Fire

by Sebastian Junger

  Very quickly, the Soviets understood that there was no way to control Afghanistan without controlling the Panjshir Valley, and they started attacking it with forces of up to fifteen thousand men, backed by tanks, artillery, and massive air support. Massoud knew that he couldn’t stop them, and he didn’t even try. He would evacuate as many civilians as possible and then retreat to the surrounding peaks of the Hindu Kush; when the Soviets entered the Panjshir, they would find it completely deserted. That was when the real fighting began. Massoud and his men slept in caves and prayed to Allah and lived on nothing but bread and dried mulberries; they killed Russians with guns taken from other dead Russians and they fought and fought and fought, until the Soviets simply couldn’t afford to fight anymore. Then the Soviets would pull back, and the whole cycle would start all over again.

  Between 1979 and their withdrawal ten years later, the Soviets launched nine major offensives into the Panjshir Valley. They never took it. They tried assassinating Massoud, but his intelligence network always warned him in time. They made local peace deals, but he used the respite to organize resistance elsewhere in the country. The ultimate Soviet humiliation came in the mid-eighties, after the Red Army had lost hundreds of soldiers trying to take the Panjshir. The mujahidin had shot down a Soviet helicopter, and some resourceful Panjshiri mechanic patched it up, put a truck engine in it, and started running it up and down the valley as a bus. The Soviets got wind of this, and the next time their troops invaded, the commanders decided to inspect the helicopter. The last thing they must have seen was a flash; Massoud’s men had booby-trapped it with explosives.

  The night attack on the Taliban positions began with waves of Katyusha rockets streaming from Massoud’s positions and arcing across the valley. The rockets were fired in volleys of ten or twelve, and we could see the red glare of their engines wobble through the darkness and then wink out one by one as they found their trajectories and headed for their targets. Occasionally an incoming round would explode somewhere down the line with a sound like a huge oak door slamming shut. The artillery exchange lasted an hour, and then the ground assault started, Massoud’s men moving under the cover of darkness through minefields and machine-gun fire toward the Taliban trenches. The fighting was three or four miles away and came to us only as a soft, frantic pap-pap-pap across the valley.

  We had driven to a hilltop command post to watch the attack. The position had a code name, Darya, which means “river” in Dari, the Persian dialect that’s Afghanistan’s lingua franca, and on the radio we could hear field commanders yelling, “Darya! Darya! Darya!” as they called in reports or shouted for artillery. The commander of the position, a gentle-looking man in his thirties named Harun, was dressed for war in corduroy pants and a cardigan. He was responsible for all the artillery on the front line; we found him in a bunker, studying maps by the light of a kerosene lantern. He was using a schoolboy’s plastic protractor to figure out trajectory angles for his tanks.

  Harun was working three radios and consulting the map continually. After a while a soldier brought in tea, and we sat cross-legged on the floor and drank it. Calls kept streaming in on the radios. “We’ve just captured another position; it’s got a big ammo depot,” one commander shouted. Another reported, “The enemy has no morale at all; they’re just running away. We’ve just taken ten more prisoners.”

  Harun showed us on the map what was happening. As we spoke, Massoud’s men were taking small positions around the ridgeline and moving into the hills on either side of a town called Khvajeh Ghar, which was at a critical part of the front line. Khvajeh Ghar was held by Pakistani and Arab volunteers, part of an odd assortment of foreigners—Burmese, Chinese, Chechens, Algerians—who are fighting alongside the Taliban to spread fundamentalist Islam throughout Central Asia. Their presence here is partly due to Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden, who has been harbored by the Taliban since 1997 and is said to repay his hosts with millions of dollars and thousands of holy warriors. The biggest supporter of the Taliban, however, is Pakistan, which has sent commandos, military advisers, and regular army troops. More than a hundred Pakistani prisoners of war sit in Massoud’s jails; most of them—like the Taliban—are ethnic Pashtuns who trained in the madrasahs.

  None of the help was doing the Taliban fighters much good at the moment, though. Harun switched his radio to a Taliban frequency and tilted it toward us. They were being overrun, and the panic in their voices was unmistakable. One commander screamed that he was almost out of ammunition; another started insulting the fighters at a neighboring position. “Are you crazy are you crazy are you crazy?” he demanded. “They’ve already taken a hundred prisoners! Do you want to be taken prisoner as well?” He went on to accuse them all of sodomy.

  Harun shook his head incredulously. “They are supposed to represent true Islam,” he said. “Do you see how they talk?”

  I went into Afghanistan with Iranian-born photographer Reza Deghati, who knew Massoud well from several long trips he’d taken into the country during the Soviet occupation. Back then, the only way in was to take a one-to three-month trek over the Hindu Kush on foot, avoiding minefields and Russian helicopters, and every time Reza did it he lost twenty or thirty pounds. The conditions are vastly easier now but still unpredictable. Last summer, in a desperate effort to force international recognition for their regime, the Taliban launched a six-month offensive that was supposed to be the coup de grace for Massoud. Some fifteen thousand Taliban fighters—heavily reinforced, according to Massoud’s intelligence network, by Pakistani Army units—bypassed the impregnable Panjshir Valley and drove straight north toward the border of Tajikistan. Their goal was to move eastward along the border until Massoud was completely surrounded and then starve him out. They almost succeeded. Waiting to go into Afghanistan that September and October, Reza and I watched one town after another fall into Taliban hands, until even Massoud’s old friends began to wonder if he wasn’t through. “It may be his last season hunting,” as one journalist put it.

  Massoud finally stopped the Taliban at the Kowkcheh River, but by then the season was so far advanced that the mountain roads were snowbound, and the only way for Reza and me to get in was by helicopter from the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. Massoud’s forces owned half a dozen aging Russian military helicopters, and the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe could put you on a flight that left at a moment’s notice, whenever the weather cleared over the mountains. On November 15, late in the afternoon, Reza and I got the word. We raced to the airfield, and two hours later we were in Afghanistan.

  The helicopters flew to a small town just across the border called Khvajeh Baha od Din, and we were provided a floor to sleep on in the home of a former mujahidin commander who was now a local judge. Each night, anywhere from ten to twenty fighters stayed there, sleeping in rows on the floor next to us. The electricity was supplied by a homemade waterwheel that had been geared to a generator through an old truck transmission. Some fuel came in by truck over the mountains—a five-day trip—but farther north it all came in by donkey and cost twenty dollars a gallon. (The locals jokingly refer to donkeys as “Afghan motorcycles.”) We washed at an outdoor spring and subsisted on rice and mutton and kept warm at night around a woodstove; we lived comfortably enough. The situation around us, though, was unspeakable.

  Eighty thousand civilians had fled the recent fighting, adding to the hundred thousand or so who were already displaced in the north, and thousands of them were subsisting in a makeshift refugee camp along the Kowkcheh River half a mile away. They slept under tattered blue UN tarps and had so little food that some were reduced to eating grass. Tribal politics have long dominated Afghanistan; many observers, in fact, say that Massoud, a Tajik, will never be able to unite the country. These refugees were mostly ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, and they claimed that when the Taliban, who are Pashtun, took over a town, they raped the women, killed the men, and sold the young into servitude. One old man at a refugee camp pulled back his quilted coat to show me a six-inch
scar on his stomach. A Taliban soldier, he said, had stabbed him with a bayonet and left him for dead.

  A week or so after we arrived inside Afghanistan, Reza and I were told that Massoud was coming in—he’d been in Tajikistan, negotiating support from the government—and we rushed down to the river to meet him. A lopsided boat made of sheet metal, powered by a tractor engine that had paddle wheels instead of tires, churned across the Kowkcheh with Massoud in the bow. He wore khaki pants and Czech Army boots and a smart camouflage jacket over a V-neck sweater. He looked to be in his late forties and was as lean and spare as the photographs of him from the Soviet days. He was not tall, but he stood as if he were. The great man stepped onto the riverbank along with a dozen bodyguards and greeted us. Then we all drove off to the judge’s compound in Khvajeh Baha od Din.

  There he met with his commanders, listened to their preparations for the coming offensive, then hurried off. We later found out that he’d been forced to return to Tajikistan because of a chronically bad back; apparently the problem was so severe that it had put him in the hospital.

  Finding ourselves once again waiting for Massoud, Reza and I decided to go out to the front line to see a position that had just been taken from the Taliban. We drove south along the Kowkcheh, past miles of trenches and bunkers, and stopped at an old Soviet base that had been gutted by artillery fire. The local commander was there, housed in the shell of the building. The wind whistled through the gaping windows, and his soldiers crouched in the shadows, preparing their weapons. The commander said that the position they’d taken was code-named Joy and that the bodies of the dead Taliban were still lying in the trenches.

  He made a call on his radio and arranged for some men and packhorses to meet us on the other side of the river. Then he directed us to the crossing point; it was in a canyon a few miles away, just below a town called Laleh Meydan. When we stopped there to sort our gear, a Taliban MiG jet appeared and made a pass over the town, completely ignoring the antiaircraft fire that was directed at it. The townsmen scattered but drifted back within minutes to help us carry our gear down to the river. The raft that was to ferry us across was made from a design that must have been around since Alexander the Great: eight cowhides sewn shut and inflated like tires, each stoppered by a wood plug in one leg and lashed to a frame made of tree limbs. Four old men paddled it across the river and then tied our gear to some horses. Three soldiers with Kalashnikovs were waiting to take us to the front.

  It took us all afternoon to get there, walking and riding through mud hills, bare and smooth as velvet, that undulated south toward the Hindu Kush. There was no sound but the wind—not even any fighting—and nothing to look at but the hills and the great, empty sky. When we turned the last ridgeline, we saw Massoud’s men silhouetted on a hilltop, waving us on.

  Maybe the Taliban spotted our horses, or maybe they’d overheard the radio communications, but we were halfway up the last slope when I found myself facedown in the dirt as a Taliban rocket slammed into the hillside behind us. Then we were up and running, and the next rocket hit just as we got to the top, and they continued to come in, slightly off target, as we crouched in the safety of the trenches.

  There was nothing exciting about it, nothing even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad. Whenever the Taliban fired off another salvo, a spotter on a nearby hilltop would radio our position to say that more were on the way. The commander would shout a warning, and the fighters would pull us down into the foxholes, and then we’d wait five or ten seconds until we heard the last, awful whistling sound right before they hit. In a foxhole you’re safe unless the shell drops right in there with you, in which case you’d never know it; you’d simply cease to exist. No matter how small the odds were, the idea that I could go straight from life to nonexistence was almost unbearable; it turned each ten-second wait into a bizarre exercise in existentialism. Bravery—the usual alternative to fear—also held no appeal, because bravery could get you killed. It had become very simple: It was their war, their problem, and I didn’t want any part of it. I just wanted off the hill.

  The problem was, “off” meant rising out of this good Afghan dirt we’d become part of and running back the way we’d come. Four hundred yards away was a hilltop that they weren’t shelling; over there it was just another normal, sunny day. After we’d spent half an hour ducking the shells, the commander said he’d just received word that Taliban troops were preparing to attack the position, and it might be better if we weren’t around for it. Like it or not, we had to leave. Reza and I waited for a quiet spell and then climbed out of the trenches, took a deep breath, and started off down the hill.

  Mainly there was the sound of my breathing: a deep, desperate rasp that ruled out any chance of hearing the rockets come in. The commander stood on the hilltop as we left, shouting good-bye and waving us away from a minefield that lay on one side of the slope. Ten minutes later it was over: We sat behind the next ridge and watched Taliban rockets continue to pound the hill, each one raising a little puff of smoke, followed by a muffled explosion. From that distance, they didn’t look like much; they almost looked like the kind of explosions you could imagine yourself acting bravely in.

  The Taliban kept up the shelling for the next twelve hours and then attacked at dawn. Massoud’s men fought them off with no casualties.

  Massoud returned one week later, flying in by helicopter to Harun’s command post to start planning a heavy offensive across the entire northern front. The post was at the top of a steep, grassy hill in some broken country south of a frontline town called Dasht-e Qaleh. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived, and Massoud was studying the Taliban positions through a pair of massive military binoculars on a tripod. The deposed Afghan government’s foreign minister, a slight, serious man named Dr. Abdullah, walked up to greet us as we got out of the truck. Reza wished him a good evening.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Abdullah corrected, nodding toward the Taliban positions across the valley. “Our day is just beginning.”

  The shelling had started again, an arrhythmic thumping in the distance that suggested nothing of the terror it can produce up close. That morning, I’d awakened from a dream in which an airplane was dropping bombs on me, and in the dream I’d thrown myself on the ground and watched one of the bombs bounce past me toward a picnicking family. “Good,” I’d thought; “it will kill them and not me.” It was an ugly, ungenerous dream that left me unsettled all day.

  Massoud knew where the Taliban positions were, and they obviously knew where his were, and the upshot was that you were never entirely safe. A guy in town had just had both legs torn off by a single, random shell. You couldn’t let yourself start thinking about it or you’d never stop.

  Massoud was still at the binoculars. He had a face like a hatchet. Four deep lines cut across his forehead, and his almond-shaped eyes were so thickly lashed that it almost looked as if he were wearing eyeliner. When someone spoke, he swiveled his head around and affixed the speaker with a gaze so penetrating it occasionally made the recipient stutter. When he asked a question, it was very specific, and he listened to every word of the answer. He stood out not so much because he was handsome but simply because he was hard to stop looking at.

  I asked Dr. Abdullah how Massoud’s back was doing. Dr. Abdullah spoke low so that Massoud couldn’t hear him. “He says it’s better, but I know it’s not,” he said. “I can see by the way he walks. He needs at least a month’s rest…but, of course, that won’t be possible.”

  The shelling got heavier, and the sun set, and Massoud and his bodyguards and generals lined up on top of the bunker to pray. The prayer went on for a long time, the men standing, kneeling, prostrating themselves, standing again, their hands spread toward the sky to accept Allah. Islam is an extraordinarily tolerant religion—more so than Christianity, in some ways—but it is also strangely pragmatic. Turning the other cheek is not a virtue. The prophet Muhammad, after receiving the first revelations of the Koran in A.D
. 610, was forced into war against the corrupt Quraysh rulers of Mecca, who persecuted him for trying to make Arab society more egalitarian and to unite it under one god. Outnumbered three to one, his fighters defeated the Quraysh in 627 at the Battle of the Trench, outside Medina. Three years later he marched ten thousand men into Mecca and established the reign of Islam. Muhammad was born during an era of brutal tribal warfare, and he would have been useless to humanity as a visionary and a man of peace if he had not also known how to fight.

  It was cold and almost completely dark when the prayers were finished. Massoud abruptly stood, folded his prayer cloth, and strode into the bunker, attended by Dr. Abdullah and a few commanders. We followed and joined them on the floor. A soldier brought in a pot for us to wash our hands, then spread platters of rice and mutton on a blanket. Massoud asked Dr. Abdullah for a pen, and Dr. Abdullah drew one out of his tailored cashmere jacket.

  “I recognize that pen, it’s mine,” Massoud said. He was joking.

  “Well, in a sense everything we have is yours,” Dr. Abdullah replied.

  “Don’t change the topic. Right now I’m talking about this pen.” Massoud wagged his finger at Dr. Abdullah, then turned to the serious business of preparing the offensive.

  Massoud’s strategy was simple and exploited the fact that no matter how one looked at it, he was losing the war. After five years of fighting, the Taliban had fractured his alliance and cut its territory in half. Massoud was confined to the mountainous northeast, which, although easily defensible, depended on long, tortuous supply lines to Tajikistan. The Russians, ironically, had begun supplying Massoud with arms—with the Taliban near their borders, they couldn’t afford to hold a grudge—and India and Iran were helping as well. It all had to go through Tajikistan. The most serious threat to Massoud’s supply lines came last fall, when he lost a strategically important town called Taloqan, just west of the Kowkcheh River. The Taliban, convinced that recapturing Taloqan was of supreme importance to Massoud, shipped the bulk of their forces over to the Taloqan front. Massoud arrayed his forces in a huge V around the town and began a series of focused, stabbing attacks, usually at night, that guaranteed that the Taliban would remain convinced that he would do anything to retake the town.