The Great War for Civilisation (10 page)

“In all my life, I have never seen so many tanks,” my old Swedish radio colleague from Cairo, Lars-Gunnar Erlandsson, said when we met. Lars-Gunnar was a serious Swede, a thatch of blond hair above piercing blue eyes and vast spectacles. “And never in my life do I ever want to see so many tanks again,” he said. “It is beyond imagination.” There were now five complete Soviet divisions in Afghanistan; the 105th Airborne Division based on Kabul, the 66th Motorised Rifle Brigade in Herat, the 357th Motorised Rifle Division in Kandahar, the 16th Motorised Rifle Division in the three northern provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar and Samangan and the 306th Motorised Division in Kabul with the Soviet paratroopers. There were already 60,000 Soviet troops in the country, vast numbers of them digging slit trenches beside the main roads. This was invasion on a massive scale, a superpower demonstration of military will, the sclerotic Brezhnev—Red Army political commissar on the Ukrainian front in 1943, he would die within three years—now flexing his impotent old frame for the last time.

But Russia's final imperial adventure had all the awesome fury of Britain's Afghan wars. In the previous week alone, Soviet Antonov-22 transport aircraft had made 4,000 separate flights into the capital. Every three minutes, squadrons of MiG-25s would race up from the frozen runways of Kabul airport and turn in the white sunshine towards the mountains to the east and there would follow, like dungeon doors slamming deep beneath our feet, a series of massive explosions far across the landscape. Soviet troops stood on the towering heights of the Kabul Gorge. I was Middle East correspondent of
The Times
of London, the paper whose nineteenth-century war correspondent William Howard Russell—a student of Trinity College, Dublin, as I was—won his spurs in the 1854–55 Anglo-Russian war in the Crimea. We were all Tom Grahams now.

I think that's how many of us felt that gleaming, iced winter. I was already exhausted. I lived in Beirut, where the Lebanese civil war had sucked in one Israeli army and would soon consume another. Only three weeks before, I had left post-revolutionary Iran, where America had just lost its very own “policeman of the Gulf,” Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, in favour of that most powerful of Islamic leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Within nine months, I would be running for my life under shellfire with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Army as it invaded the Islamic republic. America had already “lost” Iran. Now it was in the process of “losing” Afghanistan—or at least watching that country's last pitiful claim to national independence melt into the Kremlin's embrace. Or so it looked to us at the time. The Russians wanted a warm-water port, just as General Roberts had feared in 1878. If they could reach the Gulf coast—Kandahar is 650 kilometres from the Gulf of Oman—then after a swift incursion through Iranian or Pakistani Baluchistan, Soviet forces would stand only 300 kilometres from the Arabian peninsula. That, at least, was the received wisdom, the fount of a thousand editorials. The Russians are coming. That the Soviet Union was dying, that the Soviet government was undertaking this extraordinary expedition through panic—through fear that the collapse of a communist ally in Afghanistan might set off a chain reaction among the Soviet Muslim republics—was not yet apparent, although within days I would see the very evidence that proved the Kremlin might be correct.

Indeed, many of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan came from those very Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia whose loyalties so concerned Brezhnev. In Kabul, Soviet troops from the Turkoman region were conversing easily with local Afghan commanders. The high-cheekboned Asiatic features of some soldiers often suggested that their military units had been drawn from the Mongolian region. In Kabul and the villages immediately surrounding the city, no open hostility was shown towards the Soviet invaders in the daylight hours; so many Russian units had been moved into the snow-covered countryside that Afghan troops had been withdrawn to protect the capital. But at night, the Soviets were pulled back towards Kabul and unconfirmed reports already spoke of ten Russian dead in two weeks, two of them beaten to death with clubs. In Jalalabad, 65 kilometres by road from the Pakistan border, thunderous night-time explosions bore witness to the continued struggle between Afghan tribesmen and Soviet troops.

For the next two months, we few journalists who managed to enter Afghanistan were witness to the start of a fearful tragedy, one that would last for more than a quarter of a century and would cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America. How could we have known? How could we have guessed that while an Islamic revolution had enveloped Iran, a far more powerful spiritual force was being nursed and suckled here amid the snows of early January 1980? Again, the evidence was there, for those of us who chose to seek it out, who realised that the narrative of history laid down by our masters—be they of the Moscow or the Washington persuasion—was essentially short-term, false and ultimately self-defeating. Perhaps we were too naive, too ill-prepared for events on such a scale. Who could grasp in so short a time the implications of this essentially imperial story, this latest adventure in the “Great Game”? We were young, most of us who managed to scramble into Afghanistan that January. I was thirty-five, most of my colleagues were younger, and journalism is not only an imprecise science but a fatiguing one whose practice involves almost as much bureaucracy as it does fact-gathering. I had spent Christmas in Ireland and returned to wartime Beirut on 3 January to prepare for my onward assignment to cover the continuing revolution in Iran. But no event could compare to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

For a journalist, nothing can beat that moment when a great story beckons, when history really is being made and when a foreign editor tells you to go for it. I remember one hot day in Beirut when gunmen had hijacked a Lufthansa passenger jet to Dubai. I could get there in four hours, I told London. “Go. Go. Go,” they messaged back. But this was drama on an infinitely greater scale, an epic if we could be there to report it. The Soviet army was pouring into Afghanistan, and from their homes and offices in London, New York, Delhi, Moscow, my colleagues were all trying to find a way there. Beirut was comparatively close but it was still more than three thousand kilometres west of Kabul. And it was a surreal experience to drive through West Beirut's civil war gunfire to the ticketing office of Middle East Airlines to seek the help of a Lebanese airline that now had only twelve elderly Boeing 707s and three jumbos to its name. Under the old travel rules, Afghanistan issued visas to all British citizens on arrival. But we had to work on the principle that with the country now a satellite of the Soviet Union, those regulations—a remnant of the days when Kabul happily lay astride the hashish tourist trail to India—would have been abandoned.

Richard Wigg, then our India correspondent, was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, Michael Binyon was in Moscow. The Lebanese airline had conceived of a plan to get me into Afghanistan, an ingenious plot that I sent through to London on the ancient telex machines in the Beirut Associated Press bureau, which regularly misspelled our copy. “Friends in ticketing section at MiddlehEast [sic] Airlines . . . have suggested we might try following: I buy single ticket to Kabul and travel in on Ariana [Afghan Airlines] flight that terminates in Kabul,” I wrote. “This means that even if I get bounced, I will probably earn myself twelve hours or so in the city . . . because my flight will have terminated in Afghanistan and I can't be uput [
sic
] back on it . . . At the very worst, I would get bounced and could buy a ticket to Pakistan then head for Peshawar . . . Grateful reply soonest so I can get MEA ticket people to work early tomorrow (Fri) morning.” London replied within the hour. “Please go ahead with single ticket Kabul plan,” the foreign desk messaged. I was already back at the MEA office when
The Times
sent another note. “Binyon advises that Afghan embassies uround [
sic
] the world have been instructed to issue visus [
sic
] which might make things easier.”

This was astonishing. The Russians
wanted
us there. Their “fraternal support” for the new Karmal government—and the supposedly hideous nature of his predecessor's regime—was to be publicised. The Russians were coming to
liberate
Afghanistan. This was obviously the story the Kremlin was concocting. For several years, I had—in addition to my employment by
The Times
—been reporting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I liked radio, I liked CBC's courage in letting their reporters speak their minds, in letting me go into battle with a tape recorder to “tell it like it is,” to report the blood and stench of wars and my own disgust at human conflict. Sue Hickey came on the telex from CBC's London office. “Good luck keep ur eyes open in the back of ur head,” she wrote. I promised her an Afghan silk scarf—bribery knows no bounds in radio journalism. “What is the Russian for ‘Help I surrender where is the Brit Embassy?' ” I asked. “The Russian for help is ‘
pomog
,' ” Sue responded in her telex shorthand. “So there u shud not hv any trouble bi bi.”

Ariana had a flight from Frankfurt to Kabul early on Sunday morning. Then it was cancelled. Then it was rescheduled and cancelled again. It would fly from Rome. It would fly from Geneva. No, it would fly from Istanbul. When I reached Turkey on MEA, the snow was piled round the Istanbul terminal and “Delayed” was posted beside the Kabul flight designator. There was no fuel for heating in Istanbul so I huddled in my coat on a broken plastic seat with all the books and clippings I had grabbed from my files in Beirut. My teeth were chattering and I wore my gloves as I turned the pages. We journalists do this far too much, boning up on history before the next plane leaves, cramming our heads with dates and presidents, one eye on the Third Afghan War, the other on the check-in desk. I pulled out my map of Afghanistan, green and yellow to the west where the deserts imprison Kandahar, brown in the centre as the mountains shoulder their way towards Kabul, a big purple-and-white bruise to the north-east where the Hindu Kush separates Pakistan, India, China and the Soviet Union.

The border between British India and Afghanistan was finally laid across the tribal lands in 1893, from the Khyber Pass, south-west to the desert town of Chaman (now in Pakistan), a dustbowl frontier post at the base of a great desert of sand and grey mountains a hundred kilometres from Kandahar. These “lines in the sand,” of course, were set down by Sir Mortimer Durand and recognised by the great powers. For the people living on each side of the lines, who were typically given no say in the matter, the borders were meaningless. The Pathans in the southwest of Afghanistan found that the frontier cut right through their tribal and ethnic homeland. Of course they did; for the borders were supposed to protect Britain and Russia from each other, not to ease the life or identity of Afghan tribesmen who considered themselves neither Afghans nor Indians—nor, later, Pakistani—but Pushtun-speaking Pathans who believed they lived in a place called Pushtunistan, which lay on both sides of what would become known as the Durand Line.

The end of the First World War, during which Afghanistan remained neutral, left a declining British Raj to the south and an ambitious new Soviet communist nation to the north. Emir Amanullah began a small-scale insurrection against the British in 1919—henceforth to be known as the Third Afghan War—which the British won militarily but which the Afghans won politically. They would now control their own foreign affairs and have real independence from Britain. But this was no guarantee of stability.
⁴

Reform and regression marked Afghanistan's subsequent history. My collection of newspaper cuttings included a 1978 report from
The Guardian
, which recalled how the Soviets had spent £350 million to build the Salang road tunnel through the mountains north of Kabul; it took ten years and cost £200 million a mile. “Why should they spend £350 million on a little-used roadway across the Hindu Kush?” the writer asked. “Surely not just for the lorry-loads of raisins that toil up the pass each day. The answer is no. The Salang Tunnel was built to enable Russian convoys . . . to cross from the cities and army bases of Uzbekhistan all the way over to the Khyber and to Pakistan . . . ”

A nation of peasants relied upon tribal and religious tradition while only Marxists could provide political initiative. The violent overthrow of Mohamed Daoud in 1978 led to a series of ever harsher Marxist regimes led by Nur Mohamed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, their opposing Parcham (“Banner”) and Khalq (“People”) parties cruelly executing their rivals. Rebellion broke out in rural areas of Afghanistan and the army, increasingly mutinous despite its Soviet advisers, began to disintegrate. Taraki died of an “undisclosed illness”—almost certainly murdered by Amin's henchmen—and then, in December 1979, Amin in turn was shot dead. An entire Afghan army unit had already handed over its weapons to rebels in Wardak and there is some evidence that it was Amin himself who asked for Soviet military intervention to save his government. Soviet special forces were arriving at Afghan airbases on 17 December, five days after Brezhnev made his decision to invade, and it is possible that Amin was killed by mistake when his bodyguards first saw Soviet troops around his palace.

A quarter of a century later, in Moscow, I would meet a former Soviet military intelligence officer who arrived in Kabul with Russian forces before the official invasion. “Amin was shot and we tried to save him,” he told me. “Our medical officers tried to save him. More than that I will not tell you.” It is certainly true that the Soviet officer in charge of the coup, General Viktor Paputin, shortly afterwards committed suicide. On 27 December, however, it was announced that the increasingly repressive Amin had been “executed.” Babrak Karmal, a socialist lawyer and a Parcham party man who had earlier taken refuge in Moscow, was now installed in Kabul by the Soviets. He had been a deputy prime minister—along with Amin—under Taraki; now he was the Trojan horse through whom the Soviets could protest that Afghanistan had been “freed” from Amin's tyranny.