When I asked him whether we needed any waterproofs for our visit to Afghanistan, our leader, Sandy Gall, was firm. No need whatever, he said. But when we reach Bamiyan on a UN plane early in the morning, we look down from the cliff above the town and see our hotel cut off by flood. A lorry has capsized in the torrents, and men with their salwars hoisted high are wading ineffectually about. Sandy’s solution is to book ten donkeys to carry us across later, and meanwhile breakfast in the rather broken-down hotel where, pro tem, we find ourselves. From where we sit, we can survey the niches in which, until the Taleban bombarded them to smithereens, stood the two colossal Buddhas — one from the fifth and the other from the third century — which were wonders of the world.
It is so sad to look in the niches and see only the faintest ghosts of those great figures. But nothing can eradicate the grandeur and mystery of the site — a vast, reddish wall of mountain (‘dark rhubarb red cliffs’, wrote Robert Byron, who, with eccentric Talebanism, thought the Buddhas ‘loathsome effort[s] artistically’), honeycombed by the hundreds of caves in which the Buddhist monks lived. We, the only white visitors all day, climb up inside the niches and caves, tuck in behind where the Buddha’s head once was, and peer out at the green and soaking valley beyond. Across the river, we can see the ‘City of Screaming’, the old fortified hill town in which, maddened by the death of his favourite grandson, Genghis Khan killed every living being. Crossing from one niche to the other, we meet a young French archaeologist supervising a dig for the remains of the royal monastery. He says they are searching for a 1,000ft-long recumbent Buddha, mentioned by a Chinese visitor in 632. But he concedes it may not be there. Perhaps it is like the sleeping Arthur, awaiting resurrection at the end of persecution and violence.
The Buddha will not awake soon, I fear. When we finally make it to the Silk Road Hotel — the flood has subsided enough for the donkeys to be unnecessary — we find a group of New Zealand policemen sitting in the restaurant. They come from the local PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team). Two days ago, in what is now known in the jargon as a ‘complex attack’, a patrol of New Zealand soldiers in the Bamiyan district were caught by a roadside bomb and then ambushed by the Taleban. One man was killed and two others wounded. The weather was so bad that no air rescue could be attempted, so the comrades drove the wounded back three hours over the terrible roads. Later, they returned for ‘what was left’ of their comrade’s body. They are classic Kiwis — tough, laconic, humorous — but they admit their shock at this, the first death their country has suffered in the conflict.
The next morning, Rangina, a spirited young Afghan member of our party, celebrates her 21st birthday. But she appears among us weeping. She has just read on Facebook that eight aid workers, including the British doctor Karen Woo, have been murdered, with two of their drivers, in Badakhshan. They were surrounded in a restaurant, robbed, and then taken out and shot one by one. Rangina knew them. The party came from International Assistance Mission, a Christian organisation which gives medical and educational help to Afghans, in this case, eye-doctoring. The Taleban — boasting of the deed even though no one yet knows whether they really did it — say (untruthfully) that the eight were trying to distribute Bibles. Rangina sits outside, hunched and inconsolable.
For Sandy Gall, such grim events are not new. In 1982, he made the situation in Afghanistan famous in Britain with the first of his several television films. He accompanied the followers of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ‘Lion of the Panjsher’, over the mountains into the Panjsher Valley, and filmed their attacks on Soviet convoys. He barely survived his first journey because Massoud’s men in the first village he entered thought he was a Russian spetsnaz (Special Forces) officer, and trained their rifles on him until someone stopped them just in time. Sandy noticed the suffering of warriors and children who lost limbs and could not be treated. In 1983, he set up Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal to provide prosthetic limbs, physiotherapy etc, and it has continued ever since, surviving the Soviets, the Taleban, and now the insurgency. It is to look at and raise money for its work that our trip is conceived. Sandy is both endearing and impressive. Even at the most mundane level — getting from A to B, walking down the street — Afghanistan is a place of chaos, but this scarcely troubles him. He trusts local people and his daughter Fiona, who works for the charity, to sort things out. His tall, benign figure seems to inspire trust in return. He is unflustered by the security threat, barely repines that he cannot quite work his mobile phone, and travels with enough whisky to put problems in perspective. The amazing thing is that Sandy Gall is 82, but still he climbs to the top of the City of Screaming to explain to us the bloody scenes of past and present.
Another member of our party is Margaret Evison. Her son, Mark, a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards, was shot in Helmand last year, and bled to death because medical assistance took more than an hour to reach him. Dauntlessly, she has come out to try to learn more about the country which Mark tried to assist. She tells me she finds the visit helpful, but is shocked by much of what she finds. Here is the most trivial example. Massoud was assassinated by al-Qa’eda two days before 9/11. Sandy takes us to his shrine, high in the Panjsher, where his friend’s body lies. As we stroll down from the shrine, a car draws up. ‘Oh look,’ says Margaret, smiling, ‘they’ve brought the family goat.’ So they have, but not for a weekend walk. The guardian of the shrine approaches, and draws a long knife. He and the paterfamilias take the goat to a ledge, hold it down with a rope, and cut its throat to make it ready for lunch.
A street scene in Kabul. Two small boys trot down the road, waving smoking cans at people. They do so for money: the smoke is supposed to ward off djinns. One of the boys approaches a parked car full of teenage girls. He offers them the can and they gesture him away contemptuously. The boy sees a chance for mischief. He hurries up to each open window and, with great precision, blows his smoke as hard as he can through it, then runs away. The girls scream with outrage. Then they see me watching, and start laughing.
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