Soldiers of God (26 page)

J
UST AS
Abdul Haq was, behind the scenes, the most respected of the Peshawar-based mujahidin, Rahim Wardak was the most laughed at.

Haq, having never served in a formal army, had no rank and did not psychologically require one. Wardak, a former general in the Afghan army who defected while a military attaché in India, had a very impressive-sounding rank and title: major general and chief of the general staff of Mahaz-i-Milli Islami (National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, or NIFA), one of the moderate groups in the seven-party alliance. Haq's English was often ungrammatical and full of swear words; Wardak's was a polished, Sandhurst variety. Haq always wore the same gray
shalwar kameez.
Wardak, a portly man in middle age with black, gray-flecked hair, sported aviator glasses, pressed American military fatigues, a scarf and matching beret in camouflage design, a pistol and a survival dagger. Wardak resembled not an Afghan guerrilla but a fashion model in a mercenary magazine advertisement. Flanked, as he sometimes was, by a squad of NIFA mujahidin armed with Israeli-manufactured Uzi machine guns, he and his men conveyed the aura of a Latin American drug smuggler's army. Regarding the dagger that Wardak carried, Haq once remarked, “You want to see a knife? I'll show you a real knife.” He picked up a small knife from his desk. “This is a penknife. I open letters with it. That's more than Rahim Wardak does with his knife.”

Wardak controlled no territory inside Afghanistan and rarely left Pakistani soil. He directed “battles” across the border with a frequency-hopping walkie-talkie given him by the Americans. But not even the Americans in Islamabad were fooled by him. Once when Wardak claimed to have rained two thousand rockets on Kabul, a check by the U.S. embassy revealed that only eight rockets had fallen on the city that week. Wardak called the December 1987 mujahidin siege of Khost, in Paktia province near the Pakistani border, in which he took part, “the biggest battle of the war.” But a few weeks later, Wardak said Khost was “a joke,” blown out of proportion by the media.

At the American Club bar, Wardak was considered “a goofy NIFA general.” He was the extreme, comic embodiment of the British military historian John Keegan's dictum: “Generalship is bad for people…. The most reasonable of men suffuse with pomposity when stars touch their shoulders.”

When reporters, diplomats, and relief workers in Pakistan thought of NIFA, Wardak naturally came to mind. He was an apt symbol for a party of mujahidin who dressed slick, talked fancy, did less fighting, and held less territory than the rough-hewn, tea-slurping fundamentalists of Yunus Khalis's party.

NIFA's founder was Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani (a Pir is a hereditary saint). Gailani, in addition to claiming direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed, was the leader of the Sufi Qadirrya sect, which has small groups of followers throughout the Middle East. While this sounds pious and impressive, the Pir's reputation on the Northwest Frontier was anything but. Some journalists, and mujahidin too, called him “the disco Pir.” In the mid-1970s, while Khalis and others were fighting in the hills, Gailani ran a car dealership in Kabul. Rather than traditional robes, he preferred Savile Row suits, Gucci loafers, and silk scarves. John Fullerton, in a 1983 primer about the war in Afghanistan, described the Pir, in his late fifties, as “otiose, sedentary, sleepy-eyed and boastful.” Later he developed
cancer, and this necessitated frequent trips to London. But during the fasting month of Ramadan in spring 1988, the Pir's departure for London caused many to remark aloud, “Away from the eyes of the mujahidin, in England he doesn't have to fast.”

Gailani's troops were known as the “Gucci muj.” NIFA offices in Peshawar, Islamabad, and Quetta were staffed by mujahidin in designer sunglasses, running shoes, and sleeveless Banana Republic vests and fatigue pants. Some even wore expensive cologne and possessed Sony Walkmans, along with camouflage-patterned wallets and briefcases. They patronized the restaurants and coffee shops of expensive Pakistani hotels. NIFA offices were air conditioned, of course, and had refrigerators stocked with soft drinks. But the most significant physical characteristic of the “Gucci muj” was that their leading officials either had beards that were neatly trimmed … like the Pir's … or had no beards at all.

To visit a NIFA office was to be bombarded with complaints about American and Pakistani arms supply policy. Apparently, Zia was shortchanging the NIFA commanders, just as he was Abdul Haq, in favor of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami. But instead of soldiering on, the NIFA mujahidin constantly whined about it. They saw themselves, correctly, as representing the Western values that America encouraged. Yet Pakistan's intelligence service, with U.S. acquiescence, was giving NIFA only a pittance in weapons and supplies. This was why NIFA, according to its own officials, was not more active in the fighting. The American and Pakistani answer was: “If NIFA showed more fighting ability, then it would get more weapons.” To that, NIFA retorted: “If Hekmatyar takes power in a post-Soviet Afghanistan and turns the country into a version of Khomeini's Iran, then America and Zia will have only themselves to blame.” (When Zia was killed in a plane crash, NIFA officials were quietly ecstatic.)

NIFA had only two leaders they could really boast about:
Amin Wardak and Haji Abdel Latif, two commanders with strong local support in their areas who fought well … without cologne or matching berets and scarves.

Amin Wardak, who was unrelated and unconnected to Major General Rahim Wardak, had been the guerrilla chieftain of Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, since 1978. For two years, Amin Wardak and his men had no contact with the Pakistan-based resistance parties, and completely on their own they wrested control of Wardak province from the Afghan Communists. After the Soviets invaded, Amin Wardak sent a group of mujahidin to Peshawar to negotiate with the parties in order to get more arms. A deal was struck with NIFA, only because of an old friendship between Pir Gailani and Amin's father. But the relationship quickly went sour. “We saw Gailani give power and money to people who weren't doing any real fighting, while we were doing to Ghazni [a major town south of Wardak province] what Abdul Haq was doing to Kabul,” explained Amin's younger brother, Ruhani Wardak. “Gailani,” he went on, “wanted a diplomatic strategy and we preferred to fight …And what about Rahim Wardak? Well, our people were getting killed while he was still a military attaché in India for the Communist government!”

Considering the contempt Amin Wardak had for Pir Gailani, it was amazing that the relationship lasted as long as it did. It wasn't until the beginning of 1988 that Amin Wardak formally broke away from NIFA and joined up with Khalis. The final straw was nothing that the Pir precipitated; rather, it had to do with Abdul Haq's injury. The medical compound where Haq was taken after he had stepped on the mine was in Wardak province, and so under Amin's control. Haq felt that he owed his life to him and showed his appreciation by sending Amin several truckloads of weapons and ammunition. Some bargaining ensued, and as a result NIFA was suddenly without one of its only two big commanders.

NIFA still had Haji Abdel Latif, though. Haji Latif was about
the last person on earth one would normally associate with the “Gucci muj.” He was in his eighties and, even more so than Khalis, spent most of his time inside, fighting. Haji Latif had a particularly unsavory reputation before the war. He had served twenty-one years in prison on a murder charge and was a strange sort of brigand: he was the leader of a gang of Kandahar cutthroats that functioned as a benevolent mafia, robbing rich merchants by making them pay exorbitant rates for “protection” and, occasionally, giving some of the money to the poor. NIFA officials defined him as a “Robin Hood figure.” His gang was called Pagie Louch, Farsi for “bare feet,” because along with special prayers and magic incantations, its initiation rites involved walking barefoot on a bed of hot coals. New members also had to suffer nails to be driven into their heels without showing pain.

Switching gears from gang leader to mujahidin commander was easy in Afghanistan, particularly in the southern desert city of Kandahar, the wildest part of perhaps the wildest country on earth.

In a war that was in many ways the most dangerous ever for a reporter to cover, Kandahar was the most dangerous theater of the war. Its desert land was flat and cluttered with land mines. When MI-24 helicopter gunships swept in low after their prey, you could run but you couldn't hide. Because you didn't have to walk, the Kandahar area was physically less demanding than everywhere else in the country. But never in the mountainous north did a reporter feel as scared and vulnerable as when jammed inside a Toyota Land Cruiser, slowed down by deep pockets of sand, with Soviet helicopters in the sky. The Kandahari guerrillas, more than the other mujahidin, had a reputation for reckless bravado. When mines and helicopters were reported ahead, they slammed on the accelerator.

Kandahar really got to me; it wiped out what was left of my
so-called objectivity. Being there made me think that the Western media really were a bunch of pampered, navel-gazing yuppies, too busy reporting illegal detentions and individual killings in South Korea and the West Bank … before dashing back to their luxury hotels in Seoul and Jerusalem … to bother about the nuclearlike wasting of an entire urban center by the Soviet military. The throngs of reporters in places like Israel, South Korea, and South Africa, and the absence of them in Kandahar, or even in the Pakistan border area that abuts it, made me think that “war reporting” was fast becoming a misnomer.

Blazers were replacing flak jackets. The warfare most often videotaped and written about was urban violence in societies that have attained a level of development sufficient to allow large groups of journalists to operate comfortably. The worldwide profusion of satellite stations, laptop computers, computer modems, and luxury hotels with digital phone and telex systems was narrowing the media's horizons rather than widening them. If there wasn't a satellite station nearby, or if the phones didn't work, or if the electricity wasn't dependable, you just reported less or nothing at all about the place. Although the South Africans, for example, merely curtailed your movements, the Soviets tried to hunt you down and kill you. So you covered South Africa while at the same time denouncing its government for the restrictions it placed on your work. But you didn't fool around with the Soviets, because they were serious about keeping reporters out. I couldn't think about Kandahar; I could only rant and rage about it.

The modern destruction of Kandahar had its origins in the American decision to build an airport there in 1956. By the time the airport was completed in December 1962, at a cost of $15 million, it was already considered a white elephant. According to Louis Dupree, in his 1973 book
Afghanistan,
the airport, in theory, “would have been a refueling stop for piston aircraft on their way across the Middle East and South
Asia…. The introduction of the jet age smashed this dream before the completion of the project, and the magnificent facilities now sit, virtually unused, in the desert” outside Kandahar.

Of course Dupree, when he wrote that passage, had no way of knowing what was going to happen. It turned out that the Americans did not build a white elephant after all. Following the Soviet invasion, that airport, about fifteen miles southeast of the city, became the heart of the southernmost concentration of Soviet soldiery in the three-hundred-year history of Russian imperialism in central Asia. Not since Czar Peter the Great first moved against the Tartars had the Russians been so tantalizingly close to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean: five hundred miles across the Baluchi desert, to be exact; or, to put it another way, thirty minutes’ flying time by strike aircraft or naval bomber to the Persian Gulf.

The Soviets garrisoned the airport and the nearby city against mujahidin attacks. Early in the war, when the attacks grew more bold, the Soviets, as they had begun to do in the Panjshir Valley in the north, stretched the definition of counterinsurgency in Kandahar to a point beyond any that the Americans in Vietnam had ever conceived of. They peppered the surrounding desert with tens of thousands of land mines, which they usually dropped from the air but sometimes shot from mortars. Soviet rockets fired from the city and the airport blasted the villages around Kandahar. These villages became lifeless archeological sites, overgrown with weeds and silent except for the buzzing of flies and wasps. But the Kandahari mujahidin were every bit as hell-bent as the Soviets. They zigzagged through minefields on the dust-packed, gravelly wastes with double-barreled 23 mm antiaircraft guns mounted on the backs of their pickup trucks, firing away at anything that moved in the sky. The guns made a harsh, piercing noise that felt like sharp metal inside your stomach, but the gunners never used ear plugs. In 1986, the year after
Charles Thornton of the
Arizona Republic
was killed in a helicopter ambush, when even the bravest journalists avoided Kandahar, the fighting there became truly awful.

James Rupert of the
Washington Post
was one of a handful of American reporters to visit Kandahar before the Soviet troop withdrawal and the only one I'm aware of who visited the city in 1986. His October 6 dispatch was the most graphic news story about the war in Afghanistan by an American journalist:

Rupert described a group of mujahidin listening to a radio report about a bombing in Beirut. “Why do they always talk about Beirut?” the man asked Rupert. “Kandahar had a hundred bombs last night.” Rupert's story made little impact and was quickly forgotten.

The following year, 1987, the situation in Kandahar worsened still. A State Department publication noted, “By the onset of summer, the capital of southern Afghanistan and its surrounding areas had become the scene of what has been probably the heaviest concentration of combat of the war.” The Soviets, who by this time were starting to tell their own people the truth about what was happening in Afghanistan, brought an
Izvestia
correspondent to Kandahar in September. He wrote that the city “is one big ruin. There is shooting all the time. Nobody would give a brass farthing for your life if you took it into your head, say, to walk down the street unarmed.”