LITMIR.BIZ

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looks like an Afghan,’ said Khalil approvingly.

      By the time the inevitable pot of green tea arrived, there was a bitter chill and the orchard had emptied of diners. But Khalil had more to tell. Between postings for the secret police, he had spent some months as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban. He came from the same branch of the Ghilzai tribe and so was trusted.

      Holding my teacup in both hands to keep them warm, I asked him to describe Mullah Omar. One of the most enigmatic things about the Taliban was the reclusiveness of their one-eyed leader. Not only had he never travelled outside Afghanistan, Mullah Omar had barely visited his own country. He had only twice gone to Kabul, preferring to rule from his adopted home of Kandahar though he was actually born in Tarin Kot in Uruzgan, the mountainous province north of the city. He had never given interviews to western journalists, and he had refused to meet with western diplomats.

      No pictures of him hung in government offices. Newspaper articles about him were always illustrated by the same blurred photograph taken from television footage of him in Kandahar holding up the Sacred Cloak of Prophet Mohammed at a special gathering of Taliban in 1996. At this ceremony, he had himself declared as Amir ul Momineen, Commander of all Islam; it was also the first time the cloak had been taken out for more than sixty years.

      All that was known about Mullah Omar was that until 1994 he had been a simple village mullah in Sanghisar, a small community of mud-walled houses an hour’s drive north of Kandahar. He was about forty, bearded, wore a black turban and had only one eye, having lost the other in a Soviet rocket attack during the jihad in the 1980s, supposedly clawing it out of the socket when he realised that he had been blinded. Even the one eye was sometimes disputed. A few days earlier a friend of a friend had come to my hotel, whispering because of all the ISI officers in the lobby, that he had a picture of the real Mullah Omar. I opened the envelope to see a small black and white passport photograph of a man with a turban and two eyes.

      Khalil was not very enlightening on his appearance. ‘He looks normal, medium height, a bit fat and has an artificial eye which is green.’ He had more to say on his personality. According to Khalil, Mullah Omar modelled himself on Caliph Umar, a seventh-century leader of Islam who had been declared Amir ul Momineen of the peoples of Arabia and was the second Caliph after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. A simple man who owned just one shirt and one mantle, and who ordered his own son killed for immorality, Caliph Umar used to disguise himself in ragged clothes to mingle incognito amongst the common people. In the same way, Mullah Omar would go out of his compound at night on his battered old motorcycle to find out what his people were saying about him in the bazaars and chai-khanas or tea-houses.

      Khalil said that Mullah Omar presented himself as a man of simple tastes but though he berated his cook every day for serving meat when his soldiers in the field had none, he ate it anyway, and he liked listening to war-chants and riding his Arabian horse around his compound. In fact Khalil had quickly come to the conclusion that the great enigmatic mastermind behind the Taliban was just simple-minded. ‘Mullah Omar knows only how to write Omar and to sign his name,’ he said. ‘He’s completely illiterate.’

      I had been told the same thing a few days earlier by General Ishaq, administrator of the hospital in Kandahar that used to treat Mullah Omar, and a former general in the Afghan army. ‘His doctor told me he thought that the rocket had left bits of shrapnel in his brain. He said Omar likes sitting at the wheel of one of his cars making engine noises and that he had days of terrible headaches and mood-swings when he would not see anyone and dreams when he thought he was having visions.’

      For Khalil, coming into such close contact with the Taliban leadership was what made him lose faith in the whole movement. ‘It is the first time in Afghanistan’s history that the lower classes of the country are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration – like Mullah Omar they are all totally backward and illiterate. They have no idea of the history of the country and they call themselves mullahs but have no idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have beards or women cannot be educated, in fact on the contrary the Koran says people must seek education.’

      For all the Taliban leader’s avowed simplicity and proclaimed intention of returning Afghanistan to the time of the Prophet, 1400 years earlier, Khalil said Mullah Omar loved the trappings of power. Not poor himself, he had however been shocked by the lavishness of Mullah Omar’s house, set in a vast walled compound with a mosque, guesthouse, its own farm, stables and houses for the uncle who acted as a father-figure and all his relatives. Built in 1997, all paid for by Osama bin Laden, it had specially reinforced walls and roofs, six feet thick and cushioned with car tyres, to withstand even a cruise missile. He had even had a road moved because it went too close to the compound.

      The main house where Mullah Omar lived with his three wives and five children was in an inner walled area. In front of the wrought-iron entrance gate was a fountain flowing over a fibreglass sculpture of a fallen log dotted with small Miami Beach-style plastic palm trees. The house itself was a two-storey building, set either side of a central courtyard which contained a water purification system and was painted with murals of the scenic attractions of Afghanistan including the fort at Kalat, the minaret at Jam, the mosque of Herat and oddly one of the swimming pool at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, but not of course of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Whichever wife was in favour would sleep on the same side of the house as Mullah Omar while the other two would sleep in the other section with the children.

      Just outside the inner compound was the guesthouse, a bungalow with a large patio with columns painted like tree trunks and walls decorated with gaudy flower murals. Mullah Omar spent the mornings there, sitting on a bed with a tin of money and a walkie-talkie by his side, receiving his commanders, handing out cash and issuing instructions, usually sent out on paper chits.

      Khalil said he sometimes saw Osama bin Laden at Mullah Omar’s house, arriving in a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows, usually in a convoy of seven or eight cars at a time. ‘His bodyguards were all very tall people, Sudanese I think, with curly hair and all with wireless sets and earpieces like those American bodyguards. Sometimes I went to Mullah Omar’s house in Uruzgan when they went hunting for birds or deer together or fishing with dynamite.’

      The more he saw of them together the more he became convinced that the Taliban were not really in control. ‘We laughed when we heard the Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden,’ he said. ‘The Americans are crazy. Afghanistan is not a state sponsoring terrorism but a terrorist-sponsored state. It is only Osama bin Laden that can hand over Mullah Omar not vice versa.’

      During his time in the Taliban, Khalil had attended two Arab-run training camps, one in Jari Dasht, the Yellow Desert, four hours from Helmand, an area with its own airstrip where Arab sheikhs used to go hunting, and one near Herat. ‘We were taught by Pakistani military trainers how to shoot exact targets and how to move along the ground in the front-line,’ he said. They were also told that if they died while fighting under the white flag of the Taliban, they along with seventy-two members of their families would go to paradise. They were also given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and encouraged to ‘take wives’ during battle, basically a licence to rape.

      Being ordered to the front-line was to provide Khalil’s chance for escape: ‘We were sixty-two friends sent to Bagram, north of Kabul, and our line was attacked by the Northern Alliance and they almost defeated us. Many of my friends were killed and we didn’t know who was fighting whom, there was killing from behind and in front. Our commanders fled in cars leaving us behind so we also escaped, walking all night.

      ‘I was very afraid of being caught. I got away but then I was stopped by a line of Arabs who demanded to know why we were escaping. For two days we were under their arrest then taken back to the front-line.’

      One night he was put on watch and saw a truck of sheep and goats coming through the lines from Northern Alliance territory so he jumped in and got to Kabul and from there back to Kandahar. There he was arrested and put in jail for eight days and interrogated but managed to get out to Quetta through the intervention of some relatives who were high-ranking Taliban members.

      Since leaving the Taliban, Khalil had been living back in

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