The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

Each time he left Kandahar there were plots to overthrow him, often by his own relatives and whenever he returned home from extending his empire, Ahmad Shah would spend the first few days executing dissidents. A later king, Abdur Rahman Khan, would refer to his country as Yaghistan or Land of the Unruly, and as the great Afghan scholar, the late Louis Dupree remarked, ‘no Pashtun likes to be ruled by another, particularly someone from another tribe, sub-tribe or section’.

In an attempt to deter the pretenders, the king started executing not only the plotters but also ten randomly chosen members of each sub-tribe involved, yet the intrigues continued. A sword wound on his nose turned ulcerous and cancer began eating away at his face, leaving him in terrible pain and according to accounts of the time, forced to wear a silver nose, with maggots from the wound dropping into his mouth whenever he ate or drank. The Sikhs raised an army and rebelled in the Punjab, forcing him to return to India a fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth time, twice destroying the Sikh city of Amritsar in his anger but never really succeeding in defeating them. Other parts of his empire broke away, some declaring independence, while Murad Beg, the Emir of Bokhara, took others.

Despairing of the land he had created, in 1772 he died alone and in agony in the Suleyman Mountains east of Kandahar, aged only fifty. He left thirty-six children including twenty-three sons most of whom thought they should be his successor. From then on the Durranis lost Punjab, Sindh, Kashmir and much of Baluchistan as two Durrani branches, the Barakzai and Saddozai – and family members within – tussled for control. With no outsiders to unite against until the first British invasion in 1839, soon everyone was fighting and blinding everyone else for power in each region, fathers against sons, brother against brother, uncle against nephew and one wearer of the Koh-i-Noor after another met a violent death.

(#ulink_c498246a-ded9-5878-930f-bfd5f0f27515) They even had a name for it – badshahgardi, which means ruler-turning.

But in his heyday Ahmad Shah had ruled an empire stretching from the Amu Darya or Oxus River in the north to the Arabian Sea, from Mashad in the west to Delhi in the east, as well as Kashmir, Sindh and most of what is now Baluchistan. One way or another the Durrani dynasty he founded was to rule Afghanistan till the Communist takeover in 1978 and most Afghans regard him as the father of the nation, referring to him as Ahmad Shah Baba.

There was another reason for wanting to go to Kandahar. In Peshawar I had met a direct descendant of Ahmad Shah Abdali, a Kandahari called Hamid Karzai. Educated at a private school in the Indian hill-station of Simla, followed by a master’s in political science at Delhi University, he was about thirty and spoke the old-fashioned English of newspapers in the subcontinent, addressing women as ‘ma’am’ and using expressions such as ‘turning turtle’ and ‘miscreants’.

Hamid was unlike anyone I had ever met. He wore a leather jacket and jeans, yet walked with the bearing of a king. In a city where men did not consider themselves dressed without rocket-propelled grenades or Kalashnikovs across their shoulders, he was polite and gentle and liked reading English classics such as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. He had a beaked nose and a bald round head that cocked from side to side like a bird as he fixed deep brown eyes upon his listeners. With me he would talk about English music and literature, the feeling that he had lost his youth, and his hatred for Pakistan and his life there. But the greatest passion in his voice came when he spoke of Kandahar with its orchards and running streams, grapes which he said came in forty varieties, not just green and black as I had known in England, and deep-red pomegranates so sweet and luscious that Persian princesses dined on them and lovers wrote poetry about them. He told me too of great tribes and heroic clashes and had a sense of history and being part of it unlike anyone I had ever come across. His eyes would bulge with anger as he talked of centuries-old feuds between his tribe and another.

His tribe were the Popolzai, a Durrani clan that could trace their origins back to the fifteenth century and had given the king the land to build Kandahar as his capital. Once I asked him to tell me their story. ‘It’s too long,’ he laughed, telling me only the part about an Abdali khan who was so old and weak he could no longer mount his horse and beseeched his four sons to help him. The first three all laughed and refused. But the youngest, whose name was Popol, put him on his back and carried him, so when the old man was dying, it was Popol he named as his heir.

Though Hamid was not the eldest of the seven sons of Abdul Ahad Karzai, leader of the Popolzai, he was the only one not to have gone into exile and thus regarded as the probable successor. His brothers all lived in America where they ran a chain of Afghan restaurants called Helmand in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Maryland.

He too had been planning to move abroad but after the Soviets took over and imprisoned his father, he abandoned his studies in India to travel to Pakistan and visited a refugee camp near Quetta where he found himself surrounded by hundreds of Popolzai. ‘They thought I could help them just because of who I was,’ he said. ‘But I was who I was only because of them. They were such brave people, it made me feel humble and guilty about my privileged life and I became determined to be the man they thought I was.’

His house in Peshawar bustled with tribal elders, large men with complicated turbans, sitting cross-legged on floor cushions in various rooms, drinking green tea from a pot constantly replenished by a small boy, and unwrapping small silver-foil Hershey Kisses sent by Hamid’s brothers. Some of his visitors looked wild and unwashed and seemed from another century entirely to Hamid, but he listened to them with great respect and gave them food and shelter, while he himself lived very simply, using any money he acquired to help his tribesmen.

‘I’ve always had this drive. It’s something in me, this great love for the tribe,’ he said. Yet growing up he had hated what he called the ‘tribal thing’ and had been eager to escape Kandahar and go abroad. Had the Russians not invaded, his dream had been to become a diplomat, perhaps even Foreign Minister one day, but the war had changed everything. His skill was with words rather than guns so he became spokesman for the National Liberation Front of Professor Sibghatullah Mojadiddi, a royalist from a prominent Sufi family and one of the most moderate – and thus worst funded – of the seven leaders.

This was the job he was doing when I first met him in 1988 but by then he was disillusioned with the mujaheddin leadership. It should have been a time of jubilation – the defeated Russians had agreed to leave and their troops would soon be heading back across the Oxus River in a humiliation that would help trigger the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the cost had been enormous – 1.5 million Afghans had lost their lives and more than 4 million become refugees – and the mujaheddin had failed to agree on any credible government to replace the Soviet-backed regime. As far as Hamid was concerned the seven leaders were not interested in the future of their country and had all become corrupt and power-grabbing, people who would have been nothing in the traditional tribal set-up but now lived in palatial houses in Peshawar with fleets of Pajero jeeps and dollar accounts overseas.

Mostly he blamed ISI, in particular General Hamid Gul, the agency’s manipulative director who initiated the policy of bringing Arabs to fight in Afghanistan and made no secret of his desire to see his protégé Hekmatyar installed in Kabul running a ‘truly Islamic state’. Because US support for the mujaheddin to fight the Russians was a covert CIA operation, ISI had been in charge of distributing all the arms and money as well as providing the Americans with intelligence. The agency was in effect controlling Afghan policy. It was ISI that had created the seven mutually hostile parties back in 1980, following the well-tried British divide-and-rule policy, and it was made clear to refugees that a membership card for Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami was a fast track for obtaining flour and cooking oil while joining the royalists meant a long wait. ISI was mistrustful of anyone from Kandahar, remembering how the Durranis had once controlled a large part of what was now Pakistan, and refused to recognise Pashtun nationalist organisations. Instead, they diverted the lion’s share of aid and weapons to fundamentalists such as Hekmatyar who received half of the US$6bn provided by the US and Saudi Arabia, telling the Americans quite erroneously that his men were more effective on the battleground.

‘The Russians may have destroyed our territory but the Pakistanis have destroyed our liberal culture,’ Hamid complained. ‘I can never get married in this country because I don’t want to subject my wife to this kind of life.’ Saddened that the jihad was ending in disarray and he had sacrificed his youth and studies for ‘nothing’, he often talked about giving it all up and moving to Europe. Instead, increasingly he began to believe that the future of Afghanistan lay with some of the leading commanders and the tribes, the same view I was hearing from Abdul Haq, the young Kabul commander who lived a couple of streets away from me in Peshawar’s University Town and where I would often drop in to persuade him to send me with his fighters to Kabul.

‘You’re just a girl,’ Abdul Haq would always say, laughing at my irritation, and then moving on to politics. ‘We commanders did our job fighting and expected the leaders to do theirs. Now it seems we might have to do that too,’ he grumbled, painfully shifting the artificial foot which he had to wear since stepping on a mine in 1987. ‘We have been loyal and are still loyal but if the leaders cannot come together we cannot just sit by and let the country be destroyed.’

One day Hamid told me of an independent group known as the Mullahs Front fighting around Kandahar. He was going to visit and offered to take me with him. ‘You must go to Kandahar. That’s the real Afghanistan,’ he said in his emphatic way, a tic vibrating in his cheek.

Hamid Karzai in Kandahar, 1988.

Our journey began in Quetta, a small lawless town centred round a bazaar of small shacks from which moneychangers somehow sent money all round the world, merchants displayed sacks of cumin and saffron, and reams of bright silks, and where men wore shirts embroidered with tiny mirrors and jewelled sandals with high heels. It seemed on the very edge of the earth, surrounded by the rifts and caramel-coloured escarpments of the Baluchistan desert, and at the time the only hotel was the New Lourdes. A colonial place in the cantonment with a lush lawn that looked as if it should have peacocks, its rooms did not appear to have seen a duster since Pakistan’s creation in 1947 and were heated by complicated Heath Robinson-style boilers of brass pipes and tin funnels that emitted periodic roaring noises sending the whole contraption rattling. Flushing the toilet flooded the room and the only light came from a lamp with no plug, just bare wires twisted straight into sockets.

My fair hair, green eyes and pale skin made it very hard for me to disguise myself as an Afghan guerrilla and on previous trips across the border, I had travelled as a woman refugee, my face and body hidden by a burqa, and sometimes provided with a small child to hold my hand for authenticity. But the Mullahs Front would apparently be a laughing stock in Kandahar if a woman was seen amongst them so this time I went dressed the same as the fighters I was travelling with, in shalwar kamiz, loose pyjama trousers made of many yards of cotton which hang in folds from the hips tied with pyjama cord and a long shirt, and heavily turbaned, with a grey embroidered Kandahari shawl thrown carelessly over the shoulder.

As always with Afghanistan, the journey, which had been delayed for days, finally started in a great hurry in the dawn hours then involved endless waiting, changing vehicles five times. I began to sympathise with Frank Martin, an Englishman who worked from 1895–1903 as Engineer-in-Chief to king Abdur Rahman then his son Habibullah, and whose account of his travels into the country in the party of an Afghan prince I had been reading. ‘It is not in the habit of the people to rush things,’ he wrote. ‘Their custom is instead to put off all they can until tomorrow, or the day after that for preference.’ Unlike the exasperated Mr Martin, we did not have to wait for a man with a drum to go out in front of us, nor another carrying a huge gold embroidered umbrella as sunshade to protect princely skin. Even so the sun was setting by the time we ended up in a Pajero jeep heading out of town, the desert-mountains rising smudged and Sphinx-like in perfect Turner colours either side of us. Apart from Hamid, my travel companions were Abdul Razzak, one of Kandahar’s leading commanders known as the Airport Killer for his daring raids on the airport, and Ratmullah, a chubby sub-commander with an impressively twisted turban, a loud belly laugh, twinkling black eyes and bushy black beard.

Deep into the night, we climbed the Khojak pass, passing trucks gaudily painted with mountain scenes or Pathan beauties and inlaid with intricate metalwork which hid secret compartments. We were in tribal territory and the only industry in these barren lands was smuggling – and abduction. For most of the way the road intertwined with the British-built railway as it twisted in and out of the mountains. According to local legend, the chief engineer committed suicide because he had made a bet with his colleague leading the drilling team from the other side that they would meet in the middle on a certain date. When they did not he thought he had miscalculated and their two tunnels had failed to join up. The day after his death the tunnels met and the 3.2-mile-long Khojak tunnel, the longest in South Asia, now graces Pakistan’s five-rupee note.

It was almost midnight by the time we crossed the border to be greeted by the red flares of the heavy guns from nearby Spin Boldak, which the mujaheddin were trying to capture. The blurred face of Yunus Khalis beamed down from a calendar on the wall of the compound where we stopped for the night. One of the fundamentalist leaders, Khalis was a ferocious henna-bearded seventy-year-old with a sixteen-year-old wife, and virulently anti-royalist. Yet Hamid was welcomed with great enthusiasm, everyone coming to pay respects. As we squatted on the floor for dinner with a group of large men after the usual long guttural exchange of Pashto greetings, Abdul Razzak, who was himself a member of Khalis, explained, ‘parties mean nothing here. We just go with whoever gives us arms. None of the Peshawar leaders would dare come here.’

The men laid their Kalashnikovs down by their sides as boys too young to fight brought a pitcher of water and grubby hand-towel for us to wash, going round the room in order of seniority, serving me last. The only sound was the smack of lips and tongues as we scooped greasy goat stew out of an aluminium bowl with stretchy Afghan bread, washing it down with curd in iced water. On the dried-earth walls our silhouettes flickered in the light of the oil lamp.

It didn’t seem very long after we had gone to sleep, huddled on flea-ridden cushions under quilted coverlets in shiny pink and red material, when we were woken by wailing. It was prayer time. Outside, where the daystar had not yet faded from the sky, the men were laying down their shawls on the ground and prostrating themselves, shawls flapping in the wind and rockets thundering in the dust not far away as they held their palms in front of their faces and mouthed the words ‘Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

The boys brought breakfast – a pot of green tea thick with sugar, which they poured into small glasses, boiled sweets from Iran, and a tray of hard bread left from dinner, as well as dry lentils, which the commanders cracked noisily between their teeth. I went outside to brush my teeth in water left from the previous night’s hand-washing. Abdul Razzak and some of his mujaheddin were crouched in the early sun, brushing their teeth with twigs or clipping facial hair, using their small round silver snuffboxes as mirrors.

We set off through the desert, not the majestic sands of T.E. Lawrence or Wilfred Thesiger, but endless grey plains which absorbed and amplified the beating sun and abandoned villages that had been turned into battlefields scattered with spent ammunition. In one village we got out and wandered around, identifying the bombed-out remains of the clinic, the prison and the school, one wall covered with children’s charcoal drawings of Soviet helicopters shooting down stick people. The mujaheddin leapt onto the burnt-out hull of a tank for me to photograph them, striking poses with their Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers. Two ragged children suddenly emerged from one of the ruins, hand-in-hand, their faces and eyelashes grey with dust, the only survivors, begging for food. I could not imagine what they were living on and they fell upon my packet of emergency digestive biscuits, stuffing them into their mouths.

We were supposed to follow in each other’s footprints because of land-mines but the dust kept blowing them away. There was dust everywhere, coating my clothes, in my hair, my ears, my fingernails and mouth, the wind lifting it up in columns so that sometimes it was difficult to see, and giving everything a gritty feel. It was at least 40°C, and my thirst made my head ache, but instead of water Ratmullah appeared clutching marigolds which he shyly presented me for my hair and laughed when I tucked them behind my ears. Like many mujaheddin, I often saw him walking around casually clutching a flower, sometimes hand-in-hand with a friend. Later, when I got to know him better, I asked him why they loved flowers so much and he replied; ‘because they are peace and beauty and everything we have lost’.

The author on a destroyed Soviet tank, near Kandahar, 1988.

Our destination was Abdul Razzak’s secret training camp cum madrassa or religious school in an area called Khunderab, inside a narrow gorge hidden by overhanging mountains, the entrance blasted out of the rock with dynamite. A guard sat at a table, an old black telephone in front of him. Abdul Razzak explained it was part of a wireless phone system captured from the Russians, and enabled camp-guards to call a military post on top of the mountains where they had men stationed with anti-aircraft guns if an enemy approached.

The camp, which acted as a training and rest camp for fighters for the Mullahs Front, had existed for about a year, moving there after the previous site was bombed by Soviet Mig 17s for seventy-four hours continuously, destroying all their weapons and killing fifty men. ‘There were forty planes dropping 3000 bombs,’ said one man with what I presumed was the usual Afghan exaggeration of multiplying everything by ten, ‘it was the only day we couldn’t pray.’

Prayer was an important feature of camp-life. The camp was home to eighty men and forty-two students aged from eight to eighteen and Abdul Razzak took me to see the school where children studied the Koran and Arabic. We watched a recitation lesson, boys rocking back and forth as they intoned the words of the Koran, and Abdul Razzak gave some religious books he had brought from Quetta to the white-bearded teacher. Hamid told me that for boys educated in madrassas, the rocking becomes such a habit that later in life they cannot read without it. Had we but known it, we were seeing the incipient Taliban. In my diary I wrote: ‘Mohammed Jan is eight. After Koranic lessons he learns how to load a BM12’.

Next we saw the boys’ dormitory – camouflaged from above with a roof of tree branches and hay that allowed air to circulate, keeping it cool inside. A small boy sat in the doorway cleaning a pile of Kalashnikovs. There seemed to be weaponry everywhere. ‘We have thirty-five RPG7, forty-two RR82mm recoil rifles, seven anti-aircraft guns,’ said Razzak. They also had two Stinger missiles left of an initial six which they received in November 1987, kept under twenty-four-hour guard, though they happily took them out to pose for photographs. Nine hundred of these heat-seeking missiles had been provided by the Americans to the resistance in 1986–7 along with British Blowpipes and were thought to have turned the tide of the war by countering the threat of Soviet air superiority though many were instead sold on to Iran, forcing the CIA to launch a buyback programme which did not stop them later turning up everywhere from Angola to Algeria.

The camp was run by Abdul Razzak’s friend Khadi Mohammed Gul who said he was twenty-eight but looked at least ten years older. He told me he had wanted to be a mullah, a village priest, but had joined the resistance and in 1983 been captured by the Soviets and sent to Pul-i-Charki, the notorious prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Run by KHAD, the East-German trained Afghan secret police, it held around 10,000 political dissidents. He was there for four years until he was released in a prisoner swap when Razzak captured a top commander from the Afghan regime.

Survivors of Pul-i-Charki were rare and I asked him about life there. ‘We knew whenever the Soviets had suffered heavy casualties because they would take a whole lot of prisoners, remove their blood for transfusions then shoot them,’ he said. He also told of awful tortures. ‘Sometimes it would be electric shocks to the nose, ears, teeth and genitals, so many that now I am impotent. Other times they tied us to trees with our feet on broken glass and left us for several days until the wounds went rotten and there were maggots inside. Another punishment was to give us food with laxative or something bad in to cause diarrhoea then leave us in a room one meter square so we would have to live in our own excreta for days. Sometimes at night they would call someone’s name and we would know he was being shot but we would say “bye!” as if he was going for a trip but we knew he’d never come back.’

The words hung heavily in the air and we sat there for a while in silence. Then I asked to see the rest of the camp. There was a clinic with a few lint bandages and a box of aspirins where a doctor was cleaning a horrible suppurating wound on the thigh of a fighter who sat silently despite the agonising treatment, and a bakery where young boys were slapping flat wide oblongs of dough onto the wall of a large clay pot buried in the ground with hot coals in the bottom to make nan, the traditional unleavened bread. Some other boys were scrubbing clothes in the small river and it was hard not to notice the red staining the water. A few goats and sheep were grazing and there was a small plantation of okra or ladyfingers as well as several apple trees so the camp was more or less self-sufficient.

The camp had strict rules, one of which was ‘men must be taught religious teachings as much as possible’. Everyone was checked at the gate and there were heavy penalties for sneaking out weapons or ammunition.

(#ulink_32f5296f-dad4-5332-b622-eb16b4a28818) ‘You see we are not like those other groups which steal the money and sell the arms to the Iranians,’ said Gul. ‘This is what jihad is meant to be.’ He pointed out that many villagers used the clinic, which was the only medical facility for perhaps fifty miles, and all wanted their boys to be accepted to study at the school as free board was provided.

It was the first time I had seen a mujaheddin group making an effort to provide facilities to civilians. At the main gate as we were leaving, an exhausted ten-year-old boy named Safa Mohammed had just arrived ‘to join the resistance’ after a fourteen-hour walk through the mountains. ‘My father was killed by the Russians and I ran away from my mother,’ he said. ‘First I want to study but when I grow up I will carry a gun and kill Soviets.’

It was evening as we drove away, bumping across rutted mountain tracks, headlights off to avoid being spotted by a Russian plane. The area was heavily mined so two brave men walked in front of the wheels of the jeeps, testing the ground as we followed slowly behind. Of all the many ways to die or be injured in Afghanistan, mines were the scariest. The Soviets had scattered them everywhere, including what the mujaheddin called jumping mines, designed to bounce up and explode in the genitals, and even some disguised as pens and dolls to entice children. Most were butterfly mines dropped from the air, which maimed rather than killed and thus took out more resistance firepower as men would be needed to carry the victim. No one knew how many mines there were – the latest figure from the US State Department was more than ten million – nor their whereabouts, for contrary to all rules of warfare the Soviets had not kept maps.

I had seen far too many victims in the hospitals of Peshawar with legs or arms blown off, eyes missing or guts hanging out, as well as all the people in the bazaars and refugee camps with stumps for limbs and had taken to identifying interviewees in my notebooks as ‘man with beard and two eyes’. My head throbbed from concentrating as I scoured the land in front for mines and scanned the skies, for somewhere among the many stars there might be a Soviet Mig.

It was 2.30 a.m. when we arrived at our destination of Argandab, a valley of orchards about ten miles west of Kandahar which Alexander the Great had used as a camp for his army of 30,000 men and elephants and was now an important base of the resistance. Mujaheddin love gadgets and someone turned on flashing fairy lights to herald our arrival after all our efforts to be invisible. The rumble of guns was not far off but I fell asleep to the soothing sound of running water from a river.

As we breakfasted the next morning on salted pomegranate pips, I saw that the whole area was pitted with holes from bombs, in between which were clusters of mujaheddin graves made from little piles of stones with small tattered green flags stuck on top. The shelling was relentless, sometimes so near that dust sprayed over us, but none of the mujaheddin sitting around seemed to pay any attention to it. Hamid told me that when he was growing up this had been a favourite picnic spot with its orchards of apricots, pomegranates, peaches, figs and mulberry trees but that was hard to imagine. The crop had all been destroyed in the fighting or rotted because there was no labour for picking and the Russians had destroyed the karez, or irrigation channels to stop the mujaheddin using them for cover. As we talked a delegation of Popolzai arrived, led by Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, overall commander of the Mullahs Front, all of whom seemed overjoyed to see Hamid, embracing him to the right, to the left and right again in the traditional way, then shaking his hand.

I began to realise the importance of his visit and the risk he was taking. He had told me the previous day that he was high up on the Soviet hit list and I wondered whether the fact that we were bombed everywhere we stopped was really a coincidence. I wished he wouldn’t keep radioing everyone to say we had arrived. That morning as we sat under a tent of camouflage material, he told me, ‘The first casualties in Kandahar were forty from my family. The four most important were taken to the Governor’s house, laid on a big rug and huge rocks thrown on them from above to smash their skulls. Afterwards the carpets had to be taken to Bawalpur to be washed.’

There was a roar of engines and several turbaned men on motorbikes shot into the orchard. It was incongruous seeing these medieval bearded figures on their Yamaha motors and I started to laugh, but Hamid got up to greet the heaviest one. I recognised Ratmullah, who had left us the previous day and was now back with some of his fellow-fighters.

‘The bikes are the best way to get around quickly and not to be seen,’ he explained as he dismounted. ‘Anything bigger gets picked out and shot.’ When there was a lull in the shelling, we set off on the motorbikes, bumping across plains which looked like the set of a war movie crisscrossed with muddy trenches, something I had never seen before in Afghanistan. I held on to the back of Ratmullah’s bike, shouting ‘you’re Allah’s Angels!’ which he didn’t understand but we both laughed, my turban unravelling all round my face as we hurtled along.

Passing a tall concrete silo for storing wheat, we were suddenly riding along a paved highway, the Heart – Kandahar road. The stretch we were on was controlled by mujaheddin and just in front of a blue-domed tomb which had somehow survived intact and that housed a mujaheddin camp, they had built a wall along the road consisting of tanks and armoured personnel vehicles turned on their sides, moving each one into place after it had been destroyed. I counted eighty-two. It felt very exposed particularly as we came to a bend in the road beyond which we could not see. ‘Is this safe?’ I shouted to Hamid but his words were lost in the wind and I only caught what sounded like helicopter. Later he told me he had said we were fine as long as no helicopters came in which case we were dead.

Motorbikes were less likely to be spotted by Soviet planes.

It was a relief when we turned off the road and rode through some orchards of rotting pomegranates. In the distance we could see plumes of thick black smoke. Finally we came to Malajat, an area that had seen so much fighting that all its inhabitants had fled, leaving just the resistance. The mujaheddin post where we were to stay was the homeliest I had seen, the usual earthen-walled house but with a garden decorated with pots of pink and red geraniums and a small shed which turned out to be an improvised shower-room where one stood under an upside-down water bucket full of holes.

The commander of the post was Bor Jan, a squat man with a shaved head who looked like a friar in his black robes and served us green tea and boiled sweets using a Russian parachute as a tablecloth. He had been an officer in the Afghan army but at the time of the Communist takeover went into a madrassa where he joined forces with fellow religious students Abdul Razzak and Mullah Mohammed Rabbani. ‘Of the original ninety persons there are only eight of us left,’ he said. ‘I cannot describe the suffering.