The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Page B

Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment in Cork in Ireland, not long after the 1916 Easter Rising. There is even a pale photograph of my father in my archives, kissing the Blarney Stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a second lieutenant in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Was he consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

    The rest of the novel is a disturbing tale of colour prejudice, xenophobia and outright anti-Muslim hatred during the Second Afghan War. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion had naturally focused upon Afghanistan, whose unmarked frontiers had become the indistinct front lines between imperial Russia and the British Indian Raj. The principal victims of the “Great Game,” as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistan—there was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britain—were, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting point—between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East—and a battlefield. 3 A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistan’s first king, Dost Mohamed, to receive a Russian mission in Kabul after his re-accession in 1868 led directly to what the British were to call the Second Afghan War. The First Afghan War had led to the annihilation of the British army in the Kabul Gorge in 1842, in the same dark crevasse through which I drove at night on my visit to Osama bin Laden in 1997. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, Shir Ali’s son Yaqub Khan agreed to allow a permanent British embassy to be established in Kabul, but within four months the British envoy and his staff were murdered in their diplomatic compound. The British Army was sent back to Afghanistan.
    In Bill Fisk’s novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawar— now in Pakistan, then in India—Graham encounters Pathan tribesmen, “a villainous lot . . . most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer.” Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet “up to the nozzle” into the chest of an Afghan, a “swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate.” In the Kurram Valley, Graham and his “chums”—a word my father used about his comrades in the First World War—fight off “infuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder.” When General Sir Frederick Roberts—later Lord Roberts of Kandahar—agrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with “as wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined.” The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, “their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form.” When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, “a thrill of satisfaction” goes through the ranks of Graham’s comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.
    Afghans are thus a “villainous lot,” “fanatics,” “rascals,” “fiends in human form,” meat for British bayonets—or “toasting forks” as the narrative cheerfully calls them. It gets worse. A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the words “that will scatter the flies.” The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. “Boy readers,” the author pontificates, “may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878–80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out