Intercept (6 page)

The city itself represents one of the world’s most dramatic clashes of the ancient and modern. Motorized rickshaws are all over the place, high-powered modern businessmen abound. Every other person is walking around with a cell phone stuck to his ear. The armada of modern auto - mobiles swamps the camel drovers. You can smell the exhaust pollution on the warm summer winds. . . .

And yet, the heady call of an ancient culture pervades the atmosphere, especially in the teeming bazaars in the warren of the old city. The air at all times is thick with the smell of grilling kebabs, and the majority of people are dressed traditionally in baggy pants and long robes, turbans, and Afghan hats. The presence of women is rare.

Great samovars dispense vast quantities of
qawa
, that delicious green tea with cardamom and lemon, which has refreshed the Pathan and Pashtun tribes for thousands of years. They pour it into little enameled pots, and fleet-footed boys race through the crowds to deliver these pots to prosperous-looking local merchants.

Some of these families have trading connections established over hundreds of years, stretching as far afield as Shanghai and St. Petersburg. At
various intervals there are great houses built around courtyards with overhanging balconies, some of them owned by Peshawar’s merchant classes, others are further reminders of the Raj.

Behind one of these high-walled residences on a hot morning in late June 2008, a solemn gathering of five men sat quietly sipping tea beside the fountain on the shady southern wall of the courtyard. The house, approached through a dark alleyway leading directly to the
Andar Shehr,
belonged to Shakir Khan, a ranking government official in the assembly of the North West Frontier Province. He was accompanied by his assistant, thirty-year-old Kaiser Rashid, whose two brothers were both decorated Taliban commanders.

All of them had been born in the Swat Valley in the river town of Madyan, including Shakir Khan himself. The other two men, Ahmed and Gholam Azzan, were brothers, Afghanis by birth, forward commanders and assault instructors in al-Qaeda. Ahmed was thirty-eight years old, the senior brother by two years. He had served bin Laden faithfully through all the years of jihad and intended to continue doing so, whether or not The Sheikh had died in the U.S. onslaught on Tora Bora. Very few people had a definitive answer to that.

The last of the five was Captain Musa Amin, commander of a small Taliban army of perhaps two hundred warriors that operated in the Hindu Kush, harassing, and killing any U.S. military personnel with whom they closed to striking range. The Americans, however, had grown distinctly fed up with the activities of Captain Amin, and had very nearly wiped out his entire force in an ambush conducted in the mountains, ten thousand feet above sea level.

Amin, now forty, had fought valiantly on the ground, but the American bombing and rocket fire, as so often in the high escarpments, had been too tough. Amin had fled the Navy SEAL clean-up parties that swooped down onto the battlefield in the aftermath of the attack. Badly wounded, he had slowly made his way from village to village until, finally, he crossed the Pakistan border, and reached the Kachikani Pass, gateway to the northern end of the Swat Valley.

In the months that followed, his wounds had healed, and he had found his way into one of the al-Qaeda training camps, right here in the cradle of the jihadist movement. What also healed was his spirit, for Captain Amin had been terrified of the U.S. onslaught on his troops, and had doubted whether he would ever fight again.

His search for protection had not been easy, for he could not just present himself, bloodstained and shot, at any village house and demand help. He represented too much of a liability, and the Americans were everywhere. Inevitably he worked his way back into the embrace of his own kind, fellow terrorists who welcomed, and indeed lionized, him.

Such was Amin’s celebrity, the camp commandant realized that the Captain outranked him, both in experience and intellect. Within weeks he was appointed by the elders as the camp’s commanding officer. And he swiftly slipped back into the old routines, training the young Pashtuns from across the border, and recruiting young Pathans from the Pakistan side.

His new somewhat exalted status brought him into contact with al-Qaeda’s high command, and, at least on the eastern side of the border, there was no one much higher than Shakir Khan, who was rich beyond reason, as are many government officials in that part of the world.

Shakir was no warrior, but he was the negotiator for illegal arms from Iran. He was the man who arranged the innocent-looking camel trains to haul the dynamite and the rockets and the Kalashnikovs up the through the passes under the pretence of honest traders.

Shakir too had been bin Laden’s banker, receiving the payments from Saudi Arabia, laundering the money, and funneling it through to The Sheikh for distribution, all the while extracting ten percent for himself.

Osama knew perfectly well that Shakir was a villain, but he was priceless in his position as a highly placed member of the government of the Northwest Frontier. His position alone meant cast-iron protection for those training camps, and a complete absence of intruders, including those from the United States armed forces.

Conversation in the courtyard centered around the usual topic, which had more or less consumed al-Qaeda for many years—the crying need for a better officer class. The men who now ran the organization had often been reckless in deploying young lieutenants after the massacre in Tora Bora. And these insurgents had died by the dozen in the hot, dusty backstreets of Baghdad and Basra, Gaza and Kabul, anywhere they decided to launch assaults on the Americans, British, or Israelis.

The result had been a chronic shortage of trained leaders, and, naturally, the lower the standards of military competence fell, the worse al-Qaeda’s casualty rate became. They had never succeeded in hitting the United States again in all the years of the Bush presidency simply because
they did not have the senior staff officers to pull it off. They kept getting caught, over and over, by either the CIA, the FBI, British MI6, or the Mossad. And without the super-cunning hand of Osama to guide them, things had gone from bad to worse.

They had opened more training camps in the Swat Valley, but as the memory of the World Trade Center began to fade, young men of fifteen and sixteen were turning up with scarcely a memory of Osama’s Day of Glory. Like the U.S. Navy SEALs, Osama’s army promotes top combat troops into instructors, and the five men in the courtyard had been mulling over this obvious weakness in their indoctrination system for the past three hours.

The critical point was the lack of forward commanders returning from various battlefields. Half of them had been grabbed from the field of conflict and shipped to Guantanamo Bay. The other half died in action, shot while trying to blow up their U.S. enemy. Also, when the men from the mountains were forced to spill the beans in the hot, brightly lit interrogation rooms at Guantanamo, the Americans tended to strike hard, using whatever information they had gleaned.

The result was a series of sudden, merciless rocket attacks on several of Osama’s safehouses, and the instant death of literally dozens of al-Qaeda warriors trying to make their way back into the Hindu Kush and the Swat Valley, for the onward progression of the jihad.

Right now there were two camps a few miles south of Kalam, right on the river, which were essentially closed for training owing to this shortage of instructors. The five men talked endlessly about the Valley, and the need for a Big Plan, a major strike against the West. And they talked of the crushing defeats in Baghdad, the disappointments of the Ayatollahs in Iran, and the overwhelming desire they had for another Great Victory.

And, as ever, they talked of the possible return of young leaders still incarcerated in Guantanamo. In particular, Captain Amin had begged Allah, at mid-morning prayers, for the safe return one day of his beloved nephew, Ibrahim Sharif, the only son of his own sister Anandi:

The clock high on the ramparts of the Cunningham Tower stood at two minutes after 1 p.m., and all five men had heard its single resonant chime, the same metalic clang which had tolled out the hour after midday and midnight since the year 1900 when the tower was completed to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the reign of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Empress of India, and ruler of the Domains Beyond the Seas, including Peshawar.

The great bell’s haughty echo of the old empire had scarcely died away on the warm mountain wind when sound came from the side door of the courtyard that led out into the alleyway—three sharp taps and then a pause, then two more and another pause, then a single crack on the heavy wooden gate. The entrance code was accurate. Whoever wanted entry was an insider.

Kaiser Rashid was on his feet in an instant, drawing his curved combat knife as he walked toward the gate. He peered through a small glass peep-hole, smiled, re-sheathed his knife, and drew back the two black cast-iron bolts that barred the door. Outside stood an elderly Pathan tribesman, with a hard, nut-brown, wrinkled face, holding the reins of his camel.

He and Kaiser exchanged the traditional Muslim greeting, bowing their heads and touching their foreheads, before bringing down their hands in an arc, the gesture of respect:

He handed Kaiser a brown sealed envelope, and added, “From Islamabad, e-mail from the USA. I left last night.”

“Will you stay for dinner? You must be tired. I’ll have someone take care of the camel.”

“I cannot today. I have to keep going, up to the Valley. This is important news.”

Kaiser said he understood, and wished him well before closing and bolting the gate.

Shakir Khan opened the envelope and stared at the message. “Allah has heard our cries,” he said softly. “And now He has answered our prayers. The Americans have given in to world pressure and allowed our poor brave jihadists at last to be taken from the Guantanamo Hell, to stand before a civilian court of justice and demand either a fair trial or liberty, the rights of every man.”

Captain Amin stood up and raised his eyes to the sky. He clasped his hands together and called to the azure blue heavens above the northwest frontier, “Allah is great. Ibrahim and his friends will come home. God has heard our plea. Almighty God, you have saved them from the oppressor!”

Shakir Khan held in his hand a printout of the Supreme Court verdict. Carefully he read out the words of Justice Kennedy, the ones that rendered jihadist terrorists regular rights like any other U.S. citizen . . . the words that had appalled the president himself. Not to mention all of his key military and civilian security advisors.

“Why has this Kennedy person done this? Does he believe in our cause? Is he a traitor to America?” Kaiser Rashid was astounded.

So was the far more sophisticated Shakir Khan. “My son,” he said, “the Americans are sometimes difficult to understand. They have big smiles and strike with weapons that would terrify the Prophet himself. They will kill us without mercy. All of you can bear witness to that. And yet there is a side to them that is inexplicable. As if they are ashamed of their own land, and laws, and people. They have fits of conscience, and try to atone for things that cannot be corrected. In the end they must lose our Holy War on them. Because they are soft, and too often they do not have the steel of the true warrior within them. They do not have the stomach for the fight. They are like poor, weak, pitiful women, and now they have invented a way to let loose our top warriors from captivity.”

“Does this mean they are tired of the conflict?” asked Kaiser.

“Of course they are,” replied Khan. “But we are not tired. This is a long war, and we will not rest until the American Infidel heeds the word of the Prophet and understands that Allah alone is great.”

Captain Amin spoke next. “Either that, or he lies dead at our feet,” said the uncle of Ibrahim Sharif.

THEY PASSED THE COMMUNICATION
from hand to hand—five robed native tribesmen staring at the verdict written seven thousand miles away in Washington, DC, by Justice Kennedy on behalf of the Supreme Court of the United States.

No one spoke. The only sound was from the water softly splashing in the courtyard fountain. Ali’s camel, which had born the stunning news north through the dangerous mountain passes from the army city of Kohat, had padded silently away, down the alleyway, and into the streets of Peshawar.

The Azzam brothers and Captain Musa could only ask for clarity, to help them understand the ramifications of the American judgment. Kaiser Rashid, Khan’s assistant, who had studied law in London, tried his best.

“The important part,” he said, “Is the writ of
habeas corpus.”

“Which language is that?” asked Captain Amin.

“It’s Latin,” said Kaiser. “Most Western law traces back to the Romans.”

“How about ours?”

“Older. Much older.”

“Did we have
habeas corpus?”

“I’m not sure we needed it, Captain. We were well organized thousands of years before The Prophet.”

“Hmmm,” said Amin. “Anyway I still don’t understand what it is.”

“It means, literally,
thou shalt have the body,
meaning an appearance in court. The writ requires the person to be brought physically before a
judge or a court, with the right to explain why he should be released from captivity.”