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Afghanistan, al-Qaida and me
Conflict
Wednesday August 1st 2007
Observer foreign correspondent Jason Burke, author of ‘al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam’ and ‘The Road to Kandahar’, spent over a decade reporting from the Middle East. In the first of an exclusive three-part series, he shares his experiences of working in Pakistan and Afghanistan, meeting the Taliban and witnessing the lead-up to the US-led invasion. For part two on the invasion of Iraq, click here. For part three on investigating the terror trail in Pakistan, click here.
Wednesday August 1st 2007
Jason Burke in Iraq in the early days of the conflict
The end of the beginning came in the high mountains south of Jalalabad, the eastern Afghan city. At least, it was the end of the beginning for me. For the best part of three years, living and working in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a young freelancer, I had been investigating Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and the emerging phenomenon of modern Islamic militancy. Now, in December 2001, as I watched the long, straight vapour trails of the American B-52s slicing across the dawn sky above the snow-capped peaks, picked out by the rays of the rising sun against the washed out blue grey of the early morning, I knew everything was changing.
I had spent much of the previous two years talking to, sometimes even travelling with, the militants, most usually from the Taliban, in nominal control of Afghanistan until about a month previously. After repeated visits, I knew Kabul well. I had even ‘doorstepped’ bin Laden, knocking on doors of camps as, in the best traditions of British journalism, I had been trained to do. Equally, I had spent weeks working in the wilder parts of the North West Frontier Province, eating kebabs and rice with local tribal chiefs, meeting militant clerics, being shown medressas and even, on one occasion, a military exercise. If I wanted to meet the hardline militants fighting in Kashmir I got on my motorbike and rode down from my flat in Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad to the seething metropolis of Rawalpindi a few miles away, knocked on a door and had tea with the young recruits, some British, waiting to travel to the training camps and war.
Over time, I developed something of a tentative grasp of vast complexities of the various styles of Islamic militancy and activism – the differences, for example, between the parochial Taliban, the often-nationalist Pakistanis and the worldly Arabs. I also began to see the huge complexity of Islam itself. I often visited a shrine on the outskirts of Islamabad – not least to go walking in the arid hills behind the city – and there I saw the moderate, folkloric, non-political Islam of the vast bulk of Pakistan’s rural masses. Its contrast with the political Islamism that was increasingly prevalent among urban middle classes was striking. In the south of the country too, working on stories in the poor agricultural areas of Sindh or the Punjab, I came across the same traditions. Sometimes they were mixed with a visceral, ignorant and unthinking anti-semitism or anti-Western sentiment. Often they were not. I was made welcome almost everywhere and learned fast.
Yet as I watched the gouts of flames from the bombs spout into the air above the rocky slopes of Tora Bora - the name locals gave the valleys under bombardment where ‘al-Qaida’ were supposed to be making a last stand - I knew that was all changing. Firstly, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and al-Qaida were now household names. Secondly, it was with an undeniable regret that I had watched my colleagues of the international media pour into Peshawar, Jalalabad, Kabul, all my previous stamping grounds. Thirdly, I suddenly had to look out for my safety in a way that had never been the case previously. Contacts among the Pashtun tribes refused to speak to me, others simply said it was too dangerous to meet. Travelling as freely I had once done in Afghanistan was out of the question. I had made one finely-judged foray into the heart of the al-Qaida infrastructure in Afghanistan in Khost just after the fall of Kabul but had little desire to push my luck. The days of motorbikes and tea with terrorists was over.
And of course, the ‘War on Terror’ had been declared. The conventional wisdom, repeated in the media, that ‘al-Qaida’ was a classic terrorist organisation with bin Laden running every cell across the world from a cave in Afghanistan, was wrong. So the primary response to the threat was a classic quasi-military counter-terrorism strategy. Ironically, though bin Laden and those around him had been able to appropriate and develop a considerable physical structure in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, they were actually, in late 2001, in the process of losing everything that could possibly have been conceived as ‘classic’ in terms of terrorist structure.
In the book on al-Qaida I wrote in 2002, I outlined three elements of the phenomenon: the ‘hardcore’ of the organisation, composed of bin Laden and a few dozen others; the ‘network of networks’ that included the scores of groups and cells in rough organisational or ideological alliance with bin Laden; and, most importantly, the ideology of al-Qaida, ‘al-Qaida-ism’, the methodology and worldview of al-Qaida. My argument was that, at the time that analysis emphasised the first element, the hardcore, it was in fact that very part of the phenomenon of al-Qaida that was losing its dominance and the third element, the ideology, that, over the years to come, would be the most evident.
All this, however, lay in the future. As I watched the bombs falling on Tora Bora, none of this was clear. The fog of war lay across Afghanistan, the frontier and al-Qaida. Six years later, it still does.
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