Fire

THE LION IN WINTER 2001

The fighters were down by the river, getting ready to cross over, and we drove out there in the late afternoon to see them off. We parked our truck behind a mud wall, where it was out of sight, and then walked one by one down to the position. In an hour or so, it would be dark, and they’d go over. Some were loading up an old Soviet truck with crates of ammunition, and some were cleaning their rifles, and some were just standing in loose bunches behind the trees, where the enemy couldn’t see them. They were wearing old snow parkas and blankets thrown over their shoulders, and some had old Soviet Army pants, and others didn’t have any shoes. They drew themselves into an uneven line when we walked up, and they stood there with their Kalashnikovs and their RPGs cradled in their arms, smiling shyly.

Across the floodplain, low, grassy hills turned purple as the sun sank behind them, and those were the hills these men were going to attack. They were fighting for Ahmad Shah Massoud—genius guerrilla leader, last hope of the shattered Afghan government—and all along those hills were trenches filled with Taliban soldiers. The Taliban had grown out of the madrasahs, or religious schools, that had sprung up in Pakistan during the Soviet invasion, and they had emerged in 1994 as Afghanistan sank into anarchy following the Soviet withdrawal. Armed and trained by Pakistan and driven by moral principles so extreme that many Muslims feel they can only be described as a perversion of Islam, the Taliban quickly overran most of the country and imposed their ironfisted version of koranic law. Adulterers faced stoning; women’s rights became nonexistent. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognize their government as legitimate, but it is generally thought that the rest of the world will have to follow suit if the Taliban complete their takeover of the country. The only thing that still stands in their way are the last-ditch defenses of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

The sun set, and the valley edged into darkness. It was a clear, cold November night, and we could see artillery rounds flashing against the ridgeline in the distance. Hundreds of Taliban soldiers were dug in up there, waiting to be attacked, and hundreds of Massoud’s soldiers were down here along the Kowkcheh River, waiting to attack them. In a few hours, they would cross the river by truck and make their way through the fields and destroyed villages of no-man’s-land. Then it would begin.

We wished Massoud’s men well and walked back to the truck. The stars had come out, and the only sound was of dogs baying in the distance. Then the whole front line, from the Tajik border to Farkhar Gorge, rumbled to life.

I’d wanted to meet Massoud for years, ever since I’d first heard of his remarkable defense of Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. A brilliant strategist and an uncompromising fighter, Massoud had been the bane of the Soviet Army’s existence and had been largely responsible for finally driving them out of the country. He was fiercely independent, accepting little, if any, direction from Pakistan, which controlled the flow of American arms to the mujahidin. His independence made it impossible for the CIA to trust him, but agency officials grudgingly admitted that he was an almost mythological figure among many Afghans. He was a native of the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, the third of six sons born to an ethnic Tajik army officer. In 1974, he went to college to study engineering, but he dropped out in his first year to join a student resistance movement. After a crackdown on dissidents, Massoud fled to Pakistan, where he underwent military training. By 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up the teetering Communist government, Massoud had already collected a small band of resistance fighters in the Panjshir Valley.

As a guerrilla base the Panjshir couldn’t have been better. Protected by the mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush and blocked at the entrance by a narrow gorge named Dalan Sang, the seventy-mile-long valley was the perfect staging area for raids against a highway that supplied the Soviet bases around Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. Massoud quickly organized his Panjshiri fighters, rumored to number as few as three thousand men, into defense groups comprising four or five villages each. The groups were self-sufficient and could call in mobile units if they were threatened with being overrun. Whenever a Soviet convoy rumbled up the highway, the mujahidin would mine the road, then wait in ambush. Most of the fighters would provide covering fire while a few insanely brave men worked their way in close to the convoy and tried to take out the first and last vehicles with rocket-propelled grenades. With the convoy pinned down, the rest of the unit would pepper it with gunfire and then retreat. They rarely stood and fought, and the Soviets rarely pursued them beyond the protection of their armored vehicles. It was classic guerrilla warfare, and if anything, Massoud was amazed at how easy it was. For his defense of the valley, Massoud became known as the Lion of Panjshir.

Very quickly, the Soviets understood that there was no way to control Afghanistan without controlling the Panjshir Valley, and they started attacking it with forces of up to fifteen thousand men, backed by tanks, artillery, and massive air support. Massoud knew that he couldn’t stop them, and he didn’t even try. He would evacuate as many civilians as possible and then retreat to the surrounding peaks of the Hindu Kush; when the Soviets entered the Panjshir, they would find it completely deserted. That was when the real fighting began. Massoud and his men slept in caves and prayed to Allah and lived on nothing but bread and dried mulberries; they killed Russians with guns taken from other dead Russians and they fought and fought and fought, until the Soviets simply couldn’t afford to fight anymore. Then the Soviets would pull back, and the whole cycle would start all over again.

Between 1979 and their withdrawal ten years later, the Soviets launched nine major offensives into the Panjshir Valley. They never took it. They tried assassinating Massoud, but his intelligence network always warned him in time. They made local peace deals, but he used the respite to organize resistance elsewhere in the country. The ultimate Soviet humiliation came in the mid-eighties, after the Red Army had lost hundreds of soldiers trying to take the Panjshir. The mujahidin had shot down a Soviet helicopter, and some resourceful Panjshiri mechanic patched it up, put a truck engine in it, and started running it up and down the valley as a bus. The Soviets got wind of this, and the next time their troops invaded, the commanders decided to inspect the helicopter. The last thing they must have seen was a flash; Massoud’s men had booby-trapped it with explosives.

The night attack on the Taliban positions began with waves of Katyusha rockets streaming from Massoud’s positions and arcing across the valley. The rockets were fired in volleys of ten or twelve, and we could see the red glare of their engines wobble through the darkness and then wink out one by one as they found their trajectories and headed for their targets. Occasionally an incoming round would explode somewhere down the line with a sound like a huge oak door slamming shut. The artillery exchange lasted an hour, and then the ground assault started, Massoud’s men moving under the cover of darkness through minefields and machine-gun fire toward the Taliban trenches. The fighting was three or four miles away and came to us only as a soft, frantic pap-pap-pap across the valley.

We had driven to a hilltop command post to watch the attack. The position had a code name, Darya, which means “river” in Dari, the Persian dialect that’s Afghanistan’s lingua franca, and on the radio we could hear field commanders yelling, “Darya! Darya! Darya!” as they called in reports or shouted for artillery. The commander of the position, a gentle-looking man in his thirties named Harun, was dressed for war in corduroy pants and a cardigan. He was responsible for all the artillery on the front line; we found him in a bunker, studying maps by the light of a kerosene lantern. He was using a schoolboy’s plastic protractor to figure out trajectory angles for his tanks.

Harun was working three radios and consulting the map continually. After a while a soldier brought in tea, and we sat cross-legged on the floor and drank it. Calls kept streaming in on the radios. “We’ve just captured another position; it’s got a big ammo depot,” one commander shouted. Another reported, “The enemy has no morale at all; they’re just running away. We’ve just taken ten more prisoners.”

Harun showed us on the map what was happening. As we spoke, Massoud’s men were taking small positions around the ridgeline and moving into the hills on either side of a town called Khvajeh Ghar, which was at a critical part of the front line. Khvajeh Ghar was held by Pakistani and Arab volunteers, part of an odd assortment of foreigners—Burmese, Chinese, Chechens, Algerians—who are fighting alongside the Taliban to spread fundamentalist Islam throughout Central Asia. Their presence here is partly due to Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden, who has been harbored by the Taliban since 1997 and is said to repay his hosts with millions of dollars and thousands of holy warriors. The biggest supporter of the Taliban, however, is Pakistan, which has sent commandos, military advisers, and regular army troops. More than a hundred Pakistani prisoners of war sit in Massoud’s jails; most of them—like the Taliban—are ethnic Pashtuns who trained in the madrasahs.

None of the help was doing the Taliban fighters much good at the moment, though. Harun switched his radio to a Taliban frequency and tilted it toward us. They were being overrun, and the panic in their voices was unmistakable. One commander screamed that he was almost out of ammunition; another started insulting the fighters at a neighboring position. “Are you crazy are you crazy are you crazy?” he demanded. “They’ve already taken a hundred prisoners! Do you want to be taken prisoner as well?” He went on to accuse them all of sodomy.

Harun shook his head incredulously. “They are supposed to represent true Islam,” he said. “Do you see how they talk?”

I went into Afghanistan with Iranian-born photographer Reza Deghati, who knew Massoud well from several long trips he’d taken into the country during the Soviet occupation. Back then, the only way in was to take a one-to three-month trek over the Hindu Kush on foot, avoiding minefields and Russian helicopters, and every time Reza did it he lost twenty or thirty pounds. The conditions are vastly easier now but still unpredictable. Last summer, in a desperate effort to force international recognition for their regime, the Taliban launched a six-month offensive that was supposed to be the coup de grace for Massoud. Some fifteen thousand Taliban fighters—heavily reinforced, according to Massoud’s intelligence network, by Pakistani Army units—bypassed the impregnable Panjshir Valley and drove straight north toward the border of Tajikistan. Their goal was to move eastward along the border until Massoud was completely surrounded and then starve him out. They almost succeeded. Waiting to go into Afghanistan that September and October, Reza and I watched one town after another fall into Taliban hands, until even Massoud’s old friends began to wonder if he wasn’t through. “It may be his last season hunting,” as one journalist put it.

Massoud finally stopped the Taliban at the Kowkcheh River, but by then the season was so far advanced that the mountain roads were snowbound, and the only way for Reza and me to get in was by helicopter from the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. Massoud’s forces owned half a dozen aging Russian military helicopters, and the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe could put you on a flight that left at a moment’s notice, whenever the weather cleared over the mountains. On November 15, late in the afternoon, Reza and I got the word. We raced to the airfield, and two hours later we were in Afghanistan.

The helicopters flew to a small town just across the border called Khvajeh Baha od Din, and we were provided a floor to sleep on in the home of a former mujahidin commander who was now a local judge. Each night, anywhere from ten to twenty fighters stayed there, sleeping in rows on the floor next to us. The electricity was supplied by a homemade waterwheel that had been geared to a generator through an old truck transmission. Some fuel came in by truck over the mountains—a five-day trip—but farther north it all came in by donkey and cost twenty dollars a gallon. (The locals jokingly refer to donkeys as “Afghan motorcycles.”) We washed at an outdoor spring and subsisted on rice and mutton and kept warm at night around a woodstove; we lived comfortably enough. The situation around us, though, was unspeakable.

Eighty thousand civilians had fled the recent fighting, adding to the hundred thousand or so who were already displaced in the north, and thousands of them were subsisting in a makeshift refugee camp along the Kowkcheh River half a mile away. They slept under tattered blue UN tarps and had so little food that some were reduced to eating grass. Tribal politics have long dominated Afghanistan; many observers, in fact, say that Massoud, a Tajik, will never be able to unite the country. These refugees were mostly ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, and they claimed that when the Taliban, who are Pashtun, took over a town, they raped the women, killed the men, and sold the young into servitude. One old man at a refugee camp pulled back his quilted coat to show me a six-inch scar on his stomach. A Taliban soldier, he said, had stabbed him with a bayonet and left him for dead.

A week or so after we arrived inside Afghanistan, Reza and I were told that Massoud was coming in—he’d been in Tajikistan, negotiating support from the government—and we rushed down to the river to meet him. A lopsided boat made of sheet metal, powered by a tractor engine that had paddle wheels instead of tires, churned across the Kowkcheh with Massoud in the bow. He wore khaki pants and Czech Army boots and a smart camouflage jacket over a V-neck sweater. He looked to be in his late forties and was as lean and spare as the photographs of him from the Soviet days. He was not tall, but he stood as if he were. The great man stepped onto the riverbank along with a dozen bodyguards and greeted us. Then we all drove off to the judge’s compound in Khvajeh Baha od Din.

There he met with his commanders, listened to their preparations for the coming offensive, then hurried off. We later found out that he’d been forced to return to Tajikistan because of a chronically bad back; apparently the problem was so severe that it had put him in the hospital.

Finding ourselves once again waiting for Massoud, Reza and I decided to go out to the front line to see a position that had just been taken from the Taliban. We drove south along the Kowkcheh, past miles of trenches and bunkers, and stopped at an old Soviet base that had been gutted by artillery fire. The local commander was there, housed in the shell of the building. The wind whistled through the gaping windows, and his soldiers crouched in the shadows, preparing their weapons. The commander said that the position they’d taken was code-named Joy and that the bodies of the dead Taliban were still lying in the trenches.

He made a call on his radio and arranged for some men and packhorses to meet us on the other side of the river. Then he directed us to the crossing point; it was in a canyon a few miles away, just below a town called Laleh Meydan. When we stopped there to sort our gear, a Taliban MiG jet appeared and made a pass over the town, completely ignoring the antiaircraft fire that was directed at it. The townsmen scattered but drifted back within minutes to help us carry our gear down to the river. The raft that was to ferry us across was made from a design that must have been around since Alexander the Great: eight cowhides sewn shut and inflated like tires, each stoppered by a wood plug in one leg and lashed to a frame made of tree limbs. Four old men paddled it across the river and then tied our gear to some horses. Three soldiers with Kalashnikovs were waiting to take us to the front.

It took us all afternoon to get there, walking and riding through mud hills, bare and smooth as velvet, that undulated south toward the Hindu Kush. There was no sound but the wind—not even any fighting—and nothing to look at but the hills and the great, empty sky. When we turned the last ridgeline, we saw Massoud’s men silhouetted on a hilltop, waving us on.

Maybe the Taliban spotted our horses, or maybe they’d overheard the radio communications, but we were halfway up the last slope when I found myself facedown in the dirt as a Taliban rocket slammed into the hillside behind us. Then we were up and running, and the next rocket hit just as we got to the top, and they continued to come in, slightly off target, as we crouched in the safety of the trenches.

There was nothing exciting about it, nothing even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad. Whenever the Taliban fired off another salvo, a spotter on a nearby hilltop would radio our position to say that more were on the way. The commander would shout a warning, and the fighters would pull us down into the foxholes, and then we’d wait five or ten seconds until we heard the last, awful whistling sound right before they hit. In a foxhole you’re safe unless the shell drops right in there with you, in which case you’d never know it; you’d simply cease to exist. No matter how small the odds were, the idea that I could go straight from life to nonexistence was almost unbearable; it turned each ten-second wait into a bizarre exercise in existentialism. Bravery—the usual alternative to fear—also held no appeal, because bravery could get you killed. It had become very simple: It was their war, their problem, and I didn’t want any part of it. I just wanted off the hill.

The problem was, “off” meant rising out of this good Afghan dirt we’d become part of and running back the way we’d come. Four hundred yards away was a hilltop that they weren’t shelling; over there it was just another normal, sunny day. After we’d spent half an hour ducking the shells, the commander said he’d just received word that Taliban troops were preparing to attack the position, and it might be better if we weren’t around for it. Like it or not, we had to leave. Reza and I waited for a quiet spell and then climbed out of the trenches, took a deep breath, and started off down the hill.

Mainly there was the sound of my breathing: a deep, desperate rasp that ruled out any chance of hearing the rockets come in. The commander stood on the hilltop as we left, shouting good-bye and waving us away from a minefield that lay on one side of the slope. Ten minutes later it was over: We sat behind the next ridge and watched Taliban rockets continue to pound the hill, each one raising a little puff of smoke, followed by a muffled explosion. From that distance, they didn’t look like much; they almost looked like the kind of explosions you could imagine yourself acting bravely in.

The Taliban kept up the shelling for the next twelve hours and then attacked at dawn. Massoud’s men fought them off with no casualties.

Massoud returned one week later, flying in by helicopter to Harun’s command post to start planning a heavy offensive across the entire northern front. The post was at the top of a steep, grassy hill in some broken country south of a frontline town called Dasht-e Qaleh. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived, and Massoud was studying the Taliban positions through a pair of massive military binoculars on a tripod. The deposed Afghan government’s foreign minister, a slight, serious man named Dr. Abdullah, walked up to greet us as we got out of the truck. Reza wished him a good evening.

“Good morning,” Dr. Abdullah corrected, nodding toward the Taliban positions across the valley. “Our day is just beginning.”

The shelling had started again, an arrhythmic thumping in the distance that suggested nothing of the terror it can produce up close. That morning, I’d awakened from a dream in which an airplane was dropping bombs on me, and in the dream I’d thrown myself on the ground and watched one of the bombs bounce past me toward a picnicking family. “Good,” I’d thought; “it will kill them and not me.” It was an ugly, ungenerous dream that left me unsettled all day.

Massoud knew where the Taliban positions were, and they obviously knew where his were, and the upshot was that you were never entirely safe. A guy in town had just had both legs torn off by a single, random shell. You couldn’t let yourself start thinking about it or you’d never stop.

Massoud was still at the binoculars. He had a face like a hatchet. Four deep lines cut across his forehead, and his almond-shaped eyes were so thickly lashed that it almost looked as if he were wearing eyeliner. When someone spoke, he swiveled his head around and affixed the speaker with a gaze so penetrating it occasionally made the recipient stutter. When he asked a question, it was very specific, and he listened to every word of the answer. He stood out not so much because he was handsome but simply because he was hard to stop looking at.

I asked Dr. Abdullah how Massoud’s back was doing. Dr. Abdullah spoke low so that Massoud couldn’t hear him. “He says it’s better, but I know it’s not,” he said. “I can see by the way he walks. He needs at least a month’s rest… but, of course, that won’t be possible.”

The shelling got heavier, and the sun set, and Massoud and his bodyguards and generals lined up on top of the bunker to pray. The prayer went on for a long time, the men standing, kneeling, prostrating themselves, standing again, their hands spread toward the sky to accept Allah. Islam is an extraordinarily tolerant religion—more so than Christianity, in some ways—but it is also strangely pragmatic. Turning the other cheek is not a virtue. The prophet Muhammad, after receiving the first revelations of the Koran in A.D. 610, was forced into war against the corrupt Quraysh rulers of Mecca, who persecuted him for trying to make Arab society more egalitarian and to unite it under one god. Outnumbered three to one, his fighters defeated the Quraysh in 627 at the Battle of the Trench, outside Medina. Three years later he marched ten thousand men into Mecca and established the reign of Islam. Muhammad was born during an era of brutal tribal warfare, and he would have been useless to humanity as a visionary and a man of peace if he had not also known how to fight.

It was cold and almost completely dark when the prayers were finished. Massoud abruptly stood, folded his prayer cloth, and strode into the bunker, attended by Dr. Abdullah and a few commanders. We followed and joined them on the floor. A soldier brought in a pot for us to wash our hands, then spread platters of rice and mutton on a blanket. Massoud asked Dr. Abdullah for a pen, and Dr. Abdullah drew one out of his tailored cashmere jacket.

“I recognize that pen, it’s mine,” Massoud said. He was joking.

“Well, in a sense everything we have is yours,” Dr. Abdullah replied.

“Don’t change the topic. Right now I’m talking about this pen.” Massoud wagged his finger at Dr. Abdullah, then turned to the serious business of preparing the offensive.

Massoud’s strategy was simple and exploited the fact that no matter how one looked at it, he was losing the war. After five years of fighting, the Taliban had fractured his alliance and cut its territory in half. Massoud was confined to the mountainous northeast, which, although easily defensible, depended on long, tortuous supply lines to Tajikistan. The Russians, ironically, had begun supplying Massoud with arms—with the Taliban near their borders, they couldn’t afford to hold a grudge—and India and Iran were helping as well. It all had to go through Tajikistan. The most serious threat to Massoud’s supply lines came last fall, when he lost a strategically important town called Taloqan, just west of the Kowkcheh River. The Taliban, convinced that recapturing Taloqan was of supreme importance to Massoud, shipped the bulk of their forces over to the Taloqan front. Massoud arrayed his forces in a huge V around the town and began a series of focused, stabbing attacks, usually at night, that guaranteed that the Taliban would remain convinced that he would do anything to retake the town.

In the meantime he was thinking on a completely different scale. Massoud had been fighting for twenty-one years, longer than most of the Taliban conscripts had been alive. In that context, Taloqan didn’t matter, the next six months didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the Afghan resistance survive long enough for the Taliban to implode on their own. The trump card of any resistance movement is that it doesn’t have to win; the guerrillas just have to stay in the hills until the invaders lose their will to fight. The Afghans fought off the British three times and the Soviets once, and now Massoud was five years into a war that Pakistan could not support forever. Moreover, the civilian population in Taliban-controlled areas had started to bridle under the conscription of soldiers and the harshness of Taliban law. Last summer, in fact, a full-fledged revolt boiled over in a town called Musa Qaleh, and the Taliban had to send in six hundred troops to crush it. “Every day, I bathe in the river without my pistol,” the local Taliban governor later told a reporter, with no apparent irony. “What better proof is there that the people love us?” The end of the Taliban, it seemed, was only a matter of time.

The Dari word for war is jang, and as Massoud ate his mutton, he explained to his commanders that within weeks he would start a jange-gerilla-yee. Here in the north he was locked into a frontline war that neither side could win, but he had groups of fighters everywhere—even deep in areas the Taliban thought they controlled. “In the coming days, we will engage the Taliban all over Afghanistan,” he announced. “Pakistan brought us conventional war; I’m preparing a guerrilla war. It will start in a few weeks from now, even a few days.”

Massoud had done the same thing to the Soviets. In 1985 he had disappeared into the mountains for three months to train 120 commandos and had sent each of them out across Afghanistan to train 100 more. These 12,000 men would attack the vital supply routes of the cumbersome Soviet Army. They used an operations map that had been found in a downed Soviet helicopter, and they took their orders from Massoud, who had informers throughout the Soviet military, even up to staff general. All across Afghanistan, Russian soldiers traded their weapons for drugs and food. Morale was so bad that there were gun battles breaking out among the Soviet soldiers themselves.

Dinner finished, Massoud spread the map out on the floor and bent over it, plotting routes and firing questions at his commanders. He wanted to know how many tanks they had, how many missile launchers, how much artillery. He wanted to know where the weapons were and whether their positions had been changed according to his orders. He occasionally interrupted his planning to deliver impromptu lectures, his elegant hands slicing the air for emphasis or a single finger shaking in the harsh light of the kerosene lantern. His commanders—many of them older than he, most veterans of the Soviet war—listened in slightly chastised silence, like schoolboys who hadn’t done their homework.

“The type of operation you have planned for tonight might not be so successful, but that’s okay; it should continue,” he said. “This is not our main target. We’re just trying to get them to bring reinforcements so they take casualties. The main thrust will be elsewhere.”

Massoud was so far ahead of his commanders that at times he seemed unable to decide whether to explain his thinking or to just give them orders and hope for the best. The Soviets, having lost as many as fifteen thousand men in Afghanistan, reportedly now study his tactics in the military academies. And here he was, two decades later, still waging war from some bunker, still trying to get his commanders to grasp the logic of what he was doing.

It was getting late, but Massoud wasn’t even close to being finished. He has been known to work for thirty-six hours straight, sleeping for two or three minutes at a time. There was work to do, and his men might die if it wasn’t done well, and so he sat poring over an old Soviet map, coaxing secrets from it that the Taliban might have missed. At one point he turned to one of the young commanders and asked him whether he could fix the hulk of a tank that sat rusting on a nearby hill.

“I have already been up there to see it,” the young man said. “I have fixed tanks much worse than that.”

There were a total of three destroyed tanks; Massoud thought they all could be salvaged. One was stuck in an alleyway between two houses, and the young commander said the passageway was too narrow for them to drag it out. “Buy the houses, destroy them, and get it out,” Massoud said. “Get two more tanks from Rostaq; that’s five. Paint them like new and show them on the streets so people will see them. Then the Taliban will think we’re getting help from another country.”

On and on it went, commander by commander, detail by detail. Don’t shell from Ay Khanom Hill; you’re just wasting your ammunition. Don’t shell any positions near houses or towns; the Taliban are too deeply dug in in those spots and you’ll just hurt civilians. Send your men forward in jeeps to save the heavy machinery and shell heavily beforehand to raise a lot of dust. That way, the Taliban won’t see the attack.

When Massoud was growing up in Kabul, he was part of a neighborhood gang that had regular battles with other gangs. One particularly large gang would occupy a hilltop near his house, and he and his friends would go out and challenge them. Naturally enough, Massoud was the leader. He would split his force, sending one half straight up the hill while the other half circled and attacked from the rear. It always worked. It still worked.

Massoud sat cross-legged on the floor, bent forward at the waist, methodically opening and eating pistachios. His head hung low and swung from side to side as he spoke. He had a slight tic that ran like a shiver up his back and into his shoulders. “Get me your best guys,” he said, looking around. “I don’t want hundreds. I want sixty of your best. Sixty from each commander. Tomorrow I want to launch the best possible war.”

Like so many fundamentalist movements, the Taliban were born of war. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, it ultimately sent in eight armored divisions, two enhanced parachute battalions, hundreds of attack helicopters, and well over a hundred thousand men. What should have been the quick crushing of a backward country, however, turned into the worst Soviet defeat of the Cold War. The very weaknesses of the fledgling resistance movement—its lack of military bases, its paucity of weapons, its utterly fractured command structure—meant that the Soviets had no fixed military objectives to destroy. Fighting Afghans was like nailing jelly to a wall; in the end there was just a wall full of bent nails. Initially using nothing but old shotguns, flintlock rifles, and Lee-Enfield .303s left over from British colonial days, the mujahidin started attacking Soviet convoys and military bases all across Afghanistan. According to a CIA report at the time, the typical life span of a mujahidin RPG operator—rocket-propelled grenades were the antitank weapon of choice—was three weeks. It’s not unreasonable to assume that every Afghan who took up arms against the Soviets fully expected to die.

Without the support of the villagers, however, the mujahidin would never have been able to defeat the Soviets. They would have had nothing to eat, nowhere to hide, no information network—none of the things a guerrilla army depends on. The Soviets knew this, of course, and by the end of the first year—increasingly frustrated by the stubborn mujahidin resistance—they turned the dim Cyclops eye of their military on the people themselves. They destroyed any village the mujahidin were spotted in. They carpet-bombed the Panjshir Valley. They cut down fruit trees, disrupted harvests, tortured villagers. They did whatever they could to drive a wedge between the people and the resistance. Still, it didn’t work. After ten years of war, the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind a country full of land mines and more than one million Afghan dead.

A country can’t sustain that kind of damage and return to normal overnight. The same fierce tribalism that had defeated the Soviets—“radical local democracy,” the CIA termed it—made it extremely hard for the various mujahidin factions to get along. (It would be three years before they would be able to take Kabul from the Communist regime that the Soviets had left.) Moreover, the mujahidin were armed to the teeth, thanks to a CIA program that had pumped three billion dollars’ worth of weapons into the country during the war. Had the United States continued its support—building roads, repatriating the refugees, clearing the minefields—Afghanistan might have stood a chance of overcoming its natural ethnic factionalism. But the United States didn’t. No sooner had the Soviet-backed government crumbled away than America’s Cold War–born interest in Afghanistan virtually ceased. Inevitably, the Afghans fell out among themselves. And when they did, it was almost worse than the war that had just ended.

The weapons supplied by the United States to fight the Soviets had been distributed through Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence branch. The ISI, as it is known, had chosen a rabidly anti-Western ideologue named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to protect its strategic interests in Afghanistan, so of course the bulk of the weapons went to him. Now, using Hekmatyar to reach deep into Afghan politics, Pakistan systematically crippled any chance of a successful coalition government. As fighting flared around Kabul, Hekmatyar positioned himself in the hills south of the city and started raining rockets down on the rooftops. His strategy was to pound the various mujahidin factions into submission and gain control of the capital, but he succeeded merely in killing tens of thousands of civilians. Finally, in exchange for peace, he was given the post of prime minister. But his troops remained where they were, the barrels of their tanks still pointed down at the city they had largely destroyed.

While the commanders fought on, life in Afghanistan sank into a lawless hell. Warlords controlled the highways; opium and weapons smuggling became the mainstay of the economy; private armies battled one another for control of a completely ruined land. This was one of the few times that Massoud’s forces are thought to have committed outright atrocities, massacring several hundred to several thousand people in the Afshar District of Kabul. There is no evidence, however, that Massoud gave the orders or knew about it beforehand. As early as 1994 Pakistan, dismayed by the fighting and increasingly convinced that Hekmatyar was a losing proposition, began to look elsewhere for allies. Its attention fell on the Taliban, who had been slowly gaining power in the madrasahs while Afghanistan tore itself apart. The Taliban were religious students, many of them Afghan refugees in Pakistan, who were trained in an extremely conservative interpretation of the Koran called Deobandism. Here, in the tens of thousands of teenage boys who had been orphaned or displaced by the war, Pakistan found its new champions.

Armed and directed by Pakistan and facing a completely fractured alliance, the Taliban rapidly fought their way across western Afghanistan. The population was sick of war and looked to the Taliban as saviors, which, in a sense, they were, but their brand of salvation came at a tremendous price. They quickly imposed a form of Islam that was so archaic and cruel that it shocked even the ultratraditional Muslims of the countryside. With the Taliban closing in on Kabul, Massoud found himself forced into alliances with men—such as Hekmatyar and former Communist Abdul Rashid Dostum—who until recently had been his mortal enemies. The coalition was a shaky one and didn’t stand a chance against the highly motivated Taliban forces. After heavy fighting, Kabul finally fell to the Taliban in early September 1996, and Massoud pulled his forces back to the Panjshir Valley. With him were Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was the acting president of the coalition government, and a shifty assortment of mujahidin commanders who became known as the Northern Alliance. Technically, Rabbani and his ministers were the recognized government of Afghanistan—they still held a seat at the UN—but in reality, all they controlled was the northern third of one of the poorest countries in the world.

Worse still, there was a growing movement from a variety of Western countries—particularly the United States—to overlook the Taliban’s flaws and recognize them as the legitimate government of the country. There was thought to be as much as two hundred billion barrels of untapped oil reserves in Central Asia and similar amounts of natural gas. That made it one of the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, and the easiest way to get it out was to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan. However appalling Taliban rule might be, their cooperation was needed to build the pipeline. Within days of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, a U.S. State Department spokesman said that he could see “nothing objectionable” about the Taliban’s version of Islamic law.

While Massoud and the Taliban fought each other to a standstill at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, the American oil company Unocal hosted a Taliban delegation to explore the possibility of an oil deal.

The day before the offensive, Massoud decided to go to the front line for a close look at the Taliban. He couldn’t tell if the attack, as planned, would succeed in taking their ridgetop positions; he was worried that his men would die in a frontal assault when they could just as easily slip around back. He had been watching the Taliban supply trucks through the binoculars and had determined that there was only one road leading to their forward positions. If his men could take that, the Taliban would have to withdraw.

Massoud goes everywhere quickly, and this time was no exception. He jumped up from a morning meeting with his commanders, stormed out to his white Land Cruiser, and drove off. His commanders and bodyguards scrambled into their own trucks to follow him.

The convoy drove through town, raising great plumes of dust, and then turned down toward the river and plowed through the braiding channels, muddy water up to their door handles. One truck stalled in midstream, but they got it going again and tore through no-man’s-land while their tanks on Ay Khanom Hill shelled the Taliban to provide cover. They drove up to the forward positions and then got out of the trucks and continued on foot, creeping to within five hundred yards of the Taliban front line. This was the dead zone: Anything that moves gets shot. Dead zones are invariably quiet; there’s no fighting, no human noise, just an absolute stillness that can be more frightening than the heaviest gunfire. Into this stillness, as Massoud studied the Taliban positions, a single gunshot rang out.

The bullet barely missed one of his commanders—he felt its wind as it passed—and came to a stop in the dirt between Massoud’s feet. Massoud called in more artillery fire, and then he and his men quickly retraced their route to the trucks. The trip had served its purpose, though. Massoud had identified two dirt roads that split in front of the Taliban positions and circled behind them. And he had let himself be seen on the front line, reinforcing the Taliban assumption that this was the focus of his attack.

Late that afternoon Massoud and his commanders went back up to the command post. The artillery exchanges had started up again, and a new Ramadan moon hung delicately in the sunset over the Taliban positions. That night, in the bunker, Massoud gave his commanders their final instructions. The offensive was to be carried out by eight groups of sixty men each, in successive waves. They must not be married or have children; they must not be their families’ only sons. They were to take the two roads Massoud had spotted and encircle the Taliban positions on the hill. He told them to cut the supply road and hold their positions while offering the Taliban a way to escape. The idea was not to force the Taliban to fight to the last man. The idea was just to overtake their positions with as few casualties as possible.

The commanders filed out, and Reza and Dr. Abdullah were left alone with Massoud. He was exhausted, and he lay down on his side with his coat over him and his hands folded under his cheek. He fell asleep, woke up, asked Reza a question, then fell asleep, over and over again for the next hour. Occasionally a commander would walk in, and Massoud would ask if he’d repositioned those mortars or distributed the fifty thousand rounds of ammunition to the front. At one point, he asked Reza which country he liked best of all the ones he’d worked in.

“Afghanistan, of course,” Reza said.

“Have you been to Africa?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been to Rwanda?”

“Yes.”

“What happened there? Why those massacres?”

Reza tried to explain. After a few minutes, Massoud sat up. “A few years ago in Kabul, I thought the war was finished, and I started building a home in Panjshir,” he said. “A room for my children, a room for me and my wife, and a big library for all my books. I’ve kept all my books. I’ve put them in boxes, hoping one day I’ll be able to put them on the shelves and I’ll be able to read them. But the house is still unfinished, and the books are still in their boxes. I don’t know when I’ll be able to read my books.”

Finally Massoud bade Reza and Dr. Abdullah good night and then lay back down and went to sleep for good. Though he holds the post of vice-president in Rabbani’s deposed government, Massoud is a man with few aspirations as a political leader, no apparent desire for power. Over and over he has rejected appeals from his friends and allies to take a more active role in the politics of his country. The Koran says that war is such a catastrophe it must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. That, perhaps, is why Massoud has devoted himself exclusively to waging war.

I woke up at dawn. The sky was pale blue and promised a warm, clear day, which meant that the offensive was on. Reza and I ate some bread and drank tea and then went outside with the fighters. There seemed to be more of them milling around, and they were talking less than usual. They stood in tense little groups in the morning sun, waiting for Commander Massoud to emerge from his quarters.

The artillery fire started up in late morning, a dull smattering of explosions on the front line and the occasional heavy boom of a nearby tank. The plan was for Massoud’s forces to attack at dusk along the ridge, drawing attention to that part of the front, and then around midnight other attacks would be launched farther south. That was where the front passed close to Taloqan. As the afternoon went by, the artillery fire became more and more regular, and then suddenly at five-fifteen a spate of radio calls came into the bunker. Massoud stood up and went outside.

It had begun. Explosions flashed continually against the Taliban positions on the ridge, and rockets started streaking back and forth across the dark valley. We could see the lights from three Taliban tanks that were making their way along the ridgeline to reinforce positions that were getting overrun. A local cameraman named Yusuf had shown me footage of seasoned mujahidin attacking a hill, and I was surprised by how calm and purposeful the process was. In his video the men moved forward at a crouch, stopping to shoot from time to time and then moving forward again until they had reached the top of the hill. They never stopped advancing, and they never went faster than a walk.

Unfortunately, I doubted that the battle I was watching was being conducted with such grace. They were just kids up there, mostly, on the hill in the dark with the land mines and the machine-gun fire and the Taliban tanks. Massoud was yelling on the radio a lot, long bursts of Dari and then short silences while whoever he was talking to tried to explain himself. Things were not going well, it seemed. Some of the commanders weren’t on the front line, where they belonged, and their men had gone straight up the hill instead of circling. As a result, they had attacked through a minefield. Massoud was in a cold fury.

“I never told you to attack from below. I knew it would be mined,” he told one commander in the bunker. The man’s head tipped backward with the force of Massoud’s words. “The plan was not to attack directly. That’s why you hit the mines. You made the same mistake last time.”

The commander suggested that the mistake might have been made by the fighters on the ground.

“I don’t care. These are my children, your children,” Massoud shot back. “When I look at these fighters, they are like lions. The real problem is the commanders. You attacked from below and lost men to land mines. For me, even if you took the position, you lost the war.”

The offensive was supposed to continue all night. Reza and I ate dinner with Massoud, then packed up our truck and set out on the long drive back to Khvajeh Baha od Din. We were leaving the front for good, and on the way out of town we decided to check in at the field hospital. It was just a big canvas tent set up in a mud-walled courtyard, lit inside by kerosene lanterns that glowed softly through the fabric. We stopped the truck and walked inside, and we were just wrapping up our conversation with the doctor when an old Soviet flatbed pulled up.

It was the first truckload of wounded, the guys who had stepped on mines. They were stunned and quiet, each face blackened by the force of a land mine blast, and their eyes cast around in confusion at the sudden activity surrounding them. The medics lifted the men off the back of the truck, carried them inside, and laid them on metal cots. A soldier standing next to me clucked his disapproval when he saw the wounds. The effect of a land mine on a person is so devastating that it is almost disorienting. It takes several minutes to understand that the sack of bones and blood and shredded cloth that you’re looking at used to be a man’s leg. One man lost a leg at the ankle; another man lost a leg at the shin; a third lost an entire leg to the waist. This man didn’t seem to be in pain, and he didn’t seem to have any understanding of what had happened to him. Both would come later. “My back hurts,” he kept saying. “There’s something wrong with my back.”

The medics worked quickly and wordlessly in the lamplight, wrapping the stumps of the legs with gauze. The wounded men would be flown out by helicopter the next day and would eventually wind up in a hospital in Tajikistan. “This is the war,” Reza hissed over and over again as he shot photos. “This is what war means.”

Reza had covered a lot of wars and seen plenty of this in his life, but I hadn’t. I ducked out of the tent and stood in the cold darkness, leaning against a wall. Dogs were barking in the distance, and a soldier shouted into his radio that the wounded were coming in and they needed more medicine, now. I thought about what Reza had said, and after a while I went back inside. This is the war too, and you have to look straight at it, I told myself. You have to look straight at all of it or you have no business being here at all.