LITMIR.BIZ

       3 Inside the House of Knowledge

       ‘How can you have a minister for railways?’ asked the Pakistani, ‘you don’t have any trains in Afghanistan?’ ‘You have a Justice Minister,’ replied the Afghan.

      Mujaheddin joke

      AS I STOOD AT Hamid Karzai’s doorway in Quetta’s Satellite Town a week after the attack on the World Trade Center, war in Afghanistan was once again imminent, but it was reawakening long-buried ghosts from the past that worried me, not the future. By then I had been a foreign correspondent for fourteen years and knew that conflicts often seem more dangerous from a distance than when one is there. I rang the bell. The Karzai house was salmon-pink and high-walled and the front step piled high with dusty sandals. Tribesmen with Kalashnikovs stood guard, for Hamid had become chief of the Popolzai and was a prime Taliban and al Qaeda target, particularly since September 11^th. Two years earlier, on 14 July 1999, his father had been assassinated on the road behind the house, shot dead by a man on a motorcycle while he was chatting to a neighbour on the way back from evening prayers.