No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  While the Communists waged devastation on the countryside, within the big cities they managed to win a semblance of support through the provision of services. They built modern housing complexes and subsidized health care and basic foodstuffs. Record numbers of women went to college. “I don’t know about their political views,” Heela said of the Communists, “but they helped build Kabul. We liked them for that.” She also approved of their liberal take on women’s rights. “There was complete freedom in those days,” she said. “No one could tell a woman where to go or what to do.” Even the headscarf, that shibboleth of societal conservatism, had become a matter of familial discretion. Heela was supposed to wear one, but upon leaving the house she would stuff it into her purse.

  Education was Heela’s abiding ambition. At seventeen, she won admission to Kabul University, the nation’s premier institution of higher learning. She majored in economics, hoping to go on for a master’s degree.

  One day during her junior year, her family brought home a young man for tea. It had become a regular occurrence, for at nineteen she was well into her marriageable years. Heela was to stay quietly in the adjacent room until called; usually, she would be brought out to meet the visiting family, some words would be exchanged with the adults, and then modesty would call for her to retreat again. This time, though, as she was introduced, she saw that there were no relatives accompanying this visitor, no throng of curious aunts. There was only a tall, pale young man standing shyly in the corner. He had a sharp nose, prominent cheekbones, and—impossible to ignore—a disarming smile.

  Heela knew that it would be improper to inquire about him openly, but over the next few days she gleaned snippets here and there. His name was Musqinyar, and he’d come alone because his family was down south. He had been living by himself in Kabul, something she’d never heard of before, working for the government. She also learned that he was a Communist and a fervent defender of women’s rights. Over the following weeks, Heela registered her approval the way a good Afghan girl did—by saying nothing at all.

  During her daily walks to the university she found her thoughts wandering to him. It was killing her not to know what the two sides were discussing, or if they were talking at all. One afternoon, she had almost reached the campus when suddenly Musqinyar appeared in her path. Oh my god, she thought. They stood staring at each other. She could see the scandal, the tears and screams at home, the accusations about a couple skirting their families and taking matters into their own hands.

  Before she could say anything, he broke into a wide grin and announced that he would like her hand in marriage. Not knowing what to do, she turned and hurried the other way. She fought the urge to look back.

  Some days later he appeared again. This time, before she could flee, he blurted out that he wanted to get to know the woman that he might spend the rest of his life with. He meant no harm, he insisted, and no one would know that they had spoken. It was just for his peace of mind.

  She agreed to walk with him. He quickly slid into lengthy monologues about politics and religion and the war. He was distinctly modern, progressive, in a way she’d never seen before in a man. He assured her that only the Communists could save the country, that the stories filtering in from the countryside were exaggerated. By the end of the walk, she finally plucked up the courage to ask if he would allow her to work. He shot her a wounded look, seeming insulted that she’d even asked. It was a woman’s natural right, he said.

  Soon he became a fixture on her daily walk. They spoke of Pashto poetry and overbearing relatives, of traveling the country after the war and some day visiting central Europe, where Kabul’s electric trolleybuses were built. They would go to Germany, he promised, after peace arrived. They’d ride the trains, even the ones that ran underground.

  In 1991, they were wed. Shortly after, they moved into a small Soviet-built apartment near downtown Kabul. Musqinyar was making good money working for the Ministry of Health, and Heela, upon receiving her diploma, found a job as a teacher. In her spare time she took courses in nursing and midwifery, which led to a moonlighting gig with the World Health Organization. It wasn’t long before she gave birth to a baby boy.

  Life was good. Infused with tiny, daily acts of hope, their imagination told of a future that belonged entirely to them. But beyond city limits, in the rust-hued mountains girding Kabul, that future was being unwritten.

  * * *

  Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place—which was how, for instance, school janitor Jan Muhammad reinvented himself. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money.

  The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps that were festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One such edition declared: “Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim.” An American text designed to teach children the Farsi alphabet began:

  Aleph [is for] Allah; Allah is one

  Bey [is for] Baba (father); Father goes to the mosque

  Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen

  Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad.

  The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. (This litany of terror pales in comparison to Soviet brutality but is relevant for what came next.)

  With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency, pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued,
though, the government withstood the onslaught.

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

  * * *

  It was an unseasonably warm evening in April 1992 when one of Heela’s neighbors appeared at the front door. “Sister!” she pleaded. “Do you have a headscarf? The mujahedeen are coming!” Heela rarely wore Islamic head coverings anymore, inside or out. But she knew that she would have to find something, for the mujahedeen’s reputation preceded them. In the closet, she discovered two large pieces of torn cloth. Her neighbor took one, wrapping it around her head. Heela kept the other and waited.

  Although there had been occasional assassinations and terrorist attacks over the years, during the occupation the mujahedeen had never openly set foot in Kabul, lending them such an aura of mystery that they were dubbed dukhi, ghosts, by the Russians. Now, with the government collapsing, Kabul residents began to burn their state-issued ID cards to avoid any visible link with the previous authorities.

  Musqinyar and Heela stepped outside. The streets were empty and the shops shuttered, but the wind carried in shouts from the distance. They moved toward the commotion, stopping at the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare.

  The voices grew louder. On terraces and balconies, people stood watching. Heela looked down the road and saw a crowd of men walking her way. They had on pakols—woolen flat-topped hats resembling berets, worn in the mountains—and green jackets. Everyone was carrying arms, and a few were pulling along artillery pieces. As they approached, the shouting coalesced into a distinct call, resounding down the street: “God is great!”

  They swarmed around a pair of government asphalting vehicles and set them ablaze. As smoke filled the air, Heela heard, again and again, the cry of “God is great!” The rebels surged past them toward a government rations center, torching it as well. Heela and her husband looked at each other. A new order had arrived.

  For the next few mornings, whenever she looked outside she saw an ashen daylight, fed by columns of smoke rising on the horizon. The mujahedeen ransacked the library at Kabul University, burning the books in a pyre. They confiscated thousands of bottles of alcohol, piling them up and crushing them with a captured tank. They banned female television announcers from the airwaves.

  Outside the capital, mujahedeen rule veered into the tyrannical. A commander in the northwestern province of Faryab decreed it permissible to rape any unmarried girl over the age of twelve. In the western city of Herat, authorities curtailed musical performances, outlawing love songs and “dancing music.” It was the mujahedeen—not the Taliban, who did not yet exist as a formal group—who first brought these strictures into politics. Many of these same commanders would be returned to power by the United States to run the country after 2001.

  Soon enough, the Supreme Court demanded that the government oust female employees from their jobs and girls from their schools, because “schools are whorehouses and centers of adultery.” It decreed:

  Women are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely; are not to wear attractive clothing and decorative accessories; are not to wear perfume or jewelry that makes any noise; are not to walk gracefully or with pride in the middle of the sidewalk; are not to talk to strangers; are not to speak loudly or laugh in public; and they must always ask their husbands’ permission to leave the home.

  Noisy jewelry would soon be the least of anyone’s problems. A few days after the takeover, Heela ventured to the school where she taught, now closed because of the troubles. Along the way she noticed something terrible-smelling in the drainage ditch, wrapped in dark plastic. A premonition told her not to look, but she couldn’t resist and pulled back the plastic—and recoiled. It was a dead body. She glanced around. The street was ghostly still, not a car in sight, the buildings locked and the shops closed. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the patter of gunfire. She turned and ran home as fast as she could.

  The Afghan civil war had begun. At home, Musqinyar explained that the newly victorious mujahedeen factions, cut off from their American and Pakistani patrons, had turned their guns on each other in a scramble for power. The first mujahedeen group to make it into the city had been Jamiat-e-Islami (the Islamic Society), headed by a wizened, kind-faced professor named Burhanuddin Rabbani and counting among its ranks the war’s most famous commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud. A system of rotating presidents was established to share authority among the various factions, but Rabbani refused to relinquish power when his term ended. In response, a rival group, Hizb-i-Islami (the Islamic Party), rained rockets down on the city from an encampment in the suburbs. Their leader was the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an erstwhile CIA favorite known, above all, for his ruthlessness. A number of other factions also jostled for power, forming alliances and switching sides with the seasons.

  * * *

  The civil war stretched from 1992 to 1996, and no one escaped unscathed. Some, like Jan Muhammad, were eager participants, waging endless battles over tiny scraps of territory, but most had participation thrust upon them. One day, in a dusky cluttered office on the outskirts of Kabul, I asked Mullah Cable about his memories of the time. He glanced at me, then looked down at his hands. “Well,” he finally said, “I guess that war is why I ended up like this.”

  He had grown up in Shah Shahid, a rough neighborhood in the south end of the capital, where his family lived on a narrow dirt lane crisscrossed by electrical wires and clotheslines. It was a life of pranks and street fights, of barefoot poverty and cousins too many to count. He was known then by his given name, Akbar Gul, and he had a bit of a reputation. “People would call me badmash,” a sort of raffish hooligan, he said with pride.

  For as long as he could remember, jobs had been scarce. His father had never held steady employment, and he had always expected to get married, settle down, and grow old in a refugee camp somewhere. In the meantime he earned some notoriety on the streets as a quick-witted hustler, a lanky teenager with a penchant for mischief and an entrepreneurial eye, which he took to Kabul’s scrap yards to scavenge spare parts for sale. Eventually he fell into drug running, one of the only sure forms of employment around, and wound up in and out of jail. Still, he harbored a secret desire to get out of the drug business and follow the path of his two older brothers, the pride of the family, who worked as policemen under the Communist government.

  With the outbreak of the civil war, government functions ground to a halt and his brothers stopped receiving paychecks. The family spent whole days indoors, listening to the radio and waiting for word of the resumption of services. In the evenings, Akbar Gul and his cousin Manaf would climb onto the roof of their house, stretch out under a warm summer sky, and talk themselves to sleep, dreaming idle dreams of escape. For weeks, he wondered whether he could make his way to Iran. Friends who’d gone there had found jobs—and girls, too. The problem, as always, was money. The Iranians didn’t hand out visas to just anyone, so you had to hire a trafficker to smuggle you across the border. The Hindu Kush presented another possibility. He’d heard that in the peaks of the Panjshir Valley you could hunt for gemstones, that some mine floors were literally covered with them. You wouldn’t even be able to carry back all that you found in a single trip. But that was mujahedeen territory, which both he and Manaf wished to avoid.

  In time, however, the mujahedeen came to him. Early one morning, militiamen showed up in his neighborhood, going house to house, banging on doors, ordering people out for “inspections,” and taking whatever they liked—jewelry, embroidered cushions, sometimes girls. They plundered so meticulously that locals christened them Gelam Jam, the Rug Collectors, for it was said that when they looted your home nothing would be left, not even the rugs. After Gelam Jam took over a nearby
street corner, Akbar Gul stopped sleeping on the roof.

  One afternoon, he was in a crowd of pedestrians on his way to buy motorcycle parts when a man stepped out of an alley and blocked their path. He was clutching a Kalashnikov and his eyes shone crimson. The stench of alcohol was unmistakable. “Where are you going?” he shouted. It was a Gelam Jam militiaman. Other gunmen stood farther back in the alley, watching. “We’re just walking, brother,” an elder said. “We aren’t part of this war.” The gunman stood glaring, and then his gaze fell upon a group of burqa-clad women. “Get on the ground,” he yelled. They did as they were told, no one uttering a sound. Keeping his weapon trained on the crowd, he walked over to the prone women and seized one of them. She screamed and struggled and almost broke free. “I’ll kill you now if you don’t shut up,” the militiaman snapped, dragging her into a giant shipping container by the roadside.

  Akbar Gul kept his face to the asphalt, and for a few moments everything was still. Then he heard a long, shrill scream and looked up to see the woman burst through the container door. Her burqa was torn, exposing a breast. An elder ran to help. A fighter leaned out of the shipping container and shouted, “We told you to stay down, you dog!” and fired two rounds into him. Another fighter chased down the woman and hoisted her over his shoulders. After returning her to the container, he slammed the door shut.

  From then on, even life’s simplest acts took on a new meaning. Akbar Gul learned to plan walks to the grocery store meticulously, and to go only when absolutely necessary. For families with children, school was out of the question. Women stopped going outside. Yet the looting and killing and rapes continued. At the time, historian and Kabul resident Muhammad Hassan Kakar wrote that “adults wish not to have new babies,” and if they have them, “they pray to God to give them ugly ones. Women hate themselves for being attractive.”