by Robert Fisk
The television cameras moved like beetles through the mob of refugees, selecting a man who dares to speak, who saw a body hanging in the main square of Kandahar, a man who—in a second—becomes the centre of an ever-growing amoeba of wires and lenses and notebooks and video-cassettes. The man wears an old brown shawl around his shoulders and a sparkling Pashtun hat. Other young men appear from the gate amid a crowd of boys. There were two bodies twisting in the breeze in Kandahar, not just one, they say. A Pakistan government official with a stick lashes out at the kids with a kind of swagger. Yet a third man is cornered by television crews from Japan, France 2 and Catalan television. He doesn’t speak Japanese or French or Catalan—indeed, the Catalan reporter turns out to be a Basque—but their Pakistani translator bellows questions about the body in the Kandahar square. “He was a young man,” the Afghan replies warily. “He was tortured and killed before they hung him up. He was a friend of Mullah Khaksar.” The story gets clearer. Mullah Khaksar was the Taliban interior minister in Kabul before he changed sides. His friend—the hanged man—was allegedly found with a GPS device, enough to condemn him as an American spy.
His fate, of course, is important to us. It is further proof of the ruthlessness of the Taliban, our enemy in the War for Civilisation, of their cruelty and their despair. A truck-driver who has lost two family members in American bombing attracts fewer cameras. Not a single photographer bothers with an old Afghan man I find resting in the broken metal chair of the immigration officer. He is wearing an odd pair of shoes, the toes of the right shoe pointing to the sky. The reason is simple: only a wooden stump emerges from his right trouser leg. It somehow adheres to the shoe but upends it the moment the weight of his body is applied. The left shoe is flat on the ground. Above it stands a bright pink plastic leg with a wooden foot which fits the shoe, a hairless, feminine prosthesis.
I try to talk to the sweating, bearded, legless man but he will not respond. He is gritting his teeth with pain but he could talk if he chose. How did he lose his legs? His eyes move towards the dustbowl of Chaman with its packed, filthy, Dickensian streets and he stands up, swaying, and begins to stump off down the road between lines of barbed wire. The cameramen ignore him. They know he is the victim of another war of landmines—there are millions in Afghanistan—laid by the Russians who are our new allies in the War for Civilisation. He knows that too. He will not talk to me and, after a few moments, I realise he is right not to talk.
The crowds still gather on the other side of the wire. We stand there, three at a time, to take pictures, focusing on the tractor-load of children, the elderly man lying on sacks on a truck, the Afghan girl, perhaps five years old, who is begging from a soldier. But we cannot absorb the sheer mass of people. They came like this when the Russians invaded in 1979, but somehow they have become too familiar—banalisés, as my colleagues from France 2 would say—in history. Vietnam 1972, Palestine 1948, Poland and Germany 1945, France 1940. The poor and the dispossessed and the terrified are background material, wallpaper to our drama.
An old couple arrive in wheelbarrows, the man hunched in one, the woman— head lolling out of the bucket—in the one behind, each pushed by two grinning, laughing youths who shout to the journalists and point cruelly to their charges. Had the couple been able to walk, we would have ignored them. But an elderly man and woman in wheelbarrows is too good a picture to miss. Not so the white-haired man who stared at me with his left eye until I was forced to look at his right eye, a nightmare socket, a tissue of skin criss-crossed with tiny red scars. No photos of this Cyclops in rags.
Down the road at Takhta-Pul, they are talking about another massacre—of 160 Taliban prisoners by tribal rulers—and from all over the countryside come stories of villages crushed by American bombs; an entire hamlet destroyed by B-52s at Kili Sarnad, fifty dead near Tora Bora, eight civilians killed in cars bombed by USAF jets on the road to Kandahar, another forty-six in Lashkargah, twelve more in Bibi Mahru. We are not supposed to know the details of these deaths. “Investigation?” U.S. defence secretary Rumsfeld roared at a press conference at the beginning of October 2001, claiming he knew nothing of Amnesty International’s call for an inquiry into the Mazar prison massacre. “I can think of a dozen things there that people could inquire into.”
So could we. There’s the hanged man in Kandahar, a local poet, we later learned. Then there’s the sweating man with no legs. And the begging five-year-old. And the old couple in the wheelbarrows and the awful Cyclops with the purulent right eye and the dead of Takhta-Pul and Kili Sarnad and Lashkargah and Bibi Mahru and the whole swelling mass of humanity standing in the squalor of Chaman. Not to mention the slaughter at Mazar. And the War for Civilisation.
I am invited to meet a senior Taliban official who has just fled to his family home across the Pakistani border, in the wind-whipped village of Pishin. He sits on the floor of a large, cold, wooden-ceilinged room, back against the wall, an embroidered grey shawl wound over his black turban, large eyes wearily surveying me. “An adviser to the Taliban Elders of Kandahar” is how he asks to be described. He asks to be called “Mullah Abdullah”—which is his real first name—although the thirty-two-year-old graduate of Sheikh Hassanjan’s madrassa in Kohat held a different identity and a far more important post in the Taliban hierarchy. The great mud-walled hujra family home below the mountains is blasted by a vicious little wind that has given the mullah a bout of flu. Defeat is hard.
So are words in this cold climate. “The people think we are defeated because we have lost many of our men,” Mullah Abdullah concedes. “But our men lost their lives in martyrdom and therefore they were successful. So we don’t think we have been defeated . . . When the Americans go home, we’ll have the land back. The Americans didn’t come here for Osama bin Laden—that’s not their main reason. They are here because they don’t want a country run under an Islamic system of law. They want a government that will do what they want.” It is the authentic voice of Taliban Kandahar. The mullah, it emerges, has just arrived from the Taliban’s besieged little caliphate, trekking six hours into the desert to avoid the American air raids round Takhta-Pul, resting here before returning to Kandahar, a man in denial or a man who has already decided to go into the mountains. He seems almost uninterested in the strategy of war. He has held a post in the Taliban defence ministry in Kabul—Arabs, he says, were employed to maintain his vehicles—but every military question brings a theological reply. “Even now the Americans have not succeeded in finding Sheikh Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda. They haven’t achieved this mission of theirs. For us, Osama is a Muslim and a Muslim from another country is a brother. As for us, we will fight on in the mountains as guerrillas if we lose Kandahar—and if we achieve martyrdom, this is victory.”
I am growing tired of all this but I am beginning to understand. Victory comes with success and victory comes with defeat. Two years later there would be a Bush version of this same nonsensical ideology as he tried to explain why Iraq was descending into chaos: the better things were, the worse the violence would become—because life was improving. “The Afghans,” Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Burnes pompously observed in 1841, “are not deficient in the imaginative faculties, and they may be quoted as a proof that invention precedes judgement.” Yet for Mullah Abdullah, history and politics and defeat appear part of a religious text. “A hadith of the Holy Prophet says that it is the right of Muslims to perform jihad. It was not necessary for us to rule the whole of Afghanistan when the Taliban started its existence in a tiny village. There were only a few Talibans who began all this. At the start, we stated that this was enough. We never cared that we succeeded in gaining 95 per cent of the land of Afghanistan. So we don’t care about the land we’ve lost. The Taliban doesn’t want the land as such—our main purpose is to convey Islam to the people. If our people return and take back this lost land, it’s a success. If we are killed trying to do so, we have received martyrdom and this will be a great success for us too.”
Only occasionally does the worm of doubt creep into the mullah’s conversation. “Only time can tell if we will hold Kandahar or not—we are doing our best.” It might be an editorial from a Taliban newspaper—if, that is, they hadn’t banned newspapers. “If we are thrown out of Kandahar, we will go to the mountains and start the guerrilla war as we did with the Russians.” I try to argue that the Americans are not the Russians, that this is not a simple repeat performance, that the Taliban have for the most part been fighting other Afghans, that the Americans have only attacked them from the air. It is no use. He will go to the mountains. The Taliban will ambush the Americans. They will fight on. And they did.
The Americans are entering Kandahar. I will make just one last effort to reach the city. It is 8 December. If I can drive to Chaman, I have the opportunity to pick up a lift with a CNN crew all the way to Mullah Omar’s caliphate. All I have to do is hook up with Justin Huggler—fresh from covering the Mazar massacre—and travel in a jeep with our Pashtun driver, Amanullah, and our translator, Fayyez Ahmed, from Quetta to Chaman. It must have been around 4:30 p.m. that we reached Kila Abdulla, about halfway through our journey, when our jeep stopped in the middle of a narrow, crowded street. A film of white steam was rising from the bonnet, a constant shriek of car horns and buses and trucks and rickshaws protesting the roadblock we had created. All four of us got out of the car and pushed it to the side of the road. I muttered something to Justin about this being “a bad place to break down.”
Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war had created in Pakistan. Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn later, were outraged by what they had seen on television of the Mazar massacres, of prisoners killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told Amanullah that they had seen the videotape of two CIA officers threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar. Some of the Afghans had been in the little village for years. Others had arrived—desperate and angry and mourning their newly slaughtered loved ones—over the past two weeks. Sure it was a bad place to break down, a bad time too, just before the Iftar, the end of the daily fast of Ramadan. These people were uneducated—I doubt if many could read—but you don’t have to have schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52’s bombs.
Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered around our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands and we said Salaam aleikum many times. Peace be upon you. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank. Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me on the back.
How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all Salaam aleikum a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. At one point, I later discovered, a screaming teenager had turned to Amanullah and asked, quite seriously: “Is that Mr. Bush?” The West was being brought low. Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus-driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyez, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. But as I put my foot on the step, three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back onto the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on!” he shouted. I did.
That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me. There were two more blows, one on the back of my shoulder, a powerful fist that sent me crashing against the side of the bus while clutching Justin’s hand. The passengers were looking out at me and then at Justin. But they did not move. No one wanted to help. I cried out “Help me, Justin!” and Justin, who was doing more than any human could do by clinging to my ever-loosening grip, asked me—over the screams of the crowd—what I wanted him to do. Then I realised I could only just hear him. They were shouting at me and about me. Did I catch the word kaffir—infidel? That’s when I was dragged away from Justin’s grasp.
There were two more cracks on my head, one on each side, and for some odd reason part of my memory—some back street in my brain—registered a moment at school, at my primary school called the Cedars in Maidstone more than fifty years before, when a tall boy building sandcastles in the playground hit me on the head. I had a memory of the blow smelling, as if it had affected my nose. The next shock came from a man I saw carrying a big stone in his right hand. He brought it down on my forehead with tremendous force and something hot and liquid splashed down my face and lips and chin. I was kicked. On the back, on my shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager grabbed my bag yet again and I was left clinging to the strap, looking up and realising there must have been sixty men in front of me, howling at me; they had, I now noticed, big, wolfish smiles. Oddly, it wasn’t fear I felt but a kind of wonderment. So this is how it happens. I knew that I had to respond. Or, so I reasoned in my stunned state, I had to die.
In a place of peace and clarity, I might have remembered that baleful morning in the Afghan city of Ghazni more than two decades earlier when Gavin Hewitt and I and his crew had been urged to leave before the crowd attacked us with stones. I could have recalled all those tales of Afghan cruelty from British officers of the Raj, even in Bill Fisk’s gift from his mother, Tom Graham, V.C. Yet the only thing that shocked me was my own physical sense of collapse, my growing awareness of the liquid beginning to cover me. I don’t think I’d ever seen so much blood before. For a second, I caught a glimpse of something ghastly, a nightmare face— my own—reflected in the window of the bus, streaked in blood, my hands drenched in the stuff like Lady Macbeth, slopping over the collar of my shirt and down my pullover until my back was wet and my bag dripping with crimson and vague splashes suddenly appearing on my trousers. I was swamped in it. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? That was the quotation as I remembered it, right there, at that moment. The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists. Pebbles and small stones bounced off my head and shoulders. How long, I remember thinking, could this go on? How long does it last?
My head was struck by stones on both sides at the same time—not thrown stones but stones in the palms of stout men who were using them to try and break my skull. Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the leather container from the cord. And here I have to thank Lebanon. For twenty-five years, I had covered Lebanon’s wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive. Take a decision—any decision—but don’t do nothing. So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand, and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn’t see very much—my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze—but I saw the man cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For a second, the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my bag under m
y arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit more, and ran.
I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country—among others—was killing, along with the Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.
Then something quite remarkable happened. A man walked up to me, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn’t see him too well for all the blood that was running into my eyes again, but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men behind me and a few stones skittered along the road, but they were not aimed at me—presumably to avoid hitting the stranger. He was like an Old Testament figure or some Bible story, the Good Samaritan, a Muslim man—perhaps a mullah in the village—who was trying to save my life. He pushed me into the back of a police truck. But the policemen didn’t move. They were terrifed. “Help me,” I kept shouting through the tiny window at the back of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down the glass. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.
