Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  At the last checkpoint, Afghan Communist troops were looking under the seats and even unscrewing the door panels of the other cars. But as it turned out, Gunston’s driver knew one of the guards, a cousin of a friend, and the vehicle passed into the city without a search.

  “At a bus station, an Afghan army major in full uniform greeted us with embraces. We ducked into his waiting Volga staff car — courtesy of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, where the major worked — and drove to the safe house. We were saluted at all the checkpoints. Wearing civilian clothes, I was taken for just another Russian out for a drive with his Afghan comrade.”

  Hamid, meanwhile, put on a three-piece suit with flared trousers and platform shoes for his clandestine meeting.

  One of the safe houses where Gunston was hidden in the capital was right near the Soviet embassy. It was there that he interviewed an Afghan army general and a KhAD captain, both members of Haq’s underground. The general gave Gunston a bottle of Russian vodka to take back to Pakistan with him.

  The reason the vehicle that was to take Gunston into Kabul had not arrived in Kolangar on time had to do with Abdul Haq’s temperamental aide-de-camp, Khairullah. The youngest son of a wealthy Jalalabad trading family, Khairullah had literally been given to Haq as one of the family’s many contributions to the jihad against the Soviets — in sort of the same way that sons are still given to the church to become monks in Orthodox Christian countries. Khairullah was a tall, elegant, urbanized guerrilla much like Hamid, with wavy, light brown hair and a mustache instead of a beard. Hamid and Khairullah had business dealings together in Pakistan, and they had had a falling out over money prior to Gunston’s departure over the border. Khairullah threw a temper tantrum and deliberately did not send Haq’s message to Kabul ordering the car and driver. With his bear paw of a hand slapping back and forth across Khairullah’s face, Haq later beat the whole tale out of him in front of an office full of mujahidin. Khairullah left in tears, utterly humiliated. Beating subordinates in front of others was something that the big, soft-spoken commander did frequently.

  This episode spoke volumes about the problems Abdul Haq was encountering, more and more, since the mine injury had forced him to remain in Peshawar. Unable to communicate face to face with his Kabul-area network, he was losing his grip on it. Haq tried to compensate through increased efficiency. He kept more detailed files on dozens of subcommanders. He dispatched more messages to the field, using hand-carried messages and a cipher machine with a complicated number code he had thought up himself. He had his Tajik accountant monitor more closely the flow of money that kept the Kabul front going. Lumbering around his office like an injured football linebacker with a nervous, fatigued look on his face, Haq became compulsive about every facet of organization. He would send me a written note just to change the time of our next meeting by fifteen minutes. Such fastidiousness was not all that common in my own culture, and in the midst of the chaos of the Pathan world it seemed utterly bizarre.

  Haq was not a happy man when I first got to know him. He confided much more to Gunston than he would to me. Still, Gunston was close to Haq only as one brave soldier could be to another.

  It hadn’t taken Abdul Haq more than a few seconds to see beyond Gunston’s spiffy, boyish exterior to the sterner stuff beneath. In 1983, after meeting with Savik Shuster, a Lithuanian Jew and former Soviet citizen, Haq, an extremely devout Moslem at war with the Soviet Union, trusted him enough to arrange a series of trips inside for him.

  “At first, I didn’t tell Abdul Haq that I was Jewish,” Shuster told me. “I wasn’t sure how he would react. When I did tell him, I quickly mentioned that I was an agnostic, that I didn’t really believe in God. This second admission made him suddenly angry. ‘Now you sound like a Soviet,’ he said. So I told him, as kind of an apology, that I questioned everything in life, but that I was prepared to accept the existence of God. Eventually, Abdul Haq learned to live with my disbelief.”

  Shuster took risks inside that not even Gunston would take. If Gunston had been caught, the Afghan government would have accused him of spying and sent him to Kabul’s infamous Pul-i-Charki prison, where he would have experienced several months of terror until the British government struck a behind-the-scenes bargain for his release. Shuster, who had lived in the Soviet Union until he was twenty, would simply have been shot.

  “I was scared out of my mind by the things I did, sure.” Shuster, who was thirty-five, always talked with the wry, self-questioning grin of an Eastern European intellectual. Growing up in the Soviet Republic of Lithuania had provided him with wisdom and pessimism in abundant amounts. Shuster seemed much older than his years. His eyes had a warm, intimate glow common to exiled Eastern Europeans, whose outer lives have been so restricted that their inner ones have taken on an ornate texture and symbolism that few in the West could approximate. He had dark curly hair, a dark complexion, and thin aviator glasses. Sometimes, because of the way his eyes lit up like sparks whenever he talked, he reminded me of Einstein.

  Shuster claimed he did what he did in Afghanistan “out of historical memory.” He considered himself a “Lithuanian nationalist.” He could draw many parallels between the Soviet rape of his land and the rape of Afghanistan. He recited for me the whole sordid history of how Lithuania was grabbed by Stalin after the 1939 pact with Hitler, then grabbed by Hitler after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and taken back by Stalin near the end of the war. Anti-Semitism in Lithuania didn’t bother him. Shuster believed that “the true partisans and resistance fighters against the Soviets were not anti-Semites.”

  But I knew that Shuster, like most everybody else in Peshawar, had a stated reason for taking risks inside and a real reason. The stated reason was “Lithuania;” the real reason I could only guess at.

  In the fifteen years since Shuster left the Soviet Union, he had tone to medical school, worked as a doctor and journalist, and taught himself French, English, and Italian. He wrote in English for Newsweek and in Russian for his current employer, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. He had reported from Lebanon, Chad, Nicaragua, and numerous other places. He had an Italian wife and newborn baby and was studying German. He was writing two books simultaneously. Like his friend Abdul Haq, he never seemed to sleep, and the two often spent half the night talking. When Shuster would finally return to his room at Dean’s, Haq would phone him about something they had forgotten to discuss, or Shuster would phone Haq. After he went back to Munich, the headquarters for Radio Liberty, Shuster phoned Haq often.

  Shuster took life so seriously that he could only live it in overdrive. There was an intensity and self-awareness about him that reminded me of the characters in a Milan Kundera novel. Like many Eastern Europeans, only with alcohol did Shuster unwind; his personality then became like that of an ordinary person when sober.

  When Shuster came to Peshawar for two weeks in late May 1988, he produced over a dozen long radio reports, went inside near Kandahar for two days, drank every other night at the American Club, and helped negotiate a three-way deal between Abdul Haq, Haq’s oldest brother, Din Mohammed, and the office of Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuéllar for Haq to visit the United Nations. Shuster finished these negonations at 1:00 on the morning of his departure and dashed out at 1:30 on a three-wheel auto rickshaw to pick up a friend’s tape of traditional Afghan music, which he needed for one of his radio shows.

  UN officials had told Shuster that they were willing to welcome Haq in New York as a representative of the mujahidin commanders. Haq was willing to go, but only under certain conditions, conditions that were still unacceptable to perhaps the one person on earth whose respect Haq himself psychologically required: that of his oldest brother, the de facto head of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami. Din Mohammed was not in favor of Haq’s “exposing himself as a politician.” Until now, Din Mohammed thought, his younger brother was seen by other Afghans as purely a soldier. It was in that context — or such was the perception in Afghanistan and Peshawar —
that Haq had met with President Reagan at the White House in 1985 and with Prime Minister Thatcher in London the following year. At any rate, for all the press coverage these meetings brought, they stirred no controversy among the various mujahidin political factions in Peshawar. Reagan and Thatcher were so friendly to the mujahidin that meetings with them aroused no suspicions. But the United Nations, influenced as it was by the Soviets and their allies, was considered an enemy camp. Meetings with UN officials did arouse suspicions in Peshawar and were the responsibility of politicians, not soldiers. If he now came to be thought of as a politician, Haq could be in danger. Though the commanders and leaders of other resistance parties besides Hizb-i-Islami wanted Haq to represent them, he could never go to New York without his brother’s approval. Shuster’s challenge was to mediate between the two brothers and convince Din Mohammed that Haq should go to the United Nations.

  Abdul Haq’s father died when he was still a small boy, making Din Mohammed the family’s father figure. He even looked the part. Although Haq, on account of his hefty size, appeared older than his twenty-nine years, Din Mohammed, with a bald head and long gray beard, looked like an old man at forty. And while Din Mohammed, Haq, and the middle brother, Abdul Qadir, had all gone on the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, only Din Mohammed was always referred to as Haji — Haji Din Mohammed, he was called. It was a title that seemed to suit the crusty graybeard better than it did the other two brothers.

  In the 1970s, Din Mohammed had experienced the same trauma as his younger brothers: he watched as his house west of Jalalabad was burned down, his cattle were shot, and the village mullah and headmen were taken away to prison for summary execution by Afghan Communists. The soldiers even defecated on the ritually cleansed dishes, the most sacred items in a Moslem household. Unlike Abdul Haq, Din Mohammed seemed truly transformed and hardened by this experience. Whereas Haq, in his role as a field commander, had killed Soviets, he didn’t seem to hate with the same fanatical intensity as his brother. “Din Mohammed is a bitter, inflexible man” was a remark I frequently heard from Afghans outside the fundamentalist fold.

  I was one of the only reporters ever to talk with Din Mohammed at length, and the experience was disconcerting. For several hours he suffered me. He certainly did not feel comfortable with non-Moslem foreigners, although he would spend long stretches with Shuster, chatting and drinking tea.

  Shuster, himself a product of totalitarianism, seemed to think in the same cynical, conspiratorial framework as Din Mohammed. He badgered Din Mohammed with a harsh reality designed to force the Haji’s hand, in order to allow Haq to go to the United Nations.

  President Zia of Pakistan was conspiring, in early and mid-1988, to make the anti-Western Afghan extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the permanent chairman of the seven-party mujahidin alliance. Hekmatyar, whose three-month term of office as temporary chairman was set to expire, was loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike. He was young, charismatic, highly educated, and power hungry, but his organization lacked fighting ability and squandered much of its resources attacking other guerrilla factions. Hekmatyar wanted personal power first, a mujahidin victory second. He was a Pathan from the northern Afghan province of Badakshan, but his eyes were not those of a Pathan. They resembled an Arab’s or Persian’s: pellets of hard black ice that never stopped moving unless they were looking down and away from you. A spellbinding demagogue before a crowd, in private he was eerily soft-spoken; his mouth flowed with honey that denied all bad intentions. Hekmatyar was forever calling press conferences, accusing the other parties of selling out to the Soviets while claiming credit for military operations that the other parties had carried out. It was a Peshawar truism that the split in the “hopelessly divided mujahidin” — as the media phrased it — was basically six against one. At times it seemed that the only issue all the factions of Westerners at the American Club could agree on was a hatred of Hekmatyar for “giving the mujahidin a bad name” in the outside world.

  Yet Zia favored the thirty-nine-year-old leader. In addition to being a militant fundamentalist like Zia himself, Hekmatyar was a talented politician backed up by almost no grassroots support and no military base inside. He was therefore wholly dependent on Zia’s protection and financial largess (courtesy of American taxpayers) for his party’s existence. Hekmatyar, a former student leader at Kabul University, was the classic artificial creation of an outside power. But the mujahidin could not openly oppose Zia’s choice, because it was Zia’s personal support that allowed the guerrillas to operate from Pakistani territory over the opposition of most of his countrymen, who would have gladly cut a deal with the Kabul Communists in return for getting the 3.5 million refugees off their soil. And the price for Zia’s protection was a mujahidin leader who was completely subservient to him.

  Shuster pleaded his case to Din Mohammed: Abdul Haq and the other alliance leaders were the way around Zia’s machinations. By accepting the invitation from Perez de Cuéllar’s office, which Shuster was asked to help relay, Haq could become, overnight, a unifying figure in the mujahidin alliance, overshadowing Hekmatyar and thus blunting the force of Zia’s gambit without openly crossing him. Also, at that very moment in mid-1988, Ahmad Shah Massoud was forming a grand alliance of Tajik, Turkoman, and Uzbek commanders all over northern Afghanistan. With the Soviets starting to pull out of the country, it was critical that a Pathan commander get a quick dose of diplomatic legitimacy. It was time, Shuster dared to say to the graybeard Haji, for the Pathans “to stop looking backward to their own suffering and to start showing political ability.” And whether Din Mohammed liked it or not, Abdul Haq was already being thought of in Peshawar as a politician, a role for which he had greater talent than several of the seven party leaders.

  Even so, Shuster pointed out, whatever took place in New York between Haq and UN officials would probably turn out to be of little relevance, since the United Nations served only Soviet interests. The most important thing was how Abdul Haq’s visit would be perceived in Peshawar by the refugees and party leaders. Shuster, ever the realist, was less optimistic about toppling the Kabul regime than anyone else I knew on the Frontier. He desperately wanted Haq to take over the mujahidin alliance because he knew that if Hekmatyar and the Pakistanis continued to run the war, the guerrillas would falter once the Soviet troop withdrawal was completed — which is exactly what happened.

  After the final, four-hour session with Shuster, in broken English, Din Mohammed relented. Shuster had merely played back to him the Haji’s own private thoughts in a more concise, pointed form. Abdul Haq departed for New York five days after Shuster left Peshawar. Haq’s visit to the United Nations helped force Hekmatyar out of the chairman’s post in mid-June 1988. This proved, however, to be only a temporary setback for Hekmatyar.

  During his last days in Peshawar, Shuster would wait in his hotel room or in the dim, gloomy dining hall at Dean’s Hotel for Abdul Haq’s driver to fetch him. Haq would be reclining in the back seat of the well-upholstered Toyota Corolla with darkened windows like some mafia don, massaging his injured right foot and moving over to make room for his friend beside him. In the car, Shuster would begin patiently making his case about every nuance of the military and diplomatic struggle facing the mujahidin. Shuster could handle Haq, who occasionally fell into bad moods and acted like a spoiled child — as when he refused to answer calls from the State Department while recovering from his mine injury in the Pittsburgh hospital. (Actually, Haq was convinced that the Americans were trying to kill him. The reason? Since the U.S. government was paying his medical expenses, Washington regulations stipulated that he fly on an American carrier on the last leg of his journey to the United States. In horrible pain, Haq was forced to wait hours at a London airport for a connecting flight.)

  Faced with Shuster’s arguments, Haq would ease into a smile. He’d make a joke about getting diarrhea from the food at Dean’s and ask about the latest gossip in the foreign community. Shuster would in t
urn loosen up. As though they were on stage, they would look deep into each other’s eyes when they talked. There was something a bit pretentious about the way they acted in each other’s presence. It was a self-conscious dialogue. Each was aware that the other came from the other side, and that was perhaps why, although they argued, they never really fought. What kept the relationship from being a cliché was the fact that they had been together under life-threatening conditions.

  In the early years of the war, whenever Abdul Haq was in Peshawar he went everywhere on his motorcycle and ate many of his meals in local Afghan restaurants with a large group of friends. Assassinations by KhAD had later forced him out of public places and into a protected car. His world had narrowed, and consequently Shuster’s role in it loomed larger. While John Gunston was the brash, soldierly comrade — the good mate who was forever slapping you on the back — Shuster was a sounding board for ideas with whom Haq could have late-night heart-to-hearts and do what was impossible to do with another Pathan: talk about his fears and vulnerabilities.

  Haq felt himself to be a man alone. Even to his older brothers he wouldn’t talk about many aspects of his Kabul operation, which he saw as something he created on his own without their help. He spent little time with his wife. Unlike other Pathans, he was satisfied with only two children and didn’t want any more — something she couldn’t understand. Like other mujahidin commanders I’ve met, he appeared to view sex as an undisciplined act of self-indulgence — something that Westerners needed, not toughened Pathans like himself. Sometimes he didn’t tell his wife when he was leaving Peshawar to go to war inside Afghanistan. At home he smoldered. His wife and other family members feared his temper, which could turn violent. This fear was mixed with awe after his mine injury, when even deliberate pampering by the women in the family failed to soften his disposition. When his sister pleaded with him to talk, he once responded, “What do you know? You’re only a woman.” The one woman he felt truly at ease with was his mother. He always told her when he was going on jihad.