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

Rumours that thousands of Afghans were being secretly held in the Soviet Union – in violation of international law – had been circulating for more than a year. Many of the families whom I watched as they angrily stormed the Polecharkhi prison outside Kabul in January were looking for relatives who, it now appeared, might have been in Russia all along. According to the Waez letter, he and other Afghans jailed in Tula were referred to as ‘state prisoners’, although all were seized in Afghanistan. In 1979 the US ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubbs, had been murdered by gunmen who, intriguingly, had initially demanded Waez’s release in return for the diplomat’s life. Were the Soviets unwilling to free Waez because this would reveal how many Afghans were held captive in Tula?

I knew that Afghanistan’s government was forcing the last of us out of the country, but the door was still ajar and I thought there was a crack through which I might squeeze. *I made one last trip to Jalalabad with Ali, only to find my hotel the venue for a clandestine meeting between six senior Soviet officers and the Afghan interior minister, Saed Mohamed Gulabzoi, and his local officials, all anxious to prevent a full-scale siege of Jalalabad by the rebels. So dangerous was the highway that the Russians had to be flown down from Kabul by helicopter. I watched them arrive at the Spinghar, protected by security police in riot visors who erected belt-fed machine guns on tripods upon bar tables around the hotel’s rose gardens. There were now 3,000 Soviet troops outside the town.

And the destruction of the villages around Jalalabad was now under way. Alisingh and Alinghar outside Metarlam had been bombed by the Russians but a 40-kilometre journey into mujahedin-held territory in Laghman province showed that every school and government office in the villages had been burned by the rebels. Several villagers said that up to fifty women and children had been killed in Soviet air raids in the previous three days. An old man with an unshaven face kept repeating the word ‘napalm’, gesturing with his hands in a downwards, smothering motion. In one tiny village outside Metarlam, more than 200 men surrounded my taxi when they thought we were Russians.

The mujahedin were not without their humour. Two nights earlier, an Afghan truck-driver found a notice on the main road west. ‘In the name of God,’ it read, ‘this is for tanks.’ The driver journeyed on and promptly set off a landmine. An armed insurgent then turned up to demand that the lorry driver pay $350 for the explosives which he had just wasted. Far less amusing was a report from three independent sources in Jalalabad that a museum at Hadda containing a statue of Buddha – dating from at least the second century bc – had been destroyed, along with other priceless antiquities. What did this mean? And if the reports were true, what confidence could the world have that the giant 1500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan might not one day be similarly destroyed? On my way back to Kabul, the guerrillas were back on the road, twenty of them this time, and there were no longer any roses attached to their rifles.

I would, briefly, return to Afghanistan in the summer of 1980, flying in to Kabul with a tennis racket and an unbelievable claim to be a tourist. The Khad attached a cop to me this time and I was taken under escort to the Intercontinental where I paid him off in return for a taxi ride around the capital. The dust hung in layers of heat over Kabul and the Soviet soldiers were now on the defensive, escorting civilian cars in long armoured convoys across the highways of Afghanistan, their airbase at Bagram now flying bombing sorties against the mujahedin every three minutes. Soviets now occupied senior ‘advisory’ positions in all the Kabul ministries, their large black limousines gliding through the muggy streets of the city at midday, curtains pulled across the back windows and plain-clothes men peering from the front passenger seats. The occupants were not the large, bulky commissars of popular mythology but, for the most part, small, respectable men in glossy grey business suits, narrow, slightly unfashionable ties and hair thick with oil, family men from an autonomous republic with five-year plans to meet.

In the stifling summer, the Russian soldiers were wearing floppy, wide-brimmed sombreros and their trucks jammed the streets of Kabul. Their ‘limited intervention’ had spawned a spring offensive – that tactic beloved of all generals confronted by an armed insurrection – which had now turned into a full-scale military campaign. Helicopter gunships stood in rows five deep at Kabul airport. Four-engined Ilyushin transport aircraft en route to Tashkent turned all day over the city, trailing fuel exhaust as they banked sharply above the international airport to avoid ground-to-air missiles.

At the airport, the two faces of Afghanistan’s revolution could be seen within 800 metres of each other. Above the main terminal building, the faded outline of January’s triumphant greeting to Soviet troops could still be observed – ‘Welcome to the New Model Revolution’ – although the 1.5-metre-high letters had long ago been taken down and the sun had bleached the red paint a drab pink. Just across the airfield, at the eastern end of the main runway, lay the other symbol of Afghanistan’s revolutionary conflict: a Soviet SA-2 missile with a 130-kilogram warhead, a range of 50 kilometres and a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet; this was the same weapon used with devastating effect against US B-52 bombers over Hanoi in the Vietnam war. And Vietnam was the word that more and more Afghans were using to describe their own conflict. President Carter and Mrs Thatcher were urging the world to boycott the Olympics in Moscow.

Kabul’s schoolchildren were refusing to attend classes since hundreds of them were taken ill; rebels, according to the government, had put sulphur in the schools’ water supplies. A thousand children had been taken to the Aliabad hospital in one week alone. At night, gun battles crackled around the city as gunmen attacked Russian patrols and rival Parcham and Khalq party members assaulted each other. A doctor who was a member of President Karmal’s Parcham party was shot dead while visiting a patient at Bandeghazi – within the city limits – but the police could not discover whether he was killed by mujahedin or by Khalq agents. One of the cops assigned to me was a Khalq man who, in the privacy of the hotel elevator, suddenly burst out in anger: ‘It is bad here and I am sick. We want Soviet help – we need it. But if anyone stays longer than we want – anyone, and that includes the Soviet Union – we will shoot them.’

On 14 June, Karmal ordered the execution of thirteen former Khalq functionaries for ‘hatching conspiracies against the state’. Most were minor officials – Sidaq Alamyar, the ex-planning minister, for example, and Saeb Jan Sehrai, who was in charge of ‘border affairs’ – while the deputy prime minister, Asadullah Sawari, who was head of Taraki’s secret service, remained untouched. His name was on the death list of the ‘night letter’ pushed into diplomatic compounds four months earlier. I was lucky to have stolen forty-eight hours in Kabul, albeit under secret police surveillance. When I was taken back to Kabul airport for my flight out, an Aeroflot jet was standing on the apron, its fuselage evidence for Mrs Thatcher’s profound cynicism towards the Soviets.

The aircraft bore Aeroflot’s proud English-language slogan ‘Official Olympic Carrier’ on both sides of its fuselage but from its doors it was disgorging Soviet combat troops, young men – some with blond hair – carrying their rifles in the hot sun as they walked down the steps to the tarmac. They looked happy enough – one raised his arms towards the sun and said something that made his comrades laugh – although their chances of returning home in similar mood had decreased in recent weeks. More than 600 seriously wounded Soviet servicemen had been admitted to the Kabul military hospital, another four hundred to Soviet clinics near the bus station at Khai Khana; of these one thousand, two hundred had died – and this figure only included those who died of wounds, not those who were killed in combat. The dead were loaded in square wooden coffins aboard Antonov-12 aircraft and no one knew what they contained until a young Soviet soldier was seen saluting one of the boxes. Even the Khad secret policeman who followed me so assiduously agreed that the Soviet army was experiencing ‘very big trouble’.