The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Yet Durand sent a letter to his biographer’s sister, Ella Sykes, which provided gruesome evidence that Tom Graham contained all too real descriptions of Afghan cruelty. ‘During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec.r 1879,’ he wrote almost sixteen years after the event, ‘two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives … I saw it all …’ But Durand was well aware that the Afghans were not the ‘fiends in human form’ of popular fiction. In 1893, he describes the Afghan army commander, Ghulam Hyder, as an inquisitive and generous man.
Today we talked about the size of London, and how it was supplied with food … about religious prejudices, the hatred of Sunnis and Shias, the Reformation and the Inquisition, the Musselman [sic] and Christian stories of Christ’s life and death, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and his wars, about which Ghulam Hyder knew a good deal, the manners of the Somalis, tiger shooting …
Durand had been sent to negotiate with the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman – a cousin of Shir Ali – over the southern border of his country, to secure an agreed frontier between British India and Afghanistan. Durand’s brother Edward had already helped to delineate the country’s northern frontier with Russia – during which the Russians sent a force of Cossacks to attack Afghan troops on the Kushk river – and Mortimer Durand found the king deeply unsympathetic to his northern neighbour. According to Durand’s notes, Abdur Rahman announced that
unless you drive me into enmity, I am your friend for my life. And why? The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkmenistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join with them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I hate them.
Eighty-six years later, the Russians would find out what this meant.
I saw them first, those Russians, standing beside their T-72 tanks next to the runways at Kabul airport, fleece-lined jackets below white-pink faces with thick grey fur hats bearing the red star and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The condensation of their breath hung so thickly in the air in front of their mouths that I looked for cartoon quotations in the bubbles. On the trucks parked beside the highway into the city, they wore the steel helmets so familiar from every Second World War documentary, the green metal casks with ripples over the ears, rifles in gloved hands, narrowed eyes searching the Afghans unflinchingly. They drew heavily and quickly on cigarettes, a little grey smog over each checkpoint. So these were the descendants of the men of Stalingrad and Kursk, the heroes of Rostov and Leningrad and Berlin. On the tarmac of the airport, there were at least seventy of the older T-62s. The snow lay thickly over the tanks, icing sugar on cakes of iron, enough to break the teeth of any Afghan ‘terrorist’.
The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, but when I arrived two weeks later their armour was still barrelling down through the slush from the Amu Darya river, the Oxus of antiquity, which Durand’s brother Edward had agreed with the Russians should be the northern frontier of this frost-covered land. Save for a few isolated cities, the Soviet army appeared to have crushed all resistance. Along the highways south and east of Kabul, Russian military encampments protected by dozens of tanks and heavy artillery controlled the arteries between the rebellious provinces of south-eastern Afghanistan. An ‘intervention’, Leonid Brezhnev had called his invasion, peace-loving assistance to the popular socialist government of the newly installed Afghan president Babrak Karmal.
‘In all my life, I have never seen so many tanks,’ my old Swedish radio colleague from Cairo, Lars Gunnar Erlandsen, said when we met. Lars Gunnar was a serious Swede, a thatch of blond hair above piercing blue eyes and vast spectacles. ‘And never in my life do I ever want to see so many tanks again,’ he said. ‘It is beyond imagination.’ There were now five complete Soviet divisions in Afghanistan; the 105th Airborne Division based on Kabul, the 66th Motorised Rifle Brigade in Herat, the 357th Motorised Rifles in Kandahar, the 16th Motorised Rifles in the three northern provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar and Samangan and the 306th Motorised Division in Kabul with the Soviet paratroopers. There were already 60,000 Soviet troops in the country, vast numbers of them digging slit trenches beside the main roads. This was invasion on a massive scale, a superpower demonstration of military will, the sclerotic Brezhnev – Red Army political commissar on the Ukrainian front in 1943, he would die within three years – now flexing his impotent old frame for the last time.
But Russia’s final imperial adventure had all the awesome fury of Britain’s Afghan wars. In the previous week alone, Soviet Antonov-22 transport aircraft had made 4,000 separate flights into the capital. Every three minutes, squadrons of Mig-25s would race up from the frozen runways of Kabul airport and turn in the white sunshine towards the mountains to the east and there would follow, like dungeon doors slamming deep beneath our feet, a series of massive explosions far across the landscape. Soviet troops stood on the towering heights of the Kabul Gorge. I was Middle East correspondent of The Times of London, the paper whose nineteenth-century war correspondent William Howard Russell – a student of Trinity College, Dublin, as I was to be – won his spurs in the 1854–55 Anglo-Russian war in the Crimea. We were all Tom Grahams now.
I think that’s how many of us felt that gleaming, iced winter. I was already exhausted. I lived in Beirut, where the Lebanese civil war had sucked in one Israeli army and would soon consume another. Only three weeks before, I had left post-revolutionary Iran, where America had just lost its very own ‘policeman of the Gulf’, Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, in favour of that most powerful of Islamic leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Within nine months, I would be running for my life under shellfire with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army as it invaded the Islamic Republic. America had already ‘lost’ Iran. Now it was in the process of ‘losing’ Afghanistan – or at least watching that country’s last pitiful claim to national independence melting into the Kremlin’s embrace. Or so it looked to us at the time. The Russians wanted a warm-water port, just as General Roberts had feared in 1878. If they could reach the Gulf coast – Kandahar is 650 kilometres from the Gulf of Oman – then after a swift incursion through Iranian or Pakistani Baluchistan, Soviet forces would stand only 300 kilometres from the Arabian peninsula. That, at least, was the received wisdom, the fount of a thousand editorials. The Russians are coming. That the Soviet Union was dying, that the Soviet government was undertaking this extraordinary expedition through panic – through fear that the collapse of a communist ally in Afghanistan might set off a chain reaction among the Soviet Muslim republics – was not yet apparent, although within days I would see the very evidence that proved the Kremlin might be correct.
Indeed, many of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan came from those very Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia whose loyalties so concerned Brezhnev. In Kabul, Soviet troops from the Turkoman region were conversing easily with local Afghan commanders. The high-cheekboned Asiatic features of some soldiers often suggested that their military units had been drawn from the Mongolian region. In Kabul and the villages immediately surrounding the city, no open hostility was shown towards the Soviet invaders in the daylight hours; so many Russian units had been moved into the snow-covered countryside that Afghan troops had been withdrawn to protect the capital. But at night, the Soviets were pulled back towards Kabul and unconfirmed reports already spoke of ten Russian dead in two weeks, two of them beaten to death with clubs. In Jalalabad, 65 kilometres by road from the Pakistan border, thunderous night-time explosions bore witness to the continued struggle between Afghan tribesmen and Soviet troops.
For the next two months, we few journalists who managed to enter Afghanistan were witness to the start of a fearful tragedy, one that would last for more than a quarter of a century and would cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America. How could we have known? How could we have guessed that while an Islamic revolution had enveloped Iran, a far more powerful spiritual force was being nursed and suckled here amid the snows