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

I sat in silence, thinking about these words as bin Laden discussed my journey back to Jalalabad with his guards. He was concerned that the Taliban – despite their ‘sincerity’ – might object to his dispatching a foreigner through their checkpoints after dark, and so I was invited to pass the night in bin Laden’s mountain camp. I was permitted to take just three photographs of him, this time by the light of the Toyota which was driven to the tent with its headlights shining through the canvas to illuminate bin Laden’s face. He sat in front of me, expressionless, a stone figure, and in the pictures I developed in Beirut three days later he was a purple and yellow ghost. He said goodbye without much ceremony, a brief handshake and a nod, and vanished from the tent, and I lay down on the mattress with my coat over me to keep warm. The men with their guns sitting around slept there too, while others armed with rifles and rocket-launchers patrolled the low ridges around the camp.

In the years to come, I would wonder who they were. Was the Egyptian Mohamed Atta among those young men in the tent? Or Abdul Aziz Alomari? Or any other of the nineteen men whose names we would all come to know just over four years later? I cannot remember their faces now, cowled as they were, many of them, in their scarves.

Exhaustion and cold kept me awake. ‘A shadow of itself’ was the expression that kept repeating itself to me. What did bin Laden and these dedicated, ruthless men have in store for us? I recall the next few hours like a freeze-frame film; waking so cold there was ice in my hair, slithering back down the mountain trail in the Toyota with one of the Algerian gunmen in the back telling me that if we were in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under bin Laden’s orders to protect me and thus would give his life for me. The three men in the back and my driver stopped the jeep on the broken-up Kabul – Jalalabad highway to say their dawn fajr prayers. Beside the broad estuary of the Kabul river, they spread their mats and knelt as the sun rose over the mountains. Far to the north-east, I could see the heights of the Hindu Kush glimmering a pale white under an equally pale blue sky, touching the border of China that nuzzled into the wreckage of a land that was to endure yet more suffering in the coming years. Hills and rocks and water and ancient trees and old mountains, this was the world before the age of man.

And I remember driving back with bin Laden’s men into Jalalabad past the barracks where the Taliban stored their captured arms and, just a few minutes later, hearing the entire store – of shells, anti-tank rockets, Stinger missiles, explosives and mines – exploding in an earthquake that shook the trees in the laneway outside the Spinghar Hotel and sprinkled us with tiny pieces of metal and torn pages from American manuals instructing ‘users’ on how to aim missiles at aircraft. More than ninety civilians were ripped to bits by the accidental explosion – did a Taliban throw the butt of a cigarette, a lonely and unique item of enjoyment, into the ammunition? – and then the Algerian walked up to me in tears and told me that his best friend had just perished in the explosion. Bin Laden’s men, I noted, can also cry.

But most of all I remember the first minutes after our departure from bin Laden’s camp. It was still dark when I caught sight of a great light in the mountains to the north. For a while I thought it was the headlights of another vehicle, another security signal from the camp guards to our departing Toyota. But it hung there for many minutes and I began to realise that it was burning above the mountains and carried a faintly incandescent trail. The men in the vehicle were watching it too. ‘It is Halle’s comet,’ one of them said. He was wrong. It was a newly discovered comet, noticed for the first time only two years earlier by Americans Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, but I could see how Hale – Bopp had become Halley to these Arab men in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was soaring above us now, trailing a golden tail, a sublime power moving at 70,000 kilometres an hour through the heavens.

So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qaeda men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. ‘Mr Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?’ It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. ‘It means that there is going to be a great war.’ And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.

CHAPTER TWO

‘They Shoot Russians’

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘The Young British Soldier’

Less than six months before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War. ‘Presented to Willie By his Mother’ is written in thick pencil inside the front cover. ‘Date Sat. 24th January 1914, for another’. ‘Willie’ would have been almost fifteen years old. Only after my father’s death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross – ‘For Valour’, it says on the medal – and, on the spine, a soldier in red coat and peaked white tropical hat with a rifle in his hands. I never found out the meaning of the cryptic reference ‘for another’. But years later, I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900 by Thomas Nelson and Sons, it tells the story of the son of a mine-owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father’s sudden impoverishment, joins the British army under-age. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit at Buttevant in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland – he even kisses the Blarney Stone, conferring upon himself the supposed powers of persuasive eloquence contained in that much blessed rock – and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War, where he is gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father’s grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that he will lead ‘a pure, clean, and upright life’.

The story is typical of my father’s generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. But reading it, I was struck by some remarkable parallels. My own father, Bill Fisk – the ‘Willie’ of the dedication almost a century ago – was also taken from school in a northern English port because his father Edward was no longer able to support him. He too became an apprentice clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he wrote before his death, Bill recalled that he had tried to join the British army under-age; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, eleven days after the start of the First World War and almost exactly six months after his mother Margaret gave him Tom Graham. Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment in Cork in Ireland, not long after the 1916 Easter Rising. There is even a pale photograph of my father in my archives, kissing the Blarney Stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Was he consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

The rest of the novel is a disturbing tale of colour prejudice, xenophobia and outright anti-Muslim hatred during the Second Afghan War. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion had naturally focused upon Afghanistan, whose unmarked frontiers had become the indistinct front lines between imperial Russia and the British Indian Raj. The principal victims of the ‘Great Game’, as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistan – there was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britain – were, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting point – between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East – and a battlefield.* A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistan’s first king, Dost Mohamed, to receive a Russian mission in Kabul after his re-accession in 1868 led directly to what the British were to call the Second Afghan War. The First Afghan War had led to the annihilation of the British army in the Kabul Gorge in 1842, in the same dark crevasse through which I drove at night on my visit to Osama bin Laden in 1997. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, Shir Ali’s son Yaqub Khan agreed to allow a permanent British embassy to be established in Kabul, but within four months the British envoy and his staff were murdered in their diplomatic compound. The British army was sent back to Afghanistan.

In Bill Fisk’s novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawar – now in Pakistan, then in India – Graham encounters Pathan tribesmen, ‘a villainous lot … most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer’. Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet ‘up to the nozzle’ into the chest of an Afghan, a ‘swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate’. In the Kurrum Valley, Graham and his ‘chums’ – a word my father used about his comrades in the First World War – fight off ‘infuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder’. When General Sir Frederick Roberts – later Lord Roberts of Kandahar – agrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with ‘as wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined’. The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, ‘their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form’. When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, ‘a thrill of satisfaction’ goes through the ranks of Graham’s comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.

Afghans are thus a ‘villainous lot’, ‘fanatics’, ‘rascals’, ‘fiends in human form’, meat for British bayonets – or ‘toasting forks’ as the narrative cheerfully calls them. It gets worse. A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the words ‘that will scatter the flies’. The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. ‘Boy readers,’ the author pontificates, ‘may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878–80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise.’ After Tom Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans – in the words of his Irish-born army doctor – have become ‘murtherin villains, the black niggers’.

When the British suffer defeat at the battle of Maiwand, on a grey desert west of Kandahar, an officer orders his men to ‘have your bayonets ready, and wait for the niggers’. There is no reference in the book to the young Afghan woman, Malalei, who – seeing the Afghans briefly retreating – tore her veil from her head and led a charge against her enemies, only to be cut down by British bullets. That, of course, is part of Afghan – not British – history. When victory is finally claimed by the British at Kandahar, Tom Graham wins his Victoria Cross.

From ‘villains’ to ‘flies’ and ‘niggers’ in one hundred pages, it’s not difficult to see how easily my father’s world of ‘pure, clean and upright’ Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the ‘boldness’ of Afghan tribesmen – and just one to their ‘courage’ – no attempt is made to explain their actions. They are evil, hate-filled, anxious to prove their Muslim faith by ‘cutting pieces out of the unfortunate Britisher’. The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country simply does not exist in the story.

If official British accounts of Afghanistan were not so prejudiced, they nevertheless maintained the oversimplified and supremacist view of the Afghans that Johnston used to such effect in his novel. An account of life in Kabul between 1836 and 1838 by Lt. Col. Sir Alexander Burnes of the East India Company – published a year before the massacre of the British army in 1842 – gives a sensitive portrayal of the generosity of tribal leaders and demonstrates a genuine interest in Afghan customs and social life. But by the end of the century, the official Imperial Gazetteer of India chooses to describe the animals of Afghanistan before it reports on its people, who are ‘handsome and athletic … inured to bloodshed from childhood … treacherous and passionate in revenge … ignorant of everything connected with their religion beyond its most elementary doctrines …’

Among the young Britons who accompanied the army to Kabul in 1879 – a real Briton, this time – was a 29-year-old civil servant, Henry Mortimer Durand, who had been appointed political secretary to General Roberts. In horror, he read the general’s proclamation to the people of Kabul, declaring the murder of the British mission diplomats ‘a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people’. The followers of Yaqub Khan, General Roberts declared, would not escape and their ‘punishment should be such as will be felt and remembered … all persons convicted of bearing a part in [the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts’. It was an old, Victorian, version of the warning that an American president would give to the Afghans 122 years later.

Durand, a humane and intelligent man, confronted Roberts over his proclamation. ‘It seemed to me so utterly wrong in tone and in matter that I determined to do my utmost to overthrow it … the stilted language, and the absurd affectation of preaching historical morality to the Afghans, all our troubles with whom began by our own abominable injustice, made the paper to my mind most dangerous for the General’s reputation.’ Roberts ameliorated the text, not entirely to Durand’s satisfaction. He thought it merely ‘a little less objectionable’.

Yet Durand sent a letter to his biographer’s sister, Ella Sykes, which provided gruesome evidence that Tom Graham contained all too real descriptions of Afghan cruelty. ‘During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec.r 1879,’ he wrote almost sixteen years after the event, ‘two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives … I saw it all …’ But Durand was well aware that the Afghans were not the ‘fiends in human form’ of popular fiction. In 1893, he describes the Afghan army commander, Ghulam Hyder, as an inquisitive and generous man.

Today we talked about the size of London, and how it was supplied with food … about religious prejudices, the hatred of Sunnis and Shias, the Reformation and the Inquisition, the Musselman [sic] and Christian stories of Christ’s life and death, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and his wars, about which Ghulam Hyder knew a good deal, the manners of the Somalis, tiger shooting …

Durand had been sent to negotiate with the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman – a cousin of Shir Ali – over the southern border of his country, to secure an agreed frontier between British India and Afghanistan. Durand’s brother Edward had already helped to delineate the country’s northern frontier with Russia – during which the Russians sent a force of Cossacks to attack Afghan troops on the Kushk river – and Mortimer Durand found the king deeply unsympathetic to his northern neighbour. According to Durand’s notes, Abdur Rahman announced that

unless you drive me into enmity, I am your friend for my life. And why? The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkmenistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join with them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I hate them.

Eighty-six years later, the Russians would find out what this meant.

I saw them first, those Russians, standing beside their T-72 tanks next to the runways at Kabul airport, fleece-lined jackets below white-pink faces with thick grey fur hats bearing the red star and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The condensation of their breath hung so thickly in the air in front of their mouths that I looked for cartoon quotations in the bubbles. On the trucks parked beside the highway into the city, they wore the steel helmets so familiar from every Second World War documentary, the green metal casks with ripples over the ears, rifles in gloved hands, narrowed eyes searching the Afghans unflinchingly. They drew heavily and quickly on cigarettes, a little grey smog over each checkpoint. So these were the descendants of the men of Stalingrad and Kursk, the heroes of Rostov and Leningrad and Berlin. On the tarmac of the airport, there were at least seventy of the older T-62s. The snow lay thickly over the tanks, icing sugar on cakes of iron, enough to break the teeth of any Afghan ‘terrorist’.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, but when I arrived two weeks later their armour was still barrelling down through the slush from the Amu Darya river, the Oxus of antiquity, which Durand’s brother Edward had agreed with the Russians should be the northern frontier of this frost-covered land. Save for a few isolated cities, the Soviet army appeared to have crushed all resistance. Along the highways south and east of Kabul, Russian military encampments protected by dozens of tanks and heavy artillery controlled the arteries between the rebellious provinces of south-eastern Afghanistan. An ‘intervention’, Leonid Brezhnev had called his invasion, peace-loving assistance to the popular socialist government of the newly installed Afghan president Babrak Karmal.

‘In all my life, I have never seen so many tanks,’ my old Swedish radio colleague from Cairo, Lars Gunnar Erlandsen, said when we met. Lars Gunnar was a serious Swede, a thatch of blond hair above piercing blue eyes and vast spectacles. ‘And never in my life do I ever want to see so many tanks again,’ he said. ‘It is beyond imagination.’ There were now five complete Soviet divisions in Afghanistan; the 105th Airborne Division based on Kabul, the 66th Motorised Rifle Brigade in Herat, the 357th Motorised Rifles in Kandahar, the 16th Motorised Rifles in the three northern provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar and Samangan and the 306th Motorised Division in Kabul with the Soviet paratroopers. There were already 60,000 Soviet troops in the country, vast numbers of them digging slit trenches beside the main roads. This was invasion on a massive scale, a superpower demonstration of military will, the sclerotic Brezhnev – Red Army political commissar on the Ukrainian front in 1943, he would die within three years – now flexing his impotent old frame for the last time.

But Russia’s final imperial adventure had all the awesome fury of Britain’s Afghan wars. In the previous week alone, Soviet Antonov-22 transport aircraft had made 4,000 separate flights into the capital. Every three minutes, squadrons of Mig-25s would race up from the frozen runways of Kabul airport and turn in the white sunshine towards the mountains to the east and there would follow, like dungeon doors slamming deep beneath our feet, a series of massive explosions far across the landscape. Soviet troops stood on the towering heights of the Kabul Gorge. I was Middle East correspondent of The Times of London, the paper whose nineteenth-century war correspondent William Howard Russell – a student of Trinity College, Dublin, as I was to be – won his spurs in the 1854–55 Anglo-Russian war in the Crimea. We were all Tom Grahams now.

I think that’s how many of us felt that gleaming, iced winter. I was already exhausted. I lived in Beirut, where the Lebanese civil war had sucked in one Israeli army and would soon consume another. Only three weeks before, I had left post-revolutionary Iran, where America had just lost its very own ‘policeman of the Gulf’, Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, in favour of that most powerful of Islamic leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Within nine months, I would be running for my life under shellfire with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army as it invaded the Islamic Republic. America had already ‘lost’ Iran. Now it was in the process of ‘losing’ Afghanistan – or at least watching that country’s last pitiful claim to national independence melting into the Kremlin’s embrace. Or so it looked to us at the time. The Russians wanted a warm-water port, just as General Roberts had feared in 1878. If they could reach the Gulf coast – Kandahar is 650 kilometres from the Gulf of Oman – then after a swift incursion through Iranian or Pakistani Baluchistan, Soviet forces would stand only 300 kilometres from the Arabian peninsula. That, at least, was the received wisdom, the fount of a thousand editorials. The Russians are coming. That the Soviet Union was dying, that the Soviet government was undertaking this extraordinary expedition through panic – through fear that the collapse of a communist ally in Afghanistan might set off a chain reaction among the Soviet Muslim republics – was not yet apparent, although within days I would see the very evidence that proved the Kremlin might be correct.

Indeed, many of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan came from those very Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia whose loyalties so concerned Brezhnev. In Kabul, Soviet troops from the Turkoman region were conversing easily with local Afghan commanders. The high-cheekboned Asiatic features of some soldiers often suggested that their military units had been drawn from the Mongolian region. In Kabul and the villages immediately surrounding the city, no open hostility was shown towards the Soviet invaders in the daylight hours; so many Russian units had been moved into the snow-covered countryside that Afghan troops had been withdrawn to protect the capital. But at night, the Soviets were pulled back towards Kabul and unconfirmed reports already spoke of ten Russian dead in two weeks, two of them beaten to death with clubs. In Jalalabad, 65 kilometres by road from the Pakistan border, thunderous night-time explosions bore witness to the continued struggle between Afghan tribesmen and Soviet troops.

For the next two months, we few journalists who managed to enter Afghanistan were witness to the start of a fearful tragedy, one that would last for more than a quarter of a century and would cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America. How could we have known? How could we have guessed that while an Islamic revolution had enveloped Iran, a far more powerful spiritual force was being nursed and suckled here amid the snows of early January 1980? Again, the evidence was there, for those of us who chose to seek it out, who realised that the narrative of history laid down by our masters – be they of the Moscow or the Washington persuasion – was essentially short-term, false and ultimately self-defeating. Perhaps we were too naive, too ill-prepared for events on such a scale. Who could grasp in so short a time the implications of this essentially imperial story, this latest adventure in the ‘Great Game’? We were young, most of us who managed to scramble into Afghanistan that January. I was thirty-five, most of my colleagues were younger, and journalism is not only an imprecise science but a fatiguing one whose practice involves almost as much bureaucracy as it does fact-gathering. I had spent Christmas in Ireland and returned to wartime Beirut on 3 January to prepare for my onward assignment to cover the continuing revolution in Iran. But no event could compare to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.