No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  At home, Akbar Gul’s family was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. The city faced acute food shortages. Meals had become nothing more than stone-hard, days-old bread soaked in water and parceled out, the smallest children and the elderly getting priority. Finally, Akbar Gul’s oldest brother, Muhammad, decided to brave the streets and head for the police precinct office to see if he might collect the salary he was owed.

  He did not return that afternoon. The family waited into the evening, but he still did not come back. Akbar Gul spent the night in front of the house, but he saw no sign of his brother.

  The next afternoon, as Akbar Gul was floating in and out of sleep, he heard a knock on the door. It was a neighbor, looking nervous and uncomfortable. He said to come quickly but wouldn’t explain why. A sick feeling overcame Akbar Gul. Whatever it was, he wanted to hear it first with his own ears. Finally, he forced out the words: “Did they kill him?”

  “Pray for his soul,” the neighbor answered.

  The rest of the day was a haze of wailing women and visiting relatives. Even amid his tears, Akbar Gul simmered inside. Muhammad had been the trailblazer in the family, the first one to land a job, the first one to marry. He had done everything the right way, while Akbar Gul had taken the easy path. Fate, it seemed, had picked out the wrong man. Gelam Jam were killing the good ones, the honest ones, and it filled him with disgust.

  In search of a fresh start, his parents decided to abandon Kabul for Pakistan, and in short order his sisters and cousins, too, fled the country. Only Akbar Gul, his cousin Manaf, and his remaining brother stayed behind, planning to sell the house and the family’s possessions before joining the rest. Yet they could not find any takers, for everyone in the neighborhood appeared to be doing the same. Moving to Pakistan did not come cheap—for a start, you’d need to bribe dozens of commanders who had set up checkpoints along the way. Akbar Gul’s brother had an old friend in the neighborhood who owed him money, and he felt that he had no choice but to venture out and track him down. This time, Manaf tagged along for protection.

  Later that evening, Akbar Gul learned that his brother and cousin had been stopped on a street corner and, along with other military-age males, ordered to the wall. In full sight of the passersby, they were executed.

  For weeks, Akbar Gul could hardly eat. He spent his days in bed, blaming himself for letting the two of them go. The bitterness he felt was deep and growing. In every militiaman who passed his window he saw the men who had ruined his family. It felt as if God Himself were taunting him, sparing the wicked and condemning the just, rewarding criminals like Gelam Jam and idlers like himself. He had visions of living in a refugee camp in Pakistan while Gelam Jam fighters occupied his home, trekking through in their shoes, spitting and hacking where they pleased, bringing in people from the streets to do what they pleased.

  It was time for a change. He would honor his brothers, live by their example, live an honest life. He’d stay behind, guard the family home, and help ensure that no one else suffered what his parents had. But how? All around him, families were crumbling. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it—it didn’t matter what you thought, whether you supported the mujahedeen or the Communists. The only households surviving unscathed, he knew, were the neighborhood’s few Uzbek families, members of the same ethnic group as Gelam Jam.

  He wasn’t interested in this war, but the war seemed interested in him. There were no more innocents, no more neutrals, only sides already chosen for him. The choice was clear: pick a side, or end up like his brothers. It would have been unthinkable before the war, but now he felt he could trust only his fellow Pashtuns. They had borne the brunt of Gelam Jam in his neighborhood, it seemed. At first, they had hidden their ethnicity, speaking only Farsi in public, but soon they were getting plucked from their vehicles to have their pronunciation checked—and if their speech sounded Pashtun, they were often killed on the spot. This was a war against people who spoke like him, who looked like him, and if that’s what the enemy had decided, then he’d play by their rules.

  So one morning he went to a camp of Hizb-i-Islami, a Pashtun-heavy militia, and sought out an acquaintance. “I want to do jihad,” he announced.

  The man broke into a broad smile. “Welcome,” he said.

  * * *

  Thousands of young men, many of them now orphans and widowers, flocked to the various factions feuding for power in the civil war. There were no heroes; each group proved as responsible for the bloodshed as the next. Broadly, the factions were organized along ethnic lines—not so much due to ethnic nationalism but because in the face of perpetual instability, with a weak or absent state, you allied with those you knew and trusted. In fact, it was often unclear what ideological differences, if any, divided the men fighting each other on Kabul’s streets. Still, the struggle for power and survival was imbued with meaning: more than simply a battle of wills, for many the war was “jihad.”

  The West responded to the civil war by simply ignoring it, and after the 2001 invasion the years from 1992 to 1996 were all but stricken from the standard narrative. It was dangerous history, the truths buried within it too uncomfortable and messy. If the mujahedeen had been no better than the Taliban or al-Qaeda, any attempt to bring the principal actors of that period to account could only lead to the highest echelons of Hamid Karzai’s government, and, by extension, to American policy over the previous thirty years.

  Yet it isn’t difficult to uncover this history, for every Kabuli has a story to tell. Deadly roadblocks, disappeared neighbors, and decaying bodies were woven into the fabric of daily life, like going shopping or saying your prayers. Every day brought fresh destruction; any date picked out of the calendar is the anniversary of some grisly toll.

  On May 5, 1992, for example, Sher Muhammad climbed to the roof of his house in southern Kabul to wash his face under the spring sun. He had just returned to Afghanistan after ten years as a refugee, hoping to relaunch his singing career. As he stood there, a Hekmatyar rocket crashed into the nearby Brezhnev Bazaar, a sprawling market of corrugated tin roofs that had once sold stolen Soviet supplies. Seven people were killed, including an orphaned boy. Then another rocket overshot its target and slammed into Muhammad’s house, killing him and three others.

  Or take February 2, 1993, when Muhammad Haroun was arrested by an ethnic Hazara militia as he walked past a school. Fifteen days later, after surrendering a fortune in bribes, his mother was led to his body. It lay in a dry well, burnt from head to toe, the eyes gouged out.

  That same year, Hazara militiamen stormed the house of Rafiullah, a Pashtun vegetable peddler. His hands and feet were bound and he was thrown into a corner of the room. As he watched, the militiamen forced themselves upon his screaming daughter. After finishing, they seized his wife and did the same. Unable to face their community after the attack, the family fled, leaving most of their possessions behind. Later, it was said, his daughter committed suicide by throwing herself down a well.

  November 25, 1995: Gelam Jam fighters broke into apartment number 38 of the Microrayon housing complex. They killed a pregnant woman and her three children, then stripped the apartment clean. A month later another group came to the housing complex, this time to apartment number 4, killing a woman and kidnapping her daughter. She was never seen again.

  May 24, 1996: A rocket struck the house of Abdul Karim, injuring him and killing his three-year-old son. When his wife went to visit him at the hospital, she was abducted and gang-raped.

  And so it went.

  By 1993, Ahmad Shah Massoud had allied his forces with those of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Islamist professor and mujahedeen leader. A staunch fundamentalist, Sayyaf would one day invite Osama bin Laden to take refuge in Afghanistan. (Nevertheless, he would be counted as a US ally during the 2001 invasion, eventually landing in parliament.) On February 7, 1993, Massoud and Sayyaf’s forces attacked Afshar, a Hazara enclave in western Kabul. They began by lobbing mortars blindly into the densely populated n
eighborhood, killing scores. Then soldiers went door to door, seizing able-bodied men, lining them up against the walls, and executing them in full view of their wives and children. As news of the massacre spread, residents began to flee. Massoud’s forces, on a mountain overlooking the neighborhood, fired down at the crowds, killing many more. Meanwhile, the house-by-house manhunts continued. Militiamen stormed the home of a woman named Mina and carried her husband away. Later that afternoon, a second group of fighters forced their way into the home; finding no adult males left to kill, they seized her eleven-year-old son. “They held him and asked where his father was,” Mina said later. “They aimed their guns at him and I threw myself over him. I was shot in the hand and leg, but he was shot five times. He died.” As she lay bleeding next to her son’s corpse, three soldiers held her down while a fourth raped her. Then they took the rest of the women in the house, including two teenagers, to the basement for their turn.

  Like victors in a medieval battle, the mujahedeen attacking Afshar hauled captives and booty away. Some Hazaras, like resident Abdul Qader, were forced into slavery. First, he was pressed into service carrying loot from his neighborhood; then was taken to a militia base outside the city, where he was jammed into a giant shipping container with other prisoners. Eventually he was moved to another base, forced to work for his captors by day and kept manacled at night. He would remain enslaved for three years.

  After two days of bloodshed, most of the population of Afshar was dead or missing. Nearly five thousand homes had been destroyed. An unknown number of people—probably at least one thousand—had been killed. Photographs of the aftermath show a stricken neighborhood: Swiss cheese holes in concrete walls, hollowed-out buildings, and bones—many bones. Sometimes, it seemed that killing alone was not enough. An old man named Fazil Ahmed was decapitated and his limbs sawed off; his body was found with his penis stuffed into his mouth. It was as if the violence sprang from some far deeper, more complex drive than simply planting flags in a civil war. Could it have been a collective post-traumatic stress disorder response to years of Russian brutality? It’s hard to say, especially since there has been no national reckoning with the civil war, no truth and reconciliation process.

  What is certain, however, is that the Afshar violence had clear enough political motives: to eliminate a Hazara militia stronghold. Human rights investigators subsequently found that senior mujahedeen commanders were aware of the massacre and, in many cases, helped carry it out. At the top of the chain of responsibility sat the operation’s architects, Massoud and Sayyaf. (Despite this, Massoud is still considered a hero in some circles.) A number of their sub-commanders bear direct culpability, yet every one of them has emerged politically unscathed. Marshal Muhammad Fahim, who oversaw the operation and commanded an important outpost during the siege, became a key American ally during the 2001 invasion, earning himself millions in CIA dollars. Eventually, he became vice president of Afghanistan. Baba Jan, who also helped plan and execute the siege, became a key Northern Alliance commander. After 2001, he grew extravagantly wealthy as a logistics contractor for the US military. Mullah Izzat, who commanded a group that led house searches, also struck gold after the invasion—counting, among his considerable holdings, Kabul’s only golf course. Zulmay Tofan, complicit in the house searches and forced labor, reaped his post-2001 windfall by supplying fuel to US troops.

  The twin dislocations of the Soviet invasion and CIA patronage of the mujahedeen irrevocably reconfigured Afghan society, leading directly to the horrors of the civil war, then to the Taliban, and ultimately to the shape of Afghan politics after 2001. Still, when Zbigniew Brzezinski, who as national security adviser to President Carter helped to initiate Washington’s anti-Soviet mujahedeen policies, was asked in the late 1990s whether he had any regrets, he replied: “What is more important in the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

  * * *

  It was in those years that the future Mullah Cable began to regard his brother’s gold watch as a talisman, one of his few remaining links to a world now dissolved. In his new reality as a member of the Hizb-i-Islami militia, Akbar Gul’s days of streetwise insouciance, his idle afternoons with brothers and cousins, were now behind him. His life now structured by a militia’s responsibilities, he grew up quickly. Duties included patrolling, checking weapons stocks, and staffing roadblocks. He learned how to use firearms and operate communication systems, how to target mortar fire and conduct reconnaissance—skills passed on from those who once trained in American-funded Pakistani camps.

  One day, his unit was patrolling near an abandoned palace on the city’s edge when they stumbled upon a weapons depot. “As we came nearer,” he told me, “we could hear people’s voices, just barely. I held my ear to the door and then I knew that there were people locked up in there. They were shouting, so we shot the door open.

  “There were a lot of women and some men in there. Some of them had already died, and the smell made me sick. A few of the women were completely naked. They were crying and screaming and told us they had been in there for days. They were all Pashtuns—the Hazara groups had done this to them. When we saw this, we couldn’t control ourselves, and we decided to do the same thing to their people. We went down to Dasht-e-Barchi”—a Hazara neighborhood—“and made retribution.”

  I asked if he was personally involved in the retribution. He stared into his lap for a long moment. Then he said, “I managed to save three Hazara girls from having a very big problem during the incident. We should not get revenge on children.”

  * * *

  Initially, families with money had ways of avoiding the war. Musqinyar, Heela, and their infant son, Omaid, moved to Microrayon, an upscale neighborhood with Soviet-built apartment complexes where the fighting was not intense. Schools were still closed, so she spent days with Omaid in the park, listening to the rat-a-tat of faraway gunfire. Sometimes she ran into her neighbor Orzala, who had a small daughter of her own, and the two would sit and watch the children play.

  They were resting in the shade one afternoon when Heela heard a pop and saw Orzala’s daughter drop to the ground. Neighbors tried to rush her to the hospital, but Massoud’s fighters were blocking the roads and refused to let them pass. They brought her back home, where she slipped into a coma and died.

  It was difficult for Heela to process. A stray bullet right there in her neighborhood, in that tucked-away little park. She could no longer bring herself to leave the house. It was just as well, for the sound of gunfire echoed louder by the day. Rashid Dostum and his Gelam Jam militia had abruptly switched sides and joined Hizb-i-Islami, who were battling Massoud’s forces. Some evenings, the fighting swelled to such intensity on the street below that she was forced to sit in the darkness—a neighbor had once left her lights on and received a bullet through the window. “I went to sleep expecting to die,” she recalled, “and woke up thankful for another day. We focused very hard on our prayers, because that’s all we had.”

  Through it all, Musqinyar went about his days calm and resolute. He had stopped going to work at the Ministry of Health after it was taken over by mujahedeen, but still made informal house calls delivering medical supplies to neighbors in need. He was convinced that the war’s end was near, that the various factions would snap to their senses. It was his habit to see the good in all people, a stance that Heela regarded with a mixture of admiration and despair. While the days of dinner parties and casual visits were long gone, friends still showed up from time to time. A positive outlook was a precious find, worth braving a trip across neighborhoods.

  The winter came and went, the fighting unconquered by the snow, and spring arrived late. Occasionally Musqinyar would risk visiting friends in other parts of town, returning with news of the neighborhoods and streets of their youth reduced to rubble. Heela did her best to wish it all away. In the evenings she would curl up with Omaid and
ask Musqinyar to read to them. It didn’t matter what it was; she simply loved the rise and fall of his soft voice. It soothed her like nothing else.

  Early in 1994 she became pregnant with her second child. In those days, this was no simple matter. She heard that militiamen had once stopped a vehicle carrying a woman in labor to the hospital. The fighters, almost all teenagers, had never seen a live birth. They stripped the woman naked and forced her to deliver right there at the roadside as they watched.

  So Heela planned to give birth at home, but as she neared term that summer the fighting pressed so close that Musqinyar couldn’t even leave for extra medical supplies. Soon enough, a battle erupted over control of their apartment block. It was late evening, and artillery shell explosions pounded the air. They crouched in the corner. Then the room shook violently, blanketing them in dust. A rocket had hit somewhere close by, maybe even next door. Heela clung to Musqinyar and Omaid. A second explosion rattled the room, loosening slabs of concrete in the ceiling. One fell, hitting Heela squarely in the face. She lost consciousness.

  * * *

  When Heela awoke, the first thing she saw was Musqinyar’s bright, relieved smile. They were somewhere she didn’t recognize. She immediately asked about her baby, but he wouldn’t answer. She started crying, pleading with him, and he looked at her silently. Then he reached over and gently caressed her head.

  In the following days, Heela noticed a change in Musqinyar’s demeanor. He stopped talking about the old neighborhoods or the possibility of a coming peace. In fact, since the miscarriage he hardly talked at all. Instead, she watched him spend hours staring out the window into the ruined street below, a scarred no-man’s-land of bullet holes and collapsed buildings.