Without Borders

Jere Van Dyk

Description

Afghanistan Without Borders: The Haqqani Network and the Road to Kabul is the untold story of the origins, political awakening, and rise of what the United States and its allies call the Haqqani Network, and what the Haqqani family calls the Haqqani Mujahideen. The author lived with the Haqqanis as a young reporter for the New York Times in the 1980s, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, when they were America’s allies in the Afghan-Soviet war. After 9/11, the network became America’s enemy. This book tells the exciting story of how the author began to try to find the Haqqanis again, and, later, his quest to understand their influence in the greater Middle East. This is the story of the rise of an ideology and movement born in the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which resurfaced in Arabia and India in the 18th Century, lived on in the anti-Christian, anti-British, anti-European, and anti-Russian colonial movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in modern times evolved, with American help, into the Haqqani Mujahideen and their allies and followers around the world.

Sujets

• Post-Colonialism
• Political Science
• Islamic Studies
• Middle Eastern
• Afganistán
• Mujahideen
• Postcolonialism
• General officer
• Terrorism
• Middle East
• World
• General
• Islam
• Afghanistan

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680538670
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Without Borders The Haqqani Network and the Road to Kabul
By Jere Van Dyk
“The most important qualification for a leader is to not want to be the leader.” Plato
“In our family Jalaluddin Sab is the eldest and because of his age and because he has had a stroke and cannot talk well and is very weak, Sirajuddin is his representative. Yes, we call him the Khalifa.” Ibrahim Haqqani, April 2015, Islamabad
Academica Press Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Van Dyk, Jere (author)
Title: Without borders : the haqqani network and the road to kabul | Van Dyk, Jere.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022944785 | ISBN 9781680538656 (hardcover) | 9781680538663 (paperback) | 9781680538670 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 Jere Van Dyk
Dedication
To Craig Whitney, who, in 1981, as Deputy Foreign Editor, and Bob Semple, as Foreign Editor, at the New York Times , gave me a letter of introduction, and a check for $500 to help pay my way to Afghanistan. They trusted me. I am forever grateful.
To Mike Kaufman: (1938-2010), South Asia correspondent (1979-1982), the New York Times .
To Aunt Elva (Woods), who after an argument with my grandmother, left the University of Washington and took a slow boat to Shanghai, and got a job at the U.S. Consulate. It was her stories, and those of Uncle (Hugh) Woody, General Manager of the China National Aviation Corporation, the first man to fly over the Himalayas, and the first man shot down by the Japanese, and of my father, in the Marine Corps, who after island hoping in the Pacific fought Mao Tse Tung, told me about the fiercest men he ever saw, riding Bactrian camels off the Gobi Desert through a gate in the Great Wall, that resonated when I was a boy.
To (Uncle) Roy Major, navigator on President Franklin Roosevelt’s flight to Yalta, after which he met with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. After the war he charted flight routes for TWA around the world ïncluding to Afghanistan.
To Henry Van Dyk, U.S. Seventh Army, betrayed by Berber nomads, captured by Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and held as a POW for two years in Germany.
To Vartan Gregorian (1934-2021), president of the Carnegie Corporation, author, and Afghan hand, who provided supplemental funding from his own budget for this book. 1
I have changed the names of some people, and their features, to protect them.
I want to thank my agent, Michael Carlisle for his indispensable help, and friendship, his rising assistant, Michael Mungiello, for all his hard work, and Soumyadev Bose for his design and indexing skills, and Paul du Quenoy for his unwavering support.

1 Vartan Gregorian. The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan; Politics of Reform and Modernization , 1880-1946 , ( Redwood City, Stanford University Press, 1969)
Contents
Preface
The Sheikh
The Kajaki Larah
The Tanga Khola
Dar-ul-Uloom (The House of Knowledge)
The Rise of Christianity and Islam
The Birth of the Modern Mujahideen
The Birth of the Haqqanis
“You Are Like Our Founding Fathers”
Major General Naseerallah Babar
Din Mohammad
Al-Sharq al-Awsat
The Middle East
Liverpool
The Algerian
Al Yaman
The Zaidi Prince
The Old City, Houthis, and the Rise of al-Qaeda
What is Shari’ah?
The Religious Wars
The Rival to Mecca
Luke Somers
A Former Prime Minister
Professor Bakeel Zindani
The Sword
The Massacre
A Soldier of the Left
The National Security Council
An Al-Qaeda Messenger
The Salafis
Guantanamo
Is This How Al-Qaeda Really Began?
The Tablighi
Al-Qaeda
The Story of Maher
The Renegade
Tariq al-Fadhli
The Foreign Minister
Dubai
London
Egypt
The Iranian Connection
The House of Knowledge
Egyptian Intelligence
Al-Azhar and Walid of the Ikhwan
A Son of the Ikhwan
Bin Laden’s Filmmaker
The Reformed Islamist
London
Saudi Arabia
Abdul Majid al-Wahhab
Al-Qaeda is American Mumbo-Jumbo
The Desert
The Road to Sudan
A Typical Conservative Family
The Rebel
Jamal Khashoggi
Sudan
The Aristocrat
“The thing we need is a military organization of agents”…Lenin
Al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya
The Levant
Nicholas Berg
Afghanistan
The Foreign Minister
The National Directorate of Security
Ibrahim Haqqani
Pakistan
The Islamic State
Pacha Khan Zadran
Turquoise Mountain
The Taliban Military Council
The Scion
Pakistan
ISIS
Turkey
An ISIS Commander
The Power of the Tribe
Islamabad
Kabul
Postscript
Index
Preface
This is the story of my search to understand the reach in the Arab Middle East of the Haqqani family, born in the foothills of the Suleiman (Solomon) Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and from which rose in the early 1970s, to fight Communism, this secular religion, a threat to their faith, the Haqqani Mujahideen (Holy Warriors), what the U.S. today calls the Haqqani Network, but which they still call The Haqqani Mujahideen, one of the oldest, and maybe the most powerful jihadist group, and family, in the world, which rose, through its alliance with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, other Arab nations, the United States, and its anti-Soviet allies, to become a symbol of an ideology, born in the early days of Islam, which became a force after the Mongol conquest in the 13 th Century in Baghdad, reemerged in Arabia in the 18 th Century, in the anti-European, particularly British colonial rebellions of the 19 th and the 20 th centuries, which led to the Irregulars in 1947 in Pakistan, to the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to al-Qaida, to the Taliban, to the Islamic State and to jihadist groups from Asia to Arabia to Africa to the Levant and to Europe, and beyond.
The Sheikh
May 2019
We looked like a large empty restaurant, with bare round wood tables. A big burly man, standing behind an empty bar, with no bottles, the only person I saw, in a white shirt, black bow tie and a black vest, saw the Sheikh, placed his hand on his heart, and bowed his head. Sheikh Hameed al-Ahmar, of the Hashed tribal federation, a businessman, more ambitious and political than his older brother Saddiq, the Sheikh of the Sheikhs of the Hashed, the most powerful tribe in Yemen, walked to the front and sat by a window. Did I want coffee or tea? The bartender came over and the Sheikh ordered, and then and in a deep, confident voice welcomed me.
An Ethiopian taxi driver in Washington said a few months ago coffee originated in Ethiopia, not in Yemen. The Sheikh smiled. They had the same culture as Ethiopia. The Yemenis were descended from Sheba, who maybe lived in Ethiopia. When she returned from her journey to Palestine to see King Solomon she wanted to take the throne from Marib. The Yemenis were Jewish then but became Christians when the Ethiopians became, under the Eastern Orthodox Church, the first nation.
It appears that Christian missionaries first preached in Ethiopia, and in southern Arabia, about 45 A.D. The Christians were south of Sana’a all the way to Aden. The Yemenis believe that they descended from Shem (Sam) the son of Noah and that his ship was somewhere around where Turkey and Iran have their borders today. Sana’a means the city of Sam—Medina Sam. We believe that Sam built Sana’a and lived there until he died.
The Sheikh drank his coffee. Christians also believe that Noah’s ark is there. 2 We watched the sun move closer to the west. It took two years to arrange this meeting. A former Yemeni ambassador was my go-between. If anyone could help me it would be the Sheikh. I was told that Jalaluddin Haqqani was married to a Yemeni. The Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and western Pakistan—the Taliban were mostly Pashtuns—rarely married outsiders. I wanted to know the name of her tribe, and what he knew about her family. I didn’t learn about Jalaluddin’s marriage to a Yemeni until after I left Yemen in 2014.
The Sheikh continued. The first prophet after Sam was Hood. One of his sons was Galon and the other was Khatan, the main son of Sheba. The Khatanis were the main inhabitants of Arabia. Saba (Sheba) spoke Yarib and became the first speaker of what we call Arabic. Saba’s son was king. He had two sons, Hamden and Kahlan. The descendants of Hamden (the Hashed) were the Hamdens, the most civilized of all the tribes. The Khatalans protected them. There was jealousy among the Hamden and other tribes because they were closest to and got to Mecca first. All the roads of the Arabs came from Yemen.
There is no mention of Yemen in the Koran but twice it mentions Saba. Mohammad refers to them, he said, by her first son, Hamid. The Sheikh had nine brothers. He turned to politics, the other reason why I was here. The kings of the Gulf were afraid of the Arab Spring. They were afraid of their revolution, especially the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. 3 They wanted to try to stop it, to stop the people of the (Muslim) Brotherhood. (King) Abdullah, of Saudi Arabia, and Mohammad bin Zaid, Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the ruler of the UAE, were a team, and came up with a plan. They were the enemy but he didn’t think that they would be as stupid as they were. First, they allowed el-Sisi 4 and his gang to come back to power, to imprison the president, Mohamed Morsi, and to shoot and kill a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the streets.
They allowed al-Houthi to attack Islah, the most powerful political party, founded in part by the Brotherhood, Zindani, and Ali Mohsen and the Al-Ahmar family, even his own home. 5 He meant, by the al-Ahmar family, his father Sheikh Abdullah, chief of the tribe, and attacked even my host’s own compound. In August 2014, he had to take his elderly mother to the Czech Republic for physical therapy. Jane Marriott, the British ambassador, came and told him to leave immediately and not return. Al-Houthi would not stop at the border of Sana’a as he was ordered to do but