Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail . . .
In 1972 there was a hamlet in one of these upland valleys called Maloko-zai; like all these hamlets, it was named after a long-dead warrior founder. There were five walled compounds in the settlement, each the home of one extended family of about twenty persons. The village headman was Nuri Khan and it was in his compound and round his fire that the men gathered on a summer evening to sip hot, unmilked and sugarless tea.
As with all the compounds, the walls were where the residences and livestock pens were built, so that all faced inwards. The fire of mulberry logs blazed as the sun dropped far to the west and darkness clothed the mountains, bringing chill even in high summer.
From the women’s quarters the cries were muted, but if one was especially loud the men would cease their jovial conversation and wait to see if news would arrive. The wife of Nuri Khan was bearing her fourth child and her husband prayed that Allah would grant him a second son. It was only right that a man should have sons to take care of the flocks when young and defend the compound when they had become men. Nuri Khan had a boy of eight and two daughters.
The darkness was complete and only the flames lit the hawk-nosed faces and black beards when a midwife came scurrying from the shadows. She whispered in the ear of the father and his mahogany face broke into a flashing smile.
‘Allahu akhbar! I have a son,’ he cried. His male relatives and neighbours rose as one and the air crackled and roared with the sound of their rifles exploding upwards into the night sky. There was much embracing and congratulations and thanks to all-merciful Allah who had granted his servant a son.
‘How will you call him?’ asked a herdsman from a nearby compound.
‘I shall call him Izmat after my own grandfather, may his soul rest in eternal peace,’ said Nuri Khan. And so it was when an imam came to the hamlet a few days later for the naming and the circumcision.
There was nothing unusual about the raising of the child. When he could toddle he toddled, and when he could run he ran furiously. Like most farm boys he wanted to do the things the older boys did, and by five was entrusted to help drive the flocks up to the high pastures in summer and watch over them while the women cut forage for the winter.
He yearned to be out of the house of the women and it was the proudest day of his life thus far when he was at last allowed to join the men round the fire and listen to stories of how the Pashtun had defeated the red-coated Angleez in these mountains only a hundred and fifty years ago, told as if it were only yesterday.
His father was the richest man in the village in the only way a man could be rich: in cows, sheep and goats. These, along with relentless caring and hard work, provided meat, milk and hides. Patches of corn yielded porridge and bread; fruit and nut-oil came from the prolific mulberry and walnut orchards.
There was no need to leave the village, so for the first eight years of his life Izmat Khan did not. The five families shared the small mosque, and joined each other for communal worship on Fridays. Izmat’s father was devout but not fundamentalist and certainly not fanatical.
Beyond this mountain existence, Afghanistan called itself the Democratic Republic, or DRA, but as so often this was a misnomer. The government was Communist and heavily supported by the USSR. In terms of religion, this was an oddity, because the people of the wild interior were traditionally devout Muslims for whom atheism was godlessness and therefore unacceptable.
But equally traditionally the Afghans of the cities were moderate and tolerant – the fanaticism would be imposed on them later. Women were educated, few covered their faces, singing and dancing was not only allowed but commonplace and the feared secret police pursued those suspected of political opposition, not religious laxity.
The hamlet of Maloko-zai had two links with the outside world. One was the occasional party of Kuchi nomads passing through with a mule-train of contraband, avoiding the Great Trunk Road through the Khyber Pass with its patrols and border guards, seeking the track to the town of Parachinar across in Pakistan. They would have news of the plains and the cities, of the government in faraway Kabul and the world beyond the valleys. And there was also the radio, a treasured relic that squawked and screeched but then uttered words they could understand. This was the BBC’s Pashto service, bringing the Pashtun a non-Communist version of the world. It was a peaceful boyhood. Then came the Russians.
It mattered not much to the village of Malokozai who was right or wrong. They neither knew nor cared that their Communist president had displeased his mentors in Moscow because he could not control his bailiwick. It mattered only that an entire Soviet army had rolled across the Amu Darya river from Soviet Uzbekistan, roared through the Salang Pass and taken Kabul. It was not (yet) about Islam versus atheism; it was an insult.
Izmat Khan’s education had been very basic. He had learned the Koranic verses necessary for prayer, even though they were in a language called Arabic and he could not understand them. The local imam was not resident; indeed it was Nuri Khan who led the prayers; he had taught the boys of the village the rudiments of reading and writing, but only in Pashto. It was Izmat’s father who had taught him the rules of the Pukhtunwali, the code by which a Pashtun must live. Honour, hospitality, the necessity of vendetta to avenge insult: these were the rules of the code. And Moscow had insulted them.
It was in the mountains that the Resistance began and they called themselves warriors of God, Mujahidin. But first the mountain men needed a conference, a shura, to decide what to do and who would lead them.
They knew nothing of the Cold War, but they were told they now had powerful friends, the enemies of the USSR. That made perfect sense. He who is the enemy of my enemy . . . First among these was Pakistan, lying right next door and ruled by a fundamentalist dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. Despite the religious difference, he was allied with the Christian power called America, and her friends, the Angleez, the one-time enemy.
Mike Martin had tasted action and knew he enjoyed it. He did a tour in Northern Ireland, operating against the IRA, but the conditions were miserable and, though the danger of a sniper’s bullet in the back was constant, the patrols were boring. He looked around and in spring 1986 applied for selection to the SAS.
Quite a proportion of the SAS comes from the Paras because their training and combat roles are similar, but the SAS claims their tests are harder. Martin’s papers went through the Regiment’s records office at Hereford where his fluent Arabic was noted with interest and he was invited to a selection course.
The SAS claims they take very fit men and then start to work on them. Martin did the standard ‘initial’ selection course of six weeks among others drawn from the Paras, infantry, cavalry, armour, artillery and even engineers. Of the other ‘crack’ units, the Special Boat Service draw their recruits mainly from the Marines.
It is a simple course based on a single precept. On the first day a smiling sergeant instructor told them all: ‘On this course, we don’t try to train you. We try to kill you.’
They did, too. Only ten per cent of applicants pass the ‘initial’. It saves time later. Martin passed. Then came continuation training: jungle training in Belize, and one extra month back in England devoted to resistance to interrogation. ‘Resistance’ means trying to stay silent while some extremely unpleasant practices are inflicted. The good news is that both the Regiment and the volunteer have the right every hour to insist on an RTU – return to unit.
Martin started in the late summer of 1986 with 22 SAS as a troop commander with the rank of captain. He opted for ‘A’ Squadron, the free-fallers, a natural choice for a Para to pick.
If the Paras had no use for his Arabic, the SAS did, for it has a long and intimate relationship with the Arab world. It was formed in the Western Desert in 1941 and its empathy with the sands of Arabia has never left it.
It has the jokey reputation of being the only army unit that actually makes a profit – not quite true
, but close. SAS men are the world’s most sought-after bodyguards and trainers of bodyguards. Throughout Arabia the sultans and emirs have always sought a team from the SAS to train their own personal guards, and they pay handsomely for it. Martin’s first assignment was with the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh when, in summer 1987, he was called home.
‘I don’t like this sort of thing,’ said the CO in his office at Stirling Lines, the Regiment’s Hereford HQ. ‘No, I bloody well don’t. But Vauxhall wants to borrow you. He was referring to a green and sandstone building on the south bank of the Thames in London called Vauxhall Cross. He meant the SIS – the Firm.’
He had used the occasionally friendly phrase reserved by fighting soldiers for intelligence people.
‘Haven’t they got their own Arabic speakers?’ asked Martin.
‘Oh, yes, desks full of them. But this isn’t just a question of speaking it. And it’s not really Arabia. They want someone to go behind the Soviet lines in Afghanistan and work with the Resistance, the Mujahidin.’
The military dictator of Pakistan had decreed that no serving soldier of a western power was to be allowed to penetrate into Afghanistan via Pakistan. He did not say so, but his own ISI military intelligence much enjoyed administering the American aid pouring in the direction of the ‘Muj’ and he further had no wish to see a serving American or British soldier, infiltrated via Pakistan, captured by the Russians and paraded around.
But halfway through the Soviet occupation the British had decided the man to back was not the Pakistani choice Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but the Tajik Shah Massoud, who was not skulking in Europe or Pakistan but doing real damage to the occupiers. The trouble was bringing that aid to him. His territory was up in the north.
Securing good guides from the Muj units near the Khyber Pass was not a problem. As in the time of the Raj, a few pieces of gold go a long way. There is an aphorism that you cannot buy the loyalty of an Afghan, but you can always rent it.
‘The key word at every stage, Captain,’ they told him at SIS headquarters, which back then was at Century House near the Elephant and Castle, ‘is deniability. That is why you actually have to – just a technicality – resign from the army. Of course, the moment you come back’ – they were nice enough to say ‘when’, not ‘if’ – ‘you will be completely reinstated.’
Mike Martin knew perfectly well that the SAS already had within its ranks the ultra-secret Revolutionary Warfare Wing whose task was to stir up as much trouble for Communist regimes worldwide as they could handle. He mentioned this.
‘This is even more covert,’ said the mandarin. ‘We call this unit Unicorn, because it doesn’t exist. There are never more than twelve and at the moment only four men in it. We really need someone to slip into Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass, secure a local guide and be brought north to the Panjshir Valley where Shah Massoud operates.’
‘Bringing gifts?’ asked Martin. The smooth one made a helpless gesture.
‘Only tokens, I am afraid. A question of what a man can carry. But later we might move to mule-trains and a lot more kit, if Massoud will send his own guides south to the border. It’s a question of first contact, don’t you see.’
‘And the gift?’
‘Snuff. He likes our snuff. Oh, and two Blowpipe surface-to-air tubes with missiles. He is much troubled by air attacks. You’d have to teach his people how to use them. I reckon you’d be away six months from this autumn. How do you feel about it?’
Before the invasion was half a year old it was clear that the Afghans would still not do one thing that had always been impossible for them: unite. After weeks of arguing in Peshawar and Islamabad, with the Pakistani army insisting it would not distribute American funds and weapons to any but the resisters accredited to them, the number of rival Resistance groups was reduced to seven. Each had a political leader and a war commander. These were the Peshawar Seven.
Only one was not Pashtun: Professor Rabbani and his charismatic war leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, both Tajiks from the far north. Of the other six, three were soon nicknamed the ‘Gucci commanders’ because they rarely if ever entered occupied Afghanistan, preferring to wear western dress in safety abroad.
Of the remaining three, two, Sayyaf and Hekmatyar, were fanatical supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood of ultra-Islam. Hekmatyar was so cruel and vindictive that by the end of the Soviet occupation he had executed more Afghans than killed Russians.
The one who tribally controlled the province of Nangarhar where Izmat Khan had been born was the Mullah Maulvi Younis Khalès. He was a scholar and preacher, but he had a twinkle in his eye that spoke of kindness, as opposed to the cruelty of Hekmatyar who loathed him.
Although the oldest of the seven at more than sixty, Younis Khalès, over much of the next ten years, made forays into occupied Afghanistan to lead his men personally. When he was not there his war commander was Abdul Haq.
By 1980 the war had come to the valleys of the Spin Ghar. The Soviets were streaming through Jalalabad below the mountains and their air force had started punitive raids on mountain villages. Nuri Khan had sworn allegiance to Younis Khalès as his warlord and been granted the right to form his own lashkar or fighting yeomanry.
He could shelter much of the animal wealth of his village in the natural caves that riddled the White Mountains and his people could shelter in them too, when the air raids came. But he decided it was time for the women and children to cross the border to seek refuge in Pakistan.
The small convoy would of course need a male chaperone for the journey and the stay at Peshawar, however long that would last. As mahram he appointed his own father, over sixty and stiff of limb. Donkeys and mules were secured for the journey.
Fighting back his tears at the shame of being sent out like a child, eight-year-old Izmat Khan was embraced by his father and brother, took the bridle of the mule bearing his mother, and turned towards the high peaks and Pakistan. It would be seven years before he returned from exile and when he came it would be to fight the Russians with cold ferocity.
To legitimize themselves in the eyes of the world, it had been agreed the warlords would each form a political party. That of Younis Khalès was called Hizb-i-Islami and everyone under his rule had to join it. Outside Peshawar a rash of tented cities had sprung up under the auspices of something called the United Nations, though Izmat Khan had never heard of it. The UN had agreed that each warlord, now masquerading as leader of a political party, should have a separate refugee camp, and no one should be admitted who was not a member of the appropriate party.
There was another organization handing out food and blankets. Its insignia was a stumpy red cross. Izmat Khan had never seen one of those either but he was familiar with hot soup and after the arduous crossing of the mountains was glad to drink his fill. There was one more condition required of inhabitants of the camps and those benefiting from the largesse of the West, funnelled through the United Nations and General Zia-ul-Haq: boys should be educated at the Koranic school, or madrassah, in each refugee camp. This would be their only education. They would not learn maths or science, history or geography. They would just learn endlessly to recite the verses of the Koran. For the rest, they would only learn about war.
The imams of these madrassahs were in the main provided, salaried and funded by Saudi Arabia and many were Saudis. They brought with them the only version of Islam permitted in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism, the harshest and most intolerant creed within Islam. Thus within sight of the sign of the cross dispensing food and medications, a whole generation of young Afghans was about to be brainwashed into fanaticism.
Nuri Khan visited his family as often as he could, two or three times a year, leaving his lashkar in the hands of his elder son. But it was a harsh journey and Nuri Khan looked older each time. In 1987 when he arrived he looked lined and drawn. Izmat’s elder brother had been killed ushering others towards the safety of the caves during a bombing raid. Izmat was fifteen and his chest nearly burst with pride when his
father bade him return, join the resistance and become Mujahid.
There was much weeping from the women, of course, and mumbling from the grandfather who would not survive another winter on the plain outside Peshawar. Then Nuri Khan, his remaining son and the eight men he had brought with him to see their families turned west to cross the peaks into Nangarhar Province and the war.
The boy who came back was different and the landscape he found was shattered. In all the valleys hardly a stone bothy was standing. The Sukhoi fighter-bombers and the Hind helicopter gunships had devastated the valleys in the mountains from the Panjshir to the north, where Shah Massoud had his fighting zone, down to Paktia and the Shinkay Range. The people of the plains could be controlled or intimidated by the Afghan army or by the Khad, the secret police taught and stiffened by the Soviet KGB.
But the people of the mountains and those from the plains and cities who chose to join them were intractable and, as it later turned out, unconquerable. Despite air cover, which the British had never had, the Soviets were experiencing something like the fate of the British column cut to pieces on the suicidal march from Kabul to Jalalabad.
The roads were not safe from ambush, the mountains unapproachable save by air. And the deployment in Muj hands of the American Stinger missile since September 1986 had forced the Soviets to fly higher – too high for their fire-power to be accurate – or risk being hit. The Soviet losses were relentlessly mounting, with further manpower reductions due to wounds and disease, and even in a controlled society like the USSR morale was dropping like a falcon on the stoop.
It was a savagely cruel war. Few prisoners were ever taken and the quickly dead were the lucky ones. The mountain clans especially hated the Russian fliers; if taken alive, they could be pegged out in the sun with a small cut in the stomach wall so the entrails would burst out and fry in the sun until death brought release. Or they could be given over to the women and their skinning knives.