THE ENDURING FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
bones, until I searched the cemeteries and saw it for myself.
The grave robbers were children. I asked the leader of the first gang I met to open his bag so that I could see the bones inside. Faizadeen was 14 and only the thinnest layer of parchment-dry skin, withered by malnutrition and the winter wind, separated his frame from the bleached jumble of human remains in his tattered cotton sack. He reached inside it to take hold of a tibia, which he used to stir around the fragments.
There were six other kids in the gang. Faizadeen was the eldest. They were employed to rob graves, smashing the skulls and larger bones with rocks to hide their origin, before selling them to local merchants who mixed them with the bones from livestock. The bones were then sold on to middlemen, who trucked them to Pakistan where they were boiled down to be made into glue and cooking oil.
“I used to dig for scrap iron,” the boy said, raking through the human remains. “But now I dig for bones. We need the money for food.”
AS HE stared out across the smokewreathed vista through a set of binoculars, gunfire hammering the air, Gul Haider swung around from his perch on the compound wall, his peg leg sticking out and a scarf around his head, eyes ablaze, yelling at his war captains.
“The lines are breaking! The Taliban are fleeing! Don’t let them escape! Go, go, go!”
Below the walls, their hour at hand, scores of waiting mujahidin roared back in unison, punching the air with their assault rifles and charged off in the track lines of a T-55 tank as it pitched forward across no man’s land in a grind of gears and belch of black smoke. It was November 12, 2001, the day the Northern Alliance smashed through the Taliban lines on the Shamali Plain north of Kabul and raced forward to recapture the city.
Since I had last seen Massoud the previous year, the whole war had revolutionised in a way unforeseeable at the time. Massoud himself was dead, slain two months earlier on September 9 in a suicide blast by two al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists in his northern headquarters.
Two days later, before word of his killing leaked out among his beleaguered Northern Alliance, the hijacked jets had slammed into the twin towers and Massoud’s leaderless fighters suddenly had the most powerful nation in the world as their ally.
Days after Massoud’s death I had travelled across the mountains to reach the Shamali Plain, where there was a build-up of Northern Alliance forces preparing to capture Kabul as US airstrikes blasted Taliban defence positions. By the day of the battle, I was in optimum condition for a war assignment: two months in-country, in the war’s rhythm, thin, feral and sick enough to shit wherever I needed to.
The battle slouched on to the Shamali Plain with a three-day warning, as thousands of levied fighters turned up in early November to join Northern Alliance militia already in place under the field command of Gul Haider, one of Massoud’s Panjsheris.
On the fourth day, the attack for Kabul began. Perched on the wall of his command post, Gul Haider judged the moment his strike units had broken the Taliban line then committed his main force to the fray. They rushed forward into no man’s land, ululating.
The nearest group of fighters was running hunched behind the tank so I followed them. No man’s land was a stretch of withered vines and shrapnel-tilled soil, and a sense of pandemonium accompanied the run across it: hoarse shouts and gunfire, whistling bullets and exploding rockets; the crash of airstrikes, chatter of radios and thump of mortars.
Dropping over the lip of a trench, a bullet-riddled Taliban soldier lay at my feet, with a group of wild-eyed Northern Alliance fighters already looting his body. Just ahead, three other Taliban fighters broke cover and made a run for it. An RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) blast knocked them down but they rose again, stunned now and staggering, only to be overwhelmed by a pursuing group of 20 or so Northern Alliance fighters who killed them where they stood: a chatter of Kalashnikov fire sending their brains rolling out into their turbans as their bodies thumped down in the dust.
All along the Shamali Plain, thousands of mujahidin pushed through breaches in the Taliban lines, pressing on to the next objectives, moving on foot, hanging from tanks, piled on trucks. Details swirled out of the roil and heave of the fight: dead prisoners, their hands tied; looted corpses; a gut-shot mujahidin on his knees, holding the spreading bloodstain as his comrades ran past him; a one-legged fighter, his prosthesis lost, hopping desperately though the smoke and dust alongside a truck carrying his unit, crutch in one hand and rifle in the other.
The advance paused at nightfall, then continued again at dawn. By sunrise, the Northern Alliance were at the gates of Kabul. The Taliban, having left their rearguard to fight and die on the Shamali Plain, had abandoned the city overnight.
The morning of their downfall, as I drove towards the city, among the dead and dying I found a single slain Taliban fighter on the tarmac, robbed of his Kalashnikov and turban. On his back, arms flung wide, knees slightly bent, a rivulet of blood poured from his groin, streaming down the road’s slight incline to pool nearly 10ft beyond. He appeared to have been killed by the single act of castration.
So began the liberation of Kabul.
BENEATH THE lip of his helmet, the colonel’s face had the grey luminosity of sudden grief. “I’ve just lost one of my best soldiers,” he said to me, his words so quiet they were nearly a whisper. The identities of two dead soldiers had come over the radio minutes earlier. One, a sergeant, was among the battalion’s most renowned soldiers. The other was an 18-year-old battle casualty replacement who had only been in Afghanistan for a fortnight.
I had often seen that look on the faces of British officers in Afghanistan. They talked about their mission and their operations with an air of enthusiasm, becoming a little more cautious as they explained the “small steps of progress”. Then, bang, one more of their soldiers was dead — “rag-dolled”, as the men called it — and the patter stopped, the mask would drop and raw grief stared back into your face.
It was August 20, 2009, the day of an Afghan presidential election in the year that the US-led coalition “surged” its forces in an attempt to quell the Taliban revival. The polling booths in Sangin, a small town in Helmand already infamous for the number of British soldiers killed there, had not even been open an hour and already two more British troops were dead.
In his sandbagged operations room inside Sangin’s district centre, the colonel and his headquarters staff were in full body armour and helmets as Taliban rocket fire and mortars detonated about the base, while from the roof soldiers blazed away with machineguns at insurgents in the tree line along the Helmand River to the north, rage, frustration and vengeance ploughing the river reed lines with every burst of fire.
The colonel’s unit, built around a core of several hundred soldiers from 2 Rifles, already had the worst casualties of any British brigade sent to Helmand, with just over 100 soldiers killed or wounded, a fifth of their total. When their tour ended a few weeks later, one in four was dead or wounded, a figure that compared to British infantry casualty ratios in Europe in the later stages of the Second World War.
Eight years after their downfall and ejection from Kabul, the Taliban were regenerating. Fuelled by a mixture of coalition clumsiness, Pakistani support and Afghan government corruption, their insurgency was spreading across southern and eastern Afghanistan. The more the coalition exercised force to quell it, the more the local population was antagonised, the more empowered the Taliban became.
I had taken a helicopter to Sangin a week earlier, flying up from the main British base in Helmand at Camp Bastion. Before leaving Bastion, a doctor had invited me to visit the field hospital there. I had not even walked through the main entrance before a wounded British soldier arrived by helicopter. He was a young man in his prime, with the torso of an athlete. One of his legs had been blown off above the knee. A branch of a bush was sticking out of his thigh. The other leg had been grotesquely stripped so that it was no more than bone and ligament. One of his hands was pulped. He was still conscious.
In the operating theatre they tidied him up with a saw. He would leave the hospital a triple amputee.
Soon, more wounded arrived, some with terrible injuries. Three dead soldiers, killed earlier that day in Sangin, were already lying dead in “Rose Cottage”, the hospital’s morgue.
Once I reached Sangin I spoke with survivors from the 2 Rifles patrol on which these men had died. They described how during a search operation along the green belt outside Sangin the first soldier had trodden on an IED (improvised explosive device) in a compound. It blew his legs off. The other two went to his aid. As they carried him out of the compound, one of them trod on another IED. The blast left all three dead or dying. Amid the dust cloud and carnage, other soldiers froze. Some were crying.
Next, a helicopter tried and failed to land on the compound roof to evacuate the casualties. The space was too small. Two of the injured were dead by then. Eventually, one soldier, a sniper, lost patience waiting for his wounded friend to be evacuated and, cradling the legless man in his arms, ran 200 metres with him through the mineinfested green zone, to a new landing site. The soldier died anyway. As they extracted back to the base in Sangin later that day, the survivors hit another belt of IEDs; two interpreters were killed and two more soldiers wounded.
Three days later, the same unit went out on another operation. They ran straight into another multiple bomb incident in the green zone. Three more soldiers were blown up and killed: two more were wounded. In this way the Sangin summer passed. If ever a soldier there had refused to go out on patrol, I never heard of it, but I never met one who spoke of “winning”.
THE MAN in the rocks with the gun in his hand had jail time in his memory, shrapnel scars in his gut, and said he was tired of killing, but was ready to kill some more. We met in March this year, just nine days after the Doha agreement was signed. A Taliban commander, his name was Khalid Agha, and he was sure of victory, though his narrative of impending triumph involved no compromise.
“We haven’t been shedding blood all these years with the intent of sharing power with the Kabul Government,” he said, tapping his PK machinegun. He laughed, as if the concept of power-sharing was ridiculous. “We fight for sharia, for the Islamic Emirate, not to make deals with democrats in the time of our victory.”
Our rendezvous was near the Afghan frontier with Pakistan in Kandahar province. Perched among boulders overlooking a dusty plain, his bodyguards staring out across the vista for signs of movement, Khalid Agha had the typical profile of a mid-rank Taliban fighter.
Thirty years old, he had been born a refugee in Pakistan, and had studied at a madrassa before joining the Taliban at 17. He had fought British soldiers in Helmand; as well as Americans, Canadians and Afghan security forces. During the war, he told me, he had lost many men, spent several months in jail, and had been badly wounded in the stomach by shrapnel.
Noting the trajectory of the Taliban’s advances across Afghanistan over recent years — even US reports admitted the Taliban contested or controlled nearly 50 per cent of the country and towns like Sangin were long ago ceded to the insurgents — Khalid Agha saw the Doha deal neither as a peace agreement nor the end of war, but as a totemic moment of defeat for America.
“We have just defeated a superpower,” he smirked. “Once the Americans have gone it will be easy to sort out the Afghan Government.”
Across the Taliban heartland in southern Afghanistan this narrative — of victory against a superpower — was deeply entrenched and growing, the Taliban fighters regarding the Doha agreement not as a peace deal, but a milestone victory on the road to a further stage of war in which they will overthrow the Kabul Government and re-establish sharia.
Narrative has exponential power in any war, especially so in Afghanistan where logic, emotion and rationale have for so long been contorted by killing and chaos that Afghans are eager to believe in almost any discernible storyline that may make sense against the backdrop of disempowerment, confusion and violence.
In Taliban areas, where war aims are often merged with cultural traditions of vengeance, the decades of conflict have produced a younger generation of deeply radicalised fighters, less malleable to the authority of their elders, many of whom see no more purpose to life than death itself. To some, peace is death.
Last summer I had met a 23-year-old Taliban suicide bomber, Fawad, who, along with his teenage brother, was determined to die despite being begged by their widowed mother to live.
“I am counting the days impatiently waiting for my mission,” he told me one afternoon as we sat beneath the shade of a weeping willow. “Without that, there is no point to my life.”
Fawad’s urge to kill and die began in
2018, when his father and two sisters, aged
16 and 6, were killed in a night raid by Afghan special forces in their village in Ghazni province. On seeing their bulletriddled corpses, and noting that his father’s hands were tied, Fawad and his brother, Shorib, vowed vengeance and left home to train as suicide bombers with insurgent group the Haqqani network, in a camp across the border in Pakistan.
“From time to time one of our fellow pupils would get his mission and would walk out of the gates,” Fawad recalled. “Our mood was good in this time. We had not required much motivating — we were eager to die and felt we were close to jannah [paradise].”
However, their widowed mother — her two sons all that was left of her family — tracked them down to the camp, and begged the Taliban commanders to release them from their duty.
The Taliban acquiesced, but within weeks both sons had returned to the ranks of the militant groups as suicide bombers: Shorib had joined Islamic State and Fawad was back with the Taliban.
These two groups are sworn enemies, but the brothers still spoke by phone as Fawad attempted to persuade Shorib to return to die for the Taliban.
“I promised Shorib that, if he rejoined the Taliban, I could get him a really good suicide mission,” Fawad told me, his eyes lambent with the glow of fervour as he waited for news of his own mission.
Fawad’s story, of a family so riven and mauled by war that loyalty, respect and a wish to live had all become subsumed by an enraged yearning for destruction, epitomised not only the fate of Afghanistan after four decades of war, but illuminated how great is the division between radicalised Taliban fighters in the field, implacable in their fundamentalist war aims to reestablish sharia, and the vagaries of the Doha settlement.
Yet when I discussed the atomisation of his country with Khalid Agha and his Taliban bodyguards in the rocks on the Kandahar hillside in March, asking him finally if Doha might offer the chance for a negotiated settlement, even peace, and suggesting that the Taliban must also be exhausted by war, he laughed in the same way the prisoner in Mamur Hassan’s rose garden did two decades before, amused by my apparent naivety.
“It is 40 years we have been fighting now to establish an Islamic emirate, either as the Taliban or as the mujahidin,” he told me while a slow breeze danced dust around the desert plains beneath us.
“It is true we are sick of killing and dying. Who wouldn’t be? But if it takes another 40 years of fighting and killing to achieve what we fight for, then so be it.”
The Taliban’s confidence was further inflated by the political crisis that engulfed the Afghan Government in the immediate wake of the Doha accord.
After a bitterly disputed presidential election, two rival claimants — Ashraf Ghani and Dr Abdullah Abdullah — were both inaugurated as president on March 9, each swearing on a Koran in the eyes of God to serve their people as president. Their rift, reflecting a deeper north-south divide in the country, opened up sectarian divisions in the Afghan security forces even as Taliban attacks continued. The Government’s situation became worse when, on March 23, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo announced a $1 billion cut in aid to the Afghan Government — much of it earmarked to fund the Afghan security forces — after he had failed to negotiate an end to the impasse. Following on from their bilateral agreement with the Taliban at Doha, this punitive “fining” of the Afghan authorities by the US represented a volteface in American policy: suddenly, it was very clear that the survival of the Kabul Government was no longer an American priority. Then coronavirus began to play its hand, its spread accelerating with the influx of 150,000 Afghans returning to the country in March from virus-stricken Iran.
At the time of writing, official figures suggested there had only been 1279 Covid19 cases confirmed and 42 deaths across Afghanistan, though in the absence of widespread testing the real scale of infection will be much higher.
Its medical infrastructure weakened by years of war and mismanagement, the country is totally unprepared for what will follow.
The Ministry of Health admitted last month that it had just 300 ventilators, and lacked the trained staff to operate them. Emblematic of the Government’s growing misfortunes, the virus had also penetrated the presidential palace, where at least 20 cases were reported among staff.
Though fighting continued in many parts of the country and the intra-Afghan talks envisaged by the Doha accord had not yet begun, six weeks after their intended start date, in some areas the Taliban released videos of their fighters wearing PPE, enforcing quarantine, isolation and social distancing. The videos provided powerful imagery as part of the overall campaign to launder the organisation’s reputation, but it is doubtful they represented much real coherence in the campaign to counter Covid-19.
Travelling through Taliban areas in March, as the virus first began to make its presence known, I noticed that so much exposure to the random awards of death had freed many Afghans from a fear of coronavirus. In communities within the Taliban heartland we sat together side by side, thigh to thigh, eating with our hands from the same plates, as the men trilled over the certain coming of victory, with little thought given to the virus.
In triumphant mood, they likened coronavirus to just another of death’s many impositions, and built the virus’s likely toll into their narrative of endurance and ultimate victory.
After all, after four decades of war with two superpowers, was Covid-19 not just another way to die?
“You talk about your coronavirus in the west as a disease,” said Haji Taj Mohammed, 82, a resplendently bearded former mujahidin commander who had fought against the Russians in the fields around his village in Kandahar province, where we sat one afternoon six weeks ago. His adult son was killed by the Americans in the same fields.
“We joke about the term among ourselves, now we’ve heard it on the radio,” he added. “You foreigners are our corona. You filled our graveyards.”
The Times of London