The Great War for Civilisation Read Online Free Page A

impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know—no one told us.” Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist on
Ha’aretz
newspaper whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories have outshone anything written by non-Israeli reporters, discussed this with me more than two years ago. I was insisting that we had a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. “No, Robert, you’re wrong,” she said. “Our job is to monitor the centres of power.” And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority—all authority—especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
    But can we perform that task? This book will not provide an answer. My life as a journalist has been a great adventure. It still is. Yet looking through these pages after months of writing, I find they are filled with accounts of pain and injustice and horror, the sins of fathers visited upon their children. They are also about genocide. I used to argue, hopelessly I’m sure, that every reporter should carry a history book in his back pocket. In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whiffled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone upon which Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. And of course the shots were still being fired in Sarajevo in 1992. It was as if history were a gigantic echo chamber. That was the year in which my father died. This is therefore the story of his generation. And of mine.
    Beirut, June 2005

CHAPTER ONE
    â€œOne of Our Brothers Had a Dream . . . ”
    They combine a mad love of country with an equally mad indifference to life, their own as well as others. They are cunning, unscrupulous, and inspired.
    â€”“Stephen Fisher” in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Foreign Correspondent
(1940)
    I KNEW IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me. But I didn’t. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Unless I saw a man I recognised—an Arab rather than an Afghan—I would watch this road for traps, checkpoints, gunmen who were there to no apparent purpose. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch of the vehicle up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber over a rock.
    A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought to myself, when Major-General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War. But Afghans don’t