THE ENDURING FIGHT for FREEDOM
Four decades of war have ravaged Afghanistan, cost America $3 trillion and left more than one million dead. As US troops prepare to withdraw, the award-winning journalist Anthony Loyd returns to the country that has always obsessed him and asks, what next for a nation more divided than ever?
In the rose garden of the warlord walked a newly freed man. Spareframed, his dark hair cropped in a convict cut, he was in his early 30s and had a pale, drawn face that suggested recent pain.
Seeing a stranger on the lawn he sat down beside me to talk, as Afghans do. The war was close by, fought out in the arid hills of Takhar province, and from time to time as he spoke the sound of distant artillery rumbled over his words from across the Kokcha River. That autumn of 2000, a year before the 9/11 attacks brought America into the conflict, it seemed the Taliban would be victorious.
The man told me something that has resonated ever since, as valid an observation of liberty that day as it is now that the Doha agreement between the Americans and the Taliban, signed in February this year, has ushered in a new and uncertain era of the Afghan war.
I was recently back from the front. Despite the atmosphere of failing fortune among the mujahidin groups with whom I moved, the days of war were of great wonder and high adventure. I travelled by horse, motorbike and raft and, as so often in Afghanistan, the journey to a place was often more remarkable than the destination itself. A couple of days earlier I had crossed the Kokcha River with 1500 mujahidin fighters who were on the move for an attack in another sector. On horseback, at the banks of the fast flow I dismounted, took off the saddle and handed the reins to a bare-chested boy who plunged without hesitation into the depths, the horse with him, both swimming through the current to the other side, as I climbed aboard a raft made from stoppered cow carcases, saddle on my shoulders, to join them on the far bank.
Aside from the murmuring shellfire and my dusty clothes, nothing in the warlord’s garden suggested the proximity of war. The prisoner and I sat drinking tea on a lawn that bounced to the touch, while kneeling in a nearby flowerbed a gardener snipped at the shrubbery. The warlord, whose name was Mamur Hassan, had a pair of Lady Amherst’s pheasants there too, and the roses were still in bloom.
Mamur Hassan was a leading figure among the mujahidin in northern Afghanistan. He had fought first against the Soviets and that autumn day he was commanding his forces against the Taliban. The Taliban’s capture of Kabul four years earlier had caused panic among rival mujahidin groups in the north, who had come together in a military union, the
Northern Alliance, led by the famed resistance hero Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Of Uzbek heritage, Mamur Hassan was one of the principal commanders in this alliance, and I stayed as a guest in his compound in Dasht-e Qaleh, a small northern town near the confluence of the Panji and Kokcha rivers.
As the prisoner and I sat there peaceably in the golden light of the afternoon, he told me that he was originally from Kabul, and was one of Mamur Hassan’s nephews. A year earlier he had been arrested in Kabul by the Taliban during a random patrol. They had discovered the business card of a Christian aid organisation in his pockets. A friend of his had given him the card, suggesting the organisation might be able to help him leave the country. It led instead to jail.
During his incarceration the prisoner was repeatedly tortured. Hung upside down by chains, he had the soles of his feet and legs beaten with wire cabling.
After eight months of prison and torture, the man’s wife sold her jewellery and bribed the Taliban to release her husband. The couple fled north, seeking sanctuary with his powerful uncle, escaping the cohesive strictures and relative stability of the Taliban zone for the lawlessness and war of the mujahidin fiefdoms.
“I didn’t like the Taliban, but I don’t like these mujahidin either,” he said, somewhat conspiratorially, as if his uncle might somehow overhear. “Now, the mujahidin are united. But if they were to push the Taliban back, they would fight among each other again.”
“Until I was put in prison, at least I had peace in the Taliban zone,” he added. “There is no crime and no war there. You are not free, but you are not robbed. And there is no longer the threat of shelling and fighting.”
I asked which way of life he preferred: repressive security or chaotic liberty. He looked at me for a while, and then laughed.
“You never find this answer absolutely, not in your country, not in ours,” he said, smiling. “Life is the condition of the search between.”
I NEVER learnt the prisoner’s fate, but ever since the US agreed a timeline for its withdrawal from Afghanistan in the February 29 deal it signed with the Taliban in the Qatari capital, the question of what place liberty might have in his country’s search for peace and stability is again at the forefront of Afghan minds — even as their latest invader, coronavirus, begins its insidious advance across the land.
No one can doubt the imperative to end the world’s most protracted and costly conflict. Since fighting began in Afghanistan in 1979, well over one million Afghans have died violently, and more than six and a half million have become refugees.
Among those who stayed inside their country, three in four have been displaced by fighting. Afghans are exhausted by four decades of conflict, and deserve the peace most of them crave. The impact of a pandemic on them at this moment of extreme vulnerability, with fighting continuing and peace as yet a chimeral prospect, could cause death and displacement on a scale that far exceeds that of the most recent years of war.
It is equally understandable that the US wishes to conclude its longest involvement in a war that has cost it more than 2400 American lives and an investment of up to US$2 trillion ($3.3 trillion) — for so little obvious result.
Supporters of the Doha agreement see it as a groundbreaking opportunity to secure peace for the Afghans and an honourable withdrawal for the US. Others regard the accord as little more than a political gamble designed to allow President Trump delivery on his pledge to pull American troops from Afghanistan ahead of the US presidential elections in November.
Just a few weeks after it was signed, and with American units already pulling out of Afghanistan, the omens for Doha are inauspicious, even before the coronavirus added its own foreboding drumbeat to Afghan affairs.
The clauses of the accord acquiesced to every major Taliban demand and gave the Afghan Government nothing. No ultimate peace settlement is even required for a full US withdrawal to occur: under Doha’s terms, all American forces are required to pull out from Afghanistan by summer next year merely so long as some sort of talks between the Kabul Government and the Taliban are in progress.
Civil liberties, human and women’s rights? These are passionate aspirations for the millions of educated Afghans who have a vision of modernity beyond the limitations of conflict and fundamentalism. Yet no word of rights, liberty or even democracy is mentioned in the Doha accord, let alone stipulated as a prerequisite of any ultimate peace settlement.
With Washington’s interests turning inwards in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, at no time since the US invasion of 2001 has Afghanistan faced such a critical juncture in its history.
Some foreigners are spellbound by Afghanistan. I am one of them. It has lured me back time and again on assignments over the 24 years since I first went to Kabul in February 1996. Of decisive events I saw little. Mostly, I witnessed the war, its slow tides and lightning twists, through the details in a day or moment: a remark in a conversation such as that with the newly released prisoner in the rose garden; a dead man on a road; a colonel’s face, luminous with grief; the swimming boy and horse in the Kokcha River.
Returning home to the UK in March after my 27th assignment in Afghanistan, these are the slivers of my recall in the pirouettes of the Afghan war; these are the memories with which I wonder at the prisoner’s riddle in the rose garden that autumn day, as Doha awaits to reveal its truths amid the coming of corona.
EVEN IN life he was a legendary figure, but the last time I saw him — in a car coming back from the front one autumn afternoon — Ahmad Shah Massoud seemed much worse than exhausted. He looked like his luck was almost out.
Sleep kept seizing him as we drove. Midconversation his eyes would slip closed and his head nod and roll from side to side as the vehicle bumped over the rough terrain. During wakeful moments he discussed war and regret, his face deeply lined and lacking its normal glow as the desiccated land, hued with autumnal browns, bucked and plunged past the car windows.
These days, 19 years on from his assassination at the age of 48, Massoud is officially a posthumous “national hero” of Afghanistan, his legacy enduring not just in the road named after him, leading to Kabul’s international airport, but across the northern half of the country in thousands of roadside billboards and office portraits.
In each, his pakol cap cocked jauntily on the back of his head, brow furrowed over an ascetic face and wide, goodhumoured mouth, he appears the wise champion on the edge of provident decision: victory must surely be his, the portraits suggest. In person, he was no less convincing and had an ethereal glow about him — an aura, a shining, call it what you will — that made his presence captivating.
Yet that day in Takhar province in 2000, with just 10 months left to live, Afghanistan’s best-known resistance fighter seemed enervated, even remorseful.
The Taliban were on a roll, pushing Massoud’s Northern Alliance forces back into a shard of territory, less than 10 per cent of the country, squished up against the border with Tajikistan, an area that seemed barely defensible.
“I have had so many ‘worst moments’ in my life that I can’t remember the worst,” he said at one point, turning around to me in his seat, his hooded eyes ringed with darkness. “Also regrets. I have many regrets. Regrets for things I have or have not done in the war. Who would like to spend their whole life constantly fighting? I do so because I am without choice.”
One of the most impressive guerrilla commanders in modern times, Massoud was born in the Panjshir Valley in northeastern Afghanistan and there battled with the Soviets throughout their occupation, earning himself the sobriquet of “Lion of Panjshir”.
Yet after leading his mujahidin into Kabul in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal, Massoud became embroiled in a civil war involving a shifting array of allegiances that reduced much of the capital to ruina and killed thousands of Kabulis.
In a single three-month period that year the UN reported 1800 Kabulis being killed on the streets by artillery barrages, while in the same period 500,000 fled the city. Two years later, 25,000 were recorded as being slain in the capital, a third of which was destroyed. Those who remained there did so terrified by the random barbarities inflicted on them at whim by rival mujahidin groups, which continued until the Taliban captured the capital in 1996.
“I regret that when I had Kabul I could not do better for the people,” he continued glumly, turning around again.
“And I regret that the system they lived under was so corrupt.”
I wonder now if prescience of his own death caused him to speak with such reflective introspection that day. I had never seen him in that mood before. It was like listening to a general’s confession on the eve of a doomed battle.
“Our only choices are to fight or surrender,” he concluded bitterly. “And that is no choice at all.”
As the prisoner in the rose garden had described, the Afghans’ essential problem was that they were so seldom given a better choice than theological austerity or authoritarian criminality.
Few liked the Taliban. Yet many preferred the relative security in Taliban zones to the banditry and corruption of areas controlled by warlords or whatever forces passed themselves off as representing “central authority”.
Many Afghans found that “liberty” became a definition of surviving unmolested by violence and crime, rather than anything related to the abstract benefits of an imported political system named democracy.
Driving into Afghanistan in the winter of 1996 during the Taliban’s tenure in Kabul, I saw a state of wretchedness. Much of the capital was in ruins, ravaged by the years of civil war, and hungry Afghans huddled in the city’s carcass, water and electricity supplies haphazard or absent, burning whatever combustible material they could find in an effort to keep warm.
While it was true that the capital was experiencing relief from the shelling and the looting that had characterised the four previous years in which the mujahidin had fought over it, the stabilising influence of the Taliban’s repressive rule carried its own particular band of misery.
The arrogance of the Taliban’s religious leaders, who believed they could run a country on the back of their madrassa educations, quickly ensured that whatever was left of the Afghan economy collapsed.
Inflation was running at 400 per cent and more than half of the country was unemployed; 6.3 million Afghans — a fifth of the population — were refugees in Pakistan with little inclination to return. Living standards had been further eroded when the Taliban banned women from working.
In the city’s bazaars I met men selling broken locks, empty Biros and soleless shoes in a bid to survive. At first I did not believe the rumours of a trade in human
“I have many regrets. Regrets for things I have or have not done in the war. Who would like to spend
their whole life constantly fighting? I do so because I am without choice.”
Ahmad Shah Massoud, Afghan commander