A late night secret meeting in Kabul

It was 11:30pm and almost three hours into an intense discussion in a mini-palace in central Kabul on 7 December 2013. The participants, a small group of super-rich political elites, had gathered to hear classified briefings from two comrades-in-cause - Bismillah Mohammadi, Afghan defense minister, and Salahuddin Rabbani, chairman of the Afghan High Peace Council.

Mr. Mohammadi had just returned from Brussels where he’d attended a NATO ministerial gathering about Afghanistan and at the sidelines of which he’d held separate talks with U.S. and NATO officials.

The meeting was in a Kabul mini-palace

“I told Kerry [John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State] we want it signed and that it will be signed,” Mohammadi told the participants referring to a controversial Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) of Afghanistan and the U.S. awaiting final signature by President Hamid Karzai.

“They wanted to know how can we force Karzai to sign it or at least allow a minister to do it,” he added.

“You could have told him ‘it’s all your blind support that has made this stupid man so insane’,” one participants interrupted.

“They know it,” Mohammadi responded instantly.

In the meeting that cold winter night were Dr Abdullah, a long-time presidential hopeful and a former foreign minister, Amrullah Saleh, former director of the National Security Directorate, Haseen Fahim, a brother of the Vice-President Qasim Fahim, Yunus Qanooni, a former minister, Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh Province, Haji Almaas, a member of parliament and about four other associates and confidants.

A Pashtun plot

There was a strong consensus among the participants that President Karzai’s refusal to promptly sign the BSA had to be linked to his Pashtun ethnicity.  

“I told them because Karzai thinks that his Pashtuns will be losers, he does not want to sign it...he wants their homes be protected in Kandahar and Helmand,” Mohammadi said.

At one point in the meeting it was said that only Karzai, Hekmatyar and Taliban opposed the BSA - the vicious Pashtun triangle.

Although large plates filled with fresh fruits were laying alongside trays of dry fruits and sweets over the tables but participants were mostly sipping tea.

At stake, in the BSA’s complicated affair, was not only the group’s collective grip on political power but each participant’s business interests. For them, the U.S. was not only an ally but a guarantor of the post-Taliban regime in which they’ve thrived politically, financially and even morally.

“We should tell them that the North and the West are signing this agreement and Karzai must go to his South and die with his Pashtun brothers,” Atta Mohammad Noor was heard saying.

Others suggested that Karzai should be warned that if he delayed inking the BSA, the Northern leaders would seek direct arrangements with the Americans and all U.S. military bases would be offered in the northern provinces of the country.

“His Kandahar will be bombed from the North,” one participant said loudly.

The mood among the participants was more like a WW-II meeting of allied leaders pondering over attacks on German territories than a chitchat of Afghan politicians in the presence of a national defense minister.

The wrong peace envoy

“He was like a dead body,” said Salahuddin Rabbani, Karzai’s chief peace-maker for the Taliban.

He was talking about Mullah Bradar, a former second-in-command of the Taliban who has been held by Pakistani intelligence agency since 2010.

Years of Karzai’s advocacy for Bradar’s release had only given partial success in late November 2013 when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif agreed to permit a visit of Afghan peace  council with  Bradar at a secure location in Pakistan.

Karzai had sent Rabbani to see Mullah Bradar and now he was sharing the classified details of his top secret visit with his Jamiat leaders. Jamiat Islami is a political network of the former Northern Alliance which was headed by Salahuddin’s father, Burhanuddin Rabbani, also chairman of the peace council who was assassinated in 2012.

“He was kind of drugged and could not talk but I whispered in his filthy ear ‘Mullah sahib, enjoy!” and a laughter broke out.

My source, who witnessed the meeting until it ended at about 11:52pm on 7 December 2013, received a call and he had to leave.

Can this be a story, I asked myself as I walked out of the coffee shop where we meet in Kabul. No. Who will run it? But I had to write what I had heard. Perhaps it could give lead to others to run their stories on it.