The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The governor still visited the nearest villages during daylight, in the company of three soldiers, to inspect the progress of land reform and Jalalabad’s newly created irrigation scheme. But he understood why the reforms had created animosity. “We tried to make sure that all men and women had equal rights and the same education,” he said. “But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.”

  Mr. Ziarad’s last words, as we walked from his office, were drowned by the roar of four more Soviet helicopter gunships that raced across the bazaar, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air beside the single-storey mud-walled houses. He asked me if I would like to use his car to travel back to my hotel. In view of the angry faces of the Afghans watching the helicopters, I decided that the governor of Jalalabad had made the kind of offer it was safer to refuse. But the cops at the Spinghar were getting nosy, wanting to know how long I was staying in Jalalabad and why I didn’t go to Kabul. It was time to let Jalalabad “cool down.” As Gavin always said, don’t get greedy.13

  It was the Russians who were getting greedy. Hundreds of extra troops were now being flown into Kabul in a fleet of Antonov transport aircraft along with new amphibious BMB armoured vehicles. In some barracks, Russian and Afghan soldiers had been merged into new infantry units, presumably to stiffen Afghan army morale. New Afghan army trucks carried Afghan forces but Soviet drivers. There were more Karmal speeches, the latest of which attacked what he called “murderers, terrorists, bandits, subversive elements, robbers, traitors and hirelings.” That he should, well over a month after the Soviet invasion, be appealing for “volunteer resistance groups” to guard roads, bridges and convoys—against the much more powerful and genuine “resistance,” of course—demonstrated just how serious the problem of the insurgents had become and how large an area of Afghanistan they now effectively controlled.

  The Russians could neither wipe out the guerrillas nor give hope to Afghan villagers that their presence would improve their lives. Large areas of Afghanistan were cut off from government-subsidised food and the Soviets were flying planeloads of grain—even tractors—into Kabul while one of their generals appeared at the Bagram airbase to claim that only “terrorist remnants” remained in the mountains. “Remnants”— bakoyaye in Dari—became the vogue word for the insurgents on Afghan radio. But to “reform” Afghanistan under these circumstances was impossible. The government was losing. It was only a matter of time. And the more the government said they were winning, the fewer people believed them. In the lobby of the Intercontinental, a Polish diplomat told me that he thought the Russians would need at least 200,000 troops to win their war.14

  Karmal’s men had effectively closed down the capital’s mosques as a centre of resistance. When I found the speaker of the Polekheshti Mosque in the centre of Kabul, a small man with a thin sallow face whose features betrayed his anxiety and who refused even to give his name, he declined to answer even the mildest questions about the welfare of his people. He arrived one minute before morning prayers, walking quickly across the ice-encrusted forecourt in his tightly wound silk turban and golden cap and leaving immediately after his devotions were completed. When I walked towards him, he immediately glanced over his right shoulder. And when I presented him with a list of questions in Pushtu—what was the role of Islam in Afghanistan since December, I asked him?—he waved the paper in the frozen air in a gesture of hopelessness.

  “Your questions are all political,” he yelped at me. “One of your questions is asking if the people are happy with the new regime of Babrak Karmal. I will answer no questions about him. I do not represent the people. I will answer only religious questions.” It was predictable. As khatib of the Polekheshti, he had only to interpret the Koran, not to deliver sermons on the morality of his government. Since the khatibs had all been appointed by the revolutionary governments in the past two years, there was even less chance that he would unburden himself of any feelings about the Soviet Union’s invasion. A few days after Taraki’s coup in 1978, calls for a jihad were read out in Kabul’s mosques. Any political independence among the Sunni Muslim clergy had been wiped out within days when police raided all the city’s religious institutions and dispatched dissenting mullahs to the Po-le-Charkhi prison, whence they never emerged. But brutal repression did not alone account for the lack of any serious political leadership within the clergy.

  A decapitated church can scarcely give political guidance to its flock, but the history of Islam in Afghanistan suggested that there would be no messianic religious leader to guide the people into war against their enemies. Shia Muslims, whose tradition of self-sacrifice and emphasis on martyrdom had done so much to destroy the Shah’s regime, were a minority in Afghanistan. In the western city of Herat, posters of Khomeini and Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari could be found on the walls, but the Sunnis formed the majority community and there was a fundamental suspicion in Afghanistan of the kind of power exercised by the leading clergymen in Iran. Afghans would not pay national subservience to religious divines. Islam is a formalistic religion, and among Sunnis, the mosque prayer leaders had a bureaucratic function rather than a political vocation. The power of religious orthodoxy in Afghanistan was strong but not extreme, and the lack of any hierarchy among Sunnis prevented the mullahs from using their position to create political unity within the country. Besides, Islam was also a class-conscious religion in Kabul. The Polekheshti Mosque catered largely to the poor, while the military favoured the Blue Mosque and the remains of the country’s middle-class elite attended funerals at the two-tiered Shah-Do-Shamshira Mosque.

  The monarchy, so long as it existed, provided a mosaic of unity that held the country more or less together. And although the last king was ostentatiously toasted in the chaikhana now that more ominous potentates had appeared in Kabul, the spendthrift rulers who once governed Afghanistan were never really popular. When the monarchy disappeared, the only common denominator was religion; it was identified with nationalism—as opposed to communism—which is why Karmal had reintroduced green into the colour of the national flag. All ministerial speeches, even by cabinet members known to be lifelong Marxists, now began with obsequious references to the Koran. The Afghan deputy prime minister had just visited Mazar to pray at the shrine of Hazarate Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed. But in Afghanistan—as in most rural countries— religion was regarded with deepest respect in the villages rather than in the towns and it was from the villages that the mujahedin came. Although it was a reactionary force—opposing the emancipation and equality of women and secular education—it focused the attention of the poor on the realities of politics in a way that had never happened before. It was not by chance that a joke made the rounds of Afghans in Kabul, that apart from the five traditional obligations of Islam, a sixth instruction must now be obeyed: every true Muslim should listen to the BBC. This would no longer be a joke, of course, if a new Islamic force emerged from within the resistance rather than the clergy.

  So few journalists were now left in Afghanistan that no one paid much attention to the Times correspondent, who carried no cameras but still possessed a valid visa. In Kabul, I shopped for carpets in the bazaar among the off-duty Soviet soldiers who still felt safe walking along Chicken Street. The Russians bought souvenirs, beads and necklaces for wives and girlfriends, but the Tajik Soviet soldiers would go to the bookshops and buy copies of the Koran. I eventually purchased a 2-by-3-metre rug of crimson and gold that had been lying on the damp pavement. Mr. Samadali, who was still free to drive us within the Kabul city limits, cast his critical eye on my rug, announced that I had paid far too much for it—it is a function of all taxi-drivers in south-west Asia to depress their foreign clients by assuring them they have been ripped off—and tied it to the roof of his car.

  From Kabul, I now once mo
re took Ali’s bus down to Jalalabad, planning to spend a night at the Spinghar before returning to Kabul. In the Jalalabad bazaar, I went searching for a satin bag in which to carry my massive carpet out of Afghanistan. After ensuring I knew the Pushtu for a satin bag— atlasi kahzora—I bought a large Hessian sack, along with a set of postcards of Jalalabad under the monarchy, a gentle, soporific town of Technicolor brilliance that was now lost for ever. I visited the Pakistani consulate in the town, whose staff—some of them at least—must already have been coordinating with the guerrillas. They spoke of Soviet fears that Jalalabad might partially fall to the rebels, that the highway to Kabul might be permanently cut. And the Pakistani diplomats did not seem at all unhappy at this prospect.

  No sooner was I back at the Spinghar than the receptionist, in a state of considerable emotion, told me that the Russians were using helicopters to attack the village of Sorkh Rud, 20 kilometres to the west. I hired a rickshaw and within half an hour found myself in a township of dirt streets and mud-walled houses. I told the driver to wait on the main road and walked into the village. There was not a human to be seen, just the distant thump-thump sound of Soviet Mi-25 helicopters which I only occasionally saw as they flitted past the ends of the streets. A few dogs yelped near a stream of sewage. The sun was high and a blanket of heat moved on the breeze down the streets. So where was the attack that had so upset the hotel receptionist? I only just noticed the insect shape of a machine low in the white sky seconds before it fired. There was a sound like a hundred golf balls being hit by a club at the same time and bullets began to skitter up the walls of the houses, little puffs of brown clay jumping into the air as the rounds hit the buildings. One line of bullets came skipping down the street in my direction, and in panic I ran through an open door, across a large earthen courtyard and into the first house I could see.

  I literally hurled myself through the entrance and landed on my side on an old carpet. Against the darkened wall opposite me sat an Afghan man with a greying beard and a clutch of children, open-mouthed with fear and, behind them, holding a black sheet over her head, a woman. I stared at them and tried to smile. They sat there in silence. I realised I had to assure them that I was not a Russian, that I was from Mrs. Thatcher’s England, that I was a journalist. But would this family understand what England was? Or what a journalist was? I was out of breath, frightened, wondering how I came to be in such a dangerous place—so quickly, so thoughtlessly, so short a time after leaving the safety of the Spinghar Hotel.

  I had enough wits to remember the Pushtu for journalist and to try to tell these poor people who I was. “Za di inglisi atlasi kahzora yem!” I triumphantly announced. But the family stared at me with even greater concern. The man held his children closer to him and his wife made a whimpering sound. I smiled. They did not. Fear crackled over the family. Only slowly did I realise that I had not told them I was a journalist. Perhaps it was the carpet upon which I had landed in their home. Certainly it must have been my visit to the bazaar a few hours earlier. But with increasing horror, I realised that the dishevelled correspondent who had burst in upon their sacred home had introduced himself in Pushtu not as a reporter but with the imperishable statement: “I am an English satin bag.”

  “Correspondent, journalist,” I now repeated in English and Pushtu. But the damage had been done. Not only was this Englishman dangerous, alien, an infidel intruder into the sanctity of an Afghan home. He was also insane. Of this, I had no doubt myself. Whenever we journalists find ourselves in great danger, there is always a voice that asks “Why?” How on earth did we ever come to risk our life in this way? For the editor? For adventure? Or because we just didn’t think, didn’t calculate the risks, didn’t bother to reflect that our whole life, our education, our family, our loves and happiness, were now forfeit to chance and a few paragraphs. Sorkh Rud was the “border station” into which Kipling’s British soldier cantered, the street outside this house his “dark defile,” the helicopter his enemy’s jezail. The cliché tells us that life is cheap. Untrue. Death is cheap. It is easy and terrible and utterly unfair.

  I sat on the carpet for perhaps ten minutes, smiling idiotically at the cold-faced family opposite me until a little girl in a pink dress walked unsteadily across the floor towards me and smiled. I smiled back. I pointed at myself and said “Robert.” She repeated my name. I pointed to her. What was her name? She didn’t reply. Outside I heard a donkey clop past the gate and a man shouting. The sound of the helicopters had vanished. There was a wailing from far away, the sound of a woman in grief. I stood up and looked out of the door. Other people were walking down the street. It was like Jalalabad each daybreak, when the night of death turned magically into a day of toil and dust and blooming jacaranda trees. The war had washed over Sorkh Rud and now it had moved elsewhere. I turned to the family and thanked them for their unoffered protection. “ Shukria,” I said. Thank you. And very slowly the man with the beard bowed his head once and raised his right hand in farewell.

  The rickshaw driver was waiting on the main road, fearful that I might have died, even more fearful, I thought, that I might not have survived to pay him. We puttered back to Jalalabad. That night the party leaders were back in the hotel with news that obviously disturbed them. The mujahedin had raided a student hostel of Jalalabad University, taken twenty girls from the building, and transported them to Tora Bora, where they were given money—1,000 afghanis, about $22—and a black veil and told to end their studies. The same day, a Russian technical engineer had been sent to the suburbs of Jalalabad to mend an electric cable that had been repeatedly sabotaged. When he was at the top of a pylon, someone had shot him dead and his body hung in the wires 10 metres above the ground for several hours while men and women arrived to gaze at his corpse.

  I would leave next day on the first bus back to Kabul, a luxury bus that left at dawn, long before Ali’s old vehicle ground into town. My visa had only another three days to run. The bus from Jalalabad was packed, not with the villagers and Pakistani businessmen who travelled on Ali’s charabanc, but with Afghan government students, Parcham party apparatchiks travelling back to Kabul University after vacation. Even before we had left the suburbs of the city, they were ordering everyone to pull the curtains so that no one could be seen and they craned their necks at every bend in the road to squint through the cracks in case an ambush lay ahead. I didn’t see how the curtains would help. A mystery bus would attract far more attention from the mujahedin than a vehicle with windows open and passengers asleep inside.

  When we stopped 25 kilometres to the north to find the body of a dead man covered in a blanket being loaded onto a truck, the communist students gazed in silence and in horror. It was, according to a middle-aged Afghan on another bus, the corpse of a lorry-driver who had not stopped for the mujahedin. There were five buses bunched up together, all heading for Kabul, and they all stopped now at a chaikhana while their drivers debated whether to talk their way through the guerrilla roadblock up the road or turn back to Jalalabad. Two hours passed, the drivers unable to make up their minds, the young Afghan men ever more nervous. And with good reason. The mujahedin gave their prisoners only two options: they could join the resistance or face execution. Some of the Afghan boys were taking off their party badges. I could only feel sorry for them. Perhaps they joined Parcham for promotion at college or because their parents worked for the government. And for all the government’s brutality and its reliance on foreign invaders, its functionaries had been trying to create a secular, equal society in the villages around Jalalabad. It was not the government that was burning the schools and killing the teachers.

  Another hour drifted by, the heat rising, the students ever more depressed, the drivers basking in the sun. In wartime, in any great danger, indecision is a narcotic. Then labouring up the highway came Ali’s wooden bus, the coat of arms of the North West Frontier Province proudly displayed on its flanks. “Why do you desert me?” Ali wanted to know. He pointed to his charabanc. “Mr. Ro
bert, please come with us.” So I took my usual seat on the right-hand side of his vehicle and the other buses moved out into the road like sheep behind us. “You are better with us, Mr. Robert,” Ali said. “You should not be with them.” I soon realised why.

  Round a bend just 5 kilometres up the highway, in a narrow valley of rocks and small pines, six tall and sun-burned mujahedin stood astride the road. A seventh was perched on a rock, lazily waving his arm up and down to tell us to stop. We had been told that they were poorly armed, that they only dared appear at dusk, that they were frightened of government retaliation. But here were the mujahedin in the hot midday sun in their turbans and Afghan shawls, each holding a brand-new Kalashnikov, controlling the traffic on one of Afghanistan’s most important highways. It was an audacious display of self-confidence and a fearful one for the students in the bus behind. There was no anxiety in Ali’s bus and a Pakistani passenger—a cloth merchant from Peshawar—was so bored that he began a long and tiresome discussion about Pakistan’s domestic politics.

  Through the back window, however, I could see the students stepping off their bus onto the road. They stood there, heads lowered as if they were criminals, some trying to hide behind the others. Ali was chatting and joking with one of the guerrillas. The other drivers stood beside their buses expressionless. The gunmen were moving through the line of young Afghans. Some were ordered back on the bus. Others, white with fear, were told to form a line by the road. Three of them were tied up and blindfolded and taken, stumbling and falling, through the pine stands and towards the river that gurgled away to our right. We watched them until they and their captors had disappeared. The Pakistani cloth merchant clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Poor chaps,” he said.