The Sewing Circles of Herat Read online

  The Taliban say this is a war on Afghanistan. Some of our friends say we must now support the Taliban against the outside but how can we support those who lock us away?

  We listen secretly to the BBC and hope that Mr Bush and Mr Blair mean what they say.

  I hope they do not come and bomb and forget us again. Maybe when you watch the bombs on television you will think of me and know we are real feeling people here, a girl who likes to wear red lipstick and dreams of dancing, not just the men of beards and guns.

  Marri

  1 Until Mullah Omar took it out in November 1996 and displayed it to a crowd of ulema or religious scholars to have himself declared Amir-ul Momineen, Prince of all Islam, the last time had been when the city was struck by a cholera epidemic in the 1930s.

  2 The Koh-i-noor left Afghanistan when it was given by Shah Shuja to Ranjit Singh, the wily one-eyed ruler of Punjab, as payment for helping restore him to the Kabul throne in 1839, then was appropriated by the British after the defeat of the Sikhs and annexation of the Punjab in 1849. It was the prize exhibit in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and was then recut to the present 109 carats and worn in the crowns of Queen Victoria, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, but no kings for it is still considered unlucky for males.

  3 ‘Salah furush’, or weapons seller, had become a term of abuse in Afghanistan as many commanders enriched themselves by selling off arms or signing false receipts to the ISI for more arms than they actually received, getting a kickback in return.

  4 Although Dr Brydon is generally remembered as the only survivor, in fact a few hundred Indian soldiers and camp followers did stagger into Jalalabad or back to Kabul a few days later, while some of the British women and children and married officers were taken hostage on the fifth day by Akbar who took them to Bamiyan where they were rescued by the Army of Retribution nine months later.

  3

  Inside the House of Knowledge

  ‘How can you have a minister for railways?’ asked the Pakistani,

  ‘you don’t have any trains in Afghanistan?’

  ‘You have a Justice Minister,’ replied the Afghan.

  Mujaheddin joke

  AS I STOOD AT Hamid Karzai’s doorway in Quetta’s Satellite Town a week after the attack on the World Trade Center, war in Afghanistan was once again imminent, but it was reawakening long-buried ghosts from the past that worried me, not the future. By then I had been a foreign correspondent for fourteen years and knew that conflicts often seem more dangerous from a distance than when one is there. I rang the bell. The Karzai house was salmon-pink and high-walled and the front step piled high with dusty sandals. Tribesmen with Kalashnikovs stood guard, for Hamid had become chief of the Popolzai and was a prime Taliban and al Qaeda target, particularly since September 11th. Two years earlier, on 14 July 1999, his father had been assassinated on the road behind the house, shot dead by a man on a motorcycle while he was chatting to a neighbour on the way back from evening prayers.

  Though I had never gone back to Afghanistan after Jalalabad, I had seen Hamid in Pakistan several times, whenever I returned to cover one of the periodic removals of an elected Prime Minister by the all-powerful military, always laughing as we recalled our days of mud-crabs and ditchwater. It was a story he loved to recount to other people, telling them, ‘she was part of the jihad’.

  The resistance had finally ousted the Communist regime in 1992, three years after the Russians had left and the ill-fated attempt to capture Jalalabad. Hamid had been made Deputy Foreign Minister in the mujaheddin government. But he had quickly become disillusioned and resigned in May 1993 as the leaders turned on each other, and fighting between the forces of Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud destroyed much of the capital and killed thousands of civilians.

  One evening in 1995, over dinner in Islamabad, Hamid said he had something to tell me.

  ‘Remember the Mullahs Front?’ he asked. ‘Well those same guys on motorbikes are now running Kandahar!’

  I looked at him in astonishment. ‘The motorbiking mullahs are the Taliban?’

  ‘They are good honest people, you remember,’ he replied. ‘Besides things have been so bad, you can’t imagine. People go to bed not knowing if they’ll wake up. They are the only hope.’

  He explained that the key members of the Mullahs Front were all on the Supreme Shura of the Taliban and he had moved to Quetta and was travelling around trying to raise funds for them. Bor Jan, the house-proud commander with his bucket-shower and pots of geraniums, was now Mullah Bor Jan, the commander-in-chief of the Taliban forces. As they swept across the country capturing Helmand, Herat, Jalalabad and eventually Kabul, I would later hear him described as the Rommel of the Taliban. Abdul Razzak, the Airport Killer, was his deputy and a member of Mullah Omar’s ruling council in Kandahar. Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, the important man who had come to greet Hamid in the orchards of Argandab, was regarded as Mullah Omar’s number two and was also part of his inner cabinet as well as commanding forces in Loghar province. Mullah Ehsanullah Ehsan, the man who had so clearly disapproved of me and had boasted of his father burning down cinemas and girls’ schools, was also on the ruling shura. Ratmullah and even young Abdul Wasei, the former raisin-cleaner who had guarded my showers, were commanding units.

  Little was known about the Taliban at that point but what I had heard made me uncomfortable. In Kandahar, which they had captured in October 1994, they had closed girls’ schools and told all women to give up work and stay home, and were doing the same in Herat. Yet Hamid seemed convinced that they simply wanted to establish security in the country then would invite back the king. He reminded me that our friends in the Mullahs Front had been royalists. He himself had given them $50,000 and arranged for the king’s son-in-law and military commander General Abdul Wali to fly over to Pakistan to meet with them on the border at Torkham.

  But within a year of my dinner with Hamid, both Bor Jan and Mullah Mohammed Rabbani had died mysteriously. The speculation was that they had been got out of the way because of their pro-monarchical sympathies. Bor Jan had been killed when his pick-up hit a land-mine in the Silk Gorge during the final advance on Kabul. After the capture of the capital in September 1996, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani had been appointed head of the six-man shura in charge of Kabul then suddenly disappeared, supposedly shot while walking in the street.

  Abdul Razzak, who had also acquired a Mullah title, was the only one of the three motorbiking commanders to remain on the ruling council and had become Governor of Herat. From there he opened the western front against General Dostum and went on to lead the Taliban forces into Mazar-i-Sharif in May 1997 where he met his death, amid fierce fighting, as his men were driven from the city. Abdul Wasei was said to be heading one of the units of the feared moral police. Mullah Ehsanullah Ehsan1 had become Governor of the State Bank and was also commanding an elite force of 1000 crack troops.

  As for Hamid, he had fallen out with the Taliban and become one of their strongest critics. He explained that first they had been taken over by ISI, then, ‘others had started appearing at their meetings, silent ones I did not recognise. I realised they had been infiltrated by terrorists, people like Osama bin Laden who were thoroughly corrupt and I did my best to tell the world.’

  If anyone could offer insight into what had been happening in Afghanistan that had led to the World Trade Center attack it was him, and the pile of shoes outside his door suggested I was not the only one to think it. I was ushered into a downstairs room where he was sitting cross-legged on the floor holding court with a group of commanders, tribal elders and a former headmaster, and immediately provided with a glass of tea and a dish of sugared almonds. For as long as I had known Hamid he had been clean-shaven and I was surprised to see he was growing a beard. It was streaked with silver and made him look older than his forty-four years.

  ‘I’m very upset,’ he said, after greeting me warmly then telling me off as usual for having tried to talk to him on the phone, which he insisted was bugged by IS
I. ‘I knew something like this would happen. If people had listened to us in London and Washington two years ago all those lives would have been saved.’

  A few days later he invited me to dinner. Once again the house was full of men. Under pressure as head of the tribe to take at least one wife, Hamid had got married the previous year to a woman doctor, the daughter of a friend of his father. His mother also lived with them, but as always in Pashtun houses, even an enlightened one, the women were nowhere to be seen. During dinner he was less garrulous than usual and the realisation dawned on me. Gesturing to his beard, I said, ‘You’re planning to go inside, aren’t you?’

  He said nothing. Later, as we said goodbye, I asked, ‘If you go can you take me with you?’

  ‘Let’s see, ma’am,’ he replied, which I knew meant no.

  ‘It will be just like before,’ I pleaded. But I knew it wouldn’t. Nothing was like before. The Taliban were a different enemy and we were living different lives.

  The next day I got a message from the hotel reception to say a Mr Karzai had rung. When I called back, his assistant Malik said he had gone to Karachi and was uncontactable. A few days later I called again and Malik said he was in Islamabad, still not reachable. Malik was not a good liar. Then I heard that Abdul Haq had led a force inside to fight the Taliban and I knew where Hamid had gone. I supposed if I felt guilty for having travelled with the mullahs on motorbikes and thought they were the good guys, he must have felt more so. The next time we spoke was by satellite phone and he was in the mountains of Uruzgan, north of Kandahar, home territory of Mullah Omar.

  There seemed little point in staying in Quetta. I had received another letter from Marri in Kabul, even more moving than the first, but I doubted that she could smuggle any more out as the Americans had begun bombing Afghanistan. The start of the bombing had sparked off riots in Quetta, Taliban sympathisers burning down banks and cinemas showing the latest Antonio Banderas movie, and stoning the Serena hotel where all journalists and UN workers were staying. In the mosques, mullahs were issuing fatwas to kill all Americans and British. One morning we woke to find that an anti-aircraft gun had been mounted on the roof and local police had locked us in, meaning all we could do was sit in our rooms watching the green flashes on CNN that were Pentagon film of bombing raids. The lobby of the hotel was full of ISI agents and on the rare occasions we were allowed out, after signing a paper saying we accepted ‘all life risk’, they followed us everywhere. Conversations had become meaningless.

  One day in a refugee camp I met a widow whose eleven-year-old son Abdul was a student at a madrassa called Haqqania and she told me that she had not been allowed to hug him since he was eight. A cart of green apples pulled by a small one-eyed donkey passed as I asked her why she sent him there, and she pointed at it and said simply, ‘I have four children and they have never tasted apples.’ The madrassas provide free board and lodging. Thousands of these religious schools had sprung up in Pakistan’s border areas since the start of the jihad, larger versions of Abdul Razzak’s camp in Khunderab, where education consisted of sitting at low tables rocking back and forth intoning page after page of the Koran in Arabic, a language incomprehensible to Abdul and his schoolfellows, most of who were Pashto-speakers. But there was little other schooling available for refugees, the billions of dollars of foreign money that had poured in during the war against the Russians going on weapons rather than books.

  Haqqania was not just any madrassa. Often referred to as the ‘Jihad University’, its full name was Darul Uloom Haqqania – the House of Knowledge of Haqqania – and the school had a particular claim to fame. Not only had it conferred the title of Mullah on the man who had once been plain Mohammed Omar, but its prospectus – a thin white book entitled ‘Mission and Services Rendered’ – proudly boasted ‘ninety percent of personnel of Afghanistan’s Taliban Movement are students of Haqqania’.

  This school in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province was the academic fount of the Taliban policies that Marri was writing about in her letters and which Khalil Hassani had described in such chilling detail in the garden of the Serena Hotel. I knew that were I ever to understand how the jocular mullahs on motorbikes had turned into menacing figures who chopped off women’s fingers for wearing nail varnish and considered kite-flying a heinous crime, I needed to enter the House of Knowledge for myself.

  As a Western woman it was never going to be easy to get into a male madrassa where students were taught from an early age to regard communication with such a species as the fast route to eternal damnation. The Haqqania view on females was summed up by its spokesman Maulana Adil Siddiqui who had publicly stated: ‘It is biologically, religiously and prophetically proven that men are superior to women.’

  But my plans to visit Haqqania could hardly have started less auspiciously. The rector, Maulana Sami-ul Haq, was a fundamentalist cleric, who, as a close friend of both Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, was leading criticism of the Pakistan government’s decision to support America’s war on terrorism – though as he himself privately conceded they had not had a lot of choice. When President Bush said to General Musharraf, ‘you’re either with us or against us’, to choose the latter would have implied Pakistan becoming a target itself. Anyway Pakistan was now ‘on side’ so Maulana Sami-ul Haq had been placed under house arrest and was not meeting with western journalists. However, in the way things work in Pakistan, his late father had been the close friend of the late father of one of my friends, so on the day he was released from house arrest, I was telephoned with the address of a basement flat in Islamabad and told to be there at 3.30 p.m. ‘British time’ – in other words, punctually.

  Islamabad is an artificial capital that was ordered by a general and designed by a Greek. The buildings are white and in keeping with its sterile environment, the city has no street names but an Orwellian address system of letters and numbers starting from Zero Point and including a wide thoroughfare leading to the oft-closed parliament called Constitution Avenue, which locals call Suspended Constitution Avenue. In the more upmarket F and E sectors, the houses tend to be modelled on the White House with tall columns and wedding-cake tiers but our meeting was in a basement flat in the city’s slightly down-at-heel G8 sector. I arrived with my friend and colleague from the Sunday Telegraph, photographer Justin Sutcliffe, at the appointed hour to find a dark red corrugated-iron gate between us and the apartment. There was no doorbell and banging on the gate elicited no response. The gate did not seem to be locked so after standing there for a while, Justin tried pushing it. The stone pillars either side started to shift ominously and the top of one fell off. Horrified, we quickly balanced the bricks back together but a large crack had appeared in the wall. A few minutes later a jeep drew up with the Maulana inside. His driver jumped out to open the gate and Justin and I looked at each other in panic. There was a loud crash and the entire wall collapsed to the ground. We had gone to meet one of the world’s most anti-western clerics and had destroyed his front wall.

  Sami-ul Haq standing by his garden wall.

  Fortunately Sami-ul Haq was a mullah with a sense of mirth. ‘So the foreign terrorists have arrived,’ he giggled, his long orange henna-ed beard waggling merrily and eyes watering under his heavy black-rimmed bi-focals as he waved us in past the rubble. ‘This must be what they mean by collateral damage.’

  A politician who had served as a senator during the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, Sami-ul Haq was sixty-three but his apartment was as unkempt as that of a student. It was just one room with a bed and a camping stove on the floor surrounded by unwashed dinner plates and pans, opening onto a grimy bathroom, and I remembered that there had always been a whiff of personal scandal around his name. He did not seem embarrassed, tying an orange turban round his head with an impressive twist then fixing his brown eyes on me intently.

  ‘We have met before,’ he stated as he rummaged under the bed and unearthed a two-thirds-full bottle of flat Pepsi, which he began po
uring into teacups. I did not recall and thought it odd that a man who ran a school which had endorsed a call from Osama bin Laden to kill all Americans should be serving American fizzy drink, but it seemed wiser to start what might be a fraught conversation more diplomatically. As he handed out the cups, I asked the maulana what it was like to be known as ‘The Man who Taught the Taliban’. ‘Every teacher is proud of his students, particularly when they humiliated one of the world’s superpowers and are not bowing before the other superpower,’ he replied. ‘The Taliban are not dangerous people, they are just misunderstood.’

  If anyone knew the Taliban he did. The large number of Taliban with the surname Haqqani such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, the army chief, were all graduates of Haqqania as were the Prime Minister, many ministers and judges, and the Governors of Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad. But he insisted, ‘I am their teacher not their commander. And actually like all pupils, they don’t always listen to me. I’ve been advising them not to be harsh, to be lenient. For example I tried to stop them destroying the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan earlier this year but they went ahead.’

  The maulana was being modest. It was well known that he was in regular contact with Mullah Omar whom he had first met in 1996 and had awarded him Haqqania’s first-ever honorary degree as he had not done the necessary three years study to become a mullah. ‘He phones me for advice about decisions on Shariat – Islamic law,’ he admitted. ‘He’s a very pious and humble man with no formalities who sits on the floor.’