Bin Laden himself was not present at the Khost gathering, having gone home with his family to Jedda to establish a welfare organisation for returned Arab fighters. In Jedda he might well have stayed but for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, which prompted him to contact the Saudi Defence Minister, Prince Sultan, with a proposal to defend Saudi Arabia by calling on his global network of ex-Afghanistan jihadis, beginning with the several thousand Wahhabi veterans now back in Arabia. According to one account, he left the meeting believing his offer had been accepted, so that when he learned subsequently that the Saudi Government had turned instead to the United States of America, it seemed a double betrayal. His strong Wahhabi convictions could not countenance the affront of infidel desert boots on the sacred soil of Arabia, which he saw as a direct defiance of the Prophet’s injunction that there should not be two religions in Arabia. Within months Bin Laden was set on the course that was to send him into permanent exile as a bitter enemy of the House of Saud and of the Wahhabi Establishment that had betrayed its founding fathers. Although his assets in Saudi Arabia were frozen he still had sufficient funds and contacts to became the banker of Al-Zawahri’s Islamic Jihad and the Al-Qaeda confederacy.
In September 1993 New York’s World Trade Center was bombed and six persons killed. This was Al-Qaeda’s first serious act of aggression against the United States of America, and it was followed by further operations in Somalia and Egypt.
12
The Unholy Alliance
In early April 2001 a vast encampment of canvas tents and brightly coloured cotton shamianas sprang up on the plains beside the village of Taro Jaba on the eastern limits of the Vale of Peshawar. Over the course of three days what was reported as the largest gathering ever seen in Pakistan celebrated the achievements of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband madrassah movement. According to its organisers, the JUI, well over one million delegates attended, representing madrassahs in countries as far afield as the United States and South Africa. More than a score of countries sent official delegations, and messages of congratulation were read from such luminaries as Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi. However, the two speeches that received the greatest acclaim were both taped messages. The first was from Mullah Omar, Amir ul-Momineen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The second, for all that the conference organisers blandly denied it, was from ‘al-Shaykh’: Osama bin Laden.
Presiding over the conference was Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, a burly, genial, white-turbaned and, of course, bearded figure in his early fifties, widely known in Pakistan as the ‘Diesel Maulana’ following allegations – not proven – concerning his part in a fuel permit scandal. He had inherited his position as head of a militant faction of JUI from his Dar ul-Ulum Deoband-educated father Maulana Mufti Mahmood, who had guided the JUI party through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. He now chaired a coalition of five Deobandi political groups and was spoken of as the ‘mentor’ of the Taliban. In his concluding address he called on Muslims to unite behind their brothers wherever they were in trouble. ‘No one’, he ended, ‘can bar us from supporting the Taliban or other Muslims fighting for their independence and identity in any part of the world.’ This was five months before the coordinated attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001.
In September 1994, so the popular version goes, a thirty-five-year-old mullah from the Maiwand region outside Kandahar happened upon the scene of a murder: a family driving from Herat to Kandahar had been held up by a local warlord who had raped and killed all the girls and boys in the family. With the help of some local taliban the mullah washed the bodies and gave them a proper burial. This was Mullah Omar, a landless and barely literate Ghilzai Pathan and veteran jihadi who had lost his right eye fighting the Russians but had afterwards become so disillusioned by the corruption of the mujahedeen warlords that he had exchanged his AK-47 for the Quran. He had then resumed his religious studies at the Sang-i-Hisar madrassah in Singesar, a hamlet to the north-west of Kandahar not far from the scene of a famous Afghan victory over the invading British in 1880. So sickened was Mullah Omar by this latest atrocity that he gathered a group of mujahedeen veterans together and swore with them to rid Afghanistan of the devils who were destroying it – and to restore true sharia. This little group then went from mosque to mosque calling for volunteers, and out of this local reaction there developed – with more than a little military assistance from the Hizb-e-Islami and Pakistan’s ISI – the Taliban.
The man who almost by accident founded the Taliban was no ideologue, but the men who joined him and who became his closest lieutenants were very much of a type, for nearly every one of them was the product of a madrassah in one form or another. As Ahmed Rashid says in his book Taliban: The Story of the Warlords, ‘the Taliban represented nobody but themselves and they recognised no Islam but their own’. They described themselves as Sunnis who followed the Hanafi form of Islamic jurisprudence and insisted they were neither Deobandis nor Wahhabis nor followers of any other religious party. But they did have an ideological base, which was linked to ‘an extreme form of Deobandism’. As Rashid explains, ‘The links between the Taliban and some of the extreme Deobandi groups are solid because of the common ground they share… The Deobandi tradition is opposed to tribal and feudal structures, from which stems the Taliban’s mistrust of the tribal structure and the clan chiefs.’
In April 1996, nineteen months after Mullah Omar’s intervention, an unprecedented gathering of Pathan leaders took place in Kandahar. This was not the usual loya jirga but a gathering of ulema on the Arab model, a shura or religious council that bypassed the usual tribal leaders. It was at this shura that Mullah Omar was elected Amir-ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful) before cloaking himself in the Prophet’s mantle and receiving the oath of allegiance (baiat) from all those present. A Pathan-dominated council of ten was then formed with Mullah Omar at its head, and a jihad proclaimed against those Muslims who refused to acknowledge its authority. These actions won widespread support among Afghanistan’s Pathan population but were not welcome to the Tajiks, Uzbeks and other groups who together made up the other half of the country. Nevertheless, with the continuing support of Pakistan and a Saudi-backed switch of sides by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hizb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar) armed force, the ever-growing Taliban army was strong enough to lay siege to Kabul throughout the summer of 1996, culminating in an August offensive which saw thousands of armed but raw taliban from the frontier madrassahs hurrying to join its ranks. Kabul fell to the Taliban in September 1996 and within twenty-four hours the strictest form of sharia ever seen outside Saudi Arabia was imposed on the country. Indeed, it took Saudi Arabia as its model and was in conformity with the theology of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab of Nejd, founder of Wahhabism. Only two governments recognised the Taliban Government: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.