The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk

adversary than Moscow. Yet he persisted. And I shall always remember Osama bin Laden’s last words to me that night on the bare mountain: “Mr. Robert,” he said, “from this mountain upon which you are sitting, we broke the Russian army and we destroyed the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he will permit us to turn the United States into a shadow of itself.”
    I sat in silence, thinking about these words as bin Laden discussed my journey back to Jalalabad with his guards. He was concerned that the Taliban—despite their “sincerity”—might object to his dispatching a foreigner through their checkpoints after dark, and so I was invited to pass the night in bin Laden’s mountain camp. I was permitted to take just three photographs of him, this time by the light of the Toyota which was driven to the tent with its headlights shining through the canvas to illuminate bin Laden’s face. He sat in front of me, expressionless, a stone figure, and in the pictures I developed in Beirut three days later he was a purple-and-yellow ghost. He said goodbye without much ceremony, a brief handshake and a nod, and vanished from the tent, and I lay down on the mattress with my coat over me to keep warm. The men with their guns sitting around slept there too, while others armed with rifles and rocket-launchers patrolled the low ridges around the camp.
    In the years to come, I would wonder who they were. Was the Egyptian Mohamed Atta among those young men in the tent? Or Abdul Aziz Alomari? Or any other of the nineteen men whose names we would all come to know just over four years later? I cannot remember their faces now, cowled as they were, many of them, in their scarves.
    Exhaustion and cold kept me awake. “A shadow of itself” was the expression that kept repeating itself to me. What did bin Laden and these dedicated, ruthless men have in store for us? I recall the next few hours like a freeze-frame film; waking so cold there was ice in my hair, slithering back down the mountain trail in the Toyota with one of the Algerian gunmen in the back telling me that if we were in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under bin Laden’s orders to protect me and thus would give his life for me. The three men in the back and my driver stopped the jeep on the broken-up Kabul–Jalalabad highway to say their dawn
fajr
prayers. Beside the broad estuary of the Kabul River, they spread their mats and knelt as the sun rose over the mountains. Far to the north-east, I could see the heights of the Hindu Kush glimmering a pale white under an equally pale blue sky, touching the border of China that nuzzled into the wreckage of a land that was to endure yet more suffering in the coming years. Hills and rocks and water and ancient trees and old mountains, this was the world before the age of man.
    And I remember driving back with bin Laden’s men into Jalalabad past the barracks where the Taliban stored their captured arms and, just a few minutes later, hearing the entire store—of shells, anti-tank rockets, Stinger missiles, explosives and mines—exploding in an earthquake that shook the trees in the laneway outside the Spinghar Hotel and sprinkled us with tiny pieces of metal and torn pages from American manuals instructing “users” on how to aim missiles at aircraft. More than ninety civilians were ripped to bits by the accidental explosion—did a Taliban throw the butt of a cigarette, a lonely and unique item of enjoyment, into the ammunition?—and then the Algerian walked up to me in tears and told me that his best friend had just perished in the explosion. Bin Laden’s men, I noted, can also cry.
    But most of all I remember the first minutes after our departure from bin Laden’s camp. It was still dark when I caught sight of a great light in the mountains to the north. For a while I thought it was the headlights of another vehicle, another security