‘I shall call him Izmat after my own grandfather, may his soul rest in eternal peace,’ said Nuri Khan. And so it was when an imam came to the hamlet a few days later for the naming and the circumcision.
There was nothing unusual about the raising of the child. When he could toddle he toddled, and when he could run he ran furiously. Like most farm boys he wanted to do the things the older boys did, and by five was entrusted to help drive the flocks up to the high pastures in summer and watch over them while the women cut forage for the winter.
He yearned to be out of the house of the women and it was the proudest day of his life thus far when he was at last allowed to join the men round the fire and listen to stories of how the Pashtun had defeated the red-coated Angleez in these mountains only a hundred and fifty years ago, told as if it were only yesterday.
His father was the richest man in the village in the only way a man could be rich: in cows, sheep and goats. These, along with relentless caring and hard work, provided meat, milk and hides. Patches of corn yielded porridge and bread; fruit and nut-oil came from the prolific mulberry and walnut orchards.
There was no need to leave the village, so for the first eight years of his life Izmat Khan did not. The five families shared the small mosque, and joined each other for communal worship on Fridays. Izmat’s father was devout but not fundamentalist and certainly not fanatical.
Beyond this mountain existence, Afghanistan called itself the Democratic Republic, or DRA, but as so often this was a misnomer. The government was Communist and heavily supported by the USSR. In terms of religion, this was an oddity, because the people of the wild interior were traditionally devout Muslims for whom atheism was godlessness and therefore unacceptable.
But equally traditionally the Afghans of the cities were moderate and tolerant – the fanaticism would be imposed on them later. Women were educated, few covered their faces, singing and dancing was not only allowed but commonplace and the feared secret police pursued those suspected of political opposition, not religious laxity.
The hamlet of Maloko-zai had two links with the outside world. One was the occasional party of Kuchi nomads passing through with a mule-train of contraband, avoiding the Great Trunk Road through the Khyber Pass with its patrols and border guards, seeking the track to the town of Parachinar across in Pakistan. They would have news of the plains and the cities, of the government in faraway Kabul and the world beyond the valleys. And there was also the radio, a treasured relic that squawked and screeched but then uttered words they could understand. This was the BBC’s Pashto service, bringing the Pashtun a non-Communist version of the world. It was a peaceful boyhood. Then came the Russians.
It mattered not much to the village of Malokozai who was right or wrong. They neither knew nor cared that their Communist president had displeased his mentors in Moscow because he could not control his bailiwick. It mattered only that an entire Soviet army had rolled across the Amu Darya river from Soviet Uzbekistan, roared through the Salang Pass and taken Kabul. It was not (yet) about Islam versus atheism; it was an insult.
Izmat Khan’s education had been very basic. He had learned the Koranic verses necessary for prayer, even though they were in a language called Arabic and he could not understand them. The local imam was not resident; indeed it was Nuri Khan who led the prayers; he had taught the boys of the village the rudiments of reading and writing, but only in Pashto. It was Izmat’s father who had taught him the rules of the Pukhtunwali, the code by which a Pashtun must live. Honour, hospitality, the necessity of vendetta to avenge insult: these were the rules of the code. And Moscow had insulted them.
It was in the mountains that the Resistance began and they called themselves warriors of God, Mujahidin. But first the mountain men needed a conference, a shura, to decide what to do and who would lead them.
They knew nothing of the Cold War, but they were told they now had powerful friends, the enemies of the USSR. That made perfect sense. He who is the enemy of my enemy . . . First among these was Pakistan, lying right next door and ruled by a fundamentalist dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. Despite the religious difference, he was allied with the Christian power called America, and her friends, the Angleez, the one-time enemy.
Mike Martin had tasted action and knew he enjoyed it. He did a tour in Northern Ireland, operating against the IRA, but the conditions were miserable and, though the danger of a sniper’s bullet in the back was constant, the patrols were boring. He looked around and in spring 1986 applied for selection to the SAS.
Quite a proportion of the SAS comes from the Paras because their training and combat roles are similar, but the SAS claims their tests are harder. Martin’s papers went through the Regiment’s records office at Hereford where his fluent Arabic was noted with interest and he was invited to a selection course.
The SAS claims they take very fit men and then start to work on them. Martin did the standard ‘initial’ selection course of six weeks among others drawn from the Paras, infantry, cavalry, armour, artillery and even engineers. Of the other ‘crack’ units, the Special Boat Service draw their recruits mainly from the Marines.
It is a simple course based on a single precept. On the first day a smiling sergeant instructor told them all: ‘On this course, we don’t try to train you. We try to kill you.’
They did, too. Only ten per cent of applicants pass the ‘initial’. It saves time later. Martin passed. Then came continuation training: jungle training in Belize, and one extra month back in England devoted to resistance to interrogation. ‘Resistance’ means trying to stay silent while some extremely unpleasant practices are inflicted. The good news is that both the Regiment and the volunteer have the right every hour to insist on an RTU – return to unit.
Martin started in the late summer of 1986 with 22 SAS as a troop commander with the rank of captain. He opted for ‘A’ Squadron, the free-fallers, a natural choice for a Para to pick.
If the Paras had no use for his Arabic, the SAS did, for it has a long and intimate relationship with the Arab world. It was formed in the Western Desert in 1941 and its empathy with the sands of Arabia has never left it.
It has the jokey reputation of being the only army unit that actually makes a profit – not quite true
, but close. SAS men are the world’s most sought-after bodyguards and trainers of bodyguards. Throughout Arabia the sultans and emirs have always sought a team from the SAS to train their own personal guards, and they pay handsomely for it. Martin’s first assignment was with the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh when, in summer 1987, he was called home.
‘I don’t like this sort of thing,’ said the CO in his office at Stirling Lines, the Regiment’s Hereford HQ. ‘No, I bloody well don’t. But Vauxhall wants to borrow you. He was referring to a green and sandstone building on the south bank of the Thames in London called Vauxhall Cross. He meant the SIS – the Firm.’
He had used the occasionally friendly phrase reserved by fighting soldiers for intelligence people.
‘Haven’t they got their own Arabic speakers?’ asked Martin.
‘Oh, yes, desks full of them. But this isn’t just a question of speaking it. And it’s not really Arabia. They want someone to go behind the Soviet lines in Afghanistan and work with the Resistance, the Mujahidin.’
The military dictator of Pakistan had decreed that no serving soldier of a western power was to be allowed to penetrate into Afghanistan via Pakistan. He did not say so, but his own ISI military intelligence much enjoyed administering the American aid pouring in the direction of the ‘Muj’ and he further had no wish to see a serving American or British soldier, infiltrated via Pakistan, captured by the Russians and paraded around.
But halfway through the Soviet occupation the British had decided the man to back was not the Pakistani choice Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but the Tajik Shah Massoud, who was not skulking in Europe or Pakistan but doing real damage to the occupiers. The trouble was bringing that aid to him. His territory was up in the north.
Securing good guides from the Muj units near the Khyber Pass was not a problem. As in the time of the Raj, a few pieces of gold go a long way. There is an aphorism that you cannot buy the loyalty of an Afghan, but you can always rent it.
‘The key word at every stage, Captain,’ they told him at SIS headquarters, which back then was at Century House near the Elephant and Castle, ‘is deniability. That is why you actually have to – just a technicality – resign from the army. Of course, the moment you come back’ – they were nice enough to say ‘when’, not ‘if’ – ‘you will be completely reinstated.’
Mike Martin knew perfectly well that the SAS already had within its ranks the ultra-secret Revolutionary Warfare Wing whose task was to stir up as much trouble for Communist regimes worldwide as they could handle. He mentioned this.