A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks Read Free Book Online Page B

acquaintances where else he should look, and they told him Yemen. The Yemenis, they said, had a large, uneducated population and were hiring Arabs from abroad to teach their children the Quran. Egyptians did not need a visa to get into Yemen, so after two or three months he quit Jordan for Sanaa. Yemen, however, proved to be already awash in Egyptians teaching the Quran. He managed to find work at a school library, which was more agreeable than hauling rocks, but the pay was slight and he could save nothing. Again he asked the natives where he might find a better life, and this time he was told to go to Pakistan. Pakistan, the Yemenis said, is the place for a man like you. After four or five months in Yemen, he went.
    PESHAWAR IS the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. From its tin-makers’ shops and wool-spinning factories, it is a short and not particularly steep climb to the Khyber Pass, beyond which lies the chaos of Afghanistan, battlefield of greater powers since history began. Afghanistan’s modern convulsions started in 1978, when the country fell into civil war, which prompted the Soviet Union to invade and the United States to arm the opposing rebels, some of whom, notoriously, saw in their struggle not merely a resistance to empire but a jihad. The war was—is, depending on how one defines it—nasty, brutish, and long, and millions of shelled and pauperized Afghans sought refuge over the Khyber Pass. With them came holy warriors who set up headquarters in Peshawar, from which they raised money, bought arms, launched raids into the motherland, and in some cases trained terrorists for attacks beyond Afghanistan. The noncombatants who overfilled Peshawar lived in sweeping tent cities whose pitiful sight moved governments and individuals across the Middle East to send money for their relief. For a time Peshawar was, if not quite soaked, at least damp in riyals from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, dinars from Algeria and Jordan, and pounds from Egypt and Syria. Much of the money went to schools, clinics, and charities of the food-and-shelter variety, but much also went to jihad. For terrorists, it was convenient to smudge the line between humanitarian and military aid, and so charities arose that gave long-grain rice with one hand and long-range sniper rifles with the other.
    Arabs sometimes traveled to Peshawar with similarly smudged intentions. A man might start from Jeddah for a madrassa and end in a Tora Bora tunnel. Sometimes the madrassa had been a ruse all along, but sometimes the man had been moved to fight only after arriving. Or maybe he had known he would fight but not that he would become a terrorist. Some Arab governments, eager to be rid of their zealots, paid their way to Peshawar. Egypt even released a few extremists from prison on condition they enplane for Pakistan. Evidently the governments assumed that the zealots would be killed in the war, or their zeal would shrivel in the Afghan wastes, or the rich among them—Osama bin Laden being the epitome—would run through their fortunes arming God’s battalions. The Arab governments thought little, and the American government less, about the men who would survive the Afghan wars. They did not foresee that the zealots’ passion for sharia might be intensified or that they would become practiced in guerrilla warfare and connected to an international network of terroristic financiers, recruiters, and plotters. The blowback, infamously, would concuss the Hudson and Potomac.
    Peshawar had many exiles from Egypt, in large part because the repression by Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination sent many Islamists fleeing at just the time when Peshawar was most in need of humanitarians and soldiers. One Egyptian who came to Peshawar, for a few months in 1980 and a few years from 1986, was Ayman al-Zawahiri. A surgeon, he dressed the wounds of refugees in a Red Crescent hospital but eventually developed an enthusiasm for mass murder. From Peshawar