by Deva, Mukul
‘But he did save my life so let’s give him one chance. If he makes it out alive from Special Tasks then it is Allah’s will that he lives.’
The doctor did not reply, but his silence conveyed his displeasure at the decision.
‘How is the old man now?’ the Ameer asked, turning to face him.
‘Not so good.’ The doctor hesitated. ‘In fact, he is slipping away fast. We have tried everything but there has been too much internal damage. Maybe I could have done something if I had the facilities of a full-fledged hospital available to me. Right now, here…’
‘I want to see him.’
‘Now?’ ‘Now.’
The doctor carefully helped the Ameer to his feet and began to walk him outside. Halting at the door, the Ameer shrugged off the doctor’s support, straightened his back and stepped out, unaided. He was enough of a leader to know that in this part of the world any sign of weakness was unacceptable. Weakness was a clear invitation for the enemy to close in for the kill, and Allah knew that a man like the Ameer had enough enemies. He commanded his body to ignore the pain and followed the doctor to the hut across the alley.
Moans of pain greeted him at the door. The smell of spirit and blood assaulted his senses as soon as he entered. There were two men hovering around the frail old mullah lying on the bed. More than half of Hamidi’s upper body was drenched in blood. He seemed to be just about holding onto life. Miraculously, his face had been left untouched by the American missiles.
At a glance from the Ameer, everyone left the room except the doctor, who maintained a careful vigil at the door.
‘How is it going, old man?’ There was affection in the Ameer’s voice as he settled down on the bed beside Hamidi and took one of his hands in both his own.
‘Not so good.’ Hamidi’s whisper was almost drowned out by his wheezing.
The Ameer had to lean forward to hear him. ‘We will soon have you up and about,’ he said, trying to sound encouraging.
‘No, you will not.’ The mullah gave a weak smile. Another bout of coughing seized him. Flecks of blood spotted his lips and beard. Picking up a wad of cotton from the bedside table, the Ameer gently wiped his mouth clean. It was an uncharacteristically gentle gesture for the cruel warlord.
Hamidi acknowledged it with a grateful smile. ‘But there are no regrets, my son. We have had a long and eventful journey, haven’t we?’
‘Yes, we have and, by the grace of Allah, it has been a glorious one.’
‘Do you remember how it all began?’
‘Of course I do. Can I ever forget?’
‘Don’t ever let go of the past. Remember that we are what we are because of what lies behind us.’ Another bout of coughing interrupted Hamidi. Then he drew a deep breath and added, ‘You will remember what Allah wants from you? You will not stray from the path, will you, Jalal?’
‘Of course not.’ The Ameer’s fingers pressed down reassuringly on Hamidi’s fragile hand.
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
‘Good. Do not let these treacherous army bastards get away with this betrayal. Remember that Pakistan was established so that the Sharia and the rule of Allah the Magnificent could be implemented.’
The Ameer’s face shone with anger. ‘If they think they can play with us they are mistaken. Don’t worry, I am going to make the traitors pay.’
‘You must, but be very careful. Remember, there is much at stake. Everything we have worked for is now almost within our grasp.’ Hamidi wanted to say more but he was tiring fast. He started coughing again. More drops of blood sprayed out from his mouth this time, the internal hemorrhaging had intensified. His hand, clasped between the Ameer’s, betrayed the pain that wracked through his body.
‘Can I ask you a favour?’ the mullah murmured. ‘One final favour for an old friend?’
‘Of course,’ he replied sadly.
Hamidi smiled. ‘You know me well, my son.’
‘How could I not? You have been like a father to me, the only father I have ever known.’ There was great affection in the look they exchanged. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I am sure.’ Hamidi’s voice was laced with pain. ‘There is no point in delaying the inevitable and prolonging the agony, my son. Let me go now.’
The Ameer looked at the doctor, desperately seeking some hope, but saw none. He turned back to the mullah and nodded reluctantly. There was gratitude in the smile he got in return. He leaned forward and gently raised the old man in his arms and held him close. ‘Sleep well. I shall miss your guidance and support, especially now, when the end is almost within reach.’ His grip on Hamidi tightened briefly before he freed his right hand, reached for the pistol stuck in his waistband, and placed it against the dying man’s heart.
Mullah Ismail Hamidi looked into his former student Jalaluddin’s eyes, meeting death as he had lived his life: head-on, without flinching.
The doctor manning the door winced as the pistol shot reverberated through the room.
Hamidi’s body jerked and then went limp in the Ameer’s arms. Tiny pungent wisps of cordite floated up in the air, momentarily overpowering the smell of blood. They slowly dissipated and the bloody aura of death returned.
The man who had pulled the trigger did not seem to notice any of this. He was watching his teacher’s sightless eyes with his own unseeing ones.
He lowered the body back onto the bed. He gently closed the eyes and with the bedsheet he covered the hole the bullet had made in Hamidi’s chest.
Finally, the Ameer got up and headed for the door. His pace strengthened with every passing step and the pain in his eyes receded. By the time he left the hut, there was no trace of emotion on his face.
Only when he reached his room did the Ameer allow himself to slump down on the bed and let his feelings surface. That night, long after the silence of uneasy sleep had settled over the village, the Ameer lay awake, his gaze fixed on the darkness outside the window. His mind went back to the bloody, treacherous road the mullah and he had travelled together. It was a road he did not like to walk on, but that night he journeyed down it again.
Born because of the karma of their past mistakes, they make more mistakes and fall into more mistakes.
Sri Guru Granth Sahib
The Manba Ulom madrassa lay on the outskirts of Danda Darpa Khel, not far from Miramshah in North Waziristan. About 3 kilometres to the east of the madrassa was a nondescript cluster of mud-walled huts.
A little Pashtun boy named Jalaluddin played in the dusty open area behind his house. Although still a month away from his eighth birthday, the boy was taller than most of the ten-year-olds in his village. Other than that, he was just like the other boys.
Like most men in the village, Jalaluddin’s father, Rehman Haq, made ends meet through a combination of agriculture and the drug trade.
Straightforward, fun-loving, god-fearing but not rabidly so, these people lived by the Pashtun code of conduct. At the end of the day, life was simple if not easy, satisfying if not gratifying and, above all, free from external interference of any kind, which was the one thing the proud, fiercely independent Pashtun could not tolerate.
‘Jalal! Jalal!’ The boy looked up when he heard his mother’s excited call. He left his playmates and ran inside the house. ‘Your father says we are going to meet the rest of the family.’
This did not make much sense to Jalal; as far as he was concerned, the family comprised his parents, infant brother and himself. Seeing the bewilderment on his face, his mother explained, ‘Your father has an older brother who lives near Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan. He was just telling me that both your birthdays, which are just a week apart, will be a good time for all of us to meet.’
‘Is it far?’ Jalal asked.
‘I am sure it is.’ Like Jalal, his mother had not travelled a lot, though she had been to Miramshah several times.
That got Jalal excited. The more they talked about it, the more thrilling it all sounded. By the time h
e sprinted out to share the news with his friends, he was swelling with pride. He did not know many boys who had gone further than a few villages away. It had never even occurred to him that there was a world beyond the periphery of the village.
Several hundred miles away, in Moscow, a handful of men were getting together to discuss an issue that had been troubling the corridors of power in several countries for several centuries.
The late afternoon sun bathed the car park outside the Kremlin conference hall where the meeting was scheduled to take place.
The hall was one of several rooms where members of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party’s central committee met. However, an official meeting of the Politburo hadn’t been scheduled that day. Instead, converging in the conference hall was a smaller group of men, oligarchs who held the real power in Soviet Russia. They were the ones who ran the state, making secret decisions and arriving at resolutions by consensus, avoiding any individual responsibility.
Mikhail Suslov, the chief party ideologue, was the first to arrive. Right after him was the Russian defence minister Dmitri Feodorovich Ustinov. The remaining three, general secretary Leonoid Brezhnev, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, arrived a few minutes later. Their cars swept into the heavily guarded car park in a tight cavalcade. A host of aides rushed forward to relieve the cars of their occupants.
Supported by his assistants, Brezhnev, a bloated, bushy-browed bear of a man, was flanked by Andropov and Gromyko when he entered the conference room. The meeting was immediately called to order. The quorum was complete, though it is said that the Russian prime minister Alexei Kosygin arrived a few minutes later and was present when the momentous decision was taken. This, however, was never confirmed. The decision certainly was.
It was 12 December 1979. And the burning issue for these five (or six) gentlemen was Afghanistan.
While many guesses have been hazarded and many theories put forward, there are no existing records of that meeting and the decisions taken. The only publicly available record of the meeting is a cryptic handwritten note by Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko (who would go on to become the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). The note says nothing about military action. In fact, it highlights nothing except that Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko were authorized to undertake certain measures to address the situation in ‘A’, which was how they referred to Afghanistan. The note was signed by Brezhnev and seconded by members of the Politburo.
The stance each man took is now largely a matter for conjecture. Suslov and Ustinov probably favoured military intervention. It is likely that Andropov was initially against military action but was convinced by his hawkish deputy, Vladimir Kryuchkov, to support it. Gromyko apparently tilted towards it once Taraki, Afghanistan’s first communist president, was assassinated.
It is also possible that Brezhnev’s emotional attachment to Taraki was an important consideration that led these men to order the elimination of Amin and his replacement by the far more malleable Babrak Karmal.
Afghanistan’s proximity to the Soviet Central Asian Muslim population and the Russian fear of US intervention, maybe even invasion of Afghanistan, were compelling reasons for what happened next. Compounding their fear was the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini had recently toppled the Shah of Iran and established the wilayat al-faqih (by which a Muslim cleric becomes the supreme leader) and called for an Islamic revolution. The situation was made worse by the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, by a group of Saudi and Egyptian extremists who claimed that the Mahdi, the Guided One, had come to restore righteousness and redeem the world by forming a just Islamic society. All these factors came together to force a decision that would soon impact the security of many nations.
Jalaluddin’s family were preparing for their journey to Afghanistan when the tragic sequence of events, initiated by that momentous meeting in Moscow, was set in motion.
On 13 December 1979 Hafizullah Amin, the fourth president of Afghanistan during the period of the Communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, was served a poisoned Coke. The attempt to kill him failed when the Coca Cola bubbles blunted the effect of the poison. Much to Russian chagrin, Amin survived.
Having made the run across the brutally rugged border areas several times as a mule for the drug trade, Rehman Haq was well aware of the dangers involved, especially since this time he was crossing it with his wife and young children. The family traversed across the Durand Line, mostly during the dark, due to the illegal nature of the journey. They climbed up narrow mountain tracks, where a false step meant certain death. However, to Jalal this trek did not seem any different from the short family jaunts he had gone on with his parents.
Jalal, of course, had no way of knowing that this journey into Afghanistan to meet his relatives on the other side of the border had been rendered illegal by a gentleman named Sir Mortimer Durand who, over a hundred years ago, had been the foreign secretary of faraway India. For reasons best known to himself and other foreign office mandarins in the British Raj, Durand had drawn a line that split the Pashtun people into two different nations: Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan.
It may have created two different countries but the Durand Line did little to separate the Pashtun people or weaken their ties.
The Pashtun, an eastern Iranian ethno-linguistic group, is the world’s largest patriarchal tribalized society, numbering about 45 million. It makes up approximately 42 per cent of the population in Afghanistan and 16 per cent in Pakistan.
Since 1893, when the line was drawn, the Pashtun regarded it with total disdain. Most were unaware of its existence. Those who were, crossed it without compunction as they went about their daily lives.
When Jalal’s family started out from Waziristan, the little boy had no idea that the journey across the Durand Line would throw his life into a bloody upheaval from which he would never recover. Or that it was a journey he was destined to repeat many times during his life.
Amin’s survival did not sit well with the Soviet high command. Unwilling to concede to failure, it immediately came up with new ploys to deliver Amin to his grave. The result was Operation Storm-333, launched by the Russians on 27 December 1979.
For reasons that have been charred by the incinerator of history, this assassination attempt snowballed into a full-blown invasion of Afghanistan and two weeks later, the first Soviet troops arrived in Kabul.
Equally bewildering is the ease with which the Russians forgot the lessons of history and the fates of the empires that ventured into Afghanistan.
The fate of Afghanistan has been decided more by its position on the globe than by anything else. From time immemorial it has been a strategically important crossroad. Whether it was Cyrus the Great in sixth century BC or Alexander the Great who came along 300 years later, followed by the British, the Russians and the Americans, all were afflicted by the same insane urge to venture into the graveyard of empires.
The wave of invasions achieved little for the invaders themselves, but it began a culture of warfare between the disparate tribes and ethnic groups that inhabit Afghanistan: from the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmen in the north to the Hazaras in central Afghanistan, the Nuristanis in the northeast and, the most powerful of the lot, the Pashtun majority in the south.
Historically, these groups have continually fought among themselves except when united by the common goal of expelling the latest intruder. Other than this strong resentment for invaders, the only thing Afghans have in common is Islam, with 80 per cent of them being Sunnis and the remainder (the Hazaras and the Ismailis) being Shias.
It was this constantly simmering, seething cauldron that the Russians stepped into.
The midday sun was high in the sky, desperately seeking to dispel the winter chill, when Jalal and his family arrived at the tiny village of Saret Koleh in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, from where they had sprung forth decades ago.
Located barely 20 kilometres fro
m the Af-Pak border, trapped in a mire of mountains and the river Helmand, Saret Koleh is a scattered line of mud houses. Like most villages in this area, it plays a vital role in the drug trade. Not surprising, considering Helmand is the world’s largest opium-producing region, accounting for 42 per cent of the global production.
Rehman’s brother and other family members, who had gathered for the reunion, greeted the family with great joy. The aroma of sweetmeats and other delicacies wafted through the tiny house that buzzed with a host of relatives who had flocked in from all over.
Not too far away, at the presidential palace, Amin and some of his key officials were attending a special luncheon held in honour of Ghulam Dastagir Panjsheri, a central committee member who had just returned from the Soviet Union.
Two Russian girls working as waitresses in the palace, possibly secret agents, mixed a light poison with the soup and ashak which they were serving. Since Panjsheri was the only one who did not consume the poisoned food, his role in the matter is automatically suspect.
The luncheon was in progress when a number of Afghan leaders and army officers were arrested at a Soviet-hosted reception held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. They were being escorted out under guard when an explosion ripped through Kabul’s general communications system. This marked the onset of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Approximately 5000 Soviet soldiers (four motor-rifle divisions, two airborne divisions, paratroopers, Spetsnaz special forces and the KGB secret police) who had been landing at Kabul International Airport over the past three days rolled out.
In a few hours, all strategic centres of Kabul were under Soviet control. The Soviets had taken every precaution to occupy the nerve centres of the city while the Afghans were still unaware that they were being invaded. Russian advisers on attachment to Afghan army units repeated simple tricks they had used during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; Afghan soldiers were told to turn in all live ammunition and substitute them with blank rounds for a ‘training exercise’, batteries were removed from army vehicles for winterization due to an alleged fuel shortage, diesel from the older tanks was siphoned off for the replacement armour scheduled to come in. Soviet advisers even persuaded key personnel of the Kabul air base to go on vacation and hand over their duties to the Soviet experts who had just arrived.
