The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk

the Saudis tried to kill him and they shot at him but bin Laden’s guards fired back and two of the men were wounded. The same people also tried to murder Turabi.” The Egyptian listened to this in silence. “Yes, the country is very dangerous,” he said. “The Americans are trying to block the route to Afghanistan for the Arabs. I prefer the mountains. I feel safer there. This place is semi-Beirut.”
    Not for long. Within nine months, I would be back in a transformed, still more sinister Afghanistan, its people governed with a harsh and ignorant piety that even bin Laden could not have imagined. Again, there had come the telephone call to Beirut, the invitation to see “our friend,” the delay—quite deliberate on my part— before setting off yet again for Jalalabad. This time, the journey was a combination of farce and incredulity. There were no more flights from Delhi so I flew first to the emirate of Dubai. “Fly to Jalalabad?” my Indian travel agent there asked me. “You have to contact ‘Magic Carpet.’ ” He was right. “Magic Carpet Travel”—in a movie, the name would never have got past the screenplay writers 2 —was run by a Lebanese who told me to turn up at 8:30 the next morning at the heat-bleached old airport in the neighbouring and much poorer emirate of Sharjah, to which Ariana Afghan Airlines had now been sent in disgrace. Sharjah played host to a flock of pariah airlines that flew from the Gulf to Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Tajikistan and a number of obscure Iranian cities. My plane to Jalalabad was the same old Boeing 727, but now in a state of much-reduced circumstances, cruelly converted into a freight carrier.
    The crew were all Afghans—bushy-bearded to a man, since the Taliban had just taken over Afghanistan and ordered men to stop shaving—and did their best to make me comfortable in the lone and grubby passenger seat at the front. “Safety vest under seat,” was written behind the lavatory. There was no vest. And the toilet was running with faeces, a fearful stench drifting over the cargo of ball-bearings and textiles behind me. On take-off, a narrow tide of vile-smelling liquid washed out of the lavatory and ran down the centre of the aircraft. “Don’t worry, you’re in safe hands,” one of the crew insisted as we climbed through the turbulence, introducing me to a giant of a man with a black-and-white beard who kept grinding his teeth and wringing his hands on a damp cloth. “This,” he said, “is our senior flight maintenance engineer.” Over the Spinghar Mountains, the engineer at last sniffed the smell from the toilet, entered the tiny cubicle with a ratchet and attacked the plumbing. By the time we landed at the old airstrip at Jalalabad, I was ready to contemplate the overland journey home.
    The immigration officer, a teenager with a Kalashnikov, was so illiterate that he drew a square and a circle in my upside-down passport because he couldn’t write his own name. The airline crew offered me a lift on their bus into Jalalabad, the same dusty frontier town I remembered from the previous July but this time with half its population missing. There were no women. Just occasionally I would catch sight of them, cowled and burqa-ed in their shrouds, sometimes holding the hands of tiny children. The campus gates of Nangarhar University were chained shut, the pathways covered in grass, the dormitories dripping rain water. “The Taliban say they will reopen the university this week,” the post office clerk told me. “But what’s the point? All the teachers have left. The women can no longer be educated. It’s back to Year Zero.”
    Not quite, of course. For the first time in years, there was no shooting in Jalalabad. The guns had been collected by the Taliban—only to go up in smoke a few days later in a devastating explosion that almost killed