Soldiers of God (28 page)

Throughout his childhood, Hamid had resented the restrictions placed on him as the son of one of Afghanistan's most important men. He longed to escape Kandahar and the stifling routine of tribal ceremonies. He wanted to serve his country, but only as a diplomat living abroad in the West. His first shock and humiliation came as a student in India in 1979, when officials at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi informed him that the Taraki regime had imprisoned his father. A few months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. “I suddenly realized
how spoiled I was,” Hamid told me. “I realized that I had been consciously rejecting all the things that were really important and now were lost.”

A few months later, in 1980, Hamid visited a refugee camp near Quetta. As soon as he entered the camp, hundreds of Popalzai tribesmen gathered around him, smiling. “They thought that just because I was the
khans
son, I had the power to help them. I felt ashamed, because I knew I was just a naive student who was spending his college years thinking only of himself and his ambition. I was not what they thought I was. My goal from that moment on was to become the man that those refugees thought I was. To become a man like my father.”

The man that Hamid Karzai became was one who never tired of talking about the rich history of his tribe and the region of Kandahar. The story of the founding of the Popalzai … first told to me by Hamid … sounds like one of the archetypal tales in the Book of Genesis.

Abdal, the patriarch of the Abdalis (later the Durranis), died at the age of 105 and was succeeded by Rajar, who in turn passed over his oldest son and picked the younger but smarter Zirak to be headman. Zirak ruled for many years and had four sons. One day, near Kandahar, the family was breaking camp. By then Zirak was over 100 and too old even to move, let alone saddle his horse. He asked his oldest son, Barak, for help. Barak laughed and made fun of his father. The second son, Alik, did the same. The third son, Musa, told his father to get on a horse and follow him. When Zirak was not able, Musa kicked him and told him he must remain behind until the beasts devoured him. Popal, the youngest son, offered to carry his father on his back. Old Zirak never forgot the incident, and when he died at the age of 120, he invested Popal as head of the clan. Thus it was that Popal founded his own branch of the Abdali tribe.

The mythic, elemental quality of the story is enhanced by
the fact that, though the origin of the Popalzai is relatively recent … the late fifteenth century … nobody can accurately date when the events took place. It is such stories that, stylistically at least, lend credence to the notion that the Pathans are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. True or not, one could at least say that the desert surrounding Kandahar was to the Pathans what the wilderness of Sinai was to the Hebrews: the seed-ground where an assemblage of tribes grew into a nation. To Hamid Karzai, Kandahar was “the home of our original Afghan culture, the genuine Afghanistan.”

A trip to Kandahar begins in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's province of Baluchistan. Quetta and Baluchistan were to the Kandahar region what Peshawar and the Northwest Frontier were to the rest of Afghanistan: a rear base for mujahidin, war correspondents, and relief workers. And because everything about the Kandahar area was wild and exotic, even compared to the rest of Afghanistan, Quetta was wilder and more exotic than Peshawar.

As I looked down from thirty thousand feet on the flight from Islamabad to Quetta, Baluchistan resembled a series of boils and lesions on a scratched, sandpaper surface: the product of volcanic upheavals and tectonic shifts going back two billion years. Once on the ground, I continued to feel lost in space. There was a weird flimsiness to the setting. In 1935, Quetta was wiped out by an earthquake that killed twenty-three thousand people in the city and many more in the desert around it. In the 1980s, everything in Quetta seemed truly temporary, as unstable and prone to violent shifts as the ground I walked on.

The new Quetta was built on the ruins of the old one. The single-level unfinished cement houses looked like a theatrical set that could have been ripped out at any moment from the gray backdrop of hills beyond by blasts of plateau wind.

During the Afghan war, Baluchistan was especially important
strategically. It was the only remaining barrier that kept the Russians from reaching the Indian Ocean … the ultimate dream of the czars. Like so many strategic places, Quetta was a shithole. Only in July 1988 was a decent hotel opened. Before that, you stayed at the New Lourdes. To flush the toilet in your room you needed a raincoat and Wellingtons because the water exploded in all directions. The place had no heating and the boiler rarely worked, so during the cold plateau winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing at night, you faced the choice of a cold shower or none at all. The Bloom Star, the only other hotel at the time, was just marginally better.

Baluchistan was the ultimate free-trade zone and smuggler's haven: an unregulated void of hazy identity set between Iran, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani province of Sind, with its back to the Indian Ocean. Despite the awful accommodations, you could get almost anything in Quetta … heroin, Japanese cameras, cans of Heinz soup, relatively recent copies of
Gentlemen's Quarterly
and the
Washington Journalism Review.

Even the ethnic identity that gave the province its name was at risk in the 1980s, as the influx of Pathan refugees from Afghanistan tipped the demographic balance against the Baluchis, a people of Middle Eastern origin who speak an Indo-European language similar to Pukhtu. Because Quetta, with a population of 250,000, was one fourth the size of Peshawar, and because Baluchistan was inundated with close to a million refugees from southern Afghanistan, the Afghan influence on Quetta appeared even more dramatic than in Peshawar. Quetta seemed to have
become
Kandahar, since a large portion of Kandahar's prewar population now lived in or near Quetta. With its Afghan merchants, Afghan carpet shops, and refugees smoking water pipes, Quetta blurred in my mind with the Kandahar I had briefly known in 1973.

Everything about Quetta had an air of unreliability, and I was apt to distrust much of what I saw and heard.

The first person I met there was Atta Mahmoud, a twenty-
eight-year-old refugee from Kandahar, who lured me to his carpet shop. Inside, we sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping cup after cup of green tea. He wore a psychedelic black, green, and gold turban; his eyes were crazed. He implored with his hands as if speaking to a multitude and kept calling me Babà, which means father and is a sign of respect. But there was a fawning quality to his voice; his words had the tone of a sales pitch. Having had previous experiences with carpet dealers in the East, I was deeply suspicious, especially after Atta Mah-moud told me he had worked at the Sunshine Hotel in Kandahar before the war, and had sold drugs there to European hippies.

But Atta Mahmoud wanted to talk about Kandahar, not about carpets. “Kandahar city, Babà, is no more. No more, I tell you. There is not a street or a building standing, Babà. No more nut or apple trees. No bazaars. Just one meter of dust and new paved roads for Russian tanks and security patrols.” This was the first eyewitness account I had heard concerning the destruction of Kandahar. I wanted more specifics, but he was hard to interrupt and his oration soon disintegrated into a mad tirade, much of it incomprehensible. “The only thing you can do with a Russian is slit his throat, Babà … If you don't want to slit his throat, you are a Communist.”

He casually mentioned that his two small sons had been killed in a Soviet artillery bombardment of Kandahar the year before, in 1986. This seemed so horrible that I didn't know how to react, or even whether to believe him. I told him I was sorry, and then, in order to break the silence, I asked the price of some of his carpets. But he brushed aside my query, treating it as an insult. He said we could discuss carpets another day. I decided that this man was not after my money and that much of what he told me about Kandahar might actually be true.

Next I wanted to see Zia Mojadidi, who, though related to Sibghatullah Mojadidi of the Afghan National Liberation Front, was not connected with the party. Rather, he was a
former faculty member at Kabul University and the local stringer for the Voice of America. Western journalists in Islamabad told me that Zia Mojadidi was a thoroughly professional reporter and the most reliable source of information in Quetta. But his phone was out of order, and the directions to his house were vague: “near the Helper's High School and the orphanage.” After searching for half an hour and banging on several doors I found him … miraculously, it seemed to me. He looked like a professor, with thick glasses and a courteous, serious way of speaking. The room he took me to was completely bare, save for carpets on the floor. Since he did not show me the other rooms in the house, he gave the impression of living a marginal existence, and this made me uncertain. After twenty-four hours in Quetta, my instinct told me that if a man possessed no furniture, he also possessed no useful information. His precise speech dispelled some of my doubts, however. He did have information, and filled the holes in Atta Mahmoud's description of Kandahar with hard facts. Basically, Zia Mojadidi, the respected local journalist, backed up the carpet dealer Atta Mahmoud's story of how the Soviets were destroying Kandahar.

At a Red Cross hospital for war victims, my feet finally touched solid ground. Real people packed the corridors; bullets, mortar fire, and mine fragments had torn up their flesh. The day I visited there were 103 patients, and since the hospital had room for only 60, the staff had set up tents on the lawn. The surgeons were working nonstop. A nurse shaved a little boy's head in preparation for surgery. He shrieked with terror. Orderlies wheeled by with carts stacked with bottles of blood. The smell of disinfectant was everywhere. The situation was the same at the thirteen other hospitals in Baluchistan, I was told. But these patients, the doctors said to me, were the lucky few: the ones who had made the three-week trek on foot from Kandahar to the border and the grueling, bumpy drive from the border to Quetta without dying of their injuries
or being killed by Afghan regime border guards. It was in the interest of the Communists that wounded civilians never reach the border alive; that way there would be no witnesses to what was happening.

I had never seen indications of this level of carnage in the hospitals I had visited in Basra, Iraq, in the company of a horde of other Western journalists writing about the Gulf war. Basra had a Sheraton, though. Quetta then had only the New Lourdes and the Bloom Star. Sure enough, when the swank Sareena Hotel opened in 1988, the number of journalists in Quetta increased dramatically. Still, stories about the Kandahar fighting in the American press and on television were practically nonexistent.

I wrote as much as I could about Kandahar for a radio network and a magazine. But the Red Cross hospital was as close to the reality of the fighting as I was able or willing to get at the time. I was scared. The vision of Charles Thornton, the
Arizona Republic
reporter who was killed by a helicopter missile just as he reached the top of a hill, made me think hard about crossing the border. But in 1988 I returned to Quetta and, swallowing my fear, was determined to reach Kandahar.

The NI FA villa, from where I began my trip to Kandahar, was in a Quetta suburb. It had only a few guns, but it was luxurious in comparison with more rough and ready mujahidin headquarters: there was air conditioning, marble floors, a tiled bathroom with Head and Shoulders shampoo, and a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and mineral water. Fashionable wicker furniture and a Persian carpet filled the living room. A Russian ceramic tea set from the czarist period sat in a cabinet against the wall. On the wall were photographs of King Zahir Shah, in exile in Italy. There was also a photograph of the Baghdad mausoleum of Sheikh Abdul Khader, reputedly the fourteenth direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and a distant relative of the Aga Khan and of King Hussein of
Jordan, the great-grandfather of Pir Gailani. (The Pir's family had migrated to Afghanistan from Iraq at the turn of the century.) Everything in this villa suggested comfort and privilege, but not even privately was I critical. Having gone into Afghanistan several times with the Khalis fundamentalists, I was grateful for the pampering. Whatever the fear and danger, I knew that being relatively clean and well fed would keep me happy for now.

A NIFA staff man brought me to the villa from my downtown Quetta hotel in a spanking new Land Cruiser with racing stripes, the latest addition to NIFA's car fleet. As soon as I arrived, I met the mujahid who was to be my interpreter, Mohammed Akbar. He was twenty-one, spoke excellent English, and was a sophisticated Kabuli to the core. Had the Soviets not invaded, he would undoubtedly have gone abroad to study in England or America. His first remark was to ask if I had brought a sleeping bag, toilet paper, and water purification tablets for the trip. I all but laughed aloud. The gulf between
Akbar jan
(Akbar dear), as his NIFA comrades called him, and Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb … the interpreter and guides for my first trip with Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami … was vast.

NIFA supplied Akbar and me with a Land Cruiser (though not a new one), a driver, and several bodyguards. Kandahar was 150 miles northwest of Quetta. Before the war, the journey on the all-weather road took as little as six hours. By that idyllic standard, our route would be circuitous: straight on the all-weather road for 40 miles … halfway to the border … then northeast and east over the Baluchistan desert, hugging the Pakistan side of the border, then over the border into the Arghastan desert in a northwesterly direction, arcing north and west over Kandahar in order to enter the city's environs from the southwest. This meant eighteen hours of continuous driving. But compared to the previous year, 1987, and the year before that, our trip did not seem circuitous at all. Back then, the northern arc over and around the city was much wider,
and the journey took several days. Despite the Soviet-driven orgy of destruction in Kandahar, the military situation in southern Afghanistan had been steadily shifting in favor of the mujahidin, and this was reflected in the traveling distance from Quetta to Kandahar.