Inside the Kingdom (39 page)

“I know,” says Ahmed Rashid, “that whenever I saw pickup trucks, especially new shiny ones, and asked the Taliban where they came from, the answer was always from the Saudis or the Emiratis. They were very specific about which country gave it to them, because they wanted to show they had international support, although they didn’t distinguish between government, personal, or charitable aid. In the [British] Foreign Office I was told of specific instances of Saudi aid. Some of it was from the government—in the early days there was a lot of official sympathy and support for the Taliban. But some of it was certainly from private individuals and charities.”

Saudi charities became high profile in Afghanistan. By the end of 1995 the student warriors were operating with more resources than they could possibly have received from their relatively poor Pakistani patrons, and they made particularly effective use of their Datsun 4x4 pickups. They bolted machine guns onto the rear platforms to convert the vehicles into gunships, then deployed them as a nimble, mechanized cavalry—updated versions of the gun-mounted Chevrolets with which Abdul Aziz slaughtered the Ikhwan at Sibillah. As winter closed in the Taliban took control of the entire south, center, and west of the country and soon found themselves at the gates of Kabul. In the spring of 1996 Mullah Omar summoned to Kandahar more than a thousand religious leaders from the territories he controlled to have them proclaim him Amir-ul-Momineen, the “Commander of the Faithful.”

Kandahar’s most sacred shrine houses a silver box containing a unique relic, an ancient robe that is said to have been the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed. It is removed only at moments of special emergency—the last occasion had been more than sixty years previously during a cholera epidemic. Now, on April 4, 1996, Mullah Omar had the Prophet’s Cloak brought to the top floor of a mosque in the center of the city, stuck his hands into the sleeves of the holy garment, and proceeded to parade around the roof, wrapping and unwrapping the sacred fabric for half an hour as the mullahs in the courtyard threw their turbans in the air and shouted out their homage.

By Wahhabi standards, Omar’s gesture was doubly un-Islamic—relic worship magnified by an act of theater. But the Taliban’s Saudi benefactors took a tolerant view. These were the excesses of a young movement that would mellow, they felt sure, and the spinning mullah had certainly energized the madrasa graduates. By the end of September 1996 the Taliban had conquered Kabul and had extended their rule to twenty-two of the country’s thirty-one provinces. They announced that their godly government would be known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and while most of the world prudently stepped back and waited, three countries granted this unusual entity official recognition: Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates—and Saudi Arabia.

There was a dark side, however, to the students’ rapid and unlikely triumph. On the night that they occupied Kabul, the Taliban flouted the diplomatic immunity of the United Nations compound to kidnap Mohammed Najibullah, the last Communist president of Afghanistan, who had lived in UN custody since his deposition four years earlier. In what would become a pattern of brutality, they beat Najibullah and his brother senseless, castrated both men, dragged their bodies behind a jeep, then hanged them by wire nooses from lampposts.

The next day they started issuing the prohibitions for which the Taliban would become notorious: no kite-flying, no pool tables, no music, no nail polish, no toothpaste, no televisions, no beard-shaving, no “British or American hairstyles,” no pigeon keeping, no playing with birds. Less comically, the Taliban also imposed the wearing of the head-to-toe veil, the burqa, closed all girls’ schools and colleges, and banned women from working—a particularly savage blow to the tens of thousands of Afghan war widows who had to work to keep their children alive.

“Women, you should not step outside your residence,” instructed a Taliban decree of November 1996. “If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves, they will be cursed by the Islamic sharia and should never expect to go to heaven.”

These draconian regulations were enforced by religious police squads, local Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice that were built directly on the Saudi model of fundamentalist vigilantes and drew support from Saudi religious charities. Bin Baz’s energetic support for the Taliban was matched by other members of the ulema.

“I remember,” says Ahmed Rashid, “that all the Taliban who had worked or done hajj [pilgrimage] in Saudi Arabia were terribly impressed by the religious police and tried to copy that system to the letter. The money for their training and salaries came partly from Saudi Arabia.”

Ahmed Rashid took the trouble to collect and document the Taliban’s medieval flailings against the modern West, and a few months later he stumbled on a spectacle that they were organizing for popular entertainment. Wondering why ten thousand men and children were gathering so eagerly in the Kandahar football stadium one Thursday afternoon, he went inside to discover a convicted murderer being led between the goalposts—to be executed by a member of his victim’s family.

The roots of Taliban practice were not Wahhabi—their ideas stemmed from the local Deobandi school of Islam. But the two fundamentalisms were soul mates. Not for the first or last time, Saudi favor to Islamic purists had helped give birth to a monster—and as if to emphasize the point, on May 19, 1996, Osama Bin Laden flew into Afghanistan from Sudan.

Bin Laden knew next to nothing about the Taliban. They were a phenomenon of the 1990s. But he could plainly see what they were doing to his friends, the now discredited mujahideen. Soon after arriving in Jalalabad he made it his business, according to Huthayfah, the son of Abdullah Azzam, to contact Mullah Omar and ask for his protection.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,”
came the warm and positive answer, as Huthayfah later reported it. “You are most welcome. We will never give you up to anyone who wants you.”

It sounds oversimplified. Bin Laden’s protector in Jalalabad was Younis Khalis, a mujahid friend from the old days. But Khalis would soon join forces with the Taliban, and as events unrolled, Mullah Omar’s promise came to pass. There were many Western-style reasons, from personal rivalry to realpolitik, why it made sense for the Taliban leader to be wary of the uninvited Osama—both men had toweringly grandiose visions of their purpose in life. But those visions also locked them firmly into the same Islamic mission. The two holy warriors needed to coexist, and they found a way to do so. Breaking off from a sermon one day, Mullah Omar singled out Bin Laden in the congregation and praised him to the worshippers as one of Islam’s most important spiritual leaders. Osama returned the compliment, telling the world that his fatwas were now being issued from Khorassan, the great Afghan-based empire of the Prophet’s time, from which, according to certain hadiths, the armies of Islam would emerge in the final days, wearing black turbans and unfolding black banners, like the black flag of the Taliban, to defeat the kuffar and march in triumph to Jerusalem.

It was fortunate, perhaps, for the two partners in this messianic alliance that Saudi Arabia could not, for the moment, see a way to break them up. In 1996 the Al-Saud were severely annoyed with Bin Laden, but they had no ready means to implement their displeasure. If they brought Osama back to the Kingdom, he could only be a source of trouble, whether at liberty or in jail. At that date his crimes were matters of inflammatory words, not proven misdeeds for which he could easily be punished—nor, at that point, had he accomplished anything to suggest he would go much beyond words in the future. He seemed, as Bandar bin Sultan later put it, just a “young, misguided kid” with a big mouth and lots of money—“not a threat to the system; not a threat to anyone.” The Saudi government had deliberately passed up on chances to extract Bin Laden from the Sudan in the early 1990s, and in Afghanistan he seemed even more safely out of the way.

In 1996 the Taliban took full control of the Khyber Pass areas where Younis Khalis had been operating and sent a message to Prince Turki Al-Faisal.

“We’ve taken over Jalalabad,” they told him, “and Bin Laden is here. We have offered him sanctuary and we can guarantee his behavior.”

The prince recalled his reply in an interview he gave to the U.S. TV show
Nightline
in December 2001. “Well, if you have already offered him refuge, make sure he does not operate against the Kingdom or say anything against the Kingdom.” At that moment Turki felt quite confident, he explained, that the Taliban would take charge of “keeping his mouth shut.”

Viewed from the other side of 9/11, this seems an incredibly casual, even negligent, attitude to adopt toward the man who would become the world’s most notorious terrorist. But that was not the position that Bin Laden occupied at the end of 1996. The terrorism expert Peter Bergen has assembled the memories of journalists who went to Afghanistan to interview Osama at this time, and while their stories all play up their own personal sense of risk and danger, none of them presented the lone Saudi exile as a man who could flatten Lower Manhattan. Several of them painted him, even, as faintly mad. Railing at the world windily from remote tents and caves in the Hindu Kush, Bin Laden sounded like a crazed Don Quixote.

“Oh William,” he declared that August, addressing William Perry, the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, “tomorrow you will know which young man is confronting your misguided brethren. . . . These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained—there is only killing and neck smiting.”

Bin Laden titled his eight-thousand-word diatribe “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” It sounded ludicrous. In the context of his flight from the Sudan and his hand-to-mouth survival in Afghanistan, his antique rhetoric seemed especially full of bluster—particularly to Prince Turki, who knew just how little actual fighting “Abu Abdullah” had actually done in the 1980s jihad for which he was now claiming such credit. In the Sudan, Bin Laden had fulminated indignantly for four years and had organized training camps to little effect. Now that he was back in the chaos of Afghanistan, it did not seem to make much difference if he fulminated some more—or even opened up his camps again.

CHAPTER 22

Infinite Reach

B
y the spring of 1997 Osama Bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan for nearly a year. He had been working with the Taliban to set up a new generation of multinational jihadi training camps, and the recruits were flowing in—including a young electrical engineer from Jeddah, Khaled Al-Hubayshi.

“Go to Afghanistan,” Al-Hubayshi had been told by all the veterans he consulted. “That is the only place you can learn the real jihad.” The twenty-year-old had already tried the Philippines. In 1996 he had sold his car to finance a trip to the southern island of Mindanao, where he spent several months with Muslim separatists who were training at “Camp Vietnam.”