Jihad Redux

I returned from a long reporting trip in late 2006 to find a letter waiting. It was handwritten, in a spidery script that sloped off the page. ‘I read with great interest your articles in the Guardian concerning Osama bin Laden and the “war” in the North West Frontier,’ it began. ‘I spent six years there once.’ A flush of black-and-white pictures, dated in the 1930s and 40s, tumbled out. In one, sweaty-faced British officers in pith helmets trudged up a boulder-strewn hill; in another, white tents were arrayed under a line of sawtooth peaks. A turbaned Indian soldier posed on a desert airstrip before a biplane that was, inexplicably, tipped forward on to its nose. Then there was a portrait of a young soldier: tightly shaven in pressed khaki shorts, frowning into the camera, looking rather hot. This, it turned out, was my correspondent.

Charles Burman was ninety-two years old, writing from his home in Shropshire in western England. He was wheelchair-bound, a nurse cooked his meals, and arthritis had rusted his joints, but that didn’t stop him following the news from Pakistan. His particular interest was the tribal belt: the mountain citadel nestled against the Afghan border that, since 2001, had become one of the world’s most notorious trouble spots, a bubbling cauldron of tribesmen, Taliban and al-Qaeda fugitives. The headlines stirred deep, sometimes disturbing memories in the old man. Seven decades earlier, he explained, in the twilight of the British Empire, he had been dispatched to the tribal belt to fight a war with striking echoes of the present conflagration. ‘I stayed two thousand days,’ he noted with bitter-sweet precision. ‘It was rather dicey then too.’