"Kal Roos ko bikharte dekha tha,
Ab India toot ta dekhenge,
Hum barq-e-jehad ke sholon mein,
America ko jalta dekhenge.
(We saw Russia disintegrate,
Now we will see India fall apart,
In the flames of jehad we will see America ablaze)."
-Mujahideen ki Lalkaar (War Cry of the Mujahideen), a poem found in a terrorist's notebook at Rishkhor, Afghanistan.

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The algebra of evil can be infinite. Or it can unfold with stark simplicity over 1,086 pages.
The manual in neatly printed Arabic and accompanied by clear, hand-drawn illustrations is possibly one of the most comprehensive urban terrorist encyclopaedia. It was found at the Rishkhor Military Garrison located 15 km south-west of Kabul, set in the idyllic burnt beige landscape typical of the Afghan countryside. Rishkhor was among the largest and most efficiently organised terrorist training camps of Al Qaida. Just a 30- minute drive from Kabul, Osama bin Laden had established his University of Terror here. Run as a joint venture with Pakistan's dreaded Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, its teachers were retired Pakistani military personnel and its syllabus one of frightening magnitude. It was here that impressionable young men-they called themselves jehadis-from as far away as China and Chechnya imbibed the mechanics of mayhem laced with religious overtones.

THE EPILOGUE: A Northern Alliance soldier rifles through papers found at the Al Qaida camp at Tora Bora

The lessons told terrible truths in the plainest of languages. "For an assassin, reconnaissance is an art. The target has to be well observed. You have to know where he comes and goes, the places he frequents, his friends. Come as close to him and even try and build a relationship with him ... the safest way to assassinate someone is by booby-trapping his car, using letter bombs or poisoning him using chemicals which cause heart attacks."

What September 11 had made amply clear, Rishkhor only reiterated: this was not a random group of rebels, the fanatics faithful throwing themselves at the non-Islamic world. This was a motivated, organised army in the making. According to US intelligence sources, close to 25 camps throughout Afghanistan tutored an estimated 11,000 youths, turning them into the multi-skilled Swiss army knives of the jehad. The cadres were meant not only to help realise bin Laden's objective of expelling the US from the Gulf, but also to topple Islamic governments and ultimately help re-establish an Islamic Caliphate. Rishkhor was one of his most powerful indoctrination plants. Its success lay in its ability to fit the hand of medieval ideology into the glove of rigorous scientific military training.

YESTERDAY'S WAR: Al Qaida men storm a house during a drill at Al Faruq training camp; (below) destroyed artillery at the site

Close to 25 camps spread throughout Afghanistan transformed nearly 11,000 youth into multi-skilled Swiss army knives of the jehad.

The Al Qaida manual leaves nothing to chance. Every element of an act of violence, from the materials and means used for preparation, execution and the aftermath is explained, catered to and taught. Recruits received detailed instructions on techniques of murder: remote-controlled explosives, assault rifles, cars, poisonous chemicals, gases and letter bombs filled with slivers of plastic explosives. There were instructions about the means of getting to a target: by diverting the attention of his security group, creating a fire or staging a street quarrel.

The manual instructs further: "To stop the target's car without shooting in a two-way street, speed up your car and hit his car on the left so it spins around and stops. As soon as it stops, the driver and the hit man start firing."

For the jehadis' own use, the manual details first-aid in emergency situations: how to prevent blood loss from wounds and how to survive extreme cold in high mountains, surveillance techniques, briefings about the various intelligence agencies like the CIA and Mossad and a listing of ciphers and codes used by the Al Qaida. Instructors often used perverse analogies faithfully noted by their students. One notebook records how to blow up a helicopter: "1,000 gm hashoon aap uske qabool fuel tankon par rakh kar usko ba-aasani Rajiv Gandhi ki tarah sati kar sakte hain. (Place 1,000 gm of explosives on its fuel tanks and watch it blow up like Rajiv Gandhi).

The entire manual has been deliberately given a religious twist, with a liberal sprinkling of quotations from the Koran on instances of subterfuge and psychological warfare to illustrate examples. Chapters usually begin with inscriptions from the Koran like, "It often happens that a small force has beaten a large army." What follows is a 10-page lesson on infiltration, which makes for chilling reading. It talks about the need to travel light, carry minimal food, clothing and arms-"remember, clothes aren't as important as speed". Besides guerrilla warfare, the course includes street-fighting techniques, full-frontal military assaults in populated urban areas using tanks, troops and armoured cars.

Students were given "practicals" in the open, thin-air laboratory of Rishkhor which involved stripping and assembling small arms, lessons on unit leadership and use of explosives. Rishkhor's students were taught to destroy practically every modern invention known to man-bridges, battle tanks, helicopters, power pylons. Al Qaida's bomb-making manuals give precise recipes for the quantity of explosives to be used for damaging and destroying targets: 1 kg to destroy a truck's fuel tank and 1.2 kg split in six pieces to destroy a railway intersection. The section on timers for explosives lists a range of switches, from complex to crude, including those that can be made from mousetraps, electrical fittings or even ordinary clothes pegs.

The trained cadres could be deployed anywhere: with the Taliban, in military offensives against the Northern Alliance or in a suicide attack against a US target or an assassination bid. In the case of Alliance military commander Ahmed Shah Masood's murder, Al Qaida operatives performed a text-book operation. They posed as journalists and used plastic explosives hidden in a video camera.

There were rudimentary courses on politics, on Indian political parties and their leaders. Qari Mohammad Irfan from Bahawalpur, Pakistan, scrawled two pages on "extremist Hindu organisations" and their leaders. The parties include the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, BJP, ABVP, Swadeshi Jagran Manch, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and the Shiv Sena. The Bajrang Dal is a "gundon ki tanzeem (party of thugs)" and the Sena is identified as the party that fights against Muslims ("musalmanon ke khilaf ladai karta hain"). It isn't clear if these organisations were ever targeted by the Al Qaida or its allied groups. But whoever was targeted faced an enemy painstakingly instructed by the indigenous encyclopaedia of terror.