A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (37 page)

I knew from experience that it was useless to protest. I was tucked up in a thick acrylic tiger-rug while the room's only working appliance, an antique single-bar electric heater, was carefully turned towards my feet.

Nightfall was a couple of hours away. Men of various ages came and went, sometimes to make desultory conversation, sometimes to pray, sometimes just to sit and watch in easy silence. A clock on the wall, the only decoration in the room, was permanently stopped at 10.33. Cocooned in the tiger-rug, I felt my eyelids droop as the shadows lengthened on the mountains through the window.

The greybeard looked alarmed when at last we got up to leave. He followed us out to the frost-caked car, chattering shrilly. It wasn't easy for Mohammed to soothe him.

'What was all that about?' I asked as we bumped our way back through the iron gates into the night.

'He thought we were staying. He wanted to know where we were going.'

'And what did you tell him?'

'I told him we had an appointment with some other cousin-friends,' Mohammed replied with a smirk, 'but then he said he would accompany us for our safety. He said it wasn't safe here because there were Taliban around.'

'Do you think he guessed the truth?'

'Probably. I don't know. It doesn't matter.'

We drove slowly back the way we had come, through one frozen deserted village and then another. On the outskirts of the second, our headlights picked out a cloaked figure at the side of the road. This spectre stepped forward as we approached, and a pair of dark eyes appeared briefly at my window, the rest of his face muffled in the folds of a woollen
patou
. He set off at a brisk pace down a rough side-track, motioning us to follow.

The track wound and dipped through trees and shrubbery and was barely passable in places. Our guide pressed on regardless, his bobbing, shrouded form wreathed in the vapour of his breath. At length we reached a cluster of farmhouses where the road was blocked altogether by a heap of branches. A pair of dogs, unseen in the darkness, began to bark fiercely as our guide dragged the obstacles out of the way. We had arrived at last at the Taliban's secret lair.

The mountain cold was harsh now, perhaps ten degrees below zero, although we didn't have to endure it for long. We were led into a farmhouse and up a steep earthen staircase to a room as hot as a sauna thanks to a wood-burning stove in the centre that hissed and clicked gently to itself. A man was seated next to it, alone. He rose as we entered and greeted each of us in the normal Pashtun way: a double hug, a solemn handshake, the right hand placed across the heart, and a long, falling murmur of salaams. He was a burly man of about forty, tall for an Afghan, with a glossy black beard and a handsome face.

'This is Commander Abdullah,' Mohammed said with satisfaction. I realized that he hadn't been quite sure whom we were going to meet tonight, either. 'He is the head of the Taliban in this province. His lieutenants are all on their way to see you.'

'Please tell him that I'm very pleased to meet him.'

Abdullah looked me up and down with his head to one side, sizing me up like a bird from a branch, before silently ushering me to the cushions next to the stove.

A stopped clock hung on the wall, just as at Mohammed's cousin's place. This one said 12.48. Given the old cliché about the Taliban wanting to drag Afghanistan back to the seventh century, the symbolism suddenly seemed quite ridiculous.

Abdullah's lieutenants began to arrive almost immediately. They entered in ones and twos, dropping Kalashnikovs, RPGs and light machine-guns in a heap by the door, metal clanking on metal, until there were a dozen men sitting around the edges of the hot little room. At each arrival, everyone stood and performed the ritual of hugs and handshakes. Form was important, but it was also evident that these people had known one another intimately for years. Many of them, I was to learn, had fought together against the Russians. They were all from Wardak, although not necessarily local; some had walked for three hours to attend this meeting with a single foreign journalist. The order from headquarters to look after me was obviously being taken very seriously.

They stared at me with frank curiosity.

'The
feringhee
really came,' Mohammed overheard one of them say to the man next to him. 'Look at him – he's really one of them. Why don't we just kidnap him?'

'Shh,' his friend replied, 'don't even joke about it. He's here on orders from Quetta.'

As soon as everyone was assembled it was time for dinner: a communal heap of rice and a plate of oily, orange-coloured mutton. Once I had been served, the others fell upon the food with an enthusiasm that said much about how they usually ate. This was a special occasion. Abdullah had scooted around the circle beforehand with a pewter basin and a jug of warm water – a hand-washing ceremony that was usually performed by the youngest son of the family, not the most senior man present. It was a deliberate act of self-abasement, an expression of humility and comradeship more eloquent than any words. I knew immediately that I would be safe in Abdullah's hands. The
malmastia
tradition to which I had entrusted my life was solid among these Pashtuns.

They were all what the British Embassy in Kabul termed 'Tier 1 Taliban' – warriors motivated by ideology rather than angry poppy farmers or opium dealers, who were classed as Tier 2, or the adventurers, impoverished peasants and other hired guns who made up Tier 3. They were fighting, their leader explained with disarming simplicity, because it was their religious duty to resist the infidel invaders – just as they had fought the Russians, and as their fathers and grandfathers in earlier times had fought against the British. They were dressed like everyone else in Wardak, a necessity of the clandestine war they were waging. Before 2002, they confirmed, all of them had worn the black turbaned uniform of their movement. 'We drop the turbans here,' Abdullah said, 'but the time for black will come again.'

He had 700 men under arms – the precise number required, he claimed, to take and hold Wardak when the order came. Every province in the country, he said, had an underground cell of the requisite shape and size. They kept themselves in a state of constant readiness for the order from Quetta to attack a police station, or an American convoy, or even to take over the province. They slept during the day and did everything, including training and live firing exercises, by night. 'Night-time is Taliban time here,' Abdullah told me.

In Wardak, the Taliban were already an alternative government. Farmers came to them to settle land disputes. Even the police asked their permission before going about their business. 'If it wasn't for American air power,' Abdullah added with sudden bitterness, 'we could take half the country in a single day. What we need more than anything is missiles to shoot their planes. We cannot fight them in the air. But, insha'allah, we will get these missiles very soon.'

I asked about the wisdom of gathering so many Taliban commanders in one place. A laser-guided bomb through the roof above us would obviously serve ISAF well. Abdullah replied that they seldom gathered together like this, and never in the same place twice. Even separately, they tended to sleep in a different place every day. Then he added, with cheerful sang-froid, that a bomb through the roof was perfectly possible, since our location was no secret to the Coalition's intelligence community.

In a show of strength the previous year, Abdullah's men had taken over Wardak's local government district centre. 'We were ready to sell our lives to hold on to it, but headquarters said the time was not right, that there was nothing to be gained from our dying then. We were ordered to retreat.' Mistaking this move for weakness, US Special Forces had pursued Abdullah to this very farmhouse, surrounding it and demanding his surrender. There was a tense Mexican stand-off that ended, for reasons still obscure to them, when the Americans withdrew.

'Does that make you scared?' someone said when this story was finished.

I pulled a doubtful face, and everyone laughed.

'Don't worry,' Abdullah said quietly. 'If the Americans come again tonight, we will defend you with our lives.'

The laughter subsided; suddenly, everyone was nodding seriously. I smiled in gratitude – it seemed the appropriate response – although I was secretly bewildered by this pledge and the strangeness of my situation. Whose side, ultimately, did they suppose I was really on?

The talk turned naturally to Helmand. Musa Qala, they said, had been bombed again that morning. Fighting throughout the province was intensifying for the third consecutive day. Much of Abdullah's talk was bombast. The Taliban, he claimed, had 10,000 fighters in Helmand, with a further 2,000 suicide bombers standing by. They were concentrating on the south, he said, because this was where they had 'broken the back' of the British the last time; history, another Maiwand, would shortly be repeating itself. All of these men had fought the Coalition somewhere or other in Afghanistan the previous year. Wardak, I understood, was a designated safe haven, a place for the fighters to rest and reorganize before being rotated back to the front lines. In many ways they operated just as the British Army did.

I asked if any of them had themselves fought the British last summer. Abdullah nodded. He had been in Musa Qala in July.

'Were you there when the tank was blown up?'

Abdullah nodded again.

'Were you involved in that ambush?'

Mohammed's seamless translation suddenly stalled. 'I can't ask him that,' he said quietly. 'It's too close.'

There was an awkward silence as Abdullah glanced from Mohammed to me and back again, his eyebrows raised in amusement, perhaps guessing what was going on.

'There were lots of things happening in different places all the time,' he offered. 'The situation was very confused.'

'But . . . are you
ghazi
?'

Ghazi
, an Arabic word, was a kind of honorific in Afghanistan that denoted someone who had killed an infidel in the service of jihad.

'Not yet,' Abdullah replied solemnly, 'but I know in my heart that I am very close to it.'

Mohammed was reluctant to go on with this line of enquiry. It seemed best to return to the generalities of killing the British.

Our Army boys, Abdullah conceded, were not bad soldiers. He said he was in a position to know, since he had got to within thirty metres of some of them at Musa Qala. 'They are not cowards. They do not cry, or shout "Oh-my-God" in the front line as the Americans do. But still, they don't stand and fight like us.'

'What do you mean?'

'I have a video of British soldiers surrendering. I can show it to you if you like.'

This could only be the Taliban version of the Musa Qala deal. Of course the British had not 'surrendered' in the conventional sense when they left that town on 17 October. There was never any question of the Paras and Royal Irish giving up their weapons. The garrison had withdrawn in fighting order, in a manoeuvre General Richards very carefully described as 'a redeployment'; but to these men the departure looked quite different. The Taliban had naturally filmed the spectacle for propaganda purposes. The video was probably on sale in every bazaar from here to Rabat by now.

'The British were defeated at Musa Qala,' Abdullah continued. 'Everyone knows this. We were going to slaughter or capture them, but we let them go out of respect for the elders. It suited us because it gave us a chance to destroy Karzai's spy network in the town.'

Abdullah and his men were against the presence of all foreign invaders in their country, but the British had special status. Most of their ancestors had fought the
gora feringhee
, as they called them – the red-faced foreigners. Every man in the room knew how they had beaten us in the 1840s. The long entanglement of Britain and Afghanistan was evident even in the clothes these Taliban wore: it was no coincidence that they wore waistcoats, or that the Pashtun word for the garment is
wezcot
. I had long suspected that sending the British Army to win modern hearts and minds in the Pashtun south was one of the worst decisions Nato had ever taken, and now Abdullah seemed to confirm it. 'There's a strong connection,' he said. 'Fighting the British feels like unfinished business for many of us.'

The British death toll in southern Afghanistan had reached forty-five that week, a figure that included the fourteen victims of the Nimrod accident in early September. The Taliban did not believe it: they reckoned that there were well over a hundred British dead. I explained that there was no possibility in the British Army of manipulating the figures for propaganda purposes, but they remained sceptical. They were equally certain that the Coalition had inflated their estimates of Taliban dead, and in this they were probably right.

'Perhaps your figures don't include Nepalis?' wondered one lieutenant.

I assured him that any Gurkha dead would certainly be included in the body count – had there been any. He shook his head in a way that made me wonder what he thought he'd seen, presumably at Now Zad. It was plain he did not believe me; he just wasn't quite certain whether this
feringhee
was lying, or merely wrong about the facts.

The assumption of British racism behind the lieutenant's question about the Gurkhas was interesting. But however disdainful of other races he believed the British to be, they all seemed to prefer the UK to the US. These Taliban hated the Americans more than anyone, even more than the Russians who had brutalized their country twenty years earlier. 'The Russians fought man to man,' Abdullah said, 'but when one American soldier gets hit, a whole village gets razed by bombs in response. The only difference is that America claims to drop bombs with pinpoint accuracy, but that isn't true. I've seen many dead villagers. Their bombs are too big. It was easier to respect the Russians.' The Americans, Abdullah complained, were heavy-handed in other ways. 'The Russians just killed people, but these people enter our houses without permission and dishonour our women. To an Afghan, that is worse than being killed. Dishonouring us is the fastest way of ensuring your defeat.'