CHAPTER 21
Islam’s triumphant ousting of Communist Russia from Afghanistan in 1989 did not bring peace to the Afghan people. On the contrary. Scarcely missing a beat, resistance to the foreign enemy morphed into a bitter and bloody civil war.
“After the Russians left, they just turned on each other,” recalls Ahmed Badeeb, chief of staff of Prince Turki Al-Faisal’s General Intelligence Department, the Istikhbarat. “There seemed no way that we could stop them fighting. They were all as bad as each other. We cut off the payments we had been making to them, but they just went on feuding. I remember that we once made a really major effort. We put all the leaders on a plane and flew them to Mecca for a peace conference. We actually opened up the Kaaba and took them inside so they could swear reconciliation to each other—right in the very heart of Islam. It was a truly exceptional gesture, very moving, with lots of embracing and tears. Then, as they were coming back out down the ladder—before their feet had even touched down on the floor of the mosque—I got a call saying that one of them must have given orders to shell Kabul because the electricity station had just been hit. ‘Shame on you,’ I said, as I took them all out to the airport. ‘You are devastating your own country.’ ”
After a decade of armed struggle, conflict had become a way of life for Afghanistan’s mujahideen. The country was awash with weaponry, and the competing regional and ethnic factions fought ruthlessly for supremacy.
“They inherited big problems, but they kept creating new ones,” says Badeeb. “I told my people to leave the bastards alone for a bit. We kept out of the politics and just did what we could to help the ordinary people.”
Badeeb had a personal project that he had started in the 1980s, a technical school for handicapped Afghani children and orphans.
“There were a lot of children,” he remembers, “without an arm or a leg because of the land mines. I wanted to help them, so I financed this school with some Saudi friends as a charity. It was on the Pakistan border. We raised a lot of money from Mecca. We hired local teachers and taught them rug making, sewing, electrical work, and plumbing—practical, peaceful things that were an alternative to fighting.”
Badeeb had founded a madrasa, or school, but not in a narrowly religious sense—nor for the unashamedly militaristic reasons that some of these schools were created.
“We have to remember and admit,” says one Saudi diplomat who can recall discussing the funding and promotion of the Afghan madrasas with the CIA in the 1980s, “that the original purpose of these schools was strategic. The fighting with the Soviets had tragic consequences—it was creating a lot of orphans. So some of us in Washington did some brainstorming. ‘What better source of future fighters,’ we said, ‘than these boys whose fathers have been killed by the Russians?’ The plan was to find them, clothe them, put them through school—then ship them to the front. The Saudis get the blame for the madrasas now, but let’s not forget that many of them were part of a joint U.S.-Saudi project to take these poor kids and make them warriors for the West.”
“There were a lot of religiously focused madrasas along the Afghan-Pakistan border and in the Pakistan tribal areas,” recalls Ahmed Badeeb. “Some of them were financed by charities in Riyadh, and Prince Turki was not happy with that. He said the money should go on more practical education. But how can you stop people who want to spend money promoting their religion?
“Let’s face it, we all made mistakes. America just walked away from Afghanistan. After the Russians left, I went to the States and Europe and to Eastern Europe trying to organize some sort of reconstruction. I went to Turkmenistan and also Iran. I got nil response. The only person who did anything serious was King Fahd. He allocated $300 million to be spent through the various Saudi ministries—so much on electricity and power, so much on religious guidance, but always on peaceful, humanitarian projects for the people.”
Fahd was adamant that funds should no longer go to the feuding mujahideen.
“Stopping the funds was intended to show disapproval, but also as an incentive,” remembers Prince Turki Al-Faisal. “We kept telling them we were ready to provide support if they were willing to make peace—if they could find a way.”
The way eventually came from an unexpected source, from the south of the country, the area dominated by the Pashtun tribes, and it grew out of the madrasas. Focusing their studies on the Koran and its picture of the just and perfect society that Mohammed was able to create in the midst of warfare fourteen centuries earlier, the young Pashtun pupils in these schools could not help but see a lesson for their own benighted country in the simple, black-and-white rules of fundamentalist Islam.
“We would discuss the terrible plight of our people living under these bandits . . .” the one-eyed Taliban foreign minister Mohammed Ghaus would later explain to the Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid. “We only had a vague idea what to do and we thought we would fail. But we believed we were working with Allah as His pupils.”
The Arabic for pupil or student is talib. In Pashtu, a group of talibs make up a taliban—and in the mid-1990s the idealistic talibs in the Kandahar area started taking their destiny into their own hands. Going from village to village, the long-bearded, turban-wearing young tribesmen carried a Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other.
“Put down your weapons for the sake of the Koran,” they said to the bandits and warlords, brandishing the holy book in their faces. If anyone resisted, the young students shot them dead on the spot. It was traditional, rough Pashtun justice, turned into a jihad by the Salafi teachings that the talibs had absorbed in their madrasas.
“We want to live a life like the Prophet lived fourteen hundred years ago,” one Taliban leader explained to Ahmed Rashid, “and jihad is our right. We want to re-create the time of the Prophet, and we are only carrying out what the Afghan people have wanted for the past fourteen years.”
The war-weary population of Kandahar welcomed the simple and direct methods of the young students. They might be as violent as any other Afghan faction, but they seemed to be untainted by corruption and they were of local stock. Within a matter of months much of the Pashtun south, including Kandahar itself, Afghanistan’s second largest city with a population of over four hundred thousand, was under Taliban authority. Driving to Kandahar the previous year through the Khojak Pass from Pakistan, Ahmed Rashid had been stopped twenty times or more by armed bandits who had strung chains across the road, demanding tolls for safe passage. By the end of 1994 the 130-mile stretch of road was clear of obstructions. Local trucking companies—including heroin merchants who were transporting their share of the opium harvest—willingly paid their dues to the Taliban.
Prince Turki was introduced to these holy liberators early in 1995 in the course of a visit to Pakistan—which was no coincidence, since the spectacular advance of the Taliban had not been the work of God alone. The students had received crucial funding and armaments—particularly in the clearing of the road to Kandahar—from Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence) who had masterminded the campaign against the Soviets and had become as frustrated as anyone else by the subsequent conflicts between their protégés.
“These are my boys,” declared General Naseerullah Babar, the Pakistani interior minister, beaming proudly as he welcomed the Saudi intelligence chief to Islamabad and introduced him to a group of Taliban headed by a young mullah, Mohammed Rabbani.
“We’re totally devoted to bringing peace to our country,” said Rabbani (no relation to the Afghan president Rabbani), who acted with extreme humbleness toward the prince. “Anything that comes from Saudi Arabia, we will accept.”
The young man seemed genuine to Turki, but naïve.
“He was not well educated,” remembers the prince of Rabbani. “He was a country boy. I don’t think he really understood what was going on. But just the same he was at that time the number two man in their heirarchy.”
Sometime afterward Ahmed Badeeb met the Taliban’s number one—thanks again to the Pakistanis.
“Afghanistan, Pakistan—they’re almost like one country,” says Badeeb, explaining why Saudi intelligence, which had operated hand-in-glove with the ISI throughout the war of the 1980s, was now following the Pakistani lead again. “They kept telling us about these young men who were protecting their local areas in the south, working to make them more safe and decent, and eventually they arranged a meeting with the chief. I shall never forget. These two strong young men appeared with big beards, two Taliban, carrying a third. ‘Our guy is suffering,’ they said. He had lost an eye and was without a leg.”
Badeeb was being introduced to the Taliban’s mysterious and reclusive leader, Mullah Omar. Aged around forty-four in 1995, Omar was already the stuff of legend. When exploding shrapnel had damaged his face five years earlier, it was said, he had taken a knife and cut out his right eye himself. He had a reasonable command of Arabic, which he spoke in a low and modest voice, and he issued only rare public statements. His group, he explained, was “a simple band of dedicated youths determined to establish the laws of God on earth. . . . The Taliban will fight until there is no blood in Afghanistan left to be shed, and Islam becomes a way of life for our people.”
The Saudi intelligence envoy was impressed.
A few months later Badeeb was coming in to land at Kandahar airport in a Saudi intelligence G-2 corporate jet, when he spotted a cow wandering across the middle of the runway. His pilot zoomed upward and circled once or twice while the welcoming committee of Taliban shooed the animal away. King Fahd had liked what he heard about Kandahar’s pious and militant students. They seemed the best hope of restoring some order to the enduring chaos of Afghanistan, and Prince Turki’s chief of staff had been dispatched to find out more.
“Don’t you remember us?” asked some of the bearded young warriors as they crowded around Badeeb on the tarmac. “We were pupils at your school!”
It was a genial, almost fraternal reunion. Meeting up again with Mullah Omar, Badeeb found himself greeted with a warm hug. Returning the gesture, he presented the one-eyed leader with a copy of the Koran.
“Whatever Saudi Arabia wants me to do,” declared Omar, repeating the homage that his number two had paid to Prince Turki, “I will do.”
The Taliban were effectively placing themselves under Saudi sponsorship, asking for Saudi money and materials, and according to Ahmed Rashid they received it. “The Saudis provided fuel, money, and hundreds of new pickups to the Taliban,” he wrote in his book Taliban, published in 2000, the first significant history of the movement. “Much of this aid was flown in to Kandahar from the Gulf port city of Dubai.”
Prince Turki Al-Faisal flatly denies this.
“The Saudi government gave no financial aid to the Taliban whatsoever,” he says. “Not one cent. I can say that categorically. When I read later of the alleged pickup trucks from Dubai, I had the matter investigated. There was absolutely no truth to the story. We certainly provided some low-cost fuel to the Rabbani government in Kabul for humanitarian purposes. That was kept in Pakistani depots. And we were also encouraging the project of a pipeline to bring fuel from the north. That was all. We kept receiving aid requests, and we always said, ‘No. Not until the fighting stops.’ The Taliban got their assistance from Pakistani intelligence and also from outside businesspeople and well-wishers. Some of those came from the Gulf—from Kuwait and the Emirates—and some of them may have been Saudis.”
Here was the loophole. As news of the Taliban’s godly reformation arrived back to Saudi Arabia, it had been greeted with general delight—the Afghan jihad was being fought over again, with pure, young Salafi warriors. The collection boxes reappeared in mosques and supermarkets, re-creating the charity chain of the 1980s, only now transmitting much larger sums of money. The Friday preachers had a theme on which to wax lyrical, with Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, grand mufti since 1992, a particular enthusiast. The man who had sponsored and protected Juhayman now urged the holy cause of the Afghan students with the ulema, and more potently still with the senior princes to whom he had private access. It is not known—it will never be known—which of the family of Abdul Aziz privately parted with money at the venerable sheikh’s request, but what was pocket money to them could easily have bought a fleet of pickup trucks for the Taliban.
“I know,” says Ahmed Rashid, “that whenever I saw pickup trucks, especially new shiny ones, and asked the Taliban where they came from, the answer was always from the Saudis or the Emiratis. They were very specific about which country gave it to them, because they wanted to show they had international support, although they didn’t distinguish between government, personal, or charitable aid. In the [British] Foreign Office I was told of specific instances of Saudi aid. Some of it was from the government—in the early days there was a lot of official sympathy and support for the Taliban. But some of it was certainly from private individuals and charities.”
Saudi charities became high profile in Afghanistan. By the end of 1995 the student warriors were operating with more resources than they could possibly have received from their relatively poor Pakistani patrons, and they made particularly effective use of their Datsun 4x4 pickups. They bolted machine guns onto the rear platforms to convert the vehicles into gunships, then deployed them as a nimble, mechanized cavalry—updated versions of the gun-mounted Chevrolets with which Abdul Aziz slaughtered the Ikhwan at Sibillah. As winter closed in the Taliban took control of the entire south, center, and west of the country and soon found themselves at the gates of Kabul. In the spring of 1996 Mullah Omar summoned to Kandahar more than a thousand religious leaders from the territories he controlled to have them proclaim him Amir-ul-Momineen, the “Commander of the Faithful.”
Kandahar’s most sacred shrine houses a silver box containing a unique relic, an ancient robe that is said to have been the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed. It is removed only at moments of special emergency—the last occasion had been more than sixty years previously during a cholera epidemic. Now, on April 4, 1996, Mullah Omar had the Prophet’s Cloak brought to the top floor of a mosque in the center of the city, stuck his hands into the sleeves of the holy garment, and proceeded to parade around the roof, wrapping and unwrapping the sacred fabric for half an hour as the mullahs in the courtyard threw their turbans in the air and shouted out their homage.
By Wahhabi standards, Omar’s gesture was doubly un-Islamic—relic worship magnified by an act of theater. But the Taliban’s Saudi benefactors took a tolerant view. These were the excesses of a young movement that would mellow, they felt sure, and the spinning mullah had certainly energized the madrasa graduates. By the end of September 1996 the Taliban had conquered Kabul and had extended their rule to twenty-two of the country’s thirty-one provinces. They announced that their godly government would be known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and while most of the world prudently stepped back and waited, three countries granted this unusual entity official recognition: Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates—and Saudi Arabia.
There was a dark side, however, to the students’ rapid and unlikely triumph. On the night that they occupied Kabul, the Taliban flouted the diplomatic immunity of the United Nations compound to kidnap Mohammed Najibullah, the last Communist president of Afghanistan, who had lived in UN custody since his deposition four years earlier. In what would become a pattern of brutality, they beat Najibullah and his brother senseless, castrated both men, dragged their bodies behind a jeep, then hanged them by wire nooses from lampposts.
The next day they started issuing the prohibitions for which the Taliban would become notorious: no kite-flying, no pool tables, no music, no nail polish, no toothpaste, no televisions, no beard-shaving, no “British or American hairstyles,” no pigeon keeping, no playing with birds. Less comically, the Taliban also imposed the wearing of the head-to-toe veil, the burqa, closed all girls’ schools and colleges, and banned women from working—a particularly savage blow to the tens of thousands of Afghan war widows who had to work to keep their children alive.
“Women, you should not step outside your residence,” instructed a Taliban decree of November 1996. “If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves, they will be cursed by the Islamic sharia and should never expect to go to heaven.”
These draconian regulations were enforced by religious police squads, local Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice that were built directly on the Saudi model of fundamentalist vigilantes and drew support from Saudi religious charities. Bin Baz’s energetic support for the Taliban was matched by other members of the ulema.
“I remember,” says Ahmed Rashid, “that all the Taliban who had worked or done hajj [pilgrimage] in Saudi Arabia were terribly impressed by the religious police and tried to copy that system to the letter. The money for their training and salaries came partly from Saudi Arabia.”
Ahmed Rashid took the trouble to collect and document the Taliban’s medieval flailings against the modern West, and a few months later he stumbled on a spectacle that they were organizing for popular entertainment. Wondering why ten thousand men and children were gathering so eagerly in the Kandahar football stadium one Thursday afternoon, he went inside to discover a convicted murderer being led between the goalposts—to be executed by a member of his victim’s family.
The roots of Taliban practice were not Wahhabi—their ideas stemmed from the local Deobandi school of Islam. But the two fundamentalisms were soul mates. Not for the first or last time, Saudi favor to Islamic purists had helped give birth to a monster—and as if to emphasize the point, on May 19, 1996, Osama Bin Laden flew into Afghanistan from Sudan.
Bin Laden knew next to nothing about the Taliban. They were a phenomenon of the 1990s. But he could plainly see what they were doing to his friends, the now discredited mujahideen. Soon after arriving in Jalalabad he made it his business, according to Huthayfah, the son of Abdullah Azzam, to contact Mullah Omar and ask for his protection. “Ahlan wa sahlan,” came the warm and positive answer, as Huthayfah later reported it. “You are most welcome. We will never give you up to anyone who wants you.”
It sounds oversimplified. Bin Laden’s protector in Jalalabad was Younis Khalis, a mujahid friend from the old days. But Khalis would soon join forces with the Taliban, and as events unrolled, Mullah Omar’s promise came to pass. There were many Western-style reasons, from personal rivalry to realpolitik, why it made sense for the Taliban leader to be wary of the uninvited Osama—both men had toweringly grandiose visions of their purpose in life. But those visions also locked them firmly into the same Islamic mission. The two holy warriors needed to coexist, and they found a way to do so. Breaking off from a sermon one day, Mullah Omar singled out Bin Laden in the congregation and praised him to the worshippers as one of Islam’s most important spiritual leaders. Osama returned the compliment, telling the world that his fatwas were now being issued from Khorassan, the great Afghan-based empire of the Prophet’s time, from which, according to certain hadiths, the armies of Islam would emerge in the final days, wearing black turbans and unfolding black banners, like the black flag of the Taliban, to defeat the kuffar and march in triumph to Jerusalem.
It was fortunate, perhaps, for the two partners in this messianic alliance that Saudi Arabia could not, for the moment, see a way to break them up. In 1996 the Al-Saud were severely annoyed with Bin Laden, but they had no ready means to implement their displeasure. If they brought Osama back to the Kingdom, he could only be a source of trouble, whether at liberty or in jail. At that date his crimes were matters of inflammatory words, not proven misdeeds for which he could easily be punished—nor, at that point, had he accomplished anything to suggest he would go much beyond words in the future. He seemed, as Bandar bin Sultan later put it, just a “young, misguided kid” with a big mouth and lots of money—“not a threat to the system; not a threat to anyone.” The Saudi government had deliberately passed up on chances to extract Bin Laden from the Sudan in the early 1990s, and in Afghanistan he seemed even more safely out of the way.
In 1996 the Taliban took full control of the Khyber Pass areas where Younis Khalis had been operating and sent a message to Prince Turki Al-Faisal.
“We’ve taken over Jalalabad,” they told him, “and Bin Laden is here. We have offered him sanctuary and we can guarantee his behavior.”
The prince recalled his reply in an interview he gave to the U.S. TV show Nightline in December 2001. “Well, if you have already offered him refuge, make sure he does not operate against the Kingdom or say anything against the Kingdom.” At that moment Turki felt quite confident, he explained, that the Taliban would take charge of “keeping his mouth shut.”
Viewed from the other side of 9/11, this seems an incredibly casual, even negligent, attitude to adopt toward the man who would become the world’s most notorious terrorist. But that was not the position that Bin Laden occupied at the end of 1996. The terrorism expert Peter Bergen has assembled the memories of journalists who went to Afghanistan to interview Osama at this time, and while their stories all play up their own personal sense of risk and danger, none of them presented the lone Saudi exile as a man who could flatten Lower Manhattan. Several of them painted him, even, as faintly mad. Railing at the world windily from remote tents and caves in the Hindu Kush, Bin Laden sounded like a crazed Don Quixote.
“Oh William,” he declared that August, addressing William Perry, the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, “tomorrow you will know which young man is confronting your misguided brethren. . . . These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained—there is only killing and neck smiting.”
Bin Laden titled his eight-thousand-word diatribe “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” It sounded ludicrous. In the context of his flight from the Sudan and his hand-to-mouth survival in Afghanistan, his antique rhetoric seemed especially full of bluster—particularly to Prince Turki, who knew just how little actual fighting “Abu Abdullah” had actually done in the 1980s jihad for which he was now claiming such credit. In the Sudan, Bin Laden had fulminated indignantly for four years and had organized training camps to little effect. Now that he was back in the chaos of Afghanistan, it did not seem to make much difference if he fulminated some more—or even opened up his camps again.