The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Read Free Book Online Page A

his death—and then blame the killing on Islamists? How many reporters would set off to interview bin Laden after that? So I called back the contact in London. Would he meet me at my hotel?
    The receptionist at the Sheraton Belgravia called my room in the early evening. “There is a gentleman waiting for you in the lobby,” he said. The Belgravia is the smallest Sheraton in the world, and if its prices don’t match that diminutive title, its wood-panelled, marble-floored lobby was as usual that evening the preserve of elderly tea-sipping ladies, waistcoated businessmen with silver hair slightly over the collar and elegantly dressed young women in black stockings. But when I reached the lobby, I noticed a man standing by the door. He was trying to look insignificant but he wore a huge beard, a long white Arab robe and plastic sandals over naked feet. Could this, perhaps, be bin Laden’s man?
    He was. The man ran the London end of the “Advice and Reform Committee,” a Saudi opposition group inspired by bin Laden which regularly issued long and tiresome tracts against the corruption of the Saudi royal family, and he dutifully sat down in the Belgravia lobby—to the astonishment of the elderly ladies—to explain the iniquitous behaviour of the House of Saud and the honourable nature of Osama bin Laden. I did not believe the man I was talking to was a violent personality. Indeed, within two years he would personally express to me his distress—and rupture—with bin Laden when the latter declared war on “Americans, ‘Crusaders’ and Jews.” But in 1996, the Saudi hero of the Afghan war could do no wrong. “He is a sincere man, Mr. Robert. He wants to talk to you. There is nothing to fear.” This was the line I wanted to hear; whether I believed it was another matter. I told the man I would check into the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad.
    The most convenient flight into eastern Afghanistan was from India, but Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight FG315 from New Delhi to Jalalabad was not the kind that carries an in-flight magazine. The female passengers were shrouded in the all-enveloping burqa, the cabin crew were mostly bearded and the cardboard packet of litchee juice was stained with mud. The chief steward walked to my seat, crouched in the aisle beside me and—as if revealing a long-held military secret—whispered into my ear, “We will be flying at thirty-one thousand feet.” If only we had. Approaching the old Soviet military airstrip at Jalalabad, the pilot made an almost 180-degree turn that sent the blood pumping into our feet, and touched down on the first inch of narrow tarmac—giving him just enough braking power to stop the jet a foot from the end of the runway. Given the rusting Soviet radar dishes and the wrecked, upended Antonov off the apron, I could understand why Jalalabad arrivals lacked the amenities of Heathrow or JFK.
    When I trudged through the heat with my bags, I found that the bullet-scarred terminal building was empty. No immigration. No customs. Not a single man with a rubber stamp. Just six young and bearded Afghans, four of them holding rifles, who stared at me with a mixture of tiredness and suspicion. No amount of cheery
Salaam aleikums
would elicit more than a muttering in Pushtu from the six men. After all, what was this alien, hatless creature doing here in Afghanistan with his brand-new camera-bag and his canvas hold-all of shirts and newspaper clippings? “Taxi?” I asked them. And they looked away from me, back at the big blue-and-white aircraft which had jetted so dangerously into town as if it held the secret of my presence.
    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