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

But Russia’s final imperial adventure had all the awesome fury of Britain’s Afghan wars. In the previous week alone, Soviet Antonov-22 transport aircraft had made 4,000 separate flights into the capital. Every three minutes, squadrons of Mig-25s would race up from the frozen runways of Kabul airport and turn in the white sunshine towards the mountains to the east and there would follow, like dungeon doors slamming deep beneath our feet, a series of massive explosions far across the landscape. Soviet troops stood on the towering heights of the Kabul Gorge. I was Middle East correspondent of The Times of London, the paper whose nineteenth-century war correspondent William Howard Russell – a student of Trinity College, Dublin, as I was to be – won his spurs in the 1854–55 Anglo-Russian war in the Crimea. We were all Tom Grahams now.

I think that’s how many of us felt that gleaming, iced winter. I was already exhausted. I lived in Beirut, where the Lebanese civil war had sucked in one Israeli army and would soon consume another. Only three weeks before, I had left post-revolutionary Iran, where America had just lost its very own ‘policeman of the Gulf’, Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, in favour of that most powerful of Islamic leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Within nine months, I would be running for my life under shellfire with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army as it invaded the Islamic Republic. America had already ‘lost’ Iran. Now it was in the process of ‘losing’ Afghanistan – or at least watching that country’s last pitiful claim to national independence melting into the Kremlin’s embrace. Or so it looked to us at the time. The Russians wanted a warm-water port, just as General Roberts had feared in 1878. If they could reach the Gulf coast – Kandahar is 650 kilometres from the Gulf of Oman – then after a swift incursion through Iranian or Pakistani Baluchistan, Soviet forces would stand only 300 kilometres from the Arabian peninsula. That, at least, was the received wisdom, the fount of a thousand editorials. The Russians are coming. That the Soviet Union was dying, that the Soviet government was undertaking this extraordinary expedition through panic – through fear that the collapse of a communist ally in Afghanistan might set off a chain reaction among the Soviet Muslim republics – was not yet apparent, although within days I would see the very evidence that proved the Kremlin might be correct.

Indeed, many of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan came from those very Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia whose loyalties so concerned Brezhnev. In Kabul, Soviet troops from the Turkoman region were conversing easily with local Afghan commanders. The high-cheekboned Asiatic features of some soldiers often suggested that their military units had been drawn from the Mongolian region. In Kabul and the villages immediately surrounding the city, no open hostility was shown towards the Soviet invaders in the daylight hours; so many Russian units had been moved into the snow-covered countryside that Afghan troops had been withdrawn to protect the capital. But at night, the Soviets were pulled back towards Kabul and unconfirmed reports already spoke of ten Russian dead in two weeks, two of them beaten to death with clubs. In Jalalabad, 65 kilometres by road from the Pakistan border, thunderous night-time explosions bore witness to the continued struggle between Afghan tribesmen and Soviet troops.

For the next two months, we few journalists who managed to enter Afghanistan were witness to the start of a fearful tragedy, one that would last for more than a quarter of a century and would cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America. How could we have known? How could we have guessed that while an Islamic revolution had enveloped Iran, a far more powerful spiritual force was being nursed and suckled here amid the snows of early January 1980? Again, the evidence was there, for those of us who chose to seek it out, who realised that the narrative of history laid down by our masters – be they of the Moscow or the Washington persuasion – was essentially short-term, false and ultimately self-defeating. Perhaps we were too naive, too ill-prepared for events on such a scale. Who could grasp in so short a time the implications of this essentially imperial story, this latest adventure in the ‘Great Game’? We were young, most of us who managed to scramble into Afghanistan that January. I was thirty-five, most of my colleagues were younger, and journalism is not only an imprecise science but a fatiguing one whose practice involves almost as much bureaucracy as it does fact-gathering. I had spent Christmas in Ireland and returned to wartime Beirut on 3 January to prepare for my onward assignment to cover the continuing revolution in Iran. But no event could compare to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

For a journalist, nothing can beat that moment when a great story beckons, when history really is being made and when a foreign editor tells you to go for it. I remember one hot day in Beirut when gunmen had hijacked a Lufthansa passenger jet to Dubai. I could get there in four hours, I told London. ‘Go. Go. Go,’ they messaged back. But this was drama on an infinitely greater scale, an epic if we could be there to report it. The Soviet army was pouring into Afghanistan, and from their homes and offices in London, New York, Delhi, Moscow, my colleagues were all trying to find a way there. Beirut was comparatively close but it was still three thousand kilometres west of Kabul. And it was a surreal experience to drive through West Beirut’s civil war gunfire to the ticketing office of Middle East Airlines to seek the help of a Lebanese airline that now had only twelve elderly Boeing 707s and three jumbos to its name. Under the old travel rules, Afghanistan issued visas to all British citizens on arrival. But we had to work on the principle that with the country now a satellite of the Soviet Union, those regulations – a remnant of the days when Kabul happily lay astride the hashish tourist trail to India – would have been abandoned.

Richard Wigg, our India correspondent, was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, Michael Binyon was in Moscow. The Lebanese airline had conceived of a plan to get me into Afghanistan, an ingenious plot that I sent through to London on the ancient telex machines in the Beirut Associated Press bureau, which regularly misspelled our copy. ‘Friends in ticketing section at MiddlehEast [ sic ] Airlines … have suggested we might try following: I buy single ticket to Kabul and travel in on Ariana [Afghan Airlines] flight that terminates in Kabul,’ I wrote. ‘This means that even if I get bounced, I will probably earn myself twelve hours or so in the city … because my flight will have terminated in Afghanistan and I can’t be put [ sic ] back on it … At the very worst, I would get bounced and could buy a ticket to Pakistan then head for Peshawar … Grateful reply soonest so I can get MEA ticket people to work early tomorrow (Fri) morning.’ London replied within the hour. ‘Please go ahead with single ticket Kabul plan,’ the foreign desk messaged. I was already back at the MEA office when The Times sent another note. ‘Binyon advises that Afghan embassies around [ sic ] the world have been instructed to issue visus [ sic ] which might make things easier.’

This was astonishing. The Russians wanted us there. Their ‘fraternal support’ for the new Karmal government – and the supposedly hideous nature of his predecessor’s regime – was to be publicised. The Russians were coming to liberate Afghanistan. This was obviously the story the Kremlin was concocting. For several years, I had – in addition to my employment by The Times – been reporting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I liked radio, I liked CBC’s courage in letting their reporters speak their minds, in letting me go into battle with a tape recorder to ‘tell it like it is’, to report the blood and stench of wars and my own disgust at human conflict. Sue Hickey came on the telex from CBC’s London office. ‘Good luck keep ur eyes open in the back of ur head,’ she wrote. I promised her an Afghan silk scarf – bribery knows no bounds in radio journalism. ‘What is the Russian for “Help I surrender where is the Brit Embassy?’” I asked. ‘The Russian for help is “pomog” , ’ Sue responded in her telex shorthand. ‘So there u shud not hv any trouble bi bi.’