The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [130]
BIN LADEN’S FAMILIES and some of his followers arrived in Jalalabad to find rudimentary quarters: tents for the wives, with latrines and drainage ditches, set inside a barbed-wire enclosure. When winter arrived, bin Laden secured new housing for the families on a former Soviet collective farm, which he called Najm al-Jihad (star of the holy war). The men bunked nearby in the old ammunition storage cavern that bin Laden had excavated in Tora Bora. He outfitted the main cave with an armory of Kalashnikovs, a theological library, an archive of press clippings, and a couple of mattresses draped across several crates of hand grenades.
He went back into business, setting up a modest trade in honey, but Afghanistan has almost no commercial infrastructure, so there was little he could actually do. The three wives who stayed with him were accustomed to hardship, which bin Laden, naturally, embraced. He no longer slaughtered a lamb every day to serve his guests; now he rarely ate meat, preferring to live on dates, milk, yoghurt, and flatbread. Electricity was available for only three hours a day, and because there was no international telephone service his wives were completely cut off from their families in Syria and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden had a satellite phone, but he spoke on it sparingly, believing that the Americans were monitoring his calls. He was suspicious of mechanical devices in general, even clocks, which he thought might be used for surveillance.
Mainly, however, he was worried about the Taliban. He had no idea who they were. The anxious tribesmen in the northern region of Afghanistan spread rumors that the Taliban were a huge army of communists. When two of his mujahideen sponsors, Governor Mehmoud and Maulvi Saznoor, were killed in an ambush soon after Jalalabad fell, bin Laden taught his wives how to shoot.
The Taliban knew something about bin Laden, though, and they were just as worried about him as he was about them. “We don’t want subversive actions to be launched from here against any other countries,” the Taliban’s acting information minister declared. “In areas under Taliban control, there are no terrorists.” But they had heard about the millions he had poured into Sudan, and they assumed he was still a wealthy Islamic philanthropist. They hoped to use his money and expertise to rebuild their shattered country. Mullah Omar was also mindful of the pledge he had given, no doubt supported by many millions of Saudi riyals, to keep his guest silent and out of trouble.
After Jalalabad fell, the Taliban finally entered Kabul. The victorious young fighters broke into the UN compound where Najibullah, the former president of Afghanistan from its communist era, had taken refuge since the fall of his government four years before. He and his brother were beaten and tortured, castrated, dragged behind a jeep, shot, then hanged from a traffic pole in downtown Kabul. Cigarettes were placed in their mouths and money was stuffed in their pockets. There was little to mourn about a man who had begun his career as a torturer in the secret police, but the immediate disregard for international protocols, the casual savagery, the mutilation of the body—forbidden in Islam—and the absence of any court of justice set the stage for the carnival of religious tyranny that characterized the Taliban era. Prince Turki soon appeared in Kabul to congratulate them on their victory. During the entire Taliban reign, only three countries—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates—recognized the Afghan government.
“Women you should not step outside your residence,” the new government ordered. Women were a particular target, as might be expected from men who had so little experience of their company. “If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves,” the