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Department. The message that he conveyed was simple –
the mullah wants to parley
.
    By that stage it was already clear to anyone who was a student of Afghan affairs that the Taliban, under the command of Mullah Omar, were not the pliable yokels that it had been assumed they were. In August 1998, the Clinton administration had launched a cruise missile attack on terrorist training camps near Khost in retaliation for the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam truck bombings, and the US oil giant Lodestone and its rival Unocal, the Taliban’s only corporate friends, had suspended work and closed their Kandahar offices. In November 1998 the Manhattan Federal Court had issued an indictment chronicling 238 separate charges against Osama Bin Laden, from participating in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and funding Islamist groups in New Jersey to conspiring with Sudan, Iran and Iraq to attack US installations. And the following month, the UN Security Council had passed a motion of censure on the Taliban for its failure to conclude a ceasefire with the Northern Alliance, the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Hazaras in Mazari Sharif, profiting from the lucrative heroin trade and harbouring terrorists.
    Jonah was living on the Hebridean island of Islay, with his wife Sarah and Esme, his baby daughter. He remembered the sense of relief when the call came and the sense of palpable excitement in the Department when he arrived. He also recognised, with the clarity of hindsight, the significance of Sarah’s parting question, delivered across the kitchen table: ‘Is that what you’re going to do? You’re going to keep leaving us?’
    What could he say?
He had come to his own conclusion. As miserable as it was, his job was what he was. It was his calling. He was nothing without it.
    Monteith called them together before the Khyber Collage. He had clearly ignored the directive to dismantle and send it to a museum. It had grown larger in size in the last two years, spilling over to fill half of another wall of the briefing room with more newspaper clippings, photographs of fire-breathing imams, and frame grabs of jihadist websites and satellite channels. Strings of ribbon showed an intricate web of alliances among Sunni extremists worldwide, including Chechen rebel groups, Palestinian ­radicals, Kashmiri militants, the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. It was Monteith’s assertion that it had only been since 1996, when the Taliban swarmed into Kabul and Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan after half a decade in Sudan – at about the same time as the Afghan Guides were disbanded, Monteith liked to point out – that al-Qaeda had taken on its current incarnation as a worldwide revolutionary vanguard operating in more than sixty countries from a secure base in the Hindu Kush. A base provided by the Taliban and their Pakistani masters. Monteith called them an army of occupation, Pakistani proxies ruling a client state, and he hated them with a passion.
    The Taliban sat at the centre of the Collage, fed by three distinct streams: the first, weapons and money from Saudi Arabia via the ISI; the second, a ready source of fanatical foot-soldiers from the Pakistani madrasas; and the third, revenue from the opium trade, with Helmand province as the centre of production. And in each case the hand of the ISI’s chief of Afghan intelligence, Brigadier Javid Khan, Monteith’s arch-nemesis, was detected and highlighted for all to see.
    For the sceptics at the Foreign Office and within MI6 who regarded Afghanistan as a backward hellhole and posed the question of why the Pakistanis or for that matter the Saudis should bother with it, Monteith liked to describe the Taliban regime as an ideological picket fence, a buffer zone built by the Pakistanis against the Soviets, and those who came after – the Russians and the Central Asians – to block their access to the Indian Ocean. As for the Saudis, he said that they would always