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Afghan Spy Chief Quits After Denouncing Talks With Pakistan Afghanistan and Pakistan Agree to Reopen Talks With an Absent Taliban
(about 7 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, a staunch critic of his government’s policies toward neighboring Pakistan, resigned on Thursday, in an apparent protest against President Ashraf Ghani’s trip this week to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, which has been widely viewed as part of an effort to restart peace talks with the Taliban. KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States have agreed, once again, to restart peace talks with the Taliban, but there is still one big piece of the effort missing: the Taliban themselves.
Rahmatullah Nabil, a favorite of American officials who has served two stints totaling almost five years at the helm of the National Directorate of Security, criticized Mr. Ghani’s trip to Pakistan in a scathing message posted on his Facebook page on Wednesday, the eve of his resignation, just as the president’s plane was landing back in Kabul. The Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, returned home from an ice-breaking visit to Pakistan to contend not only with fallout from a skeptical and largely anti-Pakistan public, but also with the resignation of his intelligence chief and a new body count from the latest Taliban rampage: the siege of residential buildings in Kandahar, near the largest United States military base in southern Afghanistan. The attack raised serious questions about whether the insurgents would even be interested in talking peace.
Mr. Nabil said the president’s trip was disrespectful to Afghans killed in Taliban attacks around the country because Mr. Ghani had been holding talks with government leaders in Pakistan, where the Taliban’s leadership council is based. The two-day siege, as Mr. Ghani was holding meetings in the Pakistani capital in the hopes of restarting peace talks, reinforced the theory that the insurgents time their attacks for maximum effect and message. Analysts, as well as residents of Kandahar, said the timing did not bode well for Taliban participation in a new round of peace talks.
His message made specific mention of the Taliban’s nearly 26-hour siege on residential buildings near Kandahar Airfield, in southern Afghanistan, which ended on Wednesday and resulted in the deaths of at least 50 people, according to the Afghan Ministry of Defense. Naseem Jan, a shopkeeper in Kandahar, predicted more violence, “a blood bath before peace knocks on our doors.”
Referring to the Pakistani leader, Mr. Nabil noted that “the moment when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif once again stated that Afghanistan’s enemy is Pakistan’s enemy — right at that moment our compatriots in the residential areas of Kandahar Airport, Khanishin district of Helmand and Takhar and Badakhshan” were being killed. “Thank God I am not part of it,” he added. A new political setback came on Thursday, when Mr. Ghani’s intelligence chief, Rahmatullah Nabil, a United States favorite who led Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security for five years, resigned. He lashed out at his boss in a scathing Facebook message posted just as the plane carrying the Afghan delegation was landing in Kabul on Wednesday.
“When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif once again stated that Afghanistan’s enemy is Pakistan’s enemy,” Mr. Nabil wrote, referring to the Pakistani leader, “our compatriots in the residential areas of Kandahar airport, Khanashin district of Helmand and Takhar and Badakhshan were being martyred and slaughtered, and at least 1,000 liters of blood of our innocent people was shed, in the same red color as the carpet that we catwalked on.
“Thank God I am not part of it,” he added.
Mr. Ghani’s trip to Pakistan was a bold move, and while he won some concessions and came back optimistic for a new round of peace talks this winter, Pakistani officials were less enthusiastic. One Pakistani foreign ministry official said talk of the efforts’ beginning next week was “premature” and “exaggerated.”
Pakistan has always been seen as crucial to the peace process in Afghanistan, since the Taliban leadership is based there — mostly in Quetta, in southern Baluchistan Province — and fighters depend on cross-border sanctuaries to escape Afghan security forces and their American combat allies.
But the Taliban have also shown a determined independent streak recently, especially when it comes to peace talks. When Pakistan pressured the Taliban to sit down for talks with the Afghan government in July, the militants’ leader, Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, suddenly disappeared for days, with his phones turned off, Afghan security officials said at the time.
Mr. Mansour is now officially at the helm of the movement, though his succession is contested by many Taliban leaders, and it is not clear yet where he stands on negotiations.
The true extent of the carnage from the siege near Kandahar Airfield, which lasted 26 hours and involved hostage taking, only came to the fore on Thursday as residents woke up to collect the bodies for burial. At least 50 people were killed, the Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday. Eyewitnesses spoke of indiscriminate shooting by the Taliban assailants, and of the government forces’ firing tear gas into residential buildings.
Many of the bodies recovered had been burned in the fires set off by the fighting. About 100 shops were destroyed, said Nasrullah Khan, whose uncle was killed and brother wounded.
“It was a massacre, a massacre of innocent and powerless people,” Mr. Khan said.
Sharifullah — who, like many Afghans, uses only one name — said his brother, a shopkeeper, had died of bullet wounds. “I was watching the shooters and how merciless they were, and thinking that these people might not have hearts in their chests,” he said.
Mr. Nabil, the spy chief who resigned, was a critic of Mr. Ghani’s overtures to Pakistan from the beginning, and it was only a matter of time before he left his job, officials said. His objections are shared by former President Hamid Karzai, Mr. Nabil’s close ally, who is seen as still wielding influence and as scuttling the new government’s efforts.
When the government changed hands last year, with Mr. Ghani and his coalition partner, Abdullah Abdullah, taking over from Mr. Karzai, Mr. Nabil remained as intelligence chief largely because Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah could not agree on a successor and because the Americans wanted continuity amid increasing Taliban attacks. But it was clear that Mr. Nabil did not get along with his new boss and disagreed with his policies.
Officials said he had felt increasingly marginalized, and even embarrassed, by Mr. Ghani, and that he had often been excluded from meetings held with visiting Pakistani military officials, including his Pakistani counterpart.
On Thursday, Mr. Ghani appointed Massoud Andarabi, a low-profile young officer who rose through the ranks to become the intelligence agency’s operational deputy, as his acting spy chief.
Although many in Kandahar criticized the president for reaching out to Pakistan, others expressed sympathy, saying he had no choice but to keep on pushing for talks.
“This is a scattered, spread war in Afghanistan which also involves several countries,” said Abdul Jabar Qahraman, a member of Parliament. “The Afghan government has no other way but to engage them. The Taliban are also a fractured movement. One of them launched an attack on Kandahar, but it is possible that another faction wants to talk.”