Rahimullah’s contacts were legendary, so it was only to be expected that when a new phenomenon appeared on the Afghan scene in the autumn of 1994 he was the first journalist to note it and the first to appreciate its significance. This new phenomenon came in the form of earnest, unsmiling young men with untrimmed black beards who wore black turbans and black waistcoats, and who almost invariably carried either Kalashnikov automatic rifles or grenade launchers. They called themselves Taliban or ‘seekers of knowledge’ and they expressed allegiance not to a general or a tribal leader but to a one-eyed cleric by the name of Mullah Muhammad Omar.
Rahimullah Yusufzai and BBC correspondent David Loyn were on hand to cover the swift advance of these new insurgents northwards from Kandahar. They followed them as they fought their way through the gorges carved in the mountains by the Kabul River and observed how they combined military incompetence with extraordinary valour, charging the enemy without a thought to tactics or personal safety, secure in the belief that their death in jihad (the struggle against forces opposed to Islam) would win them the status of shahid (the martyr who goes straight to Paradise). It was this religious madness that vanquished their opponents, causing large numbers to switch sides. Of their leader, Mullah Omar, little was known other than that he had lost an eye fighting the Russians, and that before and after taking up arms against the infidels he had spent years studying the faith in a number of madrassahs, or religious schools, across the border in Pakistan. Some said that he had returned to the struggle after the Prophet Muhammad appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to bring peace to Afghanistan; others that he had grown so disgusted by the corruption of the warlords – in particular, the very public marriage of one such warlord to his young catamite – that he had become a willing puppet of Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency, the ISI. Whatever the case, in April 1996 Mullah Omar appeared on a rooftop before a large crowd of mullahs in Kandahar, draped in the city’s most precious relic: the Mantle of the Prophet Muhammad. This was in deliberate imitation of the ceremony by which the second Caliph, Omar ibn al-Khattab, had established his right to rule over all Muslims before going on to enter Jerusalem riding on a white camel in the year 637. The parallel was further reinforced when Mullah Omar was proclaimed Amir ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful), a title first used by the Caliphs in the days of Islam’s golden age. In September 1996 Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Amir ul-Momineen entered the city in a minivan, the deposed former President was castrated and hanged from a lamp-post, and Afghanistan was declared an Islamic state under the divinely ordained laws of Islam (sharia).
Our journey to Kabul took us through country shattered by civil war and the depredations of the warlords. Every foot of the road had been fought over and the roadsides were littered with both buried mines and the graves of Taliban martyrs. Prominent among the latter was a whitewashed stone surrounded by green flags on poles and marked with a notice inscribed in Arabic which Rahimullah translated for me: ‘Hajji Mullah Burjan, military commander of the Taliban Islamic Movement, was martyred at this spot leading an attack against the miscreant and illegal Rabani forces at the Silk Gorge, while trying to bring sharia to Afghanistan.’ A year earlier Mullah Burjan had stood on this same spot being interviewed by Rahimullah and the BBC’s David Loyn before leading a suicidal attack against enemy tanks blocking the road.
Wherever we went it was clear that the Taliban were the heroes of the day: they had brought peace to the land and restored the rule of law – and indeed there was a great deal to admire in them. The groups of black-clad militiamen who manned the check posts and who guarded Jellalabad’s one functioning hotel were disciplined and courteous, if strict in their demands. Those who were willing to talk to us came across as hardened campaigners, but with a naivety and a lack of curiosity about the outside world which reminded me of Red Guards I had met at the time of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966–7. Where they differed markedly from the Red Guards was in their behaviour off duty, when, as often as not, they pulled out pocket mirrors, tweezers, eyeliner and various unguents and began preening themselves.
Rahimullah’s explanation was that many of the Taliban were youngsters orphaned by war, who had been brought up and educated in the hundreds of religious schools set up in Pakistan with funds from Saudi Arabia. For many thousands of young Pathan boys the madrassah had been their home and its male teachers – men like Mullah Omar – their surrogate parents. Here the bonds and shared purpose had been forged which had given these ‘searchers after truth’ their extraordinary aura of invincibility, for the madrassah was not so much a school as a seminary, with a curriculum made up entirely of religious instruction and the study of the Quran. Here they had spent their adolescence rocking to and fro as they learned to recite by heart an Arabic text whose meaning they did not understand but which they knew conferred on them absolute authority in all matters governing social behaviour.
Only once on our brief foray into Afghanistan did Taliban militiamen show us hostility, when we drove south from Jellalabad to the site of a famous Buddhist monastery from the centuries before the advent of Islam. Here we found unusually large numbers of armed guards, and were soon told to go back the way we had come. Only later did it become clear why: in 1996 Mullah Omar’s Taliban Government had given sanctuary to a Yemen-born Saudi national who had earlier helped channel vast sums of Saudi Arabian petro-dollars into the war against the Soviets. His name was Osama bin Laden and he had recently been joined by an Egyptian doctor named Ayman al-Zawahri.
Kabul in 1997 was a city still racked by war, strewn with mines and unexploded ordnance, with entire suburbs roofless and deserted, inhabited only by pariah dogs. We very soon returned to Peshawar, where the contrast could not have been greater, for it was almost literally bursting with humanity: a city that had numbered no more than 250,000 souls when I first came through here in the early 1970s now held ten times that number. Then, it had consisted of two quite clearly demarcated areas: the old city, squeezed within walls laid down centuries earlier; and the civil station, set down outside the city walls in expansive British Raj pattern in the mid-nineteenth century. Now there was suburban sprawl on every side, but especially north of the Grand Trunk Road linking Peshawar to Nowshera and Islamabad. The ploughed fields of twenty-five years before lay under a shantytown of corrugated iron roofs and mud walls extending far across the Vale of Peshawar. This was the Afghan Colony, home to more than two million refugees.
From Peshawar my travels took me northwards to Hoti Mardan, which stands almost at the centre of the Vale, bounded on one side by the mountain ranges of Swat and Buner and on the other by the Kabul and Indus rivers. Hoti Mardan is now the Pakistan Army’s Punjab Regimental Centre, but for well over a century it was the headquarters of that most famous of British India’s frontier regiments, the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides Cavalry and Infantry, formed by twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Harry Lumsden in 1847 from volunteers drawn from the surrounding tribes. The first of these irregular soldiers were Yusufzai or ‘sons of Joseph’, a Pathan tribe originally from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan which had conquered the Peshawar valley and the mountains to the north at about the time that King Henry VII was establishing his Tudor dynasty in England and Wales. The Yusufzai today are one of the largest of the Pathan tribes and their territories extend northwards from the Kabul River for a hundred miles into the mountain fastnesses of Swat and Buner. They are honoured among the Pathans as the purest of their number in terms of their blood-line.