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

Not that the governor of Jalalabad let these things overwhelm him. ‘There is no reason to overdramatise these events,’ he said, as if the nightly gun battles had been a part of everyone’s daily life for years. He sipped tea as he signed the reports, joking with an army lieutenant and ordering the removal of an old beggar who had forced his way into the room to shout for money. ‘All revolutions are the same,’ he said. ‘We defend the revolution, we talk, we fight, we speak against our enemies and our enemies try to start a counter-revolution and so we defend ourselves against them. But we will win.’

If Mr Ziarad seemed a trifle philosophical – almost whimsical, I thought – in his attitude towards Afghanistan’s socialist revolution, it was as well to remember that he was no party man. Somehow, he had avoided membership of both the Parcham and the Khalq; his only concession to the revolution was an imposing but slightly bent silver scale model of a Mig jet fighter that perched precariously on one end of his desk. He admitted that the insurgents were causing problems. ‘We cannot stop them shooting in the country. We cannot stop them blowing up the electric cables and the gas and setting off bombs at night. It is true that they are trying to capture Jalalabad and they are getting closer to the city. But they cannot succeed.’

Here Mr Ziarad drew a diagram on a paper on his desk. It showed a small circle, representing Jalalabad, and a series of arrows pointing towards the circle which indicated the rebel attacks. Then he pencilled in a series of arrows which moved outwards from Jalalabad. ‘These,’ he said proudly, ‘are the counter-attacks which we are going to make. We have been through this kind of thing before and always we achieve the same result. When the enemy gets closer to the centre of Jalalabad, they are more closely bunched together and our forces can shoot them more easily and then we make counter-attacks and drive them off.’ What a strange phenomenon is the drug of hope. I was to hear this explanation from countless governors and soldiers across the Middle East over the coming quarter of a century – Westerners as well as Muslims – all insisting that things were getting worse because they were getting better, that the worse things were, the better they would become.

Mr Ziarad claimed that only three Afghan soldiers had been killed in the past week’s fighting around the city and – given the unspoken truce between the army and the mujahedin – the governor’s statistics were probably correct. He did deny, however, that there were any Soviet troops in Jalalabad – only a handful of Russian agricultural advisers and teachers were here, he said – which did not take account of the thousand Soviet soldiers in the barracks east of the town. He was not concerned about the Russian presence in his country. ‘It is the bandit groups that are the problem and the dispossessed landlords who had their land taken from them by our Decree Number Six and they are assisted by students of imperialism. These people are trained in camps in Pakistan. They are taught by the imperialists to shoot and throw grenades and set off mines.’

The governor still visited the nearest villages during daylight, in the company of three soldiers, to inspect the progress of land reform and Jalalabad’s newly created irrigation scheme. But he understood why the reforms had created animosity. ‘We tried to make sure that all men and women had equal rights and the same education,’ he said. ‘But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.’

Mr Ziarad’s last words, as we walked from his office, were drowned by the roar of four more Soviet helicopter gunships that raced across the bazaar, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air beside the single-storey mud-walled houses. He asked me if I would like to use his car to travel back to my hotel. In view of the angry faces of the Afghans watching the helicopters, I decided that the governor of Jalalabad had made the kind of offer it was safer to refuse. But the cops at the Spinghar were getting nosy, wanting to know how long I was staying in Jalalabad and why I didn’t go to Kabul. It was time to let Jalalabad ‘cool down’. As Gavin always said, don’t get greedy. *

It was the Russians who were getting greedy. Hundreds of extra troops were now being flown into Kabul in a fleet of Antonov transport aircraft along with new amphibious BMB armoured vehicles. In some barracks, Russian and Afghan soldiers had been merged into new infantry units, presumably to stiffen Afghan army morale. New Afghan army trucks carried Afghan forces but Soviet drivers. There were more Karmal speeches, the latest of which attacked what he called ‘murderers, terrorists, bandits, subversive elements, robbers, traitors and hirelings’. That he should, well over a month after the Soviet invasion, be appealing for ‘volunteer resistance groups’ to guard roads, bridges and convoys – against the much more powerful and genuine ‘resistance’, of course – demonstrated just how serious the problem of the insurgents had become and how large an area of Afghanistan they now effectively controlled.

The Russians could neither wipe out the guerrillas nor give hope to Afghan villagers that their presence would improve their lives. Large areas of Afghanistan were cut off from government-subsidised food and the Soviets were flying planeloads of grain – even tractors – into Kabul while one of their generals appeared at the Bagram airbase to claim that only ‘terrorist remnants’ remained in the mountains. ‘Remnants’ – bakoyaye in Dari – became the vogue word for the insurgents on Afghan radio. But to ‘reform’ Afghanistan under these circumstances was impossible. The government were losing. It was only a matter of time. And the more the government said they were winning, the fewer people believed them. In the lobby of the Intercontinental, a Polish diplomat told me that he thought the Russians would need at least 200,000 troops to win their war. *

Karmal’s men had effectively closed down the capital’s mosques as a centre of resistance. When I found the speaker of the Polekheshti Mosque in the centre of Kabul, a small man with a thin sallow face whose features betrayed his anxiety and who refused even to give his name, he declined to answer even the mildest questions about the welfare of his people. He arrived one minute before morning prayers, walking quickly across the ice-encrusted forecourt in his tightly wound silk turban and golden cap and leaving immediately his devotions were completed. When I walked towards him, he immediately glanced over his right shoulder. And when I presented him with a list of questions in Pushtu – what was the role of Islam in Afghanistan since December, I asked him? – he waved the paper in the frozen air in a gesture of hopelessness.

‘Your questions are all political,’ he yelped at me. ‘One of your questions is asking if the people are happy with the new regime of Babrak Karmal. I will answer no questions about him. I do not represent the people. I will answer only religious questions.’ It was predictable. As khatib of the Polekheshti, he had only to interpret the Koran, not to deliver sermons on the morality of his government. Since the khatibs had all been appointed by the revolutionary governments in the past two years, there was even less chance that he would unburden himself of any feelings about the Soviet Union’s invasion. A few days after Taraki’s coup in 1978, calls for a jihad were read out in Kabul’s mosques. Any political independence among the Sunni Muslim clergy had been wiped out within days when police raided all the city’s religious institutions and dispatched dissenting mullahs to the Polecharkhi prison, whence they never emerged. But brutal repression did not alone account for the lack of any serious political leadership within the clergy.