Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

I hitched a ride with a French aid worker. They seemed to be everywhere. Jalalabad was a dusty brown city of mud-and-wood houses, unpaved earthen streets and ochre walls with the characteristic smell of charcoal and horse manure. There were donkeys and stallions and Indian-style ‘velo’ rickshaws and Victorian bicycles and the occasional clapboard shop-front, Dodge City transferred to the subcontinent. Khartoum had nothing on this. Two of Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s local guerrilla commanders had turned up for their haircut at the same time the previous month and shot dead the barber and a couple of other men before deciding who was first in the queue for his regular haircut. A third of all the children in Jalalabad hospitals were the victims of joy-shooting at weddings. It was a city ripe for Islamic discipline.

But it didn’t put the agencies off. There was SAVE and the World Food Programme, UNDP, Médecins Sans Frontières, Madera, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Emergency Field Unit, the Sandy Gall clinic for orphaned children, the Swedish Committee for Afghans, the UNHCR and a German agronomist agency; and they were only the first few offices signposted off the highway to Kabul. Seven years after the last Soviet troops had left Afghanistan, four years after the communist government of President Mohamed Najibullah had been overthrown, the Afghan mujahedin victors of the war were slaughtering each other in Kabul. So what was the point? Were the agencies here to assuage our guilt at abandoning the Afghan people once they had served their purpose in driving the Russians from their land? The United Nations had a force of just two soldiers observing the chaos in Afghanistan – a Swede and an Irishman, both of whom stayed at the old Spinghar Hotel.

The Spinghar is a relic of the Afghanistan hippy trail, a high-ceilinged hotel of the 1950s with large rose gardens and tall palm trees which, even in winter, bask in the warmth of the winds coming up from the valley of the Indus. But in the torment of the summer heat of 1996 – it is now mid-July – a roaring air conditioner plays Catch-22 with me: to cool my empty double room upstairs, I turn it on, but its tigerlike engine vibrates so loudly that sleep is impossible. So I switch it off. Yet when I turn to the only book beside my bed – Plain Tales from the Raj – the sweat runs down my arms and glues my fingers to the pages.

Then a rustle, a kind of faint, rasping sound, comes from the silent conditioner. I sit up and, five feet from my face, I see the dragon’s head of a giant lizard looking at me from the cooled bars of the machine. When I raise my hand, the head disappears for a moment. Then it is back, a miniature armoured brontosaurus face that is followed now by a long, rubbery torso, grey-green in the dim afternoon sunlight, and big sucking feet that grip the plastic air-conditioning vents. Like an old silent film, it moves in jerks. One moment, I see its head. Then at shutter’s speed, half its length of heavily-breathing rubberiness is out of the machine. A moment later, the whole half foot of creature is suspended on the curtain above my bed, swaying on the material, alien and disturbing, looking back at me over its fortresslike shoulder. What is it doing here? I ask myself. Then it scuttles out of sight into the drapery.

And of course, I switch on the air conditioner and swamp the room with a rush of ear-freezing cold air. And I curl up on the further bed and watch for movement at the top of the curtain rod. I am frightened of this thing and it is frightened of me. And only after half an hour do I realise that the bright screws on the curtain rail are its beady eyes. With rapt attention, we are watching each other. Are others watching me? I wake up next morning, exhausted, drenched in perspiration. The boy at the reception desk in a long shirt and a traditional pakul hat says that no one has called for me. Bin Laden has friends in Jalalabad, the tribal leaders know him, protect him, and even the man I met in London said that I should let ‘Engineer Mahmoud’ know that I have arrived in Afghanistan to see ‘Sheikh Osama’.

Engineer Mahmoud turns out to work for the city’s Drug Control and Development Unit in a back street of Jalalabad. I might have expected the purist bin Laden to be involved with the eradication of drugs. In 1996, Afghanistan was the world’s leading supplier of illicit opium, producing at least 2,200 metric tonnes of opium – about 80 per cent of western Europe’s heroin. Afghans are not immune. You can see them in the Jalalabad bazaar, young men with withered black arms and sunken eyes, the addicts returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan, still-living witnesses to the corruption of heroin. ‘It’s good for the Afghan people to see them,’ a Western aid official says coldly. ‘Now they can see the effect of all those poppy fields they grow – and if they are as Islamic as they claim they are, maybe they’ll stop producing opium.’ He smiles grimly. ‘Or maybe not.’

Probably not. The eastern Nangarhar province is now responsible for 80 per cent of the country’s poppy cultivation – for 64 per cent of western Europe’s heroin – and laboratories have now been transferred from Pakistan to a frontier strip inside Afghanistan, producing hundreds of kilos of heroin a day, fortified with anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles to withstand a military offensive. Local government officials in Jalalabad claim to have eradicated 30,000 hectares of opium and hashish fields over the past two years, but their efforts – brave enough given the firepower of the drug producers – seem as hopeless as the world’s attempts to find a solution to drug abuse.

In Engineer Mahmoud’s office, the problem is simple enough. A map on the wall depicts Nangarhar with a rash of red pimples along its eastern edge, a pox of opium fields and laboratories that are targets for Mahmoud’s armed commandos. ‘We have been eradicating hashish fields, using our weapons to force the farmers to plough up the land,’ he proclaims. ‘We are taking our own bulldozers to plough up some of the poppy fields. We take our guns and rockets with us and the farmers can do nothing to stop our work. Now our shura [council] has called the ulema to lecture the people on the evils of drug production, quoting from the Koran to support their words. And for the first time, we have been able to destroy hashish fields without using force.’ Mahmoud and his ten-strong staff have been heartened by the United Nations’ support for his project. On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium – around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the Jalalabad markets.

Only a few months earlier – and here is the strange geography that touched bin Laden’s contacts – Engineer Mahmoud visited Washington. ‘The US drugs prevention authorities took me to their new headquarters – you would not believe how big it is,’ he said. ‘It is half the size of Jalalabad city. And when I went inside, it is very luxurious and has many, many computers. They have all this money there – but none for us who are trying to stop the drug production.’ Engineer Mahmoud’s senior staff received just under $50 a month and his senior assistant, Shamsul Hag, claimed that the drugs unit had to buy 4,000 kilos of maize seed to distribute to farmers the previous month. But the western NGOs in Jalalabad had little time for all this. ‘Haji Qadir, the governor of Jalalabad, went to the UN drugs people in Islamabad,’ one of them said, ‘and told him: “Look, I have destroyed 20,000 hectares of opium fields – now you must help me because the people are waiting for your help.” But it was more complicated than this. Farmers who had never grown poppies began to plant them so they could get free maize seed in return for destroying the fields they had just planted.’ Other aid workers suspected that the farmers were rotating their crops between wheat and drugs each season, the opium sold in return for increased payments, and for weapons that were recently transported in boxes through the Pakistan railway station of Landi Kotal on the Peshawar steam train to the Afghan border.