Literature at the Khyber Pass

At Jamrud we
stopped for hashish and chai, hot sweet tea potent enough to power a man over
the Khyber Pass despite dysentery and altitude, and were settled at an old oil
drum serving as a curbside table when the tall fellow in robes and turban and
bristling bandolier strolled up. He was handsome, even by Pathan standards,
and taller than most and you knew straight away that he was a man of power and
substance because he carried not only the Lee Enfield with the carved and inlaid
stock that was the standard accessory before the Soviets invaded, but a revolver
and a dagger too.

A frisson of
fear tingled my spine, but I made sure he didn’t know it. I looked at Jacoub,
the best driver I ever had in those days in the tribal territories of the Northwest
Frontier, but his eyes betrayed nothing. There are some things that have not
changed for a couple of thousand years up the Khyber, and one of them is that
you can have your throat slit with absolutely no consequence whatsoever. That
is what "tribal territory" means.

"My name’s
Khan," the man said as he pulled up a chair. "I hear you are British."

He said this
in perfect English, which was less remarkable given the legacies of Empire in
the old Jewel in the Crown than the fact that he already knew that I had come
from the Old Country. I cast a dark look at the chai-stall owner: spy.

Driving west
from Peshawar, Jamrud is the last stop on the road to the border post between
Pakistan and Afghanistan, a place where Alexander the Great would most certainly
have watered the horses, and countless smugglers, bandits and armies have done
since. The Soviets had just staged their putsch in Kabul and sent in their sorry-arsed
troops from the north, but back then in the early spring of ’79 the Khyber
was still open to anyone prepared to take the risk.

A few miles
back I had passed the cliff where the regimental colors of British regiments
who passed this way are carved in stone. Very few men returned, leaving only
legends for the officers’ messes back home and a hard lesson in the limits
of Empire. I had clambered out of Jacoub’s Nissan, and got him to take
a snap. I am grinning with that peculiar pride of the Brit at the memory of
heroic failure.

Moghuls, Brits,
Soviets. Now Americans?

Driving the
other way had been a steady caravan of refugees, ragged Afghans mostly from
the high eastern plains around Khost and Jalalabad, women and kids in the care
of old men with long white beards. The mujahideen had already formed and the
men of fighting age were up there in the hills. They were using Kalashnikovs
alongside the old Lee Enfields, which meant they had already taken blood from
the Russians.

It was romantic,
in its way. The Hindu Kush were high and snowcapped and crisscrossed by ancient
paths being put to use once more by the toughest and sharpest-shooting mountain
men the world has ever known–the Ghurkas of Nepal are the only rivals to
this dubious honor–and the steep craggy valleys were dotted with ancient
high-walled farms not yet flattened by the rockets of modern warfare. The farmers
were still growing hashish, the top prize of the old 1960s Hippie Trail, and
had yet to be corrupted by opium grown for heroin and the tithes demanded by
Allah’s holy warriors.

You could wonder
at the guerrillas–to a post-Enlightenment war correspondent they seemed
absurdly willing to leave their chances of survival to God rather than a well-dug
foxhole–but there could be no doubt that these guys were men. They traveled
fast and light and the soles of their feet seemed infinitely tougher than my
best Timberlands.

But back on
the plains of Peshawar things were already turning ugly. Vast spreads of canvas
tents were metamorphosing into mud-walled towns as Afghans built wattle stockades
around their tents. It was intriguing to watch. You could tell how long each
camp had stood by the progress of the walls. Some were working on the roofs.
These were the walls of purdah, the keeping of women out of sight and away from
contact with the outside world and the semen of rival men. This has a lot in
common with the ravings of the Southern Baptist loudmouth aiming his fire and
brimstone at pubescent teenagers, but it did not take long on the sun-baked
plains of the Northwest Frontier to discover just how nasty exotic medievalism
could become, and how fast.

A Swedish relief
team took me to visit a camp where they had distributed a few bales of childrens’
sweaters, kindly donated by those peace-loving Swedes. The woolens were stretched
to bursting over the chests of adult males. In this culture, the warriors get
first pick, even of the baby clothes. The kids learn to shiver through the freezing
nights.

And then I
dug out this story: volunteer nurses had found a wife and three daughters huddled
behind their mud wall in the final, emaciated stages of dysentery. They could
not be taken to a doctor, the nurses were told, without the permission of the
man, who was off fighting. If they died, they died. The nurses took them to
the clinic: cultural relativism has its limits.

When our brave
freedom fighter returned from battling the Soviet yoke, he heard the story of
the miraculous medicine that had saved his wife and daughters. Then he shot
them all dead. Not only had they left the compound without his permission, the
doctor had been male. Only the massacre could restore his honor, and please
God.

From this rank
soil the mujahideen were already growing, and it seems odd to this day that
the CIA and the State Dept. could venture into this ancient world and somehow
take no notice. The Taliban, or something just as poisonous, was sure to be
the fruit.

This is the
sort of thing that was going through my head when Khan sat down. Was I to be
accused of taking pictures of those strange figures in black chadors, flapping
down dirt paths like so many winged crows? Had I sealed my fate by saying "no"
to the offer of a kilo of dope ($100, by the way)? Was I to be shot for a spy?

We shook hands.

"I, sir,
am the secretary of the Jamrud Literary Society," said Khan. "We have
just finished reading Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and
I wish to ask your advice."

I could have
choked on my chai. Charles Lamb? This book is an historical curio from the days
of the British Raj, the literary equivalent of one of those ancient but still
chuff-chuffing steam engines, Made in England. Something, surely, was in my
tea. Tales from Shakespeare was published, you see, specifically to give
the natives a dose of Western civ, the Victorian equivalent to hamburgers and
Hollywood.

"My members,"
Khan went on, propping the rifle casually against the old barrel, "have
heard of a writer called Charles Dickens, and would you agree he would be good
to read next? But where would we find the books of Charles Dickens?"

This, I assured
him, would be an excellent choice, and that the novels were readily available.
In fact, I would be happy to send a collection once I had returned–safely–to
London.

Khan stood
up, and proffered his hand again: "You, sir, are an honorable enemy."

I have treasured
those words ever since. An honorable enemy: note the present tense. There could
surely be no greater compliment.

I sent him
the books, of course, because an honorable enemy keeps his end of the deal.
And I have been thinking of this strange story since thousands of souls were
so vilely dispatched at the tip of the island that I now call home. Honorable
enemy. The Afghans and their Pakistani cousins won the CIA their war, but no
one bothered to send them food for their wives and their children, nor even
woolly sweaters, used and far too small. America just walked away. That was
not honorable.

When all this
is over, it might be an idea to make friends with the natives. Amazing what
a few copies of old Charles Lamb could do, and a literary society in the least
likely of places is a far, far better prospect than a medieval mullah with poison
in his heart.