Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 drink ever. I tried it and found it warm and disgustingly saccharine, the Soviet-grade chemicals cloying in my throat. I joshed him about his weight and his incorrigibly sweet tooth. He chatted fervently about his ambition to work for the BBC. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and after the stomach-knotting stress of the trenches Mazar now seemed blissfully normal. And then without warning he disappeared. One minute he was dawdling along as usual at my elbow; the next he was gone. His departure was so sudden that I was left holding his coat. I thought little of it at first, but when the parade started and there was still no sign of him I began to worry. The dust thrown up by the tanks had settled, the crowds had gone home and the sun was starting to set by the time Mir reappeared in the Oxfam compound. He looked pale and was sporting two black eyes. Ewan and I clustered around him as he sat and told us in a tired voice that he had been arrested by Dostum’s secret police, Russian-trained Uzbek goons who had taken him to a cell and beaten him up.

      – They are werry angry with your article, he said, nodding at me. They wanted to know, why did I help the foreigners? They think all foreigners are spies. They said I should not have translated what Ismail Khan said about the Northern Alliance. But I said, why? I am just an interpreter – how can I lie? I said I am a good Muslim and that a good Muslim always tells the truth.

      Ewan and I looked at each other. Al had been right after all: it was impossible to detach oneself from the story in this crazy place, and I was already becoming embroiled.

      – Don’t worry, Mir went on. These men are idiots – galamjam. You know galamjam? It means carpet-thieves.

      His sang-froid was admirable but there was a danger that it was also misplaced. Mir was not streetwise. He could be alarmingly naive at times, and I didn’t like the sound of these galamjam one bit. At the very least he was now a marked man with the authorities. I told him as forcefully as I could that he would need to keep a low profile and to stop working for journalists, at least for the time being. Ewan agreed.

      – Don’t worry, Mir replied in a bored voice. I’ll be fine.

      We checked he was not too shaken and sent him home to his parents in a taxi.

      The following morning I went to the UN office and reported the incident to a savvy Irishman who spoke Dari and knew Mazar and the Uzbeks who controlled it well. He nodded sagely and promised to keep an eye out for Mir. I was due to leave Afghanistan for Uzbekistan in a few days. The Independent had expressed an interest in a story about oil and gas politics and my interviews in Tashkent were already set up. I left for the north full of misgivings, but didn’t see what more I could do.

      Mir’s future in Mazar ended a fortnight later. He didn’t keep a low profile, but teamed up with the BBC in the shape of the experienced Afghan correspondent Lionel David. Working for the BBC carried kudos in Mazar and was very lucrative. The temptation was more than he was able to resist.

      From a purely professional point of view my decision to quit Mazar at the beginning of May was a disaster. I felt a certain Schadenfreude that Ewan had also left and missed the moment, although Rick had stayed behind. None of us had foreseen Dostum’s betrayal by his Uzbek ally Abdul Malik Pahlawan, or the consequent fall of Mazar to the Taliban who, at Abdul Malik’s invitation, swept with devastating speed across the undefended plains to the west in their Hi-Lux trucks. Lionel, however, had excellent Taliban contacts who had tipped him off to the impending operation, and he turned up to film their arrival in Mazar at the perfect moment. At first the Taliban occupation of the city went unopposed. But then they called a public meeting at the central mosque, where they laid out the rules of the new regime: men to wear beards, women to wear birqas and be confined to their homes; no television, no music, no kite-flying, no partridge-fighting;^* everyone to pray five times a day, or else. This was not well received. Many men walked out in the course of the meeting, shaking their heads and muttering darkly. But it was a few days later when the Taliban tried to disarm the populace, as they had successfully done everywhere else in the country, that the real trouble began.

      Five years later Lionel was still able to recall the minutest details of the next hellish forty-eight hours. I sat him down with a tape recorder in my London flat where he obligingly relived the trauma for an hour and a half, the narrative bizarrely interrupted by a mobile phone call from his young son, who wanted to know if it was OK to use a tube of Bostik to fix a plastic model from his Warhammer set.

      Lionel’s story began on a lovely Tuesday evening in the centre of Mazar. He was out near the shrine with Mir, shooting a piece to camera for Newsnight. All was calm. The setting sun lit up the cobalt of the shrine’s mosaics and his crew was adjusting the camera tripod to get the scene into shot. Until that moment Mazar seemed to have fallen to the Taliban as peacefully as every other city had done. But then they СКАЧАТЬ