Soldiers of God (17 page)

The next few hours were a blur of agony. On the downhill march my companions left the trail and bounded earthward on a forty-five-degree angle over a treacherous, rocky slope, rifles and my rucksack clanging against their shoulders, while I hobbled along the path, knees quaking, thinking that if
mountain goats could talk and think like men, they would be equal to the mujahidin. Then a trickling noise sent chills through my body: the sound of running water. In the failing, dust-stained light I could make out an assemblage of pudding-stone houses at the bottom of the hill that merged with the dun-colored soil like sand castles on a beach. The trail became so steep and my knees so sore as I descended toward the village that I slid the last fifty yards through the packed dust into a mud embankment, which was channeling the spring water I had heard into a young fruit orchard. I must have looked like a chimney sweep.

A pitcher of water appeared magically out of the twilight, held by an old man with a stringy gray beard and
apakol
on his head. He squatted down in the mud and handed it to me.

As I started to drink he began yelling at me, raising a finger in the air.
“Khabarnegah, khabarnegah!”
It was the Pukhtu word for journalist.

“We told this man you are a journalist,” explained Wakhil, who along with Lurang and Jihan-zeb was washing his feet and hands in the irrigation ditch in preparation for evening prayers.

The old man exploded into a loud babble of Pukhtu that sounded like an insult. His contorted, sunburned face was inches away from me, suspended in the enveloping darkness. Every time I took another gulp of water or rinsed my face and hands he shook his head in a mocking manner. When Wakhil came over after the prayers were finished, the old man was silent for a moment, then started screaming again.

“He says his name is Gholam Issa Khan.” Wakhil had to shout so that I could hear his translation above the graybeard's ranting. I struggled to retrieve my notebook. Two loud, simultaneous voices now pounded at my head. I was covered with dust and lightheaded from hunger. This incident gained a mystical quality in my mind; it was like listening to the voices of your own conscience.

“The Communists don't like my God and his messenger,”
the old man said. “They tried to wipe out my way of life. But my God gives me strength. My God always helps me. America is godless but America is good because America gives me guns to fight Communists. After we drive the
shuravi
[Soviet forces] out of Afghanistan, we will drive them out of Bukhara and Samarkand and Tashkent too.
Allahu akbar!”

“How old are you?” I asked. I wanted to get his story straight from the beginning. The old man thought for a moment. I wondered if anybody had ever asked him this question.

“Forty,” Wakhil translated.

“Forty? He looks like seventy.”

“These people are not like you,” Wakhil said. “They don't know exactly when they were born. Why do you always ask such questions about numbers and dates? What does it matter?”

Wakhil was angry. Maybe the man really was forty — or at least thought he was. Lurang and Jihan-zeb were both ten years younger than I, yet they looked older.

The old man continued to shout: “Taraki people tried to rape my wife, to stop me from praying. I have thirty hectares. Taraki people want to take ten hectares away from me. They say my daughters must go to Communist school. I say I kill you first!” He shook his fist.
“Shuravi
come with planes, helicopters,
boom, boom.
This, this” — he pointed in all directions — “all finished. We go to Pakistan. Then mujahidin come,
shuravi
leave. We make all this, this” — again he pointed — “all over again. Again bomb, again make.”

The graybeard jabbed furiously at my notebook, as if to say, “Write, write.” I wrote. Then for the first time he smiled. I took out my camera and aimed it at him.

“Ne, ne,”
he shouted, covering his face with his hands.

“You must not take this man's picture,” Wakhil said. “This man says his picture is only for God to see.”

Behind the graybeard's frantic bursts of speech lay a familiar, well-documented story. Had I been traveling in South Africa,
the West Bank, or Lebanon, where quantitatively the destruction and suffering were a mere fraction of what it was in Afghanistan, I would not even have taken out my notebook, because the contents of his story would already have formed part of the well of knowledge available to all serious newspaper readers. In those places, books were written about nuances because the basics were already known from the daily press. In Afghanistan, the basics had yet to be proclaimed. So the most fundamental feature of its history, which has never been fully appreciated, must be set down here.

While the country had always been horribly poor, dirty, and underdeveloped, Afghans had never known very much political repression until after the April 27, 1978, coup that brought the sixty-one-year-old poet and self-declared Marxist idealist Nur Mohammed Taraki to power. Until the 1970s, Afghanistan was relatively civilized by the standards of Amnesty International. The soldiers’ knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries, was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside Kabul.

Taraki's coup changed all that. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. (That's 7,000 more people than were killed during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.) Many of the victims were village
mullahs
and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. The keystones of Taraki's revolution were land reform and the extension of secular education into the villages. By Western standards, this was a salutary idea in the abstract. But it was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets, who through Taraki wanted to transform Afghanistan into a satellite.

“Land reform” to the graybeard Gholam Issa Khan and to Din Mohammed, Abdul Haq, Abdul Qadir, and others meant
soldiers breaking into houses, raping or trying to rape the women, defecating on the dishes, executing the local
mullah
and headman, and confiscating land in a haphazard manner that enraged everyone, benefited no one, and reduced food production. It was the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese destruction of Tibet all over again, with hundreds of thousands of people affected. As in China and Tibet, it was perpetrated in darkness, with barely a scratch of interest from the normally aggressive Western media. The mujahidin revolt against the Kabul authorities and the refugee exodus to Pakistan were ignited not by the Soviet invasion, as most people in the West suppose, but by Taraki's land reform program, which represented the first instance of organized, nationwide repression in Afghanistan's modern history.

Taraki fell in mid-September 1979, toppled by his fellow Communist conspirator Hafizullah Amin, who was described by foreign diplomats as a “brutal psychopath.” He had Taraki strangled and Taraki's family thrown into Pul-i-Charki prison. The mujahidin rebellion gathered strength as a reaction to Amin's crescendo of purges, mass executions, and land confiscations. It was a war that pitted an urban elite against rural peasants. The East bloc, contrary to its stated ideology, was behind the urban elite. “During 1978 and 1979 the people of Afghanistan were forced into a bloody struggle to defend themselves against incorporation into a new form of colonial empire ruled from Moscow,” wrote Henry S. Bradsher, a former Associated Press correspondent.

When the Soviet army invaded on December 27, 1979, it was not so much a bold, new aggression as a last-ditch effort by the Kremlin to save a nascent satellite from being overthrown by Moslem guerrillas, as a result of the overzealousness of the Kremlin's own hand-picked men. To an extent, one could argue that the Soviet Union won and lost Afghanistan in 1978 and 1979, when few in the West were paying attention. The more than one million deaths and the planting of millions of
land mines in the 1980s were merely part of the long, drawn-out, bloody aftermath of an already foregone conclusion.

Taraki's and Amin's oppression had depopulated Gholam Issa Khan's mud brick village and sent him and his kinsmen to refugee camps in Pakistan. The two leaders were Khalqis, sons of poor families who were members of an extremist, Pukhtuspeaking Communist faction called Khalq (Masses). The Soviet invasion replaced Amin with a more suave, moderate brand of Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal. Karmal, then fifty years old, was born into a wealthy Kabul family and had been educated in the capital's foreign schools. He had helped form Parcham (Banner), an urban, Dari-speaking Communist faction that favored a more conciliatory approach toward the peasants. It was sometimes said that had Karmal and his Parcham allies been in power in the late 1970s instead of the more brutal Khalqi fanatics, land reform might have been implemented more intelligently, the mujahidin revolt might have lost momentum, and Afghanistan might have evolved into a quiescent Soviet satellite state like Bulgaria.

Karmal released political prisoners and relaxed the repression. But it was too late. Gholam Issa Khan and tens of thousands of others like him had already joined such mujahidin groups as Jamiat and Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami and had liberated large chunks of the countryside. Karmal's Soviet backers responded with mines, aerial bombardments, and ground troop assaults. Gholam Issa Khan's village had been destroyed and rebuilt several times before I saw it. It was uninhabited. But now, with the guerrillas in complete control of the area, Gholam Issa Khan and a few of his kinsmen and their wives came back periodically throughout the year to plant and harvest wheat, maize, and some other crops. The graybeard's story was a dramatic one. Still, with so much land to traverse and so relatively few journalists inside, I could have been the first to stop at his village and talk to him.

Gholam Issa Khan took us to an earthen house supported by hardwood beams. A ladder led to an upper level, where jute beds were arranged around a dusty carpet. Under the dim white light of a hissing gas lamp, one-eyed Jihan-zeb, using a rusted needle and thread, began repairing the torn strap of my rucksack without my asking. He looked up and smiled at me. I felt shamed, helpless, and grateful, all at the same time. Someone brought moldy, moth-eaten pillows for us. Through the beams, I saw a brilliant, breathing starscape. As sore and dirty as I was, I felt like a baby in a cradle and nearly fell asleep. A boy came with a brass pitcher of water and loaves of flat bread in a bundle of cloth. I moved over to the edge of the carpet when the boy brought a large bowl of thin, sour goat's milk curd, called
shlombeh.
We took turns drinking from it. The boy came with a second bowl and then with a kettle of green tea, all of which I slurped greedily. I remember the aromatic smell of burning deodar wood from the fire. After the boy cleared the carpet, Wakhil, ever the
mullah,
led the group in prayers.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the drone of helicopter gunships dropping “fishing flares” in the black sky over the mud brick village: huge, space-age insects disturbing the silence. The Reagan administration's delivery of over a thousand Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahidin since 1986 had forced the Soviets into flying only after dark or at high altitudes. My stomach knotted. Gholam Issa Khan lifted his head for a moment, looked around, then fell back to sleep with a dismissive wave of his hand. The helicopters were a nightly occurrence for him. The others just grunted.

Morning found us in a paradise lost. This lush valley, arrayed with walnut, mulberry, black plum, and oriental plane trees and noisy with sparrows and magpies, had become a zone of death. Bomb-cratered fields lay fallow. Antipersonnel mines lay not far from the path. Once-soaring minarets were cut off at their midsections, and village after mud brick village
that we passed through was nothing but a roofless jigsaw of collapsed walls adjoining mounds of rubble. I had seen similar places in eastern Turkey leveled by earthquakes: pathetic little toy towns that looked as though an unruly child had smashed them during a tantrum. But here was something else: clusters of tattered white flags flying on swaying bamboo poles signifying the graves of
shaheedan
— mujahidin martyred by the Soviets and Afghan Communists.

Still, as Wakhil never stopped pointing out, the province of Nangarhar was a beautiful land. Arriving from the arid north, Babur had observed: “In Nangarhar another world came to view — other grasses, other trees, other animals, other birds, and other manners and customs of clan and horde. We were amazed, and truly there was ground for amaze.”

We stopped by a stream, and Jihan-zeb constructed a bath for me with a pile of stones. I took out my spare
shalwar kameez
from my rucksack and changed while in the water. Soaking wet in my new clothes, I washed the others by smashing and rubbing them against the stones. The men didn't wash, but they looked and smelled the same as when they left Peshawar: nothing at all seemed to affect them.