Al nodded agreement, but I was full of doubt. A part of me very much wanted to know what it was like to come under fire. Like many British boys of my generation I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. My Fergusson forebears included several soldiers who fought the Russians in the Crimea, the Dervish at Omdurman and the Germans at Arras and Cambrai, but the one I remembered most was my Great-Uncle Bernard. Passionate, irascible, boastful, occasionally pompous, he was larger than life and we children loved him. He wore a monocle, led a column of Chindits against the Japanese in Burma under Orde Wingate in 1943–44 and became Governor-General of New Zealand before retiring to Scotland. When I was a child he used to pick me up and let me puff at him like a candle on a birthday cake. With a hammed-up gasp of surprise he would let his monocle drop from his eye, only to catch it with a satisfying plop far down below in the palm of his hand. Behind enemy lines in Burma, Great-Uncle Bernard was said by the newspapers of the time to have been supplied with fresh monocles by parachute.
Small wonder, then, that as a boy I spent all my pocket money on Airfix models and Commando magazines – trash mags, we called them. I drew battleships and fighter planes in the margins of schoolbooks. I played endless war games in the sandpit of our London garden, marshalling toy tanks and tiny plastic soldiers across the burning wastes of the North African desert, circa 1942.
Yet now that I had the opportunity to live out this intoxicating fantasy I found myself weighing up the matter in a manner I had not anticipated. Ewan was surely wrong. Never mind the extreme personal risk – somebody’s death, even a nameless Afghan conscript’s, was too high a price to pay for war tourism. I was under no illusion about the value of the experience from a professional point of view either. Perhaps it was justifiable for an agency cameraman whose pictures might be stored away or used in a different context to tell a story worth telling. But I was a freelance adventurer with an uncertain commission from the London Independent, and I knew that a strategically meaningless exchange of shellfire in a back-page war would be worth a column inch or two at best. It seemed better to keep my doubts to myself, however. For a first-timer in Afghanistan, travelling companions had obvious advantages – and I definitely needed the services of a good fixer-interpreter. Later that night I persuaded Ewan and Rick to let me join them.
I found my Afghan adventure all right. We flew low in an army helicopter through valleys so steep that the sheep looked down on us. The pilot, who was stoned, made me sit in the Perspex nose beyond his foot pedals, laughing maniacally as his machine pitched and rolled through the vertiginous passes. When at last we touched down in a field of poppies near the front line at Bala Murghab, guerrillas emerged from hiding places in the rocks to unload the cargo. The poorly stacked crates on which the others had been perching turned out to be filled with Iranian-made anti-personnel mines. Our visit to the western front only lasted a week, but it seemed far longer, and there was no possibility of getting off the roller-coaster. It was like a mad theme park. We lurched about the front lines on the back of a stinking tank, fired Kalashnikovs at tin cans, tracked an imaginary Mig through the cross-hairs of a fifty-year-old anti-aircraft gun, and rode out on patrol with a posse of Uzbek cavalrymen whose horses were trained not to flinch when their masters fired rocket-propelled grenades at full gallop between their ears. At night we slept fitfully in the dugouts of field commanders who were mostly psychotic or homosexual, and sometimes both, while making ourselves sick from their contaminated water supplies.
We didn’t see the enemy but they were never more than a few miles away, secreted in dugouts just like our own, watching and waiting for the spring fighting season to begin again. At dusk each evening the two sides traded insults over their field radios. Mir thought this battlefield ritual a wonderful game, and asked to take over the handset.
– Talib Talib Talib, he growled, suppressing a giggle. Your mother was a camel and your father was a Pakistani spy.
– Spawn of Satan, crackled the outraged respondent. Your offspring are all bastards. With Allah’s help we will soon put an end to your infernal mating with dogs and donkeys.
– Hooh, did you hear that? Mir whispered, wide-eyed at the profanity of it. Dogs and donkeys! Can you imagine?
Mir was an excellent fixer. His family were prominent in Mazar, and everybody seemed to know him. His father was no ordinary member of the judiciary but an ’alim, one of the hundred or so most senior Sharia judges in the country, so Mir’s family name alone commanded a certain respect. He had the knack of knowing when to drop a name, when to cajole with flattery or a gift.
Ewan could be impatient, but Mir unfailingly took this in his stride. If anything, he was sometimes too eager to please. For instance, he had never ridden a horse before, but he agreed without hesitating to go along on a cavalry expedition. Ewan and Rick hoped to persuade the Uzbeks to let us participate in a full-blown cavalry charge, which was ambitious. Ewan demonstrated his superior horsemanship by cantering around a field with one hand on his hip like some eighteenth-century cavalier, but to Mir’s relief our hosts rejected his proposal. Ewan turned sarcastic in his disappointment and blamed Mir for the failure to persuade the Uzbeks, but I found myself standing up for him. He had been hired as an interpreter, not a cavalry guide. It was hardly his fault if he was nervous of horses or that he sat slumped in the saddle like a sack of potatoes.
The journalistic high point of the trip was an interview with Ismail Khan, the legendary Mujaheddin leader and ousted governor of the far western town of Herat. The sector commanders had tried to keep us away but Mir knew one of the helicopter pilots, whom we bribed with a bottle of whisky. We saw Ismail Khan’s upturned face as the helicopter descended to the secret drop zone, his tiny band of followers standing guard around him, prophet-like with his snowy beard and pristine white shalwar qamiz blowing about him as the long grass flattened in the downwash. We were escorted to a ruined farmhouse where the old soldier displayed an outspoken determination to get back to Herat, threatening to bomb and machine-gun anyone who stood in his way. More interestingly, he scoffed at his so-called allies in the Northern Alliance.
The leaders of the non-Pashtun minorities had agreed six months earlier to set aside their differences and form a pact in the face of the Taliban onslaught, but the pact was already coming apart. The Hazaras and the Tajiks, particularly, resented the way the Uzbek leader, General Rashid Dostum, had taken the leadership of the Alliance upon himself. To hell with Dostum’s broader strategy, Khan said now. Who did Dostum think he was, anyway? He, Ismail Khan, would take Herat back from the Taliban with or without the assistance of the Alliance’s so-called and self-appointed leader. If Dostum didn’t agree, it was too bad.
Ismail Khan’s comments had important implications for the military integrity of the Northern Alliance. Back in Mazar several days later therefore, I faithfully wrote up the interview for the Independent, dictating to the copy-takers in London at budget-sapping expense via a satellite phone link. I never paused to consider the effect such an article might have, but in retrospect it was a fateful decision, the event that probably marked the start of Mir’s long slide into eventual exile. Rather to my surprise the Independent ran the story. To my even greater surprise I was informed of this editorial decision in faraway London by Mir. He bustled into the Oxfam compound one morning to announce that the BBC World Service had picked up the story and broadcast it across Afghanistan in both Pashtun and Dari. The whole town was talking about it, he said. He revelled in this triumphant proof of the power of modern media, his enthusiasm strangely touching.
It was May Day and General Dostum was planning a spectacular Soviet-style demonstration of military might. A podium had been erected for him and a long column of tanks had congregated in a sidestreet near the shrine the night before. Bunting dangled from the lamp posts and gave the town an almost carnival atmosphere. Genial crowds were already out on the streets, buying lemonade and candy from newly erected stalls or securing the best vantage points for the coming parade. I led Mir to one of the stalls and bought him a celebratory can of orange fizz called Mirinda, a lurid import from Uzbekistan that I had seen everywhere in the markets, virtually the only canned drink available in Mazar. It was the sort of useless foreign luxury that the Taliban would no doubt try to ban if they ever captured the city. Mir smacked his lips and guzzled it down, declaring it werry delicious and his favourite