His voice grew stronger as he spoke.
“The Mohmands are one of the largest and most powerful Pashtun tribes,” he said proudly. “Our territory reaches south from Afghanistan’s Konar Province into Nangarhar and across the border into Pakistan.
“My grandfather was a malik in the Mohmand tribe, and he served in a lashkar that fought against British forces,” Noor Afzhal went on. When faced with an external threat, Afghan rulers called on each major Pashtun tribe to raise a militia, a tribal army called a lashkar. The grandfather, Fatih Mohammed, was part of the Mohmand tribal militia that fought in decisive battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
In 1919, Noor Afzhal’s father, Sher Mohammed Khan, joined tribal forces that rallied against British troops in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Noor Afzhal remembered his father’s tales of brave Pashtuns battling the British with swords, slingshots, and homemade explosives.
“The British were treating the people badly in Peshawar,” he recalled. “So the big tribal leaders and maliks got together, chose a commander, and put a turban on him so he could lead all the tribes to fight. My father was one of them,” he said. “He wanted to fight to the last breath.”
Like many of his fellow tribesmen, Sher Mohammed was fighting not for the Afghan nation but for the Pashtun people. Born in Mangwel around the turn of the century, he deeply resented the British and their splitting of the Pashtun lands, Noor Afzhal said.
In a draconian measure, the British launched aerial bombing strikes on Kabul and Jalalabad during the war, and after about a month of fighting, the war ended in an agreement in which Pashtuns in Afghanistan were forced to accept a division of the Pashtun land. (In 1893, a demarcation called the Durand Line had been drawn down the middle of the Pashtun world, and half was appropriated for the British Empire’s Raj, which included modern India and Pakistan.) Britain in turn recognized Afghanistan’s independence in internal and external affairs. Afghans from then on considered 1919 as the year their modern nation was born, but Pashtuns also see it as the year when their territory was torn apart in the service of Western politics.
“When the fighting was over my father returned to this village to farm. He married and thanks to God started a family.” Mangwel then had a few hundred homes, and the villagers—all from the Mohmand tribe—were mostly subsistence farmers who grew rice, corn, wheat, and opium poppy in fields irrigated by the Konar River.
Noor Afzhal’s father, Sher Mohammed, was a kind but strict husband and father to three wives and five sons. Noor Afzhal was born around 1935, the youngest son of the brood.
“When I was a boy, I remember him saying, ‘You are forbidden to go to village wedding parties,’ ” Noor Afzhal said with a smile. “Father believed all the music and singing and smoking of hashish was against Islam.
“But Ann, I will tell you, I loved the songs of those who came from Jalalabad with sitars, rababs, and drums. When I was this high”—he raised his hand to the height of a boy of eight or nine years old—“I began to be too tempted by the music and happiness of those weddings, and I and some others would sneak off to the feasts. I never ever smoked, never ever. But the food, how I remember the delicious food, spiced rice and fragrant meat slaughtered for the occasion.
“You know my father could not read, but he wanted all of us, his sons, to learn reading and writing,” he said. “But my brothers and I had to work in the fields, too, and so after a few years, I decided to quit. Our land needed tending, and I was drawn to that kind of life. For my older brothers, things were different; they studied and one became a police officer and the other a doctor. For me, my education came sitting at my father’s side. He had been chosen senior malik in Mangwel and leader of the shura for the entire district. He was an honorable and strong man and I wished to follow his example.
“I know in America things are different than they are here. Here we have the shura, where we sit with all the tribal and religious elders and government men. I would sit and listen, and each and every day men arrived at our house and sat in the guest room to ask my wise father to solve their problems. This is how I learned how to mediate conflicts between my people, by watching and listening.”
As the head malik, Sher Mohammed helped resolve disputes and struggles with neighboring tribes. His reputation for wisdom and fairness grew.
“It is hard to give the people justice,” Noor Afzhal told me, recalling the councils. “But even if your own family is guilty, you have to be able to make that decision,” he said.
As he learned about the internal workings of the tribe, Noor Afzhal also absorbed his father’s beliefs as a Pashtun nationalist. In 1947, when he was twelve years old, Pakistan, a Muslim-dominated territory that was part of greater India under the British, gained independence. On behalf of the Pashtun tribes, Afghanistan’s leadership in Kabul tried to negotiate the dissolution of the Durand Line. The effort fueled the movement for the creation of Pashtunistan, a sovereign state that would unite all Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To no avail.
Noor Afzhal’s apprenticeship in the Pashtun ways of leadership sealed his future when his father passed away during the reign of King Zahir Shah in 1955. As the family grieved, dozens and then hundreds of people arrived at the qalat from far and wide to pay their respects. The governor of Nangarhar Province came all the way from Jalalabad with an entourage of more than two hundred to honor the malik, bringing a wooden coffin. He also brought money for a feast for the poor, a tradition at Afghan funerals. The guests overflowed from the qalat into a cemetery in front of the home, where Noor Afzhal’s grandfather was also buried.
After the burial, all the Mohmand tribal elders gathered and sat to discuss who would become the next malik. Noor Afzhal sat on the outskirts of the circle, listening. A few names came up, often that of his brother, Sher Afzhal, the policeman. Then it came time to vote.
The oldest of the elders, Malik Amin, tallied the results. The governor whispered to Malik Amin. He stood, unfurled a green striped cloth, and wrapped it into a turban. Then he walked over to Noor Afzhal and placed it on his head.
At the age of twenty, these voters believed, Noor Afzhal had the wisdom and judgment to lead the tribe. His heart was both heavy and proud. He had lost his beloved father but had won the trust of his people.
Two years later, the young malik was conscripted into the king’s Afghan security forces and ventured out of his tribal area for the first time. He served as a member of a local guard in Jalalabad for a year and was then transferred to a tribal border police force called the jandarma and assigned to the mountainous border districts of Kamdesh in Nuristan and Sirkanay in Konar.
Tensions over the border rose as the Pashtunistan movement intensified. Pakistan and Afghanistan pressed to gain territory on either side of the disputed frontier, in part by encouraging resettlement. Fighting broke out along the border in 1960, when Afghan prime minister Daoud Khan, a member of the royal family, ordered troops and tribal forces into the Pakistani region of Bajur, including Noor Afzhal’s jandarma unit.
Noor Afzhal was put in charge of ten men from the Mohmand tribe. Other fighters came from the powerful Safi and Shinwari tribes whose territory neighbored the Mohmand’s in Konar and Nangarhar provinces and elsewhere in eastern Afghanistan. Like the rest of the jandarma, Noor Afzhal had no uniform and wore jami and a pakol. Other tribesmen who lived in the area joined the clashes, armed with knives, axes, and other tools.
The Afghan and Pakistani forces and civilians faced off for weeks along the border. Noor Afzhal and his men built fortifications and fighting positions. In a last-minute bid to diffuse the conflict, the Pakistani employed the Pashtun concept of nanawati. They sent over a small delegation of women carrying Korans and a promise not to fight.
But the cease-fire was short-lived. One morning not long afterward, a single shot rang out on the Pakistani side, followed by men yelling in Urdu for an attack.
Pakistani militia opened fire on the Afghan border positions. Noor Afzhal and other a
rmed jandarma shot back. Civilians from Bajur joined in the attack, clashing with a group of Safi tribesmen, known for their ferocity, who battled with knives. The fighting raged for a day and a half, but the Pakistani militia, armed with machine guns on the high ground, proved overpowering.
As the Afghans began to fall back, many were gunned down, with the Safis taking heavy losses. While retreating with his army, Noor Afzhal’s unit was ambushed by the Pakistanis.
“Drop your weapon!” a Pakistani fighter ordered Noor Afzhal.
He refused. A brief standoff ensued that ended when Noor Afzhal’s older brother arrived with forty police from his checkpoint.
Despite the Afghan losses, Noor Afzhal gained honor as a fighter in the eyes of his tribe. An honorable man will never give up his weapon. The border clash solidified his support for Pashtunistan and his admiration for Daoud Khan, whom he considered one of Afghanistan’s most talented leaders.
Pakistan and Afghanistan severed relations in 1961 as a result of the conflict, which ultimately contributed to the decision of King Zahir Shah to force Daoud Khan to resign. Years later, in 1973, however, Daoud Khan overthrew the monarchy and created the Afghan republic, making himself president. He ushered in a period that some Afghans, including Noor Afzhal, considered a golden era because of the country’s relative stability and his strong support for the Pashtun tribes. Noor Afzhal returned to Mangwel.
“For a few years I lived with my oldest brother, named after my father, Sher Afzhal. I helped him on his farm, but it finally became very clear that my brother was jealous of my status as malik. I could see it gnawing on him, this jealousy. Then one day it just went too far and he exploded at me. I still remember his words and how badly they hurt me: ‘You aren’t doing anything!’ I knew there was only one thing I could do: leave. I packed a small bag and all my money and just started walking down the dirt road toward Jalalabad.
“My second brother, the doctor, he tried to stop me, but it was no use. I just kept walking. I can still hear my kind brother pleading, ‘Stop! Come back!’ But I did not look back.”
It was 1970 and Noor was young, strong, and tall, his jet-black hair wrapped in a traditional turban. He continued walking. After a few weeks he crossed into Pakistan and bought a one-way rail ticket to Karachi, the bustling port city on the Arabian Sea. For the first time in his life, he boarded a train, and rode for two days and two nights on a wooden bench, eating a bit of bread from Mangwel. As the train rolled through the countryside, taking him ever farther from home, the reality of what he had done overwhelmed him. He was angry and downcast. He had never wanted to leave his village. Now he was on his way to a strange city. As the train neared Karachi, he was bombarded by unfamiliar sights and sensations, and gawked at the paved roads, traffic, and tall buildings. What shocked him most of all, though, was seeing the ocean.
He felt isolated and alone, torn away from the tribe that gave him dignity and purpose. Little did he know that he was a vanguard for his people, who would soon follow him in an exodus from Mangwel.
A DECADE AFTER NOOR Afzhal left Mangwel, catastrophe struck for the people of his home village.
At dusk one day in October 1981, Soviet tanks crested the western bank of the Konar River, heading toward Mangwel. Several tribesmen witnessed the Russian attack on their village.
Umara Khan, the arbakai with big green eyes, was just a teenager with peach fuzz that year. He saw the tanks and ran from the village up to a nearby hillside. He knew the Russians were trying to press young tribesmen into the communist Afghan government’s army, and hid behind some rocks to evade capture. But that night the Soviet forces would take no prisoners. Russian bombs killed some three dozen people in Mangwel and destroyed more than half the homes in the village. It had been nearly two years since the invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 ended a period of relative stability and plunged the country back into war.
A Pashtun nationalist coup in 1973 had brought Daoud Khan to power. Daoud Khan ruled with an iron hand, which made him unpopular, although Pashtun tribesmen, including Noor Afzhal, valued his staunch nationalism and considered him a great leader.
When Daoud Khan was executed by a Soviet-backed communist regime in 1978, the new government soon announced reforms such as land redistribution and women’s rights that struck at the heart of traditional Pashtun society. Pashtun tribesmen revolted in eastern Afghanistan, and the Konar valley became a stronghold of resistance. Desertion spread throughout the Afghan army and the Soviet Union dispatched helicopters and other weaponry and a growing number of military advisors to put down the rebels. In one early atrocity in August 1979, Russian helicopter gunships destroyed villages and killed dozens of civilians in Konar. The incident galvanized the resistance. Soon a new fighting force coalesced in the tribal areas. They were called mujahideen, “soldiers of God.”
By the spring of 1980, mujahideen were ambushing Russian armored units, and the war raged in the Konar River valley. Mangwel residents recall a mujahideen attack on a Russian convoy that destroyed fourteen large military trucks carrying fuel, food, guns, and clothes.
While the fighting continued, the refugees streamed out of the villages. Thousands joined a mass exodus from Mangwel. Fearing more Russian attacks, families just wanted to escape with their children. They packed a few of their belongings, loaded them onto donkeys, and traveled east—to Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and other Pakistani cities.
Noor Afzhal, established in a shanty near the sea, brought his family to Karachi. And now that the tribe was abandoning the village wholesale, many other families followed, gravitating once again around his leadership. As the Soviet war continued in their homeland, nearly two hundred families from Mangwel made the fifteen-hundred-mile trek to Karachi, and Noor Afzhal was their malik.
Every day Noor Afzhal went to work at the port, unloading huge bags of wheat, tea, sugar, fertilizer, and other goods from ships. The labor was backbreaking and the pay uncertain, but it fed his family. In time, Noor Afzhal gained a Pakistani ID card and became a foreman at the port, in charge of a crew of ten laborers. He and Hakima had six more children—in all, four sons and four daughters—and sent them to government-run schools in Pakistan. He knew that the greater opportunities for his family lay in Pakistan. He had tasted life in the westernized world. But as the years passed, Noor Afzhal still longed to return to Mangwel with his tribe.
One chilly day in 1995, Noor Afzhal walked down the main road into Mangwel. His oldest brother, the police officer Sher Afzhal, had passed away, and when Noor Afzhal attended the burial in Mangwel, the other exiled tribespeople appealed to him as their malik to return to the village and bring them home. He agreed.
At the time, the country was in the grip of civil war, as mujahideen factions had divided the country into warlord fiefdoms. Noor Afzhal passed one qalat after another with crumbled stone walls and courtyards overgrown with weeds. He turned down the familiar path to his qalat, his birthplace, and found it gutted. Not a shred of cloth, a single wash- basin, or any other remnant of his past life there remained. His beloved village was little more than a ghost town.
Noor Afzhal moved back to Mangwel and for weeks afterward stayed up all night, guarding his home against bandits who roamed the area beating and robbing anyone who was unarmed. To feed his large family, he also bought land, and sold his house in Karachi to buy a tractor. In Afghanistan a family’s land is divided among the offspring, with sons getting a full share and daughters a half share, causing the portions to shrink from one generation to another. A jerib, the Afghan unit of measure for land, is about half an acre. Noor Afzhal inherited three jeribs of land from his brother and bought two more, for a sum of about two and a half acres. That produced enough grain to feed his family with some left over to sell.
But as Noor Afzhal and other families struggled to rebuild their lives in Mangwel, they faced a continual threat that even their meager gains would be stolen from them. “Everyone was so tired of the mujahideen and wanted to get rid of the
m,” Noor Afzhal told me.
The chaos created an opening for the Taliban. In September 1996, word spread through Mangwel that Taliban forces had launched an offensive in Jalalabad, the main city in Nangarhar Province that bordered Konar to the south. The Taliban was a radical Islamic movement that claimed it would restore law and order and purge the country of the impurity of the mujahideen, whose leadership had been widely discredited. The Taliban took its name from the students at Islamic madrassas, or taliban, who made up most of its ranks. It was an overwhelmingly Pashtun movement, led by the reclusive Mullah Omar.
Within days of taking Jalalabad in mid-September 1996, the Taliban captured Nangarhar and Konar provinces. Seeing the writing on the wall, the mujahideen leaders in Khas Kunar District, where Mangwel is located, put up no fight and disappeared overnight, fleeing across the border to Pakistan. Two or three Taliban officials arrived first and took charge at the abandoned district government, and not a shot was fired. Like many Pashtun tribal leaders, Noor Afzhal decided to throw his support behind the Taliban as the best alternative to the anarchic days of mujahideen rule.
“I will take responsibility for my village,” Noor Afzhal told the Taliban officials. “There will be no problems here, nothing will happen to you.”
Initially, the Taliban practiced consensus leadership under a shura system based on the tribal jirga, or council. Whereas the jirga was purely tribal, the shura also included religious and government officials. As a senior malik in the area, Noor Afzhal had become a member of the district shura under the mujahideen and continued during the Taliban period. The Taliban’s military organization, too, borrowed from the tribal militias, or lashkars, which were localized and fluid in composition. But at its core, the Taliban was mistrustful of Afghanistan’s traditional tribal authorities and sought to undermine their leadership.
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