The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
down by our masters – be they of the Moscow or the Washington persuasion – was essentially short-term, false and ultimately self-defeating. Perhaps we were too naive, too ill-prepared for events on such a scale. Who could grasp in so short a time the implications of this essentially imperial story, this latest adventure in the ‘Great Game’? We were young, most of us who managed to scramble into Afghanistan that January. I was thirty-five, most of my colleagues were younger, and journalism is not only an imprecise science but a fatiguing one whose practice involves almost as much bureaucracy as it does fact-gathering. I had spent Christmas in Ireland and returned to wartime Beirut on 3 January to prepare for my onward assignment to cover the continuing revolution in Iran. But no event could compare to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
For a journalist, nothing can beat that moment when a great story beckons, when history really is being made and when a foreign editor tells you to go for it. I remember one hot day in Beirut when gunmen had hijacked a Lufthansa passenger jet to Dubai. I could get there in four hours, I told London. ‘Go. Go. Go,’ they messaged back. But this was drama on an infinitely greater scale, an epic if we could be there to report it. The Soviet army was pouring into Afghanistan, and from their homes and offices in London, New York, Delhi, Moscow, my colleagues were all trying to find a way there. Beirut was comparatively close but it was still three thousand kilometres west of Kabul. And it was a surreal experience to drive through West Beirut’s civil war gunfire to the ticketing office of Middle East Airlines to seek the help of a Lebanese airline that now had only twelve elderly Boeing 707s and three jumbos to its name. Under the old travel rules, Afghanistan issued visas to all British citizens on arrival. But we had to work on the principle that with the country now a satellite of the Soviet Union, those regulations – a remnant of the days when Kabul happily lay astride the hashish tourist trail to India – would have been abandoned.
Richard Wigg, our India correspondent, was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, Michael Binyon was in Moscow. The Lebanese airline had conceived of a plan to get me into Afghanistan, an ingenious plot that I sent through to London on the ancient telex machines in the Beirut Associated Press bureau, which regularly misspelled our copy. ‘Friends in ticketing section at MiddlehEast [sic] Airlines … have suggested we might try following: I buy single ticket to Kabul and travel in on Ariana [Afghan Airlines] flight that terminates in Kabul,’ I wrote. ‘This means that even if I get bounced, I will probably earn myself twelve hours or so in the city … because my flight will have terminated in Afghanistan and I can’t be put [sic] back on it … At the very worst, I would get bounced and could buy a ticket to Pakistan then head for Peshawar … Grateful reply soonest so I can get MEA ticket people to work early tomorrow (Fri) morning.’ London replied within the hour. ‘Please go ahead with single ticket Kabul plan,’ the foreign desk messaged. I was already back at the MEA office when The Times sent another note. ‘Binyon advises that Afghan embassies around [sic] the world have been instructed to issue visus [sic] which might make things easier.’
This was astonishing. The Russians wanted us there. Their ‘fraternal support’ for the new Karmal government – and the supposedly hideous nature of his predecessor’s regime – was to be publicised. The Russians were coming to liberate Afghanistan. This was obviously the story the Kremlin was concocting. For several years, I had – in addition to my employment by The Times – been reporting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I liked radio, I liked CBC’s courage in letting their reporters speak their minds, in letting me go into battle with a tape recorder to ‘tell it like it is’, to report the blood and stench of wars and my own disgust at human conflict. Sue Hickey came on the telex from CBC’s London office. ‘Good luck keep ur eyes open in the back of ur head,’ she wrote. I promised her an Afghan silk scarf – bribery knows no bounds in radio journalism. ‘What is the Russian for “Help I surrender where is the Brit Embassy?’” I asked. ‘The Russian for help is “pomog”,’ Sue responded in her telex shorthand. ‘So there u shud not hv any trouble bi bi.’
Ariana had a flight from Frankfurt to Kabul early on Sunday morning. Then it was cancelled. Then it was rescheduled and cancelled again. It would fly from Rome. It would fly from Geneva. No, it would fly from Istanbul. When I reached Turkey on MEA, the snow was piled round the Istanbul terminal and ‘Delayed’ was posted beside the Kabul flight designator. There was no fuel for heating in Istanbul so I huddled in my coat on a broken plastic seat with all the books and clippings I had grabbed from my files in Beirut. My teeth were chattering and I wore my gloves as I turned the pages. We journalists do this far too much, boning up on history before the next plane leaves, cramming our heads with dates and presidents, one eye on the Third Afghan War, the other on the check-in desk. I pulled out my map of Afghanistan, green and yellow to the west where the deserts imprison Kandahar, brown in the centre as the mountains shoulder their way towards Kabul, a big purple and white bruise to the north-east where the Hindu Kush separates Pakistan, India, China and the Soviet Union.
The border between British India and Afghanistan was finally laid across the tribal lands in 1893, from the Khyber Pass, south-west to the desert town of Chaman (now in Pakistan), a dustbowl frontier post at the base of a great desert of sand and grey mountains a hundred kilometres from Kandahar. These ‘lines in the sand’, of course, were set down by Sir Mortimer Durand and recognised by the great powers. For the people living on each side of the lines, who were typically given no say in the matter, the borders were meaningless. The Pathans in the south-west of Afghanistan found that the frontier cut right through their tribal and ethnic homeland. Of course they did; for the borders were supposed to protect Britain and Russia from each other, not to ease the life or identity of Afghan tribesmen who considered themselves neither Afghans nor Indians – nor, later, Pakistani – but Pushtun-speaking Pathans who believed they lived in a place called Pushtunistan, which lay on both sides of what would become known as the Durand Line.
The end of the First World War, during which Afghanistan remained neutral, left a declining British Raj to the south and an ambitious new Soviet Communist nation to the north. King Amanullah began a small-scale insurrection against the British in 1919 – henceforth to be known as the Third Afghan War – which the British won militarily but which the Afghans won politically. They would now control their own foreign affairs and have real independence from Britain. But this was no guarantee of stability.*
Reform and regression marked Afghanistan’s subsequent history. My collection of newspaper cuttings included a 1978 report from the Guardian, which recalled how the Soviets had spent £350 million to build the Salang road tunnel through the mountains north of Kabul; it took ten years and cost £200 million a mile. ‘Why should they spend £350 million on a little-used roadway across the Hindu Kush?’ the writer asked. ‘Surely not just for the lorry-loads of raisins that toil up the pass each day. The answer is no. The Salang Tunnel was built to enable Russian convoys … to cross from the cities and army bases of Uzbekhistan all the way over to the Khyber and to Pakistan …’
A nation of peasants relied upon tribal and religious tradition while only Marxists could provide political initiative. Mohamed Daoud’s violent overthrow in 1978 led to a series of ever harsher Marxist regimes led by Nur Mohamed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, their opposing Parcham (‘Banner’) and Khalq (‘People’) parties cruelly executing their rivals. Rebellion broke out in rural areas of Afghanistan and the army, increasingly mutinous despite its Soviet advisers, began to disintegrate. Taraki died of an ‘undisclosed illness’ – almost certainly murdered by Amin’s henchmen – and then, in December 1979, Amin in turn was shot dead. An entire Afghan army unit had already handed over its weapons to rebels in Wardak and there is some evidence that it was Amin himself who asked for Soviet military intervention to save his government. Soviet special forces were arriving at Afghan airbases on 17 December, five days after Brezhnev made his decision to invade, and it is possible that Amin was killed by mistake when his bodyguards first saw Soviet troops around his palace.
A quarter of a century later, in Moscow, I would meet a former Soviet military intelligence officer who arrived in Kabul with Russian forces before