to join Jihad. During which time, he
was linked with many key figures in the anti-soviet resistance, including the
current Taliban head Mullah Omar. After the war, Zaeef turned to a quite life in a
small village in Kandhar, but a situation of turmoil and chaos soon overwhelmed
Afghanistan as factional fighting erupted after the Russians pulled out. In 1988, he
took parting wretched attack on the Russians at Kandhar airport, and his group lost
many men He survived to see Russians leaves and describes the day Mujahideen
took over in 1992, as the happiest day of his life. But soon there was anarchy in
Kandhar, where local commanders set up checkpoints, shaking down villagers for
bribes, rapping women and kidnapping young boys. Zaeef points out that the
group already existed in Jihad and got together again in 1994 to sort out local
crime. Mullah Omar was chosen as a leader by them as he was not a known figure.
Disgusted by the lawlessness that ensued, Zaeef was one among the former
mujahidin who were closely involved in the discussions that led to the emergence
of the Taliban, in 1994. Zaeef then details his Taliban career as civil servant and
minister who negotiated with foreign oil companies as well as with Afghanistan’s
own resistance leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. They had weapons but no money,
and a motorbike. The ordinary Afghans were fed up with lawlessness but they
were able to take control of Kandhar. From there, they moved on to Heart, Mazar-
e-Sharfif and eventually Kabul. Zaeef and his editors perform a valuable service in
introducing us to Guantanamo from the point of view of one of its inmates. This
section must be read by those who believe that West is more civilized than
Afghans.
Zaeef was ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and his
account discusses the strange ‘phoney war’ period before the US-led intervention
overthrew the Taliban. In early 2002, Zaeef was handed over to American forces
in Pakistan, not enduring his diplomatic status, and spent four and a half years in
prison (including several years in Guantanamo) before being released without
having been tried or charged with any offence. He portrays the mental and
physical torture he and his fellow prisoners suffered at the hands of American
soldiers and concludes with an intense condemnation of American policy in
Afghanistan. The author’s attempt as ambassador in Pakistan to retain the release
of Taliban prisoners in Kunduz area who were subsequently masaccared.
According to the author, although American commanders of the International
coalition are trying to defeat Taliban yet they have been informed by their allies
that their can not be military solution to the conflict. For a viable political solution,
the Afghan Government, Western leaders and those they represent need to
understand who Taliban are. There is all kind of intriguing detail about Taliban
tactics and the methods that one can find no where. The reader gets a closer look at
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the formation of Taliban, of which the author has great pride and trust in its
members. The reader gets a glance of the operations of the Afghan Embassy in
Peshawar and daily life at Guantanamo. He writes of being chained up, beaten and
forcibly shaved, of prisoners, being beaten to death or paralyzed, and of American
guards urinating on their Qurans. Curiously, he was frequently asked about the
presence of natural minerals in Afghanistan, including uranium and gold. Despite
years of imprisonment, Zaeef preserves strongly Islamist leanings. Since he
returns from Guantanamo, the author has been a reconciled Taliban, who lives
quietly in Kabul and at peace with the government. The author clearly roots
against the US in his epilogue, as his point of view is different from US policy
makers.
The book is a gleaming insight into the psyche of those who fought the Soviet
corruption and accordingly tried to defend their country. Zaeef confabulates that
the Taliban were a distinct group during the anti-Soviet mujahideen wars and
operated as such under their own identity and leadership. While there is no doubt
that the sundry madrassa students, i.e. Talib-e-ilm (plural: Taliban), were part of
the Peshawar-based mujahideen groups and were also included in the fold of the
field commanders like Abdul Haq and Jalaluddin Haqqani, there is no evidence
that the Taliban operated then as a distinct entity. A striking surprise that comes to
light in the book is that 9/11 was avoidable if the Taliban had taken action against
Al Qaeda before it occurred. Had the Taliban responded conscientiously to the
US’s pre-emptive warning, this horrible tragedy would have never happened.
Weeks before the attack, the United States ambassador to Islamabad met Zaeef
and handed him an official warning. In response to the American warning the
Taliban wrote back in a letter that Afghanistan had no intention to harm the United
States of America then or in the future. Zaeef hints Pakistani spies as the real
wrongdoers for the Taliban’s indecisiveness, for they supplied Mullah Omar with
ambiguous and fake information about the US’s intents. Zaeef’s account is
explicitly and shrewdly focused on Pakistan and its military spy agency. For him,
Pakistan and the agency have been the ultimate spoilers in the war on terrorism
and the Afghan game. He blames Pakistan for every single wrong, the Taliban has
ever committed. He portrays ISI as a global evil run by underhanded anti-Afghan
thugs.
In the second half of the book, Zaeef self-indulgently descends into political
preaching. He is more of the Taliban preacher. He tries to gloss over Osama’s
relationship with the Taliban, Taliban’s misogyny and all the melancholy, they had
caused in Afghanistan and beyond. He identifies Mullah Omar as a good leader
and Karzai a weak one. Taliban issued another decree on beards and wearing
turbans that every male must be growing a beard to a certain length. In prison, they
angered him for shaving his beard twice. He fails to provide any evidence from
Koran to support up this statement. Zaeef’s book is well written that lays out an
inside story of the Taliban from its roots up to its collapse, its changing into an
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anti-Western uprising and its uncertain future. The book is a must-reading for
those American policy makers who want to understand one of the most
controversial religious movements in modern times.
The book offers little optimism for the current war in Afghanistan. As the
author has repeatedly pointed out that Afghanistan has never been conquered by
foreign forces and he claims to have warned the Americans from the start that with
in 10 years they would face an embarrassing failure. It is a standard reading for the
one who wants to study Afghanistan today. By the time one finishes the reading,
one becomes aware of the fact that Taliban are not the monsters but people. There
is no pretence here, Zaeef is an opponent of the West’s intervention in his country
and continues to consider himself a Talib, if he is no longer an active member. The
editors must be appreciated for their work and should be required reading for any
one with an interest in the region. As an ambassador, he has come to know that
Osma Bin Laden was only an alleged motive that America used to go to
Afghanistan. His cynical view of America worsened when he ended up in
Guantanamo. He opposes the American occupation of his country. He rebukes the
Obama administration (and therefore Australia and other allies) for relying “solely
on force and even the so-called peace talks are accompanied by threats”. Although
Zaeef hardly represents a liberal face of the war-torn country, his interpretations
about Afghanistan provide a valuable lesson for readers who view the nation as
incapable of rising above its tribal afflictions.
The book contains certain draw backs also. As the writer has ignored the US
role in Russian war until its end, and then in context of its withdrawal of support.
Through the years of Taliban rule, he has written nothing about the treatment of
women or the declining conditions of the country. Zaeef doesn’t regret the
Taliban’s despotic rule that kept women in the Afghanistan community under
house arrest. He is also silent about how the Taliban clamped down the medieval
codes of behavior on Afghanistan. There is no mention of Taliban’s alleged use of
opium money, or the use of suicide bombs and the civilian causalities they have
caused. There is almost nothing about his wife or children. The book tells that
Taliban was formed in 1994 while Taliban were known and operating during the
fight against Russians. No where does he talk about Taliban stopping girls to go to
schools. He says nothing about Taliban’s tyrannical attitude towards women.
Zaeef makes no mention of the major international crimes committed on their
watch. He does not mention, even in passing, the killing of the former president
Dr. Najibullah, who was murdered by the Taliban and their handlers in utter
disregard for any human, Pashtun or international conventions. That is how the
Taliban rule was ushered in, in Kabul in 1996. Similarly, he skips over the
genocide of the Shiite Hazaras and the ethnic cleansing of the Tajiks in Mazar-i-
Sharif while remembering this much that the former Pakistani interior minister
Moinuddin Haider was supposedly a Shia. Zaeef and his editors make it a point to
criticise and condemn the PDPA for its land reform policy and allege that the party
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systematically eliminated the traditional power brokers like the tribal chieftains,
landlords and indeed the petty mullahs. In his selective amnesia, Zaeef makes no
mention of a much more inhuman account of the same strategy set out by his
regime, through which wholesale killing of teachers, middle class employees,
politicians and tribal elders took place on both sides of the Durand Line. There is
also a complete silence in the book about the finances of the Taliban regime. It
does mention its diplomatic recognition by three Muslim states including the
Saudis, but does not touch upon their massive financing of the Taliban regime. It
fully ignores the military and technical expertise, oil and gas supplies, food items
and human cannon fodder that the Taliban received from its three patrons.
Despite certain flaws, still it is a precious addition to the literature on present-
day Afghan history. It is a must-reading for those American policy makers who
want to understand one of the most controversial religious movements in modern
times. Reading this book with all its references to belief and scripture leaves the
impression of a passionate Afghan nationalist who believes the Pashtuns are
disenfranchised and who hates the Americans and Pakistani ISI in equal measure.
The book is very much useful for those who want to understand Taliban
movement in historical context. My Life with the Taliban is a required reading for
anyone interested in, where the Afghan conflict is heading. Though Zaeef has not
pointed out the way towards a negotiated end to the fighting yet what he says that
ending the atrocities could prove enormously complex, if possible at all.
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