A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (38 page)

His was one of those Afghan points of view that made no sense whatsoever to the military planners of the West. The whole idea of the American military machine, with its reliance on long-range technology and air power, was antagonistic to these fighters. Their attitude to war was pre-industrial. To Western soldiers, it seemed almost insanely old-fashioned. These Taliban yearned to fight on the terms of a mythical past, when men were honourable and wars were won through courage and faith, not superior weaponry. This war, to them, was a holy duty: the object was not necessarily to win, but to resist. Abdullah was quite specific about that. 'We are against war,' he said. 'It creates nothing but widows and destruction. But jihad is different. It is our moral obligation to resist you foreigners. One year, a hundred years, a million years, ten million years – it is not important. We will never stop fighting. At Judgement Day, Allah will not ask, "What did you do for your country?" He will ask, "Did you fight for your religion?"'

'What we can't understand,' said a voice from the back, 'is why you allow yourselves to be the puppets of America.'

It was a question asked just as often back at home. The man asking it was the group's Mullah, a straight-backed, scholarly man with piercing eyes who had said little so far, but who found his voice as the evening went on. He gave his name as Qari Abdul- Basit.
Qari
means 'Reader', a title given to specialists in the sung recital of the Koran. It was an obvious nom de guerre: Qari Abdul- Basit Abdul-Samad, from Egypt, was the first president of the pan-Islamic Reciters' Union, a legend in the Muslim world who died, rock-star like, in a car crash in 1989. The others, Abdullah included, deferred to the Mullah whenever he spoke. He was, I realized, the real spokesman for the group, their spiritual guide and mentor in their Holy War.

'You British are clever people,' the Mullah went on. 'It makes no sense. You were beaten here before, and you will lose this time, too. Why do you think it is any different now?'

'Maybe we believe in the superiority of our technology,' I said. 'We have bombs and planes with chain guns that can fire sixty-five rounds a second. You only have Kalashnikovs and RPGs.'

The men looked at one another.

'But we had even less than you the last time,' Abdullah said. 'Only swords and
jezails
.
^*18
But still we beat you.'

'A clever man does not get bitten by a snake from the same hole twice,' said the Mullah, to nods all round.

'But we're not in the same hole,' I persisted. 'It is different this time. We are not here to occupy your country. We are here to help your government to secure economic development.'

'Then why do you come here with guns and bombs?'

'Are you saying that it would be different if we had come here unarmed?'

'But of course!' said the Mullah. 'In that case you would have been our guests, just as you are our guest now. If your engineers and agriculture experts had come to us and explained what they were trying to do, we would have protected them with our lives.'

'But our soldiers are trying to protect the engineers! That is what the fighting around Kajaki is about. The engineers cannot mend the generators unless there is security.'

'Mending the generators is a good thing to do. But the government has done nothing at the dam for the last five years. And now your soldiers have emptied the villages for miles around with their bombs and fighting. They are killing innocent people.'

'What about Panjwayi?' one of the lieutenants added, rolling an RPG around on the carpet with his foot. He was referring to Operation Medusa, five months earlier. Much of the fighting then had centred on Panjwayi, a district just west of Kandahar, where up to a thousand Taliban fighters had been killed. 'The Canadians have announced a huge aid package, but the people say it is all useless. One minute they're bombing us to death, the next they're promising to rebuild. That's a disgrace. Do they think Afghans are stupid?'

'What about al-Qaida?' I said. 'Bin Laden attacked the West. Don't you think we had the right to hunt him here?'

'Al-Qaida were our guests,' said the Mullah. 'We had no connection with them beyond that. We knew bin Laden as a jihadi in the time of the Russians. He is a good Muslim, an honourable man.'

'9/11 was not honourable.'

'There's no evidence that 9/11 was planned in Afghanistan. Those martyrs didn't learn to fly here. Besides,' he added, emphasizing his bitterness with a solitary raised finger, 'you destroyed our whole government for just one man.'

'What about poppies? My government says that you exploit the opium trade to buy weapons.'

'How can they say that when we are the only ones who managed to reduce the harvest? Poppy-growing is
haraam
['forbidden' – the opposite of
halal
]. Mullah Omar issued a fatwa against it. We were succeeding in abolishing it. We couldn't stop it all at once – the process is slow, like weaning a child off breast-feeding – but we were getting there when the Americans came.'

And now?'

'And now we make no money from poppies,' he insisted. 'What little money we have is entirely donated by the people.'

'They say you are against economic development. They say you are against women's education.'

'That is not true. There are girls' schools here in Wardak, set up under the Taliban, that are still running.'

'But many girls' schools have been burned.'

'Some have, it's true,' he said, 'but only those schools with Western curricula, where girls were being taught pornography.'

And so it went on. I pressed as hard as I could, yet found no chink in the Mullah's ideological armour. I knew I was being spun a very slanted version of reality. The accusation that girls were being taught pornography in Western-funded schools was backward and absurd. More than 1,100 girls' schools were said to have been attacked or burned down in Afghanistan since 2002. A dozen girls' schools had been destroyed in Wardak alone; by September 2006 there was just one still open in the entire province. I was also aware that as 'Tier 1' Taliban, these men were far from typical of the average fighter who opposed the British during Herrick 4. They presented themselves as defenders of the national interest, yet only a quarter of the public openly supported them, at best. They were not quite the populist movement they claimed to be.

On the other hand, support for them did seem to be growing.
^*19
And it was hard, in the end, not to sympathize with some of their grievances, or to disagree wholeheartedly with their central contention that the West had no business being in their country. America, they said, were hypocrites when they claimed to cherish human rights. Collateral damage caused by bombing was one thing, but what excuse could there be for Abu Ghraib, or for Guantanamo, where dozens of innocent Afghans had been held for years without trial? In Kabul I had met the Taliban's former ambassador to Islamabad, Abdul Salaam Zaeef, who had spent more than three years in detention, most of it in Cuba, enduring strippings and solitary confinement and endless psychological bullying by bone-headed GIs. He was a gentle, bespectacled, dignified soul, a religious moderate who publicly and repeatedly condemned the 9/11 attacks before his arrest. I had read a translation of his account of his experiences at Guantanamo, a bitter little book that sold over 200,000 copies in Pashto, and I had to agree with him that his incarceration without trial or charge was a disgrace.

My Westerner's conscience was troubled, and it was no comfort to recall that Captain Bladen Neill recorded something very similar as long ago as 1845. 'Does the review of the past in Affghanistan [
sic
] justify us in maintaining that our conduct there was without reproach?' he wrote. 'Was there no breach of faith, no disregard of promises, to cause doubts of our integrity? It must ever be borne in mind that the rights of the Affghans, as a nation, had been causelessly assailed, their feelings wantonly insulted . . . They had grounds for the indulgence of revengeful passions; and had their cause not been stained by [the massacre of the Kabul garrison in 1842], they must have claimed the admiration which would have been due to a people combating to the death for their assaulted freedom.'

It was past one o'clock in the morning yet the meeting showed no signs of breaking up. Abdullah and his men had been asleep all day, and seemed to be enjoying the novelty of this exchange with a
feringhee
. I was enjoying it too. I was susceptible to the romance of that lonely farmhouse, and could almost imagine being one of them.

'Tell me,' said one of the lieutenants, leaning forward and shyly clearing his throat. 'Please don't take this as an insult or anything, but . . . supposing thousands of Afghans had invaded
your
country, and bombed
your
villages, and killed
your
wives and children, what would you do?'

'I'd fight,' I found myself saying. 'Of course I'd fight.'

The throat-clearer paused, considering this.

'And tell me, in such a situation, do you think it would be possible for an Afghan journalist to come as you have come to us now, to meet and talk and eat with fighters from the British resistance?'

His question had an edge to it. It was, of course, inconceivable that this surreal meeting could ever have happened the other way round.

'Probably not,' I said.

'So, why aren't you scared now?'

'Because I understand that you are good Pashtuns. I have faith in your respect for Pashtun Wali, for
malmastia
.'

'Yes,' he nodded equitably. 'Without
malmastia
, we would certainly kill you.'

It was hard to imagine these people ever being defeated. I recalled reading an interview with a Para whose patrol had been ambushed by a single gunman, who popped up with an AK at close quarters with no earthly possibility of survival. 'You do wonder what goes through their little minds sometimes, don't you?' the Para told the reporter.

Incomprehensible courage was often married to military prowess. I didn't doubt this as one of the lieutenants began to explain his technique for doctoring an RPG warhead to improve its ability to pierce armour – including that of a British Scimitar, I thought darkly to myself. He said that RPG warheads were readily available in the markets for 400 Afghanis – about £4. 'I'll show you how to fire one if you like,' he said cheerfully. 'You have to keep your mouth open when you pull the trigger, otherwise your eardrums will burst.'

There was something genuinely moving about their revolutionary fervour, however naive or wrong-headed it might have been. The Mullah's argument that, had we only asked them,
they
would have provided security for Western engineers and developers was hard to resist while I reclined on their cushions in the warmth of their stove. As Pashtuns, of course they would have treated unarmed foreigners as honoured guests! If the Mullah was telling the truth, it meant that an opportunity for dialogue with these extraordinary people had indeed existed before the battles of Herrick 4. It implied that the resort to bloodshed had been at best premature, at worst wholly unnecessary; and that by taking a fight to the north of Helmand, the British had thrown away a precious chance, however small, to reach an acceptable compromise.

I wondered if it was not too late for international dialogue with the Taliban. At the very least, better communication had the potential to benefit everyone, right away. If, for example, they truly believed that girls were being taught 'pornography' in Western-funded schools, might this not simply be because no one had explained the curriculum to them? (I checked later and discovered that Chak district's only girls' school, in the village of Sheik Yassine, had been torched in April 2006, six months after it opened its doors. It had been built by an American-funded NGO called Afghans4Tomorrow with the consent of Chak's tribal elders but, as I suspected, without direct consultation with the Taliban – although there were of course many other complex local political factors at work in the decision to destroy the school.)

I also wondered whether it was not they but I who was being naive. There was no telling, in the end, how honest the Mullah was being with me. In any case, although he might possibly have been the voice of the Taliban in Chak, or even in Wardak, he was not Mullah Omar. He did not set his movement's policy towards the West. It was also an easy thing to promise security for Western engineers and aid officials, a much harder one to guarantee it in a land as intrinsically violent as this one. But, still, didn't any chance of peace deserve the benefit of the doubt?

I asked if I could be photographed with them. Abdullah, wary at first, gave his permission on condition that his men's faces were covered. Two men scrambled forward, as eager as children. They arranged an RPG and a couple of guns in the foreground, and hustled in on either side of me as Mohammed took the shot. Someone lent me their hat and turban, insisting I put them on. There was general hilarity as I bungled it, and the badly wound cloth slid down over my face.

'How about that?' someone cried when the turban was properly adjusted at last. 'He looks exactly like someone from Dara-i-Noor!'

There was more laughter. Mohammed, still taking pictures, explained that Dara-i-Noor was a district near Jalalabad whose people were noted for their pale skin and blue eyes.

When he had finished I passed the camera around the room for everyone to enjoy the results on the little screen, and also to allow Abdullah to check that his men's masks had not inadvertently slipped. The pictures were as ambivalent as my feelings for these people. They made me look, almost, like their comrade-in-arms; yet they might just as plausibly have been released to the Western media as evidence of an all too successful kidnap operation.

Qari Abdul-Basit suddenly announced that it was time to pray. The men lined up towards Mecca, switching with bewildering speed from pranksters into soldiers of God. I sat alone on the cushions and watched the line bow, kneel and kiss the ground in perfect unison as the Qari's singing filled the air. His voice was extraordinary. I listened in a state of semi-hypnosis as his mournful crescendos reverberated in the silences in between. There was spirituality here, a transcendental sense of peace and purpose and closeness to death and God seldom experienced in the modern West. This, for me, was Islam at its most appealing. It was marvellous how these people were able to plug instantly into such rapturous oblivion, five times a day, and for a brief moment I frankly envied their serenity.