Читать книгу Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World - Christina Lamb - Страница 11

Before exacting revenge, the Bush administration wanted Congressional approval, as under the United States Constitution only Congress can authorise war. So just twenty-four hours after the second plane hit the South Tower, while most people were still trying to digest what had happened, White House lawyer Timothy Flanigan was already sitting at his computer urgently typing up legal justification for action against those responsible.

The last time the US had declared war was in 1991 against Iraq, so he first cut and pasted the wording from the authorisation for that. However, the problem was that this time no one really knew who or where the enemy was, so something wider and more nebulous was needed.

By 13 September Flanigan and his colleagues had come up with the Authorisation for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, for Congress to vote on. At its core was a single sixty-word sentence: ‘That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.’

In other words, this would be war with no restraints of time, location or means.

At 10.16 a.m. on 14 September, the AUMF went to the Senate. The nation wanted action, and all ninety-eight Senators on the floor voted Yes. From there they were bussed straight to Washington’s multi-spired and gargoyled National Cathedral for a noontime prayer meeting called by the White House for the victims of the attacks. It was a highly charged service, with many tears, prayers, a thundering organ and an address by President Bush, followed by the singing of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. Members of Congress were then bussed to the House for their vote. One after another called for unity. Four hundred and twenty voted in favour, and just one against. Barbara Lee, a Democratic Congresswoman from California, was as heartbroken as anyone by 9/11 – her Chief of Staff had lost his cousin on one of the flights. But she worried that what she called ‘those sixty horrible words’ could lead to ‘open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target’. So to the outrage of her colleagues, she stood up and voted No. Her voice cracking, she cried as she asked people to ‘think through the implications of our actions today so this does not spiral out of control’. She ended by echoing the words of one of the priests in the cathedral: ‘As we act let us not become the evil we deplore.’

By the time of the vote, I was on a plane. International air traffic had reopened on 13 September after an unprecedented closing of the skies. Most journalists headed to northern Afghanistan to join up with the Northern Alliance, or to Peshawar in north-west Pakistan, the closest Pakistani city to the border with Afghanistan, and the headquarters of the mujaheddin during the war against the Russians. I headed further west, to the earthquake-prone town of Quetta, which was the nearest Pakistani city to Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban, and like Peshawar had long been home to hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. It was also where my oldest Afghan friend, Hamid Karzai, lived.

I checked into the Serena Hotel, where there were soon so many journalists that makeshift beds were set up in the ballroom. I was happy to be back. From my window I could see hills the colour of lion-skin, populated with tribes so troublesome that the British Raj had given up trying to control them and instead given them guns and cash to leave them alone. Beyond those hills lay Afghanistan.

The town used to be on the overland route for backpackers, and in the 1980s I would see big orange double-decker buses that had come all the way from London’s Victoria station. The buses did not come any more, but little else had changed. On the main Jinnah Road you could still buy a rifle or some jewelled Baluch sandals, both of which were sported by the local men who wandered around hand in hand.

I met up with commanders I had known back in the 1980s when they were young, dashing and full of hope. Now they were potbellied, greying and jaded, but they had been given a sudden lease of life by finding their long-forgotten country the focus of world attention. Just as in the old days we sat cross-legged on cushions on the floor drinking rounds of green tea, served with little glass dishes of boiled sweets (in place of sugar) and crunchy almonds.

The most important call of all my old contacts was Karzai, whom I had got to know when we lived near each other in Peshawar and he was spokesman for the smallest of the seven mujaheddin groups fighting the Russians. His family were prominent landowners from the grape-growing village of Karz, near Kandahar. His father had been Deputy Speaker of parliament, and his grandfather Deputy Speaker of the senate; they were from the majority Pashtun tribe, the same Popolzai branch of the royal family as the unfortunate murdered King Shah Shuja. Karzai had been at school in the Indian hill city of Simla when the Russians invaded, and would never forget the moment his schoolfriends gave him the news. ‘I felt I could no longer hold my head high as a proud Afghan,’ he told me. Though he was the youngest of six brothers, he became spokesman for the family as the only one to stay after the others moved to America and opened a chain of Afghan restaurants called ‘Helmand’ in Baltimore, Boston and San Francisco.

‘If you want to understand Afghanistan you must understand the tribes,’ he urged me on our very first meeting. He invited me to his home to meet elders from across southern Afghanistan who soon had me spellbound with astonishing stories that mostly involved fighting and feuding.

Karzai insisted that the key city of Afghanistan was Kandahar, where its first King, Ahmat Shah Durrani, had been crowned. He took me on my first trip there in 1988, the only time he had gone on jihad, when we rode around on motorbikes and had several narrow escapes from Soviet bombs and tanks. The group we had travelled with, the Mullahs’ Front, went on to become Taliban.

A year after that trip the last Soviet soldier crossed the Oxus River out of Afghanistan, but what seemed an astonishing victory quickly soured as the Afghan mujaheddin all started fighting each other. I moved on to other stories in other countries and continents that didn’t bruise my heartstrings quite as much. I still went back and forth to Pakistan, however, and had last seen Karzai in 1996, when we quarrelled bitterly in Luna Caprese, the only Italian restaurant in Islamabad after he told me he was fundraising for the Taliban.

Later he had turned against them, saying Pakistanis had taken over the Taliban and Arabs had taken over the country, and like Dr Abdullah he kept banging on offices in Whitehall and Washington with Cassandra-like warnings. For years, he too had met only closed doors. The British Foreign Office didn’t even have an Afghan section, and a diplomat in the South Asia section told me Karzai would be palmed off with the most junior official, who would moan, ‘Not him again.’

He moved to Quetta, to the house of his genial half-brother Ahmed Wali, who had supported him through all those years when everyone else had forgotten Afghanistan. Now, of course, everything had changed. As a fluent and eloquent English speaker he had a queue of diplomats, spies and journalists at his, or rather Ahmed Wali’s, door.

Karzai greeted me warmly. His father had been assassinated in 1999 by men on motorbikes as he was walking back from prayers at the mosque around the corner from the house. Karzai blamed the Taliban and Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). He had become head of the tribe after that and needed a wife, so in a betrothal arranged by his mother he married his cousin Zeenat, a gynaecologist at Quetta hospital.

He was shocked by 9/11. ‘If only people had listened,’ he said.‘Everything will change now,’ I replied.

Some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed. Back in the 1980s we had endlessly discussed how ISI were pulling the wool over the eyes of the CIA, which had given them carte blanche to distribute billions of American and Saudi dollars and weapons to the mujaheddin fighting the Russians. Karzai and other Afghans had not forgiven ISI for the way they directed the vast majority to their favourites, the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, or diverted it to fund their own proxy war in Kashmir as well as build their nuclear bomb. In those days they didn’t really hide this, and I’d even been to visit one of their militant training camps just outside Rawalpindi. Their openness had some limits. In 1990, when I wrote stories that Karzai had helped me research on ISI’s interference and on selling arms to Iran, I had been picked up from my apartment in Islamabad, threatened and interrogated by ISI for a night, followed for a week by two cars and a red motorbike, even to a friend’s wedding, then eventually deported.

Now over green tea Karzai insisted that Pakistan was again lying to the US. ‘They are saying they have stopped supporting the Taliban because otherwise the US will declare them a terrorist sponsor state and bomb them too,’ he said. ‘The Americans told them you are either with us or against us. But you and I know it’s an ideology, not just a policy. I promise you they are still supplying arms to the Taliban.’

To start with, I wasn’t sure I believed him. The eyes of the world were on this region. Surely Pakistan would not be so reckless. But I did know that they had got away with it before, and how personally involved many ISI officers in the field were with some of the Taliban after more than twenty years of working with them. I’d had enough discussions with them to agree with Karzai that for many it was an ideology, not a policy – some told me they saw the Taliban as a pure form of Islam, and would like a similar government in Pakistan.

Some strange things were happening. Shortly after 9/11, when President George W. Bush had asked Pakistan’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf for cooperation, Musharraf had asked that the US hold off any action until Pakistan had made a last try at persuading the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. General Mahmood Ahmed, the ISI chief, who had helped to organise the coup that brought Musharraf to power, led a delegation of clerics to Kandahar to personally appeal to Mullah Omar. But Mufti Jamal, one of the clerics who went with him, told me that the General made no such request. ‘He shook hands very firmly with Mullah Omar and offered to help, then later even made another secret mission without Musharraf’s knowledge.’

It seemed ISI had calculated that however the Americans retaliated in Afghanistan, they would eventually lose patience, and like all foreigners before them be driven out. ‘We knew the Americans could not win militarily in Afghanistan,’ I was told by General Ehsan ul Haq, who later replaced Mahmood as ISI chief. Pakistan would, however, still be next-door, so it was understandably hedging its bets. ‘The Americans forget other people have national interests too,’ said Maleeha Lodhi, then Pakistan’s Ambassador to Washington.

From Quetta I went to Rawalpindi to see General Hamid Gul, who had been head of ISI when I lived in Pakistan, running the Afghan jihad. He was virulently anti-American, blaming the US for his dismissal in May 1989. It was the first time I had spoken to him since my deportation, and he insisted to me that the people who had abducted and interrogated me were ‘rogue agents’. He still lived in an army house, and somehow it seemed to me that he was still involved. He had personally known bin Laden, and encouraged Arabs to come and fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, setting up reception committees, which as he said the CIA was very happy to use at the time. Indeed, on his mantelpiece was a piece of the Berlin Wall sent to him by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It was inscribed: ‘With deepest respect to Lt Gen Hamid Gul who helped deliver the first blow.’ ‘You in the West think you can use these fundamentalists as cannon fodder and abandon them, but it will come back to haunt you,’ he had told me in a rare interview just after the Soviet withdrawal. At the time I had not understood what he meant.

General Gul insisted that 9/11 was orchestrated not by bin Laden but Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, to set the West against Muslims and provide an excuse to launch a new Christian Crusade. ‘No Jews went to work in the World Trade Center that day,’ he claimed. He was dismissive about the latest foreigners to enter Afghanistan. ‘The Russians lost in ten years, the Americans will lose in five,’ he said. ‘They are chocolate-cream soldiers, they can’t take casualties. As soon as body bags start going back, all this “Go get him” type of mood will subside.’

Meanwhile, we waited. War had come to America, 3,000 people had been killed in the Twin Towers, and we knew the US administration would soon retaliate. ‘My blood was boiling,’ Bush later wrote in his memoir. ‘We were going to find out who did this and kick their ass.’ In a televised address to both houses of Congress nine days after 9/11, he told the nation that ‘every necessary weapon of war’ would be used to ‘disrupt and defeat the global terror network’. He warned that ‘Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.’

There was one problem. When 9/11 happened, the CIA did not have a single agent in Afghanistan. Only a handful had been there in the previous decade, and they were in the north. The CIA had no contacts among Pashtuns in the south. The FBI had only one officer dedicated to bin Laden. At Fort Bragg the top US special forces continued to be taught Russian, as if the Cold War had not gone away.

While journalists quickly found their way into Northern Alliance strongholds, renting all the available cars and houses, the military took much longer to arrive. The first Americans into Afghanistan after the journalists were a CIA team headed by a man who, at fifty-nine, had thought his days in the field were long over. One of the few agents to have gone to Afghanistan in recent years, Gary Schroen had been involved with Afghanistan on and off since 1978, and had close contacts with the Northern Alliance. He was preparing for retirement when he was called up by the Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), much to his wife’s annoyance. Seventeen days after 9/11 his seven-man team were on an old Russian helicopter into the Panjshir valley to link up with the Northern Alliance.

Apart from communications equipment, the most important part of their baggage was a large black suitcase containing $3 million in cash. On the first night they gave $500,000 to Engineer Aref, intelligence chief for the Northern Alliance, followed by $1 million the next day to Marshal Fahim, who had succeeded Ahmat Shah Massoud as military commander. More money was sent, and within a month they had handed out $4.9 million.

The plan was to send teams of US special forces to join up with Afghan commanders. The Americans would then direct airstrikes using SOFLAMs (Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Markers) to pinpoint targets. They also had GPS systems to provide coordinates, as these could be used in all weathers. B52s would then fly over and drop 2,000-pound smart bombs, which would pulverise the target.

However, when the bombing started, almost a month after 9/11, bureaucratic delays and infighting in Washington meant there was still not a single US soldier inside Afghanistan. The only on-the-ground information was coming from Schroen’s CIA team and the Afghans.

From the start there was friction. America wanted intelligence on al Qaeda safe houses and camps, and most of all they wanted the man behind 9/11. Before he had left the US, Schroen’s boss Cofer Black had told him, ‘I want you to cut bin Laden’s head off, put it on dry ice, and send it back to me so I can show the President.’ The Northern Alliance commanders were more interested in targeting Taliban front lines so they could advance on Kabul and take power.

On Friday, 7 October, President Bush stood in the Treaty Room of the White House and addressed America, announcing the launch of Operation Ultimate Justice (which was quickly renamed Operation Enduring Freedom). A few hours earlier – night-time in Afghanistan – an awe-inspiring fleet of seventeen B1, B2 and B52 bombers had taken off from bases in Missouri and Diego Garcia to drop their bombs on one of the poorest places on earth. Alongside them were twenty-five F14 and F18 fighter jets flown off the decks of aircraft carriers USS Enterprise and USS Carl Vinson in the Arabian Sea. Fifty Tomahawk missiles were launched from American ships and a British nuclear submarine. Several had been painted with the letters ‘FDNY’ – Fire Department of New York – in remembrance of the firefighters who lost their lives trying to rescue victims at the Twin Towers. The heaviest bombing that night was carried out by the B52s, which rained 2,000-pound JDAMs as well as hundreds of unguided bombs aimed at taking out the Taliban air force and suspected al Qaeda training camps in eastern Afghanistan. That first night they struck thirty-one targets.1 The US State Department sent a cable to Mullah Omar via Pakistan informing him that ‘every pillar of the Taliban regime will be destroyed’.

In my hotel room in Quetta I watched on CNN the Pentagon videos of the planes setting off on the bombing raids, and the flashes as targets were hit. Taken on night-vision cameras, the footage was green, with a ticking digital timer running at the bottom, and looked like a video game. I wondered what the Americans could bomb in that country of ruins, with no real infrastructure. Soon they found themselves running out of targets. All the air power in the world was of little use when what they were really fighting was an ideology, not a conventional army.

Our own movements were curtailed by Pakistani minders. For our ‘security’ we were not allowed out of the hotel without the company of one of the ISI agents who frequented the lobby. I’d found a Fuji photographic shop that had a back door into the market through which I could be met by an old friend. He would whisk me off to meet tribal elders or Afghan commanders so they could speak freely while my minder was watching TV in the Fuji shop. I knew I was testing their patience, so sometimes I met people in what we called ‘Nuclear Mountain Park’ – its centrepiece was a model of Chagai in the Baluch hills, where Pakistan had carried out its first nuclear tests three years earlier on what was referred to as ‘Yaum-e-Takbeer’, or Allah’s Greatness Day. Every evening people came out to walk round and round the model nuclear mountain, eating ice creams from a cart decorated with red-tipped rockets.

When the US bombing started across the border there were riots in Quetta, and anything perceived as Western was attacked. In Quetta this was not a lot – basically the cinema and the HSBC bank, which had its cashpoint ripped out of the wall, causing untold inconvenience to us correspondents, as it was the only one. The protests gave ISI an excuse to lock us in the hotel altogether, on the grounds that it was too dangerous for us to venture out.

I kept thinking of what Karzai had told me about Pakistan. Before we were locked in I managed to go to the frontier town of Chaman, where I met a chief of the Achakzai tribe, whose people lived on both sides of the border and controlled the smuggling routes in and out. He told me that trucks coming from the National Logistics Company of Pakistan’s army, supposedly transporting flour, were actually full of weapons for the Taliban.

Nine days into the bombing, on 16 October, a second CIA team, Team Alpha, arrived in Afghanistan, joining General Abdul Rashid Dostum in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. The choice caused consternation among the Northern Alliance leadership. The whisky-loving Uzbek and his feared Jowzjan militia were notorious for atrocities, such as driving over prisoners with tanks, and had fought alongside the Soviets during the jihad, fighting pitched battles against Ahmat Shah Massoud’s forces. Dostum switched over to the mujaheddin in 1992 when the fall of the Soviet-backed President Mohammad Najibullah was imminent, and had only recently linked up with the Northern Alliance. In their view he was not to be trusted. They thought the CIA team should have been placed with their long-time commander Mohammad Ustad Atta, Dostum’s rival for control of the city.

The first US military to set foot in Afghanistan was special forces team ODA 555, codenamed ‘Triple Nickel’, which was flown in from Uzbekistan and landed on the Shomali plains north of Kabul on 19 October to join Marshal Fahim and his CIA advisers. The following day a second special forces team, ODA 595, joined General Dostum in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. A third group was dropped south of Kandahar. Using SOFLAMs, they laser-guided bombs from US fighter jets onto Taliban targets with such precision that Dostum bragged on the radio to Taliban that he had a ‘death ray’. They also attempted to organise the Afghan fighters, and were joined by SAS and some Australian special forces.

Back in Quetta, the nights had started to chill. We had all grown tired of the nightly lamb barbecue and fresh apple juice in the orchard. American newspapers were already talking of quagmires. It felt as if we might be there for a long time.

One day, shortly after the bombing had started, I knocked at Karzai’s door to be told by his assistant, Malik, that he had gone away.

‘Where has he gone?’ I asked.

‘Karachi,’ he replied.

Malik was not a good liar. ‘He’s gone to Afghanistan, hasn’t he?’ I said.

Karzai had told me he’d been planning to go to southern Afghanistan to try to raise support. I’d begged him to take me along. ‘Taking you inside is as easy as cracking this nut,’ he had said, holding up an almond. ‘The problem is what to do then.’

He’d always felt insecure about the fact that he hadn’t actually fought in the jihad. The only time he had gone inside Afghanistan during the war against the Russians was our trip to Kandahar in 1988. If he was going to play an important role in whatever government replaced the Taliban, he needed to prove his bravery. Also, Pakistan had cancelled his visa, so if he stayed in Quetta he could be arrested.

His intention was to go and rally the southern tribes against the Taliban. He seemed to think this would be quite easy. I couldn’t help remembering our own trip to Kandahar, and the way we kept almost being bombed by the Russians as he naïvely broadcast his presence everywhere by radio. Now he was heading into the Taliban’s own backyard.

Ahmed Wali said he’d tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. One day Karzai told his wife he was going to visit some relatives near the border, and to pack him a toothbrush. ‘If I don’t come back after two days forget about me,’ he had said.

He’d set off on a second-hand motorbike, accompanied by a few trusted elders. He had asked for help from the CIA, meeting with his case officer ‘Casper’ in Islamabad. They thought his mission was crazy, so provided him only with a satellite phone and an emergency phone number. He was so poorly equipped that he had to send someone back out to Ahmed Wali in Quetta on a motorbike with the phone batteries for charging.

Over in the east, another old friend from the jihad days had gone into Afghanistan with the same idea. Abdul Haq had been the main mujaheddin commander in the Kabul area during the Russian occupation, and had lost his right foot to a landmine. Like Karzai he was a long-time critic of ISI. He had kept fighting, but eventually left Peshawar for Dubai after his wife and son had been killed there in 1999 – he believed by ISI. After 9/11 he returned to Peshawar and began renewing his old mujaheddin networks. While Karzai headed west, Abdul Haq gathered supporters to head into his home area of eastern Afghanistan around Jalalabad, where his family were very influential, and planned to start a Pashtun uprising against the Taliban.

A charismatic man with twinkling eyes, Abdul Haq always liked to talk. Back in the eighties I had spent many afternoons with him in his house in Peshawar, eating pink ice cream and listening to his stories of the war and why it was going wrong. Predictably, he had told journalists of his plans before setting off over the border on 21 October with his nephew Izzatullah and seventeen men, mostly veterans of the jihad. They had travelled in pick-ups, crossing the border the old way near Parachinar, stopping for the night under the stars, sleeping under Orion and the Milky Way.

It was hard for Haq to walk far over the rugged mountains because of his artificial foot, so the next morning they mounted horses in Jaji, near where bin Laden used to have a camp. They rode through the Alikhel gorge, which had been a favourite spot for ambushing Soviet convoys. But just as their own forces had cut off that road in the past, they soon found themselves cut off by the Taliban, and in the midst of a firefight.

As the bullets were flying, Izzatullah ducked behind a rock and managed to make a call to the US on the satellite phone. He telephoned Bud McFarlane, a retired CIA agent who had been a long-time backer of his uncle. McFarlane contacted the Agency headquarters at Langley, Virginia. But they could do nothing, and the men were captured and taken to Jalalabad.

On 26 October we got the news that Haq had been executed. He was forty-three. I was horrified. He seemed to me to have been one of the genuinely good people, and someone who might have been critical for Afghanistan’s future. His friends believed he had been betrayed by ISI.

I was worried about Karzai.

Frustrated by not being able to report freely in Quetta, I flew to Karachi to meet Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a cleric close to Mullah Omar and the Taliban who headed the Banuri complex, the city’s largest madrassa. Some said it was he who had first introduced Mullah Omar and bin Laden. He laughed at the idea that Pakistan had stopped supporting the Taliban. He had personally declared a fatwa against the US.

The evening I returned to Quetta I went to Ahmed Wali’s house. We spoke to Karzai on the satellite phone, and he told me some of the things he had seen crossing the border. I got back to the Serena just before the 9 p.m. curfew, planning to write my story for my paper the next day.

I am lucky to sleep well even in war zones, and was deeply asleep when around 2 a.m. I was woken by pounding on my door. Through the spyhole I could see the hotel’s duty manager with a group of five men. Wearing grey shalwar kamiz and aviator glasses even at night, they were instantly identifiable as ISI.

‘There are some guests for you,’ said the duty manager.

‘It’s the middle of the night!’ I protested. ‘Tell them to come back in the morning.’

I started walking back to my bed, but the duty manager had the room key, and one of the men in grey snapped the door chain. I was shocked rather than scared. I was in pyjamas, and to have strange men barging into my room in an Islamic country where I had always thought there was respect for women was unbelievable. They snatched my mobile phone, which was charging on the side cabinet, and told me I was going with them.

They let me dress after I protested, then marched me downstairs to reception, where I was made to pay my bill before leaving. I was glad when another group of men appeared holding Justin Sutcliffe, the photographer I was working with. They tried to put us in separate vehicles, but we made so much fuss that they finally bundled us into the same jeep, and we were driven off into the night.

The streets were deserted because of the curfew, and for the first time I felt scared. They could do anything they liked with us, and nobody would know. I was relieved when we turned into a driveway rather than out into the vast Baluch desert. At the end was an abandoned bungalow. Inside, the only furniture was a bed. We were told to sleep while our nine guards sat around and watched. We later discovered this was the old rest-house of Pakistan Railways from colonial times. Fortunately Justin always travelled with spare supplies, and he whispered to me that he had managed to secrete a phone in a pocket. During the night he went to the toilet, from which he called our newspaper while I distracted the guards by pretending to be hysterical. None of our editors answered, as it was the middle of the night back in the UK, but eventually Justin managed to get hold of our Washington correspondent, David Wastell.

The next night our guards drove us to the airport, radioing colleagues with the code ‘The eagle has landed.’ We were put on a flight to Islamabad and handed over to the FIA, another Pakistani intelligence agency, where no one seemed to know who had ordered our arrest or why. The FIA Director was at a loss what to do, as his cells were being rebuilt, so he kindly fed us some of his own curry dinner and put us under guard in the VIP section of the departure lounge. The next day a diplomat came from the British High Commission, who unhelpfully told us the best thing in terms of our security would be if we left Pakistan. We were unceremoniously deported.

The typed expulsion notices were dated 3 November 2001, and signed by Shah Rukh Nusrat, Deputy Secretary to the government of Pakistan. Mine stated: ‘Whereas Miss Christina Lamb, British national acting in manner prejudicial to the external affairs and security of Pakistan it is necessary that she may be externed from Pakistan. Now because in exercise of the powers conferred by section 3 subsection 2 clause C of the Foreigners Act the federal government is pleased to direct that the Miss shall not remain in Pakistan and should leave the country immediately.’

The Pakistani newspapers printed a ludicrous story, fed from ISI, that we had tried to buy a plane ticket in the name of Osama bin Laden. Years later I would still get asked why we had done this.

My relationship with Pakistan had been conflicted since my previous deportation. As we were led onto the PIA plane (having been asked to pay for the ticket, which we refused to do), I vowed I would never go back.

Shortly after take-off, one of the stewardesses came and said the pilot was inviting us into the cockpit. We were astonished. This was less than two months after 9/11, and the world’s airlines had all issued instructions to keep cockpits locked. I pointed out we had been deported as threats to national security, but she just smiled and led us to the front. Inside the cockpit was Captain Johnny Afridi, the plane’s pilot, a Pashtun with John Lennon glasses and a long, skinny ponytail. ‘Don’t worry about those goons,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve been arrested too.’ By the end of a very entertaining flight, sitting in the cockpit for a spectacular sunset landing at Heathrow, my resolve never to return to Pakistan was forgotten.

Back in London we were called into the Foreign Office to meet the head of the consular service. I was furious that they had done nothing to fight our case – we were from one of Britain’s leading newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, and had been trying to report on a war in which Britain was involved.

‘You must understand Pakistan are our allies,’ we were told. ‘We need their support during the bombing campaign. It’s a very sensitive time.’ We later learned that four Pakistani bases in Sindh and Baluchistan were being used to fly some of the bombing raids.

It was a bright sunny day, but as we walked out into St James’s I blinked back angry tears. It seemed my war was over before it had even started.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan everything was suddenly happening very quickly. Since the start of November the US had agreed to all the urging from the Northern Alliance commanders, and begun pounding Taliban front lines with giant daisy-cutter bombs dropped from AC-130s. Gary Schroen and his CIA team were monitoring Taliban radio traffic, and could literally hear the fear. ‘Our guys were listening to the radios and the panic, the screaming, the shouting as bunkers down the line were going up from 2,000-pound bombs,’ he said. ‘I mean, they were just simply devastated, and they broke.’

There was no more talk of quagmire. Mazar-i-Sharif fell to Dostum’s men on 10 November. ‘This whole thing might unravel like a cheap suit,’ President Bush told President Putin.

The Taliban quickly realised it was no contest, and by 13 November had fled Kabul, leaving the Northern Alliance to move in. By the beginning of December they were gone from all the major cities apart from their heartland of Kandahar in the south, which they finally abandoned on 7 December. ‘I think everybody was surprised (with the possible exception of [US Defense Secretary] Don Rumsfeld, who would have felt vindicated) at the result of military intervention, which was nasty, brutish and short,’ said Lieutenant General Sir Robert Fry, commandant of the Royal Marines at the time, who went on to be Director of Military Operations at the Ministry of Defence. ‘It was remarkably successful in that there were negligible Western casualties. You had overwhelming Western firepower, loads of CIA playing the Great Game with buckets of money, and a compliant infantry in the shape of the Northern Alliance. All of a sudden they thought they’d found the philosopher’s stone of intervention.’

New technology, like laser-guided bombs, had avoided a major deployment of troops. To overthrow the Taliban the US had put on the ground fewer than five hundred men – 316 special forces and 110 CIA officers. Only four American soldiers and one CIA agent had been killed, and three of those soldiers were killed by their own bomb – in ‘friendly fire’. The whole operation had cost only $3.8 billion. The CIA estimated it had spent $70 million, mostly in bribes to Afghan commanders. President Bush called it one of the biggest ‘bargains’ of all time.

So easy did it seem that on 21 November, while US forces were still fighting the Taliban, Bush had secretly already directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for a war with Iraq. ‘Let’s get started on this and get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein,’ he said.

General Franks, the commander of US Central Command, was sitting in his office at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, working on plans for Afghanistan when he got the phone call from Rumsfeld. ‘Son of a bitch. No rest for the weary,’ is how he recalled his reaction in his memoir. Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack has a rather different account. ‘Goddamn, what the fuck are they talking about?’ Franks is reported as saying. ‘They were in the midst of one war, Afghanistan, and now they wanted detailed planning for another?’

Back in London, Justin and I got help from an unexpected source when Iran obliged us with visas to get into Afghanistan from the west. We flew to Tehran, then to the pilgrim town of Mashad near the border, and drove into Herat the day after the Taliban left. We were helped by Ismael Khan, a warlord who looked the part, with his flowing beard and trucks of neatly clad but fearsome gunmen who accompanied him everywhere. I’d first met Ismael when I went to Herat during Russian times, and his resistance was legendary. He had been imprisoned during the Taliban after being betrayed by General Dostum’s men, though he’d managed to escape. Although part of the Northern Alliance he had his own status as ‘the Emir of the West’, and as soon as the Taliban left he took power in his home city.

From Herat we managed to catch the first Ariana flight to Kabul, a nerve-racking experience, as I’d never before been on a plane that had to be jump-started. As we flew awfully close to mountains, the pilot told us the only instrument working was his ‘vision’.

But we made it, and found ourselves in the Mustafa. It had been a complicated journey that in a way felt the culmination of years, not just months. We had hardly any electricity and little food, but we were happy. Wais even got hold of a TV so we could watch BBC World on the occasions when there was electricity.

The challenges ahead were brutally clear. There was destruction everywhere – parts of the city such as Jadi Maiwand, the old carpet bazaar, and the road to Dar ul Aman palace, resembled pictures of Dresden after the bombing of the Second World War. The once sparkling-blue Kabul River was a brown trickle clogged with evil-smelling garbage. I went to visit the Children’s Hospital, where the doctors told me the power often went off in the middle of surgery, so children just died. My own son had been born more than eleven weeks premature two years earlier, and I asked a doctor what would happen to him if he were born in the hospital. The doctor looked at me as if I was mad. ‘He would die of course,’ he said. Afghanistan was the worst place in the world to be a mother or a child.

After I wrote of this in the Sunday Telegraph, generous readers raised money for a generator which the British military agreed to fly out. In what should have been a warning for the future, once it reached the hospital the generator disappeared.

Everyone was promising not to abandon Afghanistan again. It had been a model war, and the plan was for a model construction of democracy. There would be no more ‘ungoverned space’ which terrorists could move into and use as launching pads for attacks. ‘You abandoned us last time and got bitten by a scorpion,’ warned Hamid Gilani, whose father Pir Gilani was one of the seven jihadi leaders who had raised arms against the Russians. ‘If you abandon us this time you’ll get bitten by a cobra.’

We all assumed foreign aid would pour in to turn Afghanistan around – a donors’ conference was scheduled for Tokyo, and there was talk of billions being pledged. Already there were lots of aid agencies moving in. Kabul was the new sexy place to be, and every day more people arrived at the Mustafa, prompting effusive reunions. ‘Hey, I last saw you in East Timor/Kosovo/Bosnia/Sierra Leone …!’ became a common refrain.

There were French lawyers arriving to draw up a constitution. Feminists setting up gender-awareness classes, a women’s bakery and a beauty school for which American beauty editors sent make-up. There would even be estate agents, as so many aid agencies coming in pushed rents sky high. Elections were planned for the following spring. But when I talked to my Afghan friends, nobody mentioned democracy or women’s rights. They wanted security and food and speedy justice.

The West had its swift military success, dismantling the Taliban regime in two months. I don’t think anybody spoke to ordinary Afghans about what they wanted.