Читать книгу Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World - Christina Lamb - Страница 16

Quetta, February 2002

The Additional Secretary Home and Tribal Affairs for Baluchistan was fed up. ‘Look at all these files, it’s rubbish!’ he barked. ‘This whole building is filled with rubbish!’

I could hardly disagree. Every available surface was covered with tottering piles of dusty files spewing out yellowing papers, and from adjoining offices came the sound of clattering typewriters churning out more. A stream of men wandered in and out, bringing files back and forth containing carbon-copied letters to be signed and placed in other files.

‘You people did this,’ he said, waving his hands. In fact, I suspected things hadn’t really changed since colonial days, though I wasn’t sure if he meant the bureaucracy, or if he was gesturing at the map on the wall. It was a large hand-drawn map of the region on which the land north of Afghanistan was marked ‘Russian Dominions’, while that to the west was ‘Caucasia’. Some parts had been shaded in different colours, and there was an explanatory key code at the bottom: Red = Tribes in Baluchistan; Blue = Pathan in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and, confusingly, Blue [though a slightly different blue] = Miscellaneous Tribes in Iran.

A gold-lettered wooden board over the Additional Secretary’s desk showed that no one stayed long in the post. Humayun Khan was the eleventh occupant in fourteen years, and that included several long periods for which the board was inscribed ‘Post Vacant’, as if that were a person’s name.

I was trying to get something called a No Objection Certificate (NOC) to permit me to travel through the tribal areas to the Afghan border, and he was the only person who could grant one. However, he had a thick blue file which he explained was on me. ‘What are these “undesirable activities”?’ he asked, leafing through it. ‘You are a terror! More, more undesirable activities,’ he intoned. ‘Undesirable activities, I suppose they are one of the great indefinables, like national interest or supreme national interest. Frankly, Mrs Lamb, I am surprised you are back in Baluchistan.’

So was I. It was less than ten weeks since my previous stay had come to an abrupt halt when I’d been woken up by ISI banging on the door of my room in the Serena Hotel at 2 a.m. Probably the last place on earth I wanted to be was back in Quetta, particularly on my own. However, I had spent the previous few weeks in Kandahar, where I learned that when the Taliban surrendered this, their final stronghold, without a shot on 7 December 2001, they had fled to the Pakistan border in their thousands. There they were met by ISI officials and Frontier Constabulary who shepherded them to camps, madrassas or houses in a suburb of Quetta known as Satellite Town, and told them to lay low. The B52s may have driven the Taliban out of Afghanistan in less than sixty days, but in their view they had only lost the battle, not the war.

Among them were most of the leadership, who would come to be known as the Quetta shura. My friend Dr Umar, who used to run reception committees for Arabs coming to fight in the jihad, had close connections with senior Taliban. He offered to take me for tea with some of the ministers, and I had no intention of passing up the chance. The problem was how to do it without being caught by ISI. The agency received a list of every foreigner who flew into Quetta or checked into any of the few hotels, and as a tall, blonde Englishwoman, if I took the bus from Karachi I would be very conspicuous.

My plan was to go to Quetta openly, stating that I was on my way to Kandahar, just over the border. This would also give me a chance to talk to people in the frontier towns of Chaman and Spin Boldak. I would cross over legally, then sneak back into Pakistan using the old mujaheddin trails. ISI would assume I was in Afghanistan.

It wasn’t a great plan, and frankly I was terrified. It also depended on me getting an NOC, and this depended on the crotchety Additional Secretary. A series of phone calls got me nowhere, and I had been forced to check back into the Serena.

I didn’t get much sleep, for there was a picture I couldn’t get out of my head. Two weeks earlier, on 23 January 2002, an American reporter named Daniel Pearl from the Wall Street Journal had been kidnapped in Karachi while investigating links between militant groups and Richard Reid, the British shoe bomber. Just before I travelled to Quetta an email had been sent to news organisations with photos of a frightened Pearl in shackles with a gun to his head, and a warning for all American journalists in Pakistan to leave within three days.

The sender was the ‘National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty’, a group that nobody had heard of, and they seemed to have strange demands. Apart from the release of 177 Pakistanis being held in Guantánamo, they were demanding the delivery of American F16 fighter jets purchased by Pakistan in 1989 but never handed over. I’d never heard of a terrorist group demanding F16 jets. However, anyone who had spent much time in Pakistan knew that the F16s are a national obsession. The issue was frequently raised in newspaper editorials, and the jets vied with Bollywood stars as the favourite thing to paint on the colourfully decorated Bedford trucks that transport goods around the country. Most of all they were an obsession of Pakistan’s powerful generals, for whom they were a festering sore in relations with Washington.

The issue went back to the late 1980s, when Pakistan and the US had been going through a good patch in relations (or at least shared a common interest), working together to train and arm the Afghan mujaheddin to oust the Russians. In 1989 Pakistan had ordered twenty-eight F16s from the American company General Dynamics for $22 million each. But in 1990, before the planes could be shipped, the sale was cancelled by Congress because of reports that US jets bought by the military ruler General Zia in 1983 had been modified to carry nuclear warheads. The departure of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1989 meant the US was no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear activities, and the F16s were sent to a facility in the Arizona desert known as ‘the boneyard’. Not only did the US refuse to reimburse the $656 million paid by Pakistan to American defence contractors, but to add insult to injury they also charged it for storage. The episode left Pakistan’s generals convinced that Americans couldn’t be trusted. They only got the money reimbursed by the Clinton administration a decade later after they hired former White House lawyer Lanny Davis. But really they wanted the planes.

‘It’s either ISI or someone wanting to make it look like ISI,’ said Umar when the kidnappers’ demands circulated.

Pakistan is a land of conspiracy. Everyone I met told me that ISI had encouraged the kidnapping of Pearl to discourage other foreign journalists from investigating the country’s murkier links. If that was so, they had been pretty successful. When I had last stayed in Quetta two months earlier, the Serena had been so packed with journalists that some were even paying to rent the laundry cupboard or to sleep on the floor of the ballroom. This time it was empty.

I had no intention of spending more time in Quetta than necessary. So that morning when I got into the Additional Secretary’s office, I was determined that I would not leave without the NOC in my hand.

It seemed clear that the real problem was that no one wanted to take responsibility. While the Additional Secretary was complaining to me, another carbon-copied letter came down from the section officer upstairs, this time on green paper. ‘Regarding Mrs Christina Lamb,’ it stated. ‘The NOC could be issued or otherwise.’

Mr Khan pushed it aside. ‘The only reason you Britishers are successful is because of the cold weather,’ he said. ‘I went to Britain once, to Brighton and Blackpool. It wasn’t worth it,’ he added dismissively.

I had no idea which way he was leaning, when suddenly he reached for his pen. ‘If no one else wants to take responsibility I suppose I’ll have to use my discretion,’ he said.

After a second near-sleepless night in the Serena, I couldn’t believe it when I woke the next morning to snow – the first in Quetta for fifteen years. Everyone in town was happy, because it meant the end of drought. I was worried the snow would trap me in the Serena for more sleepless nights, but Umar turned up as promised with his ambulance, in which we would travel to the border. ‘It’s good luck for your trip,’ he said, smiling. He may have spoken too soon. By the time we collected the guards assigned by Mr Khan’s office and headed towards the Khojak Pass, the snow was falling quite thickly, coating the hills and making the way treacherous.

The road to the border follows the railway from Quetta to the border town of Chaman, built by the British in the 1880s, after the Second Anglo–Afghan War. The railway was clearly intended to go into Afghanistan – to the fury of King Abdur Rahman, who described it as ‘like pushing a knife into my vitals’, and forbade his subjects from travelling on it. It is an incredible feat of engineering, snaking in and out of the pass via tunnels through the mountains, including the longest one in South Asia, which is commemorated on Pakistan’s five-rupee note.

Even without snow it is inhospitable terrain, and it was perhaps a Baluch idea of a joke to give the towns along the way inappropriate names. There is Gulistan, which means ‘place of flowers’ and has none; Fort Jilla, which has no fort; and Chaman, which means ‘fruit garden’, yet nothing grows there. Most poignant was Sheilabagh, supposedly named after the wife of the chief engineer. Apparently he’d made a bet with the engineer working from the other end of the line that the two tunnels would meet on a certain date. When they didn’t, he committed suicide. The tunnels met the next day.

As we climbed above Sheilabagh the ambulance wheels started slipping and sliding. Umar had no idea how to drive on ice, and kept braking. I tried not to look over the side of the pass, with its precipitous drop. When we finally managed to slip and slide further up the road, we found the way blocked by painted trucks, one heavily overloaded with logs and the other with bright-coloured cloths and mattresses spilling out. Men were shouting unhelpful advice and occasionally pushing.

I jumped out of the ambulance, causing everything to stop, foreign women being rare in these parts, when suddenly an army jeep drove up. Inside were two Pishin Scouts, members of one of the regiments of the paramilitary Frontier Corps originally set up by the British to control smuggling and the border. They got the trucks moved, and one of the officers, Captain Mubashar, gallantly came to my rescue. ‘I will take memsahib in my 4x4,’ he said.

On the way he told me they had spent the night before on foot patrol in the mountains, looking for al Qaeda. It was very difficult, and so far the Pishin Scouts had caught just four Arabs. ‘It’s a very long and porous border and they still have lots of money to pay locals,’ he explained. ‘What about Taliban?’ I asked. Had he seen them coming across the border when Kandahar fell? ‘They have switched from black turbans to white and are tricky to spot,’ he laughed.

Captain Mubashar told me that before 9/11 the Scouts’ main work was stopping smuggling. When I admired a particularly elaborate painted truck, jingling with chains, he said, ‘Behind the rose is a thorn.’ He explained that the intricate paintings and metalwork often hide cavities in which contraband is hidden – sometimes opium, but also imported Japanese electronics, or just cloth or fruit to avoid duty. Some trucks have as many as twenty cavities. ‘Once I saw a truck of goats which didn’t look right,’ he said. ‘The goats looked too tall.’ When he opened the truck he found it had a false floor, with a whole level below.

Captain Mubashar and his colleagues had been so successful in catching smugglers that the previous year they had sent 550 million rupees in duties and fines to the federal government. But the local tribesmen were furious, and revolted, blocking the road and killing three soldiers. ‘It’s the only industry,’ he explained. ‘There are no factories, and nothing grows, even the apple orchard dried up, so everyone smuggles, even children of five or six have contraband in their pockets.’ In the end they decided to turn a blind eye to the small stuff. But he admitted they had little success in intercepting drugs. ‘They are transported over the mountains on unmanned donkeys which are trained to be terrified of anyone dressed in dark clothes.’ The Frontier Corps wear charcoal shalwar kamiz. ‘They run like mad when we come.’

In Captain Mubashar’s view, the lack of alternative sources of income, combined with the area’s traditional hostility to foreigners and the Pashtunwali honour code, which means strangers must be protected, made it extremely unlikely that any local would cooperate in handing over Taliban or al Qaeda.

I heard the same in the scruffy border town of Chaman, where he left me with Nasibullah, the head of the levies, the local tribal force set up in British times. Nasibullah was sitting in a room with walls painted baby pink with a bottle-green stripe all the way round and dominated by a vast Sony TV which looked suspiciously like the smuggled goods in the trucks we had passed. Around him, their eyes glued to the screen, was a gaggle of men with orange henna-stained beards. Also on the wall were three gilt-framed black-and-white photographs – Nasibullah’s late grandfather, first head of the levies; his father, who came next; and himself. ‘You Britishers created us, then left us orphans,’ he said.

Pashtun hospitality dictates that no visitor can leave without food, however much of a hurry they might be in. A servant laid a plastic cloth on the floor then brought in huge, steaming bowls of fatty lamb and a foot-long strip of stretchy nan bread. A plastic jug of water and a dirty towel were passed around for us to wash and dry our hands. The men then began to tear off the bread and scoop up the meat, eating lustily, with loud smacking noises. I tried to avoid the gristle and globules of fat, and to make it look as if I was eating more than I was, something I had perfected after years of practice.

Nasibullah told me that his uncle was head of the Achakzai, one of the tribes that straddles the border. I asked if they thought of themselves as Pakistanis or Afghans. ‘We’ve been Pashtuns 5,000 years, Muslims 1,400 years, then Pakistanis just fifty years,’ he replied. ‘You Britishers with your Colonel Durand divided our tribe. The real Afghan border should be a hundred kilometres south of Quetta, not this fake line of Durand.’

He told me that his men had arrested three al Qaeda they had found being treated in the local hospital and taken them to the authorities in Quetta, but later heard they escaped. As for Taliban, he said that Abdul Razzaq, the Interior Minister, and other senior Taliban were sheltering in the local madrassa run by Abdul Ghani, deputy to Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of one of Pakistan’s main religious parties, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JuI).

What about Osama bin Laden? ‘As long as he stays in our tribal areas he will not be found, because he is protected by Pashtunwali,’ he replied. But the Americans had announced a $25 million reward. Wouldn’t that tempt people? I asked. ‘That doesn’t matter, because most people think he was fighting for Islam,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s too much money. Nobody here understands what that means. They would have been better off offering a herd of goats.’

The last few miles to the border were full of people selling things by the wayside. An old man with an emerald-green turban and a long white beard was crouched on his haunches the way Pashtuns seem to be able to sit all day, with a cockerel in each hand like balancing scales.

It was almost dark when I finally reached the border post. There was a stream of bearded men blatantly walking to one side of it rather than through. Inside, a white-haired man was sitting at a desk. He looked relieved to see me. ‘Ah, Christina Lamb, I have been waiting for you,’ he said, unfolding a typed carbon copy, headed ‘Deletion of Mrs Christina Lamb from Exit Control List’. ‘I was worried you would slip over my border and I would lose my job of twenty years.’

The first thing that went wrong with my plan to sneak back into Quetta was that the new border office in Spin Boldak on the Afghan side tried to take all my money in bribes. The passport office consisted of a group of men lounging on cushions in a smoky room, drinking green tea and inventing ways to extract money from the few people who passed through legally.

‘$200 by order of the Governor for security,’ demanded one of them.

‘I don’t need security,’ I replied.

‘It is not a choice.’

‘$200 for a car,’ came next.

‘I’ve already got a car,’ I protested.

‘It’s for the security guards,’ was the reply.

‘Also $50 entry fee by order of the Foreign Ministry.’

‘I already have a visa,’ I pointed out.

‘That’s for Afghanistan, not for Kandahar.’

‘I’m a journalist, and this is not giving a very good impression of the new Afghanistan,’ I said in exasperation.

This prompted some heated Pashto discussion which I could not follow, but I assumed they were reassessing their extortion. I was wrong.

‘Journalist. $100 for press,’ said one of the men. ‘If you have camera and phone there will be more charges.’

‘What? Where is this written?’ I began to lose patience. ‘Look, I’m a friend of President Hamid Karzai, and I don’t think he would be very happy you are making up all these charges.’

They laughed heartily. ‘Karzai, who is he?’ said one.

It all took so long that when I finally got back outside my driver had disappeared. ‘He’s a hashish smoker and gone to the place where they smoke hashish,’ the guard told me helpfully.

No wonder most people just wandered to the side of the border posts. If Afghan democracy came with endless shakedowns I began to understand why people had initially welcomed the Taliban.

Back in Quetta, this time hidden under a burqa and staying in the curtained-off purdah quarters of a friend’s house, I received a coded message in a telephone call shortly after breakfast on the second day. ‘The carpet has arrived,’ said a voice. ‘It’s a very valuable one, and we can’t keep it here long for security reasons.’

Haste is a relative concept in Pakistan, and it was four hours before the car arrived to pick me up. We drove past the bus station, where a man was holding a muddy pelican on a string, and through the bazaar. I was told to go inside a tailor’s shop with shelves lined with giant rolls of dress material. A door at the back led out onto a rubbish-strewn alley where a man on a motorbike was waiting. We sped down a few roads and into a small mud-walled compound, the home of a local religious leader. I was beckoned into the women’s quarters, where a couple of women lifted my burqa over my head. Finally a bearded old man in a swan-white turban summoned me through the dividing curtain into a room with a large roaring fire. Inside, two men were sitting on floor cushions – the two Taliban Ministers who had agreed to meet me.

It was the strangest feeling. For most of the five months since 9/11 I had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan writing about the evil Taliban regime and meeting one after another of its victims. I had met Hazara women whose husbands had been burned to death in front of their eyes, a Kandahari footballer whose hand was cut off in a public amputation at which officials then discussed whether to also chop off a foot, and a man who had worked as a torturer and was trying to devise ever more cruel tortures.

For a moment I was taken aback. These were some of the world’s most wanted men, but with their beards trimmed short, they looked surprisingly young. I knew the Taliban leadership were mostly in their thirties, but somehow I had thought of them as bigger and older – and more malevolent.

One of the pair, Maulana Abdullah Sahadi, the former Deputy Defence Minister, was only twenty-eight, and looked vulnerable and slightly scared, greeting me with a wonky Johnny Depp-like smile. He told me it was the first time he had ventured out of his hiding place since escaping Afghanistan after the fall of Kandahar two months earlier.

The other Minister, a burly man in his mid-thirties who had agreed to meet me only on condition of anonymity, was responsible for some of the acts that have most horrified the Western world, and looked defiant. After a while we were joined by the Director General of the Passport Office who had issued Afghan visas to some of the Arab fighters who were on America’s most-wanted list.

‘You see, we don’t have two horns,’ said the older Minister with a smile as he poured me tea from a golden teapot and offered me boiled sweets. ‘Now anyone can say anything about us and the world will believe it. People have been saying we skinned their husbands alive and ate babies, and you people print it.’

We started off talking about how they had joined the Taliban. Maulana Sahadi told me his family had moved to a refugee camp in Quetta when he was just five after his father, a mujahid with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, was killed fighting the Russians. The family was very poor, surviving much of the time on bread begged or bought with money earned from sewing carpets, so his mother was pleased when he got a place at a madrassa at the age of eight. His food, board and books were all provided. At some point he learned to use a Kalashnikov, though he would not say at what age, claiming, ‘A gun is such a thing, one day you use it, the next day you master it.’

In mid-1994 a delegation of elders and ulema, or religious scholars, from Pakistan came to the madrassa. ‘They issued a fatwa telling us we must join the Taliban and fight jihad. I joined with a group of friends from the madrassa, so we were there right at the very beginning, in the first attack on Spin Boldak that October. At that time we were only about a hundred people. We were killing men and many of our companions were martyred, but we were happy because we were doing it for Islam. We were the soldiers of God.’

Sahadi went on to fight in battles all over Afghanistan, including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and Bamiyan, commanding five hundred men, then 2,500, then becoming Director of Defence. ‘I would motivate my troops before fighting by telling them that if they were martyred they would go to paradise and could take with them seventy-two of their family members.’ He got on well with Mullah Omar, whom he described as ‘a very nice, good-natured person with good morals. He treated me like a son. Whoever came to him, he treated with respect.’

Eventually, in 1999, Sahadi became Deputy Defence Minister to Mullah Obaidullah. As such he had frequent personal contact with bin Laden, though he insisted that ‘the Arabs were not controlling things. Anyone who supports Islam was welcome in our country – we had British, Americans, Australians.’

Sahadi told me how during the American bombing offensive, he and his colleagues had to keep changing houses in Kandahar to avoid being hit. But he said the Taliban leadership never contemplated handing over bin Laden to save themselves. ‘He was a guest in our country, and we gave him refuge because hospitality is an important part of our code of behaviour. Besides, he was supporting us, giving us money, when no one else was.’ He also complained that the Americans had not given the evidence they had asked for to show bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks: ‘The Taliban leadership do not believe the Twin Towers attack was carried out by al Qaeda. According to my own opinion, the attack was wrong. It is not Islamic to kill innocent people like that.’

The other Minister interjected. ‘What this war is really about is a clash between Islam and infidels. America wants to implement its own kafir religion in Afghanistan. We are the real defenders of Islam, not people like Gul Agha [the Governor of Kandahar] and Hamid Karzai. They are puppets of America.’

But why, then, did the Taliban collapse so easily? ‘We’re not broken, we’re whole,’ insisted Sahadi. ‘We weren’t defeated, we agreed to hand over rather than fight and spill blood. Our people went back to their tribes or left the country. Now we are just waiting. Karzai cannot even trust his own people to guard the presidential palace, but has to have American troops. We are regrouping. We still have arms and many supporters inside, and when the time is right we will be back.’

How had they escaped Afghanistan? ‘We shaved off our beards, changed our turbans from white Taliban to Kandahari [green or black with thin white stripes], got in cars and drove on the road across the border. My beard was as long as this,’ he said, gesturing down to his chest. Among those who had headed across the border were Mullah Turabi, the Justice Minister; Abdul Razzak, the Interior Minister; Qadratuallah Jamal, the Culture Minister; Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the Defence Minister; and Mullah Baradar, deputy to Mullah Omar. The local Pakistani authorities, he claimed, not only turned a blind eye but helped.

‘Thank God this war happened, because now we really know who is with us and who is against us,’ added Sahadi. ‘Karzai went to the other camp. Once he pretended he was with us, but now we see he just wanted power. They will all be brought before justice and punished according to Islamic law. The Americans are celebrating victory, but they have failed. They have not caught bin Laden or Mullah Omar. All they have done is oust our government. We never did anything to them. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan [between Uruzgan and Helmand], and will stay there making contact with those commanders unhappy with the new government. You will see Islam will win out and we will break the Americans into pieces as we did with the Russians and, inshallah, bring back the name of the Taliban.’

I was intrigued, but feared lingering longer in case word of my presence got back to the authorities. The nameless Taliban smiled as I left. ‘You see, unlike you people, we are not in a hurry.’

A week later I was back in Kabul, and went to the headquarters of the ISAF peacekeeping forces, then under the command of the British general John McColl. I asked what they thought about Taliban living freely in Pakistan. They weren’t much use, pointing out that they weren’t allowed outside Kabul, and their job was ‘stabilisation’, not to hunt down militants – that was down to Operation Enduring Freedom, the US forces.

So I went to see the Americans. If I could find Taliban Ministers, then surely they could. Yet by that point only one senior Taliban had been arrested – Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil, the Taliban’s Foreign Minister; and that was only because he surrendered to Afghan officials in Kandahar. He had actually offered to cooperate with the US forces, but instead they imprisoned him in Bagram, which no doubt deterred other Taliban from coming forward.1

Nobody seemed interested. The Taliban was gone, as far as they were concerned. ‘If these are senior Taliban officials, maybe the Pakistani authorities should be arresting them,’ shrugged one US official. ‘Frankly there was no great interest on the part of the Pakistanis in catching Taliban, and it wasn’t our priority,’ said Bob Grenier, who was CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time. ‘I suppose we might have kicked and screamed and held our breath and demanded “By God you’ve got to get these guys,” but that might actually have undermined our efforts in what was for us the greatest priority, and where we already had their active cooperation, which was al Qaeda. I didn’t see any particular reason to do that.’

The lack of will to do anything about the Taliban was infuriating President Karzai. He told me he had even given the Americans the names and addresses of Taliban in Quetta. Both he and his Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah had used their visit to Washington in January to ask the Bush administration to pressure Pakistan. ‘I told the Americans I know the Taliban leaders are in Pakistan,’ said Abdullah. ‘But they were only interested in al Qaeda, and for that they believed they needed Musharraf.’

After going to Washington, Abdullah went to see Musharraf. ‘He told me, “ISI is now under my control, previous governments didn’t control it but I’ve sacked eighty people.” Then he told me his brother was visiting from the US, and said he’s a very free kind of person who likes to travel and wanted to go to Kabul. Musharraf said, “I told him no, it’s not safe,” but then said, “I’ll send him in a bus with my ISI.” I couldn’t believe he was so blatant.’

The very week I was meeting Taliban in Pakistan, Musharraf was being fêted in Washington on his second visit since 9/11. He met Vice President Dick Cheney and had lunch with President Bush at the White House. ‘President Musharraf is a leader with great courage and vision,’ said Bush. ‘I am proud to call him my friend.’

On 12 February 2002, while Musharraf was in Washington, the Pakistan government announced that it had arrested a British-born Pakistani called Omar Saeed Sheikh for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. A graduate of the London School of Economics, this was not the first time twenty-seven-year-old Sheikh had been involved in a kidnapping. He had served time in an Indian jail for the kidnap of four Western tourists in Delhi in 1994. Pretending to be a local, he had befriended the three British and one American travellers and invited them to what he said was his village. They were freed by Indian police and he was jailed till 1999, when he was released in exchange for 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane that had been hijacked to Kandahar.

Mysteriously, Sheikh turned out to have been staying with retired ISI brigadier Ejaz Shah for a week before being handed over to Pakistani police working with the FBI hunting for Pearl in Karachi. Nobody explained why Shah did not turn him in earlier. The CIA believed Sheikh had been working for ISI. Even once he was in police custody, it was a month before the FBI were allowed to interview him. By then it was too late. What we didn’t know when Sheikh’s arrest was announced was that the thirty-eight-year-old Pearl was already dead. Nine days later, on 21 February, a video was handed to the US Embassy entitled ‘The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl’. The horrific footage, showing a knife slitting Pearl’s throat and beheading him, was the first al Qaeda execution recorded on video.2 It ended with the captors demanding the release of all Muslim prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and warning that if their demands were not met they would repeat the scene ‘again and again’.

Pakistan refused to extradite Sheikh. When asked about this, Musharraf said, ‘Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over-intrusive. A media person should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas. Unfortunately he got over-involved.’

Pakistani generals were astonished that the US hadn’t committed more troops to Afghanistan, and that they had allowed bin Laden and so many al Qaeda fighters to escape. Throughout 2002, ISI sent memos to Musharraf saying that the Americans were clearly not interested in Afghanistan and would soon leave, and that the Taliban should be kept as an option.

In February 2003 Mullah Omar emerged from silence with a letter faxed to a Pakistani newspaper, calling on all Afghans to rise up against the Americans and the Karzai government: ‘The Afghans should abandon the ranks of America, the crusaders and their allies, and should immediately start a jihad. Vacate all offices, ministries, provinces so that the distinction between a Muslim and a crusader is made.’

A few weeks later I went back to Quetta, and found the Taliban were no longer in hiding. World attention had moved on to Iraq, where the US was poised to invade any day, and the city had become Taliban Central.

Umar took me to Mizan Chowk, a busy square. Men in black turbans, their eyes lined with black kohl, wandered about openly, exchanging the typical lengthy Pashto greetings. Newsstands openly sold Taliban CDs and tapes, including one of Mullah Omar’s speech.

We visited the New Muslim Speeches Music Shop, which displayed posters and stickers depicting grenades, handheld rocket launchers and other jihadi weapons of choice, imprinted with slogans calling for youth to rise up against the West. Inside were a group of younger men with tightly wound turbans and trousers cropped way above the ankle, which was typical of Taliban. They seemed galvanised by Mullah Omar’s call to arms. ‘We fought before to liberate our country, and we will fight again,’ said one. ‘Now it is time to expel these infidels from our land.’ They told us that they had been in Kandahar when the bombing started, and had come into Pakistan – white flags were flown near the border to tell them it was safe to cross.

One told us that ISI was giving them satellite phones, Toyota pick-ups and motorbikes. Once again the agency was running training camps, just as it had during the jihad in the 1980s, and bringing in arms shipments and funds from the Gulf.

I was fascinated and wanted to talk longer, but my presence was drawing attention, and Umar was growing nervous. He pointed out a car with dark-tinted windows that had stopped nearby.

Later we heard that Taliban commanders were being threatened that if they did not return to the fight, ISI would hand them over to the Americans, and they’d end up in Guantánamo.

After I wrote about what I had seen, Pakistan’s Embassies started excluding Quetta when they issued visas to journalists. ‘It’s for your own safety,’ said the smiling Press Minister at the High Commission in London. ‘But I have friends in Quetta who will keep me safe,’ I pleaded, to no avail. The handful of other journalists who sneaked in were beaten up or arrested, like my good friend Marc Epstein from the French magazine L’Express and his photographer Jean-Paul Guilloteau, who were picked up in December 2003 and held for almost a month. Their fixer Khawar Mehdi Rizvi was accused of sedition, conspiracy and impersonation of Taliban, and was tortured while in jail. He later went into exile in the US, as many Pakistanis have been forced to do.

Next time I got a visa it was stamped ‘Islamabad Only’. ‘No country in the world issues visas just for the capital city,’ I protested.

Back home, I met up with an old friend from ISI in a south-west London bistro full of yummy mummies and ladies who lunch. ‘We never had this conversation,’ he said as we started our soup. ‘What you have to understand is everything we do to cooperate with the Americans there are others who work in the opposite way.’ He referred to what he called ‘the shadow organisation’ – the first time I heard about the so-called ‘Sector S’ – explaining that Pakistan needed to keep its options open, so ISI had an entire group of people who were officially retired, perhaps heading ‘welfare organisations’, but were still training and advising Taliban. ‘It’s all about deniability,’ he said. If any of them were caught, they would be shrugged off as ‘rogue elements’.

My soup got cold as I sat open-mouthed, wondering if Pakistan really could pull the wool over the eyes of the world’s most powerful country. ‘Does Mullah Omar even exist?’ I asked.

‘There is a man with one eye and limited intelligence called Mullah Omar, if that’s what you mean,’ he chuckled. ‘You saw what happened to Danny Pearl,’ he said, as all around us the bistro tinkled with the laughter of gossiping women and small children and sunlight. ‘If I were you, I would know this: I would eat my lunch and I would investigate no further.’