Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

It was the last straw. She presumed it was a transfer back to Arabia, and she quite properly put to him an ultimatum: You can have the Paras, the SAS and your bloody desert or you can come to Birmingham and have a marriage. He thought it over and chose the desert.

Outside the seclusion of the high valleys of the White Mountains, his old party leader, Younis Khalis, died, and the Hizb Islami Party was then wholly in the control of Hekmatyar, whose reputation for cruelty Izmat loathed. By the time Izmat’s baby was born in February 1994, President Najibullah had fallen but was alive, confined to a UN guesthouse in Kabul. He had supposedly been succeeded by Professor Rabbani, but he was a Tajik and so not acceptable to the Pashtun. Outside Kabul, only the warlords ruled their domains, but the real master was chaos and anarchy.

But something else was also happening. After the Soviet war, thousands of young Afghans had gone back to the Pakistani madras-sahs to complete their educations. Others, too young to have fought at all, went over the border to achieve an education-any education.

What they got was years of Wahhabi brainwashing. Now they were coming back, but they were different from Izmat Khan.

Because the old Younis Khalis, though ultradevout, had possessed some residual moderation in him, his madrassahs in the refugee camps had taught Islam with a hint of temperance. Others concentrated only on the ultra-aggressive passages from the Sword Verses to be found in holy Koran. And old Nuri Khan, thought devout also, was humane, and saw no harm in singing, dancing, sports and some tolerance of others.

The returnees were ill educated, having been taught by barely literate imams. They knew nothing of life, of women-most lived and died virgins-or even of their own tribal cultures, as Izmat had learned from his father. Apart from the Koran, they knew only one other thing: war. Most came from the deep south, where Islam had always been the most strict in all of Afghanistan. In the summer of 1994, Izmat Khan and a cousin left the upland valley for Jalalabad. It was a short visit, but long enough to witness the savage massacre inflicted by the followers of Hekmatyar on a village that had finally refused to pay him any more tribute money. The two travelers found the menfolk tortured and slain, the women beaten, the village torched. Izmat Khan was disgusted. In Jalalabad, he learned what he had seen was quite commonplace. Then something happened in the deep south. Since the fall of any semblance of a central government, the old official Afghan Army had simply reassigned itself to the local warlord who paid the best. Outside Kandahar, some soldiers took two teenage girls back to their camp and gang-raped them. The local preacher in the village where they came, who also ran his own religious school, went to the Army camp with thirty students and sixteen rifles. Against the odds, they trounced the soldiers, and hanged the commandant from the barrel of a tank gun. The priest was called Mohammad Omar, or Mullah Omar. He had lost his right eye in battle.

The news spread. Others appealed to him for help. He and his group swelled in numbers, and responded to the appeals. They took no money, they raped no women, they stole no crops, they asked no reward. They became local heroes. By December 1994, twelve thousand had joined them, adopting this mullah’s black turban. They called themselves the students. In Pashto, “student” is talib, and the plural is taliban. From village vigilantes, they became a movement, and when they captured the city of Kandahar, an alternative government. Pakistan, through its forever-plotting ISI, had been trying to topple the Tajik in Kabul by backing Hekmatyar, but he had failed repeatedly. As the ISI was deeply infiltrated by ultraorthodox Muslims, Pakistan switched support to the Taliban. With Kandahar, the new movement inherited a huge cache of arms, plus tanks, armored cars, trucks, guns, six MiG-2l ex-Soviet fighters and six heavy helicopters. They began to sweep north. In 1995, Izmat Khan embraced his wife, kissed his baby farewell and then came down from the mountains to join them. Later, on the floor of a cell in Cuba, he would recall that the days on the upland farm with his wife and child had been the happiest days of his life. He was twenty-three.

Too late, he learned there was a dark side to the Taliban. In Kandahar, even though the Pashtun had been devout before, they were subjected to the harshest regimen the world of Islam has ever seen.

All girls’ schools were closed at once. Women were forbidden to leave the house save in company of a male relative. The all-enveloping burqa robe was decreed at all times; the clacking of female sandals on tiles was decreed forbidden as being too sexy.

All singing, dancing, the playing of music, sports and kite flying-a national pastime-was forbidden. Prayers were to be said the required five times a day. Beards on men were compulsory. The enforcers were often teenage fanatics in their black turbans, taught only the Sword Verses, cruelty and war. From liberators they became the new tyrants, but the advance became unstoppable. Their mission was to destroy the rule of the warlords, and as these were well hated by the people, the people acquiesced to the new strictness. At least there was law, order, no more corruption, no more rape, no more crime; just fanatic orthodoxy.

Mullah Omar was a warrior-priest but nothing more. Having started his revolution by hanging a rapist from a gun barrel, he withdrew into seclusion in his southern fortress, Kandahar. His followers were like something out of the Middle Ages, and among the many things they could not recognize was fear. They worshipped the one-eyed mullah behind his walls, and before the Taliban fell eighty thousand would die for him. Far away in Sudan, the tall Saudi who controlled the twenty thousand Arabs now based in Afghanistan watched and waited.

Izmat Khan joined a lashkar of men drawn from his own province, Nangarhar. He was quickly respected because he was mature, had fought the Russians and been wounded.

The Taliban arm was no real army; it had no commanding general, no general staff, no officer corps, no ranks and no infrastructure. Each lashkar was semi-independent under its tribal leader, who often held sway through personality and courage in combat, plus religious devotion. Like the original Muslim warriors of the first caliphates, they swept their enemies aside by fanatical courage, which gave rise to a reputation for invincibility-so much so that opponents often capitulated without a shot fired. When they finally ran into real soldiers, the forces of the charismatic Tajik Shah Massoud, they took unspeakable losses. They had no medical corps, so their wounded just died by the roadside. But still, they came on.

At the gates of Kabul, they negotiated with Massoud, but he refused to accept their terms and withdrew to his own northern mountains, whence he had fought and defied the Russians. So began the next civil war, between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Massoud, the Tajik, and Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek. It was 1996. Only Pakistan, who had organized it, and Saudi Arabia, who paid for it, recognized the new, weird government of Afghanistan. For Izmat Khan, the die was cast. His old ally Shah Massoud was now his enemy. Far to the south, an airplane landed. It brought back the tall Saudi who had spoken to him eight years earlier in a cave at Jaji and the chubby doctor who had pulled a chunk of Soviet steel from his leg. Both men paid immediate obeisance to Mullah Omar, paying huge tribute in money and equipment, and thus securing his lifelong loyalty.

After Kabul, there was a pause in the war. Almost the first act of the Taliban in Kabul was to drag the toppled ex-president Najibul-lah from his house arrest, torture, mutilate and execute him, hanging his corpse from a lamppost. That set the tenor of the rule to come. Izmat Khan had no taste for cruelty for its own sake. He had fought hard enough in the conquest of his country to rise from volunteer to commander of his own lashkar, and this, in turn, grew, as word of his leadership spread, until it became one of the four divisions in the Taliban army. Then he asked to be allowed to go back to his native Nangarhar, and was made provincial governor. Based in Jalalabad, he could visit his family, wife and baby.