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

For a journalist, nothing can beat that moment when a great story beckons, when history really is being made and when a foreign editor tells you to go for it. I remember one hot day in Beirut when gunmen had hijacked a Lufthansa passenger jet to Dubai. I could get there in four hours, I told London. ‘Go. Go. Go,’ they messaged back. But this was drama on an infinitely greater scale, an epic if we could be there to report it. The Soviet army was pouring into Afghanistan, and from their homes and offices in London, New York, Delhi, Moscow, my colleagues were all trying to find a way there. Beirut was comparatively close but it was still three thousand kilometres west of Kabul. And it was a surreal experience to drive through West Beirut’s civil war gunfire to the ticketing office of Middle East Airlines to seek the help of a Lebanese airline that now had only twelve elderly Boeing 707s and three jumbos to its name. Under the old travel rules, Afghanistan issued visas to all British citizens on arrival. But we had to work on the principle that with the country now a satellite of the Soviet Union, those regulations – a remnant of the days when Kabul happily lay astride the hashish tourist trail to India – would have been abandoned.

Richard Wigg, our India correspondent, was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, Michael Binyon was in Moscow. The Lebanese airline had conceived of a plan to get me into Afghanistan, an ingenious plot that I sent through to London on the ancient telex machines in the Beirut Associated Press bureau, which regularly misspelled our copy. ‘Friends in ticketing section at MiddlehEast [sic] Airlines … have suggested we might try following: I buy single ticket to Kabul and travel in on Ariana [Afghan Airlines] flight that terminates in Kabul,’ I wrote. ‘This means that even if I get bounced, I will probably earn myself twelve hours or so in the city … because my flight will have terminated in Afghanistan and I can’t be put [sic] back on it … At the very worst, I would get bounced and could buy a ticket to Pakistan then head for Peshawar … Grateful reply soonest so I can get MEA ticket people to work early tomorrow (Fri) morning.’ London replied within the hour. ‘Please go ahead with single ticket Kabul plan,’ the foreign desk messaged. I was already back at the MEA office when The Times sent another note. ‘Binyon advises that Afghan embassies around [sic] the world have been instructed to issue visus [sic] which might make things easier.’

This was astonishing. The Russians wanted us there. Their ‘fraternal support’ for the new Karmal government – and the supposedly hideous nature of his predecessor’s regime – was to be publicised. The Russians were coming to liberate Afghanistan. This was obviously the story the Kremlin was concocting. For several years, I had – in addition to my employment by The Times – been reporting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I liked radio, I liked CBC’s courage in letting their reporters speak their minds, in letting me go into battle with a tape recorder to ‘tell it like it is’, to report the blood and stench of wars and my own disgust at human conflict. Sue Hickey came on the telex from CBC’s London office. ‘Good luck keep ur eyes open in the back of ur head,’ she wrote. I promised her an Afghan silk scarf – bribery knows no bounds in radio journalism. ‘What is the Russian for “Help I surrender where is the Brit Embassy?’” I asked. ‘The Russian for help is “pomog”,’ Sue responded in her telex shorthand. ‘So there u shud not hv any trouble bi bi.’

Ariana had a flight from Frankfurt to Kabul early on Sunday morning. Then it was cancelled. Then it was rescheduled and cancelled again. It would fly from Rome. It would fly from Geneva. No, it would fly from Istanbul. When I reached Turkey on MEA, the snow was piled round the Istanbul terminal and ‘Delayed’ was posted beside the Kabul flight designator. There was no fuel for heating in Istanbul so I huddled in my coat on a broken plastic seat with all the books and clippings I had grabbed from my files in Beirut. My teeth were chattering and I wore my gloves as I turned the pages. We journalists do this far too much, boning up on history before the next plane leaves, cramming our heads with dates and presidents, one eye on the Third Afghan War, the other on the check-in desk. I pulled out my map of Afghanistan, green and yellow to the west where the deserts imprison Kandahar, brown in the centre as the mountains shoulder their way towards Kabul, a big purple and white bruise to the north-east where the Hindu Kush separates Pakistan, India, China and the Soviet Union.

The border between British India and Afghanistan was finally laid across the tribal lands in 1893, from the Khyber Pass, south-west to the desert town of Chaman (now in Pakistan), a dustbowl frontier post at the base of a great desert of sand and grey mountains a hundred kilometres from Kandahar. These ‘lines in the sand’, of course, were set down by Sir Mortimer Durand and recognised by the great powers. For the people living on each side of the lines, who were typically given no say in the matter, the borders were meaningless. The Pathans in the south-west of Afghanistan found that the frontier cut right through their tribal and ethnic homeland. Of course they did; for the borders were supposed to protect Britain and Russia from each other, not to ease the life or identity of Afghan tribesmen who considered themselves neither Afghans nor Indians – nor, later, Pakistani – but Pushtun-speaking Pathans who believed they lived in a place called Pushtunistan, which lay on both sides of what would become known as the Durand Line.

The end of the First World War, during which Afghanistan remained neutral, left a declining British Raj to the south and an ambitious new Soviet Communist nation to the north. King Amanullah began a small-scale insurrection against the British in 1919 – henceforth to be known as the Third Afghan War – which the British won militarily but which the Afghans won politically. They would now control their own foreign affairs and have real independence from Britain. But this was no guarantee of stability.*

Reform and regression marked Afghanistan’s subsequent history. My collection of newspaper cuttings included a 1978 report from the Guardian, which recalled how the Soviets had spent £350 million to build the Salang road tunnel through the mountains north of Kabul; it took ten years and cost £200 million a mile. ‘Why should they spend £350 million on a little-used roadway across the Hindu Kush?’ the writer asked. ‘Surely not just for the lorry-loads of raisins that toil up the pass each day. The answer is no. The Salang Tunnel was built to enable Russian convoys … to cross from the cities and army bases of Uzbekhistan all the way over to the Khyber and to Pakistan …’

A nation of peasants relied upon tribal and religious tradition while only Marxists could provide political initiative. Mohamed Daoud’s violent overthrow in 1978 led to a series of ever harsher Marxist regimes led by Nur Mohamed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, their opposing Parcham (‘Banner’) and Khalq (‘People’) parties cruelly executing their rivals. Rebellion broke out in rural areas of Afghanistan and the army, increasingly mutinous despite its Soviet advisers, began to disintegrate. Taraki died of an ‘undisclosed illness’ – almost certainly murdered by Amin’s henchmen – and then, in December 1979, Amin in turn was shot dead. An entire Afghan army unit had already handed over its weapons to rebels in Wardak and there is some evidence that it was Amin himself who asked for Soviet military intervention to save his government. Soviet special forces were arriving at Afghan airbases on 17 December, five days after Brezhnev made his decision to invade, and it is possible that Amin was killed by mistake when his bodyguards first saw Soviet troops around his palace.

A quarter of a century later, in Moscow, I would meet a former Soviet military intelligence officer who arrived in Kabul with Russian forces before the official invasion. ‘Amin was shot and we tried to save him,’ he told me. ‘Our medical officers tried to save him. More than that I will not tell you.’ It is certainly true that the Soviet officer in charge of the coup, General Viktor Paputin, shortly afterwards committed suicide. On 27 December, however, it was announced that the increasingly repressive Amin had been ‘executed’. Babrak Karmal, a socialist lawyer and a Parcham party man who had earlier taken refuge in Moscow, was now installed in Kabul by the Soviets. He had been a deputy prime minister – along with Amin – under Taraki; now he was the Trojan horse through whom the Soviets could protest that Afghanistan had been ‘freed’ from Amin’s tyranny.

It was below zero in Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. There was frost on the inside of the windows. I padded off to the empty check-in desk. There was a pamphlet lying there, a brochure from the Afghan Tourist Organisation. ‘Say “Afghanistan” and you think of the friendliest country,’ it said on the back. ‘Say “Ariana” and you’ve thought of the friendliest way of getting there.’ But the Afghan Tourist Organisation had not survived the purges. A thick black crayon had been drawn through the first page in a vain attempt to erase the name of ‘the Head of State of the Republic of Afghanistan Mr Mohamed Daoud’. The word ‘Democratic’ – an essential adjective in the title of every undemocratic regime – had been penned in above the country’s name and all references to the former royal family pasted over. Local tourist officials who had served Daoud and since disappeared suffered the same paper fate.

But the brand-new Ariana DC-10 arrived in Istanbul before dawn, its Afghan crew still flying with the American McDonell Douglas technicians who had taught them to fly the aircraft. It was a bumpy, cold flight down to Tehran, the flight’s last stop before Kabul. The Afghan crew ate their breakfast in First Class before serving the passengers; the ‘friendliest way’ of getting to Afghanistan. At Tehran Mehrabad airport, three Iranian Revolutionary Guards boarded and ordered two middle-aged men off the plane. They went, heads bowed, in fear. The Afghan crew would not reveal who they were. At dawn we took off for Kabul.

Afghanistan was cloaked in snow, its mountain ravines clotted white and black with rock. From 10,000 feet, I could see tiny Soviet helicopters turning the corners of the great gorges south of Kabul, fireflies dragging a brown trail in their wake. The airport was now a military base, the streets of the capital a parking lot for Soviet armour; and these were not just Russian conscripts. The new ASU 85 infantry fighting vehicle belonged only to the Soviet Union’s top divisions. Many of the soldiers held the newest version of the Kalashnikov rifle, the AKS 74. North of the city, the 105th Airborne Division had quite literally dug a maze of trenches – miles in length – across the plateau beneath the mountains. From a distance, they looked like soldiers standing along the front lines of the Western Front in those old sepia photographs which my father had taken sixty-two years earlier. Their commanders must have been hoping that this was the only obvious parallel between the two military campaigns.

When the Russians stopped my taxi, they stared at my passport, frowning. What was an Englishman doing in Kabul? At the Intercontinental Hotel, on a low hill above the city, there was no such puzzlement. The Afghan reception staff were all smiles, discreetly moving their eyes towards the plain-clothes Afghan cops lounging on the foyer sofas so that guests would know when to lower their voices. The intensity with which men from the Khad – the Khedamat-e Etelaat-e Dawlati or ‘State Information Services’ – would watch us was fortunately only matched by their inability to speak much English. There was a snug little bar filled with bottles of Polish vodka and Czech beer and a large window against which the snow had sprawled thickly. The bedrooms were warm and the balconies a spy’s delight; from mine, Room 127, I could look out across all of Kabul, at the ancient Bala Hissar fort – one of the fictional Tom Graham’s last battles was fought there – and the airport. I could count the Soviet jets taking off into the afternoon sun and the explosions echoing down from the Hindu Kush and then the aircraft again as they glided back down to the runways.

In wars, I only travel with those I trust. Reporters who panic don’t get second chances. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times had talked his way up from the Khyber Pass through Jalalabad. He was already in the old telecommunications office down town, watching with an evil glint in his eye as the operator soldered the letter ‘w’ back onto its iron stem inside the telex machine. Gavin Hewitt, a 29-year-old BBC television reporter, arrived with Steve Morris and Mike Viney, the smartest crew I’ve ever worked with, and a battered camera – these were the days of real film with its wonderful colour definition, now lost to the technology of videotape – and Geoff Hale. They were also the days of real crews when a soundman – in this case Morris – and a film editor, Hale, accompanied a reporter into the field. Hewitt had shrewdly found a beat-up old yellow Peugeot taxi, its front and back windows draped in plastic flowers and other artificial foliage behind which we thought we could hide when driving past Soviet or Afghan military checkpoints. For $100 a day, its driver, a certain Mr Samadali, was ready to break all the rules and drive us out of Kabul.

So on the bright, white morning of 9 January 1980 we set out in our ramshackle Peugeot to watch the invasion of Afghanistan. We headed east towards the Kabul Gorge, deep into the crevasse at the foot of the Spinghar mountains. The Soviet army was making its way down to Jalalabad and we threaded our way between their great T-72s and their armoured vehicles, each machine blasting hot, black smoke onto the snow from its exhausts. And beside the highway, the Afghan men watched, their faces tight against the cold, their eyes taking in every detail of every vehicle. They looked on without emotion as the wind tugged at their orange and green shawls and gowns. The snow spread across the road and drifted at their feet. It was two degrees below zero but they had come out to watch the Soviet army convoy hum past on the great road east to the Khyber Pass.

The Russian crews, their fur hats pulled down low over their foreheads, glanced down at the Afghans and smiled occasionally as their carriers splashed through the slush and ice on the mud-packed road. A kilometre further on, Soviet military police in canvas-topped jeeps waved them into a larger convoy in which more tanks and tracked armour on transporter lorries raced along the Jalalabad highway. They were in a hurry. The generals in Kabul wanted these men at the border with Pakistan – along the Durand Line – as fast as they could travel. Secure the country. Tell Moscow that the Soviet army was now in control. We drove alongside them for 16 kilometres, our car jammed between tanks and transporters and jeeps, the young Russian soldiers watching us from beneath their furs and steel helmets as the snow blew across us. Every kilometre, troops of the Afghan army stood on guard beside the dual carriageway and 8 kilometres out of Kabul the convoy passed through a Russian checkpoint, two Soviet soldiers standing to attention on each side of the road in long splayed coats of dark green.

The further we went, the safer we felt. We knew we were heading into danger; we were well aware that the Russians had already been attacked around Jalalabad. But once we had cleared the first suspicious police checkpoint in the suburbs of Kabul – we were, Hewitt fraudulently claimed with schoolboy innocence, merely touring the city – the next military post waved us nonchalantly through amid the convoys. If we had been allowed to leave Kabul, then we must have been given permission to be on this highway. That, at least, was what the Soviet and Afghan soldiers beside the road obviously thought. Who, after all, would countermand such permission? Thank God, we said, for police states. Our greatest concern was the speed we were forced to travel. The Russians moved fast, even their tank transporters overtaking each other at 80 kilometres per hour in the semi-blizzard, sometimes forcing civilian traffic to use the other carriageway, at one point almost crushing our diminutive taxi between a lorry and a tank.

All morning there had been rumours of a new battle at Jalalabad between the Russians and Afghan tribesmen. They were pushing armour out towards the city of Herat, close to the Iranian border, and back up towards Salang where a convoy had just been attacked. What the Soviets were representing as a move against ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ in Afghanistan was clearly taking longer to complete than expected. The American contention that 85,000 Soviet troops had now entered the country from Tashkent and Moscow appeared to be correct. There could have been a hundred thousand.

Packed into Mr Samadali’s cramped Peugeot, we were recording history. Steve and Geoff sat in the back with Mike sandwiched between them, hugging the camera between his knees as Gavin and I watched the Soviet troops on their trucks. The moment we knew that no one was looking at us, I’d shout ‘Go!’ and Gavin – he was, after all, the boss of our little operation – cried ‘Picture!’ At this point, he and I would reach out and tear apart the curtain of plastic flowers and greenery, Mike would bring up the camera – the lens literally brushing the sides of our necks in the front – and start shooting through the windscreen. Every frame counted. This was the biggest Soviet military operation since the Second World War and Mike’s film would not only be shown across the world but stored in the archives for ever. The grey snow, the green of the Soviet armour, the dark silhouettes of the Afghans lining the highway, these were the colours and images that would portray the start of this invasion. A glance from a Russian soldier, too long a stare from a military policeman, and Gavin and I would cry ‘Down!’, Mike would bury his camera between his legs and we would let the artificial foliage flop back across the inside of the windscreen. ‘Don’t let’s be greedy,’ Gavin kept telling his crew. We all agreed. If we kept our cool, if we didn’t become overconfident – if we were prepared to lose a beautiful shot in order to film again another day – then we’d get the story.

Above the village of Sarobi, we stopped the car. Afghanistan’s landscape is breathtaking in the most literal sense of the word. Up here, the sun had burned the snow off the astonishingly light green mountain grass and we could see for up to 50 kilometres east to the Khyber Pass, to the suburbs of Jalalabad, bathed in mists. For the descent to the Valley of the Indus was like walking from a snowstorm into a sauna. Hold your hand out of the window and you could actually feel the air grow warmer. Gavin was literally bouncing on his toes as he stood by the road, looking across the panorama of ridges and mountain chains. Far to the north we could even make out the purple-white snows on the top of the Pamirs. We were that close to China. And we felt, we young men, on the top of the world.

The tragedy of this epic had not yet gripped us. How could I have known that seventeen years later I would be standing on this very same stretch of road as Osama bin Laden’s gunmen prayed beneath that fiery comet? How could I know, as I stood with Gavin on that hillside, that bin Laden himself, only twenty-two years old, was at that moment only a few miles from us, in the very same mountain chain, urging his young Arab fighters to join their Muslim brothers at war with the Russians?

We were halfway down the narrow, precipitous road through the Kabul Gorge when a car came towards us, flashing its headlights and skidding to a halt. The driver, unshaven and turbaned, knew only that there was ‘trouble’ further on down the pass. He raised his hands in a gesture of ignorance and fear and then, having vouchsafed this vague intelligence, he drove off behind us at speed. In the mountains of Afghanistan, you do not take such warnings lightly. We all knew what happened to General Elphinstone’s British army in this very gorge in 1842. So when we drove gingerly on down the road, we watched the rocks above us where the snowline ended and the crags gave cover for an ambush. We carried on like this for 15 kilometres without meeting another car until we reached the little village of Sarobi, where a group of decrepit old buses and a taxi stood parked beside a barber’s shop. There was an Afghan policeman standing in the road who referred in equally indistinct terms to an ‘ambush’ ahead. The road had been blocked, he said. So beside the highway, with the mountains towering above us and the Kabul river carrying the melted snows in a thrashing torrent down the ravine below, we drank hot sweet tea until two Russian tanks came round the corner followed by two lorryloads of Afghan soldiers.

The tanks swept past to the south, their tracks cutting into the tarmac, the radio operators staring straight ahead. The soldiers, each holding a Kalashnikov rifle, gave two cheers as they passed through Sarobi but received no reply. We followed them further down the pass, out of the snowline and into the hot plains where the sub-zero temperatures and ice of the mountains were replaced by dust and orange groves beside the road. A lorryload of soldiers suddenly pulled across the highway and we heard gunfire up in the cliffs. We watched the soldiers scrambling up the rocks until we lost sight of them amid the boulders, figures from an old portrait of imperial hostilities in the Khyber. But we drove on behind the Russian tanks into the plain, and round a bend we came to a checkpoint and the site of the ambush.

For 400 metres, the trees that lined the road had been cut down. There were troops there now and two Russian armoured personnel carriers had already come up from Jalalabad and cleared most of the road. Tribesmen had fired out of the trees when the first civilian cars had stopped at the roadblock before dawn. They killed two people and wounded nine others, one in the back and chest. There was still a litter of glass across the highway but no one knew whether the tribesmen were bandits or whether they had mistaken the cars for Russian military vehicles in the dark. There was an old man by the road who thought he knew the answer. The men who carried out the ambush, he told us, were ‘mujahedin’, ‘holy warriors’. Gavin looked at me. We hadn’t heard that word in Afghanistan before.

It was a reminder that the Soviet-backed authorities in Afghanistan could not even secure the main highway to Pakistan, although we noticed that the Afghan army was still allowed to play an important role in operations. The soldiers who checked our papers through the pass and manned the small concrete forts beside the gorge were all Afghans. Some of the tanks parked in the mountains outside Jalalabad were Afghan too, and only the Afghan army patrolled the city in daylight. Not a Russian was to be seen along the tree-lined, shady streets of this pretty town where horse-drawn carriages rattled with colonial grace over dirt roads, where shoeless peasant boys beat donkeys loaded with grain down to the little market. But the scene was deceptive and Jalalabad provided an important indicator to what was happening in other, remoter, towns in Afghanistan.

For despite the delightful serenity of the place, Pathan tribesmen in their thousands were shooting nightly at Afghan troops in the countryside outside Jalalabad. In the past six days, explosions had rumbled over the town at night and two large bombs had twice destroyed the electric grid and transformers carrying power into Jalalabad, whose population had had no electricity for five days. The curfew had been extended from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. And during those hours of night, the Soviet army had been moving heavy armour through the town. There were now 1,400 Russian troops with T-54 tanks and tracked vehicles quartered in the old Afghan army barracks 5 kilometres east of Jalalabad on the road to Pakistan. If the Afghan army could not keep the peace, it seemed that the Russians were preparing to step in and pacify the countryside.

We drove back to Kabul before dusk and tried to visit the Russian-built military hospital. Through the iron fences, we could see soldiers with their arms in slings, walking with the aid of sticks or crutches. More ominously, a turboprop Aeroflot aircraft was parked at a remote corner of Kabul airport and when we drove close to it, we could make out a Russian military ambulance next to a loading ramp at the front of the fuselage. In the years to come, the Russians would give a nickname to the aircraft that flew their dead home from Afghanistan: the ‘Black Tulip’. Within eight years, the Russians would lose 14,263 combatants dead and missing, and bring home 49,985 wounded.