Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  “I used to hide large amounts of it in a shop. Then one day the police came and took away the shopkeeper. The plastique was taken too. Nobody ever saw the shopkeeper again. I never knew exactly what happened, whether the police had found the plastique or whether the shopkeeper was arrested for something unrelated. No, I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t will the police to arrest him. If I was the one arrested, who was going to weep for me? By this time… it was 1976… my family was split up and Khalis and Din Mohammed and Abdul Qadir were all in hiding or already in Pakistan. No, never in my life have I known any self-doubt.”

  Before his twentieth birthday, Haq was involved at the fringes of two coup attempts against Daoud, shuttling messages and explosives between various rebel officers in the Afghan military. Haq was an early bloomer: a roughneck who thought quickly and clearly on his feet, undoubtedly blessed with an extraordinary natural intelligence… the quintessential guerrilla. He was becoming every bit an equal to those who had once inhabited the jungle of Algiers and were now dismantling Beirut, places where the competence of the inner-city combatants was much higher than the crude, comic-opera attempts of the Pathans, who fought well only in their mountains.

  In April 1978, Haq slipped and fell off a friend’s roof. So when the police caught up with him near Mirwas Maidan in downtown Kabul, with an unloaded gun he had just purchased, it was impossible for him to run away. “I just said, ‘Bullshit,’ and threw the gun at one of the policemen as hard as I could and then punched him in the face.”

  Haq was thrown into Pul-i-Charki. (Daoud had built the prison, and there, as fate would have it, Daoud would spend his last days, together with his family.) In the cell across from him was the infamous Khalqi leader Nur Mohammed Taraki. Haq studied his face for hours at a time. “So that’s Taraki, I said to myself, the top Communist. Everybody in the prison knew who he was. No, I never spoke to him. I only stared. He was old. I thought, He’s not so goddamned tough.”

  One overcast day the soldiers came to remove Taraki’s handcuffs. It was the morning of April 27, 1978. Haq would never forget the moment. The Khalqi’s expression was fixed in stone. One minute a prisoner, the next the keeper and tormentor of other prisoners. Taraki inhabited a world of power and violence and terror; maybe it was all the same to him. Whatever his emotions were, he kept them hidden. The eighteen-year-old fundamentalist guerrilla, who to the new Communist ruler of Afghanistan was just another prisoner, read nothing in the old man’s face. Taraki was murdered the next year by fellow Communist Hafizullah Amin, the same man who had let him out of prison that morning.

  “A few hours later we were all freed. The warden said, ‘Everybody out and fight the Daoud regime.’ The next day I was arrested again and taken back to Pul-i-Charki. This time I was not allowed a radio or my Koran. I had to sleep on the cement floor. That’s where I pissed, since I was no longer permitted to use the toilet.” Others were soon being tortured. A broken Fanta bottle rammed up the anus was the most common method. Months later, when Soviet advisers came, the guards were taught how to wire the rectum, in addition to the ears, nose, and testicles, so they could administer electric shocks. When they came to take a man away, he gave his clothes and whatever else he had to the other prisoners. The man then simply vanished. The family was told nothing, not even that the man had been arrested in the first place. All that remained of him were his clothes, worn by other men who would give them away a second time when their turn came. Whenever the prisoners heard the rumble of trucks and buses outside, they knew that a lot of men were to be taken away at once to the “firing range.” Sometimes they were killed with machine guns in the courtyard. Over a seventeen-month period, Taraki killed roughly twenty thousand people in this manner, more than the number of Egyptians and Israelis who died in the 1973 Middle East war. To Afghan Communists, this was the Saur Revolution, named for the Moslem month that corresponded with April 1978, when they removed Ta-raki’s handcuffs.

  When guards came to take away Haq, they placed a black hood and sheet over his head and body. “I gave one man my watch and another my shalwar kameez. I figured they were going to kill me.” Instead, they shoved him into an automobile, and after driving for about forty-five minutes they took the hood off. “I was in the parking lot behind the Interior Ministry and KhAD headquarters. Okay, I said to myself. Now they’re going to torture me. I knew this was where the special cases were brought. But they just held me for three months. I was treated better than in the prison. Then one night, around two A.M., they put me in a Volga and drove me to my sister’s house and released me.” As is so often the case in Afghanistan… where men keep in close contact all their lives with second, third, and fourth cousins through extended tribal networks; where blood is not only thicker than water but as persistent as the law and politics too… a distant relative was found who in turn had a relation at the Interior Ministry, and with their help, plus a $7,500 bribe, Haq was released. He was “young and just irresponsible,” Haq’s relative told KhAD officials during the negotiations.

  “A few days later I escaped to Pakistan,” Haq said. “That’s when I really started fighting.”

  Abdul Haq spent only two weeks in Peshawar before joining the forces of an older and already established mujahidin leader, Jallaluddin Haqqani, who had just opened a front against Taraki’s regime in Paktia, an eastern province south of Nangarhar, along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Jallaluddin taught Haq how to fire and repair all types of machine guns and other ordnance that Haq had not yet encountered.

  But fighting with Jallaluddin had made Haq realize “how stupid the mujahidin were. We would build huts that leaked snow from the roof. We would start a fire and burn our faces while feeling cold on our backs. We would go for days without food, when a little planning would have allowed us to eat whenever we wanted. We suffered for no reason because we had no experience in surviving for long periods outside in the snow.”

  Haq left Jallaluddin after a few months and started his own front in Nangarhar, where Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami enjoyed strong local support, thanks to the stunning personal example set by Khalis himself in the jihad: here was a man in the seventh decade of life, with one kidney, who nevertheless sported a pistol in his belt and had lived outside in the snows of Nangarhar with Din Mohammed since the first year of the fundamentalist revolt against the Daoud regime.

  Haq harbored deep love and respect for his older brother and Yunus Khalis, but he was not blind to their faults. Din Mohammed and Khalis both had plenty of faith and heart, but that’s all they had. In the eyes of Western diplomats they may have been fundamentalist radicals, but Haq saw them as overly conservative and hopelessly out of date when it came to developing a strategy that would allow the mujahidin to survive against a modern superpower’s army.

  “I knew I must start a front on my own in Kabul,” Haq told me. “Khalis had nothing there at the time. All of our strength was in Nangarhar and Paktia. Khalis and my brother said, ‘No, the government is going to kill you. You are too young and don’t know what it is to fight the regime in Kabul. You are not ready to fight there.’ I had lots of arguments with them about it. It was the first time I ever fought with them. Finally I said, ‘Look, I’m going to start a front in Kabul whether you want me to or not. Can you help me with money or arms?’ They said no. I got really angry and told them that the machine guns and other arms I captured in Nangarhar were mine to keep, and I was going to take the guns with my friends to Kabul. I left Peshawar without saying goodbye. I was really mad. I felt deserted.”

  Abdul Haq once claimed to have started his Kabul front with three other mujahidin and 300 afghanis (under $5 at the time). No doubt he exaggerated. Nevertheless, in his mind it was something he accomplished on his own, without the help or encouragement of those he had always loved and looked up to. He had at last broken away from the family fold. Years later, when Western analysts discerned that Haq had kept his distance from the family interest in Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, they couldn’t have known ho
w right they were.

  Of the three original fighters who crossed into Afghanistan with Abdul Haq in the first weeks of 1980, two are now dead. One of the two was a Kabul police officer, Zabet Halim, who defected with arms, a car, and several other men and joined up with Haq in the forests of Paghman, west of the city. More weapons came from Haq’s other brother, Abdul Qadir, who had more confidence in Haq than Din Mohammed or Khalis had. Qadir had smuggled the guns across the border from the arms bazaar at Darra without Din Mohammed’s knowledge.

  Haq’s mujahidin then numbered about a dozen. They lived in the fields, in the snow, and attacked small Communist posts in the outskirts of Kabul. Halim’s stolen car was used to make night forays into the city… easy at the time, since this was before the Soviets had established a formal security perimeter. Haq spent his time in the capital meeting with the few friends he could trust, to explain what he was trying to do and to ask for their help. He also sent messages to Khalis and Din Mohammed, begging them to reconsider. He needed more arms and more money. No answers came. He eventually cut off all contact with them.

  The culture Abdul Haq was operating in, though riddled with treachery and intrigue, didn’t include a modern, sophisticated underground guerrilla network. Haq didn’t learn such a technique on his feet, either: even a few small mistakes in 1980 would have cost him his life. He just seemed to know instinctively what an intelligence network was. Later in his career he would use file cards for everything, but that was because his mind seemed to be divided into airtight compartments, each keeping track of a different underground operation simultaneously. His ability to think analytically was his single greatest asset, even more developed than his talent with explosives.

  “I realized that not everyone can pick up a gun and fight. Not everyone was a tough guy like me. But everyone could do something. Those who had money could buy boots and field jackets for us. And those who couldn’t fight and didn’t have money could just work their way up behind desks in the government and listen… and tell us what was going on. You have to make even the weakest and stupidest people feel they have an important job to do. That way everyone will help you.”

  The first months of 1980, as the Red Army was implanting itself in Afghanistan, parading up and down the main roads with tanks, showing the flag… in effect telling the citizenry that armed, popular resistance was a quaint, romantic notion that just didn’t work in the real world of massive Soviet arms… Haq spent more of his time talking than he did fighting. It was an elementary apparatus he was setting up: clandestine groups of five or less, all people he knew, who in turn would organize similar groups of people they could trust absolutely. One secret group did nothing but print leaflets. Another distributed them. Another passed messages between printer and distributor. One unit hid the explosives while another transferred them to a third, which carried out the operation. No group knew very much about what the others were doing. Haq invented a language of code words, coded clothing, even an umbrella code for street signals. One month, someone holding a black umbrella meant an operation was on, while the next month the same color meant it was postponed. Because such a basic intelligence system had never been attempted with any discipline in Afghanistan before, and because the Soviets weren’t expecting one, it was effective.

  A confidant of the guerrilla leader said, “Haq knew that for such people to succeed they needed to live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods… like Chardihi, south of the city… and have nice cars and nice clothes, so they would look like people who had enough money to bribe their way out of the army and would never be stopped or suspected by the police. He also knew that such groups of people may go months at a time doing nothing at all for the network, yet still had to be maintained, still encouraged, still given pep talks… and still paid.”

  The short time Haq was in Nangarhar before starting the front in Kabul, he had established a rudimentary network in Jalalabad that he had turned over to “Engineer” Mahmoud (another Khalis commander). Mahmoud did nothing with it: never contacted the people, never paid them. So that underground fell apart and Haq got very angry at him. The other mujahidin, including other top Khalis commanders, had no concept of what a network was all about.

  Intelligence work took a good deal of money, since operatives had to be paid. Haq, because he was a clear thinker, was a good talker and persuader. With the coming of the Soviets, his reputation as a brawler and young rebel was suddenly converted into hard currency as someone with experience at what the Afghans needed most. So the money came. It came from Haq’s friends’ fathers who were merchants and traders. It came from Abdul Qadir, more sympathetic to Haq than Din Mohammed, who ran a smuggling network between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it came from a handful of wealthy, patriotic families willing to give money rather than fight or lose their business with the Communist government.

  In July 1980 the BBC reported that a large number of mujahidin were harassing the Soviets in Paghman, west of the capital. “There were only thirteen of us in Paghman,” Haq told me. “The rest were in houses in Kabul. The BBC exaggerated, but it felt great. It felt like we were really doing something.” The same month Haq took shrapnel in the head and returned to Pakistan for the first time since he had argued with his oldest brother and Khalis. (It was the first of many shrapnel wounds Haq would suffer. In the mid-1980s, when he traveled abroad to meet President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, the fragments in his body set off airport metal detectors.)

  “I shouted at my brother. I was very rude. I was supposed to respect him but I didn’t. I was full of pride because I had proved him wrong. Hizb-i-Islami asked me to come to the headquarters. I refused. Khalis called me. I shouted at him too. Then one day I was sitting on a carpet drinking tea with Qadir when Khalis came into the room and sat down. I didn’t say hello to him. He grabbed me hard and shouted at me and told me not to be so proud. He admitted he had been wrong about me. I agreed to go with him for two days up to Swat [a mountain valley and resort area in northern Pakistan]. It was my first vacation since I was a child. I felt better. That was when Khalis said, ‘All right, whatever you need, the party will help you.’”

  Haq gradually built up an underground network of several hundred safe houses involving thousands of Kabul citizens, who with little advance warning could distribute leaflets throughout the city within hours. And this was in addition to the seven thousand fighters Haq had in Paghman and the other mountain regions overlooking the capital. Haq pioneered the technique of using dummy mujahidin convoys as decoys to ambush Soviet armored troops. He taught his men how to hold their rocket fire until the helicopter gunships were practically on top of them. Wherever he moved in the mountains around “Russian Kabulistan,” he sent out lateral… as well as forward and backward… patrols to make certain he himself was never ambushed. Any of his men who wasted ammunition shooting at birds or other wild game… an Afghan tradition… had their rifles confiscated. Mujahidin who aroused his wrath often got his big, hairy fist in their face. Haq was still very much the little devil who had smacked the teacher. His short fuse made him at once feared, loved, hated, and respected.

  Haq’s underground units made their reputation with the kidnapping in Kabul of General Yevgeny Nikolaivich Akhrimiyuk, a relative of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. General Akhrimiyuk was reported to be the head of the KGB in Afghanistan during the Daoud era and, in 1983 when he was captured, was one of the senior advisers to the Afghan puppet ruler Babrak Karmal… though officially he just advised the government “on geology.”

  General Akhrimiyuk’s Afghan driver of four years secretly worked for Zabet Halim, the police officer who defected to Haq when the latter first organized the Kabul front. One morning, the driver picked up the general outside the entrance of the Ministry of Mines and Industry in Kabul and headed for the airport to meet the general’s wife, arriving that day from the Soviet Union. On the way, the driver casually asked the general if it would be all right to give his brother a lift to the bus station,
since his brother had to go to Jalalabad. General Akhrimiyuk said no, it would not be all right. The driver expected this and had thought of something else.

  The driver mentioned to the general that he had accidentally left the trunk open. Before the general could protest, the driver pulled over to the side of the road on a street near the Ministry of Defense. As the driver got out to close the trunk, another man jumped into the car through the open door and pointed a cocked pistol at the general’s head. The driver, who had not left the trunk open at all, quickly got back into the car and drove out of the city, to a rendezvous with Haq’s men in Paghman. After three days there, they took General Akhrimiyuk to an area bordering Pakistan, where they held him for eight months.

  There was talk of exchanging him for fifty of Khalis’s mujahidin being held prisoner in Kabul. But as the talks stalled, Haq said he began to feel a little sorry for the general, who was old, sick, and had been badly wounded in an antipersonnel mine explosion during World War II. General Akhrimiyuk whimpered constantly about his wife and family, but despite continued questioning, stuck to his cover, refusing to discuss anything except “gas and petroleum.” The mujahidin allowed the general to write a letter to a high-level Soviet official, begging him to negotiate a release, but nothing happened.

  “I was always against torture,” Haq said to me. “And this guy was old. I went to Strasbourg, where I told the European Parliament that we don’t kill prisoners. Then I picked up a newspaper and read that my party had killed him. It was Khalis who ordered him killed. I got really mad at Khalis but he just said, ‘He was dying anyway.’ I should never have let Akhrimiyuk get out of my hands. They held him for months and didn’t even get any information out of him. What did I have him kidnapped for?”

  Within Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee community on the Northwest Frontier, Abdul Haq’s reputation grew. On November 21, 1985, Dr. Najib replaced Babrak Karmal as Afghanistan’s Communist ruler, and Haq faced a new challenge. Najib, born in 1946, was almost twenty years younger than Karmal, more lethal, and more dynamic. A medical doctor trained in security work by the KGB, and head of KhAD from 1980 to 1985, Najib had been described by the Afghan prime minister at the time, Sultan Ali Keshtmand, as a “strong and penetrating weapon of the Revolution.” Najib, more than any other Afghan, was responsible for making KhAD the feared and effective enterprise it was. Under his command, KhAD grew into a force of twenty-five thousand, with a budget larger than that of the Afghan regular army. KhAD took over all aspects of the arrest and interrogation of political prisoners, with the jurisdiction of the police restricted to common criminals.