The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [127]
13
Hijira
SUDAN WAS BEHIND HIM. Bin Laden flew across the bright, narrow sea, and soon Jeddah and Mecca passed below, and the al-Sarawat escarpment, and then the great yellow desert, marked only by the roads his father had built across it. He was thirty-eight years old. He had been famous, a hero, and now he was a refugee, forbidden to touch down in his own country. He refueled in the United Arab Emirates, where he was briefly greeted by emissaries of the government who may have given him money. He had been rich all of his life, but he had poured his savings into poor investments, which were, in any case, essentially stolen from him. Now he accepted the charity of those who remembered his name.
He flew over the suckling supertankers docked beside the massive refineries lining the ports of the Persian Gulf, the source of so much wealth and trouble. Beyond Iran lay the blank southern desert of Afghanistan, and then Kandahar, surrounded by the ruins of its irrigation canals and pomegranate orchards. Now there were only poppy fields, the last resource worth the risk of cultivating in a country so devastated by twenty years of warfare. The savagery of the Soviets was forgotten in the convulsion of the civil war. Authority had broken down everywhere. The roads were given over to highwaymen who demanded tolls and sometimes abducted children when money was insufficient. Tribes were fighting tribes, warlords against warlords; drug gangs and the transport mafia dominated the barren economy. The cities had been pounded so hard they were disaggregated into piles of bricks and stones. Electrical posts, turned to lace after two decades of flying armament and long since stripped of wire, ran along the roadsides as ghostly reminders of a time when Afghanistan had taken its first turn toward modernity. Millions and millions of land mines contaminated the countryside, having disabled 4 percent of the population, according to a UN survey, and rendering much of the arable land useless.
As bin Laden passed over Kabul, the capital was under siege once again, this time by the Taliban. They had arisen in 1994 as a small group of students, most of them orphans who had been raised in the refugee camps and who were outraged by the chaos and depravity of the rule of the mujahideen. The liberators in the war against the Soviets had turned out to be more barbaric rulers than their enemy. Stirred to action by the misery that victory had brought to Afghanistan, the Taliban arose with stunning swiftness. Thanks to the support of Pakistani intelligence, they were transformed from a populist militia into a formidable, highly mobile guerrilla army, on the verge of consolidating their rapid rise to power as they stood on the outskirts of Kabul, raining rockets into the ruins.
In the next valley, at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, was Jalalabad. Bin Laden landed at the same airport that he had laid siege to in 1989. He was greeted by three former mujahideen commanders, then he moved into an old lodge above the river that had once served as a Soviet military post. A few weeks later he moved again, to a tumbledown farm five miles south of Jalalabad. It was owned by one of bin Laden’s old sponsors, Younis Khalis, an elderly warlord with a taste for teenage brides.
AFGHANISTAN IS A LARGE AND RUGGED COUNTRY, divided from east to west by the Hindu Kush Mountains, its population split into four major ethnic groups and numerous tribes and dialects. It is a difficult country to govern even in peacetime, although peace was such a distant memory that many Afghans had never experienced it. The longing for order was so great that almost any strong, stabilizing power would have been welcomed.
The Taliban rapidly captured nine out of Afghanistan’s thirty provinces. President