The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
need not have worried. Every night, the rebels drew closer to Jalalabad. Four days earlier they had blown up a bridge outside the town and that very first night, after dark, they opened fire on an Afghan patrol from the plantation behind the hotel. Hour after hour, I lay in bed, listening to machine guns pummelling away in the orange orchards, sending the tropical birds screaming into the night sky. But it was a Ruritanian affair because, just after the call for morning prayers, Jalalabad would wake up as if the battles had been fought in a dream and reassume its role as a dusty frontier town, its bazaar touting poor-quality Pakistan cloth and local vegetables while the Afghan soldiers ostensibly guarding the market place nodded in fatigue over their ancient – and British – Lee Enfield rifles. I would take a rickshaw out of town to look at a damaged tank or a burned-out government office, type up my report of the fighting for the paper, and at mid-morning Ali would arrive with the ‘down’ bus – Peshawar being 4,700 feet lower than Kabul – to pick up my report.
The teashops, the chaikhana stalls on the main street, were filled with truck-drivers, many of them from Kandahar, and they all spoke of the increasing resistance across the country. South of Kandahar, one man told me, villagers had stopped some Russian construction engineers and killed them all with knives. I could believe it. For however brave the mujahedin might be – and their courage was without question – their savagery was a fact. I didn’t need the fictional Tom Graham or Durand’s account of the fate of the 7th Lancers to realise this. ‘We will take Jalalabad,’ a young man told me over tea one morning. ‘The Russians here are finished.’ A teenage student, holding his father’s hunting falcon on his wrist – editors love these touches, but there it was, a real live bird of prey anchored to the boy’s arm with a chain – boldly stated that ‘the mujahedin will take Jalalabad tonight or tomorrow.’ I admired his optimism but not his military analysis.
Yet their views were also to be found within the Afghan army. Lunching in a dirty restaurant near the post office, I found an off-duty soldier at the next table, eating a badly cooked chicken with an unfamiliar knife and fork. ‘We do not want to fight the mujahedin – why should we?’ he asked. ‘The army used to have local soldiers here but they went over to the mujahedin and so the government drafted us in from Herat and from places in the north of Afghanistan. But we do not want to fight with these people. The mujahedin are Muslims and we do not shoot at them. If they attack some building, we shoot into the air.’ The young man complained bitterly that his commanding officer refused to give him leave to see his family in Herat, 750 kilometres away near the Iranian border, and in his anger the soldier threw the knife and fork onto the table and tore savagely at the chicken with his hands, the grease dribbling down his fingers. ‘Jalalabad is finished,’ he said.
Again, untrue. That very morning, the Afghan air force made a very noisy attempt to intimidate the population by flying four of the local airbase’s ageing Mig-17s at low level over the city. They thundered just above the main boulevard, the palm trees vibrating with the sound of jet engines, and left in their wake a silence broken only by the curses of men trying to control bolting, terrified horses. The big Soviet Mi-25 helicopters were now taking off from Jalalabad’s tiny airport each morning and racing over the town to machine-gun villages in the Tora Bora mountains. While I was shopping in the market they would fly only a few feet above the rooftops, and when I looked up I could see the pilot and the gunner and the rockets attached to pods beneath the machine, a big, bright red star on the hull, fringed with gold. Such naked displays of power were surely counterproductive. But it occurred to me that these tactics must be intended to deprive the guerrillas of sufficient time to use their ground-to-air missiles. American helicopter pilots were to adopt precisely the same tactics to avoid missiles in Iraq twenty-three years later.
If there was a military accommodation between the Afghan army and the mujahedin, however, the insurgents knew how to hurt the government. They had now burned down most of the schools in the surrounding villages on the grounds that they were centres of atheism and communism. They had murdered the schoolteachers, and several villagers in Jalalabad told me that children were accidentally killed by the same bullets that ended the lives of their teachers. The mujahedin were thus not universally loved and their habit of ambushing civilian traffic on the road west – two weeks earlier they had murdered a West German lorry-driver – had not added much glory to their name. And the mujahedin lived in the villages – which is where the Russians attacked them. On 2 February, I watched as four helicopter gunships raced through the semi-darkness to attack the village of Kama and, seconds later, saw a series of bubbles of flame glowing in the darkness.
Each morning at eight o’clock, the tea-shop owners would tell the strange Englishman what had been destroyed in the overnight battles and I would set off in my rickshaw to the scene. Early one morning, I arrived at a bridge which had been mined during the night. It lay on the Kabul road and the crater had halted all Soviet troop movements between Jalalabad and the capital, much to the excitement of the crowd which had gathered to inspect the damage.
Then one of them walked up to me. ‘Shuravi?’ he asked. I was appalled. Shuravi meant ‘Russian’. If he thought I was Russian, I was a dead man. ‘Inglistan, Inglistan,’ I bellowed at him with a big smile. The man nodded and went back to the crowd with this news. But after a minute, another man stepped up to me, speaking a little English. ‘From where are you – London?’ he asked. I agreed, for I doubted if the people of Nangarhar would have much knowledge of East Farleigh on the banks of the Medway river in Kent. He returned to the crowd with this news. A few seconds later, he was back again. ‘They say,’ he told me, ‘that London is occupied by the Shuravi.’ I didn’t like this at all. If London was occupied by the Soviet army, then I could only be here with Russian permission – so I was a collaborator. ‘No, no,’ I positively shouted. ‘Inglistan is free, free, free. We would fight the Russians if they came.’ I hoped that the man’s translation of this back into Pushtu would be more accurate than the crowd’s knowledge of political geography. But after listening to this further item of news, they broke into smiles and positively cheered Britain’s supposed heroism. ‘They thank you because your country is fighting the Russians,’ the man said.
It was only as the rickshaw bumped me back to Jalalabad that I understood what had happened. To these Afghan peasants, Kabul – only a hundred kilometres up the highway – was a faraway city which most of them had never visited. London was just another faraway city and it was therefore quite logical that they should suppose the Shuravi were also patrolling Trafalgar Square. I returned to Jalalabad exhausted and sat down on a lumpy sofa in a chaikhana close to the Spinghar Hotel. The cushions had been badly piled beneath a pale brown shawl and I was about to rearrange them when the tea-shop owner arrived with his head on one side and his hands clutched together. ‘Mister – please!’ He looked at the sofa and then at me. ‘A family brought an old man to the town for a funeral but their cart broke down and they have gone to repair it and then they will return for the dead man.’ I stood up in remorse. He put his hand on my arm as if it was he who had been sitting on the dead. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. The sorrow was mine, I insisted. Which is why, I suppose, he placed a chair next to the covered corpse and served me my morning cup of tea.
At night now, the local cops and party leaders were turning up at the Spinghar to sleep, arriving before the 8 p.m. curfew, anxious men in faded brown clothes and dark glasses who ascended to their first-floor lounge for tea before bed. They would be followed by younger men holding automatic rifles that would clink in an unsettling way against the banisters. The party men sometimes invited me to join their meals and, in good English, would ask me if I thought the Soviet army would obey President Carter’s deadline for a military withdrawal. They were understandably obsessed with the deadly minutiae of party rivalry in Kabul and with the confession of a certain Lieutenant Mohamed Iqbal, who had admitted to participating in the murder of the ‘martyr’ President Nur Mohamed Taraki. Iqbal said that he and two other members of the Afghan palace guard had been ordered to kill Taraki by the ‘butcher’ Amin and had seized the unfortunate man, tied him up, laid him on a bed and then suffocated him by stuffing a pillow over his face. The three then dug the president’s grave, covering it with metal sheets from a sign-writer’s shop.
The party men were so friendly that they invited me to meet the governor of Jalalabad, a middle-aged man with a round face, closely