The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Page A

so they could get free maize seed in return for destroying the fields they had just planted.” Other aid workers suspected that the farmers were rotating their crops between wheat and drugs each season, the opium sold in return for increased payments, and for weapons that were recently transported in boxes through the Pakistan railway station of Landi Kotal on the Peshawar steam train to the Afghan border.
    Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered health insurance. This was capitalism on a ruthlessly illegal scale. And when I asked a European UN official how the world could compete with it, he drew in his breath. “Legalise drugs!” he roared. “Legalise the lot. It will be the end of the drug barons. They’ll go broke and kill each other. But of course the world will never accept that. So we’ll go on fighting a losing war.”
    Engineer Mahmoud would only shrug his shoulders when I repeated this to him. What could he do? I raised the subject of “Sheikh Osama” for the third time. The Sheikh wanted to see me, I repeated. I was not looking for him. I was in Jalalabad at the Sheikh’s request. He was looking for me. “So why do you ask me to look for him?” Engineer Mahmoud asked with devastating logic. This was not a problem of language because Mahmoud spoke excellent English. It was a cocktail of comprehension mixed with several bottles of suspicion. Someone—I did not want to mention the man in London—had told me to contact Mahmoud, I said. Perhaps he could tell the Sheikh that I was at the Spinghar Hotel? Mahmoud looked at me pityingly. “What can I do?” he asked.
    I sent a message through the Swedish UN soldier—he was the UN’s sole radio operator as well as one of its only two soldiers in Afghanistan—and he connected me to the only person in the world I really trusted. There had been no contact, I said. Please call bin Laden’s man in London. Next day a radio transmission message arrived, relaying the man’s advice. “Tell Robert to make clear he is not there because of his own wish. He is only replying to the wish of our friend. He should make it clear to the Engineer that he is only accepting an invitation. The engineer can confirm this with our friend . . . Make it very clear he was invited and did not go on his own. This is the fastest thing. Otherwise he has to wait.” Back I went to Engineer Mahmoud. He was in good form. In fact he thought it immensely funny, outrageously humorous, that I was waiting for the Sheikh. It was fantastic, laughable, bizarre. Many cups of tea were served. And each time a visitor arrived—a drugs control worker, an official of the local governor, a mendicant with a son in prison on drugs offences—he would be regaled with the story of the bareheaded Englishman who thought he had been invited to Jalalabad and was now waiting and waiting at the Spinghar Hotel.
    I returned to the Spinghar in the heat of midday and sat by the lawn in front of the building. I had hidden in the same hotel sixteen years earlier, after Leonid Brezhnev had sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan, when I had smuggled myself down to Jalalabad and watched the Russian armoured columns grinding past the front gates. Their helicopters had thundered over the building, heavy with rockets, and the windows had rattled as they fired their missiles into the Tora Bora mountain range to the north. Now the butterflies played around the batteries of pink roses and the gardeners put down their forks and hoses and unspread their prayer rugs on the grass. It looked a bit like paradise. I drank tea on the lawn and watched the sun