Here’s a name from the past: Ambassador Zaeef, Abdul Salam Zaeef. Not exactly a household moniker but you may remember him as the spokesman for the Taliban back in 2001 - black silk turban, heavy beard, long, horsy face.
Zaeef was on American TV from the side porch of his home in Pakistan almost daily after 9/11 and on the run-up to the Afghanistan bombing by the US in October of 2001.
I visited Zaeef at his house in Islamabad for a few days that October, the week before the US attack on Afghanistan.
Zaeef was still taking his orders from Mullah Omar, the Taliban Chief but after the US military bombed the hell out of Afghanistan Zaeef seemed to disappear. No surprise there. I called his cell phone a few times but he never answered.
Turns out that after some adventures along the Pakistani/Afghanistan tribal border area he was snatched up by the Pakistanis and turned over to the Americans. Ultimately, he spent four years sitting in a cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Zaeef has been recently released. He is back in Afghanistan living on government handouts and keeping a low profile. He’s been reunited with his two wives and eight children.
He’s not mad at the Americans he told a reporter. In fact, he said he had no complaints about his treatment in Guantanamo although he claimed he was smacked around when he was in custody of the Americans for some months at the US air base in Kandahar in 2001.
To keep his views in perspective, consider that he doesn’t accept that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the suicide assaults of Sept 11, 2001 despite all the evidence to the contrary, including Bin Laden’s own statements. He does say he regrets they happened but, “I don’t know who did those attacks.”
Zaeef appeared somewhat philosophical about the Americans but he doesn’t like the Pakistanis much.
“They have two faced policies,” he told the New York Times, “Pakistan is always telling the thief to steal things and at the same time telling the owner to watch out for thieves.”
He’s right about that. Pakistan is a land of extremely complex politics and loyalties, shaded and nuanced, a country impossible to run by any one person, even a tough character like General Pervez Musharraf, an Urdu-speaking former commando leader (the Pakistani officer corps is almost exclusively Punjabi) who seized power in a coup three years before the World Trade Tower attacks and has held on to it from crisis to crisis.
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