Beginnings

      MY STORY like that of Afghanistan has no beginning and no end. The Pashtuns say that when Allah created the world he had a pile of rocks left over from which he made Afghanistan, and just as the historians seem unable to agree on when or how that far-off land of hills and mountains got its name, settling on the exact moment when it became part of my life seems an arbitrary process.

      There is a dreamcatcher over my desk, a small cylinder made with loops of tiny seeds out of the bottom of which dangle four small bunches of turquoise, scarlet and yellow macaw feathers. Crafted by Indians who still live by the old ways in a remote river inlet of the Amazon, it is meant as its name suggests to catch dreams, filtering out the nightmares and only allowing through the good ones. As I begin to write in the pale light of dawn, I suddenly notice it moving, the feathers fluttering wildly even though there is no wind in my small study. I check the window and it is firmly closed yet the coloured feathers refuse to still.

      On my desk is a handful of letters from a woman of about my own age in Kabul. She risked her life to get them to me and this is also her story. But if I must choose a moment to start my tale it would be when I was twenty-one years old, a graduate of philosophy at university and of adolescence in British suburbia, stumbling out of a battered mini-bus in the Old City of the frontier town of Peshawar, dizzy with Kipling and diesel fumes. Clenched in my hand was a suitcase I could barely lift, containing everything I imagined I would need for reporting a war, from packets of wine gums and a tape of Mahler’s Fifth to a much-loved stuffed pink rabbit, missing one ear.

      If I close my eyes, I can conjure up the image of standing there, momentarily unsure in the dust-laden sunset, a gawky English girl, surrounded by motor rickshaws painted with F-16 fighter jets, beggars with missing arms or legs or faces eaten away by leprosy, and men in large turbans or rolled woollen caps selling everything from hair-grips to Shanghai White Elephant torches and wearing rifles as casually as Londoners carry umbrellas. The streets were ancient and narrow with two-storey wooden-framed buildings and across one hung a giant movie placard of a sultry raven-haired beauty drawing a crimson sari across cartoonish eyes. Everywhere such faces, carved with proud features as if from another time, some wise and white-bearded in sheepskin cloaks, others villainous with kohl-rimmed eyes. These were the Pashtuns of whom Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British Governor of the Frontier, had written ‘for the stranger who had eyes to see and ears to hear … here was a people who looked him in the face and made him feel he had come home’.

      A rickshaw took me to Greens, a hotel mostly frequented by arms dealers, where I was given a room with no curtains. I lay on the thin mattress, looking northwest to a sky dark with a serrated mountain range. Beyond those dragon-scale peaks lay Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, the remotest place I had ever imagined suddenly only forty miles away.

      If ever there was a country whose fate was determined by geography, it was the land of the Afghans. Never a colony, Afghanistan has always been a natural crossroads – the meeting place of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East – and thus frequently the battlefield and graveyard of great powers. Afghans spoke of Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Tamerlane as well as various Moghul, Sikh and Persian rulers as if they had just passed through.

      The Red Army were the latest in a long line of invaders going back to the fourth century BC when Alexander the Great spent three years crossing the country with 30,000 men and elephants, taking the beautiful Roxanne as his wife en route. During the nineteenth century, the country’s vast deserts and towering mountains provided the stage for what became known as ‘The Great Game’, the shadowy struggle between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for dominance in the region, in which many of the players were individual officers or spies, often as young as I was when I first stepped out of that Flying Coach.

      Peshawar had once been part of Afghanistan, used by its kings as their summer capital, and that first night in Greens was the start of two years which turned everything I had known or valued upside down. Coming home again would never be the same.

      Smuggled back and forth across the Khyber Pass in an assortment of guises and on a variety of transport with the mujaheddin, I found them brave men with noble faces who exuded masculinity yet loved to walk hand-in-hand with each other and pick flowers, or who would sit for hours in front of hand mirrors clipping their nostril hairs with nail scissors. They exaggerated terribly, never claiming to have shot down just one Soviet helicopter but always seven. Yet they were poetic souls such as Ayubi, one of Commander Ismael Khan’s key lieutenants in western Afghanistan and a huge bear of a man in a Russian fur hat who would silence a room by walking in, but who on bidding farewell, penned me a note in the exquisite loops and swirls of Persian script saying ‘if you don’t think of me in 1000 years I will think of you 1000 times in an hour’.

      Crouching in trenches watching the nightly show of red and green tracer-fire light up the sky, breakfasting on salted pomegranate pips as rockets whistled overhead, I was supremely happy and alive. With the confidence of youth, I thought I was indestructible.

      Part of the charm was the romance of being with people fighting for a cause after a childhood on the not exactly lawless borders of Surrey and south London where