Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Charles Lindholm, a Columbia University anthropologist who lived for two years in a Pathan village, observed that the Pathans “live within a system which obliges men to present themselves as completely self-reliant…. Suspicion, defensiveness, bravery, vengefulness, pride, envy,” and “a Hobbesian vision” characterize their world view and interpersonal relationships — meaning, the Pathan can trust no one but an outsider “to fill the role of friend.” This was the basis of friendships between British colonial administrators and tribal Pathans in the last century.

  At first I dismissed Lindholm’s analysis as mere anthropological twaddle. But there was clearly something to it. Haq’s men were known to resent their commander’s emotional dependence on foreigners, but Haq required these friendships. There was a side of his personality that could find release only with outsiders. He needed contact with values that were vastly different from his own. And this need increased when he was sidelined in Peshawar, recovering from the mine injury, at a time when the Soviets were starting their withdrawal and the war was entering a complex military and diplomatic phase that forced him to think in ways that he was not used to.

  By journalistic definition, Haq was a Moslem fundamentalist. He prayed five times a day. He kept the Ramadan fast. He didn’t smoke or drink. When traveling, he refused to wear Western clothes or eat Western food: in London to meet Prime Minister Thatcher, he wouldn’t eat in a Moslem Lebanese restaurant until the cook assured him that the food was hallal. The idea of a free Afghanistan not ruled by Islamic law was anathema to him. The media, and especially American think-tank specialists, sometimes lumped Haq and Hekmatyar together in the same category as “Iranian-style fundamentalists.” But with us Haq laughed, made jokes, and liked to gossip. And he was not driven by ideology. He was the only man in all the fundamentalist parties whom the nonfundamentalist Afghans, especially the intellectuals, liked and respected. I kept asking myself whether, in the final analysis, Haq was, in effect, just a military tool of others in the alliance — and in his own family, in particular — who were fundamentalists.

  Great as Abdul Haq’s need for outside friendships was, he was still a Pathan, and a Kabul-area commander at that. Shuster’s closeness to Haq and Din Mohammed was ultimately a measure of what Shuster had accomplished inside Afghanistan and of the physical risks he had taken. Haq and his brother never confided anything to Shuster until after he had made several cross-border forays.

  Everything in Peshawar always went back to time spent inside. Whatever other factors influenced a journalist’s access to a mujahidin commander — his personality, his knowledge of Pukhtu or Dari, his years covering the story, his commitment to the cause — the reporters closest to the commanders were those who had performed best under fire. There were no exceptions. From anywhere in town you could see the brown Khyber hills. Up there was where it was all taking place. As long as you didn’t go up there, the hills were a constant reminder of your fear, your guilt over remaining in Peshawar, and your burning curiosity about what was happening over the border. And once you returned from inside, the hills reminded you of how lucky you were to be back in Peshawar. I really knew nothing about Haq or Gunston or Shuster or much else about the war that was important until I went into Afghanistan. Only then did I begin to understand about the people I was interviewing, and why inside was all that mattered in a journalist’s relationship with a guerrilla commander.

  Shuster went over the border with Abdul Haq for the first time in October 1984. The trip lasted four weeks. The Soviets were in the midst of an offensive, spearheaded by airborne troops, to regain swaths of territory in the area south and east of Kabul. This was around the time a French television reporter was captured by Communist regime soldiers, when the mujahidin group he had been traveling with fell into an ambush. Haq’s force of three hundred was snaking fast through the same territory as the Soviets, who were equipped with troop-carrying helicopters and fighter jet support. Haq and Shuster were bombed several times by the jets. Because Haq, as the commander, had to be the last to run for cover, Shuster was forced to crouch beside him in the open, his bowels loosening from fear and bad food. The hardest thing to do was run toward a falling projectile, not away from it. Haq had taught Shuster that a bomb always drops at an angle; only by running toward its source are you safe from being hit.

  Shuster admitted that he was perpetually frightened of either being killed or being caught. But he could never even start to explain why he persisted in going inside. I didn’t buy his Lithuanian nationalism argument, even though he was an intellectual who clearly lacked the macho mentality of other journalists. Shuster seemed determined to earn Haq’s respect, as if he knew that he and Haq were destined to be friends and he had no choice in the matter. Once Shuster tried to describe to me how he and Haq had stripped down to their waists and gone swimming in a deserted reservoir east of Kabul with all of Haq’s men looking on. “You don’t know what it is to be with Abdul Haq at such a moment!…” Words deserted him. Perhaps, like the Japanese karate master and the London window cleaner, Shuster was merely acting out a fantasy — another foreign male in the war zone who saw himself as a character in a movie.

  But as so often happened on the Northwest Frontier, a great, irrational act of will had made the movie real. Shuster’s first trip to Kabul, arranged by Haq in the fall of 1983, was such an act, during which his bravery and ingenuity endeared him forever to Haq, Din Mohammed, and the rest of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami.

  He and his escort of Haq’s mujahidin (Haq himself didn’t make the trip) had just climbed to the top of a mountain from where one descends into Kabul from the south. Soviet helicopter activity forced them to wait for four days at the summit, hiding in rock crevices from the snooping gunships constantly patrolling the environs of the capital. After the group finally started to descend into the city at 4:30 P.M. on a mid-October evening, two gunships, flying back from a raid near the Kabul airport, sprayed the ground with their remaining bullets. A few minutes later, Shuster’s group was attacked by artillery. Evidently, the helicopter pilots had radioed to government ground posts in the area about the mujahidin presence. “There were explosions all around,” Shuster recalled. “The muj lying next to me, an old man, threw a patou over both of us, as if the blanket could protect us from the artillery shells. Then he started to pray loudly. I didn’t know how to pray, so I just trembled. After the shelling ended, we began walking again.

  “Suddenly we heard footsteps in the dark. The mujahidin yelled ‘Dresht,’ which means stop. But the sound of someone walking continued. Gun barrels clicked all over the place. There is nothing so frightening as being in a war zone and hearing bullets being slipped into breeches in complete darkness. ‘Dresht,’ the muj shouted again. It turned out to be only an old man who didn’t hear so well. One of the muj slapped him hard across the face for not identifying himself. Then we continued walking toward Kabul.”

  A little boy, a member of Abdul Haq’s underground, led Shuster into downtown Kabul. Haq had provided his friend with mujahidin bodyguards after Shuster had explained to Haq what he planned on doing once inside the Soviet-occupied capital.

  At eleven at night the boy brought Shuster to the house of a guerrilla in the central bazaar, where he had some tea. Shuster said he needed water in order to mix the glue he had brought with him, to paste anti-Communist newspapers on the walls of Mirwas Maidan, a square in the heart of town. He was told not to worry; when he got there, someone would have water for him. Then several mujahidin, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades, arrived to accompany him to Mirwas Maidan, with two guerrillas falling out at each street corner to cover the retreat. Shuster and another mujahid were the only ones who weren’t armed: they carried plastic bags filled with copies of the newspaper.

  “We came to a lighted paved road where we could see groups of government soldiers about a hundred fifty feet away on either side. I asked the muj about the water. They handed me a glass. Can you believe it? One glass of
water! I needed several barrels to dissolve the glue.” As was the case with Gun-ston, the men started knocking on doors, waking people up. And again, after making a lot of noise, which the government soldiers ignored — it was they who were the more frightened… the mujahidin found someone who started bringing out kettles of water. Shuster himself glued sixteen copies of the newspaper to the walls around the square, then let the guerril las do the rest after he was escorted out of the city. All he could say about the experience was that “it was unreal.”

  The newspapers were forged copies of the four-page Soviet Ministry of Defense daily, Red Star, produced in Italy by Shuster in cooperation with several European periodical publishers, including the Italian youth monthly Frigidaire (literally, FreezedNews). The cover design was Shuster’s idea. It depicted a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan breaking his Kalashnikov over his knee, exclaiming in Russian, “Stop the war, let’s go home”… the same phrase Lenin had used during World War I to get Russian soldiers to desert the czar’s army. Inside was a lengthy satire by Vladimir Voinovich, an exiled Russian writer living in Munich, about how a dynasty of cooks had taken over the Red Army and had convinced all the soldiers to withdraw from Afghanistan. That morning, Abdul Haq’s subcommander, Abdul Wakhil, had six hundred copies of the newspaper distributed throughout the downtown area, including the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel.

  A few hours later, Soviet troops surrounded the neighborhood of the square, searching all the houses for copies of the paper. Two Afghan regime officers were reportedly shot on account of the incident. The Soviet publication Literaturnaya Gazeta, in an article entitled “Forgers of Newspapers,” said the prank was the work of the CIA. The West German weekly Stern also wrote a story about the affair in a 1984 issue. “Now you are a real journalist,” Abdul Haq told Shuster when he returned to Peshawar. From then on it wasn’t a problem for Shuster to see Din Mohammed whenever he wanted.

  When I first met Shuster and Gunston, I was having difficulty getting access to Haq. I had originally been recommended to him by another journalist who knew him well, and this was enough for Haq to grant me an interview about once every seven or ten days, which I was not satisfied with. But Shuster and Gunston opened more doors for me, and soon I was with the commander several times a week.

  Then one night Haq told me suddenly, “Be ready in the morning. You’re going inside.”

  3

  Going up Khyber

  IT HAPPENED within the space of a few seconds. Three mujahidin arrived at the door at seven the next morning. Without speaking, one of them took my rucksack and hid it, along with the canteen, inside a filthy patou (Pathan blanket), which he tied into a bundle and slung over his shoulder. I gave another my watch and gold wedding band to hold until we crossed the last Pakistani checkpoint. “Bob,” said the one who would be my interpreter, “from now on, your name will be Babar Khan.” I nodded. Then the four of us, all dressed the same, left. Abrupt as that.

  We jammed into a horse-drawn tonga. Bumping along in the back seat as the road unrolled below me, I felt the sudden exhilaration of total freedom and total loss. I was vulnerable in a way I had never been before. But I also felt the security that rests in anonymity, the sensation familiar to army recruits of being welded to something sturdier than the self you are giving up.

  This was a false and temporary notion. It took no time at all to find out how different I was from the young men I was with.

  The mujahidin paid the tonga driver 5 rupees (30 cents) as we jumped off the creaking carriage and onto a slow-moving bus, painted in garish psychedelic designs and rebuilt from the battered carcass of a Bedford truck. Inside, the bus was a scarred shell of sharp, twisted metal and plastic seat cushions running with sweat. I stumbled to the rear, where my handlers packed me among a crowd of refugees and their squawking chickens. With my dark complexion and new beard, I caught only a few sideward glances. I felt almost invisible.

  The bus rambled straight ahead on a flat table of increasingly dry earth that bred nothing, it seemed, except a rash of cinder block and mud brick shanties inhabited by refugees. The throngs of people and roadside stalls gradually thinned as the wall of mountains came closer. At the edge of the plain, just past the stone gate with the inscription from Kipling’s “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” stood the tan battlements of Jamrud Fort, built by the Sikh governor of Peshawar, Hari Singh, in 1836 to defend the entrance to the Pass. It was like a stage set for Gunga Din.

  Then, quickly, the earth heaved upward, and what had minutes before seemed like a solitary sandstone wall disintegrated into a labyrinth of scooped-out riverbeds and folds reflecting the dull soldierly hues of gunmetal gray and plankton green. I had the sensation of being trapped in a tunnel. Topping each rise was a slash of red or ocher as the sun caught a higher, steeper slope at a different angle. Lifts of cooler air penetrated the bus, momentarily drying my sweat — my first fresh taste of the mountains after the gauzy heat film of Peshawar. The machine-gun rhythm of Pakistani popular music filled my ears as the winding bed of a Kabul River tributary led to a series of long, slowly rising switchbacks that constituted the heart of the twenty-five-mile-long Khyber Pass.

  Disguised as a Pathan in this metal crate hurtling upward toward Afghanistan, I thought it was hard not to be a little impressed with myself. But I had just showered and eaten a hearty breakfast. I doubted that I would feel the same after two weeks of bad food and little sleep.

  By themselves, the dimensions of the Khyber Pass are not impressive. The highest peak in the area is under seven thousand feet, and the rise is never steep. What makes the Pass spectacular is sheer scenery, historical association, and a present-day reality every bit as gripping and dangerous as in former epochs. Perhaps nowhere else on the planet are the cultural, climatic, and topographic changes quite so swift and theatrical. In a world of arbitrary boundaries, here is one border region that lives up to the definition.

  In the space of forty minutes you are transported through a confined, volcanic nether world of crags and winding canyons, from the lush, tropical floor of India to the cool, tonsured wastes of middle Asia; from a world of black soil, bold fabrics, and rich, spicy cuisine to one of sand, coarse wool, and goat meat. And some would add: from a land of subtle, slippery justifications to one of hard, upright decision.

  Alexander the Great, accompanied by his teenage Bactrian bride, Roxanne, must have experienced this very sensation as he came down into India (Hindustan) near the Malakand Pass, sixty miles north of here, in the early winter of 327 B.C. Some of Alexander’s troops, under the command of his most trusted general, Hephaestion, trekked through these same Khyber defiles. So did Babur, the sixteenth-century Mongol king and descendant of Tamurlane, who had lost his father’s central Asian kingdom as a young man, but before his death had conquered Kabul and Delhi and founded the great Moghul dynasty. Babur was a poet, whose fantastically detailed memoirs, the Babur-nama, exude a sensitive, lyric intensity that captures the awe and pain of travel in this part of the world. (On finding a cave in the middle of a blizzard in the first days of January 1507, he wrote: “People brought out their rations, cold meat, parched grain, whatever they had. From such cold and tumult to a place so warm, cozy and quiet!”)

  Though he conquered India, Babur preferred Afghanistan; his conquest of Kabul in 1504 had marked the turning point in his fortunes. And it was to Kabul, his favorite city, that his body was taken. He lies now under a garden of mulberry trees on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, in a marble monument built in the following century by Shah Jahan, the Moghul emperor responsible for the Taj Mahal. For the handful of journalists and relief workers in Peshawar enamored of such stuff, Babur’s marble tomb loomed as the longed-for summit of their Frontier Odysseys, where, under the shade of that mulberry arbor, they would one day rest their dirty, fatigued bodies and read Babur’s poetry after having witnessed — they hoped — the mujahidin conquest of Kabul: “0 Babur! dream of your luck when your Feast is the meeting, your New-year the f
ace; For better than that could not be with a hundred New-years and Bairams.” Like Babur, some of us measured happiness by how close we were to going up Khyber for the last time.

  The British first marched up the Khyber Pass in 1839, on their way to the first Afghan war, which was to end in disaster three years later with the massacre of every soldier save one, a Dr. William Brydon, who lived to tell the story. The British came back up the Pass in 1878 and again were forced by the Afghans to withdraw. The graves of British soldiers killed in the second Afghan war lie near the Masjid Mosque by the top of the Pass. Each time, the British lost hundreds of men just fighting their way through the Khyber territory, controlled by the Afridis, a tribal branch of the Pathans who since antiquity have served the function of “guardians of the Pass.”

  In 1897, the British had to dispatch forty thousand troops to this area just to quell an Afridi uprising and regain control of the Pass. Alexander and Babur also fought pitched battles with the Afridis. It is these tribesmen, numbering over 300,000 in their mud brick redoubts that dot the hills of the Khyber Tribal Agency, who have given the Khyber Pass its allure of danger and epic drama throughout history — and never more so than in the 1980s.

  In The Pathans by Sir Olaf Caroe, the definitive work on the subject, the author provides evidence that the Aparutai, mentioned by the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, are the ancestors of the Afridis of today. (As Caroe writes, the names sound similar when one recognizes that the Afridis, like other Pathans, “habitually change f into p”) The Afridis are also generally thought to have more ancient Greek blood than other Pathans who intermixed with Alexander’s soldiers, evinced by their sharp features and fairer complexions. They dress differently too: you can always spot an Afridi by his turban, wrapped tightly with an ostentatious bow around a bulbous red hat, called a kullah.