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.