The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [131]
The Taliban also turned their attention to ordinary pleasure. They forbade kite flying and dog racing. Trained pigeons were slaughtered. According to the Taliban penal code, “unclean things” were banned, an all-purpose category that included: “pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, any equipment that produces the joy of music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computer, VCRs, televisions, anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, pictures, Christmas cards.”
The fashion dictators demanded that a man’s beard be longer than the grip of his hand. Violators went to jail until they were sufficiently bushy. A man with “Beatle-ly” hair would have his head shaved. Should a woman leave her home without her veil, “her home will be marked and her husband punished,” the Taliban penal code decreed. The animals in the zoo—those that had not been stolen in previous administrations—were slain or left to starve. One zealous, perhaps mad, Taliban jumped into a bear’s cage and cut off his nose, reputedly because the animal’s “beard” was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion’s den and cried out, “I am the lion now!” The lion killed him. Another Taliban soldier threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived the Taliban rule.
“Throw reason to the dogs,” read a sign posted on the wall of the office of the religious police, who were trained by the Saudis. “It stinks of corruption.” And yet the Afghan people, so exhausted by war, initially embraced the imposition of this costly order.
WHILE BIN LADEN was setting up in Jalalabad, his friend and military chief, Abu Ubaydah, was in East Africa, overseeing the al-Qaeda cell that had been established two years before. The former Egyptian policeman was a revered figure in al-Qaeda. His courage was legendary. He had been with bin Laden during the war against the Soviets, all the way from the battle of the Lion’s Den to the siege of Jalalabad. Some said that if Zawahiri had taken over bin Laden’s brain, Abu Ubaydah had his heart. He was bin Laden’s most trusted emissary, often serving as a mediator between al-Qaeda and al-Jihad. He trained mujahideen in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Tajikistan, drawing valuable recruits to the Qaeda camps. In Kenya, he had taken a new identity and married a local woman, claiming to be in the mining business while he was actually preparing al-Qaeda’s first great strike against America.
On May 21, three days after bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan, Abu Ubaydah and his Kenyan brother-in-law, Ashif Mohammed Juma, were in a second-class cabin in an overloaded ferry on Lake Victoria, traveling to Tanzania. One of the ballast tanks was empty, and in the early morning the ferry capsized in rough water. Juma managed to get through the door of the cabin into the corridor, but the five other passengers crammed into the tiny compartment were trapped. The door was now above them, and water was gushing in from an open portal. Passengers were screaming, luggage and mattresses were falling on top of them, and they clawed at each other in order to reach the door, their only escape. Juma grabbed Abu Ubaydah’s hand and pulled him halfway out of the room, but suddenly the door was ripped from its hinges and al-Qaeda’s military chief was pulled back into the cabin by his doomed companions.
THIS WAS THE NADIR of bin Laden’s career.
Abu Ubaydah was not his only loss. Others,