Al-Qaeda (2 page)

21. US planes forming defensive screen over Washington, DC, 2002 (
Reuters/Corbis
)

22. Bali bombing, 2002 (
Reuters/Corbis
)

23. Colin Powell, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld (
Reuters/Corbis
)

24. American pamphlet dropped over Afghanistan, 2003 (
Reuters/Corbis
)

25. American troops in Najaf, Iraq, 2003 (
Laszlo Balogh/Reuters/Corbis
)

26. Author with American troops in Iraq, 2003 (
Seamus Murphy
)

27. Casablanca bombing, 2003 (
Joelle Vassort/Reuters/Corbis
)

28. UN compound bombing, Baghdad, 2003 (
Reuters/Corbis
)

29. Istanbul bombing, 2003 (
Reuters/Corbis
)

30. Madrid bombing, 2004 (
Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters/Corbis
)

31. Palestinians with photos of bin Laden at Gaza funeral (
Reuters/Corbis
)

32. Pakistani soldier arresting suspected Islamic militant, Waziristan, 2004 (
Faisal Mahmood/Reuters/Corbis
)

Acknowledgements

I have many people to thank. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues at the
Observer
. Roger Alton, Paul Webster, Andy Malone, John Mulholland, Allan Jenkins and many others have taught me a huge amount and have provided unfailing support. Other reporters on the newspaper, especially Martin Bright, have been generous with their time and contacts. I owe Peter Beaumont, a great reporter and friend, a lot. For their faith in my days as a penurious freelancer, thanks are due to Leonard Doyle and Ian Birrell at the
Independent
. Without Ciaran Byrne’s advice at Lambeth town hall in 1993, things would have been very different.

I also have to thank the many colleagues outside the newspaper who have been so generous with their own work, advice and resources both during the writing of this book and on innumerable days in the field. They must include Abdul Bari Atwan, Scott Peterson, Adrian Levy, Alex Milner, Paul Danahar, Munir Ahmed, Zaffar Abbas, Ahmed Zaidan, Janaullah Hashimzada, Rory McCarthy, Ibrahim, Said Aburish, John Aglionby, Stephen Farrell, Luke Hunt, Syed Salahuddin, Fareed, Mirwais, Abdullah, Ahmed Shah and Azzam in Kabul, Muzamil Jaleel in Srinagar, Peter Popham, Tim Judah, Ben Brown and Dilip Hiro. There are many, many others who have been excellent company on long journeys in strange places, far too many to list here.

I was enormously lucky to be able to tap the profound scholarship of Malise Ruthven, who very kindly read much of my manuscript at very short notice and made many invaluable suggestions. Peter Bergen gave me the benefit of his own deep knowledge with a similarly detailed
reading of the book. Brian Whitaker was generous and patient, as were Gilles Kepel, Owen Bennett Jones, Camille Tawil, Peter Marsden and Alice Perman. I am very grateful to them all. My thanks to Simon Reeve too.

Ilyas Masih is the best driver in Pakistan. His brother, Taj, is the second best. Ershad Mahmud of Islamabad’s IPS and Alexander Evans have been particularly helpful. Ala Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was a huge help in northern Iraq. In five years living or working in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are many, many people who have assisted me in one way or another. Hundreds of people from prime ministers and presidents to shepherds and kebab-sellers enabled me to travel and work in safety in such interesting times. My thanks to Karen Davies as well. There are many others, diplomats, policemen and security officials in the UK, the Middle East and the Far East, whom I cannot thank by name. They know who they are and I am grateful to them. I owe Ashleigh Lezard thanks too.

Above all I have to thank Mohammed Ekram Shinwari. Ekram is a fantastic reporter, and a good friend. His understanding of Afghanistan, contacts, news judgement, unflagging enthusiasm, energy, sense of humour and hospitality are without equal. His mental computer, an archive of contemporary Afghan history, is a national asset as valuable as the Bagram ivories. Without him this book simply could not have been written. With him, it has been a lot easier, and a lot more fun.

Nor, of course, could this book have been written without Toby Eady, my agent, a consummate professional whose enthusiasm, understanding, erudition and experience are indispensable.

Raf Nieto, Denise Bailey, Roger Deane and everyone else, student or sensei, involved with Zen-do have done a magnificent job of keeping me sane and vaguely fit over the last five years.

For all the support and the forbearance of all my friends I am profoundly grateful.

I would like to thank my brothers and sisters, Adam, Sonya, Patrick and Anna, and my parents, my grandmother and Mike and Sally, all of whom are always there. I can remember days spent reading on Nina’s dining-room table.

This book is dedicated to my grandfathers, Sidney Marks and Samuel Burke. Both were truly good men, full of dry humour, respect for others, honesty, tolerance and integrity. I miss them both.

Regardless if Osama is killed or survives, the awakening has started, praise
be to God.

Osama bin Laden, videoed speech, broadcast 27 December 2001

He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and revolt… The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by

personal impulses disguised into creeds.

Joseph Conrad
, The Secret Agent

Brute force without wisdom falls by its own weight.

Horace
, Odes,
iv, 65

Introduction

The Shadow of Terror

The fighters came back in the middle of the night. Their weapons and the ammunition slung around their shoulders reflected the dull red glow given out by the embers of the fire. The men sleeping in the room sat up and moved to make space by the fire for the new arrivals. Outside it was cold enough for frost to form wherever there was standing water.

During the day, two men had been taken prisoner and several others killed or wounded, and the fighters did not talk much. One of them cleaned and checked a captured light machine gun while the others ate the remnants of a thin chicken stew cooked several hours earlier. It was 3am, and everyone knew, at least if the routine established over the previous two days continued, that the bombing would not start again for two or three hours, and now was the time to sleep.

Throughout the day and for much of the night the B-52s had been overhead. We had watched their distinctive quadruple contrails tracking in straight lines from the north towards their targets. Then they would make a sharp turn to the west and we would see great gouts of smoke, dirt, rock and flame on the steep slopes above us. A second or so later the noise and the blast would reach us, tugging at our clothes.

But now there was no noise. The fighters were sleeping or eating or talking softly to each other. In the next room, where the commanders were sitting on the floor drinking tea and dozing, a radio set on the dirt floor crackled out bursts of conversations and static.

When I woke three hours later all the men in the room were awake and most were standing. They had already eaten and stowed some dry bread for later in the day and had hung chains of bullets for the
captured light machine gun around their necks. Then they wrapped their blankets over their thin
shalwar kameez
, hitched the straps of their Kalashnikovs over their shoulders, put magazines in their pockets or in the home-stitched webbing and, talking in low, muffled, uninflected voices, moved outside into the cold. Many of their blankets, bought in the bazaars of the city of Jalalabad some 30 miles away, had been imported from Iran and were bright green and pink and covered in gold prints of large flowers. There was the occasional abrupt laugh and then, with the blankets still wrapped over their thin clothes, the men moved off in small groups towards the pick-up trucks that would take them up to their assault positions.

The sky had begun to lighten and long files of men were now marching along the ridge towards the steep, dark, forested slopes that rose towards the snowy mountains. To the north, behind us, lay the city of Jalalabad and the dirt-coloured desert around it. Strands of mist hung over the irrigated lands around the Kabul River. Beyond it the ground banked up in a series of crumpled dry valleys, cliffs and plateaux to another long, low ridge of snow-covered summits. I heard the dull double or treble crack of the big 20-year-old Soviet anti-aircraft guns that the mujahideen were using as ground support weapons.

Then high overhead, above the mountains to the north, scoring confident white lines across the pale sky like a steel cutter across glass, I could see the first set of the quadruple vapour trails of the B-52s of the day. When they appeared, the trails were white against the dawn sky. But the rays of the early morning sun, though yet to hit the mountain tops, were angled up into the sky like searchlights, and when they struck the vapour trails, at an altitude of 10,000 feet, they turned them a pink as lurid and as bright and as out of place as the printed flowers on the blankets wrapped around the soldiers’ thin shoulders. The trails powered forwards towards the mountains and then dipped elegantly away to the west. And then came the boiling, orange flames and the oily, dark smoke, indistinct in the half-light as if through a smeared windowpane. The noise came rolling over the hills.

The Americans had started bombing the caves, on a spur of the Spin Ghar mountains and less than ten miles from the Pakistani border, on 30 November 2001. They were known locally as Tora Bora. Seventeen
days earlier, the Taliban and their Arab and Pakistani auxiliaries had pulled out of Kabul, and the troops of the Northern Alliance had advanced across the Shomali plains to enter the city they had abandoned just over five years before. With a group of mujahideen, I had smuggled myself across the border and arrived in Jalalabad a few hours after it had been liberated. Two days later I drove the road to Kabul, hours before four reporters were killed on it, swung through Gardez and finally, after nearly a week, reached the eastern Afghan city of Khost, the heart of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan. My hosts, fighters loyal to the local warlord, told me I was the first Westerner in the city for five years. The Arabs, they said, had all gone.

Over the next weeks American warplanes scoured Afghanistan, mopping up retreating Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Resistance was minimal. The Taliban virtually evaporated. Those commanders who had hitched themselves to the movement as it had swept through the country from 1994 to 1998 defected as quickly as they had joined up. By early December the southern desert city of Kandahar, the spiritual home and administrative headquarters of the Taliban, was in the hands of warlords, and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive cleric who had led the hardline Islamic militia, was a fugitive.