The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
of this thing and it is frightened of me. And only after half an hour do I realise that the bright screws on the curtain rail are its beady eyes. With rapt attention, we are watching each other. Are others watching me? I wake up next morning, exhausted, drenched in perspiration. The boy at the reception desk in a long shirt and a traditional pakul hat says that no one has called for me. Bin Laden has friends in Jalalabad, the tribal leaders know him, protect him, and even the man I met in London said that I should let ‘Engineer Mahmoud’ know that I have arrived in Afghanistan to see ‘Sheikh Osama’.
Engineer Mahmoud turns out to work for the city’s Drug Control and Development Unit in a back street of Jalalabad. I might have expected the purist bin Laden to be involved with the eradication of drugs. In 1996, Afghanistan was the world’s leading supplier of illicit opium, producing at least 2,200 metric tonnes of opium – about 80 per cent of western Europe’s heroin. Afghans are not immune. You can see them in the Jalalabad bazaar, young men with withered black arms and sunken eyes, the addicts returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan, still-living witnesses to the corruption of heroin. ‘It’s good for the Afghan people to see them,’ a Western aid official says coldly. ‘Now they can see the effect of all those poppy fields they grow – and if they are as Islamic as they claim they are, maybe they’ll stop producing opium.’ He smiles grimly. ‘Or maybe not.’
Probably not. The eastern Nangarhar province is now responsible for 80 per cent of the country’s poppy cultivation – for 64 per cent of western Europe’s heroin – and laboratories have now been transferred from Pakistan to a frontier strip inside Afghanistan, producing hundreds of kilos of heroin a day, fortified with anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles to withstand a military offensive. Local government officials in Jalalabad claim to have eradicated 30,000 hectares of opium and hashish fields over the past two years, but their efforts – brave enough given the firepower of the drug producers – seem as hopeless as the world’s attempts to find a solution to drug abuse.
In Engineer Mahmoud’s office, the problem is simple enough. A map on the wall depicts Nangarhar with a rash of red pimples along its eastern edge, a pox of opium fields and laboratories that are targets for Mahmoud’s armed commandos. ‘We have been eradicating hashish fields, using our weapons to force the farmers to plough up the land,’ he proclaims. ‘We are taking our own bulldozers to plough up some of the poppy fields. We take our guns and rockets with us and the farmers can do nothing to stop our work. Now our shura [council] has called the ulema to lecture the people on the evils of drug production, quoting from the Koran to support their words. And for the first time, we have been able to destroy hashish fields without using force.’ Mahmoud and his ten-strong staff have been heartened by the United Nations’ support for his project. On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium – around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the Jalalabad markets.
Only a few months earlier – and here is the strange geography that touched bin Laden’s contacts – Engineer Mahmoud visited Washington. ‘The US 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 20,000 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