in a tin that contained about 10 per cent sardines and 90 per cent oil. Every few minutes, Major Yuri would pace the roadway and talk over the radio telephone, and when eventually we did move away with our armoured escorts scattered through the column, he seemed unsure of our exact location on the highway. Could he, he asked, borrow my map? And it was suddenly clear to me that this long convoy did not carry with it a single map of Afghanistan.
There was little evidence of the ambushed convoy in front save for the feet of a dead man being hurriedly pushed into a Soviet army van near Charikar and a great swath of crimson and pink slush that spread for several yards down one side of the road. The highway grew more icy at sundown, but we drove faster. As we journeyed on into the night, the headlights of our 147 trucks running like diamonds over the snow behind us, I was gently handed a Kalashnikov rifle with a full clip of ammunition. A soldier snapped off the safety catch and told me to watch through the window. I had no desire to hold this gun, even less to shoot at Afghan guerrillas, but if we were attacked again – if the Afghans had come right up to the truck as they had done many times on these convoys – they would assume I was a Russian. They would not ask all members of the National Union of Journalists to stand aside before gunning down the soldiers.
I have never since held a weapon in wartime and I hope I never shall again. I have always cursed the journalists who wear military costumes and don helmets and play soldiers with a gun at their hip, greying over the line between reporter and combatant, making our lives ever more dangerous as armies and militias come to regard us as an extension of their enemies, a potential combatant, a military target. But I had not volunteered to travel with the Soviet army. I was not – as that repulsive expression would have it in later wars – ‘embedded’. I was as much their prisoner as their guest. As the weeks went by, Afghans learned to climb aboard the Soviet convoy lorries after dark and knife their occupants. I knew that my taking a rifle – even though I never used it – would produce a reaction from the great and the good in journalism, and it seemed better to admit the reality than to delete this from the narrative.* If I was riding shotgun for the Soviet army, then that was the truth of it.
Three times we passed through towns where villagers and peasants lined the roadside to watch us pass. And of course, it was an eerie, unprecedented experience to sit with a rifle on my lap in a Soviet military column next to armed and uniformed Russian troops and to watch those Afghans – most of them in turbans, long shawls and rubber shoes – staring at us with contempt and disgust. One man in a blue coat stood on the tailboard of an Afghan lorry and watched me with narrowed eyes. It was the nearest I had seen to a look of hatred. He shouted something that was lost in the roar of our convoy.
Major Yuri seemed unperturbed. As we drove through Qarabagh, I told him I didn’t think the Afghans liked the Russians. It was beginning to snow heavily again. The major did not take his eyes from the road. ‘The Afghans are cunning people,’ he said without obvious malice, and then fell silent. We were still sliding along the road to Kabul when I turned to Major Yuri again. So why was the Soviet army in Afghanistan, I asked him? The major thought about this for about a minute and gave me a smile. ‘If you read Pravda,’ he said, ‘you will find that Comrade Leonid Brezhnev has answered this question.’ Major Yuri was a party man to the end.*
In Kabul, the doors were closing. All American journalists were expelled from the country. An Afghan politburo statement denounced British and other European reporters for ‘mudslinging’. The secret police had paid Mr Samadali a visit. Gavin was waiting for me, grim-faced, in the lobby. ‘They told him they’d take his children from him if he took us outside Kabul again,’ he said. We found Mr Samadali in the hotel taxi line-up next day, smiling apologetically and almost in tears. My visa was about to expire but I had a plan. If I travelled in Ali’s bus all the way to Peshawar in Pakistan, I might be able to turn round and drive back across the Afghan border on the Khyber Pass before the Kabul government stopped issuing visas to British journalists. There was more chance that officials at a land frontier post would let me back into Afghanistan than the policemen at the airport in Kabul.
So I took the bus back down the Kabul Gorge, this time staying aboard as we passed through Jalalabad. It was an odd feeling to cross the Durand Line and to find myself in a Pakistan that felt free, almost democratic, after the tension and dangers of Afghanistan. I admired the great plumes on the headdress of the soldiers of the Khyber Rifles on the Pakistani side of the border, the first symbol of the old British raj, a regiment formed 101 years before, still ensconced at Fort Shagai with old English silver and a visitor’s book that went back to the viceroys.
But of course, it was an illusion. President General Mohamed Zia ul-Haq ran an increasingly Islamic dictatorship in which maiming and whipping had become official state punishments. He ruled by martial law and had hanged his only rival, the former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, less than a year earlier, in April 1979. And of course, he responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with publicly expressed fears that the Russian army planned to drive on into Pakistan. The United States immediately sent millions of dollars of weapons to the Pakistani dictator, who suddenly became a vital American ‘asset’ in the war against communism.
But in Ali’s wooden bus, it seemed like freedom. And as we descended the splendour of the Khyber Pass, there around me were the relics of the old British regiments who had fought on this ground for more than a century and a half, often against the Pathan ghazi fighters with their primitive jezail rifles. ‘A weird, uncanny place … a deadly valley,’ a British writer called it in 1897, and there on the great rocks that slid past Ali’s bus were the regimental crests of the 40th Foot, the Leicestershires, the Dorsetshires, the Cheshires – Bill Fisk’s regiment before he was sent to France in 1918 – and the 54th Sikh Frontier Force, each with its motto and dates of service. The paint was flaking off the ornamental crest of the 2nd Battalion, the Baluch Regiment, and the South Lancs and the Prince of Wales’ Volunteers had long ago lost their colours. Pathan tribesmen, Muslims to a man of course, had smashed part of the insignia of a Hindi regiment whose crest included a proud peacock. Graffiti covered the plaque of the 17th Leicestershires (1878–9). The only refurbished memorial belonged to Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides, a mainly Pathan unit whose eccentric commander insisted that they be clothed in khaki rather than scarlet and one of whose Indian members probably inspired Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’. The lettering had been newly painted, the stone washed clean of graffiti.
Peshawar was a great heaving city of smog, exhaust, flaming jacaranda trees, vast lawns and barracks. In the dingy Intercontinental there, I found a clutch of telex operators, all enriched by The Times and now further rewarded for their loyalty in sending my reports to London. This was not just generosity on my part; if I could re-enter Afghanistan, they would be my future lifeline to the paper. So would Ali. We sat on the lawn of the hotel, taking tea raj-style with a large china pot and a plate of scones and a fleet of huge birds that swooped from the trees to snatch at our cakes. ‘The Russians are not going to leave, Mr Robert,’ Ali assured me. ‘I fear this war will last a long time. That is why the Arabs are here.’ Arabs? Again, I hear about Arabs. No, Ali didn’t know where they were in Peshawar but an office had been opened in the city. General Zia had ordered Pakistan’s embassies across the Muslim world to issue visas to anyone who wished to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
A clutch of telexes was waiting for me at reception. The Times had safely received every paragraph I had written.* I bought the London papers and drank them down as greedily as any gin and tonic. The doorman wore a massive imperial scarlet cummerbund, and on the wall by the telex room I found Kipling’s public school lament for his dead countrymen – from ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ – framed by the Pakistani hotel manager:
A scrimmage in a border station –
A canter down some dark defile –
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail –