Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  While Jamiat was a Tajik-dominated party, Hizb-i-Islami was the ultimate Pathan party: it presented a facade of Moslem fundamentalism, but in reality it was tribal. Yunus Khalis, a respected Moslem cleric and former schoolteacher, played the role of figurehead and spiritual guide; Din Mohammed ran the party’s daily operations. This party, which constituted the strongest mujahidin force in the major cities of Kabul, Jalalabad, and Ghazni, appeared to the uninitiated outsider as one big, disorganized mess.

  Hizb-i-Islami had few foreign-language speakers. Its spokesmen rarely kept appointments. Its leaders seemed unable to keep track of one another. Trips inside for journalists, postponed for weeks, often fell through at the last moment. Nor was the party especially interested in help or attention from the Western relief community. The only aid worker whom Hizb-i-Islami appeared to have any regular dealings with was Anne Hurd, an American from Mobile, Alabama, who worked for the Washington-based Mercy Fund. Hurd’s friendly Southern accent concealed a tough, militarylike personality that was neither intimated nor discouraged by the party’s diffident, fundamentalist exterior. Hurd always took care to “dress up” as if she had a “business appointment in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Even though I’m a woman, the Afghans treat me as an equal because I try to be perceived as being totally outside their culture and range of control.” Still, it took her years of daily effort to establish a working relationship with Hizb-i-Islami officials.

  To judge by its power, Hizb-i-Islami obviously worked. How it did so was a mystery, and because of the difficulties in dealing with its leaders, few foreigners bothered to find out. While the smooth-talking Tajiks at Jamiat headquarters had telephones in working order, clear, positive answers to most requests, and ice-cold Coca-Cola and Fanta on hand, the Pathans at the Hizb-i-Islami office offered only Afghan green tea and words riddled with ambiguity.

  Abdul Haq himself was the only exception to the confusion. He spoke English, albeit with a lot of profanities mixed in (courtesy of a Dutch journalist who taught him in the early 1980s). He kept appointments and had a reputation as one of the few mujahidin leaders who had really interesting things to say. It was thought that the forceful impression Haq made on President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was pivotal in the subsequent American decision to supply the mujahidin with Stinger missiles in 1986. “I told Mrs. Thatcher,” Haq said, “that my great-grandfather and his father before him fought the British, who invaded Afghanistan to keep the Russians out. So I asked her: Now that the Russians have finally come, as the British once feared, why are you so quiet? Why did you send everything a hundred years ago and yet now you send nothing?”

  The Tajiks at Jamiat headquarters spoke in catchy soundbite phrases (“In six years we’ve gone from stones to Stingers” and “We ask for mine-clearing equipment and our allies give us coin detectors”); Haq offered substance. Jamiat’s people in Peshawar were just spokesmen; Haq was a commander with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a good analytical mind, and a sense of rebellion against his own family and party, all of whose members seemed very different from him. But Haq was not usually in Peshawar in the mid-1980s, and he rarely took journalists inside with him.

  It was only because of a terrible injury that I got to know Abdul Haq and Hizb-i-Islami. It was the kind of accident that occurred all the time in Afghanistan. Months later, after I knew him better, Haq told me how it had happened.

  It was in early October 1987. At eight thousand feet in the mountains overlooking Kabul, winter had already come. The plan was to attack six Soviet targets: the Kabul airfield and radar station and several military bases north and west of the capital. On October 11, Haq’s particular destination was Qarga, a lake region that was the site of a golf course used by foreign diplomats and a major Soviet base. Qarga had once before been lucky for him: fourteen months earlier, in August 1986, he launched a spectacular raid that destroyed the base’s ammunition dump.

  At about 7:15 in the evening, Haq and a forward guerrilla unit were advancing on Qarga from the west. The Soviets, perhaps anticipating an attack, had flown over the region several hours before, peppering the bare, eroded mountainside with butterfly mines. To avoid the mines, the mujahidin took a detour. It was dark, with strong winds and heavy rain mixed with snow. The mud might have been as deep as two feet in some spots.

  “There was a mud trench, about six or seven meters long, which we had to cross to get to the road,” Haq told me. “Four or five mujahidin were walking in front of me. There was some shooting and firing nearby, which you know there always is in Afghanistan. Each of us placed our foot into the hole made by the one ahead. Though we took the long way around, we still had to be careful of mines.

  “You have to remember how dark and muddy it was. Anyway, because of the mud I did a stupid thing. I slid a few centimeters off the path, something I never did before. Then I saw my boot fly up in the air in front of me. It was like I was dreaming. I was wounded fourteen times before, but this time I really felt nothing at first. I tried to take a few more steps, but then the rocks crushed against the exposed bone and nerves of my right foot and suddenly I got dizzy and fell. I told the major behind me that I needed a tourniquet. When he saw the blood pouring out on the snow he started screaming and all the others came. You see, they were all afraid to touch me because I was their commander. We had no doctor or medical supplies. We Afghans are so stupid sometimes.

  “So what did we do? We started arguing. I argued against going back. I said I must write a letter explaining how the operation is to continue without me. But it was difficult to write because it was so dark and cold. I must have been completely delirious.”

  The men made tourniquets out of a turban and tied them above and below his knee. Haq, who weighed over two hundred pounds, was carried piggyback for almost a mile until someone found a horse. Even with help he had trouble putting his good left foot in the stirrup. “By now there was so much blood and it was snowing harder,” Haq said. “All I could think of was how cold I was. On the horse I started vomiting so I had to get off and be carried again.” Strangely, he recalled, the pain was less vivid than the cold and the nausea.

  Four hours later, Haq was lying on a jute bed in the house of another mujahidin commander in the town of Maidan Shahr (twenty-five miles southwest of Kabul), and the pain was “everywhere.” The guerrillas found a local doctor with some sort of knife, but he had no anesthetic and liquor is prohibited under Islamic law. A piece of bone hanging from what remained of his right foot had to be cut. “When the knife hit the bone, that was a bit difficult for me. Mujahidin rubbed my palms to take my mind off the pain. It didn’t help much.” Haq laughed when he told me this.

  Someone took a snapshot of the commander five days later, after he had been transferred to a medical compound in Wardak province run by Médecin du Monde, a Paris-based relief group. Part of his foot had just been amputated by a French-trained Hungarian doctor, a refugee of the 1956 revolution against the Soviets. (This time an anesthetic was available.) In the photograph, Haq is pointing his exposed stump toward the camera and smiling. “Because I knew I lost part of my foot for a logical reason, I felt less depressed,” he said to me. “I pity such people who lose limbs in car accidents and other stupid things.” Haq was lucky. The mine that wounded him was a pressure-pad mine, a powerful antipersonnel weapon that would have blown off his whole leg or killed him if he had stepped on it directly rather than slid down on it at an angle.

  His pain seemed to grow day by day. I rarely saw Haq when he wasn’t in some physical discomfort. Always, he would be taking off his Reebok running shoe, fitted with a special plastic shin support, to massage the ball of his foot. I met him for the first time a week after the snapshot was taken. He was drawing deep, wheezing breaths against the pain and sweating in streams. Fie had just been jammed into the back seat of a car, without any drugs, for a three-hour trip to Islamabad in order to meet with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, before being flown to a hospita
l in Pittsburgh at the U.S. government’s expense. There he was to have a second amputation, to remove more bone fragments and damaged nerves. When he got to Pittsburgh he was given painkillers for the first time since his accident.

  I sat in the front seat of the car and asked him how he felt. He was told only a few minutes earlier that I was a journalist who wanted to ask him some questions. He had a huge round head covered with short black hair, graying sideburns, and a close, scruffy beard, which partially concealed a mild case of acne. Though he was personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Soviet soldiers, his eyes didn’t reflect this. Haq’s small, dark eyes registered considerable pain, but they weren’t jaded, nor were they lifeless or cynical looking. He could have been a Jewish actor hired to play the role of a Third World guerrilla leader.

  Speaking was hard for him. Between breaths, he explained that the only thing he wanted to do was return to Afghanistan to fight. It was what every Afghan said when wounded, so the words had little effect on me. He was a burly man but his voice was not deep at all. There was almost nothing about him that was menacing. He thanked me profusely for my concern and I left the car. I was with him for less than five minutes. When I saw him next, three months later, he remembered me instantly and apologized for not having been able to say more.

  I had met Palestinian leaders in Syria and Jordan, Polisario leaders in Algeria, Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq and Iran, and Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas in northern Ethiopia. Most had eyes that appeared to undress you and peer into your innermost secrets. All of them were burdened by an emotional austerity bordering on asceticism which saw individual people only in the abstract, as mere symbols that could be wiped off a board without remorse. The Eritreans were less like this, but they had a sadness and a cynicism that was beyond belief. You couldn’t really get to know any of those leaders; it seemed as if there were an invisible, high-voltage field between you and them. You could observe them, and write about them, but you couldn’t get to know them.

  Abdul Haq emitted no intimidating emotional charge. He threw up no barriers when he spoke. Because he wasn’t paranoid, you weren’t. With him, at least, you had the feeling that you were innocent until proved guilty.

  2

  A World of Men

  WOMEN ARE OPPRESSED in all Moslem societies. But among the rural Pathans, women simply don’t exist. “They’re not even in the background. They’re just not there,” said a Pathan woman who left the Northwest Frontier to live in New Jersey. Here are three Pathan proverbs:

  Women have no noses. They will eat shit.

  One’s own mother and sister are disgusting.

  Women belong in the house or in the grave.

  You rarely see women on the Northwest Frontier or in Afghanistan; you do see moving tents with narrow holes for the eyes. Photographers who walked through minefields and sneaked into Soviet bases were afraid to take close-ups of Pathan women unless they were at least a hundred yards away and had a lens the size of a mortar — and provided not a single mujahid was looking. A close-up of a Pathan woman was more prized and difficult to get than a photograph of the undercarriage of an MI-24 helicopter gunship.

  The only Pathan females I was ever allowed to see were all five years old and younger. Some of those girls were beautiful, with long, dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and doe eyes. What Pathan women look like when they are older is a secret that only Pathan men know.

  A desert Arab, after he gets to know you, may invite you to his home, where you may steal a brief glance at his wife while she serves the food. A Pathan may also invite you to his home, but either he or another man will carry in the food that has been prepared in the women’s quarters. The food, in turn, is often the traveler’s only clue to the presence of a woman nearby. If the dish is relatively clean and the meal appetizing, it means there is a woman in the adjoining room who cooked it; if the food is inedible, a Pathan man did the deed.

  A Pathan won’t even tell you the names of his wife and mother. To ask him is an insult. It would be like asking him to undress in front of a crowd. “Women are as private to a Pathan as his private parts,” a Pathan lawyer remarked to me. “Women are the holy of holies in a culture where the men act as the barricades.” The first time I interviewed Abdul Haq I made the mistake of asking him the names of the men and women in his family. The names of the men he told me. Concerning the women, he blushed and turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t ask such personal questions,” he said. I felt ridiculous for days afterward and worried whether he would agree to see me again.

  The very existence of women in a Pathan’s life is an intimate secret, sacred to him but also a source of shame. Women threaten the facade of splendid male isolation that is central to a Pathan’s sense of self. A Pathan knows women are needed for procreation, but that is an unfortunate and embarrassing fact to him, and if he could change it, he would. In the Arab world and even in Iran, pregnant women are a common sight. Among the Pathans, one never sees them, for as soon as a woman’s womb begins to expand, she is locked away in the house.

  After enough time on the Northwest Frontier you forgot about Pathan women altogether. They became invisible. You forgot that the mujahidin had wives and mothers, because you never saw them and the men encouraged you to forget. Only rarely did that other, hidden world break through to the surface, as when a colleague of mine asked Abdul Haq why he always kept his hair short. “Because my mother would slap my face if I grew my hair long,” he said, turning his head away, embarrassed.

  In Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan, many women were educated, held proper jobs, and didn’t hide themselves in black sheets. That was more because of Westernization than Communist influence. The mujahidin were, for the most part, backwoodsmen, and they suffered no threats or complexities in any of their personal relationships. They inhabited a self-contained world of men, a world of sharp cutouts, where women were held in contempt and the only sure touchstones of masculinity were bravery, the ability to endure physical pain, prowess with a rifle, and the length and thickness of one’s beard.

  Men without beards were distrusted by the mujahidin. After all, women didn’t have beards — and neither, thought the mujahidin, did homosexuals. Nor did the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies. Nor, for that matter, did the more modern, secular mujahidin within the seven-party resistance — the ones who drank Coca-Cola with journalists at the Pearl Continental Hotel and who were thought to do little of the fighting. In Peshawar, a beard meant credibility. It was striking how many Western journalists and relief workers who had contact with the guerrillas had beards. You would grow one before you arrived in Pakistan and shave it off as soon as you went back home. Once, when I shaved off my beard before leaving Peshawar, a mujahid friend laughed at me and said, “You look like a woman — no, like a Christian!”

  The Pathans had no patience with the fine lines or ambiguities of other cultures. Either you were a man or you weren’t. It was a barren, stunted vision of life that made sense only under impossible conditions — which was why it flourished in the 1980s. In such a harsh and sterile social environment, male friendships took on an archetypal character, based on the bread and salt of absolute trust and the respect that could be earned only by bravery and the willingness to endure terrible physical hardships. It took a rare kind of individual to be able to pass through the crucible of Pathan friendship, especially if the friendship was with someone like Abdul Haq.

  In a decade of war, a few foreign journalists managed to become close friends of Haq. They were the only people he trusted outside his family and guerrilla organization. Haq would often agree to meet a journalist only if he was recommended by one of Haq’s friends — getting close to the commander meant first getting close to the commander’s friends. By ordinary, conventional standards, none of the journalists whom Haq considered his friends were well-established professionals, and they lacked the clout of other media personages to whom he wouldn’t give the time of day. But Haq had his own ideas about what c
onstituted a good newsman. To him, a good journalist was a strong, brave man who would regularly risk his life just as any fighter would. And when it came to spotting brave men, Abdul Haq was an expert and an uncanny judge of character.

  John Wellesley Gunston did not have a beard, and he was the only journalist in Peshawar who wore a suit and tie to some appointments. Of average height and weight, Gunston had a smiling, cherubic countenance and the pale English complexion that seemed the epitome of youthful innocence and vulnerability. No matter whom he was with, his light brown eyes always sparkled with friendliness and enthusiasm. Gunston was one man in Peshawar who was not trying to prove himself: he possessed the absolute self-confidence that came from being born into a wealthy British colonial family and having served in the commonwealth’s best army units. Unlike other Westerners in Peshawar, who preferred hiking boots, khaki pants, and sleeveless military jackets from Banana Republic, Gunston was a real soldier and was therefore content to dress as a civilian. In the cowboy environment of the American Club bar, he always wore pressed slacks, a pin-striped shirt, and well-shined loafers.

  Gunston was born in July 1962 in Nyasaland (later Malawi), where his father was the local British commissioner in the town of Blantyre. Gunston gave his address on business cards as the Cavalry & Guards Club, one of London’s few remaining gentlemen’s clubs, where officers, both serving and retired, of Her Majesty’s Footguards and the Cavalry can dine together in an atmosphere reminiscent of glories past. Gunston would use such exclusive surroundings to entertain visitors before showing them his personal library of over two thousand books on travel, photography, military history and tactics, and opera. He owned eighty books on Afghanistan alone. Having never finished secondary school, he considered himself self-taught. His room at Dean’s Hotel was always littered with good books, lying all over the tables, beds, even the floor. He had a particular affinity for Lord Byron and could recite sections of Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by heart. Gunston was only twenty-five when I met him, yet he exuded an air of seasoned maturity of the sort that members of the British upper class display like a coat of arms. His passion for Byron may have been his only youthful affectation, but given everything else I knew about him, I never dismissed it as ridiculous.