Soldiers of God (10 page)

It wasn't until late April that Gunston got the go-ahead from Abdul Haq to cross the border. Haq gave Gunston a thirty-eight-year-old former Afghan army major, Syed Hamid, as an escort. In 1984, Hamid had defected from an army transport division in the southern city of Kandahar and joined Yunus Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami, which is how Haq had met him. For the Khalis organization, Hamid was a rare kind of mujahid. He was a dandy who doused himself with Estelle perfume (not knowing it was for women), preferred a trimmed, Pakistani-style mustache to a beard, and was always dressed in a clean, tailor-fit
shalwar kameez
(the traditional Afghan trousers and shirt were loose and baggy). An educated Tajik from around Kabul, Hamid was also a bit of a wheeler-dealer. In a few short years since defecting from the Afghan army he had managed to procure himself a new Honda car and a partial ownership in an Islamabad video rental shop. He had the same qualities that help make a good intelligence agent, and that was why Haq recruited him. Later, Hamid merged his own network of Kabul friends into Haq's much larger underground labyrinth in the capital.

Haq was the only commander in the whole Afghan resistance
who was fighting an urban, Beirut-style war, and this required not only the backwoods mujahidin but city slickers like Hamid too. The fact that Hamid was a Tajik meant little to Haq. “I don't give a shit,” Haq told me. “I'll take a hardworking Tajik or Turkoman any day over a lazy, stupid Pa-than.” Haq's chief accountant, who handled all the money for the Kabul underground, was also a Tajik.

Hamid and Gunston crossed the border at Terri-Mangal, a smuggler's town one hundred miles west of the Khyber Pass that was perched at the edge of a salient of Pakistani territory, which brought the pair directly into Logar province, only a three-day trek from the Gardez—Kabul highway. Hamid bought himself a horse for 80,000 afghanis ($400). Gunston walked the whole way.

They reached the vicinity of the highway, patrolled by Soviet paratroopers, at the town of Kolangar, thirty-five miles south of Kabul, where Hamid's Tajik friends from Jamiat gave him and Gunston a place to stay. Here they waited for Haq's vehicle that was supposed to sneak them into Kabul. It was scheduled to arrive within a few days, but more than two weeks went by without any sign of it. They dispatched runners with messages for Haq. Meanwhile Hamid was up to three packs of cigarettes a day, and pushing four, trying to work out alternative schemes. One such scheme involved hiding inside the tank of an empty hijacked gasoline truck with Hamid's cross-eyed brother at the wheel. “I had accompanied a few hare-brained muj missions in the past, but this promised to surpass them all,” Gunston later remarked to me. At the time Gunston pleaded with Hamid: “Don't you realize that the fumes would kill us both if we sit inside the petrol tank? And anyway, you can't even stop smoking!” According to Gunston, it was the last taunt, about his smoking habit, that decided Hamid against the idea.

Hamid eventually left for Kabul on his own, using his brother's identity card, to find out what was causing Haq's delay.
Hamid promised to send for Gunston when he arrived. Though the wait was nerve-racking, it was without physical hardships. “Hamid insisted on living well,” said Gunston. “When we first got to Kolangar, the food was okay, but Hamid always sent it back, shouting and complaining. Then the food got exceptionally good — for Afghanistan, I mean. The man was nothing if not resourceful. He could stretch the law of hospitality quite far.”

Gunston spent three weeks in Kolangar, but Hamid was as good as his word. A civilian sedan finally arrived, driven by an Afghan army major who secretly worked for Abdul Haq. Gunston was stuffed into a specially built secret compartment in the trunk with an air hole and view outside. “The muj kissed a copy of the Koran as we left,” Gunston said. “I rather selfconsciously crossed myself.” Hamid put on a pair of Christian Dior sunglasses and sprayed himself liberally with perfume. He intended to run the gauntlet into Kabul disguised as a rich trader.

On the road to Kabul, the car fell in behind a Soviet convoy of tanks, trucks, artillery, and airborne troops in armored personnel carriers who were firing long bursts of cannon into the surrounding farm area, trying to provide cover for a retreating group of comrades on their way back to the Soviet Union.

After passing through two checkpoints, the car was abruptly flagged down by three Soviet paratroopers led by a junior sergeant with a Lenin badge on his khaki shirt, the kind awarded for meritorious service to the Party. The three, who were on their way out of Afghanistan, offered to sell Gunston's driver a toolbox for 150 afghanis (under $1). Rather than arousing suspicion by giving them the brush-off or buying the toolbox for the asking price, the driver haggled noisily with the paratroopers until he got the price down to 100 afghanis — while Gunston crouched in the secret compartment. “I was shaking with fear,” Gunston told me. “I wanted to shout, ‘Take it for 150 afghanis, man. Just get us out of here!’ “ But his fear
didn't stop him from snapping away with his camera through the view hole.

At the last checkpoint, Afghan Communist troops were looking under the seats and even unscrewing the door panels of the other cars. But as it turned out, Gunston's driver knew one of the guards, a cousin of a friend, and the vehicle passed into the city without a search.

“At a bus station, an Afghan army major in full uniform greeted us with embraces. We ducked into his waiting Volga staff car — courtesy of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, where the major worked — and drove to the safe house. We were saluted at all the checkpoints. Wearing civilian clothes, I was taken for just another Russian out for a drive with his Afghan comrade.”

Hamid, meanwhile, put on a three-piece suit with flared trousers and platform shoes for his clandestine meeting.

One of the safe houses where Gunston was hidden in the capital was right near the Soviet embassy. It was there that he interviewed an Afghan army general and a KhAD captain, both members of Haq's underground. The general gave Gunston a bottle of Russian vodka to take back to Pakistan with him.

The reason the vehicle that was to take Gunston into Kabul had not arrived in Kolangar on time had to do with Abdul Haq's temperamental aide-de-camp, Khairullah. The youngest son of a wealthy Jalalabad trading family, Khairullah had literally been given to Haq as one of the family's many contributions to the
jihad
against the Soviets — in sort of the same way that sons are still given to the church to become monks in Orthodox Christian countries. Khairullah was a tall, elegant, urbanized guerrilla much like Hamid, with wavy, light brown hair and a mustache instead of a beard. Hamid and Khairullah had business dealings together in Pakistan, and they had had a falling out over money prior to Gunston's departure over
the border. Khairullah threw a temper tantrum and deliberately did not send Haq's message to Kabul ordering the car and driver. With his bear paw of a hand slapping back and forth across Khairullah's face, Haq later beat the whole tale out of him in front of an office full of mujahidin. Khairullah left in tears, utterly humiliated. Beating subordinates in front of others was something that the big, soft-spoken commander did frequently.

This episode spoke volumes about the problems Abdul Haq was encountering, more and more, since the mine injury had forced him to remain in Peshawar. Unable to communicate face to face with his Kabul-area network, he was losing his grip on it. Haq tried to compensate through increased efficiency. He kept more detailed files on dozens of subcommanders. He dispatched more messages to the field, using hand-carried messages and a cipher machine with a complicated number code he had thought up himself. He had his Tajik accountant monitor more closely the flow of money that kept the Kabul front going. Lumbering around his office like an injured football linebacker with a nervous, fatigued look on his face, Haq became compulsive about every facet of organization. He would send me a written note just to change the time of our next meeting by fifteen minutes. Such fastidiousness was not all that common in my own culture, and in the midst of the chaos of the Pathan world it seemed utterly bizarre.

Haq was not a happy man when I first got to know him. He confided much more to Gunston than he would to me. Still, Gunston was close to Haq only as one brave soldier could be to another.

It hadn't taken Abdul Haq more than a few seconds to see beyond Gunston's spiffy, boyish exterior to the sterner stuff beneath. In 1983, after meeting with Savik Shuster, a Lithuanian Jew and former Soviet citizen, Haq, an extremely devout Moslem at war with the Soviet Union, trusted him enough to arrange a series of trips inside for him.

“At first, I didn't tell Abdul Haq that I was Jewish,” Shuster told me. “I wasn't sure how he would react. When I did tell him, I quickly mentioned that I was an agnostic, that I didn't really believe in God. This second admission made him suddenly angry. ‘Now you sound like a Soviet,’ he said. So I told him, as kind of an apology, that I questioned everything in life, but that I was prepared to accept the existence of God. Eventually, Abdul Haq learned to live with my disbelief.”

Shuster took risks inside that not even Gunston would take. If Gunston had been caught, the Afghan government would have accused him of spying and sent him to Kabul's infamous Pul-i-Charki prison, where he would have experienced several months of terror until the British government struck a behind-the-scenes bargain for his release. Shuster, who had lived in the Soviet Union until he was twenty, would simply have been shot.

“I was scared out of my mind by the things I did, sure.” Shuster, who was thirty-five, always talked with the wry, self-questioning grin of an Eastern European intellectual. Growing up in the Soviet Republic of Lithuania had provided him with wisdom and pessimism in abundant amounts. Shuster seemed much older than his years. His eyes had a warm, intimate glow common to exiled Eastern Europeans, whose outer lives have been so restricted that their inner ones have taken on an ornate texture and symbolism that few in the West could approximate. He had dark curly hair, a dark complexion, and thin aviator glasses. Sometimes, because of the way his eyes lit up like sparks whenever he talked, he reminded me of Einstein.

Shuster claimed he did what he did in Afghanistan “out of historical memory.” He considered himself a “Lithuanian nationalist.” He could draw many parallels between the Soviet rape of his land and the rape of Afghanistan. He recited for me the whole sordid history of how Lithuania was grabbed by Stalin after the 1939 pact with Hitler, then grabbed by Hitler after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and taken
back by Stalin near the end of the war. Anti-Semitism in Lithuania didn't bother him. Shuster believed that “the true partisans and resistance fighters against the Soviets were not anti-Semites.”

But I knew that Shuster, like most everybody else in Peshawar, had a stated reason for taking risks inside and a real reason. The stated reason was “Lithuania;” the real reason I could only guess at.

In the fifteen years since Shuster left the Soviet Union, he had tone to medical school, worked as a doctor and journalist, and taught himself French, English, and Italian. He wrote in English for
Newsweek
and in Russian for his current employer, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. He had reported from Lebanon, Chad, Nicaragua, and numerous other places. He had an Italian wife and newborn baby and was studying German. He was writing two books simultaneously. Like his friend Abdul Haq, he never seemed to sleep, and the two often spent half the night talking. When Shuster would finally return to his room at Dean's, Haq would phone him about something they had forgotten to discuss, or Shuster would phone Haq. After he went back to Munich, the headquarters for Radio Liberty, Shuster phoned Haq often.

Shuster took life so seriously that he could only live it in overdrive. There was an intensity and self-awareness about him that reminded me of the characters in a Milan Kundera novel. Like many Eastern Europeans, only with alcohol did Shuster unwind; his personality then became like that of an ordinary person when sober.

When Shuster came to Peshawar for two weeks in late May 1988, he produced over a dozen long radio reports, went inside near Kandahar for two days, drank every other night at the American Club, and helped negotiate a three-way deal between Abdul Haq, Haq's oldest brother, Din Mohammed, and the office of Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuéllar for Haq to visit the United Nations. Shuster finished these negonations
at 1:00 on the morning of his departure and dashed out at 1:30 on a three-wheel auto rickshaw to pick up a friend's tape of traditional Afghan music, which he needed for one of his radio shows.

UN officials had told Shuster that they were willing to welcome Haq in New York as a representative of the mujahidin commanders. Haq was willing to go, but only under certain conditions, conditions that were still unacceptable to perhaps the one person on earth whose respect Haq himself psychologically required: that of his oldest brother, the de facto head of Yunus Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami. Din Mohammed was not in favor of Haq's “exposing himself as a politician.” Until now, Din Mohammed thought, his younger brother was seen by other Afghans as purely a soldier. It was in that context — or such was the perception in Afghanistan and Peshawar — that Haq had met with President Reagan at the White House in 1985 and with Prime Minister Thatcher in London the following year. At any rate, for all the press coverage these meetings brought, they stirred no controversy among the various mujahidin political factions in Peshawar. Reagan and Thatcher were so friendly to the mujahidin that meetings with them aroused no suspicions. But the United Nations, influenced as it was by the Soviets and their allies, was considered an enemy camp. Meetings with UN officials did arouse suspicions in Peshawar and were the responsibility of politicians, not soldiers. If he now came to be thought of as a politician, Haq could be in danger. Though the commanders and leaders of other resistance parties besides Hizb-i-Islami wanted Haq to represent them, he could never go to New York without his brother's approval. Shuster's challenge was to mediate between the two brothers and convince Din Mohammed that Haq should go to the United Nations.