INTO THE WAR ZONE
October 1, 2001
DAILY MAIL
THE battle was raging by noon.
The Taliban had opened fire first from the ridge a mile away, sending the sound of heavy artillery echoing through the Aqbloq valley.
Then it was the turn of the Northern Alliance, the guerilla force backed by Britain and the United States.
It responded with heavy machine guns and a rocket propelled grenade mounted on the back of a truck. As each fresh salvo was fired in our direction, the turbaned Mujahideen guerillas, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, pressed forward to watch the plumes of smoke drift into the clear mountain sky. One shell dropped barely 200 yards from where we were, causing everyone to jump.
It continued like this, backwards and forwards, until the deep black of Afghanistan's night drew the day's hostilities to their close.
'We are strong, we are winning,' the Alliance's commander Nazer Muhammed declared as he launched the grenade on the Taliban position. From my position on a rocky outcrop it looked more like a stalemate.
Muhammed has 3,500 men under his leadership, compared to 2,000 on the other side of the frontline, but the Taliban has bigger ordnance and more tanks.
The Northern Alliance equipment is old and, in many cases, obsolete and in urgent need of replacement.
But it can still kill, and Muhammed claims that his guns killed 100 Taliban soldiers on Saturday. What he wouldn't admit to was the number of deaths on his own side. Yesterday everyone, on our side at least, came through unscathed.
It was, in other words, just another typical weekend in a country whose inhabitants have been fighting either the outside world or each other for centuries.
That is because Afghanistan is where it has always been - locked in its savage past, cut off from the outside world, indifferent to the goods, services and ideals we have come to take for granted.
It beggars belief that from within this God-forsaken land terrorists have been able to wreak such havoc on our own society, but all the evidence says that it has.
But if the notion of eternal salvation as a reward for mass murder is incomprehensible to the modern mind, it does not seem in the least out of place here.
Only in a country like Afghanistan could a fanatic like Osama Bin Laden flourish. Only in Afghanistan would he be allowed to.
'Don't worry, we will find him,' insisted Mohamed Nazir, special adviser to Afghanistan's ousted President, Burhanuddin Rabbani. 'We have our eyes and ears everywhere.'
I wanted to believe him, for the sake of all our futures. But Rabbani's Northern Alliance controls less than five per cent of Afghanistan.
The SAS has reconnaissance patrols in the mountains. The United States has sent in troops from Delta Force, the unit established in the mid-Sixties and modelled on the Special Air Service.
The Alliance has pledged to give them what help it can. But how are they going to find one man in this grotesquely inhospitable terrain?
Yesterday's statement by the Taliban that it has Bin Laden under its control will not make the manhunt any easier.
After more than two weeks of prevarication during which it insisted he was 'missing', Taliban diplomats said his whereabouts were known only to its security services.
One Alliance commander told me Bin Laden was cut off in Jalallabad on the road south to the Khyber Pass.
Another claimed that the world's most wanted man is surrounded somewhere in the centre of the country. When I suggested that they were relying more on guesswork than hard intelligence, they shrugged indifferently in that annoying way I had once been so familiar with.
The Northern Alliance is not, on the face of it, a formidable force.
It has been badly mauled by the Taliban and two days before the attack on the World Trade Centre two of Bin Laden's suicide bombers killed the Alliance's leader, Abdul Massood.
No one should doubt its fighting spirit. Since the Taliban swept to power six years ago, it has fought a ferocious rearguard action against the Fundamentalists and is still in the field, armed and determined.
Its problem is, however, a lack of proper modern equipment. Its forces are down to a mere handful of old Russian T72 tanks. They have only six helicopters. And their rocket- propelled grenades are a generation out of date.
Until now neither the Russians and certainly not the Americans have had any practical interest in updating the Alliance arsenal.
The circumstances have changed and the Alliance is anxious to make the most of the opportunity.
It has asked Russia for more equipment, and in the wake of the terrorist strike on the World Trade Centre President Putin has agreed to the request.
The Americans, too, have indicated their willingness to give the Alliance and its 15,000 fighting men the ground to air missiles which will take out the Taliban's MiG jet fighters and their remaining helicopter gunships.
What the Alliance needs more than anything, though, is proper training. This would allow its forces to move from guerilla warfare, at which they are so effective, on to a more direct form of engagement.
Presumably America will not overlook the Alliance's ability to operate as a guerilla strike force, however.
The SAS and Delta Force have indicated their willingness to deploy its men first of all for reconnaissance, then as partners in combat.
This would enable the West to strike hard at the pariah regime in Kabul without having to take the possibly fatal step of putting its own ground forces into a country which has been the graveyard for successive foreign armies, starting with the British in 1842 and ending with the Russian retreat in 1989.
It is 20 years since I was last in Afghanistan, and the absence is not long enough. I joined the Mujahideen as they went in to combat with the Russian invader.
They won, leaving as many as 70,000 Soviet troops dead on the battlefields. But the world has moved on since.
The intervening decades have witnessed the rise of the computer, the invention of the Internet and the refinement of the satellite communications I am using to file this report.
In Afghanistan, however, time has gone backwards. According to the Islamic calendar the year is 1379. It is a date the Taliban takes literally, and to journey through Afghanistan's mountain passes and along the ancient donkey tracks which serve as highways is to step into the Middle Ages.
We flew in across the foothills of the Hindu Kush from neighbouring Tajikistan in an old Antonov transport plane and landed on a makeshift airstrip high in the mountains.
From there it was an eleven-hour drive to the Kafalghan front along precipitous passes littered with the burnt-out skeletons of Soviet tanks, their tracks torn off by mines, their twisted barrels pointing aimlessly at an enemy they could not defeat.
The soldiers who survived those attacks often chose to take their own lives than allow themselves to fall into the hands of the Mujahideen. That time-honoured tradition of unmentionable cruelty continues to this day.
In the five years they have been in power they have slaughtered anyone who stood in their way, leaving their bodies to rot in the streets. They excuse their actions as acts of faith when it is really a case of blind bigotry.
After 20 years I had hoped to see some improvement. Not a bit of it. If anything conditions are worse now than they were then.
There is still little electricity, there are few metalled roads, no public health or schooling, television, telephones, lavatory paper, tables, forks or spoons.
Houses are still built of wattle. Wheat, where it still grows in a land parched by drought, is winnowed in the wind. Milk is served warm straight from sheep and goats tended by children barely old enough to walk. The rivers serve as kitchen and public lavatory.
In this miserable enviroment life is not a pleasure but a struggle, bound by the passage of the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun.
To add to that there is the Taliban's perverted, profane interpretation of the Koran.
This is the last place anyone would wish to be, especially now and especially if you happen to be a woman.
I know what that feels like, because the last time I was here, I had to disguise myself as a woman in order to avoid the Soviet border patrols.
I was forbidden to speak because in Afghanistan women are allowed no voice. For several hours my only sight of the world was through the fretwork of my enshrouding burka.
It was a terrifying view from the inside of how women were subjugated. With the Taliban in control, it is worse. Women are even denied health care, and education is out of the question.
It is a lifetime's imprisonment I cannot even bring myself to imagine for my own daughters.
Yet that is precisely what Bin Laden and the Taliban wish to impose on all of us. It is what the Northern Alliance has sworn to oppose.
Perhaps the tide is already turning. In the battle we witnessed, the last salvo fell half a mile short. It would be too much to suggest this was a Taliban retreat. The best we can hope for is that it is a start.
END
