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

There were other graves, of course, innocent mounds with tiny headstones that contained the inevitable victims of every empire’s domesticity. ‘Beatrice Ann, one year and 11 months, only child of Bandmaster and Mrs. A. Pilkington’ lay in the children’s cemetery with ‘Barbara, two years, daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. P. Walker’. She died three days before Christmas in 1928. Some of the children died too young to have names. There were young men, too, who succumbed to the heat and to disease. Private Tidey of the First Sussex died from ‘heatstroke’ and Private Williams of ‘enteric fever’. E. A. Samuels of the Bengal Civil Service succumbed to ‘fever contracted in Afghanistan’. Matron Mary Hall of Queen Alexander’s Military Nursing Service – whose duties in Salonika and Mesopotamia presumably included the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey as well as the British invasion of Iraq in 1917 – died ‘on active service’.

There were a few unexpected tombs. The Very Rev. Courtney Peverley was there, administrator apostolic of Kashmir and Kafiristan, who clearly worked hard because beyond the British headstones were new places of interment for Peshawar’s still extant Christian community, paper crosses and pink flags draped in tribal fashion beside the freshly dug graves. Many imperial graves exhibit a faith that would be understood by any Muslim, the favourite from the Book of Revelation: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’ And there was a Gaelic cross on top of the remains of Lieutenant Walter Irvine of the North West Frontier Police ‘who lost his life in the Nagoman River when leading the Peshawar Vale Hunt of which he was Master’. No Soviet soldier would earn so romantic a memorial. On the graves of the Russian soldiers now dying just north of this cemetery, it would be coldly recorded only that they died performing their ‘international duty’.

The local CIA agent already had a shrewd idea what this meant. He was a thin, over-talkative man who held a nominal post in the US consulate down the road from the Peshawar Intercontinental and who hosted parties of immense tedium at his villa. He had the habit of showing, over and over again, a comedy film about the Vietnam war. Those were the days when I still talked to spooks, and when I called by one evening, he was entertaining a group of around a dozen journalists and showing each of them a Soviet identity card. ‘Nice-looking young guy,’ he said of the pinched face of the man in the black and white photograph. ‘A pilot, shot down, the mujahedin got his papers. What a way to go, a great tragedy that a young guy should die like that.’ I didn’t think much of the CIA man’s crocodile tears but I was impressed by the words ‘shot down’. With what? Did the guerrillas have ground-to-air missiles? And if so, who supplied them – the Americans, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, or those mysterious Arabs? I had seen thousands of Russians but I had yet to see an armed guerrilla close up in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have to wait long.

Ali’s bus returned to the border one warm afternoon and I walked back across the Durand Line to a small grubby booth on the Afghan side of the frontier. The border guard looked at my passport and thumbed through the pages. Then he stopped and scrutinised one of the document’s used pages. As usual, I had written ‘representative’ on my immigration card. But the thin man clucked his tongue. ‘Journalist,’ he said. ‘Go back to Pakistan.’ How did he know? There were visas to Arab countries in the passport which identified me as a journalist, but the Afghan official would not know Arabic, would have no idea that sahafa meant ‘journalist’. A group of men shoved past me and I walked back to Ali. How did they know? Ali looked through my passport and found the page that gave me away. A visa to post-revolutionary Iran was marked with the word khabanagor – Persian for ‘journalist’ – and Persian, or Dari, was one of the languages of Afghanistan. Damn.

I took a taxi back to Peshawar and sent a message to The Times: ‘Scuppered.’ But next day Ali was back at the hotel. ‘Mr Robert, we try again.’ What’s the point? I asked him. ‘We try,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’ I didn’t understand, but I repacked my bags and boarded his friendly wooden bus and set off once more for the border. This was beginning to feel like a real-life version of Carry On up the Khyber , but Ali was strangely confident I would be successful. I sat back in the afternoon sun as the bus moaned its way up the hairpin bends. There’s an odd, unnerving sensation about trying to cross a border without the consent of the authorities. Gavin and I had experienced this at almost every checkpoint we came across in Afghanistan. Would they let us through or turn us round or arrest us? I suppose it was a throwback to all those war films set in German-occupied Europe in which resistance heroes and heroines had to talk their way past Nazi guards. The Afghan border police were not quite up to Wehrmacht standards – and we were no heroes – but it wasn’t difficult to feel a mixture of excitement and dread when we arrived once more at the grotty little booth on the Afghan side of the frontier.

Yet before I had a chance to stand up, Ali was at my seat. ‘Give me your passport,’ he said. ‘And give me $50.’ He vanished with the money. And ten minutes later, he was back with a broad smile. ‘I will take you to Jalalabad,’ he said, handing me back my newly stamped passport. ‘Give me another $50 because I had to give your money away to a poor man.’ The Russians had invaded but they couldn’t beat that most efficacious, that most corrupt of all institutions between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal: The Bribe. I was so happy, I was laughing. I was singing to myself, all the way to Jalalabad. I’d even arranged with Ali that he would stop by at the Spinghar Hotel each morning to take my reports down to Peshawar – and come back in the afternoon with any messages that The Times sent to me via Pakistan. I could meanwhile snuggle down in the Spinghar and stay out of sight of the authorities.

I need not have worried. Every night, the rebels drew closer to Jalalabad. Four days earlier they had blown up a bridge outside the town and that very first night, after dark, they opened fire on an Afghan patrol from the plantation behind the hotel. Hour after hour, I lay in bed, listening to machine guns pummelling away in the orange orchards, sending the tropical birds screaming into the night sky. But it was a Ruritanian affair because, just after the call for morning prayers, Jalalabad would wake up as if the battles had been fought in a dream and reassume its role as a dusty frontier town, its bazaar touting poor-quality Pakistan cloth and local vegetables while the Afghan soldiers ostensibly guarding the market place nodded in fatigue over their ancient – and British – Lee Enfield rifles. I would take a rickshaw out of town to look at a damaged tank or a burned-out government office, type up my report of the fighting for the paper, and at mid-morning Ali would arrive with the ‘down’ bus – Peshawar being 4,700 feet lower than Kabul – to pick up my report.

The teashops, the chaikhana stalls on the main street, were filled with truck-drivers, many of them from Kandahar, and they all spoke of the increasing resistance across the country. South of Kandahar, one man told me, villagers had stopped some Russian construction engineers and killed them all with knives. I could believe it. For however brave the mujahedin might be – and their courage was without question – their savagery was a fact. I didn’t need the fictional Tom Graham or Durand’s account of the fate of the 7th Lancers to realise this. ‘We will take Jalalabad,’ a young man told me over tea one morning. ‘The Russians here are finished.’ A teenage student, holding his father’s hunting falcon on his wrist – editors love these touches, but there it was, a real live bird of prey anchored to the boy’s arm with a chain – boldly stated that ‘the mujahedin will take Jalalabad tonight or tomorrow.’ I admired his optimism but not his military analysis.