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Finally on the second day the tanks retreated back up the hill, presumably deciding we must all be dead. We ran crouching along the trench then out and back into the mulberry woods where our bikes were still where we had left them. When we got back to the post and were sitting drinking green tea, I put on my radio. After the usual crackle and static, I found BBC World Service and the unmistakable gravelly voice of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World. It was one of those moments you know you will never forget. Exhilarated at still being alive, I asked Abdul Wasei if he was ever scared. He shook his head. ‘That would bring dishonour on my family. A coward running away will not be buried in Muslim rites. Instead he becomes a ghost so will never reach Paradise.’

  That night as it was our last dinner before leaving, we had rice with little bits of meat and bone, eaten scooped up in our hands. The next day, on the way back to Pakistan, I realised that the sparrow had disappeared.

  The more times I went into Afghanistan to cover the war the more I realised that there were many realities and the best I could hope for was a few fragments, never the big picture. But always within a few days of returning ‘outside’ to the comfort of Peshawar and the luxury of plentiful food and clean clothes, there would come an aching hollowness and I would spend all my time trying to get back inside. War was an addiction and I was badly hooked.

  ‘No foreign editor is worth dying for,’ said someone older and wiser who saw what was happening to me but I laughed, downed shots of the smuggled vodka we referred to as ‘Gorbachev’ and went swimming at midnight in the Pearl Continental pool to the outrage of the hotel management. The ragtag mujaheddin of the mountains with their plastic sandals and Lee Enfield rifles were defeating the powerful Red Army with all their tanks and helicopter gunships and these were glory days.

  That was before Jalalabad.

  Jalalabad was different. By then it was March 1989 and the Russians had finished withdrawing their troops from Afghanistan. After years of guerrilla warfare the pressure was on the mujaheddin to show that they could capture and control a town. ‘It’s time to fish or cut bait,’ said an American diplomat with a southern twang at the weekly ‘Sitrep’ and we knew it was battle on. Kabul was the ultimate prize, but snug in its nest of tall mountains, the city presented too difficult a target. So the royal winter capital of Jalalabad was chosen as it was only fifty-eight miles from the Pakistan border and thus logistically easy. There were no secrets in Peshawar though plenty of misinformation and rumour. Everyone knew that the Pakistani military advisors were working on a plan. We all wanted to be the first one there.

  One evening when I was in Islamabad the phone-call came. ‘It’s starting.’ Quickly I dressed in my mujaheddin gear of shalwar kamiz, rubbed permanganate powder mixed with earth into my skin to darken it, tucked my hair into a flat wool pakol cap, and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. By then, as a fully paid-up member of the War Junkies Club I also had a mud-spattered US army jacket. I grabbed my small rucksack and jumped into my little Suzuki car weaving my way though the camels and arms trucks up the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar to meet with the group of guerrillas I was planning to travel with. They had bad news. The border had been closed by ISI and no journalists were to be allowed across.

  The commander was a friend and willing to take the risk so we left immediately, crammed in the back of a jeep, up the Khyber Pass, a twenty-five-mile journey through narrow gaps in craggy mountains decorated with pennants of the Khyber Rifles and other frontier forces familiar from British history. The mountains were barren and not spectacularly high but it was always a thrilling drive, recalling the various British misadventures starting in 1839 when British troops marched up here on the way to the First Afghan War which ended in disaster in 1842, and back again in 1878 for the Second when they were again forced to withdraw. Each time hundreds of men had been killed just getting through this pass, controlled then as now by the murderous Afridi tribe famous for smuggling and complete untrustworthiness. Many of these men were buried near the Masjid mosque at the top of the pass. Nearby, at the Torkham border post, ISI were out in large numbers. An officer jumped in the back and shone his torch on our faces. I had my head down, my shawl covering me as much as possible.

  ‘You’re not a mujahid!’ he spat, hauling me out, ‘you’re a Britisher!’ As my mujaheddin friends zigzagged across the border towards battle, I was unceremoniously taken back to Peshawar in the back of a police van. I was furious, crazed and desperate to get to Jalalabad. It was little comfort to find that none of the journalists were getting in. Famous war correspondents were pacing about hotel lobbies, shouting at their fixers and interpreters and waving wads of dollars. ISI had told the mujaheddin that they would be fined $2000 if a journalist was found with them so most were refusing even to try.

  That night I visited all my friends and contacts, pleading to be taken across the border. Speed was of the essence and the usual ways of going by foot or donkey along smugglers’ paths over the mountains would take too long. Then my friend Azim came up with an idea. He had a fleet of ambulances that were going back and forth to ferry the wounded and I could hide under the floor. He lifted up one of the floor cushions and I curled in the space while he piled blankets and medicines on top of me. It was perfect.

  We left before daybreak, last in a convoy of three ambulances. It took us about two hours back up the Khyber Pass to reach Torkham. I held my breath as I heard the doors being opened but we were waved straight across with only a cursory glance into the back of the ambulance. The blankets under which I lay were saturated with disinfectant so by the time we got into Afghanistan and I could emerge into daylight I was high on the fumes.

  The men driving the ambulances were delighted by the success of the plan, laughing at how we had fooled the Pakistanis. The air always seemed lighter and cleaner the moment one crossed the border and the scent of the pines and spruces of the Spinghar Mountains began to clear my head.

  In the first ambulance was a boy called Naem with the stubbly beginnings of a beard who picked a pink flower, which he shyly offered to me. ‘It must be orange blossom season in Jalalabad,’ he said as we sat on the ground looking down across the vast plain. ‘My mother told me that before the war every year at this time poets from all over the country would gather here to read poems dedicated to the beauty of the orange blossoms.’

  He told me that he was working as a medic rather than a fighter because his father and elder brothers had been made shaheed in the war and so he was looking after his mother and sisters, but he really wanted to fight. It didn’t seem odd to me. It was too far away to smell the oranges but in the distance I could just make out the green trees of Afghanistan’s garden city and remembered the famous oil painting of Dr William Brydon arriving slumped over his exhausted horse at the gates of the garrison, the only survivor of 16,000 British fleeing from Kabul back in 1842 including women and children.4 He had been allowed to live by the Afghan forces in accordance with the orders of their commander Akbar Khan, son of the former ruler Dost Mohammed whom the British had unseated, to ‘annihilate the whole army except one man who would reach Jalalabad to tell the tale’. The doctor’s report recounted in chilling detail how his fellow officers and their families and orderlies had been mown down by gunmen on mountaintops as they fled the ninety miles through narrow snowy passes. So many were killed that when the British Army of Retribution marched back this way a year later they wrote of their gun carriages crunching over the bones and skeletons. These plains had seen so much death, and sitting on that hilltop, listening to the far-off sounds of war, the hum of planes and pops and crashes of tank-fire and rockets followed by puffs of grey smoke on the horizon, I felt the familiar rush of adrenalin.

  We stopped for a while at an earth-walled mujaheddin post in Ghaziabad, about twenty miles outside Jalalabad, for a glass of green tea drunk with boiled sweets in place of sugar. There were hundreds of men with Kalashnikovs milling around, eyes rimmed with black kohl for battle, many chewing naswar, opium
-laced tobacco, which they then spat out noisily. The news from the front was not good. In the first few hours the previous day, the mujaheddin had captured several government outposts, southeast of the city, including Samarkhel which was headquarters of the feared Eleventh Division, and it had been easier than expected. ‘They just fled,’ said one commander who had taken part. But as the fighting had progressed to the perimeter of Jalalabad airport, the regime had sent in reinforcements from Kabul. The Afghan airforce that the Americans had confidently pronounced useless now the Russian pilots had left was flying skilfully, and it was looking bad.

  Ahead we could see columns of smoke rising and hear the dull rumble of bombing. Sher Ali, the medic in my ambulance picked up a clutch of bullets from the floor. ‘See,’ he grinned. ‘That was last time.’ He pointed to a string of holes along the rear door. He wasn’t smiling for long. As we neared a small stone bridge over the Kabul River which flows through the centre of Jalalabad, the whine of aircraft suddenly grew louder and the sky darkened as a bomber-jet hummed low like an enormous grey moth over our heads. Our ambulance screeched to a halt off the road and we all jumped out and scrambled down the stony slope. For a moment everything seemed to stop. My heart was thudding so hard I could not hear anything outside, just a voice in my mind praying for survival. Then there was a loud explosion and scraps of dust and rubble flew all around us and the plane was gone. There was an eerie moment of complete silence then a stray dog started whining and cluster bombs were dropping sending up mushrooms of smoke and seeming to bounce towards us. Then I saw. Almost in slow motion on the road in front the first ambulance had been hit and exploded into orange flame. No one could have survived. Still tucked behind my ear was the pink flower that Naem had given me only an hour or so earlier.

  I was horrified but not as much as I should have been. All I could think of was getting to the front. When the other ambulances decided to turn back, I was incredulous. ‘It’s too dangerous,’ said Sher Ali, ‘we have to look after you. Mr Azim would be very angry.’

  ‘But you’re ambulances!’ I protested, ‘you’re supposed to go to dangerous places and pick up the wounded.’

  There was no persuading them. We headed back toward Pakistan at high speed. In the end after furious arguments they let me off back at the mujaheddin post where I begged everyone coming through to take me to the front. Eventually a group of fighters arrived from Peshawar under the command of Rahim Wardak, whom I knew, so they agreed I could go with them.

  At Samarkhel we stopped and walked around the captured government post, half-eaten meals testimony to the speed with which the forces of the regime had fled. There were dead bodies in a cornfield lying on their backs like broken puppets. A red food-ration book was lying by the side of one and I picked it up.

  We were getting nearer to the noise of battle and close to the airport we came upon an exodus of people on donkeys and foot. There were hundreds, thousands of them. Mostly women with children, a few belongings bundled up in scarves. Many were bleeding and wounded or dragging half-dead people on carts behind them. It was clear what was happening. The 200,000 civilians of the former Moghul city that had once been a place of palaces and gardens were being caught between the mujaheddin rockets coming into the city and the Afghan airforce bombing of the roads. It was what commanders like my friend Abdul Haq, who had been against the battle, had predicted would happen. In those few days 10,000 people were killed, the biggest single death toll of the whole war.

  I was scribbling non-stop in my little notebook. I had a great story. But the refugees, seeing a western woman, presumed I was a doctor. I was surrounded by people, then dragged to one side of the road. A weeping woman was crouched over her young daughter laid out by a clump of witch’s hair. Her eyes were open, a pale limpid green but there was a film over them and a waxiness to her face. I guessed she must have been about seven. The woman lifted up a cloth. The girl’s insides were hanging out of a hole in her stomach.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, pen poised, not looking too closely.

  ‘She was hit by a rocket while fetching water. Please, you take her in your jeep to Peshawar. If she dies it is too much for my mind. Her father had been killed and her brothers have not come since the fighting began two days ago. Now it is just us. Please by the grace of Allah help us.’

  I made notes then started to walk away. I had to get to where the action was. I wasn’t getting the point that it was all around us.

  The woman pulled at my sleeve. There was a heady perfume in the air, not from the orange blossom which was still only in bud, but from crimson and yellow narcissi growing nearby and often sold in the bazaar in Peshawar. The flowers were meant to signify hope and the coming of spring.

  ‘Her name is Lela,’ she said, ‘please you can help us.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I am not a doctor,’ I said as I got back in the Pajero with the mujaheddin who had been signalling impatiently. We drove off leaving the woman staring disbelieving after us, her arms in the air in a gesture of supplication. It was a picture that would stay frozen in my mind and later sometimes come to me in the unlikeliest places, ice-skating under the Christmas tree of the Rockefeller Center and seeing a young girl with head back and green eyes shining as her mother twirled her round and round.

  It turned out there wasn’t really a front, just a mess in which everyone was trying to survive and turning on each other, and for which later everyone would blame everyone else, the commanders saying they had never wanted to fight and were not equipped or trained for such a frontal assault. The previous year General Zia had promised Jalalabad as a Christmas present to Congressman Charlie Wilson, a frequent visitor to Peshawar and fervent supporter of the war against the Communist Russians. But Zia was dead now after an explosion brought down his plane, so you couldn’t blame him.

  The Soviet ambassador in Kabul, Yuli Vorontsov, told me a few months later that ‘the amount of ammunition spent in Jalalabad was four times that spent in the battle of Stalingrad because unlike the German and Soviet armies the Afghans are getting it for free and so are not economical’.

  In the midst of it all as we were crouching down trying not to get hit by bullets that may well have been from our side, I felt the man next to me stiffen. I followed his gaze and saw an ISI colonel we all recognised from Peshawar. Rahim Wardak, the commander, was furious and strode towards him, said something and walked back. The ISI man looked stunned so I asked Rahim what he had said. ‘I asked him “How do you who have never won a war, dare try and order us who have never lost one?”’ he replied. Later, much later, I read that Osama bin Laden was also there in that battle and was so shocked by the needless slaughter of both civilians and mujaheddin that he became convinced that it was part of a US conspiracy implemented through the Pakistanis to discredit and end the jihad.

  Whatever your point of view you couldn’t be part of Jalalabad and not be affected.

  War wasn’t beautiful at all. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen and it made me do the ugliest thing I had ever done. The real story of war wasn’t about the firing and the fighting, some Boy’s Own adventure of goodies and baddies. It wasn’t about sitting around in bars making up songs about the mujaheddin we called ‘The Gucci Muj’ with their designer camouflage and pens made from AK47 bullets. It was about the people, the Naems and Lelas, the sons and daughters, the mothers and fathers. I had let someone die and I knew however far away I went there would be no forgetting.

  I had never gone back to Afghanistan after that. The world had used and forgotten Afghanistan and it gave me an excuse to pretend I had forgotten too.

  Kabul, October 12, 2001

  Dear Christina

  This week I listen to the bombs falling on the airport and military command just a few miles away and though we are scared by the bangs which shake our flat, we believe they will not hurt us and we come out and watch the flashes in the sky and we pray this will be an end to our suffering.

  Now it is good that after all this time t
he world has turned its face towards Afghanistan. Right now I want to laugh a lot because in other countries of the civilised and progressive world no one knew about our problems before those attacks on America and now we are all the time on the BBC.

  Many people have left but my family is staying, praying for change. The market is still working – we Kabulis are tough – and there is food in the market but we have stocked up in case it runs out. Already there is no oil. At night there is no light. We eat by candles and moonlight.

  This week a bad thing happened. For a long time my mother mostly just sits silent in her room because she has a cough that does not go and is nervous after all the fighting thinking her sons will be conscripted – also I did not tell you before that in 1993 when the rocketing was very bad, she was not well and we children went with my uncle to live in Pakistan. That was the worst time because we knew there were rockets and bombings every day between Hekmatyar and Massoud and we didn’t know if our parents were alright. We do not have a telephone. The only way to get messages was if someone went to Kabul.

  Anyway on Tuesday my brother persuaded her to go with him to his tailor’s shop because he had some spare material for winter shalwar kamiz. So she lifted her burqa to look at the material and a Taliban from the Bin Marouf in the bazaar saw her and came and slapped her and called her bad insults. Under their laws if a woman shows her face the punishment is twenty-nine lashes. Now she is always crying again.

  You cannot imagine how an educated Afghan girl lives or how even when we go out for something in the market, the Taliban, in particular Pakistani Taliban, tease us a lot. They insult us and say ‘you Kabuli girls, still coming out on the streets, shame on you’, and worse. Now think, Afghanistan is my motherland and a Pakistani Talib treats me like that.

  You might wonder why I am not married at my age. My father lost his job in the Foreign Ministry when the Taliban took over because they knew we were supporters of the king and now he makes some few Afghanis bringing oil from Pakistan to sell, so I must help my parents by teaching to earn some money. It is not much. When things are better they will arrange me a marriage – I think that’s odd for you. Anyway it’s hard to find love in this situation, we are so tired. What is a wedding when there can be no music and all the women even the bride must wear burqas? I look in the mirror and I see a face that does not remember a time before war, and I would not want to bring a child in this city of fear.