The Afghan

West of the road from Pakistani Peshawar to Afghan Jalalabad lies the range of the Spin Gahr, the White Mountains, dominated by the towering Tora Bora. These mountains, seen from afar, are like a great barrier between the two countries, bleak and cold, always tipped with snow, and in winter wholly covered.

The Spin Gahr lies inside Afghanistan, with the Safed range on the Pakistani side. Ru

Life is harsh, and with the life-support system being so sparse the communities of the valleys are small and scattered. The people bred up here are the ones the old British Empire knew and feared, calling them the Pathans, now Pashtun. Back then they fought from behind their rocky fastness with long, brass-bound muskets called the “jezail,” with which each man was accurate as a modern sniper. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the old Raj, evoked the deadliness of the mountain men against subalterns expensively educated in England in just four lines:

A scrimmage in a Border Station – A canter down some dark defile – Two thousand pounds of education – Drops to a ten-rupee jezail-

In 1972, there was a hamlet in one of these upland valleys called Maloko-zai-like all these hamlets, named after a long-dead warrior founder. There were five walled compounds in the settlement, each the home of one extended family of about twenty persons. The village headman was Nuri Khan, and it was in his compound and round his fire that the men gathered on a summer evening to sip hot, unmilked, sugarless tea.

As with all the compounds, the walls were where the residences and livestock pens were built, so that all faced inward. The fire of mulberry logs blazed as the sun dropped far to the west and darkness clothed the mountains, bringing chill even in high summer.

From the women’s quarters, the cries were muted, but if one was especially loud the men would cease their jovial conversation and wait to see if news would arrive. The wife of Nuri Khan was bearing her fourth child, and her husband prayed that Allah would grant him a second son. It was only right that a man should have sons to take care of the flocks when young and defend the compound when he had become a man. Nuri Khan had a boy of eight and two daughters. The darkness was complete and only the flames lit the hawk-nosed faces and black beards when a midwife came scurrying from the shadows. She whispered in the ear of the father, and his mahogany face broke into a flashing smile. “Inshallah, I have a son,” he cried. His male relatives and neighbors rose as one, and the air crackled and roared with the sound of their rifles exploding upward into the night sky. There was much embracing and congratulations and thanks to all-merciful Allah, who had granted His servant a son. “How will you call him?” asked a herdsman from a nearby compound. “I shall call him Izmat after my own grandfather, may his soul rest in eternal peace,” said Nuri Khan. And so it was when an imam came to the hamlet a few days later for the naming and the circumcision.

There was nothing unusual about the raising of the child. When he could toddle, he toddled, and when he could run he ran furiously. Like farm boys, he wanted to do the things the older boys did, and by five was entrusted to help drive the flocks up to the high pastures in summer and watch over them while the women cut forage for the winter.

He yearned to be out of the house of the women, and on the proudest day of his life so far was at last allowed to join the men round the fire and listen to stories of how the Pashtun had defeated the red-coated Angleez in these mountains only a hundred and fifty years ago, as if it was yesterday. His father was the richest man in the village in the only way a man could be rich-in cows, sheep and goats. These, along with relentless caring and hard work, provided meat, milk and hides. Patches of corn yielded porridge and bread; fruit and nut oil came from the prolific mulberry and walnut orchards. There was no need to leave the village, so for the first eight years of his life Izmat Khan did not. The five families shared the small mosque, and joined each other for communal worship on Fridays. Izmat’s father was devout but not fundamentalist, and certainly not fanatical.

Beyond this mountain existence, Afghanistan called itself the Democratic Republic, or DRA, but as was so often the case this was a misnomer. The government was communist, and heavily supported by the USSR. In terms of religion, this was an oddity, because the people of the wild interior were traditionally devout Muslims for whom atheism was godlessness and therefore unacceptable.

But equally traditionally, the Afghans of the cities were moderate and tolerant-the fanaticism would be imposed on them later. Women were educated, few covered their faces, singing and dancing was not only allowed but commonplace, and the feared secret police pursued those suspected of political opposition, not religious laxity.

Of the two links the hamlet of Maloko-zai had with the outside world, one was the occasional party of Kuchi nomads passing through with a mule train of contraband, avoiding the Great Trunk Road through the Khyber Pass, with its patrols and border guards, seeking the track to the town of Parachinar across in Pakistan.

They would have news of the plains and the cities, of the government in faraway Kabul and the world beyond the valleys. And there was the radio, a treasured relic that squawked and screeched but then uttered words they could understand. This was the BBC’s Pashto service, bringing the Pashtun a noncommunist version of the world. It was a peaceful boyhood. Then came the Russians. It mattered little to the village of Maloko-zai who was right or wrong. They neither knew nor cared that their communist president had displeased his mentors in Moscow because he could not control his bailiwick. It mattered only that an entire Soviet Army had rolled across the Amu Darya River from Soviet Uzbekistan, roared through the Salang Pass and taken Kabul. It was not yet about Islam versus atheism; it was an insult.

Izmat Khan’s education had been very basic. He had learned the Koranic verses necessary for prayer, even though they were in a language called Arabic and he could not understand them. The local imam was not resident; indeed, it was Nuri Khan who led the prayers-yet he had taught the boys of the village the rudiments of reading and writing, but only in Pashto. It was his father who had taught him the rules of the Pukhtunwali, the code by which a Pashtun must live. Honor, hospitality, the necessity of vendetta to avenge insult-these were the rules of the code. And Moscow had insulted them.

It was in the mountains that the resistance began, and they called themselves “Warriors of God,” Mujaheddin. But first the mountain men needed a conference, a shura, to decide what to do and who would lead them. They knew nothing of the Cold War, but they were told they now had powerful friends, the enemies of the USSR. That made perfect sense. He who is the enemy of my enemy… First among these were Pakistan, lying right next door, and ruled by a fundamentalist dictator. General Zia-ul-Haq. Despite the religious difference, he was allied with the Christian power called America, and her friends, the Angleez, the onetime enemy.

Mike Martin had tasted action and knew he enjoyed it. He did a tour in Northern Ireland, operating against the IRA, but the conditions were miserable, and though the danger of a sniper’s bullet in the back was constant the patrols were boring. He looked around, and in the spring of 1986 applied for the SAS. Quite a proportion of the SAS comes from the Paras because their training and combat roles are similar, but the SAS claims their tests are harder. Martin’s papers went through the regiment’s records office at Hereford, where his fluent Arabic was noted with interest, and he was invited to a selection course. The SAS claims they take very fit men and then start to work on them. Martin did the standard “initial” course of six weeks among others drawn from the Paras, infantry, cavalry, armor, artillery and even engineers. Of the other “crack” units, the Special Boat Squadron draws their recruits exclusively from the Marines.