Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds

– I don’t know, Al shrugged. I think I got some good stuff. I won’t know until the edit. But if the pictures are any good we’ll use them.

– Of course it was worth it, Ewan interrupted crossly. They’re frontline soldiers – they live every day with the possibility of death. They take their risks, we took ours. And it might have been us, you know? It isn’t as if we were observing from ten miles back through binoculars. Besides, we didn’t ask them to start firing. It’s their war, after all.

Al nodded agreement, but I was full of doubt. A part of me very much wanted to know what it was like to come under fire. Like many British boys of my generation I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. My Fergusson forebears included several soldiers who fought the Russians in the Crimea, the Dervish at Omdurman and the Germans at Arras and Cambrai, but the one I remembered most was my Great-Uncle Bernard. Passionate, irascible, boastful, occasionally pompous, he was larger than life and we children loved him. He wore a monocle, led a column of Chindits against the Japanese in Burma under Orde Wingate in 1943–44 and became Governor-General of New Zealand before retiring to Scotland. When I was a child he used to pick me up and let me puff at him like a candle on a birthday cake. With a hammed-up gasp of surprise he would let his monocle drop from his eye, only to catch it with a satisfying plop far down below in the palm of his hand. Behind enemy lines in Burma, Great-Uncle Bernard was said by the newspapers of the time to have been supplied with fresh monocles by parachute.

Small wonder, then, that as a boy I spent all my pocket money on Airfix models and Commando magazines – trash mags, we called them. I drew battleships and fighter planes in the margins of schoolbooks. I played endless war games in the sandpit of our London garden, marshalling toy tanks and tiny plastic soldiers across the burning wastes of the North African desert, circa 1942.

Yet now that I had the opportunity to live out this intoxicating fantasy I found myself weighing up the matter in a manner I had not anticipated. Ewan was surely wrong. Never mind the extreme personal risk – somebody’s death, even a nameless Afghan conscript’s, was too high a price to pay for war tourism. I was under no illusion about the value of the experience from a professional point of view either. Perhaps it was justifiable for an agency cameraman whose pictures might be stored away or used in a different context to tell a story worth telling. But I was a freelance adventurer with an uncertain commission from the London Independent, and I knew that a strategically meaningless exchange of shellfire in a back-page war would be worth a column inch or two at best. It seemed better to keep my doubts to myself, however. For a first-timer in Afghanistan, travelling companions had obvious advantages – and I definitely needed the services of a good fixer-interpreter. Later that night I persuaded Ewan and Rick to let me join them.

I found my Afghan adventure all right. We flew low in an army helicopter through valleys so steep that the sheep looked down on us. The pilot, who was stoned, made me sit in the Perspex nose beyond his foot pedals, laughing maniacally as his machine pitched and rolled through the vertiginous passes. When at last we touched down in a field of poppies near the front line at Bala Murghab, guerrillas emerged from hiding places in the rocks to unload the cargo. The poorly stacked crates on which the others had been perching turned out to be filled with Iranian-made anti-personnel mines. Our visit to the western front only lasted a week, but it seemed far longer, and there was no possibility of getting off the roller-coaster. It was like a mad theme park. We lurched about the front lines on the back of a stinking tank, fired Kalashnikovs at tin cans, tracked an imaginary Mig through the cross-hairs of a fifty-year-old anti-aircraft gun, and rode out on patrol with a posse of Uzbek cavalrymen whose horses were trained not to flinch when their masters fired rocket-propelled grenades at full gallop between their ears. At night we slept fitfully in the dugouts of field commanders who were mostly psychotic or homosexual, and sometimes both, while making ourselves sick from their contaminated water supplies.

We didn’t see the enemy but they were never more than a few miles away, secreted in dugouts just like our own, watching and waiting for the spring fighting season to begin again. At dusk each evening the two sides traded insults over their field radios. Mir thought this battlefield ritual a wonderful game, and asked to take over the handset.

– Talib Talib Talib, he growled, suppressing a giggle. Your mother was a camel and your father was a Pakistani spy.

– Spawn of Satan, crackled the outraged respondent. Your offspring are all bastards. With Allah’s help we will soon put an end to your infernal mating with dogs and donkeys.

– Hooh, did you hear that? Mir whispered, wide-eyed at the profanity of it. Dogs and donkeys! Can you imagine?

Mir was an excellent fixer. His family were prominent in Mazar, and everybody seemed to know him. His father was no ordinary member of the judiciary but an ’alim, one of the hundred or so most senior Sharia judges in the country, so Mir’s family name alone commanded a certain respect. He had the knack of knowing when to drop a name, when to cajole with flattery or a gift.

Ewan could be impatient, but Mir unfailingly took this in his stride. If anything, he was sometimes too eager to please. For instance, he had never ridden a horse before, but he agreed without hesitating to go along on a cavalry expedition. Ewan and Rick hoped to persuade the Uzbeks to let us participate in a full-blown cavalry charge, which was ambitious. Ewan demonstrated his superior horsemanship by cantering around a field with one hand on his hip like some eighteenth-century cavalier, but to Mir’s relief our hosts rejected his proposal. Ewan turned sarcastic in his disappointment and blamed Mir for the failure to persuade the Uzbeks, but I found myself standing up for him. He had been hired as an interpreter, not a cavalry guide. It was hardly his fault if he was nervous of horses or that he sat slumped in the saddle like a sack of potatoes.

The journalistic high point of the trip was an interview with Ismail Khan, the legendary Mujaheddin leader and ousted governor of the far western town of Herat. The sector commanders had tried to keep us away but Mir knew one of the helicopter pilots, whom we bribed with a bottle of whisky. We saw Ismail Khan’s upturned face as the helicopter descended to the secret drop zone, his tiny band of followers standing guard around him, prophet-like with his snowy beard and pristine white shalwar qamiz blowing about him as the long grass flattened in the downwash. We were escorted to a ruined farmhouse where the old soldier displayed an outspoken determination to get back to Herat, threatening to bomb and machine-gun anyone who stood in his way. More interestingly, he scoffed at his so-called allies in the Northern Alliance.

The leaders of the non-Pashtun minorities had agreed six months earlier to set aside their differences and form a pact in the face of the Taliban onslaught, but the pact was already coming apart. The Hazaras and the Tajiks, particularly, resented the way the Uzbek leader, General Rashid Dostum, had taken the leadership of the Alliance upon himself. To hell with Dostum’s broader strategy, Khan said now. Who did Dostum think he was, anyway? He, Ismail Khan, would take Herat back from the Taliban with or without the assistance of the Alliance’s so-called and self-appointed leader. If Dostum didn’t agree, it was too bad.

Ismail Khan’s comments had important implications for the military integrity of the Northern Alliance. Back in Mazar several days later therefore, I faithfully wrote up the interview for the Independent, dictating to the copy-takers in London at budget-sapping expense via a satellite phone link. I never paused to consider the effect such an article might have, but in retrospect it was a fateful decision, the event that probably marked the start of Mir’s long slide into eventual exile. Rather to my surprise the Independent ran the story. To my even greater surprise I was informed of this editorial decision in faraway London by Mir. He bustled into the Oxfam compound one morning to announce that the BBC World Service had picked up the story and broadcast it across Afghanistan in both Pashtun and Dari. The whole town was talking about it, he said. He revelled in this triumphant proof of the power of modern media, his enthusiasm strangely touching.

It was May Day and General Dostum was planning a spectacular Soviet-style demonstration of military might. A podium had been erected for him and a long column of tanks had congregated in a sidestreet near the shrine the night before. Bunting dangled from the lamp posts and gave the town an almost carnival atmosphere. Genial crowds were already out on the streets, buying lemonade and candy from newly erected stalls or securing the best vantage points for the coming parade. I led Mir to one of the stalls and bought him a celebratory can of orange fizz called Mirinda, a lurid import from Uzbekistan that I had seen everywhere in the markets, virtually the only canned drink available in Mazar. It was the sort of useless foreign luxury that the Taliban would no doubt try to ban if they ever captured the city. Mir smacked his lips and guzzled it down, declaring it werry delicious and his favourite drink ever. I tried it and found it warm and disgustingly saccharine, the Soviet-grade chemicals cloying in my throat. I joshed him about his weight and his incorrigibly sweet tooth. He chatted fervently about his ambition to work for the BBC. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and after the stomach-knotting stress of the trenches Mazar now seemed blissfully normal. And then without warning he disappeared. One minute he was dawdling along as usual at my elbow; the next he was gone. His departure was so sudden that I was left holding his coat. I thought little of it at first, but when the parade started and there was still no sign of him I began to worry. The dust thrown up by the tanks had settled, the crowds had gone home and the sun was starting to set by the time Mir reappeared in the Oxfam compound. He looked pale and was sporting two black eyes. Ewan and I clustered around him as he sat and told us in a tired voice that he had been arrested by Dostum’s secret police, Russian-trained Uzbek goons who had taken him to a cell and beaten him up.

– They are werry angry with your article, he said, nodding at me. They wanted to know, why did I help the foreigners? They think all foreigners are spies. They said I should not have translated what Ismail Khan said about the Northern Alliance. But I said, why? I am just an interpreter – how can I lie? I said I am a good Muslim and that a good Muslim always tells the truth.

Ewan and I looked at each other. Al had been right after all: it was impossible to detach oneself from the story in this crazy place, and I was already becoming embroiled.

– Don’t worry, Mir went on. These men are idiots – galamjam. You know galamjam? It means carpet-thieves.

His sang-froid was admirable but there was a danger that it was also misplaced. Mir was not streetwise. He could be alarmingly naive at times, and I didn’t like the sound of these galamjam one bit. At the very least he was now a marked man with the authorities. I told him as forcefully as I could that he would need to keep a low profile and to stop working for journalists, at least for the time being. Ewan agreed.

– Don’t worry, Mir replied in a bored voice. I’ll be fine.

We checked he was not too shaken and sent him home to his parents in a taxi.

The following morning I went to the UN office and reported the incident to a savvy Irishman who spoke Dari and knew Mazar and the Uzbeks who controlled it well. He nodded sagely and promised to keep an eye out for Mir. I was due to leave Afghanistan for Uzbekistan in a few days. The Independent had expressed an interest in a story about oil and gas politics and my interviews in Tashkent were already set up. I left for the north full of misgivings, but didn’t see what more I could do.

Mir’s future in Mazar ended a fortnight later. He didn’t keep a low profile, but teamed up with the BBC in the shape of the experienced Afghan correspondent Lionel David. Working for the BBC carried kudos in Mazar and was very lucrative. The temptation was more than he was able to resist.

From a purely professional point of view my decision to quit Mazar at the beginning of May was a disaster. I felt a certain Schadenfreude that Ewan had also left and missed the moment, although Rick had stayed behind. None of us had foreseen Dostum’s betrayal by his Uzbek ally Abdul Malik Pahlawan, or the consequent fall of Mazar to the Taliban who, at Abdul Malik’s invitation, swept with devastating speed across the undefended plains to the west in their Hi-Lux trucks. Lionel, however, had excellent Taliban contacts who had tipped him off to the impending operation, and he turned up to film their arrival in Mazar at the perfect moment. At first the Taliban occupation of the city went unopposed. But then they called a public meeting at the central mosque, where they laid out the rules of the new regime: men to wear beards, women to wear birqas and be confined to their homes; no television, no music, no kite-flying, no partridge-fighting;

(#litres_trial_promo) everyone to pray five times a day, or else. This was not well received. Many men walked out in the course of the meeting, shaking their heads and muttering darkly. But it was a few days later when the Taliban tried to disarm the populace, as they had successfully done everywhere else in the country, that the real trouble began.

Five years later Lionel was still able to recall the minutest details of the next hellish forty-eight hours. I sat him down with a tape recorder in my London flat where he obligingly relived the trauma for an hour and a half, the narrative bizarrely interrupted by a mobile phone call from his young son, who wanted to know if it was OK to use a tube of Bostik to fix a plastic model from his Warhammer set.

Lionel’s story began on a lovely Tuesday evening in the centre of Mazar. He was out near the shrine with Mir, shooting a piece to camera for Newsnight. All was calm. The setting sun lit up the cobalt of the shrine’s mosaics and his crew was adjusting the camera tripod to get the scene into shot. Until that moment Mazar seemed to have fallen to the Taliban as peacefully as every other city had done. But then they heard shooting coming from the Hazara Shi’ite enclave in the north-west quarter. Being Shi’ites, these people with high cheekbones and narrow eyes, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had sacked Mazar in the thirteenth century, had already been cruelly persecuted by the strictly Sunni Taliban. They evidently wanted nothing to do with the new regime. Looking half a mile down the main avenue with his BBC binoculars, Lionel spotted two colleagues running for their lives, bullets kicking up the dirt behind them like a scene from a cowboy film. One of them was Al, newly returned from the Live News offices in Islamabad.

The Hazara revolt signalled a general uprising in the town. Within moments the air above Lionel and Mir was fizzing with bullets and even artillery fire. The crew had only expected to be out for half an hour and had left their flak jackets in the hotel, a two-minute taxi ride away. Their taxi, however, had vanished, and it took them several hours to get back to relative safety, creeping through the sidestreets with their backs to the walls. En route they encountered the rebel Uzbek commander Ghafar Pahlawan. Oblivious to the gunfire exploding all around him, he was reclining outside his house in a stripy deckchair recently looted from a Western aid agency compound, comfortably shod in a pair of oriental blue slippers. Mir and the BBC men, crouching and flinching at every burst of gunfire, asked him wildly what was going on.

– You are journalists, Ghafar purred. I think you know what is going on.

Even the hotel wasn’t safe. Mir and the journalists huddled in a corridor in the centre of the building, the frightened staff congregated around them, as the battle outside raged through the night. One of the BBC crew was almost hit by a stray bullet fired more than a mile away. By morning the Taliban guard posted at the hotel’s gates the day before had disappeared, the clearest sign yet that the invaders were in deep trouble. Later, Lionel and Mir watched a Hi-Lux truckload of Talib fighters speed past the hotel gates in the direction of the shrine, shooting as they went. It was suicide – and a hundred yards further on they died the way they wanted, a glorious martyr’s death at the hands of the townspeople, who opened up on them from all sides. Such vignettes were repeated across the city throughout that terrible day.

I heard separately what had happened to Rick during the fighting. He beetled out of the Oxfam compound with his cameras the moment it started. Somewhere in the city he dived into a house to shelter from an outburst of shooting, only to find a platoon of Taliban manning the windows. The house seemed solidly built and he was minded to stay put until the shooting subsided, but a local man who had been similarly trapped insisted that it was not safe. They argued. The local won. The two of them bolted across the street to take cover in another building. Just as they reached it a tank shell sailed into the first house and flattened it.

Some six hundred Taliban were killed as they retreated desperately from house to house. Another thousand were captured out by the airport as they tried to flee. Many were said later to have been herded into truck containers that were sealed and dumped out in the desert, where they were baked to death.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was the first serious military reverse the Taliban had ever known, as well as a great embarrassment to the three countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – that had responded to the capture of Mazar too soon by formally recognising the legitimacy of the new regime.

These were dangerous times for Westerners in Afghanistan. They were also dangerous times for Mir. By now he should have been at home with his family, cowering beneath upturned furniture behind bolted doors. His colleagues among Mazar’s small cadre of interpreters had long since abandoned their Western charges and melted into the town. Mir never explained why he alone stayed behind. It might have been out of a sense of loyalty, or naivety, or a mixture of the two, but there is no doubt that it was another fate-sealing moment.

As the chaos continued into Thursday a collective decision was taken by the small foreign community to evacuate. The nearest border was at Hairaton, ninety miles to the north, where the Amu Darya river marks the southern edge of Uzbekistan. The UN hastily arranged a convoy.

Lionel David was staying not at the UN’s heavily sandbagged guesthouse, from where the convoy would depart, but half a mile away at the city’s main hotel. The BBC crew loaded their voluminous equipment, tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of generators, sat phones, Toko boxes and old-fashioned edit packs in silver suitcases, into the backs of two cars. But they were fatally slow in starting out. Over by the UN guesthouse a large and hostile crowd had gathered around the waiting convoy. When the mob started smashing car windows the organisers decided they could wait no longer, and set off for Hairaton. The first BBC car turned the corner and drove straight into a riot. The mob had stormed the empty UN guesthouse and was in the process of looting it. Now they turned on the equipment-laden BBC car.

Lionel and Mir arrived in the second car to see their cameraman and soundman sprinting down the street pursued by a swarm of Afghans shouting Kill the foreigners. By now it was open season on all outsiders. Everyone in Mazar understood that the Taliban were secretly armed and funded by the Pakistanis, just as the Pakistanis with their American and other Western allies had armed and funded the Mujaheddin opposition to the Soviets twenty years before. British, American, Pakistani, Taliban – what was the difference? They were all foreigners, and all guilty by association. It was their fault that jang, the fighting, had finally come to the once peaceful city of Mazar. The BBC men narrowly escaped in the second car and made it back to the hotel, where they discovered that someone had stabbed the car door, piercing the metal. Mir advised Lionel that there was nothing for it but to seek official protection. And so they all drove together to the traitor Abdul Malik’s house to see if they could find someone, anyone, in charge. They found General Majid Ruzi, one of Dostum’s senior commanders, who was full of purposeful sympathy for the foreigners.

– Leave it to me, he said. I’ll see what I can do.

Three weeks earlier I had interviewed Ruzi myself along with Ewan, Rick and Mir, in a field tent out on the western front. We sat cross-legged and drank tea in glorious sunshine on the edge of a plain tinkling with birdsong, the air filled with the scent of red and yellow spring flowers. His men were hunting partridge chicks among the brush, walking in long lines through the undergrowth with nets. He seemed an urbane and charming man. He was shrewd and educated and appeared pleased with the opportunity to discuss the war. The Northern Alliance, he told us, would never permit the Taliban to take Mazar. This was because the northern Afghans were liberal people with no time for fundamentalism. The Uzbeks believed in live and let live. Had we heard that in Kandahar the Taliban were insisting that stallions wore trousers? He roared with laughter. Were these people not preposterous?

But there was no live and let live from Ruzi now. Lionel recounted in the Observer what happened next, in what he described as an act of personal catharsis. Mir and the Westerners were escorted by Ruzi’s men back to the UN guesthouse. A quarter of an hour later Ruzi himself turned up. Then odd bits of their looted kit began to materialise. The foreigners’ metal suitcases were so conspicuous that it was easy for Ruzi’s men to retrieve them from the bazaars into which they had vanished. An open Russian jeep appeared with a sullen young man in the back, a TV camera marked BBC bouncing on the seat beside him. He was a Hazara commander, darker-skinned than the average Afghan, wearing Western-looking brown clothes. He had been arrested while carrying the camera – or so Ruzi said. Events began to accelerate. Ruzi barked orders. The milling crowd of looters, suddenly electrified, drew back. That was the moment that Mir realised his mistake in soliciting Ruzi’s help.

– Lionel, he said, he is going to kill this man.

Thinking quickly, Mir went down on his knees and touched Ruzi’s feet, the sincerest Afghan gesture of supplication and respect. Lionel followed suit and beseeched the General, Mir translating feverishly: a lump of glass and metal was not worth dying for. He would prefer the Hazara to keep the camera equipment than to pay for it with his life. But Ruzi’s decision was final. The Hazara was marched by two gunmen to a wall across the road, a look of disbelief on his face, protesting loudly over his shoulder that he was an Afghan like Ruzi, while the BBC man was just a foreigner; why was he doing this? Then the gunmen stepped back from their still protesting prisoner, flicked their Kalashnikovs to automatic, and killed him instantly in a spray of bullets. Before the noise of the gunfire had died away the crowd had fled in all directions, leaving behind a shoe or two, bits of loot from the guesthouse, a hastily abandoned bicycle.

It was time for the foreigners to leave, but even now they had to wait. Lionel, in deep shock from what had just happened, recalled playing an uncomfortably symbolic game of Risk in the trashed but re-secured guesthouse, while a friendly mechanic reinstalled the camshafts of two decommissioned UN Landcruisers parked around the back.

Two hours later the cars were ready and the foreigners reassembled, trying hard not to look at the pool of coagulated blood in the dust across the street. Mir offered to travel with them, but the convoy organisers thankfully dissuaded him: he would never be allowed to cross the border, and Hairaton would be desperately dangerous for him once the foreigners were safely out of reach in Uzbekistan. Even in his home town he knew it was only a matter of time before the relatives of the dead Hazara came looking for revenge. A big crowd had witnessed the execution, and Mazar’s grapevine was highly developed. All the town would quickly know of his involvement in the killing.

He didn’t wait around to wave goodbye. As the foreigners finally rolled northwards he already knew that this day marked a major turning point in his life, and in all probability in the lives of his family, too. He would have to abandon his home town. The alternative was to die in a vengeful hail of bullets just as the camera thief had done.

I barely slept the night of Mir’s touchdown in London, one year on. By the following morning I had almost convinced myself that I had been duped. His promise to call me on arrival had meant nothing after all: he was just another crafty Afghan who had taken the opportunity to exploit another gullible foreigner. But when at last he did call with the explanation that he had ‘forgot’, I was too relieved to be angry, as well as a little ashamed for thinking ill of him. The Heathrow immigration officers had been friendly and had done everything by the book. His processing had taken less than an hour, and when he emerged Hamid was waiting for him as arranged.

Two mornings later, a Saturday, I headed east by motorbike to the address Mir had given me, a house in Mafeking Avenue, London E6. According to my street directory this was the postcode for East Ham, in the borough of Newham. I had lived in west London all my life, and my knowledge of most districts east of the financial centre was uncertain, so my journey was punctuated by frequent stops for a look at the map. Mafeking Avenue is beyond the most easterly suburbs that even many Londoners have heard of. Almost everyone knows that West Ham has a football club. Some people know of Plaistow from the song by Ian Dury. But what is there to say about East Ham, or the communities of Plashet, Wallend or Manor Park? And these are still places with ‘proper’ London postcodes. Out beyond the eastern arc of the North Circular ringroad the capital straggles on for another five miles at least, through Barking and Dagenham, barely thinning through Hornchurch and Upminster to the limits of the street directory. The immensity of the city was sobering. I had not expected my involvement with Mir to be broadening my horizons again so soon – certainly not this horizon, the eastern edge of my own home town.

On the A13 approach road some wag had prefixed a ‘T’ to a road sign marked Urban Clearway, but I was still unprepared for what I found. By the time I arrived it felt as though I had travelled out of London altogether and come to another city; or another continent. The street that ran past Upton Park tube station resembled more closely than seemed possible a Pakistani street bazaar. At first sight the crowds milling along the pavements appeared almost entirely Asian, many of the men in shalwar qamiz beneath tatty Argyle sweaters or bulky down jackets, the women in saris and headscarves. The crowds were thickest outside Queen’s Market, a cacophony of stalls close to the station.

I pulled in, switched off the engine, and stared. The stalls stretched far back into impenetrable darkness beneath a low concrete roof, the shoppers mostly chattering in Urdu as they hurried to and fro with bags of groceries. The stall-keepers were hawking the same exotic fruits, the same halal meat, the same plastic tat and £2 watches and bolts of primary-coloured cloth that are the stock-in-trade of the Saddar Market in Peshawar, treats for magpies. The place even smelled the same, a spicy-sweet mustiness that was two parts curry house and one part poverty.