The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
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.’
I sat in silence, thinking about these words as bin Laden discussed my journey back to Jalalabad with his guards. He was concerned that the Taliban – despite their ‘sincerity’ – might object to his dispatching a foreigner through their checkpoints after dark, and so I was invited to pass the night in bin Laden’s mountain camp. I was permitted to take just three photographs of him, this time by the light of the Toyota which was driven to the tent with its headlights shining through the canvas to illuminate bin Laden’s face. He sat in front of me, expressionless, a stone figure, and in the pictures I developed in Beirut three days later he was a purple and yellow ghost. He said goodbye without much ceremony, a brief handshake and a nod, and vanished from the tent, and I lay down on the mattress with my coat over me to keep warm. The men with their guns sitting around slept there too, while others armed with rifles and rocket-launchers patrolled the low ridges around the camp.
In the years to come, I would wonder who they were. Was the Egyptian Mohamed Atta among those young men in the tent? Or Abdul Aziz Alomari? Or any other of the nineteen men whose names we would all come to know just over four years later? I cannot remember their faces now, cowled as they were, many of them, in their scarves.
Exhaustion and cold kept me awake. ‘A shadow of itself’ was the expression that kept repeating itself to me. What did bin Laden and these dedicated, ruthless men have in store for us? I recall the next few hours like a freeze-frame film; waking so cold there was ice in my hair, slithering back down the mountain trail in the Toyota with one of the Algerian gunmen in the back telling me that if we were in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under bin Laden’s orders to protect me and thus would give his life for me. The three men in the back and my driver stopped the jeep on the broken-up Kabul – Jalalabad highway to say their dawn fajr prayers. Beside the broad estuary of the Kabul river, they spread their mats and knelt as the sun rose over the mountains. Far to the north-east, I could see the heights of the Hindu Kush glimmering a pale white under an equally pale blue sky, touching the border of China that nuzzled into the wreckage of a land that was to endure yet more suffering in the coming years. Hills and rocks and water and ancient trees and old mountains, this was the world before the age of man.
And I remember driving back with bin Laden’s men into Jalalabad past the barracks where the Taliban stored their captured arms and, just a few minutes later, hearing the entire store – of shells, anti-tank rockets, Stinger missiles, explosives and mines – exploding in an earthquake that shook the trees in the laneway outside the Spinghar Hotel and sprinkled us with tiny pieces of metal and torn pages from American manuals instructing ‘users’ on how to aim missiles at aircraft. More than ninety civilians were ripped to bits by the accidental explosion – did a Taliban throw the butt of a cigarette, a lonely and unique item of enjoyment, into the ammunition? – and then the Algerian walked up to me in tears and told me that his best friend had just perished in the explosion. Bin Laden’s men, I noted, can also cry.
But most of all I remember the first minutes after our departure from bin Laden’s camp. It was still dark when I caught sight of a great light in the mountains to the north. For a while I thought it was the headlights of another vehicle, another security signal from the camp guards to our departing Toyota. But it hung there for many minutes and I began to realise that it was burning above the mountains and carried a faintly incandescent trail. The men in the vehicle were watching it too. ‘It is Halle’s comet,’ one of them said. He was wrong. It was a newly discovered comet, noticed for the first time only two years earlier by Americans Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, but I could see how Hale – Bopp had become Halley to these Arab men in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was soaring above us now, trailing a golden tail, a sublime power moving at 70,000 kilometres an hour through the heavens.
So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qaeda men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. ‘Mr Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?’ It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. ‘It means that there is going to be a great war.’ And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘The Young British Soldier’
Less than six months before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War. ‘Presented to Willie By his Mother’ is written in thick pencil inside the front cover. ‘Date Sat. 24th January 1914, for another’. ‘Willie’ would have been almost fifteen years old. Only after my father’s death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross – ‘For Valour’, it says on the medal – and, on the spine, a soldier in red coat and peaked white tropical hat with a rifle in his hands. I never found out the meaning of the cryptic reference ‘for another’. But years later, I read the book. An