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themselves that they had helped defeat a superpower. Muslim piety had triumphed over the godless might of the Soviet Union. A myth was born.
    It was during this period that al-Qaeda took shape. Founded by bin Laden and an Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with a small band of Arabs who had come to Afghanistan, the group’s goal was to support jihads against insufficiently Islamic regimes around the world. The United States was not an initial target but became one when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the Saudi royal family called on U.S. troops for protection. Bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia and offered to field an army of Arab veterans of Afghanistan to defend the country. The Saudi royal family turned him down. For bin Laden, the shame of an infidel army protecting the land of Mecca and Medina was too much to bear. Three years later, in 1993, al-Qaeda graduates bombed the World Trade Center in New York.
    Meanwhile, the civil war that erupted in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal was steadily consuming the country. Once again Peshawar cast its long shadow. In 1994, a movement of radical Islamists, calling themselves Taliban, or students, emerged in Kandahar province with the stated goal of restoring order and bringing Islamic law to Afghanistan. Many had lived in Peshawar and had studied in its madrassahs. They were led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, a one-eyed sheik from a poor family near Kandahar. Afghan refugees from the sprawling camps outside Peshawar swelled their ranks. Their base grew out of Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt and spread north. In 1996 they captured Kabul. Mullah Omar declared that Afghanistan was an Islamic emirate. He donned a cloak thought to have belonged to the prophet Mohammad and dubbed himself “Commander of the Faithful.”
    Pakistan, through its ISI spy agency, had armed and funded the Taliban since its inception. It was one of only three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers. Having a friendly regime next door provided the Pakistani government with “strategic depth” as it faced off against its main rival, India, ensuring Pakistan could never be threatened from the west. And the Taliban’s training camps for jihadists provided recruits for the ISI to infiltrate into Kashmir and hit India there. The Taliban were Pakistan’s pawns and Afghanistan a client province to be exploited.
    Some in Afghanistan initially welcomed the Taliban. Road travel was safer. Men who raped children were punished. But the Taliban also imposed a brutal and atavistic version of Islam. They treated women like animals, forbidding them even to leave their homes unless they were covered in a bedsheet-like burka, let alone work or go to school. It is little exaggeration to say that fun itself was forbidden. Music, dancing, flying kites, all were banned as un-Islamic. On occasion the Taliban massacred those they considered ethnically or religiously impure. In 1998 they slaughtered some 6,000 Shia Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif.
    Their most serious opposition came in the form of the predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance, which held out in northern Afghanistan and in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. Here, during the 1980s, their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, earned his nickname “Lion of Panjshir” and the affection of millions of Afghans because of his steadfast resistance against Soviet troops, who tried innumerable times to dislodge him and could not.
    Osama bin Laden watched the Taliban’s rise from Sudan, where he had moved in 1992 along with his al-Qaeda jihadist cohorts and was wearing out his welcome. The Saudi government had persuaded his family to cut off his multi-million-dollar allowance, and Egypt, the United States, and Saudi Arabia were all pressuring Sudan to kick him out. In 1996 he chartered a jet and returned to Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his fellow Arabs found accommodating hosts in Mullah Omar