Sir, – I spent a fair bit of the 1980s and 19 90s trekking in the Himalayas – India and Nepal at first, then, towards the end, Pakistan. On one of my last journeys I crossed the Ganglewatt Pass and ended up for a while in the lands of the Hindu Kush.
I was a lone European, travelling with a couple of local tribesmen, and that journey confirmed in me a belief that had began to form in my mind on my very first journeys into this “desert on the roof of the world”.
The men I was travelling were dressed for the most part in the thin clothes of the hill tribes, topped with woollen shawls, and with little but rubber shoes on their feet. They marched for days across ice and glacial moraine, forded snow-melt rivers and slept at night under the stars, wrapped in their shawls; sometimes they found a cave or overhang to shelter in. Whenever we stopped they would brew tea on a twig and dung fire making hardly any smoke, and in the evening they would bake “Balti bread” on a flat stone and roast small portions of goat which they carried in their shoulder bags. They could live for months at a time like that if they had to, and they knew all the dry routes over the high passes and all the shifting routes across the groaning glaciers.
Like all the people I met in the mountains, they were hospitable to the Nth degree, but at the same time solidly proud of their country their culture and their history.
I saw then why the walls of so many village churches in Britain carry tablets commemorating the dead of the Afghan Wars, and why the Russians had been beaten into exhaustion by the mujahideen.
Fighters who can live for days on nothing, who can carry massive loads across a murderous landscape and can vanish into dust are unbeatable – unless you nuke the whole country.
When Blair and Bush blundered into Afghanistan again, ignoring the lessons of history, it was obvious to me that it would end up the way it has. I take no comfort in this. Left to itself, Afghanistan would have found its own version of modernity, but ever since the UK/US clandestine interventions which led to the Russian invasion and all that followed, this has been denied them. – Yours, etc,
MIKE HARDING,
Clifden,
Co Galway.