David Pratt on his new work Pictures From Afghanistan

There is an old saying that goes: “You can rent an Afghan, but you can never buy one.” Some might think this a romantic notion, but it’s more of a truism than many imagine. Never a people to be patronised, they take even more unkindly to being ruled, especially by outsiders.

On that score certainly, history has often dealt Afghanistan a malign hand. But those who have dared venture up against its rugged landscape and dogged fighters have often paid dearly.

As Olaf Caroe in his historical book The Pathans– about Afghanistan’s main ethnic group – once put it, this is a place where ‘‘the land was made for the men in it, not men for the land’’.

It’s that stubborn streak and the Afghans’ dislike of being told by others how to run their affairs that almost 40 years ago first led me to go there as a freelance photojournalist.

Their determination to resist the Soviet Red Army, who rolled into Afghanistan back in the 1980s, saw me head off independently with no assignment and virtually no track record as a reporter to the wilds of the North-West Frontier in Pakistan.

It was there in the city of Peshawar, which sits at the foot of the famous Khyber Pass on the border with Afghanistan, that I was to meet the man who would become my friend and plunge me headlong through the Hindu Kush mountains into a war and love affair with his country. His name was Sayed Hussein Anwari.

As a Shia commander of mujahideen guerrilla fighters with the Harakat-e-Islami party of Afghanistan, it was Anwari who took me under his wing and through whom for years to come I would be associated with the varying fortunes of his country.

Almost four decades on from that initial encounter, I wonder what he first made of the Scottish working-class boy draped in cameras who turned up alone at his guerrilla group headquarters having tracked them down in the tumbling, smog-filled chaotic backstreets of Peshawar.

What too would Anwari, had he still been alive, have made all these years later of the documentary film, Pictures From Afghanistan, that will see its premiere screening a week today as part of the Glasgow Film Festival and later be broadcast on BBC Scotland?

For without Anwari and his willingness to take me on those long gruelling marches across the frontier and into Afghanistan’s mountains where he and his men fought the Russians, the great adventure that followed would never have begun.

It was more than a year ago when I sat down in Glasgow’s Merchant City over a beer with Robbie Fraser, the filmmaker and director who would make Pictures From Afghanistan. His own track record spoke for itself, having around that time just completed an acclaimed film on the legendary Scottish mountaineer Hamish MacInnes, entitled Final Ascent.

Before that another Hamish had been the focus of Fraser’s lens, when he charted the life of Perthshire-born Scottish cultural colossus Hamish Henderson. I was, in other words, in solid filmmaking hands and during the many meetings with Fraser in the weeks and months that followed I’d often recount those stories and characters from Afghanistan that ultimately formed the narrative thread of the film.

“Every rock, every hill has its story,” wrote a young Winston Churchill in a despatch to the Daily Telegraph back in those Great Game days of 1897, as the British and Russian empires tussled for strategic control of the region at the heart of which sat Afghanistan. Churchill was right on that count.

ANYONE who goes to Afghanistan can’t help but feel the richness of this reservoir of tales and desire for storytelling. Where else but in the North-West Frontier town of Peshawar on the edge of Afghanistan would you expect to find the Kissa Qani or storytellers’ bazaar? To visit these wild lands is to feel part of a great narrative tradition and in part that power of storytelling lies at the core of Pictures From Afghanistan.

Speaking with Robbie Fraser during those formative stages of pulling the film together I would tell him of those early days in Peshawar meeting Anwari.

Someone once said that conspiracy is to Peshawar what prayer is to the Vatican, and so it was when I first arrived in the frontier town.

With its teeming bazaars and coffin-narrow alleyways, the Peshawar has always been a den of spies, gunrunners, drug dealers, mercenaries and Islamic holy warriors. In the same way that Peshawar caught the imagination of a young photojournalist all those years ago, so too did it kindle a fascination for Fraser today as a filmmaker. We spoke too of those early forays into Afghanistan with Anwari and his men.

How on the first march across the frontier, disguised in a turban and the baggy outfit or shalwar kameez worn by locals, I followed my Afghan guides along a dried up river-bed through the same frontier foothills where countless soldiers, explorers and smugglers had journeyed in earlier times.

Sidestepping a small cluster of anti-personnel landmines on the track ahead of us, I recall pointing to the ground and asking that pressing one word question of my guide: “Pakistan?”

“No, Afghanistan,” he instantly replied with a grin. After weeks of clandestine negotiations and plans in Peshawar, here I was finally on Afghan soil in the midst of a war that few westerners had then managed to access.

Those marches that followed and recounted in the film are something that will always stick in my mind. Fear and exhaustion were constant companions. Often at night explosions would growl and rumble and the horizon flicker like a candlelit room from some far-off battle or bombardment.

At night too, as fatigue set in, events would assume an almost surreal quality, as if a line from the Arabian Nights had come to life. But instead of the 40 thieves, other groups of footsore, hollow-eyed mujahideen would pass by, murmuring “Manda nabashi’’ – “May you not be tired” – to which the reply was “Zenda bashi” -–“May you live”.

Exhausting and terrifying as they often were, perhaps never have I felt more alive than during those countless marches that I repeated over many years. Western reporters, after all, were not meant to be inside Afghanistan with the guerrillas, and the penalties if caught by the Russians could be severe indeed.

But Pictures From Afghanistan is not solely about that era. Years later in the 1990s, after the Russians had withdrawn from Afghanistan as Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika prevailed, the daily ritual of slaughter and survival was no longer against the communists. Having routed the “reds”, Afghanistan’s “holy warriors” now turned on each other in a bitter factional struggle for control of the country’s capital, Kabul.

Anwari and his men inevitably became embroiled in that battle, which ravaged the Afghan capital and during which I took some of my most memorable photographs.

AFTER lengthy discussion, Robbie Fraser and I decided the only way to really bring home the resonance of those stills images for the film was to return to Afghanistan today and some of the precise locations where the photographs were originally taken in Kabul.

With us on our subsequent journey to Kabul went a portfolio of my images of large black and white prints, among them pictures of Kabul Zoo, that in the 1990s straddled the frontline between the warring factions.

Then there was the Russian Science and Cultural Centre, now rebuilt but which back then was a war ruin and scene of some of the fiercest fighting.

Today the centre’s director is a man called Vyacheslav Nekrasov, who during the years of the Soviet war in Afghanistan was an intelligence officer and would doubtless have had me imprisoned as a spy had we encountered each other back then.

For the film too we visited Kabul’s Puli-Mahmood Khan neighbourhood where back in the 90s along with Anwari’s men, I was based in a bomb-blasted bus station from which surrounding street-to-street and often house-to-house fighting ensued.

In all, it was a moving and sometimes surreal experience. Perhaps more than anything it’s these cameo insights shot on location in Kabul, along with my archive stills and video footage, that director Robbie Fraser has masterfully fused to bring home why Afghanistan matters so much to me, and now I suspect to him.

As he told me himself the film presented him with the perfect opportunity to tell my story, but also to “re-tell the story of a country which many people could be forgiven for seeing as an intractable, bloody mess”.

In that respect he says the film reveals the place and its people “from some unexpected angles.”

That he too has been well and truly bitten by the Afghanistan bug I have no doubt.

The light, the calls to prayer, the people, have all by his own admission had an impact on him, as I felt sure it would before we set out to film in the country.

Indeed such has been the impact on the director that he now regularly finds himself a visitor to the Bab E Khyber restaurant in Glasgow’s south side for his “fix” of Afghan food.

On a sadder note, if I have one regret about the film it’s that my old friend Sayed Hussein Anwari was not around on my last visit to talk to me or see it finished. He was a remarkable man whose friendship and cameraderie I will always cherish. For a guerrilla leader who survived many close calls during those years of the Soviet War, he sadly died in 2016 of cancer in India where he was receiving treatment.

But the ties of friendship, as I’ve said, are strong in Afghanistan and often span across generations as I hope will become apparent to those of you who see the film. I will say no more on that for now.

"Trust a Brahmin before a snake, a snake before a harlot and a harlot before an Afghan," the character Kim in Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name, used the Hindu saying to derisorily describe the Afghan character when the book was published in 1901.

Historically maligned and often misunderstood, what such an observation fails to make clear however is that those same Afghans wouldn’t hesitate to give you their last morsel of food or the shelter of their home.

For nearly four decades now I’ve followed the fortunes of this hard land and its generous people who have never in that time known a lasting peace.

It was conflict that first took me there, and why I continue to return. Having said that, even without the war, or jang, as the Dari word beautifully captures its true clashing, dislocating essence, I would still be drawn to this extraordinary place.

A few days ago knowing that Pictures From Afghanistan is due to be screened for the first time, someone asked me; “So the film’s a story about war then?” Not really, I replied. More of a love story.

The Glasgow Film Festival premiere screening of Pictures From Afghanistan followed by a Q&A with David Pratt, chaired by Allan Little, is at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Sunday March 1 at 1:15pm. Tickets available on the GFF website.