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Choirs of Kandahar

      No one spoke of hatred of the Russians, as the feeling experienced … from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, for they did not regard dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures …

      LEO TOLSTOY, Haji Murat

      The ghosts of British rule seemed to haunt Peshawar. In the bookshops, I found a hundred reprints of gazetteers and English memoirs. Sir Robert Warburton’s Eighteen Years in the Khyber stood next to Woosnam Mills’s yarns; ‘Noble conduct of our sepoys’, ‘Immolation of 21 Sikhs’ and ‘How British officers die’. Further volumes recalled the exploits of Sir Bindon Blood, one of whose young subalterns, Winston Churchill, was himself ambushed by Pathans in the Malakand hills to the north of Peshawar.* Not only ghosts frequented Peshawar. Unlike the Russian occupiers of Afghanistan, the British could not take their dead home; and on the edge of Peshawar, there still lay an old British cemetery whose elaborate tombstones of florid, overconfident prose told the story of empire.

      Take Major Robert Roy Adams of Her Majesty’s Indian Staff Corps, formerly deputy commissioner of the Punjab. He lay now beside the Khyber Road, a canyon of traffic and protesting donkeys whose din vibrated against the cemetery wall. According to the inscription on his grave, Major Adams was called to Peshawar ‘as an officer of rare capacity for a frontier. Wise, just and courageous, in all things faithful, he came only to die at his post, struck down by the hand of an assassin.’ He was killed on 22 January 1865, but there are no clues as to why he was murdered. Nor are there any explanations on the other gravestones. In 1897, for example, John Sperrin Ross met a similar fate, ‘assassinated by a fanatic in Peshawar City on Jubilee Day’. A few feet from Ross’s grave lay Bandsman Charles Leighton of the First Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, ‘assassinated by a Ghazi at this station on Good Friday’. Perhaps politics was left behind at death, although it was impossible to avoid the similarity between these outraged headstones and the language of the Soviet government. The great-grandsons of the Afghan tribesmen who killed the British were now condemned by the Kremlin as ‘fanatics’ – or terrorists – by Radio Moscow. One empire, it seemed, spoke much like another.

      To be fair, the British did place their dead in some historical context. Beneath a squad of rosewood trees with their bazaar of tropical birds lay Privates Hayes, Macleod, Savage and Dawes, who ‘died at Peshawar during the frontier disturbances 1897–98’. Not far away was Lieutenant Bishop, ‘killed in action at Shubkudder in an engagement with the hill tribes, 1863’. He was aged twenty-two. Lieutenant John Lindley Godley of the 24th Rifle Brigade, temporarily attached to the 266th Machine Gun Company, met the same end at Kacha Garhi in 1919.

      There were other graves, of course, innocent mounds with tiny headstones that contained the inevitable victims of every empire’s domesticity. ‘Beatrice Ann, one year and 11 months, only child of Bandmaster and Mrs. A. Pilkington’ lay in the children’s cemetery with ‘Barbara, two years, daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. P. Walker’. She died three days before Christmas in 1928. Some of the children died too young to have names. There were young men, too, who succumbed to the heat and to disease. Private Tidey of the First Sussex died from ‘heatstroke’ and Private Williams of ‘enteric fever’. E. A. Samuels of the Bengal Civil Service succumbed to ‘fever contracted in Afghanistan’. Matron Mary Hall of Queen Alexander’s Military Nursing Service – whose duties in Salonika and Mesopotamia presumably included the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey as well as the British invasion of Iraq in 1917 – died ‘on active service’.

      There were a few unexpected tombs. The Very Rev. Courtney Peverley was there, administrator apostolic of Kashmir and Kafiristan, who clearly worked hard because beyond the British headstones were new places of interment for Peshawar’s still extant Christian community, paper crosses and pink flags draped in tribal fashion beside the freshly dug graves. Many imperial graves exhibit a faith that would be understood by any Muslim, the favourite from the Book of Revelation: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’ And there was a Gaelic cross on top of the remains of Lieutenant Walter Irvine of the North West Frontier Police ‘who lost his life in the Nagoman River when leading the Peshawar Vale Hunt of which he was Master’. No Soviet soldier would earn so romantic a memorial. On the graves of the Russian soldiers now dying just north of this cemetery, it would be coldly recorded only that they died performing their ‘international duty’.

      The local CIA agent already had a shrewd idea what this meant. He was a thin, over-talkative man who held a nominal post in the US consulate down the road from the Peshawar Intercontinental and who hosted parties of immense tedium at his villa. He had the habit of showing, over and over again, a comedy film about the Vietnam war. Those were the days when I still talked to spooks, and when I called by one evening, he was entertaining a group of around a dozen journalists and showing each of them a Soviet identity card. ‘Nice-looking young guy,’ he said of the pinched face of the man in the black and white photograph. ‘A pilot, shot down, the mujahedin got his papers. What a way to go, a great tragedy that a young guy should die like that.’ I didn’t think much of the CIA man’s crocodile tears but I was impressed by the words ‘shot down’. With what? Did the guerrillas have ground-to-air missiles? And if so, who supplied them – the Americans, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, or those mysterious Arabs? I had seen thousands of Russians but I had yet to see an armed guerrilla close up in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have to wait long.

      Ali’s bus returned to the border one warm afternoon and I walked back across the Durand Line to a small grubby booth on the Afghan side of the frontier. The border guard looked at my passport and thumbed through the pages. Then he stopped and scrutinised one of the document’s used pages. As usual, I had written ‘representative’ on my immigration card. But the thin man clucked his tongue. ‘Journalist,’ he said. ‘Go back to Pakistan.’ How did he know? There were visas to Arab countries in the passport which identified me as a journalist, but the Afghan official would not know Arabic, would have no idea that sahafa meant ‘journalist’. A group of men shoved past me and I walked back to Ali. How did they know? Ali looked through my passport and found the page that gave me away. A visa to post-revolutionary Iran was marked with the word khabanagor – Persian for ‘journalist’ – and Persian, or Dari, was one of the languages of Afghanistan. Damn.

      I took a taxi back to Peshawar and sent a message to The Times: ‘Scuppered.’ But next day Ali was back at the hotel. ‘Mr Robert, we try again.’ What’s the point? I asked him. ‘We try,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’ I didn’t understand, but I repacked my bags and boarded his friendly wooden bus and set off once more for the border. This was beginning to feel like a real-life version of Carry On up the Khyber, but Ali was strangely confident I would be successful. I sat back in the afternoon sun as the bus moaned its way up the hairpin bends. There’s an odd, unnerving sensation about trying to cross a border without the consent of the authorities. Gavin and I had experienced this at almost every checkpoint we came across in Afghanistan. Would they let us through or turn us round or arrest us? I suppose it was a throwback to all those war films set in German-occupied Europe in which resistance heroes and heroines had to talk their way past Nazi guards. The Afghan border police were not quite up to Wehrmacht standards – and we were no heroes – but it wasn’t difficult to feel a mixture of excitement and dread when we arrived once more at the grotty little booth on the Afghan side of the frontier.

      Yet before I had a chance to stand up, Ali was at my seat. ‘Give me your passport,’ he said. ‘And give me $50.’ He vanished with the money. And ten minutes later, he was back with a broad smile. ‘I will take you to Jalalabad,’ he said, handing me back my newly stamped passport. ‘Give me another $50 because I had to give your money away to a poor man.’ The Russians had invaded but they couldn’t beat that most efficacious, that most corrupt of all institutions between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal: The Bribe. I was so happy, I was laughing. I was singing to myself, all the way to Jalalabad. I’d even arranged with Ali that he would stop by at the Spinghar Hotel each morning to take my reports down to Peshawar – and come back in the afternoon with any messages that The Times sent to

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