Haji Babà sighed. “We have already given God over a million martyrs. That is more than enough.”
After only a few more minutes of driving we were in the cratered back streets of Mahalajat, the southern suburb adjacent to the main bazaar of Kandahar city, now reduced to rubble. Clusters oftall wooden poles affixed with ragged white shaheedan banners flared like porcupine quills out of the ground. On the cassette player inside the Land Cruiser blared the haunting, melodramatic voice of Ahmad Wali, an exiled Afghan singer.
Though Mahalajat was considered a mujahidin stronghold, once in the city the battle lines were haphazard, with Afghan regime posts only about two hundred yards away from our car in several directions. Small arms, light and heavy machine guns, and mortars and artillery pieces were all being fired simultaneously; after a few minutes I got used to the racket. Twice we had to cross an open field in sight of an enemy post. The driver swerved and accelerated, yet still we attracted fire. Then the Land Cruiser got stuck behind a tonga that was having difficulty negotiating an irrigation ditch. It was incredible: a tottering horse-drawn carriage with a veiled woman in the back seat holding a sack of groceries in the middle of a free-fire zone. The spotted white horse, decked out in red and purple pompoms as if out for a stroll in Central Park, was so emaciated that I could see the outline of its skeleton beneath the flesh. The horse served as an apt symbol for Afghanistan, I thought; almost dead, yet defiant to the last.
Our driver parked behind a fragment of stone wall. From there we made a dash to a small NIFA base near the point where Mahalajat merges with the heart of the city… an idyllic spot if you could ignore the bombs. The mujahidin kept a patch of daisies next to a carpeted terrace in the shade of a vine pergola. Here we stretched out and relaxed until tea and mint-flavored curds were served. A cage with a singing canary hung from the vines. Despite the nearby explosions of artillery and mortar shells, I dozed off for a few minutes.
Haji Babà shook me awake to greet a group of city elders, who had crossed over from the regime-held sector of Kandahar that morning so I could interview them. They all had long beards like Haji Baba’s and resembled wise men in their white shalwar kameezes and white turbans draped over gold-threaded caps.
Local custom enabled the honored elders to cross safely back and forth between the two halves of the divided city. Women and children were similarly protected. In fact, the mujahidin regularly used boys of about ten years of age to carry messages in and out of the regime sector; that was how the old men knew to come to the NIFA post that morning. Only army-age men were stopped at checkpoints, to catch defectors from the government’s desertion-ridden ranks.
The stories the elders told me would be familiar to anyone who knows what goes on in a besieged Third World city. There was no medicine, and the price of produce was exorbitant. Makeshift market stalls were shut for days at a stretch, and when open they were looted and ransacked by the regime’s soldiers. These troops, claiming to be from the northern Afghan province of Jozjan, were actually mercenaries brought in from Soviet central Asia, who roamed the streets in unruly gangs, holding people up and breaking into the ruins of homes in search of young boys to do menial labor for them in their barracks. Though the Soviets constantly charged the Pakistanis with violations of the Geneva accords, they themselves were guilty of much more basic offenses, such as bombing populated areas from air bases inside the Soviet Union and putting Soviet troops in Afghan regime uniforms, as they evidently were doing in Kandahar.
The city elders I interviewed desperately wanted a negotiated settlement with the Communist governor of Kandahar, a disaffected Parchami named Nur-ul Haq Ulumi. That, of course, was what NIFA wanted too, so that the only Afghan city with a strong royalist base would fall first and serve as a springboard for King Zahir Shah’s return. But since the fundamentalist parties, the Pakistanis, and the Americans did not back a settlement, Kandahar’s inhabitants were doomed to go on suffering. (Had the Pakistanis and Americans supported NIFA’s course of action, it is possible that Kandahar would have fallen to the mujahidin before the end of 1988, leading to mass army desertions in Kabul and the subsequent collapse of the Najib regime… making unnecessary the badly organized, bloody siege of Jalalabad that began in March 1989, in which large numbers of civilians were killed. Kandahar was bigger than Jalalabad, psychologically almost as vital to the regime, already destroyed, and much harder for the Communists to defend. But because the fundamentalists were stronger in Jalalabad, the Pakistani intelligence services controlling mujahidin arms supplies concentrated on that city.)
I had wanted to get as close to the city center as possible without running the risk of being stopped at a regime checkpoint. The youth who accompanied Akbar and me on this foray had lost a leg in a mine explosion, but he was as fast and agile as most people are with two. He led the way, checking for mines and enemy lookouts hidden behind sandbag emplacements, then waved when it was safe for us to follow.
We had to cross one of several open fields in sight of hostile machine gun nests, where, incredibly, a shepherd was grazing his sheep. Bullets sprayed the field a few seconds after we had crossed it: a sheep lay bleeding as I looked back. The shepherd cursed aloud, caressed the dying animal, and by tossing a few stones moved the flock on. The stones startled the sheep; the bullets hadn’t.
“The bullets they are more used to,” Akbar observed.
The scene was not what I expected on the basis of my visit to Kandahar fifteen years earlier. I imagined an urban setting: streets, shops, and pavements, some in place, some destroyed. But as we moved northward from Mahalajat toward the Herat Gate area, where I had spent that miserable night in 1973, there was no sign of a true cityscape. The ashen monotony of an archeological site continued almost to the center of Kandahar. We ran along remnants of walled streets and arched portals with smashed networks of ceramic underground plumbing systems, and past weeds and wildflowers that grew in stony places where ground had been churned up. People had once lived in these ruins, I knew, but it seemed as if that must have been thousands of years ago. Only the bombs and bullets and that dead sheep kept me from believing I was a tourist visiting an ancient city,
This was not a military landscape of the past but of an eerie doomsday future. The twentieth century had come late to Afghanistan, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. The Soviets had sown so many mines, dropped so many bombs, and fired so many mortars and artillery shells over such a wide swath of territory that the effect of a nuclear strike had been achieved.
No city in North Vietnam was destroyed to the extent that Kandahar was. Whereas American air strikes on the North early in the Vietnam war were initially so restrictive that President Lyndon Johnson had personally to approve the targets in advance, the Soviets engaged in indiscriminate carpet bombing throughout their war. Whereas the American military tended to use attack helicopters against specific targets or to insert troops, the Soviets usually used those helicopters against mud brick villages. Whereas the Americans at least tried to carefully map their minefields, and deploy mines mainly along strategic routes like the Ho Chi Minh trail and around their base perimeters, the Soviets kept few maps and sowed millions of mines. The Soviets lost between 12,000 and 50,000 men in Afghanistan, considerably fewer than the 58,000 troops the Americans lost in Vietnam. Yet the number of Afghan civilians who were killed… estimated at over a million… probably exceeded civilian Vietnamese fatalities, even though North and South Vietnam had a combined population two and a half times larger than Afghanistan.
Another sign of the future was the absence of battle and its attendant drama: I saw only monotonous images of mass destruction. In The Face of Battle, the military historian John Keegan intimates that the totality of future wars will render battle itself obsolete. Battle implies limits, but in Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan there was little ebb and flow to the killing. The Soviets carpet bombed Kandahar and the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul for months at a time. Mines killed about thirty Afghans, more o
r less, every day of the entire decade.
Kipling’s vision only partially illuminated the true symbolism of the war in Afghanistan. Kipling could be an imperialist and a moralist at the same time precisely because he had little inkling of modern totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism and the extremes to which they would take the imperialist impulse. Though Kipling’s chivalrous world of manly honor had in Afghanistan vanquished the modern world of mechanized destruction, Afghanistan in the 1980s was still no Kiplingesque war… the glorious escapades of the likes of John Wellesley Gunston and Savik Shuster notwithstanding. These two were brave men and brave journalists. But, like me, they were living an illusion. Abdul Haq, and Haji Babà too, despite what we thought, were only in a small sense Kiplingesque Pathans. They represented some sort of primitive, vestigial lone warrior from the past but also of the future, when the only people willing and able to fight a superpower will be poverty-stricken peasant guerrillas who have no motive to surrender because they have no material possessions at risk.
Because the historical images, particularly in Kandahar, were so vivid and intimidating, the relatively few journalists who went inside, like myself, were for the most part blind to these revelations. We tended to look backward only… to World War II, to Kipling, and to Alexander the Great.
We left Mahalajat and returned to Arghandab in time for the night fireworks display. Red flares crossed the sky as if in slow motion, followed by exploding artillery shells that caused small brush fires to break out in the mined desert between Kandahar’s southern suburbs and the ring road. Again the driver swerved and accelerated, and drove without headlights. Then, still in artillery range, he stopped and the others got out of the Land Cruiser to pray. With no water in sight, they washed their hands and faces with the dust, just as I had seen the fundamentalists do in Nangarhar.
Epilogue to the Original Edition
Something I Only Imagined
IT WAS THE WORST possible place to get a flat tire: in broad daylight on the undulating stretch of desert directly under the flight path between the Shindand and Kandahar air bases. Again the driver built a wobbly tower of rocks under the jack and was able to change the tire in just a few minutes. Nobody talked or worried about the driver under the car. Each of us knew what the other was thinking. I felt fear leave my gut as we climbed back into the Land Cruiser.
After fifteen minutes’ more driving, the smooth, American-laid asphalt of the Kandahar…Kabul road appeared on the open desert. At the same moment that we saw a spiraling pillar of black smoke rise from a burning truck on the road to our left, we heard the whining boom of two helicopter gunships swinging sideways and upward, away from us in the southern sky. The driver speeded up and over the other side of the road and zigzagged into the Arghastan desert, heedless of mines. But the gunships were already winging their way home to Kandahar air base.
Our flat tire had saved us. Had we arrived at the road crossing a few minutes earlier than we did, our fate might have been the same as that of the burning truck and its driver.
The rain came down in sheets, driven by the wind against the ranks of lonely tents on the muddy hillside. The mud was like glue and splattered all over my army surplus jacket, inside which I shivered. It was February 1988. A few miles outside the Northwest Frontier town of Miram Shah, near the Afghan border, a few hundred Afghan men, women, and children had just stampeded over the border to escape the fighting in Paktia province. They were the newest of over five million Afghans in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran… more than five times the number of Palestinians in refugee camps. Stranded on the freezing mud, the UN-supplied tents were all these Afghans possessed. The children had no patous (blankets); against the wind, rain, and low temperatures all they had to wear were cotton shalwar kameezes. Several of them coughed and shivered.
With two other journalists I drove into Miram Shah and, for the equivalent of a few dollars in Pakistani rupees, bought several dozen old sweaters and pairs of pants to distribute to the children. A UN group or some other relief organization would have gotten around to distributing warm clothes to the children eventually. But for the moment, no one else was even thinking about them.
Away from Pakistan and Afghanistan, I could barely speak about the war. When I told people where I had been, their blank expressions indicated I might as well have been on the moon. Of the few who were truly interested in what I had to say, the retort that often greeted me was: “Really? Well then, how come we read so little about it in the newspapers?” The conversation would shift abruptly to another subject. It was nothing they needed to think or concern themselves about. It was happening so far away, to a people unrelated to them or to anybody they knew. Most listened to me only out of politeness, as though the stories I had brought back from central Asia were just that… stories, something I had only imagined.
American conservatives claimed that the media deliberately avoided Afghanistan because of a double standard regarding the Soviets. It was worse than that. Afghanistan, which on the scale of human suffering vastly overshadowed any other military conflict of the 1980s, was, quite simply, almost unconsciously ignored.
7
The Lawless Frontier
BALUCHISTAN
This past April in Quetta, the bleached-gray, drought-stricken capital of the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan, I awoke to explosions and gunfire. In search of the violence, my translator, Jamil, and I jumped into a four-wheel-drive Toyota and raced through the section of town inhabited by Pashtoon tribesmen. Suddenly we were surrounded by Pakistani soldiers, who forced us out of the car and pointed assault rifles in our faces. While they searched us, I saw two other soldiers with automatic weapons run along a high wall a few feet from where we stood. Shots rang out from inside the adjacent compound. By 11:00 A.M. five people had been killed and twenty wounded, and a large cache of weapons had been confiscated in a raid on the Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami (Pashtoon National People’s Party), a group supporting an independent “Pashtoonistan” created out of Pakistani territory. The party stood accused of murders and kidnapping. Security forces claimed victory, but reports later circulated that party members had filtered back into the area with weapons.
Quetta’s mainly Pashtoon shop owners called a strike to protest the raid. It was the second strike that week against the recently installed military regime of General Pervez Musharraf. For the previous two days owners had shut their businesses to protest the regime’s plan to tax the cross-border smuggling of computer parts, fuel, automatic weapons, and much other contraband on which the province’s economy depends… as it depends on the heroin trade. The week I was in Quetta, there was also a series of bomb blasts in government buildings, relating to the arrests of a hundred members of an ethnic-Baluch clan who were wanted in connection with the murder of a judge. A few weeks before that two bombs had gone off inside army bases in Quetta. Musharraf’s regime was trying to extend taxation and the rule of law to this tribal area hard by Afghanistan, and it was encountering stiff resistance. Chiefs here were nervous about Musharrafs plan to hold local elections, which could threaten their power.
“The government wants to destroy the tribal system, but there are no institutions to replace it,” the head of the Raisani tribe, Nawabzada Mir Lashkari Raisani, told me inside his walled compound, which was protected by white-turbaned bodyguards armed with Kalashnikovs. “Much of my time is spent deciding cases that in another country would be handled by family courts,” he said, as we devoured mounds of rice and spicy grilled meats laid out on a carpet in his residence. “The tribes are large social-welfare networks. The government wants us to stop smuggling, and that will cause huge social distress.”
The Raisanis, numbering some 20,000, speak a Dravidian language of southern India… unlike the Turco-Iranian Baluchis and the Indo-Aryan Pashtoons, whose languages borrow heavily from Persian. The Raisanis are traditional enemies of the Bugtis, an ethnic-Baluch tribe. “I will not disarm, because I do not trust the government to protec
t me,” Mir Lashkari told me. He added, “Only the army needs Pakistan.” The tribes and ethnic groups, he said, can defend themselves without the state. Indeed, the international arms bazaar and the unrestricted flow of drugs and electronic goods have increased the tribes’ autonomy.
Inside Mir Lashkari’s compound, surrounded by a sandpaper desert and bare saw-toothed escarpments, it occurred to me that a topographical map would explain, at least partially, why both military and democratic governments in Pakistan have failed, even as India’s democracy has gone more than half a century without a coup… and why, I believe, Pakistan and its problems will for the next few years generate headlines.
Pakistan, in fact, could be a Yugoslavia in the making, but with nuclear weapons. In the Balkans the collapse of both communist authoritarianism and the Cold War security structure unleashed disintegrative tribal forces. But in South Asia globalization itself could bring collapse. South Asia illustrates that globalization is not a uniform coat of paint. It can lead to war and chaos as easily as to prosperity and human rights. Just as the media’s fascination with Poland, Hungary, and the rest of Central Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall obscured for a time the dissolution that had already begun in Yugoslavia, the current consternation over the extremist government in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, and the fighting in Kashmir obscures the core issue of South Asia: the institutional meltdown of Pakistan. And as was true of Yugoslavia, it is the bewildering complexity of ethnic and religious divisions that makes Pakistan so fragile. My comparison to 1980s Yugoslavia, a place that I also saw firsthand, is not casual. In both cases it was the very accumulation of disorder and irrationality that was so striking and that must be described in detail… not merely stated… to be understood.
Soldiers of God Page 24
