The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [56]
“What are you talking about?” Khalifa said. “Suppose I go to die?”
But he agreed to meet her as soon as it could be properly arranged. When he did, he decided that Sheikha was “the best I ever met in my whole life.” He put off the marriage for a year, however, in case he was martyred in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden also wanted to go openly to Afghanistan, but he could not get permission from the authorities. “The Saudi government asked me officially not to enter Afghanistan due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership,” bin Laden later said. “They ordered me to stay in Peshawar, because if the Russians arrested me that would be proof of our support against the Soviet Union. I didn’t obey their order. They thought my entry into Afghanistan was damning to them. I didn’t listen.”
He would have to defy another authority as well, which was even more difficult for him. His mother forbade him to go. He begged for her permission, saying that he would be going there only to take care of the families of the mujahideen. He said he would call every day. Finally he promised, “I won’t even get near Afghanistan.”
5
The Miracles
ONE MONTH AFTER THE SOVIET INVASION, Prince Turki al-Faisal paid a visit to Pakistan. He was shaken by the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan, which he saw as the first step in a march toward the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Pakistan would be next. He believed the Soviet Union’s ultimate target was to control the Strait of Hormuz at the base of the Gulf, where Oman reaches toward Iran like a fishhook for an open mouth. From there, the Soviets could control the supply route for the supertankers that ferried the petroleum from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and Iran. Whoever commanded the strait had a knife at the throat of the world’s oil supply.
Turki’s colleagues in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) briefed him on the Afghan resistance, then took him to the refugee camps outside Peshawar. Turki was appalled by the scale of the suffering. He went back to the Kingdom vowing to dedicate more money to the mujahideen, although he believed that these ragged soldiers could never defeat the Red Army. “Afghanistan was gone,” he decided. He only hoped to delay the inevitable Soviet invasion of Pakistan.
Similar thinking was going on in Washington, especially by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the U.S. national security advisor for the Carter administration. Brzezinski, however, saw the invasion as an opportunity. He wrote to Carter immediately, saying, “Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam war.” Looking for an ally in this endeavor, the Americans naturally turned to the Saudis—that is, to Turki, the American-educated prince who held the Afghan account.
Turki became the key man in the covert alliance of the United States and the Saudis to funnel money and arms to the resistance through the Pakistani ISI. It was vital to keep this program secret in order to prevent the Soviets from having the excuse they sought to invade Pakistan. Until the end of the war, the Saudis would match the Americans dollar for dollar, starting with only seventy-five thousand dollars but growing into billions.
The immediate problem Turki faced was that the mujahideen were little more than disorganized mobs. There were about 170 armed Afghan militias in the mid-1980s. In order to manage this chaos, the ISI anointed six major émigré parties as the designated recipients for aid. Afghan refugees, who numbered 3.27 million by 1988, had to sign up with one of the six official parties to qualify for food and supplies. The two largest of these, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani, each had 800,000 people in Peshawar under their authority. Turki forcibly created a seventh