The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  There were other graves, of course, innocent mounds with tiny headstones that contained the inevitable victims of every empire’s domesticity. “Beatrice Ann, one year and 11 months, only child of Bandmaster and Mrs. A. Pilkington” lay in the children’s cemetery with “Barbara, two years, daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. P. Walker.” She died three days before Christmas in 1928. Some of the children died too young to have names. There were young men, too, who succumbed to the heat and to disease. Private Tidey of the First Sussex died from “heatstroke” and Private Williams of “enteric fever.” E. A. Samuels of the Bengal Civil Service succumbed to “fever contracted in Afghanistan.” Matron Mary Hall of Queen Alexander’s Imperial Military Nursing Service—whose duties in Salonika and Mesopotamia presumably included the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey as well as the British invasion of Iraq in 1917—died “on active service.”

  There were a few unexpected tombs. The Very Rev. Courtney Peverley was there, administrator apostolic of Kashmir and Kafiristan, who clearly worked hard because beyond the British headstones were new places of interment for Peshawar’s still extant Christian community, paper crosses and pink flags draped in tribal fashion beside the freshly dug graves. Many imperial graves exhibit a faith that would be understood by any Muslim, the favourite from the Book of Revelation: “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.” And there was a Gaelic cross on top of the remains of Lieutenant Walter Irvine of the North West Frontier Police “who lost his life in the Nagoman River when leading the Peshawar Vale Hunt of which he was Master.” No Soviet soldier would earn so romantic a memorial. On the graves of the Russian soldiers now dying just north of this cemetery, it would be coldly recorded only that they died performing their “international duty.”

  The local CIA agent already had a shrewd idea what this meant. He was a thin, over-talkative man who held a nominal post in the U.S. consulate down the road from the Peshawar Intercontinental and who hosted parties of immense tedium at his villa. He had the habit of showing, over and over again, a comedy film about the Vietnam War. Those were the days when I still talked to spooks, and when I called by one evening, he was entertaining a group of around a dozen journalists and showing each of them a Soviet identity card. “Nice-looking young guy,” he said of the pinched face of the man in the black-and-white photograph. “A pilot, shot down, the mujahedin got his papers. What a way to go, a great tragedy that a young guy should die like that.” I didn’t think much of the CIA man’s crocodile tears but I was impressed by the words “shot down.” With what? Did the guerrillas have ground-to-air missiles? And if so, who supplied them—the Americans, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, or those mysterious Arabs? I had seen thousands of Russians but I had yet to see an armed guerrilla close up in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have to wait long.

  Ali’s bus returned to the border one warm afternoon and I walked back across the Durand Line to a small grubby booth on the Afghan side of the frontier. The border guard looked at my passport and thumbed through the pages. Then he stopped and scrutinised one of the document’s used pages. As usual, I had written “representative” on my immigration card. But the thin man clucked his tongue. “Journalist,” he said. “Go back to Pakistan.” How did he know? There were visas to Arab countries in the passport which identified me as a journalist, but the Afghan official would not know Arabic, would have no idea that sahafa meant “journalist.” A group of men shoved past me and I walked back to Ali. How did they know? Ali looked through my passport and found the page that gave me away. A visa to post-revolutionary Iran was marked with the word khabanagor—Persian for “journalist”—and Dari, one of the languages of Afghanistan, was a dialect of Persian. Damn.

  I took a taxi back to Peshawar and sent a message to The Times : “Scuppered.” But next day Ali was back at the hotel. “Mr. Robert, we try again.” What’s the point? I asked him. “We try,” he said. “Trust me.” I didn’t understand, but I repacked my bags and boarded his friendly wooden bus and set off once more for the border. This was beginning to feel like a real-life version of Carry On Up the Khyber, but Ali was strangely confident I would be successful. I sat back in the afternoon sun as the bus moaned its way up the hairpin bends. There’s an odd, unnerving sensation about trying to cross a border without the consent of the authorities. Gavin and I had experienced this at almost every checkpoint we came across in Afghanistan. Would they let us through or turn us round or arrest us? I suppose it was a throwback to all those war films set in German-occupied Europe in which resistance heroes and heroines had to talk their way past Nazi guards. The Afghan border police were not quite up to Wehrmacht standards—and we were no heroes—but it wasn’t difficult to feel a mixture of excitement and dread when we arrived once more at the grotty little booth on the Afghan side of the frontier.

  Yet before I had a chance to stand up, Ali was at my seat. “Give me your passport,” he said. “And give me $50.” He vanished with the money. And ten minutes later, he was back with a broad smile. “I will take you to Jalalabad,” he said, handing me back my newly stamped passport. “Give me another $50 because I had to give your money away to a poor man.” The Russians had invaded but they couldn’t beat that most efficacious, that most corrupt of all institutions between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal: The Bribe. I was so happy, I was laughing. I was singing to myself, all the way to Jalalabad. I’d even arranged with Ali that he would stop by at the Spinghar Hotel each morning to take my reports down to Peshawar—and come back in the afternoon with any messages that The Times sent to me via Pakistan. I could meanwhile snuggle down in the Spinghar and stay out of sight of the authorities.

  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 9th 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 Musl
ims 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. Shuravimeant “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 captu
re 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.”