H is right. Afghans depend on so little for their survival that there isn’t much for an invading army to control. The mechanisms by which a modern government influences its people simply don’t exist. Power, and its pursuit, is a fragmented and intensely local affair, and central government has never meant much to Afghans. The capital has never had significant influence in the countryside, except to take taxes or conscripts. Rural Afghanistan is made up of communities that depend on a close-knit structure of local rights designed to protect fragile resources. And since Afghans live from their land, their lives are bound up with the practical realities of survival, not abstract political or social goals. Fifty miles from the capital might as well be a different country. Five, even.
We pause at the top of the Hajigak Pass to admire the spectacular view. The men pray beside the cars. The engines smell hot. The peaks to the east and west of us soar to 15,000 feet, and the road behind and beyond us swoops down to loop between the intersecting spurs of the valleys. Then, from just below our line of sight, a man wearing a giant brown turban appears as if from out of the ground, flanked by a pair of grinning friends. The fact that he’s lost his right leg to a mine and must have ascended the pass on his crutches gives the sight a surreal quality. He stares at us with a mute grin, which reveals a wide gap where a tooth has been knocked out, and I marvel at his physical hardiness before giving him a few afghanis for his troubles, wondering how far he’ll have to go before he reaches home.
A long and winding descent leads us towards the Bamiyan valley. The surrounding geology seems to pass through every colour of the spectrum as we creep down, deepening to a purplish shade of red as we near the valley floor and turn west towards the site of the famous Buddhas. I catch glimpses of stairways and walls and ruined galleries in the cliffs above us and am reminded that Bamiyan was once a Buddhist state that resisted its Muslim overlords until well after their arrival in the seventh century. Its natural setting has always enchanted visitors. I don’t know if it’s because of the time of day, but the light seems particularly magical, and now that we’ve been released from the grasp of the mountains the valley seems a place of delicacy and charm, where slender poplars line the riverbanks and their pale leaves shimmer in the soft flame of the afternoon sun.
‘This place is stunning,’ says H. ‘I thought Afghanistan was all rocks and desert, but this is something else.’
Closer to the town, in the folds of reddish stone above us, we can make out the crumbling towers and ramparts of another long-abandoned fortified settlement. It’s Shahr-e Gholghola, the City of Lamentation, laid to waste, so the story goes, by Chengiz Khan himself in 1222.
But the town itself brings a different feeling. It’s strange to look at, because the last time I was here there was a thriving bazaar where there are now ruins. A whole section of the town has simply been annihilated. Its obvious there’s been heavy fighting and the majority of the local Hazara families have fled. They are still the underdogs of Afghan society. Their virtually autonomous kingdom was smashed by the nineteenth-century king Abdur Rahman, and the Pashtun tribes have treated them like slaves ever since. Their recent battles with the Taliban have been particularly fierce.
The radio crackles into life, and I hear Aref’s voice.
‘Taliban checkpoint ahead,’ he says. Then Momen grabs the radio from him.
‘Make sure your beard is long enough.’ He chuckles.
‘So long as it’s only my beard they want to measure,’ I say, because there are lots of jokes like this about the Taliban. Cackles of laughter erupt from both men.
‘Drive up slowly and stop,’ I say.
It’s time to introduce ourselves to the local Taliban commander. A black flag flutters from a small command post on a bluff above us, towards which Aref and Sher Del walk. They are met by two armed Talibs. They are not unfriendly, but have the tense look of people who know they don’t belong. A few others descend from the post and circle the cars but don’t quite dare to search them.
H and I get out, distribute some cigarettes to break the ice and ask if we can walk up to the Buddhas. The fighter standing next to me shrugs as if to ask why we’d want to bother but walks up with us. He leads us through a warren of steps and tunnels until we emerge above the hollow niches from which the giant statues have gazed for 1,500 years. From the top we can see a fantastic range of snow-covered peaks to the south. Closer to we can make out a red jeep racing towards our position, trailing a plume of dust.
‘That’ll be their commander,’ says H.
We meet him as we emerge from the dusty doorway at the foot of the niche. He’s unexpectedly friendly, intrigued to meet foreigners, and suggests we be his guests for the night, even though it’s obvious we have no choice in the matter. We follow him in the vehicles to a fortified compound, where we park inside the gates and unpack our things.
Whether as a courtesy or precaution, an armed Talib follows us everywhere. I suspect it’s a bit of both. We are all shown into a long room strewn with carpets, and the first of many glasses of tea is poured. As dusk falls, the room fills gradually with about thirty armed men.
‘It’s like a dinner party in Notting Hill,’ says H, as the men lay their AKs by their sides like napkins. The magazines of their weapons are doubled and taped together to give them twice the amount of ammunition without having to grope around for a fresh magazine.
The commander is a man of about thirty. We sit next to him as the meal is served. His manners are peculiarly modern, and I wonder whether he grew up in Pakistan. He has none of the formality or reserve of most Afghans I’ve met, and asks me directly about the work we’ve come to carry out. I tell him that even in England we’re concerned about helping Afghanistan with its mine problem. And because everything in Afghanistan is about establishing allegiances and invoking the names of powerful strangers, I make up a speech about the Queen, whose authority they can’t quite assess from this distance, and how keen she is to see peace and prosperity in Afghanistan, and emphasise how grateful she’ll be for the assistance we’re receiving here in Bamiyan.
‘We beat the British,’ he says cheerfully, ‘last time they came to Afghanistan.’
‘War was different then,’ I say, ‘and battles were fought man to man.’
‘Perhaps they will come back,’ he says with a smile, ‘and we can fight them again the same way.’
As darkness falls a fighter shows us to our room. We’ve been on the road only a couple of days but for some reason it feels like weeks. For a moment we wonder whether to position ourselves near the door or the window.
‘If they’re planning to kill you,’ I tell H, ‘the preferred method is to drop a rock on your head.’
‘With all those weapons they hardly need a rock.’
‘You forget how thrifty Afghans are. A rock will save them the expense of a bullet.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I hope it’s big enough. I’ve got quite a hard head.’
We leave the next morning, our heads intact. The commander has given us a handwritten letter of permission to travel as far as Yakawlang, but can’t guarantee much after that. I’m glad we’ve got the letter. There are several checkpoints as we head west, and at each we’re waved to a halt by a pair of fighters whose surly manner improves once our letter has been inspected and passed around. We’ve chosen the right combination of personalities for the lead vehicle. Sher Del is not only a Pashtun, but his white beard and confident manner give him an authority that no one will easily challenge. Aref plays the role of boffinish administrator to perfection, and between the two of them all suspicions are put to rest.
Beyond Bamiyan the high mountains draw apart, the cultivated plain broadens to a width of several miles, and the glittering braid of the river and its tall green poplars runs beside us. The lesser hills are bare and reddish, and against their starkness the valley and its carefully tended fields and borders once again seem all the more delicate.
We reach Yakawlang in the afternoon, refuel the vehicles and eat a meal of kebabs. The town has an unhappy air and looks as though it’s suffered from recent fighting, which a number of abandoned armoured vehicles confirm. We don’t want to linger, and drive south into the mountains towards Panjab. There’s almost no wheeled traffic, but we pass several families struggling on foot with their possessions piled onto donkeys, and a woman clutching a child begs us for money. The desperation in her expression is obvious and she claims the Taliban have forced her from her home. Her face and gestures haunt me like a presence as we drive further south along a deteriorating route, and our pace slows to a crawl. Several times we catch sight of trucks which have fallen from the road and tumbled into the ravines below.
As we near the Isharat Pass, the lead vehicle has its first puncture, and while Aref and Sher Del are changing the wheel, H and I get out to admire the spectacular scenery.
‘It’s not like anywhere I’ve ever seen,’ he says. ‘Every part of it’s different, like a different country. You could never win a war here.’
I ask him why not.
‘It’s the people. They belong too much. They’d never give it up.’
We’re looking over to the east where about thirty miles away the highest peaks of the Koh-e Baba range rear up from among the lesser summits in a magnificent glistening knot of ice. A purplish haze is settling over the landscape and after the relentless lurching of the route the silence is almost overwhelming. Quietly, H recites the lines of a poem.
‘We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea
‘Regimental poem,’ he says as if emerging from a private trance. ‘Don’t know the rest.’ He looks back over the darkening mountains. ‘I’m glad I came. This is a special place.’
‘There’s some things I haven’t told you,’ I say.
‘That’s normal,’ he says. ‘There’s stuff I haven’t told you either.’
‘Like what?’
‘You killed a mate of mine, for one thing,’ he says after a pause.
The fact that this doesn’t make any sense to me does nothing to lessen the shock.
‘How? When?’
‘In Kuwait. The team that busted your Lebanese mate out. They were all Regiment blokes. You took out the team leader.’
For years I’ve never really understood why the man I killed hesitated when he was about to shoot me.
‘I didn’t know,’ I say.
‘You weren’t supposed to. It was a Special Projects op. We had the order to go in as an Israeli team. Weirdest thing is that it was going to be me leading it.’ He smiles. ‘You would have slotted me instead.’
‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
‘Kenny was his name. He was from up north, Glasgow, I think. Couldn’t understand a word he said half the time. I nearly killed him myself once on a hostage rescue practice. That’s the way it is.’ He brushes some dust from his arm. ‘Anyway, what aren’t you telling me?’
I wonder how much I should say, but the power of the land has stripped us of our secrets now, and there seems no purpose in hiding anything from him any longer. So I tell him what I can, because I cannot tell him everything, right up to my meeting with Manny in Kabul, and about the plan that we made together in the ruins of the Darul Aman Palace.
At dusk we stop in a tiny settlement and the five of us sleep on the floor of a small room in our sleeping bags. In the morning the old man who provided our accommodation brings a bundle wrapped in newspaper and says he wants to show us something very old. He unwraps a dozen small yellowish figurines that do indeed look very old, and tells us they come from somewhere nearby and that they date from the time of the
Younan
, the Greeks. The faces are carved from some sort of bone or tusk and portray a series of men with staring eyes and long moustaches wearing crowns or ornate headbands. They look more like the faces of the Lewis chessmen than anything from this part of the world, and it’s impossible not to wonder what uncharted portion of the region’s history they really belong to. Then he shows us an enigmatic oval-shaped stone medallion depicting a soldier with a lance, wearing a kilt-like skirt and sandals with long leather straps like a centurion’s. The script resembles nothing I’ve even seen.
We skirt north of Panjab the next morning and begin the slow and winding route towards the south-west that will take us out of Bamiyan province and into Oruzgan. It takes us five days. The landscape seems ever more wild and beautiful and untouched by the world beyond. An entire day is spent losing and refinding the correct route, driving into valleys where the track ends at the foot of a mountain or dissolves into a rock-strewn wilderness. Aref surprises me by remembering that he has some old maps in the pickup, and produces them the next morning. They’re 1:200K Soviet military maps from the 1980s, and they’re far better than the ones we’ve got. It takes a little longer to transliterate the place names, which are printed in Cyrillic script, into English and then into Persian, but they’re extraordinarily detailed.
The problem is that the locals we ask have no idea of the names of villages only a few miles distant and give us contradictory directions because they’ve never driven there and travel on paths where we can’t. To the villagers we are like aliens from a distant planet, and whenever we stop we are endlessly questioned as to where we come from by men who are barely aware that there’s even a war going on.