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‘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.
The Soviet response was to bomb, rocket and strafe anything that moved: man, woman, child or animal. They seeded the mountains with untold millions of air-dropped mines, which eventually created a nation of crutches and prosthetic limbs. Before it was over there would be a million Afghans dead, a million crippled and five million refugees.
Izmat Khan knew all about guns from his time in the refugee camp, and the favourite was of course the Kalashnikov – the infamous AK-47. It was a supreme irony that this Soviet weapon, the favourite assault rifle of every dissident movement and terrorist in the world, was now being used against them. But the Americans were providing them for a reason; every Afghan could replenish his ammunition from the packs on a dead Russian, which saved carrying compatible ammunition across the mountains.
Assault rifle apart, the weapon of choice was the rocket-propelled grenade, the RPG, simple, easy to use, easy to reload and deadly at short to medium range. This too was provided by the West.
Izmat Khan was big for fifteen, desperately trying to grow a fuzz round the chin, and the mountains soon made him as hard as he had ever been. Witnesses have seen the Pashtun mountain men moving like wild goats through their own terrain, legs seemingly immune from exhaustion, breathing unlaboured when others are gasping for breath.
He had been back home for a year when his father summoned him. There was a stranger with him; face burned dark from the sun, black-bearded, wearing a grey woollen shalwar kameez over stout hiking boots and a sleeveless jerkin. On the ground behind him stood the biggest backpack the boy had ever seen and two tubes wrapped in sheepskin. On his head was a Pashtun turban.
‘This man is a guest and a friend,’ said Nuri Khan. ‘He has come to help us and fight with us. He has to take his tubes to Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, and you will guide him there.’
