On the Grand Trunk Road (40 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

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“But isn’t that an argument for dismantling the bureaucracy and perhaps having a system of job and school reservations based on economic need, not caste identity?”
 
“The idea that India would be a casteless society under such a system is nonsense,” he answered. “The reservation policy is not meant to eradicate poverty. It is meant to correct past wrongs and to create a better future. The purpose is to create social justice.”
 
“But doesn’t the emergence of a new middle class in the cities, however tentative, suggest that in time, if you just let free market prosperity take root, these caste and feudal arrangements will start to dissolve?”
 
“There is a middle class coming up, but the caste system is not breaking up,” he said. “Where caste is breaking down is where the government reservations policy has already succeeded—as in the south of India.”
 
A lower-caste friend of Yadav’s from Bihar, Praveen Chandra, chimed in, asserting the primacy of social mobility through government jobs. “When this man from a lower class is sitting down next to you at the government office, who will you now hold in contempt?”
 
I heard the answer to precisely that question a week later when I invited three upper-caste student leaders from Delhi University to my office. They turned up in stone-washed jeans, preppy knit shirts, and tennis shoes. They were passionate about the idea of a casteless society organized on principles of markets and merit. But their idea about how to help those on the bottom compete as equals seemed infused with condescension.
 
“It doesn’t make sense that after centuries of oppression, just by giving them a job, their self-esteem is going to go up,” said P. Murali Gopal to my suggestion that a government jobs plan, however flawed in principle, might be a useful way to create rapid social mobility. “There is a lot of discrimination, yes. You see harijans [untouchables] being burned. These things are still there among the educated. These are the attitudes that we got from our fathers and we want to change that. We don’t burn harijans or go about raping their women, but yes, it’s still there.... But there will be a backlash from reverse discrimination. Even now, in government offices, even with senior officials, when you hear them talking about their scheduled-caste colleagues, it’s very humiliating. There’s no acceptance. When they see this chap, how are they going to think of him if they are victims of reverse discrimination?”
 
“What comes to everybody’s mind is that these people have what they have only because of reservations,” added Subodh Marwah, who was dressed in Adidas high-top basketball shoes and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. “It is coming out that we are talking very negatively about the backward classes. But what my father’s generation believes is not what we believe. We have to have every kind of person to make the country move. My father’s generation talks as if when a person reaches a certain intellectual level, he can’t move down to do these other kinds of [menial] jobs. So if the servants moved up, we would be stranded without any help. We think this school of thought is wrong. We want them to come up, but not at our expense.”
 
“As thinking people, we realize that job reservations are giving the lower classes false dreams that they will not get,” said Ajay Khanna.
 
“I go back to my village and see the ayah [nanny] that took care of me when I was born,” reflected Gopal. “For her, nothing has changed. It’s so sad.”
 
“It’s the politicians who are fooling us,” said Marwah.
 
It is that, or it is the upper castes who are fooling themselves.
 
13
 
Secret War
 
 
So we are as good or bad a civilized nation as anyone living in the
West because, when you carry out this sort of operation, it has a
double edge.
—
Retired Pakistani Brigadier General Mohammed Yousaf
 
 
 
 
J
ust west down the Grand Trunk Road from Rawalpindi, in a flat expanse of agricultural fields, railroad tracks, hand-painted billboards, ramshackle food stalls, and muddy market junctions, there sits a walled compound that was for most of the 1980s the Afghan operations headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. No signs or uniformed pickets identify the complex. In the chaos around the Pakistani Grand Trunk, the trucks this ISI compound disgorged and received each day passed largely unnoticed. Four to five dozen of them departed each morning between five A.M. and noon. The commercial license plates tacked to their rears were false and frequently changed. In their locked cargo bins rattled Chinese-made long-range rockets, or Soviet-made rifles bought from the Egyptians, or American-made antiaircraft missiles, or Italian-made antitank weapons, or British-made limpet mines, or even on occasion Argentinian horses and Texas mules shipped across the Atlantic by the CIA to slog through the rugged, treeless Afghan mountains in service of the mujaheddin.
 
The trucks crossed the ISI compound gate singly and at carefully planned intervals of five or ten minutes, then turned left on the highway to Peshawar, weaving among the elaborately painted commercial trucks with their singsong horns, the speeding Japanese compact cars, the bullock and mule carts, and the scores of mustachioed male pedestrians in earth-tone salwar robes who loitered about the road with an air of general suspicion. Behind the wheels of the ISI trucks sat drivers from the Pakistan army’s logistics command. They wore civilian dress, as did their shotgun-riding bodyguards. On the floor of the cab each team kept a single fully loaded assault rifle, a practice more discreet than that of some ordinary Pakistani drivers, who don’t mind dangling their weapons out the window as they overtake bothersomely sluggish cars. In this state of preparation the ISI trucks rolled slowly to Peshawar, the dusty frontier town lodged against the hills beneath the Khyber Pass, on the Afghan border. Day in and day out for nearly a decade these trucks laden with weaponry rolled to Peshawar and then came back empty to Rawalpindi following an overnight stop, during which Afghan rebels backed by the CIA and ISI unloaded the goods into unmarked Peshawar warehouses. Throughout the enterprise the trucks encountered no Soviet agents or highway bandits or saboteurs, the man who ran the program, Mohammed Yousaf, later assured me. The drivers, he said, had but one vexing problem—road accidents. They kept smashing into the zippy Japanese compact cars or into other trucks racing down the highway. Once an ISI truck filled with a stash of weapons and explosives rolled right over an oncoming car and killed two of its occupants, who happened to be Pakistani army officers. Such events drove the secret agents at ISI headquarters to distraction. But there was nothing to be done but pay off or otherwise assuage the victims. If you want to run a secret war in South Asia, you’ve got to play it as it lays. This was something the CIA may have learned more quickly than the KGB.
 
Peshawar is where the British Empire in South Asia retreated when it was decided, following the massacre in the late nineteenth century of tens of thousands of British imperial soldiers and civilians at the hands of Afghan tribesmen, that it was not plausible to go any farther. A hundred years later on the western side of Peshawar, where the jagged mountains rise, you still get a sense of Afghanistan as a place unto itself. Geography is part of it—the way the Hindu Kush mountains (the name means “Killer of Hindus”) form a wall around much of the country, and then walls within walls, dividing valley from valley and tribe from tribe. History is also part of it. Afghanistan has for centuries been a crossroads between East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and West Asia (as the Middle East is known on the subcontinent), and it has participated in more than its share of wars for being situated in the crosshairs. In the Indian subcontinent’s subculture of melodramatic machismo, you hear much idle boasting about which ethnic group is more sturdily martial than another, with the conventional prejudice, reinforced by British imperial policy, placing the Gurkhas and the Punjabis somewhere near the top of the heap and the talkative, erudite Bengalis somewhere near the bottom. One explicit premise of such chatter, however, is that the Afghans are a separate category because, after all, for them war is a kind of national sport. Afghans are justifiably offended by this line, but at the same time what nationalism they possess does arise in part from a shared pride in some of the very characteristics so frequently remarked on by the “three-feet-short” South Asians—especially the Afghans’ record of being the only country in the region to consistently defeat foreign invaders who had superior arms. Underlying some of these generalizations is the obvious way in which preindustrial imperatives brim so much closer to the surface in Afghanistan than elsewhere in South Asia. In modem India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and even in Nepal, imperial and independent states advertising themselves as the basis of individual political identity became well established after the eighteenth century. In modern Afghanistan no such state managed to endure and grow outside of the Kabul valley, where the country’s seat of ancient kings is ringed by a forbidding wall of mountains. When a handful of Kabul conspirators who amounted to little more than an overambitious Marxist book club attempted through revolution to create and impose such an Afghan state in the late 1970s, all hell broke loose.
 
The depths of this hell were chiseled during the 1980s by the reigning quasi-imperial superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The basic facts are by now well known, although the balance of moral responsibility remains a topic of contention for many of those involved. Part of the difficulty is that after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan early in 1989 and the crumbled remains of the country began to fall in on themselves, a vigorous effort ensued to obscure and recast the origins of the struggle. One proponent of this version of history was Afghan president Najibullah, a high-school leftist revolutionary and former secret police chief in the days of the Soviet occupation who later projected himself as a moderate democrat and capitalist, a bulwark of secularism against a tide of mujaheddin Islamic radicalism. Najibullah will be remembered vividly by many foreign visitors to Kabul in the late 1980s because in an effort to promote his new image—and, he said, to facilitate peace in Afghanistan—he probably gave more interviews to foreign journalists than any other head of state in the world.
 
Najibullah is (as of this writing, we still await, against all odds, the use of the past tense) a large, brutish-looking man with expressive eyes and a chilling belly laugh that erupts without warning. During his interviews, he sat across a shiny conference table with his hands folded and stared at you meaningfully—you felt he was measuring your ability to stare back. In three years, I must have seen him ten times in Kabul, and in each session I asked him what, exactly, he used to believe, back in the prerevolution days of secret Marxist study groups, Kabul University demonstrations, and liaisons with the attaches of the Soviet and East European embassies in the capital. And each time, he gave an answer such as, “The philosophies and ideologies have been put aside now. We have turned the page in a way that we face a white page and we are going to write new things. Most of the time we are not looking backward, we are looking forward.”
 
In some ways, I thought, that was too bad, for what a time it was in Kabul in the late 1960s and early 1970s! In an isolated mountain capital, an island in a sea of feudalism and tribal superstition, a small band of Afghan university students, poets, self-styled intellectuals, and army officers—no more than a few thousand in all—conspired to change the course of their country’s history. They met secretly at one another’s houses, evading the security forces of the king, a tottering despot named Zahir Shah, and they read aloud from the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. They plotted conspiracies and bandied about such grand phrases as “progressive democratic socialism” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The more noble among them thought about transforming backward, impoverished, unjust Afghanistan into a progressive, equitable society. For an explanation more illuminating than Najibullah’s rehearsed amnesia, I went once to see Suleiman Layec, a founder of the Communist-style People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and one of the country’s better-known revolutionary poets. Layec sat in a spacious office in the central committee building of the PDPA; between murderous party intrigues, he was composing an epic poem on modem Afghanistan’s history.
 
“In the sixties, when we were establishing our party, the cold war was at its climax,” he said. “Every week in Africa and Asia a new country was liberated and broke the pull of imperialism. In Africa, the anti-imperialist slogan was very strong. This was the theme of that period. Even at the United Nations people spoke of these things, and this slogan was very strong in confrontation with the United States. We had no experience of establishing a party. It was the first experience of Afghan revolutionaries. It was a political baby—it had to learn to walk. There is a poem that says a baby who has never learned to walk must fall a hundred times. That is our party.”
 
I asked Layec how such a small group of people in Kabul could have tried to emulate the Soviet Union by embracing and enforcing revolutionary ideas—the liberation of women, the abolition of state support for Islam, the redistribution of land—that ran so completely against the grain of Afghanistan’s religious and social history.

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