“They are going to set Afghanistan on fire,” said Amir Shah. He knew his homeland would suffer and his people, most of whom wouldn’t have recognized Osama bin Laden if they were sitting next to him on a bus – or at least that’s what one woman I interviewed that night told me.
By Kathy Gannon / Sapan News
Shortly before 6 p.m. in Kabul on Sept. 11, 2001 the big news was the death two days earlier of one of Afghanistan’s former mujahedeen leaders, Ahmad Shah Masood killed in a suicide bombing.
The Taliban were in power and because they had banned TV there were no visuals of the destruction happening in New York. The parents of two American Christian women, who had been arrested by the Taliban along with four Germans for proselytising, were in the Afghan capital, hoping to see their children. That would all change.
As news goes, it was already a busy day. Then the phone in the Associated Press Kabul bureau rang and the amazing international editor of the day Sally Jacobsen was on the phone. A plane had just hit the World Trade Center Tower.
Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan and while it still wasn’t clear what was the cause of the crash she alerted me.
While on the phone the second plane hit the second tower. She hung up.
In the bureau we were almost certain bin Laden and Afghanistan were at the centre of whatever it was that was unfolding on the other side of the world.
Within half an hour, our AP colleague, the great Amir Shah, who had been listening to the radio (our only source of information) came running up the stairs to the office to say a plane had flown into the Pentagon and then a fourth plane had gone down.
We couldn’t understand what was happening but one thing we all knew for certain – the world, our world, would never be the same.
“They are going to set Afghanistan on fire,” said Amir Shah, who was heartbroken for the misery being suffered in America, but he knew America would set its sights on bin Laden, who had been hiding in Afghanistan since May 1996, even BEFORE the Taliban took power.
Amir knew his homeland would suffer and his people, most of whom wouldn’t have recognized bin Laden if they were sitting next to him on a bus – or at least that’s what one woman I interviewed that night told me.
That night we went to the darkened markets. There was only sporadic electricity in Afghanistan then and on most nights the only folks with lights were those with generators.
We wanted to know how Afghans felt about the horrors unfolding in the United States. They had heard of the attacks on the radio. They didn’t know what New York looked like, or could even imagine the towering structures that was the World Trade Center, but they knew war and they knew the pain of loss.
Afghans, who had by 2001 suffered more than two decades of war, were sad for what they understood had happened in the United States. They knew the horrors of bombs falling on their neighbourhoods and death and they wished none of that on others. They were sad.
Most Afghans knew nothing of bin Laden. Even among the Taliban rank and file he was an unknown. It’s not even certain that most within the Taliban leadership, Mullah Muhammad Omar included, could have found New York on a map.
But Afghans, like Amir Shah, understood, even if they couldn’t imagine the might of America and NATO’s combined armies, they were soon going to be in the middle of another war. And again, they were.
To understand how war has devastated Afghans and Afghanistan, here is a brief recounting:
The first of the wars in the last more than four decades began in 1979 when the former Soviet Union invaded to prop up a pro-Moscow government, and Pakistan and the U.S. and a collection of other anti-Soviet Union countries joined together to support the Afghan mujahideen or ‘holy warriors’ to battle the communist government. It was that same 1980s war that brought Islamic radicals from across the Arab speaking world to Afghanistan, invited to fight the former Soviet Union. Bin Laden was among them.
From that same 1980s war Afghanistan inherited their warlords and the Taliban. They all fought against the invading Soviet Union, all as mujahedeen.
When these mujahedeen won in 1992, they took power in Kabul only to turn their guns on each other, rob the country through massive corruption and kill tens of thousands of civilians in Kabul. They lasted until 1996 when they were thrown out by the Taliban, also mujahedeen, who had gone home only to return to fight against the lawlessness of their former comrades in arms.
The Taliban lasted until 2001, when they were thrown out by the U.S.-led coalition, who in turn brought back the same folks, who had ruled and destroyed Kabul from 1992 to 1996, which then, like now, resulted in a Taliban rule.
Anniversaries of tragedies come and go, but the reality is that the suffering of Afghans and Afghanistan seems only to continue.
Kathy Gannon is a longtime former correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a member of the Sapan News Advisory Council. She and photographer Anja Niedringhaus were the first western journalists to embed with the Afghan army. This is a Sapan News syndicated feature first published on Kathy Gannon’s Substack.
Lead Image: Amir Shah and Kathy Gannon, AP correspondents, interviewing Afghan police in central Wardak province after allegations by some local Afghans of torture by US and Afghan security personnel. Photo by Anja Niedringhaus circa 2010 via Kathy Gannon.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit http://www.sapannews.com.
Note on Southasia as one word: We use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states” —Himal Southasian.
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Also published in :
Scroll.in : Afghanistan and its enduring ‘unfreedom’, 14 September 2024.