Be they Roses, or Violets, or Tulips:
By their sight is my heart now soothed to rest.
May I devote myself to the Creator of these works,
Since from his mighty hands such beauties have been produced.
Those were the words of Khushal Khan Khatak. The wearing of a pink rose by an uneducated mule boy was, for me, a sign that the poetic impulse ran deep in the culture.
Of course, Arab and Persian culture offered similar contrasts between the barren and the baroque. But with the Pathans those contrasts seemed to be starker and more dramatic. On a later trip inside Afghanistan I stayed at a guerrilla base that was under constant mortar bombardment where the mujahidin raised petunias and had paid the equivalent of $175 — a fortune by Afghan standards — for a songbird.
The little tea or water I could keep down was not enough to soothe my throat, which grew more and more parched. Then my throat became so dry it was almost too painful to swallow, and pressure built up in my ears as if I were in an airplane. At a tea stall I noticed a rotting watermelon skin, and my self-discipline broke down. Just the thought of more green tea or water was enough to make me gag, but I knew I could hold down a watermelon. I began crying, almost, for a piece, but there was no more. Evidently, watermelons could be had in war-torn Nangarhar, but finding one at a tea stall was a matter of luck. The idea of rinsing my desiccated mouth with the juice began to obsess me, however. I began to imagine mountains of watermelons and waterfalls of watermelon juice. Then I started counting the hours to Landi Kotal, where I could buy a watermelon. Or a Coke. Fifty hours to go, forty-five… I was lost in childhood memories of root beer and cream soda flushing through my mind. It was comic. All restraint had dissolved. Afghanistan had completely broken me.
The pain of thirst was so all-encompassing that I was barely aware of the welts that were forming on my buttocks from the hours on the mule. I was becoming so dehydrated and overheated that just the sound of trickling spring water sent chills of relief through my body, and rinsing my fully clothed body in the cold streams was pure sensual annihilation.
And so was the photograph of my family by the Aegean Sea. Opening his eyes wide, Farouk Ali pointed at the blue water in the background. The sight of my wife in shorts and without a veil appeared to have no effect on him. Never having been out of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier, he had never even seen a lake, let alone a sea. The sight of what, for a Pathan, was the equivalent of a naked woman did not stir him as much as the idea of a large body of water. Given my thirst, I could understand his emotion.
Then came the Valley of Tirah Bazaar. At a small camp of Khalis mujahidin we picked up two bodyguards for the journey through Afridi territory. It took eight hours on the mule during the hottest hours of the day, stopping not once for water. Because of my illness, I was now a whimpering idiot.
In Landi Kotal, I bought Farouk Ali and myself four watermelons and six Coca-Colas. Suddenly he seemed as thirsty as I was. He had never complained, yet now he was devouring the watermelons and Cokes faster than I. We both slurped and drank until there was nothing left. After I paid him for the mule, Farouk Ali went back into the desert toward the Valley of Tirah Bazaar and Afghanistan. Back to that same thirst and other deprivations.
The ability to endure, year after harrowing year, such a monastic existence, as barren and as confined by self-denial as that of the most disciplined desert anchorites, constituted the most lethal weapon the Pathans had in their battle against the Soviets. Had the Afghans acquiesced to Soviet rule without a fight, no doubt there would have been more watermelon and other fruit, and perhaps even a bus and paved road in Nangarhar. And there would not have been any mines. The idea of fighting for political freedom is an easy one to grasp until you see in the flesh what the cost is.
Of course, I didn’t have to get dysentery to figure this out. But, in the manner of the surgeon learning about mines in the operating room, being sick in Afghanistan provided me with an experience through which I was better able to appreciate the concept — and the price — of freedom as I never had before.
5
The Growth of a Commander
As WE ALL KNOW, memory is selective. Individuals, like tribes and nations, continually revise their own pasts to conform with current self-images. This was especially true for the Pathans. “Facts,” observed a British friend, “were so interwoven with fiction on the Northwest Frontier that one might as well unstitch all the carpets in the Khyber bazaar before finding a stitch of truth.”
Between trips inside, I fell into a pattern of seeing Abdul Haq at least two times a week. I have only Haq’s word for the seminal events of his youth. But that was all I wanted. It was his attitudes and image of himself, rather than the bare-bones literal truth, that I was after.
Haq’s headquarters in a guarded Peshawar villa was one of the few places in the Third World I’d seen where real work — rather than the usual conspiracy-mongering over endless cups of tea… seemed to be done, where I knew that I was taking up valuable time. In the waiting room I always saw a group of mujahidin nervously clutching notes, waiting to see “Haji Sa-hab” (Mr. Haji). One entered Haq’s private office only after removing one’s shoes. Apart from that, his office had a surface resemblance to that of any businessman or lawyer in the West. Haq would usually be talking on one of his two desk phones while simultaneously reading a report and writing notes on a separate sheet of paper. Next to the two phones were a small globe and a red desk lamp. Papers were stacked at neat right angles to the other objects on the desk and separated into “in” and “out” piles. Behind the desk on the wall was a large map of Soviet posts in Kabul. (In the adjacent “war room” was a nine-foot-high Soviet wall map of Afghanistan, with a sandbox that had markers for planning battles: this was the room where John Gunston’s pictures were displayed.)
Haq, always dressed in a gray shalwar kameez and vest… the equivalent of a pin-striped suit in the West… would be on the phone for a few minutes after I came in the office. Inevitably, a succession of mujahidin would file in, take seats opposite him, make a request, and give him a note to initial before being ushered out to receive a stack of money from Haq’s Tajik accountant. The tone of each man was submissive. Listening to their requests, Haq looked discerning, impassive, and slightly smug, as if he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could accurately size up the character and actions of every man under his command. His was a face that at times reminded me of Marlon Brando playing Don Vito Corleone in the opening scene of The Godfather.
Profusely apologizing for the interruptions, Haq would hobble over to the couch opposite me, order tea, and patiently submit to my queries about his life. He took only one lump of sugar in his tea and didn’t smoke… unusual for an Oriental male. Scratching his beard, he would joke: “The eyes of a journalist scare me almost as much as the eyes of a doctor with a knife about to cut into my foot.”
Abdul Haq was born Abdul Rauf on April 23, 1958, in Nan-garhar province west of Jalalabad. But he spent his first years in the faraway southern province of Helmand, near Iran and Pakistan, where his father, Mohammed Aman, was the representative of a Nangarhar construction company. A clash of wills between the two dominated Haq’s first childhood memories. In his mind, he and his father were the only actors on stage. The rest of the family didn’t exist. The eerie Helmand steppes provided a beautiful yet threatening background.
“I was on a bus with my father,” Haq said. “For hours I was asking him questions. I don’t remember about what, but I kept asking them. He got so tired of my questions that he started screaming and slapped me. Everybody on the bus was a stranger. We didn’t have any friends in Helmand. I was four. It is my earliest memory.
“Another time, my father was driving his jeep up a hill near our house. It was evening and he was tired. On either side of the road were mud walls. I stood in the middle of the road and refused to let him pass. He started screaming at me, but I wouldn’t get out of the road. I hugged the ground wit
h my body. Finally, he drove around me and crashed the side of the jeep into the wall. I was five, I think.
“I wanted to go to school like my older brothers, but my father told me I was still too young. I was only five and you had to be seven. I got so mad that I tore up my brothers’ school books. So my father took me, unregistered, to the school. I remember once the teacher fell asleep. Maybe he was tired or sick, but I thought that rude and I went over to the teacher’s desk and hit him hard over the head with a stick to wake him up. The teacher ran after me but I got away. I was always a little devil.
“My father liked to see children fight. I remember he would throw a coin up in the air and my brothers and I would scramble for it. I worshiped my father. I was six when he died of kidney disease. He was fifty-one. We left Helmand and went back to Nangarhar. We had no family in Helmand. In Nangarhar we did… lots of aunts and uncles and cousins to play with. We owned land and a big house and garden, and everybody in the village knew us. We always had lots of guests. This gave me a great sense of security after my father died. I found that I was part of something. From then on I had no doubt who I was.”
Haq was wealthy by Afghan standards; nevertheless, when in Peshawar he lived in one room with his wife and two children in the same crowded house as the families of his two older brothers. Though he confided in foreigners and felt alienated from the rest of his family, he could not stand to live apart from any of them.
Haq’s family is of the Arsala Khel, a subdivision of the Jabbar Khel, which is a leading landowning clan of the Ahmadzai… the great Pathan tribe that historically has been in conflict with the Durrani kings (also Pathans), who ruled Afghanistan from the middle of the eighteenth century through 1973, when King Zahir Shah was deposed and went into exile in Rome. The Jabbar Khel consists of over fifteen hundred prosperous families, who in days gone by robbed travelers on the Kabul-Jalalabad road. Jabbar himself is buried near the main road, and his grave is, according to one legend, a place of evil and a haunt of robbers and wolves. Haq’s hometown of Fateh-bad is synonymous with the deaths of many British soldiers during the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in January 1842. But in the last hundred years the clan has gained a reputation for government service. Haq’s great-grandfather on his father’s side was Wazir Arsala Khan, a foreign minister of Afghanistan. Haq’s cousin Hedayat Arsala was until 1988 an officer of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The first time I met Haq, in his car after the mine injury, Hedayat Arsala was by his side, having flown over from Washington as soon as he heard about the accident. Haq, the maimed warrior in a shalwar kameez, and Hedayat in a gray suit and tie, looking like an international banker… it made for a deliciously interesting contrast and testified to the reserves of love, tradition, and talent in this Pathan family.
“I know little about the history of my family or my people,” Haq said. “I feel humiliated that it is foreigners like you who have to tell me about the history of the Pathans. The problem is that I spent so much time fighting and in jail that I never had a chance to read books. When this war is over all I want to do is read about my own culture, nothing but read, so that I’ll know what I was fighting for.”
As a little boy in the Nangarhar village of Fatehbad, Haq went with his older brothers every morning at 5:30 to pray in the local mosque. Then came six hours of Koranic school, followed by lessons with a private tutor. “The mullahs were strict and kept us busy till the evening. If we talked or were late, we’d get a hard slap across the face. There were only the mullahs. The government in Kabul didn’t exist for us.
“But we had a house in Kabul and spent the summers there. Kabul was cooler than Nangarhar. I love my village a hundred times more than the city. I hated to buy things from strangers and go into stores where we didn’t know people.
“Everyone in my village was Moslem. It was something that you didn’t think about or question. That’s why the fundamentalists are so strong now against the Communists. To destroy one ideology you need another. I remember when I was eight I started at the lycée. One of the teachers, who I now realize was a Communist, told us we must go to war against Pakistan for Islam. So I asked, ‘What about Panjdeh?’ [Russia had taken this town in northwestern Afghanistan in 1885.] I had seen it on a map. The teacher ignored me. So I kept asking the same question over and over. Finally, the teacher hit me, so I hit him back. Then my classmates and I dragged him outside and dry-shaved his head. I was taken to the principal’s office and suspended from school for a time. But my family didn’t punish me. This was my first political experience.
“When I was a little older, about twelve or thirteen, I was taken with some other boys to be tutored by Yunus Khalis, who was a close friend of the family. He joked a lot, made me laugh, and gave me little presents. Khalis was good with children. I adored him and looked up to him.”
Khalis, a renowned Islamic scholar and mathematician from the nearby town of Khogiani, ran a publishing house that printed the first Pukhtu translation of several Koranic commentaries from the original Arabic. The idea of such a scholar finding pleasure teaching unruly teenage boys was typical of Khalis, a salt-of-the-earth type with a ready sense of humor who was completely lacking in pretense. (Years later, Khalis would arrive barefoot to his first meeting with the natty UN special representative to Afghanistan, Diego Cordovez. In Khalis’s hand was a rusty nail, which he used as a toothpick.) I’ll never forget watching Khalis in his Peshawar headquarters while one of his commanders playfully yanked at his long red beard, which Khalis had just redyed with henna to impress his teenage wife. Khalis laughed loudly the whole time, slapping the man on the back. Afterward Khalis sat down next to me, smiled, and patiently answered my questions about Islam, which he lamented was “totally outside the thought pattern of the West, making it difficult for Americans to understand our struggle, even though they are helping us with arms.” This is an ayatollah? I asked myself. A foreign policy bureaucrat in Washington might say he was. But had Khomeini ever let an American reporter into his presence and behaved like that? The answer, of course, was no.
Back in 1973, when King Zahir Shah was overthrown by his first cousin and former prime minister, Mohammed Daoud, fundamentalists like Khalis and Haq’s older brothers, Din Mohammed and Abdul Qadir, cheered. Zahir Shah had held the throne for forty years, since he was eighteen, and to the fundamentalists he was a corrupt profligate who fiddled while Afghan Communists busily burrowed into the state bureaucracy. But the fundamentalists feared Daoud even more. He was known to be a friend of the Soviet Union and stood for a stronger, more efficient central government.
Daoud’s coup was made possible by the assistance of cells of junior officers controlled by Parcham (Banner), the less extreme of the two branches of the Afghan Communist party. Parcham’s influence in the army’s lower echelon complemented Daoud’s own clout among the generals. The combination made for a bloodless coup, in which all potential resistance was snuffed out. Because the Parcham Communists were crucial to Daoud when he first assumed power, he let them dominate the ruling revolutionary council. Eventually, Daoud purged the Parchamis from the council and tried to steer a less pro-Soviet path. As a result, not only were the disaffected Khalqis… the more extreme of the Afghan Communists… busy plotting against Daoud’s government, but the Parchamis were too.
To Khalis and Din Mohammed especially, the Kabul government under Daoud was a godless force seeking to extend its dominion into the countryside in order to subvert age-old religious and tribal traditions. As reactionary and paranoid as this vision may have seemed in 1973, subsequent events were to bear it out completely, when the more extreme Khalqis overthrew Daoud. The most powerful mujahidin groups in the 1980s were the fundamentalist ones, simply because the fundamentalists were the first to decipher the course of events in the 1970s, and therefore the first to act.
Abdul Haq continued his story the next time we met: “Just after Daoud came to power, I remember we had a teacher at our school who, like the other one, tried to intr
oduce Socialist ideas into the class. I objected to this.” Haq formed a delegation that protested to the headmaster and demonstrated outside the school. “My family had a few acres of land, so I had a little money to spend on making posters and placards. I was arrested.” That was the end of Haq’s formal education.
“I learned how to use a Lee-Enfield rifle and explode dynamite at an early age. It was an easy way to hunt and fish and kill cats. I once killed a hundred fifty cats with dynamite,” Haq bashfully admitted. “I attacked my first police station when I was sixteen. It was easy, but we didn’t know what to do once we were inside. One of us was captured and tortured. I promised myself that I would never do anything like that again without planning every detail in advance. It was about then that I took the name of Abdul Haq, so I wouldn’t get my family into trouble. But for months at a time I would use the name Saleh to confuse the police. I had other names too during that period. I can’t remember them all.
“The first time I was caught with plastic explosive I told the policeman it was soap. He said, ‘All right, light a match to it. We’ll see if it’s really soap.’ I lit the match, and of course it didn’t explode. It was a type of plastique called kama, which only explodes if it is lit from inside. You can hold a match around the edges all day and nothing is going to happen.
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