The Old and the Not-So

Over the last several years, I've been focused on murder, and before that oil, so it's been easy to forget that at one time my main obsession was the concentration in Peshawar, where I was then based as a correspondent for Newsweek, of a bunch of clearly discontented Arabs.

In 1991, that turned into a long piece that I wrote with another correspondent, Melinda Liu, on what were then known as the "Afghan Arabs," the Somalis, Jordanians, Egyptians and so on who, having earned their spurs in the anti-Soviet conflict of the 1980s in Afghanistan, were now filtering out to Bosnia, the Middle East and elsewhere to fight other wars.

Among the people we profiled was a fellow down in southeast Afghanistan named Abu Abdullah, who for years and years had led a ragtag band of Arabs who, though they never could quite get their act together, were among a determined bunch that aimed to capture the city of Khost. Finally, the Pakistanis, perhaps in sympathy with the long-suffering Abdullah and others, fired artillery shells into Khost, spooking soldiers from the Moscow-backed Afghan government, and Abdullah and his gang poured in to the city.

Forlorn Abdullah later became known to the world by his real name -- Osama bin Ladin. And we wrote about the organization he had just set up, al Qaeda, which at that time was simply meant as a counter-organization to a rival group run by the locally worshipped leader of foreign Muslims, a Jordanian named Abdullah Azzam.

In any case, my memory of all this was triggered today when I ran across a video interview of a former colleague of mine from the period, Steve Coll, discussing his new book, The Bin Ladens.

In the video he describes how, in 1993, a car bomb went off in the garage of the World Trade Center, and he and I proceeded to try to find the roots of what happened.

We split up the Afghan Arab world as we knew it. I went off to Sudan, and Steve to Jordan and elsewhere. In Khartoum, I found the house to which bin Ladin shifted after leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan in disgust. The scene was straight out of Peshawar -- the mini-trucks, the men dressed in shalwar kameez, the over-sized houses, and of course the dust. I left several notes for Bin Ladin.

I never met him. At one point, a Sudanese intelligence man pulled up in a car behind us and called aside my assistant. Stop trying to see Osama, he warned my assistant; it's dangerous for him. People want to kill him.

In late summer, we produced a long story for the Post on the network of these militants that had sprung up, starting in Afghanistan.

Peshawar today looks a lot like it did in those days -- a base for foreign Muslims in a war against a foreign invader. Only the perceived invader has changed.

Photo: tnk_gn

Rights: Creative Commons

Ode to Harry Flashman

Westerners gathered in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s understood they were in Great Game territory. They understood it deep in fact, mainly because of the writing of a handful of superb Britons -- Peter Hopkirk, Fitzroy Maclean, and of course George MacDonald Fraser.

Fraser died yesterday, which brought me back to the influence he had on a generation of foreign correspondents based in Peshawar, Kabul and Islamabad.

In The Great Game, Hopkirk was unmatched in his grasp of the big picture, and Maclean's Eastern Approaches was a riveting, first-person account of sneaking into the Caucasus and Central Asia when it truly was perilous to do so.

But it was Fraser's Flashman that provided comic relief while delivering the authentic history. It's a belly-laugh-out-loud frolick through Afghanistan, starring the cad Harry Flashman. When new correspondents arrived in Peshawar, the first thing they were often advised to do was stop by Abdara Road and pick up a copy.

That helped to create a Flashman cult following. In all, Fraser turned out a dozen Flashman novels, taking his character into exploits ranging from the charge of the light brigade to the U.S. civil war.

Farewell George MacDonald Fraser, and thanks for the inspiration.