The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
– 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 rifle, 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 chequered 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 children 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 US 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. US 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 US 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