Is This Your First War? (4 page)

“They would play music. We'd smoke pot together. My favourites were the German women. They were all laid back, blonde, good-looking. Peace and love. They were the best, but all the women were nice, their boyfriends too. They loved it here. And they loved this guesthouse. They said it was like Shangri-La.” He smiled and shook his head then rolled a piece of gummy hash into a hand-rolled cigarette. The paper stuck to his juice-stained fingers. He inhaled deeply and tilted his head back, puckering his lips to blow the smoke away from his face in a tight stream.

“Do you play the guitar?” he asked.

“A little.”

“I have one inside. A Dutch man, long hair, he left it here as a present. All the strings are broken.”

“Did you learn to play?”

“Not really. The girls would try to teach me.”

Ali tried to blow hashish smoke rings and coughed loudly. “You two are the first guests I've had in months,” he said.

When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran blocked overland routes to Pakistan from Europe, the flow of liberal-minded young tourists to Ali's guesthouse dried up.

“I was a businessman in Europe for a while,” Ali said. “More of a salesman, really.”

“What did you sell?”

“Gems. Precious stones. Rubies, that sort of thing.”

“How did that go?”

“Not very well. I was arrested and jailed in France for two years.”

“A salesman?”

“They said I was a smuggler.”

Ali returned to Pakistan, reopened his guesthouse, and waited for the tourists to come back. They didn't. “I'd like to immigrate to Australia,” he said.

Madyan fell to the Taliban in 2007. Scores died fighting in the area when Pakistani security forces fought to take it back two years later. I don't know what happened to Ali, whether he ever made it to Australia or was purged by the Taliban because of his love of Western women and music. We said goodbye and caught a minibus south to Peshawar and the ungoverned Tribal Areas west of the city, where even in 2000 the Taliban's influence was strong and growing.

Peshawar's history has been shaped by its geography. It lies at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, connecting Central Asia with the Indian subcontinent, and for centuries every explorer, spy, smuggler, bandit, and conquering army crossing between Europe and Asia had little choice but to pass this way. Alexander led his near-mutinous army through the pass more than two thousand years ago. The British occupied Peshawar in the 1800s and from there sent armies and secret agents into Afghanistan and beyond. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the city became the home base of the Afghan mujahideen resistance and their allies, who included Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, the CIA, and Muslim freelance volunteers from around world.

Osama bin Laden, then little more than the son of a wealthy Yemeni construction tycoon in Saudi Arabia, showed up at this time. He set up an office in the University Town neighbourhood of the city to organize the flow of Arab volunteers hoping to get a crack at the infidel Soviets or to martyr themselves in the attempt. Bin Laden gained some fame as a cash cow but wasn't satisfied. He wanted to cross the border and fight. He established a mountain base inside Afghanistan for several dozen Arab volunteers under his command. These so-called Afghan Arabs were brave but incompetent. Afghans fighting with them recoiled from their suicidal zeal, and the military exploits of bin Laden's foreign volunteers were of negligible impact. But when the Russians were finally driven out, they convinced themselves that they had helped defeat a superpower. Muslim piety had triumphed over the godless might of the Soviet Union. A myth was born.

It was during this period that al-Qaeda took shape. Founded by bin Laden and an Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with a small band of Arabs who had come to Afghanistan, the group's goal was to support jihads against insufficiently Islamic regimes around the world. The United States was not an initial target but became one when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the Saudi royal family called on U.S. troops for protection. Bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia and offered to field an army of Arab veterans of Afghanistan to defend the country. The Saudi royal family turned him down. For bin Laden, the shame of an infidel army protecting the land of Mecca and Medina was too much to bear. Three years later, in 1993, al-Qaeda graduates bombed the World Trade Center in New York.

Meanwhile, the civil war that erupted in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal was steadily consuming the country. Once again Peshawar cast its long shadow. In 1994, a movement of radical Islamists, calling themselves Taliban, or students, emerged in Kandahar province with the stated goal of restoring order and bringing Islamic law to Afghanistan. Many had lived in Peshawar and had studied in its madrassahs. They were led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, a one-eyed sheik from a poor family near Kandahar. Afghan refugees from the sprawling camps outside Peshawar swelled their ranks. Their base grew out of Afghanistan's Pashtun belt and spread north. In 1996 they captured Kabul. Mullah Omar declared that Afghanistan was an Islamic emirate. He donned a cloak thought to have belonged to the prophet Mohammad and dubbed himself “Commander of the Faithful.”

Pakistan, through its ISI spy agency, had armed and funded the Taliban since its inception. It was one of only three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate rulers. Having a friendly regime next door provided the Pakistani government with “strategic depth” as it faced off against its main rival, India, ensuring Pakistan could never be threatened from the west. And the Taliban's training camps for jihadists provided recruits for the ISI to infiltrate into Kashmir and hit India there. The Taliban were Pakistan's pawns and Afghanistan a client province to be exploited.

Some in Afghanistan initially welcomed the Taliban. Road travel was safer. Men who raped children were punished. But the Taliban also imposed a brutal and atavistic version of Islam. They treated women like animals, forbidding them even to leave their homes unless they were covered in a bedsheet-like burka, let alone work or go to school. It is little exaggeration to say that fun itself was forbidden. Music, dancing, flying kites, all were banned as un-Islamic. On occasion the Taliban massacred those they considered ethnically or religiously impure. In 1998 they slaughtered some 6,000 Shia Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif.

Their most serious opposition came in the form of the predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance, which held out in northern Afghanistan and in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. Here, during the 1980s, their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, earned his nickname “Lion of Panjshir” and the affection of millions of Afghans because of his steadfast resistance against Soviet troops, who tried innumerable times to dislodge him and could not.

Osama bin Laden watched the Taliban's rise from Sudan, where he had moved in 1992 along with his al-Qaeda jihadist cohorts and was wearing out his welcome. The Saudi government had persuaded his family to cut off his multi-million-dollar allowance, and Egypt, the United States, and Saudi Arabia were all pressuring Sudan to kick him out. In 1996 he chartered a jet and returned to Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his fellow Arabs found accommodating hosts in Mullah Omar and the Taliban. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden formally declared war against the United States and Israel or, as he put it, crusaders and Jews. He wasn't bluffing. Al-Qaeda operatives bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, murdering hundreds, and two years later the group attacked the American navy destroyer USS
Cole
while it was harboured in the Yemeni port city of Aden.

When we arrived in November 2000, a month after al-Qaeda's attack on the
Cole
, Peshawar felt like the edge of a frontier. Energy oozed from every crowded nook. Swarms of kids loudly peddled sugarcane and men on exhaust-belching motorcycles roared past pastry shops that sold rice pudding out of steel vats in their front windows. But when night fell, the streets emptied and it didn't seem safe to linger outdoors. Just outside the city was a large smugglers' bazaar for those who needed to stock up on supplies that weren't readily available in regular stores. Officially, as a large sign and armed guard made clear, the bazaar was closed to foreigners. But by this time both Adam and I were wearing Pakistani-style
shalwar kamiz
trousers and tops, and I, being a little darker than Adam, was able to sneak past the guard to see what was for sale along the market's main drag. Vendors on one side of the dusty street specialized in opium and hashish — huge blocks of which were displayed in storefront windows. The vendors opposite boasted equally prominent displays of automatic weapons.

We had been in Peshawar a day or two when we met Fired, an Afghan who had arrived a month before us but was well connected in the city. He had a stubbly face, a thick shock of frizzy black hair, and a gash across the bridge of his nose that was held together by a messy stitching job. He didn't explain how he got it. Fired's family traded and smuggled across the border, mostly carpets. He rented a shop in the city. One afternoon, as we drank tea with a few of his friends in his carpet-filled apartment, we asked Fired if he could arrange to take us to Dara Adam Khel, a town in the Tribal Areas that had been well known for more than a century — among certain kinds of people — for the crafting and selling of black market weapons.

Within seven years, Dara Adam Khel too would be swallowed by the Taliban's insurgency. Jihadists would leave pamphlets on the town's streets forbidding music and instructing men to grow beards and women to wear burkas. They murdered supposed spies of either the American or the Pakistani states, leaving headless bodies on the street each morning with notes pinned to the chest that outlined their alleged crimes.

But when we asked Fired about visiting the place, he wasn't concerned. He simply sent one the kids who was hanging around his apartment into the roiling streets below us to seek out his friend, Sohail, who had family in the area.

The boy returned twenty minutes later with Sohail, a twenty-three-year-old man wearing a crisp and spotless pale blue shalwar kamiz and a warm, if slightly boyish, smile. His face was round and smooth. If he had to shave at all, it wasn't very often. Sohail agreed to take us to Dara Adam Khel the next day, early, before any problems that might flare up in the Tribal Areas had a chance to develop.

“All these buildings, they are houses for smugglers,” Sohail said as we drove through the flat and dusty expanse west of Peshawar. He pointed out the car window at buildings enclosed by long and tall mud-brick walls that hid everything inside from the road.

“They must be rich smugglers,” I said.

“Oh, yes, they are very wealthy men. They smuggle guns, drugs, gold, diamonds, everything — to America, Canada, France, Germany, all over. My uncle, he is also a smuggler.” Sohail paused and laughed. “But my mother is finished with him now. She doesn't want any problems for us children.”

Sohail explained that Pakistani law was non-existent where we were. Officially, it was in the hands of the tribal authorities. “But only on the roads,” he said. “If the police come into the village, the people will kill them.” Sohail said his own village was run by the patriarch of a leading family, “a very big man.” When the patriarch died, his son would take over.

Dara Adam Khel, when we finally arrived, looked like any other rural village in the area. There were a few butcher shops with goat carcasses and sides of beef hanging in the windows. Some had tables out front covered in sheep heads. Small boys stood behind them trying to wave off the flies that gathered in the rising heat. Men lounged in shadowed teahouses. But the gunfire was constant and unnerving. It began the moment we stepped out the car and continued as we followed Sohail to his friend's house, where we reclined on rope beds for a quick meal of flatbread and sweet, milky tea. All around the village, craftsmen and prospective buyers were testing the merchandise. And every time the gunfire shattered a few fleeting minutes of quiet, I would wince and Sohail and his friend would laugh, one of them slapping me on the back.

When we finished our tea, we walked into town, Sohail's friend carrying an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. We browsed through dozens of workshops and showrooms where proud and occasionally bored craftsman showed off their handiwork. It felt like we were on a school field trip. The gunsmiths worked sitting on the floor of simple workshops and appeared to use the most basic tools. One fit a gun barrel into the wooden stock of a rifle while squatting below a large poster of a dove with the word “Peace” written on it in English. Children crouched on mats outside shops with piles of defective bullets in front of them, knocking them apart to retrieve the gunpowder inside. The most common weapon produced was the Kalashnikov, or AK-47, the assault rifle that is popular throughout the developing world and is valued for its basic design and reliability. They're cheap and easy to repair — the preferred weapon of guerillas everywhere. Other craftsman specialized in shotguns and pistols. One designed a one-shot gun disguised as pen.

A gunsmith in Dara Adam Khel.