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

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 7th 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.

Then one of them walked up to me. ‘Shuravi?’ he asked. I was appalled. Shuravi meant ‘Russian’. If he thought I was Russian, I was a dead man. ‘Inglistan, Inglistan,’ I bellowed at him with a big smile. The man nodded and went back to the crowd with this news. But after a minute, another man stepped up to me, speaking a little English. ‘From where are you – London?’ he asked. I agreed, for I doubted if the people of Nangarhar would have much knowledge of East Farleigh on the banks of the Medway river in Kent. He returned to the crowd with this news. A few seconds later, he was back again. ‘They say,’ he told me, ‘that London is occupied by the Shuravi.’ I didn’t like this at all. If London was occupied by the Soviet army, then I could only be here with Russian permission – so I was a collaborator. ‘No, no,’ I positively shouted. ‘Inglistan is free, free, free. We would fight the Russians if they came.’ I hoped that the man’s translation of this back into Pushtu would be more accurate than the crowd’s knowledge of political geography. But after listening to this further item of news, they broke into smiles and positively cheered Britain’s supposed heroism. ‘They thank you because your country is fighting the Russians,’ the man said.

It was only as the rickshaw bumped me back to Jalalabad that I understood what had happened. To these Afghan peasants, Kabul – only a hundred kilometres up the highway – was a faraway city which most of them had never visited. London was just another faraway city and it was therefore quite logical that they should suppose the Shuravi were also patrolling Trafalgar Square. I returned to Jalalabad exhausted and sat down on a lumpy sofa in a chaikhana close to the Spinghar Hotel. The cushions had been badly piled beneath a pale brown shawl and I was about to rearrange them when the tea-shop owner arrived with his head on one side and his hands clutched together. ‘Mister – please!’ He looked at the sofa and then at me. ‘A family brought an old man to the town for a funeral but their cart broke down and they have gone to repair it and then they will return for the dead man.’ I stood up in remorse. He put his hand on my arm as if it was he who had been sitting on the dead. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. The sorrow was mine, I insisted. Which is why, I suppose, he placed a chair next to the covered corpse and served me my morning cup of tea.

At night now, the local cops and party leaders were turning up at the Spinghar to sleep, arriving before the 8 p.m. curfew, anxious men in faded brown clothes and dark glasses who ascended to their first-floor lounge for tea before bed. They would be followed by younger men holding automatic rifles that would clink in an unsettling way against the banisters. The party men sometimes invited me to join their meals and, in good English, would ask me if I thought the Soviet army would obey President Carter’s deadline for a military withdrawal. They were understandably obsessed with the deadly minutiae of party rivalry in Kabul and with the confession of a certain Lieutenant Mohamed Iqbal, who had admitted to participating in the murder of the ‘martyr’ President Nur Mohamed Taraki. Iqbal said that he and two other members of the Afghan palace guard had been ordered to kill Taraki by the ‘butcher’ Amin and had seized the unfortunate man, tied him up, laid him on a bed and then suffocated him by stuffing a pillow over his face. The three then dug the president’s grave, covering it with metal sheets from a sign-writer’s shop.

The party men were so friendly that they invited me to meet the governor of Jalalabad, a middle-aged man with a round face, closely cropped grey hair and an old-fashioned pair of heavily framed spectacles. Mohamed Ziarad, a former export manager at Afghanistan’s national wool company, could scarcely cope with the morning visitors to his office. The chief of police was there with an account of the damage from the overnight fighting; the local Afghan army commander, snapping to attention in a tunic two sizes too small for him, presented an intimidatingly large pile of incident reports. A noisy crowd of farmers poured into the room with compensation claims. Every minute, the telephone rang with further reports of sabotage from the villages, although it was sometimes difficult for Mr Ziarad to hear the callers because of the throb of helicopter gunships hovering over the trees beyond the bay window. It had been a bad night.

Not that the governor of Jalalabad let these things overwhelm him. ‘There is no reason to overdramatise these events,’ he said, as if the nightly gun battles had been a part of everyone’s daily life for years. He sipped tea as he signed the reports, joking with an army lieutenant and ordering the removal of an old beggar who had forced his way into the room to shout for money. ‘All revolutions are the same,’ he said. ‘We defend the revolution, we talk, we fight, we speak against our enemies and our enemies try to start a counter-revolution and so we defend ourselves against them. But we will win.’

If Mr Ziarad seemed a trifle philosophical – almost whimsical, I thought – in his attitude towards Afghanistan’s socialist revolution, it was as well to remember that he was no party man. Somehow, he had avoided membership of both the Parcham and the Khalq; his only concession to the revolution was an imposing but slightly bent silver scale model of a Mig jet fighter that perched precariously on one end of his desk. He admitted that the insurgents were causing problems. ‘We cannot stop them shooting in the country. We cannot stop them blowing up the electric cables and the gas and setting off bombs at night. It is true that they are trying to capture Jalalabad and they are getting closer to the city. But they cannot succeed.’

Here Mr Ziarad drew a diagram on a paper on his desk. It showed a small circle, representing Jalalabad, and a series of arrows pointing towards the circle which indicated the rebel attacks. Then he pencilled in a series of arrows which moved outwards from Jalalabad. ‘These,’ he said proudly, ‘are the counter-attacks which we are going to make. We have been through this kind of thing before and always we achieve the same result. When the enemy gets closer to the centre of Jalalabad, they are more closely bunched together and our forces can shoot them more easily and then we make counter-attacks and drive them off.’ What a strange phenomenon is the drug of hope. I was to hear this explanation from countless governors and soldiers across the Middle East over the coming quarter of a century – Westerners as well as Muslims – all insisting that things were getting worse because they were getting better, that the worse things were, the better they would become.

Mr Ziarad claimed that only three Afghan soldiers had been killed in the past week’s fighting around the city and – given the unspoken truce between the army and the mujahedin – the governor’s statistics were probably correct. He did deny, however, that there were any Soviet troops in Jalalabad – only a handful of Russian agricultural advisers and teachers were here, he said – which did not take account of the thousand Soviet soldiers in the barracks east of the town. He was not concerned about the Russian presence in his country. ‘It is the bandit groups that are the problem and the dispossessed landlords who had their land taken from them by our Decree Number Six and they are assisted by students of imperialism. These people are trained in camps in Pakistan. They are taught by the imperialists to shoot and throw grenades and set off mines.’

The governor still visited the nearest villages during daylight, in the company of three soldiers, to inspect the progress of land reform and Jalalabad’s newly created irrigation scheme. But he understood why the reforms had created animosity. ‘We tried to make sure that all men and women had equal rights and the same education,’ he said. ‘But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.’

Mr Ziarad’s last words, as we walked from his office, were drowned by the roar of four more Soviet helicopter gunships that raced across the bazaar, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air beside the single-storey mud-walled houses. He asked me if I would like to use his car to travel back to my hotel. In view of the angry faces of the Afghans watching the helicopters, I decided that the governor of Jalalabad had made the kind of offer it was safer to refuse. But the cops at the Spinghar were getting nosy, wanting to know how long I was staying in Jalalabad and why I didn’t go to Kabul. It was time to let Jalalabad ‘cool down’. As Gavin always said, don’t get greedy.*

It was the Russians who were getting greedy. Hundreds of extra troops were now being flown into Kabul in a fleet of Antonov transport aircraft along with new amphibious BMB armoured vehicles. In some barracks, Russian and Afghan soldiers had been merged into new infantry units, presumably to stiffen Afghan army morale. New Afghan army trucks carried Afghan forces but Soviet drivers. There were more Karmal speeches, the latest of which attacked what he called ‘murderers, terrorists, bandits, subversive elements, robbers, traitors and hirelings’. That he should, well over a month after the Soviet invasion, be appealing for ‘volunteer resistance groups’ to guard roads, bridges and convoys – against the much more powerful and genuine ‘resistance’, of course – demonstrated just how serious the problem of the insurgents had become and how large an area of Afghanistan they now effectively controlled.

The Russians could neither wipe out the guerrillas nor give hope to Afghan villagers that their presence would improve their lives. Large areas of Afghanistan were cut off from government-subsidised food and the Soviets were flying planeloads of grain – even tractors – into Kabul while one of their generals appeared at the Bagram airbase to claim that only ‘terrorist remnants’ remained in the mountains. ‘Remnants’ – bakoyaye in Dari – became the vogue word for the insurgents on Afghan radio. But to ‘reform’ Afghanistan under these circumstances was impossible. The government were losing. It was only a matter of time. And the more the government said they were winning, the fewer people believed them. In the lobby of the Intercontinental, a Polish diplomat told me that he thought the Russians would need at least 200,000 troops to win their war.*

Karmal’s men had effectively closed down the capital’s mosques as a centre of resistance. When I found the speaker of the Polekheshti Mosque in the centre of Kabul, a small man with a thin sallow face whose features betrayed his anxiety and who refused even to give his name, he declined to answer even the mildest questions about the welfare of his people. He arrived one minute before morning prayers, walking quickly across the ice-encrusted forecourt in his tightly wound silk turban and golden cap and leaving immediately his devotions were completed. When I walked towards him, he immediately glanced over his right shoulder. And when I presented him with a list of questions in Pushtu – what was the role of Islam in Afghanistan since December, I asked him? – he waved the paper in the frozen air in a gesture of hopelessness.

‘Your questions are all political,’ he yelped at me. ‘One of your questions is asking if the people are happy with the new regime of Babrak Karmal. I will answer no questions about him. I do not represent the people. I will answer only religious questions.’ It was predictable. As khatib of the Polekheshti, he had only to interpret the Koran, not to deliver sermons on the morality of his government. Since the khatibs had all been appointed by the revolutionary governments in the past two years, there was even less chance that he would unburden himself of any feelings about the Soviet Union’s invasion. A few days after Taraki’s coup in 1978, calls for a jihad were read out in Kabul’s mosques. Any political independence among the Sunni Muslim clergy had been wiped out within days when police raided all the city’s religious institutions and dispatched dissenting mullahs to the Polecharkhi prison, whence they never emerged. But brutal repression did not alone account for the lack of any serious political leadership within the clergy.

A decapitated church can scarcely give political guidance to its flock, but the history of Islam in Afghanistan suggested that there would be no messianic religious leader to guide the people into war against their enemies. Shia Muslims, whose tradition of self-sacrifice and emphasis on martyrdom had done so much to destroy the Shah’s regime, were a minority in Afghanistan. In the western city of Herat, 100 kilometres from the Iranian border, posters of Khomeini and Ayatollah Shariatadari could be found on the walls, but the Sunnis formed the majority community and there was a fundamental suspicion in Afghanistan of the kind of power exercised by the leading clergymen in Iran. Afghans would not pay national subservience to religious divines. Islam is a formalistic religion, and among Sunnis, the mosque prayer leaders had a bureaucratic function rather than a political vocation. The power of religious orthodoxy in Afghanistan was strong but not extreme, and the lack of any hierarchy among Sunnis prevented the mullahs from using their position to create political unity within the country. Besides, Islam was also a class-conscious religion in Kabul. The Polekheshti Mosque catered largely for the poor, while the military favoured the Blue Mosque and the remains of the country’s middle-class elite attended funerals at the two-tiered Do Sham Shira Mosque.

The monarchy, so long as it existed, provided a mosaic of unity that held the country more or less together. And although the last king was ostentatiously toasted in the chaikhana now that more ominous potentates had appeared in Kabul, the spendthrift rulers who once governed Afghanistan were never really popular. When the monarchy disappeared, the only common denominator was religion; it was identified with nationalism – as opposed to communism – which is why Karmal had reintroduced green into the colour of the national flag. All ministerial speeches, even by cabinet members known to be lifelong Marxists, now began with obsequious references to the Koran. The Afghan deputy prime minister had just visited Mazar to pray at the shrine of Hazarate Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed. But in Afghanistan – as in most rural countries – religion was regarded with deepest respect in the villages rather than in the towns and it was from the villages that the mujahedin came. Although it was a reactionary force – opposing the emancipation and equality of women and secular education – it focused the attention of the poor on the realities of politics in a way that had never happened before. It was not by chance that a joke made the rounds of Afghans in Kabul, that apart from the five traditional obligations of Islam, a sixth instruction must now be obeyed: every true Muslim should listen to the BBC. This would no longer be a joke, of course, if a new Islamic force emerged from within the resistance rather than the clergy.

So few journalists were now left in Afghanistan that no one paid much attention to the Times correspondent, who carried no cameras but still possessed a valid visa. In Kabul, I shopped for carpets in the bazaar among the off-duty Soviet soldiers who still felt safe walking along Chicken Street. The Russians bought souvenirs, beads and necklaces for wives and girlfriends, but the Tajik Soviet soldiers would go to the bookshops and buy copies of the Koran. I eventually purchased a 2-by-3-metre rug of crimson and gold that had been lying on the damp pavement. Mr Samadali, who was still free to drive us within the Kabul city limits, cast his critical eye on my rug, announced that I had paid far too much for it – it is a function of all taxi-drivers in south-west Asia to depress their foreign clients by assuring them they have been ripped off – and tied it to the roof of his car.

From Kabul, I now once more took Ali’s bus down to Jalalabad, planning to spend a night at the Spinghar before returning to Kabul. In the Jalalabad bazaar, I went searching for a satin bag in which to carry my massive carpet out of Afghanistan. After ensuring I knew the Pushtu for a satin bag – atlasi kahzora – I bought a large hessian sack, along with a set of postcards of Jalalabad under the monarchy, a gentle, soporific town of technicolor brilliance that was now lost for ever. I visited the Pakistani consulate in the town, whose staff – some of them at least – must already have been coordinating with the guerrillas. They spoke of Soviet fears that Jalalabad might partially fall to the rebels, that the highway to Kabul might be permanently cut. And the Pakistani diplomats did not seem at all unhappy at this prospect.

No sooner was I back at the Spinghar than the receptionist, in a state of considerable emotion, told me that the Russians were using helicopters to attack the village of Sorkh Rud, 20 kilometres to the west. I hired a rickshaw and within half an hour found myself in a township of dirt streets and mud-walled houses. I told the driver to wait on the main road and walked into the village. There was not a human to be seen, just the distant thump-thump sound of Soviet Mi-25 helicopters which I only occasionally saw as they flitted past the ends of the streets. A few dogs yelped near a stream of sewage. The sun was high and a blanket of heat moved on the breeze down the streets. So where was the attack that had so upset the hotel receptionist? I only just noticed the insect shape of a machine low in the white sky seconds before it fired. There was a sound like a hundred golf balls being hit by a club at the same time and bullets began to skitter up the walls of the houses, little puffs of brown clay jumping into the air as the rounds hit the buildings. One line of bullets came skipping down the street in my direction, and in panic I ran through an open door, across a large earthen courtyard and into the first house I could see.

I literally hurled myself through the entrance and landed on my side on an old carpet. Against the darkened wall opposite me sat an Afghan man with a greying beard and a clutch of children, open-mouthed with fear and, behind them, holding a black sheet over her head, a woman. I stared at them and tried to smile. They sat there in silence. I realised I had to assure them that I was not a Russian, that I was from Mrs Thatcher’s England, that I was a journalist. But would this family understand what England was? Or what a journalist was? I was out of breath, frightened, wondering how I came to be in such a dangerous place – so quickly, so thoughtlessly, so short a time after leaving the safety of the Spinghar Hotel.