The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
him. More than that I will not tell you.’ It is certainly true that the Soviet officer in charge of the coup, General Viktor Paputin, shortly afterwards committed suicide. On 27 December, however, it was announced that the increasingly repressive Amin had been ‘executed’. Babrak Karmal, a socialist lawyer and a Parcham party man who had earlier taken refuge in Moscow, was now installed in Kabul by the Soviets. He had been a deputy prime minister – along with Amin – under Taraki; now he was the Trojan horse through whom the Soviets could protest that Afghanistan had been ‘freed’ from Amin’s tyranny.
It was below zero in Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. There was frost on the inside of the windows. I padded off to the empty check-in desk. There was a pamphlet lying there, a brochure from the Afghan Tourist Organisation. ‘Say “Afghanistan” and you think of the friendliest country,’ it said on the back. ‘Say “Ariana” and you’ve thought of the friendliest way of getting there.’ But the Afghan Tourist Organisation had not survived the purges. A thick black crayon had been drawn through the first page in a vain attempt to erase the name of ‘the Head of State of the Republic of Afghanistan Mr Mohamed Daoud’. The word ‘Democratic’ – an essential adjective in the title of every undemocratic regime – had been penned in above the country’s name and all references to the former royal family pasted over. Local tourist officials who had served Daoud and since disappeared suffered the same paper fate.
But the brand-new Ariana DC-10 arrived in Istanbul before dawn, its Afghan crew still flying with the American McDonell Douglas technicians who had taught them to fly the aircraft. It was a bumpy, cold flight down to Tehran, the flight’s last stop before Kabul. The Afghan crew ate their breakfast in First Class before serving the passengers; the ‘friendliest way’ of getting to Afghanistan. At Tehran Mehrabad airport, three Iranian Revolutionary Guards boarded and ordered two middle-aged men off the plane. They went, heads bowed, in fear. The Afghan crew would not reveal who they were. At dawn we took off for Kabul.
Afghanistan was cloaked in snow, its mountain ravines clotted white and black with rock. From 10,000 feet, I could see tiny Soviet helicopters turning the corners of the great gorges south of Kabul, fireflies dragging a brown trail in their wake. The airport was now a military base, the streets of the capital a parking lot for Soviet armour; and these were not just Russian conscripts. The new ASU 85 infantry fighting vehicle belonged only to the Soviet Union’s top divisions. Many of the soldiers held the newest version of the Kalashnikov rifle, the AKS 74. North of the city, the 105th Airborne Division had quite literally dug a maze of trenches – miles in length – across the plateau beneath the mountains. From a distance, they looked like soldiers standing along the front lines of the Western Front in those old sepia photographs which my father had taken sixty-two years earlier. Their commanders must have been hoping that this was the only obvious parallel between the two military campaigns.
When the Russians stopped my taxi, they stared at my passport, frowning. What was an Englishman doing in Kabul? At the Intercontinental Hotel, on a low hill above the city, there was no such puzzlement. The Afghan reception staff were all smiles, discreetly moving their eyes towards the plain-clothes Afghan cops lounging on the foyer sofas so that guests would know when to lower their voices. The intensity with which men from the Khad – the Khedamat-e Etelaat-e Dawlati or ‘State Information Services’ – would watch us was fortunately only matched by their inability to speak much English. There was a snug little bar filled with bottles of Polish vodka and Czech beer and a large window against which the snow had sprawled thickly. The bedrooms were warm and the balconies a spy’s delight; from mine, Room 127, I could look out across all of Kabul, at the ancient Bala Hissar fort – one of the fictional Tom Graham’s last battles was fought there – and the airport. I could count the Soviet jets taking off into the afternoon sun and the explosions echoing down from the Hindu Kush and then the aircraft again as they glided back down to the runways.
In wars, I only travel with those I trust. Reporters who panic don’t get second chances. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times had talked his way up from the Khyber Pass through Jalalabad. He was already in the old telecommunications office down town, watching with an evil glint in his eye as the operator soldered the letter ‘w’ back onto its iron stem inside the telex machine. Gavin Hewitt, a 29-year-old BBC television reporter, arrived with Steve Morris and Mike Viney, the smartest crew I’ve ever worked with, and a battered camera – these were the days of real film with its wonderful colour definition, now lost to the technology of videotape – and Geoff Hale. They were also the days of real crews when a soundman – in this case Morris – and a film editor, Hale, accompanied a reporter into the field. Hewitt had shrewdly found a beat-up old yellow Peugeot taxi, its front and back windows draped in plastic flowers and other artificial foliage behind which we thought we could hide when driving past Soviet or Afghan military checkpoints. For $100 a day, its driver, a certain Mr Samadali, was ready to break all the rules and drive us out of Kabul.
So on the bright, white morning of 9 January 1980 we set out in our ramshackle Peugeot to watch the invasion of Afghanistan. We headed east towards the Kabul Gorge, deep into the crevasse at the foot of the Spinghar mountains. The Soviet army was making its way down to Jalalabad and we threaded our way between their great T-72s and their armoured vehicles, each machine blasting hot, black smoke onto the snow from its exhausts. And beside the highway, the Afghan men watched, their faces tight against the cold, their eyes taking in every detail of every vehicle. They looked on without emotion as the wind tugged at their orange and green shawls and gowns. The snow spread across the road and drifted at their feet. It was two degrees below zero but they had come out to watch the Soviet army convoy hum past on the great road east to the Khyber Pass.
The Russian crews, their fur hats pulled down low over their foreheads, glanced down at the Afghans and smiled occasionally as their carriers splashed through the slush and ice on the mud-packed road. A kilometre further on, Soviet military police in canvas-topped jeeps waved them into a larger convoy in which more tanks and tracked armour on transporter lorries raced along the Jalalabad highway. They were in a hurry. The generals in Kabul wanted these men at the border with Pakistan – along the Durand Line – as fast as they could travel. Secure the country. Tell Moscow that the Soviet army was now in control. We drove alongside them for 16 kilometres, our car jammed between tanks and transporters and jeeps, the young Russian soldiers watching us from beneath their furs and steel helmets as the snow blew across us. Every kilometre, troops of the Afghan army stood on guard beside the dual carriageway and 8 kilometres out of Kabul the convoy passed through a Russian checkpoint, two Soviet soldiers standing to attention on each side of the road in long splayed coats of dark green.
The further we went, the safer we felt. We knew we were heading into danger; we were well aware that the Russians had already been attacked around Jalalabad. But once we had cleared the first suspicious police checkpoint in the suburbs of Kabul – we were, Hewitt fraudulently claimed with schoolboy innocence, merely touring the city – the next military post waved us nonchalantly through amid the convoys. If we had been allowed to leave Kabul, then we must have been given permission to be on this highway. That, at least, was what the Soviet and Afghan soldiers beside the road obviously thought. Who, after all, would countermand such permission? Thank God, we said, for police states. Our greatest concern was the speed we were forced to travel. The Russians moved fast, even their tank transporters overtaking each other at 80 kilometres per hour in the semi-blizzard, sometimes forcing civilian traffic to use the other carriageway, at one point almost crushing our diminutive taxi between a lorry and a tank.
All morning there had been rumours of a new battle at Jalalabad between the Russians and Afghan tribesmen. They were pushing armour out towards the city of Herat, close to the Iranian border, and back up towards Salang where a convoy had just been attacked. What the Soviets were representing as a move against ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ in Afghanistan was clearly taking longer to complete than expected. The American contention that 85,000 Soviet troops had now entered the country from Tashkent and Moscow appeared to be correct. There could have been a hundred thousand.
Packed into Mr Samadali’s cramped Peugeot, we were recording history. Steve and Geoff sat in the back with Mike sandwiched between them, hugging the camera between his knees as Gavin and I watched the Soviet troops on their trucks. The moment we knew that no one was looking at us, I’d