On the Grand Trunk Road (43 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
—M. Akbar Popal
“
T
hey’re heee-eeere.”
T
hey’re heee-eeere.”
That was how the cold war ended in Kabul initially, with six or seven dozen foreign journalists and cameramen darting manically around a confused if largely peaceful capital in Soviet-made taxis, flagging each other down, and passing along the day’s signature joke, a quote from a Hollywood ad campaign for a film depicting the arrival of aliens on Earth. Reports of recent mujaheddin sightings were freely exchanged. You might think the mujaheddin deserved better after all their struggle against the Soviets and the Kabul Communists, but the members of the first rebel vanguard to enter the city on that Saturday in late April 1992 did look a bit as if they were trying to sort out which planet they were on. They wandered into the city singly or in small groups with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Kalishnakovs slung over their shoulders. Many had specific instructions from their loosely linked commanders as to which downtown government facility they were to enter and secure, but after fourteen years of living and fighting in remote rock gorges and tiny villages, it was not so easy to find your way around a large and semimodern capital, especially one lacking proper street signs. So the mujaheddin just stood around on corners at first, spinning this way and that, wondering if it was safe to ask directions and assessing whether the war would be starting again right away, or maybe a little later. With their flowing dark beards and draping robes, stumbling through Kabul’s Stalinist architecture and Milan-by-way-of-Prague street fashions, they looked like Hasidic diamond traders just arrived for a convention, uncertain where the hotel might be. Their weapons, however, were a useful defense against anxiety. I spotted one mujaheddin straggler over by the zoo, turning in circles and insisting that anyone who wished to talk with him do so from a distance of ten feet. His name was Syed Munir. “Everyone is friendly,” he announced in a tone of pleasant surprise. “But maybe some people want to take my gun.”
One of the first things that happened after the mujaheddin’s long-awaited triumph in Kabul was that ten of thousands of people went home and changed their clothes. By afternoon it was difficult to find women on the street in the dark skirts and spiked heels that were previously de rigueur in the capital. Instead they wore headscarves, salwars, or the mustard-colored full-length Islamic burkas worn by the purdah-confined refugees in Peshawar. Men tossed their sport jackets with the narrow East European lapels into the closet and pulled out their salwars, stored against the day when tradition might become an urgent necessity. The more prescient among them, evaluating the steady collapse of Kabul’s leftist government and the rush of the mujaheddin to the capital’s outskirts, had stopped shaving some days before, hoping that the growth on their cheeks would subsume the imitation-Najibullah brute mustaches many of them wore when secular machismo was in fashion. At the hilltop Hotel Continental, where the equally stubbled international press was stationed, government generals arrived in casual attire for evening press conferences to explain how they had really believed in Islam and the mujaheddin all along. The teeming, smoky lobby looked like the union hall of a particularly disreputable Teamsters local. Everybody seemed to be wearing unusual, ill-fitting hats. It was difficult, as my colleague Bill Branigin remarked, to tell the generals from the doormen.
Kabulians had been warned against this day for years by their reigning Bolsheviks. The urgency of the warning was perhaps muted by the absurd language of scientific socialist propaganda through which it frequently was imparted, but the point had settled in nonetheless. If you lived in Kabul, you did not need to accept the stilted formulations about “feudal-reactionary counterrevolutionaries” to be worried about what a mujaheddin victory might mean. Prerevolutionary Afghan codes provided more than enough cause for concern. Sufficient blood had been spilled in Afghanistan during the previous decade to fertilize centuries of clan- and family-inspired acts of revenge. This was certainly on the mind of former president Najibullah, who had tried as his government collapsed to flee the country with the help of the United Nations, only to be turned back at the airport by unruly Uzbeks armed with grenade launchers and prepared to use them. Najibullah now awaited his fate in hiding at a U.N. safe house in the capital, where we chose to imagine him passing the time with a deck of cards. Around him the ethnic, tribal arrangements that had supported his country’s tenuous nationalism for so many years—before Najibullah’s Bolshevik book club declared ethnicity and tribalism to be instruments of the oppressive feudal class—looked to be badly, dangerously out of whack.
The northern Afghan minorities—Tajiks, Uzbeks, Shiites—had endured for long years the dominance of the southern and eastern ethnic Pashtuns. Under the leadership of the Tajik mujaheddin commander Ahmed Shah Massoud and the formerly Communist Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostam, they were prepared to bid for an enlarged share of power in post-Communist Afghanistan. On the Pashtun side loomed the fearsome reputation of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the manipulative, opportunistic Islamic radical whose disciplined performance during the Soviet years of the war had won the respect of the CIA and the affection of the ISI. As a consequence, Hekmatyar received much of the most sophisticated kit from the high-technology covert pipeline in the late 1980s. He was now prepared to use it in service of his ambitions. (A wide range of Pakistanis, Americans, and Europeans involved in managing the secret war told me that Hekmatyar never received much more than a quarter of the weaponry allocated to the mujaheddin, but that what he got was of higher quality than what reached his rivals, in part because Hekmatyar and his men were more willing to accept ISI and CIA training and supervision.) Among the Pashtuns, there were splits within splits, with the long-dominant Durrani tribe now shattered and under challenge from historically less important but now ambitious tribes. Traditional tribal elders and Islamic spiritual leaders found themselves in competition for power with usurping mujaheddin commanders of low birth but high reputation earned on the battlefield. In short, fourteen years of war and destruction had utterly scrambled Afghanistan’s political structures, and there were plenty of reasons to be worried about what would happen when the mujaheddin attempted to unscramble them in the capital city they had long coveted.
Months afterward, as the Yugoslav civil war deepened, racist-nationalist gangs rioted in Germany, the speed train to European political union seemed derailed, clan warlords in post-cold war Somalia enforced a brutal famine, and ex-Soviet subenclaves declared independence from enclaves, which declared independence from republics, which declared independence from each other, I wondered if, in time, I might think back on what occurred during the first twenty-four hours after the fall of Kabul as a kind of fast-forward metaphor for what the end of the worldwide ideological, military, and economic confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States would mean for my currently indifferent generation. In Afghanistan’s capital, the local celebration of this momentous event lasted exactly one day.
By nightfall thousands of mujaheddin had poured into the city from the surrounding mountains. When they found their bearings they entered as subdivided units into military barracks, police stations, and strategic civilian buildings, embraced the neo-Bolshevik government soldiers on duty with brotherly Afghan hugs, stripped them of their weapons and rank patches, and sent them home. Triumphant truckloads of mujaheddin rolled through Kabul chanting “God is great!” Guerrillas tossed flower petals from their trucks. Militiamen inserted tulips in their tank barrels. In this way the streets of Kabul were transformed within hours into a polyglot patchwork of rival mujaheddin parties and ethnic militias in anxious competition to grab the best locales for prospective postideological conflict. Hekmatyar’s guerrillas had the interior ministry and parts of the presidential palace. Massoud’s guerrillas had patches of the palace, the historic Bala Hissar fort, and many of the key army garrisons. Dostam’s fierce Uzbek militiamen controlled the airport north of the city center. Shiites took the formerly Soviet, now Russian, embassy and assured its understandably nervous occupants that, as the commander in charge put it, “we want to respect them and for them to be comfortable.” Radical Sunni mujaheddin from a relatively minor party took control of the neighborhood across the way. About them, the Shiite commander was less tolerant. It was one thing to demonstrate to the world that the cold war was history by protecting the Russians, but it was quite another to make peace with Sunni Afghan bastards bent on denying the Shiites their rightful place at the postwar negotiating table. From our hilltop vantage in the curfew-bound darkness that night, we saw the dazzling visual expression of this paradox. At first the sky above the wide Kabul Valley erupted with a celebratory display of white military flares and streaming, arcing red tracer bullets shot joyfully into the sky. Victory! By the early morning hours, as the noise continued unabated, we wondered if the tracer lines weren’t beginning to tilt downward, streaming now in horizontal crossfire instead of vertical celebration. In the disorienting blackness after midnight, it was difficult to tell.
What became an extended, unpleasant stint of ducking and running began the next morning at the downtown palace, where we found the flowers had been taken out of the gun barrels and the new war was well under way. Massoud’s mainly Tajik guerrillas had moved on Hekmatyar’s mainly Pashtun guerrillas just after breakfast, attempting to drive them off the perimeter of the palace and eventually out of town. Shells crashed and bullets pinged. Buildings burned. A Massoud commander led us quickly into an ornate palace residence near the center of the grounds. We scurried beneath crystal chandeliers, up mahogany staircases covered with intricately woven carpets, past nineteenth-century sculpture, vases, polished green marble tables. Makeshift bunkers had been established on the upper floors. Uzbek militia reinforcements, nominal allies of Massoud’s mujaheddin guerrillas, were pouring in from the airport, nabbing loot as they marched in and out—silverware here, a teapot there. Our commander-escort, Ghulam Jam, could not conceal his contempt. “They are uneducated men,” he said. “Put them in the zoo.”
Jam had been fighting in the northeastern Afghan valleys for more than a decade, first against Communists, more recently against rival mujaheddin. As he led us politely on a tour through his latest battlefield, we asked why the fighting had erupted so quickly and so violently after such a universally celebrated collective victory. “They fired first,” he replied. “We didn’t let them inside the palace. We want this place to belong to us. They think all this country belongs to them. This group [of Hekmatyar] wants to get the power for themselves.”
We asked if he wasn’t tired of the war. “For one hundred years we have been fighting,” he said. “I will never get tired.” We walked on past the sculpture and vases, then paused on a verdant lawn in spring bloom to watch bright orange flames consume a small outbuilding across the palace grounds. It was strangely peaceful, even with the occasional thudding shells and crackling rifles. “It’s a very beautiful place, yes?” Jam asked. In Afghanistan, you grab your aesthetics where you can find them.
For all the potent cold war symbols that Kabul offered, probably the more useful way to think about what has happened in the capital since the mujaheddin’s victory is to accept that for Afghans, the imposed ideological aspects of the war faded far more rapidly than occurred in Washington and Moscow, even after Gorbachev’s accession. In this sense, the fighting that erupted immediately after Kabul’s fall to the mujaheddin, and which has continued since then at the cost of thousands of civilian lives, marked a reckoning of ethnic, tribal, and social conflicts that were well advanced before the rebels entered the capital. That some of these conflicts were created, mutated, and in a few cases explicitly sponsored by the conduct of the superpowers’ proxy war is indisputable. That they festered in the last phase of the Afghan war because the outside sponsors could not or would not help to resolve them peacefully is especially tragic, if not an outright case of criminal neglect. Of course, it is hard to know who should be held responsible for what sorts of crimes when you hear reports such as the ones that emanated from Kabul in the summer of 1992, describing rival ethnic mujaheddin commanders who suffocated prisoners of war in railroad boxcars or executed them by driving nails into their skulls. But in any event, to expect that the exhausted, half-bankrupted superpower antagonists of the cold war would rush to the world’s far corners and unscramble all the messes they made since World War II was, to say the least, unrealistic. And so today Afghanistan smolders, occupied with its inevitable reckonings, but at the same time justifiably angry, and frustrated by its impotence against the retreating superpowers.
In this environment it is sometimes difficult to recall that the recent conflict in Afghanistan began as a war over foreign ideas. It was my conviction, not always shared by colleagues I respected, that this fact should continue to be a framework for inquiry, even when the ethos of the news shifted in new directions. Ideas and the consequences of ideas did not seem to me a kind of neutral, balanced superstructure, beneath which the “truth” of immutable social history grinds on. Partly for that reason, six weeks before Kabul fell, I traveled to the city to sort out for myself one last time what the end of the cold war meant to those who had constructed one side of the barricade in Afghanistan.
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