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

      The story is typical of my father’s generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. But reading it, I was struck by some remarkable parallels. My own father, Bill Fisk – the ‘Willie’ of the dedication almost a century ago – was also taken from school in a northern English port because his father Edward was no longer able to support him. He too became an apprentice clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he wrote before his death, Bill recalled that he had tried to join the British army under-age; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, eleven days after the start of the First World War and almost exactly six months after his mother Margaret gave him Tom Graham. Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment in Cork in Ireland, not long after the 1916 Easter Rising. There is even a pale photograph of my father in my archives, kissing the Blarney Stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Was he consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

      The rest of the novel is a disturbing tale of colour prejudice, xenophobia and outright anti-Muslim hatred during the Second Afghan War. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion had naturally focused upon Afghanistan, whose unmarked frontiers had become the indistinct front lines between imperial Russia and the British Indian Raj. The principal victims of the ‘Great Game’, as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistan – there was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britain – were, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting point – between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East – and a battlefield.* A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistan’s first king, Dost Mohamed, to receive a Russian mission in Kabul after his re-accession in 1868 led directly to what the British were to call the Second Afghan War. The First Afghan War had led to the annihilation of the British army in the Kabul Gorge in 1842, in the same dark crevasse through which I drove at night on my visit to Osama bin Laden in 1997. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, Shir Ali’s son Yaqub Khan agreed to allow a permanent British embassy to be established in Kabul, but within four months the British envoy and his staff were murdered in their diplomatic compound. The British army was sent back to Afghanistan.

      In Bill Fisk’s novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawar – now in Pakistan, then in India – Graham encounters Pathan tribesmen, ‘a villainous lot … most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer’. Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet ‘up to the nozzle’ into the chest of an Afghan, a ‘swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate’. In the Kurrum Valley, Graham and his ‘chums’ – a word my father used about his comrades in the First World War – fight off ‘infuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder’. When General Sir Frederick Roberts – later Lord Roberts of Kandahar – agrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with ‘as wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined’. The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, ‘their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form’. When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, ‘a thrill of satisfaction’ goes through the ranks of Graham’s comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.

      Afghans are thus a ‘villainous lot’, ‘fanatics’, ‘rascals’, ‘fiends in human form’, meat for British bayonets – or ‘toasting forks’ as the narrative cheerfully calls them. It gets worse. A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the words ‘that will scatter the flies’. The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. ‘Boy readers,’ the author pontificates, ‘may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878–80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise.’ After Tom Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans – in the words of his Irish-born army doctor – have become ‘murtherin villains, the black niggers’.

      When the British suffer defeat at the battle of Maiwand, on a grey desert west of Kandahar, an officer orders his men to ‘have your bayonets ready, and wait for the niggers’. There is no reference in the book to the young Afghan woman, Malalei, who – seeing the Afghans briefly retreating – tore her veil from her head and led a charge against her enemies, only to be cut down by British bullets. That, of course, is part of Afghan – not British – history. When victory is finally claimed by the British at Kandahar, Tom Graham wins his Victoria Cross.

      From ‘villains’ to ‘flies’ and ‘niggers’ in one hundred pages, it’s not difficult to see how easily my father’s world of ‘pure, clean and upright’ Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the ‘boldness’ of Afghan tribesmen – and just one to their ‘courage’ – no attempt is made to explain their actions. They are evil, hate-filled, anxious to prove their Muslim faith by ‘cutting pieces out of the unfortunate Britisher’. The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country simply does not exist in the story.

      If official British accounts of Afghanistan were not so prejudiced, they nevertheless maintained the oversimplified and supremacist view of the Afghans that Johnston used to such effect in his novel. An account of life in Kabul between 1836 and 1838 by Lt. Col. Sir Alexander Burnes of the East India Company – published a year before the massacre of the British army in 1842 – gives a sensitive portrayal of the generosity of tribal leaders and demonstrates a genuine interest in Afghan customs and social life. But by the end of the century, the official Imperial Gazetteer of India chooses to describe the animals of Afghanistan before it reports on its people, who are ‘handsome and athletic … inured to bloodshed from childhood … treacherous and passionate in revenge … ignorant of everything connected with their religion beyond its most elementary doctrines …’

      Among the young Britons who accompanied the army to Kabul in 1879 – a real Briton, this time – was a 29-year-old civil servant, Henry Mortimer Durand, who had been appointed political secretary to General Roberts. In horror, he read the general’s proclamation to the people of Kabul, declaring the murder of the British mission diplomats ‘a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people’. The followers of Yaqub Khan, General Roberts declared, would not escape and their ‘punishment should be such as will be felt and remembered … all persons convicted of bearing a part in [the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts’. It was an old, Victorian, version of the warning that an American president would give to the Afghans 122 years later.

      Durand, a humane and intelligent man, confronted Roberts over his proclamation. ‘It seemed to me so utterly wrong in tone and in matter that I determined to do my utmost to overthrow it … the stilted language, and the absurd affectation of preaching historical morality to the Afghans, all our troubles with whom began by our own abominable injustice, made the paper to my mind most dangerous for the General’s reputation.’ Roberts ameliorated the text, not entirely to Durand’s satisfaction. He