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

It would be difficult for bin Laden’s family, too. Next morning, the Egyptian turned up at the Spinghar Hotel to take me to the grass encampment in which the families of the returning Arab ‘Afghans’ would live. It was vulnerable enough. Only a few strands of barbed wire separated it from the open countryside and the three tents for bin Laden’s wives, pitched close to one another, were insufferably hot. Three latrines had been dug at the back, in one of which floated a dead frog. ‘They will be living here among us,’ the Egyptian said. ‘These are ladies who are used to living in comfort.’ But his fears centred on the apparent presence of three Egyptian security men who had been driving close to the camp in a green pick-up truck. ‘We know who they are and we have the number of their vehicle. A few days ago, they stopped beside my son and asked him: “We know you are Abdullah and we know who your father is. Where is bin Laden?” Then they asked him why I was in Afghanistan.’

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* – was run by a Lebanese who told me to turn up at 8.30 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 the Union Oil Co. of California Asian Oil Pipeline Project – UNOCAL – were negotiating with the Taliban to secure rights for a pipeline to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan; in September 1996, the US State Department 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 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 was 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 before 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.

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 US 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.’