Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  In the space of a few hours, I had gone from extreme heat to extreme cold. My sweat-soaked body was suddenly shivering under my cotton shalwar kameez and the woolen patou that Wakhil wrapped around me. I was reminded of Arnold Toynbee’s description of Afghanistan: “a Turkish bath on a gigantic scale, with the chilly room at an altitude of 7,000 feet and upwards, opening out of the steam room at 3,000 feet and under.” Just as we arrived at Habibullah’s tent, dark clouds tumbled over the plateau and the sky exploded in thunder. The first hailstones hit the ground, and the dozen men huddled inside with patous to keep warm. The temperature was now below freezing, and the mujahidin were without socks, boots, jackets, and sleeping bags. As they watched the sharp pellets of ice rattle on the ground, they smiled and looked grateful. Wakhil explained to me that the mujahidin called hail “Allah’s mine sweeper,” since the force of the pellets was often enough to set off the butterfly mines.

  It was pathetic. Though by the late 1980s U.S. taxpayers were aiding the Afghan resistance to the tune of $400 million annually, the guerrillas still had no mine-clearing equipment, and the walkie-talkies that Commander Habibullah used to communicate with his units throughout Spinghar and adjacent valleys were cheap transceivers whose signals the Soviets could easily intercept. Out of habit, the mujahidin still relied on runners carrying handwritten notes through the mountains, a method that provided much tighter security. When better quality Japanese transceivers finally did arrive, they came with English-language instructions that nobody in these mountains could understand. You would have thought that someone in the massive American bureaucracy dealing with the largest covert operation since the Vietnam war would have had the instructions translated into Pukhtu and photocopied. The aid program certainly seemed more impressive from Washington than it did from Spinghar.

  The racket of pellets on the canvas grew louder, and wind ruffled the tent, which was beginning to feel like a ship at sea. The mujahidin inside ranged in age from teenagers to old men, and they all had been living together on this isolated peak for years already. In guerrilla armies there is no recruitment period, and some of the men had been away from their families since 1978, when the Taraki regime first forced them underground. I noted the disparity in their ages but was not particularly conscious of it, since they themselves didn’t appear to be. They all wore the same shalwar kameezes and pakols. The younger ones had lived through the same experiences as the old men, and although they lacked white hair and wrinkles, the look in their eyes was just as old.

  The hail turned into intermittent freezing rain. As evening fell, the oldest-looking mujahid, white-bearded Yar Mohammed, silently walked out of the tent to the edge of the escarpment, where the gusts of icy wind were fiercest. Split curtains of cloud flew quickly across the fairy tale light of the heavens, as though in a scene from the Bible. The old man sat on a clump of white hail and rinsed his bare feet with a pitcher of cold water. Then he bowed down on his knees in the wet ice and began to repeat Allahu akbar thirty-four times, his hands and forehead falling to the earth, where he kept them fastened while softly, almost inaudibly whispering the name of God to himself. He was absolutely rigid against the wind. Though barefoot and without apatou, he never once shivered. Inside the open-flapped tent, tucked deep in my sleeping bag, I shivered just looking at him.

  What could you say about this spindly old man quietly praying barefoot in the ice? Compare him to a sword swallower or a yogi who walks over hot coals? As with Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb praying in the dirt, a visual report of this man’s behavior would only portray him as a fanatic.

  Mujahidin life, and that of the Pathans in particular, was stark. Likewise, my thoughts and experiences over these last few days were intense but not varied — like the act of survival itself. Variety was more easily conveyed in journalistic prose than intensity because variety was horizontal, and reporters were conditioned to cover stories horizontally, aspect by aspect. But what did you do with people who were essentially uncomplicated? The mujahidin had few aspects to their personalities, but each aspect required boring deep down to a level of experience that went beyond speech itself. “Damn it, there’s nothing you can say about the muj. You have to feel them,” said Tony O’Brien, a photographer friend.

  No one else paid much attention to Yar Mohammed’s praying. The mujahidin, even when in a cohesive group like this one, often prayed alone, whenever each man felt like it. One after another they performed their evening prayers, if not alone, then in groups of two or three. Some shouted; others, like Yar Mohammed, just whispered. Up here on this plateau, in the hail and freezing rain, each man communicated with God in his own style. The chanting crowd in the mosque was absent, and the Koran seemed less like a monologue. This was as close to democracy as one was likely to get in central Asia.

  In the gas-lit darkness, we sat around the sides of the tent and ate a meal of flat bread, raw turnips, onions, and green tea. Away from the villages there were no goats and therefore no curds. The only luxury was the water pipe, assembled from a brass pitcher and bamboo pole. After the repast, Commander Habibullah read a passage from the Koran while we all listened. It was one of the few occasions when everyone prayed together.

  Habibullah was constantly busy, writing messages, communicating by walkie-talkie, or going off to a nearby tent on an inspection or to confer. He appeared efficient, competent, and unfriendly — disdainful of the world I seemed to represent. Only very late at night did he agree to talk to me.

  Habibullah, one of Abdul Qadir’s top lieutenants, had a dark Indian’s complexion, a long black beard, and an aquiline nose. He reminded me of a Sikh warrior rather than a Pathan, and in the dim, smoky light he looked like a Greek or Syrian saint in an early Christian fresco. Habibullah was twenty-six years old and from the Kuchi tribe, a nomadic branch of the Pathans. Being a Kuchi explained a lot about his demeanor. The British writer Peter Levi, in an erudite travelogue about Afghanistan, The Light Garden of the Angel King, described the Kuchis this way: “Kuchi means travelers and they are hard to know. We found them stoical about disease and distrustful of the local doctors, and in their tents their behavior was regal.” Erect and motionless, Habibullah spoke impassively through Wakhil’s translation.

  As in the case of Gholam Issa Khan, in the late 1970s Taraki’s Communist regime seized Kuchi land in Nangarhar and hauled the local mullah and headman of Habibullah’s nomadic encampment off to prison. They were never seen again. Many of his kinsmen fled to refugee camps in Pakistan. Habibullah joined Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami to fight the Communists south of Jalalabad, near the town of Rodat Baru, where his family used to live. He described how Soviet troops entered the Kuchi camp in 1982, “robbing houses, killing the goats, taking money and the cows.” Then this Kuchi area was bombed from the air, and all the irrigation canals were destroyed. “Less than ten people out of two thousand are still left there. Many are in Peshawar, many we don’t know if they are alive or dead.”

  About that time, Habibullah returned temporarily to Pakistan, where he married. He now had a wife and two children living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar. Amid strangers in the impersonal, barrackslike arrangement of the sprawling camp, his wife was obliged to wear the veil, something Kuchi women didn’t have to do in Afghanistan, where everyone in the encampment was a close relative. Living as a guerrilla, Habibullah had seen his wife and children only a few times over the years, and he worried about them. He said over a third of the members of his extended family had been killed, “but if we stopped fighting and went to live in the camps in Pakistan, we would all become refugee slaves and the Communists would have everything.”

  Habibullah was not vehement or even enthusiastic about what he said. There was an almost bored look in his olive-pit eyes. Jihad was obviously no joy for him, but a fundamental duty that grew out of the unfortunate circumstances of his life. Oppression had forced Habibullah — against his better nature, it seemed — to hate. The Afghans, I was beginning to notice, were not really good haters,
not like the kind that existed in Iran, Lebanon, and other places Moslems felt themselves to be oppressed. The differences between those places and Afghanistan were, among other things, politics and urbanization. The mujahidin were not politicized to the degree that Arabs and Iranians were. The Afghan fundamentalists were mainly simple village people, not an angry peasant proletariat that had fled to city slums in search of jobs, as in Iran and Egypt, and in the process had sacrificed their cultural underpinnings. Habibullah had lost a lot, but one thing he hadn’t lost was a sense of who he was.

  Scurrying field mice and the drone of helicopter gunships again disturbed my sleep. When Habibullah saw my fear he laughed. It was the only time I ever saw a smile cross his face. He explained to Wakhil that the gunships never came in low over Spinghar anymore because of the enemy’s fear of Stingers. “We don’t have Stingers here,” Habibullah said. “But we always say we do when communicating by radio, which we know they intercept.”

  After daybreak the bombs came. The earth vibrated from the thousand-pounders dropped by the fighter jets overhead. Clouds of dust from exploding earth filled the air. The nearest bomb hit several hundred yards away from us and, as it turned out, nobody was hurt. It had been a useless exercise: the jets had taken off from the military air field at Jalalabad, dropped their bombs from about ten thousand feet, and flew home. The jets were flying so high that from the ground they appeared no larger than specks. Even with television-guided missiles — which these planes were not equipped with — hitting a target as small as a pup tent from that altitude is exceedingly difficult. It was another potent illustration of how the Stingers had changed the face of the war. Weighing only thirty pounds, the heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles were mobile and cost only $75,000 apiece, and in two out of three times that they were fired in Afghanistan, a Stinger destroyed a Soviet jet or helicopter that cost about $4 million each. So the Soviet and Afghan government pilots weren’t taking any chances.

  Wakhil and I said our goodbyes to Lurang and Jihan-zeb, who would now rejoin Habibullah’s forces on Spinghar for guerrilla sorties in the Jalalabad area. We were headed down into the Kot Valley toward that city. Habibullah gave us a new guide, a raw-boned old man whose name I never found out and who I thought, gratefully, would be unable to move along at the same demanding pace set by Lurang and Jihan-zeb.

  I was wrong.

  The trek from Spinghar was all downhill and took only five hours, which must have been like a sprint for the mujahidin but was among the most difficult of the marches I made inside. The geezer practically jogged the whole way, holding his Kalashnikov in his hand rather than using the shoulder strap. The entire journey was in a canyon floor along a treacherous mountain stream. After days of walking for hours on almost no water, suddenly I was deluged by it. As we descended toward the plain, the weather became hot again, yet the spring water was as cold as melting snow and filled with sharp stones and pebbles. And it was moving fast. We had to ford the stream twenty-three times (masochistically, I was keeping count). My feet were numb inside my soaking running shoes, but I needed the traction to keep from falling in the water — anyway, our guide was not going to wait for me to take my shoes off and put them on again. Near the bottom of the canyon Wakhil noticed several butterfly mines that the mujahidin had surrounded with stones so a passer-by wouldn’t easily stumble onto them. In such circumstances there would often be other mines in the vicinity that they hadn’t spotted. The old man casually waved at us to come ahead and jogged on, and so did we. After a while I got so tired and out of breath that I stopped thinking about mines. If I was fated to step on one I would, and that was that. My principal fear was the immediate one: falling behind Wakhil and our guide.

  The Kot Valley unrolled like a plush green carpet at the foot of Spinghar, a jungly world in sight of the snows. We alighted under a large plane tree on a raised table of earth about a hundred feet over the valley, providing a prospect from which to espy the terrain we were about to enter. A local farmer laid out a rush mat and Turkoman rug for us. His son, wearing a gold Sindhi cap, brought ceramic cups for tea. I took off my shoes and smelly socks and let the hot sun dry my feet while I drank tea under a blue sky on a rug I would have been proud to have in my living room back in Greece. It was the kind of moment that a traveler files away in his mind in order to impress people later on. But what I also remember about that moment was what the farmer told Wakhil about all the irrigation ditches that had been blown up by fighter jets, and the flooding in the valley and malaria outbreak that followed. Malaria, which on the eve of Taraki’s Communist coup in April 1978 was at the point of being eradicated in Afghanistan, had returned with a vengeance, thanks to the stagnant, mosquito-breeding pools caused by the widespread destruction of irrigation systems. Nangarhar was rife with the disease. This was another relatively minor, tedious side effect of the Soviet invasion that lacked drama and would only have numbed newspaper readers if written about or even mentioned in passing — which it never was.

  We crossed rice, grain, and maize fields, walking along rebuilt irrigation embankments and down dusty trails partially shaded by apple and apricot trees. It was hot and, for the first time since I left Peshawar, a bit humid too. Almost every mud brick dwelling we saw had been hit by a bomb. Yet more civilians lived here than elsewhere in the Spinghar region, and women in colorful chadors were ubiquitous in the fields, separating the strands of grain and carrying bundles of it on their heads. Only since the end of 1986 had refugees started to come back to the Kot Valley from Pakistan. The upsurge in cultivation was the result of one thing: Stingers. High-altitude Soviet bombing notwithstanding, the missiles were providing enough air cover to frighten away low-flying gunships, allowing some peasant farmers to return and start growing crops. Relief workers in other parts of Afghanistan where the mujahidin had Stingers had also noticed this phenomenon. The antiaircraft missiles were actually putting food in people’s mouths.

  We rested again in an apple orchard, and a farmer brought us the best meal I had eaten so far in Afghanistan: curds, lentils, greasy fried eggs, apples, and green tea. The heat, the greenery, the water slowly trickling in the stagnant canals, and the timelessness of the setting evoked a town in the Nile Delta in Egypt.

  Our guide took Wakhil and me to meet the commander in the valley. His name was Ashnagur. He was tall and lanky, and with his rifle, bandoleer, and high, bright green turban wrapped tightly around his head he resembled an Afridi bandit. Ashnagur had the visage of a hawk, with a long hooked nose, huge forehead, and black beard. He seemed cocky and reckless. Besides the rifle, he had an old Spanish Star pistol stuck inside his belt with the safety catch off. He was surrounded by about thirty young boys, all armed and constantly staring at him, even though I was the one who was surely the novelty. It was a charisma that rubbed off on me too. Ashnagur hugged me and explained — without my asking — how he would send a prearranged coded signal on the walkie-talkie to Habibullah, announcing my safe arrival. Then he smacked his huge calloused hand on the ground and said, “Sit. I am here to answer your questions.”

  Ashnagur was twenty-eight years old, the only child of a peasant couple in a Peshawar refugee camp. Since almost every other Pathan I ever met had at least half a dozen brothers and sisters, growing up as an only child here struck me as a much more intense experience than in my own culture. I wondered if his extreme sociability was a way to compensate for a lonely childhood.

  Now Ashnagur seemed to have thirty siblings, all younger and looking up to him as the adored older brother. There was something scary and magical about this band of mujahidin. They suggested a Gypsy troupe, a Central American terrorist outfit, a Puerto Rican street gang, and the orphan thieves of Oliver Twist all rolled into one. Their Kalashnikov rifles and grenade launchers were emblazoned with purple and red talismans and pompoms. In place of dull brown pakols, some of the boys wore colorful bandannas around their heads. One boy carried an old megaphone for Ashnagur to shout orders through during a battle, but there were n
o medical supplies except for a half-used and expired package of cold pills. Others had rag-wrapped bundles tied on branches over their shoulders that contained lumps of American-supplied C-4 plastic explosive for nightly sorties against Soviet and Afghan regime installations in the area. Proudly, Ashnagur took out a fistful of the substance, stuck a copper wire into it that was affixed at the end to a “time pencil,” and blew up a section of mud embankment to demonstrate the explosive power. The boys, who must have seen him do this many times before, nevertheless watched with awe. Isolated in this lush central Asian valley, with all their family members dead or in refugee camps, the boys had dreamed up their own rich pantheon of gods and sacred objects, including Allah, C-4 plastique, magic charms, and Ashnagur. For these homeless boys, Ashnagur was everything: older brother, father figure, and supreme role model.

  There was one old man in the unit, sixty-year-old Said Hamidullah. Trachoma blinded him in one eye. He told me that one of his three sons had been killed here in 1986 during a Soviet ground assault. “As long as I can still see out of the other eye I will fight and kill Russians,” he shouted at me in a hoarse, eccentric tone. “In the Gulf, Moslems are killing Moslems. The Palestinians are all Communists. Ours is the only true jihad.” None of the teenagers laughed or at any time seemed to make fun of him.

  They all lived off the land, eating wild maize, rice, fruit, raw turnips and onions, and the occasional egg or bowl of curds given to them by the local farmers. Almost every evening after dark they set out for the Jalalabad plain to blow up a small bridge or a section of road or just to take a few pot shots at an enemy base, since at this late stage in the war, neither the Soviets nor the Afghan regime’s troops ventured from their bases. A siege mentality had overcome them.

  Wakhil and I stayed with Ashnagur’s unit for the better part of a week. I heard gunfire and the thud and shake of artillery throughout each day and early evening, and several times Soviet aircraft bombed the valley to no great effect. One evening, the boys in the unit brought me a chicken to eat, but it tasted rotten and had a maggot inside. I went behind a tree to vomit. Wakhil remonstrated me for insulting our hosts. I apologized. Another night, I was sound asleep under a plane tree when, at about four A.M., we were all awakened by the rumble of feet and the clanging of rifles. Clack, clack, clack — bullets slid into breeches as the mujahidin prepared for a firelight. My stomach turned. I rolled off the jute bed onto the ground. My ultimate nightmare was being killed or captured in an ambush by Communist troops, who from time to time found it necessary to prove that they were still to be taken seriously. It was a false alarm. Another guerrilla unit had just arrived from an all-night trek and had forgotten to give the password. Everyone laughed, and I felt like a fool again, lying on the ground, shaking.