Such acts provoked outrage in a city proud of its reputation as the cradle of Afghan civilisation. Herat is a centre of learning and has produced so many poets that the country’s inhabitants have a saying: ‘If you stretch out your feet in Herat, you kick a poet.’
Professor Rahiyab explains: ‘We were poor in everyday life. Why should we be poor in culture, too? If we had not done what we did to keep up the literary spirit of the city, the depth of our tragedy would have been greater.’
One of his students, 23-year-old Zena Karamzade, was in her second term as a medical student when the Taliban ended female education. With her dreams of becoming a doctor in tatters, she was on the verge of suicide when a friend introduced her to the sewing classes. ‘We didn’t live under the Taliban,’ she explains. ‘We just stayed in our rooms like cows. If we did go out, we had to be accompanied and wear a burqa, which is like being imprisoned in a closed space. With the carbon dioxide you breathe out and not enough oxygen coming in, after a while your lungs feel like exploding. The only time we felt human was in the sewing classes.’
The friend she went with was Leyla Razeghi, a 24-year-old who has had several stories published in the Literary Circle’s journal. Written under male pseudonyms to protect her identity and based on one theme – life for women under the Taliban – her stories use metaphors to criticise the regime. One, called ‘The Good News’, is the monologue of a girl called Rusa who writes of her frustration at not being able to study because of a sick relative. Others used voices of birds and animals so as not to attract the attention of the censors who vetted all publications. ‘The head of censorship was too stupid to realise what I was doing,’ said Leyla.
The effects of the Taliban’s hatred of literature can be seen at Herat’s old public library, a one-storey whitewashed building with tall green-painted windows that look out on to the bare branches of the winter trees. Most shelves are empty apart from a bookcase of gold-engraved Pakistani books on Islamic jurisprudence and a few shelves of tattered paperbacks that include Moby Dick and a book called The Road from Huddersfield. ‘We call it the book graveyard,’ said Zena, who took me there.
Zare Hussaini, the white-bearded librarian, explained that, last year, a line of trucks roared up to the door bearing the Governor of Herat, the head of censorship, and twenty-five Taliban soldiers. ‘They said all books “contrary to the tastes and beliefs of Sunni” must be confiscated, as well as those with pictures and political books, and they began packing them all up.’
Around 25,000 books were removed and burnt in an enormous pyre outside the city. Pakistani Korans and religious volumes were brought in to replace them. ‘Nobody reads them,’ said Mr Hussaini. ‘They are in Arabic, which no one here speaks, and far too theoretical.’
The only non-religious books saved by the library were a few boxes that members of the Literary Circle had managed to remove earlier and bury under the ruins of an old theatre in the next-door garden, as well as in the lavatories of a youth centre. Last week, these books, including Moby Dick, were ceremoniously returned to the library’s shelves, which are still mostly empty.
That same day, the Herat Literary Circle held its first open meeting of men and women for seven years, over lamb meatballs and rice. Inside the restaurant, men and women chattered together excitedly. Yet, before leaving, the women without exception disappeared inside burqas. ‘Walking around uncovered attracts a lot of attention,’ explains Zena. ‘The Taliban have gone, but they have altered this city and people won’t change their habits overnight.’
From Herat we travelled to Kabul on an Ariana plane which had to be jump-started. The flight over the snowy mountains of Bamian was spectacular if somewhat disturbing when the pilot told us no instruments were working and he was flying ‘by vision’. The Afghan capital was almost unrecognisable from the place I had visited in 1989. The shining blue river along which I had sat eating ice cream with girls from the university was now a brown trickle piled high with garbage. The Jadi Maiwand carpet bazaar where I had bought my living-room rug had been almost flattened, leaving row after row of crumbling bullet-spattered ruins. Yet this was not the work of the Russians – the damage had been done by the Afghan mujahideen whom I had known in Peshawar and who had spent much of the 1990s fighting each other.
My old friend Hamid Karzai had been chosen as head of the interim government by a UN-organised meeting of Afghan leaders in Bonn and had moved into the palace where he was waiting for his inauguration. Huddled by a one-bar electric fire, he looked thin after his weeks in the mountains and was wearing a long stripy chapan coat someone had given him to keep him warm, as he had not had chance to go back to Quetta to fetch clothes. Later it would become his trademark. It was disturbing to see him there in this palace where so many previous presidents and kings had been horribly murdered. He showed me how the Taliban had knocked the heads off the stone lions on the drive and used white paint to blot out the heads of the peacocks on the wallpaper of the Peacock Room because of their ban on all human and animal images.
I just managed to get back to England for Christmas, arriving on the morning of 25 December. There were no direct flights from Kabul to Europe but, even so, the two-day trip had left little time for acclimatisation. It was a shock to go from this land of dust and hunger to an enormous lunch of turkey with all the trimmings at my parents’ house and a mountain of presents under the tree for Lourenço. I couldn’t stop myself snapping at him for leaving food on his plate, though I knew he was far too young to understand.
All Roads Lead to Pakistan
Face to face with the Taliban leaders
Sunday Telegraph, 10 February 2002
THE TELEPHONE CALL came shortly after breakfast. ‘The carpet has arrived,’ said a voice. ‘It’s a very valuable one and we can’t keep it here long for security reasons.’
It was the strangest feeling. For most of the previous five months since September 11, I had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan writing about the evil Taliban regime and meeting one after another of its victims, from Hazara women whose husbands were burnt to death in front of their eyes, to a Kandahar footballer whose hand was cut off in a public amputation at which officials then discussed whether to also chop off a foot. Now this coded telephone message meant that I would soon be meeting some of the regime’s key members in their hiding places in Pakistan.
Four hours later I was taken down a rubbish-strewn alley where I entered a house through the women’s quarters. Finally a bearded old man in a swan-white turban summoned me through the dividing curtain into a room where two former Taliban ministers were sitting on floor cushions along with our go-between. For a moment I was taken aback. For the past few months the combined might of the American armed forces has been hunting the former leaders of the Taliban regime who presided over a reign of terror in Afghanistan. Any Taliban leaders captured are shipped off to Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for interrogation about their links with the al-Qaeda network. So far only one high-ranking member has been caught – Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil*, the Taliban’s Foreign Minister, who yesterday surrendered to Afghan officials and was turned over to US forces. He is being held in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar for questioning that the United States hopes will yield intelligence about fleeing leaders of the Taliban and the allied al-Qaeda guerrilla network.
But a large number of Taliban leaders have managed to escape and are now hiding out in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, apparently unhindered by the attentions of the Pakistani security authorities.
It took me a few moments to come to terms with the fact that I was sitting cross-legged in front of some of the world’s most wanted men. With their beards trimmed short, they looked surprisingly young. I knew the Taliban leaders were mostly in their thirties, but somehow I had thought of them as bigger and older – and more malevolent.
One of the two men, Maulana Abdullah Sahadi, the former Deputy Defence Minister, was only 28 and looked vulnerable and slightly scared, greeting
me with a wonky Johnny Depp-like smile. It was the first time he had ventured out of his hiding place since escaping Afghanistan after the fall of Kandahar two months ago.
The other minister, a burly man in his mid-thirties who agreed to meet only on condition of anonymity and is responsible for some of the acts that have most horrified the western world, looked defiant. Later that day I would also meet the director-general of the passport office, who had issued Afghan visas to some of the Arab fighters who are now on America’s most-wanted list.
My interviews took place in Baluchistan, a vast smugglers’ land of desert, mountains and earth tremors, much of which is governed by tribal law, where women are kept locked away and federal government officials fear to tread. It was here in the madrasas, or religious schools, that the Taliban originated and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is where they have taken refuge after surrendering their last stronghold of Kandahar on 7 December.
‘We shaved off our beards, changed our turbans from white Taliban to Kandahari [green or black with thin white stripes], got in cars and drove on the road across the border,’ says Maulana Sahadi, adding, ‘My beard was as long as this.’ He gestured down to his chest.
The Pakistani authorities, he claims, turned a blind eye. While US Special Forces based in Kandahar continue to go on daily operations in the Afghan mountains searching for al-Qaeda and Taliban, just across the border it is an open secret that senior Taliban ministers are sheltering in madrasas and houses. Among those are Mullah Turabi, the Justice Minister; Abdul Razzak, the Interior Minister; Qadratullah Jamal, the Culture Minister; and Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the Defence Minister.
According to Sahadi, bin Laden was still in Afghanistan when the Taliban fell at the end of last year, and he laughed at the Americans’ failure to catch him. ‘I spoke to him on the telephone the day we surrendered Kandahar and he was in Paktia and he was fine. I briefed him and he wished me Godspeed. Now we think he is in Saudi or Yemen.
‘The last time I actually met him was in November during the bombing in Herat. We met there to talk about finances. He was helping us to buy cars. He may have gone to Iran at that time.
‘He seemed well. A couple of years ago, he had some health problems linked to his kidney but now he seemed better. The Americans were bombing the military installations while we had lunch in the Mowafaq Hotel. He was taking anti-anxiety pills, some kind of sedatives, but he was not hiding.’
Mr Sahadi said that bin Laden spent much of his time in Afghanistan travelling around in Toyota Land Cruisers with darkened windows like those favoured by Afghan warlords, with just one other car of armed Arab bodyguards from his elite 55 Brigade accompanying him.
He suggests that bin Laden might have fled through the tribal areas of Pakistan. ‘I have had no direct contact with him since December but my information is that he is definitely alive.’
I was able to arrange this extraordinary meeting because thirteen years ago, during the jihad they waged to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, I had travelled on the back of motorcycles in Kandahar for three weeks with a group of young fighters known as the Mullahs’ Front. These had later helped found the Taliban.
‘You see, we don’t have two horns,’ said one of the ministers with a smile as he poured me tea and offered me boiled sweets in place of sugar. ‘Now anyone can say anything about us and the world will believe it. People have been saying we skinned their husbands alive and ate babies and you people print it.’
We started off talking about how they had joined the Taliban. Maulana Sahadi’s story is typical. When he was 5, his family moved to a refugee camp in Quetta after his father, a mujahid with Hezb-i-Islami, was killed fighting the Russians. They were very poor, surviving largely on bread begged or bought with money from sewing carpets, and were pleased when he got a place at a madrasa at the age of 8. His food, board and books were all provided. At some point, he learnt to use a Kalashnikov, though he would not say at what age, claiming, ‘A gun is such a thing, one day you use it, the next day you master it.’
In mid-1994, a delegation of elders and ulema, or religious scholars, from Pakistan came to the madrasa. ‘They issued a fatwa telling us we must join the Taliban and fight jihad. I joined with a group of friends from the madrasa so we were there right at the very beginning in the first attack on Spin Boldak [a town just over the Afghan border on the way to Kandahar] that October. At that time, we were only about a hundred people.
‘We were killing men and many of our companions were martyred, but we were happy because we were doing it for Islam. We were the soldiers of God.’
Sahadi went on to fight in battles all over Afghanistan, including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and Bamian, commanding 500 people, then 2,500 people, then becoming director of defence. ‘I would motivate my troops before fighting by telling them that if they were martyred they would go to paradise and could take with them seventy-two of their family members.’
He got on well with Mullah Omar, whom he describes as ‘a very nice, good-natured person with good morals. He treated me like a son. Whoever came to him, he treated with respect.’
Two years ago, Sahadi became Deputy Defence Minister and as such says he had frequent personal contact with Osama bin Laden, though he insisted that ‘the Arabs were not controlling things’. ‘Anyone who supports Islam was welcome in our country – we had British, Americans, Australians,’ he adds.
Sahadi admits that, during the American bombing offensive, he and his colleagues were required continually to change houses in Kandahar to avoid being hit. But he says the Taliban never contemplated handing over bin Laden to save themselves. ‘He was a guest in our country and we gave him refuge because hospitality is an important part of our code of behaviour. Besides, he was supporting us, giving us money, when no one else was.
‘The Taliban leadership do not believe the Twin Towers attack was carried out by al-Qaeda,’ he continued. ‘According to my own opinion, the attack was wrong. It is not Islamic to kill innocent people like that.’
How did they explain the videos in which bin Laden talks of the attack. ‘They were fake,’ he replied.
The other minister interjected. ‘What this war really is about is a clash between Islam and infidels. America wants to implement its own kafir religion in Afghanistan. We are the real defenders of Islam, not people like Gul Agha [the Governor of Kandahar] and Hamid Karzai. They are puppets of America.’
But why, then, did the Taliban collapse so easily? ‘We’re not broken, we’re whole,’ insists Sahadi. ‘We weren’t defeated, we agreed to hand over rather than fight and spill blood. Our people went back to their tribes or left the country. Now we are just waiting. The fighting for power has begun in Gardez, Mazar, and different provinces. Karzai cannot even trust his own people to guard the presidential palace but has to have American troops. We are regrouping. We still have arms and many supporters inside, and when the time is right we will be back.
‘Thank God this war happened because now we really know who is with us and who is against us,’ Sahadi adds. ‘Karzai went to the other camp. Once he pretended he was with us, but now we see he just wanted power. They will all be brought before justice and punished according to Islamic law.’
Sahadi insists that the ‘Americans have failed’. He said: ‘They have not caught bin Laden or Mullah Omar. All they have done is oust our government. We never did anything to them. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan and will stay there making contact with those commanders unhappy with the new government. You will see Islam will win out and we will break the Americans into pieces as we did with the Russians and bring back the name of the Taliban.’
As early as February 2002, it was already clear that the US had not won the so-called war on terror. The B-52s may have driven the Taliban out of Afghanistan in less than sixty days but Mullah Omar’s zealots had lost the battle not the war. Far from being wiped out, they had simply fled over the border into Pakistan, finding safe haven back where they started.
; It was unnerving being back in Quetta, alone this time. I had entered Pakistan by land over the Bolan Pass from Kandahar but I knew that ISI received the names of all foreigners arriving in the city. There was no point checking in anywhere other than the Serena but while I was there I hardly slept, tossing and turning in expectation of that midnight knock on the door.
Yet, again and again, I found myself being drawn back. This was where the real story was. As the British would later discover in Helmand, the West could send as many troops as they liked into Afghanistan but if they could not staunch the supply of Taliban fighters from madrasas in Pakistan, they would never resolve the problem. One American colonel fighting in eastern Afghanistan told me that defeating Taliban who come across the porous 1,470-mile border is ‘like trying to drain a swamp when you can’t shut off the streams feeding it’.
And in March 2003, western foreign policy, namely the war in Iraq, was about to provide them with a whole lot more recruits.
Hail, the mini bin Ladens
New Statesman, 24 March 2003
THE NEW MUSLIM Speeches Music Shop in Quetta does a fine line in posters and stickers depicting grenades, hand-held rocket launchers and other jihadi weapons of choice imprinted with slogans calling for youth to rise up against the West. It is a shack really, rather than a shop, part of a crowded bazaar just along from the bus station where a man stands with a muddy pelican on a string. Any stranger who lingers long outside is quickly warned to move on in whispers, for this is the gathering place every Thursday of a group of men with the silky black turbans and kohl-rimmed eyes that mark them out as Taliban.
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