The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Frightening off strangers was one thing. Fighting a well-equipped modern army would be quite another. On the road north again, we noticed, high on the hillsides and deep in the snow, a series of metal turrets with gun barrels poking from them. The Russians had already taken physical control of the highway even though they did not stand beside the road. Soviet tanks had been parachuted into the mountains north of Kabul and the artillery outside Ghazni had also been dropped from the air. Our plastic foliage twitched aside as we cleared the windscreen for Mike. We were becoming experts. Indeed, it was Gavin’s contention that the Russians would inevitably learn about our stage-prop jungle and assume that all modern movies were produced like this, that a new generation of Soviet film-makers would insist on shooting all future productions through car windows stuffed with artificial purple flowers.

  And there was plenty more to film in Afghanistan. Even before we arrived, the Karmal government had attempted to slink back into popular support by freeing Amin’s political prisoners. But when the city prison in Kabul was opened, thousands of men and women arrived to greet their loved ones and began throwing stones at the young Soviet troopers around the walls. No one doubted that the previous regime was detested by the population; the newly installed Karmal officials lost no time in letting us know of their hatred. This, after all, was why we had been given visas to come to Afghanistan. In Peshawar, rebel groups had claimed that the Afghan army would fight the Russian invaders, but the 7th and 8th Afghan Divisions in Kabul, both of which were equipped with Soviet tanks, never fired a shot against Russian armour. Their Soviet advisers had seen to that.

  On 11 January, however, the government’s propaganda went disastrously wrong. Thousands of Afghans—relatives of inmates, many of them in long cloaks and turbans—gathered this time outside the Po-le-Charkhi prison, a grim fortress of high stone walls, barbed wire, jail blocks and torture cells, to witness the official release of 118 political prisoners. But enraged that so few had been freed, the crowd burst through an Afghan army cordon and broke open the iron gates. We ran into the prison with them, a Russian soldier next to me almost thrown off his feet. He stared, transfixed by the sight as men and women—the latter in the all-covering burqa—began shouting “Allahu akbar,” “God is Great,”5 through the outer compound and began to climb over the steel gates of the main prison blocks. Gavin and I looked at each other in wonderment. This was a religious as much as it was a political protest. On the roof of a barracks, a young Soviet officer with a Kalashnikov rifle began shouting in Russian that there were only eight people left inside the prison. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times was in the yard in his big Russian greatcoat. He was based in Moscow and spoke good Russian and he turned to me with his usual irredeemable smirk. “That guy may claim there are only eight men left,” he said. “I suspect we’re going to find out he’s lying.”

  For a moment, the crowd paused as the officer swung his rifle barrel in their direction, then heeded him no more and surged on through the second newly broken gate. Hopelessly outnumbered, the soldier lowered his weapon. Hundreds of other prisoners’ relatives now smashed the windows of the cell blocks with rocks and used steel pipes to break in the doors of the first building. Three prisoners were suddenly led into the winter sunlight by their liberators, middle-aged men in rags, thin and frail and dazed and blinking at the snow and ice-covered walls. A young man came up to me in the prison as crowds began to break in the roof of a second concrete cell block. “We want Russians to go,” he said in English. “We want independent Afghanistan, we want families released. My brother and father are here somewhere.”

  I squeezed into the cell block with the mob, and there were certainly more than the eight prisoners to which the Russian officer referred. Blankets had been laid on the stone floor by the inmates as their only protection against the extreme cold. There was a musty, stale smell in the tiny, airless cells. Across the compound, other prisoners waved through the bars of windows, screaming at the crowd to release them. One man in baggy peasant trousers bashed open a hatch in the metal roof of a cell and slid inside, shouting to his friends to follow him. I climbed through a window in the end of the same cell block and was confronted by at least twenty men, sitting on the floor amid chains and straw, eyes wide with horror and relief. One held out his hand to me. It was so thin I felt only his bones. His cheeks were sunken and blue, his teeth missing, his open chest covered in scars. And all this while, the Russian soldiers and the Afghan guards stood watching, unable to control the thousands of men and women, aware that any public bloodletting would cause irreparable damage to the Karmal regime. Some of the crowd abused the Russians, and one youth who said he was from Paktia Province screamed at me that “Russians are bombing and killing in south Afghanistan.”

  But the most notable phenomenon about this amazing prison break-in were the Islamic chants from the crowds. Several men shouted for an Islamic revolution, something the Russians had long feared in Afghanistan and in their own Muslim republics. Many of the youths looking for their relatives came from rural areas to the south of Kabul, where tribal rebellion had been growing for at least fourteen months. Altogether, the government had released more than 2,000 political prisoners in the previous two weeks—it was Babrak Karmal’s first act as president—but the decision had the unintended effect of reminding the crowds of how many thousands of political prisoners were not being released, inmates who had long ago been executed under Amin.

  Only in the early afternoon did Soviet soldiers form a line inside the main gate of Po-le-Charkhi with rifles lowered, apparently to prevent the hundreds of men and women from leaving. Conor pulled his greatcoat round him, hands in pockets, the very model of a modern KGB major-general, and walked straight up to the nearest officer in the line of troops. “ Dosvidanya,” he said in Russian. The officer and another soldier snapped smartly to attention and we walked out of the jail.6

  That same day, Babrak Karmal held his first press conference, a dismal affair in which the new Soviet-installed president—the son of a high-ranking Pushtun army officer, a heavily built man with a prominent nose, high cheekbones and greying hair with the manners of a nightclub bouncer—denounced his socialist predecessor as a criminal and insisted that his country was no client kingdom of the Soviet Union. This was a little hard to take when the main door of the Chelsotoon Palace—in which this miserable performance was taking place—was guarded by a Soviet soldier with a red star on his hat, when a Russian tracked armoured vehicle stood in the grounds and when a Soviet anti-aircraft gun crew waited in the snow beside their weapons a hundred metres from the building. So when Babrak Karmal told us that “the only thing brighter than sunshine is the honest friendship of the Soviet Union,” one could only regard it as a uniquely optimistic, if not Olympian, view of a world that Dr. Faustus would have recognised.

  Even the Afghan officials clustered beside Karmal, however, must have wished for the presence of some subtle Mephistopheles to soften the rhetoric as the president’s press conference descended into an angry and occasionally abusive shouting match. The questions that the Western journalists put to Karmal were often more interesting than his replies, but highlights of the affair had to include the following statements by Moscow’s new man: that not one Soviet soldier had been killed or wounded since the Russian military “intervention” began; that the size of the “very limited Soviet contingent” sent to Afghanistan had been grossly exaggerated by the “imperialist Western press”; that the Soviet Union had supported the “brutal regime” of the late Hafizullah Amin because “the Soviet Union would never interfere in the internal affairs of any country”; and, finally, that Soviet troops would leave Afghanistan “at the moment that the aggressive policy of the United States—in compliance with the Beijing leadership and the provocation of the reactionary circles of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia—is eliminated.”

  The full flavour of the press conference, however, could only be captured by quoting extracts. Martyn Lewis of ITN, for example, w
anted to know about Karmal’s election to the presidency after his predecessor had been overthrown in a coup.

  LEWIS: “I wonder, could you tell us when and under what circumstances you were elected and—if that election was truly democratic—why is it that Russian troops had to help you to power?” KARMAL: “Mr. Representative of British imperialism, the imperialism that three times blatantly invaded Afghanistan, you got a rightful and deserved answer from the people of Afghanistan.”

  This exchange was followed by a burst of clapping from Afghan officials and Soviet correspondents. Only after this excursion into three Afghan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did Karmal reply to Lewis, telling him that during the Amin regime “an overwhelming majority of the principal members of the People’s Democratic Party [PDP] of Afghanistan” had elected him president.7 We had, of course, expected no less of Karmal, and his courageous—some might say foolhardy—assertion that “a true non-alignment for Afghanistan can be obtained with the material and moral help of the Soviet Union” accurately reflected Moscow’s point of view.

  The new man was once a bitter opponent within the PDP of Nur Mohamed Taraki, the assassinated president whose “martyrdom” Karmal now blamed on the CIA, and Gavin Hewitt experienced first-hand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the new dictator’s anger. For when Gavin commented mildly that “there doesn’t seem to be much support for you or the Russians in Afghanistan,” Karmal drew in his breath and bellowed the first response that came into his head. “Mr. Correspondent of the BBC—the most famous propaganda liar in the world!” he roared. That was all. The room collapsed in applause from the satraps around Karmal and uncontrollable laughter from journalists. “Well,” I told Gavin, “old Babrak can’t be that bad a guy—at least he got you down to a ‘T.’ ” Gavin shot me a sidelong grin. “Just wait, Fiskers,” he muttered. And he was right. Within hours, Karmal’s absurd reply had gone round the world, proving that Moscow’s new man in Kabul was just another factotum with a single message.

  But it was a clear sign that our presence in Afghanistan would not be tolerated indefinitely. This was made clear to me some days later when three members of the Khad secret police turned up at the reception desk at the Intercontinental to see me. They all wore leather coats—de rigueur for plain-clothes cops in Soviet satellite countries—and they were not smiling. One of them, a small man with a thin moustache and a whining voice, held out a piece of paper. “We have come to see you about this,” he snapped. I took the paper from him, a telegram bearing the stamp of the Afghan PTT office. And as I read the contents, I swallowed several times, the kind of guilty swallow that criminals make in movies when confronted with evidence of some awesome crime. “URGENT. BOB FISK GUEST INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL KABUL,” it said. “ANY POSSIBILITY OF GETTING TWO MINUTE UPDATE RE SOVIET MILITARY BUILDUP IN AFGHANISTAN FOR SUNDAY MORNING THIS WEEK? LOVE SUE HICKEY.” I drew in my breath. “Jesus Christ!” I shouted. How could Sue have sent such a telegram? For days, I had been sending tapes to CBC, describing the atmosphere of fear and danger in Afghanistan, and here was Sue sending me an open telegram requesting details of Soviet military deployment in a state run by pro-Moscow communists. It was, I suspected, part of a very old problem. Somewhere between reporters and their offices in faraway London or New York there exists a wall of gentle disbelief, an absolute fascination with the reporter’s dispatch from the war zone but an unconscious conviction that it is all part of some vast Hollywood production, that the tape or the film—though obviously not fraudulent—is really a massive theatrical production, that the Russian army was performing for us, the world’s press, that the Khad—always referred to in news reports as the “dreaded” secret police—was somehow not that dreadful after all, indeed might be present in Afghanistan to give just a little more excitement to our stories.

  I looked at the little man from Khad. He was looking at me with a kind of excitement in his face. He was one of the few who could speak passable English. And he had caught his man. The Western spy had been found with incontrovertible proof of his espionage activities, a request for military information about the Soviet army. “What does this mean?” the little man asked softly. Oh yes, indeed. What did this mean? I needed time to think. So I burst into laughter. I put my head back and positively gusted laughter around the lobby of the hotel until even the receptionists turned to find out the cause of the joke. And I noticed one of the cops grinning. He wanted in on the joke, too. I slowly let my laughter subside and shook my head wearily. “Look, this lady wants me to report for a radio show called Sunday Morningin Canada,” I said. “There is no ‘Soviet military buildup’—we all know that because President Karmal told us that only a ‘very limited Soviet contingent’ has come to Afghanistan. This lady obviously doesn’t know that. I have to clear up this ridiculous situation and report the truth. I’m sorry you’ve been bothered with such a silly message—and I can certainly understand why you were worried about it.” And I laughed again. Even the little cop smiled sheepishly. I offered him back the incriminating telegram. “No—you keep it,” he snapped. And he wagged his finger in my face. “We know, you know,” he said. I’m sorry, I asked, what did he know? But the lads from the Khad had turned their backs and walked away. Thank you, Sue. Weeks later, we dined out on the story—and she paid for the meal.

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

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

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

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