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

But back in that chill February of 1980, I still had two days of precious, lonely freedom before my visa expired and I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I decided this time to be greedy, to try once more a long-distance bus ride, this time to a city whose people, so we were told in Kabul, had rediscovered their collective faith in confronting the invaders of their country: Kandahar.

I took the bus before dawn, from the same station I had set out from on my vain trip to Mazar, wearing the same Afghan hat and hunched under the same brown shawl. Men and women sat together – they all appeared to be families – and the moment I announced my nationality, I was deluged with apples, cheese, oranges and the big, flat, sagging nan bread that Afghans use as an envelope to contain their food. When I gently expressed my concern that there might be ‘bad’ people on the bus – the very word Khad usually had the effect of silencing any conversation for an hour – I was assured there were none. I would be safe. And so the passengers, with scarcely any English, gave me their silent protection on the fourteen-hour journey across the moonlike, frozen landscape to Kandahar.

It was an epic of a country at war. Our coach passed the wrecks of countless vehicles beside the road. Sixty-five kilometres west of Ghazni, the town from which Gavin and I and his crew had fled the previous month – it already felt another life ago – a convoy of civilian buses and trucks had just been ambushed. All of the vehicles were burning fiercely, sending columns of black smoke funnelling up from the snow-covered plains. Small, darkened mounds lay beside the buses, all that was left of some of their passengers. Soviet convoys passed us in the opposite direction, each vehicle carrying a Russian soldier standing in the back, pistol in hand. The Soviets were now too busy ensuring their own safety to worry about the civilians they had supposedly come to rescue from the ‘bandits’.

In one village, three Afghan soldiers, including an officer, boarded our bus and tried to arrest a postman who had deserted from the army. There was a brutal fist-fight between soldiers and passengers until two uniformed conscripts who were smoking hashish in the back seats walked down the aisle and literally kicked the officer out of the vehicle. So much for the morale of Karmal’s Afghan army. In another village, the passengers hissed at Soviet Tajik troops who were standing beside the barbed wire of a military depot. But the passenger behind tapped me urgently on the shoulder. ‘Look!’ he gasped, and pointed to his forehead. I looked at his face and could not understand. ‘Look!’ he said more urgently and placed his right hand flat on top of his head, as if it was a hat. Hat. Yes, there was something missing from the Soviet Tajik soldiers’ grey fur hats. They had removed the red star from their hats. They stood looking at us, darker-skinned than their Russian comrades, bereft now of the communist brotherhood in which they had grown up.

I should have understood at once. If Soviet troops in Afghanistan – Muslim Soviet soldiers – would remove the very symbol of their country, the badge that their fathers had worn so proudly in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945, then already the cancer of Afghanistan must have eaten deep into their souls. They had been sent to war against their Muslim co-religionists and had decided that they would not fight them. No more telling portent of the imminent collapse of empire could have confronted me in Afghanistan. Yet my trek across the snowlands was so vast, the dangers so great, my exhaustion so overwhelming that I merely jotted in my notebook the observation that the soldiers had ‘for some reason’ removedtheir hat-badges.

A few miles further on, an Afghan soldier could be seen standing in the desert, firing into the dusk with a sub-machine gun at an enemy he could not possibly have seen. When our bus stopped at a chaikhana in the frozen semi-darkness, an old man from the burned convoy we had passed told us that of the three hundred passengers taken from the buses, fifty were detained by more than a hundred armed rebels, all of them told – quite openly – that they would ‘probably’ be executed because they were party men. Each scene spoke for itself, a cameo of violence and government impotence that our frightened passengers clearly understood.

It was night when we entered Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, our bus gliding past the shrine in which lay the cloak of the Prophet Mohamed, circling a set of nineteenth-century cannon that had belonged to General Roberts’s army in the Second Afghan War. I was dirty and tired and checked into a seedy hotel in the old city, a place of cigarette smoke, sweat and overcooked meat. My bedroom was small, the sheets stained, the threadbare carpet smallpoxed with cigarette burns. But two big rust-encrusted doors led onto a tiny balcony from where I could see the moon and the stars which glistened across the winter sky.

I was lying on my bed when I first heard the sound. Allahu akbar . God is great. It was a thin, pitched wail. Allahu akbar . God is great. I looked at my watch. This was no fixed time for prayers. It was 9 o’clock. The curfew had just begun. Allahu akbar . Now the chant came from the next roof, scarcely 20 metres from my room, more a yodel than an appeal to the Almighty. I opened the door to the balcony. The cry was being carried on the air. A dozen, a hundred Allahu akbars , uncoordinated, overlaying each other, building upon a foundation of identical words, high-pitched and tenor, treble and childlike, an army of voices shouting from the rooftops of Kandahar. They swelled in volume, a thousand now, ten thousand, a choir that filled the heavens, that floated beneath the white moon and the stars, the music of the spheres.

I saw a family, a husband and wife and a clutch of children, all chanting, but their voices were lost in the pulse of sound that now covered the city. This extraordinary phenomenon was no mere protest, a lament at the loss of freedom. When the Prophet entered Mecca in the year 630 of the Christian era, he walked to the great black stone, the Kaaba, touched it with his stick and shouted in a strong voice that supreme invocation of Islam. Allahu akbar . His ten thousand followers chorused those same words and they were taken up by members of the Prophet’s own Qureishi tribe who had gathered on their roofs and balconies in Mecca. Now these same holy words were being chanted by another ten thousand voices, this time from the roofs and balconies of Kandahar. A Westerner – or a Russian – might interpret this as a semi-political demonstration, a symbolic event. But in reality, the choirs of Kandahar were an irresistible assertion of religious faith, the direct and deliberate repetition of one of the holiest moments of Islam. In the last year of his life, the Prophet had entered the newly purified shrine in Mecca and seven more times chanted Allahu akbar . In Kandahar, the voices were desperate but all-powerful, mesmeric, unending, deafening, an otherwise silent people recognising their unity in God. This was an unstoppable force, an assertion of religious identity that no Afghan satrap or Kremlin army could ultimately suppress.

Kandahar’s earthly, political protests had little effect. Shopkeepers had closed down the bazaar for more than two weeks but a squad of Afghan soldiers forced its reopening by threatening to smash stores whose owners did not obey their orders. Afghan troops could be found chain-smoking in their trucks beside the Khalkisherif Mosque. But the five rebel groups operating south of Kandahar had united and the otherwise obedient mullahs had told the city’s Muslim population that they should be ‘aware of events’ – an over-discreet but nonetheless unprecedented reference to the Soviet invasion.