Up The Panjsher!
In September 2003, SGAA organised a sponsored walk in Afghanistan to raise money for the charity and to celebrate it's 20th anniversary. 24 hardy walkers, plus five members of the Gall family and Diane Steer, a member of the committee, walked and rode up the 100-mile length of the Panjsher valley that lies north-east of Kabul, and leads to the Anjuman Pass. Each walker was asked to raise a minimum of £2,000 over and above their expenses. Many of them raised and continue to raise much more. So thank you to the many generous donors who supported the walkers and the Gall family. Below are accounts written by two of the walkers.
An account by Nigel Ryan, walker and ex-editor of ITN
Well, we did it. We had set out to cover ten miles a day in the Panjsher valley, camping out along the route used by successive conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Northern Alliance in their war against the Taliban two years before. And we had done it. Our walk has raised £130,000 for Sandy Gall's Afghanistan Appeal to provide artificial limbs for Afghan mine victims.
For Sandy Gall (75) and myself (73) the trip was relatively luxurious - this was the route we had taken twenty years before to make an ITV documentary about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Then we had been bombed and all but starved to death.
This time we were cossetted. With us was a cardiologist, a physiotherapist, a paramedic (consistently the sickest member of the group) and two surgeons (though no anaesthetist). Our camping equipment was leapfrogged ahead of us by jeep and we carried only what we needed for the day. Caterers kept up a non-stop supply of mutton broth and introduced into the Afghan food chain an inspiration in the shape of porridge.
Each night unseen hands dug two "long drop" throne loos: at times there was even hot water. Camping equipment has been transformed since my scouting days by lightweight sealed tents erected in five minutes with no gaps for insects, self-inflating mattresses; pretzel lamps that strap on to the forehead and free the hands, thermal sleeping bags, microlite walking sticks.
Last time I saw it the Panjsher was blackened by Soviet scorched earth policy and half deserted. Today it is getting back to its normal self, an enchanted 100 mile stretch of green locked 7,000 feet up in its mountain stronghold and watered by the Panjsher river. The people are returning, and with them traditional patrician hospitality. One minute we were slogging along a road of dust and loose rock, the next drinking tea sitting in a villager's little tree-lined patch of garden (its greenery sometimes deepened by a healthy clump of cannabis.) I ran into our horseman from twenty years ago who received me like a lord, with hugs and warmed cow's milk. Everywhere were posters of Ahmed Shah Massud, the Panjsheri hero assassinated by Al Qaeda suicide bombers, who changed the course of the twentieth century by showing the world that the Red Army was not invincible. Spookily we stayed in the guesthouse which had lodged his assassins; and in another in Kabul where one of Bin Laden's wives had lived.
Nobody knows how many million live mines are left in Afghanistan, ranging from Russian plastic devices that defy metal detectors to the stray unexploded US cluster bomb. Over 20 years SGAA, using a locally trained workforce of 80 men and - despite Taliban harassment - 20 women, has fitted 10,000 amputees with artificial limbs and thousands more with polio clubfoot and other endemic disabilities have been given orthopaedic appliances.
The Panjsher is said to be clear of mines; even so we kept an eye open for the red painted stones you find elsewhere
where you have to pass to one side (the trick being to know which). There were a few bad moments, such as walking on loose stones along terrifying precipices; and when we arrived at the foot of the Anjuman pass (nearly 15,000 feet and our final challenge) we learned that the jeeps had been held up by a river in spate. We spent a freezing hour in shirtsleeves watching the sun sink, taking our hearts with it. Then, looking like Rommel, Sandy Gall arrived with the blankets at the head of a column of vehicles, whereupon we instantly forgot we had ever been afraid.
Afghanistan is not yet quite ready for package tourism. Apart from mines and mayhem, the domestic airline flying you in has a few problems to sort out. Our party experienced two: three days' separation from our luggage and one emergency landing.
An account by John Elliott, Delhi correspondent
The only bad thing was flying clapped-out Ariana Afghan Airlines. When the rest of the group flew in via Dubai, their luggage was left behind by Ariana to make room for a trader's goods - thanks (according to well-informed Kabul gossip) to an "easily persuaded" Dubai cargo-handling agent! When they went home, the landing gear jammed on their Scariana (as it is known) Airbus 300. After circling for 90 minutes to burn surplus fuel, they returned to Kabul and a twisted front wheel slewed their Air India hand-me-down aircraft across the runway. And when I flew Ariana from Delhi to join the group last month, there was a tremendous juddering noise as we reached cruising height. Inexplicably, the pilot said he had lowered the undercarriage because it was too hot!
That apart, we encountered no danger - though there was of course violence in other parts of the country as the Taliban regroups, especially in the south, and old Mujahideen war lords battle for supremacy elsewhere. Some Danish-employed Afghan aid workers were killed just before we arrived. Bomb explosions blew up two houses near Bagram Airport (which we passed), and so on.
In Kabul it was peaceful, despite rather threatening US, Dutch and German ISAF security patrols, with the famous Chicken Street carpet and trinket shops all open for what looked like good business - including two shops selling snow leopard skins. We stayed in small rest house-hotels - mine, the Gandamak Lodge, run by a well-known and enterprising BBC cameraman, Peter Jouvenal, who's rented it from its Afghan owner, had comfortable rooms with elegant furniture, lots of carpets, a large garden and excellent (though expensive) food.
As we drove out through the northern outskirts of Kabul towards the Shamali Plains, the scene of many battles in the past, there was an enormous bustle of traders doing business and people building new small homes. In the Panjshir itself, the harvest (wheat and beans) was being taken in and, again, people were rebuilding their mud-brick homes. That's not of course typical of this war-ravaged country - which I guess is why we were rare tourists! (A journalist, Matthew Leeming, who's written on Afghanistan for The Spectator and others and is bringing out a guidebook next year, is planning to take groups on trips - www.matthewleeming.com - but there's little else at present).
We were a group of 24 paid-up walkers, aged from early 30s to mid-late 70s, Sandy and Eleanor Gall and two of their daughters; Fiona who is SGAA's consultant in Kabul, and the only paid ex-pat on the charity's books and Michaela, a professional painter who also helps voluntarily. There were about five or six SGAA staff to give general help and a similar number of cooks (and porters) who fed us superbly with Jan Mohammad, Masood's head of logistics and an old friend of Sandy's, in charge. Other Afghans included Haji Sufatmir, an elderly guide, who took one of the Rothschilds hunting Marco Polo sheep at the end of the 1970s. That made a total of 45 people or more. It's not surprising that the Independent's correspondent Phil Reeves, who interviewed Sandy in Kabul, started his story (it appeared on Sept 20) with the thought that American spy satellite watchers scouring the Afghan countryside for Osama bin Laden would surely be mystified by this straggling line of people moving up the Panjshir!
Our trek lasted ten days. We always tried to walk early to escape the midday sun and were generally away by 7am or so. At night we were in tents or rest houses - including Masood's main Defence Ministry rest house at Astana where I stayed when I interviewed him a month before he was assassinated in September 2001 (his two Arab suicide bombers also stayed there). We visited Masood's simple but striking tomb, sited dramatically on a hill in a bend of the river, and saw his house. In Kabul I met his elder brother, Yahya, and asked him how the assassins had managed to get past Masood's many security checks. He said it was because Masood had wanted to get his message across to Arab nations, the two came with good credentials and, most importantly, Afghanistan had never experienced suicide bombers, so they were not prepared for such an attack.
The valley is now peaceful, untouched by the violence elsewhere, after 20 years of being bombed and invaded by the Russians and then bombed by the Taliban. Rusting old Russian tanks and other equipment from the 1980s dot its dramatic landscape (along with some still-operational tanks, missiles and other military stores). The River Panjshir tumbles down past gaunt bare mountains - deforested by bombings and tree felling but green I'm told in the spring rains - and through well-cultivated green and yellow fields that are irrigated by mountain streams or long irrigation channels. Brown mud brick villages cluster in the base of the valley and sometimes climb up the mountainsides. Tank tracks and other parts add drama to grey stone walls where they are used as reinforcement.
The population of approaching 100,000 is being depleted as people drift to the towns for work because, with only one crop a year, this is not a rich valley. The people were almost universally friendly though women usually scurried behind their doors when they saw the men in our party.
Journalists rarely leave good behind when they move from one story to another but, for Sandy, now 75, the 1982 visit to find Masood triggered a mission to help disabled Afghans. He and Nigel Ryan both wrote books on the trip, and the pr lady for Sandy's publisher suggested that he offered to donate some of the proceeds to help the limbless. He had already been asked for help one of Masood's commanders, Abdul Wahid, who had lost a leg. This led to the creation in 1983 of the SGAA to care for victims of the Russian and (later) Taliban battles, plus children crippled by polio - and our walk marked the charity's 20th anniversary. As we walked up the Panjshir, the medical team - including two British doctors who are regular volunteer consultants - examined potential patients and told them about the clinics.
There were of course a few dramas and priceless remarks. A youngish banker lost his trendy sun specs down a deep drop loo when he lowered his head and bent too far to look down the hole! A lady architect tried to help by rolling a spare jeep wheel across a rough bridge and bowled it into the river - the driver waded in and saved it. Sandy memorably said in exasperation one day "What do people think this is - a holiday camp?"
I'm convinced the amount I've raised is money well spent. The SGAA is run with a minimum of administrative costs and is doing excellent work for people who certainly need help.