Then something happened in the deep south. Since the fall of any semblance of a central government the old official Afghan army had simply reassigned itself to the local warlord who paid the best. Outside Kandahar some soldiers took two teenage girls back to their camp and gang-raped them.
The preacher from the village they had raided, who also ran his own religious school, went to the army camp with thirty students and sixteen rifles. Against the odds they trounced the soldiers and hanged the commandant from the barrel of a tank gun. The priest was called Muhammad Omar, or Mullah Omar. He had lost his right eye in battle.
The news spread. Others appealed to him for help. He and his group swelled in numbers and responded to the appeals. They took no money, they raped no women, they stole no crops, they asked no reward. They became local heroes. By December 1994, twelve thousand had joined them, adopting this mullah’s black turban. They called themselves the students. In Pashto ‘student’ is talib, and the plural is the Taliban. From village vigilantes they became a movement and when they captured the city of Kandahar an alternative government.
Pakistan, through its forever-plotting ISI, had been trying to topple the Tajik Rabbani in Kabul by backing Hekmatyar, but he failed repeatedly. As the ISI was deeply infiltrated by ultra-orthodox Muslims, Pakistan switched support to the Taliban. With Kandahar the new movement inherited a huge cache of arms, plus tanks, armoured cars, trucks, guns, six MiG 21 ex-Soviet fighters and six heavy helicopters. They began to sweep north. In 1995 Izmat Khan embraced his wife, kissed his baby farewell and then came down from the mountains to join them.
Later, on the floor of a cell in Cuba, he would recall that the days on the upland farm with his wife and child had been the happiest days of his life. He was twenty-three.
Too late he learned there was a dark
side to the Taliban. In Kandahar, even though the Pashtun had been devout before, they were subjected to the harshest regimen the world of Islam has ever seen.
All girls’ schools were closed at once. Women were forbidden to leave the house save in the company of a male relative. The all-enveloping burka robe was decreed at all times; the clacking of female sandals on tiles was decreed forbidden as being too sexy.
All singing, dancing, the playing of music, sports and kite-flying, a national pastime, was forbidden. Prayers were to be said the required five times a day. Beards on men were compulsory. The enforcers in their black turbans were often teenage fanatics, taught only the Verses of the Sword, cruelty and war. From being liberators they became the new tyrants, but their advance was unstoppable. Their mission was to destroy the rule of the warlords, and as these were loathed by the people, the people acquiesced to the new strictness. At least there was law, order, no more corruption, no more rape, no more crime; just fanatical orthodoxy.
Mullah Omar was a warrior-priest but nothing else. Having started his revolution by hanging a rapist from a gun barrel he withdrew into seclusion in his southern fortress, Kandahar. His followers were like something out of the Middle Ages, and among the many things they could not recognize was fear. They worshipped the one-eyed Mullah behind his walls and before the Taliban fell eighty thousand would die for him. Far away in Sudan the tall Saudi who controlled the twenty thousand Arabs now based in Afghanistan watched and waited.
Izmat Khan joined a lashkar of men drawn from his own province, Nangarhar. He was quickly respected because he was mature, had fought the Russians and been wounded.
The Taliban army was not a real army; it had no commanding general, no general staff, no officer corps, no ranks and no infrastructure. Each lashkar was semi-independent under its tribal leader who often held sway through personality and courage in combat, plus religious devotion. Like the original Muslim warriors of the first Caliphates they swept their enemies aside with fanatical courage, which gave rise to a reputation for invincibility, so much so that opponents often capitulated without a shot fired. When they finally ran into real soldiers, the forces of the charismatic Tajik Shah Massoud, they took unspeakable losses. They had no medical corps so their wounded simply died by the roadside. But still they came on.
At the gates of Kabul they negotiated with Massoud but he refused to accept their terms and withdrew to his own northern mountains whence he had fought and defied the Russians. So began the next civil war, between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Massoud the Tajik and Dostum the Uzbek. It was 1996. Only Pakistan (who had organized it) and Saudi Arabia (who paid for it) recognized the new weird government of Afghanistan.
For Izmat Khan the die was cast. His old ally Shah Massoud was now his enemy. Far to the south an aeroplane landed. It brought back the tall Saudi who had spoken to him eight years earlier in a cave at Jaji and the chubby doctor who had pulled a chunk of Soviet steel from his leg. Both men paid immediate obeisance to Mullah Omar, paying huge tribute in money and equipment and thus securing his lifelong loyalty.
After Kabul there was a pause in the war. Almost the first act of the Taliban in Kabul was to drag the toppled ex-president Najibullah from his house arrest, torture, mutilate and execute him before hanging his corpse from a lamp-post. That set the tenor of the rule to come. Izmat Khan had no taste for cruelty for its own sake. He had fought hard enough in the conquest of his country to rise from volunteer to commander of his own lashkar, and this in turn grew as word of his leadership spread until it became one of the four divisions in the Taliban army. Then he asked to be allowed to go back to his native Nangarhar and was made Provincial Governor. Based in Jalalabad, he could visit his family, wife and baby.
He had never heard of Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. He had never heard of anyone called William Jefferson Clinton. He had indeed heard much of a group now based in his country called Al-Qaeda and knew that its adherents had declared global jihad against all unbelievers and especially the West and most of all against a place called America. But it was not his jihad.
He was fighting the Northern Alliance to unite his homeland once and for all and the Alliance had been beaten back to two small and obscure enclaves. One was a group of resistants of the Hazara tribe bottled up in the mountains of Dara-i-Suf and the other was Massoud himself in the impregnable Panjshir Valley and the north-eastern corner called Badakshan.
On 7 August 1998 bombs exploded outside the American embassies in two African capitals. He knew nothing of this. Listening to foreign radio was now banned, and he obeyed. On 20 August America launched seventy Tomahawk cruise missiles at Afghanistan. They came from the two missile cruisers Cowpen and Shiloh in the Red Sea and from the destroyers Briscoe, Elliot, Hayler and Milius, plus the submarine Columbia, all in the Arabian Gulf south of Pakistan.
They were aimed at the training camps of Al-Qaeda, and the caves of the Tora Bora. Among those that went astray was one that entered the mouth of a natural and empty cave high in the mountain above Maloko-zai. The detonation deep inside the cave split the mountain and an entire face peeled away. Ten million tons of rock crashed into the valley below.
When Izmat Khan reached the mountain there was nothing to recognize. The entire valley had been buried. There was no stream any more, no farm, no orchards, no stock pens, no mosque, no stables, no compounds. His entire family and all his neighbours were gone. His parents, uncles, aunts, sisters, wife and child were dead beneath millions of tons of granite rubble. There was nowhere to dig and nothing to dig for. He had become a man with no roots, no relatives, no clan.
In the dying August sun he knelt on the shale high above where his dead family lay, turned west towards Mecca, bowed his head to the ground and prayed. But it was a different prayer this time; it was a mighty oath, a sworn vendetta, a personal jihad unto death and it was against the people who had done this. He declared war on America.
A week later he had resigned his governorship and gone back to the front. For three years he fought the Northern Alliance. While he had been away the tactically brilliant Massoud had counter-attacked and again caused huge losses to the less competent Taliban. There had been massacres at Mazar-i-Sharif where after the native Hazara had risen in revolt and killed six hundred Taliban the avenging Taliban had gone back and butchered over two thousand civilians.
The Dayton Agreement had been signed; technically the Bosnian war was over. But what had been left behind was nightmarish. Muslim Bosnia had been the main theatre of war, even though the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats had all been involved. It had been the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
The Croats and the Serbs, far and away the better armed, had inflicted most of the brutalities. A thoroughly and rightly ashamed Europe set up a war crimes tribunal at The Hague in Holland and waited for the first indictments. The problem was, the guilty ones were not about to come forward with their hands up. Milosevic would offer no help at all; indeed, he was preparing fresh miseries for another Muslim province, that of Kosovo.
Part of Bosnia, the exclusively Serbian third, had declared itself the Serb Republic and most of the war criminals were hiding within it. This was the task: find them, identify them, snatch them and bring them out to stand trial. Living mainly in the fields and forests, the SAS spent 1997 hunting down what they called the PIFWICs – persons indicted for war crimes.
By 1998 Mike Martin was back in the UK and back in the Paras, a Lieutenant Colonel and instructor at Staff College, Camberley. The following year he was made Commanding Officer First Battalion, known as One Para. The NATO allies had again intervened in the Balkans, this time a little more speedily than before, and again to prevent a massacre big enough to cause the media to use the over-employed word of genocide.
Intelligence had convinced both the British and American governments that Milosevic intended to ‘cleanse’ the rebellious province of Kosovo and to do it thoroughly. The medium would be the expulsion of most of its 1.8 million citizens westwards into neighbouring Albania. Under the NATO banner the allies gave Milosevic an ultimatum. He ignored it and columns of weeping and destitute Kosovans were driven through the mountain passes into Albania.
The NATO response was no invasion on the ground but bombing raids which lasted seventy-eight days and wrecked both Kosovo and Serbian Yugoslavia itself. With his country in ruins Milosevic finally conceded and NATO moved into Kosovo to try to govern the wreckage. The man in charge was a lifelong Para, General Mike Jackson, and One Para went with him.
That would probably have been Mike Martin’s last ‘action’ posting had it not been for the West Side Boys.
On 9 September 2001 news flashed through the Taliban army that had the soldiers roaring Allahu akhbar, God is Great, over and over again. The air above Izmat Khan’s camp outside Bamiyan crackled with the shots fired in a delirium of joy. Someone had assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud. Their enemy was dead. The man whose charisma had held together the cause of the useless Rabbani, whose cleverness as a guerrilla fighter had caused the Soviets to revere him and whose generalship had carved Taliban forces to pieces, was no more.