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

And over the past few days, a series of poorly printed posters had made their appearance on the walls of the reopened bazaar. ‘The people are asleep,’ one of them admonished. ‘Why do you not wake up?’ Another, addressed to Soviet troops, asked simply: ‘Sons of Lenin – what are you doing here?’ Yet the poster addressed to the Russians was written in Pushtu – a language with which Soviet troops were unlikely to be familiar – and five days earlier the people of Kandahar had watched from those same balconies and rooftops as a column of tanks, tracked armoured vehicles and trucks drove through their city. The first tank was seen just after nine in the evening and the tail of the convoy only left Kandahar at four in the morning. Most of this Soviet convoy ended up along the road to Spinboldak on the Pakistan border.

In Kandahar, food prices had doubled, inflation had cut into wages. Meat and rice prices in the city had risen by 80 per cent and eggs 100 per cent. A shopkeeper, an educated man in his fifties who combined a European sweater and jacket with traditional Afghan baggy trousers and turban, claimed that Karmal’s government could not survive if it was unable to control food prices. ‘Every day the government says that food prices are coming down,’ he said. ‘Every day we are told things are getting better thanks to the cooperation of the Soviet Union. But it is not true.’ The man lapsed into obscenities. ‘Do you realise that the government cannot even control the roads? Fuck them. They only hold on to the cities.’

This I already knew. And the journey back to Kabul, 450 kilometres across lagoons of snow and deserts held by marauding rebels, was evidence of the terrible future that Afghanistan would be forced to endure. From the windows of my bus I saw, 8 kilometres from the road, an entire village on fire, the flames golden against the mountain snows, while the highway was sometimes in the hands of gunmen – several, I noticed, were wearing Arab kuffiah scarves – or truckloads of cringing Afghan soldiers. The Russian troops were moving up the side roads now, spreading their army across the plains, driving imperiously into the smallest villages.

At one intersection, a Soviet patrol was parked, the soldiers in their BMB armoured vehicles watching us with routine disinterest, already counting their mission as something normal. This was now their land, their inheritance, dangerous, to be true, but a part of their life, a duty to be done. But their mission was as hopeless as it was illusory. ‘Even if they kill a million of us,’ an Afghan bazaari was to say to me later in Kabul, ‘there are a million more of us ready to die. We never allow people to stay in our country.’ Both statements were true.

Only days after I left Kabul, Afghan troops and security men brutally suppressed a mass demonstration against the Soviet invasion, shooting down hundreds of protesters, including women students, in the streets of the capital. Well over a million Afghans would be killed in the war against the Russians over the next nine years, at least 4 million would be wounded and 6 million driven out of the country as refugees – even before the Afghan war entered its further tragedy of civil conflict between the mujahedin, Taliban rule and subsequent American bombardment. What that suffering meant we would only discover later. The most efficient killers were the armies of landmines sown across the mountains and fields of Afghanistan by the Soviets. The war would cost the Russians, it has been estimated, around $35 billion– $2.5 billion worth of Russian aircraft were lost in one year alone – and the Americans claimed to have spent $10 billion on the conflict. Saudi Arabia, on its own admissionin 1986, spent $525 million in just two years on Afghan opposition parties and their Arab supporters. Pakistani sources would later say that three to four thousand Arab fighters were in action in Afghanistan at any one time throughout the war and that as many as 25,000 Arabs saw servicein the fighting. Yet in the end, once the Russian bear had burned its paws and the Soviet Union was on its way to perdition, the Americans and their Arab and Pakistani suppliers abandoned Afghanistan to its fate and ignored the thousands of Arabs who had fought there. Nor did any Saudi prince risk his life for the Afghans, nor any Arab leader ever dare to go to war for his fellow Muslims there, nor did Yassir Arafat, who understood the meaning of dispossession, ever criticise the army of occupation that was to lay waste the Muslim lands between the Amu Darya and the Durand Line. Only Bin Laden and his men represented the Arabs.

I flew out of Kabul on a little Pakistani prop aircraft that bucked in the air pockets over the Hindu Kush and dropped me into the basking, bakery-hot airport at Peshawar from which Francis Gary Powers had set off twenty years earlier in his doomed U-2 intelligence plane over the Soviet Union. I was light-headed, overwhelmed to have watched history and survived, possessed of a schoolboy immaturity. Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent had nothing on this. *At my hotel, a message from my foreign news editor Ivan Barnes told me I had won an award for my reporting on the Iranian revolution. ‘Have a very big drink on me tonight …’ he telexed. The editor announced a $1,000 bonus. A letter was to arrive with congratulations from my old soldier father. ‘Well done Fella,’ he wrote. I could not sleep.

Next morning, I indulged my innocence by riding the old British steam train back up the Khyber Pass, to take one last look at Afghanistan before I returned to Beirut. Engine-driver Mohamed Selim Khan, a brisk and mustachioed Pathan with a topi on his head and eighteen years’ experience with Pakistan State Railways under his arm, wiped his oil-cloth over the firebox of his sixty-year-old steam engine, knowingly tapped the lubricator – a Wakefield patent made in London EC4 – and eased loco Number 2511 out of Peshawar’s hot and smoky station. Every schoolboy would have loved SGS Class No. 2511, and so did I. She had six driving wheels, a smokestack with a lid like a teapot, a rusting boiler under constant repair, a squadron of gaskets that leaked steam and a footplate that reeked of oil, smoke and freshly brewed tea. She made a noise like thunder and I clung like a child to the fittings of Mr Khan’s footplate.

The Ministry of Defence in Islamabad paid for the upkeep of the 60 kilometres of track – they might need it one day, to take their own army up to Landi Kotal if those Russian convoys spilled over the border – but its subsidy allowed us to hammer our way up the one-in-three gradient, the steepest in the world, black smoke boxing us into more than thirty tunnels that line the route, a thin, shrieking whistle sending buffaloes, goats, sheep, children and old men off the track. At 3,000 feet, No. 2511 performed so sharp a turn above so sheer a ridge of boulders high above a spinning river that Mr Khan and I grasped the iron doors of the cab to stop ourselves falling out. So we steamed into Landi Kotal from Jamrud Fort, our loco fuming in the sharp high-altitude breeze.

And when I jumped down from the footplate and crunched my way across the gravel of the permanent way, there were the pale blue mountains of Afghanistan shimmering to the north and west, sun-soaked and cold and angry and familiar and dangerous. I looked at them with attachment now, as one always does a dark land from which one has emerged alive. Up there, with Gavin and his crew, I had reached the top of the world. Never could I have imagined what we had given birth to in Afghanistan, nor what it held in store for that same world in twenty-one years’ time. Nor the pain it was to hold for me.

… the Men who for their desperate ends