A milestone in this regards was when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the Shah of Iran who fled his country. A year later, Ronald Reagan was elected as the fortieth President of the United States. The US intelligence community informed him that the Soviet Union could be seriously weakened by a protracted war in Afghanistan. The President gave his unqualified support to a policy that allowed the CIA to gather billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition and send them to mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan to establish an international pan-Islamic army. The capital city of the international jihadist or ‘holy warrior’ movement at once was the dusty lawless Pakistani town of Peshawar, which was packed with spooks from the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. They were attempting to manage the chaotic and feuding mujahedin groups that had set up their headquarters in the town. As the money poured in, mujahedin commanders bought glistening new Toyota Landcruisers that carried no licence plates and prowled the streets like wild animals stalking their quarry. They shared the roads with noisy three-wheeled rickshaws, donkey-drawn carts and injured fighters hobbling on crutches. The wounded were left to disappear in the dust and fumes of the four wheel-drive behemoths, which were often steered by a group of three or four men, packed into the front seats. Each would-be driver battled with the steering wheel as the Landcruisers bounced along the rutted roads, sometimes dumping a passenger or two who had clung on to the roof or the swinging doors that rarely closed. Each fighter was bearded and dressed in salwar kameez. Armed with a shiny new automatic rifle and gusto for war, they often raised their guns and screamed ‘God is Great!’ to passing aid workers of which I was one.
Behind the square was Peshawar’s seventeenth-century mosque, named after the city’s Mogul governor, Mahabat Khan. To enter the mosque, people had to pass stalls selling food and fabric and squeeze into an alleyway between shop windows laden with gold jewellery. Two white minarets soared above a courtyard that was thronged with worshippers. Some were washing in the ablution pond, others laying down their prayer mats. I was there to meet the leader of one of the mujahedin parties. Yunis Khalis was one of the ‘Peshawar Seven’, the alliance of mujahedin faction leaders who had set up an interim ‘Afghan government’ in Peshawar. Khalis was the oldest of the “Seven” and was best known by outsiders for his flaming red beard. I was hoping that his men would take me ‘inside’ Afghanistan.
When I met Khalis he was polite and quickly approved a trip across the border, in general, however, a mood of mayhem surrounded the mujahedin, and made Western observers underestimate their potential. I certainly did not consider what they wanted to create in Afghanistan; and for the rest the muj, as journalists called them, were treated as amiable primitives. It was rather like discovering a lost tribe in the Amazon: they had quaint, if not bizarre customs, but were respected for their fighting skills and exaggerated hospitality. And they were, without dispute amongst the mainstream media that time, “freedom fighters”.
Afghanistan
not far from the Kyber Pass:
Unknown to me during my visits in the late 1980s, one of the men with whom Yunis Khalis had worked closely, was a tall Saudi with high cheekbones and a quiet, resolute manner. By the time I had met Khalis, he had already built a close friendship with Osama bin Laden. Later on, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the two men became neighbours.
Against this backdrop, the Afghan war was fought over a decade that witnessed a revolution in global communications, not least in the growth of relatively inexpensive air travel. The would-be mujahed from Egypt or Indonesia, inspired by video footage of the Afghan War, required only a Pakistani tourist visa and an air ticket to reach Peshawar. From there, given the right connections, the jihad was only a few hours’ drive away.
During the early 1980s, bin Laden made several visits to Afghanistan and supplied the mujahedin with arms, as well as tractors and drilling equipment to cut roads and tunnels through the mountains. Soon he became involved in combat with units under the command of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Arabic-speaking scholar with close links to Saudi Arabia.
Aside from the
effort of explaining the complex background, there was another reason for
me to spot the timebomb ticking in Afghanistan. The only evidence that
most informed people had of anti-Western Islamic militancy was in
Iran and Lebanon, and these were Shi’ites. The tame “Sunni majority”
were perceived to be allied to Western interests, under the guiding hand
of the powerful pro-American leadership of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden’s
activities were not secret; in fact, he was well known to many in Peshawar
and local shopkeepers joked that he was financing a “University of Jihad”.
Saudi intelligence welcomed his efforts:
‘He was a
model. We wanted more of him,’ recalled Prince Turki al-Faisal, the man
who headed the desert kingdom’s intelligence service. In the collective
viewpoint of Western journalism, a wealthy Saudi funding the war was little
more than a ‘colour story’, which aroused little interest.
Bin Laden became a resident of Peshawar in 1984 when he opened a guest house for foreign mujahedin, designed to be a first point of call and staging post before they left for training camps inside Afghanistan. It coincided with the setting up of Maktab al-Khadimat, or ‘Office of Services’, which was run by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian religious scholar, whose name at the time would have meant nothing to me had it not been for a comment made by a wise local a quiet, understated man who was then the Peshawar correspondent for a local newspaper. “It’s very interesting what’s going on there,” he said while having lunch in the bustling Saddar Road, which leads from old Peshawar to the ‘cantonment’ district around the former British military camp. “They have money pouring in from the Arab states and many dedicated fighters.” He suggested I take a look and meet some of the “Afghan Arabs”. He took me to a building on the road toward the university with the gates at the entrance open. Going inside we could hear a man in one of the rooms screaming down an old Bakelite phone. Another entered carrying several boxes. Eventually, a young man with a bright, clean salwar kameez said hello and gave me a handful of leaflets. Most were in Arabic, with fuzzy pictures of jubilant mujahedin fighters and the corpses of either Russian or Afghan army soldiers. “What do they say?” I asked. “I don’t know,” the boy replied, “I don’t read Arabic.”
While I considered the Office of Afghan-Arabs a sideshow at the time, it was actually the hub for the nascent al-Qa’eda. The Office’s publications were distributed to mosques throughout the Arab world and then translated and forwarded to Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere. They called on Muslims all over the globe to fulfil their religious duty to support their fellow believers in Afghanistan. In fact one of the leaflets published that year declared: “After Afghanistan, nothing is impossible for us any more. There are no superpowers. What matters is the willpower that springs from our religious belief.”
The Office of Services attracted thousands of fighters and created a formal international recruiting network. It also organized accommodation in Peshawar that was known as Bait al-Ansar, ‘Houses for the Devoted Followers’. Along with official Saudi charities, the main benefactor was, Osama bin Laden. By 1988, bin Laden’s commitment to the war had escalated sharply. He had built at least six military camps inside Afghanistan and later, as the number of recruits mushroomed, he set up training camps on the outskirts of Peshawar. The Saudi millionaire had met and befriended an Egyptian surgeon named Ayman Zawahri, who’d become the leader of the Jihad movement in his native Egypt. It appeared that bin Laden was drawn to Islamic radicals who wanted to escalate the jihad to include arming and training militants who would then return home to fight against their own governments. Zawahri was particularly concerned to build up links with militants in Egypt and saw the potential to expand this strategy to radical Muslim groups around the world. Abdullah Azzam was sceptical; he adamantly opposed the undertaking of a global jihad before the creation of an Islamic state in Afghanistan and he disapproved of the murder of moderate Muslim leaders. It seems that Zawahri eventually persuaded bin Laden to follow a different route. The surgeon, who was brought up in a well-off suburb of Cairo by a respected family of doctors, later became bin Laden’s deputy in al-Qa’eda.
Despite an agreement by Moscow to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the US would continue funding the mujahedin while the Russians still gave money to the regime of President Najibullah. The American Club, the only western eating place in Peshawar at the time was a regular hangout for foreigners; the legion of aid workers, diplomats, journalists, and, who badly needed a break from the extremities of faith and war that they witnessed in the city. One could buy a cold bottle of beer and choose from a menu that included T-bone steak and chicken wings. This was in 1990, I was sitting next to a man with long straggling black hair, a flowing beard and brown salwar kameez with a waistcoat over the top. All that was missing from the ‘official’ muj outfit was the circular woollen cap, the kolas. That, I discovered later, was on a chair by his side. He was gorging on a gigantic plate of barbecued spare ribs; it looked as if he had ordered half a roasted pig. Naturally, a true mujahedin would not be eating meat deemed haram, or unlawful, by the Qur’ân. Nor would he be sipping a beer. So I asked, “where are you from?”-“Dallas, Texas,” he said proudly and loudly. Have you been, um, “inside”?’ ‘Inside’ was the phrase used for entering Afghanistan with the mujahedin. He nodded. “Just got out.” How are things over there?’ I asked, trying to be chummy. He gave the impression that he was more interested in his spare ribs than talking to me. “The problem with Afghanistan is simple. There’s not enough war,” declared the man from Texas. “We need to escalate fighting and expedite mujahedin capabilities in impacting war.”
Often in such a situation I feel like a bumbling Hugh Grant character, fumbling for words. He was wiping the barbecue sauce from his beard and preparing to leave when I asked if he wanted another beer. He declined my offer. “I gotta go. Got work to do, plenty of it.” I assumed his work meant dealing out ‘more war’ to a nation that already had thousands dead and four million made homeless by the fighting.
The journey from Peshawar to Kabul, under the Khyber Gate and through the gorges of the pass, is breathtaking. The winding British-built road is flanked with machine-gun posts of Pakistan’s legendary Khyber Rifles regiment. The folklore tells of Pashtun tribesmen with a firm handclasp and penetrating stare. They were resplendent, handsome men of honour, with bullet-studded bandoliers across their chests and pistol at their sides.
The reality
is somewhat different. Along hundreds of miles of lawless borderland lies
a feudal territory called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. It’s
like an American Indian ‘reservation’ that technically remains within
Pakistan but lies outside the remit of its laws. The British tried to conquer
the Pashtun tribes who inhabited this land but failed, leaving them to
police themselves. When the British left the subcontinent in 1947, the
Pakistani government found the Pashtun in rebellious mood and they were
forced to continue the arrangement; its police and soldiers rarely enter
without permission from the local tribal leader.
Most people
in the Tribal Areas say they are Pashtun first, then weher Pakistani or
Afghan. Few accept the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was
an arbitrary creation of a British diplomat, Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893
and which effectively cut the Pashtun population in two.
The town of Landi Kotal, once dubbed the most lawless town in Asia, nestled in the throat of the Khyber Pass; it was a truck stop and watering hole for travellers before the descent to the Afghan border posts at Tor Kham. During the 1980s, it was a mujahedin staging post and there were several dozen Russian tanks parked at Tor Kham, which regularly shelled the hills around Landi Kotal. The bazaar at Millad Chowk had a breezy, relaxed mood despite the proximity of war. A child no more than twelve carried a tall stick festooned with balloons of, amongst other things, pink rabbits, Dalmatian dogs and, curiously, a blow-up Santa Claus. He also carried a well-used AK-47 assault rifle and his webbing was bulging with magazines. Another child, perhaps no more than eight, offered me soft drinks. He too had an AK-47. As I glanced around, I realized that every male of walking age was armed. One of our escorts from the Khyber Rifles said his sons started carrying guns when they were eight or nine. ‘It’s part of being a man,’ he said without irony. ‘It’s the first sound they hear as a baby,’ he added, referring to the use of celebratory gunfire at births and weddings.
The Landi Kotal Bazaar was busy; mujahedin mixed with older men and women covered from head to toe in the burka. Most boys in the Tribal Areas have traditionally chosen one of two career paths, fighting or smuggling. The economy, with scarcely any industry or agriculture, revolved around a smuggling arrangement born after the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement was signed in 1950. Containers were allowed to be loaded off ships, typically at Karachi, and driven by truck directly into Afghanistan, escaping Pakistan’s crippling import duties. Tribal leaders then arranged for trucks to be unpacked in areas under their control or just over the border. The goods were then smuggled back into Pakistan, often over remote mountain passes on horseback or donkey cart.
The Tribal Areas adhere to a lifestyle similar to that imposed in Afghanistan by the Taliban. They abide by a civil code known as Pashtunwali; it provides a set of obligations regulating honour, hospitality and revenge. Pashtunwali draws much from Islam but its interpretation of Islamic law arises from centuries of tribal custom Dawn was a spectacular sight. The sunlight was instantly warming and I saw for the first time the faces of the men around me. Some returned our smiles, but most just stared blankly. Many of them had been back to their homes and were returning to the front line. Suddenly the truck screeched to a halt. In a hurry, the men jumped down, and began to pray at the roadside. A few had prayer mats, but pattus, the cloaks worn over salwar kameez, were used by most. The pattu is a very durable item; a blanket at night, a dust sheet by day, it protects from the sun and is also used as a towel and napkin during mealtimes.
I was still concerned about being spotted by the Khyber Rifles patrolling the border. When prayers had finished I asked how far we were from the frontier with Afghanistan. “Here, Afghanistan!” one man laughed as he pointed to the ground. Apparently we’d already crossed and I’d been unaware of the border. The mood of the men had now changed from sullen to excitable.
There were half a dozen mujahedin on foot and horseback on the road ahead. We were heading west along the border and would end up south of Jalalabad, a city which had been under siege since the last Soviet troops had left, a year earlier. The truck was heaving and spitting; the gradients were becoming steeper and steeper, the crunching of the gears louder and louder. A large plume of oily smoke spewed from the exhaust; as if fatigued, the truck ground to a halt. ‘Harakat! Harakat!’ shouted one man. Above us, the stony peaks loomed like skyscrapers.
The Afghan fighters have a tenacity and strength in their wiry frames that I have found impossible to understand. They moved like ants, tirelessly and without complaint; some carried ammunition, others boxes of food. We were puffing at the back, no doubt delaying their progress.
After about two hours we reached a small elevated plain; there were shrubs and clutches of poplars sprinkled amongst the angular stony red and grey landscape. The air was still and clear; it was peaceful and my earlier restive mood had been replaced by wonder at my unearthly surroundings. We stopped at a collection of houses that looked uninhabited. A few young boys came to greet us and Jalal told me that lunch had been prepared. The young boys brought water in a thermos pot and we washed our hands. One man laid out his green woollen pattu on the floor to create a dining area. Another pulled out a Qur’ân from a knapsack.
Lunch was chicken and rice; a gentle breeze had carried dust and sand over the drumsticks and other, less well-defined parts. A large bowl of rice was placed in the middle of the pattu and everyone made little balls with their hands before scooping it into their mouths. The men had begun to enjoy our company and, when they saw that we were hungry, starting throwing chicken legs at us, unconcerned that most fell on the ground. The dusty soil provided a coating rather like breadcrumbs. Dust was a part of life here; to fight it was to enter an unwinnable battle.
Amongst the men was Commander Noor ul-Haq, a quiet, wiry man with a long nose and feline features. He had a constant smile and looked surprisingly young to be in charge of what I was told was a company of about a hundred men. Commander Noor was planning another assault on Jalalabad. “The city is about ten miles away, behind there,” he told me as he pointed to a mountain. “We’ve lost many shaheed,” Commander Noor said quietly. After a pause, his gait stiffened and he declared: “Twenty martyrs. Allah chose twenty of my men to deliver to paradise.” I looked at the commander with a sympathetic sorrowful expression but now he was smiling. “Twenty!” he repeated, with satisfaction. “We were fortunate that we could please Allah.” A few men muttered, “God is Great,” and waved a fist in the air. Suddenly, bad news had been transformed into good, but I didn’t feel it appropriate to offer congratulations.
Yunis Khalis was the first to spark the Islamic revival amongst Afghan exiles in Pakistan in the 1970s based on Deobandism, a creed that evolved in South Asia and is usually described in the West as a form of fundamentalism. Deobandism is more accurately a strand of Salafism, a broad movement that has appeared in various forms during the past century. It describes those who follow the sala f or al-sala f alsaalih, the “pious forefathers”. In traditional Islamic scholarship, the word refers to the Prophet Mohammed’s contemporary followers, known as his ‘Companions’, and the next two generations of Muslims. In other words, a Salfi is an early Muslim who had access, it is believed, to a purer interpretation of the revelation of the Qur’ân and therefore understood its message more clearly. Osama bin Laden considers himself a Salafist. As an ideology, Salafism does not necessarily involve political violence. It does, however, tend to view the world through a divided, Manichean prism; during the past centuries of European and American domination of Muslim lands, the West is viewed as the primary source of impurity that darkens and besmirches the true message from God. Khalis inspired his mujahedin to fight the Soviets with his Salafist beliefs, and remained close to the Taliban while it governed from Kabul and gave shelter to several senior officers when they fled after 2001. The Taliban owed much to his teachings.
In late 2003, Yunis Khalis issued a fatwa, or religious order, describing the US and its allies as ‘crusaders’. He called for jihad against all foreign forces in Afghanistan. ‘Muslims all over the world are required to fight the invading infidels and refrain from befriending or assisting them,’ he maintained. ‘Islam does not allow friendship with infidels whose brutal armies have attacked Islamic countries.’ He urged Muslims worldwide to realize the gravity of the threat to their religion. ‘The US invasion of Afghanistan is unjustified and unprincipled and is no less than the Soviet aggression against our homeland,’ he proclaimed.
One should however make distinctions between the motivations that drive political (or ethno-nationalist) terrorism and religious terrorism. But the rise of religious terrorism, coupled with the increased availability of weapons of mass destruction, may foretell an era of even greater violence. In the past, the main goal of the terrorist was not to kill, but to attract media attention to his cause in the hope of initiating reform. For the religious terrorist today, however, violence is first and foremost a sacramental act or divine duty executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative. Thus religious terrorists see themselves not as components of a system worth preserving but as 'outsiders,' seeking fundamental changes in the existing order.
