The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  The rules of engagement were strict. The IRA men had to fire first and they had to fire at the SAS. If they threw down their guns at the challenge, they had to be taken prisoner. Before firing, both the SAS and Paras had to be immensely careful. It is a recent tradition of British politicians and lawyers that Britain’s enemies have civil rights but her soldiers do not.

  Notwithstanding, in the eighteen months Martin spent as an SAS captain in Ulster he participated in the dark-of-night ambushes. In each a party of armed IRA men was caught by surprise and challenged. Each time they were foolish enough to draw and point weapons. Each time it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary who found the bodies in the morning.

  But it was in the second shootout that Martin took his bullet. He was lucky. It was a flesh wound in the left bicep but enough to see him flown home and sent for convalescence at Headley Court, Leatherhead. That was where he met the nurse, Lucinda, who was to become his wife after a brief courtship.

  Reverting to the Paras in the spring of 1990 Mike Martin was posted to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, London. Having set up home in a rented cottage near Chobham so that Lucinda could continue her career, Martin found himself for the first time a commuter in a dark suit on the morning train to London. He ranked as a Staff Officer Three and worked in the office of MOSP, the Military Operations, Special Projects Unit. Once again it was to be a foreign aggressor who would get him out of there.

  On 2 August that year Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait. Once again Margaret Thatcher would have none of it and US President George Bush, senior, concurred. Within a week plans were in furious preparation to create a multi-national coalition to counter-invade and free the oil-rich mini-state.

  Even though the MOSP office was at full stretch the reach and influence of the Secret Intelligence Service was enough to trace him and ‘suggest’ he join a few of the ‘friends’ for lunch.

  Lunch was in a discreet club in St James’s and his hosts were two senior men from the Firm. Also at the table was a Jordanian-born, British-naturalized analyst brought in from GCQH at Cheltenham. His job there was to listen to and analyse eavesdropped radio chatter inside the Arab world. But his role at the lunch table was different.

  He conversed with Mike Martin in rapid Arabic and Martin replied. Finally the analyst nodded at the two spooks from Century House.

  ‘I’ve never heard anything like it,’ he remarked. ‘With that face and voice, he can pass.’

  With that he left the table, clearly having performed his function.

  ‘We would be so damnably grateful,’ said the senior mandarin, ‘if you would go into Kuwait and see what is going on there.’

  ‘What about the army?’ asked Martin.

  ‘I think they will see our point of view,’ murmured the other.

  The army grumbled again but let him go. Weeks later, passing himself off as a Bedouin camel drover, Martin slipped over the Saudi border into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. On the plod north to Kuwait City he passed several Iraqi patrols but they took no notice of the bearded nomad leading two camels to market. The Bedouin are so determinedly non-political that they have for millennia watched the invaders sweep hither and thither through Arabia and never intervened. So the invaders have mostly let them be.

  In several weeks inside Kuwait Martin contacted and assisted the fledgling Kuwaiti resistance, taught them the tricks of the trade, plotted the Iraqi positions, strong points and weaknesses, and then came out again.

  His second incursion during the Gulf War was into Iraq itself. He went over the Saudi border in the west and simply caught an Iraqi bus heading for Baghdad. His cover was a simple peasant clutching a wicker basket of hens.

  Back in a city he knew intimately well, he took a position as a gardener in a wealthy villa, living in a shack at the end of the garden. His mission was to act as message collector and on-passer; for this he had a small, foldable, parabolic dish aerial whose ‘blitz’ messages were uninterceptable by the Iraqi secret police but which could reach Riyadh.

  One of the best-kept secrets of that war was that the Firm had a source, an ‘asset’ high in Saddam’s government. Martin never met him; he just picked up the messages at pre-agreed dead-letter boxes, or ‘drops’, and sent them to Saudi Arabia where the American-led Coalition HQ was both mystified and appreciative. Saddam capitulated on 26 February 1991, and Mike Martin came out, only to be very nearly shot by the French Foreign Legion as he came through the border in the dark.

  On the morning of 15 February 1989 General Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviet 40th Army, the army of occupation of Afghanistan, walked alone back across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya river into Soviet Uzbekistan. His entire army had preceded him. The war was over.

  The euphoria did not last long. The USSR’s own Vietnam had ended in disaster. Her restive European satellites were becoming openly mutinous and her economy was disintegrating. By November the Berliners had torn down the Wall and the Soviet empire simply fell apart.

  In Afghanistan the Soviets had left behind a government which most analysts predicted would last no time as the victorious warlords formed a stable government and took over. But the pundits were wrong. The government of President Najibullah, the whisky-appreciating Afghan the Soviets had abandoned in Kabul, hung on for two reasons. One was that the Afghan army was simply stronger than any other force in the country, backed as it was by the Khad secret police, and was able to control the cities and thus the bulk of the population.

  More to the point, the warlords simply disintegrated into a mêlée of snarling, grabbing, feuding, self-serving opportunists, who far from uniting to form a stable government did the reverse: they created a civil war.

  None of this affected Izmat Khan. With his father still head of the family, although stiff and old before his time, and with the help of neighbours, he helped rebuild the hamlet of Maloko-zai. Stone by stone and rock by rock, they cleared the rubble left by the bombs and rockets and remade the family compound by the mulberry and pomegranate trees.

  With his leg fully healed he had returned to the war and taken command of his father’s lashkar in all but name and the men had followed him for he had been blooded. When peace came, his guerrilla group seized a huge cache of weapons the Soviets could not be bothered to carry home.

  These they took over the Spin Ghar to Parachinar in Pakistan, a town that is virtually nothing but an arms bazaar. There they traded the Soviet leftovers for cows, goats and sheep to restart the flocks.

  If life had been hard before, starting over was even harder, but he enjoyed the labour and the sense of triumph that Maloko-zai would live again. A man must have roots, and his were here. At twenty he both uttered the call and led the prayers at the village mosque on a Friday.

  The Kuchi nomads passing through brought grim tales from the plains. The army of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, loyal to Najibullah, still held the cities, but the warlords infested the countryside and they and their men behaved like brigands. Tolls were arbitrarily set up on main roads and travellers were stripped of their money and goods or badly beaten.

  Pakistan, in the form of its ISI Directorate, was backing Hekmatyar to become controller of all Afghanistan and in areas he ruled utter terror existed. All those who had formed the Peshawar Seven to fight the Soviets were now at each other’s throats and the people groaned. From being heroes the Muj were now seen as tyrants. Izmat Khan thanked the merciful Allah that he was spared the misery of the plains.

  With the end of the war the Arabs had almost all gone from the mountains and their precious caves. The one who by the end had become their uncrowned leader, the tall Saudi from the cave-hospital, was also gone. Some five hundred Arabs had stayed behind but they were not popular; they were scattered far and wide and living like beggars.

  When he was twenty Izmat Khan was visiting a neighbouring valley when he saw a girl washing the family clothes in the stream. She failed to hear his horse because of the sound of the running water
and before she could draw the end of her hejab across her face he had made eye contact. She fled in alarm and embarrassment. But he had seen that she was beautiful.

  Izmat did what any young man would do. He consulted his mother. She was delighted and soon two aunts had joined with her in happy conspiracy to find the girl and persuade Nuri Khan to contact the father to arrange a union. Her name was Maryam and the wedding took place in the late spring of 1993.

  Of course it was in the open air, which was full of blossom being blown off the walnut trees. There was a feast and the bride came from her village on a decorated horse. There was playing of the flutes and attan dancing under the trees but of course only for the men. With his madrassah training Izmat protested at the singing and dancing, but his father was rejuvenated and overruled him. So for a day Izmat rejected his strict Wahhabi training and he too danced in the meadow and the eyes of his bride followed him everywhere.

  The delay between the first glimpse by the stream and the marriage was necessary both to arrange the details of the dowry and to build a new house for the newly-weds inside the Khan compound. It was here that he took his bride when night had fallen and the exhausted villagers returned home, and his mother forty yards away nodded in satisfaction when a single cry in the night told her that her daughter-in-law had become a woman. Three months later it was clear she would bear a child in the snows of February.

  As Maryam carried Izmat’s child the Arabs came back. The tall Saudi who led them was not among them; he was somewhere far away called Sudan. But he sent a great deal of money and by paying tribute to the warlords was able to set up training camps. Here, at Khalid ibn Walid, al-Farouk, Sadeek, Khaldan, Jihad Wal and Darunta, the thousands of new volunteers from across the Arabic-speaking world came to train for war.

  But what war? So far as Izmat Khan could see, they took no sides in the civil war among the tribal satraps, so who were they training to fight? He learned that it was all because the tall one, whom his followers called the Sheikh, had declared jihad against his own government in Saudi Arabia and against the West.

  But Izmat Khan had no quarrel with the West. The West had helped defeat the Soviets with arms and money, and the only kafir he had ever met had saved his life. It was not his holy war, not his jihad, he decided. His concern was for his country, which was descending into madness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The parachute regiment accepted Mike Martin back and asked no questions because that was what it was told to do, but he was already acquiring a reputation as a bit of an oddity. Two unexplained absences from duty inside four years, each for six months, caused raised eyebrows over breakfast in any military unit. For 1992 he was sent to the Staff College at Camberley and thence back to the Ministry, but as a major.

  This time it was to the Directorate of Military Operations again, but as a Staff Officer Two in Department Three, the Balkans. The war was still raging, the Serbs under Milosevic were dominant and the world was sickened by the massacres known as ethnic cleansing. Chafing at the lack of any chance of action, he spent two years commuting in a dark suit from the suburbs to London.

  Officers who have served in the SAS can return for a second tour, but only on invitation. Mike Martin got his call from Hereford at the end of 1994. It was the Christmas present he had been hoping for. But it did not please Lucinda.

  There had been no baby; there were two careers heading in different directions. Lucinda had been offered a big promotion; she called it the chance of a lifetime, but it meant going to work in the Midlands. The marriage was under strain and Mike Martin’s orders were to command B Squadron, 22 SAS, and take them covertly to Bosnia. Ostensibly they would be part of the United Nations’s UNPROFOR peace-keeping mission. In fact they would hunt down and snatch war criminals. He was not allowed to tell Lucinda the details, only that he was leaving again.

  It was the final straw. She presumed it was a transfer back to Arabia and she quite properly put to him an ultimatum: you can have the Paras, the SAS and your bloody desert, or you can come to Birmingham and have a marriage. He thought it over and chose the desert.

  Outside the seclusion of the high valleys of the White Mountains Izmat Khan’s old party leader Younis Khalès died and the Hizb-i-Islami party was then wholly in the control of Hekmatyar, whose reputation for cruelty Izmat loathed.

  By the time his baby was born in February 1994 President Najibullah had fallen but was alive, confined to a UN guest house in Kabul. He had supposedly been succeeded by Professor Rabbani, but Rabbani was a Tajik and therefore not acceptable to the Pashtun. Outside Kabul, only the warlords ruled their domains, but the real master was chaos and anarchy.

  Yet something else was happening too. After the Soviet war thousands of young Afghans had gone back to the Pakistani madrassahs to complete their education. Others, too young to have fought at all, went over the border to achieve an education, any education. What they got was years of Wahhabi brainwashing. Now they were coming back, but they were different from Izmat Khan.

  Because the old Younis Khalès, though ultra-devout, had possessed some residual moderation in him, his madrassahs in the refugee camps had taught Islam with a hint of temperance. Others concentrated only on the ultra-aggressive passages from the Verses of the Sword to be found in the Holy Koran. And old Nuri Khan, though devout also, was humane and saw no harm in singing, dancing, sports and some tolerance of others.

  The returnees were ill educated, having been taught by barely literate imams. They knew nothing of life, of women (most lived and died virgins) or even of their own tribal cultures as Izmat had learned from his father. Apart from the Koran, they knew only one thing: war. Most came from the deep south where the Islam practised had always been of the most strict variants in all Afghanistan.

  In the summer of 1994 Izmat Khan and a cousin left the upland valley for Jalalabad. It was a short visit but long enough to witness the savage massacre inflicted by the followers of Hekmatyar on a village that had finally refused to pay him any more tribute money. The two travellers found the menfolk tortured and slain, the women beaten, the village torched. Izmat Khan was disgusted. In Jalalabad he learned what he had seen was quite commonplace.

  Then something happened in the deep south. Since the fall of any semblance of a central government the old official Afghan army had simply reassigned itself to the local warlord who paid the best. Outside Kandahar some soldiers took two teenage girls back to their camp and gang-raped them.

  The preacher from the village they had raided, who also ran his own religious school, went to the army camp with thirty students and sixteen rifles. Against the odds they trounced the soldiers and hanged the commandant from the barrel of a tank gun. The priest was called Muhammad Omar, or Mullah Omar. He had lost his right eye in battle.

  The news spread. Others appealed to him for help. He and his group swelled in numbers and responded to the appeals. They took no money, they raped no women, they stole no crops, they asked no reward. They became local heroes. By December 1994, twelve thousand had joined them, adopting this mullah’s black turban. They called themselves the students. In Pashto ‘student’ is talib, and the plural is the Taliban. From village vigilantes they became a movement and when they captured the city of Kandahar an alternative government.

  Pakistan, through its forever-plotting ISI, had been trying to topple the Tajik Rabbani in Kabul by backing Hekmatyar, but he failed repeatedly. As the ISI was deeply infiltrated by ultra-orthodox Muslims, Pakistan switched support to the Taliban. With Kandahar the new movement inherited a huge cache of arms, plus tanks, armoured cars, trucks, guns, six MiG 21 ex-Soviet fighters and six heavy helicopters. They began to sweep north. In 1995 Izmat Khan embraced his wife, kissed his baby farewell and then came down from the mountains to join them.

  Later, on the floor of a cell in Cuba, he would recall that the days on the upland farm with his wife and child had been the happiest days of his life. He was twenty-three.

  Too late he learned there was a dark
side to the Taliban. In Kandahar, even though the Pashtun had been devout before, they were subjected to the harshest regimen the world of Islam has ever seen.

  All girls’ schools were closed at once. Women were forbidden to leave the house save in the company of a male relative. The all-enveloping burka robe was decreed at all times; the clacking of female sandals on tiles was decreed forbidden as being too sexy.

  All singing, dancing, the playing of music, sports and kite-flying, a national pastime, was forbidden. Prayers were to be said the required five times a day. Beards on men were compulsory. The enforcers in their black turbans were often teenage fanatics, taught only the Verses of the Sword, cruelty and war. From being liberators they became the new tyrants, but their advance was unstoppable. Their mission was to destroy the rule of the warlords, and as these were loathed by the people, the people acquiesced to the new strictness. At least there was law, order, no more corruption, no more rape, no more crime; just fanatical orthodoxy.

  Mullah Omar was a warrior-priest but nothing else. Having started his revolution by hanging a rapist from a gun barrel he withdrew into seclusion in his southern fortress, Kandahar. His followers were like something out of the Middle Ages, and among the many things they could not recognize was fear. They worshipped the one-eyed Mullah behind his walls and before the Taliban fell eighty thousand would die for him. Far away in Sudan the tall Saudi who controlled the twenty thousand Arabs now based in Afghanistan watched and waited.

  Izmat Khan joined a lashkar of men drawn from his own province, Nangarhar. He was quickly respected because he was mature, had fought the Russians and been wounded.