Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

One of the best-kept secrets of that war was that the Firm had a source, an “asset” high in Saddam’s government. Martin never met him; he just picked up the messages at preagreed dead-letter boxes, or “drops,” and sent them to Saudi Arabia, where the American-led Coalition HQ was both appreciative and mystified. Saddam capitulated on 28 February 1991, and Mike Martin came out, only to be Very nearly shot by the French Foreign Legion as he came through the border in the dark.

On the morning of 15 February 1989, General Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviet 40 thArmy, the army of occupation in Afghanistan, walked alone back across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River into Soviet Uzbekistan. His entire army had preceded him. The war was over.

The euphoria did not last long. The USSR ’s own Vietnam had ended in disaster. Her restive European satellites were becoming openly mutinous, and her economy was disintegrating. By November, the Berliners had torn down the wall, and the Soviet empire simply fell apart.

In Afghanistan, the Soviets had left behind a government that most analysts predicted would last no time as the victorious warlords formed a stable government and took over. But the pundits were wrong. The government of President Najibullah, the whiskey-appreciating Afghan the Soviets had abandoned in Kabul, hung on for two reasons. One was that the Afghan Army was simply stronger than any other force in the country, backed as it was by the KHAD secret police, and was able to control the cities and thus the bulk of the population.

More to the point, the warlords simply disintegrated into a patchwork quilt of snarling, grabbing, feuding, self-serving opportunists who, far from uniting to form a stable government, did the reverse: They created a civil war. None of this affected Izmat Khan. With his father still head of the family, although stiff and old before his time, and with the help of neighbors, he helped rebuild the hamlet of Maloko-zai. Stone by stone and rock by rock, they cleared the rubble left by the bombs and rockets and remade the family compound next to the mulberry and pomegranate trees.

With his leg fully healed, he had returned to the war and taken command of his father’s lashkar in all but name, and the men had followed him, for he had been blooded. When peace came, his guerrilla group seized a huge cache of weapons the Soviets could not be bothered to carry home.

These they took over the Spin Gahr to Parachinar in Pakistan, a town that is virtually nothing but an arms bazaar. There they traded the Soviet leftovers for cows, goats and sheep to restart the flocks.

If life had been hard before, starting over was even harder, but he enjoyed the labor, and the sense of triumph that Maloko-zai would live again. A man must have roots, and his were here. At twenty, he both uttered the call and led the prayers at the village mosque on a Friday.

The Kuchi nomads passing through brought grim tales from the plains. The Army of the DRA, loyal to Najibullah, still held the cities, but the warlords infested the countryside and they and their men behaved liked brigands. Tolls were arbitrarily set up on main roads, and travelers were stripped of their money and goods or badly beaten.

Pakistan, in the form of its ISI Directorate, was backing Hekmat-yar to become controller of all Afghanistan, and in areas he ruled utter terror existed. All who had formed the Peshawar 7 to fight the Soviets were now at each other’s throats, and the people groaned. From heroes, the muj were now seen as tyrants. Izmat Khan thanked the merciful Allah that he was spared the misery of the plains.

With the end of the war, the Arabs had almost all gone from the mountains and their precious caves. The one who by the end had become their uncrowned leader, the tall Saudi from the cave hospital was also gone. Some five hundred Arabs had stayed behind, but they were not popular, were scattered far and wide and living like beggars.

When he was twenty, Izmat Khan was visiting a neighboring valley when he saw a girl washing the family clothes in the stream. She failed to hear his horse because of the sound of the running water, and before she could draw the end of her hejab across her face he had made eye contact. She fled in alarm and embarrassment. But he had seen that she was beautiful. Izmat did what any young man would have. He consulted his mother. She was delighted, and soon two aunts had joined with her in happy conspiracy to find the girl and persuade Nuri Khan to contact the father to arrange a union. Her name was Maryam, and the wedding took place in the late spring of 1993. Of course, it was in the open air, full of blossoms being blown off the walnut trees. There was a feast, and the bride came from her village on a decorated horse. There was playing of the flutes and attan dancing under the trees, but of course only for the men. With his madrassah training, Izmat protested at the singing and dancing, but his father was rejuvenated and overruled him. So for a day, Izmat rejected his strict Wahhabi training, and he, too, danced in the meadow, and the eyes of his bride followed him everywhere. The delay between the first glimpse by the stream and the marriage was necessary, both to arrange the details of the dowry and to build a new house for the newlyweds inside the Khan compound. It was here that he took his bride when night had fallen and the exhausted villagers returned home, and his mother forty yards away nodded in satisfaction when a single girl’s cry in the night told her that her daughter-in-law had become a woman. Three months later, it was clear she would bear a child in the snows of February. As Maryam carried Izmat’s child, the Arabs came back. The tall Saudi who led them was not among them; he was somewhere far away called Sudan. But he sent much money, and by paying tribute to the warlords was able to set up training camps. Here, at Khalid ibn Walid, Al Farouk, Sadeek, Khaldan, Jihad Wai and Darunta, the thousands of new volunteers from across the Arabic-speaking world came to train for war.

But what war? So far as Izmat Khan could see, they took no sides in the civil war among the tribal satraps, so who were they training to fight? He learned that it was all because the tall one, whom his followers called the Emir, had declared jihad against his own government in Saudi Arabia and against the West. But Izmat Khan had no quarrel with the West. The West had helped with arms and money to defeat the Soviets, and the only kafir he had ever met had saved his life. It was not his holy war, not his jihad, he decided. His concern was for his country whose situation was devolving into madness.

The Parachute Regiment accepted him back and asked no questions, because that was what it was told to do, but he was already acquiring a reputation as a bit of an oddity. Two unexplained absences from duty, each for six months, inside four years, causes raised eyebrows over breakfast in any military unit. For 1992, he was sent to the Staff College at Camberley, and thence back to the ministry, but as a major.

This time, it was to the Directorate of Military Operations again, but as a Staff Officer 2 in Department 3, the Balkans. The war was still raging, the Serbs under Milosevic were dominant, and the world was sickened by the massacres known as “ethnic cleansing.” Chafing at the lack of any chance of action, he spent two years commuting in a dark suit from the suburbs to London. Officers who have served in the SAS can return for a second tour, but only by invitation. Mike Martin got his call from Hereford at the end of 1994. It was the Christmas present he had been hoping for. But it did not please Lucinda. There had been no baby; there were two careers heading in different directions. Lucinda had been offered a big promotion. She called it “the chance of a lifetime,” but it meant going to work in the Midlands. The marriage was under strain, and Mike Martin’s orders were to command B Squadron, twenty-two SAS, and take them covertly to Bosnia. Ostensibly, they would be part of the United Nations’ UNPROFOR peacekeeping mission. In fact, they would hunt down and snatch war criminals. He was not allowed to tell Lucinda the details, only that he was leaving again.