Soldiers of God

by Robert D. Kaplan

  At a Red Cross hospital for war victims, my feet finally touched solid ground. Real people packed the corridors; bullets, mortar fire, and mine fragments had torn up their flesh. The day I visited there were 103 patients, and since the hospital had room for only 60, the staff had set up tents on the lawn. The surgeons were working nonstop. A nurse shaved a little boy’s head in preparation for surgery. He shrieked with terror. Orderlies wheeled by with carts stacked with bottles of blood. The smell of disinfectant was everywhere. The situation was the same at the thirteen other hospitals in Baluchistan, I was told. But these patients, the doctors said to me, were the lucky few: the ones who had made the three-week trek on foot from Kandahar to the border and the grueling, bumpy drive from the border to Quetta without dying of their injuries or being killed by Afghan regime border guards. It was in the interest of the Communists that wounded civilians never reach the border alive; that way there would be no witnesses to what was happening.

  I had never seen indications of this level of carnage in the hospitals I had visited in Basra, Iraq, in the company of a horde of other Western journalists writing about the Gulf war. Basra had a Sheraton, though. Quetta then had only the New Lourdes and the Bloom Star. Sure enough, when the swank Sareena Hotel opened in 1988, the number of journalists in Quetta increased dramatically. Still, stories about the Kandahar fighting in the American press and on television were practically nonexistent.

  I wrote as much as I could about Kandahar for a radio network and a magazine. But the Red Cross hospital was as close to the reality of the fighting as I was able or willing to get at the time. I was scared. The vision of Charles Thornton, the Arizona Republic reporter who was killed by a helicopter missile just as he reached the top of a hill, made me think hard about crossing the border. But in 1988 I returned to Quetta and, swallowing my fear, was determined to reach Kandahar.

  The NI FA villa, from where I began my trip to Kandahar, was in a Quetta suburb. It had only a few guns, but it was luxurious in comparison with more rough and ready mujahidin headquarters: there was air conditioning, marble floors, a tiled bathroom with Head and Shoulders shampoo, and a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and mineral water. Fashionable wicker furniture and a Persian carpet filled the living room. A Russian ceramic tea set from the czarist period sat in a cabinet against the wall. On the wall were photographs of King Zahir Shah, in exile in Italy. There was also a photograph of the Baghdad mausoleum of Sheikh Abdul Khader, reputedly the fourteenth direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and a distant relative of the Aga Khan and of King Hussein of Jordan, the great-grandfather of Pir Gailani. (The Pir’s family had migrated to Afghanistan from Iraq at the turn of the century.) Everything in this villa suggested comfort and privilege, but not even privately was I critical. Having gone into Afghanistan several times with the Khalis fundamentalists, I was grateful for the pampering. Whatever the fear and danger, I knew that being relatively clean and well fed would keep me happy for now.

  A NIFA staff man brought me to the villa from my downtown Quetta hotel in a spanking new Land Cruiser with racing stripes, the latest addition to NIFA’s car fleet. As soon as I arrived, I met the mujahid who was to be my interpreter, Mohammed Akbar. He was twenty-one, spoke excellent English, and was a sophisticated Kabuli to the core. Had the Soviets not invaded, he would undoubtedly have gone abroad to study in England or America. His first remark was to ask if I had brought a sleeping bag, toilet paper, and water purification tablets for the trip. I all but laughed aloud. The gulf between Akbar jan (Akbar dear), as his NIFA comrades called him, and Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb… the interpreter and guides for my first trip with Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami… was vast.

  NIFA supplied Akbar and me with a Land Cruiser (though not a new one), a driver, and several bodyguards. Kandahar was 150 miles northwest of Quetta. Before the war, the journey on the all-weather road took as little as six hours. By that idyllic standard, our route would be circuitous: straight on the all-weather road for 40 miles… halfway to the border… then northeast and east over the Baluchistan desert, hugging the Pakistan side of the border, then over the border into the Arghastan desert in a northwesterly direction, arcing north and west over Kandahar in order to enter the city’s environs from the southwest. This meant eighteen hours of continuous driving. But compared to the previous year, 1987, and the year before that, our trip did not seem circuitous at all. Back then, the northern arc over and around the city was much wider, and the journey took several days. Despite the Soviet-driven orgy of destruction in Kandahar, the military situation in southern Afghanistan had been steadily shifting in favor of the mujahidin, and this was reflected in the traveling distance from Quetta to Kandahar.

  A turning point in the southern front of the war was the capture of the Afghan border garrison of Spinboldak, on the main road between Quetta and Kandahar, by the mujahidin in early September 1988, a few weeks before my journey. The Spinboldak fighting cost, at the very least, several hundred lives between May and September. The two or three paragraphs about Spinboldak that could be found on the inside pages of American newspapers described the fight as between the mujahidin and the Afghan regime’s forces. This was not exactly the case. The battle actually had little to do with the struggle against the Communists, and for that reason made for a revealing story about the guerrillas: it was the best case study of Pathan tribalism that the war produced.

  On paper, the mujahidin of the fundamentalist parties, led by Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, fought the forces of General Ismatullah Muslim of the Afghan regime’s militia. In reality, it was a battle between the Achakzais and the Nurzais, two hostile clans within the Abdali (Durrani) tribal family. The Achakzais inhabited the plateau region between Kandahar and Quetta on the Afghan side of the frontier. As far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, the Achakzais had a tough, unruly reputation… even by the standards of the Kandahari Pathans. Ismatullah Muslim was a living monument to this tradition.

  Ismatullah was a warlorci who in 1984, unhappy with the amount of weaponry the mujahidin were giving him, promptly switched to the side of the Afghan Communists, who made Ismatullah a general and paid him and his Achakzais handsomely.

  One of Ismatullah’s first moves was to fortify Spinboldak, a sheer rock mountain rising from the flat desert. This offended the Nurzais, who claimed it as their territory and who held a pistol to the head of Yunus Khalis. Khalis’s teenage bride was one of the twin daughters of Nadir Khan Nurzai, the head of the clan. Nadir Khan had reportedly blackmailed Khalis the day before the wedding, saying, in effect, “I’ll give you my daughter only if you give me and my men weapons to fight Ismatullah.”

  It was evening when the Land Cruiser pulled out of the driveway of NIFA headquarters in Quetta. One of the gate guards splashed a pail of water against the rear windshield… a Pathan blessing for good luck on the journey.

  Even before leaving the all-weather road we got a flat tire. The jack was too short, so the driver had to build a platform of stones for it. When the vehicle wobbled, the driver crawled completely underneath it to adjust the stones with his hands. He was smiling and laughing, oblivious of the danger. When we were up and running again, I noticed he was missing several fingers… the result of a mine accident, he told me.

  We left the all-weather road halfway between Quetta and the border. Suddenly we were bouncing as if on a trampoline. The air inside the Land Cruiser was filled with a fine dust, though all the windows were shut. The tires kicked up a dust cloud so thick that our headlights did more harm than good, for light thrown against the dust cut down visibility. Off the track, I noticed that the dust had collected in high ridges, reminding me of photographs of the moon. I had seen dust this bad once before, in Tigre in northern Ethiopia. There the soil was eroded from drought and the neglect spawned by civil war. Here in Baluchistan we were in a desert where nothing had ever grown. It felt as though we were scratching our way across the burned, powdery crust of a giant pie that had been left too long in the oven
.

  “This is Baluchistan, but we call it Powderistan,” Akbar joked.

  After driving northeast along the border for several hours we crossed into Afghanistan at a point where NIFA had built a small, permanent camp for mujahidin coming in and out of the war zone. This was where the guerrillas picked up their weapons.

  It was 2 a.m. and freezing cold as only the desert can be. The starscape was out of a fairy tale. There was no room in any of the mud huts so we slept outside, our faces covered in dust. I crawled deep into my sleeping bag, shaking from the cold. Akbar and the others had already fallen asleep. Away from their air-conditioned offices, the “Gucci muj” turned out to be just as tough as the Khalis boys, and in the case of the driver, just as reckless too. I wondered if back in Quetta and Peshawar their pretensions to fashion were merely an effort to look Western. Since we foreigners required “noble savages” to feed our own fantasies, what we really held against the “Gucci muj” was their yearning to be like us.

  My first sight on awakening the next morning was the black NIFA flag snapping in the wind against the toneless predawn sky.

  “Why is it black?” I asked Akbar.

  “Because we are in mourning. Our freedom is lost,” Akbar explained.

  The flag of Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami was green, the symbol of Islam, the warrior faith of the future that seemed to give its fighters a kind of superhuman strength. The truth of each party was in the color of its flags, I thought: NIFA looked backward, lost in mourning over the past.

  Over the border in Afghanistan, this desert region’s name changed from Baluchistan to Arghastan. The landscape changed too, from deathlike to more deathlike. We were still scratching our way across the same greasy pie, but now the crust was a mere chalky film that covered our faces with white inside the Land Cruiser. Long ribs of cindery hills marked a horizon that appeared to curve, as though we were on a smaller planet. Between the lines of hills, carved as if by a knife, was only an ashy nothingness: not a single thorn grew here. I thought of the landscapes in Paul Bowles’s novels, in which the abstract, cubist features of the Sahara are symbols of madness, nihilism, and sensual annihilation.

  A moving cloud of dust kicked up by even a small motorcycle on this desert would be easily visible from the air. I listened fearfully, hoping not to hear the hum of a plane overhead.

  A village of domed mud brick houses sprinkled a hillside just as we came over the horizon and got our second flat tire. If a landscape is bleak and primitive enough, I thought, the distant past starts to blend with the future.

  In one of the houses we sipped our tea in a mud-walled room, leaning against pink cushions while our driver worked on the tire. The pink startled me: it was the first bright color I had seen since leaving Quetta.

  We moved on across the ocean of sand, wrinkled occasionally by a bed of limestone or a long fang of cliffs. We came upon the only pit stop in Arghastan: a cluster of mud huts where a few Land Cruisers, Bedford and Japanese diesel trucks, and Yamaha motorcycles had gathered. Old men in turbans approached and kissed my hand. Most were mujahi-din. The rest were traders transporting fresh produce back and forth across enemy lines. Fighters of the fundamentalist parties could be distinguished by the ghoulish Zia posters stuck to their truck windshields. Zia, with his deep-set bedroom eyes, looked like a vampire, set against a background with a plane exploding in midair. The caption read Shaheed (martyr).

  Gruel bubbled in pots. Men repaired tires. Akbar and I bought and devoured about a dozen blood-red pomegranates. It was like a daydream: to be so thirsty and then have your thirst quenched in such a sensuous way, with sticky, tangy juice bleeding down the sides of your mouth onto the ground. Like the pink cushions, the red of the pomegranates clashed with the whitish hues of the landscape.

  I noticed that while Akbar and I indulged ourselves in slurping fruit, our driver prayed in the corner of one of the huts. Next to him, other mujahidin drank tea, oblivious of his prayers. I turned around and saw a medieval diorama: three levels of mud rooms, in each of which a man kneeled in prayer on a carpet, wearing either a turban or a pakol, and next to him a tea ceremony was in progress. Whether moderate or fundamentalist, all the mujahidin eventually stepped off to the side to pray. As in the mountains of Nangarhar, the solitude of each man in prayer gave the act a power and meaning that I never saw before or since in the Moslem world. Akbar was the last to pray before we left. His sharp, hairless features were clenched especially tight, as though the pomegranates constituted a luxury forbidden by the jihad or NIFAs official state of mourning.

  After a few more hours of plowing through the dust we began to hear that sinister, stomach-churning sound: the drone of airplanes. We were now closing in on the main “ring road,” the paved track linking the three main cities of Afghanistan… Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul… from west to east. The section of the road linking Kandahar with Kabul was tenuously controlled by the mujahidin, so vehicles using it were often targets of helicopter strikes. The area around the highway marked the end of the Arghastan desert and the beginning of the Kandahar war zone. Before reaching the road we stopped at a village to inquire about the situation farther ahead.

  The bath of dust continued into a carpeted room shaped like a church nave, where the villagers led us. They brought water from a stagnant irrigation ditch for us to wash with, then served us green tea and curd. The Kandahari curd was much better than its Nangarhar equivalent: it was thinner and flavored with crushed mint leaves. The sweet, acrid odor of a cheroot filled the room. It was late in the afternoon now, and we were told it was safe to cross the highway. Before we left, an old man who had been our host pressed me to stay as his guest for several days. I politely refused. After such kindness and hospitality, I wondered whether the danger ahead was only an illusion.

  Here and there in the sea of dust I could discern the burned-out hulks of vehicles that had been hit by a missile or had run over an antipersonnel mine. We were now in the mine zone. The Soviet air force over the past few years had laid down countless… perhaps 100,000, perhaps a million… mines over hundreds of square miles around Kandahar. The landscape was utterly ruined, to the extent that its very existence constituted a danger to living beings. Our driver with the missing fingers kept precisely to the tracks made by the previous vehicle. Veering off into the desert was no longer safe.

  Then we reached the ring road.

  In almost any other country in the world the sight of a desolate, single-lane paved road, embanked a few feet from the ground to protect it from sand drifts and flooding, would be commonplace. But in Afghanistan this empty road was a strategic route as well as the country’s main highway, marked on international maps by a line almost as bold as that indicating the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The driver ascended to the level of the pavement, turned left toward Kandahar, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The sight of a helicopter now would probably mean instant death. But there was no helicopter or anything else in sight.

  Two miles down the road we turned off and headed west across the desert. We were about fifteen miles north of Kandahar, which we would by-pass in order to enter it another day from a southwesterly direction.

  The dust thinned and we could make out the hard limestone terrain in the falling evening light. From now on, the desultory rumble of exploding bombs was a permanent sound, except for an hour or two in the middle of the night. The driver speeded on, braking sharply every time we hit a pocket of sand. We were directly under the flight path between Kandahar airport and the Soviet air base at Shindand, south of Herat in western Afghanistan, in a stretch of desert strewn with wrecked vehicles blown apart by missiles or mines.

  The drone of a plane penetrated the silence between the exploding bombs. I watched for a sign of recognition from Akbar or the driver, but there was none. Nervously, I asked Akbar about it.

  “Just an Antonov transporting troops. They don’t bomb.”

  I asked how he knew it was an Antonov, since the plane was flying too hi
gh for its contours to be seen.

  “By the sound. After a while here you can tell each plane by its sound.”

  After climbing a steep, winding pass in total darkness we entered the Arghandab River Valley, and for the first time since leaving Quetta twenty-four hours before, I was among trees and crowds of people. The town of Arghandab, ten miles northwest of Kandahar, had been firmly in mujahidin hands since 1987 and had been rebuilt. The nearby beech and mulberry forests held the largest concentration of guerrillas in the Kandahar region. Each of the seven resistance parties had a presence here.

  The journey so far had kept me in a state of dreamlike disorientation. Now, as I came out of the night into town, sights and sounds hit me. Tongas filled with veiled women clopped along. Market stalls were crowded. The Arghandab River, along which the army of Alexander the Great had camped, rippled peacefully. Drivers honked their horns for the right of way. The rumble of explosions had died down for the moment, and it was hard to believe that this village was a short hop from the devastation in Kandahar. Life here appeared so normal, and getting here, despite the breakdowns and dusty discomfort, had been relatively uneventful. Kandahar, which for so long seemed so distant, so impossible to reach, so dangerously enigmatic, was suddenly only a few miles away. And yet it felt farther away here than it did in Quetta.

  I began to worry that I had misjudged the story’s significance, that the level of fighting and destruction had been vastly exaggerated by the mujahidin, the war freaks, and the Afghan experts in their feverish effort to get the attention of the media and the outside world. As the Land Cruiser struggled through the brush and forded a series of swamps on its way to the NIFA encampment, I felt two kinds of fear: that there would be fighting, danger, and destruction, and that there wouldn’t be any.