Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  In the Pathan mind, Punjabis acted like women. And women, according to a Pathan, are physically weak, shifty, and tempestuous. The war freaks went a step or two further, declaring Punjabis “brain dead,” unable to follow even simple orders or to think for themselves. On the Northwest Frontier, the only thing worse than a Punjabi was a Hindu. At least Punjabis on the Pakistan side of the India-Pakistan border were Moslems, and that connoted a fierce, fanatical, and therefore martial (read manly) culture — even if, as everyone on the Frontier supposed, Punjabis had “religion on their lips and money in their hearts.” Hindus practiced a religion that was subtle and introverted, which meant it was feminine. Hindus were concerned only with their personal salvation and not with the duty of a man to his tribal kinsmen. Their religion attracted hippies, mystics, and homosexuals. Hindus lacked all honor: the official policy of their country, India, was to support the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan at least backed up the mujahidin and was caring and providing a home for three and a half million fellow Moslems from Afghanistan, though not even this fact would get the war freaks to change their minds about the Punjabis.

  That’s because they all knew that it wasn’t the “filthy Punjabis” who were providing a home for the refugees but Pakistan’s president, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, backed up by hundreds of millions of American taxpayers’ dollars. Without Zia, the refugees might have been turned back at the border and massacred or starved to death in their own country.

  Zia’s most prominent opponent was Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of former Premier Zulfìkar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by Zia in April 1979. The Bhutto family was Sindhi, but in the lexicon of the Northwest Frontier, Benazir, as she was always called, might as well have been a Punjabi because she thought like one. Throughout the 1980s, her Pakistan People’s Party was on record as opposing the very presence of the Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil. Benazir was attractive and telegenic, but she was also willing to consign millions of refugees to a horrible fate. Only when it became clear that Zia’s gamble had paid off and the Soviets were going to withdraw from Afghanistan did she begin to shift her position regarding the refugees.

  Benazir, the thinly disguised “Virgin Ironpants” of Shame, Salman Rushdie’s novel about Pakistan, fooled no one on the Frontier with her Oxbridge English and her calls for “free elections.” Free elections were the war freaks’ nightmare: Why should those millions of treacherous Punjabis be allowed to decide the fate of the refugees and mujahidin? No, never. “Not for another twenty years should there be free elections in Pakistan,” said one Western relief worker. Many stories circulated about the things Punjabis said about the Afghans: “They’re making so much trouble for us.” “Why don’t they just go back home?” (Never mind that there was a war on, millions of land mines, and no food.) “It’s those refugees who are planting all the bombs in our cities.” (Never mind that the evidence indicated that it was the Communist authorities in Kabul, through their Soviet-backed intelligence service, KhAD, who were responsible for the terrorist bombs.)

  Zia, with his slicked-back hair, deep-set hypnotic eyes, and trimmed black mustache, looked like the quintessential Punjabi — touched by the devil. But he was also a tough Islamic disciplinarian who armed the mujahidin to the teeth. Benazir would never have come to power had Zia not been killed in an air crash in August 1988, for which KhAD and the KGB likely bear responsibility. As far as the war freaks and the Afghans were concerned, Zia was less a Punjabi than an honorary Pa-than.

  After just a few weeks on the Northwest Frontier, a Westerner’s thinking along such sharp racist lines became natural. The Pathans really were waging a noble struggle. And many Pakistanis really were willing to cave in to Communist terrorism and run for cover behind flowery rationalizations. But as in other places in the Third World where journalists and relief workers inevitably found themselves on one side of a conflict, the border between “clientitis” and outright prejudice against the clients’ enemies was crossed too easily.

  The journalists who covered the Afghan war regularly were different from any journalists I encountered before. Because traveling in the country was so dangerous, so physically punishing, and because the war rarely made the headlines, those who made going inside a full-time occupation were of necessity either deeply committed to the mujahidin cause or were war freaks who weren’t satisfied unless they were in danger and physical distress. Almost all were stringers on special contract or earning a living on a story-by-story basis. Most were weapons enthusiasts; Soldier of Fortune was among the most widely read magazines in Peshawar. If you had a story in S.O.F., every journalist in town soon knew about it — and nobody snickered, either.

  Journalism in Peshawar was a self-consciously macho activity. Locally based newsmen made a point of smoking a lot and drinking hard. There was a distinct hostility toward the elite establishment media and the new brand of 1980s foreign correspondents who stocked their fridges with Perrier water and talked incessantly about their computer modems — the kind of journalists who came out to Peshawar for short visits, stayed at the deluxe Pearl Continental Hotel rather than at Dean’s, directed “hostile” questions at the mujahidin, and never went inside. The objectivity and priggish yuppie values of the establishment media had no place on the Northwest Frontier — a Wild West, sepia-toned outpost of masculinity where it was still possible to escape from the modern world.

  Objectivity didn’t help you much in Peshawar, and there was a reason for this. Arranging a trip over the border was not always easy, and getting inside on short notice, if an editor in America or Europe requested it, was often exceedingly difficult. Not all of the seven main resistance parties were actively engaged in the fighting, and the most important groups were selective about whom they took in. The mujahidin sized you up. A big expense account and a business card from a world-class newspaper meant nothing to them. They had only two criteria: your physical and mental ability to cope in a war zone and your degree of sympathy for their cause. You had to be trusted. Getting inside all the time, whenever you wanted — which was what the resident stringers were paid to be able to do — required a close personal relationship with a leading figure in a guerrilla group. Since each group was suspicious of every other group, and since everyone in Peshawar knew everyone else, having a close relationship with one resistance organization often precluded a relationship with the others. The result was that most every resident journalist was identified with a particular faction, and the enmities dividing the guerrilla movement were mirrored in the foreign press corps. The situation in the aid community was similar, as relief projects in Afghanistan or the refugee camps in Pakistan depended on cooperation from one or another mujahidin organization. The seating arrangements around the bar at the American Club often told a visitor who was aligned with whom.

  Generally, most of the journalists and aid workers in Peshawar were split into two principal factions, with allegiance to the two most militarily powerful guerrilla groups, which in turn reflected the major ethnic division within Afghanistan: that between Pathans and Tajiks. Never mind that because both Pathans and Tajiks were religious Sunni Moslems and operated in different areas of Afghanistan — each isolated from the other — they were rarely in serious conflict during the Soviet phase of the war. Never mind that the leading Pa-than commanders tried not to criticize their Tajik allies in the presence of outsiders and that Tajik commanders avoided criticizing Pathans. Each group’s foreign supporters observed no such truce. In the dining room or bar at the American Club, where everyone intimately familiar with the war talked in code — using first names and abstruse abbreviations for mujahidin commanders and their parties — a person was quickly identified with one ethnic faction or the other. Subtle hints alone were required, though sometimes they weren’t so subtle. One night at dinner, an aid worker said, “Don’t ever trust a greasy Tajik. I just hate Tajiks.”

  No Pathan would ever say a thing like that. Afghanistan was a forgotten war, but among the foreigners riski
ng their lives for the sake of the mujahidin, the conflicts were more noticeable than the camaraderie. In the oppressive, glass-house atmosphere of the frontier town’s foreign community, where heat, filth, disease, loneliness, and the constant tedium of dealing with the “brain-dead Punjabis” made tempers flare, supporting the mujahidin cause wasn’t enough for many people. You were trusted only if you supported the same faction as your colleague did.

  The Tajiks and the Pathans were very different from one another, and so were the foreigners who supported them. The Pathans were by far the more numerous and important group, around which much of the Afghan drama — and my own experiences in particular — revolved. But the Tajiks played a role far out of proportion to their numbers, and many a Western writer was absolutely committed to their superiority over the Pathans as fighters.

  The Tajiks, who accounted for roughly a quarter of Afghanistan’s prewar population, are the largest minority in the Pathan-dominated country. They are concentrated in northeast Afghanistan and speak Dari, a provincial form of Farsi spoken in the old Persian court. The Tajiks are a typical upwardly mobile minority, who flocked to Kabul in order to become educated and to fill administrative jobs in government and business. Louis Dupree, the foremost specialist on Afghanistan, compares the Tajiks to the Jews and Armenians in their desire for self-improvement. Though twice as many people in Afghanistan speak Pukhtu, the influence to Tajiks in the capital has helped make Dari the lingua franca of the country. In addition to education, the Tajiks have one other advantage over the Pathans: they are not riven by tribalism, but instead are identified with the particular valley in which they live. Of all these valleys, the most important is the Panjshir, a word that in Dari means “five lions.”

  The Panjshir is a seventy-mile-long strategic corridor in the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains, which every army that has ever invaded Afghanistan from the north has had to cross. The only main entrance to the Panjshir is at its southern end, about sixty-five miles north of Kabul. But there are numerous side valleys, cutting between mountains that soar up to nineteen thousand feet, into which guerrillas can easily escape an invading force. The Panjshir is excellent guerrilla country, and it produced a charismatic mujahidin leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

  Massoud, who was born around 1950, studied engineering in Kabul and speaks fluent French. The absence of tribalism among Tajiks and their penchant for Western-style organization allowed him, early in the war, to mobilize 3,000 mujahidin regulars along with pools of several thousand part-time partisans. By the end of the 1980s, that combined force would reach an estimated 50,000, the largest single guerrilla army in Afghanistan.

  Massoud set up military cadet schools, mujahidin courts, and a tax collection system. The Soviets threw everything they could against him: mines, tanks, and heavy artillery. Carpet bombing and hideous reprisals against civilians were all too frequent; on one occasion, the Soviets lined up six hundred people and crushed them to death with tanks. Each time, however, Massoud and his men, and as many civilians as they could alert in advance, disappeared into the side valleys, sniped at Soviet troops, and eventually drove them back out. This happened seven times in the first half of the 1980s. It was an impressive show, and every journalist and relief worker who was also to penetrate the Panjshir came back to Peshawar singing the praises of Massoud, whom they dubbed “the Lion of the Panjshir.”

  The guerrilla leader first became known to the outside world through Dr. Laurence Laumonier, a strapping French woman with sparkling blue eyes and a steely resolve, who in July 1980 was the first relief worker to visit the Panjshir after the Soviet invasion the previous winter. Dr. Laumonier alerted French journalists to what was happening, and they filed into the valley to write stories about Massoud, who was able to communicate with them in their own language. Other journalists followed, almost all of them European.

  Massoud had a hawk nose, sharp features, and a wiry physique. The adjectives most often applied to him were “wily” and “scrappy.” Journalists compared him to Che Guevara and Marshal Tito, and his mujahidin to Castro’s Cuban guerrillas. The fact that he represented an ethnic minority and was getting some military aid from the Chinese further increased his allure. Massoud’s peculiar characteristics made it easy for left-wing European journalists to support him against the Soviet Union. Because Massoud’s Tajik spokesmen in Peshawar were thoroughly Westernized — they spoke foreign languages and actually arrived on time for appointments — the European relief agencies, particularly the French and Swedish ones, carried out most of their humanitarian assistance projects in territory controlled by him. Massoud became Europe’s favorite Afghan; spurring his fame was Ken Follett’s best seller Lie Down with Lions, the hero of which he based on the Tajik commander.

  The Europeans (especially the French) who visited Massoud had to be tough, or at least a little crazy. The trek into the Panjshir took up to three weeks on foot. It involved climbing several Himalayan-style passes and negotiating some of the most dangerous mine-strewn terrain Afghanistan had to offer. Few Americans — for whatever reason — made the journey, and because Massoud never emerged from inside, few Americans met him, so they were suspicious of him. As one Peshawar-based American reporter argued: “Every interview with Massoud is conducted by a journalist who has just completed a difficult journey to the Panjshir and practically owes his life to the Tajik commander, and the result is that all the articles about Massoud have been written in a tone of fawning adulation.”

  Massoud’s arms relationship with the Chinese added to American suspicions. Calumnies surfaced about him. For example, one rumor had it that he was rarely in the Panjshir at all, but was secretly spending much of his time in a luxurious and secluded Peshawar villa. In the outside world, Massoud was a hero; in Peshawar, the center of the guerrilla war effort, he was controversial.

  The biggest stone that Massoud’s enemies had to throw at him was his short-lived 1983 cease-fire with the Soviets. He used the respite to build new supply trails into Pakistan, to initiate personal contacts with other resistance leaders in the far north, to train new recruits, and to clean out areas infested with an extremely radical mujahidin faction that was causing him and other guerrilla groups trouble. It was time well spent, and he built his later successes on that period of consolidation. But Massoud’s enemies had a point too, if a mean-spirited one: the cease-fire was “a very Tajik thing to do.” In other words, it was, in a sense, selfish, since it allowed the Soviets to put more military pressure on the Pathans, who were fighting everywhere else in the country. More important, the cease-fire was a very rational — and worse, a very Western — way of dealing with a superior Soviet force that was razing Afghanistan with the same abandon as the thirteenth-century Mongol hordes.

  Tactically speaking, the cease-fire was smart, but it certainly wasn’t the way the mujahidin were going to drive the Soviets out. The Pathans would never have considered something so logical and prudent as a temporary truce. It would have been an affront both to their manhood and to Pukhtunwali, their code of honor, whose supreme precept is badai — revenge.

  So Massoud was the exception to the general reason the Soviets were losing the war: because of the wild, quixotic, completely unreasonable mentality of the Pathans, to whom the whole notion of tactics was anathema because it implied distinctions, and Pathans at war thought only in black and white.

  Like the Tajiks, the Pathans also had a great commander. To Abdul Haq’s supporters in Peshawar, he, not Ahmad Shah Massoud, was — in the words of a glossy poster with Haq’s picture on it — “the Afghan lion.” Actually, Abdul Haq wasn’t a lion at all. He was a big, friendly bear of a man with black hair, a beard, and an impish smile who had a much more difficult task to accomplish than Massoud.

  While Massoud’s lair was a valley perfectly laid out for a guerrilla struggle, Abdul Haq stalked the Afghan capital of Kabul and its environs, the center of the Soviet and Afghan Communist power structure, which was packed with government ministries, division-
size military bases, KhAD agents, barbed wire fences, checkpoints, and minefields. Haq had to fight an urban war of sabotage, as well as a guerrilla war in the adjacent mountains and villages. This called for even greater organization than Massoud required in the Panjshir Valley. And Haq had to do this with Pathans, who, because of their tribal rivalries, were more difficult to organize than Tajiks.

  Yet, compared to Massoud, Abdul Haq had little written about him until the last years of the Soviet occupation. Few knew him well, and those who did were not print journalists. In the early and mid-1980s, Haq moved swiftly and constantly around the Kabul region, stopping briefly in Peshawar every few months in order to straighten out matters of manpower, logistics, and financing. He had family concerns to attend to as well, and those were far more important than his military problems. Haq’s family was a highly unusual one, and the Pathan war effort was inextricably tied up with the complicated relationships among its members.

  Born in April 1958, Abdul Haq had two older brothers, Abdul Qadir, who was about five years older than Haq, and Din Mohammed, who was ten years older. (Pathans don’t use family names, and noms de guerre further complicate matters.) Abdul Qadir was the mujahidin commander of Shinwar, an Afghan district just over the border from the Khyber Pass, on the main route linking Kabul with Pakistan. Din Mohammed was the chief political and administrative operative for Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami (Party of Islam), one of the two most militarily powerful Afghan resistance organizations. (The other was Jamiat-i-Islami — Islamic Society — which Ahmad Shah Massoud was affiliated with.)