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

Perhaps by way of compensation, the truck-drivers of Afghanistan had turned their lorries into masterpieces of Afghan pop art, every square inch of bodywork covered in paintings and multicoloured designs. Afghan lorry art possessed a history all its own, created in 1945 when metal sheeting was added to the woodwork of long-distance trucks; the panels were turned into canvases by artists in Kabul and later Kandahar. Lorry-owners paid large sums to these painters – the more intricate the decoration, the more honoured the owner became – and the art was copied from Christmas cards, calendars, comics and mosques. Tarzan and the Horse of Imam Ali could be seen side by side with parrots, mountains, helicopters and flowers. Three-panelled rail-boards on Bedford trucks provided perfect triptychs. A French author once asked a lorry-owner why he painted his coachwork and received the reply that ‘ it is a garden, for the road is long’.

Inevitably, Karmal tried to appease the mujahedin, seeking a ceasefire in rural areas through a series of secret meetings between government mediators and tribal leaders in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. A PDP statement announced that it would ‘begin friendly negotiations with … national democratic progressives and Islamic circles [sic] and organisations’. This new approach, intriguing though doomed, was accompanied by a desperate effort on the part of the government to persuade itself that it was acquiring international legitimacy. Kabul newspapers carried the scarcely surprising news that favourable reactions to the new regime had come from Syria, Kampuchea and India as well as the Soviet Union and its east European satellites. In a long letter to Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Islamic Revolution in Iran the previous year had so frightened the Soviets, Karmal criticised the adverse Iranian response to his coup – it had been condemned by Iranian religious leaders – and sought to assure the Ayatollah that the murder of Muslim tribesmen in Afghanistan had been brought to an end with Amin’s overthrow. ‘My Government will never allow anybody to use our soil as a base against the Islamic revolution in Iran and against the interest of the fraternal Iranian people,’ he wrote. ‘We expect our Iranian brothers to take an identical stance.’

Iran, needless to say, was in no mood to comply. Within days of the Soviet invasion, the foreign ministry in Tehran had stated that ‘Afghanistan is a Muslim country and … the military intervention of the government of the Soviet Union in the neighbouring country of our co-religionists is considered a hostile measure … against all the Muslims of the world.’ Within months – and aware that the United States was sending aid to the guerrillas – Iran would be planning its own military assistance programme for the insurgents. By July, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister, was telling me that he hoped his country would giveweapons to the rebels if the Soviet Union did not withdraw its army. ‘Some proposal [to this effect] has been given to the Revolutionary Council,’ he told me in Tehran. ‘… Just as we were against the American military intervention in Vietnam, we think exactly the same way about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan … The Soviet Union claims that they have come to Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government. The Americans were in Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese government.’ But at this stage, Karmal had more pressing problems than Iran.

Desperate to maintain the loyalty of the Afghan army – we heard reports that only 60 per cent of the force was now following orders – Karmal even made an appeal to their patriotism, promising increased attention to their ‘material needs’. These ‘heroic officers, patriotic cadets and valiant soldiers’ were urged to ‘defend the freedom, honour and security of your people … with high hopes for a bright future.’ ‘Material needs’ clearly meant back pay. The fact that such an appeal had to be made at all said much about the low morale of the Afghan army. No sooner had he tried to appease his soldiers than Karmal turned to the Islamists who had for so long opposed the communist regimes in Kabul. He announced that he would change the Afghan flag to reintroduce green, the colour of Islam so rashly deleted from the national banner by Taraki, to the fury of the clergy. At the same time – and Karmal had an almost unique ability to destroy each new political initiative with an unpopular counter-measure – he warned that his government would treat ‘terrorists, gangsters, murderers and highwaymen’ with ‘revolutionary decisiveness’.

For ‘terrorists’, read ‘guerrillas’ or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – ‘freedom fighters’. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always ‘terrorists’. In the seventeenth century, governments used ‘heretic’ in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.

In Afghanistan there were no such formulaic retreats. In my cosy room at the Intercontinental, each night I would spread out a map. What new journey could be made across this iced plateau before the Russians threw us out? With this in mind, I realised that the full extent of the Russian invasion might be gauged from the Soviet border. If I could reach Mazar-e-Sharif, far to the north on the Amu Darya river, I would be close to the frontier of the Soviet Union and could watch their great convoys entering the country. I packed a soft Afghan hat and a brown, green-fringed shawl I’d bought in the bazaar, along with enough dollars to pay for several nights in a Mazar hotel, and set off before dawn to the cold but already crowded bus station in central Kabul.

The Afghans waiting for the bus to Mazar were friendly enough. When I said I was English, there were smiles and several young men shook my hand. Others watched me with the same suspicion as the three Khad men at the Intercontinental. There were women in burqas who sat in silence in the back of the wooden vehicle. I pulled my Afghan hat low over my forehead and threw my shawl over my shoulder. Cowled in cigarette smoke from the passengers, I took a seat on the right-hand side of the bus because the soldiers on checkpoint duty always approached from the left. It worked. The bus growled up the highway towards Salang as the first sun shone bleakly over the snow plains. Gavin and I had now driven this road so many times that, despite its dangers, the highway was familiar, almost friendly. On the right was the big Soviet base north of Kabul airport. Here was the Afghan checkpoint outside Charikar. This was where the young Russian soldier had shown us the wound in his hand. Soldiers at the Afghan checkpoints were too cold to come aboard and look at the passengers. When Soviet soldiers made a cursory inspection, I curled up in my seat with my shawl round my face. Three hours later, the bus pulled over to the side of the highway just short of the Salang Tunnel. There were Russian armoured vehicles parked a few metres away and a clutch of soldiers with blue eyes and brown hair poking from beneath their fur hats. That’s when things went wrong.

A Soviet officer approached the bus from the right-hand side and his eyes met mine. Then a man inside the bus – an Afghan with another thin moustache – pointed at me. He marched down the aisle, stood next to my seat and raised his finger, pointing it straight at my face. Betrayed. That was the word that went through my mind. I had watched this scene in a dozen movies. So, no doubt, had the informer. This man must have been working for the Afghan secret police, saw me climb aboard in Kabul and waited until we reached this heavily guarded checkpoint to give me away. Another young Afghan jumped from the bus, walked down the right side of the vehicle and then he too pointed at me through the window. Doubly betrayed. We were a hundred miles from Kabul. If I had cleared this last major barrage , I would have been through the tunnel and on to Mazar.