Читать книгу The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East - Robert Fisk - Страница 11

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians, as the feeling experienced … from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, for they did not regard dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures …

LEO TOLSTOY, Haji Murat

The ghosts of British rule seemed to haunt Peshawar. In the bookshops, I found a hundred reprints of gazetteers and English memoirs. Sir Robert Warburton’s Eighteen Years in the Khyber stood next to Woosnam Mills’s yarns; ‘Noble conduct of our sepoys’, ‘Immolation of 21 Sikhs’ and ‘How British officers die’. Further volumes recalled the exploits of Sir Bindon Blood, one of whose young subalterns, Winston Churchill, was himself ambushed by Pathans in the Malakand hills to the north of Peshawar.* Not only ghosts frequented Peshawar. Unlike the Russian occupiers of Afghanistan, the British could not take their dead home; and on the edge of Peshawar, there still lay an old British cemetery whose elaborate tombstones of florid, overconfident prose told the story of empire.

Take Major Robert Roy Adams of Her Majesty’s Indian Staff Corps, formerly deputy commissioner of the Punjab. He lay now beside the Khyber Road, a canyon of traffic and protesting donkeys whose din vibrated against the cemetery wall. According to the inscription on his grave, Major Adams was called to Peshawar ‘as an officer of rare capacity for a frontier. Wise, just and courageous, in all things faithful, he came only to die at his post, struck down by the hand of an assassin.’ He was killed on 22 January 1865, but there are no clues as to why he was murdered. Nor are there any explanations on the other gravestones. In 1897, for example, John Sperrin Ross met a similar fate, ‘assassinated by a fanatic in Peshawar City on Jubilee Day’. A few feet from Ross’s grave lay Bandsman Charles Leighton of the First Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, ‘assassinated by a Ghazi at this station on Good Friday’. Perhaps politics was left behind at death, although it was impossible to avoid the similarity between these outraged headstones and the language of the Soviet government. The great-grandsons of the Afghan tribesmen who killed the British were now condemned by the Kremlin as ‘fanatics’ – or terrorists – by Radio Moscow. One empire, it seemed, spoke much like another.

To be fair, the British did place their dead in some historical context. Beneath a squad of rosewood trees with their bazaar of tropical birds lay Privates Hayes, Macleod, Savage and Dawes, who ‘died at Peshawar during the frontier disturbances 1897–98’. Not far away was Lieutenant Bishop, ‘killed in action at Shubkudder in an engagement with the hill tribes, 1863’. He was aged twenty-two. Lieutenant John Lindley Godley of the 24th Rifle Brigade, temporarily attached to the 266th Machine Gun Company, met the same end at Kacha Garhi in 1919.

There were other graves, of course, innocent mounds with tiny headstones that contained the inevitable victims of every empire’s domesticity. ‘Beatrice Ann, one year and 11 months, only child of Bandmaster and Mrs. A. Pilkington’ lay in the children’s cemetery with ‘Barbara, two years, daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. P. Walker’. She died three days before Christmas in 1928. Some of the children died too young to have names. There were young men, too, who succumbed to the heat and to disease. Private Tidey of the First Sussex died from ‘heatstroke’ and Private Williams of ‘enteric fever’. E. A. Samuels of the Bengal Civil Service succumbed to ‘fever contracted in Afghanistan’. Matron Mary Hall of Queen Alexander’s Military Nursing Service – whose duties in Salonika and Mesopotamia presumably included the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey as well as the British invasion of Iraq in 1917 – died ‘on active service’.

There were a few unexpected tombs. The Very Rev. Courtney Peverley was there, administrator apostolic of Kashmir and Kafiristan, who clearly worked hard because beyond the British headstones were new places of interment for Peshawar’s still extant Christian community, paper crosses and pink flags draped in tribal fashion beside the freshly dug graves. Many imperial graves exhibit a faith that would be understood by any Muslim, the favourite from the Book of Revelation: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’ And there was a Gaelic cross on top of the remains of Lieutenant Walter Irvine of the North West Frontier Police ‘who lost his life in the Nagoman River when leading the Peshawar Vale Hunt of which he was Master’. No Soviet soldier would earn so romantic a memorial. On the graves of the Russian soldiers now dying just north of this cemetery, it would be coldly recorded only that they died performing their ‘international duty’.

The local CIA agent already had a shrewd idea what this meant. He was a thin, over-talkative man who held a nominal post in the US consulate down the road from the Peshawar Intercontinental and who hosted parties of immense tedium at his villa. He had the habit of showing, over and over again, a comedy film about the Vietnam war. Those were the days when I still talked to spooks, and when I called by one evening, he was entertaining a group of around a dozen journalists and showing each of them a Soviet identity card. ‘Nice-looking young guy,’ he said of the pinched face of the man in the black and white photograph. ‘A pilot, shot down, the mujahedin got his papers. What a way to go, a great tragedy that a young guy should die like that.’ I didn’t think much of the CIA man’s crocodile tears but I was impressed by the words ‘shot down’. With what? Did the guerrillas have ground-to-air missiles? And if so, who supplied them – the Americans, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, or those mysterious Arabs? I had seen thousands of Russians but I had yet to see an armed guerrilla close up in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have to wait long.

Ali’s bus returned to the border one warm afternoon and I walked back across the Durand Line to a small grubby booth on the Afghan side of the frontier. The border guard looked at my passport and thumbed through the pages. Then he stopped and scrutinised one of the document’s used pages. As usual, I had written ‘representative’ on my immigration card. But the thin man clucked his tongue. ‘Journalist,’ he said. ‘Go back to Pakistan.’ How did he know? There were visas to Arab countries in the passport which identified me as a journalist, but the Afghan official would not know Arabic, would have no idea that sahafa meant ‘journalist’. A group of men shoved past me and I walked back to Ali. How did they know? Ali looked through my passport and found the page that gave me away. A visa to post-revolutionary Iran was marked with the word khabanagor – Persian for ‘journalist’ – and Persian, or Dari, was one of the languages of Afghanistan. Damn.

I took a taxi back to Peshawar and sent a message to The Times: ‘Scuppered.’ But next day Ali was back at the hotel. ‘Mr Robert, we try again.’ What’s the point? I asked him. ‘We try,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’ I didn’t understand, but I repacked my bags and boarded his friendly wooden bus and set off once more for the border. This was beginning to feel like a real-life version of Carry On up the Khyber, but Ali was strangely confident I would be successful. I sat back in the afternoon sun as the bus moaned its way up the hairpin bends. There’s an odd, unnerving sensation about trying to cross a border without the consent of the authorities. Gavin and I had experienced this at almost every checkpoint we came across in Afghanistan. Would they let us through or turn us round or arrest us? I suppose it was a throwback to all those war films set in German-occupied Europe in which resistance heroes and heroines had to talk their way past Nazi guards. The Afghan border police were not quite up to Wehrmacht standards – and we were no heroes – but it wasn’t difficult to feel a mixture of excitement and dread when we arrived once more at the grotty little booth on the Afghan side of the frontier.

Yet before I had a chance to stand up, Ali was at my seat. ‘Give me your passport,’ he said. ‘And give me $50.’ He vanished with the money. And ten minutes later, he was back with a broad smile. ‘I will take you to Jalalabad,’ he said, handing me back my newly stamped passport. ‘Give me another $50 because I had to give your money away to a poor man.’ The Russians had invaded but they couldn’t beat that most efficacious, that most corrupt of all institutions between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal: The Bribe. I was so happy, I was laughing. I was singing to myself, all the way to Jalalabad. I’d even arranged with Ali that he would stop by at the Spinghar Hotel each morning to take my reports down to Peshawar – and come back in the afternoon with any messages that The Times sent to me via Pakistan. I could meanwhile snuggle down in the Spinghar and stay out of sight of the authorities.

I 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 cropped grey hair and an old-fashioned pair of heavily framed spectacles. Mohamed Ziarad, a former export manager at Afghanistan’s national wool company, could scarcely cope with the morning visitors to his office. The chief of police was there with an account of the damage from the overnight fighting; the local Afghan army commander, snapping to attention in a tunic two sizes too small for him, presented an intimidatingly large pile of incident reports. A noisy crowd of farmers poured into the room with compensation claims. Every minute, the telephone rang with further reports of sabotage from the villages, although it was sometimes difficult for Mr Ziarad to hear the callers because of the throb of helicopter gunships hovering over the trees beyond the bay window. It had been a bad night.

Not that the governor of Jalalabad let these things overwhelm him. ‘There is no reason to overdramatise these events,’ he said, as if the nightly gun battles had been a part of everyone’s daily life for years. He sipped tea as he signed the reports, joking with an army lieutenant and ordering the removal of an old beggar who had forced his way into the room to shout for money. ‘All revolutions are the same,’ he said. ‘We defend the revolution, we talk, we fight, we speak against our enemies and our enemies try to start a counter-revolution and so we defend ourselves against them. But we will win.’

If Mr Ziarad seemed a trifle philosophical – almost whimsical, I thought – in his attitude towards Afghanistan’s socialist revolution, it was as well to remember that he was no party man. Somehow, he had avoided membership of both the Parcham and the Khalq; his only concession to the revolution was an imposing but slightly bent silver scale model of a Mig jet fighter that perched precariously on one end of his desk. He admitted that the insurgents were causing problems. ‘We cannot stop them shooting in the country. We cannot stop them blowing up the electric cables and the gas and setting off bombs at night. It is true that they are trying to capture Jalalabad and they are getting closer to the city. But they cannot succeed.’

Here Mr Ziarad drew a diagram on a paper on his desk. It showed a small circle, representing Jalalabad, and a series of arrows pointing towards the circle which indicated the rebel attacks. Then he pencilled in a series of arrows which moved outwards from Jalalabad. ‘These,’ he said proudly, ‘are the counter-attacks which we are going to make. We have been through this kind of thing before and always we achieve the same result. When the enemy gets closer to the centre of Jalalabad, they are more closely bunched together and our forces can shoot them more easily and then we make counter-attacks and drive them off.’ What a strange phenomenon is the drug of hope. I was to hear this explanation from countless governors and soldiers across the Middle East over the coming quarter of a century – Westerners as well as Muslims – all insisting that things were getting worse because they were getting better, that the worse things were, the better they would become.

Mr Ziarad claimed that only three Afghan soldiers had been killed in the past week’s fighting around the city and – given the unspoken truce between the army and the mujahedin – the governor’s statistics were probably correct. He did deny, however, that there were any Soviet troops in Jalalabad – only a handful of Russian agricultural advisers and teachers were here, he said – which did not take account of the thousand Soviet soldiers in the barracks east of the town. He was not concerned about the Russian presence in his country. ‘It is the bandit groups that are the problem and the dispossessed landlords who had their land taken from them by our Decree Number Six and they are assisted by students of imperialism. These people are trained in camps in Pakistan. They are taught by the imperialists to shoot and throw grenades and set off mines.’

The governor still visited the nearest villages during daylight, in the company of three soldiers, to inspect the progress of land reform and Jalalabad’s newly created irrigation scheme. But he understood why the reforms had created animosity. ‘We tried to make sure that all men and women had equal rights and the same education,’ he said. ‘But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.’

Mr Ziarad’s last words, as we walked from his office, were drowned by the roar of four more Soviet helicopter gunships that raced across the bazaar, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air beside the single-storey mud-walled houses. He asked me if I would like to use his car to travel back to my hotel. In view of the angry faces of the Afghans watching the helicopters, I decided that the governor of Jalalabad had made the kind of offer it was safer to refuse. But the cops at the Spinghar were getting nosy, wanting to know how long I was staying in Jalalabad and why I didn’t go to Kabul. It was time to let Jalalabad ‘cool down’. As Gavin always said, don’t get greedy.*

It was the Russians who were getting greedy. Hundreds of extra troops were now being flown into Kabul in a fleet of Antonov transport aircraft along with new amphibious BMB armoured vehicles. In some barracks, Russian and Afghan soldiers had been merged into new infantry units, presumably to stiffen Afghan army morale. New Afghan army trucks carried Afghan forces but Soviet drivers. There were more Karmal speeches, the latest of which attacked what he called ‘murderers, terrorists, bandits, subversive elements, robbers, traitors and hirelings’. That he should, well over a month after the Soviet invasion, be appealing for ‘volunteer resistance groups’ to guard roads, bridges and convoys – against the much more powerful and genuine ‘resistance’, of course – demonstrated just how serious the problem of the insurgents had become and how large an area of Afghanistan they now effectively controlled.

The Russians could neither wipe out the guerrillas nor give hope to Afghan villagers that their presence would improve their lives. Large areas of Afghanistan were cut off from government-subsidised food and the Soviets were flying planeloads of grain – even tractors – into Kabul while one of their generals appeared at the Bagram airbase to claim that only ‘terrorist remnants’ remained in the mountains. ‘Remnants’ – bakoyaye in Dari – became the vogue word for the insurgents on Afghan radio. But to ‘reform’ Afghanistan under these circumstances was impossible. The government were losing. It was only a matter of time. And the more the government said they were winning, the fewer people believed them. In the lobby of the Intercontinental, a Polish diplomat told me that he thought the Russians would need at least 200,000 troops to win their war.*

Karmal’s men had effectively closed down the capital’s mosques as a centre of resistance. When I found the speaker of the Polekheshti Mosque in the centre of Kabul, a small man with a thin sallow face whose features betrayed his anxiety and who refused even to give his name, he declined to answer even the mildest questions about the welfare of his people. He arrived one minute before morning prayers, walking quickly across the ice-encrusted forecourt in his tightly wound silk turban and golden cap and leaving immediately his devotions were completed. When I walked towards him, he immediately glanced over his right shoulder. And when I presented him with a list of questions in Pushtu – what was the role of Islam in Afghanistan since December, I asked him? – he waved the paper in the frozen air in a gesture of hopelessness.

‘Your questions are all political,’ he yelped at me. ‘One of your questions is asking if the people are happy with the new regime of Babrak Karmal. I will answer no questions about him. I do not represent the people. I will answer only religious questions.’ It was predictable. As khatib of the Polekheshti, he had only to interpret the Koran, not to deliver sermons on the morality of his government. Since the khatibs had all been appointed by the revolutionary governments in the past two years, there was even less chance that he would unburden himself of any feelings about the Soviet Union’s invasion. A few days after Taraki’s coup in 1978, calls for a jihad were read out in Kabul’s mosques. Any political independence among the Sunni Muslim clergy had been wiped out within days when police raided all the city’s religious institutions and dispatched dissenting mullahs to the Polecharkhi prison, whence they never emerged. But brutal repression did not alone account for the lack of any serious political leadership within the clergy.

A decapitated church can scarcely give political guidance to its flock, but the history of Islam in Afghanistan suggested that there would be no messianic religious leader to guide the people into war against their enemies. Shia Muslims, whose tradition of self-sacrifice and emphasis on martyrdom had done so much to destroy the Shah’s regime, were a minority in Afghanistan. In the western city of Herat, 100 kilometres from the Iranian border, posters of Khomeini and Ayatollah Shariatadari could be found on the walls, but the Sunnis formed the majority community and there was a fundamental suspicion in Afghanistan of the kind of power exercised by the leading clergymen in Iran. Afghans would not pay national subservience to religious divines. Islam is a formalistic religion, and among Sunnis, the mosque prayer leaders had a bureaucratic function rather than a political vocation. The power of religious orthodoxy in Afghanistan was strong but not extreme, and the lack of any hierarchy among Sunnis prevented the mullahs from using their position to create political unity within the country. Besides, Islam was also a class-conscious religion in Kabul. The Polekheshti Mosque catered largely for the poor, while the military favoured the Blue Mosque and the remains of the country’s middle-class elite attended funerals at the two-tiered Do Sham Shira Mosque.

The monarchy, so long as it existed, provided a mosaic of unity that held the country more or less together. And although the last king was ostentatiously toasted in the chaikhana now that more ominous potentates had appeared in Kabul, the spendthrift rulers who once governed Afghanistan were never really popular. When the monarchy disappeared, the only common denominator was religion; it was identified with nationalism – as opposed to communism – which is why Karmal had reintroduced green into the colour of the national flag. All ministerial speeches, even by cabinet members known to be lifelong Marxists, now began with obsequious references to the Koran. The Afghan deputy prime minister had just visited Mazar to pray at the shrine of Hazarate Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed. But in Afghanistan – as in most rural countries – religion was regarded with deepest respect in the villages rather than in the towns and it was from the villages that the mujahedin came. Although it was a reactionary force – opposing the emancipation and equality of women and secular education – it focused the attention of the poor on the realities of politics in a way that had never happened before. It was not by chance that a joke made the rounds of Afghans in Kabul, that apart from the five traditional obligations of Islam, a sixth instruction must now be obeyed: every true Muslim should listen to the BBC. This would no longer be a joke, of course, if a new Islamic force emerged from within the resistance rather than the clergy.

So few journalists were now left in Afghanistan that no one paid much attention to the Times correspondent, who carried no cameras but still possessed a valid visa. In Kabul, I shopped for carpets in the bazaar among the off-duty Soviet soldiers who still felt safe walking along Chicken Street. The Russians bought souvenirs, beads and necklaces for wives and girlfriends, but the Tajik Soviet soldiers would go to the bookshops and buy copies of the Koran. I eventually purchased a 2-by-3-metre rug of crimson and gold that had been lying on the damp pavement. Mr Samadali, who was still free to drive us within the Kabul city limits, cast his critical eye on my rug, announced that I had paid far too much for it – it is a function of all taxi-drivers in south-west Asia to depress their foreign clients by assuring them they have been ripped off – and tied it to the roof of his car.

From Kabul, I now once more took Ali’s bus down to Jalalabad, planning to spend a night at the Spinghar before returning to Kabul. In the Jalalabad bazaar, I went searching for a satin bag in which to carry my massive carpet out of Afghanistan. After ensuring I knew the Pushtu for a satin bag – atlasi kahzora – I bought a large hessian sack, along with a set of postcards of Jalalabad under the monarchy, a gentle, soporific town of technicolor brilliance that was now lost for ever. I visited the Pakistani consulate in the town, whose staff – some of them at least – must already have been coordinating with the guerrillas. They spoke of Soviet fears that Jalalabad might partially fall to the rebels, that the highway to Kabul might be permanently cut. And the Pakistani diplomats did not seem at all unhappy at this prospect.

No sooner was I back at the Spinghar than the receptionist, in a state of considerable emotion, told me that the Russians were using helicopters to attack the village of Sorkh Rud, 20 kilometres to the west. I hired a rickshaw and within half an hour found myself in a township of dirt streets and mud-walled houses. I told the driver to wait on the main road and walked into the village. There was not a human to be seen, just the distant thump-thump sound of Soviet Mi-25 helicopters which I only occasionally saw as they flitted past the ends of the streets. A few dogs yelped near a stream of sewage. The sun was high and a blanket of heat moved on the breeze down the streets. So where was the attack that had so upset the hotel receptionist? I only just noticed the insect shape of a machine low in the white sky seconds before it fired. There was a sound like a hundred golf balls being hit by a club at the same time and bullets began to skitter up the walls of the houses, little puffs of brown clay jumping into the air as the rounds hit the buildings. One line of bullets came skipping down the street in my direction, and in panic I ran through an open door, across a large earthen courtyard and into the first house I could see.

I literally hurled myself through the entrance and landed on my side on an old carpet. Against the darkened wall opposite me sat an Afghan man with a greying beard and a clutch of children, open-mouthed with fear and, behind them, holding a black sheet over her head, a woman. I stared at them and tried to smile. They sat there in silence. I realised I had to assure them that I was not a Russian, that I was from Mrs Thatcher’s England, that I was a journalist. But would this family understand what England was? Or what a journalist was? I was out of breath, frightened, wondering how I came to be in such a dangerous place – so quickly, so thoughtlessly, so short a time after leaving the safety of the Spinghar Hotel.

I had enough wits to remember the Pushtu for journalist and to try to tell these poor people who I was. ‘Za di inglisi atlasi kahzora yem!’ I triumphantly announced. But the family stared at me with even greater concern. The man held his children closer to him and his wife made a whimpering sound. I smiled. They did not. Fear crackled over the family. Only slowly did I realise that I had not told them I was a journalist. Perhaps it was the carpet upon which I had landed in their home. Certainly it must have been my visit to the bazaar a few hours earlier. But with increasing horror, I realised that the dishevelled correspondent who had burst in upon their sacred home had introduced himself in Pushtu not as a reporter but with the imperishable statement: ‘I am an English satin bag.’

‘Correspondent, journalist,’ I now repeated in English and Pushtu. But the damage had been done. Not only was this Englishman dangerous, alien, an infidel intruder into the sanctity of an Afghan home. He was also insane. Of this, I had no doubt myself. Whenever we journalists find ourselves in great danger, there is always a voice that asks ‘Why?’ How on earth did we ever come to risk our life in this way? For the editor? For adventure? Or because we just didn’t think, didn’t calculate the risks, didn’t bother to reflect that our whole life, our education, our family, our loves and happiness, were now forfeit to chance and a few paragraphs. Sorkh Rud was the ‘border station’ into which Kipling’s British soldier cantered, the street outside this house his ‘dark defile’, the helicopter his enemy’s jezail. The cliché tells us that life is cheap. Untrue. Death is cheap. It is easy and terrible and utterly unfair.

I sat on the carpet for perhaps ten minutes, smiling idiotically at the cold-faced family opposite me until a little girl in a pink dress walked unsteadily across the floor towards me and smiled. I smiled back. I pointed at myself and said, ‘Robert.’ She repeated my name. I pointed to her. What was her name? She didn’t reply. Outside I heard a donkey clop past the gate and a man shouting. The sound of the helicopters had vanished. There was a wailing from far away, the sound of a woman in grief. I stood up and looked out of the door. Other people were walking down the street. It was like Jalalabad each daybreak, when the night of death turned magically into a day of toil and dust and blooming jacaranda trees. The war had washed over Sorkh Rud and now it had moved elsewhere. I turned to the family and thanked them for their unoffered protection. ‘Shukria,’ I said. Thank you. And very slowly the man with the beard bowed his head once and raised his right hand in farewell.

The rickshaw driver was waiting on the main road, fearful that I might have died, even more fearful, I thought, that I might not have survived to pay him. We puttered back to Jalalabad. That night the party leaders were back in the hotel with news that obviously disturbed them. The mujahedin had raided a student hostel of Jalalabad University, taken twenty girls from the building, and transported them to Tora Bora, where they were given money – a thousand afghanis, about $22 – and a black veil and told to end their studies. The same day, a Russian technical 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 statue of Buddha – dating from at least the second century bc – had been destroyed, along with other priceless antiquities. What did this mean? And if the reports were true, what confidence could the world have that the giant 1500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan might not one day be similarly destroyed? On my way back to Kabul, the guerrillas were back on the road, twenty of them this time, and there were no longer any roses attached to their rifles.

I would, briefly, return to Afghanistan in the summer of 1980, flying in to Kabul with a tennis racket and an unbelievable claim to be a tourist. The Khad attached a cop to me this time and I was taken under escort to the Intercontinental where I paid him off in return for a taxi ride around the capital. The dust hung in layers of heat over Kabul and the Soviet soldiers were now on the defensive, escorting civilian cars in long armoured convoys across the highways of Afghanistan, their airbase at Bagram now flying bombing sorties against the mujahedin every three minutes. Soviets now occupied senior ‘advisory’ positions in all the Kabul ministries, their large black limousines gliding through the muggy streets of the city at midday, curtains pulled across the back windows and plain-clothes men peering from the front passenger seats. The occupants were not the large, bulky commissars of popular mythology but, for the most part, small, respectable men in glossy grey business suits, narrow, slightly unfashionable ties and hair thick with oil, family men from an autonomous republic with five-year plans to meet.

In the stifling summer, the Russian soldiers were wearing floppy, wide-brimmed sombreros and their trucks jammed the streets of Kabul. Their ‘limited intervention’ had spawned a spring offensive – that tactic beloved of all generals confronted by an armed insurrection – which had now turned into a full-scale military campaign. Helicopter gunships stood in rows five deep at Kabul airport. Four-engined Ilyushin transport aircraft en route to Tashkent turned all day over the city, trailing fuel exhaust as they banked sharply above the international airport to avoid ground-to-air missiles.

At the airport, the two faces of Afghanistan’s revolution could be seen within 800 metres of each other. Above the main terminal building, the faded outline of January’s triumphant greeting to Soviet troops could still be observed – ‘Welcome to the New Model Revolution’ – although the 1.5-metre-high letters had long ago been taken down and the sun had bleached the red paint a drab pink. Just across the airfield, at the eastern end of the main runway, lay the other symbol of Afghanistan’s revolutionary conflict: a Soviet SA-2 missile with a 130-kilogram warhead, a range of 50 kilometres and a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet; this was the same weapon used with devastating effect against US B-52 bombers over Hanoi in the Vietnam war. And Vietnam was the word that more and more Afghans were using to describe their own conflict. President Carter and Mrs Thatcher were urging the world to boycott the Olympics in Moscow.

Kabul’s schoolchildren were refusing to attend classes since hundreds of them were taken ill; rebels, according to the government, had put sulphur in the schools’ water supplies. A thousand children had been taken to the Aliabad hospital in one week alone. At night, gun battles crackled around the city as gunmen attacked Russian patrols and rival Parcham and Khalq party members assaulted each other. A doctor who was a member of President Karmal’s Parcham party was shot dead while visiting a patient at Bandeghazi – within the city limits – but the police could not discover whether he was killed by mujahedin or by Khalq agents. One of the cops assigned to me was a Khalq man who, in the privacy of the hotel elevator, suddenly burst out in anger: ‘It is bad here and I am sick. We want Soviet help – we need it. But if anyone stays longer than we want – anyone, and that includes the Soviet Union – we will shoot them.’

On 14 June, Karmal ordered the execution of thirteen former Khalq functionaries for ‘hatching conspiracies against the state’. Most were minor officials – Sidaq Alamyar, the ex-planning minister, for example, and Saeb Jan Sehrai, who was in charge of ‘border affairs’ – while the deputy prime minister, Asadullah Sawari, who was head of Taraki’s secret service, remained untouched. His name was on the death list of the ‘night letter’ pushed into diplomatic compounds four months earlier. I was lucky to have stolen forty-eight hours in Kabul, albeit under secret police surveillance. When I was taken back to Kabul airport for my flight out, an Aeroflot jet was standing on the apron, its fuselage evidence for Mrs Thatcher’s profound cynicism towards the Soviets.

The aircraft bore Aeroflot’s proud English-language slogan ‘Official Olympic Carrier’ on both sides of its fuselage but from its doors it was disgorging Soviet combat troops, young men – some with blond hair – carrying their rifles in the hot sun as they walked down the steps to the tarmac. They looked happy enough – one raised his arms towards the sun and said something that made his comrades laugh – although their chances of returning home in similar mood had decreased in recent weeks. More than 600 seriously wounded Soviet servicemen had been admitted to the Kabul military hospital, another four hundred to Soviet clinics near the bus station at Khai Khana; of these one thousand, two hundred had died – and this figure only included those who died of wounds, not those who were killed in combat. The dead were loaded in square wooden coffins aboard Antonov-12 aircraft and no one knew what they contained until a young Soviet soldier was seen saluting one of the boxes. Even the Khad secret policeman who followed me so assiduously agreed that the Soviet army was experiencing ‘very big trouble’.

But back in that chill February of 1980, I still had two days of precious, lonely freedom before my visa expired and I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I decided this time to be greedy, to try once more a long-distance bus ride, this time to a city whose people, so we were told in Kabul, had rediscovered their collective faith in confronting the invaders of their country: Kandahar.

I took the bus before dawn, from the same station I had set out from on my vain trip to Mazar, wearing the same Afghan hat and hunched under the same brown shawl. Men and women sat together – they all appeared to be families – and the moment I announced my nationality, I was deluged with apples, cheese, oranges and the big, flat, sagging nan bread that Afghans use as an envelope to contain their food. When I gently expressed my concern that there might be ‘bad’ people on the bus – the very word Khad usually had the effect of silencing any conversation for an hour – I was assured there were none. I would be safe. And so the passengers, with scarcely any English, gave me their silent protection on the fourteen-hour journey across the moonlike, frozen landscape to Kandahar.

It was an epic of a country at war. Our coach passed the wrecks of countless vehicles beside the road. Sixty-five kilometres west of Ghazni, the town from which Gavin and I and his crew had fled the previous month – it already felt another life ago – a convoy of civilian buses and trucks had just been ambushed. All of the vehicles were burning fiercely, sending columns of black smoke funnelling up from the snow-covered plains. Small, darkened mounds lay beside the buses, all that was left of some of their passengers. Soviet convoys passed us in the opposite direction, each vehicle carrying a Russian soldier standing in the back, pistol in hand. The Soviets were now too busy ensuring their own safety to worry about the civilians they had supposedly come to rescue from the ‘bandits’.

In one village, three Afghan soldiers, including an officer, boarded our bus and tried to arrest a postman who had deserted from the army. There was a brutal fist-fight between soldiers and passengers until two uniformed conscripts who were smoking hashish in the back seats walked down the aisle and literally kicked the officer out of the vehicle. So much for the morale of Karmal’s Afghan army. In another village, the passengers hissed at Soviet Tajik troops who were standing beside the barbed wire of a military depot. But the passenger behind tapped me urgently on the shoulder. ‘Look!’ he gasped, and pointed to his forehead. I looked at his face and could not understand. ‘Look!’ he said more urgently and placed his right hand flat on top of his head, as if it was a hat. Hat. Yes, there was something missing from the Soviet Tajik soldiers’ grey fur hats. They had removed the red star from their hats. They stood looking at us, darker-skinned than their Russian comrades, bereft now of the communist brotherhood in which they had grown up.

I should have understood at once. If Soviet troops in Afghanistan – Muslim Soviet soldiers – would remove the very symbol of their country, the badge that their fathers had worn so proudly in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945, then already the cancer of Afghanistan must have eaten deep into their souls. They had been sent to war against their Muslim co-religionists and had decided that they would not fight them. No more telling portent of the imminent collapse of empire could have confronted me in Afghanistan. Yet my trek across the snowlands was so vast, the dangers so great, my exhaustion so overwhelming that I merely jotted in my notebook the observation that the soldiers had ‘for some reason’ removed their hat-badges.

A few miles further on, an Afghan soldier could be seen standing in the desert, firing into the dusk with a sub-machine gun at an enemy he could not possibly have seen. When our bus stopped at a chaikhana in the frozen semi-darkness, an old man from the burned convoy we had passed told us that of the three hundred passengers taken from the buses, fifty were detained by more than a hundred armed rebels, all of them told – quite openly – that they would ‘probably’ be executed because they were party men. Each scene spoke for itself, a cameo of violence and government impotence that our frightened passengers clearly understood.

It was night when we entered Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, our bus gliding past the shrine in which lay the cloak of the Prophet Mohamed, circling a set of nineteenth-century cannon that had belonged to General Roberts’s army in the Second Afghan War. I was dirty and tired and checked into a seedy hotel in the old city, a place of cigarette smoke, sweat and overcooked meat. My bedroom was small, the sheets stained, the threadbare carpet smallpoxed with cigarette burns. But two big rust-encrusted doors led onto a tiny balcony from where I could see the moon and the stars which glistened across the winter sky.

I was lying on my bed when I first heard the sound. Allahu akbar. God is great. It was a thin, pitched wail. Allahu akbar. God is great. I looked at my watch. This was no fixed time for prayers. It was 9 o’clock. The curfew had just begun. Allahu akbar. Now the chant came from the next roof, scarcely 20 metres from my room, more a yodel than an appeal to the Almighty. I opened the door to the balcony. The cry was being carried on the air. A dozen, a hundred Allahu akbars, uncoordinated, overlaying each other, building upon a foundation of identical words, high-pitched and tenor, treble and childlike, an army of voices shouting from the rooftops of Kandahar. They swelled in volume, a thousand now, ten thousand, a choir that filled the heavens, that floated beneath the white moon and the stars, the music of the spheres.

I saw a family, a husband and wife and a clutch of children, all chanting, but their voices were lost in the pulse of sound that now covered the city. This extraordinary phenomenon was no mere protest, a lament at the loss of freedom. When the Prophet entered Mecca in the year 630 of the Christian era, he walked to the great black stone, the Kaaba, touched it with his stick and shouted in a strong voice that supreme invocation of Islam. Allahu akbar. His ten thousand followers chorused those same words and they were taken up by members of the Prophet’s own Qureishi tribe who had gathered on their roofs and balconies in Mecca. Now these same holy words were being chanted by another ten thousand voices, this time from the roofs and balconies of Kandahar. A Westerner – or a Russian – might interpret this as a semi-political demonstration, a symbolic event. But in reality, the choirs of Kandahar were an irresistible assertion of religious faith, the direct and deliberate repetition of one of the holiest moments of Islam. In the last year of his life, the Prophet had entered the newly purified shrine in Mecca and seven more times chanted Allahu akbar. In Kandahar, the voices were desperate but all-powerful, mesmeric, unending, deafening, an otherwise silent people recognising their unity in God. This was an unstoppable force, an assertion of religious identity that no Afghan satrap or Kremlin army could ultimately suppress.

Kandahar’s earthly, political protests had little effect. Shopkeepers had closed down the bazaar for more than two weeks but a squad of Afghan soldiers forced its reopening by threatening to smash stores whose owners did not obey their orders. Afghan troops could be found chain-smoking in their trucks beside the Khalkisherif Mosque. But the five rebel groups operating south of Kandahar had united and the otherwise obedient mullahs had told the city’s Muslim population that they should be ‘aware of events’ – an over-discreet but nonetheless unprecedented reference to the Soviet invasion.

And over the past few days, a series of poorly printed posters had made their appearance on the walls of the reopened bazaar. ‘The people are asleep,’ one of them admonished. ‘Why do you not wake up?’ Another, addressed to Soviet troops, asked simply: ‘Sons of Lenin – what are you doing here?’ Yet the poster addressed to the Russians was written in Pushtu – a language with which Soviet troops were unlikely to be familiar – and five days earlier the people of Kandahar had watched from those same balconies and rooftops as a column of tanks, tracked armoured vehicles and trucks drove through their city. The first tank was seen just after nine in the evening and the tail of the convoy only left Kandahar at four in the morning. Most of this Soviet convoy ended up along the road to Spinboldak on the Pakistan border.

In Kandahar, food prices had doubled, inflation had cut into wages. Meat and rice prices in the city had risen by 80 per cent and eggs 100 per cent. A shopkeeper, an educated man in his fifties who combined a European sweater and jacket with traditional Afghan baggy trousers and turban, claimed that Karmal’s government could not survive if it was unable to control food prices. ‘Every day the government says that food prices are coming down,’ he said. ‘Every day we are told things are getting better thanks to the cooperation of the Soviet Union. But it is not true.’ The man lapsed into obscenities. ‘Do you realise that the government cannot even control the roads? Fuck them. They only hold on to the cities.’

This I already knew. And the journey back to Kabul, 450 kilometres across lagoons of snow and deserts held by marauding rebels, was evidence of the terrible future that Afghanistan would be forced to endure. From the windows of my bus I saw, 8 kilometres from the road, an entire village on fire, the flames golden against the mountain snows, while the highway was sometimes in the hands of gunmen – several, I noticed, were wearing Arab kuffiah scarves – or truckloads of cringing Afghan soldiers. The Russian troops were moving up the side roads now, spreading their army across the plains, driving imperiously into the smallest villages.

At one intersection, a Soviet patrol was parked, the soldiers in their BMB armoured vehicles watching us with routine disinterest, already counting their mission as something normal. This was now their land, their inheritance, dangerous, to be true, but a part of their life, a duty to be done. But their mission was as hopeless as it was illusory. ‘Even if they kill a million of us,’ an Afghan bazaari was to say to me later in Kabul, ‘there are a million more of us ready to die. We never allow people to stay in our country.’ Both statements were true.

Only days after I left Kabul, Afghan troops and security men brutally suppressed a mass demonstration against the Soviet invasion, shooting down hundreds of protesters, including women students, in the streets of the capital. Well over a million Afghans would be killed in the war against the Russians over the next nine years, at least 4 million would be wounded and 6 million driven out of the country as refugees – even before the Afghan war entered its further tragedy of civil conflict between the mujahedin, Taliban rule and subsequent American bombardment. What that suffering meant we would only discover later. The most efficient killers were the armies of landmines sown across the mountains and fields of Afghanistan by the Soviets. The war would cost the Russians, it has been estimated, around $35 billion – $2.5 billion worth of Russian aircraft were lost in one year alone – and the Americans claimed to have spent $10 billion on the conflict. Saudi Arabia, on its own admission in 1986, spent $525 million in just two years on Afghan opposition parties and their Arab supporters. Pakistani sources would later say that three to four thousand Arab fighters were in action in Afghanistan at any one time throughout the war and that as many as 25,000 Arabs saw service in the fighting. Yet in the end, once the Russian bear had burned its paws and the Soviet Union was on its way to perdition, the Americans and their Arab and Pakistani suppliers abandoned Afghanistan to its fate and ignored the thousands of Arabs who had fought there. Nor did any Saudi prince risk his life for the Afghans, nor any Arab leader ever dare to go to war for his fellow Muslims there, nor did Yassir Arafat, who understood the meaning of dispossession, ever criticise the army of occupation that was to lay waste the Muslim lands between the Amu Darya and the Durand Line. Only Bin Laden and his men represented the Arabs.

I flew out of Kabul on a little Pakistani prop aircraft that bucked in the air pockets over the Hindu Kush and dropped me into the basking, bakery-hot airport at Peshawar from which Francis Gary Powers had set off twenty years earlier in his doomed U-2 intelligence plane over the Soviet Union. I was light-headed, overwhelmed to have watched history and survived, possessed of a schoolboy immaturity. Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent had nothing on this.* At my hotel, a message from my foreign news editor Ivan Barnes told me I had won an award for my reporting on the Iranian revolution. ‘Have a very big drink on me tonight …’ he telexed. The editor announced a $1,000 bonus. A letter was to arrive with congratulations from my old soldier father. ‘Well done Fella,’ he wrote. I could not sleep.

Next morning, I indulged my innocence by riding the old British steam train back up the Khyber Pass, to take one last look at Afghanistan before I returned to Beirut. Engine-driver Mohamed Selim Khan, a brisk and mustachioed Pathan with a topi on his head and eighteen years’ experience with Pakistan State Railways under his arm, wiped his oil-cloth over the firebox of his sixty-year-old steam engine, knowingly tapped the lubricator – a Wakefield patent made in London EC4 – and eased loco Number 2511 out of Peshawar’s hot and smoky station. Every schoolboy would have loved SGS Class No. 2511, and so did I. She had six driving wheels, a smokestack with a lid like a teapot, a rusting boiler under constant repair, a squadron of gaskets that leaked steam and a footplate that reeked of oil, smoke and freshly brewed tea. She made a noise like thunder and I clung like a child to the fittings of Mr Khan’s footplate.

The Ministry of Defence in Islamabad paid for the upkeep of the 60 kilometres of track – they might need it one day, to take their own army up to Landi Kotal if those Russian convoys spilled over the border – but its subsidy allowed us to hammer our way up the one-in-three gradient, the steepest in the world, black smoke boxing us into more than thirty tunnels that line the route, a thin, shrieking whistle sending buffaloes, goats, sheep, children and old men off the track. At 3,000 feet, No. 2511 performed so sharp a turn above so sheer a ridge of boulders high above a spinning river that Mr Khan and I grasped the iron doors of the cab to stop ourselves falling out. So we steamed into Landi Kotal from Jamrud Fort, our loco fuming in the sharp high-altitude breeze.

And when I jumped down from the footplate and crunched my way across the gravel of the permanent way, there were the pale blue mountains of Afghanistan shimmering to the north and west, sun-soaked and cold and angry and familiar and dangerous. I looked at them with attachment now, as one always does a dark land from which one has emerged alive. Up there, with Gavin and his crew, I had reached the top of the world. Never could I have imagined what we had given birth to in Afghanistan, nor what it held in store for that same world in twenty-one years’ time. Nor the pain it was to hold for me.