In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Just as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had changed everything for General Zia, so 9/11 transformed General Musharraf from an international outcast. Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W. Bush and to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair. There was a major problem, however. Our own intelligence service, ISI, had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs. The ISI’s Colonel Imam boasted he had trained 90,000 Taliban fighters and even became Pakistan’s consul general in Herat during the Taliban regime.

当时，巴基斯坦仍受军政府控制，但美国需要我们的帮助，就像20世纪80年代阿富汗与苏联人对抗时一样。而正如苏联入侵阿富汗进而改变了齐亚·哈克将军的身份一般，9·11事件让穆沙拉夫将军摇身一变，不再是世界的弃儿。突然间，他就被美国总统的小布什先生邀请到白宫会晤，到英国唐宁街十号与英国总理托尼·布莱尔先生面谈。这之中其实还有个很大的问题。我们的三军情报局实质上扶植了塔利班。许多ISI的高层也与塔利班的高层有往来，相识多年，并拥有同样的信仰。ISI上校伊玛目就吹嘘说自己曾训练过九万名塔利班战士，后来在塔利班政权时期，他甚至成为巴基斯坦在赫拉特的总领事。

We were not fans of the Taliban as we had heard they destroyed girls’ schools and blew up giant Buddha statues – we had many Buddhas of our own that we were proud of. But many Pashtuns did not like the bombing of Afghanistan or the way Pakistan was helping the Americans, even if it was only by allowing them to cross our airspace and stopping weapons supplies to the Taliban. We did not know then that Musharraf was also letting the Americans use our airfields.

我们不是塔利班的支持者，因为我们听说他们会捣毁女校，炸毁巨型佛像。斯瓦特有很多我们引以为傲的佛像。但许多普什图人对于美军轰炸阿富汗以及巴基斯坦帮助美国这件事很不高兴。虽然巴基斯坦也只是让他们经过我们的领空，并且停止向塔利班政权提供武器而已。我们当时并不知道穆沙拉夫将军其实也允许美军使用我们的机场。

Some of our religious people saw Osama bin Laden as a hero. In the bazaar you could buy posters of him on a white horse and boxes of sweets with his picture on them. These clerics said 9/11 was revenge on the Americans for what they had been doing to other people round the world, but they ignored the fact that the people in the World Trade Center were innocent and had nothing to do with American policy and that the Holy Quran clearly says it is wrong to kill. Our people see conspiracies behind everything, and many argued that the attack was actually carried out by Jews as an excuse for America to launch a war on the Muslim world. Some of our newspapers printed stories that no Jews went to work at the World Trade Center that day. My father said this was rubbish.

国内一些宗教人士认为本·拉登是英雄。集市里可以买到他骑着白马的海报，还可以买到盒子上印着他的肖像的糖果。这些宗教人士说9·11事件是对美国人的报复，以惩罚他们对世界上其他国家做的坏事。但他们却忽略了一个事实，那就是世贸大楼里的受害者是无辜的，他们与美国政府的政策一点关系都没有，而且《古兰经》里也明确写着杀戮是错误的行为。我们的人民认为一切事件背后都有阴谋，很多人坚持这场攻击是犹太人发动的，为的是要让美国攻击伊斯兰世界。有些报纸写道，事件发生当天，世贸大楼里的犹太人都没有去上班。父亲说这简直是一派胡言。