An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World

10. A MATTER OF POLITICS: THE GAME (1982)

As long as they grow in the wild, principles of life and meaningful action do quite well, but when they are plucked and brought into our dreary world of imperfect results, they begin to wilt. Happily, our noses are so accustomed to the stink of our enemies’ putrefying ideas that when our own give over wilting and commence to decay, we can use them nonetheless.^*

The Young Man, however, did not yet know this. As yet he had established only the following:

1. The suffering that besieged him could not be justified. That put him very definitely on the Afghan side.

2. His belief that he might somehow be of use could not be justified.

3. Being victims did not make the Afghans any better or worse than anybody else.

There did not seem much left to do, then, in those days while he waited for the Brigadier’s party to finish its preparations to go inside, but to be analytical. That was all that he was really good at. Everything was melting in his hands. But at least the following must be true: I am on the side of the Afghans; therefore the Resistance has to be wonderful. (In his mind, the Mujahideen were all storybook de Gaulles; too much reading had relegated him far behind even the zero point of simple ignorance.)

“You really want to know about the parties?” laughed General N. “I can take you around, Young Man. It will be very educational for you.”

Since the man whom I call the Reliable Source was promised that he would not be identified in any way, I will abstain from any description of him or his surroundings. He was hospitable, as everyone was, and gave the Young Man a Sprite. — The difficulties across the border had begun, he said, in 1973. —Yes, it would have been in 1973 that the Soviet Union became especially interested; so the Young Man supposed. That was when Daoud overthrew the monarchy in Afghanistan.^† And when the Soviet Union got interested, then Pakistan had better get interested, too. — The Young Man switched on the recorder. “So you started studying the problem in 1973?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the Reliable Source, “in ’73 our government began to see changes on the horizon — not only in Afghanistan itself but in the entire region. You know, the Chinese leadership was aging, and so they would be going out inside some period of time. One had to allow for that.” —He was ticking off the falling colossi on his fingers. — “Then the Russian leadership was aging. No one could figure out with certainty who would follow in their shoes.” —Another finger fell. — “Much closer at home, we saw the Shah of Iran. Now, we knew that he would possibly have to go under to a popular movement at some point in time. There was no organized and organic system which could take over and run the government after him, because there were only court ministers and such.” —Another finger. — “Then, closer at home, we saw Afghanistan. With Zaher Shah ousted, we began to have real nightmares — in this sense: that as long as Daoud remained, there was some stability in the country, but once Daoud went out, then unknown people would start emerging. And that is what set us upon a certain plan of action — because we had our own national compulsions, Young Man! — In addition to that, Afghan people had never been friendly to us since ’47.^‡ They had also conducted certain activity in this province, and in Punjab, and these areas.”

“That was because of Pushtunistan?”^§ the Young Man said.

“Well, that was the racket,” laughed the Reliable Source, “but I mean it must have been the other superpower interests who brought it about. Naturally there were proxies who were playing that game, but whether it was at the behest of the Indians, or the Russians, or their own …” —He shrugged. To the Young Man he seemed rather lonely. — “But right from the time we joined the United Nations they had opposed our entry, the Afghans. That was the only country that opposed our entrance. — But then we developed a relationship. The government of Afghanistan and of Pakistan both knew that if tomorrow, in case one of us or the other of us went out …” —The Reliable Source had a trick of not finishing his sentences. Partly, no doubt, that was because English was not his main language, although he spoke it almost fluently; partly it must have been because now everything about the Afghanistan situation seemed so conditional, vanished, wistful. In case one of us or the other of us went out… — And now, of course, they had both gone out. — “Daoud in 1976 when he came here,” said the Reliable Source, “he told Mr. Bhutto, he said, ‘If from the north, it is us today; tomorrow it is you. If from the south’ (that is, India), ‘today it is you; it is us tomorrow.’ So they could see the realities. But they had to play a certain chess game that was going on” (and in his mind’s ear the Young Man could hear Daoud calling yet again for a plebiscite in the

North-West Frontier Province; he could hear the yells and rifle shots of Afridi tribesmen on horseback, come across the border to found the sovereign state of Pushtunistan no matter what the Pakistanis might say; he could hear the border closing, slamming like a door so that the nomads could no longer cross the Durand Line^‖ for their summer grazing in the snowy grassy mountains as they had done for hundreds or thousands of years) —“but the Afghans never were against our genuine interest,” said the Reliable Source, “in the sense that they never interfered in our communication or our …” —Again his voice trailed off. — “In the ’65 war^b and in the ’71 war,^a if they did not lend us support, at least they did not add to our strains. But then when Zaher Shah went out, we thought that henceforth that would be lacking! The royalty gave a continued stability to the system in Afghanistan: today Zaher Shah, tomorrow it will be his son or someone else; and there was continuity of government in Afghanistan; it remained a stable area. Now, with Daoud’s ouster of Zaher Shah, we knew that an element of uncertainty had come into being. And it had to be looked after.

“In addition, as I have said, there were the little bomb blasts and pinpricks in this area. Now, at the same point in time these groups — and they remained as such, as one group, until the fifth of July 1977 …” —The Reliable Source was getting something just right in his head. — “Well, first of all came a gentleman by the name of Habib Raman. He was then later captured by the Afghans in ’75; he was”—the Reliable Source drummed his fingers—“brutally tortured and finally killed in Kabul Jail. Then, of course, Gulbuddin and those people. Rabbani was brought in later, as he was actually kept in the background because he would not disclose his identity. We kept asking them for some time whether they had a leadership which would meet the situation in Afghanistan, and they kept insisting that they had a man but they would not disclose him. But later on in ’74 they brought him, and they said, ‘This is Rabbani, and he is our genuine leader.’

“Now, these people had come away — one, against the oppression of Daoud; the other factor was that we wanted to bring home to Daoud’s government that two can play that same game with bomb blasts here and things, playing this game across the border. You see, that is what we did in 1975 in Panjsher,^c and we brought home one lesson to Daoud with regard to ending the Pushtunistan problem and getting recognition of the Durand Line and so forth. So that was one of the objectives.”

“So Gulbuddin and Rabbani and so forth helped with these bomb blasts?” said the Young Man, trying to conceal his dismay. Somehow he had thought that they were freedom fighters.

“No, they organized, let us say, an uprising; it was not just bomb blasts; it was a national uprising against the Daoud regime in the Panjsher Valley.”

“Now, what did they want? Did they want Zaher Shah back?”

“They did, yes, because at that time they were all agreed on that, and so was our government — because we thought, you see, that any revolution which came about in Afghanistan at this point in time would not be in the people’s interest, in the sense that politically and socially they were not mature enough to take on the responsibilities of a revolution, be it leftist or rightist. So we thought,” said the Reliable Source, “that they required more time. And that time could only be forthcoming if Zaher Shah was brought back, and he had given them a few more years for education to start coming up. Now, these groups had also come up, because of the social awakening, like the Parcham and Khalq,^d and these elements like the Mujahideen were already here, too. But they needed time.”

Clearly the Reliable Source enjoyed the role of mentor. The Young Man felt like a little boy who should have been in bed, being allowed just this once to stay up, raising himself on tiptoe so that he could see where the balls went on the international pool table — and when the Reliable Source had been a man of consequence, in the days before Bhutto’s fall, he had let the Afghans stay up late, too, and taught them tricks. He told the Young Man how it had been decided, for instance, to extend the franchise in the tribal areas to include all adult males; formerly only the tribal elders had had it. — “So if you make things better for people this side of the Durand Line,” he said, “then the Afghans start looking toward Pakistan. So we wanted the elements which were lying on our borders to be looking toward us, to look up to us for change. Most of the tribes are so divided that half the elements are on the other side of the Durand Line, cis- and trans-Durand Line; they have ethnic commonality …”

The Young Man wanted to word his question tactfully. — “How did Gulbuddin, Rabbani and so forth feel about the fact that the, uh, main impetus for these changes was coming from Pakistan?”

“They agreed with us,” said the Reliable Source blandly, “for they were also, at that time, not quite so militant. They knew that our policy of evolution vis-à-vis the tribal areas had succeeded, and that the Afghans were also looking for these same social reforms. As I said, they were not revolutionaries at that stage. But they wanted a change of two things. One was against the tyranny of Daoud, and the second one was of course what they could see coming in ideologically from across the borders.”

“One of the more important events in modern Afghan history occurred in 1959,” writes the historian Louis Dupree. “With no prior public announcement or official proclamation, Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Naim,^e other members of the royal family, the cabinet, and high-ranking army officers appeared on the reviewing stand with their wives and daughters on the second day of Jeshn [Independence Week]… The women had exposed their faces for all to see. Just thirty years before, the government of King Amanullah fell because (among other reform attempts) he abolished purdah and the chadri and established coeducational schools in Kabul.

“… the large crowd of spectators stared in stunned disbelief.

“… the inevitable happened. A delegation of religious leaders requested and received an audience with the Prime Minister.

The mullahs accused him of being anti-Islamic for permitting atheistic Communist and Christian Westerners to pervert the nation … Immediately after leaving the Prime Minister’s office the religious leaders began to preach against the regime. Sardar Daoud’s efficient secret police arrested and jailed about fifty of the ringleaders … Government spokesmen informed the imprisoned religious leaders that removal of the veil was voluntary, which was only partly true, for the government did force officials to attend public functions with unveiled wives in order to set examples for the masses … The weight of this logic (plus the fact that Afghan prisons are designed to punish, not rehabilitate) convinced the mullahs of the error of their ways, so the Prime Minister ordered their release after about a week of incarceration. Not all religious leaders accepted the voluntary abolition of the veil and other reforms, however, because each intrusion into their customary power erodes their secular influence.”^f

In his pamphlet What Type of Struggle? (whose cover bears as its device a shining Qur’an nested between swords and wreaths), Professor B. Rabbani, the head of Jamiat-i-Islami Afghanistan, writes the following (September 1981): “… manners and behaviours should be selected very carefully. For instance; where preaching can be a mean [sic] for invitation (to the Way of Allah), implication of arms is not concordant with the wisdom of Islamic teaching. On the other hand, if expression and persuasion is not able to penetrate through the closed doors of contumacy and deviation or arguments and reasonings do not influence proudness, and if invitation is faced with inimical resistance of vanity, then non-implication of weapons (conduct of armed struggle) is idiocy and ignorance.”^g

Oh, how nice it would have been if the Mujahideen had appeared spontaneously following the Russian invasion! It would still have been almost perfect if they had come into being after Taraki’s coup in 1978, because THAT was probably bad, too, but if Rabbani and Gulbuddin and the rest of them had begun as creatures of the Pakistanis, then they were bandits, as the Soviets called them; they were terrorists. — It was very difficult for me to accept the tainted origins of necessity.

The National Uprising that the Reliable Source was paying homage to occurred in July of 1975. It was called the Panjsher Insurgency. Everyone agrees that the rebels were led by the mullahs. And who trained them? Pakistan, of course, denied that it had had anything to do with it. The Afghan population failed to join, and the government helicopters came quickly, shooting the rebels down; they captured ninety-three and found all but sixteen guilty, and then Daoud went on with his business.

But does what some of the groups were matter now? Was the Young Man right to feel that the Afghan Resistance was tainted by its origins? — I think not — not at present. I think that the effects of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan have been appallingly evil. Resistance is justified no matter where it comes from. Then, too, if we do accept the Reliable Source’s account, can we say that Daoud was right in his efforts to modernize the country? That (thank God for small favors) is a matter now so laughably academic…

Comparing politics to a chess game, as the Reliable Source loved to do, is, of course, trite in our own mass society, where we expect our politicians to play, and if necessary cheat, for our well-being, while the newspapers glowingly explain the moves for us — for the comparison is trite precisely because it is so valid. The Reliable Source’s use of the phrase was equally justified. — It was the British who first began to speak of the “Great Game” between their empire and Russia’s; and Afghanistan was at the center of the board.^h Every new development was less a willed decision than an inevitable crystallization, for the Game was so Great as to be playing the players rather than the reverse. — “In the natural process of civilized and civilizing Powers which I have already dwelt upon,” wrote Lord Lytton on September 4, 1878 (they were invading

Afghanistan again that year), “wherever we leave a vacuum, Russia will assuredly fill it up.” In the last few years before the Soviets gave Afghanistan their Christmas present, as the Reliable Source saw his anxieties congeal and solidify into real monsters, the Game continued, subject to the same pressures of cosmic law: Each of the players made his move because the dynamic equilibrium of the Game forced him to; he was only trying to hold his own, you see. More years fell by the wayside; we spoke of the requirements of Containment when we fought Soviet bogeys in Central America; while they explained that progression from one social arrangement to another occurs only on a one-way escalator, so that feudalism in Afghanistan MUST give way to socialism as a result of Economic Laws, and all the U.S.S.R. was doing was protecting and implementing and developing. Both players advised their pawns to relax and continue down the slaughter chute. — “Under the banner of the great April Revolution,ⁱ forward along the path toward full unity of all the national and progressive forces, toward the final victory of the national democratic, anti-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution, for the creation of a new proud, free and independent Afghanistan!” screamed Babrak Karmal after being airlifted into office. (Naturally, it is not in my interest to quote a U.S. counter-example; for if I were so principled as to insist that we help the Afghans for their own sake, not because they are anti-Soviet, whom would I have left to advance their cause with me?) — History shows that the Game has always gone on, no matter who the players are; so if the world must indeed be run in this rotten way we should not blame the Reliable Source, but honor him for his honesty. How ludicrous, how foully ludicrous, when a player pretends not to be playing (though that is part of the Game, too), as when, for instance, the Soviets insist that they uphold the quaint ethnic strictures of backward countries: In the Moscow News Weekly No. 24 (June 21–28, 1981), a column entitled “The Home Hearth: From Our Correspondent in Kabul” has the Elder of the Pashtun Tribe say, “The U.S.S.R.’s military help to Afghanistan is in full accord with the code of honor of the Pashtun tribe, the Pashtunwali. It says that if an enemy has attacked your country you can appeal to your neighbors to help oppose the enemy.” —As the Persian proverb runs, “If the king says at noonday, ‘It is night,’ the wise man says, ‘Behold the stars.’ ”

“Did the Mujahideen groups accept and trust you and President Bhutto?” asked the Young Man.

“They basically trusted us. And that is why they remained with us from when they first came, in October 1973.^j I would say that there were various periods when we were more or less happy or unhappy with each other in the sense that from October ’73 until about November ’74 they were very happy with us because I was here, and I was looking after them.” —The Reliable Source sighed. — “Then, fortunately or unfortunately, my successor who came, he thought he was a soldier, and should not dabble in this political business. So he then deprived us … He, let us say, went slow on it. It was a question of policy. It was not a question of personality. The result was that there was a little relaxation in the manner of support.”

“It must have been a very tricky job for you,” the Young Man said.

“Why?”

“Well, you must have been worried about Mr. Daoud.”

“No, at that time they were playing their games with us. So the fact is, when one side is trying to play a game according to its own rules, then you also set your own set of rules. We lost Habib Raman, but we brought a very major change to Daoud’s mind. He was compelled to come and talk with us.^k He was compelled also to understand the nature of those changes, and that is why he requested us, in 1977, ‘Please postpone your election on the elder tribal franchise basis, in the tribal area, for one year.’ He said, ‘You give me some time, so I can bring about a certain amount of reform, so that otherwise, they would rebel against me.’ Because you could see people feeling the change over here.”

How desperate was Daoud by the time he talked with Bhutto and the Reliable Source? Did he have any suspicion of what his end, what his country’s end, was going to be? And did the Reliable Source feel less enmity toward him during that meeting, simply by virtue of his precarious position? For however much he disliked Daoud, I imagine that he cared for Taraki somewhat less.

“Now what was the reaction in Afghanistan and in those political groups when Bhutto was replaced by General Zia?” asked the Young Man.

“You see, that is when the split amongst the group came. At the time when they were looked after, they were undoubtedly controlled in a certain manner, in the sense that they remained in one group.”

“What form did that control take?”

“By—understanding,” said the Reliable Source. “They understood and we understood that we and they had a common program, with the result that we were supporting them to the extent that they required. And they understood, too, that we were using each man according to his ability. Now, this fellow Gulbuddin, he is a militant; Khalis is militant; Nabi^l … they are all militant. Rabbani, on the other hand, he is one who would like to carry it out through a program of education. He was a preacher in Scandinavian countries. He came to us toward the end of ’76.† So we told him that he was doing an adequate job in Scandinavia, and he should continue over there; no need for him at the moment, because all the other groups were here, and they were united … But they were all agreed on wanting Zaher Shah back. That is why their representatives went and met with him at end of ’76, early ’77, and he agreed to come and lead them, because they also needed a central leadership.”

“So why isn’t Zaher Shah here coordinating things now?”

“Ah, that is because General Zia got cold feet, I suppose.”

“You think all the major factions still want Zaher Shah?”

“Not today. You see, Khomeini had come by then, and that was one reason; and secondly I told you that after July ’77^m they became a rabble; they became a disorganized group for lack of support. Everyone started looking around. Someone went to Kuwait, someone went to Saudi Arabia and so on, because they were not getting the support they wanted or desired within Pakistan.”

“So where are they getting their support now?” asked the Young Man.

“Now? From the Americans.”

“From the C.I.A.?”

“Yes.”

“General Zia isn’t—?”

“That — that is, my own impression is that, because, uh, there are so many things one cannot say directly,” cried the Reliable Source. “If you turn this tape recorder off, I will tell you …”

The recorder was shut off for ten minutes.ⁿ

“There is an obvious connection,” says the Tass statement on Afghanistan of December 1979, “between visits of American emissaries to Pakistan, their visits to some areas in Afghanistan and the operations of the rebel forces. It is not a chance coincidence that the mutiny in Herat to which Afghan reaction Washington and Peking were establishing special significance was started immediately after one of the ringleaders of Afghan counterrevolutionaries was received at the U.S. Department of State. There is data about the attempts of U.S. representatives to get from the Pakistani leadership a consent to still wider use of Pakistani territory for sending armed groups into Afghanistan. Even wider participation in aggressive actions against Afghanistan was being demanded of Pakistan.

“There is no need for special insight to be able to see through the motives of the United States’s actions. There are figures in Washington who persistently look for replacements for the positions which were lost as a result of the fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran. Cracks appeared in the notorious ‘strategic arc’ that Americans have been building for decades close to the southern borders of the Soviet Union, and in order to mend these cracks it was sought to bring under the Afghan people and also peoples of other regions.

“… External imperialist reaction is working constantly to undermine the organs of state power and disorganize the ranks of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan.”

I imagine that every word of this is true.

Well, perhaps it was no wonder that almost every Afghan or Pakistani I talked to believed that I was some omnipotent C.I.A. manipulator; —that almost every Afghan or Pakistani thought that he was controlled;—that in Peshawar they kept saying that a secret deal had been made whereby the Soviets would be allowed to hold on to Afghanistan and the Americans were to take over the Middle East. — What would these people have thought if they could have been, say, in San Francisco on February 12, 1987 (a rainy day), watching an anti-Asian rally in front of the Korean Embassy, the workmen with their heavy slickers, the good old boys twirling unbrellas, waving American flags and yelling, “Flag! Flag! Flag! Flag!”^o —The young men looked serious and stupid. The older ones were smiling. Everyone was tremendously excited. The iron-workers’ union was there, saying that Korea was exporting unemployment. —“GET THE GOOKS OUT OF AMERICA!” —For the Americans also believed that they were controlled.

And yet the situation was not entirely symmetrical. For when the Young Man learned that so many Mujahideen groups had come into play long before the final change of government, as maliciously twiddling and poking fingers of Pakistani Realpolitik, he felt a deep sense of shock — and yet he ought to have known how matters stood as soon as he saw the Brigadier’s letter!

…that after two months of the agreement we will be helped with the following: …40 Powerful explosive Bumbs…

Somehow when his own government did it, it did not seem either surprising or bad. Why was this?

“How do you think we can best help the Mujahideen groups now?” the Young Man said.

“The problem is still the same as it was,” said the Reliable Source. “It requires a central leadership; it requires a central figure who enjoys the confidence of all the elements of the Mujahideen, and that is the only way you can bring about unity amongst them. It is first amongst themselves, and then between them and the tribal elders, but first of all a program must be chopped out, about what is the best form of government that should come about initially in Afghanistan.”

“And who can that figure be if it isn’t Zaher Shah?”

“Well, it has to be someone by consensus. In tribal society that is always simple. But the mullahs — Gulbuddin and Rabbani — they will not accept that. The tribes will accept that, yes, but not the mullahs. So again you are at cross-purposes. The fact was, in 1973 to ’77, though we voted that we wanted Zaher Shah and we did not get him, the fact is that they remained an effective group, because there was effective coordination. And that could be brought about even today. — Now, the history of Afghanistan is that the kingmakers have been the tribesmen of Pakistan. What is the kingdom of Afghanistan? It’s a grouping of tribal groups brought about by Ahmad Shah in 1747. It is a medieval age there still, a tribal society, and this is what the Russians miscalculated, and this is why there are uprisings always. Now, what was Ahmad Shah doing? If there was uprising in Kabul you use Kandahar. If an uprising in Kandahar you play off Kabul. So these two elements were always made to balance each other. Or the Pushtuns were made to balance the rest. And so this sort of thing carried on. And this was how we operated as well. This was part of our program: that the groups of Gulbuddin and all were just to raise the issue, or bring it to the focus in case something happened. Our own tribesmen, of ethnic commonality, would also move in such large numbers that they would then have their effect and bring about that change. That was the program. Now, this government again miscalculated and lost an opportunity between April of ’78 and December of ’79^p—this could have been successfully achieved.”

“Given this tribal predominance and the fact that the tribes move back and forth across the Durand Line, can the Soviet Union digest Afghanistan without also digesting Pakistan?” asked the Young Man.

“It depends, you see,” said the Reliable Source. “They have, let us say, already digested Afghanistan to all intents and purposes. Now with the Geneva talks I think they are just going to give the situation de facto or de jure recognition. I do not think the Russians will enjoy any additional advantage by taking Pakistan. Now, Afghanistan was important from our point of view in the old times, when their objective was Delhi, and the army must move through the N.W.F.P. and those regions. But with that violently left movement in 1971, the Treaty of Friendship and things, the Russians and the Indians have a common axis, a common interest. So the objective is not Delhi anymore. If it is the Gulf, or denial of the Gulf oil to the West, then the next objective will automatically be Iran; it will not be us. If the goal is Baluchistan, then it will be us.”

“So you don’t think the Russians will care that they won’t have entirely subdued the tribes in eastern Afghanistan?”

“The point is, if the Pakistan government is not willing to interfere in Afghan affairs, then these tribesmen will be neutralized, as they are today. With all these events taking place in Afghanistan, the tribesmen on our side remain neutral. But if the government had motivated these tribes, then of course the question would have come about.”

“What would you say the chances are of the Russians being pushed out of Afghanistan?”

“None whatever.”

Well, and so the Reliable Source was wrong, for the Soviets did, of course, leave Afghanistan in 1989, and yet the Great Game may not be over.

* The Qur’an puts this prettily, remarking what a divine wonder it is that the place from which milk issues is located between the blood and the dung.

† See the entry in the Chronology for that year.

‡ That is, since the very birth of Pakistan.

§ The ideal or specter (depending on who looked at it) of a separate state for the Pakistani and Afghan Pathans, in Pakistani territory. The inhabitants of the North-West Frontier Province were mainly Pathans, like my friend General N., like his guest the Brigadier, like the refugees whom I interviewed. They had more in common with their fellows in eastern Afghanistan, with whom they had traded and intermarried for thousands of years, than with someone from Sind or Baluchistan. It was impossible for a foreigner to understand much of what they thought and what was important to them. The tribespeople on the border passed easily through the Soviet checkpoint on the Durand Line to trade with their counterparts. In those early days before the United States and the Arabs had begun to give much of their so-called covert aid to the Mujahideen, Pathans sold to Pathans. The principal business of the town of Darra, through which I passed in an International Rescue Committee van (it was a tribal area; we were not allowed to stop), was the manufacture of arms, from.38 caliber pistols made to resemble ballpoint pens to antiaircraft guns, all hand-produced. The General said that the people of Darra could copy any weapon so well that external inspection could not determine the original. He also said that those replicas sometimes blew up when fired. The Afghans were faithful patrons in Darra in 1982.

‖ The Pakistan-Afghanistan border (especially in the North-West Frontier Province). See Chronology, entry for 1893.

a The war between Pakistan and India, which Pakistan lost.

b An indecisive skirmish between Pakistan and India.

c An attempted putsch against Daoud. See Chronology, entry for 1975.

d The two rival leftist groups in Afghanistan, whom the Russians were to use in their chess game. See Chronology, entry for 1965.

e Daoud’s brother. Daoud was Prime Minister under Zaher Shah from 1953 to 1963, when he resigned over an imbroglio over the Pushtunistan issue. Daoud and Naim were members of the Royal Family. The Constitution of 1964 prohibited anyone in the Royal Family from holding political office. Daoud seized power on July 17, 1973, when Zaher Shah was on a visit to Italy. Naim was one of his advisers during his five years of power. Both of these men and their families were liquidated in a leftist coup on April 27, 1978 (see Chronology).

f Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, pp. 530–33.

g P. 9.

h See the Chronology’s entries for 1844–1907.

i I.e., Taraki’s coup in 1978.

j This would have been a few months after Daoud’s coup. He had already begun to send his 1,600 Parcham cadres into the rural areas to preach modernization. The mullahs’ hackles were rising.

k Which he did the year after the Panjsher Uprising (see Chronology, entry for 1976).

l Here a recapitulation may be useful. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar ran the right-wing group Hezb-i-Islami, Maulvi Mohammad Yunus Khalis controlled a splinter group from Hezb-i named after him, and Maulvi Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi ran Herakat-i-Inqelab-i-Islami, an organization somewhat more to the liberal taste. † This sentence makes it clear that the Reliable Source is not always so reliable in the matter of dates, for earlier (see p. 176) he had said that Rabbani came in 1974.

m I.e., after Zia displaced Bhutto.

n In June 1982, when this interview was given, the United States had not yet admitted that it was supporting the Mujahideen via Pakistan. Therefore this was interesting news to me at the time. Five years later, it seemed only vaguely sad and sordid, like the Panjsher “Uprising”—and sadder and more sordid still because I support overt and covert aid to the Mujahideen. How true, alas, that there are so many things that one cannot say directly!

o Or, as they must say in Afghanistan: “Parcham! Parcham! Parcham! Parcham!”

p I.e., the civil convulsions in Afghanistan just before the invasion.

11. A MATTER OF POLITICS: FRIENDLY ENEMIES (1982)

Of course the Afghans were unified now. The Young Man knew they must be; he had read it in the papers over and over. They had even formed a common organization called Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. — Well, no. Actually there were two rival organizations by this name, and they hated each other. But everyone told him that until recently there had been some trouble, but now the factions were as tight as the Three Musketeers. (In his notebook he wrote: “Need to know how often they kill each other before I know whether I can countenance supporting them.”)^*

“So now the Mujahideen never fight each other?” the Young Man inquired.

“That is very much exaggerated, you see,” said the refugee camp administrator quickly. “That news item is very much exaggerated now. There might have been some very few cases, but not the thing it has become in Western media. It was individual enmity that developed. That was one case. Another case was the soldiers of the Karmal regime, you see. They wanted to surrender to one party of the Mujahideen. While they were on the way, Jamiat-i-Islami people caught them. And they were going to shoot them. And the other party, Hezb-i-Islami, told them that you shouldn’t. And a fight developed … There was a fight, a long, long time ago. But now it has finished.”

“So everyone is unified now?”

The administrator nodded. They were drinking lessee in a guest tent, and the administrator finished his cup and held it up until an old man gave him more.

“Everyone is united and quite satisfied,” he said. “And if somebody body wants to surrender, he surrenders to the whole organization, you see.”

The General took the Young Man to see Professor Majrooh. Everyone meant well in this interview: the General in bringing them together, the Young Man in wishing to determine whether U.S. covert aid was effective and sufficient (imagine the laughable scene! imagine this Young Man who was about as well suited to deal with spy matters as a grasshopper!), Majrooh in aiming to help his fellow Afghans; but because the Young Man’s role was so confusingly pure, differences soon began to swarm like midges, and the usual ambiguity of these affairs dizzied the Young Man far more than the heat.

The Young Man considered that if he were going to send his nickels to a Mujahideen organization (the misunderstanding might be succinctly put by saying that Majrooh must have thought: If the boy has come all the way over here, then surely he must at least have dimes!), then he ought to make sure that said nickels went to the group that devoted the greatest proportion of its resources to killing Soviet soldiers inside as opposed to killing members of other factions in the Resistance.

And Professor Majrooh — who can blame him for responding as he did? In his mind, factionalism was unfortunate but it did not ethically prejudice the whole. And in this he was correct.

“I was a professor at Kabul University,” he said. “I was also Dean of the Faculty. I left Afghanistan at the beginning of the Soviet invasion, at the beginning of ’80, and came to help here, in my way, the war of liberation. And we are here; we have a small office. We receive information from inside and pass it on to the outside world.”

“And you are not aligned with any particular group?” asked the Young Man.

“No, we are not. The Afghan Information Office is independent and we try to be impartial, though of course we are on the side of the Resistance, but we try to have good relations with all the groups.”

“That must be very difficult,” said the Young Man politely, while on the sofa the General smiled wearily.

“A difficult task, of course,” said Majrooh brightly, “not to present the picture of one side or group, and to tell the situation as it really is: the serious burden of most refugees in Pakistan today, you know; and then we have the refugees who could not cross the border. These people must be helped. We must find a way — I don’t know how — to reach the people inside. The French are doing this, but their means are limited; the problem is too big for them.”

And he looked at the Young Man hopefully.

“How well would you say the officially recognized parties here in Pakistan represent the people in Afghanistan?”

“All are present on the fighting front inside,” said Professor Majrooh. “But they do not represent the whole. There are lots of population there who are just fighting for themselves — the Civil Defense system. Anyway, they are representing an important part of the fighting.”

“What percentage of the people in Afghanistan would you say are supporters of one or more of these officially recognized groups?”

“They make up fifty percent of the fighting forces.”

“What about the other fifty percent?”

“They have their own weapons which they captured from the Roos, and they have their own region, and they are not moving from there. And an important part inside is free; the Roos have only the big cities.”

“What would be the most practical means of distributing arms?” asked the Young Man. “If I were to give arms to Gulbuddin, say, he might use these arms to, oh, for instance, kidnap someone from the National Islamic Front.”

Professor Majrooh laughed politely. (It was here, I would say, that a shadow began to creep over the interview.)

“So can we give them directly to the people who need them,” the Young Man persisted, “or is there some party which is relatively more appealing than the others?”

“First people must agree to give arms to the Mujahideen,” replied Majrooh drily, “and secondly there is the question of what type of arms, and only thirdly the question will be this, and I think we will be led to discuss and study this with the professionals, the experts. And I think there are ways. But it cannot be answered like that.”

“Well, I don’t represent anyone,” said the Young Man, “but so far I don’t have anyone I’d want to give arms to. Can we start this process? Can we propose a favorite candidate?”

“No, no,” said Majrooh, much as a senator might say, “No comment.” “I would not propose it. That would be premature.”

“You have no suggestions as to whom I might go to to find someone who could use these arms in an effective way against the Russians? And not against others?”

“No, no, they don’t do that,” said Majrooh. “If you study — if you have time — you will understand that all the groups who are here, they are quite efficiently fighting. A small proportion, of course, and there are always in a situation like this internal problems and problems of organization, but it is not the whole picture. And now, as you have heard, they are fighting in Panjsher quite effectively, and the fifth Soviet offensive was just checked there …”

“That’s mainly the Jamiat group, Rabbani’s group?”

“No, I have told you, there are many others who have come to help, as for instance from Ghazni. It’s not a serious problem, as you seem to think. They’re not just fighting each other. There are some, but it’s not the general rule.”

“So you think that the United States should arm the Resistance.”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, if you could give me a proposal as to how that ought to be done …”

Majrooh fitted his fingertips together. “I think that we … we are in Pakistan, you know. And we try to have good relations with the official authorities, and I think that all this help must come through the official authorities.”

How pleased the Reliable Source would have been to hear these words! Evidently the puppet masters yet held the strings.

“So we should give arms to the government of Pakistan and let them decide how to distribute them?” asked the Young Man.

“No, I would not make a recommendation like that. Only when they decide, the Americans, they should discuss it with the authorities in Pakistan.”

From the sofa the General said, “I know there is a firm in London that can deliver arms anywhere in the world, including Pakistan.”

“The Americans, they know how to do it,” said Majrooh. “With the Pakistani authorities. They know the problem.”

“If you had those weapons,” said the Young Man, “it would just depend on the circumstances who you gave them to?”

“I’d not accept them personally,” said Professor Majrooh. “I’d tell you where to go, but I would not take this military responsibility. But when the question is there, I think I could give you some advice — practical advice.”

The offices of the factions were scattered about Peshawar. You took a rickshaw. If the driver was Pakistani he might have to stop and ask directions a few times, but an Afghan would know. The metal trim of Pakistani-driven rickshaws was decorated with pictures of sexy Indian movie stars, whereas the Afghans preferred pictures of men with machine guns.

The “liberal” coalition known as Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen was neither close to nor far from the fundamentalist Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. It was in a tan cement building several stories high. There were no guards, but then everyone seemed to be a guard. Big, well-built men lounged around in the courtyard and on the terraces, chatting, cradling their guns. Pizzarda,^† the Secretary-General, had work to do, so he took the Young Man to his office, told him to be comfortable, and sat behind his desk. Everyone had stood up at his arrival except for a fat man in a turban who slumbered on the bench, head forward, hands on lap, as the fan droned slowly. — Pizzarda slipped a second pair of glasses over his first, for reading, and began to sign papers.

This Pizzarda was a hospitable man. The General knew him well. Pizzarda had taken the Young Man personally to see the Hazarat Museum, which was a flat in a private apartment building where bits of rocket bombs and captured helicopter parts were mounted on a heavy brown pasteboard, along with gunship helicopter bullets, shrapnel fragments, a dead Ivan’s dogtag, a metal plaque that said something in Russian about what to do before you charged the accumulators; and from the corner Pizzarda took a Soviet helmet with a bullet hole going in and going out, and he grinned. They sat on the floor and had green tea, and later the Young Man took pictures, so that there stood Pizzarda forever, wearing his silver spectacles, unsmiling now with thin lips when the Young Man raised his camera for the Afghanistan Picture Show, and his beard was silver and gray and his wristwatch glittered and the helmet glittered and there was a bloodstain around the hole.

Watching him at work, the Young Man looked interestedly round the office, and it was at that time that Judge Dr. Said came in. Seeing that Pizzarda would be occupied for a few minutes longer, he agreed to talk with the Young Man. He was a tall, handsome, Semitic-looking man with a thick, dark beard. He spoke an Oxford-accented English.

“In your belief, are there many Communists in the other factions of the Mujahideen?” asked the Young Man. (It had been the General’s shrewd advice to ask about Communists. Anyone considered dangerous was called a Communist.)

Smiling, Dr. Said put an arm around the Young Man’s shoulder. “That is a very difficult question, my dear friend,” said he. “Nobody graphically understands how to put a graph on the heart of the people and the totality of the people, to know what faith they have got. But by political charter framework of the Mujahideen, by our efforts, by our endeavors, by our doctrine and our way of life, nobody is entitled to join who is thought to be pro-Communist.”

“So what do you do when you find a Communist?”

“Then we search to find the Communist people; when we find them it is difficult for the Communist people! It is difficult for us to find who is Communist. The Russians are not only fighting us by weapon; they are fighting us by K.G.B.; they are fighting us by any available type of means.”

“So, suppose that I were a member of your group, and you discovered conclusive evidence that I was a Communist. What would happen to me?”

“You should receive your tort, your punishment.”

“What would that be? Would you kill me?”

“Yeah.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Where?” said Dr. Said. “In Peshawar, or abroad?”

“In Peshawar.”

“This is difficult, because some of these questions should not be divulged, but our effort is continuously being — done, to find such people, and to give them punishment. This is our understanding — our law, and our charter. Those who are Communist by their nature, now they can realize that they can never ever divert this thing from Islamic roots. Do you understand my point?”

“Yes,” said the Young Man dutifully. He gathered his courage. “Just a few days ago,” he said, “if I’m not mistaken, uh, someone, um, a doctor was kidnapped by the Gulbuddin group, uh, because he was believed to be a Communist. Do you know anything about that?”

“No,” said Dr. Said firmly. “Just only as a rumor I have heard that. And there is no evidence, and I do not base my judgment on hearsay evidence!”

“Maybe you could tell me about an actual incident?” suggested the Young Man brightly.

“There is no evidence available to me.”

“I won’t press you.”

“Thank you.”

A few minutes later, when the interview had been concluded, Dr. Said picked up a dog-eared letter from his desk. It was in English. He had evidently forgotten about the young American snooping behind him. The letter was a plea to Afghan Refugee Commissioner Abdullah — who was said to be a partisan of Gulbuddin^‡—for clemency and help in regard to this very same kidnapped doctor. Dr. Said wrote something on the letter in Pushtu, stamped it with his seal, and gestured to one of his men, who took it off somewhere.

“What do you do from day to day?” asked the Young Man.

“My actual job, according to the law, and the procedure, and the charter, comes to enforcement. This alliance consists of thirteen different committees. Each committee does its own job. For instance, Secretariat. What do they do? They do their own job. Political Committee does perform its own job. Research and Inspection Committee performs its own job. And I am the president of the Research and Inspection Committee. Because I studied law, I was a judge in Afghanistan in the Supreme Court. In various cases, I do investigation. There is interrogation of the people, clashes, offenses — minor offense, major offense — felony, misdemeanor …”

“So what do you do in the course of an interrogation?”

“Ah, interrogation is, as far as we are concerned, a very great major crime. To do the research, this is a police function — to find the criminal, to bring him in for interrogation, and when they are brought for interrogation, then as a prosecution I determine my own vote on these people, and I send the vote and interrogate these people, in a very human way. After the completion of the case according to the realm of international law, we send the case to the Commissary. Whatever they like, they may perform in conjunction with the case. — I personally from the very beginning up to the last find this interesting, but if you have specific questions as far as you are concerned, please come up to my office and ask this question and I will show you the type of work: how we interrogate the people, how the accusation is delivered to the people and how their denial is accepted.”

“When can I come?”

“Anytime. Do come, and do ask for Dr. Judge Najib Said, the President of Investigation and Research.”

At the time I thought Dr. Said to be a very cruel man. Nowadays, I am happy or sad to say, if I were to meet Dr. Said I would scarcely give the possible cruelty of his occupation a thought. If there are Soviet informants among the Mujahideen, then they must be identified and killed. (But what if the Communists are not Communists at all? — Well, everyone makes mistakes.)

“Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up,” says Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, I.106), “—to see that we must stick to the objects of our every-day thinking and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”

“So Gulbuddin kidnaps people?” the Young Man asked ingenuously.

“Yes, he kidnaps so many peoples here in Peshawar!” the man cried. — They were in Secretary-General Pizzarda’s office. Judge Dr. Said was there, too, but he was talking to someone else, so he did not take note of the interview. Both the Young Man and his informant kept turning to watch Dr. Said to make sure that he was still occupied. None of the other Mujahideen said anything. — “He kidnap last year one person in — Tribal Agency,” said the man quickly, “and last month he kidnap another person, then he killed him. Last month, he kidnap my brother, Dr. Abdul Sumad Durani; he was my brother! Now he—refuse him; he say, ‘I didn’t kidnap him,’ but we have some document: he kidnap, he catch … Police catch his vehicle in driveway.”

“Gulbuddin thought he was Communist?”

“No! He was not Communist; he was Muslim; he was Mujahid!” The man was weeping quietly. None of the other Mujahideen in the office said anything.

The Young Man tried again. “Why was he kidnapped?”

“He don’t like so many social person; he don’t like educated person here in Pakistan. You know? He don’t like.”

“My name is Habib Shah Alaquadar,” said the old man, standing straight and tall.^§ “I am married. I am from Sayed Karam, in Paktiya Province. When Taraki came to power we started our jihad. At this time, my son, Dr. Abdul Sumad Durani, worked among the freedom fighters as a medical doctor. He took care of wounded people … After we came to Peshawar, he founded the doctors’ union here. This union represented other medical unions from Italy, Germany, America and France. He was the representative and director of this medical union. He received medicine and other humanitarian help from America and other countries and took them inside Afghanistan for distribution among the people. But now Gulbuddin has kidnapped him! On May 25, at 12 p.m., he was taken away by Gulbuddin party members. We don’t know where he is now. He must be in one of Gulbuddin’s prisons. We have reported this incident to different authorities. We have told the Commissioner, and the police. But Abdullah, the Commissioner, is a supporter of Gulbuddin.”

As he talked, the old man unbuttoned his shirt and reached inside to show the Young Man his cartridge belt. His voice was firm and calm. “Dr. Sumad was not an ordinary man,” he said. “He was a leader. We Afghans have a custom of taking revenge. Gulbuddin has killed a leader of ours. We must kill one of their leaders. The leader that we must kill could be Gulbuddin himself, or Sayaf or another leader. About eighty percent of the freedom fighters in Pakistan belong to our party, and we are stronger than Gulbuddin.”

The Jamiat-i-Islami had two separate offices. The Young Man was always directed to the Political Office, which was right around the corner from the street by whose low white-brick wall a vendor of little red plums stood watching the Young Man, smiling without really smiling, a red cloth around his head; and his sons big and small stood holding plums and staring at the Young Man, and the vendor looked youngish except that his stubble on chin and chest was gray; and the Young Man bought a handful of plums, which were delicious, and then he turned that corner and strode into the central courtyard, where the young boy with the AK-47 would stop him. Then the Young Man had to wait until someone could identify him. Meanwhile the guard smiled, puffed out his chest, and gestured that he wanted a photograph taken of him for the Afghanistan Picture Show. When the Young Man obliged, he beamed in delight. This happened every time.

Dr. Najibula^‖ (or Najib, as the Mujahideen called him) was a young-looking man with a black beard, piercing eyes and a high, clear voice. He had the Young Man over for supper several times. There were always young Mujahideen present at those occasions, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, polishing their Kalashnikovs (those who had them) and talking earnestly about the Panjsher situation. The Roos were trying to crush Masoud’s army that summer. They bombed clockwise, round and round the ring road; but always they singled out Panjsher Valley.

Jamiat-i-Islami had a strong presence in Panjsher.

At the end of the afternoon, when it came time to break fast, the Mujahideen washed themselves and prayed. Then they sat on the carpet and ate their vegetables and rice. There was one dish for every three or four men. You took your dordai and tore off a piece to scoop up food from the dish. (When the Young Man tried it, he usually spilled a little onto the floor.) After dinner everyone listened to Radio Afghanistan, the free station, and the only word that the Young Man could understand was “Panjsher,” “Panjsher,” “Panjsher.”

Sometimes when the Young Man was at the Jamiat-i-Islami he sat and listened to Professor Rabbani speak. Rabbani was a grave mullah with an iron-gray beard. He sat at a table and talked, and his followers sat motionless on the carpet and listened. The Young Man understood nothing. When there was a break, the Mujahideen smiled at the Young Man and teased him. They touched his shoulder. — “Afghanistan?” they said. — “Yes, yes,” the Young Man replied in Pushtu. “I go there, see Mujahideen fight the Roos.” —“You are white,” they laughed, “too white! When the Roos see you, you must say: ‘Ya Nooristani; Pukhto na pwaygum.’ ”^a And they all laughed. — But they did not really want him to accompany them. They thought him too young.

In his notebook he wrote such entries as:

Went to Najib at Jamiat again. He said take as little as possible inside—but must bring passport, Afghan clothes.

Sat around for a long time. Asked Najib what they’d set up for me. Nothing. Group leaving early this week if passes open (blocked by tribal fighting). “If you are lucky you can go with one of these groups.”

“Otherwise how long will I have to wait?”

He spread his hands.

But at least the Young Man could interview the Mujahideen to his heart’s content. He turned on his tape recorder in Dr. Najib’s office. — “I’ve met a number of people who seem to think that the Mujahideen are much less unified than they claim …”

Dr. Najib had the office cleared of other people. “First of all,” he said, “it is unfortunately true that there is not as much unity as we would like, but you might know that efforts are being brought about to make a new organization called Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen.”

“Is there one organization by that name or two?”

There was a pause. — “Two,” said Najib finally. “But I’m talking about the main one, you see; and we are working together, and in a month or two this problem of unity will have been solved. About the other group, it is true that they have established propaganda against our organizations. It must be kept in mind also that the Russians have puppets and agents in this area, and they exaggerate our disunity.”

If a man were to switch political parties, he’d be killed. If my informant’s party were to find out that he told me this, he’d be killed.

The two of them were sitting out on the patio in lawn chairs. It was hot that day, and the General had turned on a large fan that at least moved the hot air around. Not even a grasshopper stirred.

“So you think their problem is that they’re not willing to compromise?” asked the Young Man.

“Well, they say they must get together. That is one of the first principles of Islam: towhee, oneness. Yet here they are. And there are nine of them, ten of them — all these groups! They ought to be making common cause to kick the Russians out. They are doing it, but individually.”

“Do you think it’s possible for them to stop kidnapping each other and so forth?”

“Traditionally we have a system,” the General said. “You and I are at daggers drawn, and our common well-wisher decides to intervene between us. He says: ‘All right, for two, three months there will be no killing, no kidnapping, no cursing.’ And it is honored. So the differences could be done away with for a limited period — up to six months.”

The Young Man shifted in his chair. “Well, will it happen in this case?”

“The saner elements are not there,” said the General. “The young fellows … Well, the saner elements are inside. Ninety percent of the fighting is going on inside Afghanistan by the people who are there. And those chaps who are over here, they are all very ambitious; they all want the chair. And as they are ambitious, they will probably not get together. I feel we should help the majority, the ones inside. They are starving. And they are fighting your war, my war, the war of the free world. And that help should be extended materially, economically, medically. Most of the fighting takes place May to September. The rest, Afghanistan is under all this snow. Afghanistan was never self-sufficient. And with the present circumstances, the Russians are there; they can’t do any cultivations. These winters are very hard. These winters are very hard. The Russians are so bloody stupid — or clever — that they bombed their harvest and compelled them to beg food from them. So far, the common man has been rejecting these things from the Russians. Well, how long will he go on rejecting it?

“In Panjsher, the person who is fighting there, Masoud, he is paying his own men. He has a full-fledged army of two thousand people of his own. He’s a gemstone dealer: he sells his emeralds and rubies in the United States. You see, fighting inside has to be either on a tribal basis, with individual khanates, or else with those who can afford to wage the war. We must help them, not these bloody parties.”^b

* “Thank you for submitting the manuscript,” wrote the literary agent, “and my apologies for my slowness. I hope your intestinal parasites are a thing of the past. I do appreciate the chance to read An Afghanistan Picture Show. I only wish that I could get someone to buy it …”

† I never saw his name transliterated, and am spelling it exactly as it sounds.

‡ See Chapter 8, in which Abdullah is interviewed.

§ This interview, like many others, was conducted in Pushto. I am indebted to my Afghan translator in California (who does not wish to be identified).

‖ I have transliterated his name thus to avoid confusion with Babrak Karmal’s successor, Najibullah.

a “I am Nuristani and understand no Pushtu.” (Nuristanis are often light-skinned.)

b In comparison with their occupiers, the Afghans did quite well, for any person will always come off more favorably than the soldier who has come to dispossess him. Since by the time I wrote this book my sympathies in this matter had come to lie wholly with the refugees and the Mujahideen, I considered hiding or denying what is blighted on their leaf. However, that is not only a bad way to begin (and I am not certain, anyhow, that I would be capable of doing so suavely), but — more to the point — I think it is both unnecessary and inexpedient: unnecessary, because from our viewpoint the stench is hardly noxious, we being, in all respects, on the other side of the world, and because these things that the Afghans do are not of significant harm to anyone but themselves; and inexpedient, because pointing them out will not be “of aid and comfort to the enemy,” the enemy having been clever enough to play on them already. Anyhow, the war is over for the moment.

12. THE RED HILL (1982)

The five of them were in a fine, spacious house in a wooded village. The Young Man could hear the river outside the window. To get up here you crossed a number of tiny makeshift bridges, said “Sta ray machay” to the boys standing seriously under the trees, ignored the girls, who were loaded down with water and firewood, and ascended a ladder. The village was made up of tall, narrowly spaced two-story buildings. The first floor was stables and fodder sheds. Above their cattle the people lived, in houses of wood whose doors were carved in whorled patterns. The malik’s guest chamber was cool, thanks to its thick mud walls, and sluggish with shadows. From the wooden beams hung paper decorations in various colors, which reminded the Young Man of the Christmas tree ornaments he had made in elementary school. Along the length of the far wall ran two lines of pictures — dim family portraits (he supposed, not knowing, not asking) of stern Pathan men; and color prints of mosques in Afghanistan. The wall behind the guests’ heads, however, had been papered from the floor up to the height of a sitting man, for cleanliness. They all stretched out on the floor there, on thick rugs of red, green, white and yellow, with big embroidered pillows against the wall for their heads. In the back of the room were three charpoys, or rope beds.

His four companions slept beside him, their rugs thrown over their faces to keep off the flies. The Young Man was not sleepy. So, squatting at his side, the malik entertained him. He was an old man with two rifles — one Chinese and one Indian; each was kept loaded with a clip of thirty bullets.

“You are Mujahid?” said the malik. They spoke in Pushtu, which required the Young Man to go to the grammatical heart of things every time.

“No,” he said. “I Ameriki. I want to help Afghan Mujahideen. I come, take photos, bring photos to other Amerikis, and they see, they understand Mujahideen, understand refugees, maybe send rupees for Kalashnikovs, bullets, Ameriki guns, owuh dazai.”

An owuh dazai was a seven-shooter, a Lee-Enfield rifle. He had learned the word from a century-old manual for soldiers of the British Empire. It was probably hard to find an owuh dazai these days, but the Young Man had to do what he could with his vocabulary.

“You go to shoot at the Roos?” said the malik slyly.

The Young Man had hardly fired a gun in his life. “If Roos shoot at me, and Mujahideen give me topak, I shoot at Roos. But I am no good shot.”

The malik grinned. “I also no good shot. My father, he come from Afghanistan; he can kill. I am like you, just C.I.A., just tourist.” —He took the Young Man to the window. A thousand yards away, a goat was grazing among the rocks. The old man fired two shots almost simultaneously. Two puffs of dust appeared, one on either side of the goat. The goat leaped and ran.

“Very good,” said the Young Man, feeling it incumbent on him to say something. “Very good.”

The malik radiated delight. He got up and brought his guest some very good bread, made of thin, crackly, buttery layers. You rolled it in sugar and broke off pieces to dip in your chai. They offered him tea constantly. He was the only one who could legitimately eat and drink during the day. At least (fortunately for those who kept Ramazan) it was cool. The valley was at about 4,500 feet. Its sides were terraced with green rice paddies. Through the window he could see the snow on the mountains they would have to go through to cross into Afghanistan.

He had diarrhea as usual, his eyes hurt, and nobody would leave him alone.

“Sind chai wushka?” they asked him. Do you want river tea?

“Nuskam,” he replied. Don’t want. He went out and walked up to the cemetery, which was where everybody relieved himself, and had diarrhea.

The children understood his Pushtu the best, perhaps because they had not adopted one accent forever. It seemed that a man from one village might have trouble understanding a man from a village twenty miles away. The General’s son Zahid once told the Young Man that his family missed one word in five of the Brigadier’s speech. It must have been even more difficult to understand the Young Man, who had gotten his Pushtu only out of an old book.^* —The children were willing to make an effort with the Young Man because he was a novelty momentarily eclipsing their other recreations, which consisted (I am of course speaking of the male children, for I never saw the other kind doing anything but hard work) of spitting, gathering apricots, listening to the men talk beneath the trees, and punching each other. The men watched and laughed. The more impudent the boys were, the more the men liked it. The boys would gather around the circle of men at the end of the afternoon and begin spitting. They would spit closer and closer to the men’s feet. Finally they would just miss someone’s feet, and the men would scold them sternly. The one who had been scolded would be punched by the others. The men deigned to chuckle.

The four Mujahids with the Young Man believed that if he couldn’t understand something they’d said, all they had to do was yell it loud enough. When that didn’t work, they were angry and dismayed. One of them, Muhammad, could read. In Peshawar the Young Man had bought an English-Pushto dictionary. When they had something to communicate to him that he could not understand, Muhammad scanned the pages until he found a very rough equivalent for what he wanted to say (a procedure which, since the words were arranged entirely according to their counterparts in the Young Man’s alphabet, took Muhammad a long time), and put his finger on it. The Young Man, who could not read Pushto, would say the corresponding English word aloud, as if Muhammad could somehow tell him whether this was the one right word out of millions; and Muhammad always nodded. — They thought he wasn’t happy. After flipping through the English-Pushto kitab for a quarter of an hour, Muhammad pointed to a word at last. — “Tragic,” the Young Man interpreted aloud. — Muhammad smiled at him like a psychiatrist. “Tuh [you] tragic,” he said sympathetically. “Do you understand my speak, Mr. William?” —“Na,” dissented the Young Man heartily. “Kushkal, kushkal.” —Happy, happy. Of course he would be even more kushkal if they ever crossed the border, if they came back alive, if his rehydration salts held out, which they wouldn’t — oh, he was an unhappy, even tragic Young Man, he was! They had been here for days, waiting for Poor Man, the guerrilla leader, to show up with the ammunition.^†

One afternoon the Young Man wanted to go out and take pictures of the mountains. They told him he couldn’t do that. Muhammad borrowed his English-Pushto kitab again and went off into a corner with a new arrival who knew a little English. Finally, beaming, they brought him back a note:

Not — the chawkar

becose this pipol is jahil

you is DAY Doyuo my

spieke M.R. — Uuiliam—

becose this pipaeli is not

have ajoucatan—

because this pipole is impolite

he spieke cam say topak.

In other words, said the Young Man to himself, interpreting the text like the student of comparative literature that he was, “Not the hills, because this people is ignorant. You is DIE. Do you understand my speak, Mr. William? Because this people is not have education; because this people is impolite; they say that your camera is a gun.” —Well, it was certainly nothing to DIE over, so he stayed indoors. It was all getting on his nerves.

The two men of the house kept picking up their rifles every day, taking them outside into the town and returning half an hour later with expressions of deep contentment. The Young Man looked up the word for “hunt” and asked Muhammad if that was what they were doing. — Muhammad laughed, pointed at the Young Man, and said, “Jahil.” —Ignorant. — Then he pointed at the malik and his gun. He perused the English-Pushto kitab and pointed to a word. — “Hostile,” the Young Man read.

(Surely they didn’t kill people for half an hour every afternoon? He never found out what they did. Maybe it was like one of those American Civil War parades.)

On the morning of the next day, ten Mujahideen came in, and the Young Man packed up quickly, but they only stretched out to sleep. That afternoon they pulled some refugee medicines from their baggage and asked the Young Man to explain the labels. The Young Man did his best, and they noted down his words beside the English names. One of the Mujahideen took a capsule of oral tetracycline, opened it, and poured its yellow powder onto a blister, which he had first prepared for treatment by rubbing it with a matchhead. They went through all the medicines, opening tins and packets which should have been kept sealed until use, and doling them out — a handful of painkillers, antibiotics and B vitamins per man, all tossed together in a length of previously sterile bandage. They asked the Young Man if there was anything to make them strong. One of the doctors in the camps had told him, “Every Afghan believes American medicines will turn him into a superman.” —The Young Man knew that they would hold it against him if he refused to disclose the secret. Reflecting on the diet of the traveling fighter — a piece of bread, a raw onion, a lump of hardened sugar and a cup of tea — he decided that it was ethical to point to the B vitamins, which he did. They were all happy. They asked him how many to take. Fancying himself a great social liberator, he said one a day for them, and two a day for the women and children. All the men immediately took two.

At pindzuh^‡ o’clock in the evening, there was big excitement. — “Poor Man, Poor Man!” they all said. The Young Man didn’t see the guerrilla leader, but he was willing to accept the idea that smoke signals or something had been perceived. A moment later a new man rushed in and cried in English, “No go Afghanistan!”—smiling and spreading his hands. — The Young Man, at whom this was evidently directed, smiled back and said, “Okay.” —What the hell.

The next day Muhammad stayed under his sleeping rug, only poking his head out every now and then like an aquatic mammal surveying the surface of things as it refills its lungs; then Muhammad dove back into his own unconscious.

Whenever the Young Man wrote in his notebook, men came up to him and looked over his shoulder. When they could, they sounded out the words to everyone else, who nodded approvingly.

The Mujahideen grew concerned about their guest’s restlessness. In the early afternoons of those days, they would invite him to go up the river with them. Just out of sight of the village, near a shed they called “the schoolhouse” (it was always shut), was a pleasant slope of alpine meadow studded with smooth warm boulders. On these rocks the Mujahideen would stretch out for hours, eyes closed in bliss. At first the Young Man accompanied them. But he got bored quickly. So he remained inside the malik’s house; he preferred to be bored indoors.

One morning at around eleven a youngish fellow showed up and wanted to take the Young Man somewhere. The Mujahideen had gone out early. — “You from what party?” said the Young Man in his cautious Pushtu. — The other smiled, hesitated. “Gulbuddin,” he said at last. — “Where you go?” said the Young Man. “What you want?” He knew that Gulbuddin and the N.L.F. were at loggerheads. — But the man just smiled and touched his sleeve. — “I stay here,” the Young Man said. — The Gulbuddin man lay in the next charpoy, staring at him. He stared at him for half the day. — To hell with him. To hell with the Afghans. Stupid idea to come here. — When the Mujahideen came back, the Gulbuddin man got up and left.

A great anger was swelling inside the Young Man — the righteous fury of the spoiled child. He said to the Mujahideen, as he said this time every day, “I only want to help you; this is for you, not for me; I’ve been waiting a long time here; my time will soon be up, and then I won’t be able to help you, to send you rupees. Mujahideen—thoughtless, disorganized; maybe they don’t want me to help them!”^§ —It had taken hours to learn to say all this (he had had to look up almost every word), but, after all, the Young Man had all the time in the world, and he had been practicing every day. — “Tomorrow,” they soothed him. — “Tomorrow no good,” he replied as usual, “every day you say ‘tomorrow.’ I must go to Afghanistan today or I won’t be able to help you.”

He’d scored this time, though; that he could see. The Mujahideen conferred. Finally Abdullah, the one who knew a little English, said: “Sit down, please.” They all went off.

He waited until his dysentery called him. When he returned from the cemetery, Muhammad was packing the Young Man’s things and telling him to hurry. Evidently, the Young Man reflected, this sort of continual quiet insistence had been what was required all along. Maybe a positively dictatorial European manner, like that of any Great White Man, could even arrange him a skirmish at the appropriate hour … Then the Young Man noticed that they were heading back down the valley toward Parachinar.

“Peshawar?” he said.

“Peshawar.”

They were sorry for him. They kept asking how he was and picking apricots for him to eat. Muhammad carried his pack. When they got to town they told him that the bus was “broken”; he’d have to spend the night in the N.L.F. office; but, as for Peshawar, “Tomorrow!” they told him confidently. At the N.L.F. office they left him.

He sat in the courtyard of the office, surrounded by heroic posters and cartons of biscuits marked for Afghan refugees. The green flag of Islam blew above his head. He was stunned and despondent. An old man came up to him to display his prosthetic arm. The Young Man interrupted, explaining why it was so desperately important for him to go to Afghanistan that day. The old man replied that he was at the American’s service, which meant, no doubt, nothing. — It was very hot now that they were out of the mountains, and the Young Man’s intestinal parasites churned nauseously. There was no bathroom in sight, and no word for it in his English-Pushto kitab. He longed to go home.

Then Poor Man strode in, smiling. — “You angry?” he said. “Pindzuh minuta.” Five minutes. — His men carried cases of bullets and rocket-launcher shells into the storeroom. Then Poor Man snapped his fingers for the American to get up, and everyone climbed into the back of a covered van. All the other Mujahideen were sitting there. They smiled at him. The van went up the dirt road toward the mountains. It began to rain. Cool rain dripped in through the canopy, refreshing everyone’s face. The Young Man was exhilarated. Around him sat the Mujahideen — twenty of them now — laughing at each other, smoking, cleaning their topaks. The van was full of the pleasant smell of gun oil.

At six that evening they reached the village again. The malik welcomed the Young Man back and embraced him. All the other men were sitting out in the middle of the village, watching the Mujahideen. They were cooking kebabs for the children who were too young to observe Ramazan. The Young Man’s mouth watered. Suleiman, a Mujahid with whom he was especially friendly, offered to buy him one, but the Young Man smiled nobly and said, “You no eat, I no eat.” (It sounded very funny in Pushtu.) — The children of the village surrounded him; he was a novelty again, having been gone for half the day. They wanted him to take pictures of them for the Afghanistan Picture Show. But he said no. He was only taking pictures of the jihad. He was afraid that his film would run out.

The malik invited the Young Man into his house, where, out of sight of the others, he was given a meal. It had not occurred to them that he wanted to be strong like them; how could they know? And if he refused the meal he would give offense. It was lukewarm tea and bread with a bite taken out of it. The malik explained proudly that the Young Man was receiving Poor Man’s own leavings. They tasted good. — An hour later the Mujahideen broke fast together in a grand meal. Poor Man had the Young Man sit at his right side, and spoke to him in his minimal English, to honor him. They were to leave for Afghanistan at 3 a.m.

The Young Man lay awake all night, bitten by bedbugs, excited and terrified. He had been given a charpoy. Beside him, in the next bed, Poor Man coughed and coughed.

“My name is ——— ——. I come from Ningrahar. I am the son of —— and the grandson of ——.^‖ I command a group of Afghan Mujahideen. In a recent battle I succeeded in getting some small souvenirs, including the uniform of a Russian brigadier general, which I brought to Peshawar and had sent to Islamabad. This battle took place at a Russian base with a hospital and landing facilities. The fighting lasted for eighteen days, in which period I killed the Russian general and several other people.”

“What tactics have you found to be most successful against the Russians?” the Young Man asked.

“Last year, when we were weaker from a military point of view, we used to perform night operations. Now we have Russian weapons, such as Kalashnikovs, and the battles can take place in the daytime. We can inflict heavy casualties now. We still cannot give them a pitched battle, especially in the daytime, but in our hilly terrain we can dig in with trenches and give them a good fight.”

“Which Soviet tactics cause you the greatest problems?”

“There are four stages,” Poor Man said. — He was sitting out with the General and the Young Man at the General’s house in Peshawar, and a bird was hopping in the lime tree. — “First they come with gun-ship helicopters, and they know our locations; they bombard us. After that, the gunships having marked the place for them, come the MiG bombers. Third comes heavy artillery fire — mortars and rockets. And then the fourth is the Soviet infantry. We have to fight directly with them in this fourth stage, because the infantry comes up against us head-on. All of this is difficult.”

“What arms and other aid would you most appreciate?”

“The first thing we want is anti-gunship weapons, to shoot down the helicopters, because they are the most damaging thing. And secondly, we want weapons that we can give to the people, so that we can raise troops.”

“Are the Afghans getting tired of fighting now? Do they fight less strongly?”

“We have a high morale,” Poor Man smiled. “We like to fight, and we will keep on fighting.”

They walked for thirty-six hours. What the Young Man hated the most were the river crossings in the dark, when you could vaguely see the rocks and foaming water, but well enough to be gambling with each jump from stone to stone. The Mujahideen did everything they could for him. They carried his pack, held him by the hand, and let him lean his weight on them as they made their way up and down the mountains. They even carried him piggyback where the fordings were especially difficult. Even so, the Young Man quickly became exhausted. One thing that forced him to go on, however (the other was the impossibility of returning alone), was a sense of shame, for his body was no less well-made than theirs; and in appurtenances he was better equipped, having his comfortable Italian hiking boots while they wore sandals and slippers, and as they walked their feet were sometimes bleeding on the rocks. Their limbs, like his, swelled up and purpled with the altitude and the great exertion. Like him, they licked their lips with thirst. They went up into the snow and the fog of the mountain peaks, and across a terrifying green meadow where it hailed continually — hailstones half as big as a fist. Then they were in Afghanistan, and it was not safe to slacken their steps, even, for fear that a helicopter would see them.^a They descended through the mists again, the trail down the cliffsides being nothing but loose, wobbling rocks (for all the easy paths had been mined by the Soviets). Then they slipped down kilometer after kilometer of snow-covered, rotten summer glacier, the snow sometimes covering huge pits where a boulder had broken through to the water ten feet beneath. The Young Man was exhausted and terrified. He stumbled along, leaning on their shoulders. — What a burden he was! As I recall this, you cannot imagine a tenth of the shame I still feel. — At one point he tripped in the unfamiliar baggy trousers and ripped them halfway up the length of a leg. They all chuckled. They sat him down; a Mujahid pulled out needle and thread and sewed them up again. (If a plane had come then, not a one could have survived.) They were unfailingly cheerful, praying and singing and smiling as they went. No one lagged or complained but the Young Man. Once he was so tired that they carried him half a kilometer. Then his shame overcame his exhaustion again, and he kept on. Early in the second morning, when it was still dark, he thought he couldn’t go on. Then one of them finally lost patience and gave him a prod in the back, yelling at him to go faster. Another one pinched him in the arm and hand. This made him angry. — “Don’t treat me like that!” he said to the Mujahid who had shoved him. “I Ameriki, not Mujahid.” The Young Man meant: I don’t belong to you. He shook the Mujahid by the shoulder. The man snarled and shook him back, much harder, and dug his rifle butt into the Young Man’s back. This was real; this made him keep going. His slowness was endangering their lives. Without him they could have made the journey in one long day.

When they came up to the top of a bluff, Poor Man told him to be careful where he stepped. The trail had many little bombs, he said.

A little after sunrise, as they came into the main war zone, they stopped for tea. They fed him unripe plums, which tasted delicious in his dry mouth, and lumps of gura, or hardened sugar. Gradually the way grew easier and shadier. As they walked they reached up and plucked fruits and nuts. At all times his friend Suleiman stood at his shoulder supporting him.

“You go slow-slow,” Poor Man told him. “What takes us fifteen minutes takes you ten days, ten years.”

The Young Man apologized.

“Ah, Ouilliam, Ouilliam!” they said indulgently, and carried his heaviest camera for him.^b

They took him past a deserted village and a bombed-out village. An old woman in black came hobbling through the ruins, shaking her fist at him, but he said, “Ameriki!” and then she smiled.

[NOTE: I saw on this journey a very ingenious procedure employed by the Mujahideen for dealing with the mines, but will not reveal it here for fear that it might possibly be of aid to those who have dropped them. These mines are quite diabolical. They are small and hard to see, especially at night. They can blow an arm or leg off. When detonated, they leave behind a little twisted lump of green or blue plastic. It is said that some are made to resemble pens or toys, so that people will pick them up. I saw a little toy hashish pipe lying on a rock once. The commander I was with told me that it was a mine. I did not see it detonated, so I cannot confirm this (we went very carefully around it), but no detail of the Soviets’ foreign policy in Afghanistan would surprise me.]

“The day we killed the Russian general, it was the next day. They are very reluctant to use this chemical warfare, or they don’t do it with the winds, but that day, it was the next day the general was killed. They attacked us. They used this gas about thirty yards away from where we were. When the battle is on, these birds, on account of the sound, get frightened and they fly. We saw the pigeons being killed. They came down; we saw them coming down, so we thought probably the enemy has used this gas. They fired the rocket, and it hit the ground. It didn’t make much noise. After thirty, forty seconds, a streak went up — a white streak. Up to forty feet it spread, on all sides. Then the wind took it from one side to the other, and whatever came in the way of that gas had got killed. All the animals. And we lost in the process only three. Three from my band, they got killed in the process. The gas passed over there, or near them, and they died.

“The [first] two died spontaneously. When we discovered them, to see if they were hit by the gas or otherwise, we took their clothes off to check to see if they were hit by a bullet. We saw no — nothing, no injury, nothing at all … The third one, who was slightly poisoned, he lived for a day or two; we did our best for him, with the medicine and so on, but nothing happened, and he also died.”

“If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.”^d

So they came into Afghanistan with its chalky ridge-shoulders from which shade trees grew like miracles, leaf-crowned, fruit-crowned, with great dark root-knees for tired men to sit upon, but they scarcely ever sat, being anxious now to get home to war, so, steady in baggy pants, with bulging canvas sacks slung over their backs, they descended into steep green valleys whose terraces of fields were cool and wet; they followed the river down to the lower mountains. — His thoughts rolled down ahead of him like the men with guns winding down the trail between rock heaps and purple sand ridges and rust-red ground whose barrenness left the widespread grass clumps pale. Here and there you might see a shade bush, but the farther down into Afghanistan you went, the drier it seemed to become. What was he going to see? What would he find? But after a while he was too weary to ask anything.

He made himself a refreshing drink of water and sour grape squeezings, only he had forgotten how bad the water tasted (it came from the muddy ditch) and how much worse it tasted in that corroded, dirty tin cup, to say nothing of the fact that the grapes actually weren’t so good, either.

As they walked along the mountain trail, butterflies settled and rose in the sand, fanning their wings like helicopters. The guerrilla beside the Young Man took his hand, the palm of it, the soft flesh of it, between two fingers, pinching it and working it. — “Why … like this?” he said. “You not strong.” —The Afghan’s hand was dark and hard, like a new walking shoe that hadn’t been broken in. — The Young Man was not ashamed. “I do different things in America,” he said. “I read, write, push buttons. You dig, plow, shoot.” —The guerrilla said nothing.

Seizing the charred stump of a rocket bomb, a Mujahid raised it high above his head and turned to face the Young Man, his eyes shining fiercely as if to say: This is why you came! Now look, look! Your business here is to see! See this, and understand it; never forget it! and the Young Man stood looking at the man’s leathery reddish-brown face, the cheeks drawn up in effort as he held the bomb high, the parted lips, the even white teeth, the graying hairline just below the double-lipped prayer cap, the shadow of the bomb falling from shoulder to shoulder, those upraised arms in which the bomb casing lay khaki and black and orange-rusted, rusted through in places so that the Young Man could see the skeleton grid beneath the shell (it must have been a dud), and the bomb hung eternally in the air and the Mujahid’s cotton shirt hung down and the river flowed clear and shallow behind him, leaving undisturbed the white rocks that lined it, and the hills were tan with dry grass, green-spotted here and there with a bush or a tree, and the other Mujahideen had also turned and were staring at the Young Man as the bomb stared at him and he stared back and said to himself: Whether or not I can do anything useful, at least I will remember.

In so many frames of my Afghanistan Picture Show I see the men in wildly various caps grinning at their guns and cradling them, uplifting them among the tree-pocked mountains, loving them, pointing them, holding them like guitars, the bullets long and gold and heavy together in cartridge belts sweeping down shoulder and chest; each laughing at the sight the others made, each looking at his Kalashnikov or Lee-Enfield or Springfield with shy fondness because the weapon was a dream like a son was a dream;^e the weapon was a dream of revenge.

And I also see those Pakistanis and Afghans leaning forward into the tape recorder, talking and talking emphatically, some hoping, some desperate, some without expectations, just helping me to understand. — What a daunting thing RECOGNITION is.

It rained there every day at a little past twelve. The result was to raise more dust. It always stank of dust there, a metallic, choking, dirty taste in the throat like you might expect to get after kissing someone who’d worked for twenty years in a tombstone company or a cement factory. Everybody coughed all the time. It was no wonder, the Young Man thought, that Pushtu speech has so many t’s and s’s and kh’s; if you are going to hack, why not make use of it? Maybe people with the same disease ought to get together to communicate with their spots.

Every time it rained the rooster crowed.

The men sat around in their baggy white shirts and trousers, spitting.

The Young Man hated the flies. There were always dozens of them on him, with at least two or three on his lips and eyes.

To console him, Poor Man went and got him some peaches. — “Go back to Peshawar,” he said. “Tell them, send strong American.”

“You want I go to Peshawar?” said the Young Man angrily.

“I want you see the fight. I want you go to city, see dead Roos. But you”—he pointed to the Young Man’s legs—“no good.”

Across the river gorge, a few clouds lay over a grubby reddish hill. There were trees on the hill; there was agricultural terracing; there were flies there, and a smell of dust, bomb debris and one tiny spring. There was a wide and easy path up the hill, but the guerrillas told him that an alootooka^f had flown over it and dropped butterfly mines there. So to climb the hill you had to ascend a steep slope of loose rock. On the summit of the hill were many trees, and empty Russian food tins. It was here that the war zone really began. Looking discreetly through the tree branches, you could see Afghanistan ahead, a desert dream of sand dunes and hazy dunes spread out far below, for this was the edge of the mountains. It was like a map that kept unrolling in the sun, with its bright baked canyons and oases and villages showing forth on the plains as if they had been painted there.

To the left of where the Young Man stood, the hill continued on to a ridge that made a right angle and ended in a spur, like an arm and fist extended from a man’s shoulder. The ridge was bare. It was very dangerous to go out on it. It had been torn by rocket shells. It was explained to the Young Man that if you went out on it, the Roos could see you.

Just on the horizon were six black dots in the middle of a village.

Suleiman guided the Young Man’s eyes to them. — “Roos,” he said. The Young Man peered through his telephoto at 600 mm. — Sure enough. Six tanks. — He looked at them for a while. Later he and Suleiman went down to the spring, and Suleiman gathered for him little sour yellow peaches and the tutan fruits, although it was still Ramazan and Suleiman could not eat. Suleiman smiled happily to see him eat. —“Malgurae,” the Young Man said. — Friend. —“Malgurae,” Suleiman said, and gripped his hand.

He had finally gotten to like the food. The morning after they had arrived, Poor Man had made him breakfast with his own hands: two eggs fried for a few seconds in very hot oil (so what he had, then, was a glass bowl full of hot oil, with the eggs diffused through it in curds of greater or lesser size) and a hunk of bread to eat it with, salted cucumber slices and tea saturated with sugar. It all tasted good. He was very hungry.

Every day a boy sneaked him dried apricots and tutans beneath his armload of kitchen onions. The Young Man took himself off to eat them. In midafternoon the Commander in Blue, Poor Man’s lieutenant, would fix him beef kebab and sweet green tea. An old man brought him a double handful of almonds. Later he found out that they were not almonds after all, but the nutlike kernel of the zwardailoo.^g

“Much rain tomorrow?” he asked the Commander in Blue. Poor Man had gone into the chakar to meditate and pray.

“Kum-kum,” said the Commander in Blue. “Leg-leg. Fifty-fifty.”

He went up to the top of the red hill again. The tanks were still there. From nowhere he felt a hand on his shoulder. A Mujahid smiled at him. There was always someone on watch here. — The Mujahid asked him to take his picture. When he obliged, the Mujahid was very happy and honored. It did not matter that he would never see the picture. He stood there with his Kalashnikov and smiled. Later he gathered a bunch of wild grapes for the Young Man. The Mujahid’s lips were chapped with dry dusty thirst, for it was still Ramazan, but he insisted that the Young Man eat the grapes there. (If he ate them, he would not be as good as the Mujahideen were. If he did not eat them, friendship would be insulted.) They tasted so sweet, so refreshing; he ate them and was ashamed.

On the safe side of the hill, just below the crest, was a line of shallow pits. Against the tanks a semicircular wall of stones had been constructed in each pit. In the event of an attack, Poor Man told him, the men would get into these pits and begin to shoot. A single gunship helicopter could probably have killed everyone in the pits. But they were all the Mujahideen had.

One morning the air of laziness disappeared from the camp. All morning the men cleaned their weapons and loaded them, soberly, but in good spirits.^h There was no wasteful shooting off of cartridges.

Down by the Young Man’s charpoy, Poor Man and the Commander in Blue sat on a mat in a circle with some new arrivals who had brought cases of bombs. With them also was a commander with whom the Young Man had eaten dinner in the tree-house the previous night. He wore flashy rings and bird ornaments; his face was made up. He carried with him little balls of colored sugar, in a hashish box. He gave the Young Man a handful of them. When he posed for a picture, the Commander in Blue made him put his ornaments aside, which made him crestfallen. Later, when the Commander in Blue was gone, the Flashy Commander winked at the Young Man and posed for another picture.

Poor Man was talking slowly, fiddling with a rocket launcher. The Commander in Blue, who had just thumbprinted some new recruits, was studying a letter which one of them had given him. Poor Man seemed abstracted. His round face looked up smiling sometimes, but then his eyes flickered down again to the rifle he was cleaning, or to the message that he’d already read. He was a pudgy man, graying a little, who, unlike the grandly gesturing Mujahideen commanders whom the Young Man had met at the General’s, did not seem impressive. Poor Man had been sick to his stomach during the journey from Pakistan. Every hour or two he stopped to vomit, but that had never kept him from returning to the head of his line of men (who never waited for him), leading them at a steady, rapid walk, with his arms serenely folded across his chest. Within a few minutes he would be so far ahead as to be out of sight, and they caught up with him only when he paused impatiently for them, or when he was sick again. He said very little. His men honored him. They carried a bottle of rose-petal Sharbet syrup which only he could drink. In the high passes, he poured a little of the syrup into a snowball and ate it, smiling. Sometimes in the morning Poor Man looked very pale, and then the Mujahids massaged his back. But when it came time to go, he was never anywhere but in front. — The sunshine was white and brown as Poor Man and the Commander in Blue sat in state, and Poor Man flexed his toes, turning a cartridge slowly round and round in his hand, and the cursive on the green N.L.F. banner above his head was like swords, crowns, wriggling snakes, crossed ribbons, and the Commander in Blue sat dreamily in the half-darkness of the doorway, and the books shone snowy white in the sun.

Elias, the malik of the village nearby, came up the trail to the camp, leaning on his staff. He took his cap off, brushed away the flies from his baldness, put his cap on again, picked up his staff, and put it down … He sat on the mat with the others. He leaned forward and spoke. Now several men were speaking excitedly at once. Old Elias shook his head. — “ Qur’an,” he said. — Poor Man’s eyes flicked back and forth slowly.

Poor Man signed a book slowly, carefully, as yesterday he had done with the new party membership cards. A young boy leaned on a gun sternly, then rose as Poor Man reached to take his hand, put his hand on the stamp pad, and entered his fingerprint in the register book. The boy looked proud. Every man smiled at him; every man was like the man in the white skullcap, whose cheeks were wrinkled into long laugh lines as he stood cleaning his rifle, the stock braced against his belly with one hand, oil can in the other, and the stained awning covered the others who sat talking quietly on their mats and Poor Man sat against the wall, watching with eyes that gave and took.

Poor Man seemed more relaxed now. The talk was slow — and then abruptly he ordered away the Mujahids sitting by the Young Man’s side on the charpoy.

The Flashy Commander stretched, got up, and put his sandals on. He winked at the Young Man and chewed a ball of sugar.

Poor Man said something about guns, and everyone laughed. He and Malik Elias gripped a Kalashnikov from opposite ends, inspecting it, and then he entered a note in his book. Someone handed him another gun. He looked it up and down very slowly, and then fingerprinted the next recruit.

It was half past seven in the morning now. The flies were coming out strongly. The battle was set for nine.

Poor Man took a cartridge and straightened it with a pair of pliers. — Was that safe? the Young Man wondered. He knew nothing about guns. It reminded him of the way the Mujahideen used hair tonic as lip balm, because it smelled like peaches and was thick and yellow. They wouldn’t believe him when he translated the label for them.

Poor Man checked over and rendered fit each of their weapons, attaching straps, loading bullets, with the same peaceful, unhurried spirit as when the Commander in Blue cooked kebabs and wetted down the mud floors every morning. — Sighing, Poor Man inserted a fuse in a grenade.

Elias borrowed the key from Poor Man. He went to the store-room and brought a sack of dried tutans. (So preserved, these fruits taste like very sweet raisins gone slightly bad. Fresh on the tree they resemble white, pink or black raspberries without seeds; then they taste like sweet grapes gone slightly bad.) Poor Man ran a few of them through his fingers and made a note in the book.

The council of war went on. Near the Young Man’s bed, suspended by two ropes so that it hung over the steep riverbank, a little wooden airplane twirled in the faint morning breeze. Beside it, three pairs of soldiers’ trousers swayed like hanged men.

Because the Young Man had never seen a battle, the associations he tended to make were with boyhood’s summer games. The Commander in Blue, for instance, slept in a tree fort, complete with real machine guns and a plate full of peaches that he could snack on at midnight, if he chose, spitting the seeds into the river below. To the right of the Young Man’s charpoy, a twin-log bridge led to a watch post in another tree. Down the riverbank and over the next rise was a real enemy somewhere in the dreamy distances of desert — namely, a division or two (what exactly was a division?) of the Soviet Army — but that had nothing to do with him. The exploded bombs and the downed helicopter that he’d walked past were also toys, like the wooden alootooka. Seeing Poor Man counting shells brought him a sensation of thrilling delight. Once again, I do not think the Young Man can be blamed for this.

The plane was really an ironic touch. He wondered which of the guerrillas had made it. In his imagination it had overflown a thousand English children’s gardens, the pilot bailing out every now and then as a flung stone or a division of scarecrows necessitated. Then, wandering for hours behind the enemy lines, ducking spiders’ webs and hungry moles in the shadows of the cornstalks, he was finally rescued by a little girl, who found him wedged in a tree root by a stream.

“Poor soldier,” she said. “Poor dear soldier. You’ve tried so hard, haven’t you, and it’s all come to nothing.”

And she rocked him in her arms, but he could not cry, being made of wood.

He knew that eventually he’d rot or burn or get lost among her worn-out stuffed animals (those other refugees from the Land of Counterpane, lovestained and tearstained, gaping at the world through scratched glass eyes); or the girl would grow up, nervous at first because the training wheels were off the bicycle, but the day she stopped being afraid of falling was the day she’d be too big to listen to the reading of Just So Stories, and that was when she’d get tired of him, because he could never be anything new. So he had the certainty of a negative future. He decided, therefore, to make the best of the present. Maybe she’d buy him clothes, or a toy gun…

But as the days went like clock-hands crossing, he began to miss the wooden airplane. The view at the window seemed the same, even though the leaves turned red and yellow and then curled and dropped off, and the children came back from school with their books in their arms, going around the corner until they were lost in gold leaf-shimmers; and while it was very nice to sit by the fireplace, the heat soon began to dry him out and warp him. Yes, her bed was lovely, but sometimes he’d get thrust under one of the pillows where he could scarcely breathe; or she’d jog him carelessly with her elbow. Even wood can feel, although his thoughts were empty like bombed-out villages with crossbeams of shadow resembling gallowses, rubble and emptiness inside the roofless rooms whose cracked walls were still strangely straight-topped; and through doors and window frames he could see the mountains to which the survivors must have fled. — One day he said that he had to be going. (At least he would have said that if his mouth were anything more than painted on.) He went out into the rain and found his downed craft in a stubbly field. With leaf and rubber band he made emergency repairs; then he took off again on his mission, which was to get from Point A to Point B. He skimmed his way through the backyard airspace of white houses, glimpsing sometimes the children at piano practice, or the families out together in their colorful automobiles…

Now, which do you think would be a sadder fate — to be rescued time and time again by the same person, and find that the accumulating separations were making her simultaneously more distant and more stale, or to travel forever through an afternoon above the many gardens, being rescued by different girls (that is every Young Man’s dream), for him the familiarity of an unfamiliar elbow in bed, the knowledge that the afternoon would go on and on like this until he broke? — At least in the latter case he’d be going Somewhere; whereas to be rescued by his first love again and again he’d have to fly in circles around her house, its field and brook. (Not that this is objectionable in principle: a kite is not unhappy for being attached to a string.)

The airplane beside the Young Man’s charpoy had no pilot. Something must have happened to him. Either he’d gotten killed or he’d gotten permanently rescued. Of course, everyone gets permanently rescued eventually (when one gets killed). But isn’t it better to get an early start on death, so as to at least taste permanence on one’s own terms?

The airplane still twirls and twirls there above the guerrilla camp, every afternoon, but for its pilot there must have finally come an hour when the lights came on, and the children were getting ready for bed, and there was time for only one more emergency landing.

The day passed. The battle was postponed. A skirmish with some Gulbuddin men had occurred, Poor Man said; someone had been injured. The Commander in Blue prepared for the Young Man a marvelous dish of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and peppers, all sliced thin and covered with salt.

Shadows began to stain the red hill across the valley. The Young Man’s own afternoon was ending. Flying finally on his night mission through the clouds of sleep, he sat among the red lights of the cockpit, bomb-bay switches in hand to deal with any nightmare, but as he flew on and on, he understood that anyone who might have been able to rescue him, should he need it, was long since in bed; that the fields and gardens had grown in the dark, widening and drying and crinkling into vast mountains, the entire Hindu Kush; and sand and snow and icy, filthy streams all around him, no moon in sight, and the Roos picking up the tenor of his night thoughts on their electronic gear — and he realized that he had succeeded in his objective of several years, which was to get himself in deep trouble.

He imagined being caught with the Mujahideen in some sandy gulley by a patrol of the Roos. They must surrender; they were disarmed. Then, one by one, the prisoners ahead of him were machine-gunned. Did he say, “Ameriki!”—at first softly, out of shame, then in a shout, so that everyone heard, and the Mujahideen, the doomed ones, turned their backs on him contemptuously, the guards understanding him at last, pulling him away, offering him water before his first beating, primping him for his television appearance as a spy, as meanwhile the Mujahideen, muttering earnestly, “Allah, Allah,” were shot behind him? — Or did he loudly insist, “Yah — Afghan!” as the guards led him up for execution, and as he hid his glasses to hide his foreignness, the fanatic Gholam Sayed, who had not permitted the Young Man to give Suleiman medicine when he was sick,ⁱ because it was Ramazan, cried to the guards, “Mr. Ouilliam — Kaffir, na Muslim!”^j so that he would not even have the satisfaction of that stand? Which, oh which would have been worse?

The Commander in Blue invited him to accompany them on the raid. He lay in his charpoy, trying to ignore the flies, waiting for the sun to come up, the ordeal to begin. At 4:30 a.m. he had tea and eggs in the tree-house while the Commander in Blue stared into the foliage. At 6:45, old Elias came to him. —“Alootooka — chakar!” he cried. — Right, he thought skeptically, but the old man kept grabbing his arm and yelling, so he put on his shoes, took a camera, and ascended the red hill. As always, there was nothing but a group of Mujahideen practicing with their guns. They were astonishingly good marksmen. Maybe he had been too slow to see the plane.

They were to leave for the battle at ten. At twenty of eleven the whole camp was asleep. The Commander in Blue, that source of kebabs and consolation, lay wrapped in a cloth in his loft. No tours for the Young Man today, no viewing of the anti-aircraft gun, no U.N.I.C.E.F. tablets of condensed milk with sugar glaze to cheer him, no Poor Man for him to pester. At least some new guests were here, travelers carrying grenades to Herat, who distracted most of his flies. The sky was cloudless. In an hour and a half it would be time for the pathetic dusty rain.

The hill was not that red, actually, but more of an ocher color. It was a series of nondescript curves with local exceptions, such as the Russian and Bulgarian food tins, the spring, the stone walls, the shooting pits, the dead bombs. On the whole, the hill still interested him because he was careful not to look at it too much. He had a feeling that if he ever became bored with it, that is, really bored with it, there would be difficulties for him. Every day, Suleiman and Elias sat up there behind the dusty trees, watching for the Roos with their binoculars, and their Kalashnikovs gleamed in the sunshine, every curving groove of the banana magazines outlined in precious silver, and the wooden stocks gleamed and glowed, and the sun was white on the two men’s caps and noses and foreheads, and it seemed that the world ended just behind them because they sat at the very tip of the ridge, beyond which the mountains fell into a distant sun-dusted wrinkle of bluish-gray dunes far below like waves of infinity; in this sea the Roos trolled. And so Suleiman and Elias trolled for the Roos.

He lay in bed dodging the flies, whose angry whining voices reminded him to kill them. The songbirds emitted sounds lethargically from their wicker cages. Gholam Sayed sat reading his Qur’an in a semiliterate stammer. From the far side of the red hill came a gunshot — certainly another Mujahid practicing late. A breeze began to blow through the sour grapes, and the wooden airplane stirred. Soon it would be afternoon.

The man in the bed beside him stirred, pulled a canvas shirt away from his face, scratched his mustache and went back to sleep.

He thought about getting up quietly to ascend the red hill one last time, and continuing down into the desert where the cities were, and the tanks. What were the Roos doing right now? What would it be like when he met them? — Then again, suppose they came to meet him; suppose that right now something shiny were to poke itself over the crest of the red hill: a gun barrel, a turret, a tank with a big red star on it …?

“Mister,” said Poor Man, striding over to him, “Russian soldiers coming this way. Five hundred tanks. Tomorrow we fight.”

“Oh,” the Young Man said.

“You ready? Your legs good now?”

“Very good.”

“We go early.”

The Young Man lay back in his charpoy. All around him, the men slept the afternoon away. He could not sleep. When the breeze picked up, he climbed aboard the wooden alootooka and soared over the red hill. He flew for a long time. Finally an interceptor beam got him, and the plane fell into splinters. They picked him up a few yards from the wreckage, ushered him into a black jeep, and brought him into the presence of the Commander in Red, who was the Commander in Blue’s counterpart, and had sworn to destroy him. Within a twinkle of a Slavic eye, he’d poured the Young Man a shot of vodka, or whatever the Russians drank in Afghanistan. (The General had said that many of the Roos were addicted to hashish.) Then it was time to talk business.

“Now, where exactly is this rebel base you came from?” the Commander in Red would say.

“If I tell you, you’ll destroy it.”

The Commander in Red shrugged. “Destroy it, pacify it, save it from feudalism,” he said, “make it safe, let us say, for us to visit.”

“And if I don’t tell you?”

“We’re both clever — no need to even answer that.”

“Well, you see,” the Young Man explained, “I have good friends there.”

“Friends? What did they ever do for you that we can’t? Why, I bet they made you walk all the way there!”

Now, this was in fact a sensitive point with the Young Man, for the Brigadier had promised him that he would be given a horse, and when he told that to Poor Man, gasping his way up the mountain, Poor Man gave him a piece of snow to slake his thirst, and then called the Brigadier a son of a dog. “He lies!” Poor Man continued; “he told me nothing! He is nothing; he is no leader; he is C.I.A.; he is K.G.B.!” So evidently it was all the Brigadier’s fault. Or his own. Or someone else’s. When he got more tired still and asked the Mujahideen how far it was, they said, “Tsalor kilometer!” and when he walked four kilometers and asked them how far it was, they said, “Pindzuh kilometer!” and when he walked those five more kilometers and asked them how far it was, they said two, then six, then one, then another, then seven… — Nonetheless, the Young Man was no Benedict Brezhnev. He hoped that he wasn’t, anyhow.

During the evening meal, which he ate with the Commander in Blue, the red hill turned slowly orange, like a photo of the surface of Mars.

No, it was really impossible to imagine what it was like in Afghanistan.

Then they were going into battle, over the red hill. But it turned out that there was actually not one red hill but a whole series of them, and they went over them for hours without seeing a Roos. Once they had to be very quiet, and tiptoe along the base of a dour red bluff, in a place where the river echoed. There were supposed to be enemy tanks on the other side. But they never heard a sound, except for a faint hum, which was either the Young Man’s imagination or the change in altitude. Going over red hill and red hill with the guerrillas, he looked up at the sky, but never saw a helicopter or even a cloud. Maybe they weren’t in Afghanistan after all. Maybe the Roos had long since died of some disease, like Wells’s Martians, and the Mujahideen were having a great time swaggering around their wasteland and firing Chinese candles at each other.

Then he saw his first alootooka.

They walked along down the river. After a while, they saw pomegranates and ripe red figs all around, and grapes so good that the village dogs stood up on their hind legs to eat them. Near the town of ——, where the Soviet garrison was, they stopped under the trees, unrolled their mats, and prayed beside their machine guns, each in his time. They kept asking the Young Man how he was. Elias and Suleiman embraced him. Poor Man looked for a long time through binoculars at an ancient clay fort in which nothing moved. They all sat there behind the trees, waiting for the hot daylight to go away. — “Roos,” whispered Suleiman, pointing over the ridge. Elias was praying again on his blanket, his head touching the stock of his Kalashnikov, and the grenade launcher also prayed like a mantis, a single grenade pointing upwards toward the sky, and the other fighters sat patiently. — Now at last the country began to darken, and the men to tense themselves for what was about to come. They prayed again. Poor Man led them into the village, stepping only on the boundary stones of the fields so as not to damage the crop. The village dreamed under wide fig trees. The houses were made of clay. The Mujahideen bowed to the village malik, and he brought them fermented milk and beans cooked in oil. Then they sat there waiting. Presently it was completely dark, and through the sky passed a silent, eerie swarm of winking lights. Planes. They waited. In front of them rose a red hill (now a gentle black solidity in the moonlight). They walked along the edges of the rice fields, trying not to damage the crops. Crickets chirred around them.

“Why are you fighting?”

“I am not fighting for myself; I am not fighting for Afghanistan; I am fighting only for the God.”

Ahead of them, at the summit of the red hill, there was a flash. Poor Man had begun to fire. The boy who carried the rocket launcher ran up to Poor Man, smiling happily. A Soviet shell exploded loudly somewhere near them. The Young Man felt cold. He looked around him. All his companions were happy. Another shell landed, flinging stones. While the boy prepared the rocket launcher, the other Mujahideen began to fire. They shot beyond themselves like the snap of the slide projector in darkness as he advanced the carousel, letting image after image tumble down into the abyss of light (more than ten seconds’ exposure is said to put the transparency at risk of fading, and now it has been eleven years!), and the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason that I came; I don’t want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly believe; they had crossed their river so long ago that I could not really comprehend them as anything except heroes shining like Erica on the far side of the water; they were over the red hill and nothing else mattered.

“What weapons do you most need?”

“Anti-aircraft guns. And if we get anti-air missiles, you will see what a lesson we can give the Soviet invaders!”

“How is the food situation in your part of Afghanistan?”

“Very bad.”

“What will you do if you cannot get what you need?”

“Why, perhaps we will kill ourselves, but we will certainly never surrender.”

* A manual for soldiers of the British Empire, with such helpful pattern sentences as “Silence!” or “Bring me at once five hundred coolies,” or “You are now under Government rule.” One of the most humiliating things that happened to me on this journey occurred when I was still on the plane and I proudly told the man in the seat beside me that I had studied some Pushtu, and he said something that I could not understand, and I said, “What?” and he said, “I asked you how your Pushtu was.”

† The General told me that ammunition was hard to get, and when it was in good supply, the Peshawar-based organizations distributed it stingily, so as to keep the individual bands from becoming too independent. So it was like everything else. If their parties helped them too much they hurt themselves. So Commissioner Abdullah had thought, not wanting to give vocational training to the refugees because that took work away from Pakistanis, so he left them as beggars, as a burden. So our C.I.A. might have thought — why should they be in a hurry for this embarrassment to the Soviets to come to an end? So the Young Man undoubtedly thought; otherwise he would have given away all his money and let them feed upon his flesh.

‡ Five.

§ Probably they didn’t.

‖ Why should I give the enemy anything?

a In April 1987, I read with great pleasure that Pakistan had shot down a plane of the “Afghan” Air Force over this terrain, not far, said the paper, from Parachinar. The plane had violated Pakistani airspace a day or two after two other bombings by “Afghan” planes which had killed about a hundred people.

b “Then we have the problem of the journalists going inside Afghanistan. Even if they can smuggle [themselves] out the Pakistan checkpoints, it is difficult for them to walk for several days and weeks in the mountain terrain of the country. Moreover, danger awaits them in every step they take. Very few exceptional journalists can work under such conditions. Most of those who go inside limit their trips to areas near the border and write superficial reports.” —Mirror of Jehad: The Voice of the Afghan Mujahideen (Jamiat-i-Islami publication), January — February 1982.

c This portion of Poor Man’s statement was translated by a different person than the other, which explains the syntactical differences. For more information on the use of C.B.W. agents in Afghanistan, see the Haig Report cited in the Sources section at the end of this book.

d Philosophical Investigations, IIxi, p. 223e.

e And here I see the slide of the boy who stood on a high green Afghan hillside, pointing at the sun the wooden toy gun that his father had carved for him (had he already crossed the river also, so young?), and his little sister’s hair was falling out in patches from some disease but she wore a necklace of heavy squares of pure silver carved with signs, gladdened with jewels or colored glass beads (how would I ever know which?).

f Airplane.

g Small sweet apricot.

h This may sound like propaganda. It is not. Never have I seen people so serene, yet so full of a great considered purpose.

i The Qur’an in fact states that sick people, travelers and warriors on jihad may break their fast and make it up later. Suleiman, therefore, would have been triply justified in taking the medicine.

j Mr. William is an unbeliever, not a Muslim.

13. ON THE TRAIN (1982)

At the end of his voyage he took the Khyber Mail back to Karachi — second class this time, for financial reasons (cost: about Rs. 103). It brought back to mind his nightmares of the Karachi railway station, City and Cantt — the wild-eyed woman holding out a hand and bringing it slowly to her mouth, then stretching it out again, saying, “Give me only for food — only for food!”; the soft, persistent “Hello, mister? Hello? Hey, mister!” gradually increasing in volume as the Young Man walked past until it became a desperate shout, the faces of the red-uniformed coolies contorting with rage when he clung to his pack, and always people staring, staring at him, moving in like flies if he so much as slackened his step, old men bellowing offers of hotels and rides and hashish, filthy kids standing there with waiting palms, and all of them crying out to him to help them, until for frustration he could have killed them.

The Khyber Mail, anyhow, was packed even worse than usual, it being the Eid holiday at the close of Ramazan. Second class was just wooden benches. Men slept braced between seat tops and the luggage rack, the rest of their bodies entirely in space; or piled on the floor, pushing at each other in their sleep. To go to the latrine you had to step on heads or fingers. (There was no toilet paper; the doorknob was slippery with shit.) If you were lucky enough to be sitting on a bench, two or three heads were heavy against your ankles like cannonballs; someone else casually slung his legs up on your shoulders; a third had his head on your thigh — and stretched full-length on the bench was another sleeper, anyhow, so that everyone else on it, including you, had to sit an inch from the edge. When the Young Man couldn’t stand it anymore he got down on the floor with the others. A man pressed up against him fiercely in sleep, pushing him at a slant against the faces of other sleepers. He slept for half an hour. Then finally when he couldn’t stand it anymore there, either, he sat up on the floor. Above him, in the little space where he had been sitting, was a stack of feet originating from all directions — five or six pairs of feet, each on top of the others.

An acquaintance invited him into an upper berth. He accepted with alacrity, for there were little army-green fans up there, on the ceiling. He discovered immediately, however, that they did nothing. When he put his hand right against the grille he could barely feel any disturbance in the air.

“Are you married?” his companion asked shyly.

“Soon,” he said.

This evidently excited the fellow, for the Young Man felt his hand poking slyly in his ribs. It was 3:00 a.m. He reached out to push the hand away and found it to be the foot of another aerial slumberer.

The instant he had gotten on the train (the General’s son Zahid had driven him to the station and found his coach for him), sweat began to run down his face, as with everyone else’s, so humid with bodies it was in there. During the two nights of the journey it only got worse. Every time the train stopped, the fans stopped and the lights faded to red-eyed bulbs. It was an express train, so, unlike the Yugoslavian trains of that appellation, it didn’t stop at every single station — it stopped at every station but two. He got desperately thirsty. Few pleasures of beauty or love, or any other, are as wonderful as the satisfaction of thirst; few needs are more tormenting. At those midnight stops, sometimes he’d see (in the larger towns of the Punjab) a man presiding like a bartender over Fanta and Coca-Cola, the bottles not even cold the way they were in the daytime when musclebound old men with sad faces walked up and down the trains, carrying buckets filled with drinks in ice and crying — “Bottali! Bottali! Soda! Yaukh!”^* (“bottali” sounding to him like beetles or insects) — no, now there was just the filthy, hazy, soggy night as they trundled on and on through the farmland province, and the man seated behind the counter with his bottles would refuse to come to the train window — and there was no predicting how long they might stay at any one station — fifteen minutes? half a minute? — so climbing out the window was very risky and he never did it.

On his trip back to the base from the raid, the Young Man traveled with four friends who had given up their jihad for his sake. (In every respect, it seemed, he was a burden.) The way was very steep for the last two hours; it was der möskel, very difficult. When he began to fall behind, he told them to go on; presently he was all alone, and walking among unfamiliar hills. He thought: Oh, God, I’m lost in Afghanistan, and with no water. But he kept on walking; and after a while he recognized a landmark, a view he’d stared at through his telephoto for days as he looked toward the tanks, so he kept going until the angle of vision was right, and he saw the beginning of the forested mountains and knew that he had made it. —China, china, he kept saying to himself, licking his lips: —Spring, spring.

Suddenly he saw two of his companions a hundred feet below him. It was almost sunset. —“Asalamu alaykum,” he said. They had been wandering all over the hills looking for him. — “Ouilliam, Ouilliam,” they sighed tolerantly. — He expressed his apologies. — One of his friends helped him down the last hill with his strong hand. The Young Man was in an agony of thirst. He kissed the Mujahid’s hand with his bloody lips. At the china he drank a quart of obuh, then settled back for serious and attentive consumption. As he walked the last hundred yards to the spring, he had kept thinking: I’m so happy, I’m so happy, I’m so happy.

Now on the train he was not as thirsty as that, but still he was thirsty, and it was hard to think of anything else in the world. They stopped at a little station, and a banana seller came by. The Young Man hissed, the way the Pakistanis did.

“Hello,” the banana seller said in English.

Bananas were safe; you could peel them. And they would be moist inside. There was a great cracking lump in his throat.

“Bananas,” he croaked, not knowing the Punjabi word.

The vendor went back to his cart and pushed it away, walking down the tracks to the next car. The Young Man hissed and hissed, without any luck. Finally the train began to move slowly away from the station, and he passed the man again. He held out a five-rupee note pathetically. The banana seller stared at him, said something, and thrust a giant bunch of bananas into his hand — it must have been forty or so. The train went on. Evidently most people used a one-rupee note for that transaction.

A few of his compartment mates had woken up, and they laughed at him and his many bananas good-humoredly. “Okay,” they said to him delightedly. “Okay.”

The bananas were juicy and sweet. He ate about twenty of them right away to satisfy his thirst, and gave most of the remainder away over the hours.

One man had a flute. He played sitting on a seat top. The flute was gorgeously carved and painted with rings of color.

“You like?” the flute player said when he found that the Young Man could speak a little Pushtu.

“Very much. Very good. How long you play?”

“Ten years. For you. Gift. Take to Am-rika.”

“But I cannot use. No understand flute.”

They tried to show him how to play. For half an hour they tried. He couldn’t blow a note. They laughed and laughed; it was a game. He laughed, too. After a while another man tried to learn. He couldn’t do it, either. They all laughed.

They bought him sodas all day, and dinner (dordai with onion, a few tomato slices and, for the main dish, lumps of corn flour fried in curry oil). When he thanked them, they looked a little hurt, and said, “But it’s our duty!”

On hospitality:

1. If you extend it to everyone, does it mean less because you don’t care about the particular person involved, or more because you genuinely care about everyone?

2. If you exclude Russians, Kaffirs, et cetera, does that make hospitality mean more or less? (Sartre says two people make a community by excluding a third.)

You cannot love as thoroughly as you ought to, and you cannot love those who aim to destroy you, but you can love (maybe, the Young Man qualified, gulping). Click to next picture: His first night at the Hotel Excelsior, which they called the Hotel Exercise; across the street there were people sleeping at the State Hotel on tables outside; and what I find most astonishing about that is that he was astonished, because at that time there weren’t so many people in his country who had to sleep that way; if I went to Pakistan now and saw them I probably wouldn’t even notice.

On the Afghans:

They have their faults, but so do we. Let us give them what we can. And let’s accept whatever they can give us.

That’s really what he wrote and thought; it seems so sweet to me now, like something that a child might have written. He had the feeling of being rich, his notebook and cassettes now filled weightlessly with information susceptible to understanding. He would comb it like a head of hair, having whipped out his long- and fine-toothed analyses. Now that the Soviets have left (whether or not they come back), it is funny to see how much of it has turned to ashes.

On the Pakistanis:

The same.

It was an overcast day when the Young Man disembarked at Karachi Cantt. Everyone invited him to stay. He went instead to a youth hostel, drinking Sprite after Sprite until his Pakistani money was gone. Then he lay listening to the call to evening prayers.

…“wie fromme viktorianische Kriegsgeschrei …” said the Süddeutscher Zeitung as they flew out of German airspace, the Young Man rolling back home like the proverbial foul ball to the fallow field. — “Sorry about the turbulence,” the captain said. — The Young Man didn’t mind it. It kept him awake. But his eyes flicked down to his belly, where he felt the familiar cramps begin — was it that grape-leaf stuff from the Turkish caterer, or simple intestinal incredulity at preservatives, meat ’n’ cheese? A glut of food for whatever reason on airplanes, and never enough to drink — half the volume in the glass is ice cubes, and after ten 7-Ups a day in Pakistan he needed it, oh how he needed it — even the air-conditioning seemed fake, and his body could not stop preparing itself for the shock that must come when it ended, as when he stepped out of Levi’s car, or the Habib Bank, or the American Center, into the reality of dear old P-P-Peshawar — and every time a hair moved on his head he raised his hand, expecting to dislodge a cloud of flies, for the moment too ill and exhausted to plan out the action-steps of his Help to the Afghans stage by stage;^† closing his eyes, he did not see the narrow cafe in Peshawar with its counter topped with long-necked bottles of Mango Squash and rose-flavored syrup, the racks of Sprites and Fantas in the cooler with its magnificently transparent double doors (although it was not cool inside), where the customers sat, dark-mustached, with wide giving eyes, and someone always bought the Young Man a soda when he came in; and it took him years to think the thought: What if I had bought everybody there a soda? — since after all that’s all I could have done for them — but he had selfishly hoarded in order to be selfless, as for instance in Afghanistan when the Mujahideen were sitting under a tree with him and they wanted to play an Indian rock-and-roll cassette on his tape player but he said no because he had to save the batteries for interviews; after all, interviewing them was the only way to begin helping them (to his credit, he did at least feel bad about it — he honestly was not stingy even though he acted that way; he was convinced of himself just as Pakistanis and Afghans were each convinced that the other was dirtier); and the plane descended toward this — ISLE, this — WHIMSY, this — POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE where all topics are mediated through sports and weather and people read books like All Quiet in the Garden and (look at the lovely unveiled face of that girl across the aisle!) now here they all were in this — ENGLAND … He had lost thirty pounds. He had taken about twelve hundred slides, most of which were worthless. Soon he would be organizing his Afghan relief presentations, to which hardly anyone would come; he would scrupulously send his pure-got contributions to Pakistan, in doses so small that they ought to have been homeopathic, instead of simply useless. — Oh, he was determined to be of use, all right. Two years after his return, he began learning to shoot a gun…

My dear Bill,

Thanks for your nice letter. There is an old saying — Health is wealth. You ought to take good care of your health. Three things are needed for every Project:

a. brain

b. hands — Physical fitness to do things

c. money.

You have the brain — but you are not physically fit and you have no money — hence forget about the AFGHANS — for the time being. My advice to you is to get down to serious profession — any of your own choice.…… and take good care of your health………… “ROOS” is at our doorstep.…… We will keep her at a distance ourselves, if we live as Muslims..… The other day a young Afghan orphan boy came to see me. He had a bullet injury in his head. A C.R.C.^‡ doctor removed it but he has gone blind now..… Surely they could arrange Eye transplant etc…… “T.B.” is on the increase — sitting in America you can’t appreciate the problems of the Refugees in Pakistan and the problems inside Afghanistan.

More in my next.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

THE END

* “Bottles! Bottles! Soda! Cold!”

† “Bill,” wrote the General six months later, “get well soon. If the American Doctors can’t take care of you — come back to Pakistan, we shall look after you. The weather is nice and chilly. Please accept Xmas and New Year’s greetings from all of us. May the New Year bring happiness and prosperity. Are you still reading the holy Qur’an?”

‡ Committee of the Red Cross.

14. POSTSCRIPT

Bill — your First Book is a “hit”—now get down to serious business of writing. I read the book reviews at least ten times and side-lined/under-lined the remarks — try to eradicate your failings in printed ink.

Your book on Afghanistan must reflect the following:

a. Afghanistan — its importance to the Free World & USA, if any, prior to the Russian invasion.

b. Why Russia invaded Afghanistan. Has Russia achieved its aim?

c. How the Afghans kept the Russians — a superpower — at bay! with outmoded weapons.

d. Will the Russians quit Afghanistan — for good.

e. Spell out the Russian and the USA interest in clear terms, in this Region — before invasion, during invasion and after the Russian pull-out.

f. The role played by Pakistan — its physical and economical contribution — Afghanistan’s impact on Pakistan’s economy.

g. Has the Free World adequately compensated Pakistan and the victims of Russian aggression by air and blasts?

h. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Has Pakistan lived up to this role?

I ask the reader: What would your list of important issues be? Have I addressed them? How can you help?

Because I am a believer in the Fairness Doctrine, I decided to contact the consulate of the U.S.S.R. to obtain their opinion of this book. Here is what I wrote.

3065 Pacific Ave.

San Francisco, CA 94115

6 November 1987

Consulate General of the

Soviet Union

279 Green Street

San Francisco, CA

Ladies and Gentlemen:

…Being somewhat of an empiricist, I place a high value on what I see and hear myself. It causes me some regret, therefore, to admit that when I was in Afghanistan I never spoke with Soviet or pro-Occupation personnel. This makes my book seriously flawed. I have, of course, read a few key documents which present the Soviet point of view: the 1980 interview with Brezhnev given shortly after Babrak Karmal took office, those two or three of Babrak’s speeches which are available, some Tass statements, etc. But the fact remains that almost all of my sources have a very strong anti-Soviet bias.

For this reason, I would like to give you the opportunity to read and comment on the manuscript draft of my book (which is about 250 double-spaced pages). Any suggestions or corrections to errors of fact would be gratefully appreciated. I frankly believe that the Soviet presence in Afghanistan is wrong. I do my best to make my readers believe this, too. I challenge you to convince them otherwise. If you care to comment on the book, I will give you five or ten pages in it to do so. I will not edit or alter your remarks in any way without your permission. If you sincerely feel that the views of my book are in error, well, as Lenin said (“All Out For the Fight Against Denikin!”), “All our agitation and propaganda must serve to inform the people of the truth.” If not, your silence will speak for itself…

Yours truly,

William T. Vollmann

Their silence spoke for itself.