Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Ashnagur conducted most of his sorties near the Soviet base at Dihbala, a complex of sandbagged bunkers at the edge of the Spinghar foothills that looked out on the Jalalabad plain. The pattern was always the same. At dusk, the mujahidin would eat a meager meal on the ground and then pray while Ashnagur split the plastique into small pieces and prepared them with the copper wire and time pencils, which had breakable seals releasing acid that burned down the wire. The march to the road linking the Soviet base with Jalalabad took several hours. As usual, a bridge or section of the road would be blown up and the guerrillas would beat a fast retreat. The pace was impossible, so I went only partway to the target, staying behind with a member of the unit. I heard the explosion and a volley of shots fired from the nearby enemy position in response. Then the young fighter I was with badgered me to run as fast as I could behind him. He cursed me all the way back to Ashnagur’s base area. Still, the others who had carried out the sabotage operation arrived back first. Thank God Abdul Haq wasn’t there to see me, I thought. The entire experience had the humiliating quality of army basic training. Each day, more and more of me was being broken down.

  When I staggered back I saw Ashnagur’s boys collapsed on the jute beds. Dawn had peeled away the darkness from their faces to reveal glazed, jubilant expressions. Backfire from a malfunctioning grenade launcher had blistered one boy’s face. Ashnagur gave him a cold pill. The boy, his eyes dazed and watery, smiled and swallowed the pill with a serious expression, as if it could actually help. I gave him one of my painkillers. The others cleaned their rifle barrels and grenade launchers with kerchiefs wrapped around branches. This was the base of rural resistance upon which more impressive actions of other, more famous commanders rested.

  * * *

  Despite the constant fatigue and physical discomfort, I rarely felt cynical or let down. Because of the war, Afghanistan offered a form of travel that had all but died out in the last part of the twentieth century. I considered myself privileged to be crossing frontiers without the need of a passport and trekking over new and fascinating landscape that had not been altered by modern development. As selfish and retrograde as this attitude was, it was irresistible. I never felt uneasy, either, despite being at the mercy of a band of seared, scrappy young men.

  As fighters, Ashnagur’s band may not have been the most impressive, but they and the other mujahidin I met embodied characteristics that were unique in the Third World, and my awareness of this fact kept my enthusiasm from flagging. Not only were they fanatical Moslems who were exceedingly tolerant of nonbelievers; they were also probably the only group of their kind with whom a Western woman would have been absolutely safe. (Several female journalists, who would not necessarily think of themselves as tough, traveled with the guerrillas.) I saw no hint of overt homosexuality or any kind of sexual deviation, though, as in all cultures, such things undoubtedly existed.

  Rarely in Afghanistan or the Northwest Frontier did I encounter a mujahid with a lewd look in his eyes, as if he were staring at someone through a keyhole — an expression I had seen throughout the Middle East. Displays of excessive politeness toward Western women, also common in that part of the world, were absent among the Pathans. Abdul Haq treated the occasional female journalist as if she were one of the boys — primitive though his attitude was toward women of his own culture. After Abdul Qadir had had the opportunity to pass through Bangkok, I asked him if he had taken advantage of the city’s easily available sexual delights. “You think I am a donkey,” Qadir hissed, as if I had insulted him.

  You could come up with various explanations for the genuine respect accorded to foreign women by Pathans, as well as for the Pathans’ apparent lack of sexual frustration and conflict when away from their wives for months at a time. A university-educated Pathan in Peshawar told me the fact that the Pathans were never urbanized, as Arabs and Iranians were, may have something to do with it. The exigencies of war may be another reason. In The Danger Tree, a novel about the World War II desert campaign in Egypt, the British writer Olivia Manning observed:

  Here in the desert, either from lack of stimulus or some quality in the air, the men were not much troubled by sex. The need to survive was their chief preoccupation.… In spite of the heat of the day, the cold of the night, the flies, the mosquitoes, the sand-flies, the stench of death that came on the wind, the sand blowing into the body’s interstices and gritting in everything one ate, the human animal not only survived but flourished. Simon felt well and vigorous and he thought of women, if he thought of them at all, with a benign indifference. He belonged now to a world of men; a contained, self-sufficient world where life was organized from dawn till sunset. It had so complete a hold on him, he could see only one flaw in it: his friends died young.

  Except for the desert sand, of which there was less in Afghanistan, it would have been an accurate description of the Pathan world in the 1980s.

  Up to a point, that is. For the aura of masculinity and self-containment is common to men at war in general. But how many warrior societies were so primitive, so free of Western influence, and so chock-full of literary references?

  At the turn of the century there were the Cossacks, the fabled horsemen of southern Russia. To Russian intellectuals like Tolstoy, the Cossack was a man of “primitive energy, passion, and virtue. He was the man as yet untrammelled by civilization, direct, immediate, fierce.” That, at least, is how Lionel Trilling once described Tolstoy’s attitude toward the Cossacks, comparing it to that of Isaac Babel:

  We have devised an image of our lost freedom which we mock in the very phrase by which we name it: the noble savage. No doubt the mockery is justified, yet our fantasy of the noble savage represents a reality of our existence, it stands for our sense of something unhappily surrendered, the truth of the body,…the truth of open aggressiveness. Something, we know, must inevitably be surrendered for the sake of civilization; but the “discontent” of civilization which Freud describes is our self-recrimination at having surrendered too much. Babel’s view of the Cossack was more consonant with that of Tolstoy than with the traditional view of his own people [the Jews]. For him, the Cossack was indeed the noble savage, all too savage, not often noble.

  No, the Cossack of a hundred years ago was not often noble. The horseman of the steppes was the instrument of czarist violence against the Jews, raping and murdering women and children in sadistic pogroms. This was the problem with Babel’s worship of the Cossacks. But to imagine the Pathans going into a village in Afghanistan and doing the same things strains credibility. Were this ever to occur, it would be so at odds with Pathan behavior that other Pathans would unite to condemn it.

  For decades, Western journalists, relief workers, and other intrepid romantics had scoured the East in search of an exotic human specimen who was undefiled by the bastardizing influences of the West, yet was also without the perversions and hypocrisies for which the East was famous. The Afghan war brought their search to an end; on the Northwest Frontier they rediscovered Kipling’s Pathans.

  For the Americans who went to the Northwest Frontier in the 1980s, the attraction was particularly intense, perhaps because, unlike generations of British schoolboys brought up on Empire, Americans came late to the discovery that Kamal and Mahbub Ali and the characters in Kipling’s stories and poems were not Arabs but Pathans — and set apart.

  “At first, I knew only that Kamal and his fellows were some unusual kind of Indians, rather like our own Indians of the American West, devoted to brave and warlike deeds…. Then I began to have a dim idea of the great tribal brotherhood which sprawled across northern India and Afghanistan,” wrote the American diplomat James W. Spain in his memoir The Way of the Pathans. Actually, the Pathans were more like our cowboys than like American Indians; they lived by the law of the gun and had an unambiguous code of honor, Pukhtunwali, whose preeminent precepts are nang (pride), badai (revenge), and melmastia (hospitality).

  Distinct from all other Moslem peoples in the Near East, the
Pathans were essentially democratic and egalitarian, with political life dominated by the jirga, a kind of ancient Athenian parliament of tribal elders, and no tradition of especially cruel, autocratic rulers. Yet like the Arabs, they lived a harsh, sterile existence that was nevertheless baroque and romantic: “They have bred poets as copiously as they have bred warriors,” Spain said. The Pukhtu ballads of Khushal Khan Khatak, reeking as they do of blood and flowers and noble deeds, are as Arthurian as those of the greatest Arab poets. The Pathans, then, were an American romantic’s dream come true: as exotic as the Arabs, but without the Arabs’ reputation for authoritarianism. The Pathans were men. As some Americans on the Northwest Frontier saw it, you didn’t have to be an aesthete or moral relativist like those goddamn Europeans who worshiped the Cossacks and Arabs to justify them.

  As the young mujahidin in the Kot Valley looked up to Ashnagur, Ashnagur — and Habibullah too — looked up to Abdul Qadir. Qadir, Abdul Haq’s brother, was the chief guerrilla commander in Shinwar, the region of Nangarhar closest to the Khyber Pass. Ashnagur and Habibullah talked about Qadir as though he were some kind of god. “Qadir is our father, our brother. We follow him everywhere. He teaches us about religion. He is a wise judge,” Ashnagur once said. In reality, what prompted these accolades was Qadir’s social status: he was an educated man from a wealthy landowning family among poor peasants like Ashnagur and Habibullah. Whenever Qadir translated the newscasts on the BBC World Service into Pukhtu for his field commanders, an awed look came over their faces. They were obviously impressed with his education and knowledge of English. And Qadir was generous — always passing out wads of afghanis to the mujahidin and the peasants of Shinwar.

  I got to know Qadir on my second trip inside, which Abdul Haq had arranged. Qadir’s thirty-eight-year-old cousin had died of a heart attack two days before our departure for Afghanistan, and Qadir walked into the stone dwelling where we were staying near the border with tears in his eyes. “This fate comes from God,” he said to me, boring his eyes deep into mine. “All of us must face it someday.”

  Qadir himself had serious kidney and liver problems, the same illness that had killed his father and that Abdul Haq suffered from too. Qadir, unlike Haq, was a chain smoker and naswar addict, chewing gobs of the opium-laced stuff throughout the day, and as a consequence was always coughing and spitting. He was thirty-five and easily looked fifty. He complained of stomach and chest pains before we even started out on our journey, and I wondered how he was going to climb the fourteen-thousand-foot pass that lay ahead of us. I also wondered how this fretful physical wreck of a man could maintain the respect and adoration of the likes of Ashnagur and Habibullah.

  Qadir was in a particularly foul mood that day. Chewing naswar and puffing on a water pipe, he said sarcastically: “Where is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? I thought he was Zia’s big mujahid! Gulbuddin is afraid to cross the border. You know what Zia told Charlie Wilson [a Democratic congressman from Texas and an enthusiastic supporter of the mujahidin]? Zia told him, I will give you Jalalabad as a Christmas present, with Hekmatyar in charge.’ Why do you Americans believe all this bullshit? Jalalabad will not fall so soon. The mujahidin are not ready for conventional battles. I know, because I and ‘Engineer’ Mahmoud [another Khalis party commander] will take Jalalabad when we are ready.” Qadir then went outside to pray and sip tea on a carpet. Listening to the birds at sunset, he closed his eyes and seemed to enter a kind of nirvana.

  The next day, taking a route different from the one I had traveled with Wakhil, we climbed the highest pass in the Spinghar range. At the foot of the fourteen-thousand-foot pass, before beginning the ascent, Qadir squatted on the ground and vomited, and in addition had an attack of diarrhea. But after a few minutes of groaning, Qadir slowly got up, draped a cloth over his pakol to further protect his head from the sun, and proceeded to climb the mountain, arriving at the windy, icy summit — the Durand Line — only a few minutes behind me. And, despite all the tobacco smoking he did, Qadir was not breathing hard. “This is good,” he said, looking down the other slope at a lovely forest of firs, cedars, and spruces. “Now that I am in Afghanistan I feel better.” From that moment on, I had trouble keeping up with him. Like Wakhil and every other mujahid I knew, Qadir grew in strength with the difficulty of the terrain while I always weakened.

  His tenacity was unquestioned. In November 1986, Qadir led seven hundred guerrillas, clothed only in open leather sandals and cotton shalwar kameezes, against upward of two thousand Soviet and Afghan regime troops in a snowstorm near Dihbala. The battle was a stand-off. Several of Qadir’s men had to have their frostbitten toes amputated afterward.

  Other aspects of Qadir’s personality were less entrancing. His strengths and weaknesses derived from the fact that he was a typical Pathan. Traveling with him was like going back to the days of Chaucer’s knights; meals with him were medieval spectacles. As he was the leading guerrilla commander for the region, Shinwar peasants were expected to kill a sheep or goat in his honor. Every evening we would enter a new village and sit outside under the stars, talking, smoking a water pipe, and waiting for the meat to cook. Then Qadir, at least a dozen other mujahidin, and the village notables would enter the house and stack their guns against the mud walls, sit around the carpet, and silently devour a repast that would include a sheep or a goat, chicken livers, rice, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, mangoes, and bananas. (Whether you were a journalist or a fighter, you always ate better when traveling with a big commander. The problem was trying not to break wind, something that Pathans consider to be far ruder and funnier than we Westerners do. An American relief worker did so in the presence of Abdul Haq, and the mujahidin spoke of the incident for months.)

  Qadir even had a court jester, a sixty-year-old turbaned Afridi who was fat, didn’t carry a gun, and seemed to have no discernible function except to tell stories and jokes. Journalists dubbed him “Haji Ball Grabber,” because one of his pranks was to pretend to shake your hand while lunging for your testicles.

  It was a leisurely stroll into Afghanistan with Qadir. He slept late and every night sat down to a huge feast. He had been in Peshawar for several weeks and told me he would need several more, to talk to Ashnagur, Habibullah, and other field commanders before planning a series of attacks against Soviet and Afghan regime positions near Jalalabad. This was in June

  after the Soviet withdrawal had started, when pundits in America were speculating about the possibility of a mujahidin assault on the city of Jalalabad itself. But the war seemed to Qadir like a sport. He fought and risked his life at his own pace and didn’t consult much with other big commanders about what he was doing, as they didn’t consult with him. This was why the assault on Jalalabad didn’t come until February

  and partly why it failed.

  Qadir was like an English country squire taking up the hunt. But finally, after a month of sleeping late and leisurely consuiting with his subordinates, he surgically blasted the Afghan government post of Achin into near oblivion.

  It was at Qadir’s headquarters, an eyrie of tents and heavy machine guns looking out onto Soviet and Afghan regime positions at Dihbala, that I got sick. It was dysentery. I couldn’t stop vomiting and had diarrhea. Unlike Qadir, however, I lacked the strength to climb a mountain.

  Everyone I knew got sick in Afghanistan, and many of the books written about the country seemed to revolve exclusively around the writer’s illnesses and constant physical discomfort. Because of its humor and brilliant, tongue-in-cheek conclusion, the British travel writer Eric Newby’s 1958 classic, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, is the finest book of this genre. Having just scaled a twenty-thousand-foot peak despite awful weather and illness, and with little to eat, Newby and his companion, Hugh Carless, met up with the world-famous explorer Wilfred Thesiger on their trek back to Kabul. ‘Tansies,” Thesiger called them, watching Newby and Carless inflate their air mattresses on the stony ground.

  Losing weight and dehydrating fast, I had no choice but to go b
ack to Peshawar. Trekking was impossible, but riding for seventy-two hours on a mule without a saddle while suffering from dysentery proved to be far more difficult than walking the same distance in good health. It was hard to hold down any liquid in my stomach, especially since the green tea began to taste like urine and the tea boys insisted on serving it in small cups half filled with sugar. I could focus only on the negative aspects of Pathan existence. How sterile their life was! Everyone wore unkempt beards and seemed to go for months without sex. Wherever I looked there were wild herbs growing on the mountainsides, suitable for all kinds of exotic teas, but the Pathans preferred only this weak, awful stuff. Unlike the Arabs, they disdained coffee and, of course, alcohol too.

  Then the mule boy accompanying me, Farouk Ali, did something that surprised me. He grabbed a pink rose that was growing all alone on a rock face and stuck it behind his ear and smiled, wearing it like that the rest of the day. Ill with nausea, sunstroke, and dehydration, choking dust and sandstone and thorn bushes all around me, I was deeply affected by the sight of that rose and the extravagant gesture Farouk AH made with it. It was like a revelation. This was a culture that had produced no painting or sculpture of any kind and boasted little original music or dance. Though Peshawar was the principal city of the Pathans, the Peshawar Museum was filled with Buddhist, Moghul, and Persian art only. But the Pathans did write poetry: