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

Yet it was all too easy to turn the Soviet occupation into a one-dimensional drama, of brutal Russian invaders and plucky Afghan guerrillas, a kind of flip-side version of the fictional Tom Graham’s Second Afghan War. A succession of pro-Soviet dictators had ruled Afghanistan with cruelty, with socialist cant and pious economic plans, but also through tribal alliances. The Pathans and the Hazaras – who were Shia Muslims – and the Tajiks and the Ghilzais and the Durranis and the Uzbeks could be manipulated by the government in Kabul. It could bestow power on a leader prepared to control his town on behalf of the communist authorities but could withhold funds and support from anyone who did not. Prison, torture and execution were not the only way to ensure political compliance. But among the tribes, deep within the deserts and valleys of Afghanistan, the same communist governments had been trying to cajole and then force upon these rural societies a modern educational system in which girls as well as boys would go to school, at which young women did not have to wear the veil, in which science and literature would be taught alongside Islam. Twenty-one years later, an American president would ostentatiously claim that these were among his own objectives in Afghanistan.

And I remember one excursion out of Jalalabad in those early days of the Soviet invasion. I had heard that a schoolhouse had been burned down in a village 25 kilometres from the city and set off in an exhaust-fuming Russian-built taxi to find out if this was true. It was, but there was much worse. Beside the gutted school there hung from a tree a piece of blackened meat, twisting gently in the breeze. One of the villagers, urging my driver to take me from the village, told us that this was all that was left of the headmaster. They had also hanged and burned his schoolteacher wife. The couple’s sin: to comply with government rules that girls and boys should be taught in the same classroom. And what about those Pakistanis and Egyptians and Saudis who were, according to Karmal, supporting the ‘terrorists’? Even in Jalalabad, I heard that Arabs had been seen in the countryside outside the city, although – typical of our innocence at that time – I regarded these stories as untrue. How could Egyptians and Saudis have found their way here? And why Saudis? But when I heard my colleagues – especially American journalists – referring to the resistance as ‘freedom fighters’, I felt something going astray. Guerrillas, maybe. Even fighters. But ‘freedom’ fighters? What kind of ‘freedom’ were they planning to bestow upon Afghanistan?

Of their bravery, there was no doubt. And within three weeks of the Soviet invasion came the first signs of a unified Muslim political opposition to the Karmal government and its Russian supporters. The few diplomats left in Kabul called them ‘night letters’. Crudely printed on cheap paper, the declarations and manifestos were thrown into embassy compounds and pushed between consular fences during the hours of curfew, their message usually surmounted by a drawing of the Koran. The most recent of them – and it was now mid-January of 1980 – purported to come from the ‘United Muslim Warriors of Afghanistan’ and bore the badge of the Islamic Afghan Front, one of four groups which had been fighting in the south of the country.

From the opened pages of the Koran, there sprouted three rifles. The letter denounced the regime for ‘inhuman crimes’ and condemned Soviet troops in the country for ‘treating Afghans like slaves’. Muslims, it said, ‘will not give up fighting or guerrilla attacks until our last breath … the proud and aggressive troops of the Russian power have no idea of the rights and human dignity of the people of Afghanistan.’ The letter predicted the death of Karmal and three of his cabinet ministers, referring to the president as ‘Khargal’, a play on words in Persian which means ‘thief of work’. The first man to be condemned was Asadullah Sawari, a member of the Afghan praesidium who was Taraki’s secret police chief, widely credited with ordering the torture of thousands of Taraki’s opponents. Others on the death list included Shah Jan Mozdooryar, a former interior minister who was now Karmal’s transport minister.

The ‘night letter’ also included specific allegations that the Soviet army was ‘committing acts which are intolerable to our people’, adding that Russian soldiers had kidnapped women and girls working in a bakery in the Darlaman suburb of Kabul and returned them next morning after keeping them for the night. A similar incident, the letter stated, had occurred in the suburb of Khaire Khana, ‘an act of aggression against the dignity of Muslim families’. When I investigated these claims, bakery workers in Darlaman told me that women workers who normally bake bread for Afghan soldiers had refused to work for Soviet troops and that the Russians had consequently taken the women from the bakery and forced them to bake bread elsewhere. But they were unclear about the treatment the women had received and were too frightened to say more. The authors of the letter said that Muslims would eventually overthrow Karmal and judiciously added that they would then refuse to honour any foreign contracts made with his government.* Then they added, hopelessly and perhaps a little pathetically, that their statements should be broadcast over the BBC at 8.45 p.m. ‘without censorship’.

Still Gavin and I ventured out most days with Steve, Geoff, Mike and the faithful Mr Samadali. We were halfway up the Salang Pass, 130 kilometres north of Kabul, on 12 January when our car skidded on the ice and a young Russian paratrooper from the 105th Airborne Division ran down the road, waving his automatic rifle at us and shouting in Russian. He had been wounded in the right hand and blood was seeping from the bullet-hole through his makeshift bandage and staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was only a teenager, with fair hair and blue eyes and a face that showed fear. He had clearly never before been under fire. Beside us, a Soviet army transport lorry, its rear section blown to pieces by a mine, lay upended in a ditch. There were two tracked armoured carriers just up the road and a Russian paratroop captain ran towards us to join his colleague.

‘Who are you?’ he asked in English. He was dark-haired and tired, dressed in a crumpled tunic, a hammer-and-sickle buckle on his belt. We told him we were correspondents but the younger soldier was too absorbed with the pain from his wound. He re-applied the safety catch on his rifle, then lifted up his hand for our inspection. He raised it with difficulty and pointed to a snow-covered mountain above us where a Russian military helicopter was slowly circling the peak. ‘They shoot Russians,’ he said. He was incredulous. No one knew how many Russians the guerrillas had shot, although a villager a mile further south insisted with undisguised relish that his compatriots had killed hundreds.

But the ambush had been carefully planned. The mine had exploded at the same time as a charge had blown up beneath a bridge on the main highway. So for almost twenty-four hours, half of a Russian convoy en route to Kabul from the Soviet frontier was marooned in the snow at an altitude of more than 7,000 feet. Russian engineers had made temporary repairs and we watched as the Soviet trucks made their way down from the mountains, slithering on the slush and packed ice: 156 tracked armoured vehicles, eight-wheel personnel carriers and 300 lorryloads of petrol, ammunition, food and tents. The drivers looked exhausted. The irony, of course, was that the Russians had built this paved highway through the 11,900-foot pass as a symbol of mutual cooperation between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan – and for the Soviet military convoys that were now streaming south under daily attack. That night, the US State Department claimed that 1,200 Russian soldiers had been killed. It seemed an exaggeration. But the bloody-minded villager may have been right about the hundreds dead. A ‘very limited contingent’, indeed.

Karmal’s government held a ‘day of mourning’ for those killed by ‘the butcher Amin’. The British embassy even lowered its flag to half-mast. But only a few hundred people turned up at the yellow-painted Polekheshti Bridge Mosque to pray for their souls, and they were for the most part well-dressed PDP functionaries. Four young men who arrived at the mosque in northern Kabul and attempted to avoid the signing ceremony were reminded of their party duties by a soldier with a bayonet fixed to his rifle. They signed the book. The rest of Kabul maintained the uneasy tenor of its new life. The bazaars were open as usual and the street sellers with their sweetmeats and oils continued to trade beside the ice-covered Kabul river. In the old city, a Western television crew was stoned by a crowd after being mistaken for Russians.

Kabul had an almost bored air of normality that winter as it sat in its icy basin in the mountains, its wood smoke drifting up into the pale blue sky. The first thing all of us noticed in the sky was an army of kites – large box kites, triangular and rectangular kites and small paper affairs, painted in blues and reds and often illustrated with a large and friendly human eye. No one seemed to know why the Afghans were so obsessed with kites, although there was a poetic quality to the way in which the children – doll-like creatures with narrow Chinese features, swaddled in coats and embroidered capes – watched their kites hanging in the frozen air, those great paper eyes with their long eyelashes floating towards the mountains.

Gavin and I once asked Mr Samadali to take us to the zoo. Inside the gate, a rusting sign marked ‘vultures’ led to some of the nastiest birds on earth, skeletal rather than scrawny. Past the hog-pit, a trek through deep snow brought us to the polar bear cages. But the cage doors were open and the bears were missing. Even more disquieting was the silent group of turbaned men who followed us around the zebra park, apparently under the illusion we were Russians. It must have been the only zoo in the world where the visitors were potentially more dangerous than the animals. We even managed to find Afghanistan’s only railway locomotive, a big early twentieth-century steam engine bought by King Amanullah from a German manufacturer. It sat forlorn and rusting near a ruined palace, its pistons congealed together and guarded by policemen who snatched at our cameras when we tried to take a picture of this old loco – a doubly absurd event since there is not a single railway line in all of Afghanistan.

Perhaps by way of compensation, the truck-drivers of Afghanistan had turned their lorries into masterpieces of Afghan pop art, every square inch of bodywork covered in paintings and multicoloured designs. Afghan lorry art possessed a history all its own, created in 1945 when metal sheeting was added to the woodwork of long-distance trucks; the panels were turned into canvases by artists in Kabul and later Kandahar. Lorry-owners paid large sums to these painters – the more intricate the decoration, the more honoured the owner became – and the art was copied from Christmas cards, calendars, comics and mosques. Tarzan and the Horse of Imam Ali could be seen side by side with parrots, mountains, helicopters and flowers. Three-panelled rail-boards on Bedford trucks provided perfect triptychs. A French author once asked a lorry-owner why he painted his coachwork and received the reply that ‘it is a garden, for the road is long’.

Inevitably, Karmal tried to appease the mujahedin, seeking a ceasefire in rural areas through a series of secret meetings between government mediators and tribal leaders in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. A PDP statement announced that it would ‘begin friendly negotiations with … national democratic progressives and Islamic circles [sic] and organisations’. This new approach, intriguing though doomed, was accompanied by a desperate effort on the part of the government to persuade itself that it was acquiring international legitimacy. Kabul newspapers carried the scarcely surprising news that favourable reactions to the new regime had come from Syria, Kampuchea and India as well as the Soviet Union and its east European satellites. In a long letter to Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Islamic Revolution in Iran the previous year had so frightened the Soviets, Karmal criticised the adverse Iranian response to his coup – it had been condemned by Iranian religious leaders – and sought to assure the Ayatollah that the murder of Muslim tribesmen in Afghanistan had been brought to an end with Amin’s overthrow. ‘My Government will never allow anybody to use our soil as a base against the Islamic revolution in Iran and against the interest of the fraternal Iranian people,’ he wrote. ‘We expect our Iranian brothers to take an identical stance.’

Iran, needless to say, was in no mood to comply. Within days of the Soviet invasion, the foreign ministry in Tehran had stated that ‘Afghanistan is a Muslim country and … the military intervention of the government of the Soviet Union in the neighbouring country of our co-religionists is considered a hostile measure … against all the Muslims of the world.’ Within months – and aware that the United States was sending aid to the guerrillas – Iran would be planning its own military assistance programme for the insurgents. By July, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister, was telling me that he hoped his country would give weapons to the rebels if the Soviet Union did not withdraw its army. ‘Some proposal [to this effect] has been given to the Revolutionary Council,’ he told me in Tehran. ‘… Just as we were against the American military intervention in Vietnam, we think exactly the same way about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan … The Soviet Union claims that they have come to Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government. The Americans were in Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese government.’ But at this stage, Karmal had more pressing problems than Iran.

Desperate to maintain the loyalty of the Afghan army – we heard reports that only 60 per cent of the force was now following orders – Karmal even made an appeal to their patriotism, promising increased attention to their ‘material needs’. These ‘heroic officers, patriotic cadets and valiant soldiers’ were urged to ‘defend the freedom, honour and security of your people … with high hopes for a bright future.’ ‘Material needs’ clearly meant back pay. The fact that such an appeal had to be made at all said much about the low morale of the Afghan army. No sooner had he tried to appease his soldiers than Karmal turned to the Islamists who had for so long opposed the communist regimes in Kabul. He announced that he would change the Afghan flag to reintroduce green, the colour of Islam so rashly deleted from the national banner by Taraki, to the fury of the clergy. At the same time – and Karmal had an almost unique ability to destroy each new political initiative with an unpopular counter-measure – he warned that his government would treat ‘terrorists, gangsters, murderers and highwaymen’ with ‘revolutionary decisiveness’.

For ‘terrorists’, read ‘guerrillas’ or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – ‘freedom fighters’. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always ‘terrorists’. In the seventeenth century, governments used ‘heretic’ in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.

In Afghanistan there were no such formulaic retreats. In my cosy room at the Intercontinental, each night I would spread out a map. What new journey could be made across this iced plateau before the Russians threw us out? With this in mind, I realised that the full extent of the Russian invasion might be gauged from the Soviet border. If I could reach Mazar-e-Sharif, far to the north on the Amu Darya river, I would be close to the frontier of the Soviet Union and could watch their great convoys entering the country. I packed a soft Afghan hat and a brown, green-fringed shawl I’d bought in the bazaar, along with enough dollars to pay for several nights in a Mazar hotel, and set off before dawn to the cold but already crowded bus station in central Kabul.

The Afghans waiting for the bus to Mazar were friendly enough. When I said I was English, there were smiles and several young men shook my hand. Others watched me with the same suspicion as the three Khad men at the Intercontinental. There were women in burqas who sat in silence in the back of the wooden vehicle. I pulled my Afghan hat low over my forehead and threw my shawl over my shoulder. Cowled in cigarette smoke from the passengers, I took a seat on the right-hand side of the bus because the soldiers on checkpoint duty always approached from the left. It worked. The bus growled up the highway towards Salang as the first sun shone bleakly over the snow plains. Gavin and I had now driven this road so many times that, despite its dangers, the highway was familiar, almost friendly. On the right was the big Soviet base north of Kabul airport. Here was the Afghan checkpoint outside Charikar. This was where the young Russian soldier had shown us the wound in his hand. Soldiers at the Afghan checkpoints were too cold to come aboard and look at the passengers. When Soviet soldiers made a cursory inspection, I curled up in my seat with my shawl round my face. Three hours later, the bus pulled over to the side of the highway just short of the Salang Tunnel. There were Russian armoured vehicles parked a few metres away and a clutch of soldiers with blue eyes and brown hair poking from beneath their fur hats. That’s when things went wrong.

A Soviet officer approached the bus from the right-hand side and his eyes met mine. Then a man inside the bus – an Afghan with another thin moustache – pointed at me. He marched down the aisle, stood next to my seat and raised his finger, pointing it straight at my face. Betrayed. That was the word that went through my mind. I had watched this scene in a dozen movies. So, no doubt, had the informer. This man must have been working for the Afghan secret police, saw me climb aboard in Kabul and waited until we reached this heavily guarded checkpoint to give me away. Another young Afghan jumped from the bus, walked down the right side of the vehicle and then he too pointed at me through the window. Doubly betrayed. We were a hundred miles from Kabul. If I had cleared this last major barrage, I would have been through the tunnel and on to Mazar.

The Russian officer beckoned me to leave the bus. I noticed a badge of Lenin on his lapel. Lenin appeared to be glowering, eyes fixed on some distant Bolshevik dream that I would be forbidden to enter. ‘Passport,’ the soldier said indifferently. It was like the ghastly telegram Sue Hickey had sent me, further proof of my dastardly role in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the covers of British passports were black, and the gold coat of arms of the United Kingdom positively gleamed back at the Russian. He studied it closely. I half expected him to ask me for the meaning of ‘Dieu et mon droit’ or, worse still, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. He flicked it open, looked at the face of the bespectacled, tousled-haired Englishman on the third page and then at the word ‘occupation’. The word ‘journalist’ does not obtain many visas in the Middle East, and so the British Passport Office had been obliging enough to write ‘representative’ in the space provided. The Russian, who could read about as much Latin script as I could Cyrillic, tapped his finger on the word and asked in painfully good English: ‘What do you “represent”?’ A newspaper, I owned up. ‘Ah, correspondent.’ And he gave me a big knowing smile. I was led to a small communications hut in the snow from which emerged a half-naked paratroop captain wearing shades. Captain Viktor from Tashkent showed no animosity when he was told I was a journalist, and his men gathered round me, anxious to talk in faltering but by no means poor English. There was a grunting from the engine of my bus and I saw it leaving the checkpoint for the tunnel without me, my betrayer staring at me hatefully from a rear window.

Private Tebin from the Estonian city of Tallinn – if he survived Afghanistan, I assume he is now a proud citizen of the European Union, happily flourishing his new passport at British immigration desks – repeatedly described how dangerous the mountains had become now that rebels were shooting daily at Soviet troops. Captain Viktor wanted to know why I had chosen to be a journalist. But what emerged most strongly was that all these soldiers were fascinated by pop music. Lieutenant Nikolai from Tashkent interrupted at one point to ask: ‘Is it true that Paul McCartney has been arrested in Tokyo?’ And he put his extended hands together as if he had been handcuffed. Why had McCartney been arrested? he wanted to know. I asked him where he had heard the Beatles’ music and two other men chorused at once: ‘On the “Voice of America” radio.’

I was smiling now. Not because the Russians were friendly – each had studied my passport and all were now calling me ‘Robert’ as if I was a comrade-in-arms rather than the citizen of an enemy power – but because these Soviet soldiers with their overt interest in Western music did not represent the iron warriors of Stalingrad. They seemed like any Western soldiers: naive, cheerful in front of strangers, trusting me because I was – and here in the Afghan snows, of course, the fact was accentuated – a fellow European. They seemed genuinely apologetic that they could not allow me to continue my journey but they stopped a bus travelling in the opposite direction. ‘To Kabul!’ Captain Viktor announced. I refused. The people on that bus had seen me talking to the Russians. They would assume I was a Russian. No amount of assurances that I was British would satisfy them. I doubted if I would ever reach Kabul, at least not alive.

So Lieutenant Nikolai flagged down a passing Russian military truck at the back of a convoy and put me aboard. He held out his hand. ‘Dos vidanya,’ he said. ‘Goodbye – and give my love to Linda McCartney.’ And so I found myself travelling down the Hindu Kush on Soviet army convoy number 58 from Tashkent to Kabul. This was incredible. No Western journalist had been able to talk to the Soviet troops invading Afghanistan, let alone ride on their convoys, and here I was, sitting next to an armed Russian soldier as he drove his truckload of food and ammunition to Kabul, allowed to watch this vast military deployment from a Soviet army vehicle. This was better than Mazar.

As we began our descent of the gorge, the Russian driver beside me pulled his kitbag from behind his seat, opened the straps and offered me an orange. ‘Please, you look up,’ he said. ‘Look at the top of the hills.’ With near disbelief, I realised what was happening. While he was wrestling the wheel of his lorry on the ice, I was being asked to watch the mountain tops for gunmen. The orange was my pay for helping him out. Slowly, we began to fall behind the convoy. The soldier now hauled his rifle from the back of the cab and laid it between us on the seat. ‘Now you watch right of road,’ he said. ‘Tell if you see people.’ I did as I was told, as much for my safety as his. Our truck had a blue-painted interior with the word Kama engraved over the dashboard. It was one of the lorries built with American assistance at the Kama River factory in the Soviet Union, and I wondered what President Carter would have thought if he knew the uses to which his country’s technology was now being put. The driver had plastered his cab with Christmas cards.

At the bottom of the pass we found his convoy, and an officer – tall, with intelligent, unnaturally pale green eyes, khaki trousers tucked into heavy army boots – came to the door on my side of the truck. ‘You are English,’ he said with a smile. ‘I am Major Yuri. Come to the front with me.’ And so we trekked through the deep slush to the front of the column where a Soviet tank was trying to manoeuvre up the pass in the opposite direction. ‘It’s a T-62,’ he said, pointing to the sleeve halfway down the tank’s gun barrel. I thought it prudent not to tell him that I had already recognised the classification.