The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

And I had to admit that Major Yuri seemed a professional soldier, clearly admired by his men – they were all told to shake my hand – and, in the crisis in which we would shortly find ourselves, behaved calmly and efficiently. With fractious Afghan soldiers, whom he seemed privately to distrust, he was unfailingly courteous. When five Afghan soldiers turned up beside the convoy to complain that Russian troops had been waving rifles in their direction, Major Yuri spoke to them as an equal, taking off his gloves and shaking each by the hand until they beamed with pleasure. But he was also a party man.

What, he asked, did I think of Mrs Thatcher? I explained that people in Britain held different views about our prime minister – I wisely forbore to give my own – but that they were permitted to hold these views freely. I said that President Carter was not the bad man he was depicted as in the Moscow press. Major Yuri listened in silence. So what did he think about President Brezhnev? I was grinning now. I knew what he had to say. So did he. He shook his head with a smile. ‘I believe,’ he said slowly, ‘that Comrade Brezhnev is a very good man.’ Major Yuri was well-read. He knew his Tolstoy and admired the music of Shostakovich, especially his Leningrad symphony. But when I asked if he had read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, he shook his head and tapped his revolver holster. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is for Solzhenitsyn.’

I squeezed into Major Yuri’s truck, his driver and I on the outside seats, Yuri in the middle; and so we set off for Kabul. ‘England a good country?’ he asked. ‘Better than Afghanistan?’ No, Major Yuri did not want to be in Afghanistan, he admitted. He wanted to be at home in Kazakhstan with his wife and nine-year-old daughter and planned to take a return convoy back to them in three days’ time. He had spent thirteen of his thirty years in the army, had not enough money to buy a car and could never travel abroad because he was an officer. It was his way of telling me that life in the Soviet Union was hard, that his life was not easy, that perhaps Comrade Brezhnev was not that good a man. Had not Brezhnev sent him here in the first place? When I asked questions he could not answer, he smiled in silent acknowledgement that he would have liked to be able to do so.

Amid a massive army, there is always a false sense of comfort. Even Major Yuri, his pale eyes constantly scanning the snowfields on each side of us, seemed to possess a dangerous self-confidence. True, the Afghans were attacking the Russians. But who could stop this leviathan, these armoured centipedes that were now creeping across the snows and mountains of Afghanistan? When we stopped at an Afghan checkpoint and the soldiers there could speak no Russian, Major Yuri called back for one of his Soviet Tajik officers to translate. As he did so, the major pointed at the Tajik and said, ‘Muslim.’ Yes, I understood. There were Muslims in the Soviet Union. In fact there were rather a lot of Muslims in the Soviet Union. And that, surely, was partly what this whole invasion was about.

The snow was blurring the windscreen of our truck, almost too fast for the wipers to clear it away, but through the side windows we could see the snowfields stretching away for miles. It was now mid-afternoon and we were grinding along at no more than 25 kilometres an hour, keeping the speed of the slowest truck, a long vulnerable snake of food, bedding, heavy ammunition, mixed in with tanks and carriers, 147 lorries in all, locked onto the main highway, a narrow vein of ice-cloaked tarmac that set every Soviet soldier up as a target for the ‘terrorists’ of Afghanistan. Or so it seemed to the men on Convoy 58. And to me.

Yet we were surprised when the first shots cracked out around us. We were just north of Charikar. And the rounds passed between our truck and the lorry in front, filling the air pockets behind them with little explosions, whizzing off into the frosted orchards to our left. ‘Out!’ Major Yuri shouted. He wanted his soldiers defending themselves in the snow, not trapped in their cabs. I fell into the muck and slush beside the road. The Russians around me were throwing themselves from their trucks. There was more shooting and, far in front of us, in a fog of snow and sleet, there were screams. A curl of blue smoke rose into the air from our right. The bullets kept sweeping over us and one pinged into a driver’s cab. All around me, the Soviet soldiers were lying in the drifts. Major Yuri shouted something at the men closest to him and there was a series of sharp reports as their Kalashnikovs kicked into their shoulders. Could they see what they were shooting at?

A silence fell over the landscape. Some figures moved, far away to our left, next to a dead tree. Yuri was staring at the orchard. ‘They are shooting from there,’ he said in English. He gave me a penetrating glance. This was no longer to be soldiers’ small-talk. I listened to the crackle of the radios, the shouts of officers interrupting each other, the soldiers in the snow looking over their shoulders. Major Yuri had taken off his fur hat; his brown hair was receding and he looked older than his thirty years. ‘Watch this, Robert,’ he said, pulling from his battledress a long tube containing a flare. We stood together in the snow, the slush above our knees, as he tugged at a cord that hung beneath the tube. There was a small explosion, a powerful smell of cordite and a smoke trail that soared high up into the sky. It was watched by the dozen soldiers closest to us, each of whom knew that our lives might depend on that rocket.

The smoke trail had passed a thousand feet in height when it burst into a shower of stars and within fifty seconds a Soviet Air Force Mig jet swept over us at low level, dipping its wings. A minute later, a tracked personnel carrier bearing the number 368 came thrashing through the snow with two of its crew leaning from their hatches and slid to a halt beside Major Yuri’s truck. The radio crackled and he listened in silence for a few moments then held up four fingers towards me. ‘They have killed four Russians in the convoy ahead,’ he said.

We stood on the road, backed up behind the first convoy. One row of soldiers was ordered to move two hundred metres further into the fields. Major Yuri told his men they could open their rations. The Tajik soldier who had translated for the major offered me food and I followed him to his lorry. It was decorated with Islamic pictures, quotations from the Koran, curiously interspersed with photographs of Bolshoi ballet dancers. I sat next to the truck with two soldiers beside me. We had dried biscuits and large hunks of raw pork; the only way I could eat the pork was to hold on to the fur and rip at the salted fat with my teeth. Each soldier was given three oranges, and sardines in a tin that contained about 10 per cent sardines and 90 per cent oil. Every few minutes, Major Yuri would pace the roadway and talk over the radio telephone, and when eventually we did move away with our armoured escorts scattered through the column, he seemed unsure of our exact location on the highway. Could he, he asked, borrow my map? And it was suddenly clear to me that this long convoy did not carry with it a single map of Afghanistan.

There was little evidence of the ambushed convoy in front save for the feet of a dead man being hurriedly pushed into a Soviet army van near Charikar and a great swath of crimson and pink slush that spread for several yards down one side of the road. The highway grew more icy at sundown, but we drove faster. As we journeyed on into the night, the headlights of our 147 trucks running like diamonds over the snow behind us, I was gently handed a Kalashnikov rifle with a full clip of ammunition. A soldier snapped off the safety catch and told me to watch through the window. I had no desire to hold this gun, even less to shoot at Afghan guerrillas, but if we were attacked again – if the Afghans had come right up to the truck as they had done many times on these convoys – they would assume I was a Russian. They would not ask all members of the National Union of Journalists to stand aside before gunning down the soldiers.

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.* 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.*

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 Leicestershires, the Dorsetshires, the Cheshires – Bill Fisk’s regiment before he was sent to France in 1918 – and the 54th Sikh Frontier Force, each with its motto and dates of service. The paint was flaking off the ornamental crest of the 2nd Battalion, the 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 Leicestershires (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.* 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, as 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, Haji 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 21 Sikhs’ and ‘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.* 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 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 US 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 Persian, or Dari, was one of the languages of Afghanistan. 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.