The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The air was clouding with insects. I was writing in my notebook with my right hand and swatting them away from my face and clothes with my left, big insects with wide wings and buglike creatures that would slap against my shirt and the pages of my notebook. I noticed that they were colliding with bin Laden’s white robe, even his face, as if they had somehow been alerted by the anger emanating from this man. He sometimes stopped speaking for all of sixty seconds—he was the first Arab figure I noticed doing this—in order to reflect upon his words. Most Arabs, faced with a reporter’s question, would say the first thing that came into their heads for fear that they would appear ignorant if they did not. Bin Laden was different. He was alarming because he was possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come, I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic—President George W. Bush and Tony Blair come to mind—but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden.

  There was a dark quality to his calculations. “If one kilogram of TNT exploded in a country in which nobody had heard an explosion in a hundred years,” he said, “surely the exploding of twenty-five hundred kilos of TNT at al-Khobar is clear evidence of the scale of the people’s anger against the Americans and of their ability to continue that resistance against the American occupation.” Had I been a prophet, might I have thought more deeply about that fearful metaphor which bin Laden used, the one about the TNT? Was there not a country—a nation which knew no war within its borders for well over a hundred years—which could be struck with “evidence” of a people’s anger, 2,500 times beyond anything it might imagine? But I was calculating more prosaic equations.

  Bin Laden had asked me—a routine of every Palestinian under occupation—if Europeans did not resist occupation during the Second World War. I told him no Europeans would accept this argument over Saudi Arabia—because the Nazis killed millions of Europeans yet the Americans had never murdered a single Saudi. Such a parallel was historically and morally wrong. Bin Laden did not agree. “We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together . . . We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon . . . When sixty Jews are killed inside Palestine”—he was talking about Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel—“all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did not receive the same reaction.” It was bin Laden’s first reference to Iraq and to the UN sanctions which were to result, according to UN officials themselves, in the death of more than half a million children. “Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam,” bin Laden said. “We as Muslims do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future.” It was the first time I heard him use the word “crusade.”

  But it was neither the first—nor the last—time that bin Laden would distance himself from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Much good would it do him. Seven years later, the United States would launch an invasion of Iraq that would be partly justified by the regime’s “support” of a man who so detested it. But these were not the only words which bin Laden uttered that night to which I should have paid greater attention. For at one point, he placed his right hand on his chest. “I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against all Muslims everywhere,” he said. “Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans.”

  For some time, there had been a steadily growing thunderstorm to the east of bin Laden’s camp and we could see the bright orange flash of lightning over the mountains on the Pakistan border. But bin Laden thought this might be artillery fire, the continuation of the inter-mujahedin battles that had damaged his spirit after the anti-Soviet war. He was growing uneasy. He broke off his conversation to pray. Then on the straw mat, several young and armed men served dinner— plates of yoghurt and cheese and Afghan nan bread and more tea. Bin Laden sat between his sons, silent, eyes on his food. Occasionally he would ask me questions. What would be the reaction of the British Labour Party to his demand that British troops must leave Saudi Arabia? Was the Labour opposition leader Tony Blair important? I cannot, alas, remember my reply. Bin Laden said that three of his wives would soon arrive in Afghanistan to join him. I could see the tents where they would be living if I wished, just outside Jalalabad, “humble tents” for his family. He told an Egyptian holding a rifle to take me to the encampment next day.

  Then he pointed at me. “I am astonished at the British government,” he said suddenly. “They sent a letter to me through their embassy in Khartoum before I left Sudan, saying I would not be welcome in the United Kingdom. But I did not ask to go to Britain. So why did they send me this letter? The letter said: ‘If you come to Britain, you will not be admitted.’ The letter gave the Saudi press the opportunity of claiming that I had asked for political asylum in Britain—which is not true.” I believed bin Laden. Afghanistan was the only country left to him after his five-and-a-half-year exile in Sudan. He agreed. “The safest place in the world for me is Afghanistan.” It was the only place, I repeated, in which he could campaign against the Saudi government. Bin Laden and several of his Arab fighters burst into laughter. “There are other places,” he replied. Did he mean Tajikistan? I asked. Or Uzbekistan? Kazakhstan? “There are several places where we have friends and close brothers—we can find refuge and safety in them.”

  I told bin Laden he was already a hunted man. “Danger is a part of our life,” he snapped back. “Do you realise that we spent ten years fighting against the Russians and the KGB? . . . When we were fighting the Russians here in Afghanistan, 10,000 Saudis came here to fight over a period of ten years. There were three flights every week from Jeddah to Islamabad and every flight was filled with Saudis coming to fight . . . ” But, I suggested uncharitably, didn’t the Americans support the mujahedin against the Soviets? Bin Laden responded at once. “We were never at any time friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans support the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies. Most of the weapons that came to Afghanistan were paid for by the Saudis on the orders of the Americans since Turki al-Faisal [the head of Saudi external intelligence] and the CIA were working together.”

  Bin Laden was now alert, almost agitated. There was something he needed to say. “Let me tell you this. Last week, I received an envoy from the Saudi embassy in Islamabad. Yes, he came here to Afghanistan to see me. The government of Saudi Arabia, of course, they want to give the people here a different message, that I should be handed over. But in truth they wanted to speak directly to me. They wanted to ask me to go back to Saudi Arabia. I said I would speak to them only under one condition—that Sheikh Sulieman al-Owda, the ulema, is present. They have locked up Sheikh Sulieman for speaking out against the corrupt regime. Without his freedom, negotiation is not possible. I have had no reply from them till now.”

  Was it this revelation that made bin Laden nervous? He began talking to his men about amniya, security, and repeatedly looked towards those flashes in the sky. Now the thunder did sound like gunfire. I tried to ask one more question. What kind of Islamic state would bin Laden wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their hands or heads cut off in his Islamic sharia state, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today? There came an unsatisfactory reply. “Islam is a complete religion for every detail of life. If a man is a real Muslim and commits a crime, he can only be happy if he is justly punished. This is not cruelty. The origin of these punishments comes from God through the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him.”

  Dissident Osama bin Laden may be, but moderate never. I asked permission to take his photograph, and while he debated this with his companions I scribbled into my notebook the words I would use in the last paragraph of my report on our meeting: “Osama bin Laden believes he now represents the most formidable enemy of the
Saudi regime and of the American presence in the Gulf. Both are probably right to regard him as such.” I was underestimating the man.

  Yes, he said, I could take his picture. I opened my camera and allowed his armed guards to watch me as I threaded a film into the spool. I told them I refused to use a flash because it flattened the image of a human face and asked them to bring the paraffin lamp closer. The Egyptian scribe held it a foot from bin Laden’s face. I told him to bring it closer still, to within three inches, and I physically had to guide his arm until the light brightened and shadowed bin Laden’s features. Then without warning, bin Laden moved his head back and the faintest smile moved over his face, along with that self-conviction and that ghost of vanity which I found so disturbing. He called his sons Omar and Saad and they sat beside him as I took more pictures and bin Laden turned into the proud father, the family man, the Arab at home.

  Then his anxiety returned. The thunder was continuous now and it was mixed with the patter of rifle fire. I should go, he urged, and I realised that what he meant was that he must go, that it was time for him to return to the fastness of Afghanistan. When we shook hands, he was already looking for the guards who would take him away. Mohamed and my driver and just two of the armed men who had brought me to these damp, insect-hungry fields turned up to drive me back to the Spinghar Hotel, a journey that proved to be full of menace. Driving across river bridges and road intersections, we were repeatedly stopped by armed men from the Afghan factions that were fighting for control of Kabul. One would crouch on the roadway in front of our vehicle, screaming at us, pointing his rifle at the windscreen, his companion sidling out of the darkness to check our driver’s identity and wave us through. “Afghanistan very difficult place,” Mohamed remarked.

  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 writers2—was run by a Lebanese who told me to turn up at 8:30 the next morning at the heat-bleached old airport in the neighbouring and much poorer emirate of Sharjah, to which Ariana Afghan Airlines had now been sent in disgrace. Sharjah played host to a flock of pariah airlines that flew from the Gulf to Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Tajikistan and a number of obscure Iranian cities. My plane to Jalalabad was the same old Boeing 727, but now in a state of much-reduced circumstances, cruelly converted into a freight carrier.

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

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

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

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