“Tora Bora is already a world-famous name but we want it to be known for tourism, not terrorism,” said Gul Agha Sherzai, governor of the eastern Afghanistan province of Nangahar where the caves are situated.

The black-bearded governor, a former warlord turned construction mogul, has drawn up plans for a £5.3m hotel development overlooking the caves. He intends to build restaurants and pave the dirt road leading to the mountains from Jalalabad, a bone-jarring three-hour drive.

“I don’t just want one Tora Bora hotel,” he said, gnawing bones from mutton soup that he had prepared himself. “I want three or four. Long before anyone had heard of Osama, Tora Bora was known as a picnic spot and now it can be both.”

An hour’s walk from where the road runs out, across scree-covered mountains and along the bed of a stream, is the hillside the Al-Qaeda leader had turned into his fortified bunker.

Initially used as a hideout by mujaheddin fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Tora Bora was taken over by Bin Laden who extended its caves and tunnels into the mountains dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan.

In December 2001 he and his lieutenants fled here as American-led forces drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, the last known sighting of the man behind the September 11 attacks. US planes bombed the area but attempts to trap him were bungled when the US command delegated responsibility for his capture to three warlords. At least one allegedly accepted bribes to let him and his henchmen flee into Pakistan.

Anyone expecting the sort of high-tech redoubt that might feature as a villain’s lair in a James Bond movie is likely to be disappointed. In between the craters left by the US bombing are just the ruins of houses of baked mud bricks.

Far from a labyrinth of tunnels, there are just three small entrances. One has been destroyed and the other two do not extend far. Any jihadi manuals or plans for nuclear or chemical weapons have disappeared: US forces checked the area carefully. By an old Soviet tank on a hill, a guard shows off the remains of a wall that he claims was Bin Laden’s swimming pool.

“Actually it was his library,” said Haji Zaheer, one of the three local commanders charged with capturing him. “All we found were some old potatoes. It looked like they had been running short of supplies.” If the ruins are disappointing, the location is stunning. Smugglers with heavily laden donkeys wander the gorges through jagged mountains.

The local administration is hoping to cash in on the area’s notoriety and a forthcoming Hollywood film by Oliver Stone, based on the book Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer. “The name Afghanistan at the moment is associated with terrorism,” Sherzai said. “We want to remove that label and replace it with tourism.”

The country which back in the 1960s and 1970s was a popular destination on the hippie trail may not yet be ready for tourism. An attempt to take British package tours to Afghanistan in 2004 was thwarted by the assassination of the minister for tourism in whose guesthouse in Herat they had been due to stay. This month two German journalists camping near the beauty spot of Bamian were shot dead.

Although Sherzai insisted that Tora Bora is “100% safe”, he sent an escort of two pick-ups carrying 16 guards armed with Kalashnikovs to accompany me to the site of his proposed hotel.

At several points the drivers went at such speed that the pick-ups rose from the ground. “Al-Qaeda country,” muttered the gunmen. Perhaps it was all part of the Tora Bora experience.

Explore World News

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Divided Kirkuk faces up to curse of oil
• Revenge killer hailed hero joins Ossetian war
• The perfect way to swat a fly: stay one jump ahead