Excerpt: I is for Infidel

Fear, war, and repression are like threads woven into the fabric of Afghans: fear of the Russians, of the mujahedeen, of the Arabs, of al Qaeda, Pakistanis, Americans, B-52 bombers, and of each other.

My friend is a man with a history. His left arm is slightly disfigured, the elbow smashed by a Russian bullet, a battlefield scar gained fighting the invading Soviet soldiers in the 1980s. Back then, he was a brave mujahedeen, unmoved by the sight of the Russian enemy, unafraid to heave a rocket launcher onto his shoulder, take aim, and fire. But in 2004 near the border of Afghanistan, as he sits across from me, he is too afraid to be identified.

"Do you want me to be killed?" His smile is nervous. He doesn't say anything else. He just looks at me, silently. I wonder what to do.

We're sitting at a long wooden table that is hidden beneath a coffee-stained tablecloth at a hotel in Pakistan's frontier city of Peshawar, not too far from the border with Afghanistan. It's a rugged little city largely inhabited by fierce Pathan tribesmen, who live on both sides of the border, here and in Afghanistan.

Peshawar is about 400 kilometers from the Afghan capital of Kabul and relatively safe for my Afghan friend. I've always loved Peshawar. There is a romance about the city, which looks eastward to the Khyber Pass, a historically treacherous stretch of road that nineteenth-century British colonialists could neither tame nor travel without being massacred. Peshawar sits at the crossroads of the ancient silk route. In its heart, snuggled in the middle of aromatic spice bazaars, where everyone is deafened by a cacophony of screaming rickshaws and blaring car horns, is the storyteller bazaar. Its name harkens back some 2,000 years to a time when caravans of weary traders, their animals bundled high with exotic silks and spices, would stop for the night, bed their tired beasts, and trade stories of the road they had just traveled and the dangers they had faced.

The first time I visited Peshawar was in 1986. Then, nearly 5 million Afghans, who had fled a Soviet invasion of their homeland, lived as refugees in camps that crowded in on Peshawar.

A lot has happened in the intervening years. The Soviet Union withdrew its occupation troops and a brutal civil war among Islamic mujahedeen groups followed; their feuding ways gave rise to the repressive Taliban regime, which was cut down by the U.S.-led war in 2001, bringing in Hamid Karzai's government and returning many of the same feuding mujahedeen to positions of power. So much has changed, yet so little has changed.

I look down at the tablecloth, finger the teaspoon, wait for my friend to say something. I pour another cup of coffee. It's cold now, and the milk, which had been boiled, has coagulated. There's a television on in the corner of the room. The picture is fuzzy, but it's easy to see it is a cricket match, a popular sport in this part of the world.

Finally, my friend decides. He doesn't look directly at me and I don't try to make eye contact. I can feel his nervousness, and that he is ashamed of his fearfulness. When at last he speaks, his head is slightly bowed.

"Please, my friend, don't say who I am."

I agree, and that's when we decide to call him Karim.

Karim isn't much older than thirty-eight. An ethnic Pashtun from Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar Province, of which Jalalabad is the capital, he's fluent in Arabic, weak in English, but improving every day. His face is handsome, with deep brown almond-shaped eyes and a neatly trimmed black beard. He studied Arabic in Peshawar at the Institute of Imam Abu Hanifa, which is funded, he tells me, by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

I understand his fear. The topic of our conversation is a dangerous one. Karim was in Jalalabad in May 1996 when Osama bin Laden arrived from Sudan. He knows the details of his arrival, details that implicate powerful men in today's Afghanistan, men who sit with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who are welcomed at the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in Kabul to meet the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan. These men were returned to positions of power by the United States and its coalition partners in 2001, men like Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

One August day in 2004, when I was having breakfast with Hamid Karzai on the lush green lawns of the presidential palace in Kabul, he described Sayyaf as an ideologue in a way that sounded complimentary. But Sayyaf is a vicious man, whose followers have carried out unspeakable atrocities and horrific massacres of Afghanistan's ethnic Hazaras.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf inspires violence in others: Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine terrorist organization, was named for him by its founder, Abdurajak Janjalani. Janjalani was a disciple and a student of Sayyaf's who received military training from him. The Indonesian Mohammed Nasir Bin Abbas, alias Solaiman, who was arrested in Indonesia in April 2003, was trained under Sayyaf between 1987 and 1991. Bin Abbas used the terrorist training he received from Sayyaf to set up Camp Hodeibia in the Philippines, according to Maria Ressa's account in Seeds of Terror (New York: 2003). This camp was later taken over by Umar Patek, an Indonesian who has been implicated in the 2002 bombing on the resort island of Bali in which more than 200 people were killed.

A report put together from information collected by more than one Western intelligence agency and revealed by the newspaper Al Watan Al Arabi tells of a particularly terrifying meeting held soon after bin Laden's arrival in Afghanistan, before the Taliban took power and while Sayyaf and his mujahedeen colleagues were ruling the country. My friend Karim had also heard the details of the meeting, although he hadn't been present at it.

It was convened in northwest Pakistan's remotest tribal regions, tucked away on an arid plateau surrounded by hills and guarded by hundreds of men hidden in the trees and crevices of the mountainside.

The high-level secret meeting brought together some of the most radical of groups and nations, who accused the West then in 1996, a full five years before the September 11 attacks, of waging a war against Islam. The participants urged a counteroffensive and spoke of attacking the United States and the West. They spoke of their hatred for the West and their revulsion for governments in the Middle East that sympathized with the West.

Fundamentalist organizations in Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and other Gulf states were represented, as were militant groups from Pakistan, Algeria and Sudan. They sat beside dissidents who lived in London, Tehran, and Beirut. They had come together to plot a war against American and Western interests.

Convinced that the West had already begun a war against Muslims, they wanted to retaliate, go on the offensive, and take the battle to the enemy on their own terms. This was not their first gathering. There had been at least one earlier meeting in Iran to lay the ground for this gathering, to settle religious and ideological differences that would allow these men to come together to wage a single war against a single enemy—the West.

And so a huge tent was pitched on the high plateau, under the watchful guard of the sentries in the ring of hills. A noisy generator provided light. Ghostly shadows were visible from outside, backlit against the walls of the tent as the participants moved inside. It was an eerie sight.

Men arrived in four-wheel-drive vehicles that had rumbled up the tortuous roads. The first to arrive was Osama bin Laden's lieutenant, Aymen al-Zawahri. The conversation focused on Benjamin Netanyahu's rise to power in Israel. One man, who seemed to have come from a European country, spoke of a vicious offensive being readied against Islam.

The men talked for another two hours until Osama bin Laden joined the gathering. At his side was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. It was Sayyaf who spoke first. Bin Laden listened. Sayyaf shared bin Laden's revulsion for U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He praised the violent bombing one month earlier in al-Khubar in Saudi Arabia that had killed more than twenty U.S. servicemen, for which al Qaeda had been held responsible. Sayyaf's small brown eyes seemed to glow as he recounted the bombing. He reveled in the description of it, saying it should be a lesson to America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. He likened it to the 1981 and 1983 bombings in Beirut of the U.S. Embassy and its military compound that had killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and led to the American withdrawal from Lebanon.

Sayyaf's speech inspired an Iranian to call for an all-out offensive against America. He was frenzied. He warned that the Muslim world was facing its gravest conspiracy. It wasn't clear whether he had been sent by the government or whether he represented a jihadi group. Another speaker joined in, this time from Bahrain. His words were angry, his voice rising as he spoke: "We are enduring coercion and humiliation in our own country." Then an Egyptian spoke. He castigated his own government for spurning an offer from Syria to mediate its differences with Iran.

The men talked into the night. As dawn broke, a man from London looked to Sayyaf for direction. What should they do? What strategy should be adopted?

Sayyaf's voice was low. "Let us wait until this evening, when we resume our discussions. I will then speak and give my opinion as one who believes in what you believe and who is ready to fight in the same trench as you."

When they reconvened, it was brief, the decision firm. They would confront the United States and the West. The organizations represented at the meeting would work together, they would devise strategies, plots, coordinate. In this way, in mid-1996, high in the lawless tribal lands of northern Pakistan, the terrorist networking began.

After the meeting, Sayyaf returned to Kabul to resume his role in the mujahedeen-led government of Afghanistan, a government that owed its existence to the support it had received from America.

My friend Karim didn't see the United States and the West as a source of comfort or protection. He fidgeted with his beard. His voice broke. His usual speaking voice is a baritone, but when he gets excited or worried it rises and cracks, becoming squeaky sounding.

I worried for him. He knew who had been present at a series of April 1996 clandestine meetings among the mujahedeen, meetings held in lantern-lit rooms to discuss giving bin Laden sanctuary in Afghanistan. Then Sudan, under relentless pressure from the United States, wanted bin Laden gone.

A friend of Karim's went to Khartoum to meet bin Laden. Karim's voice dropped to barely a whisper as he recalled the conversations. I strained to listen.

My friend met Osama. Osama had a question. He said to my friend: "I have more problems with America and the problems that Sudan has today with America; maybe tomorrow Afghanistan will have these problems and what will your reaction be?" My friend didn't have an answer for him. He had to return to Jalalabad and ask the mujahedeen.

The mujahedeen knew that America wanted Osama, but they didn't mind. They called a shura [council meeting of elders] and the shura gave its decision: "Afghanistan has had twenty years of war. It has been destroyed by all these wars and fighting. We have thousands of problems and if Osama is one more problem, what is that? He is a Muslim. We should help. What are problems for Afghans? God will solve all our problems. Tell him to come." Among the key figures at the shura that April day in 1996 were lieutenants of Sayyaf and of other mujahedeen leaders, who today hold positions of power in Afghanistan.

Kathy Gannon served as AP correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1986-2005. She was born in Timmins, Canada. In 2004, she was the Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work has been published in Foreign Affairs and The New Yorker. She is now based in Tehran where she lives with her husband.