The Afghanistan File

The Afghanistan file is a book that I worked on last year for Medina Publishing. It is my favourite project that I have been involved with for quite a while. It is about a topic that I know very little about and I really enjoyed the research process as it was a real journey of discovery for me.

I was very kindly sent a copy before Christmas and have been reading it over my holiday.

I found a lot of the images through the standard news sites and some really fantastic photos from Magnum. The most interesting source I discovered was the The Afghan Media Resource Centre. This is in the collection of the Library of Congress. The AMRC was set up at the beginning in the early 1980’s due to a media blackout imposed by the Soviet backed Kabul government. Foreign journalists had become targets to be captured or killed, so the AMRC was an effort to overcome the problem.

In 1987, a series of sessions were conducted in Peshawar, Pakistan. Qualified Afghans were recruited from all major political parties, ethnic groups regions of Afghanistan. They received training in print journalism, photo journalism and video news production.

“The Afghanistan File, written by the former head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence, tells the story of his Department’s involvement in Afghanistan from the time of the Soviet invasion in 1979 to Nine Eleven 2001. It begins with the backing given by Saudi Arabia to the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation, and moves on to the fruitless initiatives to broker peace among the Mujahideen factions after the Soviet withdrawal, the rise to power of the Taliban and the shelter the Taliban gave to Osama Bin Laden.

A theme that runs through the book is the extraordinary difficulties Saudi Arabia and its allies had in dealing with the Mujahideen. Prince Turki found them magnificently brave, but exasperating. On one occasion in trying to arrange peace among them, he got permission from the King to open the Kaaba in Mecca, and had the leaders go inside, where they were overcome with emotion and swore never to fight each other again . A few hours later on their way to Medina they almost came to blows on the bus. Turki’s account gives details of the Saudi attempts in the 1990s to bring its volunteers out of Afghanistan – with chequered success – and his negotiations with the Taleban for the surrender of Osama Bin Laden.

The book includes a number of declassified Intelligence Department documents. Prince Turki explains that the nihilistic, apparently pointless terrorism that has been seen in the Middle East in the last twenty years had its origins in Afghanistan with Osama’s deluded belief that he had helped defeat the Russians. There is no evidence that he ever fought them at all. Soon after Nine Eleven Saudi Arabia discovered that it had a home-grown terrorist problem involving some of the returnees from Afghanistan. Much of the huge change that has taken place in the Kingdom since has stemmed from the campaign to tackle this.”