Soldiers of God
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Soldiers of God
Robert D. Kaplan
First time in paperback, with a new Introduction and final chapter
World affairs expert and intrepid travel journalist Robert D. Kaplan braved the dangers of war-ravaged Afghanistan in the 1980s, living among the mujahidin—the “soldiers of god”—whose unwavering devotion to Islam fueled their mission to oust the formidable Soviet invaders. In Soldiers of God we follow Kaplan’s extraordinary journey and learn how the thwarted Soviet invasion gave rise to the ruthless Taliban and the defining international conflagration of the twenty-first century.
Kaplan returns a decade later and brings to life a lawless frontier. What he reveals is astonishing: teeming refugee camps on the deeply contentious Pakistan-Afghanistan border; a war front that combines primitive fighters with the most technologically advanced weapons known to man; rigorous Islamic indoctrination academies; a land of minefields plagued by drought, fierce tribalism, insurmountable ethnic and religious divisions, an abysmal literacy rate, and legions of war orphans who seek stability in military brotherhood. Traveling alongside Islamic guerrilla fighters, sharing their food, observing their piety in the face of deprivation, and witnessing their determination, Kaplan offers a unique opportunity to increase our understanding of a people and a country that are at the center of world events.
Robert D. Kaplan
SHOULDERS of GOD
With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
For my mother
and
for my late father,
Philip A. Kaplan
I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war; and all of them come with defeat.
—Ernest Hemingway, Men at War
Map
Introduction
Soldiers of God, which was first published in 1990 (with the subtitle “With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan”), provides the historical context for the emergence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. My new final chapter, “The Lawless Frontier,” which appeared as a long article in the September 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, provides the follow-up. Both Soldiers of God and “The Lawless Frontier” also offer profiles of some of the prominent personalities in a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
I finished writing Soldiers of God at my home in Greece thirteen years ago, after several lengthy trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province in the mid- and late-1980s. It was the last phase of the Cold War, and while no one could predict how suddenly and definitively it would end, there were some premonitions in Afghanistan. The Afghan mujahidin (Islamic “holy warriors”) were in many respects a bunch of ornery backwoodsmen, whose religious and tribal creed seemed to flow naturally from the austere living conditions of the high desert — unlike the more abstract and ideological brand of Islam of the Taliban (“Knowledge Seekers”), who would emerge a few years later. The mujahidin in the 1980s were exacting a terrible price from the Soviet military occupiers of their country. I remember meeting captured Soviet soldiers, whom the mujahidin would make available to journalists: these Soviets were terrified and disillusioned youngsters, unsure about what they had been fighting for. Failure and an abject lack of pride registered in their eyes. It was a common assumption among the journalists who covered the mujahidin that the war in Afghanistan would ultimately have a profound impact upon Soviet society.
In 1989 the world media spotlight soon shifted from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Empire was cracking apart, helped by the trauma of the Soviet catastrophe in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was forgotten, and partly as a consequence has come back to haunt the West: a failed, bankrupt state in which terrorists with fat wallets set up shop. The primitive defiles of eastern Afghanistan — lacking electricity and running water — are where the successful plan to destroy the World Trade Center towers and a wing of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, likely had its roots.
Soldiers of God is a tale of strong-willed individuals as well as of ethnic groups formed by history and geography. I was a younger, less mature writer when I wrote Soldiers of God. I was caught up in the struggle to liberate Afghanistan, and my lack of objectivity shows; nor was I as fair to some people, or as critical of others, as I should have been. Soldiers of God is not a primer for current or future policy in Afghanistan. But it may succeed in giving the reader a sense of the mood, the beauty, and the heady politics of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier during the last phase of the Cold War.
Afghanistan, in addition to everything else that has been said about it, is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever known: the woodsmoke, the mudbrick redoubts, the purifying heat and emptiness, the tribal costumes in a part of the world unadulterated by cheap Western polyesters….
Between the writing of Soldiers of God and “The Lawless Frontier,” much happened in Afghanistan that I do not cover in this volume. In those intervening years, Afghanistan dissolved into chaos. Though the mujahidin were successful in driving out the Soviets, they failed to consolidate their victory. The mujahidin suffered the classic weakness of many guerrilla movements: they could defend their homes and make life miserable for the invader, but they lacked the unity and organization required to do what has been the central role of government since time immemorial: monopolize the use of force to create order, so that individuals and groups have no need to fear each other, and can consequently get on with their lives and engage in commerce. The early 1990s, after Soldiers of God was finished, were characterized by the wars of the mujahidin, in which one group of guerrillas would bomb the capital of Kabul in order to uproot another group from the city. In those years, Afghans learned to hate the very people who had liberated them from their Soviet occupiers.
Of all the mujahidin groups, the most ruthless and destructive was Hizb-I-Islami (the “Party of Islam”), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former student rabble rouser at Kabul University and one of the characters in Soldiers of God. In fact, Soldiers of God tells an early version of a story that other journalists have elaborated on over the years: how the Pakistani security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, favored Hekmatyar over more moderate mujahidin groups. The result was the rise of anarchy and extremism in Afghanistan, which provided a fertile petri dish for the growth of the Taliban. “The Lawless Frontier” provides the details of how the Taliban came into being in the mid-1990s.
Still, the criticisms of American policy during the period of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan may lack some historical and philosophical context. The United States, in the 1980s, was doing what great powers have done throughout history, in order to survive as great powers: pursue its strategic interests. A state that neglects the projection of power has little chance of spreading its values. Moreover, foreign policy is about priorities: in the 1980s, the welfare of Afghanistan was secondary to the defeat of the Soviet Union, America’s adversary in a bipolar world. That is a brutal, tragic realization, but as someone who reported on Eastern Europe during the Cold War, it is one that I accept. And the fact that towers above all others is that arming the mujahidin — however imperfectly it was done — played a significant role in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe. The imperfections in the Reagan administration’s policy, of course, helped lead to a new challenge: that of terrorism. Just as the imperfections in our military strategy against Nazi Germany in the latter part of World War II helped lead to the domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union for forty-four years, necessitating the Cold War.
The United States armed Hekmatyar’s radicals because that is what the Pakistanis wanted us to do. The U.S. demurred to the Pakistanis for several, somewhat unde
rstandable reasons. The CIA had a long-standing and fruitful relationship with the Pakistani security establishment that preceded the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (For example, the Pakistanis had been instrumental in helping the Nixon Administration reestablish ties with China in the early 1970s.) Defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan required the use of Pakistan as a rear base: something that was not altogether politically popular in Pakistan itself. Nevertheless, Pakistan’s leader, Zia ul-Haq, supported the U.S. effort wholeheartedly, and obviously he wanted something in return. Zia required the leeway to arm Hekmatyar, whom the Pakistanis felt they could control more easily than the other mujahidin leaders — that way a post-Soviet Afghanistan would be an ally of Pakistan.
And there was another factor: our own insecurity that was partly a result of our experience in Vietnam, where we assumed a knowledge of the local people and their culture which we either did not have, or neglected to properly employ. So this time better to listen to the Pakistanis, they were the real experts on the region. Once again, trauma and guilt over Vietnam helped lead to a grave mistake. For Hekmatyar’s ability to unleash chaos in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, and his inability to end what he had begun, led directly to the birth of the Taliban, who would provide Osama bin Laden with a safe haven for terrorizing the United States.
Hekmatyar went into exile for a time in Iran after the Taliban’s ascension to power. But he should never be ruled out of any future scenario: he is charismatic, organized, and absolutely ruthless. As for some of the other characters in Soldiers of God, here is what has happened to them:
Ahmad Shah Massoud, the resourceful mujahidin leader in northern Afghanistan, held power for a time in Kabul in the early 1990s. But he was far less successful as a political leader than he had been as a guerrilla fighter. His minority status as an ethnic Tajik in a country dominated by Pathans (alternatively spelled as Pushtuns or Pashtoons) was a drawback. After the Taliban emerged, Massoud went back to the hills with his men. He represented the most potent military force against the Taliban, just as he had against the Soviets. Indeed, Massoud might be considered among the greatest guerrilla fighters of the twentieth century, putting the Afghans in the same category as the Vietnamese and the Eritreans. Unable to match Massoud in the field of battle, Osama bin Laden dispatched him with a suicide bomber disguised as a journalist, to whom Massoud unwittingly granted an interview. Massoud died in September 2001, the same week of the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Hamid Karzai, the most moderate and Westernized of the mujahidin in Soldiers of God, has, despite the radicalization of Afghanistan, remained central to its politics. Because of his talent, education, and royal lineage — Karzai’s roots go back the first Afghan king, Ahmad Shah Durrani — he was a deputy foreign minister in a mujahidin government from 1992 to 1994, was even courted for a time by the Taliban, and will likely play a role in any post-Taliban government that emerges in Afghanistan. Karzai’s father, Abdulahad Karzai, the headman of the Popolzai branch of the Pathans, was assassinated in July 2000, reportedly by the Taliban.
Abdul Haq, among the most notable Pathan commanders against the Soviets in the mid-1980s, was losing relevance as Soldiers of God went to press in January 1990. He lived for a time in the Arabian Gulf. Still, he remained a prominent figure in Afghan refugee circles, and as a moderate pro-Western ex-mujahidin commander with Islamic credentials, he has recently been reported to be playing a significant role in plans for a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Haq is smart, has a record of political prescience, and understands the West better than many other mujahidin. In 1999 Haq suffered a major tragedy. His wife and son were assassinated in their home in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier. Some reports linked the murderers to the Taliban, whose intention was to kill Haq. But he was not at home.
Yunus Khalis, the crusty red-beard who led the strongest mujahidin group in eastern Afghanistan, died some years ago. It was in the Islamic academies run by Khalis in the Pakistani borderlands where elements of the Taliban first emerged in the mid-1990s. A plantation owned by Khalis in eastern Afghanistan has been linked to one of bin Laden’s training camps.
One night, in particular, summed up the mystery of the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. I had gone with another journalist to visit the headquarters in Peshawar of the mujahidin warlord of eastern Afghanistan, Jallalhuddin Haqqani. Haq-qani was a fierce fighter who was being helped not only by the CIA, via the Pakistani intelligence services, but also by wealthy Wahabi extremists from Saudi Arabia. It was dark and smoky that night in the room where Haqqani had been holding court to a group of leading Saudi radicals. Everywhere on the Northwest Frontier the mujahidin welcomed journalists into their homes. Suddenly, here it was different. I will never forget the anger in the eyes of those Saudis when my and friend and I, obviously Westerners, entered to talk with Haqqani. No tea was offered. We took the hint and left. When Osama bin Laden first appeared in news stories in the early 1990s, I began to wonder if, perhaps, he had been among the Saudis in the room that night.
Though he probably wasn’t, I still missed the story. I never gave sufficient attention in my reporting to the incubating menace posed by some of the most radical elements attracted to the mujahidin from other parts of the Islamic world; or how a movement that for the moment served American interests might next turn against America. It was the knowledge of my failure that partly motivated my return to the region in the spring of 2000, a trip that resulted in “The Lawless Frontier,” which serves as a coda to Soldiers of God.
Prologue
Walking Through a Minefield
AMPUTATIONS were the most common form of surgery in Afghanistan in the 1980s. A West German doctor, Frank Pau-lin, traveled around Nangarhar province in April 1985, cutting off the limbs of mine victims with a survival knife. “Sometimes I’d use a saw, basically anything I could get my hands on,” he recollected. The only anesthetic that Paulin had available for his patients was ordinary barbiturates. Some of the patients died, but the ones who survived wouldn’t have had a chance without him. Radio Moscow accused Paulin by name of being a “CIA spy.” While being hunted by Soviet troops, he contracted cholera and had to be carried on the back of a mule over a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain pass to safety in Pakistan. Paulin had only one fear: that he too would step on a mine.
An Afghan who stepped on a mine frequently died of shock and loss of blood a few feet from the explosion. More often, he was carried by a relative or friend to a primitive medical outpost run by someone like Paulin. If the victim was really lucky, he made it to a Red Cross hospital in Quetta or Peshawar over the border in Pakistan — antiseptic sanctuaries of Western medicine where emergency surgery was conducted around the clock.
I remember a Scottish surgeon at one of these hospitals who had just come off a long shift and needed to talk and get a little drunk. In the bar at Peshawar’s American Club, he sat at a table with me and two other journalists and recited from memory several stanzas of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ballad of East and West” in a deliberately loud and passionate voice, as if to demonstrate that he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him:
“Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the Border-side, And he has lifted the Colonel’s mare that is the Colonel’s pride. He has lifted her out of the stable-door between the dawn and the day, And turned the calkins upon her feet, and ridden her far away.”
At the table there was an embarrassed silence. Then the surgeon talked about what was really on his mind. “The philosophy of war is truly sinister,” he said in a hushed tone. “Now, you take the Russians. Most of the mines they’ve laid are designed to maim, not kill, because a dead body causes no inconvenience. It only removes the one dead person from the field. But somebody who is wounded and in pain requires the full-time assistance of several people all down the line who could otherwise be fighting. And if you want to depopulate an area, then you want many of the casualties to be small children. The most stubborn peasants will
give up and flee when their children are mutilated.”
These were old facts that left everyone at the table numb. In Peshawar the journalists and relief workers all knew these things. But the surgeon had discovered them on his own in the lonely, pulsing stillness of the operating theater, where he was in constant physical contact with the evidence. When he recited Kipling’s poetry it showed all over his face.
“The future battlefield is to be liberally sown with mines,” wrote the British military historian John Keegan in his prophetic work The Face of Battle. Never before in history have mines played such an important role in a war as in Afghanistan. Nobody knows precisely how many were sown by Soviet troops and airmen in the ten years between their invasion and their withdrawal. The figures offered are biblical. The British Broadcasting Corporation, on June 8, 1988, simply stated “millions.” The Afghan resistance claimed five million. The U.S. government’s first estimate was three million. Later, on August 15, 1988, State Department spokesman Charles Red-mon said the figure was more likely “between 10 and 30 million.” That would be 2 mines for every Afghan who survived the war; between 40 and 120 mines per square mile of Afghan territory. Tens of thousands of civilians, if not more — many of them small children — have already been disabled by mine detonations in Afghanistan. Even though the Russian phase of the war has ended, mines threaten to kill and maim thousands more, some of whom haven’t been born yet.
“The widespread sowing of millions of land mines has added an ominous new dimension to the rehabilitation effort,” Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 23, 1988. According to both American and United Nations officials, mines will cripple Afghanistan’s economic life for years to come, inhibiting the tilling of fields, access to pasture areas, and collection of firewood.