Soldiers of God (18 page)

Walnuts and dried mulberries appeared with the curds at meals now. And maize too, which Jihan-zeb slowly turned in the fire. He held his whole hand in the flames for several seconds, turning the corn and smiling at me. Barking in Pukhtu, he beckoned Wakhil to translate.

“Jihan-zeb asks if you know why mujahidin are brave and feel no pain.”

“No, why?” I asked.

“Because mujahid is a man who has already given himself to God. Though he still breathes, he is like the dead. He isn't afraid.”

Jihan-zeb smiled again. His simpleminded expression was like that of a fanatic. He reminded me of the Iranian youths at the Gulf war front, with headbands bearing the inscription
“Ready for martyrdom” — the kind who, in slightly altered circumstances, were capable of switching from naive kindness to cruelty, and butchery even.

In some cases, the mujahidin had been guilty of just that.

The guerrillas routinely executed enemy pilots upon capture (until American advisers prevailed upon them to at least interrogate the airmen first). In a region of Paktia province controlled by a Khalis commander, Jallaluddin Haqqani, they once took a group of Afghan Communist troops prisoner, lined them up in a ditch, and shot them in the head. After the negotiated surrender of the Communist border post at Torcham at the beginning of 1989, mujahidin alleged to belong to the Khalis organization killed the disarmed Communist soldiers and mutilated their bodies. Still, in most cases, the guerrillas held prisoners, whether Soviets or Afghans, and forced them to survive in the same Spartan manner as their captors. Documented accounts of mujahidin savagery were relatively rare and involved enemy troops only. Their cruelty toward civilians was unheard of during the war, while Soviet cruelty toward civilians was common. On January 16, 1988, for instance, after Soviet troops and an Afghan Communist militia unit captured the village of Kolagu in Paktia province from the mujahidin, they bound together twelve villagers, seven of whom were children, inside the local mosque before they burned it to the ground; nine of the twelve died. (Amnesty International later confirmed the details of the incident.) “Civilian massacres [perpetrated by Soviet and Afghan Communist troops] like the one at My Lai were the norm rather than the aberration,” said David Isby, a military analyst and the author of several books about the war in Afghanistan.

To judge by the overall record, Jihan-zeb and his fellow resistance fighters were not fanatics but simply coarse peasants reacting to the invasion of their land in an uncompromising way. Because the Afghans lacked the material wealth that people elsewhere are terrified of losing, they were able to go on
fighting and suffering. That is how they saved Afghanistan from the humiliating fate of so many countries in Eastern Europe. (Whether the Afghan Communist regime falls is to some extent beside the point, since the countryside will always be held by the resistance.)

By the standards of the Middle East, the mujahidin were paragons of virtue. Yet because they were so primitive, they were assumed to be barbaric. And the
glasnost-happy
Soviet media were masters at playing on this confusion of characteristics, weaving into their reports of Soviet battle losses a sequence of manufactured tales of mujahidin savagery.

The landscape became waterless again as we plodded through a rolling sandstone desert that made me think of mounds of ground curry. Then we began climbing up sandy slopes sprinkled with thorns, cactus, and the odd pine tree or two. Another day of thirst and sore knees — the fourth of our trek — brought us through the tree line to the Spinghar command post of the Khalis mujahidin.

Small bands of guerrillas were spread out in canvas pup tents over the chain of snow-dusted granite peaks and plateaus. From there they could look down on the Kabul-Jalalabad-Torcham highway, the ten-thousand-man Soviet armored division at Samar Khel, and the Soviet-occupied city of Jalalabad in the vast plain thousands of feet below.

It was a perfect guerrilla setup: from the air, the tiny green tents were practically indistinguishable from the stubble of dark lichen. The mujahidin had mounted captured Soviet-made heavy machine guns in ditches dug into the spurs, from where they could bag a low-flying gunship with a lucky shot. (It was near here that Khalis's men had shot down and captured the first Soviet pilot of the war, in July 1981.) The region's commander, Habibullah, lived with eleven other men in a tent about fifteen feet long and seven feet wide.

In the space of a few hours, I had gone from extreme heat
to extreme cold. My sweat-soaked body was suddenly shivering under my cotton
shalwar kameez
and the woolen
patou
that Wakhil wrapped around me. I was reminded of Arnold Toynbee's description of Afghanistan: “a Turkish bath on a gigantic scale, with the chilly room at an altitude of 7,000 feet and upwards, opening out of the steam room at 3,000 feet and under.” Just as we arrived at Habibullah's tent, dark clouds tumbled over the plateau and the sky exploded in thunder. The first hailstones hit the ground, and the dozen men huddled inside with
patous
to keep warm. The temperature was now below freezing, and the mujahidin were without socks, boots, jackets, and sleeping bags. As they watched the sharp pellets of ice rattle on the ground, they smiled and looked grateful. Wakhil explained to me that the mujahidin called hail “Allah's mine sweeper,” since the force of the pellets was often enough to set off the butterfly mines.

It was pathetic. Though by the late 1980s U.S. taxpayers were aiding the Afghan resistance to the tune of $400 million annually, the guerrillas still had no mine-clearing equipment, and the walkie-talkies that Commander Habibullah used to communicate with his units throughout Spinghar and adjacent valleys were cheap transceivers whose signals the Soviets could easily intercept. Out of habit, the mujahidin still relied on runners carrying handwritten notes through the mountains, a method that provided much tighter security. When better quality Japanese transceivers finally did arrive, they came with English-language instructions that nobody in these mountains could understand. You would have thought that someone in the massive American bureaucracy dealing with the largest covert operation since the Vietnam war would have had the instructions translated into Pukhtu and photocopied. The aid program certainly seemed more impressive from Washington than it did from Spinghar.

The racket of pellets on the canvas grew louder, and wind ruffled the tent, which was beginning to feel like a ship at sea.
The mujahidin inside ranged in age from teenagers to old men, and they all had been living together on this isolated peak for years already. In guerrilla armies there is no recruitment period, and some of the men had been away from their families since 1978, when the Taraki regime first forced them underground. I noted the disparity in their ages but was not particularly conscious of it, since they themselves didn't appear to be. They all wore the same
shalwar kameezes
and
pakols.
The younger ones had lived through the same experiences as the old men, and although they lacked white hair and wrinkles, the look in their eyes was just as old.

The hail turned into intermittent freezing rain. As evening fell, the oldest-looking mujahid, white-bearded Yar Mohammed, silently walked out of the tent to the edge of the escarpment, where the gusts of icy wind were fiercest. Split curtains of cloud flew quickly across the fairy tale light of the heavens, as though in a scene from the Bible. The old man sat on a clump of white hail and rinsed his bare feet with a pitcher of cold water. Then he bowed down on his knees in the wet ice and began to repeat
Allahu akbar
thirty-four times, his hands and forehead falling to the earth, where he kept them fastened while softly, almost inaudibly whispering the name of God to himself. He was absolutely rigid against the wind. Though barefoot and without
apatou,
he never once shivered. Inside the open-flapped tent, tucked deep in my sleeping bag, I shivered just looking at him.

What could you say about this spindly old man quietly praying barefoot in the ice? Compare him to a sword swallower or a yogi who walks over hot coals? As with Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb praying in the dirt, a visual report of this man's behavior would only portray him as a fanatic.

Mujahidin life, and that of the Pathans in particular, was stark. Likewise, my thoughts and experiences over these last few days were intense but not varied — like the act of survival itself. Variety was more easily conveyed in journalistic prose
than intensity because variety was horizontal, and reporters were conditioned to cover stories horizontally, aspect by aspect. But what did you do with people who were essentially uncomplicated? The mujahidin had few aspects to their personalities, but each aspect required boring deep down to a level of experience that went beyond speech itself. “Damn it, there's nothing you can say about the muj. You have to feel them,” said Tony O’Brien, a photographer friend.

No one else paid much attention to Yar Mohammed's praying. The mujahidin, even when in a cohesive group like this one, often prayed alone, whenever each man felt like it. One after another they performed their evening prayers, if not alone, then in groups of two or three. Some shouted; others, like Yar Mohammed, just whispered. Up here on this plateau, in the hail and freezing rain, each man communicated with God in his own style. The chanting crowd in the mosque was absent, and the Koran seemed less like a monologue. This was as close to democracy as one was likely to get in central Asia.

In the gas-lit darkness, we sat around the sides of the tent and ate a meal of flat bread, raw turnips, onions, and green tea. Away from the villages there were no goats and therefore no curds. The only luxury was the water pipe, assembled from a brass pitcher and bamboo pole. After the repast, Commander Habibullah read a passage from the Koran while we all listened. It was one of the few occasions when everyone prayed together.

Habibullah was constantly busy, writing messages, communicating by walkie-talkie, or going off to a nearby tent on an inspection or to confer. He appeared efficient, competent, and unfriendly — disdainful of the world I seemed to represent. Only very late at night did he agree to talk to me.

Habibullah, one of Abdul Qadir's top lieutenants, had a dark Indian's complexion, a long black beard, and an aquiline nose. He reminded me of a Sikh warrior rather than a Pathan, and in the dim, smoky light he looked like a Greek or Syrian
saint in an early Christian fresco. Habibullah was twenty-six years old and from the Kuchi tribe, a nomadic branch of the Pathans. Being a Kuchi explained a lot about his demeanor. The British writer Peter Levi, in an erudite travelogue about Afghanistan,
The Light Garden of the Angel King,
described the Kuchis this way: “Kuchi means travelers and they are hard to know. We found them stoical about disease and distrustful of the local doctors, and in their tents their behavior was regal.” Erect and motionless, Habibullah spoke impassively through Wakhil's translation.

As in the case of Gholam Issa Khan, in the late 1970s Taraki's Communist regime seized Kuchi land in Nangarhar and hauled the local
mullah
and headman of Habibullah's nomadic encampment off to prison. They were never seen again. Many of his kinsmen fled to refugee camps in Pakistan. Habibullah joined Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami to fight the Communists south of Jalalabad, near the town of Rodat Baru, where his family used to live. He described how Soviet troops entered the Kuchi camp in 1982, “robbing houses, killing the goats, taking money and the cows.” Then this Kuchi area was bombed from the air, and all the irrigation canals were destroyed. “Less than ten people out of two thousand are still left there. Many are in Peshawar, many we don't know if they are alive or dead.”

About that time, Habibullah returned temporarily to Pakistan, where he married. He now had a wife and two children living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar. Amid strangers in the impersonal, barrackslike arrangement of the sprawling camp, his wife was obliged to wear the veil, something Kuchi women didn't have to do in Afghanistan, where everyone in the encampment was a close relative. Living as a guerrilla, Habibullah had seen his wife and children only a few times over the years, and he worried about them. He said over a third of the members of his extended family had been killed, “but if we stopped fighting and went to live in the camps in
Pakistan, we would all become refugee slaves and the Communists would have everything.”

Habibullah was not vehement or even enthusiastic about what he said. There was an almost bored look in his olive-pit
eyes. Jihad
was obviously no joy for him, but a fundamental duty that grew out of the unfortunate circumstances of his life. Oppression had forced Habibullah — against his better nature, it seemed — to hate. The Afghans, I was beginning to notice, were not really good haters, not like the kind that existed in Iran, Lebanon, and other places Moslems felt themselves to be oppressed. The differences between those places and Afghanistan were, among other things, politics and urbanization. The mujahidin were not politicized to the degree that Arabs and Iranians were. The Afghan fundamentalists were mainly simple village people, not an angry peasant proletariat that had fled to city slums in search of jobs, as in Iran and Egypt, and in the process had sacrificed their cultural underpinnings. Habibullah had lost a lot, but one thing he hadn't lost was a sense of who he was.

Scurrying field mice and the drone of helicopter gunships again disturbed my sleep. When Habibullah saw my fear he laughed. It was the only time I ever saw a smile cross his face. He explained to Wakhil that the gunships never came in low over Spinghar anymore because of the enemy's fear of Stingers. “We don't have Stingers here,” Habibullah said. “But we always say we do when communicating by radio, which we know they intercept.”

After daybreak the bombs came. The earth vibrated from the thousand-pounders dropped by the fighter jets overhead. Clouds of dust from exploding earth filled the air. The nearest bomb hit several hundred yards away from us and, as it turned out, nobody was hurt. It had been a useless exercise: the jets had taken off from the military air field at Jalalabad, dropped their bombs from about ten thousand feet, and flew home.
The jets were flying so high that from the ground they appeared no larger than specks. Even with television-guided missiles — which these planes were not equipped with — hitting a target as small as a pup tent from that altitude is exceedingly difficult. It was another potent illustration of how the Stingers had changed the face of the war. Weighing only thirty pounds, the heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles were mobile and cost only $75,000 apiece, and in two out of three times that they were fired in Afghanistan, a Stinger destroyed a Soviet jet or helicopter that cost about $4 million each. So the Soviet and Afghan government pilots weren't taking any chances.