as a tourist interest. And then, during World War II, the Brits also built large concrete tank obstacles commonly referred to as ‘dragon’s teeth’, along the Khyber valley due to fears of a German tank invasion into India. A number of these dragon’s teeth remain in place and can still be seen if you drive along towards the pass. Interestingly, the area is also connected with the local, highly skilled, counterfeit arms industry (I have fired many copied rifles from this industry, which are amazing to see!) and for the smuggling of various commodities, including narcotics from Afghanistan.
ooOoo
Well, we eventually passed on through the ragged hills that adjoin the Khyber Pass, as we moved deeper west into the tribal areas. Finally, we came to our assigned crossing point at a location way off the main roads, now in the mountains where a small, border check post was established. After some discussion in Urdu between our team and the border guards, we were let past. The road soon became unpaved, more broken and in total disrepair. It was clear from the facial expressions of the border guards that not many ferengies (or foreigners) such as me took this route, nor were the same high quality vehicles very often seen in this area.
At one point, just after passing the border guards, we paused on some high ground in the mountains and looked over a wide valley, with a clear track seen in the far distance. With my military eyes scanning the horizon I saw two Soviet vehicles, a T55 tank and a BRDM scout vehicle, destroyed and now stationary beside the track in the very far distance. On enquiring where we were, I was told this was now Paktia Province and yes indeed, we were inside Afghanistan.
I admit, even today as I write this, a smile emerges on my face and I can feel the eagerness yet that little bit of concern I had going into this ‘wild and risky’ place I had been told about and briefed about, back in Canberra what seemed like years ago. I looked at the two Pashtuns riding in the car with me, our driver and the administrative assistant, and thought of the hundreds of others working with ATC. They were a proud and good looking race of people whose history is something to be well read. Most of the men were tall and well-muscled with an athletic presence about them. They had Aryan looks with thick, dark eyebrows and an ostensibly strong nose. All had lengthy hair which was the style of the day and wore the mandatory Islamic type of beard that was thick, relatively long and almost always jet black. Typically they would wear some form of headdress, either a chitrali (or flat wool hat) or more often a turban tied around their heads. In fact, except for their main clothing, they really looked more like movie actors, or classic pirates, rather than Afghan deminers. For the local women, it was a little harder to describe their dress, as they wore the full fitting chador that was only open around the eyes, or more commonly they wore the burkhas, that completely covered their faces allowing only a small grid of cloth for them to see through.
Well, after I made the confirmatory radio checks back to our office in Peshawar and another to our HQs in Islamabad, we moved on down into the valley. This was followed by the Afghan driver calling on the same radio to the demining party who we were to meet deep down in this valley. This was the normal procedure whenever and wherever we moved in Afghanistan as, surely, there was no-one available or capable of coming to rescue us in any sort of timely manner, should an accident or incident take place. Communications by radio were, at that time, our most important asset.
Surprisingly the drive from our hill top viewing, down into the valley took almost an hour as the road quickly turned into a weaving and unpaved track that had seen no maintenance for many years. The vehicles bounced and crunched on every rock and into every pothole as I hung firmly to the side handles in the rear of the car. This trip, down into the valley was cumbersome and tiring for me though I was soon to get very used to this form of travel, as it quickly became normal for all moves in the country. Often, as will be described later, such journeys were far worse.
On this trip and all subsequent trips I wore the traditional shalwar kameez clothing of the Afghans and Pakistanis. It was a long-sleeved shirt that was left outside the trousers and hung to about midway from the knee to the hips. The trousers (shalwar) were massive and at first comical, as they were five times the width of normal trousers. They were secured by a thin rope much like pyjamas, though this loose material was largely hidden by the long shirt (kameez). It was comfortable to wear and was set off by a chitrali cap which is woollen and flat on top and rolled up at the sides. In later trips I also grew a beard, though I looked more like Red Beard the Pirate than a local Afghan.
Once in the valley, we drove past the T55 tank and the BRDM that I had seen earlier. They had both been destroyed at least a couple of years before, though remained basically intact. I felt like I desperately wanted to get out and climb all over them, though I knew well the hazards of landmines in these areas and that I should do no more than look at them through the car windows. Incidentally, our drivers passed these war machines with barely a side glance and, again, I was soon to understand why these machines were now nothing more than scenery here in Afghanistan.
We drove on for an intolerably long time along the rough, unpaved and barely tracked routes, across the valley floor heading north west, to our night destination. We must have travelled for 2–3 hours since entering the valley floor and it was now late afternoon and still we were driving. I knew driving after dark was prohibited by the UN, though I had assumed only because of driver safety. However, I was to learn on my next trip that night-flying aircrafts from the Afghan Air Force often bombed moving vehicles at night and this was the real reason for the restriction.
In these days of 1991, the Afghan government was still communist and this government remained the enemy of the mujahideen groupings that operated throughout much of the country. They had been fighting the Soviets and the Afghan government for almost 20 years and this war continued. We, the deminers, would often look like mujahideen because of our dress and grouping of thirty to forty bodies at one time. From an informant’s perspective, or from a combat pilot’s perspective, we must have definitely looked like mujahideen.
There were surprisingly very few other cars on our road as we continued to drive and I guess we passed only about three to four vehicles heading towards us, with about the same going our direction. All were beaten up, old Toyota pick-ups, mostly filled with armed men, though we also saw a few of the very old Yak 4x4s, which were Soviet era vehicles and resembled those seen on WW2 movies. As a military guy who had studied Soviet military machinery, aircraft, ships and vehicles for several years without ever actually seeing any, the T55, BRDM and these Yak 4x4s were a real treat.
Well, by this time, it was nearly 5 pm and definitely getting somewhat dark, quite quickly. There was low cloud cover that day and the available light was rapidly disappearing. I heard Kefayatullah talking on the radio a little earlier and he told me that our demining crew had been expecting us for lunch, but we were far too late for that.
By just as the clock struck 5 pm, we turned a rocky corner and a small but well-developed village was clearly seen. The village was very typically Afghan with high mud walls surrounding the various compounds with their large, heavy wooden gates. A few trees grew alongside the dirt road and noticeably more grew inside the compounds. Of course, much of the village was in disrepair or had been damaged by shelling and fighting.
There was almost zero activity to be seen in the town itself, except for a few men walking along the sides of the road with AK-47 rifles casually draped over their shoulders. The shops were all closed by this late hour and few cars were to be seen. The Paktia River passed to our eastern side and was a rushing torrent as the winter snows were still melting and, even so far away, continued to affect this area of the country.
A few minutes later we pulled up outside a series of wooden doors as armed men in shalwar kameez and rifles, opened the doors. We motored inside where I saw it was a huge compound with a great number of mango and almond trees growing. The main building was made of mud and timber but was two stories high, strong-looking and obviously from a design and construction style of perhaps a thousand years before. Outside was a small but growing group of men, deminers I assumed, one of whom stood out. He was a tallish
