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Amruddin was evidently not a senior figure. He took a long time to answer my questions, and when he did it tended to be with the shortest of platitudes. I came away with the impression that he understood almost as little as I did about what they were really doing in Peshawar. The ostensible reason was to ‘help our Afghan brothers’ still living in the refugee camps that surrounded the city: ‘The religious duty of every Muslim,’ he said.
    I asked if their mission was supported by the Pakistan government.
    ‘The Pakistanis are our brothers – they are Muslims like us.’
    ‘And the ISI – are they also your brothers? Are they giving you money and weapons for your fight against Kabul?’
    ‘The ISI are Muslims too.’
    ‘But you are trying to impose Sharia law in Afghanistan. Not everyone wants that in your country. Is it what the ISI wants?’
    ‘We have imposed nothing but peace on the people of Afghanistan,’ he replied. ‘Our success is due only to the fact that the people want us to succeed.’
    Amruddin’s words were polite, yet the crowd round about him were increasingly unnerving. Their initial curiosity about who I was and what I might want had given way to barely suppressed impatience. Our encounter was not going to be a long one. They were young men, all of them, and there was an almost bovine quality to their stares, a passive-aggressive
hauteur
that I could not quite fathom. I wondered if I was being subtly mocked. I had no beard then, which must have seemed freakish to them. They were foot soldiers in their movement, simple people who I was sure had seen few if any Westerners before coming to Peshawar. For my part it was the first time I had seen men wearing eye-liner – actors and drag queens excepted. It was only much later that I realized how common the practice was among Pashtuns, and that wearing it was not necessarily an exercise in male vanity. 2 Onlyone thing was clear to me: they believed with total certainty that they were the coming power in the region – and that the West had better watch out. But what were they really doing here in Peshawar?
    Pakistan’s corrupt political climate had more to do with their presence than the foreign aid community imagined. In times of political weakness it was the leaders of the enormous armed forces – the seventh largest in the world – who had always stepped up to fill the void of leadership. The generals saw themselves as the guardians of the nation: its soul, its backbone, its only real source of moral fibre – and their country’s body politic was undoubtedly lacking that in the mid-1990s. In 1999, Pakistan was to experience its third military coup in half a century when General Pervez Musharraf seized power from Nawaz Sharif. The Taliban could only have opened an office in Peshawar with the permission and collusion of the ISI.
    The department had grown powerful during the 1980s, when they functioned as the CIA’s main conduit for dollars destined for the mujahideen. Peshawar was the nerve centre of an enormous support operation. The ISI did not just provide arms to the insurgents over the border, they also trained them how to use them: perhaps as many as 95,000 fighters over the decade. Out of the seven main mujahideen groups, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami was the one they most favoured, though all of them benefited from ISI largesse at one time or another, including many future Taliban – even Mullah Omar. The ISI had carried on supporting Hekmatyar after the Soviet retreat, hoping that he would establish a friendly and stable regime to their west, but by 1994 it was becoming all too obvious that their protégé had failed. As a consequence, the ISI had switched horses to an organization thatappeared to have a much better chance of restoring stability: the Taliban.
    Quite when the ISI switched horses is still hotly debated. Some Afghans believe the revolt was an ISI-sponsored project from the very start. Others say that it was as