The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
and Soviet correspondents. Only after this excursion into three Afghan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did Karmal reply to Lewis, telling him that during the Amin regime ‘an overwhelming majority of the principal members of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan’ had elected him president.* We had, of course, expected no less of Karmal, and his courageous – some might say foolhardy – assertion that ‘a true non-alignment for Afghanistan can be obtained with the material and moral help of the Soviet Union’ accurately reflected Moscow’s point of view.
The new man was once a bitter opponent within the PDP of Nur Mohamed Taraki, the assassinated president whose ‘martyrdom’ Karmal now blamed on the CIA, and Gavin Hewitt experienced first-hand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the new dictator’s anger. For when Gavin commented mildly that ‘there doesn’t seem to be much support for you or the Russians in Afghanistan’, Karmal drew in his breath and bellowed the first response that came into his head. ‘Mr Correspondent of the BBC – the most famous propaganda liar in the world!’ he roared. That was all. The room collapsed in applause from the satraps around Karmal and uncontrollable laughter from journalists. ‘Well,’ I told Gavin, ‘old Babrak can’t be that bad a guy – at least he got you down to a “T”.’ Gavin shot me a sidelong grin. ‘Just wait, Fiskers,’ he muttered. And he was right. Within hours, Karmal’s absurd reply had gone round the world, proving that Moscow’s new man in Kabul was just another factotum with a single message.
But it was a clear sign that our presence in Afghanistan would not be tolerated indefinitely. This was made clear to me some days later when three members of the Khad secret police turned up at the reception desk at the Intercontinental to see me. They all wore leather coats – de rigueur for plain-clothes cops in Soviet satellite countries – and they were not smiling. One of them, a small man with a thin moustache and a whining voice, held out a piece of paper. ‘We have come to see you about this,’ he snapped. I took the paper from him, a telegram bearing the stamp of the Afghan PTT office. And as I read the contents, I swallowed several times, the kind of guilty swallow that criminals make in movies when confronted with evidence of some awesome crime. ‘URGENT, BOB FISK GUEST INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL KABUL,’ it Said. ‘ANY POSSIBILITY OF GETTING TWO MINUTE UPDATE RE SOVIET MILITARY BUILDUP IN AFGHANISTAN FOR SUNDAY MORNING THIS WEEK? LOVE SUE HICKEY.’ I drew in my breath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I shouted. How could Sue in the London office of CBC have sent such a telegram? For days, I had been sending tapes to CBC, describing the atmosphere of fear and danger in Afghanistan, and here was Sue sending me an open telegram requesting details of Soviet military deployment in a state run by pro-Moscow communists. It was, I suspected, part of a very old problem. Somewhere between reporters and their offices in faraway London or New York there exists a wall of gentle disbelief, an absolute fascination with the reporter’s dispatch from the war zone but an unconscious conviction that it is all part of some vast Hollywood production, that the tape or the film – though obviously not fraudulent – is really a massive theatrical production, that the Russian army was performing for us, the world’s press, that the Khad – always referred to in news reports as the ‘dreaded’ secret police – was somehow not that dreadful after all, indeed might be present in Afghanistan to give just a little more excitement to our stories.
I looked at the little man from Khad. He was looking at me with a kind of excitement in his face. He was one of the few who could speak passable English. And he had caught his man. The Western spy had been found with incontrovertible proof of his espionage activities, a request for military information about the Soviet army. ‘What does this mean?’ the little man asked softly. Oh yes, indeed. What did this mean? I needed time to think. So I burst into laughter. I put my head back and positively gusted laughter around the lobby of the hotel until even the receptionists turned to find out the cause of the joke. And I noticed one of the cops grinning. He wanted in on the joke, too. I slowly let my laughter subside and shook my head wearily. ‘Look, this lady wants me to report for a radio show called Sunday Morning in Canada,’ I said. ‘There is no “Soviet military buildup” – we all know that because President Karmal told us that only a “very limited Soviet contingent” has come to Afghanistan. This lady obviously doesn’t know that. I have to clear up this ridiculous situation and report the truth. I’m sorry you’ve been bothered with such a silly message – and I can certainly understand why you were worried about it.’ And I laughed again. Even the little cop smiled sheepishly. I offered him back the incriminating telegram. ‘No – you keep it,’ he snapped. And he wagged his finger in my face. ‘We know, you know,’ he said. I’m sorry, I asked, what did he know? But the lads from the Khad had turned their backs and walked away. Thank you, Sue. Weeks later, we dined out on the story – and she paid for the meal.
Yet it was all too easy to turn the Soviet occupation into a one-dimensional drama, of brutal Russian invaders and plucky Afghan guerrillas, a kind of flip-side version of the fictional Tom Graham’s Second Afghan War. A succession of pro-Soviet dictators had ruled Afghanistan with cruelty, with socialist cant and pious economic plans, but also through tribal alliances. The Pathans and the Hazaras – who were Shia Muslims – and the Tajiks and the Ghilzais and the Durranis and the Uzbeks could be manipulated by the government in Kabul. It could bestow power on a leader prepared to control his town on behalf of the communist authorities but could withhold funds and support from anyone who did not. Prison, torture and execution were not the only way to ensure political compliance. But among the tribes, deep within the deserts and valleys of Afghanistan, the same communist governments had been trying to cajole and then force upon these rural societies a modern educational system in which girls as well as boys would go to school, at which young women did not have to wear the veil, in which science and literature would be taught alongside Islam. Twenty-one years later, an American president would ostentatiously claim that these were among his own objectives in Afghanistan.
And I remember one excursion out of Jalalabad in those early days of the Soviet invasion. I had heard that a schoolhouse had been burned down in a village 25 kilometres from the city and set off in an exhaust-fuming Russian-built taxi to find out if this was true. It was, but there was much worse. Beside the gutted school there hung from a tree a piece of blackened meat, twisting gently in the breeze. One of the villagers, urging my driver to take me from the village, told us that this was all that was left of the headmaster. They had also hanged and burned his schoolteacher wife. The couple’s sin: to comply with government rules that girls and boys should be taught in the same classroom. And what about those Pakistanis and Egyptians and Saudis who were, according to Karmal, supporting the ‘terrorists’? Even in Jalalabad, I heard that Arabs had been seen in the countryside outside the city, although – typical of our innocence at that time – I regarded these stories as untrue. How could Egyptians and Saudis have found their way here? And why Saudis? But when I heard my colleagues – especially American journalists – referring to the resistance as ‘freedom fighters’, I felt something going astray. Guerrillas, maybe. Even fighters. But ‘freedom’ fighters? What kind of ‘freedom’ were they planning to bestow upon Afghanistan?
Of their bravery, there was no doubt. And within three weeks of the Soviet invasion came the first signs of a unified Muslim political opposition to the Karmal government and its Russian supporters. The few diplomats left in Kabul called them ‘night letters’. Crudely printed on cheap paper, the declarations and manifestos were thrown into embassy compounds and pushed between consular fences during the hours of curfew, their message usually surmounted by a drawing of the Koran. The most recent of them – and it was now mid-January of 1980 – purported to come from the ‘United Muslim Warriors of Afghanistan’ and bore the badge of the Islamic Afghan Front, one of four groups which had been fighting in the south of the country.
From the opened pages of the Koran, there sprouted three rifles. The letter denounced the regime for ‘inhuman crimes’ and condemned Soviet troops in the country for ‘treating Afghans like slaves’. Muslims, it said, ‘will not give up fighting or guerrilla attacks until our last breath … the proud and aggressive troops of the Russian power have no idea of the rights and human dignity of the people of Afghanistan.’ The letter predicted the death of Karmal and three of his cabinet ministers, referring to the president as ‘Khargal’, a play on words in Persian which