Soldiers of God

6 Haji Babà and the Gucci Muj

JUST AS Abdul Haq was, behind the scenes, the most respected of the Peshawar-based mujahidin, Rahim Wardak was the most laughed at.

Haq, having never served in a formal army, had no rank and did not psychologically require one. Wardak, a former general in the Afghan army who defected while a military attaché in India, had a very impressive-sounding rank and title: major general and chief of the general staff of Mahaz-i-Milli Islami (National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, or NIFA), one of the moderate groups in the seven-party alliance. Haq’s English was often ungrammatical and full of swear words; Wardak’s was a polished, Sandhurst variety. Haq always wore the same gray shalwar kameez. Wardak, a portly man in middle age with black, gray-flecked hair, sported aviator glasses, pressed American military fatigues, a scarf and matching beret in camouflage design, a pistol and a survival dagger. Wardak resembled not an Afghan guerrilla but a fashion model in a mercenary magazine advertisement. Flanked, as he sometimes was, by a squad of NIFA mujahidin armed with Israeli-manufactured Uzi machine guns, he and his men conveyed the aura of a Latin American drug smuggler’s army. Regarding the dagger that Wardak carried, Haq once remarked, “You want to see a knife? I’ll show you a real knife.” He picked up a small knife from his desk. “This is a penknife. I open letters with it. That’s more than Rahim Wardak does with his knife.”

Wardak controlled no territory inside Afghanistan and rarely left Pakistani soil. He directed “battles” across the border with a frequency-hopping walkie-talkie given him by the Americans. But not even the Americans in Islamabad were fooled by him. Once when Wardak claimed to have rained two thousand rockets on Kabul, a check by the U.S. embassy revealed that only eight rockets had fallen on the city that week. Wardak called the December 1987 mujahidin siege of Khost, in Paktia province near the Pakistani border, in which he took part, “the biggest battle of the war.” But a few weeks later, Wardak said Khost was “a joke,” blown out of proportion by the media.

At the American Club bar, Wardak was considered “a goofy NIFA general.” He was the extreme, comic embodiment of the British military historian John Keegan’s dictum: “Generalship is bad for people…. The most reasonable of men suffuse with pomposity when stars touch their shoulders.”

When reporters, diplomats, and relief workers in Pakistan thought of NIFA, Wardak naturally came to mind. He was an apt symbol for a party of mujahidin who dressed slick, talked fancy, did less fighting, and held less territory than the rough-hewn, tea-slurping fundamentalists of Yunus Khalis’s party.

NIFA’s founder was Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani (a Pir is a hereditary saint). Gailani, in addition to claiming direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed, was the leader of the Sufi Qadirrya sect, which has small groups of followers throughout the Middle East. While this sounds pious and impressive, the Pir’s reputation on the Northwest Frontier was anything but. Some journalists, and mujahidin too, called him “the disco Pir.” In the mid-1970s, while Khalis and others were fighting in the hills, Gailani ran a car dealership in Kabul. Rather than traditional robes, he preferred Savile Row suits, Gucci loafers, and silk scarves. John Fullerton, in a 1983 primer about the war in Afghanistan, described the Pir, in his late fifties, as “otiose, sedentary, sleepy-eyed and boastful.” Later he developed cancer, and this necessitated frequent trips to London. But during the fasting month of Ramadan in spring 1988, the Pir’s departure for London caused many to remark aloud, “Away from the eyes of the mujahidin, in England he doesn’t have to fast.”

Gailani’s troops were known as the “Gucci muj.” NIFA offices in Peshawar, Islamabad, and Quetta were staffed by mujahidin in designer sunglasses, running shoes, and sleeveless Banana Republic vests and fatigue pants. Some even wore expensive cologne and possessed Sony Walkmans, along with camouflage-patterned wallets and briefcases. They patronized the restaurants and coffee shops of expensive Pakistani hotels. NIFA offices were air conditioned, of course, and had refrigerators stocked with soft drinks. But the most significant physical characteristic of the “Gucci muj” was that their leading officials either had beards that were neatly trimmed… like the Pir’s… or had no beards at all.

To visit a NIFA office was to be bombarded with complaints about American and Pakistani arms supply policy. Apparently, Zia was shortchanging the NIFA commanders, just as he was Abdul Haq, in favor of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami. But instead of soldiering on, the NIFA mujahidin constantly whined about it. They saw themselves, correctly, as representing the Western values that America encouraged. Yet Pakistan’s intelligence service, with U.S. acquiescence, was giving NIFA only a pittance in weapons and supplies. This was why NIFA, according to its own officials, was not more active in the fighting. The American and Pakistani answer was: “If NIFA showed more fighting ability, then it would get more weapons.” To that, NIFA retorted: “If Hekmatyar takes power in a post-Soviet Afghanistan and turns the country into a version of Khomeini’s Iran, then America and Zia will have only themselves to blame.” (When Zia was killed in a plane crash, NIFA officials were quietly ecstatic.)

NIFA had only two leaders they could really boast about: Amin Wardak and Haji Abdel Latif, two commanders with strong local support in their areas who fought well… without cologne or matching berets and scarves.

Amin Wardak, who was unrelated and unconnected to Major General Rahim Wardak, had been the guerrilla chieftain of Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, since 1978. For two years, Amin Wardak and his men had no contact with the Pakistan-based resistance parties, and completely on their own they wrested control of Wardak province from the Afghan Communists. After the Soviets invaded, Amin Wardak sent a group of mujahidin to Peshawar to negotiate with the parties in order to get more arms. A deal was struck with NIFA, only because of an old friendship between Pir Gailani and Amin’s father. But the relationship quickly went sour. “We saw Gailani give power and money to people who weren’t doing any real fighting, while we were doing to Ghazni [a major town south of Wardak province] what Abdul Haq was doing to Kabul,” explained Amin’s younger brother, Ruhani Wardak. “Gailani,” he went on, “wanted a diplomatic strategy and we preferred to fight…And what about Rahim Wardak? Well, our people were getting killed while he was still a military attaché in India for the Communist government!”

Considering the contempt Amin Wardak had for Pir Gailani, it was amazing that the relationship lasted as long as it did. It wasn’t until the beginning of 1988 that Amin Wardak formally broke away from NIFA and joined up with Khalis. The final straw was nothing that the Pir precipitated; rather, it had to do with Abdul Haq’s injury. The medical compound where Haq was taken after he had stepped on the mine was in Wardak province, and so under Amin’s control. Haq felt that he owed his life to him and showed his appreciation by sending Amin several truckloads of weapons and ammunition. Some bargaining ensued, and as a result NIFA was suddenly without one of its only two big commanders.

NIFA still had Haji Abdel Latif, though. Haji Latif was about the last person on earth one would normally associate with the “Gucci muj.” He was in his eighties and, even more so than Khalis, spent most of his time inside, fighting. Haji Latif had a particularly unsavory reputation before the war. He had served twenty-one years in prison on a murder charge and was a strange sort of brigand: he was the leader of a gang of Kandahar cutthroats that functioned as a benevolent mafia, robbing rich merchants by making them pay exorbitant rates for “protection” and, occasionally, giving some of the money to the poor. NIFA officials defined him as a “Robin Hood figure.” His gang was called Pagie Louch, Farsi for “bare feet,” because along with special prayers and magic incantations, its initiation rites involved walking barefoot on a bed of hot coals. New members also had to suffer nails to be driven into their heels without showing pain.

Switching gears from gang leader to mujahidin commander was easy in Afghanistan, particularly in the southern desert city of Kandahar, the wildest part of perhaps the wildest country on earth.

In a war that was in many ways the most dangerous ever for a reporter to cover, Kandahar was the most dangerous theater of the war. Its desert land was flat and cluttered with land mines. When MI-24 helicopter gunships swept in low after their prey, you could run but you couldn’t hide. Because you didn’t have to walk, the Kandahar area was physically less demanding than everywhere else in the country. But never in the mountainous north did a reporter feel as scared and vulnerable as when jammed inside a Toyota Land Cruiser, slowed down by deep pockets of sand, with Soviet helicopters in the sky. The Kandahari guerrillas, more than the other mujahidin, had a reputation for reckless bravado. When mines and helicopters were reported ahead, they slammed on the accelerator.

Kandahar really got to me; it wiped out what was left of my so-called objectivity. Being there made me think that the Western media really were a bunch of pampered, navel-gazing yuppies, too busy reporting illegal detentions and individual killings in South Korea and the West Bank… before dashing back to their luxury hotels in Seoul and Jerusalem… to bother about the nuclearlike wasting of an entire urban center by the Soviet military. The throngs of reporters in places like Israel, South Korea, and South Africa, and the absence of them in Kandahar, or even in the Pakistan border area that abuts it, made me think that “war reporting” was fast becoming a misnomer.

Blazers were replacing flak jackets. The warfare most often videotaped and written about was urban violence in societies that have attained a level of development sufficient to allow large groups of journalists to operate comfortably. The worldwide profusion of satellite stations, laptop computers, computer modems, and luxury hotels with digital phone and telex systems was narrowing the media’s horizons rather than widening them. If there wasn’t a satellite station nearby, or if the phones didn’t work, or if the electricity wasn’t dependable, you just reported less or nothing at all about the place. Although the South Africans, for example, merely curtailed your movements, the Soviets tried to hunt you down and kill you. So you covered South Africa while at the same time denouncing its government for the restrictions it placed on your work. But you didn’t fool around with the Soviets, because they were serious about keeping reporters out. I couldn’t think about Kandahar; I could only rant and rage about it.

The modern destruction of Kandahar had its origins in the American decision to build an airport there in 1956. By the time the airport was completed in December 1962, at a cost of $15 million, it was already considered a white elephant. According to Louis Dupree, in his 1973 book Afghanistan, the airport, in theory, “would have been a refueling stop for piston aircraft on their way across the Middle East and South Asia…. The introduction of the jet age smashed this dream before the completion of the project, and the magnificent facilities now sit, virtually unused, in the desert” outside Kandahar.

Of course Dupree, when he wrote that passage, had no way of knowing what was going to happen. It turned out that the Americans did not build a white elephant after all. Following the Soviet invasion, that airport, about fifteen miles southeast of the city, became the heart of the southernmost concentration of Soviet soldiery in the three-hundred-year history of Russian imperialism in central Asia. Not since Czar Peter the Great first moved against the Tartars had the Russians been so tantalizingly close to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean: five hundred miles across the Baluchi desert, to be exact; or, to put it another way, thirty minutes’ flying time by strike aircraft or naval bomber to the Persian Gulf.

The Soviets garrisoned the airport and the nearby city against mujahidin attacks. Early in the war, when the attacks grew more bold, the Soviets, as they had begun to do in the Panjshir Valley in the north, stretched the definition of counterinsurgency in Kandahar to a point beyond any that the Americans in Vietnam had ever conceived of. They peppered the surrounding desert with tens of thousands of land mines, which they usually dropped from the air but sometimes shot from mortars. Soviet rockets fired from the city and the airport blasted the villages around Kandahar. These villages became lifeless archeological sites, overgrown with weeds and silent except for the buzzing of flies and wasps. But the Kandahari mujahidin were every bit as hell-bent as the Soviets. They zigzagged through minefields on the dust-packed, gravelly wastes with double-barreled 23 mm antiaircraft guns mounted on the backs of their pickup trucks, firing away at anything that moved in the sky. The guns made a harsh, piercing noise that felt like sharp metal inside your stomach, but the gunners never used ear plugs. In 1986, the year after Charles Thornton of the Arizona Republic was killed in a helicopter ambush, when even the bravest journalists avoided Kandahar, the fighting there became truly awful.

James Rupert of the Washington Post was one of a handful of American reporters to visit Kandahar before the Soviet troop withdrawal and the only one I’m aware of who visited the city in 1986. His October 6 dispatch was the most graphic news story about the war in Afghanistan by an American journalist:

Rupert described a group of mujahidin listening to a radio report about a bombing in Beirut. “Why do they always talk about Beirut?” the man asked Rupert. “Kandahar had a hundred bombs last night.” Rupert’s story made little impact and was quickly forgotten.

The following year, 1987, the situation in Kandahar worsened still. A State Department publication noted, “By the onset of summer, the capital of southern Afghanistan and its surrounding areas had become the scene of what has been probably the heaviest concentration of combat of the war.” The Soviets, who by this time were starting to tell their own people the truth about what was happening in Afghanistan, brought an Izvestia correspondent to Kandahar in September. He wrote that the city “is one big ruin. There is shooting all the time. Nobody would give a brass farthing for your life if you took it into your head, say, to walk down the street unarmed.”

In 1987, the Soviets carpet bombed Kandahar for months on end. After reducing part of the city center and almost all of the surrounding streets to rubble, they bulldozed a grid of roads to enable tanks and armored cars to patrol the city in sectors, indiscriminately destroying shops and homes in the process. Then they tried to win back local sympathies through a rebuilding campaign. But mujahidin filtered back into the area and besieged Soviet positions. Probably more than ten thousand soldiers and civilians were killed and wounded in Kandahar in that year alone.

By 1988, the population of Kandahar, about 200,000 before the war, amounted to, by one estimate, no more than 25,000 inhabitants. The only people in the West aware of what was happening were officials in Washington with access to satellite photographs and Pakistan-based diplomats, journalists, and relief workers. The American media not only ignored the Kandahar story but in most cases probably weren’t even aware of it. The grinding, piecemeal destruction of Afghanistan’s second-largest city constituted an enormous black hole in foreign news coverage in our time.

Throughout the decade, Haji Latif was in the thick of this carnage, which meant that NIFA, whatever its reputation elsewhere, was a major player in the Kandahar fighting. One NIFA official was quick to boast about this: “We have the most fighters in Kandahar, so why don’t the Pakistanis and the Americans help us more?”

It was questionable whether NIFA really did have the most fighters in Kandahar, since Khalis and the other fundamentalist parties had considerable presence as well. But beneath the claims were fascinating little truths that gave the Kandahar fighting an importance far beyond the quantity of blood shed there.

Ideology mixed with a moderate dose of self-interest drew Haji Latif and NIFA together. NIFA was in fact at its core a royalist party, favoring the return to Afghanistan of exiled King Zahir Shah. This sat well with Haji Latif, since the king had represented a loose, rather corrupt power structure that had allowed his banditry to flourish.

King Zahir Shah’s forty-year tenure on the throne in Kabul… from his ascension in 1933 at the age of eighteen to the 1973 coup engineered by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, which toppled him… was by any reckoning a less than glorious time in Afghan history. Though Afghanistan enjoyed relative peace and development, it was the king’s lazy, uninspired leadership that permitted the Soviets to gain a foothold inside the state bureaucracy. One Western specialist on Afghanistan, with reference to the king’s philandering ways, puts it this way: “While Daoud and the Communists were busy building a power structure in Kabul, the king was busy following his dick around Europe.”

The fundamentalist parties loathed the king with a passion, almost as much as they did the Soviets. For men like Yunus Khalis, Din Mohammed, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the king was the living symbol of the cowardice and moral corruption that had brought the godless Soviets down on the nation’s head. Din Mohammed once explained to me: “How often, during his years of comfortable exile in Italy, has the king spoken out against the sufferings of our people and the crimes of the Russians? Thousands of Afghan children die, and what sacrifice has the king, in his Italian villa, made for the jihad? None.” The political attitude not only of Khalis’s party but of the other fundamentalist groups could be summed up in one phrase, which I heard often in Peshawar: “No king, no Communists!”

Afghan fundamentalists liked to compare King Zahir Shah to Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, the early-nineteenth-century ruler of Kabul, who owed his throne to the British during their brief occupation and was therefore the puppet of a foreign army. The fundamentalists thought that King Zahir Shah was as bad as Babrak Karmal and Najib, the Soviet-imposed rulers. At a rally of fundamentalist parties on the Northwest Frontier in February 1988,1 saw an impassioned mujahid grab the microphone and yell, “Death to Zahir Shah! So many mujahidin have been sacrificed for Islam that we don’t want to be ruled by anyone except God!”

When the peasant fundamentalists of Yunus Khalis’s Hizbi-Islami looked at the mujahidin of Pir Gailani’s NIFA they saw a group of pampered, Westernized, not particularly religious aristocrats who were sacrificing less for the jihad than they were.

Indeed, all of NIFA’s top officials were related either to the king or to Pir Gailani. All were educated abroad or in the few Western-style schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They began their jihad after the fundamentalists (Pir Gailani didn’t proclaim jihad until 1979). And their families were making much less of a sacrifice than the fundamentalists: whenever a mujahid from NIFA talked about his relatives, he mentioned brothers and cousins in the United States or Europe. Whenever one of Khalis’s fighters discussed his family, he referred to brothers and cousins who were shaheedan (war martyrs) or were still fighting.

The hatred of the fundamentalist parties like Khalis’s for the nonfundamentalist parties like NIFA was therefore easy to comprehend, since it had to do not only with politics but with class divisions as well. But this didn’t mean that the mujahidin of NIFA weren’t patriots too. By any standards other than Afghan ones, they were extremely religious… certainly more so than most Pakistanis, Arabs, or urban, middle-class Iranians I ever encountered. If not five times a day, they prayed three or four times. Whatever the Pir may or may not have been doing in London, his mujahidin in Pakistan and Afghanistan observed the Ramadan fast. The fact that many members of their families were abroad meant that they had other options; they didn’t have to live in the heat and filth of Pakistan or risk their lives inside if they didn’t want to. By their own lights, the NIFA fighters were indeed making a sacrifice; very few of them were pompous exhibitionists like Major General Rahim Wardak. And their hatred of the Soviets and the Afghan Communists was every bit as authentic as that of the fundamentalists, no matter what the fundamentalists themselves claimed.

But the NIFA guerrillas’ hatred of the Soviets took a different form: it was fired by tradition, not religion. The difference between NIFA and Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami was that Khalis’s men were revolutionaries, while the NIFA mujahidin were simple patriots. They wanted a restoration of the days prior to 1973, when Daoud’s coup against the king set the country on the ignoble path toward communism. Khalis, on the other hand, wanted a new Afghanistan entirely: an Islamic republic, free of both king and Communists. Unlike Iran’s Islamic republic to the west, it would not be repressive. Unlike Zia’s Islamic republic to the east, it would not overflow with hypocrisy.

Because NIFA was willing to settle for less, and was also doing less of the fighting, it was more willing to talk to the enemy. As the Kremlin began to realize that communism, as an ideology, had no future in Afghanistan and the best it could hope for was a return to the status quo ante, NIFA and the other nonfundamentalist parties became even more inclined to make a deal. By late 1987, NIFA and Moscow were each willing to settle for a return to mid-1973 conditions.

This was why these parties were labeled moderate. The irony throughout the war was that, politically, the moderate parties were in sync with official U.S. policy, which stated that the Soviets must leave and that the Afghans should determine their own future, preferably along pro-Western lines. But it was the radical mujahidin, sworn to fight to the death and compromise be damned, who got American aid, and not the moderates, who echoed U.S. policy from closer to the sidelines.

As Khalis symbolized the religious and warrior strands of the Pathan personality, Pir Gailani symbolized another rich heritage… based on royalty, history, and myth… that was also Pathan. The Pir’s only real political ally in Peshawar was Sib-ghatullah Mojadidi’s Jabha-i-Nijat-Milli (Afghan National Liberation Front). Mojadidi had fewer troops in the field than NIFA. A standingjoke in Peshawar was: “There are two things you never see in Afghanistan… Hindu graves and Mojadidi’s mujahidin.” Still, Mojadidi was more respected than Gailani. Though a staunch royalist distantly related to King Zahir Shah, Mojadidi… who carried a pistol in his belt and had once threatened to shoot Hekmatyar… had a record of opposing not only the Communists but the king too, whenever he felt the king was straying too far from Islamic ideals.

The march of current history had favored Khalis. As Abdul Haq first realized as a youngster, communism was an ideology so extreme that it required another ideology, equally extreme, to repel it. Khalis’s politics proved more useful and virile than Mojadidi’s and Gailani’s. Mojadidi and Gailani stood for an Afghanistan that was disappearing, a country of chivalrous ballads, ancient myths, and genealogies in unlikely confrontation with brutal, mechanized twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Kandahar symbolized this brutal confrontation more than any other place, not only because of the intensity of the fighting there but because it was the ancestral home of Afghanistan’s kings and the hearth of the country’s cultural tradition. Isolated in the southern outback of central Asia, Kandahar’s culture was pure Afghan, untouched by the culturally corrupting influences of Iran that had bastardized Herat or those of the Indian subcontinent that had bastardized Kabul. Kandahar in the 1980s represented past centuries being destroyed by this one.

Kandahar’s glory began with one man on horseback. The man was Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent in the army of Nadir Shah the Great, the Persian king whose forces had conquered Moghul India in 1739. Ahmad Khan and his Abdali kinsmen, though proud Afghans, were personally loyal to Nadir Shah, for even though the king had defeated them in battle, he generously incorporated them into his army. When, in his later years, Nadir Shah grew suspicious and brutal, he relied increasingly on Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis against his own Persian and Turkish forces, who he was convinced were out to kill him.

One night in 1747, sensing a plot against the king, Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis rode into the royal camp at Quchan, in eastern Iran, to protect him. At dawn, the sight of Nadir Shah’s headless body greeted the Abdali force in one of the tents. Ahmad Khan and his four thousand horsemen fled the camp as the king’s erstwhile followers looted it. Pursued by these hostile troops, Ahmad Khan sent a diversionary force to Herat and led the bulk of his cavalry southeast toward Kandahar.

“On his ride to Kandahar, Ahmad Khan thought quickly,” Sir Olaf Caroe wrote in The Pathans. Kandahar was in a frontier zone between the Persian homeland and the Moghul territories to the east that the Persians and their murdered leader, Nadir Shah, had recently vanquished. In this sea of blood and turmoil, Ahmad conceived of an island of order: a native Afghan kingdom that would be sanctioned by whoever would now rule Persia, in exchange for which he would aggressively patrol the mother kingdom’s new territories to the east. Pa-than legend has it that just then he fell upon a caravan spiriting to Persia the very Indian treasures Nadir Shah had looted eight years earlier. This treasure included the Koh-i-noor diamond, which was to finance Ahmad Khan’s new Afghan state.

Ahmad Khan was only twenty-four when he became King Ahmad Shah. In a camp outside Kandahar, as Caroe tells it, the other Abdali tribesmen “took pieces of grass in their mouths as a token that they were his cattle and beasts of burden.” Because Ahmad Shah liked to wear an earring fashioned of pearls, he became known by the title Durr-i-Durran (Pearl of Pearls). Henceforth, he and his Abdali kinsmen would be known as the Durranis.

The Durrani empire, which would eventually become modern Afghanistan, began in Kandahar. From there Ahmad Shah Durrani conquered Kabul and Herat, and Meshed in Iran. He invaded India eight times, sacking the Punjab as far as Delhi. But it was always to Kandahar that he returned after his conquests, and that is where he is buried.

Ahmad Shah’s empire in Persia and India began to crumble even before his death, but the Durranis were to rule Afghanistan until 1973, when Daoud deposed the last Durrani monarch, King Zahir Shah. Though political power in Afghanistan shifted to Kabul following Ahmad Shah’s death, Kandahar remained the region where tribal support for the Durrani kings was strongest right into the 1980s. One nineteenth-century historian wrote that the Durrani tribes viewed Kandahar “with a species of reverence as being the burial-place of the kings and heroes of their tribe.” This was why NIFA supporters, and Mojadidi too, werejustified in claiming Kandahar as their city, the only place in Afghanistan where their parties were more significant than those of the fundamentalists.

My own fascination with Kandahar began with the name itself. According to Peter Levi, Kandahar is probably the only Greek place name to have survived in Afghanistan, stemming from the Arabic form of Alexander’s name, Iskander. In 330 B.C., a year after his decisive victory over the Persian forces of Darius at Gaugamela, east of modern-day Mosul in Iraq, Alexander the Great led his army of thirty thousand men through what is now Kandahar. He left his elephants in the mud swamps west of the present-day city, then crossed the snowy summits of the Hindu Kush on foot.

I visited Kandahar briefly in November 1973, passing through by bus on my way from Herat to Kabul. I stopped for a night at a cheap hotel by the bus station near the city’s Herat Gate. The darkness and my own discomfort… I was slightly ill and horribly cold in the unheated hotel room… gave the evening a surreal quality. All I could recall later was a windblown square rilled with bearded men in high black turbans smoking a water pipe. I sometimes wondered whether that square in my memory survived the years of bombing.

More recently, I came to know Hamid Karzai, a thirty-year-old Kandahar native and spokesman for Mojadidi’s Afghan National Liberation Front. Hamid was the son of Abdulahad Karzai, the khan (headman) of the Popalzai tribe, the branch of the Abdalis that produced Ahmad Shah Durrani. With Abdul Haq, Hamid Karzai represented for me all that was larger than life in the Afghan character. He was tall and cleanshaven, with a long nose and big black eyes. His thin bald head gave him the look of an eagle. Wearing a sparkling white shal-war kameez, he affected the dignity, courtly manners, and high breeding for which the Popalzai are known throughout Afghanistan. Hamid, unlike the crowd at NIFA, whose royalist sentiments and moderate politics he shared, was not a “Gucci muj.” When he did wear Western dress, he preferred conservative blazers and slacks or a leather jacket. He moved between the Occidental and Oriental worlds without pretension or falsity. I remember him in his Peshawar villa, sitting on a carpet in a shalwar kameez, speaking Pukhtu with his turbaned Kandahari kinsmen, a copy of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss nearby. Hamid was one of six sons, but the only one who had not gone into exile in Europe or North America and who aspired to succeed his father as head of the Popalzai.

Throughout his childhood, Hamid had resented the restrictions placed on him as the son of one of Afghanistan’s most important men. He longed to escape Kandahar and the stifling routine of tribal ceremonies. He wanted to serve his country, but only as a diplomat living abroad in the West. His first shock and humiliation came as a student in India in 1979, when officials at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi informed him that the Taraki regime had imprisoned his father. A few months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. “I suddenly realized how spoiled I was,” Hamid told me. “I realized that I had been consciously rejecting all the things that were really important and now were lost.”

A few months later, in 1980, Hamid visited a refugee camp near Quetta. As soon as he entered the camp, hundreds of Popalzai tribesmen gathered around him, smiling. “They thought that just because I was the khans son, I had the power to help them. I felt ashamed, because I knew I was just a naive student who was spending his college years thinking only of himself and his ambition. I was not what they thought I was. My goal from that moment on was to become the man that those refugees thought I was. To become a man like my father.”

The man that Hamid Karzai became was one who never tired of talking about the rich history of his tribe and the region of Kandahar. The story of the founding of the Popalzai… first told to me by Hamid… sounds like one of the archetypal tales in the Book of Genesis.

Abdal, the patriarch of the Abdalis (later the Durranis), died at the age of 105 and was succeeded by Rajar, who in turn passed over his oldest son and picked the younger but smarter Zirak to be headman. Zirak ruled for many years and had four sons. One day, near Kandahar, the family was breaking camp. By then Zirak was over 100 and too old even to move, let alone saddle his horse. He asked his oldest son, Barak, for help. Barak laughed and made fun of his father. The second son, Alik, did the same. The third son, Musa, told his father to get on a horse and follow him. When Zirak was not able, Musa kicked him and told him he must remain behind until the beasts devoured him. Popal, the youngest son, offered to carry his father on his back. Old Zirak never forgot the incident, and when he died at the age of 120, he invested Popal as head of the clan. Thus it was that Popal founded his own branch of the Abdali tribe.

The mythic, elemental quality of the story is enhanced by the fact that, though the origin of the Popalzai is relatively recent… the late fifteenth century… nobody can accurately date when the events took place. It is such stories that, stylistically at least, lend credence to the notion that the Pathans are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. True or not, one could at least say that the desert surrounding Kandahar was to the Pathans what the wilderness of Sinai was to the Hebrews: the seed-ground where an assemblage of tribes grew into a nation. To Hamid Karzai, Kandahar was “the home of our original Afghan culture, the genuine Afghanistan.”

A trip to Kandahar begins in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s province of Baluchistan. Quetta and Baluchistan were to the Kandahar region what Peshawar and the Northwest Frontier were to the rest of Afghanistan: a rear base for mujahidin, war correspondents, and relief workers. And because everything about the Kandahar area was wild and exotic, even compared to the rest of Afghanistan, Quetta was wilder and more exotic than Peshawar.

As I looked down from thirty thousand feet on the flight from Islamabad to Quetta, Baluchistan resembled a series of boils and lesions on a scratched, sandpaper surface: the product of volcanic upheavals and tectonic shifts going back two billion years. Once on the ground, I continued to feel lost in space. There was a weird flimsiness to the setting. In 1935, Quetta was wiped out by an earthquake that killed twenty-three thousand people in the city and many more in the desert around it. In the 1980s, everything in Quetta seemed truly temporary, as unstable and prone to violent shifts as the ground I walked on.

The new Quetta was built on the ruins of the old one. The single-level unfinished cement houses looked like a theatrical set that could have been ripped out at any moment from the gray backdrop of hills beyond by blasts of plateau wind.

During the Afghan war, Baluchistan was especially important strategically. It was the only remaining barrier that kept the Russians from reaching the Indian Ocean… the ultimate dream of the czars. Like so many strategic places, Quetta was a shithole. Only in July 1988 was a decent hotel opened. Before that, you stayed at the New Lourdes. To flush the toilet in your room you needed a raincoat and Wellingtons because the water exploded in all directions. The place had no heating and the boiler rarely worked, so during the cold plateau winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing at night, you faced the choice of a cold shower or none at all. The Bloom Star, the only other hotel at the time, was just marginally better.

Baluchistan was the ultimate free-trade zone and smuggler’s haven: an unregulated void of hazy identity set between Iran, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani province of Sind, with its back to the Indian Ocean. Despite the awful accommodations, you could get almost anything in Quetta… heroin, Japanese cameras, cans of Heinz soup, relatively recent copies of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and the Washington Journalism Review.

Even the ethnic identity that gave the province its name was at risk in the 1980s, as the influx of Pathan refugees from Afghanistan tipped the demographic balance against the Baluchis, a people of Middle Eastern origin who speak an Indo-European language similar to Pukhtu. Because Quetta, with a population of 250,000, was one fourth the size of Peshawar, and because Baluchistan was inundated with close to a million refugees from southern Afghanistan, the Afghan influence on Quetta appeared even more dramatic than in Peshawar. Quetta seemed to have become Kandahar, since a large portion of Kandahar’s prewar population now lived in or near Quetta. With its Afghan merchants, Afghan carpet shops, and refugees smoking water pipes, Quetta blurred in my mind with the Kandahar I had briefly known in 1973.

Everything about Quetta had an air of unreliability, and I was apt to distrust much of what I saw and heard.

The first person I met there was Atta Mahmoud, a twenty-eight-year-old refugee from Kandahar, who lured me to his carpet shop. Inside, we sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping cup after cup of green tea. He wore a psychedelic black, green, and gold turban; his eyes were crazed. He implored with his hands as if speaking to a multitude and kept calling me Babà, which means father and is a sign of respect. But there was a fawning quality to his voice; his words had the tone of a sales pitch. Having had previous experiences with carpet dealers in the East, I was deeply suspicious, especially after Atta Mah-moud told me he had worked at the Sunshine Hotel in Kandahar before the war, and had sold drugs there to European hippies.

But Atta Mahmoud wanted to talk about Kandahar, not about carpets. “Kandahar city, Babà, is no more. No more, I tell you. There is not a street or a building standing, Babà. No more nut or apple trees. No bazaars. Just one meter of dust and new paved roads for Russian tanks and security patrols.” This was the first eyewitness account I had heard concerning the destruction of Kandahar. I wanted more specifics, but he was hard to interrupt and his oration soon disintegrated into a mad tirade, much of it incomprehensible. “The only thing you can do with a Russian is slit his throat, Babà… If you don’t want to slit his throat, you are a Communist.”

He casually mentioned that his two small sons had been killed in a Soviet artillery bombardment of Kandahar the year before, in 1986. This seemed so horrible that I didn’t know how to react, or even whether to believe him. I told him I was sorry, and then, in order to break the silence, I asked the price of some of his carpets. But he brushed aside my query, treating it as an insult. He said we could discuss carpets another day. I decided that this man was not after my money and that much of what he told me about Kandahar might actually be true.

Next I wanted to see Zia Mojadidi, who, though related to Sibghatullah Mojadidi of the Afghan National Liberation Front, was not connected with the party. Rather, he was a former faculty member at Kabul University and the local stringer for the Voice of America. Western journalists in Islamabad told me that Zia Mojadidi was a thoroughly professional reporter and the most reliable source of information in Quetta. But his phone was out of order, and the directions to his house were vague: “near the Helper’s High School and the orphanage.” After searching for half an hour and banging on several doors I found him… miraculously, it seemed to me. He looked like a professor, with thick glasses and a courteous, serious way of speaking. The room he took me to was completely bare, save for carpets on the floor. Since he did not show me the other rooms in the house, he gave the impression of living a marginal existence, and this made me uncertain. After twenty-four hours in Quetta, my instinct told me that if a man possessed no furniture, he also possessed no useful information. His precise speech dispelled some of my doubts, however. He did have information, and filled the holes in Atta Mahmoud’s description of Kandahar with hard facts. Basically, Zia Mojadidi, the respected local journalist, backed up the carpet dealer Atta Mahmoud’s story of how the Soviets were destroying Kandahar.

At a Red Cross hospital for war victims, my feet finally touched solid ground. Real people packed the corridors; bullets, mortar fire, and mine fragments had torn up their flesh. The day I visited there were 103 patients, and since the hospital had room for only 60, the staff had set up tents on the lawn. The surgeons were working nonstop. A nurse shaved a little boy’s head in preparation for surgery. He shrieked with terror. Orderlies wheeled by with carts stacked with bottles of blood. The smell of disinfectant was everywhere. The situation was the same at the thirteen other hospitals in Baluchistan, I was told. But these patients, the doctors said to me, were the lucky few: the ones who had made the three-week trek on foot from Kandahar to the border and the grueling, bumpy drive from the border to Quetta without dying of their injuries or being killed by Afghan regime border guards. It was in the interest of the Communists that wounded civilians never reach the border alive; that way there would be no witnesses to what was happening.

I had never seen indications of this level of carnage in the hospitals I had visited in Basra, Iraq, in the company of a horde of other Western journalists writing about the Gulf war. Basra had a Sheraton, though. Quetta then had only the New Lourdes and the Bloom Star. Sure enough, when the swank Sareena Hotel opened in 1988, the number of journalists in Quetta increased dramatically. Still, stories about the Kandahar fighting in the American press and on television were practically nonexistent.

I wrote as much as I could about Kandahar for a radio network and a magazine. But the Red Cross hospital was as close to the reality of the fighting as I was able or willing to get at the time. I was scared. The vision of Charles Thornton, the Arizona Republic reporter who was killed by a helicopter missile just as he reached the top of a hill, made me think hard about crossing the border. But in 1988 I returned to Quetta and, swallowing my fear, was determined to reach Kandahar.

The NI FA villa, from where I began my trip to Kandahar, was in a Quetta suburb. It had only a few guns, but it was luxurious in comparison with more rough and ready mujahidin headquarters: there was air conditioning, marble floors, a tiled bathroom with Head and Shoulders shampoo, and a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and mineral water. Fashionable wicker furniture and a Persian carpet filled the living room. A Russian ceramic tea set from the czarist period sat in a cabinet against the wall. On the wall were photographs of King Zahir Shah, in exile in Italy. There was also a photograph of the Baghdad mausoleum of Sheikh Abdul Khader, reputedly the fourteenth direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and a distant relative of the Aga Khan and of King Hussein of Jordan, the great-grandfather of Pir Gailani. (The Pir’s family had migrated to Afghanistan from Iraq at the turn of the century.) Everything in this villa suggested comfort and privilege, but not even privately was I critical. Having gone into Afghanistan several times with the Khalis fundamentalists, I was grateful for the pampering. Whatever the fear and danger, I knew that being relatively clean and well fed would keep me happy for now.

A NIFA staff man brought me to the villa from my downtown Quetta hotel in a spanking new Land Cruiser with racing stripes, the latest addition to NIFA’s car fleet. As soon as I arrived, I met the mujahid who was to be my interpreter, Mohammed Akbar. He was twenty-one, spoke excellent English, and was a sophisticated Kabuli to the core. Had the Soviets not invaded, he would undoubtedly have gone abroad to study in England or America. His first remark was to ask if I had brought a sleeping bag, toilet paper, and water purification tablets for the trip. I all but laughed aloud. The gulf between Akbar jan (Akbar dear), as his NIFA comrades called him, and Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb… the interpreter and guides for my first trip with Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami… was vast.

NIFA supplied Akbar and me with a Land Cruiser (though not a new one), a driver, and several bodyguards. Kandahar was 150 miles northwest of Quetta. Before the war, the journey on the all-weather road took as little as six hours. By that idyllic standard, our route would be circuitous: straight on the all-weather road for 40 miles… halfway to the border… then northeast and east over the Baluchistan desert, hugging the Pakistan side of the border, then over the border into the Arghastan desert in a northwesterly direction, arcing north and west over Kandahar in order to enter the city’s environs from the southwest. This meant eighteen hours of continuous driving. But compared to the previous year, 1987, and the year before that, our trip did not seem circuitous at all. Back then, the northern arc over and around the city was much wider, and the journey took several days. Despite the Soviet-driven orgy of destruction in Kandahar, the military situation in southern Afghanistan had been steadily shifting in favor of the mujahidin, and this was reflected in the traveling distance from Quetta to Kandahar.

A turning point in the southern front of the war was the capture of the Afghan border garrison of Spinboldak, on the main road between Quetta and Kandahar, by the mujahidin in early September 1988, a few weeks before my journey. The Spinboldak fighting cost, at the very least, several hundred lives between May and September. The two or three paragraphs about Spinboldak that could be found on the inside pages of American newspapers described the fight as between the mujahidin and the Afghan regime’s forces. This was not exactly the case. The battle actually had little to do with the struggle against the Communists, and for that reason made for a revealing story about the guerrillas: it was the best case study of Pathan tribalism that the war produced.

On paper, the mujahidin of the fundamentalist parties, led by Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, fought the forces of General Ismatullah Muslim of the Afghan regime’s militia. In reality, it was a battle between the Achakzais and the Nurzais, two hostile clans within the Abdali (Durrani) tribal family. The Achakzais inhabited the plateau region between Kandahar and Quetta on the Afghan side of the frontier. As far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, the Achakzais had a tough, unruly reputation… even by the standards of the Kandahari Pathans. Ismatullah Muslim was a living monument to this tradition.

Ismatullah was a warlorci who in 1984, unhappy with the amount of weaponry the mujahidin were giving him, promptly switched to the side of the Afghan Communists, who made Ismatullah a general and paid him and his Achakzais handsomely.

One of Ismatullah’s first moves was to fortify Spinboldak, a sheer rock mountain rising from the flat desert. This offended the Nurzais, who claimed it as their territory and who held a pistol to the head of Yunus Khalis. Khalis’s teenage bride was one of the twin daughters of Nadir Khan Nurzai, the head of the clan. Nadir Khan had reportedly blackmailed Khalis the day before the wedding, saying, in effect, “I’ll give you my daughter only if you give me and my men weapons to fight Ismatullah.”

It was evening when the Land Cruiser pulled out of the driveway of NIFA headquarters in Quetta. One of the gate guards splashed a pail of water against the rear windshield… a Pathan blessing for good luck on the journey.

Even before leaving the all-weather road we got a flat tire. The jack was too short, so the driver had to build a platform of stones for it. When the vehicle wobbled, the driver crawled completely underneath it to adjust the stones with his hands. He was smiling and laughing, oblivious of the danger. When we were up and running again, I noticed he was missing several fingers… the result of a mine accident, he told me.

We left the all-weather road halfway between Quetta and the border. Suddenly we were bouncing as if on a trampoline. The air inside the Land Cruiser was filled with a fine dust, though all the windows were shut. The tires kicked up a dust cloud so thick that our headlights did more harm than good, for light thrown against the dust cut down visibility. Off the track, I noticed that the dust had collected in high ridges, reminding me of photographs of the moon. I had seen dust this bad once before, in Tigre in northern Ethiopia. There the soil was eroded from drought and the neglect spawned by civil war. Here in Baluchistan we were in a desert where nothing had ever grown. It felt as though we were scratching our way across the burned, powdery crust of a giant pie that had been left too long in the oven.

“This is Baluchistan, but we call it Powderistan,” Akbar joked.

After driving northeast along the border for several hours we crossed into Afghanistan at a point where NIFA had built a small, permanent camp for mujahidin coming in and out of the war zone. This was where the guerrillas picked up their weapons.

It was 2 a.m. and freezing cold as only the desert can be. The starscape was out of a fairy tale. There was no room in any of the mud huts so we slept outside, our faces covered in dust. I crawled deep into my sleeping bag, shaking from the cold. Akbar and the others had already fallen asleep. Away from their air-conditioned offices, the “Gucci muj” turned out to be just as tough as the Khalis boys, and in the case of the driver, just as reckless too. I wondered if back in Quetta and Peshawar their pretensions to fashion were merely an effort to look Western. Since we foreigners required “noble savages” to feed our own fantasies, what we really held against the “Gucci muj” was their yearning to be like us.

My first sight on awakening the next morning was the black NIFA flag snapping in the wind against the toneless predawn sky.

“Why is it black?” I asked Akbar.

“Because we are in mourning. Our freedom is lost,” Akbar explained.

The flag of Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami was green, the symbol of Islam, the warrior faith of the future that seemed to give its fighters a kind of superhuman strength. The truth of each party was in the color of its flags, I thought: NIFA looked backward, lost in mourning over the past.

Over the border in Afghanistan, this desert region’s name changed from Baluchistan to Arghastan. The landscape changed too, from deathlike to more deathlike. We were still scratching our way across the same greasy pie, but now the crust was a mere chalky film that covered our faces with white inside the Land Cruiser. Long ribs of cindery hills marked a horizon that appeared to curve, as though we were on a smaller planet. Between the lines of hills, carved as if by a knife, was only an ashy nothingness: not a single thorn grew here. I thought of the landscapes in Paul Bowles’s novels, in which the abstract, cubist features of the Sahara are symbols of madness, nihilism, and sensual annihilation.

A moving cloud of dust kicked up by even a small motorcycle on this desert would be easily visible from the air. I listened fearfully, hoping not to hear the hum of a plane overhead.

A village of domed mud brick houses sprinkled a hillside just as we came over the horizon and got our second flat tire. If a landscape is bleak and primitive enough, I thought, the distant past starts to blend with the future.

In one of the houses we sipped our tea in a mud-walled room, leaning against pink cushions while our driver worked on the tire. The pink startled me: it was the first bright color I had seen since leaving Quetta.

We moved on across the ocean of sand, wrinkled occasionally by a bed of limestone or a long fang of cliffs. We came upon the only pit stop in Arghastan: a cluster of mud huts where a few Land Cruisers, Bedford and Japanese diesel trucks, and Yamaha motorcycles had gathered. Old men in turbans approached and kissed my hand. Most were mujahi-din. The rest were traders transporting fresh produce back and forth across enemy lines. Fighters of the fundamentalist parties could be distinguished by the ghoulish Zia posters stuck to their truck windshields. Zia, with his deep-set bedroom eyes, looked like a vampire, set against a background with a plane exploding in midair. The caption read Shaheed (martyr).

Gruel bubbled in pots. Men repaired tires. Akbar and I bought and devoured about a dozen blood-red pomegranates. It was like a daydream: to be so thirsty and then have your thirst quenched in such a sensuous way, with sticky, tangy juice bleeding down the sides of your mouth onto the ground. Like the pink cushions, the red of the pomegranates clashed with the whitish hues of the landscape.

I noticed that while Akbar and I indulged ourselves in slurping fruit, our driver prayed in the corner of one of the huts. Next to him, other mujahidin drank tea, oblivious of his prayers. I turned around and saw a medieval diorama: three levels of mud rooms, in each of which a man kneeled in prayer on a carpet, wearing either a turban or a pakol, and next to him a tea ceremony was in progress. Whether moderate or fundamentalist, all the mujahidin eventually stepped off to the side to pray. As in the mountains of Nangarhar, the solitude of each man in prayer gave the act a power and meaning that I never saw before or since in the Moslem world. Akbar was the last to pray before we left. His sharp, hairless features were clenched especially tight, as though the pomegranates constituted a luxury forbidden by the jihad or NIFAs official state of mourning.

After a few more hours of plowing through the dust we began to hear that sinister, stomach-churning sound: the drone of airplanes. We were now closing in on the main “ring road,” the paved track linking the three main cities of Afghanistan… Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul… from west to east. The section of the road linking Kandahar with Kabul was tenuously controlled by the mujahidin, so vehicles using it were often targets of helicopter strikes. The area around the highway marked the end of the Arghastan desert and the beginning of the Kandahar war zone. Before reaching the road we stopped at a village to inquire about the situation farther ahead.

The bath of dust continued into a carpeted room shaped like a church nave, where the villagers led us. They brought water from a stagnant irrigation ditch for us to wash with, then served us green tea and curd. The Kandahari curd was much better than its Nangarhar equivalent: it was thinner and flavored with crushed mint leaves. The sweet, acrid odor of a cheroot filled the room. It was late in the afternoon now, and we were told it was safe to cross the highway. Before we left, an old man who had been our host pressed me to stay as his guest for several days. I politely refused. After such kindness and hospitality, I wondered whether the danger ahead was only an illusion.

Here and there in the sea of dust I could discern the burned-out hulks of vehicles that had been hit by a missile or had run over an antipersonnel mine. We were now in the mine zone. The Soviet air force over the past few years had laid down countless… perhaps 100,000, perhaps a million… mines over hundreds of square miles around Kandahar. The landscape was utterly ruined, to the extent that its very existence constituted a danger to living beings. Our driver with the missing fingers kept precisely to the tracks made by the previous vehicle. Veering off into the desert was no longer safe.

Then we reached the ring road.

In almost any other country in the world the sight of a desolate, single-lane paved road, embanked a few feet from the ground to protect it from sand drifts and flooding, would be commonplace. But in Afghanistan this empty road was a strategic route as well as the country’s main highway, marked on international maps by a line almost as bold as that indicating the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The driver ascended to the level of the pavement, turned left toward Kandahar, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The sight of a helicopter now would probably mean instant death. But there was no helicopter or anything else in sight.

Two miles down the road we turned off and headed west across the desert. We were about fifteen miles north of Kandahar, which we would by-pass in order to enter it another day from a southwesterly direction.

The dust thinned and we could make out the hard limestone terrain in the falling evening light. From now on, the desultory rumble of exploding bombs was a permanent sound, except for an hour or two in the middle of the night. The driver speeded on, braking sharply every time we hit a pocket of sand. We were directly under the flight path between Kandahar airport and the Soviet air base at Shindand, south of Herat in western Afghanistan, in a stretch of desert strewn with wrecked vehicles blown apart by missiles or mines.

The drone of a plane penetrated the silence between the exploding bombs. I watched for a sign of recognition from Akbar or the driver, but there was none. Nervously, I asked Akbar about it.

“Just an Antonov transporting troops. They don’t bomb.”

I asked how he knew it was an Antonov, since the plane was flying too high for its contours to be seen.

“By the sound. After a while here you can tell each plane by its sound.”

After climbing a steep, winding pass in total darkness we entered the Arghandab River Valley, and for the first time since leaving Quetta twenty-four hours before, I was among trees and crowds of people. The town of Arghandab, ten miles northwest of Kandahar, had been firmly in mujahidin hands since 1987 and had been rebuilt. The nearby beech and mulberry forests held the largest concentration of guerrillas in the Kandahar region. Each of the seven resistance parties had a presence here.

The journey so far had kept me in a state of dreamlike disorientation. Now, as I came out of the night into town, sights and sounds hit me. Tongas filled with veiled women clopped along. Market stalls were crowded. The Arghandab River, along which the army of Alexander the Great had camped, rippled peacefully. Drivers honked their horns for the right of way. The rumble of explosions had died down for the moment, and it was hard to believe that this village was a short hop from the devastation in Kandahar. Life here appeared so normal, and getting here, despite the breakdowns and dusty discomfort, had been relatively uneventful. Kandahar, which for so long seemed so distant, so impossible to reach, so dangerously enigmatic, was suddenly only a few miles away. And yet it felt farther away here than it did in Quetta.

I began to worry that I had misjudged the story’s significance, that the level of fighting and destruction had been vastly exaggerated by the mujahidin, the war freaks, and the Afghan experts in their feverish effort to get the attention of the media and the outside world. As the Land Cruiser struggled through the brush and forded a series of swamps on its way to the NIFA encampment, I felt two kinds of fear: that there would be fighting, danger, and destruction, and that there wouldn’t be any.

At daybreak I was shaken awake by the low-density thud of a mortar. The hollow, vibrating tenor of the sound meant that the fire was probably incoming, not outgoing. But the fact that it was hard to distinguish meant that the shells were landing at least a few hundred yards away, and it would be safe to make a dash to the latrine, which the “Gucci muj” had rigged up with a light bulb and toilet paper.

The beech and mulberry forest where NIFA made its camp was just north of a chain of piebald mountains, on the other side of which lay Kandahar. Since the Arghandab River Valley was full of mujahidin, as a matter of course Afghan government posts in the northern part of the city regularly fired their 102 mm shells (which have a range of seven to nine miles) over the line of mountains in the direction of Arghandab. The guerrillas replied in kind with their recoilless rifles and captured Russian heavy machine guns.

Coming back from the latrine, I was invited into the commander’s tent for breakfast. Unlike Habibullah, the taciturn Khalis faction’s commander on Spinghar who shared his tent with eleven other men, NIFA commander Ismael Gailani, one of the Pir’s nephews, had a blue and yellow tent all to himself, doubtless purchased in a sporting goods shop abroad. Instead of the flat bread, raw onions, and green tea I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Spinghar, the commander asked me how I liked my eggs.

Ismael Gailani, in his mid-thirties, was a handsome Pathan with sharp, sculptured features, shiny black hair, and a thick, well-kept beard. His good looks were further embellished by brown-tinted aviator glasses, a matching brown pakol, shalwar kameez, and Banana Republic sleeveless vest… and an ostentatiously displayed Russian Makarov automatic pistol. The number of troops he led was small, but he traveled like a commander, with his own new Czech motorcycle, purchased on the black market in Kabul, and an escort pickup truck with a double-barreled antiaircraft gun mounted on the back.

My first impression of Ismael was not favorable. Like Abdul Haq, he looked stern and impassive when receiving his men. But while Haq’s expression seemed a natural outgrowth of his thoughts at the moment, Ismael appeared to be striking poses. I assumed that Ismael, like so many foreigners and NIFA officials on the Northwest Frontier, was afflicted with a milder version of what Major General Rahim Wardak suffered from: he had convinced himself that he was a character in a movie.

Ismael told me he had attended university in India, had a wife and three daughters in London, and was extremely lonely here in Arghandab. These revelations unsettled me. Mortar fire was landing all around us. There was nothing vicarious about the danger he was in. The movie was real, though his own role in it had obviously been blown out of proportion. I had a wife and son in Greece, and explaining to them why I constantly traveled as a journalist to war zones was not always easy; explaining such a life to our Greek neighbors, who harbored little interest in the world outside their country, was nearly impossible.

Like Ismael, I judged myself a lonely person: at home, few comprehended the fascination of my work, and when traveling I was frequently in the company of people from non-Western cultures, with whom my relationships were, perforce, fleeting. But Ismael’s loneliness had to be much greater. His family was larger than mine, he had been away from them for many more months, and he was in more constant danger than I was. Unlike Abdul Haq, he was much too Westernized to be emotionally compensated by the company of his manly fellows. Inside Afghanistan, the average NIFA mujahid was just as much of a backwoodsman as the Khalis fighters, and it was often just the accident of tribal loyalty that steered some Pathans toward NIFA rather than into the ranks of the fundamentalists. But Ismael, with his shampoo and his Walkman lying in the corner of his tent, was culturally some distance from his own troops.

“I can’t explain to people in London what I’m doing here,” Ismael told me. “My wife’s friends tell her that I’m crazy. They tell her I could get killed. So when I’m in London, I ask them, ‘Didn’t you fight against the Nazis?’ They answer, ‘Yes, but we weren’t occupied. Our children weren’t threatened like in Afghanistan. So why don’t you just make peace with the Russians? Why do you go on fighting?’ How can an Afghan communicate to people who think like that?”

I began to understand that Ismael, in his own pampered way, was heroic, if in wholly different terms and on a more muted scale than Abdul Haq. Haq’s heroism and the value he placed on freedom were instinctive reflexes. His bravery was as natural as the thorns that grew on the mountains in Nan-garhar. Ismael, through conscious thought, had come to place a high value on freedom too. The modest heroism that he displayed… his permanent presence in Arghandab… he had willed at some personal cost. By the standards of Abdul Haq, the fundamentalists, and the Pathans, Ismael Gailani was not much of a commander, but by Western standards he was a person to be taken seriously.

I ate boiled eggs while the shells rained down on us.

“That last one was only one hundred yards away,” said Mohammed Akbar, my interpreter from Quetta.

“One hundred yards is closer than you think,” I said. “If that shell landed only a hundred yards away it would sound a lot worse.”

The ground shook and dust flew into my tea. The noise was a long, condensed burst in my ears, as if the air was being sucked out of the tent.

“That” I said, trembling, “was a hundred yards away.”

Ismael sat, relaxed and impassive. “This is what it’s like here every day.” He smiled, cleaning his plate greedily with his fork. We later discovered that a farmer plowing in the next field had been killed, and the mud-walled latrine I had used a few moments before had been riddled with shell fire.

In the midst of the mortar barrage, Haji Latif arrived. An impish grin was stamped on his leathery face as he hugged and kissed each one of us in turn, his black eyes full of laughter. He had a white beard and wore a black Kandahari turban with thin white stripes wrapped around his head, the ends falling to the middle of his thigh. The only “Gucci” touch was his black sneakers. But even those were 1950s playground style, and the white laces were untied.

With his smooth features and an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, Haji Latif didn’t look like the eighty-three-year-old he claimed to be. Nor, with his squeaky voice and effeminate lisp, did he live up to his sinister reputation as a convicted murderer and gang leader before the war. Whenever he looked at me with his mouth hanging open, I thought he was going to start to drool.

I never heard the name Haji Latif uttered. Everyone called him Haji Babà as a sign of loving respect for his age.

“Are you really eighty-three, Haji Babà?” I asked.

“I was already a young man when King Amanullah went on his European tour, and I remember as if it were yesterday when Amanullah tried to fight his way back to Kabul from Kandahar. When Zahir Shah became king [in 1933] I was twenty-eight. All my friends have collapsed and died. With the help of God I am still strong and can fight Russians.”

Haji Babà inspected the caged yellow canary and the patch of purple petunias that Ismael’s men carefully looked after… this was as mortar shells continued to fall close by. Between the deep thuds of the shells came the high-pitched sound of the songbird, bringing a broad smile to Haji Baba’s face.

“All the mujahidin in Kandahar have these birds,” Akbar noted. “The sound they make is like poetry.”

Having placed a few petunia seeds in his pocket, and satisfying himself that the bird and the flowers were being well cared for, Haji Babà reclined on a pillow and rush mat under a mulberry tree, pulled his knees up to his chin in a fetal position, and quickly fell asleep.

“Haji Babà doesn’t sleep much at night, and because of his age he must take many naps,” said Akbar.

The mortar attack continued unabated.

“Come here, listen to this,” Ismael said.

He handed me the earphones of a captured Russian transmitter hooked up to an old Chinese generator operated by foot pedals. I heard two people talking to each other loudly in Russian for several minutes. According to the Soviets, and also to the U.S. State Department, there were no Russians left in the Kandahar area in October 1988, when I visited. Officially, the remaining Soviet troops had withdrawn with much fanfare and international media coverage a few weeks before. (Russians leaving Afghanistan seemed to be an easier and more interesting story for American editors to handle than Russians fighting in Afghanistan.) But these voices were proof that there were at least a handful of Soviet advisers left behind to help Afghan regime troops, and they were partial proof of the claim made by NIFA, the fundamentalist parties, and the journalist Zia Mojadidi in Quetta that at least five hundred crack Soviet soldiers had recently returned to Kandahar.

There was nothing surprising about this. Nor was it, technically speaking, a violation of the Geneva accords governing Soviet disengagement; provided half their troops were out of Afghanistan by August 15, 1988, and the remainder by February 15, 1989, the Soviets could move troops in and out of cities as they chose. What bothered me about their presence was that either the State Department was lying about it for its own convoluted reasons or that U.S. intelligence was faulty.

When I returned to Pakistan I learned that the State Department’s belief that the Soviets were out of Kandahar was based primarily on “satellite imaging”… a series of photographs from space that would show any unusual amount of air traffic in a given area. In fact, this technique was not foolproof, since several hundred troops could have filtered back into Kandahar over a period of days or weeks without satellite detection.

More troubling still was this: several times in Arghandab, and in Panjwai (another mujahidin stronghold southwest of Kandahar), I heard the horrific, piercing sound of Ismael’s antiaircraft gun. The gunner fired only when a plane was in the air, and that was several times a day at least. The aircraft I saw… Antonov helicopters and various kinds of Soviet fighter jets… were usually ascending or descending in the vicinity of Kandahar airport, and none that I saw were hit. But later, in Pakistan, I learned that American intelligence had reported that heavy mujahidin pressure had deterred all enemy aircraft from landing or taking off from Kandahar airport during the entire period of my visit. This was untrue. When I asked whom the Americans were relying on for their information, I was stunned to learn it was their liaison in ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service.

ISI had developed a pattern of exaggerating the successes of the mujahidin who were deep inside. The reason was to justify Zia’s strategy of arming his Peshawar pet, Hekmatyar, to the detriment of the other six resistance groups. ISI’s motive was particularly strong. When it began to look as if Kandahar might fall to the guerrillas, ISI got nervous. Kandahar’s conquest would strengthen the hand of royalist forces such as NIFA’s, because it was in Kandahar that King Zahir Shah enjoyed his strongest support. ISI, intent on creating a fundamentalist Afghanistan in Zia’s image, wanted Kandahar to fall only if the credit and spoils could go to commanders like Hek-matyar and Rasul Sayyaf (the leader of another fundamentalist mujahidin party that, like Hekmatyar’s, depended on outside support and was thus easily manipulated by ISI).

So, a few weeks before I visited Kandahar, ISI had sponsored Hekmatyar on a tour through the region, providing him with a Pakistani army escort right up to the Afghan border. Following the tour, which both NIFA and Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami condemned, ISI began delivering Stingers and radar-guided mortars to whatever forces in Kandahar Hekmatyar could muster, as well as to Sayyaf’s mujahidin, who were considerably stronger in Kandahar than Hekmatyar’s fighters. In order to get the Americans to turn a blind eye to this risky policy, ISI had to show results in the field, such as claiming that Kandahar airport was under control.

The awful truth seemed to be that the only sources of information the United States had about the fighting in Kandahar, and anywhere else in Afghanistan during the later stage of the war, were their own satellite photographs and what ISI chose to tell them. (Before the mujahidin cut the road links between the major cities, officials at the American consulate in Kabul were at least able to debrief visa applicants who had recently traveled to the capital from Kandahar and Herat. And for much of the war, the American embassy in Islamabad had a cordial relationship with Peshawar-based journalists who frequently went inside and, in the time-honored tradition of foreign correspondents, subsequently swapped information with diplomats. But by the late 1980s, the diplomats had decided that the “Peshawar gang” were a bunch of loonies who lacked any credibility.)

My visit to the Kandahar area crystallized my thoughts about America’s role in Afghanistan.

From a distance, this was the war in which Washington got things right for a change. Up close, it was more a case of Washington finally getting lucky. The conventional wisdom in the capital through most of the war held that the CIA played it smart by letting the locals… in this case, the Pakistanis… run the fighting. Up close, however, one got a very different impression.

The Washington wisdom, again, was that Afghanistan proved that supporting guerrilla proxies in a superpower turf battle will pay off when there is bipartisan support in Congress for it. But up close, what was clear to me, to everyone on the Northwest Frontier, and especially to Abdul Haq, was this: had the mujahidin lacked the will to suffer as they did, even bipartisan support in Congress and the billions of dollars in weaponry placed in ISI’s trust as a result would not have been enough to thwart the Soviet reach for this latest satellite state. The American intelligence community may in fact have performed little better in Afghanistan than in Lebanon or Nicaragua.

For American policy makers, there may be no reliably applicable lessons of the Afghan war except that you win some and you lose some.

The following day I departed Arghandab with Akbar, Haji Babà, and several of his men. We planned to head south, across the Herat-Kandahar stretch of the ring road, and then east into the southern suburbs of Kandahar.

After forty-five minutes of bumpy circumvolutions to avoid mines and destroyed vehicles, we approached a battered bridge on the ring road, under which a tributary of the Arghandab River flowed. At the foot of the bridge was a bombed-out hotel. It was hard to imagine, but in prewar times upper-class Afghans held wedding receptions by the hotel’s swimming pool, and newlyweds spent their first amorous night in one of the rooms. The empty pool, with its peaceful view of the swampy river tributary, still appeared to be in good condition, but Soviet soldiers had occupied… and in the process trashed… the building. In their wake had come a unit of rugged Khalis mujahidin, who now sat with their guns and grenade launchers at poolside, brewing tea while keeping an eye on the bridge. They didn’t seem to think much of the pool or the view.

As our Land Cruiser turned eastward onto the Herat-Kandahar highway to Kandahar, we saw the rusted carcasses of Soviet tanks lined up back to front for over a mile. There must have been close to a hundred of them. Each had a monumental, Rodinesque quality, bent and twisted into a separate archetype of destruction that made it easy to visualize the sheets of flame and the agony of the men as they died. Some of the tanks were burned almost completely black, others were brick-red. Severed cannons and turrets lay off to the side of the road. The desert was littered with many more tanks, transport trucks, and armored personnel carriers. I had visions of Egyptian-Israeli tank battles in the Sinai and World War II campaigns in North Africa. I thought of the opening scene of Patton, which depicted the wreckage of American armored vehicles destroyed by Rommel in Tunisia’s Kasserine Pass. Other journalists had dubbed the Iran-Iraq war a replay of “World War I in the trenches;” I thought of the Kandahar front as “World War II in the desert.” Except that the desert campaigns in World War II were reported to the outside world, while men died by the thousands on these central Asian battlefields with barely a word of coverage.

The mujahidin had created this wall of tanks, moving each one into place after it had been destroyed, in order to protect a large outpost behind the road from a Soviet ground attack. The guerrilla outpost was inside the gardens of an early-eighteenth-century tomb, where the Pathan tribal leader Mirwais Khan Hotaki lies buried. He fought many battles against the Safavid Persians in the decades preceding the rise of Ahmad Shah Durrani. Mirwais openly thought of the Persians as degenerate and effeminate; he was the first known Pathan leader to think of his race in the same heroic, masculine terms as did Kipling and other foreigners since. Miraculously, the blue faience dome of Mirwais’s mausoleum, surrounded by poplar trees, was still in perfect condition behind the tanks… a badge of medieval glory amid the Kiplingesque turbans and bandoleers, and this World War II desert backdrop.

The driver turned off the paved highway a few miles west of Kandahar and headed southeast over a well-rutted track. Mortar and artillery fire became louder again, and for the first time I heard the rattle of light machine guns. The driver stopped and Akbar, ‘Haji Babà, and I climbed to the top of a sandstone cliff to espy the city.

Everything I saw and thought at that moment summoned up antiquity. The capital of southern Afghanistan lay spread out in front of the same chain of mountains that I had seen at Arghandab a few hours earlier from the other side. The city was a vast quilt of ruins etched on the barren sand, like Palmyra in the Syrian desert. Kandahar in 1988 looked not all that much different from the cities Alexander himself had seen and founded: a Hellenistic archeological site with a regular army holed up in a fortified perimeter and guerrillas firing in from all sides. The only real landmarks were the KhAD prison on the western edge of the city and the medieval blue dome to the east, which according to Moslem folklore holds the remains of some of the Prophet Mohammed’s clothing-

This was a historic moment: the Soviets still left in the city

and at the airport were farther south than any of their other comrades had ever been, and their imminent departure would signal the first northward redrawing of the Kremlin’s imperial map since the late seventeenth century. Kandahar airport, once called an American white elephant, had become the Russian Khe Sanh.

Haji Babà sighed. “We have already given God over a million martyrs. That is more than enough.”

After only a few more minutes of driving we were in the cratered back streets of Mahalajat, the southern suburb adjacent to the main bazaar of Kandahar city, now reduced to rubble. Clusters oftall wooden poles affixed with ragged white shaheedan banners flared like porcupine quills out of the ground. On the cassette player inside the Land Cruiser blared the haunting, melodramatic voice of Ahmad Wali, an exiled Afghan singer.

Though Mahalajat was considered a mujahidin stronghold, once in the city the battle lines were haphazard, with Afghan regime posts only about two hundred yards away from our car in several directions. Small arms, light and heavy machine guns, and mortars and artillery pieces were all being fired simultaneously; after a few minutes I got used to the racket. Twice we had to cross an open field in sight of an enemy post. The driver swerved and accelerated, yet still we attracted fire. Then the Land Cruiser got stuck behind a tonga that was having difficulty negotiating an irrigation ditch. It was incredible: a tottering horse-drawn carriage with a veiled woman in the back seat holding a sack of groceries in the middle of a free-fire zone. The spotted white horse, decked out in red and purple pompoms as if out for a stroll in Central Park, was so emaciated that I could see the outline of its skeleton beneath the flesh. The horse served as an apt symbol for Afghanistan, I thought; almost dead, yet defiant to the last.

Our driver parked behind a fragment of stone wall. From there we made a dash to a small NIFA base near the point where Mahalajat merges with the heart of the city… an idyllic spot if you could ignore the bombs. The mujahidin kept a patch of daisies next to a carpeted terrace in the shade of a vine pergola. Here we stretched out and relaxed until tea and mint-flavored curds were served. A cage with a singing canary hung from the vines. Despite the nearby explosions of artillery and mortar shells, I dozed off for a few minutes.

Haji Babà shook me awake to greet a group of city elders, who had crossed over from the regime-held sector of Kandahar that morning so I could interview them. They all had long beards like Haji Baba’s and resembled wise men in their white shalwar kameezes and white turbans draped over gold-threaded caps.

Local custom enabled the honored elders to cross safely back and forth between the two halves of the divided city. Women and children were similarly protected. In fact, the mujahidin regularly used boys of about ten years of age to carry messages in and out of the regime sector; that was how the old men knew to come to the NIFA post that morning. Only army-age men were stopped at checkpoints, to catch defectors from the government’s desertion-ridden ranks.

The stories the elders told me would be familiar to anyone who knows what goes on in a besieged Third World city. There was no medicine, and the price of produce was exorbitant. Makeshift market stalls were shut for days at a stretch, and when open they were looted and ransacked by the regime’s soldiers. These troops, claiming to be from the northern Afghan province of Jozjan, were actually mercenaries brought in from Soviet central Asia, who roamed the streets in unruly gangs, holding people up and breaking into the ruins of homes in search of young boys to do menial labor for them in their barracks. Though the Soviets constantly charged the Pakistanis with violations of the Geneva accords, they themselves were guilty of much more basic offenses, such as bombing populated areas from air bases inside the Soviet Union and putting Soviet troops in Afghan regime uniforms, as they evidently were doing in Kandahar.

The city elders I interviewed desperately wanted a negotiated settlement with the Communist governor of Kandahar, a disaffected Parchami named Nur-ul Haq Ulumi. That, of course, was what NIFA wanted too, so that the only Afghan city with a strong royalist base would fall first and serve as a springboard for King Zahir Shah’s return. But since the fundamentalist parties, the Pakistanis, and the Americans did not back a settlement, Kandahar’s inhabitants were doomed to go on suffering. (Had the Pakistanis and Americans supported NIFA’s course of action, it is possible that Kandahar would have fallen to the mujahidin before the end of 1988, leading to mass army desertions in Kabul and the subsequent collapse of the Najib regime… making unnecessary the badly organized, bloody siege of Jalalabad that began in March 1989, in which large numbers of civilians were killed. Kandahar was bigger than Jalalabad, psychologically almost as vital to the regime, already destroyed, and much harder for the Communists to defend. But because the fundamentalists were stronger in Jalalabad, the Pakistani intelligence services controlling mujahidin arms supplies concentrated on that city.)

I had wanted to get as close to the city center as possible without running the risk of being stopped at a regime checkpoint. The youth who accompanied Akbar and me on this foray had lost a leg in a mine explosion, but he was as fast and agile as most people are with two. He led the way, checking for mines and enemy lookouts hidden behind sandbag emplacements, then waved when it was safe for us to follow.

We had to cross one of several open fields in sight of hostile machine gun nests, where, incredibly, a shepherd was grazing his sheep. Bullets sprayed the field a few seconds after we had crossed it: a sheep lay bleeding as I looked back. The shepherd cursed aloud, caressed the dying animal, and by tossing a few stones moved the flock on. The stones startled the sheep; the bullets hadn’t.

“The bullets they are more used to,” Akbar observed.

The scene was not what I expected on the basis of my visit to Kandahar fifteen years earlier. I imagined an urban setting: streets, shops, and pavements, some in place, some destroyed. But as we moved northward from Mahalajat toward the Herat Gate area, where I had spent that miserable night in 1973, there was no sign of a true cityscape. The ashen monotony of an archeological site continued almost to the center of Kandahar. We ran along remnants of walled streets and arched portals with smashed networks of ceramic underground plumbing systems, and past weeds and wildflowers that grew in stony places where ground had been churned up. People had once lived in these ruins, I knew, but it seemed as if that must have been thousands of years ago. Only the bombs and bullets and that dead sheep kept me from believing I was a tourist visiting an ancient city,

This was not a military landscape of the past but of an eerie doomsday future. The twentieth century had come late to Afghanistan, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. The Soviets had sown so many mines, dropped so many bombs, and fired so many mortars and artillery shells over such a wide swath of territory that the effect of a nuclear strike had been achieved.

No city in North Vietnam was destroyed to the extent that Kandahar was. Whereas American air strikes on the North early in the Vietnam war were initially so restrictive that President Lyndon Johnson had personally to approve the targets in advance, the Soviets engaged in indiscriminate carpet bombing throughout their war. Whereas the American military tended to use attack helicopters against specific targets or to insert troops, the Soviets usually used those helicopters against mud brick villages. Whereas the Americans at least tried to carefully map their minefields, and deploy mines mainly along strategic routes like the Ho Chi Minh trail and around their base perimeters, the Soviets kept few maps and sowed millions of mines. The Soviets lost between 12,000 and 50,000 men in Afghanistan, considerably fewer than the 58,000 troops the Americans lost in Vietnam. Yet the number of Afghan civilians who were killed… estimated at over a million… probably exceeded civilian Vietnamese fatalities, even though North and South Vietnam had a combined population two and a half times larger than Afghanistan.

Another sign of the future was the absence of battle and its attendant drama: I saw only monotonous images of mass destruction. In The Face of Battle, the military historian John Keegan intimates that the totality of future wars will render battle itself obsolete. Battle implies limits, but in Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan there was little ebb and flow to the killing. The Soviets carpet bombed Kandahar and the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul for months at a time. Mines killed about thirty Afghans, more or less, every day of the entire decade.

Kipling’s vision only partially illuminated the true symbolism of the war in Afghanistan. Kipling could be an imperialist and a moralist at the same time precisely because he had little inkling of modern totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism and the extremes to which they would take the imperialist impulse. Though Kipling’s chivalrous world of manly honor had in Afghanistan vanquished the modern world of mechanized destruction, Afghanistan in the 1980s was still no Kiplingesque war… the glorious escapades of the likes of John Wellesley Gunston and Savik Shuster notwithstanding. These two were brave men and brave journalists. But, like me, they were living an illusion. Abdul Haq, and Haji Babà too, despite what we thought, were only in a small sense Kiplingesque Pathans. They represented some sort of primitive, vestigial lone warrior from the past but also of the future, when the only people willing and able to fight a superpower will be poverty-stricken peasant guerrillas who have no motive to surrender because they have no material possessions at risk.

Because the historical images, particularly in Kandahar, were so vivid and intimidating, the relatively few journalists who went inside, like myself, were for the most part blind to these revelations. We tended to look backward only… to World War II, to Kipling, and to Alexander the Great.

We left Mahalajat and returned to Arghandab in time for the night fireworks display. Red flares crossed the sky as if in slow motion, followed by exploding artillery shells that caused small brush fires to break out in the mined desert between Kandahar’s southern suburbs and the ring road. Again the driver swerved and accelerated, and drove without headlights. Then, still in artillery range, he stopped and the others got out of the Land Cruiser to pray. With no water in sight, they washed their hands and faces with the dust, just as I had seen the fundamentalists do in Nangarhar.