The Lion of Sabray

by Patrick Robinson

  No one, however, had any idea how deftly the USA would seize the chance to hit the Russians through the mujahideen in Afghanistan. They provided the sledgehammer, and the mountain men swung it. Remote as they were, it was a real comfort to know that the Americans were their friends.

  Certainly the first American president involved in that war, Jimmy Carter, made his outrage clear. Immediately after the Russians attacked, he gave the Soviets exactly one month to get out of Afghanistan, or else the US would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Brezhnev refused, and sixty-four other nations joined the USA and refused to participate in those Games. But, boycott or no boycott, the war proceeded for Gulab under the guidance of his brother and his fellow commanders, all of whom were wounded, some killed. By the time he was twelve, he was, by any standards, a veteran.

  The Afghanis kept that Soviet army bottled up inside its bases, attacking whenever possible. It was not easy, because they were hit with air strikes that destroyed mujahideen bases. There were many, many civilian casualties. And it was a time of great sadness in those mountains. But no one even considered giving up the fight.

  The women of the villages were proud of their fighting men, husbands, sons, and other relatives. Indeed, if any man decided not to join the mujahideen in their holy struggle, women would ask, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you not go to war?”

  At the age of fourteen, it was decided that Gulab should get married, since the six-year veteran master gunner no longer felt comfortable attending school with children and helping around the house when he came home from combat.

  His marriage was arranged by the family, and they chose for him a very beautiful young girl from the nearby village of Suriak. Both families knew and trusted each other, and in Islamic rural culture, that matters. They do not leave matters of such importance to the whims and excitements of the young.

  “When I first saw her, I was very happy,” recalls Gulab. “At our first meeting, she shone like a bright light for me, and she still does. Down all the years, I have remained delighted with her, and we have ten children: six boys and four daughters. Our oldest son is Gul Mohammed, named after my brother.

  “He’s been a young warrior for many years now. And he was, like me, entrusted with the family Kalashnikov since the age of twelve. If I was ever asked again to lead troops in holy combat, I would immediately make him my second in command. I trust Gul Mohammed with my heart, and he’s ready to accept the highest responsibility.

  “I’ve been teaching him all of his life, as I myself was taught. In those years between 1981 and ’89, I became a hardened regular soldier. I was still only fifteen or sixteen when the Russians finally pulled out. I had seen some terrible things, but they no longer seemed so.

  “War had been my life, and since I had the experience, I was generally regarded as a junior field commander. My book learning was so little, but book learning only takes you partway. You need men who have done it before. Men who have seen mistakes made by others and will not allow them to happen again.

  “That was me. And my opinion was often sought and listened to, despite my youth. Anyway, I did not feel much like a youth; more like Genghis Khan. The joy of conquest had risen up within me.”

  Before Gulab reached his approximated fifteenth birthday, the mujahideen army knew that it was winning. The Russian troops and the Afghan government forces who marched with them already recognized the trouble they were in whenever the mountain warriors came raging into battle.

  Gulab recalls a hesitation among the Russian soldiers before they began to disembark from their vehicles. The young gunner could see there was a mood of defeat among them, and it was obvious for many months that the Russian army simply could not stay there being systematically wiped out. And it was equally obvious that nothing it inflicted on the tribesmen had the slightest effect in terms of their willingness to fight on.

  One such moment occurred right down on the road along the river that Gulab was defending after a Russian convoy had been decimated. Suddenly the Russians were no longer firing back. They were just working in teams, unloading their vehicles and tanks, chains of troops passing out packing cases.

  At first, Gulab’s commanders thought they might contain big bombs or rockets, and were considering ways to blow them right now. But then they realized the enemy was unloading weaponry, ordnance, crates of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and RPG-7s—and throwing them into the river.

  Then it dawned on them that the Russians were scared to death that if they tried to run from the battlefield, the mujahideen would most certainly shoot them down and take everything they had left behind. They must have understood now that the mujahideen army was armed with weaponry stolen from them in the first place—the spoils of victory. They were getting killed with their own guns and rockets.

  The Pashtun people had once, long ago, burned their homes and contents and fled before the onslaught of Alexander the Great. Now the Russians were doing the same thing—denying military material to their enemy.

  Every junior warrior in Sabray had been taught that the British general Elphinstone must have been spectacularly stupid, and that now, 140 years later, the Russians were not much better. The Soviets were endlessly clumsy and dedicated to close air support, which invariably killed many, many civilians. Which, in turn, made the entire Afghan population hate them unreservedly.

  Whenever Gulab’s legions hit them, the Russians switched instantly to massive-scale operations, utilizing up to fifteen thousand troops and hundreds of aircraft—the doctrines, techniques, and operational procedures of a European or Chinese theater of war.

  Much worse, they underestimated totally the resolve of the Pashtun people, and very quickly the Soviet’s enemy was not just a well-trained and elusive band of mujahideen warriors but an entire nation.

  And the Russians could not even achieve surprise. Every time they moved, they left a gigantic footprint as they mobilized thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles. It was all very predictable, and the mujahideens’ intelligence network caused word to flash from village to village, across the high pastures and into the mountain garrisons: “Russian military formations on the move.”

  Tactically rigid and amazingly slow, the army from the north was absolutely vulnerable to the mujahideens’ brand of warfare.

  Gulab was taught that the Russian army advanced to Germany’s Rhine River at about twenty-five miles a day during World War II. He now confirms:

  I know for a fact they made only two miles per day up the Kunar Valleys in 1985. And this doggedly slow advance meant they rarely caught even a sight of us. They usually had massive firepower, and nothing much to aim it at.

  We, of course, knew precisely where they were at all times, as did anyone else within a hundred-mile range. Praise Allah, they made a noise. And the mujahideen guerillas were always waiting. Our silent, skilled tribesmen plagued them from the beginning of that war to the end.

  By 1986, we had some very fine modern gear, the most important of which was the FIM-92 Stinger, a portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile. It was provided by the CIA, after a historic political decision by our friend President Reagan.

  The Stinger weighed thirty-four pounds loaded. It was handheld, and it changed the course of the war—the last straw for a Soviet army which had already taken a severe battering from us. Our best estimates claim we fired 340 missiles in Kunar Province and knocked down 269 Soviet aircraft, most of them helicopters.

  We’ve since been told that was the first time America had provided weapons for someone else to hit a Soviet army. I helped with the tactical training of our missile men: showed them how that FIM-92 could lock on and then collide with an incoming Russian Hind helicopter gunship head-on and destroy it.

  To this point in missile warfare, heat seekers like the Stinger had always needed to get astern of an airborne target and blast into the hot tail exhausts. Not anymore. We just had to fire it late, at a three-mile range, incoming.

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bsp; It carried a seven-pound penetrating hit-to-kill warhead with an impact fuse. Once launched, the missile quickly accelerated to more than sixteen hundred miles per hour—over twice the speed of sound. It did not take us long to realize that when this thing smashed head-on into an enemy gunship, that ended the discussion. The Russians found that out, too.

  And it really upset them. Because before the arrival of the Stinger, that incoming Russian Mi-24 Hind gunship forced us to take cover. It was a “flying tank,” with armored fuselage, eighty-millimeter S-8 rockets, mounted machine guns, and thousand-pound iron bombs, and it made world-record speed over the ground at more than 220 miles per hour.

  But the Stinger changed everything, and we were no longer scared. We could knock that Hind out of the sky at will. Before that US missile arrived, we hardly ever won a set-piece confrontation with the Soviets. After it arrived, we never lost one.

  The mujahideen retained a treasured record of the day when the world changed: September 25, 1986, when a tribesman, an engineer named Ghaffar, fired the first Stinger at a Hind gunship and knocked it clean out of the sky near Jalalabad.

  They gathered up that first Stinger tube and made a crate for it, which was sent to the US Embassy in Kabul. It was addressed to Congressman Charlie Wilson, the ex–US Navy gunnery officer from Texas who almost single-handedly persuaded the US government to get behind the mujahideen in the fight to expel the marauding Russians.

  Charlie Wilson was probably the best friend from the West they ever had. He talked the CIA into providing the mountain men with those Stingers, and they rewarded him with victory over the Soviet Union. It was the most successful foreign operation the CIA ever had.

  The Texas congressman believed in the Afghani cause. He had hundreds of tons of military ordnance shipped to them. And that Stinger launch tube hung on the wall of his office until his death in 2010. Without him, the task of the tribesmen would have been much, much more difficult.

  Gulab is aware there are some who claim the Stingers made little impact. “But,” he says, “that is absurd. They changed the world. And I speak from a rarified observation point, on the inside, on the mountainside, hunkered down against the blast of the flying rubble and shrapnel, praying for Allah to protect me.

  “The mere knowledge that we owned a weapon which could blow the gunships to smithereens completely altered our mind-set. It gave us renewed hope, renewed courage, and renewed faith.

  “At last we could fight a modern war, backed by this wonderful man from East Texas. Little did I know, as a teenager at the time, I would one day meet another man from there, a fellow warrior who lived about twenty-five miles from Charlie Wilson’s home.

  “After 1987, the war intensified, and we fought battle after battle, killing many Russians. But we suffered far fewer casualties ourselves, because their gunships never made it close enough to pound our mountain strongholds.

  “The Soviets were losing two thousand troops at a time in regular battle against our two hundred. Their aerial bombardment was falling short, and thanks to Charlie Wilson, we now had sophisticated radar to spot those flying tanks in time and to obliterate them.”

  The Russians had had enough. With aircraft wrecks littering the mountains, they announced they were pulling out. This was cause for some elation in the villages, but the mujahideen did not trust the Kabul government. It had told the Afghan people lie after lie about the need for Communist troop support, and the mountain warriors did not believe in this Russian surrender.

  The mujahideen high command ordered its battalions to keep fighting until the last Russian troops had returned from whence they came. Even when the invaders were in retreat, preparing to get out, the mujahideen hit them over and over to remind the Soviets precisely what they were dealing with—and also as a reminder that they should think very carefully before attacking a mujahideen army ever again.

  Victory over the Russians was a great moment of glory for the Pashtuns. When the dust cleared, the tribesmen of the Hindu Kush were still standing tall, having confirmed yet again that no one conquers Afghanistan. Allah is great, and may He bestow His blessings upon Charlie Wilson.

  For Gulab, it was a hard road to becoming an adult. He had to do everything very early in life, but looking back, he thinks it was probably worth it. And he recalls his pride when his elder brother first handed him command of his troops. Haji Nazer Gul was wounded at the time, and he made it clear that for the following weeks, Gulab’s commands were his. At fifteen, Gulab was bigger now, and vastly experienced, and Gul’s words gave him high respect.

  Up there on those mountains, helping with troop formations, he’d become a real warrior; a battlefield commander. No one knew much more about it than Gulab did, because, in truth, he knew little else. Just war. Gulab’s nickname in the village was already the Lion.

  There were several mujahideen commanders who rejoiced in this honor. But there was no greater form of military recognition. The lion is the national symbol of Afghanistan, and has been for centuries. The first postage stamps ever issued there in 1871 (1288 on the Islamic solar calendar) were known as the lion stamps. No human image appeared on the stamps until 1937.

  There was an enormous amount of work to do after the Russians left, not just “house cleaning,” but also gathering up the vast array of weaponry and matériel left behind by the retreating Soviet forces. The mountain commanders utilized everything they could claim, particularly remaining transports, armored vehicles, regular vehicles, and the occasional tank, as well as rockets, grenades, ammunition clips, rifles, heavy machine guns, and launchers, not to mention bombs and land mines. They acquired only a small percentage of the prize, but it was sufficient to equip mujahideen armies long into the future.

  They still had their superior ground-to-air missile gear, and that was always kept in a state of instant readiness, since no one ever knew when the nation would come under attack again. However, the bulk of the spoils of war went to the defeated Afghan government forces, and, in a way, this was partly the mujahideens’ fault.

  Because those mountain warriors did not fight the war for gain. They fought it for religious principle, to drive out the infidels who had defiled Islam. Thus, when the Soviets gave up, Pashtuns considered their task done, and they returned in peace to their villages. For them, it was always a Pashtun holy war, jihad, and they were ill-prepared for a voracious grab-what-you-can ending.

  Equally, the Afghan government army, which fought against them behind the Russians, was absolutely ready to claim the Soviet weapons, and it knew that the owners were on the way out long before the tribesmen from the hills did. The army also knew the storage locations of the matériel, and it had access. So when the surrender whistle blew, they came in like a pack of jackals, into the 184 abandoned Soviet garrisons, seizing thousands of tons of military reserves, ammunition, food, and fuel. Gulab reflects:

  When the last Soviet troops left, I was an eight-year veteran of many battles, many victories, and witness to a total of twelve hundred dead Pashtuns. I was a master machine gunner by trade, aged sixteen years—I think.

  As a field commander, my opinion was sought but not always listened to during the reconfiguring of our future arsenal. We would never trust our most valuable assets in identifiable military or civilian buildings, and instead we opted for our network of high caves and underground mountain passages. These secret granite warehouses and command rooms had served us well for centuries.

  The route to these was always upward and always impossible for vehicles. We thus did much heavy lifting, hauling the weaponry up to the heights using timber-hauling gear. We took everything into places where no foreign invaders would ever find them.

  Our needs were not so great as the government army’s, which planned to patrol the entire country. And they received three thousand trucks from the Russians, which would always be largely useless in our part of the world. Our own victorious army would quietly fade out of sight until the next would-be conqueror ventured into our mountainou
s territory.

  I do remember those final days of the Soviet occupation, and even I could tell, as a teenager, there was confusion among the village elders. The Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan was negotiated by a Kabul government whose forces had been defeated by the mujahideen. My commanders found this very strange, since our military policy was to fight and kill the infidels until they were gone. And whether or not Kabul had some kind of agreement with Moscow, the infidel was still here. That we understood.

  Our continuing strategy remained unaltered. We would hit them whenever and wherever we saw fit. We would not recognize the Afghan government’s agreement to allow them safe passage out of the country. The warrior tribes of Kabul answer only to Allah.

  I have no doubt that others will point out that Russia’s exit from my country was a masterpiece of military strategy: that they were not really defeated, and left in a coordinated, deliberate, and professional manner, while leaving behind a functioning government and a stronger military.

  But that’s only a point of view. They left because they could not stay, because in the end, we would have wiped them out—all of them. By 1988, they were confined to city garrisons, and they dared not set foot in the mountain ranges of the northeast.

  I suppose they left in some kind of order, but it should not be forgotten that they lost over five hundred more men on that retreat, all of them under mujahideen attack, and almost all of them in the steep passes of Kunar Province.

  The Soviet retreat began in May 1988, with fifty thousand troops taking the same two northern routes out as the ones they’d used to come in. The western road was from Kandahar, in the far south, up through Farah Rud and Herat to the Turkmenistan border town of Kushka. The eastern one began in Ghazni, Gardez, and Jalalabad, and on to Kabul, where the main road swung north, up past Bagram and into the mountains.