The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
– and aware that the United States was sending aid to the guerrillas – Iran would be planning its own military assistance programme for the insurgents. By July, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister, was telling me that he hoped his country would give weapons to the rebels if the Soviet Union did not withdraw its army. ‘Some proposal [to this effect] has been given to the Revolutionary Council,’ he told me in Tehran. ‘… Just as we were against the American military intervention in Vietnam, we think exactly the same way about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan … The Soviet Union claims that they have come to Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government. The Americans were in Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese government.’ But at this stage, Karmal had more pressing problems than Iran.
Desperate to maintain the loyalty of the Afghan army – we heard reports that only 60 per cent of the force was now following orders – Karmal even made an appeal to their patriotism, promising increased attention to their ‘material needs’. These ‘heroic officers, patriotic cadets and valiant soldiers’ were urged to ‘defend the freedom, honour and security of your people … with high hopes for a bright future.’ ‘Material needs’ clearly meant back pay. The fact that such an appeal had to be made at all said much about the low morale of the Afghan army. No sooner had he tried to appease his soldiers than Karmal turned to the Islamists who had for so long opposed the communist regimes in Kabul. He announced that he would change the Afghan flag to reintroduce green, the colour of Islam so rashly deleted from the national banner by Taraki, to the fury of the clergy. At the same time – and Karmal had an almost unique ability to destroy each new political initiative with an unpopular counter-measure – he warned that his government would treat ‘terrorists, gangsters, murderers and highwaymen’ with ‘revolutionary decisiveness’.
For ‘terrorists’, read ‘guerrillas’ or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – ‘freedom fighters’. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always ‘terrorists’. In the seventeenth century, governments used ‘heretic’ in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.
In Afghanistan there were no such formulaic retreats. In my cosy room at the Intercontinental, each night I would spread out a map. What new journey could be made across this iced plateau before the Russians threw us out? With this in mind, I realised that the full extent of the Russian invasion might be gauged from the Soviet border. If I could reach Mazar-e-Sharif, far to the north on the Amu Darya river, I would be close to the frontier of the Soviet Union and could watch their great convoys entering the country. I packed a soft Afghan hat and a brown, green-fringed shawl I’d bought in the bazaar, along with enough dollars to pay for several nights in a Mazar hotel, and set off before dawn to the cold but already crowded bus station in central Kabul.
The Afghans waiting for the bus to Mazar were friendly enough. When I said I was English, there were smiles and several young men shook my hand. Others watched me with the same suspicion as the three Khad men at the Intercontinental. There were women in burqas who sat in silence in the back of the wooden vehicle. I pulled my Afghan hat low over my forehead and threw my shawl over my shoulder. Cowled in cigarette smoke from the passengers, I took a seat on the right-hand side of the bus because the soldiers on checkpoint duty always approached from the left. It worked. The bus growled up the highway towards Salang as the first sun shone bleakly over the snow plains. Gavin and I had now driven this road so many times that, despite its dangers, the highway was familiar, almost friendly. On the right was the big Soviet base north of Kabul airport. Here was the Afghan checkpoint outside Charikar. This was where the young Russian soldier had shown us the wound in his hand. Soldiers at the Afghan checkpoints were too cold to come aboard and look at the passengers. When Soviet soldiers made a cursory inspection, I curled up in my seat with my shawl round my face. Three hours later, the bus pulled over to the side of the highway just short of the Salang Tunnel. There were Russian armoured vehicles parked a few metres away and a clutch of soldiers with blue eyes and brown hair poking from beneath their fur hats. That’s when things went wrong.
A Soviet officer approached the bus from the right-hand side and his eyes met mine. Then a man inside the bus – an Afghan with another thin moustache – pointed at me. He marched down the aisle, stood next to my seat and raised his finger, pointing it straight at my face. Betrayed. That was the word that went through my mind. I had watched this scene in a dozen movies. So, no doubt, had the informer. This man must have been working for the Afghan secret police, saw me climb aboard in Kabul and waited until we reached this heavily guarded checkpoint to give me away. Another young Afghan jumped from the bus, walked down the right side of the vehicle and then he too pointed at me through the window. Doubly betrayed. We were a hundred miles from Kabul. If I had cleared this last major barrage, I would have been through the tunnel and on to Mazar.
The Russian officer beckoned me to leave the bus. I noticed a badge of Lenin on his lapel. Lenin appeared to be glowering, eyes fixed on some distant Bolshevik dream that I would be forbidden to enter. ‘Passport,’ the soldier said indifferently. It was like the ghastly telegram Sue Hickey had sent me, further proof of my dastardly role in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the covers of British passports were black, and the gold coat of arms of the United Kingdom positively gleamed back at the Russian. He studied it closely. I half expected him to ask me for the meaning of ‘Dieu et mon droit’ or, worse still, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. He flicked it open, looked at the face of the bespectacled, tousled-haired Englishman on the third page and then at the word ‘occupation’. The word ‘journalist’ does not obtain many visas in the Middle East, and so the British Passport Office had been obliging enough to write ‘representative’ in the space provided. The Russian, who could read about as much Latin script as I could Cyrillic, tapped his finger on the word and asked in painfully good English: ‘What do you “represent”?’ A newspaper, I owned up. ‘Ah, correspondent.’ And he gave me a big knowing smile. I was led to a small communications hut in the snow from which emerged a half-naked paratroop captain wearing shades. Captain Viktor from Tashkent showed no animosity when he was told I was a journalist, and his men gathered round me, anxious to talk in faltering but by no means poor English. There was a grunting from the engine of my bus and I saw it leaving the checkpoint for the tunnel without me, my betrayer staring at me hatefully from a rear window.
Private Tebin from the Estonian city of Tallinn – if he survived Afghanistan, I assume he is now a proud citizen of the European Union, happily flourishing his new passport at British immigration desks – repeatedly described how dangerous the mountains had become now that rebels were shooting daily at Soviet troops. Captain Viktor wanted to know why I had chosen to be a journalist. But what emerged most strongly was that all these soldiers were fascinated by pop music. Lieutenant Nikolai from Tashkent interrupted at one point to ask: ‘Is it true that Paul McCartney has been arrested in Tokyo?’ And he put his extended hands together as if he had been handcuffed. Why had McCartney been arrested? he wanted to know. I asked him where he had heard the Beatles’ music and two other men chorused at once: ‘On the “Voice of America” radio.’
I was smiling now. Not because the Russians were friendly – each had studied my passport and all were now calling me ‘Robert’ as if I was a comrade-in-arms rather than the citizen of an enemy power – but because these Soviet soldiers with their overt interest in Western music did not represent the iron warriors of Stalingrad. They seemed like any Western soldiers: naive, cheerful in front of strangers, trusting me because I was – and here in the Afghan snows, of course, the fact was accentuated – a fellow European. They seemed genuinely apologetic that they could not allow me to continue my journey but they stopped a bus travelling in the opposite direction. ‘To Kabul!’ Captain Viktor announced. I refused. The