Soldiers of God (7 page)

No Pathan would ever say a thing like that. Afghanistan was a forgotten war, but among the foreigners risking their lives for the sake of the mujahidin, the conflicts were more noticeable than the camaraderie. In the oppressive, glass-house atmosphere of the frontier town's foreign community, where heat, filth, disease, loneliness, and the constant tedium of dealing with the “brain-dead Punjabis” made tempers flare, supporting the mujahidin cause wasn't enough for many people. You were trusted only if you supported the same faction as your colleague did.

The Tajiks and the Pathans were very different from one another, and so were the foreigners who supported them. The Pathans were by far the more numerous and important group, around which much of the Afghan drama — and my own experiences in particular — revolved. But the Tajiks played a role far out of proportion to their numbers, and many a Western
writer was absolutely committed to their superiority over the Pathans as fighters.

The Tajiks, who accounted for roughly a quarter of Afghanistan's prewar population, are the largest minority in the Pathan-dominated country. They are concentrated in northeast Afghanistan and speak Dari, a provincial form of Farsi spoken in the old Persian court. The Tajiks are a typical upwardly mobile minority, who flocked to Kabul in order to become educated and to fill administrative jobs in government and business. Louis Dupree, the foremost specialist on Afghanistan, compares the Tajiks to the Jews and Armenians in their desire for self-improvement. Though twice as many people in Afghanistan speak Pukhtu, the influence to Tajiks in the capital has helped make Dari the lingua franca of the country. In addition to education, the Tajiks have one other advantage over the Pathans: they are not riven by tribalism, but instead are identified with the particular valley in which they live. Of all these valleys, the most important is the Panjshir, a word that in Dari means “five lions.”

The Panjshir is a seventy-mile-long strategic corridor in the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains, which every army that has ever invaded Afghanistan from the north has had to cross. The only main entrance to the Panjshir is at its southern end, about sixty-five miles north of Kabul. But there are numerous side valleys, cutting between mountains that soar up to nineteen thousand feet, into which guerrillas can easily escape an invading force. The Panjshir is excellent guerrilla country, and it produced a charismatic mujahidin leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Massoud, who was born around 1950, studied engineering in Kabul and speaks fluent French. The absence of tribalism among Tajiks and their penchant for Western-style organization allowed him, early in the war, to mobilize 3,000 mujahidin regulars along with pools of several thousand part-time partisans. By the end of the 1980s, that combined force would
reach an estimated 50,000, the largest single guerrilla army in Afghanistan.

Massoud set up military cadet schools, mujahidin courts, and a tax collection system. The Soviets threw everything they could against him: mines, tanks, and heavy artillery. Carpet bombing and hideous reprisals against civilians were all too frequent; on one occasion, the Soviets lined up six hundred people and crushed them to death with tanks. Each time, however, Massoud and his men, and as many civilians as they could alert in advance, disappeared into the side valleys, sniped at Soviet troops, and eventually drove them back out. This happened seven times in the first half of the 1980s. It was an impressive show, and every journalist and relief worker who was also to penetrate the Panjshir came back to Peshawar singing the praises of Massoud, whom they dubbed “the Lion of the Panjshir.”

The guerrilla leader first became known to the outside world through Dr. Laurence Laumonier, a strapping French woman with sparkling blue eyes and a steely resolve, who in July 1980 was the first relief worker to visit the Panjshir after the Soviet invasion the previous winter. Dr. Laumonier alerted French journalists to what was happening, and they filed into the valley to write stories about Massoud, who was able to communicate with them in their own language. Other journalists followed, almost all of them European.

Massoud had a hawk nose, sharp features, and a wiry physique. The adjectives most often applied to him were “wily” and “scrappy.” Journalists compared him to Che Guevara and Marshal Tito, and his mujahidin to Castro's Cuban guerrillas. The fact that he represented an ethnic minority and was getting some military aid from the Chinese further increased his allure. Massoud's peculiar characteristics made it easy for left-wing European journalists to support him against the Soviet Union. Because Massoud's Tajik spokesmen in Peshawar were thoroughly Westernized — they spoke foreign languages and
actually arrived on time for appointments — the European relief agencies, particularly the French and Swedish ones, carried out most of their humanitarian assistance projects in territory controlled by him. Massoud became Europe's favorite Afghan; spurring his fame was Ken Follett's best seller
Lie Down with Lions,
the hero of which he based on the Tajik commander.

The Europeans (especially the French) who visited Massoud had to be tough, or at least a little crazy. The trek into the Panjshir took up to three weeks on foot. It involved climbing several Himalayan-style passes and negotiating some of the most dangerous mine-strewn terrain Afghanistan had to offer. Few Americans — for whatever reason — made the journey, and because Massoud never emerged from inside, few Americans met him, so they were suspicious of him. As one Peshawar-based American reporter argued: “Every interview with Massoud is conducted by a journalist who has just completed a difficult journey to the Panjshir and practically owes his life to the Tajik commander, and the result is that all the articles about Massoud have been written in a tone of fawning adulation.”

Massoud's arms relationship with the Chinese added to American suspicions. Calumnies surfaced about him. For example, one rumor had it that he was rarely in the Panjshir at all, but was secretly spending much of his time in a luxurious and secluded Peshawar villa. In the outside world, Massoud was a hero; in Peshawar, the center of the guerrilla war effort, he was controversial.

The biggest stone that Massoud's enemies had to throw at him was his short-lived 1983 cease-fire with the Soviets. He used the respite to build new supply trails into Pakistan, to initiate personal contacts with other resistance leaders in the far north, to train new recruits, and to clean out areas infested with an extremely radical mujahidin faction that was causing him and other guerrilla groups trouble. It was time well spent,
and he built his later successes on that period of consolidation. But Massoud's enemies had a point too, if a mean-spirited one: the cease-fire was “a very Tajik thing to do.” In other words, it was, in a sense, selfish, since it allowed the Soviets to put more military pressure on the Pathans, who were fighting everywhere else in the country. More important, the cease-fire was a very rational — and worse, a very Western — way of dealing with a superior Soviet force that was razing Afghanistan with the same abandon as the thirteenth-century Mongol hordes.

Tactically speaking, the cease-fire was smart, but it certainly wasn't the way the mujahidin were going to drive the Soviets out. The Pathans would never have considered something so logical and prudent as a temporary truce. It would have been an affront both to their manhood and to Pukhtunwali, their code of honor, whose supreme precept is
badai
— revenge.

So Massoud was the exception to the general reason the Soviets were losing the war: because of the wild, quixotic, completely unreasonable mentality of the Pathans, to whom the whole notion of tactics was anathema because it implied distinctions, and Pathans at war thought only in black and white.

Like the Tajiks, the Pathans also had a great commander. To Abdul Haq's supporters in Peshawar, he, not Ahmad Shah Massoud, was — in the words of a glossy poster with Haq's picture on it — “the Afghan lion.” Actually, Abdul Haq wasn't a lion at all. He was a big, friendly bear of a man with black hair, a beard, and an impish smile who had a much more difficult task to accomplish than Massoud.

While Massoud's lair was a valley perfectly laid out for a guerrilla struggle, Abdul Haq stalked the Afghan capital of Kabul and its environs, the center of the Soviet and Afghan Communist power structure, which was packed with government ministries, division-size military bases, KhAD agents, barbed wire fences, checkpoints, and minefields. Haq had to fight an urban war of sabotage, as well as a guerrilla war in the
adjacent mountains and villages. This called for even greater organization than Massoud required in the Panjshir Valley. And Haq had to do this with Pathans, who, because of their tribal rivalries, were more difficult to organize than Tajiks.

Yet, compared to Massoud, Abdul Haq had little written about him until the last years of the Soviet occupation. Few knew him well, and those who did were not print journalists. In the early and mid-1980s, Haq moved swiftly and constantly around the Kabul region, stopping briefly in Peshawar every few months in order to straighten out matters of manpower, logistics, and financing. He had family concerns to attend to as well, and those were far more important than his military problems. Haq's family was a highly unusual one, and the Pathan war effort was inextricably tied up with the complicated relationships among its members.

Born in April 1958, Abdul Haq had two older brothers, Abdul Qadir, who was about five years older than Haq, and Din Mohammed, who was ten years older. (Pathans don't use family names, and noms de guerre further complicate matters.) Abdul Qadir was the mujahidin commander of Shinwar, an Afghan district just over the border from the Khyber Pass, on the main route linking Kabul with Pakistan. Din Mohammed was the chief political and administrative operative for Yunus Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami (Party of Islam), one of the two most militarily powerful Afghan resistance organizations. (The other was Jamiat-i-Islami — Islamic Society — which Ahmad Shah Massoud was affiliated with.)

While Jamiat was a Tajik-dominated party, Hizb-i-Islami was the ultimate Pathan party: it presented a facade of Moslem fundamentalism, but in reality it was tribal. Yunus Khalis, a respected Moslem cleric and former schoolteacher, played the role of figurehead and spiritual guide; Din Mohammed ran the party's daily operations. This party, which constituted the strongest mujahidin force in the major cities of Kabul, Jalalabad, and Ghazni, appeared to the uninitiated outsider as one big, disorganized mess.

Hizb-i-Islami had few foreign-language speakers. Its spokesmen rarely kept appointments. Its leaders seemed unable to keep track of one another. Trips inside for journalists, postponed for weeks, often fell through at the last moment. Nor was the party especially interested in help or attention from the Western relief community. The only aid worker whom Hizb-i-Islami appeared to have any regular dealings with was Anne Hurd, an American from Mobile, Alabama, who worked for the Washington-based Mercy Fund. Hurd's friendly Southern accent concealed a tough, militarylike personality that was neither intimated nor discouraged by the party's diffident, fundamentalist exterior. Hurd always took care to “dress up” as if she had a “business appointment in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Even though I'm a woman, the Afghans treat me as an equal because I try to be perceived as being totally outside their culture and range of control.” Still, it took her years of daily effort to establish a working relationship with Hizb-i-Islami officials.

To judge by its power, Hizb-i-Islami obviously
worked.
How it did so was a mystery, and because of the difficulties in dealing with its leaders, few foreigners bothered to find out. While the smooth-talking Tajiks at Jamiat headquarters had telephones in working order, clear, positive answers to most requests, and ice-cold Coca-Cola and Fanta on hand, the Pathans at the Hizb-i-Islami office offered only Afghan green tea and words riddled with ambiguity.

Abdul Haq himself was the only exception to the confusion. He spoke English, albeit with a lot of profanities mixed in (courtesy of a Dutch journalist who taught him in the early 1980s). He kept appointments and had a reputation as one of the few mujahidin leaders who had really interesting things to say. It was thought that the forceful impression Haq made on President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was pivotal in the subsequent American decision to supply the mujahidin with Stinger missiles in 1986. “I told Mrs. Thatcher,” Haq said, “that my great-grandfather and his
father before him fought the British, who invaded Afghanistan to keep the Russians out. So I asked her: Now that the Russians have finally come, as the British once feared, why are you so quiet? Why did you send everything a hundred years ago and yet now you send nothing?”

The Tajiks at Jamiat headquarters spoke in catchy soundbite phrases (“In six years we've gone from stones to Stingers” and “We ask for mine-clearing equipment and our allies give us coin detectors”); Haq offered substance. Jamiat's people in Peshawar were just spokesmen; Haq was a commander with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a good analytical mind, and a sense of rebellion against his own family and party, all of whose members seemed very different from him. But Haq was not usually in Peshawar in the mid-1980s, and he rarely took journalists inside with him.

It was only because of a terrible injury that I got to know Abdul Haq and Hizb-i-Islami. It was the kind of accident that occurred all the time in Afghanistan. Months later, after I knew him better, Haq told me how it had happened.

It was in early October 1987. At eight thousand feet in the mountains overlooking Kabul, winter had already come. The plan was to attack six Soviet targets: the Kabul airfield and radar station and several military bases north and west of the capital. On October 11, Haq's particular destination was Qarga, a lake region that was the site of a golf course used by foreign diplomats and a major Soviet base. Qarga had once before been lucky for him: fourteen months earlier, in August 1986, he launched a spectacular raid that destroyed the base's ammunition dump.