The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Shebarshin learned another lesson on that first trip to Afghanistan—the Soviet Army’s formula for determining enemy casualties. The calculation was derived from a mathematical equation in which the total number of rounds fired at the enemy was divided by a predetermined factor provided by Defense Ministry analysts. The resulting quotient was the official enemy body, regardless of whether any dead were actually found on the battlefield. It was this formula that produced the number of thirty thousand bandits killed in action each year for the last four years. Simple and structured, Shebarshin thought back in 1984. But with absolutely no relationship to reality.

  Islamabad, September 1986

  The air conditioner in the teak-paneled reception room whirred softly in the background, its gentle hum a welcome damper to the tension generated by the silence in the room. The room was sterile, void of decoration, save for the elegant, framed calligraphy from the Koran hanging in all four corners where the paneled walls met the ceiling. We were in Islamabad, in the inner sanctum of Pakistan’s secret intelligence services.

  I studied the leaders of the seven resistance parties sitting impassively, even sullenly, in the awkward silence. Their appearance was as varied as their personalities, ranging from unkempt mullah to radical Islamic chic. Sitting there in silence, the seven Afghan leaders cast sidelong glances in my direction, sizing me up one by one as they waited. We were all waiting for Major General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, known universally as ISI. There had been no introductions—they would have to wait for Akhtar’s grand entrance.

  My view of the war, after two months on the scene, was uncomplicated. It was clear that of all the confrontations in the mountains, valleys, and deserts of that tortured country over the millennia, few were ever about Afghanistan itself or its people. Whether it was Alexander the Great, or a string of Mogul emperors, or imperial Britain and Russia jockeying for advantage in the great game, the clashing of armies in Afghanistan was always a derivative of some larger campaign of conquest. The people living between the Oxus and the Indus Rivers were secondary, almost incidental, to the goals of the great empires as their armies marched into or passed through Afghanistan.

  This latest round of conflict was no exception. Regardless of the moral underpinnings of Jimmy Carter’s initial stand on the Soviet invasion, American goals had moved beyond Carter’s early vision of right and wrong. Our effort in Afghanistan had now become a central component of the endgame of the Cold War. Driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan was the goal; the welfare of the people of Afghanistan would be improved along the way, it was hoped, but that was not essential.

  These Afghan leaders, too, knew how secondary their aspirations and sufferings were to our seemingly common goal of fighting the Soviet 40th Army. While the Afghan people might have reason to respect or possibly even like their fleeting American allies, their leaders would never trust our motives, nor would they expect us to trust theirs. We might share a few goals, but only a fool would think we shared real values. All in all, I thought it was an honest enough way to do business.

  Akhtar breezed into the room with his interpreter, a Pashto-speaking colonel known by the camp name “Bacha.” The general shook hands around the room and immediately launched into an opening monologue, enlightening the assembled Afghan leaders on the importance of America’s new contribution to the war and the courage of the Pakistani president for raising the struggle against the Soviets to a new level. Somewhere in the middle of his more than a little imperious opening he introduced me as the new American in charge of the arms pipeline to the fighters. Overdone, I thought, but good theater.

  Akhtar, Zia’s point man on Afghanistan, was the only serving general officer in the Pakistani Army other than the president himself, who had begun his career in the British Indian Army almost four decades earlier. At sixty-one he was slim and fit, an image he worked hard to maintain. His khakis were crisply starched, and his eyes were clear and commanding, but with a secretive cast that left me wondering where the truth might be found, or even if it could be found. In the official pecking order of the Pakistani Army, Akhtar ranked below the generals who commanded the key army corps garrisoned throughout Pakistan and below the service chiefs. But in real terms, Akhtar was as close to Zia as any general in the Army, and he made a point of reminding all who might have questioned his authority that he was quartered in Rawalpindi Cantonment practically next door to his friend. A man of unquestioned loyalty to Zia, Akhtar had been running his Afghan effort since its inception. His approach to the Afghan leaders swung between patronizing and paternal.

  To my right was Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, leader of the “moderate” Front for the Rescue of Afghanistan. A small man with a medium-cropped beard mostly gone gray, Mojaddedi was a revered leader of the Naqshbandi Sufi sect and the head of a family of religious leaders with long involvement in modern Afghan politics. He had been imprisoned in Kabul a number of times, once for plotting to assassinate Khrushchev in the early 1960s on a state visit to Afghanistan. His party had a reputation for corruption and ineffectiveness on the battlefield. Mojaddedi himself hadn’t been inside Afghanistan in three years, perhaps longer, and his party’s only real strength was its gift for public relations. In that department it was near the top. The diminutive leader caught me studying him and flashed a faint smile, perhaps welcoming me to the fight. I held his gaze for just a second, knowing I was being scrutinized by the others, always on the lookout for signs of threatening alliances.

  Next to Mojaddedi was Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, the lone Tajik among the “Peshawar Seven”—the other six were from the Pashtun majority that made up over 40 percent of the Afghan population. A former professor of Islamic law at Kabul University, Rabbani bore some resemblance to the diminutive Sufi sitting by his side on the couch. He had the same salt-and-pepper beard, the same gentle eyes, and the same impassive demeanor. But all similarity stopped there. Rabbani was a tough infighter who at forty-six had built a large and effective resistance party from his northern base in Badakhshan, in the process luring away large numbers of able commanders from other resistance parties. The most famous commander in Rabbani’s Jamiat Islami, which translates loosely as “Community of Islam,” was the fabled Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose stronghold was in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. Rabbani was a cipher. I could read nothing in his face as he stared at the floor. He didn’t scan the room and appeared to have no interest in making eye contact with me.

  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, on Mojaddedi’s other side, leaned forward slightly in his seat and took a long look at me. He was a commanding presence, and his movements drew the others involuntarily into following his gaze. Hekmatyar was the darkest of the Afghan leaders, the most Stalinist of the Peshawar Seven, insofar as he thought nothing of ordering an execution for a slight breach of party discipline. He was the single leader who stirred controversy in both Moscow and Washington, where his brand of paranoid fundamentalism was equally understood and feared. The KGB had a special disinformation team tasked with sowing discord among the Peshawar Seven, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as Pakistan’s favorite, was its central target. The line from Moscow blended known facts with classic KGB fantasy. There was the story of Gulbuddin the Kabul University radical throwing acid in the faces of young Afghan women who refused to wear the veil; the cool murderer, killing with his own hands fighters who violated his code of loyalty. And there was in furtive circulation a KGB-forged order from Gulbuddin to one of his lieutenants for the murder of one or more of the other Afghan leaders.

  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was forty, of medium height and build, with clear, olive skin and a coal black beard to match his black eyes. He wore a light gray wool shalwar kameez under an open black vest and a tightly wound black turban. A former classmate of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s, Gulbuddin was now the Panjshir commander’s mortal enemy. Colliding ambitions would have been enough to keep them at sword point, but their ethnic difference—Massoud was Tajik, Hekm
atyar Pashtun—added tribal distrust as a multiplier of their hatred. Though convenient battlefield alliances had been forged from time to time, they had long since torpedoed any existing common ground. Their rivalry would become a preoccupation for the remainder of the war, setting the stage for more brutal competition in the years ahead.

  I watched Gulbuddin as he fingered his agate prayer beads and waited for him to speak. But he said nothing, and the moment was again commandeered by General Akhtar, who had watched closely the silent interplay between us and now drew the attention of those in the room back to himself.

  “To ensure that this new weapons program is an unqualified success, I will ask that each of you take personal responsibility for the monitoring and control of these new antiaircraft missiles. If any of these weapons fall into enemy hands, or if I hear of any of these missiles being sold to others, I will hold each of you personally responsible. Anything less than your complete commitment to these measures will be a serious betrayal of the jihad.” Akhtar’s admonition was stilted and overly officious, but he had laid out the new procedures neatly for my benefit. Invoking Islam and the sanctity of the jihad had been a flourish for his audience.

  Gulbuddin was the first to pick up the signal from Akhtar that the discussion period had opened. Speaking in Pashto, in a controlled tone, he was a few seconds into his presentation when Akhtar cut him off.

  “Engineer Gulbuddin, please speak English,” Akhtar said, barely concealing his irritation. “Your English is perfectly good.”

  “Of course, General,” Gulbuddin replied, and he picked up where he had left off, this time in precise, uninflected English.

  “I wish to take this opportunity to reiterate the gratitude of the people of Afghanistan to President Zia and to you, General Akhtar, for the steadfast support you and your countrymen have given to us in our time of need. I also thank our friend for the assistance his government has provided us through Pakistan in the past. That assistance has allowed us to stand up to the Russian invaders, and now to stop them—”

  “Thank you, Engineer Gulbuddin,” said Akhtar, cutting him off again. “I think we can move on from here.”

  Akhtar’s abrupt intervention came as a surprise, and not only to me. Even Rabbani lifted his eyes from the floor. Gulbuddin was the Pakistanis’ favorite—Zia and the powerful Islamic parties saw him as Pakistan’s “solution” in postwar Afghanistan—yet he was being put down here in front of me and the others. I decided later that Akhtar thought he might be building up to an attack on the United States and decided not to give him enough rope to hang himself on our first encounter.

  Another voice broke in, bringing the tension down a notch. I glanced to my left and caught sight of Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, the only leader among the seven who’d come to the meeting in a silk-and-cashmere suit instead of a shalwar kameez.

  “I have no reservations as to the requirements for accountability,” he said, “and can guarantee that the fighters of the National Islamic Front for Afghanistan will do their duty to provide complete protection for the missiles entrusted to them.” As he spoke in his cultured English accent, I took stock of the dapper Gailani. A small, well-trimmed goatee, an affectation of the old Kabul elite, European tailor, Italian cobbler, a Patek Philippe peeking out from under the cuff of his $2,000 suit. No wonder his men were called “Gucci commanders,” I thought. Gailani was a true holy man, a hereditary pir of the Qadiriya Sufi sect, with which most Pashtun Afghans are associated. He came from a wealthy family broadly associated with prerevolutionary leaders of Afghanistan. He rarely, if ever, strayed into Afghanistan, preferring instead to spend much of his time in London, and he was Europe’s most popular moderate Afghan leader.

  The third so-called moderate, Nabi Mohammedi, neither spoke English nor understood it. A religious leader and former Afghan parliamentarian, Nabi simply nodded in agreement with whatever Ahktar was saying through Colonel Bacha. He looked bored, and every so often he’d open his small snuff can and snort a pinch of the powdered tobacco. Among the three moderates, Nabi’s party, the Movement for the Islamic Revolution of Afghanistan, was the least public relations oriented, the least corrupt, and the most effective in the field.

  Across the room from me were the other two hard-liners, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a great barrel of a man and an ardent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maulvi Yunis Khales, the red-bearded mullah from Nangarhar. Khales spoke no English. Sayyaf claimed not to, either, but he betrayed himself with a look of understanding as Gulbuddin and Gailani spoke.

  A Cairo-educated professor of Islam, Sayyaf wore a perpetual half smile, as if he were sharing a secret with whomever he happened to have locked in his gaze. He formed a party jointly with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the early 1980s, after he was released from prison, but the union was short-lived. They shared common origins in the Muslim Brotherhood and solid connections to Saudi money, but little else. Sayyaf spoke fluent Arabic and was particularly popular among the Arabs who were arriving in Pakistan and Afghanistan in increasing numbers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf.

  The last of the Peshawar Seven was a unique character of the Afghan War, Maulvi Yunis Khales, the mullah from Nangarhar. In his mid-sixties, Khales looked severe and forbidding, but behind the long, scraggly beard tinted red with henna was a face with a hint of kindness and a constant look of bewilderment as he contemplated so many things that seemed beyond his control. Khales was a regional leader, without pretense to national stature like some of the others in the room. His operations were generally limited to the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Paktia, but where many of the other leaders stayed put in Pakistan, Khales, even at his age, went into Afghanistan regularly with his men to lead the fight.

  Khales was the least politically complicated of the seven. He was committed to fighting the Russians until they left his country. After that, he would most likely disappear from the political scene and return to his chores as the head of a madrassa, an Islamic school where he had once taught his students lessons from the Koran. Word had it that the old Koranic teacher had enough energy left over to pour into his new bride, who was said to be about a quarter his age and who was rumored to be carrying a new descendant in an already long line of Nangarhari holy men.

  Khales spoke in Pashto at some length, then waited for Colonel Bacha to translate. I caught a brief exchange of glances between Akhtar and Bacha, nothing more than an almost imperceptible shake of the head and a corresponding nod from Bacha. When Khales finished, the colonel translated in just a few sentences what had taken him much longer to say.

  “Maulvi Khales says that what President Zia has decided and what the American President has promised will be good for the jihad,” said Bacha. “He says that he will do his part to ensure that the special weapons are controlled.”

  Akhtar finished up quickly and invited us into the dining room for lunch, effectively closing out any further discussion.

  The centerpiece of the luncheon that followed was roasted quail served with crisp efficiency by the military stewards in khaki uniforms with red Afridi tribal headgear. The lunch itself was uneventful, with a minimum of small talk. The Afghans were in a great rush to finish in time for the noonday call to prayers, and they ate their lunch hurriedly. The only drama I witnessed at the table was the specter of Sayyaf, wedged between Mojaddedi and Gailani, struggling to make sense of the Western dining setting. First he ate Gailani’s salad, then Mojaddedi’s, then he took bread from both. There must be symbolism in this, I thought. Mojaddedi looked across the table at me with an expression that seemed to say, See what I have to put up with?

  Despite the theater, these seven leaders were there for a reason: They served as the conduits for as many as a quarter million full- and part-time fighters in the field. There were more parties, notably the Shia Hazaras, who’d been cut out of the usual pipeline. Try as we might, we couldn’t seem to bring the number down below seven—and if all the parties claiming a right to a seat at the table in Peshawar had actu
ally been included, it would have grown to many more. The lion’s share of the logistical and financial support we provided through the Pakistanis went to the three so-called fundamentalist parties, led by Rabbani, Hekmatyar, and Khales. Sayyaf came in a close fourth, and the three moderates pulled up the rear.

  I would have to deal with the Washington fan clubs of the three moderate parties for the rest of the war, and with the recurring suggestion that if we would only funnel more supplies to the moderates, not only would the war end sooner, but nice guys would be in charge at the finish. But the reality was that Islam, in its unique Afghan incarnation, was the one thing that held the fighters together. Trying to socially engineer Afghanistan through our distribution of weapons while the Soviets still had 120,000 troops on the ground was, I thought, a recipe for disaster, though the case would be made later that the war itself had done its own social reengineering.

  4

  Ojhri Camp, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, September 1986

  The only illumination in the primitive classroom emanated from a pinpoint light source projecting from behind a white sheet draped across the front of the room. I stood in the back, watching as a group of mujahideen from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s party sat stiffly on benches and listened as a Pakistani officer drilled them one more time on the firing sequence of the Stinger. A handful of Pakistani officers had been taught how to use the missile in the United States a few months earlier, and they were now training the Afghans. Standing there taking in the scene, I mused about the cost differential between the massive multimillion-dollar Stinger training dome in Ft. Bliss, Texas, and this little classroom with its white bedsheet scrawled with a hand-painted scene of Afghan terrain. Behind the sheet, a Pakistani noncommissioned officer slowly moved a penlight whose light source the students would track and eventually “kill” with their Stinger training units. Primitive, but it did the job for about a hundred bucks.