The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  The Taliban army was not a real army; it had no commanding general, no general staff, no officer corps, no ranks and no infrastructure. Each lashkar was semi-independent under its tribal leader who often held sway through personality and courage in combat, plus religious devotion. Like the original Muslim warriors of the first Caliphates they swept their enemies aside with fanatical courage, which gave rise to a reputation for invincibility, so much so that opponents often capitulated without a shot fired. When they finally ran into real soldiers, the forces of the charismatic Tajik Shah Massoud, they took unspeakable losses. They had no medical corps so their wounded simply died by the roadside. But still they came on.

  At the gates of Kabul they negotiated with Massoud but he refused to accept their terms and withdrew to his own northern mountains whence he had fought and defied the Russians. So began the next civil war, between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Massoud the Tajik and Dostum the Uzbek. It was 1996. Only Pakistan (who had organized it) and Saudi Arabia (who paid for it) recognized the new weird government of Afghanistan.

  For Izmat Khan the die was cast. His old ally Shah Massoud was now his enemy. Far to the south an aeroplane landed. It brought back the tall Saudi who had spoken to him eight years earlier in a cave at Jaji and the chubby doctor who had pulled a chunk of Soviet steel from his leg. Both men paid immediate obeisance to Mullah Omar, paying huge tribute in money and equipment and thus securing his lifelong loyalty.

  After Kabul there was a pause in the war. Almost the first act of the Taliban in Kabul was to drag the toppled ex-president Najibullah from his house arrest, torture, mutilate and execute him before hanging his corpse from a lamp-post. That set the tenor of the rule to come. Izmat Khan had no taste for cruelty for its own sake. He had fought hard enough in the conquest of his country to rise from volunteer to commander of his own lashkar, and this in turn grew as word of his leadership spread until it became one of the four divisions in the Taliban army. Then he asked to be allowed to go back to his native Nangarhar and was made Provincial Governor. Based in Jalalabad, he could visit his family, wife and baby.

  He had never heard of Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. He had never heard of anyone called William Jefferson Clinton. He had indeed heard much of a group now based in his country called Al-Qaeda and knew that its adherents had declared global jihad against all unbelievers and especially the West and most of all against a place called America. But it was not his jihad.

  He was fighting the Northern Alliance to unite his homeland once and for all and the Alliance had been beaten back to two small and obscure enclaves. One was a group of resistants of the Hazara tribe bottled up in the mountains of Dara-i-Suf and the other was Massoud himself in the impregnable Panjshir Valley and the north-eastern corner called Badakshan.

  On 7 August 1998 bombs exploded outside the American embassies in two African capitals. He knew nothing of this. Listening to foreign radio was now banned, and he obeyed. On 20 August America launched seventy Tomahawk cruise missiles at Afghanistan. They came from the two missile cruisers Cowpen and Shiloh in the Red Sea and from the destroyers Briscoe, Elliot, Hayler and Milius, plus the submarine Columbia, all in the Arabian Gulf south of Pakistan.

  They were aimed at the training camps of Al-Qaeda, and the caves of the Tora Bora. Among those that went astray was one that entered the mouth of a natural and empty cave high in the mountain above Maloko-zai. The detonation deep inside the cave split the mountain and an entire face peeled away. Ten million tons of rock crashed into the valley below.

  When Izmat Khan reached the mountain there was nothing to recognize. The entire valley had been buried. There was no stream any more, no farm, no orchards, no stock pens, no mosque, no stables, no compounds. His entire family and all his neighbours were gone. His parents, uncles, aunts, sisters, wife and child were dead beneath millions of tons of granite rubble. There was nowhere to dig and nothing to dig for. He had become a man with no roots, no relatives, no clan.

  In the dying August sun he knelt on the shale high above where his dead family lay, turned west towards Mecca, bowed his head to the ground and prayed. But it was a different prayer this time; it was a mighty oath, a sworn vendetta, a personal jihad unto death and it was against the people who had done this. He declared war on America.

  A week later he had resigned his governorship and gone back to the front. For three years he fought the Northern Alliance. While he had been away the tactically brilliant Massoud had counter-attacked and again caused huge losses to the less competent Taliban. There had been massacres at Mazar-i-Sharif where after the native Hazara had risen in revolt and killed six hundred Taliban the avenging Taliban had gone back and butchered over two thousand civilians.

  The Dayton Agreement had been signed; technically the Bosnian war was over. But what had been left behind was nightmarish. Muslim Bosnia had been the main theatre of war, even though the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats had all been involved. It had been the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.

  The Croats and the Serbs, far and away the better armed, had inflicted most of the brutalities. A thoroughly and rightly ashamed Europe set up a war crimes tribunal at The Hague in Holland and waited for the first indictments. The problem was, the guilty ones were not about to come forward with their hands up. Milosevic would offer no help at all; indeed, he was preparing fresh miseries for another Muslim province, that of Kosovo.

  Part of Bosnia, the exclusively Serbian third, had declared itself the Serb Republic and most of the war criminals were hiding within it. This was the task: find them, identify them, snatch them and bring them out to stand trial. Living mainly in the fields and forests, the SAS spent 1997 hunting down what they called the PIFWICs – persons indicted for war crimes.

  By 1998 Mike Martin was back in the UK and back in the Paras, a Lieutenant Colonel and instructor at Staff College, Camberley. The following year he was made Commanding Officer First Battalion, known as One Para. The NATO allies had again intervened in the Balkans, this time a little more speedily than before, and again to prevent a massacre big enough to cause the media to use the over-employed word of genocide.

  Intelligence had convinced both the British and American governments that Milosevic intended to ‘cleanse’ the rebellious province of Kosovo and to do it thoroughly. The medium would be the expulsion of most of its 1.8 million citizens westwards into neighbouring Albania. Under the NATO banner the allies gave Milosevic an ultimatum. He ignored it and columns of weeping and destitute Kosovans were driven through the mountain passes into Albania.

  The NATO response was no invasion on the ground but bombing raids which lasted seventy-eight days and wrecked both Kosovo and Serbian Yugoslavia itself. With his country in ruins Milosevic finally conceded and NATO moved into Kosovo to try to govern the wreckage. The man in charge was a lifelong Para, General Mike Jackson, and One Para went with him.

  That would probably have been Mike Martin’s last ‘action’ posting had it not been for the West Side Boys.

  On 9 September 2001 news flashed through the Taliban army that had the soldiers roaring Allahu akhbar, God is Great, over and over again. The air above Izmat Khan’s camp outside Bamiyan crackled with the shots fired in a delirium of joy. Someone had assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud. Their enemy was dead. The man whose charisma had held together the cause of the useless Rabbani, whose cleverness as a guerrilla fighter had caused the Soviets to revere him and whose generalship had carved Taliban forces to pieces, was no more.

  In fact he had been assassinated by two suicide bombers, ultra-fanatical Moroccans pretending to be journalists with stolen Belgian passports, and sent by Osama bin Laden as a favour to his friend Mullah Omar. The Saudi had not thought of the ploy; it was the far cleverer Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri who realized that if Al-Qaeda did this favour for Omar, the one-eyed mullah could never expel them for what was going to happen next.

  On the eleventh four airliners were hijacked over the American east coast. Within ninet
y minutes two had destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one had devastated the Pentagon and the fourth, since its rebellious passengers invaded the flight deck to rip the hijackers from the controls, had crashed in a field.

  Within days the identity and inspiration of the nineteen hijackers had been established; within a few more days the new American President had given Mullah Omar a flat ultimatum: yield up the ringleaders or take the consequences. Because of Massoud, Omar could not capitulate. It was the code.

  In the West African hellhole of Sierra Leone, a long period of civil war and barbarism had left the once-rich former British colony a vista of chaos, banditry, filth, disease, poverty and hacked-off limbs. Years earlier the British had decided to intervene and the UN had been prevailed upon to ship in fifteen thousand troops who, broadly, just sat in their barracks in the capital, Freetown. The jungle beyond the city limits was regarded as simply too dangerous for the UN force. Only the in-country element of the British army was under national command and was prepared to go there, so it was they alone who patrolled the back country.

  In late August 2000 a patrol of eleven men from the Royal Irish Rangers were lured off the main road and down a track to the village which acted as the headquarters of a rebel band calling themselves the West Side Boys. They were, in effect, out-of-control psychopaths. They were relentlessly drunk on pure-alcohol native hooch; they rubbed their gums with cocaine or cut their arms to rub the dope into the cuts and get a faster ‘hit’. The horrors they had inflicted on the peasantry over a wide area were unspeakable; but there were four hundred of them and they were armed to the teeth. The Rangers were quickly captured and held hostage.

  Mike Martin, after a stint in Kosovo, had brought One Para to Freetown where they were based at Waterloo Camp. After complex negotiations five of the Rangers were ransomed but the remaining six seemed destined to be chopped up. In London the Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, gave the word: go in there by force and get them out.

  The task force was forty-eight SAS men, twenty-four from the SBS and ninety from One Para. Ten SAS men in jungle camouflage were dropped in a week before the attack and lived unseen in the jungle round the bandit village, watching and listening. Everything the West Side Boys said and did was overheard by the SAS men in the bush a few yards away and reported back. That was how the British knew there was no further hope of a peaceful exfiltration.

  Mike Martin went in with the second wave after an unlucky rebel mortar had injured six including the commander of the first wave who had to be evacuated without ceremony.

  The village – or in fact twin villages of Gberi Bana and Magbeni – straddled a slimy and stinking river called Rokel Creek. The seventy-two special forces took Gberi Bana where the hostages were located, rescued them all and fought off a series of manic counter-attacks. The ninety Paras took Magbeni. There were, at dawn, about two hundred West Side Boys in each.

  Six prisoners were taken, trussed and brought back to Freetown. A few of them escaped into the jungle. No attempt was made to count the bodies, either in the wreck of the two villages or the surrounding jungle, but no one ever disputed a figure of three hundred dead.

  The SAS and the Paras took twelve injured and one SAS man, Brad Tinnion, died of his wounds. Mike Martin, having lost the CO of his first wave, arrived in the second Chinook and led the final wipe-out of Magbeni. It was old-fashioned fighting, point-blank range and hand to hand. On the south side of the Rokel Creek the Paras had lost their radio to the same mortar blast that hit the attack leader. So the circling helicopters overhead could not report on the fall of their own mortar shells and the jungle was too thick to see them drop.

  Eventually the Paras just charged, blood pumping, screaming and swearing until the West Side Boys, happy to torture peasants and prisoners, fled, died, fled again and died until there were none left.

  It was twelve months later almost to the day that Martin was back in London when lunch was interrupted by those unbelievable images on the TV screen of fully loaded and fuelled airliners flying straight into the Twin Towers. A week later it was plain the USA would have to go into Afghanistan in pursuit of those responsible, with or without the agreement of the Kabul government.

  London at once agreed that it would provide whatever was needed from its own resources and the immediate requirements were air-to-air refuelling tankers and special forces. The SIS Head of Station in Islamabad said he would also need all the help he could get.

  That was a matter for Vauxhall Cross, but the Defence Attaché in Islamabad also asked for help. Mike Martin was taken from his desk at Para HQ Aldershot and found himself on the next flight to Islamabad as Special Forces Liaison Officer.

  He arrived four weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the day the first allied attacks went in.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Izmat Khan was still commanding in the north, on the Badakhshan front, when the bombs rained on Kabul. As the world studied Kabul and diversionary tactics in the south, the US Special Forces slipped into Badakhshan to help General Fahim who had taken over Massoud’s army. This was where the real fighting would be; the rest was window dressing for the media. The key would be Northern Alliance ground forces and American air power.

  Without ever taking off, Afghanistan’s puny air force was vaporized. Its tanks and artillery, if they could be spotted, were ‘taken out’. The Uzbek, Rashid Dostum, who had spent years in safety across the border, was persuaded to come back and open a second front in the north-west to match Fahim’s front in the north-east. And in November the great break-out began. The key was target-marking, the technology that has quietly revolutionized warfare since the first Gulf War of 1991.

  Hidden, invisible among the allied forces, Special Forces specialists squint through long-range binoculars to identify the enemy’s dug-in positions, guns, tanks, ammunition dumps, reserves, supplies and command bunkers. Each is marked or ‘painted’ with an infra-red dot from a shoulder-held projector. Via radio an air strike is called up.

  In the destruction of the Taliban army facing the Northern Alliance these strikes either came from far away in the south where US Navy carriers hovered off the coast, or with A-10 tank-busters flying out of well-rewarded Uzbekistan. Unit by unit, with bombs and rockets that could not miss as they followed the infra-red beam, the Taliban army was blown away and the Tajiks charged in triumph.

  Izmat Khan retreated and retreated as position after position was devastated and lost. The Taliban army of the north began with over thirty thousand soldiers, but were losing a thousand a day. There was no medication, no evacuation, no doctors. The wounded said their prayers and died like flies. They screamed Allahu akhbar and charged into walls of bullets.

  The original volunteers for the Taliban army had long been used up. Few were left. Taliban recruiting squads had pressed tens of thousands more into the ranks, but many did not want to fight. The true fanatics were dwindling away. And still Izmat Khan had to pull them back, each time convinced that, being in the forefront of every combat, he could not last another day. By 18 November they had reached the town of Kunduz.

  By a fluke of history Kunduz is a small enclave of Gilzai southerners, all Pashtun, in a sea of Tajiks and Hazaras. Thus the Taliban army could take refuge there. And it was there they agreed to surrender.

  Among Afghans there is nothing dishonourable in a negotiated surrender and, once agreed, its terms are always honoured. The entire Taliban army surrendered to General Fahim and, to the rage of the US advisers, Fahim accepted.

  Inside the Taliban were two non-Afghan groups. There were six hundred Arabs, all devoted to Osama bin Laden, who had sent them there. Well over three thousand Arabs had already died and the American attitude was that they would not weep salt tears if the rest went to Allah as well.

  There were also about two thousand Pakistanis who were clearly going to be a thundering embarrassment to Islamabad if they were discovered. The Pakistani ruler, General Musharraf, had been left i
n not a shred of doubt after 9/11 that he had a choice: become a dedicated ally of the USA with billions and billions of dollars in aid; or continue to support (via the ISI) the Taliban and thus bin Laden and pay the direct consequences. He chose the USA.

  But the ISI still had a small army of agents inside Afghanistan and the Pakistani volunteers fighting with the Taliban would not stint on revealing the encouragement they had once been given to go north. Over three nights a secret air bridge exfiltrated most of them back to Pakistan.

  In another covert deal some four thousand prisoners were sold – for varying sums according to desirability – to the USA and Russia. The Russians wanted any Chechens and (as a favour to Tashkent) any anti-Tashkent Uzbeks.

  The original army that surrendered was over fourteen thousand strong but their numbers were coming down. Finally the Northern Alliance announced to the world media, streaming north to cover the real war story, that it had only eight thousand prisoners.

  Then it was decided to hand over a further five thousand to the Uzbek commander, General Dostum. He wished to take them far to the west, to Sheberghan inside his own territory. They were packed into steel freight containers without food or water and so compressed they could only stand, straining upwards for the air pocket above their heads. Somewhere on the road west it was agreed to give them air holes. This was done with heavy machine guns that went on firing until the screaming stopped.

  Of the remaining 3,015 the Arabs were selected out. They came from every part of the Muslim world: there were Saudis, Yemenis, Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians. The ultra-radical Uzbeks had been shipped back to the tender mercies of Tashkent and most of the Chechens also, but a few had managed to remain. Through the campaign the Chechens had earned the reputation of being the most ferocious, cruel and suicidal of all.