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

I had enough wits to remember the Pushtu for journalist and to try to tell these poor people who I was. ‘Za di inglisi atlasi kahzora yem!’ I triumphantly announced. But the family stared at me with even greater concern. The man held his children closer to him and his wife made a whimpering sound. I smiled. They did not. Fear crackled over the family. Only slowly did I realise that I had not told them I was a journalist. Perhaps it was the carpet upon which I had landed in their home. Certainly it must have been my visit to the bazaar a few hours earlier. But with increasing horror, I realised that the dishevelled correspondent who had burst in upon their sacred home had introduced himself in Pushtu not as a reporter but with the imperishable statement: ‘I am an English satin bag.’

‘Correspondent, journalist,’ I now repeated in English and Pushtu. But the damage had been done. Not only was this Englishman dangerous, alien, an infidel intruder into the sanctity of an Afghan home. He was also insane. Of this, I had no doubt myself. Whenever we journalists find ourselves in great danger, there is always a voice that asks ‘Why?’ How on earth did we ever come to risk our life in this way? For the editor? For adventure? Or because we just didn’t think, didn’t calculate the risks, didn’t bother to reflect that our whole life, our education, our family, our loves and happiness, were now forfeit to chance and a few paragraphs. Sorkh Rud was the ‘border station’ into which Kipling’s British soldier cantered, the street outside this house his ‘dark defile’, the helicopter his enemy’s jezail. The cliché tells us that life is cheap. Untrue. Death is cheap. It is easy and terrible and utterly unfair.

I sat on the carpet for perhaps ten minutes, smiling idiotically at the cold-faced family opposite me until a little girl in a pink dress walked unsteadily across the floor towards me and smiled. I smiled back. I pointed at myself and said, ‘Robert.’ She repeated my name. I pointed to her. What was her name? She didn’t reply. Outside I heard a donkey clop past the gate and a man shouting. The sound of the helicopters had vanished. There was a wailing from far away, the sound of a woman in grief. I stood up and looked out of the door. Other people were walking down the street. It was like Jalalabad each daybreak, when the night of death turned magically into a day of toil and dust and blooming jacaranda trees. The war had washed over Sorkh Rud and now it had moved elsewhere. I turned to the family and thanked them for their unoffered protection. ‘Shukria,’ I said. Thank you. And very slowly the man with the beard bowed his head once and raised his right hand in farewell.

The rickshaw driver was waiting on the main road, fearful that I might have died, even more fearful, I thought, that I might not have survived to pay him. We puttered back to Jalalabad. That night the party leaders were back in the hotel with news that obviously disturbed them. The mujahedin had raided a student hostel of Jalalabad University, taken twenty girls from the building, and transported them to Tora Bora, where they were given money – a thousand afghanis, about $22 – and a black veil and told to end their studies. The same day, a Russian technical engineer had been sent to the suburbs of Jalalabad to mend an electric cable that had been repeatedly sabotaged. When he was at the top of a pylon, someone had shot him dead and his body hung in the wires 10 metres above the ground for several hours while men and women arrived to gaze at his corpse.

I would leave next day on the first bus back to Kabul, a luxury bus that left at dawn, long before Ali’s old vehicle ground into town. My visa had only another three days to run. The bus from Jalalabad was packed, not with the villagers and Pakistani businessmen who travelled on Ali’s charabanc, but with Afghan government students, Parcham party apparatchiks travelling back to Kabul University after vacation. Even before we had left the suburbs of the city, they were ordering everyone to pull the curtains so that no one could be seen and they craned their necks at every bend in the road to squint through the cracks in case an ambush lay ahead. I didn’t see how the curtains would help. A mystery bus would attract far more attention from the mujahedin than a vehicle with windows open and passengers asleep inside.

When we stopped 25 kilometres to the north to find the body of a dead man covered in a blanket being loaded onto a truck, the communist students gazed in silence and in horror. It was, according to a middle-aged Afghan on another bus, the corpse of a lorry-driver who had not stopped for the mujahedin. There were five buses bunched up together, all heading for Kabul, and they all stopped now at a chaikhana while their drivers debated whether to talk their way through the guerrilla roadblock up the road or turn back to Jalalabad. Two hours passed, the drivers unable to make up their minds, the young Afghan men ever more nervous. And with good reason. The mujahedin gave their prisoners only two options: they could join the resistance or face execution. Some of the Afghan boys were taking off their party badges. I could only feel sorry for them. Perhaps they joined Parcham for promotion at college or because their parents worked for the government. And for all the government’s brutality and its reliance on foreign invaders, its functionaries had been trying to create a secular, equal society in the villages around Jalalabad. It was not the government that was burning the schools and killing the teachers.

Another hour drifted by, the heat rising, the students ever more depressed, the drivers basking in the sun. In wartime, in any great danger, indecision is a narcotic. Then labouring up the highway came Ali’s wooden bus, the coat of arms of the North West Frontier Province proudly displayed on its flanks. ‘Why do you desert me?’ Ali wanted to know. He pointed to his charabanc. ‘Mr Robert, please come with us.’ So I took my usual seat on the right-hand side of his vehicle and the other buses moved out into the road like sheep behind us. ‘You are better with us, Mr Robert,’ Ali said. ‘You should not be with them.’ I soon realised why.

Round a bend just 5 kilometres up the highway, in a narrow valley of rocks and small pines, six tall and sun-burned mujahedin stood astride the road. A seventh was perched on a rock, lazily waving his arm up and down to tell us to stop. We had been told that they were poorly armed, that they only dared appear at dusk, that they were frightened of government retaliation. But here were the mujahedin in the hot midday sun in their turbans and Afghan shawls, each holding a brand-new Kalashnikov, controlling the traffic on one of Afghanistan’s most important highways. It was an audacious display of self-confidence and a fearful one for the students in the bus behind. There was no anxiety in Ali’s bus and a Pakistani passenger – a cloth merchant from Peshawar – was so bored that he began a long and tiresome discussion about Pakistan’s domestic politics.

Through the back window, however, I could see the students stepping off their bus onto the road. They stood there, heads lowered as if they were criminals, some trying to hide behind the others. Ali was chatting and joking with one of the guerrillas. The other drivers stood beside their buses expressionless. The gunmen were moving through the line of young Afghans. Some were ordered back on the bus. Others, white with fear, were told to form a line by the road. Three of them were tied up and blindfolded and taken, stumbling and falling, through the pine stands and towards the river that gurgled away to our right. We watched them until they and their captors had disappeared. The Pakistani cloth merchant clucked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Poor chaps,’ he said.

Ali climbed back aboard and announced that since this was a Pakistani bus, the mujahedin did not wish to trouble us. And as we drove away, a young guerrilla with a rose tied to his rifle waved vigorously at us through the window. At last I had seen them. Here were the ‘holy warriors’ whom the CIA was now adopting, the ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’ and ‘counter-revolutionary subversive elements’ as Karmal called them, the ‘remnants’ as the Soviet general blandly dismissed them, Mr Ziarad’s ‘students of imperialism’. But they didn’t look like ‘remnants’ to me. Their Kalashnikovs were the new AKS 74s that the Soviets had just brought into Afghanistan, and they were wearing new ammunition belts.

The Kabul Intercontinental was forlorn. Most Western journalists had been expelled or left. Gavin and his crew had gone. My visa would soon expire and there was no hope of acquiring another. In the hotel sales office, one of the female secretaries, Gina Nushin, pleaded with me to take her private mail out of the country. Nine months later, in Ireland, I would receive a cryptic note from her, thanking me for posting her letters; the stamp on the envelope depicted a smiling and avuncular President Taraki browsing through his morning papers. But a far more important letter had just reached Kabul, smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a Shia cleric who had been arrested after Taraki’s 1978 revolution and who was believed to have been murdered by the Afghan secret police. The mullah, whose name was Waez and who had enlisted the help of a sympathetic Soviet worker and an Afghan student at Moscow University to take his letter by hand to Kabul, told his family that he and hundreds of other Afghans were being held prisoner in the Russian city of Tula, 200 kilometres south of Moscow. Waez was honoured among Sunnis as well as Shias for his opposition to communist rule.

Rumours that thousands of Afghans were being secretly held in the Soviet Union – in violation of international law – had been circulating for more than a year. Many of the families whom I watched as they angrily stormed the Polecharkhi prison outside Kabul in January were looking for relatives who, it now appeared, might have been in Russia all along. According to the Waez letter, he and other Afghans jailed in Tula were referred to as ‘state prisoners’, although all were seized in Afghanistan. In 1979 the US ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubbs, had been murdered by gunmen who, intriguingly, had initially demanded Waez’s release in return for the diplomat’s life. Were the Soviets unwilling to free Waez because this would reveal how many Afghans were held captive in Tula?

I knew that Afghanistan’s government was forcing the last of us out of the country, but the door was still ajar and I thought there was a crack through which I might squeeze.* I made one last trip to Jalalabad with Ali, only to find my hotel the venue for a clandestine meeting between six senior Soviet officers and the Afghan interior minister, Saed Mohamed Gulabzoi, and his local officials, all anxious to prevent a full-scale siege of Jalalabad by the rebels. So dangerous was the highway that the Russians had to be flown down from Kabul by helicopter. I watched them arrive at the Spinghar, protected by security police in riot visors who erected belt-fed machine guns on tripods upon bar tables around the hotel’s rose gardens. There were now 3,000 Soviet troops outside the town.

And the destruction of the villages around Jalalabad was now under way. Alisingh and Alinghar outside Metarlam had been bombed by the Russians but a 40-kilometre journey into mujahedin-held territory in Laghman province showed that every school and government office in the villages had been burned by the rebels. Several villagers said that up to fifty women and children had been killed in Soviet air raids in the previous three days. An old man with an unshaven face kept repeating the word ‘napalm’, gesturing with his hands in a downwards, smothering motion. In one tiny village outside Metarlam, more than 200 men surrounded my taxi when they thought we were Russians.

The mujahedin were not without their humour. Two nights earlier, an Afghan truck-driver found a notice on the main road west. ‘In the name of God,’ it read, ‘this is for tanks.’ The driver journeyed on and promptly set off a landmine. An armed insurgent then turned up to demand that the lorry driver pay $350 for the explosives which he had just wasted. Far less amusing was a report from three independent sources in Jalalabad that a museum at Hadda containing a statue of Buddha – dating from at least the second century bc – had been destroyed, along with other priceless antiquities. What did this mean? And if the reports were true, what confidence could the world have that the giant 1500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan might not one day be similarly destroyed? On my way back to Kabul, the guerrillas were back on the road, twenty of them this time, and there were no longer any roses attached to their rifles.

I would, briefly, return to Afghanistan in the summer of 1980, flying in to Kabul with a tennis racket and an unbelievable claim to be a tourist. The Khad attached a cop to me this time and I was taken under escort to the Intercontinental where I paid him off in return for a taxi ride around the capital. The dust hung in layers of heat over Kabul and the Soviet soldiers were now on the defensive, escorting civilian cars in long armoured convoys across the highways of Afghanistan, their airbase at Bagram now flying bombing sorties against the mujahedin every three minutes. Soviets now occupied senior ‘advisory’ positions in all the Kabul ministries, their large black limousines gliding through the muggy streets of the city at midday, curtains pulled across the back windows and plain-clothes men peering from the front passenger seats. The occupants were not the large, bulky commissars of popular mythology but, for the most part, small, respectable men in glossy grey business suits, narrow, slightly unfashionable ties and hair thick with oil, family men from an autonomous republic with five-year plans to meet.

In the stifling summer, the Russian soldiers were wearing floppy, wide-brimmed sombreros and their trucks jammed the streets of Kabul. Their ‘limited intervention’ had spawned a spring offensive – that tactic beloved of all generals confronted by an armed insurrection – which had now turned into a full-scale military campaign. Helicopter gunships stood in rows five deep at Kabul airport. Four-engined Ilyushin transport aircraft en route to Tashkent turned all day over the city, trailing fuel exhaust as they banked sharply above the international airport to avoid ground-to-air missiles.

At the airport, the two faces of Afghanistan’s revolution could be seen within 800 metres of each other. Above the main terminal building, the faded outline of January’s triumphant greeting to Soviet troops could still be observed – ‘Welcome to the New Model Revolution’ – although the 1.5-metre-high letters had long ago been taken down and the sun had bleached the red paint a drab pink. Just across the airfield, at the eastern end of the main runway, lay the other symbol of Afghanistan’s revolutionary conflict: a Soviet SA-2 missile with a 130-kilogram warhead, a range of 50 kilometres and a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet; this was the same weapon used with devastating effect against US B-52 bombers over Hanoi in the Vietnam war. And Vietnam was the word that more and more Afghans were using to describe their own conflict. President Carter and Mrs Thatcher were urging the world to boycott the Olympics in Moscow.

Kabul’s schoolchildren were refusing to attend classes since hundreds of them were taken ill; rebels, according to the government, had put sulphur in the schools’ water supplies. A thousand children had been taken to the Aliabad hospital in one week alone. At night, gun battles crackled around the city as gunmen attacked Russian patrols and rival Parcham and Khalq party members assaulted each other. A doctor who was a member of President Karmal’s Parcham party was shot dead while visiting a patient at Bandeghazi – within the city limits – but the police could not discover whether he was killed by mujahedin or by Khalq agents. One of the cops assigned to me was a Khalq man who, in the privacy of the hotel elevator, suddenly burst out in anger: ‘It is bad here and I am sick. We want Soviet help – we need it. But if anyone stays longer than we want – anyone, and that includes the Soviet Union – we will shoot them.’

On 14 June, Karmal ordered the execution of thirteen former Khalq functionaries for ‘hatching conspiracies against the state’. Most were minor officials – Sidaq Alamyar, the ex-planning minister, for example, and Saeb Jan Sehrai, who was in charge of ‘border affairs’ – while the deputy prime minister, Asadullah Sawari, who was head of Taraki’s secret service, remained untouched. His name was on the death list of the ‘night letter’ pushed into diplomatic compounds four months earlier. I was lucky to have stolen forty-eight hours in Kabul, albeit under secret police surveillance. When I was taken back to Kabul airport for my flight out, an Aeroflot jet was standing on the apron, its fuselage evidence for Mrs Thatcher’s profound cynicism towards the Soviets.

The aircraft bore Aeroflot’s proud English-language slogan ‘Official Olympic Carrier’ on both sides of its fuselage but from its doors it was disgorging Soviet combat troops, young men – some with blond hair – carrying their rifles in the hot sun as they walked down the steps to the tarmac. They looked happy enough – one raised his arms towards the sun and said something that made his comrades laugh – although their chances of returning home in similar mood had decreased in recent weeks. More than 600 seriously wounded Soviet servicemen had been admitted to the Kabul military hospital, another four hundred to Soviet clinics near the bus station at Khai Khana; of these one thousand, two hundred had died – and this figure only included those who died of wounds, not those who were killed in combat. The dead were loaded in square wooden coffins aboard Antonov-12 aircraft and no one knew what they contained until a young Soviet soldier was seen saluting one of the boxes. Even the Khad secret policeman who followed me so assiduously agreed that the Soviet army was experiencing ‘very big trouble’.

But back in that chill February of 1980, I still had two days of precious, lonely freedom before my visa expired and I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I decided this time to be greedy, to try once more a long-distance bus ride, this time to a city whose people, so we were told in Kabul, had rediscovered their collective faith in confronting the invaders of their country: Kandahar.

I took the bus before dawn, from the same station I had set out from on my vain trip to Mazar, wearing the same Afghan hat and hunched under the same brown shawl. Men and women sat together – they all appeared to be families – and the moment I announced my nationality, I was deluged with apples, cheese, oranges and the big, flat, sagging nan bread that Afghans use as an envelope to contain their food. When I gently expressed my concern that there might be ‘bad’ people on the bus – the very word Khad usually had the effect of silencing any conversation for an hour – I was assured there were none. I would be safe. And so the passengers, with scarcely any English, gave me their silent protection on the fourteen-hour journey across the moonlike, frozen landscape to Kandahar.

It was an epic of a country at war. Our coach passed the wrecks of countless vehicles beside the road. Sixty-five kilometres west of Ghazni, the town from which Gavin and I and his crew had fled the previous month – it already felt another life ago – a convoy of civilian buses and trucks had just been ambushed. All of the vehicles were burning fiercely, sending columns of black smoke funnelling up from the snow-covered plains. Small, darkened mounds lay beside the buses, all that was left of some of their passengers. Soviet convoys passed us in the opposite direction, each vehicle carrying a Russian soldier standing in the back, pistol in hand. The Soviets were now too busy ensuring their own safety to worry about the civilians they had supposedly come to rescue from the ‘bandits’.

In one village, three Afghan soldiers, including an officer, boarded our bus and tried to arrest a postman who had deserted from the army. There was a brutal fist-fight between soldiers and passengers until two uniformed conscripts who were smoking hashish in the back seats walked down the aisle and literally kicked the officer out of the vehicle. So much for the morale of Karmal’s Afghan army. In another village, the passengers hissed at Soviet Tajik troops who were standing beside the barbed wire of a military depot. But the passenger behind tapped me urgently on the shoulder. ‘Look!’ he gasped, and pointed to his forehead. I looked at his face and could not understand. ‘Look!’ he said more urgently and placed his right hand flat on top of his head, as if it was a hat. Hat. Yes, there was something missing from the Soviet Tajik soldiers’ grey fur hats. They had removed the red star from their hats. They stood looking at us, darker-skinned than their Russian comrades, bereft now of the communist brotherhood in which they had grown up.

I should have understood at once. If Soviet troops in Afghanistan – Muslim Soviet soldiers – would remove the very symbol of their country, the badge that their fathers had worn so proudly in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945, then already the cancer of Afghanistan must have eaten deep into their souls. They had been sent to war against their Muslim co-religionists and had decided that they would not fight them. No more telling portent of the imminent collapse of empire could have confronted me in Afghanistan. Yet my trek across the snowlands was so vast, the dangers so great, my exhaustion so overwhelming that I merely jotted in my notebook the observation that the soldiers had ‘for some reason’ removed their hat-badges.

A few miles further on, an Afghan soldier could be seen standing in the desert, firing into the dusk with a sub-machine gun at an enemy he could not possibly have seen. When our bus stopped at a chaikhana in the frozen semi-darkness, an old man from the burned convoy we had passed told us that of the three hundred passengers taken from the buses, fifty were detained by more than a hundred armed rebels, all of them told – quite openly – that they would ‘probably’ be executed because they were party men. Each scene spoke for itself, a cameo of violence and government impotence that our frightened passengers clearly understood.

It was night when we entered Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, our bus gliding past the shrine in which lay the cloak of the Prophet Mohamed, circling a set of nineteenth-century cannon that had belonged to General Roberts’s army in the Second Afghan War. I was dirty and tired and checked into a seedy hotel in the old city, a place of cigarette smoke, sweat and overcooked meat. My bedroom was small, the sheets stained, the threadbare carpet smallpoxed with cigarette burns. But two big rust-encrusted doors led onto a tiny balcony from where I could see the moon and the stars which glistened across the winter sky.

I was lying on my bed when I first heard the sound. Allahu akbar. God is great. It was a thin, pitched wail. Allahu akbar. God is great. I looked at my watch. This was no fixed time for prayers. It was 9 o’clock. The curfew had just begun. Allahu akbar. Now the chant came from the next roof, scarcely 20 metres from my room, more a yodel than an appeal to the Almighty. I opened the door to the balcony. The cry was being carried on the air. A dozen, a hundred Allahu akbars, uncoordinated, overlaying each other, building upon a foundation of identical words, high-pitched and tenor, treble and childlike, an army of voices shouting from the rooftops of Kandahar. They swelled in volume, a thousand now, ten thousand, a choir that filled the heavens, that floated beneath the white moon and the stars, the music of the spheres.

I saw a family, a husband and wife and a clutch of children, all chanting, but their voices were lost in the pulse of sound that now covered the city. This extraordinary phenomenon was no mere protest, a lament at the loss of freedom. When the Prophet entered Mecca in the year 630 of the Christian era, he walked to the great black stone, the Kaaba, touched it with his stick and shouted in a strong voice that supreme invocation of Islam. Allahu akbar. His ten thousand followers chorused those same words and they were taken up by members of the Prophet’s own Qureishi tribe who had gathered on their roofs and balconies in Mecca. Now these same holy words were being chanted by another ten thousand voices, this time from the roofs and balconies of Kandahar. A Westerner – or a Russian – might interpret this as a semi-political demonstration, a symbolic event. But in reality, the choirs of Kandahar were an irresistible assertion of religious faith, the direct and deliberate repetition of one of the holiest moments of Islam. In the last year of his life, the Prophet had entered the newly purified shrine in Mecca and seven more times chanted Allahu akbar. In Kandahar, the voices were desperate but all-powerful, mesmeric, unending, deafening, an otherwise silent people recognising their unity in God. This was an unstoppable force, an assertion of religious identity that no Afghan satrap or Kremlin army could ultimately suppress.