The Great War for Civilisation (174 page)

In some cases, in America, the men giving us their advice on screen were the very same operatives who steered the CIA and the FBI into the greatest intelligence failure in modern history: the inability to uncover the plot, four years in the making, to destroy the lives of nearly 3,000 people. President Bush said this was a war between good and evil. But that was exactly what bin Laden was saying. Wasn't it worthwhile to point this out and to ask where such theories might lead?

In the Middle East, Osama bin Laden was already gaining mythic status among Arabs; his voice, repeatedly beamed into millions of homes, articulated the demands and grievances—and fury—of Middle Eastern Muslims who had observed how their pro-Western presidents and kings and princes wriggled out of any serious criticism of the Anglo–American bombardment of Afghanistan. Viewing bin Laden's latest videotape, Western nations concentrated—if they listened at all—on his remarks about the atrocities in the United States. If he expressed his approval, though denied any personal responsibility, didn't this mean that he was really behind the mass slaughter of September 11th? Arabs listened with different ears. They heard a voice that accused the West of double standards and “arrogance” towards the Middle East, a voice that addressed the central issue in the lives of so many Arabs: the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the continuation of Israeli occupation. Now, as a long-time resident of Cairo put it to me, Arabs believed that America was “trying to kill the one man ready to tell the truth.”

But the response of Arab leaders to both the atrocities in America and the American bombing of Afghanistan was truly pathetic. Listening to the speeches of the Muslim leaders at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference emergency summit on 10 October, it
was
possible to believe that bin Laden represented Arabs more faithfully than their tinpot dictators and kings. Please give us more evidence about September 11, besought the emir of Qatar. Please don't forget the Palestinians, pleaded Yassir Arafat. Islam is innocent, insisted the Moroccan foreign minister. Everyone—but everyone—wished to condemn the September 11 atrocities in the United States. No one—absolutely no one—wanted to explain why nineteen Arabs decided to fly planeloads of innocent people into buildings full of civilians.

The very name “bin Laden” did not sully the Qatar conference hall. Not once. Not even the name “Taliban.” Had a Martian landed in the Gulf—which looks not unlike Mars—he might have concluded that the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed by an earthquake or a typhoon. Was it not President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt who said, back in 1990, that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would blow over “like a summer's breeze”? Delegates condemned to a man the slaughter in America without for a moment examining why it might have come about. Like the Americans, the Arabs didn't want to look for causes. Indeed, the conference hall was a miraculous place, in which introspection included neither guilt nor responsibility.

Arafat demanded an international force—a good idea for a new Afghanistan— but it quickly turned out that he was talking about an international force to protect Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza which, according to the map, was about 3,000 kilometres from Kabul. Of course, he condemned the World Trade Center massacre. So did Sheikh Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, and Mohamed bin Issa, the Moroccan foreign minister, and Abdelouahed Belkeziz, the Islamic Conference's secretary-general. But that was about it. Indeed, the collected speeches amounted to a chorus: please don't kill innocent Afghans, but—whatever happens—don't bomb Arab countries. For much of the day, Afghanistan appeared a faraway country of which they knew little—a mendacious thought, given that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were midwives to the Taliban—and wanted to know even less.

Only Farouq al-Sharaa, the Syrian foreign minister, stated frankly that attacking Muslim states was “forbidden.” This meant, he said, “that all Arabs and Muslims will stand with the country that is attacked.” Which must have made them shiver in their boots on board the U.S. carriers in the Gulf. There was the usual rhetoric bath from other conference delegates. The communiqué from the fifty-six conference members claimed that they rejected “the linking of terrorism to the Arab and Muslim people's rights, including the Palestinian and Lebanese people's right to self-determination, self-defence and resisting Israeli and foreign occupation and aggression.” Translation: Please, America, don't take the Israeli side and bomb Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Lebanese Hizballah, Damascus, Tehran et al. “Resistance is not terrorism” had become as familiar a slogan in the Arab world as “war against terrorism” had in the Western world.

There was little that George Bush or Tony Blair would have disagreed with. Retaliation “should not extend to any but those who carried out those attacks [which] requires conclusive evidence against the culprits,” Sheikh Hamad pronounced. “The Islamic world was the first to call for the dialogue of civilisation.” This might have been scripted for the British prime minister. But the Qatari emir got off one quick biff at the Americans. The world should not, he said, fall “into conflicting sects, camps and clashing dichotomies based on the principle of ‘If you are not on my side, then you are against me.'”

Wasn't Israel the real problem? the delegates tried to ask. Principal among them, of course, was our old friend Y. Arafat, Esq. Of course he condemned the attacks in America. Of course he felt “solidarity” with the American people—the old socialist “solidarity” put to an original new use. Money was to be had in a good cause. Qatar opened a fund for the Afghans and the Saudis put in $10 million, the United Arab Emirates $3 million, Oman $1 million. But what the delegates wanted was evidence—“conclusive evidence,” according to Sheikh Hamad—that Washington had identified the culprits of September 11th. This at least allowed him to avoid the fatal words “bin Laden.” Indeed, it allowed everyone to duck this annoying, dangerous, frightening man who was calling for the overthrow of almost every single one of the Islamic delegates. We're sorry about September 11th, they said. Please don't bomb Afghanistan more than you have to. Please don't kill the innocent. And please don't bomb us.

For journalists, it was a frustrating war to cover. Around the Taliban's embassy in Islamabad and its consulate in Peshawar, we gathered in our hundreds. Names were scribbled onto visa applications and scooped up at the end of the morning by a scowling man with a long, pointed beard—and, I had no doubt, deposited in a large rubbish bin. In Quetta, I arrived at the consulate with a letter from a prominent supporter of the Taliban, insisting that I should be given a visa. I handed it to a Taliban “diplomat” in a dirty white robe. “Get out,” he screamed at me. Once outside, I saw the letter—screwed up into a ball—sail over the consulate wall onto the pavement in front of me. Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist, managed to enter Afghanistan and interview bin Laden and emerged to tell me that bin Laden himself had asked why I was not in the country to see him. Months later, I learned that the Taliban had sought to find me, that I could have travelled to Afghanistan and talked to bin Laden—but that the message never reached me. The Scoop that never was.

Unaware of all this, I went on vainly pestering the Taliban's men for a visa. I settled into a villa in Peshawar, working my contacts in Islamabad for that all-important, hopeless document. I would take tea on the lawn. Perhaps only in the old British empire do they make black tea and milk in the same scalding pot, poured with lashings of sugar into fragile cups. The bougainvillea blasted crimson and purple down the brick wall beside me while big, aggressive black birds pursued one another over the cut grass. At the end of my road lay the British cemetery I had first explored twenty-one years earlier wherein memorials recorded the assassination of the Raj's good men from Surrey and Yorkshire, murdered by what were called
ghazis
, the Afghan fundamentalists of their age, who were often accompanied into battle—and I quote Captain Mainwaring who was in the Second Afghan War—“by religious men called
talibs
.” In those days, we made promises. We promised Afghan governments our support if they kept out the Russians. We promised our Indian empire wealth, communications and education in return for its loyalty. Little had changed.

As day turned into sweaty evening, fighter-bombers pulsed through the yellow sky above my lawn, grey supersonic streaks that rose like hawks from Peshawar's mighty runway and headed west towards the mountains of Afghanistan. Their jet engines must have vibrated among the English bones in the cemetery at the end of the road, as Hardy's Channel firing once disturbed Parson Thirdly's remains. And on the big black television in my bedroom, the broken, veined screen proved that imperial history did indeed repeat itself. General Colin Powell stood at the right hand of General Pervez Musharraf after promising a serious look at the problems of Kashmir and Pashtun representation in a future Afghan government. The U.S. secretary of state and the general spent much of their time on 15 October chatting about the overnight artillery bombardment by that other old empire relic, the Indian army. General Musharraf wanted a “short” campaign against Afghanistan, General Powell a promise of continued Pakistani support in the United States's “war on terror.” Musharraf wanted a solution to the problem of Kashmir. Powell, promising that the United States was now a close friend of Pakistan, headed off to India to oblige.

Scarcely three days before Powell acquired his sudden interest in the problems of Kashmir, Yassir Arafat, the discredited old man of Gaza—“our bin Laden,” as ex-General Ariel Sharon indecently called him—was invited to Downing Street, where Tony Blair, hitherto a cautious supporter of Palestinian independence, declared the need for a “viable Palestinian state,” including Jerusalem—“viable” being a gloss for a less mangled version of the Bantustan originally proposed for Arafat. Blair had no need to fear American wrath since President Bush Junior had already discovered that even before September 11th—or so he told us—he had a “vision” of a Palestinian state that accepted the existence of Israel. Arafat—speaking English at length for the first time in years—instantly supported the air bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans were not on hand to remind the world that the same Yassir Arafat had once enthusiastically supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Why did we always make quick-fix promises to vulnerable allies of convenience after years of accepting, even creating, the injustices of the Middle East and South-West Asia?

It was intriguing, that sweltering autumn in Pakistan, to read the full text of what bin Laden demanded in his first post–World Trade Center attack videotape. He said in Arabic, in a section largely excised in English translations, that “our [Muslim] nation has undergone more than eighty years of this humiliation . . .” and referred to “when the sword reached America after eighty years.” Bin Laden might be cruel, wicked, ruthless or evil personified, but he was intelligent. He was obviously referring to the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, written by the victorious allied powers, which broke the Ottoman empire and did away—after 600 years of sultanates and caliphates—with the last dream of Arab unity. Bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman Zawahri—shouting into the video recorder from his Afghan cave on 6 October 2001—stated that the al-Qaeda movement “will not tolerate a recurrence of the Andalusia tragedy in Palestine.” Andalusia? Yes, the debacle of Andalusia marked the end of Muslim rule in Spain in the fifteenth century. We may sprinkle quick-fix promises around, but the people of the Middle East have longer memories.

However one approaches this Arab sense of humiliation—whether we regard it as a form of self-pity or a fully justified response to injustice—it is nonetheless real. The Arabs were among the first scientists at the start of the second millennium, while the Crusaders—another of bin Laden's fixations—were riding in technological ignorance into the Muslim world. So while in the past few decades our popular conception of the Arabs vaguely embraced an oil-rich, venal and largely backward people, awaiting our annual handouts and their virgins in heaven, many of them were asking pertinent questions about their past and future, about religion and science, about—so I suspect—how God and technology might be part of the same universe. No such long-term questions for us. We just went on supporting our Muslim dictators around the world—especially in the Middle East—in return for their friendship and our false promises to rectify injustice.

We allowed our dictators to snuff out their socialist and communist parties; we left their population little place to exercise their political opposition except through religion. We went in for demonisation—Messrs. Khomeini, Abu Nidal, Ghadafi, Arafat, Saddam, bin Laden—rather than historical questioning. And we made more promises. Presidents Carter and Reagan made pledges to the Afghan mujahedin: fight the Russians and we will help you. We would assist the recovery of the Afghan economy. A rebuilding of the country, even—this from innocent Jimmy Carter—“democracy,” not a concept to be sure that we would now be bequeathing to the Pakistanis, Uzbeks or Saudis. Of course, once the Russians were gone in 1989, there was no economic assistance.

The problem, it seemed, was that without any sense of history, we failed to understand injustice. Instead we compounded it, after years of indolence, when we wanted to bribe our would-be allies with promises of vast historical importance— a resolution to Palestine, Kashmir, an arms-free Middle East, Arab independence, an economic Nirvana—because we were at war. Tell Muslims what they want to hear, promise them what they want—anything, so long as we can get our armadas into the air in our latest “war against evil.” And up they flew. In the sand-blasted mud villages along the border of Afghanistan, we could watch their contrails, white gashes cut into the deep blue skies that would suddenly turn into circles and—from far away across the Kandahar desert—we would hear a distant, imperial thunder. With binoculars, we could even make out the sleek, four-engined bombers, the sunlight flashing off their wings. Then the planes would turn southwest and begin their long haul back to Diego Garcia.