The Looming Tower (38 page)

These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time. The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them. They were stigmatized as beggars and sissies, and often preyed upon by men who were isolated from women. Entrenched in their studies, which were rigidly concentrated on the Quran and Sharia and the glorification of jihad, the talibs imagined a perfect Islamic society, while lawlessness and barbarity ran rampant all around them. They lived in the shadow of their fathers and older brothers, who had brought down the mighty superpower, and they were eager to gain glory for themselves. Whenever the Taliban army required reinforcements, the madrassas in Peshawar and the Tribal Areas simply shut down classes and the students went to war, praising God as the buses ferried them across the border. Six months after Kandahar surrendered, there were twelve thousand fighters in the Taliban, and twice again that number six months later.

The third stream was opium. Immediately after capturing Kandahar, the Taliban consolidated control of Helmand province, the center of opium cultivation. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan became the largest poppy grower in the world. The smugglers and drug barons depended on the Taliban to keep the roads clear of bandits; in return, they paid a 10 percent tax, which became a principal source of income for the Taliban.

In Kandahar there is a shrine that houses what is said to be the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed. The ancient robe is removed from its silver box only during periods of catastrophe—the last time had been during a cholera epidemic seventy years before. On April
4, 1996,
Omar took the Prophet’s cloak to a mosque in the center of the city. Having announced on the radio that he would display the relic in public, he climbed on the roof of the mosque and for thirty minutes paraded around with his hands in the sleeves of the cloak, while a delirious crowd cheered his designation as Amir-ul-Momineen, the leader of the faithful. Some people in the crowd fainted; others threw their hats and turbans into the air, hoping that they would brush against the sacred garment.

Of course, it was the dream of Islamists everywhere that their religion would again be unified under the rule of a single righteous individual. Kings and sultans had bid for the role, but none had wrapped himself in the mantle of the Prophet as had this obscure mullah. It was a gesture both preposterous and electrifying. Omar gained the political authority he needed to pursue the war; but more than that, the action symbolically promised that the Taliban, as a moral force, would roll through Afghanistan and then magnify itself throughout the Islamic world.

B
IN
L
ADEN’S FAMILIES
and some of his followers arrived in Jalalabad to find rudimentary quarters: tents for the wives, with latrines and drainage ditches, set inside a barbed-wire enclosure. When winter arrived, bin Laden secured new housing for the families on a former Soviet collective farm, which he called Najm al-Jihad (star of the holy war). The men bunked nearby in the old ammunition storage cavern that bin Laden had excavated in Tora Bora. He outfitted the main cave with an armory of Kalashnikovs, a theological library, an archive of press clippings, and a couple of mattresses draped across several crates of hand grenades.

He went back into business, setting up a modest trade in honey, but Afghanistan has almost no commercial infrastructure, so there was little he could actually do. The three wives who stayed with him were accustomed to hardship, which bin Laden, naturally, embraced. He no longer slaughtered a lamb every day to serve his guests; now he rarely ate meat, preferring to live on dates, milk, yoghurt, and flatbread. Electricity was available for only three hours a day, and because there was no international telephone service his wives were completely cut off from their families in Syria and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden had a satellite phone, but he spoke on it sparingly, believing that the Americans were monitoring his calls. He was suspicious of mechanical devices in general, even clocks, which he thought might be used for surveillance.

Mainly, however, he was worried about the Taliban. He had no idea who they were. The anxious tribesmen in the northern region of Afghanistan spread rumors that the Taliban were a huge army of communists. When two of his mujahideen sponsors, Governor Mehmoud and Maulvi Saznoor, were killed in an ambush soon after Jalalabad fell, bin Laden taught his wives how to shoot.

The Taliban knew something about bin Laden, though, and they were just as worried about him as he was about them. “We don’t want subversive actions to be launched from here against any other countries,” the Taliban’s acting information minister declared. “In areas under Taliban control, there are no terrorists.” But they had heard about the millions he had poured into Sudan, and they assumed he was still a wealthy Islamic philanthropist. They hoped to use his money and expertise to rebuild their shattered country. Mullah Omar was also mindful of the pledge he had given, no doubt supported by many millions of Saudi riyals, to keep his guest silent and out of trouble.

After Jalalabad fell, the Taliban finally entered Kabul. The victorious young fighters broke into the UN compound where Najibullah, the former president of Afghanistan from its communist era, had taken refuge since the fall of his government four years before. He and his brother were beaten and tortured, castrated, dragged behind a jeep, shot, then hanged from a traffic pole in downtown Kabul. Cigarettes were placed in their mouths and money was stuffed in their pockets. There was little to mourn about a man who had begun his career as a torturer in the secret police, but the immediate disregard for international protocols, the casual savagery, the mutilation of the body—forbidden in Islam—and the absence of any court of justice set the stage for the carnival of religious tyranny that characterized the Taliban era. Prince Turki soon appeared in Kabul to congratulate them on their victory. During the entire Taliban reign, only three countries—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates—recognized the Afghan government.

“Women you should not step outside your residence,” the new government ordered. Women were a particular target, as might be expected from men who had so little experience of their company. “If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves,” the decree continued, “they will be cursed by the Islamic Sharia and should never expect to go to heaven.” Work and schooling for women were halted at once, which destroyed the health-care system, the civil service, and effectively eliminated elementary education. Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven out of ten teachers were women. Under the Taliban, many of them would become beggars.

The Taliban also turned their attention to ordinary pleasure. They forbade kite flying and dog racing. Trained pigeons were slaughtered. According to the Taliban penal code, “unclean things” were banned, an all-purpose category that included: “pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, any equipment that produces the joy of music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computer, VCRs, televisions, anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, pictures, Christmas cards.”

The fashion dictators demanded that a man’s beard be longer than the grip of his hand. Violators went to jail until they were sufficiently bushy. A man with “Beatle-ly” hair would have his head shaved. Should a woman leave her home without her veil, “her home will be marked and her husband punished,” the Taliban penal code decreed. The animals in the zoo—those that had not been stolen in previous administrations—were slain or left to starve. One zealous, perhaps mad, Taliban jumped into a bear’s cage and cut off his nose, reputedly because the animal’s “beard” was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion’s den and cried out, “I am the lion now!” The lion killed him. Another Taliban soldier threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived the Taliban rule.

“Throw reason to the dogs,” read a sign posted on the wall of the office of the religious police, who were trained by the Saudis. “It stinks of corruption.” And yet the Afghan people, so exhausted by war, initially embraced the imposition of this costly order.

W
HILE BIN
L
ADEN
was setting up in Jalalabad, his friend and military chief, Abu Ubaydah, was in East Africa, overseeing the al-Qaeda cell that had been established two years before. The former Egyptian policeman was a revered figure in al-Qaeda. His courage was legendary. He had been with bin Laden during the war against the Soviets, all the way from the battle of the Lion’s Den to the siege of Jalalabad. Some said that if Zawahiri had taken over bin Laden’s brain, Abu Ubaydah had his heart. He was bin Laden’s most trusted emissary, often serving as a mediator between al-Qaeda and al-Jihad. He trained mujahideen in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Tajikistan, drawing valuable recruits to the Qaeda camps. In Kenya, he had taken a new identity and married a local woman, claiming to be in the mining business while he was actually preparing al-Qaeda’s first great strike against America.

On May
21,
three days after bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan, Abu Ubaydah and his Kenyan brother-in-law, Ashif Mohammed Juma, were in a second-class cabin in an overloaded ferry on Lake Victoria, traveling to Tanzania. One of the ballast tanks was empty, and in the early morning the ferry capsized in rough water. Juma managed to get through the door of the cabin into the corridor, but the five other passengers crammed into the tiny compartment were trapped. The door was now above them, and water was gushing in from an open portal. Passengers were screaming, luggage and mattresses were falling on top of them, and they clawed at each other in order to reach the door, their only escape. Juma grabbed Abu Ubaydah’s hand and pulled him halfway out of the room, but suddenly the door was ripped from its hinges and al-Qaeda’s military chief was pulled back into the cabin by his doomed companions.

T
HIS WAS THE NADIR
of bin Laden’s career.

Abu Ubaydah was not his only loss. Others, such as Abu Hajer, chose not to follow bin Laden back to Afghanistan. The Saudi was isolated, stripped of his once great wealth, dependent on the hospitality of an unknown power, and yet he was not broken or even subdued. His life was lived in two spheres, the existential and the sacred. His flight to Jalalabad and the scandal of his current circumstances must have struck him, on one level, as a nearly hopeless exile; but in spiritual terms it recapitulated a critical moment in the Prophet’s life when, in
622,
ostracized and ridiculed, he was expelled from Mecca and fled to Medina. The
hijira,
or retreat, as the event is called, was such a significant turning point that it begins the Islamic calendar. The
hijira
transformed Mohammed and his demoralized followers. Within a few years, their nascent religion burst out of Medina and spread from Spain to China in a blinding flash of conversion and conquest.

Since childhood, bin Laden had consciously modeled himself on certain features of the Prophet’s life, choosing to fast on the days the Prophet fasted, to wear clothes similar to those the Prophet may have worn, even to sit and to eat in the same postures that tradition ascribes to him; and although none of this is unusual for a strict Muslim, bin Laden instinctively referenced the Prophet and his era as the template of his own life and times. Intervening history meant little to him. Naturally, he would turn to the Prophet’s example for consolation during his own period of defeat and withdrawal. However, he was also savvy enough to recognize the symbolic power of his own
hijira
and its usefulness as a way of inspiring his followers and beckoning to other Muslims to join his sacred retreat. He brilliantly reframed the disaster that had fallen upon him and his movement by calling up images that were deeply meaningful to many Muslims and practically invisible to those who were unfamiliar with the faith.

Afghanistan was already marked by miracles, the deaths of martyrs and the defeat of the superpower. Bin Laden now called this country Khorasan, referring to the ancient Muslim empire that once encompassed much of Central Asia. His followers adopted names that harked back to the companions of the Prophet or to famous warriors of early Islam. There is a disputed hadith that states that in the last days the armies of Islam will unfold black banners (like the flag of the Taliban) and come out of Khorasan. Their names will be aliases, and they will carry the names of their cities—in the same manner that al-Qaeda’s legion followed. All of these references were in the service of connecting with a former greatness and reminding Muslims of their devastating loss.

The key symbol of bin Laden’s
hijira,
however, was the cave. The Prophet first encountered the angel Gabriel, who revealed to him “You are the Messenger of God,” in a cave in Mecca. Again, in Medina, when Mohammed’s enemies pursued him, he hid in a cave that was magically concealed by a spiderweb. Islamic art is replete with images of stalactites, which reference both the sanctuary and the encounter with the divine that caves provided the Prophet. For bin Laden, the cave was the last pure place. Only by retreating from society—and from time, history, modernity, corruption, the smothering West—could he presume to speak for the true religion. It was a product of bin Laden’s public-relations genius that he chose to exploit the presence of the ammunition caves of Tora Bora as a way of identifying himself with the Prophet in the minds of many Muslims who longed to purify Islamic society and restore the dominion it once enjoyed.

On the existential plane, bin Laden was marginalized, out of play, but inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims. His life and the symbols in which he cloaked himself powerfully embodied the pervasive sense of dispossession that characterized the modern Muslim world. In his own miserable exile, he absorbed the misery of his fellow believers; his loss entitled him to speak for theirs; his vengeance would sanctify their suffering. The remedy he proposed was to declare war on the United States.