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

All my life in the Middle East, people have ordered me to trust them. And almost always I did and they were worthy of that trust. Ali received $50 a day, every day, to take my typed dispatch to Peshawar. The operators received $40 a day to telex it to London. Even in the worst blizzards down the Kabul Gorge, Ali’s ancient bus made it through the snowdrifts and the Russian checkpoints. Sometimes I travelled with him as far as Jalalabad. The Afghan army had been told to stop journalists roaming the country in cars but they never thought to check the bus. So I would sit on the steps with Ali as we puttered and rocked down the Kabul Gorge, feeling the warmth of the countryside as we descended into the Indus valley. I would stay at the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad, spend the morning driving into the rural villages in a motorised rickshaw – a cloth-covered cabin mounted on the back of a motorcycle – to investigate the results of the overnight fighting between the Russians and the mujahedin and then pick up Ali’s return bus to Kabul in the afternoon. Ali never lost a single report. Only when I received a telegram from The Times did I realise how well he did his job. ‘MANY THANKS … FILES STOP TUESDAY’S LEAD PAPERThe Times ever had, his old bus its finest transport. And when one night, in the bar of the Kabul Intercontinental, a reporter from the Daily Mail admitted he had received a telegram from his editors in London with the angry demand ‘Does Fisk have cleft stick?’ I added $100 to Ali’s next payment.

Slowly, Gavin and I enlarged our area of operations. Two hundred kilometres west of Kabul lay the thousand-year-old city of Ghazni, clustering round the giant battlements of a Turkish fort destroyed by the British in the First Afghan War, a settlement on the road to Kandahar which was successively destroyed by Arab invaders in 869 and again by Genghis Khan in 1221. The Soviet army, we were told, had not yet reached Ghazni, so we took the highway south past the big Soviet guns that ringed Kabul and a European face beneath a Cossack-style hat waved us, unsmiling, through the last Russian checkpoint. Gavin and I were working our plastic foliage routine, pulling aside the ghastly purple and blue artificial flowers whenever a Soviet tank obligingly crossed our path so that Mike could run another two or three feet of film. At the tiny, windy village of Saydabad, 70 kilometres down the road, more Russian tanks were dug in beside the highway, their barrels pointing west, dwarfing the poor mud and wattle huts in which the villagers lived. There was a bridge guarded by four soldiers with bayonets fixed and then there was just an empty, unprotected road of ice and drifting snow that stretched down towards the provinces of Paktia and Ghazni.

The old city, when Gavin and his crew and I turned up in Mr Samadali’s Peugeot, looked like a scene from a medieval painting, walled ramparts set against the snow-smothered peaks of the Safid Kuh mountains and pale blue skies that distorted all perspective. Indeed, there were no Russians, just a series of Afghan army lorries that trundled every half-hour or so down from the north to the Ghazni barracks, their red Afghan insignia a doubtful protection against attack by rebel tribesmen, their scruffily dressed drivers peering nervously from the cab. The Afghan army, notionally loyal to its new president and his Soviet allies, theoretically controlled the countryside, although it was clear the moment we entered Ghazni that some form of unofficial ceasefire existed between the local soldiers and the Pathan tribesmen. Afghan troops in sheepskin cloaks and vests – Ghazni is famous for the manufacture of embroidered Pustin coats – were wandering the narrow, mud streets, looking for provisions beneath their turreted, crumbling barracks.

Almost a thousand years ago, Mahmud of Ghazni imposed his rule over most of Afghanistan, devastated north-west India and established an Islamic empire that consolidated Sunni Muslim power over thousands of square miles. Ghazni became one of the great cities of the Persian world whose 400 resident poets included the great Ferdowsi. But the city was now a mockery of its glorious past. Some of the battlements had long ago collapsed and ice had cracked the ancient walls in the sub-zero temperatures. Isolated from the outside world, its inhabitants were suspicious of strangers, a dangerous and understandable obsession that had reached a new intensity now that reports of the Soviet invasion had reached the city.

We had scarcely parked our car when a tall man with a long grey moustache approached us. ‘Are you Russian?’ he asked, and a group of Pathans in blue and white headdress began to gather around the car. We told them we were English and for a minute or so there were a few friendly smiles. Gavin and I were to develop our own special smile for these people, a big, warm smile of delight to hide our dark concern. How good to see you. What a wonderful country. My God, how you must hate those Russians. All of us knew how quickly things could go wrong. It was only a few months since a group of Soviet civilian construction workers and their wives had decided to visit the blue-tiled Masjid Jami mosque in Herat – a place of worship since the time of Zoroaster – only to be seized by a crowd and knifed to death. Several of the Russians were skinned alive. Only the previous day, though I did not know it then, The Times had published a photograph of two blindfolded men in the hands of Afghan rebels. They were high-school teachers detained in the city of Farah, 300 kilometres west of Kandahar, and the man on the right of the picture had already been executed as a communist.

Mr Samadali needed oil for his Peugeot, and from a cluttered, dirty, concrete-floored shop an old man produced a can of motor oil. Horses and carts and donkeys staggering under sacks of grain slithered through the slush and mud and then someone muttered ‘Khar’ and the smiles all faded. Khar means ‘donkey’ and though apparently humorous on first hearing, it is a term of disgust and hatred when used about foreigners. ‘They are calling you “ khar ”,’ Mr Samadali said desperately. ‘They cannot tell the difference between Englishmen and Russians. They do not want foreigners here. You must go.’ A larger group of Pathans had now arrived and stood in a line along a raised wooden pavement beside the street. There were no guns in their hands, although two had long knives in their belts. A middle-aged man came up to us. ‘Leave here now,’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t stop for anyone. If you are stopped by people on the road, drive through them. You are foreigners and they will think you are Russians and kill you. They will find out who you are afterwards.’ We left Ghazni at speed. Were we really in danger? More than twenty-one years later, I would confront an almost identical group of angry Afghans and, almost at the cost of my life, I would discover just what it meant to incur their fury.

Frightening off strangers was one thing. Fighting a well-equipped modern army would be quite another. On the road north again, we noticed, high on the hillsides and deep in the snow, a series of metal turrets with gun barrels poking from them. The Russians had already taken physical control of the highway even though they did not stand beside the road. Soviet tanks had been parachuted into the mountains north of Kabul and the artillery outside Ghazni had also been dropped from the air. Our plastic foliage twitched aside as we cleared the windscreen for Mike. We were becoming experts. Indeed, it was Gavin’s contention that the Russians would inevitably learn about our stage-prop jungle and assume that all modern movies were produced like this, that a new generation of Soviet film-makers would insist on shooting all future productions through car windows stuffed with artificial purple flowers.