CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Why?

Out of a fired ship, which, by no way
But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,
Some men leap’d forth, and ever as they came
Near the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown’d.

—John Donne, “A Burnt Ship”

I HAD FORGOTTEN to turn off my mobile phone. I felt its vibration in my pocket only seconds after I had sat down on the Sabena transatlantic flight and my first thought—though we had not yet finished boarding—was that I had broken the rules. We believe in laws instinctively, without question, secular rules that govern our lives rather than religious dictates. So I left my seat and returned to the air-bridge on which passengers were still waiting to board the Airbus.

“Robert?” It was the features editor. “Look, I think you should know that after all this, we’re probably going to have to hold your Sabra and Chatila piece again. A light aircraft has just flown into the World Trade Center in New York and the building’s on fire.” Damn. Damn! DAMN! This was the third time. Does it really matter that much? I asked. A light aircraft? “Well, it seems quite serious and I think it would look rather odd having a big story like this in New York and us carrying a nineteen-year-old story on the front of the features section.” I gave up. It was as if our new investigation of the Israeli role in the Beirut Palestinian massacres of 1982 would never be published. All through the first week of September 2001, I had been pushing for space. Then on Thursday, 6 September, Simon Kelner decided it could run on Monday, 10 September. Then Kelner went on holiday and Ian Birrell, the deputy editor, took over Simon’s seat and postponed my report until the morning of the 12th. That meant the final proofs would go away on the afternoon of 11 September. From Brussels airport that morning—tired after my overnight flight from Beirut—I calledThe Independent. Leonard Doyle, my foreign editor, talked about the suicide assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan Northern Alliance militia leader who had fought with such bravery against the Russians but showed only contempt for Osama bin Laden. Two Arabs posing as journalists had killed him with a bomb in their camera. Did I think bin Laden was behind it? I didn’t know. In our first edition, Leonard had called Massoud by his powerful Afghan title, “the Lion of Panjshir.” Some idiot on the back-bench had changed it in the night, paring Massoud down to that darling of sub-editors, a “guerrilla leader.” Overnight, American cruise missiles had hit Kabul.

When I had first spoken to the features editors from the Brussels departure lounge, they confirmed that my Sabra and Chatila report would run at last. It was to be on the cover of that night’s review section—there was a news story for the front—and the design showed blood across the photographs of the dead Palestinians. I didn’t plan to call the office again. I would be out of touch for the six-and-a-half-hour flight over the Atlantic. I pulled out the copy of the text for a last check.

Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her almost exactly 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon—who was then Israel’s defence minister—she stops to search her memory when she confronts the most terrible moments of her life. “The Lebanese Forces militia had taken us from our homes and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies to reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That’s when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting, ‘Give us the men, give us the men.’ We thought, ‘Thank God, they will save us.’ ” It was to prove a cruelly false hope.

Mrs. Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her 30-year-old husband Hassan, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd of men. “We were all told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to the Cité Sportive, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went round saying ‘Sit, sit.’ It was 11 o’clock. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we stood around outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men.”

Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj to emerge. “Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about 4 in the afternoon, an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: ‘What are you all waiting for?’ He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn’t see inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw my husband again.”

The smashed Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium—the “Cité Sportive”—was a natural “holding centre” for prisoners. Only two miles from Beirut airport, it had been an ammunition dump for Yassir Arafat’s PLO and repeatedly bombed by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant, smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact.

It was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on 18 September 1982—around the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium—I saw hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, perhaps well over 1,000 in all, sitting in its gloomy, cavernous interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by Israeli soldiers and plain-clothes Shin Beth agents and a group of men who I suspected, correctly, were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat in silence, obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles—for further “interrogation.”

Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, up to 600 massacre victims of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the cells because the Israelis assumed—given our Western appearance—that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many of the prisoners had their heads bowed. Arab prisoners usually adopted this pose of humiliation. But Israel’s Phalangist militiamen had been withdrawn from the camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now in charge. So what did these men have to fear?

Looking back—and listening to Sana Sersawi today—I shudder now at our innocence. My notes of the time . . . contain some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man’s shoulders. “They take us away, one by one, for interrogation,” one of the prisoners muttered to me. “They are Haddad militiamen. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do not return.” Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn’t the prisoners talk to me? I asked. “They can talk if they want,” he replied. “But they have nothing to say.”

All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist jeep with the words “Military Police” painted on it—if so exotic an institution could be associated with this gang of murderers—drove by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cité Sportive. He also filmed a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called “Yahya” for the release of her husband. The colonel has now been positively identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli army.

Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside the camps. One of the tank crews, Lt Avi Grabovsky—he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission—had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the previous day and had been told not to “interfere.”

And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a U.S. television chain complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was never seen again. There were other vague rumours of “disappeared” people.

I wrote in my notes at the time that “even after Chatila, Israel’s ‘terrorist’ enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut.” But I had not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cité Sportive. I had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium in time of war. Hadn’t there been a sports stadium in Santiago a few years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet’s coup d’état, a stadium from which many prisoners never returned?

Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday, September 17th, 1982, she said, while the massacre was still—unknown to her— under way inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. “Neighbours came and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces on the road. The men were separated from the women.” This separation—with its awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war—was a common feature of these mass arrests. “We were told to go to the Cité Sportive. The men stayed put.” Among the men were Wadha’s two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. “We went to the Cité Sportive, as the Israelis told us,” she says. “I never saw my sons or brother again.”

The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité Sportive and the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away. Some militiamen —watched by the Israelis—loaded him into a car, blindfolded, she says. “That’s how he disappeared,” she says in her official testimony, “and I have never seen him again since.” It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to notice a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600 bodies had been found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported as “missing.” We assumed—how easy assumptions are in war—that they had been killed in the three days between September 16th, 1982, and the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on the 18th, that their corpses had been secretly buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected. The idea that many of these young people had been murdered outside the camps or after the 18th, that the killings were still going on while we walked through the camps, never occurred to us.

Why did we journalists at the time not think of this? The following year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on September 18th, with just a one-line hint—unexplained—that several hundred people may have “disappeared around the same time.” The commission interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become the narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing over prisoners to their blood-thirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of the 18th. A Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated Christian president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I had even met the woman who ordered the boy’s execution.

Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportive where, in one of the underground “holding centres,” she saw a retarded man, watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her gratitude for an Israeli soldier— inside the Chatila camp, against all the evidence given by the Israelis— who prevented the murder of her daughters by the Phalange.

Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportive were torn down and a brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie beneath its foundations—and its frightful implications—will give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.

I had been in the Sabra and Chatila camps when these crimes took place. I had returned to the camps, year after year, to try to discover what happened to the missing thousand men. Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television had been with me in 1982 and he had returned to Beirut many times with the same purpose. Lawyers weren’t the only people investigating these crimes against humanity. In 2001, Tveit arrived in Lebanon with the original 1982 tapes of those women pleading for their menfolk at the gates of the Cité Sportive. He visited the poky little video shops in the present-day camp and showed and reshowed the tapes until local Palestinians identified them; then Tveit set off to find the women—nineteen years older now—who were on the tape, who had asked for their sons and brothers and fathers and husbands outside the Cité Sportive. He traced them all. None had ever seen their loved ones again.¹⁷⁹

In the months to come, I would reflect on the personal irony of those last minutes at Brussels airport. I was reading through the minutiae of a crime against humanity which had been committed almost exactly nineteen years earlier—while on the other side of the Atlantic at that very moment, an international crime against humanity was on the point of being committed. At Sabra and Chatila and in the mass murders afterwards, we estimated that at least 1,700 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered. In New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, more than twice that number of human lives were about to be extinguished.

After the call from the features editor, I returned to my seat on the Airbus. Then my phone rang again. Anne Penketh was calling from the foreign desk. “It seems a helicopter has hit the Pentagon, Robert. Don’t know any more yet but I think we need you to write today.” I was sitting in business class and there was an airline satellite phone tucked into the arm-rest beside me. I ran my credit card through the side-swipe and the screen showed positive. I would be able to go on talking to London and to send my copy in-flight. The last passengers were boarding and I walked across to the chief purser. I told him about the helicopter. I kept referring to the “Free Trade Building” rather than the World Trade Center, although I had a vivid image of the twin towers in my mind, sentinels above Manhattan to the left of my taxi when I returned to JFK after giving a lecture at Princeton a few months before.

I made one more call to the office on my mobile. “Robert,” Anne had just enough time to say before I was forced to close down. “It was an airliner—a passenger aircraft that flew into the World Trade Center. And now there’s another!” I closed down the phone. The horror of this was obvious but my journalist’s brain, the professional computer that calculates event, reaction and deadline, was now moving fast. What was happening in the United States was deliberate. It was, in that most classic of clichés, a “terrorist attack.” The American East Coast was six hours behind Brussels. Thousands would be arriving in the Twin Towers for work. And in the Pentagon.

The Airbus was moving across the apron for take-off but the purser came to my seat. Did I know any more? I told him about the second plane and he went straight to the flight-deck. He came back a few seconds later, even as the engines were rising for take-off. “There’s been a passenger aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania too.” I just looked at him. Bin Laden. Who else? I pulled out my notebook and tried to remember everything bin Laden had ever said to me: his hatred for the Saudi royal family, his experience fighting the Russians, his determination to drive the Americans from the Gulf.

We were over the Irish Sea when I made my first satellite call to London. Leonard took the call. He sounded over-serious, his “Father Doyle” voice as I always called it, but I realised he was just shocked. “Two planes into the World Trade Center, an airliner into the Pentagon, another airliner crashed in Pennsylvania. You should see the pictures.” On board the Airbus, they brought round the pre-lunch drinks. The gin-and-tonic tasted like tonic. Twenty—thirty—thousand dead? That’s how I thought. This was on a still unimaginable scale. And what would be America’s revenge? I recalled the old newsreels after Pearl Harbor, the “day of infamy,” when the sound-tracks filled with racist demands to crush the “sneaky Japs.” Bin Laden. I kept coming back to bin Laden. This day represented not just a terrible crime but a terrible failure, the collapse of decades of maimed, hopeless, selfish policies in the Middle East which we would at last recognise—if we were wise—or which, more likely, we would now bury beneath the rubble of New York, an undiscussible subject whose mere mention would indicate support for America’s enemies.

I walked to the galley and asked the cabin crew what they thought. All four planes must have been hijacked. There must have been many hijackers. “They wanted to die,” the young stewardess said without thinking, and we all agreed, and then the purser looked at me very hard. I knew what he was thinking. We too were bound for America. Those four planes had taken off like ours, heading off into the bright morning with friendly crews and law-abiding passengers . . . I walked round the plane with the purser. I didn’t like it. I guess I came back with the images of thirteen passengers in my mind, thirteen I didn’t like because they had beards or stared at me in what I could easily translate as hostility or because they were fiddling with worry beads or reading Korans. Of course, they were all Muslims. In just a few minutes, the so-called liberal Fisk who had worked in the Middle East for a quarter of a century—who had lived among Arabs for almost half his life, whose own life had been saved by Muslims on countless occasions in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran—yes, that nice, friendly Fisk had turned into a racist, profiling the innocent on board his aircraft because they had beards or brown eyes or dark skin. I felt dirty. But this, I already suspected, was one of the purposes of this day. To make us feel dirty, to make us so fearful—or so angry—that we no longer behaved rationally.

I called Leonard again. There had been phone calls from the passengers on the four planes. The hijackers had cut the throats of some of the crews and passengers. Men and women were throwing themselves from the upper floors of the Twin Towers. There had been some television pictures of Palestinians celebrating. Leonard, I said, I’m going to have to write about history. We’ve got to have a context, some explanation. I said that this was so epic a crime that I would do something I had not tried since my reporting days in Northern Ireland when the IRA–British war had to be filed against deadline, from notes and memory rather than from written script. In the old days, before computers and mobiles, we dictated our reports to copy-takers, men and women wearing earphones who would type out our stories as we shouted them down the line from Irish villages or—in my early days in the Middle East—from Cairo or Damascus hotels. Now I would do the same again. I would “talk” my story over the phone so as to match the hour with the spontaneity that journalism should possess. Or so I arrogantly thought.

Even as I was talking, the Belgian Airbus captain was on the public address system. There had been terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he said, the United States had closed its air-space to all commercial aircraft. We were dumping fuel over the sea far to the west of Ireland before returning to Europe. We started to fly in big concentric circles, sunlight bursting through the starboard then through the port windows of the plane as if the sun was perpetually rising and setting, the desolation of the north Atlantic mocking our warm isolation. They served lunch as we described these spheres in the sky, foie gras and steak with glasses of Médoc. I looked at my notebook. I wrote down the names of Balfour, Lawrence of Arabia, bin Laden. Then I scribbled them out. I picked up the satellite phone, swiped the card and dialled The Independent. Leonard put me through to one of the paper’s copy-takers, a woman in Leeds with a Yorkshire accent. I told her where I was, that I was filing from my head, asked her to be patient. “Take your time, love,” she said. But it came quite easily. I knew what I wanted to say. It was like reading a letter to a friend:

So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East—the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia’s lies, the Arab revolt, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab–Israeli wars and the 34 years of Israel’s brutal occupation of Arab land—all erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair—is it moral—to write this so soon, without proof, when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma, turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at war and, unless I am mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in the Middle East, perhaps in America too. Some of us warned of “the explosion to come.” But we never dreamt this nightmare.

And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his theology, his frightening dedication to destroy American power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia—paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally—hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.

No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States. That Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of 20,000, perhaps 35,000 innocent people¹⁸⁰ is not only a symbol of their despair but of their political immaturity, of their failure to grasp what they had always been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting disproportionately. All the years of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the heart of America, to cut off the head of “the American snake” we took for empty threats. How could a backward, conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small, violent organisations fulfil such preposterous promises? Now we know.

And in the hours that followed yesterday’s annihilation, I began to remember those other extraordinary assaults upon the U.S. and its allies, miniature now by comparison with yesterday’s casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241 American servicemen and 100 French paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983 time their attacks with unthinkable precision?

There were just seven seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction of the French three miles away. Then there were the attacks on U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, and last year’s attempt—almost successful it now turns out—to sink the USS Cole in Aden. And then how easy was our failure to recognise the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans nor any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.

And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind yesterday’s firestorms. We will be told about “mindless terrorism,” the “mindless” bit being essential if we are not to realise how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great religions.

Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000 innocent deaths and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion

of Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September—the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored executions . . . all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday’s mass savagery.

No, Israel was not to blame—though we can be sure that Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will claim so—but the malign influence of history and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel’s wars for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so. But, of course, the U.S. will want to strike back against “world terror,” and last night’s bombardment of Kabul may have been the opening salvo. Indeed, who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that pejorative and sometimes racist word “terrorism”?

Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Last night, I remembered some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learnt what this means.

September 11, 2001, was not the genesis of this book. But it proved to me that history’s power is inescapable. Rereading that story I filed over the telephone from 37,000 feet over the Atlantic, I am appalled; not so much by its conclusions but by the repercussions that those conclusions—painfully accurate as they would turn out to be—would provoke. I was right about the way in which the world would be told that this was a war of “democracy versus terrorism,” about the attempt to obscure the historical injustices that lay behind this terrible act. I never imagined how brutal, how dangerous and how bloody would be the attempts to suppress all but the most sublime acceptance of this naive, infantile version of history.

As we flew back to Belgium in the dusk, I asked myself if we could really—at this early stage—name the guilty party, however strong our suspicions. I knew that with so awesome a crime, there would be those who would argue that the ordinary rules of journalism must be suspended. That we should all be “onside.” That if we stopped for a moment to ask the question “Why,” we would count as supporters of “world terror.” The Israelis had already perfected this outrageous logic. Merely to be called “pro-Palestinian” was to associate you with suicide bombing and “world terror.” You were with us or against us. George Bush Junior would use just that simplistic, dishonest argument—an argument much favoured, of course, by bin Laden himself—to shut us up, to keep us silent, to close down any debate about the Middle East or America’s role there or—an even more taboo subject—America’s relationship with Israel.

I wrote a second article on the plane that night. “Is the world’s favourite hate figure to blame?” the headline on this story would read in next day’s Independent. “If bin Laden was really guilty of all the things for which he has been blamed, he would need an army of 10,000,” I wrote:

And there is something deeply disturbing about the world’s habit of turning to the latest hate figure whenever blood is shed. But when events of this momentous scale take place, there is a new legitimacy in casting one’s eyes at those who have constantly threatened America . . . If . . . the shadow of the Middle East falls over yesterday’s destruction, then who else could produce such meticulously timed assaults? The rag-tag and corrupt Palestinian groups that used to favour hijacking are unlikely to be able to produce a single suicide bomber . . . The bombing of the U.S. Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, is more involved in its internal struggles. Iraq lies broken, its agents more intent on torturing their own people than striking at the the U.S. So the mountains of Afghanistan will be photographed from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the coming days, bin Laden’s old training camps . . . highlighted on the overhead projectors in the Pentagon. But to what end? . . . For if this is a war between the Saudi millionaire and President Bush’s America, it cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be fought at all without some costly military adventure overseas? Or is that what bin Laden seeks above all else?

The moment my Airbus touched down in Brussels, my mobile began to ring like a grasshopper. The office, radio stations in America, Britain, Ireland, France. I was in the taxi to my hotel when Karsten Tveit came on the line. “Robert, have you seen the pictures?” No, I said. “You must see the pictures. They are in-cred-ible.” Karsten, I said, I’m still in the taxi. I can’t watch television in a bloody taxi. “Look at the pictures!” he said again. “You’ve got to see the pictures. The moment you reach your room, look at the pictures—then you’ll understand.” When I reached my room, I turned on the television. The Twin Towers were smoking, incandescent. Figures floated like feathers, fast, upside down, with a terrible grace. The United passenger jet slid into the side of the south tower again and again, as if some scientific achievement was being demonstrated, as if this airliner was supposed to knife so effortlessly into the thin skin of the tower. And then there was the golden spray of fire. CNN put the edited sequences together so that the United plane crashed into the building while its burning fuel splashed out the other side, the second tape spliced in a millisecond after the collision. Hollywood could not compete with this—because it was Hollywood. The disaster movie of September 11th would never be made. It has already been made. Al-Qaeda productions got there first. This was “shock and awe” before America invented the expression for its invasion of Iraq.

All the dreams and nightmares of tinsel-town—all the racist movies depicting venal, murderous Muslims—had finally reached the screen en vérité. “Never before in the history of motion pictures . . .” If we have come to model ourselves on our film heroes, to mimic their language, their simplistic ideas, their robust, ultimately savage morality, now at last we could believe in those heroes and villains. Instead of reality turned into fiction, fiction had become reality. Still the United plane went on sliding into the tower, obsessively, obscenely, its passage so well known that one looked elsewhere on the screen. Did the tower shake, just a little, with the impact? Was that a bird that flicked across the screen just before the plane hit the building, innocence fleeing the darkness to come? And when the French crew produced their unique film of the aircraft that hit the other tower, that man on the sidewalk who looked up at the sound of the ramped-up jet engines—at what point exactly did he realise what he was watching? Or was he too seduced by the neatness, the ease with which an airplane could fly into a building?

On the Airbus, I had been connected via Irish radio to Conor O’Clery, the Irish Times’s man in New York, who had reported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with me almost a quarter of a century earlier. His office was next to the World Trade Center. He had described with his usual devastating clarity how he had seen the second plane come in, how he saw the aircraft flaps moving up and down at speed as the hijacker at the controls fought desperately to bring the aircraft into the centre of the tower. The pilot’s act of mass murder was to be as perfect as possible. In Brussels I called Chibli Mallat, the young Lebanese lawyer who was trying to arraign Ariel Sharon in a Belgian court for his role in Sabra and Chatila. Only a few hours earlier, I had assured him that my report on the new massacre evidence would be published next day. No more. “Of course, Robert, this changes everything,” he said. “I think that legally and morally we must regard what happened today as an international crime against humanity.”

The calls kept coming. Italian radio, CBS, BBC World, BBC Cardiff, BBC Belfast, Pacifica, NPR, Radio France International. They all wanted to know what no one could yet know. Who did it? How did they do it? No one—but no one— wanted to know why“they” might have wanted to do it, for this was the forbidden question. Eamon Dunphy put me on his show out of Dublin with Alan Dershowitz, the leftist, pro-Israeli academic at Harvard. I tried to explain that there must have been reasons for this atrocity, that crimes are not committed just because men are bad and don’t like democracy. Dershowitz was—I tried to think of the right word as I listened to his uncontrollable, hysterical anger—frenzied. Fisk was a bad man, a patronising man, a dangerous man; Fisk was anti-American and “anti-Americanism is the same as anti-Semitism . . .” Dershowitz shouted at me and shouted at Dunphy who eventually switched him off the air. But I got the message. Only one line was going to be allowed after these massacres in America. Any opposition to U.S. policy—especially in the Middle East—was criminal and “pro-terrorist.” Anyone who criticised America now was an anti-Semite. Anti-Semites are Nazis, fascists. So America was sacrosanct—so was Israel, of course—and those of us who asked the question “Why” were the supporters of “terrorism.” We had to shut up. On the night of September 11th, the BBC’s 24-hour news channel, reviewing the next morning’s British newspapers, produced a pro-Israeli American commentator who remarked of my article that “Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste.”

I sat on my hotel bed, flicking channels, watching the towers burn and their biblical descent in dust and ash. Our New York correspondent, David Usborne, had been called by the office with the story of the light aircraft hitting one of the towers and took the subway downtown, only to find the south tower falling at his feet. Again and again, the towers fell. Then the planes came in again. Only ash and smoke were taped at the Pentagon, and in that pit in the Pennsylvania field, but New York remained the iconic image that would now justify the “war on terror.” September 11th, I suspected, was to become a law, a piece of legislation that would be used to close down any conversation, lock up any suspect, invade any country. Opposition? Why, just show those bodies hurtling once more towards the streets of Manhattan.

I lay on my pillow, watching them again on the television at the foot of my bed. They moved at such speed, they had a kind of symmetry to them until you realised that their legs were kicking, that this was the moment of awfulness, the moment I had tried to understand when I looked into those monstrous, carbonised faces of the dead at Mutla Ridge. Those figures cascaded out of the sky and they fell, over and over at the bottom of my bed, plummeting into the blankets.

And then I realised what Karsten had meant when he urged me to concentrate on the pictures. The message was the act. Even if the casualties had not been so appalling, this wickedness so awesome, the attacks themselves so professional, this was not a routine act of “terror.” There would be no claims of responsibility, I was sure of that. There would be no statements from bin Laden or al-Qaeda, no explanations. The message—the statement—was the act itself. The claim was contained in the pictures. Our own television cameras were the claim of responsibility. I remembered again what bin Laden had said to me about his wishes for America. And looking at those pictures of the thunderous, concrete-thick clouds that surrounded Manhattan, I had to admit that New York was now “a shadow of itself.”

But why? I was right about the reaction to this question. Next morning, a blizzard of emails began to descend on The Independent, mostly in support of my article, many demanding my resignation. The attacks on America were caused by “hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and bin Laden have been spreading,” said one. According to the same message from Judea Pearl of UCLA, I was “drooling venom” and a professional “hate peddler.” Another missive, signed Ellen Popper, announced that I was “in cahoots with the archterrorist” bin Laden. Mark Guon labelled me “a total nut-case.” I was “psychotic,” according to Lilly and Barry Weiss. Brandon Heller of San Diego informed me that “you are actually supporting evil itself . . .” How quickly the pattern formed. Merely to suggest that Washington’s policies in the Middle East, its unconditional support for Israel, its support for Arab dictators, its approval of UN sanctions that cost the lives of so many Iraqi children, might lie behind the venomous attacks of September 11th was an act of evil.

This harsh and unrelenting shower of emails came in by the thousand, many of them—as the days went by—using identical phrases and, in some cases, identical sentences. Clearly this was turning into an orchestrated campaign—the kind that is taken far too seriously by American papers but treated with the scorn it deserves in Britain—and when a “reader” in San Antonio announced that he would “no longer take your magazine” because of my article, it was clear that something was amiss. The Independent does not (alas) circulate in Texas—and it definitely isn’t a magazine.

But reporters continued to avoid the “whys.” We could examine the “hows”— the hijackers had learned to fly, taken business class seats, used box-cutters—and the “whos.” The fact that the hijackers proved to be all Arabs—and that most of them came from Saudi Arabia—posed no problem to reporters or readers. This fell into the “where-and-what” slot. “Arab terrorists” are, after all, familiar characters. The sin was to connect the Arabs with the problems of the lands they came from, to ask the “why” question. All of the mass murderers came from the Middle East. Was there a problem out there? In articles and lectures in the United States, I was to raise this issue repeatedly. If a crime is committed in Los Angeles or London, the first thing the cops do is look for a motive. But when an international crime against humanity in the United States was committed on this unprecedented scale, the one thing we were not allowed to do was seek a motive.

George Bush Junior now talked about a “crusade” against evil. The “why” question was quickly disposed of by the U.S. administration—and left unvisited by American journalists—with a one-liner: “They hate our democracy.” You were with us or against us. “We are good people.” And in the national grief that clutched every American town and city, the latter made sense. The idea that the United States somehow “deserved” such an assault—that more than three thousand innocents should pay some kind of death-price for America’s sins abroad—was immoral. But without any serious examination of what had caused these acts of mass murder—political, historical reasons—then the United States and the world might set themselves on a warpath without end, a “war on terror” which, by its very nature, had no finite aim, no foreseeable conclusion, no direction except further war and fire and blood. The credo now set up by the United States and obsequiously embraced by the world’s statesmen and media—that September 11th, 2001, “changed the world for ever”—was a lie. Countless massacres of far greater dimensions had occurred in the Middle East over previous decades without anyone suggesting that the world would never be the same again. The million and a half dead of the Iran–Iraq War—a bloodbath set in train by Saddam, with our active military support—elicited no such Manichaean observation.

Nineteen years earlier, the greatest act of terrorism—using Israel’s own definition of that much misused word—in modern Middle Eastern history began. Typically, on 16 September 2001, no one remembered the anniversary in the West. I took a risk and wrote in the Independent that no other British newspaper— certainly no American newspaper—would recall the fact that on that date in 1982, Israel’s Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon—designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then U.S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig—which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That was more than five times the death toll in the September 11th, 2001, attacks. Yet I could not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon—no stirring speeches about democracy or liberty or “evil.” In fact, the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for “restraint.”

No, Israel was not to blame for what happened on September 11th, 2001. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America’s failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington was the principal supporter—all these were intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged New York into an apocalypse of fire. And I began to regard the response of the United States administration and the British government as a form of cowardice. If September 11th, 2001, really did “change the world,” then bin Laden had won the moment the hijackers boarded their four airliners. In the days that followed the attacks, I felt it ever more necessary to oppose this chicanery. Bush wanted to persuade the world that it had changed for ever so that he could advance a neo-conservative war— cloaked in honourable aspirations of freedom, democracy and liberty—that would plunge the Middle East into further chaos and death. But why must I let nineteen Arab murderers change myworld?

While Bush and Tony Blair prepared their forces for an inevitable attack on Afghanistan—whose Taliban priests predictably declined to surrender their “guest” bin Laden—they went on explaining that this was a war for “democracy and liberty,” that it was about men who were “attacking civilisation.” Bush informed us that “America was targeted for attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” But this was not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab–Muslim apocalypse, then it was intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America’s stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of the democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr. Bush was telling them about. Instead, they got a president who had just won a Saddam-like 98 per cent in Egyptian elections¹⁸¹—Washington’s friend, Hosni Mubarak—and a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortured and sometimes killed its people in prison. The Syrians would like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America—in many cases, educated at U.S. universities. No, it was “our” democracy and “our” liberty and freedom that Bush and Blair were talking about, our Western sanctuary that was under attack, not the vast site of terror and injustice that the Middle East had become.

Yes, it was shameful of Arabs to rejoice at the horrors in New York and Washington. Not only did Palestinians express their satisfaction in the streets of Ramallah, they handed out celebratory sweets to motorists in the Lebanese city of Sidon. Arab friends told me later that these comparatively small demonstrations were not the only manifestations of their kind. On a bus carrying officials to the Egyptian opera in Cairo, there was cheering and hand-clapping when news of the carnage was broadcast over the bus radio. “We didn’t believe that Americans deserved this, no,” one of those present told me later. “But we were thinking to ourselves: ‘Now they know what it’s like.’” And as Palestinians would point out, America’s name is literally stamped on the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. In August 2001, I had identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in—of all places—Florida, the state where some of the September 11th suiciders trained to fly.

Now at last, the suicide bomber had made his way west. Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis had retreated from Lebanon in 2000. Specifically because of a suicide bomber in 1983, the Americans fled Lebanon. Now the suicide bomber was here to stay. It was an exclusive weapon—it belonged to “them,” not us—and no military power appeared able to deal with this phenomenon. As long as “our” side will risk but not “give” their lives—cost-free war, after all, was partly an American invention—the suicide bomber is now the other side’s nuclear weapon. The suicider did not conform to a set of identical characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing themselves to bits—and, more often than not, the most innocent of Israelis—had little or no formal education, a poor knowledge of the Koran but a powerful sense of fury, despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizballah suiciders were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, often with years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.

The September 11th suicide bombers created a precedent. There were nineteen of them. Did they all know each other? Did they all know they were going to die? They must have had a good working knowledge of the fly-by-wire instrument panel of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft. It was the number that kept recurring to me in my exhaustion. If only four of them knew they were going to die, we had never seen this kind of suicide-cooperation before. In the Middle East, the suicide bomber is admired by millions of Arabs. Not because he is a mass killer— which he is—but because something invincible, something untouchable, something that has always dictated the rules without taking responsibility for the results, has now proved vulnerable. What if the numbers went on increasing? What if the school of self-immolation could produce a suicider a day, or two or three a day, calling them up Wal-Mart-style and deploying them against Western targets? It would take just twenty-two years from the first suicide bombing in Lebanon in 1982 for this fearful possibility to become reality. Iraq proved that suiciders could be summoned off-the-shelf, constantly replaced, repeatedly activated.

I studied the notes which Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian leader of the September 11th killers, supposedly left behind. They were fearful, grotesque—but also very, very odd. If the handwritten five-page document that the FBI said it found in Atta’s baggage was genuine, then the murderers believed in a very exclusive version of Islam—or were surprisingly unfamiliar with their religion. “The time of fun and waste is gone,” Atta, or one of his associates, is reported to have written in the notes. “Be optimistic . . . Check all your items—your bag, your clothes, your knives, your will, your IDs, your passport . . . In the morning, try to pray the morning prayer with an open heart.”

Part theological, part mission statement, the document raised more questions than it answered. Under the heading of “Last Night”—presumably the night of 10 September—the writer tells his fellow hijackers to “remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 per cent . . . Obey God, his messenger, and don’t fight among yourselves where [sic] you become weak . . . Everybody hates death, fears death . . .” The document begins with the words: “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate . . . In the name of God, of myself, and of my family.”

The problem was that no Muslim—however ill-taught—would be likely to include his family in such a prayer. He would mention the Prophet Mohamed immediately after he mentioned God in the first line. Lebanese and Palestinian suicide bombers have never been known to refer to “the time of fun and waste”— because a Muslim would not have “wasted” his time and would regard pleasure as a reward of the afterlife.¹⁸² And what Muslim would urge his fellow believers to recite the morning prayer—and then go on to quote from it? A devout Muslim should not need to be reminded of his duty to say the first of the five prayers of the day—and would certainly not need to be reminded of the text. It was as if a Christian, urging his followers to recite the Lord’s Prayer, felt it necessary to read the whole prayer in case they didn’t remember it.

However, the full and original Arabic text was not released by the FBI. The translation, as it stood, suggested an almost Christian view of what the hijackers might have felt—asking to be forgiven their sins, explaining that fear of death is natural, that “a believer is always plagued with problems.” A Muslim is encouraged not to fear death—it is, after all, the moment when he or she believes they will start a new life—and a believer in the Islamic world is one who is certain of his path, not “plagued with problems.” There were no references to any of Osama bin Laden’s demands—for an American withdrawal from the Gulf, an end to Israeli occupation, the overthrow of pro-American Arab regimes—nor any narrative context for the atrocities about to be committed. If the men had an aspiration—and if the document was above suspicion—then they were sending their message direct to their God.

The prayer/instructions may have been distributed to other hijackers before the massacres occurred—The Washington Post reported that the FBI found another copy of “essentially the same document” in the wreckage of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. No text of this document was released. In the past, CIA translators have turned out to be Lebanese Maronite Christians whose understanding of Islam and its prayers may have led to serious textual errors. Could this be to blame for the weird references in the notes found in Atta’s baggage? Or was there something more mysterious about the background of those who committed these crimes against humanity? American scholars had already raised questions about the use of “100 per cent”—hardly a theological term to be found in a religious exhortation—and the use of the word “optimistic” with reference to the Prophet was a decidedly modern concept.

From the start, the hole in the story was the reported behaviour of the hijackers. Atta was said to have been a near-alcoholic, while Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, had a Turkish girlfriend in Hamburg and enjoyed nightclubs and drinking. Was this why the published text referred to the “forgiveness” of sin? The final instruction, “to make sure that you are clean, your clothes are clean, including your shoes,” may have been intended as a call to purify a “martyr” before death. Equally, it may reflect the thoughts of a truly eccentric—and wicked—mind. The document found in Atta’s baggage ended with a heading: “When you enter the plane.” It then urged the hijackers to recite: “Oh God, open all doors for me . . . I am asking for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel . . .” Was this an attempt to smother latent feelings of compassion towards the passengers on the hijacked planes—especially the children—or towards the thousands who would die when the aircraft crashed? Did the nineteen suicide bombers say these words to themselves in their last moments? Or didn’t they need to?

And how did these perverse men—and perhaps “perverse” was the very opposite of their persona—fly these aircraft with such painless accuracy into three of their four targets? Within days, we would learn of their flight-training programmes, their desire to learn only how to fly an airliner once it had taken off. I was travelling from Beirut to Paris in late September and sought the reflections of my friends on the flight deck, by chance the same crew with whom I’d flown into Dhahran in 1990 when the United States sent its soldiers to Saudi Arabia. “Eighteen months? You think it takes eighteen months to learn how to fly a Boeing 757 once it’s in the air?” the pilot asked. Far below us, the clouds of central Europe passed like a white screen, faint ripples of emerging cumulus climbing from the plateau of mist in the afternoon sun. “I can teach you how to fly this in two minutes. At least, I can teach you all you need to know in order to become a hijacker.” As evening drew in, the instruments began to shine green in front of us. The co-pilot had laid his maps across his lap. His colleagues tut-tutted. “A hijacker doesn’t need these maps,” he said. “All he needed to do was code in the exact location of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. On automatic pilot, the plane will follow these instructions. He switches off the transponder [identifying aircraft for ground control]—this knob—and the plane will head for his chosen destination.”

The pilot leaned forward. The code word for the setting was punched in as “FISK” along with a series of numbers, in this case 123456789, so that the plane would fly itself to its “target.” “The hijacker probably couldn’t put an airliner through a take-off—but he doesn’t have to,” the pilot said. “The hijackers in America let the flight-deck crew do that. They wait until the 757 is at its cruising altitude, say 35,000 feet, then they burst into the cabin, murder the pilot and take over. Most of their work has already been done for them.” It dawned on me then that faith, however perverted, had now connected with modern technology—in just the same way as the volumes in those Algerian bookshops, works on Islam and works on science, had been placed next to one another.

A pattern of towns emerged like white and yellow blood vessels in the body of darkness below us. “Your hijacker has now reached the area west of New York, and he lets the plane take him to within sight of the city,” the pilot says. “Then he just presses this button to cut the automatic pilot and flies the plane himself. He can see the Twin Towers. In broad daylight, it’s easy—every pilot into New York would see the Trade Center. Then he pushes the wheel forward and starts his dive.” Middle East pilots had already discussed the last moments of the two aircraft to hit the Twin Towers. They had studied the photographs in the news magazines, watched and listened to the videotapes. On our flight deck, the crew had a set of press photographs of the last moments of the American Airlines and United Airlines jets.

“On the videotape that was made of the first plane to hit, you can clearly hear the twin engines,” the pilot says. “They are so loud that someone in the street looks up. The engines are over-powered, they were never meant to be flying the plane that fast, they are under immense pressure.” And he makes a noise like a jet through his teeth. “The way the plane is plunging—he’s pushing it down with the wheel [control stick], remember, it’s now flying way forward of its permitted speed. I reckon that first aircraft hit the tower at maybe nine hundred—even one thousand—kilometres an hour.”

We all digest this thought as a bubble of air gently rocks the wings of our own jet, aware of just how easily this secure cocoon of warmth, our air coming pressured into the cabin from the engines, our flight-path directed and watched from central and northern Europe, can turn into a tomb. “You know why those people jumped from the windows of the building?” the co-pilot suddenly asks. “That wasn’t gasoline that had burned into the buildings, the kind you use in a car. That jet was carrying”—and here he glances at a fuel manual—“around twenty thousand gallons of aviation fuel, which is the same as kerosene. Ordinary gasoline will burn you, but kerosene burns ferociously, it’s much hotter. The people burning in that tower were, in effect, being tortured to death. They jumped because of the pain.”

U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell laid out the ground rules for the first war against “evil” within three days of September 11th. His message to the Taliban was simple: they had to take responsibility for sheltering bin Laden. “You cannot separate your activities from the activity of these perpetrators,” he warned.¹⁸³ But the Americans absolutely refused to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. And we were supposed to go on holding our tongues even when Ariel Sharon—a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Chatila—announced that Israel also wished to join the battle against “world terror.” No wonder the Palestinians were fearful. In the four days following September 11th, twenty-three Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. But if Israel was allowed to join the new conflict, then the Palestinians—by fighting the Israelis—would, by extension, become part of the “world terror” against which Bush was supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Sharon now claim that Yassir Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden—a statement as empty of truth as Bush’s later attempt to persuade the world that Saddam Hussein had links with bin Laden.

It took a while to grasp what was now going on, the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God’s earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the Russian army for ten years, abandoned by its friends—us, of course—once the Russians had retreated, was about to be attacked by the surviving superpower. President Bush was now threatening the obscurantist, ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment he intended to mete out to bin Laden. Bush had originally talked about “justice and punishment” and about “bringing to justice” the perpetrators of the atrocities of September 11th. But he was not sending policemen to the Middle East; he was sending B-52s. And F-18s and AWACS planes and Apache helicopters. We were not going to arrest bin Laden. We were going to destroy him. And B-52s don’t discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men and women or women and children.

None deserved this fate, but after twenty-one years of continuous conflict, the Afghans merited it least of all. The Saudis and the Pakistanis had, on America’s behalf, helped to arm the militias of Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and then—disgusted by the victors’ feuding—supported Mullah Omar’s Wahhabi army of self-righteous peasant clerics, the Taliban. Saudi Arabia had poured millions of dollars into the madrassas—religious colleges—in Pakistan throughout the Afghan–Soviet conflict and the Taliban was an authentic product of Wahhabism, the strict, pseudo-reformist Islamist state faith of Saudi Arabia founded by the eighteenth-century cleric Mohamed Ibn Abdul-Wahab. Western scholars like to refer to Abdul-Wahab’s beliefs—such as they were—as extremist, but to Muslims they had a quite different connotation. For waging war on fellow Muslims who had “erred” was an obligatory part of his philosophy, whether they be the “deviant” Shias of Basra—whom he vainly attempted to convert to Sunni Islam— or Arabians who did not follow his own exclusive interpretation of Muslim “unity.” He also proscribed rebellion against rulers. His orthodoxy therefore both threatened the modern-day House of Saud because of its corruption, yet secured its future by forbidding any revolution. The Saudi ruling family thus embraced the one faith that could both protect and destroy it.

SAUDI ARABIA’S ROLE in the September 11th, 2001 attacks has still not been fully explored. While senior members of the royal family expressed the shock and horror that was expected of them, no attempt was made to examine the nature of Wahhabism and its inherent contempt for all representation of human activity or death. Abdul-Wahab ordered all tombs and mosques built over tombs to be destroyed, including the tomb of Zayd bin al-Khattab, a companion of the Prophet. The destruction of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2000— along with the vandalism in the Kabul museum—fitted perfectly into this theocratic wisdom. So, too, it might be argued, did the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Saudi Muslim legal iconoclasm led directly to the detonation of the Buddhas. In 1820, the much-worshipped statues of Dhu Khalasa, dating from the twelfth century, were destroyed by Wahhabis. Only weeks after Lebanese professor Kamal Salibi suggested in the late 1990s that once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia may have been locations in the Bible, the Saudi authorities sent bulldozers to destroy the ancient buildings there. Saudi organisations have destroyed hundreds of historic structures in the name of religion in Mecca and Medina, and former UN officials have condemned the destruction of Ottoman buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi aid agency which decided they were “idolatrous.” When the Saudis built the massive Faisal mosque in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad— originally destined for Kabul—its construction was followed almost at once by the smashing of a large number of early Islamic figure shrines in the city. Graffiti appeared beside graveyard shrines saying they must be destroyed because “there can be no sainthood in Islam.” Of the many Islamic countries to have condemned the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, one Muslim nation was noticeable by its silence: Saudi Arabia, where even private Christian worship at Christmas is forbidden and where kings and emirs are buried without gravestones.

In 1998, a Saudi student at Harvard produced a remarkable thesis—based upon first-hand research in his country—which argued convincingly that U.S. forces had suffered casualties in bombing attacks in Saudi Arabia because American intelligence did not understand Wahhabism and had underestimated the extent of the dissatisfaction among senior ulema towards the U.S. presence in the kingdom. Nawaf Obaid, who drew up his report at the request of a senior State Department official, named the two most vocal clerics opposed to King Fahd as Sheikh Sulieman al-Owda and Sheikh Safar al-Hawali. Al-Awdah had distributed tapes of sermons that compared members of the royal family to the last sultans of the Ottoman empire and the Americans to an occupying force. He drew his support, Obaid pointed out, from a town called Buraiydah, where his followers attempted to prevent his arrest in 1994.

Obaid quoted a senior officer in the Saudi army as telling him that “I was amazed at the ‘secret’ agreement that the king and the minister of defence had made with the Bush administration agreeing to U.S. troop retention after the war. I knew then and there that the society . . . would never understand or accept this situation.” More ominously, a Saudi National Guard officer told Obaid that “the more visible the Americans became, the darker I saw the future of the country.”

Wahhabi puritanism meant that Saudi Arabia was always likely to throw up men who believed they had been chosen to “cleanse” their society from corruption—the royal family usually being fingered as the centre of this Satanic cancer— and it was a former National Guard officer, Juhayman Ibn Mohamed al-Utaybi, who led the siege of the Great Mosque at Mecca in November 1979, along with his friend Mohamed Ibn Abdullah al-Qahtani. Al-Utaybi proclaimed al-Qahtani the mahdi, the divinely inspired figure foretold by the Prophet who would restore justice to a corrupt world. The Saudis deployed 10,000 troops to take back the mosque from the two hundred gunmen who had seized the building. But the Great Mosque was a veritable Afghanistan of underground caves and hiding places. Only after French riot police were brought to Mecca two weeks later—undergoing a brief but formal conversion to Islam to legitimise their presence in a city that only Muslims may visit—was the siege brought to a bloody end. The French flooded the basements of the mosque and inserted cables into the water, electrocuting Saddam-style many of the rebels “like kippers.” On 9 January 1980, in towns across Saudi Arabia, sixty-three men were beheaded in public.

Yet still the Saudis could not confront the duality of protection-and-threat that Wahhabism represented for them. Both Saudis and their Western allies have tried to bury this in obfuscations and metaphors that prevent any serious inquiry into this “puritanism.” Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s long-time ambassador to the United States, once characterised his country’s religion as part of a “timeless culture” whose people lived according to Islam “and our other basic ways.” A former British ambassador advised Westerners to “adapt” in Saudi Arabia and “to act with the grain of Saudi traditions and culture.” This “grain” is all too evident in the libraries of Amnesty International appeals for the hundreds of men—and occasionally women—who are beheaded each year in the kingdom, often after torture and grossly unfair trials.

With considerable prescience, the Saudi scholar Obaid concluded in 1998 that “in the Taliban, the U.S. will have a chance to witness a Wahhabi government without the moderating presence of the al-Saud, and perhaps a glimpse into what Saudi Arabia could become if the traditional balance of power is disrupted in favour of the religious establishment.” It was to prove a fearful experience. The Taliban made no secret of their intolerance, their merciless punishments, the hanging of thieves—along with videotapes and television sets—their amputations and beheading and beating and execution of women.¹⁸⁴ But when faced with Shia Muslim opponents, they were capable of applying Abdul-Wahab’s concept of waging war on “deviant” Muslims with a ferocity that quite matched their Afghan militia opponents. In August 1998, they succeeded in breaking into the last stronghold of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The first eyewitness accounts of the ferocious massacre—kept secret for two months in a series of confidential United Nations files—provided horrific evidence of rape, throat-slitting and mass suffocation of Shia Muslim men and women by the Saudi-funded army. The reports, compiled by officials of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights in Pakistan, were sent to New York but kept secret because the UN was still trying to negotiate with the Taliban. Outraged by what he read in the documents, however, a Swedish diplomat passed on their contents to me.

An Afghan man, a Tajik father of three, described to UN officials how he had “never before witnessed such scenes of bestial violence” until the day the Taliban entered Mazar to find the unsuspecting men and women of the city going about their daily shopping. “They were shooting without warning at everybody who happened to be on the street, without discriminating between men, women and children,” he said. “Soon the streets were covered with dead bodies and with blood. No one was allowed to bury the corpses for . . . six days. Dogs were eating human flesh and going mad and soon the smell became intolerable.” The same witness said that on the second day of their victory, the Taliban began house-to-house searches in a hunt for Shia Muslim families who were identified by their facial features. “Almost all who were found were either shot three times on the spot (one bullet in the head, one in the chest and one in the testicles), slaughtered in the Halal way (with a knife to the throat) or stuffed into containers after being badly beaten.”

Up to twelve of these containers were parked all day long in the sun with sealed doors, and the witness “saw a container that had its doors opened after all the males inside had died of suffocation. Some of the containers were filled with children (boys and girls) who were taken to an unknown destination after their parents were killed.” Women, the UN report said, “were usually abused and many rape cases were reported . . .” One witness fleeing through Mazar heard the calls of the muezzins in the mosques “asking all Shias to convert to Sunni [Islam] and attend the daily prayers for their own sake.” A woman whose husband and two brothers were executed—shot twice and then their throats cut—described how the Taliban, as they left the house, shouted “that they had more serious executions to carry out, but that they would be coming back.”

Ten Iranian diplomats and an Iranian journalist were killed when Taliban men entered their consulate. Their bodies were left lying in the building for two days until they were buried in a mass grave in the compound of the Sultan Razia Girls’ High School. The murder of the Iranians almost provoked Tehran to stage a military incursion into Afghanistan in September 1998. Of the thousands of Shia Muslims taken from Mazar, not one returned.

In the early spring of 2000, I visited a Taliban production line, a school of committed, earnest young men whose Koranic learning was aided by the modern science that captivates so many Islamists. Its pupils— talib means “student”—were of many nationalities, all seeking the divine revolution which they believed would occur in their lifetime. Arriving at the college at Akora Khattak in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province with film-makers Nelofer Pazira and Siddiq Barmak, I found Tajikistan’s Islamic “liberators” more than willing to talk to us. Down a narrow passageway, the young men were gathered, bearded, smiling, crying Allahu akbar, posing before posters that showed the Russian bear skewered with a green Muslim flag. Abdul-Raouf—there were no student family names for us as at the great mosque and its religious school opposite the railway track from Peshawar—grasped my arm. “We would like to make an Islamic revolution in Tajikistan and we believe in the rebirth of Islam in Tajikistan,” he shouted in Russian, which Siddiq—who trained in the Soviet Union—could translate. “The great light of Islam will shine upon our country. It is the promise of God for us.” His face was thin, his beard pointed, his eyes alight with conviction. Abdul-Raouf and his fellow students in the madrassa founded by Mullanah Abdul al-Haq had only recently taken leave of their Chechen colleagues, young men who—after a year of Koranic teaching at Akora Khattak—had returned to their country to fight the Russians.

The al-Haq college stood for everything the Americans and Russians most feared: a Taliban factory, an ideological school run by seventy teachers from Pakistan and Afghanistan for thousands of international Islamists eager to struggle for a united Muslim nation in south-west Asia. And if that Muslim nation was to include most of the former southern Soviet republics, Afghanistan and even Pakistan, then the Haqqania will have played its role. As twenty-two-year-old Abdul-Raouf put it when I asked about his former Chechen classmates, “they are our brothers and if they need help, we can give it to them.”

The madrassa, founded by Rashed al-Haq’s grandfather in 1974, was school to all of the Taliban leadership now ruling in Kabul, and a new four-storey boarding hostel for 3,000 students proved that this was an expanding project rather than a dying ideal. If President-General Pervez Musharraf and his Pakistani authorities liked to assure Western leaders that such institutions were a thing of the past, it was instructive to note that eight black-uniformed and armed Pakistani policemen lived within the complex, guarding Mullanah Sami al-Haq—Rashed’s father—and his students. They arrived here in 1998, on the orders of the now-deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif, for “security reasons.” Nor was this huge college steeped in the past. If its Koranic volumes were studied with exceptional reverence, the madrassa ran its own publishing house and had gone high-tech, its computer room next to the library and managed by Sajjat Khan, who was already constructing a website. Rashed al-Haq, walking me round the campus in his robe and soft Pashtun hat, insisted that the college cost only a million rupees to run—a mere $20,000 a year—but agreed that its funding came from around the world. “Not from countries, just from individuals.” I thought, of course, of Saudi Arabia.

“All the major Islamic leaders in this area were students of my grandfather and father,” al-Haq said. “Especially the Taliban. The Islamic revolution is very near, Inshallah, God willing.” Rashed al-Haq’s grandfather, whose bound works have an honoured place in the college library, is buried in a plot beside the college, along with his wife and sister. The soft pebble-rush of pouring concrete emerged from the hostel next door where workmen were completing a new fourth floor. The military takeover of Pakistan in October 1999 had left the college untouched. “In fact, we were happy [at this] because the majority of members of the assembly were dishonest people,” Rashed al-Haq said. “This was not a real democracy—and a real democracy is what we are struggling for in Islam. For fifty years since the foundation of Pakistan, we have been waiting for real Islamic law to be introduced.” And suddenly, the voice of Rashed al-Haq sounded like that of General Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan. For were not their aims similar? Did they not both demand an end to corruption? Did they not both denounce Nawaz Sharif’s rule as a fake democracy? So why should Pakistan heed Washington’s demand by closing down the Taliban factory in Akora Khattak?

Yet other remarks showed how far the college had gone in espousing everything the Americans—and Russians—hate. As we walked past the madrassa’s delicate blue-and-white tiled mosque, Rashed al-Haq, who spent a year at the Islamic university of Al-Azhar in Cairo and spoke Arabic with a thick Egyptian accent, became emotional. “There is, believe me, going to be an Islamic revolution. The more the United States and the Western world and the nations that murder Muslims oppress us, the sooner there will be an Islamic republic. Our morale is high and it’s possible to have an Islamic Union all over this area and we want to create such a union—like the EU and NATO.”

NATO, I asked? NATO? Rashed al-Haq was thinking in military as well as ideological terms. “If India and other Western countries make a nuclear bomb, everyone accepts this, it’s OK. But if one poor Muslim nation like Pakistan makes a bomb, then everyone is against it and it becomes an Islamic bomb. If the Hindus make a bomb, it’s not a Hindu bomb. But the Muslims who make a bomb are called fundamentalist terrorists.” And so I found another point of contact between the al-Haq college and General Musharraf. For Rashed al-Haq and his students and for the Pakistani general, the bomb was a symbol of pride that was there to stay.

ZIAD JARRAH’S FATHER sat beside me and opened his palms in that gesture of innocence that is also a form of special pleading. “He called just two days before the planes crashed to tell me he’d received the two thousand dollars I’d sent him.” Still recovering from open-heart surgery, Samir Jarrah sat, half slumped, sick and traumatised in a green plastic chair beneath the vines of his Lebanese garden. “Ziad said it was for his aeronautical course. He had told me last year that he had a choice of courses—in France or in America—and it was me who told him to go to the States. But there are lots of Ziads. Maybe it wasn’t him? He was a good, kind boy . . .” At which point, Samir Jarrah leaned forward, brought his hands to his face and broke down in tears. Ziad Jarrah was the pilot of United Airlines flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania when its passengers apparently tried to storm the flight deck, wrestling with the hijackers, perhaps with Ziad Jarrah as he gripped the aircraft controls.

Everyone knew. Around us, a bunch of middle-aged men sat on identical chairs, all Sunni Muslims, all appalled that a crime against humanity should have stained the tiny but wealthy village of Almarj in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley. A massive new village mosque—I’d never seen so big a mosque in so small a town— stood scarcely 200 metres from the front door, but both friends of the family and Ziad Jarrah’s uncle insisted that he was neither religious nor political. “He was a normal person,” Jamal Jarrah said. “He drank alcohol, he had girlfriends. Only last August, his Turkish girlfriend Aysel came to meet our family here because she wanted to meet her future in-laws. He wasn’t able to come with her because he said he was too busy with his studies.” It is now 15 September 2001, four days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the suicide hijackers’ plane crash in Pennsylvania.

Too busy to bring his fiancée to meet his family? Busy doing what? And what was the $2,000 for? To continue studies at his Miami aeronautical school? Or to buy air tickets for the Boeing 757 flight to California, for him perhaps, and maybe for the other hijackers on the flight. Aysel was in Germany, freely giving evidence to the Bochum city police who had just searched her apartment, discovering “aircraft-related documents” in a suitcase belonging to one of three men named by Washington as hijackers. All of them—something the Jarrah family could not explain or would not believe—lived together in Hamburg. Aysel had already reported Ziad missing—just as she had eighteen months before when Ziad Jarrah disappeared for up to five weeks. And what she told the Jarrah family over the telephone then gave them their first suspicion that something was terribly wrong with their only son.

For according to a family friend, Aysel told the Jarrahs that her fiancé, who would visit her each weekend from his university in Hamburg, might have gone to Afghanistan. Jamal Jarrah told me that this is what Aysel had feared. “But it turned out that he had been moving from his first university in Greifswald to his new courses in Hamburg and had not been in contact with Aysel during that time.” Five weeks to change universities? Without telling his fiancée?

The details of Ziad Jarrah’s life were as simple—or so the family said—as his death was obscure to them. He was twenty-six, born—according to his Lebanese identity documents—on 11 May 1975, a village boy from a wealthy family. His father was a civil servant in the Beirut Department of Social Security, his mother a schoolteacher. Ziad Jarrah attended the Evangelical School in the Christian town of Zahle, about 20 kilometres from his home, and his father paid thousands to put his son through university. He travelled to Hamburg on a student visa in 1997, later attending the city’s Technical University. He briefly went missing in 1999, just before setting off for the United States on his father’s advice. “Whenever he asked for money, I would send it,” Samir Jarrah said. “He needed money—he had a private home in Germany and a girlfriend to look after. He had to fund his studies.”

In February, Ziad Jarrah returned to Lebanon for the last time to be present during his father’s open-heart surgery. “He looked after his dad and went to the hospital every day to see him,” Jamal, the uncle, told me. “He was so normal. His personality and his life bore no relation to the kind of things that happened . . . He had girlfriends, he went to nightclubs, he went dancing sometimes.” Everyone I spoke to in Almarj said the same thing: Ziad Jarrah was a happy, secular youth, he never showed any interest in religion and never visited the mosque for prayers, he liked women even if he was at times reserved and shy. Mohamed Atta, who lived in Hamburg with him and flew the American Airlines plane into the World Trade Center, was known to knock back five or six stiff drinks in an evening. Surely such behaviour would lead to banishment from the ranks of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement. Or was this an attempt to blind any American intelligence agencies that might be watching the men? Who would believe that a young man drinking in a bar—with a Turkish girlfriend back in Germany with whom he’d been living— would be planning to crash an airliner with thirty-three innocent passengers aboard into—where? Congress? The White House?

But Samir Jarrah’s son did board the plane with a knife and a box-cutter— a woman’s last phone call from the flight revealed that these were the hijackers’ only weapons—and the intention to kill himself, along with the passengers, crew and, quite possibly, President George Bush and his staff. What, then, did he learn at his Zahle school and the Christian Patriarchate college where he also studied in Beirut? He was only seven when the Israeli army surrounded him and tens of thousands of other Lebanese civilians in the siege of Beirut in 1982. He was never involved in the civil war, his neighbours told me. He was never interested in militias. “We are ready to cooperate with the authorities,” Jamal Jarrah said to me wearily. “We all regard what happened in America as a terrorist act. It’s a tragedy for Americans, for us, for all people in the world . . .” Samir kept shaking his head, going through a creed of refusal. “My boy was just a normal person. He would never do this. Why, there may have been another ‘Ziad Jarrah’ on the plane.” But the men and women gathering at the family home that morning understood and had come dressed in black.

WHEN THE AIR BOMBARDMENT of Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001, there were no Western journalists inside the Taliban’s three-quarters of Afghanistan, only in the sliver of north-eastern territory held by Massoud’s Northern Alliance. The sole picture of life—and death—inside Kabul was Qatar’s Al-Jazeera satellite channel, which not only broadcast the statements of bin Laden but showed a tape of bomb damage to civilian areas of the capital. A few months earlier, my old friend Tom Friedman had set off for the small Gulf emirate, from where, in one of his imperial columns for The New York Times, he informed the world that the tiny state’s television channel was a welcome sign that democracy might be coming to the Middle East. Al-Jazeera had been upsetting some of the local Arab dictators— Mubarak of Egypt for one—and Tom thought this a good idea. So did I. But by early October the story was being rewritten. Colin Powell was now rapping the emir of Qatar over the knuckles because—so he claimed—Al-Jazeera was “inciting anti-Americanism.”

The Americans wanted the emir to close down the channel’s office in Kabul, which was scooping the world with its tape of the U.S. bombardments and bin Laden’s televised statements. The most wanted man in the whole world had been suggesting that he was angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions, about the corruption of pro-Western Arab regimes, about Israel’s attacks on Palestinian territory, about the need for U.S. forces to leave the Middle East. And after insisting that bin Laden was a “mindless terrorist”—that there was no connection between U.S. policy in the Middle East and the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington—the Americans needed to close down Al-Jazeera’s coverage.

Needless to say, this tomfoolery was given little coverage in the Western media, whose editors knew they did not have a single correspondent in the Taliban area of Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera did. Bin Laden’s propaganda was pretty basic. He taped his own statements and sent one of his henchmen off to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. No cross-questioning, of course, just a sermon. We didn’t see any video clips of destroyed Taliban equipment, the ancient MiGs and even older Warsaw Pact tanks that had been rusting across Afghanistan for years. Only a sequence of pictures—apparently real—of bomb damage in a civilian area of Kabul.

As usual, the first reports of the U.S. missile attacks were covered without the slightest suggestion that innocents were about to die in the country we planned to “save.” Whether the Taliban were lying or telling the truth about thirty civilians dead in Kabul, did we reporters really think that all our bombs fell on the guilty and not the innocent? To be sure, we were given Second World War commentaries about Western military morale. On the BBC we had to listen to an account of “a perfect moonless night for the air armada” to bomb Afghanistan. We were told on one satellite channel of the “air combat” over Afghanistan. A lie. The Taliban had none of their ageing MiGs aloft. There was no combat.

Of course, there was a moral question here. After the atrocities in New York and Washington, how could we be expected to “play fair” between the ruthless bin Laden and the West? We couldn’t make an equivalence between the massmurderer’s diatribes and the American and British forces who were trying to destroy the Taliban. But that was not the point. It was our viewers and readers with whom we had to “play fair.” Because of our rage at the massacre of the innocents in America, and because of our desire to kowtow to the elderly “terrorism experts,” did we have to lose all our critical faculties? Why at least not tell us how these “terrorism experts” came to be so expert? And what were their connections with dubious intelligence services?

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, itwas 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.

There was a children’s doctor I met in Peshawar, who provided considerable insight into the Taliban’s mentality at war. “After the Taliban radio went off the air . . . the next day I saw them assembling a new antenna. The Taliban always did this. Every time something was destroyed, they replaced it at once. They would go round and collect up all the wrecked equipment. This was very fast action. The Taliban were very relaxed about this. I’m trying to describe the Taliban reaction to the bombing. You know? They weren’t interested in the attacks. It was very intriguing—and strange—for me to see this.” But the doctor was no disinterested observer. “Most people, neutral people who’re not connected with political groups, they hate the American policy—and if the Taliban would change just 20 per cent of their policy against the people, then the people would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. We are waiting for an end to the Taliban policy against women and against education. People will never forget what Pakistan has done to undermine Afghanistan—they see Pakistan as the eternal enemy. Among educated people, September 11th created a new situation. We knew that America helped to create the Taliban and Osama and we call them the ‘kids’ of America and Pakistan.” And, he might have added, Saudi Arabia.

On 22 October, the Americans killed Saifullah of Turungzai, MA in Arabic and MA in Islamic Studies (Peshawar University), BSc. (Islamia College), B.Ed. and Certificate of Teaching, M. Phil. student and scholarship winner to Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest university in the Arab world. He spoke fluent English as well as Persian and his native Pushtu and loved poetry and history and was, so his family said, preparing a little reluctantly to get married. His father, Hedayatullah, was a medical doctor, his younger brother a student of chartered accountancy. No one outside Pakistan—and few inside—had ever heard of Saifullah. In these Pashtun villages of the North West Frontier, many families do not even have proper names. Saifullah was not a political leader; his fifty-year-old father said that his son was a humanitarian, not a warrior. His brother Mahazullah said the same. “He was always a peaceful person, quiet and calm, he just wanted to protect people in Afghanistan who he believed were the victims of terrorism.” But everyone agreed how Saifullah died. He was killed when five American cruise missiles detonated against the walls of a building in the Darulaman suburb of Kabul where he and thirty-five other men were meeting.

His family now called him a “martyr.” Hedayatullah embraced each visitor to their home of cement and mud walls—including me—and offered roast chicken and mitha sweets and pots of milk and tea and insisted that he be “congratulated” on being the proud father of a man who died for his beliefs. I dutifully ate the vast mounds of chicken that Hedayatullah tugged from the braziers of food on the floor. Hens clucked in the yard outside; an old coloured poster, depicting a Kalashnikov rifle with the word “jihad” above it, was pasted on the wall. But “peace” is the word the family uttered most. Saifullah had only gone to take money to Kabul for the suffering Afghans, said Mahazullah, perhaps no more than 20,000 rupees—a mere $350—which he had raised among his student friends.

That wasn’t the way the Americans told the story. Blundering through their target maps and killing innocent civilians by the day, the Pentagon boasted that the Darulaman killings targeted the Taliban’s “foreign” fighters, of whom a few were Pakistanis, Saifullah among them. In Pushtu, his name means “Sword of God.” Mahazullah dismissed the American claims. Only when I suggest that it might not be unusual for a young Muslim with Saifullah’s views to have taken a weapon to defend Afghanistan does Mahazullah say, very quickly, that his brother “may have been a fighter.” He never imagined his brother’s death. A phone call prepared the family for the news, a friend with information that some Pakistanis had been killed in Kabul. “It has left a terrible vacuum in our life,” Mahazullah said. “You cannot imagine what it is like without him. He was a person who respected life, who was a reformer. There was no justification for the war in Afghanistan. These people are poor. There is no evidence, no proof. Every human being has the right to the basic necessities of life. The family—all of us, including Saifullah—were appalled by the carnage in New York and Washington on September 11th. Saifullah was very regretful about this—we all watched it on television.” At no point did the family mention the name of Osama bin Laden.

Turungzai was a village of resistance. During the Third Afghan War in 1919, the British hunted down Hadji Turungzai, one of the leaders of the revolt, and burned the village bazaar in revenge for its insurgency. Disconcertingly, a young man entered Saifullah’s home, greeted me with a large smile and introduced himself as the grandson of the Hadji, scourge of the English. But this was no centre of Muslim extremism. Though the family prayed five times a day, they intended their daughters to be educated at university. Saifullah spent hours on his personal computer and apparently loved the poetry of the secular Pakistani national poet Allama Mohamed Iqbal of Sialkot (Sir Mohamed Iqbal after he had accepted a British knighthood), and, according to Mahazullah, was interested in the world’s religions. When Saifullah left for Afghanistan, “Trust me” were the last words he spoke to his father. Perhaps he was remembering one of Iqbal’s most famous verses:

Of God’s command, the inner meaning do you know?
To live in constant anger is a life indeed.

To children, death also came. Mullah Mohamed Omar’s ten-year-old son died in the third week of October. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city’s broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and “Emir of the Faithful,” but the boy—apparently travelling in Omar’s car when it was attacked by U.S. aircraft—died of his wounds. No regrets, of course. Back in 1986, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Ghadafi’s six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets on our part then, either. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizballah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi’s ten-year-old. Again, no regrets.

And so the casualties in Afghanistan began to mount. From Kandahar came ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. When a few television crews were able to find eighteen fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad, the U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld ridiculed the deaths as “ridiculous.” If each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom had a familiar trademark—the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of “command and control centres,” radar capabilities—each had an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. For the Afghan refugees who were turning up in their thousands at the border, it was palpably evident that they were fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles. The refugees spoke vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fell on their cities. These people were terrified of our “war on terror,” victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Despite the slavish use of the phrase on the BBC and CNN, this was not a “war on terror.” We were not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or ETA killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Indeed, the United States had spent a lot of time supporting “terrorists” in Latin America—the Contras sprang to mind—not to mention the very same Taliban whom we were now bombing in Afghanistan. This was a war on America’s enemies. Increasingly, as the date of September 11th acquired epic status, we were retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we were not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible.

And what was going to happen when the deaths for which we were responsible in Afghanistan approached the same figure as September 11th? Once the UN agencies gave us details of the starving and the destitute who were dying in their flight from our bombs, it wouldn’t take long to reach 3,000. Would that be enough? Would 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they had nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? Sure, we would blame the Taliban for future tragedies, just as we had been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban–drug linkage. And all we had to do to believe this was to forget the UN Drug Control Programme’s announcement in October 2001 that opium production in Afghanistan had fallen by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar’s prohibition of drug production in Taliban-controlled areas of the country. Most of Afghanistan’s current output came from our allies in the Northern Alliance.

And what of Pakistan? By allying himself with America’s “War on Terror,” General Musharraf had secured de facto international acceptance of his 1999 coup. Suddenly, all he had wished for—the lifting of sanctions, massive funding for Pakistan’s crumbling industry, IMF loans, a $375 million debt rescheduling and humanitarian aid—had been given him. Of course, we had to forget that it was Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) outfits—the highest ranks of the country’s security agencies—that set up the Taliban, funnelled weapons into Afghanistan and grew rich on the narcotics trade. Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the ISI had worked alongside the CIA, funding the mullahs and mawlawis now condemned as the architects of “world terror.” Most Pakistanis now realised that the ISI—sanctioned by Washington rather than Pakistan’s own rulers—had turned into a well-armed and dangerous mafia, and while money was pouring into its smuggling activities, Pakistan’s people lacked education, security and a health service. No wonder they turned to Islam and the madrassa schools for food and teaching. Pakistan’s military was now more important than ever, an iron hand to maintain order within the state while its superpower ally bombed the ruins of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the United States—unable to bomb the Taliban into submission— cosied up to the murderers and rapists of the Northern Alliance. The Alliance’s bloodiest commander, Rashid Dostum, who first visited Washington in 1996, was now a good friend of the Bush administration. Here for example is how Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid met the man:

The first time I arrived at the fort to meet Dostum there were bloodstains and pieces of flesh in the muddy courtyard . . . the guards . . . told me that an hour earlier Dostum had punished a soldier for stealing. The man had been tied to the tracks of a Russian-made tank, which then drove around the courtyard crushing his body into mincemeat, as the garrison and Dostum watched.

Surely now the Americans would send in ground troops. First came the hopeless U.S. raid on Mullah Omar’s office in Kandahar. They didn’t find him. Then came the dispatch of U.S. Special Forces to the ruthless thugs of the Northern Alliance. If the Taliban had anyone to fear, it was the Alliance’s Shah Massoud. But he had been murdered by the two Arab suicide bombers on 9 September. Then Abdul Haq—a U.S. favourite who opposed the Taliban—was hanged while trying to arrange a regional coup in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. So what did our new “friends” in the Northern Alliance have in store for us?

The capture of Kabul, of course. They arrived to liberate the capital on 12 November 2001 after originally promising not to enter it. The Alliance was supposed to enter, at most, Mazar-e-Sharif and perhaps Herat, to demonstrate the weakness of the Taliban, to show the West that its war aims—the destruction of the Taliban and thus of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement—were going to be accomplished. Captured Taliban men were executed or beaten in front of television cameras. Was it not Colin Powell who had assured General Musharraf that the Alliance would be kept under control? In the end, it did not matter to the Americans. The pictures of jubilation, of a single Afghan woman unveiled among her still burqa-ed sisters, were enough. Kabul had been freed. Western democracy was at hand. The misogynist Taliban had been crushed.

We so idolised the Northern Alliance, were so infatuated with them, supported them so unquestioningly, pictured them on television so deferentially, that now we were immune to their history. Nor would you have thought, listening to the reports from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul, that the Northern Alliance was responsible for more than 80 per cent of the drug exports from the country in the aftermath of the Taliban’s prohibition of drug cultivation. Why, I wondered, did we always have this ambiguous, dangerous relationship with our allies? For decades, we accepted the received wisdom that the “B” Specials were a vital security arm of the Northern Ireland authorities against the IRA on the grounds that they “knew the territory”—just as we now relied upon the Northern Alliance because it “knew the land.” The Israelis relied upon their Phalangist militia thugs in Lebanon because the Christian Maronites hated the Palestinians. The Nazis approved of their Croatian Ustashi murderers in 1941 because the Ustashi hated the Serbs.

There were brave men in the Alliance. Its murdered leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was an honourable man. But it remained a fact that from 1992 to 1996, the Northern Alliance was a symbol of massacre, systematic rape, and pillage. Which is why we—and I include the U.S. State Department—welcomed the Taliban when they originally arrived in Kabul. The Northern Alliance left the city in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind it. Now its members were our foot-soldiers. Better than bin Laden, to be sure. But what—in God’s name—were they going to do in our name? We were soon to discover.

As soon as the U.S. Air Force bombed Mazar-e-Sharif, our Afghan allies moved into the city and executed up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report was a footnote on the television satellite channels, a nib in journalistic parlance, perfectly normal, it seemed. The Afghans have a “tradition” of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed. Journalists watched the Mazar-e-Sharif prison “revolt” in the third week of November, in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. U.S. Special Forces—and, it quickly emerged, British troops—helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN told us that some prisoners were “executed” while trying to escape. It was an atrocity. British troops were now stained with war crimes. Within days, The Independent’s Justin Huggler had found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.

The Americans had even less excuse for this massacre. For U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that U.S. air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop “if the Northern Alliance requested it.” Leaving aside the revelation that the killers of the Alliance were now acting as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the killers of the Taliban, Rumsfeld’s incriminating remark meant that the United States was acting in full military cooperation with the militia. Most television journalists showed a minimal interest in these crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most had done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports.

One of the untold stories of this conflict was the huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to fight for the United States. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance—which didn’t have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier— could throw a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a firefight. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province were now riding around in brand-new four-wheel-drives with thousands of dollars to hand out to their gunmen. In December 2001, a new atrocity was revealed: up to 1,000 Taliban survivors of Kunduz who had been taken away towards Sherberghan prison by the Alliance in sealed containers; almost all were suffocated to death—or were later shot—in the desert. Human rights officials and reporters found the mass grave at Dasht-e Leili in which they were buried. U.S. Special Forces officers were said to have known of the killings—even been present—but declined to intervene. The UN called for an international inquiry. The Americans were silent.

What had gone wrong with our moral bearings since September 11th? I feared I knew the answer. After both the First and Second World Wars, we—the West— planted a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes. The very first Anglo–French–Russian attempt to formulate such laws was provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; the Entente said it would hold personally responsible “all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 1945, article 6 (c) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN Convention on Genocide referred to “crimes against humanity.” Each new post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the creation of ever more human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western values. Over the previous fifty years, we stood on our moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing—in nauseous detail—the secret courts and death squads and torture and extra-judicial executions carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too.

Yet suddenly, after September 11th, we abandoned everything we claimed to stand for. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants— blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for this slaughter—and then we allowed our ruthless militia allies to execute their prisoners. President George Bush signed into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a “terrorist murderer” in the eyes of America’s awesomely inefficient intelligence services. They were created so that Osama bin Laden and his men, should they be caught rather than killed, would have no public defence; just a pseudo-trial and a firing squad. What had happened was quite clear. When people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners or carpet-bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death-squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the “civilised” world. We were the masters of human rights, the liberals, the great and the good who could preach to the impoverished masses. But when ourpeople are murdered—when our glittering buildings are destroyed—then we shred every piece of human rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.

Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945 he preferred the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact that Hitler’s monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths—more than 17,000 times greater than the victims of September 11th—the Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg because Chief Justice Robert H. Jackson made a remarkable decision. “Undiscriminating [sic] executions or punishments,” he said, “without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would . . . not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride.” No one should have been surprised that George W. Bush—a small-time Texas governor–executioner— should fail to understand the morality of a statesman in the White House. What was so shocking was that the Blairs, Schröders, Chiracs and all the television boys should stay silent in the face of the Afghan executions and east European–style laws sanctified by September 11th.

Yet bin Laden was allowed to get away. He retreated with his hundreds of Arab fighters to the Tora Bora mountains outside Jalalabad. Under intense U.S. bombardment, he was reluctant to leave but—so his associates let me know later—he was eventually prevailed upon to flee into the Pakistani tribal territories, at one point physically forced by his own followers to retreat below the mountain chain after U.S.-paid Afghan tribal fighters were suborned for a higher price by bin Laden’s own men. Yet America was not quite the “paper tiger” he had boasted to me about on a neighbouring mountain just over four years earlier. Defeat for the Russians did not mean defeat for the Americans.

By 25 November, the Taliban controlled only a small area around the city of Kandahar. Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad—all the other great cities of Afghanistan—had been lost to them. And at the moment of their downfall, they decided to give me a visa. The Pakistani government had already ordered the Taliban’s embassy in Islamabad closed, but with the help of contacts, several bearded Taliban diplomats were finally prevailed upon to reopen the building for ten minutes, just long enough to stamp a pre-dated visa into my passport, the very last ever to be issued for Taliban Afghanistan. One of them wrote on the side of page 34 of my passport: “The Visa Valid Only for Kandahar.” I had no problem with that. Kandahar was the only place I wanted to go. Would I be able to watch its fall? Was bin Laden still in Afghanistan? Could there be, perhaps, a Last Interview?

At the Chaman border station, the Pakistani immigration officer offered me a cup of tea. “Perhaps your last?” he asked me with a sorrowful smile. A few metres past a chain that lay in the dust along the Durand Line, a young Taliban whose black turban glistened like birds’ feathers stamped “Entry” over my visa and, less encouragingly, “Exit.” I would have less than a day in Afghanistan. But the Taliban, I informed him with all the authority of a Roman emperor, had specifically arranged for my journey to Kandahar. The young man looked at me with pity. There was a dark conversation about me with two other men in the corner of the mud hut that was the Taliban immigration office in Spin Boldak. Far away across the Kandahar desert, I could hear that drumroll again, the thunder of B-52 bombs. Then a more senior man stepped forward. He had large, slightly amused eyes. “We will give you some men who will take you down the Kandahar road,” he said. “Then they will decide what to do when you get to Takhta-Pul.” It was the same old James Cameron predicament that I had experienced in the Iran–Iraq War. The doughty war correspondent wished to forge onwards towards the fray, to witness the last theocratic struggle for Afghanistan. The sane fifty-five-year-old Englishman with increasingly greying hair wanted to return to Beirut, to live on into happy old age and write books and sip cocoa by the fire.

I climbed into the front of a beat-up Japanese truck and we shot off down the dust-covered road towards Kandahar. The driver was a big Pashtun man, a plump face beneath his turban, who talked about his father and his grandfather and his family. A good sign, I thought. Family men don’t want to die. I was right. “You’ll never get through,” he told me. “The Northern Alliance have taken Takhta-Pul and the Americans are bombing the centre of the town.” Impossible, I said. Takhta-Pul is only 40 kilometres away, a few minutes’ ride from the Afghan border. But then a refugee with a cracked face and white hair matting the brow below his brown turban—he looked seventy but said he was only thirty-six—stumbled up to our truck. “The Americans just destroyed our homes,” he cried. “I saw my house disappear. It was a big plane that spat smoke and soaked the ground with fire.”

For a man who couldn’t read and had never left Kandahar province in all his long-short life, this was a chilling enough description of the Spectre, the American converted AC-130 “Bumble-Bee” aircraft that picks off militiamen and civilians with equal ferocity. And down the tree-lined roads poured hundreds more refugees—old women with dark faces and babies carried in the arms of young women in blue burqas and boys with tears on their faces—all telling the same stories. I climbed from the truck to watch this trail of misery. Mullah Abdul Rahman slumped down beside me, passed his hand over the sweat on his face, and told me how his brother, a fighter in the same town, had just escaped. “There was a plane that shot rockets out of its side,” he said, shaking his head. “It almost killed my brother today. It hit many people.”

Suddenly, being the last reporter in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan didn’t seem quite as romantic as it sounded. So this is what it was like to be on the losing side in the American–Afghan bloodbath. Everywhere was the same story of desperation and terror. “You’ll never get to Kandahar, they’ve cut the road,” another Taliban gunman shouted at me. An American F-18 soared through the imperial blue heaven above us as a middle-aged man approached with angry eyes. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he screamed. “Sheikh Osama is an excuse to do this to the Islamic people.” I pleaded with yet another Taliban fighter—a thirty-five-year-old father of five called Jamaldan—to honour his government’s promise to get me to Kandahar. He looked at me with irritation. “How can I get you there,” he asked, “when we can hardly protect ourselves?”

The implications were astonishing. The road from the Iranian border town of Zabol to Kandahar had been cut by Afghan gunmen and U.S. Special Forces. The Americans were bombing the civilian traffic—and the Taliban—on the road to Spin Boldak, and the Northern Alliance were firing across the highway. Takhta-Pul was under fire from American gunships and being invested by the Alliance. Kandahar was surrounded. No wonder I came across the local Taliban commander, the thoughtful and intelligent Mullah Haqqani, racing for the Pakistani border to Quetta—for “medical reasons.”

Out of a dust-storm came a woman cowled in a grey shawl. “I lost my daughter two days ago,” she said. “The Americans bombed our home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her.” Amid the chaos and shouting, I did what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen. Name of the daughter? “Muzlifa.” Age? “She was two.” I turn away. “Then there was my other daughter.” She nods when I ask if this girl died too. “At the same moment. Her name was Farigha. She was three.” I turn away. “There wasn’t much left of my son.” I turn back to her. Notebook out again, for the third time. “When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and all I could see were bones. His name was Sheriff. He was a year and a half old.”

They came out of a blizzard of sand, these people, each with their story of blood. Shukria Gul told her story more calmly. Beneath her burqa, she sounded like a teenager. “My husband, Mazjid, was a labourer. We have two children, our daughter, Rahima, and our son, Talib. Five days ago, the Americans hit an ammunition dump in Kandahar and the bullets came through our house. My husband was killed by them in the bedroom. He was twenty-five.”

U.S. Marines landed at Kandahar’s sporting club, the airport at which Saudi princes once arrived to hunt animals with the Taliban. The end was coming. At the border, you could see it already. About Chaman, they say nothing good. The muck moved across the Afghan plain in whirlwinds, great grey tunnels of the stuff, the sand and grit settling as usual into our ears and teeth and noses and behind our lips. Beyond, black mountains rose from the ocean of sand, and from way out across the Afghan moonscape, below the bomber contrails, came those changes in air pressure to remind us that the War for Civilisation was only a few miles away. The river of Afghan men, women and children that flooded through Chaman’s border wire was a CinemaScope obscenity. First, they needed to state their reasons for entering Pakistan to a soldier sitting atop a concrete bunker. Then they had to produce documents at the border gate. Then they had to face the press.

The television cameras moved like beetles through the mob of refugees, selecting a man who dares to speak, who saw a body hanging in the main square of Kandahar, a man who—in a second—becomes the centre of an ever-growing amoeba of wires and lenses and notebooks and video-cassettes. The man wears an old brown shawl around his shoulders and a sparkling Pashtun hat. Other young men appear from the gate amid a crowd of boys. There were two bodies twisting in the breeze in Kandahar, not just one, they say. A Pakistan government official with a stick lashes out at the kids with a kind of swagger. Yet a third man is cornered by television crews from Japan, France 2 and Catalan television. He doesn’t speak Japanese or French or Catalan—indeed, the Catalan reporter turns out to be a Basque—but their Pakistani translator bellows questions about the body in the Kandahar square. “He was a young man,” the Afghan replies warily. “He was tortured and killed before they hung him up. He was a friend of Mullah Khaksar.” The story gets clearer. Mullah Khaksar was the Taliban interior minister in Kabul before he changed sides. His friend—the hanged man—was allegedly found with a GPS device, enough to condemn him as an American spy.

His fate, of course, is important to us. It is further proof of the ruthlessness of the Taliban, our enemy in the War for Civilisation, of their cruelty and their despair. A truck-driver who has lost two family members in American bombing attracts fewer cameras. Not a single photographer bothers with an old Afghan man I find resting in the broken metal chair of the immigration officer. He is wearing an odd pair of shoes, the toes of the right shoe pointing to the sky. The reason is simple: only a wooden stump emerges from his right trouser leg. It somehow adheres to the shoe but upends it the moment the weight of his body is applied. The left shoe is flat on the ground. Above it stands a bright pink plastic leg with a wooden foot which fits the shoe, a hairless, feminine prosthesis.

I try to talk to the sweating, bearded, legless man but he will not respond. He is gritting his teeth with pain but he could talk if he chose. How did he lose his legs? His eyes move towards the dustbowl of Chaman with its packed, filthy, Dickensian streets and he stands up, swaying, and begins to stump off down the road between lines of barbed wire. The cameramen ignore him. They know he is the victim of another war of landmines—there are millions in Afghanistan—laid by the Russians who are our new allies in the War for Civilisation. He knows that too. He will not talk to me and, after a few moments, I realise he is right not to talk.

The crowds still gather on the other side of the wire. We stand there, three at a time, to take pictures, focusing on the tractor-load of children, the elderly man lying on sacks on a truck, the Afghan girl, perhaps five years old, who is begging from a soldier. But we cannot absorb the sheer mass of people. They came like this when the Russians invaded in 1979, but somehow they have become too familiar—banalisés, as my colleagues from France 2 would say—in history. Vietnam 1972, Palestine 1948, Poland and Germany 1945, France 1940. The poor and the dispossessed and the terrified are background material, wallpaper to our drama.

An old couple arrive in wheelbarrows, the man hunched in one, the woman— head lolling out of the bucket—in the one behind, each pushed by two grinning, laughing youths who shout to the journalists and point cruelly to their charges. Had the couple been able to walk, we would have ignored them. But an elderly man and woman in wheelbarrows is too good a picture to miss. Not so the white-haired man who stared at me with his left eye until I was forced to look at his right eye, a nightmare socket, a tissue of skin criss-crossed with tiny red scars. No photos of this Cyclops in rags.

Down the road at Takhta-Pul, they are talking about another massacre—of 160 Taliban prisoners by tribal rulers—and from all over the countryside come stories of villages crushed by American bombs; an entire hamlet destroyed by B-52s at Kili Sarnad, fifty dead near Tora Bora, eight civilians killed in cars bombed by USAF jets on the road to Kandahar, another forty-six in Lashkargah, twelve more in Bibi Mahru. We are not supposed to know the details of these deaths. “Investigation?” U.S. defence secretary Rumsfeld roared at a press conference at the beginning of October 2001, claiming he knew nothing of Amnesty International’s call for an inquiry into the Mazar prison massacre. “I can think of a dozen things there that people could inquire into.”

So could we. There’s the hanged man in Kandahar, a local poet, we later learned. Then there’s the sweating man with no legs. And the begging five-year-old. And the old couple in the wheelbarrows and the awful Cyclops with the purulent right eye and the dead of Takhta-Pul and Kili Sarnad and Lashkargah and Bibi Mahru and the whole swelling mass of humanity standing in the squalor of Chaman. Not to mention the slaughter at Mazar. And the War for Civilisation.

I am invited to meet a senior Taliban official who has just fled to his family home across the Pakistani border, in the wind-whipped village of Pishin. He sits on the floor of a large, cold, wooden-ceilinged room, back against the wall, an embroidered grey shawl wound over his black turban, large eyes wearily surveying me. “An adviser to the Taliban Elders of Kandahar” is how he asks to be described. He asks to be called “Mullah Abdullah”—which is his real first name—although the thirty-two-year-old graduate of Sheikh Hassanjan’s madrassa in Kohat held a different identity and a far more important post in the Taliban hierarchy. The great mud-walled hujra family home below the mountains is blasted by a vicious little wind that has given the mullah a bout of flu. Defeat is hard.

So are words in this cold climate. “The people think we are defeated because we have lost many of our men,” Mullah Abdullah concedes. “But our men lost their lives in martyrdom and therefore they were successful. So we don’t think we have been defeated . . . When the Americans go home, we’ll have the land back. The Americans didn’t come here for Osama bin Laden—that’s not their main reason. They are here because they don’t want a country run under an Islamic system of law. They want a government that will do what they want.” It is the authentic voice of Taliban Kandahar. The mullah, it emerges, has just arrived from the Taliban’s besieged little caliphate, trekking six hours into the desert to avoid the American air raids round Takhta-Pul, resting here before returning to Kandahar, a man in denial or a man who has already decided to go into the mountains. He seems almost uninterested in the strategy of war. He has held a post in the Taliban defence ministry in Kabul—Arabs, he says, were employed to maintain his vehicles—but every military question brings a theological reply. “Even now the Americans have not succeeded in finding Sheikh Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda. They haven’t achieved this mission of theirs. For us, Osama is a Muslim and a Muslim from another country is a brother. As for us, we will fight on in the mountains as guerrillas if we lose Kandahar—and if we achieve martyrdom, this is victory.”

I am growing tired of all this but I am beginning to understand. Victory comes with success and victory comes with defeat. Two years later there would be a Bush version of this same nonsensical ideology as he tried to explain why Iraq was descending into chaos: the better things were, the worse the violence would become—because life was improving. “The Afghans,” Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Burnes pompously observed in 1841, “are not deficient in the imaginative faculties, and they may be quoted as a proof that invention precedes judgement.” Yet for Mullah Abdullah, history and politics and defeat appear part of a religious text. “A hadith of the Holy Prophet says that it is the right of Muslims to perform jihad. It was not necessary for us to rule the whole of Afghanistan when the Taliban started its existence in a tiny village. There were only a few Talibans who began all this. At the start, we stated that this was enough. We never cared that we succeeded in gaining 95 per cent of the land of Afghanistan. So we don’t care about the land we’ve lost. The Taliban doesn’t want the land as such—our main purpose is to convey Islam to the people. If our people return and take back this lost land, it’s a success. If we are killed trying to do so, we have received martyrdom and this will be a great success for us too.”

Only occasionally does the worm of doubt creep into the mullah’s conversation. “Only time can tell if we will hold Kandahar or not—we are doing our best.” It might be an editorial from a Taliban newspaper—if, that is, they hadn’t banned newspapers. “If we are thrown out of Kandahar, we will go to the mountains and start the guerrilla war as we did with the Russians.” I try to argue that the Americans are not the Russians, that this is not a simple repeat performance, that the Taliban have for the most part been fighting other Afghans, that the Americans have only attacked them from the air. It is no use. He will go to the mountains. The Taliban will ambush the Americans. They will fight on. And they did.

The Americans are entering Kandahar. I will make just one last effort to reach the city. It is 8 December. If I can drive to Chaman, I have the opportunity to pick up a lift with a CNN crew all the way to Mullah Omar’s caliphate. All I have to do is hook up with Justin Huggler—fresh from covering the Mazar massacre—and travel in a jeep with our Pashtun driver, Amanullah, and our translator, Fayyez Ahmed, from Quetta to Chaman. It must have been around 4:30 p.m. that we reached Kila Abdulla, about halfway through our journey, when our jeep stopped in the middle of a narrow, crowded street. A film of white steam was rising from the bonnet, a constant shriek of car horns and buses and trucks and rickshaws protesting the roadblock we had created. All four of us got out of the car and pushed it to the side of the road. I muttered something to Justin about this being “a bad place to break down.”

Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war had created in Pakistan. Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn later, were outraged by what they had seen on television of the Mazar massacres, of prisoners killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told Amanullah that they had seen the videotape of two CIA officers threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar. Some of the Afghans had been in the little village for years. Others had arrived—desperate and angry and mourning their newly slaughtered loved ones—over the past two weeks. Sure it was a bad place to break down, a bad time too, just before the Iftar, the end of the daily fast of Ramadan. These people were uneducated—I doubt if many could read—but you don’t have to have schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52’s bombs.

Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered around our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands and we saidSalaam aleikum many times. Peace be upon you. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank. Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me on the back.

How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all Salaam aleikum a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. At one point, I later discovered, a screaming teenager had turned to Amanullah and asked, quite seriously: “Is that Mr. Bush?” The West was being brought low. Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus-driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyez, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. But as I put my foot on the step, three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back onto the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on!” he shouted. I did.

That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me. There were two more blows, one on the back of my shoulder, a powerful fist that sent me crashing against the side of the bus while clutching Justin’s hand. The passengers were looking out at me and then at Justin. But they did not move. No one wanted to help. I cried out “Help me, Justin!” and Justin, who was doing more than any human could do by clinging to my ever-loosening grip, asked me—over the screams of the crowd—what I wanted him to do. Then I realised I could only just hear him. They were shouting at me and about me. Did I catch the word kaffir—infidel? That’s when I was dragged away from Justin’s grasp.

There were two more cracks on my head, one on each side, and for some odd reason part of my memory—some back street in my brain—registered a moment at school, at my primary school called the Cedars in Maidstone more than fifty years before, when a tall boy building sandcastles in the playground hit me on the head. I had a memory of the blow smelling, as if it had affected my nose. The next shock came from a man I saw carrying a big stone in his right hand. He brought it down on my forehead with tremendous force and something hot and liquid splashed down my face and lips and chin. I was kicked. On the back, on my shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager grabbed my bag yet again and I was left clinging to the strap, looking up and realising there must have been sixty men in front of me, howling at me; they had, I now noticed, big, wolfish smiles. Oddly, it wasn’t fear I felt but a kind of wonderment. So this is how it happens. I knew that I had to respond. Or, so I reasoned in my stunned state, I had to die.

In a place of peace and clarity, I might have remembered that baleful morning in the Afghan city of Ghazni more than two decades earlier when Gavin Hewitt and I and his crew had been urged to leave before the crowd attacked us with stones. I could have recalled all those tales of Afghan cruelty from British officers of the Raj, even in Bill Fisk’s gift from his mother, Tom Graham, V.C. Yet the only thing that shocked me was my own physical sense of collapse, my growing awareness of the liquid beginning to cover me. I don’t think I’d ever seen so much blood before. For a second, I caught a glimpse of something ghastly, a nightmare face— my own—reflected in the window of the bus, streaked in blood, my hands drenched in the stuff like Lady Macbeth, slopping over the collar of my shirt and down my pullover until my back was wet and my bag dripping with crimson and vague splashes suddenly appearing on my trousers. I was swamped in it. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? That was the quotation as I remembered it, right there, at that moment. The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists. Pebbles and small stones bounced off my head and shoulders. How long, I remember thinking, could this go on? How long does it last?

My head was struck by stones on both sides at the same time—not thrown stones but stones in the palms of stout men who were using them to try and break my skull. Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the leather container from the cord. And here I have to thank Lebanon. For twenty-five years, I had covered Lebanon’s wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive. Take a decision—any decision—but don’t do nothing. So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand, and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn’t see very much—my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze—but I saw the man cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For a second, the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my bag under my arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit more, and ran.

I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country—among others—was killing, along with the Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.

Then something quite remarkable happened. A man walked up to me, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn’t see him too well for all the blood that was running into my eyes again, but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men behind me and a few stones skittered along the road, but they were not aimed at me—presumably to avoid hitting the stranger. He was like an Old Testament figure or some Bible story, the Good Samaritan, a Muslim man—perhaps a mullah in the village—who was trying to save my life. He pushed me into the back of a police truck. But the policemen didn’t move. They were terrifed. “Help me,” I kept shouting through the tiny window at the back of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down the glass. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.

And there, beside the road, was a Red Cross–Red Crescent convoy. The crowd were still behind us, but two of the medical attendants pulled me behind one of their vehicles, poured water over my hands and face and began pushing bandages onto my head and face and the back of my head. “Lie down and we’ll cover you with a blanket so they can’t see you,” one of them said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis, and their names should be recorded because they were good men: Mohamed Abdul Halim and Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor, groaning, aware that I might live.

Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had been protected by a massive soldier from the Baluchistan Levies—a true ghost of the British empire who, with a single rifle, kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now sitting. I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying to myself, as if my passport and credit cards were a kind of Holy Grail. But they had snatched my final pair of spare glasses—I was blind without all three—and my mobile telephone was missing and so was my leather-covered contacts book, containing twenty-five years of telephone numbers throughout the Middle East.¹⁸⁵ God dammit, I said, and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist—the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man’s jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.

So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when thousands of innocent civilians were dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the War for Civilisation was burning and maiming the people of Kandahar and other cities because “good” must triumph over “evil”? I had spent more than a quarter of a century reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it? There were the Red Crescent men, and Fayyez, who came panting back to the car incandescent at our treatment, and Amanullah, who invited us to his own home for medical treatment. And there was the Muslim saint who had taken me by the arm. And—I realised—there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me, who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us—of us who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the War for Civilisation just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them “collateral damage.”

So I thought I should write about what happened to Justin and me in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.” The Mail on Sunday won the prize for just such a distortion. Fisk, it reported—apparently aged sixty-three, not fifty-five—was, yes, “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.” And I was supposed to have said—but didn’t—that “I’m going to bear the scars for the rest of my life.” All reference to my repeated assertion that the Afghans were justified in their anger—that I didn’t blame them for what they had done—was omitted. The Afghans had become, like the Palestinians, generically violent. And of course, that was the point. The people who bore the scars were the Afghans, the scars being inflicted by us—by our B-52s—not by them. And I wrote in The Independent that “if I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

Among a mass of letters that arrived from readers of my paper, most of them expressing their sympathy, came a few Christmas cards, all but one of them unsigned, expressing the writers’ disappointment that the Afghans hadn’t “finished the job.” The Wall Street Journal published an article that said more or less the same thing under the subhead “A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due.” In it, columnist Mark Steyn wrote of my reaction that “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter.” The “Fisk doctrine,” he went on, “taken to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not only the perpetrators of September 11 but also Taliban supporters who attacked several of Mr. Fisk’s fellow journalists in Afghanistan all of whom, alas, died before being able to file a final column explaining why their murderers are blameless.”¹⁸⁶

In Quetta, two Pakistani doctors washed and bandaged my face but missed a gash on my head, so that I woke in the night stuck to my pillow with blood and had to stand in the shower and drench myself with water to detach the material from the wound. Back in Islamabad, I was befriended—ironically, in view of Steyn’s forthcoming abuse—by the Journal’s new South-West Asia correspondent, Daniel Pearl, and his wife, Marianne. They made me bottomless cups of coffee, supplied me the contents of their own contacts books, assured me that I looked as full of energy as ever. I wasn’t so sure. I asked Daniel if he was travelling to Afghanistan. “No,” he said. “My wife is pregnant and we’re not going to take that kind of risk.”

Within two months, Daniel Pearl would be dead, beheaded by his Muslim captors after being kidnapped on assignment in Karachi, forced to speak of his Jewish family in the videotape of his vile execution. His murder was as horrifying as it was gruesome.¹⁸⁷ It raised again not just the cruelty of al-Qaeda and its satellites but the degree to which we as journalists had lost our immunity. In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then in Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshawar. “Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?” a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it go wrong?

I have always thought the rot started in Vietnam. For decades, reporters have identified themselves with armies. In the Crimean War, William Howard Russell of The Times wore his own self-designed uniform. In both twentieth-century world wars, journalists worked in uniform. Dropping behind enemy lines with U.S. commandos did not spare an AP reporter from a Nazi firing squad. But these were countries in open conflict, reporters whose nations had officially declared war. It was in Vietnam that journalists started wearing combat fatigues and carrying weapons—and sometimes shooting those weapons at America’s enemies—even though their countries were not officially at war and when they could have carried out their duties without wearing a soldier’s clothes. In Vietnam, reporters were murdered because they were reporters.

This tendency of journalists to be part of the story, to play their own theatrical role, took hold only slowly. When the Palestinians evacuated Beirut in 1982, I noticed that several French reporters wore Palestinian headscarves. Israeli reporters turned up in southern Lebanon carrying pistols. In the 1991 Gulf War, as we have seen, many correspondents dressed up in army costumes—complete with helmets—as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne. In Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001, something similar happened. Reporters in Peshawar could be seen wearing soft Pashtun hats. Geraldo Rivera of Fox News claimed on television that while in Jalalabad he was carrying a gun. He fully intended to use it, he said on another occasion, to kill Osama bin Laden. “I’m feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge,” he vouchsafed to the world. “And this cartharsis I’ve gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living.” It was the last straw. The reporter had become combatant.

Of course, I had held a gun in a Soviet convoy to Kabul in 1980.¹⁸⁸ But I had little choice. And I avoided rhetoric of the kind that Rivera sought to employ, even the unfortunate and sinister phrases used by my CNN colleagues. Like several of my colleagues, I did not like hearing CNN’s Walter Rodgers quoting a Marine major on 2 December 2001 that U.S. troops and “opposition groups” might be squeezing Kandahar “like a snake.” The moment that cities or people become snakes or vermin, they can be crushed, liquidated, eliminated like animals. And every journalist’s integrity was placed at risk by the obnoxious remark of CNN boss Walter Isaacson, who instructed staff during the Afghan bombardment that “it seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” because such reporting ran the risk of helping the Taliban. In the next stage of the “war on terror”—the invasion of Iraq—many more journalists would pay with their lives because their role as correspondents simply no longer guaranteed them protection.¹⁸⁹

Yet there was another way in which our good faith was damaged, indeed fatally undermined: the unwillingness of major television channels to relay the reality of the Middle East and to support their reporters when confronted by powerful lobby groups. Back in 1993, I had worked on a three-part television series for Britain’s Channel 4 and America’s Discovery Channel called From Beirut to Bosnia which attempted, in the words of our first episode, to show “how Muslims were coming to hate the West.” We were filming exactly eight years before the attacks of 11 September 2001, and, rewatching the series today—it was made on real film, not videotape, and cost more than a million dollars—I am ever more astonished at what it told viewers. For it turns out to have been a ghastly, unintended but all too accurate warning of September 11th. In one segment, I walk into a burned-out mosque in Bosnia and ask “what the Muslim world has in store for us,” adding that I should perhaps end each of my reports from the Middle East with the words “Watch out!” There are other similar premonitions of terrors to come, which were included in our coverage of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. We were trying to answer the question “why?”—before it needed to be asked.

It was not an easy series to make. We filmed in Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Egypt, Bosnia and Croatia, questioning Hizballah guerrillas about their war against Israeli occupation troops, and filming women in Lebanese hospitals who were covered in burns from Israeli phosphorus shells. During curfews in Gaza we were repeatedly ordered off the streets by Israeli soldiers—several of whom put their hands over our camera lens to stop us working. We filmed an Israeli officer who told us that a pregnant Palestinian woman had been allowed to break the curfew to go to hospital—then found the woman still trapped in her home. Outside the walls of Jerusalem, we talked to a Jewish settler about why an elderly Palestinian was being evicted from his land—because Jews would be living there and because, in the settler’s words, “he’s an Arab. He’s not Jewish.” In Israel we traced the home of a Palestinian refugee now living in Beirut, talked to the elderly Israeli who moved into the house after 1948—and took our cameras to the Polish town from which he fled and from which his parents and brother were taken by the Nazis to be murdered in the Jewish Holocaust. In Egypt we talked to armed opponents of Mubarak’s regime and in Sarajevo to the Bosnian soldiers defending the city, and to the Muslim imam who believed his people were being persecuted “solely because we are Muslims.”

Michael Dutfield, the director, and I knew this would be easy for a British audience to watch. Europeans are used to free if sometimes bitter debates on the Middle East, where the old canard of “anti-Semitism” flung at anyone who dares to criticise Israel has largely lost its power. There are, as I always say, plenty of real anti-Semites in the world whom we must fight without inventing more in order to smother all serious discourse on Israel and the Arabs. But in the United States we knew things would be different. Our film would be a challenge not for American audiences—who were perfectly mature enough to understand our film if given the chance to watch it—but for the U.S. lobby groups which regularly set out to prevent the showing of any documentary that presents Americans with an alternative to the pro-Israeli “news” regularly served up on U.S. networks. Initial reports in the American media were faintly critical and often inaccurate.¹⁹⁰

Then, only days after Discovery showed the three films coast-to-coast, the letter-writing campaign began. Discovery first reported that some of its advertisers were being pestered with telephone calls from supposedly outraged viewers. American Express, one of the channel’s sponsors, received credit cards back from customers; the cards had been cut in half. An outfit calling itself “Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting” (Primer) wrote to Discovery with a sinister warning. Robert Fisk had “impeccable English diction,” wrote Joseph I. Ungar, the group’s vice president, in June 1994. Fisk projected “the essence of refinement and respectability . . . He could easily play the stage role of Henry Higgins. But he could be a Higgins with fangs.” In journalism, you have to laugh at this sort of nonsense. But the campaign against Beirut to Bosnia was not funny at all. The president of the same lobby group, Sidney Laibson, wrote a letter to John Hendriks, chairman of Discovery, the same month. “By airing From Beirut to Bosnia,” he wrote, “the Discovery Channel has provided the purveyors of insidious propaganda an opportunity to spread their venom into the living-rooms of America.”

Ungar’s letter claimed that for us to say that Israel “confiscates,” “occupies” and “builds huge Jewish settlements on Arab land”—all facts acknowledged by Israeli human rights groups, Israeli journalists and foreign correspondents as well as by the U.S. government for more than twenty years—was “twisted” history. A reference in my commentary to the “Christian gunmen” that the Israelis sent into the Sabra and Chatila camps—a course of action described in Israel’s own Kahan commission of inquiry—was condemned by Ungar as “an egregious falsehood.” Alex Safian of the “Camera Media Resource Center” wrote to Clark Bunting, senior vice president of Discovery, to claim that we had edited an interview with the Jewish settler Mickey Molad in such a way as to cut out a remark by him that Jews originally owned most of the land for the future settlement. We diligently searched back through all the rough-cuts—an hour of them—of the Molad interview only to find that he made no such comment in any of them. Safian’s claims, Dutfield wrote back, were “absurd and demonstrably wrong.” There were further meretricious statements: that the Palestinian woman refused permission to go to hospital was a fraud, that she was not even pregnant. She gave birth to her child three months after we filmed her.

Then an Independent reader informed me that “American friends” had told her a scheduled re-airing of our series had been cancelled by Discovery because of the complaints. Dutfield wrote to the channel asking for an explanation. Bunting sent back the most preposterous denial I have ever heard from a television executive. “. . . given the reaction to the series upon its initial airing,” he wrote, “we never scheduled a subsequent airing, so there is not really an issue as to any re-airing being cancelled.” When I read those gutless words, I was ashamed to be a foreign correspondent.

Here we were, trying to explain a grim reality of our age to an audience that deserved to hear another side to the Middle East conflict, that needed to hear the voices of those deeply aggrieved, increasingly angry people upon whom great injustice was being visited. Yet those who claimed to speak for truth—and for Israel—had effectively censored us off the air, with the cringing assistance of a major television channel. Here, long in advance of the international crimes against humanity of 2001, were answers to the “whys” that we would be told not to ask after the attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. In advance, we were not supposed to explain the explosion to come—even if this warning might have helped us to prevent it. Afterwards, we would be ordered to remain silent. This, for me, remains one of the most frightening and distressing elements to the “war on terror”: the suppression of a truth without which no free judgement could be made, before or after the event.

Is there, I ask myself, a key to all this, some incident, some lone truth that will illuminate all that we have done to the Middle East, the anger we have created, the terror we have inflicted upon those we now regard as our enemies? Is there some way in which to communicate this without reiterating the demands of the self-righteous, some way in which the death of innocence can be portrayed outside the framework of hatred? Osama bin Laden does not have to be the voice of those who have suffered. He has no monopoly over their grief and pain. He was never appointed their representative on earth. So I am drawn to the story of a young woman who died needlessly and tragically, who could never have countenanced the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, but whose terrible end was ignored by the nation that killed her and whose reporters showed no interest in her fate.

THE AMERICANS KILLED RAAFAT AL-GHOSSAIN just after two o’clock on the morning of 15 April 1986. In the days that followed her death, U.S. officials claimed that Libyan anti-aircraft fire might have hit her home not far from the French embassy in the suburbs of Tripoli. But three weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that three bombs dropped by an F-111 aircraft in the U.S. attack on Colonel Ghadafi had “impacted in the vicinity of the French embassy” and had caused—to use the usual callous euphemism—“collateral damage.” Raafat was eighteen years old, a graduate of an English school on holiday from London, a promising and beautiful artist whose individual death went unrecorded in the country that killed her nineteen years ago.

She lives on only in the seventh-floor Beirut apartment of her parents and her younger sister where a half-hour videotape of Raafat’s 1985 graduation day at Marymount International college at Kingston-on-Thames brings her briefly back to this world. “Raafat Bassam Fawzi al-Ghossain from Palestine,” the English principal announces, and a tall, striking young woman in a white ball gown can be seen walking self-consciously to receive her graduation certificate to the tinkling of Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory” on a school piano. She listens attentively to a graduation speech from an American teacher who tells the girls that “with the gift of youth, nothing is too daunting.” On the left side of the stage on which she sits is the Stars and Stripes, on the right the Union flag of Britain.

In the college gardens, Raafat stands next to her American-educated Palestinian father Bassam. “Here we are,” he says when he spots the video camera, and Raafat dutifully kisses her father on the cheek. Her mother watches proudly through sunglasses while a six-year-old girl—Raafat’s younger sister, Kinda— primps in front of the camera. As Raafat leaves the college hall with its American and British flags, the same high-pitched piano plays Thomas Arne’s “Trumpet Voluntary.” On this English summer afternoon, Raafat al-Ghossain has less than a year to live. The men who will kill her are American, flying—with special permission of Margaret Thatcher—from RAF Lakenheath, scarcely 75 miles from Marymount International College in Kingston.

Palestine, Britain, Libya, America. It is as if the Western conflict in the Middle East hovered over Raafat al-Ghossain all her short life. Bassam always wanted her to have an English education—Kinda was born in London and holds a British passport—and still feels that Britain represents something intrinsically good in the world. His father, Fawzi, was a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, a lawyer in the British Mandate government in Jerusalem, an adviser to Sir Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner to Palestine. A slightly blurred photograph shows Fawzi al-Ghossain and Samuel, who was Jewish, walking through a tree-lined avenue in Jerusalem together, deep in conversation. Even after the family was forced to flee Palestine in 1946 to settle for several years in Cairo, the al-Ghossains never lost their faith in the West. Bassam was given a scholarship to study in America by a Quaker couple who noticed his fascination with model aircraft. He graduated in chemical engineering from the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia and started work as a petroleum engineer for the national oil company in British-administered Kuwait in 1957. “My family always admired the British,” Bassam says. Rarely was a family to be so cruelly betrayed by the society and culture in which they had put their trust.

Bassam met his future wife, Saniya, half-Lebanese, half-Turkish—a daughter of the Beirut city treasurer—in 1963, but they left Kuwait during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War and moved to Algiers, where Bassam took a job in the country’s oil production company. A French doctor delivered Raafat, weighing 3.8 kilos, at an Algiers hospital; when she was only five months old the family moved to Libya, where Bassam took a job with ESSO, and later with American Occidental. Colonel Ghadafi’s revolution was only fifteen months away.

“We would take Raafat out to picnics with us, visiting the [Roman] cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha,” Bassam remembers. “There were parties every week and swimming. When Raafat was four, we enrolled her at the Lycée Français in Tripoli. She was a very pretty little girl. She loved doll’s houses, she liked putting all the members of a family in one house. Always she wanted our family to live together . . .” Raafat—“Fafo” was her nickname in the family—spoke French fluently but transferred to the American school in Tripoli when she was twelve. “She was there for two years but I thought the educational standards were not good enough. So we sent her to Marymount in Kingston-on-Thames.” And Bassam pulls from his file a thick bunch of school reports.

Raafat’s sister Kinda had been born three years earlier, on 1 January 1979. At fifteen, Raafat now found herself alone at boarding school, with neither her parents nor her baby sister to comfort her. Racked by home-sickness, and schoolwork which she initially found too advanced, she begged to return to Libya, to the family villa not far from the sea, to the house in which all the al-Ghossains could live together. “A pleasant character,” a philosophy teacher noted coldly, “but quite ill-disciplined—will not work.” At maths, there were complaints of Raafat “misusing her ability” while a singing teacher reported that Raafat “would be an excellent choral member if she were not so chatty and giggly.” But in art, she excelled. Mr. McFarland, her art teacher, wrote to her parents in 1984 that “Raafat has worked really well this quarter & I am very pleased with her progress.”

The anguish that lay behind Raafat’s unhappiness at school comes through painfully in a letter she wrote to herself in English on lined notepaper on 17 November 1981, addressed to “God” and headed with three words in capital letters: “PLEASE—PLEASE—PLEASE”:

Dear God, I love you very much. God, I have a few things I would like to ask you about and asking [sic] if you could help me. First, of course, is that you give us a long life for about 200 years (you know what I mean), I and my whole FAMILY and friends . . . Second, keep your blessings on us and help us through life . . . Third, please let my parents leave [Libya] on Friday 27th . . . or even Tuesday or Wednesday but please after this weekend . . . Fifth, please please a thousand times let it be my last year at Marymount or even if it is possible—half year . . . Don’t separate our small family [in] Libya. Let the conditions in Libya push them to leave on [ sic] January and make ME leave Marymount although it is a nice school but I get homesick too much. Let me go to a day-student school this year. PLEASE. Or make my parents come here and live . . .

Raafat’s reference to “conditions” in Libya was not without reason. A self-declared enemy of Israel and America, Libya was already being accused of “international terrorism” by the United States and Britain. The British condemned Colonel Ghadafi’s support for the IRA—he sent at least one shipload of weapons to Ireland—and in 1984 a British policewoman was shot dead by a Libyan “diplomat” outside the country’s London embassy. Ghadafi had sent hit men to eliminate his domestic opponents abroad. The West was already treating Libya as a pariah state, although Raafat al-Ghossain—conscious of her father’s birthplace and of her grandfather Fawzi’s stories of life in Jerusalem—thought of a country that no longer existed, nearly 1,300 miles to the east of Tripoli.

“Return our holy land PALESTINE, soon and let my whole family enjoy it and live there for a long time—if it is possible, next year,” Raafat wrote in her letter to “God.” In 1982, enraged by the Sabra and Chatila massacre, she joined a peaceful protest march on the streets of London. A poorly focused photograph of Raafat shows her in a raincoat in Knightsbridge, a green, red, black and white Palestinian flag curling above her head. “She went on several demonstrations,” Bassam recalls. “They were all peaceful and she would come back from all of them drenched in rain.” In her last note in the Marymount school magazine in 1985, Raafat was to write that “I would like to say a final sentence and that is May Peace and Hope come from Palestine, my homeland.”

Bassam admits that Raafat found life very difficult. “She did not want to be away from us. She cried a lot. But she had no chance of education in Libya. In London, she had stomach upsets. It was psychological. She suffered a lot from hay fever.” But Raafat was to overcome her homesickness after four long years, winning a gold medal for her painting and for drama. The 1985 video of her graduation shows her pride in triumphing over loneliness, aware that she was to follow a career in painting at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Her parents came to London in December of the same year, the last Christmas of Raafat’s life. “We went that night to San Lorenzo’s in Beauchamp Place but Kinda was too young to go out so Raafat asked to stay home with her sister,” their mother, Saniya, remembers. “It was as if that Christmas was very special to her.” Just over a month later, on 8 February 1986, Raafat wrote in her diary: “My life is changing. I’m slowly, at last, finding myself. It feels great to at last meet my real self. Freedom!!”

Bassam al-Ghossain played no part in politics but his collection of newspaper clippings shows the growing crisis over Libya. Ghadafi was accused of organising the bombing of a TWA passenger jet over Greece. President Reagan’s administration announced that it had unequivocal proof that the Libyan embassy had arranged the bombing of a Berlin discothèque on 5 April 1986, in which an American serviceman and a Turkish woman were killed. The Berlin police were later to dispute the nature of this evidence—some Western journalists suggested Syria rather than Libya might have been behind the bombing—but by then Reagan was in the Gulf, calling Ghadafi “the Mad Dog of the Middle East” and promising unspecified retaliation.

“We thought about what all this meant, that there might be an attack, but we thought the Americans would only hit military targets,” Bassam says now. “It just didn’t occur to us that they would hit civilians. The patio of our home was wall-to-wall with the French embassy.” Raafat was due home for the Easter holiday from her new art college and wrote an excited postcard, full of humour and maturity and affection—it was illustrated with a French painting of a black ladies’ hat—from London. It was to be her last written message to her parents:

Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

I’m sending this card ’cause it has a touch of class just like you! I miss you so much! I can’t wait, soon I’m going to be with you! How is my baby sister, send her all my love and kisses. How are my grandparents, send them also all my love and tell them that I miss them a lot. Well, I’ll have to love you and leave you. Till the 23rd March—god willing—take care! Lots of love [from] your daughter that love [sic] you the most . . .

Raafat’s Lebanese passport shows that she cleared Gatwick Airport immigration on the 23rd, exactly twenty-two days before the American crew of the F-111 that was to kill her took off from Lakenheath. She arrived in Tripoli with an attack of spring hay fever. Raafat was to return to London in the third week of April and was nearing the end of her holidays when, on 13 April, she spent the night at the home of the Ghandour family, Lebanese friends of long standing. There were already reports of a possible American bombing raid against Ghadafi’s headquarters in Tripoli and against the offices of Libyan intelligence. Western journalists— myself among them—had gathered at the largest hotel in the city and noticed the hurried departure of a Soviet destroyer from the waterfront on the morning of 14 April. “Raafat was in her dressing gown at breakfast in the morning and all we talked about was the possible raid and what would be the targets and if the Americans would hit civilians,” Moutassim Ghandour remembers. “She kept roaming around this point. She felt that someone close would be killed. She was fully convinced that there was going to be a raid. I tried to talk politics with her. But she kept going round and round, talking about the planes that might come. She went on about this for three hours. I think that somehow she knew she was going to be killed that day.”

On the evening of the 14th, Raafat was so overcome with hay fever that Saniya called in the doctor. “He told her to sleep well and gave her antihistamine and nose drops,” her mother recalls. “She immediately said she felt better. We talked about the art college. And she said she was happy because she had kept herself for the man she would one day marry. She looked very beautiful, like a girl standing on the stage. Bassam and Kinda came in and we had a light meal—of cheese and tomatoes and a plate of sweets from the Syrian ambassador’s wife. We let Raafat sleep in the TV room because there was a machine there that controls pollen. I went to bed in the girls’ room and Kinda slept beside her father in our bed.” At almost the same moment the al-Ghossain family went to bed, twenty-four American F-111s from the U.S. 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath, were taking off for Libya. One of the aircraft was crewed by Captain Fernando Ribas-Dominicci of Puerto Rico and Captain Paul Lorence of San Francisco.

It was just after two in the morning that Saniya awoke with a start. “There was a tremendous roaring noise and I got out of bed and shouted: ‘Wake up, Bassam, the Americans are here!’ I looked into the TV room and saw Raafat sleeping peacefully there and I thought I’d better not wake her up. I went back to bed.” Bassam woke again moments later. “I heard anti-aircraft fire and the next thing I knew my feet were buried in rubble. I couldn’t move. Kinda was in the bed next to me. She was screaming. Her body was covered by a door. I held her hand to quieten her down. The door had protected her when the ceiling came down.”

Saniya reawoke to hear Bassam’s voice shouting “as if from another planet—it was a voice I had never heard before. He was shouting ‘My God! My God!’ and calling our names. I was choking on the smoke and dust. I stood up and it was all darkness. I couldn’t see anything. I was walking on glass on my bare feet. I put my hand on the bedroom wall and found there was no door there. I asked Bassam what happened to Kinda. He said: ‘I am touching her. She is alive.’ I went to Raafat’s room and the side wall was down. I shouted her name many times. She didn’t answer. A feeling came over me that Raafat had died. I shouted: ‘Bassam—Raafat has gone.’ Then I walked out of the house to get help, on my bare feet. Tripoli was like a haunted city. I saw all the water of the city coming out of the pipes. I looked back at the wreckage of our home and there was nobody to be seen, it was as if it had been like this for a hundred years. Eventually, I found a young man who went to what was left of our home to help.” To Saniya’s amazement—it registers on her face when she recalls the fact years later—the rescuer was a Palestinian who had survived the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre, the atrocity which had so horrified the homesick Raafat in London.

Badly cut and bruised, Bassam and Kinda were taken to hospital. Neither can remember the following hours. Saniya was taken to a friend’s house. A 2,000-pound bomb had destroyed the home of the al-Ghossains’ Libyan neighbours, killing all five of them. The blast had blown down the wall of the TV room onto Raafat. Moutassim Ghandour, the family’s Lebanese friend, found a team of Libyan civil defence workers with a bulldozer at the neighbours’ ruined house and pleaded with them to find Raafat. It was already mid-morning on 15 April. He later wrote a legal testimony of what he saw:

The bulldozer tried to lift the roof slab which was on top of the couch where “Fafo” had been lying and it was then that her face appeared for the first time, she was lying on her back with the head turned on the right cheek, she was intact, her hair undisturbed and a small streak of blood coming from the top side of her head, flowing down her left cheek. When she appeared, the bulldozer stopped and rescue workers got close to her to find out if she was still alive. I was led away about 10 metres, and then somebody screamed “Every soul will have the taste of death . . .” together with other verses relevant to death and martyrdom from the Holy Koran. At this stage I realised that “Fafo” was dead.

Kinda scarcely recalls the bombing and was too young to understand what Raafat’s death meant. “I remember a door on top of me and a rock near my head and shouting ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’ My father had lots of blood on him. I couldn’t move my legs.” Bassam was distraught. In the hours to come, he would hear journalists claim that his home had been hit not by an American bomb but by Libyan anti-aircraft missiles. The United States dismissed the death of at least thirty civilians in the raid on Tripoli as “collateral damage,” adding—in the Pentagon’s words—that “only 1 or 2 per cent of the bombs impacted in civilian areas.” America’s targets—including Ghadafi’s headquarters and intelligence offices—had been hit, they claimed. A security office not far from the al-Ghossains” home had been touched, but the French embassy had suffered far worse damage and the al-Ghossain home was virtually destroyed. Not a word of regret came from Washington.

A U.S. official admitted that Ghadafi had been one of the targets of “Operation El Dorado Canyon”—this was the raid in which Ghadafi’s adopted daughter had been killed—and a Pentagon report later stated that “in terms of equipment performance, the strike was a success.” A Pentagon official told The Washington Post that the air force F-111s from Britain had been included in the raid because their pilots wanted “a piece of the action.” This may have been true. “It was the greatest thrill of my life to have been involved,” one of the pilots later told the Chicago Tribune . “It is what we are trained for.” Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger later agreed that the Americans had killed the civilians and that an F-111 lost in the raid might have dropped the bombs that killed Raafat al-Ghossain and her neighbours when it was shot down. Captain Fernando Ribas-Dominicci and Captain Paul Lorence were flying the doomed plane. Over Tripoli, the former was heard shouting: “I’m hit!” and another, anonymous pilot was recorded replying: “Sorry about that.” The body of Ribas-Dominicci was later recovered from the Mediterranean by the Libyans and returned to the United States.

Bassam still carries a file of newspaper articles on the American raid. The New York Times wrote that “even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya . . . the United States has prosecuted [Ghadafi] carefully, proportionately—and justly.” Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres claimed that the Americans had been taking their revenge for the slaughter of 241 U.S. servicemen in the Beirut truck-bombing three years earlier. But Ghadafi had no more to do with that mass killing than Saddam Hussein was to have with the mass slaughter of 11 September 2001. Bassam al-Ghossain’s file also includes a headline from The Times of London—“Raid destroyed terrorist nerve-centre.” Underneath, the by-line says: “From Robert Fisk, Tripoli.” My report did not mention “terrorists”—that had been a sub-editor’s work in the headline, and it was only a little over two years later that The Times would censor my report on the Iranian Airbus slaughter—but Bassam al-Ghossain was unforgiving. “It gives the impression we are terrorists, it says that Raafat was a terrorist.”

At the mass funeral three days later, I noticed Raafat’s coffin because—living in Lebanon—I had straight away caught sight of the Lebanese flag and the Palestinian flag lying on her casket. It had been Saniya’s idea. I knew nothing of the family but had found Raafat’s shocked and badly wounded mother. “We are Muslims but we have one God,” she had told me then. “We are one people. I hope Mr. Reagan understands that.” A stone was placed upon Raafat’s grave which quoted the Koran: “Thou causest the night to pass into the day, and thou causest the day to pass into the night. And thou bringest forth the living from the dead, and thou bringest forth the dead from the living . . .”

Saniya wanted the flags of every Arab nation on the coffins of those killed in the American raid—“because it was their fault, because they did not unite and because, for this reason, Raafat was killed by all the Arab world.” A year later, eight-year-old Kinda would write a letter to her dead sister:

Dear Fafo,

I will see you one day. I miss you very much. I wish I was with you all the time. I love you. When you died, everything changed it was ever [sic] worse. I shout at my Mom and Dad . . . Please come back one day or I go to you. You come and take me in the night and take me to see you. And then bring me back. I just wish. I love you. Your sister Kinda.

Bassam refused to visit his daughter’s grave. In 1994 he resigned from the nationalised Libyan oil company and returned to Beirut with his family, leaving Raafat’s remains behind in Tripoli. “Once the soul leaves the body, it doesn’t matter where the body is,” he remarked years later. “It says this in the Koran. I don’t believe in visiting graves. I am a strong believer. I believe that one day you’re going to meet that person again. Visiting a grave means that you’re attached to a body and that is wrong.” Saniya is not so strict. “Raafat always wanted to be with us. Sometimes I feel ‘at least let our bones be together.’ ” Nineteen years after her death, on a visit to Libya in 2005, Bassam did visit the cemetery where his daughter was buried and stood and wept before Raafat’s grave.

But Bassam’s anger never died, not least because Kinda suffered deeply from her sister’s death. Still feeling leg pains from injuries to her spinal cord, it was nine more years before she realised Raafat was dead, when she at last visited her sister’s grave in 1995. “I had to grow up without her, without having a big sister,” she says. “I have a lot of friends and they sometimes ask what it’s like to be an only child, sometimes I tell them how Fafo died in the air raid . . .” Today, Kinda, a remarkably pretty young woman of twenty-six, teaches in the educational studies department at the Deutsche Schule in Beirut. Bassam, who believes in the law as he believes in justice, wrote to ex-President Reagan’s daughter Patti, to ex-President Carter, to lawyers in Britain and America to seek redress. In the United States he was warned that any legal action for damages for Raafat’s death might be treated as a “frivolous suit” in the courts. “If you don’t follow up an injustice and let the world know what happened to you, then injustice wins,” he says. “I want the world to know what happened to our family . . . People say that it is a tragedy Kinda doesn’t have an elder sister. But she did have a sister—and she was taken from us.”

Among the family snapshots, Saniya treasures two crumpled sheets of paper that she found in the rubble of the villa. Both are covered in Raafat’s handwriting. Apparently written to herself only days before her death, the letter is an expression of Raafat’s fear and suspicion of the world but also of her hopes of a future happiness, a sombre and moving tribute to her own life:

People are only faces, images, masks worn by each one of them to deceive each other . . . Meanwhile, here I am watching, trying to survive, among a group of actors who try to show as if they understood it all but really have understood nothing, [the] hypocrites. Life is a game, a gamble, and people are its victims, its players . . . I hope that one day I shall find that stream of light, that breath of life which will open my soul up and let [me] go FREE, FREE, FREE to eternity.

At the bottom of the letter, Raafat has drawn the wings of four great white birds.