The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

American security agents in Karachi were looking for Daniel Pearl’s murderers, but they would find their arrest targets had fled because of secret support within middle ranks of the Pakistani army. “We would go with the Pakistanis to a location but there would be no one there because once the middle level of the Pakistani military knew of our plans, they would leak the information. In the NorthWest Frontier province, the frontier corps is a second-rate army—they are a lot more anti-Western in sentiment than the main Pakistani army. In the end we had to coordinate everything through Islamabad.”

  When I asked about prisoners, the Special Forces officer became worried, withdrawn. He asked for another coffee. “In Kandahar, in what we call their living areas, the prisoners are given cots with blankets and Adidas suits and runners, but they have no privacy. There are no sides to their living areas because we have to see them all the time. They have no privacy in the bathroom. Some of them masturbate when they are looking at the female guards. Our guards had no reaction to this. They are soldiers. When the interrogations take place, the prisoners are allowed to sit. I don’t want to get into specifics about the questions we ask them.” As for the Western journalists he met at Bagram, the American intelligence officer had a low opinion. “They just hung around our base all day. Whenever we had some special operation, we’d offer the journalists some facility to go on patrol with our Special Forces and off they’d go—you know, ‘We’re on patrol with the Special Forces’—and they wouldn’t realise we were stringing them along to get them out of the way.”

  IF JOURNALISTS COULD BE FOOLED by the Americans, Afghans made their own judgements on recent history. For while U.S. Special Forces cruised the streets of Kandahar in their four-by-fours, the people of this brooding, hot city were now visiting a bleak graveyard with the reverence of worshippers. Beneath grey, parched mounds of dust and dried mud lay the “martyrs” of al-Qaeda. Here, among the 150 graves, lay the men who held out to the end in the city’s Mirweis hospital, shooting at the Americans and their Afghan allies until they died amid sewage and their own excrement. They were honoured now as saints. Other earth hid the bodies of the followers of Osama bin Laden who fought at Kandahar airport in the last battle before the fall of the Taliban. They are Arabs and Pakistanis and Chechens and Kazakhs and Kashmiris and all—if you believe the propaganda—are hated and loathed by the native Pashtun population of Kandahar.

  Not true. The people of the Taliban’s former caliphate tended the graves in their hundreds. On Fridays, they came in their thousands, travelling hundreds of miles. They brought their sick and dying. Word had it that a visit to the graveyard of bin Laden’s dead would cure disease and pestilence. As if kneeling at the graves of saints, old women gently washed the baked mud sepulchres, kissing the dust upon them, looking up in prayer to the spindly flags that snapped in the dust storms. The Kandahar kabristan—the place of graves—was a political as well as a religious lesson for all who came there.

  “Foreigners are advised to stay away from the al-Qaeda graveyard,” a Western aid worker solemnly announced. “You may be in danger there.” But when I visited the last resting place of bin Laden’s men, there were only the fine, gritty winds of sand to fear. Many of the men around the graves kept their scarves around their faces, dark eyes staring at the foreigner in their midst. Two soldiers of the “new” Afghan army, stationed here by the supposedly pro-American authorities, watched the visitors as they put bowls of salt on the graves and took pieces of mud to touch with their tongues. An old man from Helmand was there. He had put stones and salt and mud on the tombs—he shook hands with me with salt on his fingers—and he had come because he was sick. “I have pain in my knee and I have polio and I heard that if I came here I would be cured,” he said. “I put salt and grain on the graves then later I will collect the grain and eat the salt and take the mud from the grave home.” Khurda, the Pashtuns call this, bringing salt to the tomb of saints.

  A second, even older man had travelled from Uruzgan with his mother. “My mother had leg and back pains and I brought her to Kandahar so she could see the doctors. But when I heard the stories about these martyrs’ graves—and that they might cure her—I also brought my mother here. She is happier here than going to the doctors.” I watched his aged mother on her knees, scraping dust from the mud tombs, praying and crying. The government soldiers appeared to have succumbed to the same visionary trance. “I’ve seen for myself people who get healed here,” a young, unbearded man with a Kalashnikov on his shoulder told me. “People get well after visiting the graves. I’ve seen deaf men who could hear again and I’ve seen the dumb speak. They were cured.”

  This was not the time—and definitely not the place—to contradict such conviction. The sand blasted over the graveyard with a ruthlessness worthy of bin Laden. The city cemetery is much larger—there are square miles of tribal graveyards within its perimeter. But it was the al-Qaeda dead who attracted the mourners. Attracted by what? The rumours and legend of healing? By the idea that these men resisted the foreigners to the end, preferred to die rather than surrender, that the non-Afghan “martyrs” had fought like Afghans?

  So there was secret collusion, a fraudulent attempt to use the United Nations as a fig leaf for war, a largely unsympathetic British public, journalists used as propagandists and our enemy—an Arab dictator previously regarded as a friend of the West—compared to the worst criminals of the Second World War. This was our world in the winter of 2002.

  But it also happened to be our world almost half a century earlier, a conflict not about oil but over a narrow man-made canal linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The Suez crisis has haunted British governments ever since 1956—it hung over Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands War, and its memory now moved between the Foreign Office and Downing Street, Jack Straw and Tony Blair. For Suez destroyed a British prime minister—along, almost, with the Anglo-American alliance—and symbolised the end of the British empire. It killed many civilians—all Egyptian, of course—and brought shame upon the allies when they turned out to have committed war crimes. It rested on a lie—that British and French troops should land in Egypt to “separate” the Egyptian and Israeli armies, even though the British and French had earlier connived at Israel’s invasion. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser was described by the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, as “the Mussolini of the Nile” even though, scarcely a year earlier, Eden had warmly shaken Nasser’s hand in an exchange of congratulations over a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty—shades of Donald Rumsfeld’s chummy meeting with the “Hitler of Baghdad” in 1983. In the end, British troops—poorly equipped and treating their Egyptian foes with racial disdain—left in humiliation, digging up their dead comrades from their graves to freight back home lest the Egyptians defile their bodies.

  I have always been fascinated by the “other side,” by how the losers thought and fought and—occasionally—turned out not to be the losers after all. When I was with the Iraqi army during the 1980–88 war with Iran, I always wanted to talk to the Iranian soldiers on the other side of the front lines. When I was with the Iranians, I was determined to talk to their Iraqi opponents. When the Hizballah fought the Israeli occupation army in southern Lebanon, I longed to listen to the Israeli army’s analysis of the Hizballah—far from the usual “terrorist” rhetoric produced by their politicians, Israeli junior officers often showed respect for the Hizballah’s guerrilla tactics. In Baghdad in 2003, I lived among Iraqis as they were bombed and attacked by the Anglo–American invasion force. I was too young to cover Suez—my mother, as I have recalled, was relieved I was too young to be a British soldier in the invasion of Egypt—but on the thirtieth anniversary of the crisis, I did set out to talk to the Egyptians who took over the Suez Canal and fought the British, spending weeks in Cairo listening to those who dared to oppose the British empire and the French nation and the invading Israelis.

  The Egyptians do not call it the “Suez Crisis” or even the “Suez War.” They refer to it, always, as “the Trip
artite Aggression,” so that their countrymen may never forget that two European superpowers colluded with Israel to invade the new republic of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Suez was a complex crisis, but it revolved around Nasser’s decision—against international agreements—to nationalise the canal and take over the Suez Canal Company. British banks and businesses had long dominated investment in Egypt and held a 44 per cent stake in the company, originally negotiated by Benjamin Disraeli. Nasser’s takeover was greeted with delirium by Egyptian crowds who had been aghast at America’s earlier withdrawal from the Aswan High Dam project. The code word for the takeover was “de Lesseps,” who had built the canal when Egypt was part of the Ottoman empire, and the moment Nasser uttered the Frenchman’s name in a radio speech from Alexandria on 26 July 1956, twelve of Nasser’s collaborators stormed the company’s great wooden-framed headquarters.

  Among them was Captain Ali Nasr, a shy twenty-six-year-old Suez Canal pilot with a thin moustache who walked up the steps of the building in Ismailia and calmly told the French employees inside that they were now working for the Egyptian Canal Company. Nasr was the only seaman of the group. “We all knew it was a job we had to do for our country—we were ready to lay down our lives for this,” he was to tell me thirty years later. “We had the feeling of being soldiers awaiting instructions. We were led inside by Engineer Mahmoud Younis, who had been given his sealed orders by Nasser himself. Engineer Younis had a pistol. I was unarmed—I have never believed in carrying a weapon. But inside, we found the French and British and Greeks were very friendly. We told them: ‘The canal is nationalised. It belongs to Egypt now. We want your cooperation. The ships must go on moving in the canal.’ Then we exchanged cigarettes with them. We slept in the offices, usually slumped on the desks of the French officials. That is how we came to run the canal.”

  As Captain Nasr was turning in to sleep in Ismailia, Anthony Eden was concluding a dinner at Downing Street with the Iraqi king and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said. Both would be assassinated in Baghdad two years later. But on that night in 1956, es-Said’s venom was directed at the Egyptian leader. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit, hit hard and hit now.” In London, Eden summoned his chiefs of staff. He wanted to topple Nasser—“regime change” is a new version of the same idea—and free the canal. But the British military informed him it couldn’t be done. Troops were out of training, landing craft out of commission. “It was only when we eventually dropped outside Port Said,” a Parachute Regiment officer told me more than forty years later, “that we suddenly realised how far our army’s readiness had declined since the Second World War. Our transport aircraft could only unload from the side, our jeeps broke down and they couldn’t even drop artillery to support us.”

  The first test of Nasser’s strength came on 15 September 1956, when almost all the foreign pilots in the Suez Canal Authority withdrew their labour. Eden and Guy Mollet, the French prime minister, had devised the walkout in London five days earlier. The world would be shown that the Egyptians were not competent to run the canal. Of the 205 pilots capable of steering convoys through the 101-mile ditch between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, only forty were Egyptian—and five of them were on holiday. “Younis realised this was going to happen and he called us Egyptian pilots together to ask what we should do,” Captain Nasr recalled. “I told him we must train extra pilots but that we did not have time to teach them the navigation of the whole canal. I told him we should teach the men four sectors of the canal—one lot would learn how to pilot vessels southbound on the first half of the canal to Ismailia, the next would be taught the second stage southbound to Suez, the other two would learn the canal northbound in the same stages.”

  On the night of 15 September, Nasr found himself aboard a 14,000-ton German ship at Port Said. “The foreign pilots had left and I was so anxious about my job and my responsibility for the new scheme that I found I couldn’t distinguish the green buoy lights from the red buoy lights at the mouth of the canal. But the German captain was very kind and gave me encouragement. We moved down the canal at night, and at dawn I saw the lights of a car on the road beside us. It was Younis with a megaphone, shouting encouragement to me and to the pilots of each ship as they steamed past him.”

  In Britain, the days and weeks and months that followed Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal were taken up with prevarication, parliamentary lies, desperate attempts to form a coalition army and—most damaging of all—a secret meeting at Sèvres, outside Paris, in which the Israelis, the British and the French agreed that the Israeli army should invade Egypt and that Britain and France would then intervene, instruct the Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw their forces either side of the canal, and then place an Anglo-French intervention force in the Canal Zone around Port Said. “Operation Musketeer,” it would be called, and the British people were duly summoned from their postwar lethargy by newspaper editorials that condemned those who questioned Eden’s right to use military force.

  The Times led the way. “Of course, it [public opinion] wants to avoid the use of force,” the paper’s editorial—written personally by its editor, William Haley— thundered. “So does everyone and we hope no one does so more than the British Government. But that is a far cry from saying that because there seems little we can do about it, the best thing is to find excuses for, and forget, the whole business. Nations live by the vigorous defence of their interests . . . The people, in their silent way, know this better than the critics. They still want Britain great.” The Manchester Guardian claimed that The Times’s editorial was an attack on the right to speak out against government in times of crisis—a similar debate restarted when the Iraqi war grew closer in early 2003—and Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, played a role not unlike Alastair Campbell’s in Downing Street under Blair.

  “Clark worked in unison with The Times,” Tony Shaw recalled in his brilliant and sometimes outrageously funny history of the crisis. Clark’s job—and here there is a deeply uncomfortable parallel with George Bush and the UN—was “to prepare the ground for the government’s brief referral of the dispute to the United Nations . . . This required a certain amount of ingenuity since Eden and the paper had hitherto dismissed the organisation as unwieldy and incapable of producing swift results.” Eden had told Haley that he wanted to use the UN as an instrument solely to prove Nasser’s guilt and justify force—which is pretty much what George W. Bush wanted the UN arms inspectors to do in Iraq in 2002.

  And there was another 1956 Times editorial that could have been reprinted in late 2002 with the word “Iraq” substituted for “the canal”:

  The objection to the matter being simply referred to the UN and left there has all along been, and remains, that the UN is likely to be dilatory and certain to be ineffective as a means of freeing the canal. But whatever international control is eventually brought about by negotiation or otherwise should certainly be under the aegis of the UN and the sooner the UN is officially informed of what has happened the better.

  “Collusion,” according to Kennett Love’s monumental study of the Suez War, “was born of a marriage between Eden’s anti-Nasser policy and the unwritten anti-Nasser alliance of France and Israel.” Israel was to invade Sinai on 29 October, stating that its forces had attacked Palestinian Fedayeen bases and that their military operations had been necessitated “by the continuous Egyptian military attacks on citizens and on Israeli land and sea communications.” Britain and France would call for a ceasefire between Israeli and Egyptian forces, a truce which—as had already been decided in advance—the Israelis would accept. Nasser, who had long convinced himself—correctly—that the three powers were conniving on the war, would refuse.

  The Egyptian army retreated with some acts of bravery but much chaos across Sinai to the banks of the canal.196 On 31 October the British and French air forces commenced their own long-planned operations against Egypt. Reserve Major Mustafa Kamal Murad of the Egyptian army’s eastern command drove down the desert road from
Cairo that afternoon. “It was a nightmare,” he was to recall for me thirty years later. “There was mile after mile of Egyptian armour on the road and every truck and armoured vehicle was burning after the air attacks. I was terribly shocked. The poor farmers were walking onto the road and screaming at us: ‘You have brought this destruction on our land, you devils.’” Murad found Ismailia calm but milling with frightened and disillusioned troops from Sinai. “Morale was very bad, our soldiers had swollen feet from walking in the desert and were putting fear into the army defenders and our home guard, the ‘National Guard.’ All withdrawing armies tell lies to their friends. We had to send them down to Cairo quickly.”

  Murad found himself in the old British consulate in Ismailia, which now served as emergency Egyptian military headquarters, an institution, Murad was to remember, “which was a great pleasure to our officers as the British had left behind them crates of whisky, champagne, beer and cognac.” Egyptian troops were looting civilian homes in the city—until their commander, Kamaledin Hussein, ordered all thieves to be shot on sight. Under the strain of command, some Egyptian officers went to pieces. “Colonel Abdul Aziz Selim was told to defend the outskirts of Ismailia and he shouted at Hussein: ‘My battalion will be completely annihilated by the British air force,’” Murad recalled. “I urged Hussein to send him back to Cairo. But in the morning, Selim’s batman came to us and said there was blood seeping from beneath the colonel’s door. When we opened the door, we found Selim had shot himself on my desk.”

  Murad’s recollection of the RAF bombing at Ismailia was still so vivid when I met him in 1986 that as he recalled the violence his hand repeatedly swooped through the air to illustrate the raids on the airfields around Ismailia. “I was astonished that they attacked no civilians. They were very accurate. When I got to the airfields after the raids, I found that our young soldiers had disobeyed their orders to retreat to the slit trenches under air attack. Instead, they had stayed at their anti-aircraft guns and kept on firing. The RAF rockets were so accurate that they always hit the guns. The rockets cut our men in half. I would find their legs and the trunks of their bodies on the guns: their top half would be missing.”