Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

From ‘villains’ to ‘flies’ and ‘niggers’ in one hundred pages, it’s not difficult to see how easily my father’s world of ‘pure, clean and upright’ Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the ‘boldness’ of Afghan tribesmen – and just one to their ‘courage’ – no attempt is made to explain their actions. They are evil, hate-filled, anxious to prove their Muslim faith by ‘cutting pieces out of the unfortunate Britisher’. The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country simply does not exist in the story.

If official British accounts of Afghanistan were not so prejudiced, they nevertheless maintained the oversimplified and supremacist view of the Afghans that Johnston used to such effect in his novel. An account of life in Kabulbetween 1836 and 1838 by Lt. Col. Sir Alexander Burnes of the East India Company – published a year before the massacre of the British army in 1842 – gives a sensitive portrayal of the generosity of tribal leaders and demonstrates a genuine interest in Afghan customs and social life. But by the end of the century, the official Imperial Gazetteer of India chooses to describe the animals of Afghanistan before it reports on its people, who are ‘handsome and athletic … inured to bloodshed from childhood … treacherous and passionate in revenge … ignorant of everything connected with their religion beyond its most elementary doctrines …’

Among the young Britons who accompanied the army to Kabul in 1879 – a real Briton, this time – was a 29-year-old civil servant, Henry Mortimer Durand, who had been appointed political secretary to General Roberts. In horror, he read the general’s proclamation to the people of Kabul, declaring the murder of the British mission diplomats ‘a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people’. The followers of Yaqub Khan, General Roberts declared, would not escape and their ‘punishment should be such as will be felt and remembered … all persons convicted of bearing a part in [the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts’. It was an old, Victorian, version of the warning that an American president would give to the Afghans 122 years later.

Durand, a humane and intelligent man, confronted Roberts over his proclamation. ‘ It seemed to me so utterly wrongin tone and in matter that I determined to do my utmost to overthrow it … the stilted language, and the absurd affectation of preaching historical morality to the Afghans, all our troubles with whom began by our own abominable injustice, made the paper to my mind most dangerous for the General’s reputation.’ Roberts ameliorated the text, not entirely to Durand’s satisfaction. He thought it merely ‘a little less objectionable’.

Yet Durand sent a letterto his biographer’s sister, Ella Sykes, which provided gruesome evidence that Tom Graham contained all too real descriptions of Afghan cruelty. ‘During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec.r 1879,’ he wrote almost sixteen years after the event, ‘two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives … I saw it all …’ But Durand was well aware that the Afghans were not the ‘fiends in human form’ of popular fiction. In 1893, he describes the Afghan army commander, Ghulam Hyder, as an inquisitive and generous man.

Today we talked about the size of London, and how it was supplied with food … about religious prejudices, the hatred of Sunnis and Shias, the Reformation and the Inquisition, the Musselman [sic] and Christian stories of Christ’s life and death, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and his wars, about which Ghulam Hyder knew a good deal, the manners of the Somalis, tiger shooting …

Durand had been sent to negotiate with the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman – a cousin of Shir Ali – over the southern border of his country, to secure an agreed frontier between British India and Afghanistan. Durand’s brother Edward had already helped to delineate the country’s northern frontier with Russia – during which the Russians sent a force of Cossacks to attack Afghan troops on the Kushk river – and Mortimer Durand found the king deeply unsympathetic to his northern neighbour. According to Durand’s notes, Abdur Rahman announced that

unless you drive me into enmity, I am your friend for my life. And why? The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkmenistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join with them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I hate them.

Eighty-six years later, the Russians would find out what this meant.

I saw them first, those Russians, standing beside their T-72 tanks next to the runways at Kabul airport, fleece-lined jackets below white-pink faces with thick grey fur hats bearing the red star and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The condensation of their breath hung so thickly in the air in front of their mouths that I looked for cartoon quotations in the bubbles. On the trucks parked beside the highway into the city, they wore the steel helmets so familiar from every Second World War documentary, the green metal casks with ripples over the ears, rifles in gloved hands, narrowed eyes searching the Afghans unflinchingly. They drew heavily and quickly on cigarettes, a little grey smog over each checkpoint. So these were the descendants of the men of Stalingrad and Kursk, the heroes of Rostov and Leningrad and Berlin. On the tarmac of the airport, there were at least seventy of the older T-62s. The snow lay thickly over the tanks, icing sugar on cakes of iron, enough to break the teeth of any Afghan ‘terrorist’.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, but when I arrived two weeks later their armour was still barrelling down through the slush from the Amu Darya river, the Oxus of antiquity, which Durand’s brother Edward had agreed with the Russians should be the northern frontier of this frost-covered land. Save for a few isolated cities, the Soviet army appeared to have crushed all resistance. Along the highways south and east of Kabul, Russian military encampments protected by dozens of tanks and heavy artillery controlled the arteries between the rebellious provinces of south-eastern Afghanistan. An ‘intervention’, Leonid Brezhnev had called his invasion, peace-loving assistance to the popular socialist government of the newly installed Afghan president Babrak Karmal.

‘In all my life, I have never seen so many tanks,’ my old Swedish radio colleague from Cairo, Lars Gunnar Erlandsen, said when we met. Lars Gunnar was a serious Swede, a thatch of blond hair above piercing blue eyes and vast spectacles. ‘And never in my life do I ever want to see so many tanks again,’ he said. ‘It is beyond imagination.’ There were now five complete Soviet divisions in Afghanistan; the 105th Airborne Division based on Kabul, the 66th Motorised Rifle Brigade in Herat, the 357th Motorised Rifles in Kandahar, the 16th Motorised Rifles in the three northern provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar and Samangan and the 306th Motorised Division in Kabul with the Soviet paratroopers. There were already 60,000 Soviet troops in the country, vast numbers of them digging slit trenches beside the main roads. This was invasion on a massive scale, a superpower demonstration of military will, the sclerotic Brezhnev – Red Army political commissar on the Ukrainian front in 1943, he would die within three years – now flexing his impotent old frame for the last time.