Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  But the NIFA guerrillas’ hatred of the Soviets took a different form: it was fired by tradition, not religion. The difference between NIFA and Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami was that Khalis’s men were revolutionaries, while the NIFA mujahidin were simple patriots. They wanted a restoration of the days prior to 1973, when Daoud’s coup against the king set the country on the ignoble path toward communism. Khalis, on the other hand, wanted a new Afghanistan entirely: an Islamic republic, free of both king and Communists. Unlike Iran’s Islamic republic to the west, it would not be repressive. Unlike Zia’s Islamic republic to the east, it would not overflow with hypocrisy.

  Because NIFA was willing to settle for less, and was also doing less of the fighting, it was more willing to talk to the enemy. As the Kremlin began to realize that communism, as an ideology, had no future in Afghanistan and the best it could hope for was a return to the status quo ante, NIFA and the other nonfundamentalist parties became even more inclined to make a deal. By late 1987, NIFA and Moscow were each willing to settle for a return to mid-1973 conditions.

  This was why these parties were labeled moderate. The irony throughout the war was that, politically, the moderate parties were in sync with official U.S. policy, which stated that the Soviets must leave and that the Afghans should determine their own future, preferably along pro-Western lines. But it was the radical mujahidin, sworn to fight to the death and compromise be damned, who got American aid, and not the moderates, who echoed U.S. policy from closer to the sidelines.

  As Khalis symbolized the religious and warrior strands of the Pathan personality, Pir Gailani symbolized another rich heritage… based on royalty, history, and myth… that was also Pathan. The Pir’s only real political ally in Peshawar was Sib-ghatullah Mojadidi’s Jabha-i-Nijat-Milli (Afghan National Liberation Front). Mojadidi had fewer troops in the field than NIFA. A standingjoke in Peshawar was: “There are two things you never see in Afghanistan… Hindu graves and Mojadidi’s mujahidin.” Still, Mojadidi was more respected than Gailani. Though a staunch royalist distantly related to King Zahir Shah, Mojadidi… who carried a pistol in his belt and had once threatened to shoot Hekmatyar… had a record of opposing not only the Communists but the king too, whenever he felt the king was straying too far from Islamic ideals.

  The march of current history had favored Khalis. As Abdul Haq first realized as a youngster, communism was an ideology so extreme that it required another ideology, equally extreme, to repel it. Khalis’s politics proved more useful and virile than Mojadidi’s and Gailani’s. Mojadidi and Gailani stood for an Afghanistan that was disappearing, a country of chivalrous ballads, ancient myths, and genealogies in unlikely confrontation with brutal, mechanized twentieth-century totalitarianism.

  Kandahar symbolized this brutal confrontation more than any other place, not only because of the intensity of the fighting there but because it was the ancestral home of Afghanistan’s kings and the hearth of the country’s cultural tradition. Isolated in the southern outback of central Asia, Kandahar’s culture was pure Afghan, untouched by the culturally corrupting influences of Iran that had bastardized Herat or those of the Indian subcontinent that had bastardized Kabul. Kandahar in the 1980s represented past centuries being destroyed by this one.

  Kandahar’s glory began with one man on horseback. The man was Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent in the army of Nadir Shah the Great, the Persian king whose forces had conquered Moghul India in 1739. Ahmad Khan and his Abdali kinsmen, though proud Afghans, were personally loyal to Nadir Shah, for even though the king had defeated them in battle, he generously incorporated them into his army. When, in his later years, Nadir Shah grew suspicious and brutal, he relied increasingly on Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis against his own Persian and Turkish forces, who he was convinced were out to kill him.

  One night in 1747, sensing a plot against the king, Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis rode into the royal camp at Quchan, in eastern Iran, to protect him. At dawn, the sight of Nadir Shah’s headless body greeted the Abdali force in one of the tents. Ahmad Khan and his four thousand horsemen fled the camp as the king’s erstwhile followers looted it. Pursued by these hostile troops, Ahmad Khan sent a diversionary force to Herat and led the bulk of his cavalry southeast toward Kandahar.

  “On his ride to Kandahar, Ahmad Khan thought quickly,” Sir Olaf Caroe wrote in The Pathans. Kandahar was in a frontier zone between the Persian homeland and the Moghul territories to the east that the Persians and their murdered leader, Nadir Shah, had recently vanquished. In this sea of blood and turmoil, Ahmad conceived of an island of order: a native Afghan kingdom that would be sanctioned by whoever would now rule Persia, in exchange for which he would aggressively patrol the mother kingdom’s new territories to the east. Pa-than legend has it that just then he fell upon a caravan spiriting to Persia the very Indian treasures Nadir Shah had looted eight years earlier. This treasure included the Koh-i-noor diamond, which was to finance Ahmad Khan’s new Afghan state.

  Ahmad Khan was only twenty-four when he became King Ahmad Shah. In a camp outside Kandahar, as Caroe tells it, the other Abdali tribesmen “took pieces of grass in their mouths as a token that they were his cattle and beasts of burden.” Because Ahmad Shah liked to wear an earring fashioned of pearls, he became known by the title Durr-i-Durran (Pearl of Pearls). Henceforth, he and his Abdali kinsmen would be known as the Durranis.

  The Durrani empire, which would eventually become modern Afghanistan, began in Kandahar. From there Ahmad Shah Durrani conquered Kabul and Herat, and Meshed in Iran. He invaded India eight times, sacking the Punjab as far as Delhi. But it was always to Kandahar that he returned after his conquests, and that is where he is buried.

  Ahmad Shah’s empire in Persia and India began to crumble even before his death, but the Durranis were to rule Afghanistan until 1973, when Daoud deposed the last Durrani monarch, King Zahir Shah. Though political power in Afghanistan shifted to Kabul following Ahmad Shah’s death, Kandahar remained the region where tribal support for the Durrani kings was strongest right into the 1980s. One nineteenth-century historian wrote that the Durrani tribes viewed Kandahar “with a species of reverence as being the burial-place of the kings and heroes of their tribe.” This was why NIFA supporters, and Mojadidi too, werejustified in claiming Kandahar as their city, the only place in Afghanistan where their parties were more significant than those of the fundamentalists.

  My own fascination with Kandahar began with the name itself. According to Peter Levi, Kandahar is probably the only Greek place name to have survived in Afghanistan, stemming from the Arabic form of Alexander’s name, Iskander. In 330 B.C., a year after his decisive victory over the Persian forces of Darius at Gaugamela, east of modern-day Mosul in Iraq, Alexander the Great led his army of thirty thousand men through what is now Kandahar. He left his elephants in the mud swamps west of the present-day city, then crossed the snowy summits of the Hindu Kush on foot.

  I visited Kandahar briefly in November 1973, passing through by bus on my way from Herat to Kabul. I stopped for a night at a cheap hotel by the bus station near the city’s Herat Gate. The darkness and my own discomfort… I was slightly ill and horribly cold in the unheated hotel room… gave the evening a surreal quality. All I could recall later was a windblown square rilled with bearded men in high black turbans smoking a water pipe. I sometimes wondered whether that square in my memory survived the years of bombing.

  More recently, I came to know Hamid Karzai, a thirty-year-old Kandahar native and spokesman for Mojadidi’s Afghan National Liberation Front. Hamid was the son of Abdulahad Karzai, the khan (headman) of the Popalzai tribe, the branch of the Abdalis that produced Ahmad Shah Durrani. With Abdul Haq, Hamid Karzai represented for me all that was larger than life in the Afghan character. He was tall and cleanshaven, with a long nose and big black eyes. His thin bald head gave him the look of an eagle. Wearing a sparkling white shal-war kameez, he affected the dignity, courtly manners, and high breeding for which the Popalzai are known thr
oughout Afghanistan. Hamid, unlike the crowd at NIFA, whose royalist sentiments and moderate politics he shared, was not a “Gucci muj.” When he did wear Western dress, he preferred conservative blazers and slacks or a leather jacket. He moved between the Occidental and Oriental worlds without pretension or falsity. I remember him in his Peshawar villa, sitting on a carpet in a shalwar kameez, speaking Pukhtu with his turbaned Kandahari kinsmen, a copy of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss nearby. Hamid was one of six sons, but the only one who had not gone into exile in Europe or North America and who aspired to succeed his father as head of the Popalzai.

  Throughout his childhood, Hamid had resented the restrictions placed on him as the son of one of Afghanistan’s most important men. He longed to escape Kandahar and the stifling routine of tribal ceremonies. He wanted to serve his country, but only as a diplomat living abroad in the West. His first shock and humiliation came as a student in India in 1979, when officials at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi informed him that the Taraki regime had imprisoned his father. A few months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. “I suddenly realized how spoiled I was,” Hamid told me. “I realized that I had been consciously rejecting all the things that were really important and now were lost.”

  A few months later, in 1980, Hamid visited a refugee camp near Quetta. As soon as he entered the camp, hundreds of Popalzai tribesmen gathered around him, smiling. “They thought that just because I was the khans son, I had the power to help them. I felt ashamed, because I knew I was just a naive student who was spending his college years thinking only of himself and his ambition. I was not what they thought I was. My goal from that moment on was to become the man that those refugees thought I was. To become a man like my father.”

  The man that Hamid Karzai became was one who never tired of talking about the rich history of his tribe and the region of Kandahar. The story of the founding of the Popalzai… first told to me by Hamid… sounds like one of the archetypal tales in the Book of Genesis.

  Abdal, the patriarch of the Abdalis (later the Durranis), died at the age of 105 and was succeeded by Rajar, who in turn passed over his oldest son and picked the younger but smarter Zirak to be headman. Zirak ruled for many years and had four sons. One day, near Kandahar, the family was breaking camp. By then Zirak was over 100 and too old even to move, let alone saddle his horse. He asked his oldest son, Barak, for help. Barak laughed and made fun of his father. The second son, Alik, did the same. The third son, Musa, told his father to get on a horse and follow him. When Zirak was not able, Musa kicked him and told him he must remain behind until the beasts devoured him. Popal, the youngest son, offered to carry his father on his back. Old Zirak never forgot the incident, and when he died at the age of 120, he invested Popal as head of the clan. Thus it was that Popal founded his own branch of the Abdali tribe.

  The mythic, elemental quality of the story is enhanced by the fact that, though the origin of the Popalzai is relatively recent… the late fifteenth century… nobody can accurately date when the events took place. It is such stories that, stylistically at least, lend credence to the notion that the Pathans are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. True or not, one could at least say that the desert surrounding Kandahar was to the Pathans what the wilderness of Sinai was to the Hebrews: the seed-ground where an assemblage of tribes grew into a nation. To Hamid Karzai, Kandahar was “the home of our original Afghan culture, the genuine Afghanistan.”

  A trip to Kandahar begins in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s province of Baluchistan. Quetta and Baluchistan were to the Kandahar region what Peshawar and the Northwest Frontier were to the rest of Afghanistan: a rear base for mujahidin, war correspondents, and relief workers. And because everything about the Kandahar area was wild and exotic, even compared to the rest of Afghanistan, Quetta was wilder and more exotic than Peshawar.

  As I looked down from thirty thousand feet on the flight from Islamabad to Quetta, Baluchistan resembled a series of boils and lesions on a scratched, sandpaper surface: the product of volcanic upheavals and tectonic shifts going back two billion years. Once on the ground, I continued to feel lost in space. There was a weird flimsiness to the setting. In 1935, Quetta was wiped out by an earthquake that killed twenty-three thousand people in the city and many more in the desert around it. In the 1980s, everything in Quetta seemed truly temporary, as unstable and prone to violent shifts as the ground I walked on.

  The new Quetta was built on the ruins of the old one. The single-level unfinished cement houses looked like a theatrical set that could have been ripped out at any moment from the gray backdrop of hills beyond by blasts of plateau wind.

  During the Afghan war, Baluchistan was especially important strategically. It was the only remaining barrier that kept the Russians from reaching the Indian Ocean… the ultimate dream of the czars. Like so many strategic places, Quetta was a shithole. Only in July 1988 was a decent hotel opened. Before that, you stayed at the New Lourdes. To flush the toilet in your room you needed a raincoat and Wellingtons because the water exploded in all directions. The place had no heating and the boiler rarely worked, so during the cold plateau winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing at night, you faced the choice of a cold shower or none at all. The Bloom Star, the only other hotel at the time, was just marginally better.

  Baluchistan was the ultimate free-trade zone and smuggler’s haven: an unregulated void of hazy identity set between Iran, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani province of Sind, with its back to the Indian Ocean. Despite the awful accommodations, you could get almost anything in Quetta… heroin, Japanese cameras, cans of Heinz soup, relatively recent copies of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and the Washington Journalism Review.

  Even the ethnic identity that gave the province its name was at risk in the 1980s, as the influx of Pathan refugees from Afghanistan tipped the demographic balance against the Baluchis, a people of Middle Eastern origin who speak an Indo-European language similar to Pukhtu. Because Quetta, with a population of 250,000, was one fourth the size of Peshawar, and because Baluchistan was inundated with close to a million refugees from southern Afghanistan, the Afghan influence on Quetta appeared even more dramatic than in Peshawar. Quetta seemed to have become Kandahar, since a large portion of Kandahar’s prewar population now lived in or near Quetta. With its Afghan merchants, Afghan carpet shops, and refugees smoking water pipes, Quetta blurred in my mind with the Kandahar I had briefly known in 1973.

  Everything about Quetta had an air of unreliability, and I was apt to distrust much of what I saw and heard.

  The first person I met there was Atta Mahmoud, a twenty-eight-year-old refugee from Kandahar, who lured me to his carpet shop. Inside, we sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping cup after cup of green tea. He wore a psychedelic black, green, and gold turban; his eyes were crazed. He implored with his hands as if speaking to a multitude and kept calling me Babà, which means father and is a sign of respect. But there was a fawning quality to his voice; his words had the tone of a sales pitch. Having had previous experiences with carpet dealers in the East, I was deeply suspicious, especially after Atta Mah-moud told me he had worked at the Sunshine Hotel in Kandahar before the war, and had sold drugs there to European hippies.

  But Atta Mahmoud wanted to talk about Kandahar, not about carpets. “Kandahar city, Babà, is no more. No more, I tell you. There is not a street or a building standing, Babà. No more nut or apple trees. No bazaars. Just one meter of dust and new paved roads for Russian tanks and security patrols.” This was the first eyewitness account I had heard concerning the destruction of Kandahar. I wanted more specifics, but he was hard to interrupt and his oration soon disintegrated into a mad tirade, much of it incomprehensible. “The only thing you can do with a Russian is slit his throat, Babà… If you don’t want to slit his throat, you are a Communist.”

  He casually mentioned that his two small sons had been killed in a Soviet artillery bombardment of Kandahar the year before, in 1986. This seemed so horrible that I didn’t
know how to react, or even whether to believe him. I told him I was sorry, and then, in order to break the silence, I asked the price of some of his carpets. But he brushed aside my query, treating it as an insult. He said we could discuss carpets another day. I decided that this man was not after my money and that much of what he told me about Kandahar might actually be true.

  Next I wanted to see Zia Mojadidi, who, though related to Sibghatullah Mojadidi of the Afghan National Liberation Front, was not connected with the party. Rather, he was a former faculty member at Kabul University and the local stringer for the Voice of America. Western journalists in Islamabad told me that Zia Mojadidi was a thoroughly professional reporter and the most reliable source of information in Quetta. But his phone was out of order, and the directions to his house were vague: “near the Helper’s High School and the orphanage.” After searching for half an hour and banging on several doors I found him… miraculously, it seemed to me. He looked like a professor, with thick glasses and a courteous, serious way of speaking. The room he took me to was completely bare, save for carpets on the floor. Since he did not show me the other rooms in the house, he gave the impression of living a marginal existence, and this made me uncertain. After twenty-four hours in Quetta, my instinct told me that if a man possessed no furniture, he also possessed no useful information. His precise speech dispelled some of my doubts, however. He did have information, and filled the holes in Atta Mahmoud’s description of Kandahar with hard facts. Basically, Zia Mojadidi, the respected local journalist, backed up the carpet dealer Atta Mahmoud’s story of how the Soviets were destroying Kandahar.