What happens in Afghanistan, they say, decides the course of history
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 15 2001
BEN MACINTYRE
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling knew, as did Queen Victoria’s Army, just how pitiless warfare in Afghanistan could be, and yet foreign powers, from Alexander the Great onwards, have not been able to resist trying to conquer, or at least impose order, on that warrior land. We may soon be going back again, with America and Nato, to try to extirpate the murderous organisers of Bloody Tuesday and punish their protectors. That prospect, however righteous, chills me.
When I was much younger, I became briefly obsessed with Afghanistan, at the time when the Mujahidin guerrillas were still locked in bloody combat with the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Thinking myself a most glamorous reporter, I grew a beard, travelled to Peshawar, bought myself the regulation Mujahidin outfit in the souk and was taken on an eight-hour journey to meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, then one of the most powerful guerrilla warlords, in his mountain stronghold.
I have never seen a more beautiful or brutal terrain, or a prouder and more callous people. At the entrance to the camp, a huge vulture, shot out of the sky on whim, had been impaled on a steel post. We drank tea and ate warm Afghan bread with yoghurt sitting on the floor of a hut as Hekmatyar, who would become Afghanistan’s Prime Minister before going into exile in Iran, described to me the perfidy of rival Mujahidin leaders and how the war would soon be won against “the puppet” in Kabul.
A few months later I was with the other side, sitting down to an identical meal in Kabul’s presidential palace with Sayid Mohammed Najibullah, “the Ox of Kabul”, the Afghan President who would eventually be ousted and then strung up by Taleban fighters.
I cannot now remember the details of what was said in either conversation, but my most vivid recollection is of the extraordinary similarity between these two bitter enemies, once contemporaries at the University of Kabul. One was a Communist and the other a fanatical Muslim, but both were haughty warlords, men for whom fighting was not just a way of life but the highest calling.
The excitement of the Mujahidin fighters as they clustered around Hekmatyar, their sheer pleasure in their weapons and ferocity, was thrilling, and horrible. The meal over, Hekmatyar picked up an AK47 and announced “target practice”. He led us down a nearby ravine, and for ten minutes he and his men blazed away at the opposing rockface until the air shook with crashing echoes. It was a display at once childish, deliberately menacing and, for people raised on gunpowder, quite natural.
Bloody war is sewn into the very land of Afghanistan, in the form of innumerable landmines. Outside Kabul I was taken to meet an Afghan doctor making rubber “feet” out of old lorry tyres to attach to children who had lost their legs from the bombs, some of the half million crippled by war. My government guide (minder/spy) condemned the brutality and then, without irony, proudly took me to Kabul Gorge where Afghan tribesmen had massacred 16,000 British soldiers and their dependants in 1842.
The tussle for Afghanistan was a “Great Game” to the great powers, but truly the greatest players of the game were the Afghans themselves. Mogul, Persian, Russian, Soviet and British armies all perished in these unconquerable mountains. When the Soviet Union pulled out in 1989 it left 50,000 dead and a million dead Afghans. War is their game, and their games are warfare.
This medieval world, with its endless cycles of atrocity and revenge, is the one that trained, formed and defends Osama bin Laden and his like. The attack on the World Trade Centre may drag us back to the world’s cruellest battlefield, and George W. Bush should have no illusions: if it comes to war, Afghan warriors will fight the Americans who once armed them as ferociously as they once fought the British and the Russians. There is a saying in the Middle East: what happens in Afghanistan decides the course of history.
The taxi driver who took us to the airport when we left Washington said he had once been a Stinger missile operator in Hekmatyar’s guerrilla army. We pretended to recognise each other. “I am one of only six survivors from our unit of 282 men,” he said, and then he grinned broadly. “That is how we fight.”
ben.macintyre@thetimes.co.uk
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