The war in Kandahar will probably continue for many months, with the guerrillas continuing their attempts to demoralise and destabilise the government forces with more attacks in the heart of the citv like Tuesday night’s.
Years later the Mullahs’ Front would become the Taliban with Mullah Mohammad as deputy leader to Mullah Omar. For a while Hamid Karzai was their chief fund-raiser though he would later prefer to forget that.
It was generally assumed that the communist regime in Kabul had no support and once the Russians had left, the mujahideen would simply sweep in and take over. The American embassy in Islamabad held weekly briefings, known as sit-reps, where we would be told of all the many Afghan government posts that had been captured by the resistance. One day I added them all up and discovered that in Jalalabad alone they had taken five times as many as actually existed. The US envoy in Islamabad, Peter Tomsen, talked of ‘riding into free Kabul on the back of a muj tank’.
But when the last Russian soldier crossed the Oxus on 15 February 1989, far from the war being over, it was about to get a whole lot messier. Yet almost overnight, the world lost interest. Diplomats, spies, aid workers and journalists packed up and left. I was shocked.
So angry was General Hamid Gul, the ISI chief, that he called me in for a rare briefing in an office dominated by a map of Afghanistan. ‘The West thinks they can use these fundamentalists as cannon fodder and abandon them,’ he raged. ‘They were all right to win the war but not to run the future Afghanistan. Well, we will not allow that and I tell you this will come back to haunt them.’
With the Russians all gone, the mujahideen were under growing pressure to capture a city. It was clear that this would have to be Jalalabad as that was logistically easiest, just fifty-seven miles from Peshawar. We all knew that ISI had drawn up a plan. One day I was in Islamabad when I got a call from an Afghan friend. ‘It’s starting tonight,’ he said.
I grabbed the small khaki rucksack I always kept ready. It contained little more than a toothbrush, a spare pair of socks, water bottle, notebook and pens. Back in those days I did not see the need for sun cream, moisturiser, medical kits, coffee sachets or cereal bars. Then I jumped in my small blue Suzuki car to drive up the Grand Trunk Road, impatiently weaving in and out of the jingle trucks and camel-drawn wagons.
I run the gauntlet of fear to siege city
Daily Express, 17 March 1989
LUCKILY, I could not guess at the nightmare that lay ahead of me.
The safest way to reach a war front, I reasoned, was by ambulance. There is no shortage of them trundling the dusty roads to Jalalabad, where the mujahideen are now dug in for the bitterest bloodiest fighting yet of this endless Afghanistan war.
The ambulances go up empty and come screaming back with the bloodied, shattered bodies of the hundreds of resistance fighters who have long since overflowed the Peshawar hospital.
I was given the choice of two vehicles – one a dented pick-up truck, the other a battered van covered with mud and branches as camouflage. I chose the van. It was a good choice.
Had I ridden in the pick-up, I would not have survived the next six hours.
I was dressed in pyjama-like Afghan garb behind which I hoped to disguise my blonde hair and green eyes. I added a woollen hat and shawl and dirtied my face for good measure. My companions were five young guerrillas, with two Kalashnikov rifles and an unlimited supply of hashish and a tape recorder. On this, for hours on end, they played Eurotrash disco music from a group called C. C. Catch.
Journalists are not only barred from heading towards Jalalabad by Pakistani border guards but any mujahideen who take them in now face heavy fines. As the border approached, floor cushions were removed and I was bundled into their place and covered with bloodstained sheets and blankets reeking of Dettol.
I was dozing, partly anaesthetised by the fumes, when they shook me awake. ‘We’re in Afghanistan!’ said Shisha.
The road, pockmarked with shell holes, was packed on our side with truckloads of mujahideen waving guns and chanting, ‘Allahu Akbar!’– God is great.
Coming the other way was a stream of refugees, mainly women and children, clutching small bundles of possessions. The women wailed. Many had lost children in the rush to escape, and husbands in the war.
The plan had been to take Jalalabad within two days, reinforcing mujahideen claims to be in control of 90 per cent of the country and providing a city in which to base a provisional government pending the fall of Kabul.
Initial fighting was successful with the muj quickly capturing several key posts, including Samarkhel, headquarters of the Kabul regime’s 11th Division, where half-eaten meals lay as evidence of the suddenness of departure. Three dead Afghan soldiers lay splayed in the field face down, shot as they tried to flee their post.
Commander Noor Haq, from the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan’s guerrilla forces, which spearheaded the attack, said: ‘The regime just fell back and left.’
He kicked one of the dead bodies over and took a red ID book from the dead man’s pocket, which he presented to me.
It was on the road just ahead of Samarkhel that we heard the first rumble of bombing. Sher Ali picked up a clutch of bullets from the floor. ‘See,’ he grinned. ‘That was last time. An ambush.’ He pointed to a string of holes across the rear door.
No one was grinning a second later. The drone of planes suddenly got much louder. A jet had dipped low and was coming straight at us.
‘Cut!’ screamed someone as the ambulance slowed to a halt. The earth vibrated as we scrambled clear and threw ourselves down the slope at the roadside.
But the other ambulance kept going. There followed an eerie moment of silence punctuated by a dog whining. Then, as if in slow motion, we watched the pick-up explode in a single vivid orange burst of light.
I was unable to speak, as I waited for some sign of life. When the planes had gone, we rushed to the burning wreckage. The occupants – two male nurses and a doctor, all Afghans – were dead.
After ten years of war, Afghans show a cold indifference to death. My companions shrugged over the victims, straightened their bodies out and left them beside the road.
Then, we turned back. It was too dangerous, I was told. ‘Of course it is, it’s a war!’ I replied. ‘Aren’t you supposed to collect the wounded?’ But my words fell on deaf ears. Ten miles further on at a mujahideen staging post, they told me to get out. But the next day, they promised, they would be back.
I spent the night surrounded by twenty soldiers in the hujra, or men’s council room, of what was probably once a beautiful mansion but was now a ruin.
In the circumstances, I slept well on the floor. But the next day I was worried. Were my companions fundamentalists eager to dispose of a western infidel?
They plainly had no intention of going to war and were amused by my plight. As I scanned the horizon for my missing ambulance, they burst into gales of laughter.
By extraordinary good fortune, I recognised the commander of a truckload of men who had pulled in on their way to the front. We had met in Peshawar. Realising the hopelessness of my position, he promised I could go with them.
Their destination was Jalalabad airport, a few kilometres outside the city, where one of the bloodiest battles was now raging.
Control of Jalalabad is a major prize for both sides. It lies across the main highway to Kabul. It must be taken if Kabul is to fall; it must be held if the regime of President Najibullah is to survive.
Although Samarkhel fell quickly, the airport and the gates to the city have proved much harder to penetrate. The regime has sent in reinforcements from Kabul, including the elite presidential guards, and started intensive bombing.
We drove to a thick wood just outside the perimeter of the airfield and the men took up posts at Position BM12, a rocket-launching site protected by tree cover. Around us, scattered through the wood, were apparently more than 600 guerrillas. Behind them were several tanks – captured earlier in the fray
but apparently abandoned. ‘We cannot drive them,’ my commander admitted.
Our rocket battery began unleashing sporadic bursts of fire. They say 5,000 rockets have been launched in the bid to take this city.
Occasionally there was a cheering charge up to the fence. But heavy fire drove them back each time, casualties staggering from the ranks. My commander says 500 men have been lost in the past week. Civilian casualties are thought to be much higher.
Mujahideen leaders broadcast loudspeaker warnings to civilians to leave. Shah Zaman, spokesman for Pakistan’s Afghan Refugee Commission, said 18,000 refugees had arrived in one week, the biggest evacuation of the war. But many had died in strafing attacks along the way and thousands more are trapped in the ruins of what was once known as Afghanistan’s ‘garden city’.
‘At the end of the day we may be left in control of a pile of rubble,’ one commander told me. ‘But there can be no going back.’
I was one of only two journalists to get into the battle at the start and I was horrified by what I had seen. So were the stalwarts of the American Club when they saw my story plastered across not just the Daily Express but the front page of the FT and Time magazine. This was not the accepted line. My membership was suspended.
It didn’t really matter. Much as I enjoyed the camaraderie and jokes of my fellow hacks, I already knew that when it came to work I didn’t want to be part of the pack. I spent most evenings with Pakistani and Afghan friends, squatting on the ground eating greasy mutton stew and rice with my hands, entranced by their Kiplingesque stories about tribes and feuds.
I never went back into Afghanistan with the mujahideen after Jalalabad. Although I had seen fighters getting killed on my previous trips, that battle was the first time I witnessed mass deaths of civilians. I couldn’t get out of my head the beseeching faces of women along the roadside with injured children who had thought I was a nurse. Back in the cold light of Peshawar I could not believe I had just driven past them in my rush to get to the front line. It was the ugliest thing I had ever done and made me realise just what an ugly thing war is. When I phoned in to dictate my copy, the Express’s gentlemanly foreign editor John Ellison must have thought I had overdone the vodka because I kept giggling; in those days no one talked of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mostly I was angry and disillusioned, watching the Afghans turn on each other. Pakistan’s manipulation through ISI had become more and more open. During the battle for Jalalabad I had seen an ISI officer, Colonel Imam, directing operations and heard one of the commanders, Rahim Wardak, ask him bitterly: ‘How can you who have never won a war dare give orders to we who have never lost one?’
A shura (council) held in Rawalpindi to form an interim government collapsed within forty minutes, unsurprisingly after all those years of ISI stoking division. General Gul’s men then locked the more than 400 Afghan delegates inside the Haji complex and tried to force them to choose a government headed by one of ISI’s pet fundamentalists – either Abdul Sayyaf or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
One day I got a call from Benon Sevan, the bear-like UN envoy who shuttled back and forth between Kabul and the Holiday Inn in Islamabad. He had persuaded President Najibullah to grant visas to some journalists who had covered the war from the other side. My name was on the list.
It was scary landing in Kabul. The Afghan capital nestles deep inside the Hindu Kush and the old Antonov seemed almost to touch the mountains as it circled. As we dropped down in a corkscrew landing, flares of white potassium exploded all around us to deter mujahideen rockets. The hills were covered in square mud-baked houses and it seemed like a place drained of colour. ‘Even in summer it’s a city of grey,’ I wrote in my diary.
The airport building had been recently rocketed, the glass blown out, and we did not hang around. But to my surprise Kabul was pretty intact. Life seemed to be going on much as usual. The streets were busy with yellow taxis and people selling second-hand clothes and birds in wooden cages. Somehow, from Peshawar, I had imagined it as a place in suspension.
The Hotel Kabul where we stayed was a dark, depressing place, its grimness not helped by the knowledge that the US Ambassador Adolph Dubs had been murdered in one of the rooms ten years earlier. There was little food apart from eggs and hard naan bread. The telephones did not work and copy had to be sent back by telex. The telex operator had just one arm and, even more alarmingly, doubled as the hotel driver, his one black-gloved hand switching back and forth from steering wheel to gear stick.
Now when I look at some of my photographs from that trip and compare it to the Kabul of today, it is hard to believe it is the same place.
Westernised women dread return to a veiled existence
Financial Times, 23 June 1989
IT COULD BE any western university campus. Brightly dressed girls in tight miniskirts or jeans and baggy T-shirts proclaiming ‘I’m Not with This Idiot’ sit in the sun, licking ice creams and discussing everything from their favourite Indian film stars to politics. Western rock music blares from a portable stereo.
A group of literature students are discussing Fariba’s newly blonde hair. ‘If Gulbuddin comes to power he’ll cut it all off and lock you up,’ jokes one.
The laughter is a little hollow. Women such as these, at Kabul University, seem a different species from the Afghan women who, as refugees in Pakistan, are forced by threats from the more fundamentalist Afghan resistance parties – such as that of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – to hide themselves in burqas, unsightly, tent-like garments with only a small grille for vision, commonly known as shuttlecocks. This is when they are allowed out on the streets at all. Some, who have dared work as teachers, have had acid thrown in their faces.
The women of Kabul University are not the only ones fearful that if the extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen take power they will be forced to stay at home, abandoning their ambitions and modern lifestyles for what they call ‘Gulbuddin’s medieval fortress’.
In a government flat, Wajia, a well-known singer, strums her guitar and, between puffs of her cigarette, says she will have to leave the country if Gulbuddin comes.
Women’s fears about a fundamentalist regime surfaced last summer when the mujahideen announced the Constitution of their government in exile, stating that women must be kept in purdah. Headlines across the US screamed, ‘Mujahideen Will Force Women Behind the Veil’ – something of an embarrassment for Washington, which has spent more than $2 billion (£1.3 billion) funding the resistance since Soviet forces entered Afghanistan in 1979 – the main portion going to the fundamentalists.
Not a single woman was invited to the 400-member shura (council), held in Pakistan in February, to choose a government. A good many of the seven resistance leaders say they would not want women to vote if elections were held.
President Najibullah, meanwhile, has tried to win over women, giving them places in his administration and creating a special 600-member women’s militia. Nadya, a 20-year-old cadet, has just returned from
Jalalabad, where she says she fired rockets on mujahideen. ‘We women have become a force to reckon with and will not let Gulbuddin here.’
Women have become vitally important to the economy, with 1.5 million men of Afghanistan’s pre-war population of 15 million killed in the ten years of fighting and many more rendered incapable of work through injury. Most staff at Afghan factories are women and, when the refugees return, reconstruction could again fall heavily on women.
Esmatee Wardak, president of Afghanistan’s women’s committee, threw away her burqa in 1959 when the then King, Zahir Shah, declared them no longer compulsory for women past puberty. One of the first Afghan women to graduate, Mrs Wardak says the war has made women more assertive: ‘I am a Muslim from a backward village and I will never again keep a burqa in my house. Islamic law does not require it and now there are many women like me who will fight anyone who tries to turn us back to the veil.’
However, unlike religious or ethnic groups such as Sikhs, Hind
us and Hazaras who felt oppressed by the previous Pashtun rule and whom Najibullah is wooing on the basis that all groups are now treated the same, women dismiss the suggestion that the party has liberated them. There were women MPs before the war and Mrs Wardak maintains it is ‘suffering and the need to be economically independent that strengthened us’.
She admits that outside the cosmopolitan city of Kabul, many rural and provincial women choose to wear burqas, but believes that with education these will be discarded.
It was Zahir Shah who gave women the vote and introduced the miniskirt to Kabul. However, women’s rights is an area where Najibullah hopes to win the public relations war.
Abhorrence at the Hekmatyar speeches does not necessarily translate into support for Najibullah. Wajia looks forward to the day when she can write the songs she wants to. At the university Jumila asks: ‘What is it to have equal rights under a regime which does not believe in rights?’
Death of a General
Pakistan 1988–1990
FOR ALL BENAZIR’S triumphant return to Pakistan in 1987, the country remained under military dictatorship and my first big interview was with General Zia-ul-Haq in July 1988.
It came about in a strange way. That May, General Zia had dismissed his own prime minister and announced on television that there would be party-based elections. Then a month later he held a press conference, a rare event, in a grand salon in the Aiwan-e-Sadr palace where he sat under a glittering chandelier and said that political parties would not be allowed to contest the elections.
No one else seemed bothered by this turnaround. As usual at Pakistani press conferences, a series of journalists stood up and made legalistic points in the form of lengthy statements rather than questions. I stuck up my hand.
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