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By Root 581 0

however, there was a dizzying sense that they were living in a supernatural world, in which reality knelt before faith. For them, the encounter at the Lion’s Den became the foundation of the myth that they defeated the superpower. Within a few years the entire Soviet empire fell to pieces—dead of the wound the Muslims inflicted in Afghanistan, the jihadis believed. By then they had created the vanguard that was to carry the battle forward. Al-Qaeda was conceived in the marriage of these assumptions: Faith is stronger than weapons or nations, and the ticket to enter the sacred zone where such miracles occur is the willingness to die.

6

The Base

BY 1986 MILLIONS OF AFGHAN REFUGEES had flooded into Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, turning Peshawar, the capital, into the prime staging area for the jihad against the Soviet invasion. The streets of the city were a welter of languages and national costumes, achieving a strange and exhilarating cosmopolitanism that cast a spell over everyone who passed through it. Aid workers and freelance mullahs and intelligence agents from around the world set up shop. The underground flow of money and arms created an economic boom in a town that had always feasted on contraband. Already the treasures of the Afghan national museum—statuary, precious stones, antiquities, even entire Buddhist temples—were being slipped into the Smugglers’ Market, an openly run bazaar on the outskirts of the city, and into the gift shops of the shabby hotels where the throng of international journalists holed up to cover the war. Afghan warlords moved their families into University Town, where the professional class lived among the eucalyptus and the magnolia trees. The warlords became rich by skimming off the subsidies that the Americans and the Saudis were providing. Their murderous rivalries, along with weekly bombings and assassinations by the KGB and KHAD (the Afghan intelligence service), made the death toll of Afghan commanders higher in Peshawar than on the field of battle. In a city that moved around mainly on hand-painted private buses and smoky motorcycle rickshaws that ripped the air like chain saws, suddenly there were new Mercedes Sedans and Toyota Land Cruisers navigating among the donkey carts. The air was a blue soup of diesel smoke. “Peshawar was transformed into this place where whoever had no place to go went,” Osama Rushdi, one of the young Egyptian jihadis, remembered. “It was an environment in which a person could go from a bad place to a worse place, and eventually into despair.”

After finishing his contract with the medical clinic in Jeddah in 1986, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri joined the growing Arab community in Peshawar. Rounder now than he had been during his previous visits before his prison years, he boasted that Pakistan was like a “second home” to him, since he had spent time as a child in the country when his maternal grandfather served there as the Egyptian ambassador. He quickly adapted to wearing the shalwar kameez, the traditional long shirt and loose-fitting pants of the region. His brother Mohammed, who had loyally followed him since childhood, joined him in Peshawar. The brothers had a strong family resemblance, though Mohammed was darker and slightly taller and thinner than Ayman. Soft-spoken and deferential, Mohammed set up al-Jihad’s financial pipeline, which ran from Cairo to Pakistan via Saudi Arabia.

Zawahiri established his medical practice at a Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital, which, like most of the aid institutions in the city, was dominated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They hated him because of a lengthy diatribe he wrote, called Bitter Harvest, in which he attacked the Brothers for collaborating with infidel regimes—that is to say, all Arab governments. He called the Brotherhood “a tool in the hands of tyrants.” He demanded that they publicly renounce “constitutions and man-made laws, democracy, elections, and parliament,” and declare jihad against the regimes they formerly supported. Privately funded, this handsomely produced book appeared