The Great War for Civilisation (8 page)

Another of the Arab men in the camp disputed bin Laden's assertion that this was only one of several Muslim countries in which he could find refuge. “There is no other country left for Mr. bin Laden,” he said politely. “When he was in Sudan, the Saudis wanted to capture him with the help of Yemenis. We know that the French government tried to persuade the Sudanese to hand him over to them because the Sudanese had given them the South American.” (This was “Carlos the Jackal.”) “The Americans were pressing the French to get hold of bin Laden in Sudan. An Arab group which was paid by the Saudis tried to kill him and they shot at him but bin Laden's guards fired back and two of the men were wounded. The same people also tried to murder Turabi.” The Egyptian listened to this in silence. “Yes, the country is very dangerous,” he said. “The Americans are trying to block the route to Afghanistan for the Arabs. I prefer the mountains. I feel safer there. This place is semi-Beirut.”

Not for long. Within nine months, I would be back in a transformed, still more sinister Afghanistan, its people governed with a harsh and ignorant piety that even bin Laden could not have imagined. Again, there had come the telephone call to Beirut, the invitation to see “our friend,” the delay—quite deliberate on my part— before setting off yet again for Jalalabad. This time, the journey was a combination of farce and incredulity. There were no more flights from Delhi so I flew first to the emirate of Dubai. “Fly to Jalalabad?” my Indian travel agent there asked me. “You have to contact ‘Magic Carpet.' ” He was right. “Magic Carpet Travel”—in a movie, the name would never have got past the screenplay writers
²
—was run by a Lebanese who told me to turn up at 8:30 the next morning at the heat-bleached old airport in the neighbouring and much poorer emirate of Sharjah, to which Ariana Afghan Airlines had now been sent in disgrace. Sharjah played host to a flock of pariah airlines that flew from the Gulf to Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Tajikistan and a number of obscure Iranian cities. My plane to Jalalabad was the same old Boeing 727, but now in a state of much-reduced circumstances, cruelly converted into a freight carrier.

The crew were all Afghans—bushy-bearded to a man, since the Taliban had just taken over Afghanistan and ordered men to stop shaving—and did their best to make me comfortable in the lone and grubby passenger seat at the front. “Safety vest under seat,” was written behind the lavatory. There was no vest. And the toilet was running with faeces, a fearful stench drifting over the cargo of ball-bearings and textiles behind me. On take-off, a narrow tide of vile-smelling liquid washed out of the lavatory and ran down the centre of the aircraft. “Don't worry, you're in safe hands,” one of the crew insisted as we climbed through the turbulence, introducing me to a giant of a man with a black-and-white beard who kept grinding his teeth and wringing his hands on a damp cloth. “This,” he said, “is our senior flight maintenance engineer.” Over the Spinghar Mountains, the engineer at last sniffed the smell from the toilet, entered the tiny cubicle with a ratchet and attacked the plumbing. By the time we landed at the old airstrip at Jalalabad, I was ready to contemplate the overland journey home.

The immigration officer, a teenager with a Kalashnikov, was so illiterate that he drew a square and a circle in my upside-down passport because he couldn't write his own name. The airline crew offered me a lift on their bus into Jalalabad, the same dusty frontier town I remembered from the previous July but this time with half its population missing. There were no women. Just occasionally I would catch sight of them, cowled and burqa-ed in their shrouds, sometimes holding the hands of tiny children. The campus gates of Nangarhar University were chained shut, the pathways covered in grass, the dormitories dripping rain water. “The Taliban say they will reopen the university this week,” the post office clerk told me. “But what's the point? All the teachers have left. The women can no longer be educated. It's back to Year Zero.”

Not quite, of course. For the first time in years, there was no shooting in Jalalabad. The guns had been collected by the Taliban—only to go up in smoke a few days later in a devastating explosion that almost killed me—but there was a kind of law that had been imposed on this angry, tribal society. Humanitarian workers could travel around the town at night—which may be why some of them argued that they could “do business” with the Taliban and had no right to interfere in “traditional culture.” Robberies were almost unknown. While prices were rising, at least there were now vegetables and meat in the market.

The Taliban had finally vanquished twelve of the fifteen venal Afghan mujahedin militias in all but the far north-eastern corner of the country and imposed their own stark legitimacy on its people. It was a purist, Sunni Wahhabi faith whose interpretation of sharia law recalled the most draconian of early Christian prelates. Head-chopping, hand-chopping and a totally misogynist perspective were easy to associate with the Taliban's hostility towards all forms of enjoyment. The Spinghar Hotel used to boast an old American television set that had now been hidden in a garden shed for fear of destruction. Television sets, like videotapes and thieves, tended to end up hanging from trees. “What do you expect?” the gardener asked me near the ruins of the old royal winter palace in Jalalabad. “The Taliban came from the refugee camps. They are giving us only what they had.” And it dawned on me then that the new laws of Afghanistan—so anachronistic and brutal to us, and to educated Afghans—were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before.

The Taliban gunmen had grown up as refugees in these diseased camps in Pakistan. Their first sixteen years of life were passed in blind poverty, deprived of all education and entertainment, imposing their own deadly punishments, their mothers and sisters kept in subservience as the men decided how to fight their foreign oppressors on the other side of the border, their only diversion a detailed and obsessive reading of the Koran—the one and true path in a world in which no other could be contemplated. The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale. Hence there was to be no education. No television. Women must stay at home, just as they stayed in their tents in Peshawar. Thus it was to be at the airport when I eventually left; another immigration officer now, perhaps only fifteen, was wearing make-up on his face—he, like many Algerians who fought in Afghanistan, was convinced the Prophet wore kohl around his eyes in Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. He refused to stamp my passport because I had no exit visa— even though exit visas did not exist in Jalalabad. But I had broken a greater rule. I wasn't wearing a beard. The boy pointed at my chin and shook his head in admonition, a child-schoolmaster who knew wickedness when he saw it and directed me towards the old plane on the runway with contempt.

On the lawn of the Spinghar Hotel, two children approached me, one a fourteen-year-old with a pile of exercise books. In one of the books, in poor English, was a hand-written grammar test. “Insert the cerrect [
sic
] voice,” it demanded: “ ‘He . . . going home.' Insert: ‘had'/‘was'/‘will.' ” I gently inserted “was” and corrected “cerrect.” Was this the new education of the Afghan poor? But at least the boys were being taught a foreign language at their pitiful school. The smaller child even had a Persian grammar which told—inevitably—of the life of the Prophet Mohamed. But girl pupils there were none. One afternoon during the same dreary days of waiting, when I was sitting on the porch drinking tea, a woman in a pale blue burqa walked slowly up the driveway muttering to herself. She turned left into the gardens but made a detour towards me. She was moaning, her voice rising and falling like a seagull, weeping and sobbing. She obviously wanted the foreigner to hear this most sombre of protests. Then she entered the rose garden.

Did we care? At that very moment, officials of Unocal (the Union Oil Company of California) and its Central Asian Oil Pipeline Project were negotiating with the Taliban to secure rights for a pipeline to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan; in September 1996, the U.S. State Department had announced that it would open diplomatic relations with the Taliban, only to retract the statement later. Among Unocal's employees were Zalmay Khalilzad—five years later, he would be appointed President George W. Bush's special envoy to “liberated” Afghanistan—and a Pushtun leader called Hamid Karzai. No wonder Afghans adopted an attitude of suspicion towards the United States. America's allies originally supported bin Laden against the Russians. Then the United States turned bin Laden into their Public Enemy Number One—a post that was admittedly difficult to retain in the Pentagon wheel of fortune, since new monsters were constantly being discovered by Washington, often in inverse proportion to its ability to capture the old ones. Now the Taliban were being courted. But for how long? Could bin Laden, an Arab whose political goals were infinitely more ambitious than the Taliban's, maintain the integrity of his exile alongside men who wished only to repress their own people? Would the Taliban protect bin Laden any more courageously than had the failed Islamic Republic of Sudan?

ON THE MOUNTAINSIDE, THE MACHINE continued his search of the machine. There was a cold moon now and, when the mist did not conceal its light, I could see the tall man's tight lips and the sunken hollows of his cheeks beneath his shades. On the frozen mountainside, he opened the school satchel that I always carry in rough countries and fingered through my passport, press cards, notebooks, the pile of old Lebanese and Gulf newspapers inside. He took my Nikon camera from its bag. He flicked open the back, checked the auto-drive and then knelt on the stones by my camera-bag and opened each plastic carton of film. Then he put them all neatly back into the bag, snapped the camera shut, switched off the auto-drive and handed me the bag.
Shukran
, I said. Again, no reply. He turned to the driver and nodded and we drove on up the ice track. We were now at 5,000 feet. More lights flashed until we turned a corner past a massive boulder and there before us in the moonlight lay a small valley. There were grass and trees and a stream of unfrozen water that curled through it and a clutch of tents under a cliff. Two men approached. There were more formal Arab greetings, my right hand in both of theirs. Trust us. That was always the intention of these greetings. An Algerian who spoke fluent French and an Egyptian, they invited me to tour this little valley.

We washed our hands in the stream and walked over the stiff grass towards a dark gash in the cliff face above us. As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could make out a vast rectangle in the side of the mountain, a 6-metres-high air-raid shelter cut into the living rock by bin Laden's men during the Russian war. “It was for a hospital,” the Egyptian said. “We brought our mujahedin wounded here and they were safe from any Russian plane. No one could bomb us. We were safe.” I walked into this man-made cave, the Algerian holding a torch, until I could hear my own crunching footsteps echoing softly from the depths of the tunnel. When we emerged, the moon was almost dazzling, the valley bathed in its white light, another little paradise of trees and water and mountain peaks.

The tent I was taken to was military issue, a khaki tarpaulin roped to iron stakes, a flap as an entrance, a set of stained mattresses on the floor. There was tea in a large steel pot and I sat with the Egyptian and Algerian and with three other men who had entered the tent with Kalashnikovs. We waited for perhaps half an hour, the Algerian slowly acknowledging under my questioning that he was a member of the “Islamic resistance” to the Algerian military regime. I spoke of my own visits to Algeria, the ability of the Islamists to fight on in the mountains and the
bled
—the countryside—against the government troops, much as the Algerian FLN had done against the French army in the 1954–62 war of independence. The Algerian liked this comparison—I had intended that he should—and I made no mention of my suspicion that he belonged to the Islamic Armed Group, the GIA, which was blamed by the government for the massacres of throat-cutting and dismemberment that had stained the last four years of Algeria's history.

There was a sudden scratching of voices outside the tent, thin and urgent like the soundtrack of an old movie. Then the flap snapped up and bin Laden walked in, dressed in a turban and green robes. I stood up, half bent under the canvas, and we shook hands, both of us forced by the tarpaulin that touched our heads to greet each other like Ottoman pashas, bowed and looking up into the other's face. Again, he looked tired, and I had noticed a slight limp when he walked into the tent. His beard was greyer, his face thinner than I remembered it. Yet he was all smiles, almost jovial, placing the rifle which he had carried into the tent on the mattress to his left, insisting on more tea for his guest. For several seconds he looked at the ground. Then he looked at me with an even bigger smile, beneficent and, I thought at once, very disturbing.

“Mr. Robert,” he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. “Mr. Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim.”

This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood bin Laden's meaning a split second each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently staring at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the “brother.” I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the “dream” lest I suggest bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me—that I should accept this “dream” as a prophecy and a divine instruction—might be fulfilled. For this man—and these men—to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice—for them to regard me as honest—that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply.