Is This Your First War? Read Online Free PDF Page B

were breaking apart and eating a kind of bright orange and impossibly sweet fruit I hadn’t seen before. Our hands were sticky. Ali was feeling nostalgic.
    â€œThey would play music. We’d smoke pot together. My favourites were the German women. They were all laid back, blonde, good-looking. Peace and love. They were the best, but all the women were nice, their boyfriends too. They loved it here. And they loved this guesthouse. They said it was like Shangri-La.” He smiled and shook his head then rolled a piece of gummy hash into a hand-rolled cigarette. The paper stuck to his juice-stained fingers. He inhaled deeply and tilted his head back, puckering his lips to blow the smoke away from his face in a tight stream.
    â€œDo you play the guitar?” he asked.
    â€œA little.”
    â€œI have one inside. A Dutch man, long hair, he left it here as a present. All the strings are broken.”
    â€œDid you learn to play?”
    â€œNot really. The girls would try to teach me.”
    Ali tried to blow hashish smoke rings and coughed loudly. “You two are the first guests I’ve had in months,” he said.
    When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran blocked overland routes to Pakistan from Europe, the flow of liberal-minded young tourists to Ali’s guesthouse dried up.
    â€œI was a businessman in Europe for a while,” Ali said. “More of a salesman, really.”
    â€œWhat did you sell?”
    â€œGems. Precious stones. Rubies, that sort of thing.”
    â€œHow did that go?”
    â€œNot very well. I was arrested and jailed in France for two years.”
    â€œA salesman?”
    â€œThey said I was a smuggler.”
    Ali returned to Pakistan, reopened his guesthouse, and waited for the tourists to come back. They didn’t. “I’d like to immigrate to Australia,” he said.
    Madyan fell to the Taliban in 2007. Scores died fighting in the area when Pakistani security forces fought to take it back two years later. I don’t know what happened to Ali, whether he ever made it to Australia or was purged by the Taliban because of his love of Western women and music. We said goodbye and caught a minibus south to Peshawar and the ungoverned Tribal Areas west of the city, where even in 2000 the Taliban’s influence was strong and growing.
    Peshawar’s history has been shaped by its geography. It lies at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, connecting Central Asia with the Indian subcontinent, and for centuries every explorer, spy, smuggler, bandit, and conquering army crossing between Europe and Asia had little choice but to pass this way. Alexander led his near-mutinous army through the pass more than two thousand years ago. The British occupied Peshawar in the 1800s and from there sent armies and secret agents into Afghanistan and beyond. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the city became the home base of the Afghan mujahideen resistance and their allies, who included Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, the CIA, and Muslim freelance volunteers from around world.
    Osama bin Laden, then little more than the son of a wealthy Yemeni construction tycoon in Saudi Arabia, showed up at this time. He set up an office in the University Town neighbourhood of the city to organize the flow of Arab volunteers hoping to get a crack at the infidel Soviets or to martyr themselves in the attempt. Bin Laden gained some fame as a cash cow but wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to cross the border and fight. He established a mountain base inside Afghanistan for several dozen Arab volunteers under his command. These so-called Afghan Arabs were brave but incompetent. Afghans fighting with them recoiled from their suicidal zeal, and the military exploits of bin Laden’s foreign volunteers were of negligible impact. But when the Russians were finally driven out, they convinced