The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
engineer had been sent to the suburbs of Jalalabad to mend an electric cable that had been repeatedly sabotaged. When he was at the top of a pylon, someone had shot him dead and his body hung in the wires 10 metres above the ground for several hours while men and women arrived to gaze at his corpse.
I would leave next day on the first bus back to Kabul, a luxury bus that left at dawn, long before Ali’s old vehicle ground into town. My visa had only another three days to run. The bus from Jalalabad was packed, not with the villagers and Pakistani businessmen who travelled on Ali’s charabanc, but with Afghan government students, Parcham party apparatchiks travelling back to Kabul University after vacation. Even before we had left the suburbs of the city, they were ordering everyone to pull the curtains so that no one could be seen and they craned their necks at every bend in the road to squint through the cracks in case an ambush lay ahead. I didn’t see how the curtains would help. A mystery bus would attract far more attention from the mujahedin than a vehicle with windows open and passengers asleep inside.
When we stopped 25 kilometres to the north to find the body of a dead man covered in a blanket being loaded onto a truck, the communist students gazed in silence and in horror. It was, according to a middle-aged Afghan on another bus, the corpse of a lorry-driver who had not stopped for the mujahedin. There were five buses bunched up together, all heading for Kabul, and they all stopped now at a chaikhana while their drivers debated whether to talk their way through the guerrilla roadblock up the road or turn back to Jalalabad. Two hours passed, the drivers unable to make up their minds, the young Afghan men ever more nervous. And with good reason. The mujahedin gave their prisoners only two options: they could join the resistance or face execution. Some of the Afghan boys were taking off their party badges. I could only feel sorry for them. Perhaps they joined Parcham for promotion at college or because their parents worked for the government. And for all the government’s brutality and its reliance on foreign invaders, its functionaries had been trying to create a secular, equal society in the villages around Jalalabad. It was not the government that was burning the schools and killing the teachers.
Another hour drifted by, the heat rising, the students ever more depressed, the drivers basking in the sun. In wartime, in any great danger, indecision is a narcotic. Then labouring up the highway came Ali’s wooden bus, the coat of arms of the North West Frontier Province proudly displayed on its flanks. ‘Why do you desert me?’ Ali wanted to know. He pointed to his charabanc. ‘Mr Robert, please come with us.’ So I took my usual seat on the right-hand side of his vehicle and the other buses moved out into the road like sheep behind us. ‘You are better with us, Mr Robert,’ Ali said. ‘You should not be with them.’ I soon realised why.
Round a bend just 5 kilometres up the highway, in a narrow valley of rocks and small pines, six tall and sun-burned mujahedin stood astride the road. A seventh was perched on a rock, lazily waving his arm up and down to tell us to stop. We had been told that they were poorly armed, that they only dared appear at dusk, that they were frightened of government retaliation. But here were the mujahedin in the hot midday sun in their turbans and Afghan shawls, each holding a brand-new Kalashnikov, controlling the traffic on one of Afghanistan’s most important highways. It was an audacious display of self-confidence and a fearful one for the students in the bus behind. There was no anxiety in Ali’s bus and a Pakistani passenger – a cloth merchant from Peshawar – was so bored that he began a long and tiresome discussion about Pakistan’s domestic politics.
Through the back window, however, I could see the students stepping off their bus onto the road. They stood there, heads lowered as if they were criminals, some trying to hide behind the others. Ali was chatting and joking with one of the guerrillas. The other drivers stood beside their buses expressionless. The gunmen were moving through the line of young Afghans. Some were ordered back on the bus. Others, white with fear, were told to form a line by the road. Three of them were tied up and blindfolded and taken, stumbling and falling, through the pine stands and towards the river that gurgled away to our right. We watched them until they and their captors had disappeared. The Pakistani cloth merchant clucked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Poor chaps,’ he said.
Ali climbed back aboard and announced that since this was a Pakistani bus, the mujahedin did not wish to trouble us. And as we drove away, a young guerrilla with a rose tied to his rifle waved vigorously at us through the window. At last I had seen them. Here were the ‘holy warriors’ whom the CIA was now adopting, the ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’ and ‘counter-revolutionary subversive elements’ as Karmal called them, the ‘remnants’ as the Soviet general blandly dismissed them, Mr Ziarad’s ‘students of imperialism’. But they didn’t look like ‘remnants’ to me. Their Kalashnikovs were the new AKS 74s that the Soviets had just brought into Afghanistan, and they were wearing new ammunition belts.
The Kabul Intercontinental was forlorn. Most Western journalists had been expelled or left. Gavin and his crew had gone. My visa would soon expire and there was no hope of acquiring another. In the hotel sales office, one of the female secretaries, Gina Nushin, pleaded with me to take her private mail out of the country. Nine months later, in Ireland, I would receive a cryptic note from her, thanking me for posting her letters; the stamp on the envelope depicted a smiling and avuncular President Taraki browsing through his morning papers. But a far more important letter had just reached Kabul, smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a Shia cleric who had been arrested after Taraki’s 1978 revolution and who was believed to have been murdered by the Afghan secret police. The mullah, whose name was Waez and who had enlisted the help of a sympathetic Soviet worker and an Afghan student at Moscow University to take his letter by hand to Kabul, told his family that he and hundreds of other Afghans were being held prisoner in the Russian city of Tula, 200 kilometres south of Moscow. Waez was honoured among Sunnis as well as Shias for his opposition to communist rule.
Rumours that thousands of Afghans were being secretly held in the Soviet Union – in violation of international law – had been circulating for more than a year. Many of the families whom I watched as they angrily stormed the Polecharkhi prison outside Kabul in January were looking for relatives who, it now appeared, might have been in Russia all along. According to the Waez letter, he and other Afghans jailed in Tula were referred to as ‘state prisoners’, although all were seized in Afghanistan. In 1979 the US ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubbs, had been murdered by gunmen who, intriguingly, had initially demanded Waez’s release in return for the diplomat’s life. Were the Soviets unwilling to free Waez because this would reveal how many Afghans were held captive in Tula?
I knew that Afghanistan’s government was forcing the last of us out of the country, but the door was still ajar and I thought there was a crack through which I might squeeze.* I made one last trip to Jalalabad with Ali, only to find my hotel the venue for a clandestine meeting between six senior Soviet officers and the Afghan interior minister, Saed Mohamed Gulabzoi, and his local officials, all anxious to prevent a full-scale siege of Jalalabad by the rebels. So dangerous was the highway that the Russians had to be flown down from Kabul by helicopter. I watched them arrive at the Spinghar, protected by security police in riot visors who erected belt-fed machine guns on tripods upon bar tables around the hotel’s rose gardens. There were now 3,000 Soviet troops outside the town.
And the destruction of the villages around Jalalabad was now under way. Alisingh and Alinghar outside Metarlam had been bombed by the Russians but a 40-kilometre journey into mujahedin-held territory in Laghman province showed that every school and government office in the villages had been burned by the rebels. Several villagers said that up to fifty women and children had been killed in Soviet air raids in the previous three days. An old man with an unshaven face kept repeating the word ‘napalm’, gesturing with his hands in a downwards, smothering motion. In one tiny village outside Metarlam, more than 200 men surrounded my taxi when they thought we were Russians.
The mujahedin were not without their humour. Two nights earlier, an Afghan truck-driver found a notice on the main road west. ‘In the name of God,’ it read, ‘this is for tanks.’ The driver journeyed on and promptly set off a landmine. An armed insurgent then turned up to demand that the lorry driver pay $350 for the explosives which he had just wasted. Far less amusing was a report from three independent sources in Jalalabad that a museum at Hadda containing a