http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/10/14/wsimp14.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/10/14/ixhomer.html
The wreck of land that I love

(Filed: 14/10/2001)

On an ardous journey to the front line, John
Simpson observe. s the destruction wreaked on
Afghanistan which has suffered as much from its
friends as its enemies
"We ought to destroy Pakistan, just like they have
destroyed our country," wailed a voice from the
cassette player as Mohammed Shah wrestled with
the steering wheel to keep our heavily laden
Russian Jeep going over the dreadful track.

Again and again the song was played until I, too,
knew it by heart. Sometimes he hummed absently
along, while crashing the gears or rubbing at the
fractured windscreen; sometimes, when the going
was easier, he would sing it in a broken voice, and a
tear would run down his pleasant, unshaven face.

And with good reason. The terrain we were driving
through on our way to the front line last week bore
witness to the totality of Afghanistan's destruction:
the wrecked buildings, the fragments of old
armoured vehicles, the ignorant, unschooled children
playing in the dust, the mine victims hobbling around
on crutches, the abject poverty, the absence of
infrastructure.

This is, indeed, a country that has been destroyed.
Not only by the Pakistanis, though they have done
their utmost. Not only by the Russians, who at least
paid heavily for it. Not only by the Americans, who
seem to have no awareness of their contribution
and have come to this crisis as though they had
never heard of the place before.

Other countries have been secretly involved, too:
Britain, India, China, Iran, France. Every meddler has
found this a useful proving-ground, a violent theme
park where they could score off each other, give
their special forces a little on-the-job training, buy
influence with weaponry, get even for past defeats
or humiliations.

Afghanistan was for the 1980s what Spain was for
the 1930s: somewhere you could pose over and
emote about, without having to trouble yourself
about the hard reality of the place or the people.

The posing and emoting had little to do with the
people; they were simply a way of striking a blow
against a Great Power you happened not to like.

How many people who went round wearing pukal
caps or wrote angry letters to the newspapers
about the destruction of a gallant people by an evil
superpower ever bothered their minds with
Afghanistan again, once the Russians had left?

When Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, I
remember, she spent an embarrassingly large
proportion of a G-7 news conference in Venice
attacking the BBC for calling the mujahideen "the
Afghan resistance" instead of "freedom fighters";
how often since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 has
she drawn attention to the mindless destruction
that has been wreaked on Afghanistan?

Now my team and I are on our way through the
harsh, difficult territory of the anti-Taliban Northern
Alliance with the intention of getting to the front line
before the expected land war takes place.

There are three vehicles in our convoy. Four days
ago, we set out with four Jeeps. Within the first
three hours, on a ludicrously steep gradient, the
gearbox failed on one of them and three of our team
nearly went over a precipice.

In the next town, we replaced the driver, hiring
Sharif, an eager-faced man with a clipped beard like
the Sheriff of Nottingham in a 1950s television
series.

On the third day, I got rid of two of the Jeeps
because they were falling apart, replacing them with
a Toyota pick-up that took most of our editing and
communications gear; a frontline television news
team cannot travel light.

I don't suppose anyone who hasn't travelled in
post-Soviet Afghanistan can have any idea what it is
like. Talk of towns and hiring vehicles probably
makes it sound reasonable enough; yet it took us
from Sunday afternoon to late on Thursday night to
make a journey of only 100 miles.

But this is Badakshan, one of the remotest and most
mountainous provinces of Afghanistan. Most of our
route lay in the Hindu Kush range; there was not a
single foot of proper road surface.

We rattled over the boulders of a river bed or across
empty desert. Bridges were merely loose planks laid
across tree trunks, and were occasionally narrower
than the width of our vehicles. Three times I saw
unexploded bombs embedded in the road.

Yet it was the loveliest landscape I have ever seen:
the hypnotic precipices beside us, falling 5,000ft to
jade rivers or lakes of lapis lazuli; the magnificent
mountain ranges with the first snow of the autumn
lying thinly on them; the gorgeous valleys with their
green fields, and willows turning gold and red; the
full-bearded men in turbans and green-striped
chappans balanced on tiny, out-of-scale donkeys;
the village women scurrying like formless ghosts in
burkas of blue or white.

In some ways, nothing has changed much in 100
years. I'm glad to see it, yet these are the signs of a
society kept in utter isolation and poverty.

Up there in Badakshan, the incessant, stupid
warfare of 20 years has not affected them too badly
in direct terms; yet it has ensured that they have
stayed ignorant, hungry and dirt-poor. The world
has abandoned Afghanistan. Those who love it, as I
do, find that very hard to forgive.

This is not a fortunate country, and it has suffered at
least as much from its friends as its enemies. In their
proxy war of the 1980s, the Americans and Russians
flooded Afghanistan with weapons.

Between them, they did little or nothing to
discourage the factions they supported from
targeting civilians first and foremost. A senior
American diplomat was once frank enough, and
cynical enough, to say that his government's only
problem was running out of Afghans.

The CIA, at Pakistan's prompting, sponsored the
nastiest and most fundamentalist mujahideen
movement - that of Gulbeddin Hekmatyar. The
Americans supplied him with Stinger missiles, while
withholding them from the far more moderate and
effective Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had British
support.

Afterwards, it cost the CIA large sums of money to
buy the Stingers back, and stop them reaching
Hekmatyar's friends, the Iranians. Had it not been
so terrible in terms of bloodshed - Afghan blood,
naturally - it would have been laughable.

Since then, Pakistan has given Afghanistan years of
turmoil and helped to create the Taliban - the
craziest, most rebarbative government any country
has suffered in modern times.

The Americans have identified the Taliban as their
especial target; and yet, only six or seven years
ago, Washington, on the recommendation of the
Pakistani secret intelligence service, the ISI,
regarded the Taliban as sturdy, committed
anti-Communists who were likely to stamp out
Afghanistan's opium production once they got to
power. They did try, briefly. Then the production
grew again.

With hindsight, the last half-way effective
government here was that of Najibullah, whom the
Russians left in power when they withdrew. Under
him, girls received an education, there were
programmes for eradicating poverty and disease,
and he tried to overcome the deep cultural, religious
and ethnic divisions between Afghans (where, that
is, he didn't take advantage of them).

Najibullah lasted less than three years, and was
overthrown by the mujahideen, who swept to power
and allowed him and his brother to live under house
arrest in the United Nations compound in Kabul.

Under the mujahideen government, women had to
wear burkas if they ventured out in public, most of
Najibullah's social programmes were abandoned,
corruption had free rein, and Osama bin Laden paid
a government minister handsomely to fly him back to
Afghanistan, where he had fought during the 1980s.

None of this discouraged the Western powers from
giving the mujahideen government their full support.
Then, in 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul, and
lynched the unfortunate Najibullah. What was left of
him and his brother was hanged from a lamp post.

In his time, Najibullah had been a crook, a murderer
and a torturer; but he ran the closest thing to a
reasonable government there has been here. As for
the mujahideen government, it fled to the Panjshir
Valley and reinvented itself as the Northern Alliance.

The Alliance had fought hard against Najibullah, yet
one of the most attractive Afghan qualities is a
willingness to forgive and forget. It has accepted
large numbers of former Najibullah supporters,
including those who fought in his army.

You can usually tell them: their faces show their
political record. Take our driver, Mohammed Shah,
for instance. He is unshaven, yet he isn't planning to
grow a beard. Beards are rural, traditionalist,
Islamist, and a mark of the 1980s mujahid;
city-dwellers and former Communists prefer to
shave.

Mohammed Shah was a Russian interpreter under
Najibullah. Now he supports the Northern Alliance
because it is against fundamentalism. Most of all, he
wants to leave the country.

After he had coaxed his ancient, accident-prone Jeep
over Anjaman, the highest drivable pass in
Afghanistan, I told him I would give him a present. A
British passport, he suggested.

His colleague, the quick-moving, rather dramatic
Sharif, turns out to be a former tank driver in
Najibullah's army. He killed a lot of mujahideen in his
time, he says.

Perhaps as a result, his views are slightly better
disguised: his turban and neat little Sheriff of
Nottingham beard hides his past. The Northern
Alliance reads these signs better than any Western
journalist could, of course, but it doesn't object.

On this trip, I have met Alliance commanders who
openly talk of their past as officers in Najibullah's
army. This is not a country of the vendetta; people
are accepted for what they choose to be.

It's the most encouraging thing about Afghanistan;
and, when the Taliban are chased out of Kabul,
many of the less fundamentalist will be accepted
into the Northern Alliance ranks.

I hope I'll be there when Kabul is retaken; it's why I
have undertaken this journey. But I'm not
anticipating a new golden age for Afghanistan. Signs
of the corruption and disorder that marked the
Alliance's time in government from 1992 to 1996 are
already showing.

On Tuesday night, as we were driving southwards,
we came across a Northern Alliance roadblock. The
nastiest and noisiest mujahid there, a little man with
a squealing, eunuch's voice and a boil plaster on his
hairless chin, demanded money from the drivers.
Sharif, the former tank commander, refused;
Mohammed Shah, the one-time Russian interpreter,
paid for both of them.

If the Northern Alliance does make it to Kabul, and I
am with it, I hope to find time to go and see
someone on the outskirts of the city. I have filmed
her before, and the pictures were re-used in a film I
narrated for Panorama last Sunday.

We happened to be in a Kabul hospital in 1996
when she was brought in - a 17-year-old girl called
Zarbibi. She had lost both legs when she stepped
on a landmine. Five years later, I still can't get her
screams out of my mind: not just the sound of them,
but the words she was screaming: "God forgive me."

Zarbibi was a victim of the most vicious war of
modern times, and her life had been devastated by
a weapon that could have been supplied by the
Russians, the Americans, the Pakistanis, the Indians
or half a dozen other countries who were playing
their war games on Afghan territory; and yet she
was the one begging God for forgiveness.

She is still beautiful, but in this society she will only
ever be a servant to her family - a burden to
everyone. The Taliban refused her the education
that might have been her only hope.

If and when I see Zarbibi, I hope I shall find the
courage to tell her that it is the players of war
games, the manipulators, the meddlers, who should
be there, begging forgiveness from her and every
other injured and mutilated person in this injured
and mutilated country.

John Simpson is the BBC world affairs editor