The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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 little 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 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 the 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.

  In the years to come, Gavin and I would remember our journeys out of Kabul in 1980 as a great adventure. We we
re a hunting party, off for an exciting day in the quest for images. We adopted the elderly Russian-built grain silo outside Kabul as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s gift to the world—it represented, we thought, about a millionth of the Soviet Union’s “gifts.” “There was an innocence about our world,” Gavin would recall more than twenty years later. “The grain silo was somehow typical. The more crumbling its presence, the more true our images were to their art form.” Travelling with his crew, I became almost as possessive of their filmed report—as anxious to see them get a scoop a day for the BBC—as Gavin himself. For his part, Gavin wanted to ensure that I sent my reports for The Times safely out of Kabul each day. Our enthusiasm to help each other was not just journalistic camaraderie. Gavin was one of the only television reporters to reach Afghanistan and his dramatic film dispatches were shaping the world’s perception of the Soviet invasion. William Rees-Mogg, the editor of The Times, and the deputy news editor, Ivan Barnes, watched all Gavin’s reports, though they often took forty-eight hours to reach the screen. There were no satellite “feeds” in Kabul and we were forbidden to bring satellite dishes into the country. So Geoff Hale was hand-carrying cans of film out to London, commuting back and forth from Kabul every two days, a 13,500-kilometre round-trip at least three times a week. Gavin found that his own editors were reading my reports every day in The Times and eagerly waited for the pictures which they knew he would have—since Gavin had told them we travelled together. And his filmed reports were feeding my own editor’s hunger for news from Afghanistan. We were two parasites, we used to claim, living off each other’s work.

  My own copy was reaching The Times in less expensive but almost equally exhausting form. The Intercontinental staff were instructed by the Afghan state security police not to allow journalists to send their reports over the hotel telex. I was thus reduced to sending messages to Ivan Barnes and to the deputy editor, Louis Heren, indicating how I planned to get my dispatch to London. Our New York and Washington bureaus were trying to call me by phone; so was Binyon in Moscow. But in all the weeks I spent in Kabul, I never received a single telephone call from anyone. Instead, I would wake up at four each morning and type up five copies of my story for The Times. I would give one copy to the Reuters news agency, which sent an Indian staffer to Delhi almost every day. I gave another copy to Reuters’ Pakistani staffer who regularly flew to Peshawar and Islamabad. From there, they were asked to punch out my text and—since the paper subscribed to the news agency—send it to London. Another copy went to anyone travelling to the Soviet Union in the hope they would contact Binyon in Moscow. A fourth carbon went to Geoff for his regular flights to Britain.

  The fifth was for a much more devious operation, one which—and still today I marvel that it worked—involved the Pakistani conductor of the daily old wooden bus that bumped down from Kabul to Jalalabad and on to Peshawar in Pakistan, where local hotel staff were standing ready to telex my pages to London. I set the scheme up on my third morning in Kabul. I had noticed the Peshawar bus on the highway south of the capital and learned that it left Kabul each morning at 6:30. I liked Ali, the conductor, an immensely cheerful Pathan with a green scarf and a round Afghan hat and a smile of massive pure white teeth who spoke enough English to understand both my humour and my cynicism. “Mr. Robert, if this hurts the Russians, I will carry your report to the very door of the Intercontinental Hotel in Peshawar. You give me money to pay their operators and when you leave Afghanistan, you will go to Peshawar with me and pay the telex bills. Trust me.”

  All my life in the Middle East, people have ordered me to trust them. And almost always I did and they were worthy of that trust. Ali received $50 a day, every day, to take my typed dispatch to Peshawar. The operators received $40 a day to telex it to London. Even in the worst blizzards down the Kabul Gorge, Ali’s ancient bus made it through the snowdrifts and the Russian checkpoints. Sometimes I travelled with him as far as Jalalabad. The Afghan army had been told to stop journalists roaming the country in cars but they never thought to check the bus. So I would sit on the steps with Ali as we puttered and rocked down the Kabul Gorge, feeling the warmth of the countryside as we descended into the Indus Valley. I would stay at the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad, spend the morning driving into the rural villages in a motorised rickshaw—a cloth-covered cabin mounted on the back of a motorcycle—to investigate the results of the overnight fighting between the Russians and the mujahedin and then pick up Ali’s return bus to Kabul in the afternoon. Ali never lost a single report. Only when I received a telegram from The Times did I realise how well he did his job. “MANY THANKS . . . FILES STOP TUES-DAY’S LEAD PAPER
  Slowly, Gavin and I enlarged our area of operations. One hundred and fifty kilometres southwest of Kabul lay the more-than-one-thousand-year-old city of Ghazni, clustering round the giant battlements of a Turkish fort destroyed by the British in the First Afghan War, a settlement on the road to Kandahar which was successively destroyed by Arab invaders in 869 and again by Genghis Khan in 1221. The Soviet army, we were told, had not yet reached Ghazni, so we took the highway south past the big Soviet guns that ringed Kabul and a European face beneath a Cossack-style hat waved us, unsmiling, through the last Russian checkpoint. Gavin and I were working our plastic foliage routine, pulling aside the ghastly purple-and-blue artificial flowers whenever a Soviet tank obligingly crossed our path so that Mike could run another two or three feet of film. At the tiny, windy village of Saydabad, 70 kilometres down the road, more Russian tanks were dug in beside the highway, their barrels pointing west, dwarfing the poor mud and wattle huts in which the villagers lived. There was a bridge guarded by four soldiers with bayonets fixed and then there was just an empty, unprotected road of ice and drifting snow that stretched down towards the provinces of Paktia and Ghazni.

  The old city, when Gavin and his crew and I turned up in Mr. Samadali’s Peugeot, looked like a scene from a medieval painting, walled ramparts set against the snow-smothered peaks of the Safid Kuh Mountains and pale blue skies that distorted all perspective. Indeed, there were no Russians, just a series of Afghan army lorries that trundled every half-hour or so down from the north to the Ghazni barracks, their red Afghan insignia a doubtful protection against attack by rebel tribesmen, their scruffily dressed drivers peering nervously from the cab. The Afghan army, notionally loyal to its new president and his Soviet allies, theoretically controlled the countryside, although it was clear the moment we entered Ghazni that some form of unofficial ceasefire existed between the local soldiers and the Pathan tribesmen. Afghan troops in sheepskin cloaks and vests—Ghazni is famous for the manufacture of such embroidered Pustin coats—were wandering the narrow, mud streets, looking for provisions beneath their turreted, crumbling barracks.

  Almost a thousand years ago, Mahmud of Ghazni imposed his rule over most of Afghanistan, devastated north-west India and established an Islamic empire that consolidated Sunni Muslim power over thousands of square miles. Ghazni became one of the great cities of the Persian world whose 400 resident poets included the great Ferdowsi. But the city was now a mockery of its glorious past. Some of the battlements had long ago collapsed and ice had cracked the ancient walls in the sub-zero temperatures. Isolated from the outside world, its inhabitants were suspicious of strangers, a dangerous and understandable obsession that had reached a new intensity now that reports of the Soviet invasion had reached the city.

  We had scarcely parked our car when a tall man with a long grey moustache approached us. “Are you Russian?” he asked, and a group of Pathans in blue and white h
eaddress began to gather around the car. We told them we were English and for a minute or so there were a few friendly smiles. Gavin and I were to develop our own special smile for these people, a big, warm smile of delight to hide our dark concern. How good to see you. What a wonderful country. My God, how you must hate those Russians. All of us knew how quickly things could go wrong. It was only a few months since a group of Soviet civilian construction workers and their wives had decided to visit the blue-tiled Masjid Jami mosque in Herat—a place of worship since the time of Zoroaster—only to be seized by a crowd and knifed to death. Several of the Russians were skinned alive. Only the previous day, though I did not know it then, The Times had published a photograph of two blindfolded men in the hands of Afghan rebels. They were high-school teachers detained in the city of Farah, 300 kilometres west of Kandahar, and the man on the right of the picture had already been executed as a communist.

  Mr. Samadali needed oil for his Peugeot, and from a cluttered, dirty, concrete floored shop an old man produced a can of motor oil. Horses and carts and donkeys staggering under sacks of grain slithered through the slush and mud and then someone muttered “Khar” and the smiles all faded. Khar means “donkey” and though apparently humorous on first hearing, it is a term of disgust and hatred when used about foreigners. “They are calling you ‘khar,’ ” Mr. Samadali said desperately. “They cannot tell the difference between Englishmen and Russians. They do not want foreigners here. You must go.” A larger group of Pathans had now arrived and stood in a line along a raised wooden pavement beside the street. There were no guns in their hands, although two had long knives in their belts. A middle-aged man came up to us. “Leave here now,” he said urgently. “Don’t stop for anyone. If you are stopped by people on the road, drive through them. You are foreigners and they will think you are Russians and kill you. They will find out who you are afterwards.” We left Ghazni at speed. Were we really in danger? More than twenty-one years later, I would confront an almost identical group of angry Afghans and, almost at the cost of my life, I would discover just what it meant to incur their fury.