The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Only a few months earlier—and here is the strange geography that touched bin Laden’s contacts—Engineer Mahmoud visited Washington. “The U.S. 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 twenty thousand 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.

  “Clack-clack-clack.” It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. “Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.” Ever since I was a child, I had hated these moments: the violent tugging of sheets, the insistent knock on the bedroom door, the screeching voice of the prefect telling me to get up. But this was different. “CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.” I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against my bedroom window. “Misssster Robert,” a voice whispered urgently. “Misssster Robert.” He hissed the word “Mister.” Yes, yes, I’m here. “Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you.” It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat—I had a feeling we might travel in the night—and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat.

  The man wore a grubby, grey Afghan robe and a small round cotton hat but he was an Arab and he greeted me formally, holding my right hand in both of his. He smiled. He said his name was Mohamed, he was my guide. “To see the Sheikh?” I asked. He smiled but said nothing. I was still worried about a trap. The guide’s name would be Mohamed, wouldn’t it? He would suggest an evening walk. I could hear the later eyewitness evidence. Yes, sir, we saw the English journalist. We saw him meet someone outside the hotel. There was no struggle. He left freely, of his own accord. He walked out of the hotel gates.

  I did, too, and followed Mohamed all the way through the dust of Jalalabad’s main street until we arrived next to a group of gunmen in a pick-up truck in the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shattered gateway. There were three men in Afghan hats in the back of the pick-up. One held a Kalashnikov, another clutched a grenade-launcher along with six rockets tied together with Scotch tape. The third nursed a machine gun on his lap, complete with tripod and a belt of ammunition. “Mr. Robert, these are our guards,” the driver said quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to set off across the wilds of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province under a white-hot afternoon sun with three bearded guerrillas. A two-way radio hissed and crackled on the shoulder of the driver’s companion as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us.

  We were about to set off when Mohamed climbed back down from the pick-up along with the driver, walked to a shaded patch of grass and began to pray. For five minutes, the two men lay half-prostrate, facing the distant Kabul Gorge and, beyond that, a far more distant Mecca. We drove off along a broken highway and then turned onto a dirt track by an irrigation canal, the guns in the back of the truck bouncing on the floor, the guards’ eyes peering from behind their checkered scarves. We travelled like that for hours, past half-demolished mud villages and valleys and towering black rocks, a journey across the face of the moon.

  Out of the grey heat, there loomed the ghosts of a terrible war, of communism’s last imperial gasp; the overgrown revetments of Soviet army firebases, artillery positions, upended, dust-covered guns and the carcass of a burned-out tank in which no one could have survived. Amid the furnace of the late afternoon, there emerged a whole blitzed town of ancient castellated mud fortresses, their walls shot through with machine-gun bullets and shells. Wild naked child
ren were playing in the ruins. Just the other side of the phantom town, Mohamed’s driver took us off the track and began steering across shale and hard rock, the stones spitting beneath our wheels as we skirted kilometres of fields that were covered in yellow dust. “This is a gift from the Russians,” Mohamed said. “You know why there are no people working this ground? Because the Russians sowed it with thousands of mines.” And so we passed through the dead land.

  Once, as the white sun was sliding into the mountains, we stopped for the gunmen on the back to pull watermelons from a field. They scampered back to the trucks and cut them up, the juice dripping through their fingers. By dusk, we had reached a series of cramped earthen villages, old men burning charcoal fires by the track, the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. There were more guerrillas, all bearded, grinning at Mohamed and the driver. It was night before we stopped, in an orchard where wooden sofas had been covered in army blankets piled with belts and webbing and where armed men emerged out of the darkness, all in Afghan clothes and soft woollen flat hats, some holding rifles, others machine guns. They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab “Afghans” denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States of America. Very soon, the world would know them as al-Qaeda.

  They came from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait. Two of them wore spectacles, one said he was a doctor. A few of them shook hands in a rather solemn way and greeted me in Arabic. I knew that these men would give their lives for bin Laden, that they thought themselves spiritually pure in a corrupt world, that they were inspired and influenced by dreams which they persuaded themselves came from heaven. Mohamed beckoned me to follow him and we skirted a small river and jumped across a stream until, in the insect-filled darkness ahead, we could see a sputtering paraffin lamp. Beside it sat a tall, bearded man in Saudi robes. Osama bin Laden stood up, his two teenage sons, Omar and Saad, beside him. “Welcome to Afghanistan,” he said.

  He was now forty but looked much older than at our last meeting in the Sudanese desert late in 1993. Walking towards me, he towered over his companions, tall, slim, with new wrinkles around those narrow eyes. Leaner, his beard longer but slightly flecked with grey, he had a black waistcoat over his white robe and a red-chequered kuffiah on his head, and he seemed tired. When he asked after my health, I told him I had come a long way for this meeting. “So have I,” he muttered. There was also an isolation about him, a detachment I had not noticed before, as if he had been inspecting his anger, examining the nature of his resentment; when he smiled, his gaze would move towards his sixteen-year-old son Omar—round eyes with dark brows and his own kuffiah—and then off into the hot darkness where his armed men were patrolling the fields. Others were gathering to listen to our conversation. We sat down on a straw mat and a glass of tea was placed beside me.

  Just ten days ago, a truck bomb had torn down part of the U.S. Air Force housing complex at al-Khobar in Dhahran, and we were speaking in the shadow of the deaths of the nineteen American soldiers killed there. U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher had visited the ruins and predictably promised that America would not be swayed by violence, that the perpetrators would be hunted down. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who had since lapsed into a state of dementia, had foreseen the possibility of violence when American military forces arrived to “defend” his kingdom in 1990. It was for this very reason that he had, on 6 August that year, extracted a promise from then President George Bush that all U.S. troops would leave his country when the Iraqi threat ended. But the Americans had stayed, claiming that the continued existence of Saddam’s regime—which Bush had chosen not to destroy—still constituted a danger to the Gulf.

  Osama bin Laden knew what he wanted to say. “Not long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. Now let us give some advice to the governments of Britain and France to take their troops out—because what happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar showed that the people who did this have a deep understanding in choosing their targets. They hit their main enemy, which is the Americans. They killed no secondary enemies, nor their brothers in the army or the police in Saudi Arabia . . . I give this advice to the government of Britain.” The Americans must leave Saudi Arabia, must leave the Gulf. The “evils” of the Middle East arose from America’s attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia had been turned into “an American colony.”

  Bin Laden was speaking slowly and with precision, an Egyptian taking notes in a large exercise book by the lamplight like a Middle Ages scribe. “This doesn’t mean declaring war against the West and Western people—but against the American regime which is against every American.” I interrupted bin Laden. Unlike Arab regimes, I said, the people of the United States elected their government. They would say that their government represents them. He disregarded my comment. I hope he did. For in the years to come, his war would embrace the deaths of thousands of American civilians. “The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation,” he said, “but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon—of Sabra and Chatila and Qana—and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.”

  Bin Laden had thought this through. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist militia allies in 1982 and the slaughter by Israeli artillerymen of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN camp at Qana less than three months before this meeting with bin Laden were proof to millions of Westerners, let alone Arabs, of Israeli brutality. President Clinton’s “anti-terrorism” conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation. Clinton had condemned the “terrorism” of Hamas and the Lebanese Hizballah, but not the violence of Israel. So the bombers had struck in al-Khobar for the Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila, for Qana, for Clinton’s hypocrisy; this was bin Laden’s message. Not only were the Americans to be driven from the Gulf, there were historic wrongs to be avenged. His “advice” to the Americans was a fearful threat that would be fulfilled in the years to come.

  But what bin Laden really wanted to talk about was Saudi Arabia. Since our last meeting in Sudan, he said, the situation in the kingdom had grown worse. The ulema, the religious leaders, had declared in the mosques that the presence of American troops was not acceptable and the government took action against these ulema “on the advice of the Americans.” For bin Laden, the betrayal of the Saudi people began twenty-four years before his birth, when Abdul Aziz al-Saud proclaimed his kingdom in 1932. “The regime started under the flag of applying Islamic law and under this banner all the people of Saudi Arabia came to help the Saudi family take power. But Abdul Aziz did not apply Islamic law; the country was set up for his family. Then after the discovery of petroleum, the Saudi regime found another support—the money to make people rich and to give them the services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied.”

  Bin Laden was picking away at his teeth with that familiar twig of mishwakwood, but history—or his version of it—was the basis of almost all his remarks. The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States “to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy.” He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War and a further $60 billion in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, “buying military equipment which is not needed or useful for the country, buying aircraft by credit” while at the same time creating unemployment, high taxes and a bankrupt economy. But for bin Laden, the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. “When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was a strong protest from the ulema and from students of sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception
. They were giving their support to nations which were fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemeni communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping Arafat’s regime fight Hamas. After it insulted and jailed the ulema eighteen months ago, the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy.”

  The night wind moved through the darkened trees, ruffling the robes of the Arab fighters around us. Bin Laden spread his right hand and used his fingers to list the “mistakes” of the Saudi monarchy. “At the same time, the financial crisis happened inside the kingdom and now all the people there suffer from this. Saudi merchants found their contracts were broken. The government owes them 340 billion Saudi rials, which is a very big amount; it represents 30 per cent of the national income inside the kingdom. Prices are going up and people have to pay more for electricity, water and fuel. Saudi farmers have not received money since 1992—and those who get grants now receive them on government loans from banks. Education is deteriorating and people have to take their children from government schools and put them in private education, which is very expensive.”

  Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. “The Saudi people have remembered now what the ulema told them and they realise America is the main reason for their problems . . . the ordinary man knows that his country is the largest oil-producer in the world yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services. Now the people understand the speeches of the ulemas in the mosques—that our country has become an American colony. They act decisively with every action to kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia. What happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar is clear evidence of the huge anger of Saudi people against America. The Saudis now know their real enemy is America.” There was no doubting bin Laden’s argument. The overthrow of the Saudi regime and the eviction of U.S. forces from the kingdom were one and the same for him. He was claiming that the real religious leadership of Saudi Arabia—among whom he clearly saw himself—was an inspiration to Saudis, that Saudis themselves would drive out the Americans, that Saudis—hitherto regarded as a rich and complacent people—might strike at the United States. Could this be true?