The Great War for Civilisation (16 page)

I have never since held a weapon in wartime and I hope I never shall again. I have always cursed the journalists who wear military costumes and don helmets and play soldiers with a gun at their hip, greying over the line between reporter and combatant, making our lives ever more dangerous as armies and militias come to regard us as an extension of their enemies, a potential combatant, a military target. But I had not volunteered to travel with the Soviet army. I was not—as that repulsive expression would have it in later wars—“embedded.” I was as much their prisoner as their guest. As the weeks went by, Afghans learned to climb aboard the Soviet convoy lorries after dark and knife their occupants. I knew that my taking a rifle—even though I never used it—would produce a reaction from the great and the good in journalism, and it seemed better to admit the reality than to delete this from the narrative.
⁹
If I was riding shotgun for the Soviet army, then that was the truth of it.

Three times we passed through towns where villagers and peasants lined the roadside to watch us pass. And of course, it was an eerie, unprecedented experience to sit with a rifle on my lap in a Soviet military column next to armed and uniformed Russian troops and to watch those Afghans—most of them in turbans, long shawls and rubber shoes—staring at us with contempt and disgust. One man in a blue coat stood on the tailboard of an Afghan lorry and watched me with narrowed eyes. It was the nearest I had seen to a look of hatred. He shouted something that was lost in the roar of our convoy.

Major Yuri seemed unperturbed. As we drove through Qarabagh, I told him I didn't think the Afghans liked the Russians. It was beginning to snow heavily again. The major did not take his eyes from the road. “The Afghans are cunning people,” he said without obvious malice, and then fell silent. We were still sliding along the road to Kabul when I turned to Major Yuri again. So why was the Soviet army in Afghanistan? I asked him. The major thought about this for about a minute and gave me a smile. “If you read
Pravda
,” he said, “you will find that Comrade Leonid Brezhnev has answered this question.” Major Yuri was a party man to the end.
¹⁰

In Kabul, the doors were closing. All American journalists were expelled from the country. An Afghan politburo statement denounced British and other European reporters for “mudslinging.” The secret police had paid Mr. Samadali a visit. Gavin was waiting for me, grim-faced, in the lobby. “They told him they'd take his children from him if he took us outside Kabul again,” he said. We found Mr. Samadali in the hotel taxi line-up next day, smiling apologetically and almost in tears. My visa was about to expire but I had a plan. If I travelled in Ali's bus all the way to Peshawar in Pakistan, I might be able to turn round and drive back across the Afghan border on the Khyber Pass before the Kabul government stopped issuing visas to British journalists. There was more chance that officials at a land frontier post would let me back into Afghanistan than the policemen at the airport in Kabul.

So I took the bus back down the Kabul Gorge, this time staying aboard as we passed through Jalalabad. It was an odd feeling to cross the Durand Line and to find myself in a Pakistan that felt free, almost democratic, after the tension and dangers of Afghanistan. I admired the great plumes on the headdress of the soldiers of the Khyber Rifles on the Pakistani side of the border, the first symbol of the old British raj, a regiment formed 101 years before, still ensconced at Fort Shagai with old English silver and a visitor's book that went back to the viceroys.

But of course, it was an illusion. President General Mohamed Zia ul-Haq ran an increasingly Islamic dictatorship in which maiming and whipping had become official state punishments. He ruled by martial law and had hanged his only rival, the former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, less than a year earlier, in April 1979. And of course, he responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with publicly expressed fears that the Russian army planned to drive on into Pakistan. The United States immediately sent millions of dollars of weapons to the Pakistani dictator, who suddenly became a vital American “asset” in the war against communism.

But in Ali's wooden bus, it seemed like freedom. And as we descended the splendour of the Khyber Pass, there around me were the relics of the old British regiments who had fought on this ground for more than a century and a half, often against the Pathan
ghazi
fighters with their primitive jezail rifles. “A weird, uncanny place . . . a deadly valley,” a British writer called it in 1897, and there on the great rocks that slid past Ali's bus were the regimental crests of the 40th Foot, the Leicestershire Yeomanry, the Dorsetshires, the Cheshires—Bill Fisk's regiment before he was sent to France in 1918—and the 54th Sikhs Frontier Force, each with its motto and dates of service. The paint was flaking off the ornamental crest of the 2nd Battalion, the 10th Baluch Regiment, and the South Lancs and the Prince of Wales' Volunteers had long ago lost their colours. Pathan tribesmen, Muslims to a man of course, had smashed part of the insignia of a Hindi regiment whose crest included a proud peacock. Graffiti covered the plaque of the 17th Leicestershire Foot Regiment (1878–9). The only refurbished memorial belonged to Queen Victoria's Own Corps of Guides, a mainly Pathan unit whose eccentric commander insisted that they be clothed in khaki rather than scarlet and one of whose Indian members probably inspired Rudyard Kipling's “Gunga Din.” The lettering had been newly painted, the stone washed clean of graffiti.

Peshawar was a great heaving city of smog, exhaust, flaming jacaranda trees, vast lawns and barracks. In the dingy Intercontinental there, I found a clutch of telex operators, all enriched by
The Times
and now further rewarded for their loyalty in sending my reports to London. This was not just generosity on my part; if I could re-enter Afghanistan, they would be my future lifeline to the paper. So would Ali. We sat on the lawn of the hotel, taking tea raj-style with a large china pot and a plate of scones and a fleet of huge birds that swooped from the trees to snatch at our cakes. “The Russians are not going to leave, Mr. Robert,” Ali assured me. “I fear this war will last a long time. That is why the Arabs are here.” Arabs? Again, I hear about Arabs. No, Ali didn't know where they were in Peshawar but an office had been opened in the city. General Zia had ordered Pakistan's embassies across the Muslim world to issue visas to anyone who wished to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

A clutch of telexes was waiting for me at reception.
The Times
had safely received every paragraph I had written.
¹¹
I bought the London papers and drank them down as greedily as any gin and tonic. The doorman wore a massive imperial scarlet cummerbund, and on the wall by the telex room I found Kipling's public school lament for his dead countrymen—from “Arithmetic on the Frontier”— framed by the Pakistani hotel manager:

A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—

CHAPTER THREE

The Choirs of Kandahar

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced . . . from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, for they did not regard dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures . . .

—Leo Tolstoy,
Haaji Murat

THE GHOSTS OF BRITISH RULE seemed to haunt Peshawar. In the bookshops, I found a hundred reprints of gazetteers and English memoirs. Sir Robert Warburton's
Eighteen Years in the Khyber
stood next to Woosnam Mills's yarns; “Noble Conduct of our Sepoys,” “Immolation of Twenty-one Sikhs” and “The Ride of the Guides: How British Officers Die.” Further volumes recalled the exploits of Sir Bindon Blood, one of whose young subalterns, Winston Churchill, was himself ambushed by Pathans in the Malakand hills to the north of Peshawar.
¹²
Not only ghosts frequented Peshawar. Unlike the Russian occupiers of Afghanistan, the British could not take their dead home; and on the edge of Peshawar, there still lay an old British cemetery whose elaborate tombstones of florid, overconfident prose told the story of empire.

Take Major Robert Roy Adams of Her Majesty's Indian Staff Corps, formerly deputy commissioner of the Punjab. He lay now beside the Khyber Road, a canyon of traffic and protesting donkeys whose din vibrated against the cemetery wall. According to the inscription on his grave, Major Adams was called to Peshawar “as an officer of rare capacity for a frontier. Wise, just and courageous, in all things faithful, he came only to die at his post, struck down by the hand of an assassin.” He was killed on 22 January 1865, but there are no clues as to why he was murdered. Nor are there any explanations on the other gravestones. In 1897, for example, John Sperrin Ross met a similar fate, “assassinated by a fanatic in Peshawar City on Jubilee Day.” A few feet from Ross's grave lay Bandsman Charles Leighton of the First Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, “assassinated by a
Ghazi
at this station on Good Friday.” Perhaps politics was left behind at death, although it was impossible to avoid the similarity between these outraged headstones and the language of the Soviet government. The great-grandsons of the Afghan tribesmen who killed the British were now condemned by the Kremlin as “fanatics”—or terrorists—by Radio Moscow. One empire, it seemed, spoke much like another.

To be fair, the British did place their dead in some historical context. Beneath a squad of rosewood trees with their bazaar of tropical birds lay Privates Hayes, Macleod, Savage and Dawes, who “died at Peshawar during the frontier disturbances 1897–98.” Not far away was Lieutenant Bishop, “killed in action at Shubkudder in an engagement with the hill tribes, 1863.” He was aged twenty-two. Lieutenant John Lindley Godley of the 24th Rifle Brigade, temporarily attached to the 266th Machine Gun Company, met the same end at Kacha Garhi in 1919.

There were other graves, of course, innocent mounds with tiny headstones that contained the inevitable victims of every empire's domesticity. “Beatrice Ann, one year and 11 months, only child of Bandmaster and Mrs. A. Pilkington” lay in the children's cemetery with “Barbara, two years, daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. P. Walker.” She died three days before Christmas in 1928. Some of the children died too young to have names. There were young men, too, who succumbed to the heat and to disease. Private Tidey of the First Sussex died from “heatstroke” and Private Williams of “enteric fever.” E. A. Samuels of the Bengal Civil Service succumbed to “fever contracted in Afghanistan.” Matron Mary Hall of Queen Alexander's Imperial Military Nursing Service—whose duties in Salonika and Mesopotamia presumably included the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey as well as the British invasion of Iraq in 1917—died “on active service.”

There were a few unexpected tombs. The Very Rev. Courtney Peverley was there, administrator apostolic of Kashmir and Kafiristan, who clearly worked hard because beyond the British headstones were new places of interment for Peshawar's still extant Christian community, paper crosses and pink flags draped in tribal fashion beside the freshly dug graves. Many imperial graves exhibit a faith that would be understood by any Muslim, the favourite from the Book of Revelation: “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.” And there was a Gaelic cross on top of the remains of Lieutenant Walter Irvine of the North West Frontier Police “who lost his life in the Nagoman River when leading the Peshawar Vale Hunt of which he was Master.” No Soviet soldier would earn so romantic a memorial. On the graves of the Russian soldiers now dying just north of this cemetery, it would be coldly recorded only that they died performing their “international duty.”

The local CIA agent already had a shrewd idea what this meant. He was a thin, over-talkative man who held a nominal post in the U.S. consulate down the road from the Peshawar Intercontinental and who hosted parties of immense tedium at his villa. He had the habit of showing, over and over again, a comedy film about the Vietnam War. Those were the days when I still talked to spooks, and when I called by one evening, he was entertaining a group of around a dozen journalists and showing each of them a Soviet identity card. “Nice-looking young guy,” he said of the pinched face of the man in the black-and-white photograph. “A pilot, shot down, the mujahedin got his papers. What a way to go, a great tragedy that a young guy should die like that.” I didn't think much of the CIA man's crocodile tears but I was impressed by the words “shot down.” With what? Did the guerrillas have ground-to-air missiles? And if so, who supplied them—the Americans, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, or those mysterious Arabs? I had seen thousands of Russians but I had yet to see an armed guerrilla close up in Afghanistan. I wouldn't have to wait long.

Ali's bus returned to the border one warm afternoon and I walked back across the Durand Line to a small grubby booth on the Afghan side of the frontier. The border guard looked at my passport and thumbed through the pages. Then he stopped and scrutinised one of the document's used pages. As usual, I had written “representative” on my immigration card. But the thin man clucked his tongue. “Journalist,” he said. “Go back to Pakistan.” How did he know? There were visas to Arab countries in the passport which identified me as a journalist, but the Afghan official would not know Arabic, would have no idea that
sahafa
meant “journalist.” A group of men shoved past me and I walked back to Ali. How did they know? Ali looked through my passport and found the page that gave me away. A visa to post-revolutionary Iran was marked with the word
khabanagor—
Persian for “journalist”—and Dari, one of the languages of Afghanistan, was a dialect of Persian. Damn.

I took a taxi back to Peshawar and sent a message to
The Times
: “Scuppered.” But next day Ali was back at the hotel. “Mr. Robert, we try again.” What's the point? I asked him. “We try,” he said. “Trust me.” I didn't understand, but I repacked my bags and boarded his friendly wooden bus and set off once more for the border. This was beginning to feel like a real-life version of
Carry On Up the
Khyber
, but Ali was strangely confident I would be successful. I sat back in the afternoon sun as the bus moaned its way up the hairpin bends. There's an odd, unnerving sensation about trying to cross a border without the consent of the authorities. Gavin and I had experienced this at almost every checkpoint we came across in Afghanistan. Would they let us through or turn us round or arrest us? I suppose it was a throwback to all those war films set in German-occupied Europe in which resistance heroes and heroines had to talk their way past Nazi guards. The Afghan border police were not quite up to Wehrmacht standards—and we were no heroes—but it wasn't difficult to feel a mixture of excitement and dread when we arrived once more at the grotty little booth on the Afghan side of the frontier.

Yet before I had a chance to stand up, Ali was at my seat. “Give me your passport,” he said. “And give me $50.” He vanished with the money. And ten minutes later, he was back with a broad smile. “I will take you to Jalalabad,” he said, handing me back my newly stamped passport. “Give me another $50 because I had to give your money away to a poor man.” The Russians had invaded but they couldn't beat that most efficacious, that most corrupt of all institutions between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal: The Bribe. I was so happy, I was laughing. I was singing to myself, all the way to Jalalabad. I'd even arranged with Ali that he would stop by at the Spinghar Hotel each morning to take my reports down to Peshawar—and come back in the afternoon with any messages that
The Times
sent to me via Pakistan. I could meanwhile snuggle down in the Spinghar and stay out of sight of the authorities.

I need not have worried. Every night, the rebels drew closer to Jalalabad. Four days earlier they had blown up a bridge outside the town and that very first night, after dark, they opened fire on an Afghan patrol from the plantation behind the hotel. Hour after hour, I lay in bed, listening to machine guns pummelling away in the orange orchards, sending the tropical birds screaming into the night sky. But it was a Ruritanian affair because, just after the call for morning prayers, Jalalabad would wake up as if the battles had been fought in a dream and reassume its role as a dusty frontier town, its bazaar touting poor-quality Pakistan cloth and local vegetables while the Afghan soldiers ostensibly guarding the market place nodded in fatigue over their ancient—and British—Lee Enfield rifles. I would take a rickshaw out of town to look at a damaged tank or a burned-out government office, type up my report of the fighting for the paper, and at mid-morning Ali would arrive with the “down” bus—Peshawar being 4,700 feet lower than Kabul—to pick up my report.

The teashops, the
chaikhana
stalls on the main street, were filled with truck-drivers, many of them from Kandahar, and they all spoke of the increasing resistance across the country. South of Kandahar, one man told me, villagers had stopped some Russian construction engineers and killed them all with knives. I could believe it. For however brave the mujahedin might be—and their courage was without question—their savagery was a fact. I didn't need the fictional Tom Graham or Durand's account of the fate of the 9th Lancers to realise this. “We will take Jalalabad,” a young man told me over tea one morning. “The Russians here are finished.” A teenage student, holding his father's hunting falcon on his wrist— editors love these touches, but there it was, a real live bird of prey anchored to the boy's arm with a chain—boldly stated that “the mujahedin will take Jalalabad tonight or tomorrow.” I admired his optimism but not his military analysis.

Yet their views were also to be found within the Afghan army. Lunching in a dirty restaurant near the post office, I found an off-duty soldier at the next table, eating a badly cooked chicken with an unfamiliar knife and fork. “We do not want to fight the mujahedin—why should we?” he asked. “The army used to have local soldiers here but they went over to the mujahedin and so the government drafted us in from Herat and from places in the north of Afghanistan. But we do not want to fight with these people. The mujahedin are Muslims and we do not shoot at them. If they attack some building, we shoot into the air.” The young man complained bitterly that his commanding officer refused to give him leave to see his family in Herat, 750 kilometres away near the Iranian border, and in his anger the soldier threw the knife and fork onto the table and tore savagely at the chicken with his hands, the grease dribbling down his fingers. “Jalalabad is finished,” he said.

Again, untrue. That very morning, the Afghan air force made a very noisy attempt to intimidate the population by flying four of the local airbase's ageing MiG-17s at low level over the city. They thundered just above the main boulevard, the palm trees vibrating with the sound of jet engines, and left in their wake a silence broken only by the curses of men trying to control bolting, terrified horses. The big Soviet Mi-25 helicopters were now taking off from Jalalabad's tiny airport each morning and racing over the town to machine-gun villages in the Tora Bora mountains. While I was shopping in the market they would fly only a few feet above the rooftops, and when I looked up I could see the pilot and the gunner and the rockets attached to pods beneath the machine, a big, bright red star on the hull, fringed with gold. Such naked displays of power were surely counterproductive. But it occurred to me that these tactics must be intended to deprive the guerrillas of sufficient time to use their ground-to-air missiles. American helicopter pilots were to adopt precisely the same tactics to avoid missiles in Iraq twenty-three years later.

If there was a military accommodation between the Afghan army and the mujahedin, however, the insurgents knew how to hurt the government. They had now burned down most of the schools in the surrounding villages on the grounds that they were centres of atheism and communism. They had murdered the schoolteachers, and several villagers in Jalalabad told me that children were accidentally killed by the same bullets that ended the lives of their teachers. The mujahedin were thus not universally loved and their habit of ambushing civilian traffic on the road west—two weeks earlier they had murdered a West German lorry-driver— had not added much glory to their name. And the mujahedin lived in the villages— which is where the Russians attacked them. On 2 February, I watched as four helicopter gunships raced through the semi-darkness to attack the village of Kama and, seconds later, saw a series of bubbles of flame glowing in the darkness.

Each morning at eight o'clock, the tea-shop owners would tell the strange Englishman what had been destroyed in the overnight battles and I would set off in my rickshaw to the scene. Early one morning, I arrived at a bridge which had been mined during the night. It lay on the Kabul road and the crater had halted all Soviet troop movements between Jalalabad and the capital, much to the excitement of the crowd which had gathered to inspect the damage.