Flying higher and a sudden descent...

Ariana, the Afghan airline, had some strange procedures. Boarding passes must have been issued but possibly without seat numbers assigned. Or, if assigned, were not considered to be of any great relevance. The huge crowd in the waiting area, overwhelmingly Afghans clutching large bundles in their hands, kept shifting en masse from one row of seats to a standing line then to another row of seats. All apparently following instructions though no voices came through the speakers. There were some uniformed men and women standing near the gateway and they perhaps were telling their compatriots what to do. Since I could not understand a word or even the gestures for that matter, I taking the next best option turned myself into a lamb and joined the herd.

If I remember right, the aircraft was one of those long, narrow-bodied Russian affairs that get you from place to place and at the same time prove that the glitz of fancier carriers is so much bunk. Fruit juice was all the sustenance on offer. It also seemed to have been an inordinately long flight as it necessarily had to be given the political geography. With both Pakistani and Iranian airspace closed for traffic to Kabul we probably took a circuitous route to enter Afghanistan from the north. That aspect did not interest me during the flight. What did was the presence of a large American correspondent who seemed to be well versed with developments on the ground. He spent most of the air-time badgering an official-looking Afghan in a very loud voice.

Their conversation--if an exchange that was extremely aggressive from the one side and pitifully defensive from the other can be called that-- produced a sinking feeling in my stomach. It made me realise that my knowledge was so pathetically inadequate that I had no real business entering into the game at such a late stage. As I was to learn over the next few days, Najibullah's government was in an extremely parlous situation. A person less than fully cognisant of the facts should not have been venturing into the territory.

On looking back at my Kabul experience from the vantage point of today, I now know that there was a significant gap between my conceptualisations about the world and my sensing of its reality. Or, more precisely, I could not see that theories I had taken on were being manifested in the reality around me. Or, even more precisely, that conceptualisations had become reality. Some of the harshest theories about how the world worked were actually being validated in the space and time I was situated in.

Yes! I knew that the world had been split from a time before my birth into two rival camps with a non- aligned group of countries floating in between. That the two superpowers each had its allies and clients was another elemental block of my understanding of the world. Beyond that it got a little tricky because I had yet to see that theory had transited into reality. Activist friends had made me understand that the armed conflicts of the Cold War were fought between the client states. Afghanistan was the client of one superpower and Pakistan of the other. I was flying into Kabul to cover a fight that was once again getting hot. However, I had not mentally linked the last threads together to arrive at the realisation that this particular game had moved into injury time.

Months earlier, during my vacation, I had bemusedly followed with friends in Delhi, the attempted coup in Moscow and the emergence of Boris Yeltsin as the most powerful figure in that bloc. In the time that followed, I had desultorily read about the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. However, I had not been made aware of, or had not paid attention to certain details. Yeltsin's decision, in the winter of 1991-92, to stop the supply of munitions and fuel to the Najibullah government was perhaps not made public. Even if it had been, I had probably dismissed it as Pakistani propaganda or failed to comprehend its impact.

Why was I so naive? One answer is that, in those days when the Internet was in its infancy, I was very dependent on Pakistani papers for Afghan news. Some of the details were either too scattered or too sketchy to hold attention. Either because of the military's control over reporting or their own lack of resources, Pakistani media outlets hardly ever sent their own staff into the field. There were some extremely well-informed correspondents, with Rahimullah Yusufzai probably the foremost among them. But they too were circumspect about the matter they put out.

Communiques issued by Mujahideen groups about the capture of one area or the other were seldom supported by reliable photographic evidence. In their absence, map-reading made little sense. Meanwhile, from what I could see from the activity of its diplomats in Delhi and Islamabad, the Najibullah regime continued as a viable entity. Rationalisations of this sort cannot obscure the fact that I was woefully under-prepared for my assignment and had no choice other than learn on the run.

With Russia cutting off essential supplies by early 1992, the Kabul regime had become very frugal in its use of airpower, its most vital weapon. Factions within the regime, seeing the writing on the wall, were making their own separate arrangements for the future. The chasm between the two main groups of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan--Khalq (Masses in Pashto) and Parcham (Flag)--had widened.

Najibullah, despite his phenomenal political acumen, was struggling to hold it all together. By the time I landed in Kabul. though I had no clue, the PDPA had virtually split along ethnic lines with the Pakhtoons (largely in the Khalq) making overtures to Hekmetyar and Haqqani and the Parchamite Tajiks tying up with Massoud.

On the flight, the American kept talking about the fall of Jebel-O-Siraj and Charikar. From the way he spoke, the phrases had some terrible significance. Yet, the Afghan while perturbed was not panicking and so I took it to be not much more than Yankee bluster. A few days later I was to learn that Charikar, a town to the north of Kabul, controlled the access both to the Salang Tunnel (Najibullah's only road link to the northern border) and to Massoud's stronghold in the Panjshir Valley. Its capture meant that the Lion of the Panjshir had virtually closed the northern arc of the ring around Kabul.

Easily the most interesting part of that dreary flight was the landing. Appan had told me about it. Ridges, segmented from one another, circle the Afghan capital and Mujahideen often resorted to the tactic of infiltrating those high points at random. From some of these positions, the rebels could fire rockets at  aircraft as they took off or landed. Over the years, the pilots had devised a technique by which they would fly to a very high point perpendicular to the middle of the runway and then descend in very tight spirals shooting flares all the time to decoy heat-seeking rockets. Spiralling upwards must have been even more difficult and they perhaps did so by using more flares. Or, maybe by taking off within a bubble created by circling Mi-24 helicopter gunships.

Post-landing memories are somewhat blearier. In mentioning this, I am not referring merely to the hours immediately following touchdown but also to the fortnight or so that ensued. One cardinal mistake I made was that I failed to keep a daily journal. Without a diary as a ready reckoner, the events that unfolded sometimes in rapid succession blurred together in the memory. The disorientation of being in a very unfamiliar milieu also prevented images from being properly registered and made amenable to orderly recall.

(Writer is former editor of Mathrubhumi)