I cannot now remember the details of what was said in either conversation, but my most vivid recollection is of the extraordinary similarity between these two bitter enemies, once contemporaries at the University of Kabul. One was a Communist and the other a fanatical Muslim, but both were haughty warlords, men for whom fighting was not just a way of life but the highest calling. The excitement of the Mujahidin fighters as they clustered around Hekmatyar, their sheer pleasure in their weapons and ferocity, was thrilling, and horrible. He led us down a nearby ravine, and for ten minutes he and his men blazed away at the opposing rockface until the air shook with crashing echoes. It was a display at once childish, deliberately menacing and, for people raised on gunpowder, quite natural.
Bloody war is sewn into the very land of Afghanistan, in the form of innumerable landmines.
Mogul, Persian, Russian, Soviet and British armies all perished in these unconquerable mountains. When the Soviet Union pulled out in 1989 it left 50,000 dead and a million dead Afghans. War is their game, and their games are warfare. This medieval world, with its endless cycles of atrocity and revenge, is the one that trained, formed and defends Osama bin Laden and his like. The taxi driver who took us to the airport when we left Washington said he had once been a Stinger missile operator in Hekmatyar's guerrilla army.