The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

They represented every contradiction of the Arab world in a city whose British colonial architecture – of low-roofed arched villas amid bougainvillea, of tired, hot government offices and mouldering police stations – existed alongside equally dated revolutionary slogans. The waters of the Blue and White Niles joined here, the permanent way-station between the Arab world and tropical Africa, and Sudan’s transition through thirteen years of nationalist rule – the mahdiya – sixty years of British-dominated government from Cairo and almost forty years of fractious independence gave the country a debilitated, exhausted, unresolved identity. Was it Islamic – after independence, the umma party was run by the son and grandsons of the Mahdi – or did the military regimes that took over after 1969 mean that Sudan was for ever socialist?

Turabi was trying to act as intermediary between Arafat, who had just signed the Oslo accord with Israel, and his antagonists in the Arab world – which meant just about everybody – and might have been making an unsubtle attempt to wipe Sudan off Washington’s ‘state terrorism’ list by persuading Hamas and Islamic Jihad to support Arafat. ‘I personally know Arafat very well,’ Turabi insisted. ‘He is a close friend of mine. He was an Islamist once, you know, and then slowly moved into the Arab “club”… He spoke to me before he signed [the accord with Israel]. He came here to Sudan. And I am now putting his case to the others – not as something that is right, but as something of necessity. What could Arafat do? He ran out of money. His army stopped. There were the refugees, the 10,000 prisoners in Israeli jails. Even a municipality is better than nothing.’

But if ‘Palestine’ was to be a municipality, where did that leave the Arabs? In need, surely, of a leader who did not speak in this language of surrender; in need of a warrior leader, someone who had proved he could defeat a superpower. Was this not what the Mahdi had believed himself to be? Did the Mahdi not ask his fighters on the eve of their attack on Khartoum whether they would advance against General Gordon even if two-thirds of them should perish? But like almost every other Arab state, Sudan recreated itself in a looking glass for the benefit of its own leaders. Khartoum was the ‘capital city of virtues’, or so the large street banners claimed it to be that December. Sometimes the word ‘virtues’ was substituted with the word ‘values’, which was not quite the same thing.

But then nothing in Sudan was what it seemed. The railhead, broiling in the midday heat, did not suggest an Islamic Republic in the making. Nor did the squads of soldiers in jungle green drowsing in the shade of a broken station building while two big artillery pieces stood on a freight platform, waiting to be loaded onto a near-derelict train for the civil war in the south. Britain had long favoured the separate development of the Christian south of Sudan from which the Arabic language and Muslim religion were largely excluded – until independence, when London suddenly decided that Sudan’s territorial integrity was more important than the separate development which they had so long encouraged. The minority in the south rebelled and their insurrection was now the central and defining feature of Sudanese life.

The authorities in Khartoum would one day have to explain a detailed list of civil war atrocities which had been handed to the United Nations in 1993 and which were to form the subject of a UN report the following year. Eyewitness testimonies spoke of rape, pillage and murder in the southern province of Bahr al-Gazal as well as the continuing abduction of thousands of southern children on the capital’s streets. According to the documents, the most recent atrocities occurred the previous July when the Sudanese army drove a railway train loaded with locally hired militiamen through territory held by the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Under the orders of an officer referred to in the papers as Captain Ginat – commander of the People’s Defence Force camp in the town of Muglad in southern Kordofan and a member of the Sudanese government council in the southern city of Wo – the militias were let loose on Dinka tribal villages along the length of the railway, destroying every village to a depth of ten miles on each side of the track, killing the men, raping the women and stealing thousands of head of cattle. Evidence taken from tribesmen who fled the village without their families included details of the slaughter of a Christian wedding party of 300 people near the Lol river. The documents the UN had obtained also alleged that government troops, along with loyal tribal militias, massacred large numbers of southern Dinkas in a displaced persons’ camp at Meiran the previous February.

This was not, therefore, a country known for its justice or civil rights or liberty. True, delegates to the Islamic summit were encouraged to speak their minds. Mustafa Cerić, the Imam of Bosnia whose people were enduring a genocide at the hands of their Serb neighbours, was eloquent in his condemnation of the UN’s peacekeeping intervention in his country. I had met him in Sarajevo a year earlier when he had accused the West of imposing an arms embargo on Bosnian forces ‘solely because we are Muslims’, and his cynicism retained all its integrity in Khartoum. ‘You sent your English troops and we thank you for that,’ he told me. ‘But now you will not give us arms to defend ourselves against the Chetniks [Serbs] because you say this will spread the war and endanger the soldiers you sent to help us.’ Cerić was a man who could make others feel the need for humility.

Thus even Sudan’s summit had become a symbol of the humiliation of Muslims, of Arabs, of all the revolutionary Islamists and nationalists and generals who dominated the ‘modern’ Middle East. The Hizballah delegates from Lebanon took me aside one night to reveal the fragility of the regime. ‘We were invited to dinner on a boat on the Nile with Turabi,’ one of them told me. ‘We cruised up and down the river for a while and I noticed the government guards on both banks watching us. Then suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from a wedding party. We could hear the music of the wedding. But Turabi was so frightened that he hurled himself from the table onto the floor and stayed there for several minutes. This is not a stable place.’ Nor was the façade of free speech going to lift the blanket of isolation which the United States and its allies had thrown over Sudan, or protect its more notorious guests.

Two months after I met bin Laden, gunmen burst into his Khartoum home and tried to assassinate him. The Sudanese government suspected the potential killers were paid by the CIA. Clearly, this was no place for a latterday Mahdi. Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship later the same year. The Saudis and then the Americans demanded bin Laden’s extradition. Sudan meekly handed its other well-known fugitive, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – ‘Carlos the Jackal’, who had seized eleven oil ministers at the Opec conference in Vienna in 1975 and organised an assault on the French embassy in The Hague – to the French. But ‘Carlos’ was a revolutionary gone to seed, a plump alcoholic now rotten enough to be betrayed. Bin Laden was in a different category. His followers were blamed for bomb explosions in Riyadh in November of 1995 and then at a US barracks at al-Khobar the following year which in all killed twenty-four Americans and two Indians. In early 1996, he was permitted to leave for the country of his choice – and that was bound to be the one refuge in which he had discovered so much about his own faith.

And so it was that one hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. ‘Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you,’ said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. I thought at first he meant Kashoggi, though I had first met Jamal in 1990, long before going to Khartoum. ‘No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?’ Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? ‘The place where he is now,’ came the reply. I knew that bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him, I asked? ‘Go to Jalalabad – you will be contacted.’ I took the man’s number. He was in London.

So was the only Afghan embassy that would give me a visa. I was not in a hurry. It seemed to me that if the bin Ladens of this world wished to be interviewed, the Independent should not allow itself to be summoned to their presence. It was a journalistic risk. There were a thousand reporters who wanted to interview Osama bin Laden. But I thought he would hold more respect for a journalist who did not rush cravenly to him within hours of his request. I also had a more pressing concern. Although the secret services of the Middle East and Pakistan had acted for the CIA in helping the Afghan mujahedin against the Russians, many of them were now at war with bin Laden’s organisation, which they blamed for Islamist insurgencies in their own countries. Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia all now suspected bin Laden’s hand in their respective insurrections. What if the invitation was a trick, a set-up in which I would unwittingly lead the Egyptian police – or the infinitely corrupt Pakistani ISI, the ubiquitously named Interservices Intelligence organisation – to bin Laden? Even worse from my point of view, what if this was an attempt to lure a reporter who knew bin Laden to his death – and then blame the killing on Islamists? How many reporters would set off to interview bin Laden after that? So I called back the contact in London. Would he meet me at my hotel?

The receptionist at the Sheraton Belgravia called my room in the early evening. ‘There is a gentleman waiting for you in the lobby,’ he said. The Belgravia is the smallest Sheraton in the world, and if its prices don’t match that diminutive title, its wood-panelled, marble-floored lobby was as usual that evening the preserve of elderly tea-sipping ladies, waistcoated businessmen with silver hair slightly over the collar and elegantly dressed young women in black stockings. But when I reached the lobby, I noticed a man standing by the door. He was trying to look insignificant but he wore a huge beard, a long white Arab robe and plastic sandals over naked feet. Could this, perhaps, be bin Laden’s man?

He was. The man ran the London end of the ‘Committee of Advice and Reform’, a Saudi opposition group inspired by bin Laden which regularly issued long and tiresome tracts against the corruption of the Saudi royal family, and he dutifully sat down in the Belgravia lobby – to the astonishment of the elderly ladies – to explain the iniquitous behaviour of the House of Saud and the honourable nature of Osama bin Laden. I did not believe the man I was talking to was a violent personality. Indeed, within two years he would personally express to me his distress – and rupture – with bin Laden when the latter declared war on ‘Americans, “Crusaders” and Jews’. But in 1996, the Saudi hero of the Afghan war could do no wrong. ‘He is a sincere man, Mr Robert. He wants to talk to you. There is nothing to fear.’ This was the line I wanted to hear; whether I believed it was another matter. I told the man I would check into the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad.

The most convenient flight into eastern Afghanistan was from India, but Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight FG315 from New Delhi to Jalalabad was not the kind that carries an in-flight magazine. The female passengers were shrouded in the all-enveloping burqa, the cabin crew were mostly bearded and the cardboard packet of litchee juice was stained with mud. The chief steward walked to my seat, crouched in the aisle beside me and – as if revealing a long-held military secret – whispered into my ear that ‘We will be flying at 31,000 feet.’ If only we had. Approaching the old Soviet military airstrip at Jalalabad, the pilot made an almost 180-degree turn that sent the blood pumping into our feet, and touched down on the first inch of narrow tarmac – giving him just enough braking power to stop the jet a foot from the end of the runway. Given the rusting Soviet radar dishes and the wrecked, upended Antonov off the apron, I could understand why Jalalabad Arrivals lacked the amenities of Heathrow or JFK.

When I trudged through the heat with my bags, I found that the bullet-scarred terminal building was empty. No Immigration. No Customs. Not a single man with a rubber stamp. Just six young and bearded Afghans, four of them holding rifles, who stared at me with a mixture of tiredness and suspicion. No amount of cheery Salaam aleikums would elicit more than a muttering in Pushtu from the six men. After all, what was this alien, hatless creature doing here in Afghanistan with his brand-new camera-bag and his canvas hold-all of shirts and newspaper clippings? ‘Taxi?’ I asked them. And they looked away from me, back at the big blue and white aircraft which had jetted so dangerously into town as if it held the secret of my presence.

I hitched a ride with a French aid worker. They seemed to be everywhere. Jalalabad was a dusty brown city of mud-and-wood houses, unpaved earthen streets and ochre walls with the characteristic smell of charcoal and horse manure. There were donkeys and stallions and Indian-style ‘velo’ rickshaws and Victorian bicycles and the occasional clapboard shop-front, Dodge City transferred to the subcontinent. Khartoum had nothing on this. Two of Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s local guerrilla commanders had turned up for their haircut at the same time the previous month and shot dead the barber and a couple of other men before deciding who was first in the queue for his regular haircut. A third of all the children in Jalalabad hospitals were the victims of joy-shooting at weddings. It was a city ripe for Islamic discipline.

But it didn’t put the agencies off. There was SAVE and the World Food Programme, UNDP, Médecins Sans Frontières, Madera, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Emergency Field Unit, the Sandy Gall clinic for orphaned children, the Swedish Committee for Afghans, the UNHCR and a German agronomist agency; and they were only the first few offices signposted off the highway to Kabul. Seven years after the last Soviet troops had left Afghanistan, four years after the communist government of President Mohamed Najibullah had been overthrown, the Afghan mujahedin victors of the war were slaughtering each other in Kabul. So what was the point? Were the agencies here to assuage our guilt at abandoning the Afghan people once they had served their purpose in driving the Russians from their land? The United Nations had a force of just two soldiers observing the chaos in Afghanistan – a Swede and an Irishman, both of whom stayed at the old Spinghar Hotel.

The Spinghar is a relic of the Afghanistan hippy trail, a high-ceilinged hotel of the 1950s with large rose gardens and tall palm trees which, even in winter, bask in the warmth of the winds coming up from the valley of the Indus. But in the torment of the summer heat of 1996 – it is now mid-July – a roaring air conditioner plays Catch-22 with me: to cool my empty double room upstairs, I turn it on, but its tigerlike engine vibrates so loudly that sleep is impossible. So I switch it off. Yet when I turn to the only book beside my bed – Plain Tales from the Raj – the sweat runs down my arms and glues my fingers to the pages.

Then a rustle, a kind of faint, rasping sound, comes from the silent conditioner. I sit up and, five feet from my face, I see the dragon’s head of a giant lizard looking at me from the cooled bars of the machine. When I raise my hand, the head disappears for a moment. Then it is back, a miniature armoured brontosaurus face that is followed now by a long, rubbery torso, grey-green in the dim afternoon sunlight, and big sucking feet that grip the plastic air-conditioning vents. Like an old silent film, it moves in jerks. One moment, I see its head. Then at shutter’s speed, half its length of heavily-breathing rubberiness is out of the machine. A moment later, the whole half foot of creature is suspended on the curtain above my bed, swaying on the material, alien and disturbing, looking back at me over its fortresslike shoulder. What is it doing here? I ask myself. Then it scuttles out of sight into the drapery.

And of course, I switch on the air conditioner and swamp the room with a rush of ear-freezing cold air. And I curl up on the further bed and watch for movement at the top of the curtain rod. I am frightened of this thing and it is frightened of me. And only after half an hour do I realise that the bright screws on the curtain rail are its beady eyes. With rapt attention, we are watching each other. Are others watching me? I wake up next morning, exhausted, drenched in perspiration. The boy at the reception desk in a long shirt and a traditional pakul hat says that no one has called for me. Bin Laden has friends in Jalalabad, the tribal leaders know him, protect him, and even the man I met in London said that I should let ‘Engineer Mahmoud’ know that I have arrived in Afghanistan to see ‘Sheikh Osama’.

Engineer Mahmoud turns out to work for the city’s Drug Control and Development Unit in a back street of Jalalabad. I might have expected the purist bin Laden to be involved with the eradication of drugs. In 1996, Afghanistan was the world’s leading supplier of illicit opium, producing at least 2,200 metric tonnes of opium – about 80 per cent of western Europe’s heroin. Afghans are not immune. You can see them in the Jalalabad bazaar, young men with withered black arms and sunken eyes, the addicts returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan, still-living witnesses to the corruption of heroin. ‘It’s good for the Afghan people to see them,’ a Western aid official says coldly. ‘Now they can see the effect of all those poppy fields they grow – and if they are as Islamic as they claim they are, maybe they’ll stop producing opium.’ He smiles grimly. ‘Or maybe not.’

Probably not. The eastern Nangarhar province is now responsible for 80 per cent of the country’s poppy cultivation – for 64 per cent of western Europe’s heroin – and laboratories have now been transferred from Pakistan to a frontier strip inside Afghanistan, producing hundreds of kilos of heroin a day, fortified with anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles to withstand a military offensive. Local government officials in Jalalabad claim to have eradicated 30,000 hectares of opium and hashish fields over the past two years, but their efforts – brave enough given the firepower of the drug producers – seem as hopeless as the world’s attempts to find a solution to drug abuse.

In Engineer Mahmoud’s office, the problem is simple enough. A map on the wall depicts Nangarhar with a rash of red pimples along its eastern edge, a pox of opium fields and laboratories that are targets for Mahmoud’s armed commandos. ‘We have been eradicating hashish fields, using our weapons to force the farmers to plough up the land,’ he proclaims. ‘We are taking our own bulldozers to plough up some of the poppy fields. We take our guns and rockets with us and the farmers can do nothing to stop our work. Now our shura [council] has called the ulema to lecture the people on the evils of drug production, quoting from the Koran to support their words. And for the first time, we have been able to destroy hashish fields without using force.’ Mahmoud and his ten-strong staff have been heartened by the United Nations’ support for his project. On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium – around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the Jalalabad markets.

Only a few months earlier – and here is the strange geography that touched bin Laden’s contacts – Engineer Mahmoud visited Washington. ‘The US drugs prevention authorities took me to their new headquarters – you would not believe how big it is,’ he said. ‘It is half the size of Jalalabad city. And when I went inside, it is very luxurious and has many, many computers. They have all this money there – but none for us who are trying to stop the drug production.’ Engineer Mahmoud’s senior staff received just under $50 a month and his senior assistant, Shamsul Hag, claimed that the drugs unit had to buy 4,000 kilos of maize seed to distribute to farmers the previous month. But the western NGOs in Jalalabad had little time for all this. ‘Haji Qadir, the governor of Jalalabad, went to the UN drugs people in Islamabad,’ one of them said, ‘and told him: “Look, I have destroyed 20,000 hectares of opium fields – now you must help me because the people are waiting for your help.” But it was more complicated than this. Farmers who had never grown poppies began to plant them so they could get free maize seed in return for destroying the fields they had just planted.’ Other aid workers suspected that the farmers were rotating their crops between wheat and drugs each season, the opium sold in return for increased payments, and for weapons that were recently transported in boxes through the Pakistan railway station of Landi Kotal on the Peshawar steam train to the Afghan border.

Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered health insurance. This was capitalism on a ruthlessly illegal scale. And when I asked a European UN official how the world could compete with it, he drew in his breath. ‘Legalise drugs!’ he roared. ‘Legalise the lot. It will be the end of the drug barons. They’ll go broke and kill each other. But of course the world will never accept that. So we’ll go on fighting a losing war.’

Engineer Mahmoud would only shrug his shoulders when I repeated this to him. What could he do? I raised the subject of ‘Sheikh Osama’ for the third time. The Sheikh wanted to see me, I repeated. I was not looking for him. I was in Jalalabad at the Sheikh’s request. He was looking for me. ‘So why do you ask me to look for him?’ Engineer Mahmoud asked with devastating logic. This was not a problem of language because Mahmoud spoke excellent English. It was a cocktail of comprehension mixed with several bottles of suspicion. Someone – I did not want to mention the man in London – had told me to contact Mahmoud, I said. Perhaps he could tell the Sheikh that I was at the Spinghar Hotel? Mahmoud looked at me pityingly. ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

I sent a message through the Swedish UN soldier – he was the UN’s sole radio operator as well as one of its only two soldiers in Afghanistan – and he connected me to the only person in the world I really trusted. There had been no contact, I said. Please call bin Laden’s man in London. Next day a radio transmission message arrived, relaying the man’s advice. ‘Tell Robert to make clear he is not there because of his own wish. He is only replying to the wish of our friend. He should make it clear to the Engineer that he is only accepting an invitation. The Engineer can confirm this with our friend … Make it very clear he was invited and did not go on his own. This is the fastest thing. Otherwise he has to wait.’ Back I went to Engineer Mahmoud. He was in good form. In fact he thought it immensely funny, outrageously humorous, that I was waiting for the Sheikh. It was fantastic, laughable, bizarre. Many cups of tea were served. And each time a visitor arrived – a drugs control worker, an official of the local governor, a mendicant with a son in prison on drugs offences – he would be regaled with the story of the bareheaded Englishman who thought he had been invited to Jalalabad and was now waiting and waiting at the Spinghar Hotel.

I returned to the Spinghar in the heat of midday and sat by the lawn in front of the building. I had hidden in the same hotel sixteen years earlier, after Leonid Brezhnev had sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan, when I had smuggled myself down to Jalalabad and watched the Russian armoured columns grinding past the front gates. Their helicopters had thundered over the building, heavy with rockets, and the windows had rattled as they fired their missiles into the Tora Bora mountain range to the north. Now the butterflies played around the batteries of pink roses and the gardeners put down their forks and hoses and unspread their prayer rugs on the grass. It looked a bit like paradise. I drank tea on the lawn and watched the sun moving – rapidly, the movement clear to the naked eye – past the fronds of the palm trees above me. It was 5 July, one of the hottest days of the year. I went to my room and slept.