Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  I was so hungry and tired that I was hallucinating into Kim.

  At the top of the next brow I allowed myself to drop to the ground a second time, thinking we had reached some sort of summit and would now be able to descend into the valley. But we were only on another shaved green platform below the main spur, and there was no shade. Again Kipling’s novel came to mind: Here one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile!

  The next few hours were a blur of agony. On the downhill march my companions left the trail and bounded earthward on a forty-five-degree angle over a treacherous, rocky slope, rifles and my rucksack clanging against their shoulders, while I hobbled along the path, knees quaking, thinking that if mountain goats could talk and think like men, they would be equal to the mujahidin. Then a trickling noise sent chills through my body: the sound of running water. In the failing, dust-stained light I could make out an assemblage of pudding-stone houses at the bottom of the hill that merged with the dun-colored soil like sand castles on a beach. The trail became so steep and my knees so sore as I descended toward the village that I slid the last fifty yards through the packed dust into a mud embankment, which was channeling the spring water I had heard into a young fruit orchard. I must have looked like a chimney sweep.

  A pitcher of water appeared magically out of the twilight, held by an old man with a stringy gray beard and apakol on his head. He squatted down in the mud and handed it to me.

  As I started to drink he began yelling at me, raising a finger in the air. “Khabarnegah, khabarnegah!” It was the Pukhtu word for journalist.

  “We told this man you are a journalist,” explained Wakhil, who along with Lurang and Jihan-zeb was washing his feet and hands in the irrigation ditch in preparation for evening prayers.

  The old man exploded into a loud babble of Pukhtu that sounded like an insult. His contorted, sunburned face was inches away from me, suspended in the enveloping darkness. Every time I took another gulp of water or rinsed my face and hands he shook his head in a mocking manner. When Wakhil came over after the prayers were finished, the old man was silent for a moment, then started screaming again.

  “He says his name is Gholam Issa Khan.” Wakhil had to shout so that I could hear his translation above the graybeard’s ranting. I struggled to retrieve my notebook. Two loud, simultaneous voices now pounded at my head. I was covered with dust and lightheaded from hunger. This incident gained a mystical quality in my mind; it was like listening to the voices of your own conscience.

  “The Communists don’t like my God and his messenger,” the old man said. “They tried to wipe out my way of life. But my God gives me strength. My God always helps me. America is godless but America is good because America gives me guns to fight Communists. After we drive the shuravi [Soviet forces] out of Afghanistan, we will drive them out of Bukhara and Samarkand and Tashkent too. Allahu akbar!”

  “How old are you?” I asked. I wanted to get his story straight from the beginning. The old man thought for a moment. I wondered if anybody had ever asked him this question.

  “Forty,” Wakhil translated.

  “Forty? He looks like seventy.”

  “These people are not like you,” Wakhil said. “They don’t know exactly when they were born. Why do you always ask such questions about numbers and dates? What does it matter?”

  Wakhil was angry. Maybe the man really was forty — or at least thought he was. Lurang and Jihan-zeb were both ten years younger than I, yet they looked older.

  The old man continued to shout: “Taraki people tried to rape my wife, to stop me from praying. I have thirty hectares. Taraki people want to take ten hectares away from me. They say my daughters must go to Communist school. I say I kill you first!” He shook his fist. “Shuravi come with planes, helicopters, boom, boom. This, this” — he pointed in all directions — “all finished. We go to Pakistan. Then mujahidin come, shuravi leave. We make all this, this” — again he pointed — “all over again. Again bomb, again make.”

  The graybeard jabbed furiously at my notebook, as if to say, “Write, write.” I wrote. Then for the first time he smiled. I took out my camera and aimed it at him.

  “Ne, ne,” he shouted, covering his face with his hands.

  “You must not take this man’s picture,” Wakhil said. “This man says his picture is only for God to see.”

  Behind the graybeard’s frantic bursts of speech lay a familiar, well-documented story. Had I been traveling in South Africa, the West Bank, or Lebanon, where quantitatively the destruction and suffering were a mere fraction of what it was in Afghanistan, I would not even have taken out my notebook, because the contents of his story would already have formed part of the well of knowledge available to all serious newspaper readers. In those places, books were written about nuances because the basics were already known from the daily press. In Afghanistan, the basics had yet to be proclaimed. So the most fundamental feature of its history, which has never been fully appreciated, must be set down here.

  While the country had always been horribly poor, dirty, and underdeveloped, Afghans had never known very much political repression until after the April 27, 1978, coup that brought the sixty-one-year-old poet and self-declared Marxist idealist Nur Mohammed Taraki to power. Until the 1970s, Afghanistan was relatively civilized by the standards of Amnesty International. The soldiers’ knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries, was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside Kabul.

  Taraki’s coup changed all that. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. (That’s 7,000 more people than were killed during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.) Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. The keystones of Taraki’s revolution were land reform and the extension of secular education into the villages. By Western standards, this was a salutary idea in the abstract. But it was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets, who through Taraki wanted to transform Afghanistan into a satellite.

  “Land reform” to the graybeard Gholam Issa Khan and to Din Mohammed, Abdul Haq, Abdul Qadir, and others meant soldiers breaking into houses, raping or trying to rape the women, defecating on the dishes, executing the local mullah and headman, and confiscating land in a haphazard manner that enraged everyone, benefited no one, and reduced food production. It was the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese destruction of Tibet all over again, with hundreds of thousands of people affected. As in China and Tibet, it was perpetrated in darkness, with barely a scratch of interest from the normally aggressive Western media. The mujahidin revolt against the Kabul authorities and the refugee exodus to Pakistan were ignited not by the Soviet invasion, as most people in the West suppose, but by Taraki’s land reform program, which represented the first instance of organized, nationwide repression in Afghanistan’s modern history.

  Taraki fell in mid-September 1979, toppled by his fellow Communist conspirator Hafizullah Amin, who was described by foreign diplomats as a “brutal psychopath.” He had Taraki strangled and Taraki’s family thrown into Pul-i-Charki prison. The mujahidin rebellion gathered strength as a reaction to Amin’s crescendo of purges, mass executions, and land confiscations. It was a war that pitted an urban elite against rural peasants. The East bloc, contrary to its stated ideology, was behind the urban elite. “During 1978 and 1979 the people of Afghanistan were forced into a bloody struggle to defend themselves against incorporation into a new form of colonial empire ruled from Moscow,” wrote Henry S. Bradsher, a former Associated Press correspondent.

  When the Soviet
army invaded on December 27, 1979, it was not so much a bold, new aggression as a last-ditch effort by the Kremlin to save a nascent satellite from being overthrown by Moslem guerrillas, as a result of the overzealousness of the Kremlin’s own hand-picked men. To an extent, one could argue that the Soviet Union won and lost Afghanistan in 1978 and 1979, when few in the West were paying attention. The more than one million deaths and the planting of millions of land mines in the 1980s were merely part of the long, drawn-out, bloody aftermath of an already foregone conclusion.

  Taraki’s and Amin’s oppression had depopulated Gholam Issa Khan’s mud brick village and sent him and his kinsmen to refugee camps in Pakistan. The two leaders were Khalqis, sons of poor families who were members of an extremist, Pukhtuspeaking Communist faction called Khalq (Masses). The Soviet invasion replaced Amin with a more suave, moderate brand of Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal. Karmal, then fifty years old, was born into a wealthy Kabul family and had been educated in the capital’s foreign schools. He had helped form Parcham (Banner), an urban, Dari-speaking Communist faction that favored a more conciliatory approach toward the peasants. It was sometimes said that had Karmal and his Parcham allies been in power in the late 1970s instead of the more brutal Khalqi fanatics, land reform might have been implemented more intelligently, the mujahidin revolt might have lost momentum, and Afghanistan might have evolved into a quiescent Soviet satellite state like Bulgaria.

  Karmal released political prisoners and relaxed the repression. But it was too late. Gholam Issa Khan and tens of thousands of others like him had already joined such mujahidin groups as Jamiat and Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami and had liberated large chunks of the countryside. Karmal’s Soviet backers responded with mines, aerial bombardments, and ground troop assaults. Gholam Issa Khan’s village had been destroyed and rebuilt several times before I saw it. It was uninhabited. But now, with the guerrillas in complete control of the area, Gholam Issa Khan and a few of his kinsmen and their wives came back periodically throughout the year to plant and harvest wheat, maize, and some other crops. The graybeard’s story was a dramatic one. Still, with so much land to traverse and so relatively few journalists inside, I could have been the first to stop at his village and talk to him.

  * * *

  Gholam Issa Khan took us to an earthen house supported by hardwood beams. A ladder led to an upper level, where jute beds were arranged around a dusty carpet. Under the dim white light of a hissing gas lamp, one-eyed Jihan-zeb, using a rusted needle and thread, began repairing the torn strap of my rucksack without my asking. He looked up and smiled at me. I felt shamed, helpless, and grateful, all at the same time. Someone brought moldy, moth-eaten pillows for us. Through the beams, I saw a brilliant, breathing starscape. As sore and dirty as I was, I felt like a baby in a cradle and nearly fell asleep. A boy came with a brass pitcher of water and loaves of flat bread in a bundle of cloth. I moved over to the edge of the carpet when the boy brought a large bowl of thin, sour goat’s milk curd, called shlombeh. We took turns drinking from it. The boy came with a second bowl and then with a kettle of green tea, all of which I slurped greedily. I remember the aromatic smell of burning deodar wood from the fire. After the boy cleared the carpet, Wakhil, ever the mullah, led the group in prayers.

  In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the drone of helicopter gunships dropping “fishing flares” in the black sky over the mud brick village: huge, space-age insects disturbing the silence. The Reagan administration’s delivery of over a thousand Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahidin since 1986 had forced the Soviets into flying only after dark or at high altitudes. My stomach knotted. Gholam Issa Khan lifted his head for a moment, looked around, then fell back to sleep with a dismissive wave of his hand. The helicopters were a nightly occurrence for him. The others just grunted.

  Morning found us in a paradise lost. This lush valley, arrayed with walnut, mulberry, black plum, and oriental plane trees and noisy with sparrows and magpies, had become a zone of death. Bomb-cratered fields lay fallow. Antipersonnel mines lay not far from the path. Once-soaring minarets were cut off at their midsections, and village after mud brick village that we passed through was nothing but a roofless jigsaw of collapsed walls adjoining mounds of rubble. I had seen similar places in eastern Turkey leveled by earthquakes: pathetic little toy towns that looked as though an unruly child had smashed them during a tantrum. But here was something else: clusters of tattered white flags flying on swaying bamboo poles signifying the graves of shaheedan — mujahidin martyred by the Soviets and Afghan Communists.

  Still, as Wakhil never stopped pointing out, the province of Nangarhar was a beautiful land. Arriving from the arid north, Babur had observed: “In Nangarhar another world came to view — other grasses, other trees, other animals, other birds, and other manners and customs of clan and horde. We were amazed, and truly there was ground for amaze.”

  We stopped by a stream, and Jihan-zeb constructed a bath for me with a pile of stones. I took out my spare shalwar kameez from my rucksack and changed while in the water. Soaking wet in my new clothes, I washed the others by smashing and rubbing them against the stones. The men didn’t wash, but they looked and smelled the same as when they left Peshawar: nothing at all seemed to affect them.

  Walnuts and dried mulberries appeared with the curds at meals now. And maize too, which Jihan-zeb slowly turned in the fire. He held his whole hand in the flames for several seconds, turning the corn and smiling at me. Barking in Pukhtu, he beckoned Wakhil to translate.

  “Jihan-zeb asks if you know why mujahidin are brave and feel no pain.”

  “No, why?” I asked.

  “Because mujahid is a man who has already given himself to God. Though he still breathes, he is like the dead. He isn’t afraid.”

  Jihan-zeb smiled again. His simpleminded expression was like that of a fanatic. He reminded me of the Iranian youths at the Gulf war front, with headbands bearing the inscription “Ready for martyrdom” — the kind who, in slightly altered circumstances, were capable of switching from naive kindness to cruelty, and butchery even.

  In some cases, the mujahidin had been guilty of just that.

  The guerrillas routinely executed enemy pilots upon capture (until American advisers prevailed upon them to at least interrogate the airmen first). In a region of Paktia province controlled by a Khalis commander, Jallaluddin Haqqani, they once took a group of Afghan Communist troops prisoner, lined them up in a ditch, and shot them in the head. After the negotiated surrender of the Communist border post at Torcham at the beginning of 1989, mujahidin alleged to belong to the Khalis organization killed the disarmed Communist soldiers and mutilated their bodies. Still, in most cases, the guerrillas held prisoners, whether Soviets or Afghans, and forced them to survive in the same Spartan manner as their captors. Documented accounts of mujahidin savagery were relatively rare and involved enemy troops only. Their cruelty toward civilians was unheard of during the war, while Soviet cruelty toward civilians was common. On January 16, 1988, for instance, after Soviet troops and an Afghan Communist militia unit captured the village of Kolagu in Paktia province from the mujahidin, they bound together twelve villagers, seven of whom were children, inside the local mosque before they burned it to the ground; nine of the twelve died. (Amnesty International later confirmed the details of the incident.) “Civilian massacres [perpetrated by Soviet and Afghan Communist troops] like the one at My Lai were the norm rather than the aberration,” said David Isby, a military analyst and the author of several books about the war in Afghanistan.

  To judge by the overall record, Jihan-zeb and his fellow resistance fighters were not fanatics but simply coarse peasants reacting to the invasion of their land in an uncompromising way. Because the Afghans lacked the material wealth that people elsewhere are terrified of losing, they were able to go on fighting and suffering. That is how they saved Afghanistan from the humiliating fate of so many countries in Eastern Europe. (Whether the Afghan Communist regime falls is to so
me extent beside the point, since the countryside will always be held by the resistance.)

  By the standards of the Middle East, the mujahidin were paragons of virtue. Yet because they were so primitive, they were assumed to be barbaric. And the glasnost-happy Soviet media were masters at playing on this confusion of characteristics, weaving into their reports of Soviet battle losses a sequence of manufactured tales of mujahidin savagery.

  The landscape became waterless again as we plodded through a rolling sandstone desert that made me think of mounds of ground curry. Then we began climbing up sandy slopes sprinkled with thorns, cactus, and the odd pine tree or two. Another day of thirst and sore knees — the fourth of our trek — brought us through the tree line to the Spinghar command post of the Khalis mujahidin.

  Small bands of guerrillas were spread out in canvas pup tents over the chain of snow-dusted granite peaks and plateaus. From there they could look down on the Kabul-Jalalabad-Torcham highway, the ten-thousand-man Soviet armored division at Samar Khel, and the Soviet-occupied city of Jalalabad in the vast plain thousands of feet below.

  It was a perfect guerrilla setup: from the air, the tiny green tents were practically indistinguishable from the stubble of dark lichen. The mujahidin had mounted captured Soviet-made heavy machine guns in ditches dug into the spurs, from where they could bag a low-flying gunship with a lucky shot. (It was near here that Khalis’s men had shot down and captured the first Soviet pilot of the war, in July 1981.) The region’s commander, Habibullah, lived with eleven other men in a tent about fifteen feet long and seven feet wide.