The Great War for Civilisation (9 page)

Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim—many Westerners in the Middle East have experienced this—to gain an adherent to the faith? Was bin Laden really trying—let us be frank—to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper—not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin—would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even—as I would contemplate just over four years later—learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire.

“Sheikh Osama,” I began, even before I had decided on my next words. “Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim.” There was silence in the tent. “I am a journalist.” No one could dispute that. “And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth.” No one would
want
to dispute that. “And that is what I intend to do in my life—to tell the truth.” Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now bin Laden's turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim,” he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved. As the old cliché goes, I “breathed again.” No deal.

Perhaps it was out of the need to curtail this episode, to cover his embarrassment at this little failure, that bin Laden suddenly and melodramatically noticed the school satchel lying beside my camera and the Lebanese newspapers partially visible inside. He seized upon them. He must read them at once. And in front of us all, he clambered across the tent with the papers in his hand to where the paraffin lamp was hissing in the corner. And there, for half an hour, ignoring almost all of us, he read his way through the Arabic press, sometimes summoning the Egyptian to read an article, at others showing a paper to one of the other gunmen in the tent. Was this really, I began to wonder, the centre of “world terror”? Listening to the spokesman at the U.S. State Department, reading the editorials in The New York
Times
or
The Washington Post
, I might have been forgiven for believing that bin Laden ran his “terror network” from a state-of-the-art bunker of computers and digitalised battle plans, flicking a switch to instruct his followers to assault another Western target. But this man seemed divorced from the outside world. Did he not have a radio? A television? Why, he didn't even know—he told me so himself after reading the papers—that the foreign minister of Iran, Ali Akbar Velayati, had visited Saudi Arabia, his own country, for the first time in more than three years.

When he returned to his place in the corner of the tent, bin Laden was businesslike. He warned the Americans of a renewed onslaught against their forces in Saudi Arabia. “We are still at the beginning of military action against them,” he said. “But we have removed the psychological obstacle against fighting the Americans . . . This is the first time in fourteen centuries that the two holy shrines are occupied by non-Islamic forces . . . ” He insisted that the Americans were in the Gulf for oil and embarked on a modern history of the region to prove this.

“Brezhnev wanted to reach the Hormuz Strait across Afghanistan for this reason, but by the grace of Allah and the jihad he was not only defeated in Afghanistan but was finished here. We carried our weapons on our shoulders here for ten years, and we and the sons of the Islamic world are prepared to carry weapons for the rest of our lives. But despite this, oil is not the direct impetus for the Americans occupying the region—they obtained oil at attractive prices before their invasion. There are other reasons, primarily the American–Zionist alliance, which is filled with fear at the power of Islam and of the land of Mecca and Medina. It fears that an Islamic renaissance will drown Israel. We are convinced that we shall kill the Jews in Palestine. We are convinced that with Allah's help, we shall triumph against the American forces. It's only a matter of numbers and time. For them to claim that they are protecting Arabia from Iraq is untrue—the whole issue of Saddam is a trick.”

There was something new getting loose here. Condemning Israel was standard fare for any Arab nationalist, let alone a man who believed he was participating in an Islamic jihad. But bin Laden was now combining America and Israel as a single country—“For us,” he said later, “there is no difference between the American and Israeli governments or between the American and Israeli soldiers”—and was talking of Jews, rather than Israeli soldiers, as his targets. How soon before all Westerners, all those from “Crusader nations,” were added to the list? He took no credit for the bombings in Riyadh and al-Khobar but praised the four men who had been accused of setting off the explosions, two of whom he admitted he had met. “I view those who did these bombings with great respect,” he said. “I consider it a great act and a major honour in which I missed the opportunity of participating.” But bin Laden was also anxious to show the support for his cause which he claimed was now growing in Pakistan. He produced newspaper clippings recording the sermons of Pakistani clerics who had condemned America's presence in Saudi Arabia and then thrust into my hands two large coloured photographs of graffiti spray-painted on walls in Karachi.

In red paint, one said: “American Forces, get out of the Gulf—The United Militant Ulemas.” Another, painted in brown, announced that “America is the biggest enemy of the Muslim world.” A large poster that bin Laden handed to me appeared to be from the same hand with similar anti-American sentiment uttered by
mawlawi
—religious scholars—in the Pakistani city of Lahore. As for the Taliban and their new, oppressive regime, bin Laden had little option but to be pragmatic. “All Islamic countries are my country,” he said. “We believe that the Taliban are sincere in their attempts to enforce Islamic sharia law. We saw the situation before they came and afterwards and have noticed a great difference and an obvious improvement.”

But when he returned to his most important struggle—against the United States—bin Laden seemed possessed. When he spoke of this, his followers in the tent hung upon his every word as if he was a messiah. He had, he said, sent faxes to King Fahd and all main departments of the Saudi government, informing them of his determination to pursue a holy struggle against the United States. He even claimed that some members of the Saudi royal family supported him, along with officers in the security services—a claim I later discovered to be true. But declaring war by fax was a new innovation and there was an eccentricity about bin Laden's perspective on American politics. At one point, he suggested in all seriousness that rising taxes in America would push many states to secede from the union, an idea that might appeal to some state governors even if it was hardly in the world of reality.

But this was a mere distraction from a far more serious threat. “We think that our struggle against America will be much simpler than that against the Soviet Union,” bin Laden said. “I will tell you something for the first time. Some of our mujahedin who fought in Afghanistan participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia and they were surprised at the collapse in American military morale. We regard America as a paper tiger.” This was a strategic error of some scale. The American retreat from its state-building mission in Somalia under President Clinton was not going to be repeated if a Republican president came to power, especially if the United States was under attack. True, over the years, the same loss of will might creep back into American military policy—Iraq would see to that—but Washington, whatever bin Laden might think, was going to be a far more serious adversary than Moscow. Yet he persisted. And I shall always remember Osama bin Laden's last words to me that night on the bare mountain: “Mr. Robert,” he said, “from this mountain upon which you are sitting, we broke the Russian army and we destroyed the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he will permit us to turn the United States into a shadow of itself.”

I sat in silence, thinking about these words as bin Laden discussed my journey back to Jalalabad with his guards. He was concerned that the Taliban—despite their “sincerity”—might object to his dispatching a foreigner through their checkpoints after dark, and so I was invited to pass the night in bin Laden's mountain camp. I was permitted to take just three photographs of him, this time by the light of the Toyota which was driven to the tent with its headlights shining through the canvas to illuminate bin Laden's face. He sat in front of me, expressionless, a stone figure, and in the pictures I developed in Beirut three days later he was a purple-and-yellow ghost. He said goodbye without much ceremony, a brief handshake and a nod, and vanished from the tent, and I lay down on the mattress with my coat over me to keep warm. The men with their guns sitting around slept there too, while others armed with rifles and rocket-launchers patrolled the low ridges around the camp.

In the years to come, I would wonder who they were. Was the Egyptian Mohamed Atta among those young men in the tent? Or Abdul Aziz Alomari? Or any other of the nineteen men whose names we would all come to know just over four years later? I cannot remember their faces now, cowled as they were, many of them, in their scarves.

Exhaustion and cold kept me awake. “A shadow of itself” was the expression that kept repeating itself to me. What did bin Laden and these dedicated, ruthless men have in store for us? I recall the next few hours like a freeze-frame film; waking so cold there was ice in my hair, slithering back down the mountain trail in the Toyota with one of the Algerian gunmen in the back telling me that if we were in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under bin Laden's orders to protect me and thus would give his life for me. The three men in the back and my driver stopped the jeep on the broken-up Kabul–Jalalabad highway to say their dawn
fajr
prayers. Beside the broad estuary of the Kabul River, they spread their mats and knelt as the sun rose over the mountains. Far to the north-east, I could see the heights of the Hindu Kush glimmering a pale white under an equally pale blue sky, touching the border of China that nuzzled into the wreckage of a land that was to endure yet more suffering in the coming years. Hills and rocks and water and ancient trees and old mountains, this was the world before the age of man.

And I remember driving back with bin Laden's men into Jalalabad past the barracks where the Taliban stored their captured arms and, just a few minutes later, hearing the entire store—of shells, anti-tank rockets, Stinger missiles, explosives and mines—exploding in an earthquake that shook the trees in the laneway outside the Spinghar Hotel and sprinkled us with tiny pieces of metal and torn pages from American manuals instructing “users” on how to aim missiles at aircraft. More than ninety civilians were ripped to bits by the accidental explosion—did a Taliban throw the butt of a cigarette, a lonely and unique item of enjoyment, into the ammunition?—and then the Algerian walked up to me in tears and told me that his best friend had just perished in the explosion. Bin Laden's men, I noted, can also cry.

But most of all I remember the first minutes after our departure from bin Laden's camp. It was still dark when I caught sight of a great light in the mountains to the north. For a while I thought it was the headlights of another vehicle, another security signal from the camp guards to our departing Toyota. But it hung there for many minutes and I began to realise that it was burning above the mountains and carried a faintly incandescent trail. The men in the vehicle were watching it too. “It is Halley's comet,” one of them said. He was wrong. It was a newly discovered comet, noticed for the first time only two years earlier by Americans Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, but I could see how Hale–Bopp had become Halley to these Arab men in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was soaring above us now, trailing a golden tail, a sublime power moving at 70,000 kilometres an hour through the heavens.

So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qaeda men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. “Mr. Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?” It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. “It means that there is going to be a great war.” And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.

CHAPTER TWO

“They Shoot Russians”

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier”

LESS THAN SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War. “Presented to Willie By his Mother” is written in thick pencil inside the front cover. “Date Sat. 24th January 1914, for another.” “Willie” would have been almost fifteen years old. Only after my father's death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross—“For Valour,” it says on the medal—and, on the spine, a soldier in red coat and peaked white tropical hat with a rifle in his hands. I never found out the meaning of the cryptic reference “for another.” But years later, I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900 by Thomas Nelson and Sons, it tells the story of the son of a mine-owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father's sudden impoverishment, joins the British Army under-age. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit at Buttevant in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland—he even kisses the Blarney Stone, conferring upon himself the supposed powers of persuasive eloquence contained in that much blessed rock—and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War, where he is gazetted a second lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father's grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that he will lead “a pure, clean, and upright life.”

The story is typical of my father's generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. But reading it, I was struck by some remarkable parallels. My own father, Bill Fisk—the “Willie” of the dedication almost a century ago—was also taken from school in a northern English port because his father, Edward, was no longer able to support him. He too became an apprentice clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he wrote before his death, Bill recalled that he had tried to join the British Army under-age; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, eleven days after the start of Britain's involvement in the First World War. Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment in Cork in Ireland, not long after the 1916 Easter Rising. There is even a pale photograph of my father in my archives, kissing the Blarney Stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a second lieutenant in the King's Liverpool Regiment. Was he consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

The rest of the novel is a disturbing tale of colour prejudice, xenophobia and outright anti-Muslim hatred during the Second Afghan War. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion had naturally focused upon Afghanistan, whose unmarked frontiers had become the indistinct front lines between imperial Russia and the British Indian Raj. The principal victims of the “Great Game,” as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistan—there was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britain—were, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting point—between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East—and a battlefield.
³
A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistan's first king, Dost Mohamed, to receive a Russian mission in Kabul after his re-accession in 1868 led directly to what the British were to call the Second Afghan War. The First Afghan War had led to the annihilation of the British army in the Kabul Gorge in 1842, in the same dark crevasse through which I drove at night on my visit to Osama bin Laden in 1997. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, Shir Ali's son Yaqub Khan agreed to allow a permanent British embassy to be established in Kabul, but within four months the British envoy and his staff were murdered in their diplomatic compound. The British Army was sent back to Afghanistan.

In Bill Fisk's novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawar— now in Pakistan, then in India—Graham encounters Pathan tribesmen, “a villainous lot . . . most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer.” Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet “up to the nozzle” into the chest of an Afghan, a “swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate.” In the Kurram Valley, Graham and his “chums”—a word my father used about his comrades in the First World War—fight off “infuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder.” When General Sir Frederick Roberts—later Lord Roberts of Kandahar—agrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with “as wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined.” The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, “their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form.” When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, “a thrill of satisfaction” goes through the ranks of Graham's comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.

Afghans are thus a “villainous lot,” “fanatics,” “rascals,” “fiends in human form,” meat for British bayonets—or “toasting forks” as the narrative cheerfully calls them. It gets worse. A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the words “that will scatter the flies.” The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. “Boy readers,” the author pontificates, “may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878–80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise.” After Tom Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans—in the words of his Irish-born army doctor—have become “murtherin villains, the black niggers.”

When the British suffer defeat at the battle of Maiwand, on a grey desert west of Kandahar, an officer orders his men to “have your bayonets ready, and wait for the niggers.” There is no reference in the book to the young Afghan woman, Malalai, who—seeing the Afghans briefly retreating—tore her veil from her head and led a charge against her enemies, only to be cut down by British bullets. That, of course, is part of Afghan—not British—history. When victory is finally claimed by the British at Kandahar, Tom Graham wins his Victoria Cross.

From “villains” to “flies” and “niggers” in one hundred pages, it's not difficult to see how easily my father's world of “pure, clean and upright” Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the “boldness” of Afghan tribesmen—and just one to their “courage”—no attempt is made to explain their actions. They are evil, hate-filled, anxious to prove their Muslim faith by “cutting pieces out of the unfortunate Britisher.” The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country simply does not exist in the story.

If official British accounts of Afghanistan were not so prejudiced, they nevertheless maintained the oversimplified and supremacist view of the Afghans that Johnston used to such effect in his novel. An account of life in Kabul between 1836 and 1838 by Lt. Col. Sir Alexander Burnes of the East India Company— published the year of the massacre of the British Army in 1842—gives a sensitive portrayal of the generosity of tribal leaders and demonstrates a genuine interest in Afghan customs and social life. But by the end of the century, the official
Imperial
Gazetteer of India
chooses to describe the animals of Afghanistan before it reports on its people, who are “handsome and athletic . . . inured to bloodshed from childhood . . . treacherous and passionate in revenge . . . ignorant of everything connected with their religion beyond its most elementary doctrines . . . ”

Among the young Britons who accompanied the army to Kabul in 1879—a real Briton, this time—was a twenty-nine-year-old civil servant, Henry Mortimer Durand, who had been appointed political secretary to General Roberts. In horror, he read the general's proclamation to the people of Kabul, declaring the murder of the British mission diplomats “a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people.” The followers of Yaqub Khan, General Roberts declared, would not escape and their “punishment should be such as will be felt and remembered . . . all persons convicted of bearing a part in [the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts.” It was a Victorian version of the warning that an American president would give to the Afghans 122 years later.

Durand, a humane and intelligent man, confronted Roberts over his proclamation. “It seemed to me so utterly wrong in tone and in matter that I determined to do my utmost to overthrow it . . . the stilted language, and the absurd affectation of preaching historical morality to the Afghans, all our troubles with whom began by our own abominable injustice, made the paper to my mind most dangerous for the General's reputation.” Roberts ameliorated the text, not entirely to Durand's satisfaction. He thought it merely “a little less objectionable.”

Yet Durand sent a letter to his biographer's sister, Ella Sykes, which provided gruesome evidence that
Tom Graham
contained all too real descriptions of Afghan cruelty. “During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec.r 1879,” he wrote almost sixteen years after the event, “two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives . . . I saw it all . . . ” But Durand was well aware that the Afghans were not the “fiends in human form” of popular fiction. In 1893, he describes the Afghan army commander, Ghulam Hyder, as an inquisitive and generous man.

Today we talked about the size of London, and how it was supplied with food . . . about religious prejudices, the hatred of Sunnis and Shias, the Reformation and the Inquisition, the Musselman [
sic
] and Christian stories of Christ's life and death, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and his wars, about which Ghulam Hyder knew a good deal, the manners of the Somalis, tiger shooting . . .

Durand had been sent to negotiate with the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman—a nephew of Shir Ali—over the southern border of his country, to secure an agreed frontier between British India and Afghanistan. Durand's brother Edward had already helped to delineate the country's northern frontier with Russia—during which the Russians sent a force of Cossacks to attack Afghan troops on the Kushk River—and Mortimer Durand found the king deeply unsympathetic to his northern neighbour. According to Durand's notes, Abdur Rahman announced that

unless you drive me into enmity, I am your friend for my life. And why? The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkmenistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join with them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I
hate
them.

Eighty-six years later, the Russians would find out what this meant.

I SAW THEM FIRST, those Russians, standing beside their T-72 tanks next to the runways at Kabul airport, fleece-lined jackets below white-pink faces with thick grey fur hats bearing the red star and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The condensation of their breath hung so thickly in the air in front of their mouths that I looked for cartoon quotations in the bubbles. On the trucks parked beside the highway into the city, they wore the steel helmets so familiar from every Second World War documentary, the green metal casks with ripples over the ears, rifles in gloved hands, narrowed eyes searching the Afghans unflinchingly. They drew heavily and quickly on cigarettes, a little grey smog over each checkpoint. So these were the descendants of the men of Stalingrad and Kursk, the heroes of Rostov and Leningrad and Berlin. On the tarmac of the airport, there were at least seventy of the older T-62s. The snow lay thickly over the tanks, icing sugar on cakes of iron, enough to break the teeth of any Afghan “terrorist.”

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, but when I arrived two weeks later their armour was still barrelling down through the slush from the Amu Darya River, the Oxus of antiquity, which Edward Durand had agreed with the Russians should be the northern frontier of this frost-covered land. Save for a few isolated cities, the Soviet army appeared to have crushed all resistance. Along the highways south and east of Kabul, Russian military encampments protected by dozens of tanks and heavy artillery controlled the arteries between the rebellious provinces of south-eastern Afghanistan. An “intervention,” Leonid Brezhnev had called his invasion, peace-loving assistance to the popular socialist government of the newly installed Afghan president Babrak Karmal.