A Taliban commander sat in the control tower of what was once the nerve centre of America’s war in Afghanistan, momentarily king of all he surveyed.
Maulawi Hafiz Mohibullah Muktaz, a religious leader and fighter from Kandahar aged 35, leaned back in his seat laughing, twiddled some dials on a control console, stared out across the multibillion-dollar base the size of a small city and picked up a phone to summon an imaginary jet.
“Never in our wildest dreams could we have believed we could beat a superpower like America with just our Kalashnikovs,” he beamed, staring across the two runways beneath him. Close by were a hundred revetted holding bays for attack jets, the airbase passenger lounge, a fifty-bed hospital and in the middle
