Soldiers of God

Prologue Walking Through a Minefield

AMPUTATIONS were the most common form of surgery in Afghanistan in the 1980s. A West German doctor, Frank Pau-lin, traveled around Nangarhar province in April 1985, cutting off the limbs of mine victims with a survival knife. “Sometimes I’d use a saw, basically anything I could get my hands on,” he recollected. The only anesthetic that Paulin had available for his patients was ordinary barbiturates. Some of the patients died, but the ones who survived wouldn’t have had a chance without him. Radio Moscow accused Paulin by name of being a “CIA spy.” While being hunted by Soviet troops, he contracted cholera and had to be carried on the back of a mule over a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain pass to safety in Pakistan. Paulin had only one fear: that he too would step on a mine.

An Afghan who stepped on a mine frequently died of shock and loss of blood a few feet from the explosion. More often, he was carried by a relative or friend to a primitive medical outpost run by someone like Paulin. If the victim was really lucky, he made it to a Red Cross hospital in Quetta or Peshawar over the border in Pakistan — antiseptic sanctuaries of Western medicine where emergency surgery was conducted around the clock.

I remember a Scottish surgeon at one of these hospitals who had just come off a long shift and needed to talk and get a little drunk. In the bar at Peshawar’s American Club, he sat at a table with me and two other journalists and recited from memory several stanzas of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ballad of East and West” in a deliberately loud and passionate voice, as if to demonstrate that he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him:

At the table there was an embarrassed silence. Then the surgeon talked about what was really on his mind. “The philosophy of war is truly sinister,” he said in a hushed tone. “Now, you take the Russians. Most of the mines they’ve laid are designed to maim, not kill, because a dead body causes no inconvenience. It only removes the one dead person from the field. But somebody who is wounded and in pain requires the full-time assistance of several people all down the line who could otherwise be fighting. And if you want to depopulate an area, then you want many of the casualties to be small children. The most stubborn peasants will give up and flee when their children are mutilated.”

These were old facts that left everyone at the table numb. In Peshawar the journalists and relief workers all knew these things. But the surgeon had discovered them on his own in the lonely, pulsing stillness of the operating theater, where he was in constant physical contact with the evidence. When he recited Kipling’s poetry it showed all over his face.

“The future battlefield is to be liberally sown with mines,” wrote the British military historian John Keegan in his prophetic work The Face of Battle. Never before in history have mines played such an important role in a war as in Afghanistan. Nobody knows precisely how many were sown by Soviet troops and airmen in the ten years between their invasion and their withdrawal. The figures offered are biblical. The British Broadcasting Corporation, on June 8, 1988, simply stated “millions.” The Afghan resistance claimed five million. The U.S. government’s first estimate was three million. Later, on August 15, 1988, State Department spokesman Charles Red-mon said the figure was more likely “between 10 and 30 million.” That would be 2 mines for every Afghan who survived the war; between 40 and 120 mines per square mile of Afghan territory. Tens of thousands of civilians, if not more — many of them small children — have already been disabled by mine detonations in Afghanistan. Even though the Russian phase of the war has ended, mines threaten to kill and maim thousands more, some of whom haven’t been born yet.

“The widespread sowing of millions of land mines has added an ominous new dimension to the rehabilitation effort,” Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 23, 1988. According to both American and United Nations officials, mines will cripple Afghanistan’s economic life for years to come, inhibiting the tilling of fields, access to pasture areas, and collection of firewood.

No group of people knew as much about mines in Afghanistan as news photographers and television cameramen. Getting close-ups of the war meant traveling with the mujahidin, the “holy warriors of Islam.” And the muj — as journalists called them — walked through minefields. “It’s like walking a tightrope,” said Tony O’Brien, a free-lance photographer who would later be captured and then released by Afghan regime forces. “You’re in a group, yet you’re totally alone. Still, there’s this absolutely incredible bond with the person ahead of you and behind you. You forget the heat, the thirst, the diarrhea. Then you’re out of the minefield and instantaneously you’re hot and thirsty again. The minute I start thinking about it I start worrying and I get totally freaked.”

For several days I rode in a Toyota Land Cruiser through the mine-strewn desert outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The trails were marked with the rusted carcasses of trucks that told you it was almost better not to survive such an explosion. My driver kept safely to previous tread marks. But when another vehicle approached from the opposite direction we had to make room for each other, and I became so afraid that I held my breath just to keep from whimpering. At night, or in the frequent dust storms when we lost the track, the fear went on for hours at a stretch, leaving me physically sick.

Joe Gaal, a Canadian photographer for the Associated Press, had been around so many minefields and had collected enough fragments of different mines that he had developed a sapper’s tactile intuition about them, which was apparent in the movements of his hands and fingers whenever we discussed the matter. An intense, gutsy fellow, Gaal had an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet mines. His terror had turned into an obsession.

The mine that could really put him in a cold sweat was what the mujahidin called a “jumping” mine, a Russian version of the “Bouncing Betty,” used by the Americans in Vietnam. It is activated by a trip wire that causes a projectile to shoot up from underground a few feet ahead. The mine is designed to go off several seconds later and explode at waist level, just as you pass over it. “It blows off your genitals and peppers your guts with shrapnel,” Gaal explained.

The Bouncing Betty was one of several different antipersonnel mines the Soviets employed, mines that had to be dug into the ground by special units and were meant to kill or maim anyone within a radius of twenty feet. But the vast majority of mines in Afghanistan were dropped from the air. The most common of these was the “butterfly” mine. The butterfly was the mine of Afghanistan, so much so that it had become part of the country’s landscape, like the white flags above the graves of martyred mujahidin. Soviet helicopter gunships would fly in at one or two thousand feet and litter the ground with mines. The butterfly’s winged shape caused it to go into a spin, slowing its descent. The detonator pin was set on impact with the ground. Green was the most common color, but the Soviets had a light brown version for desert areas and a gray one for riverbeds. Some mujahidin, not knowing this, thought the mines actually changed color.

Only eight inches long and blending in with the ground, the butterfly mine was hard to spot, especially if you were fatigued from hours of walking, which was most of the time. Except for the light aluminum detonator it was all plastic, so it was difficult to detect with mine-sweeping equipment. The mine was often mistaken for a toy by Afghan children, who paid with the loss of a limb or an eye. Its explosive power was about equal to that of the smallest hand grenade: sufficient to maim, not to kill. Contrary to Soviet claims, the mine has no self-destruct mechanism, and will be mutilating Afghans for a long time to come.

Butterfly mines, along with aerial bombardment, were the centerpiece of Moscow’s strategy of depopulation. Depopulation had come after pacification had failed and before the Communist-inspired bombing campaign in Pakistani cities. During the heyday of depopulation, in the early and mid-1980s, the Soviets dropped plastic mines disguised as wrist-watches and ball-point pens over Afghan villages in the heavily populated Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul.

There were even reports of mines disguised as dolls. The New York-based Afghanistan Relief Committee ran an advertisement in a number of American magazines featuring a photograph of a doll with its left arm blown off and a caption that read, “The toy that’s making a lasting impression on thousands of Afghan children.” The larger version of these ads contained a line in small type advising the reader that the doll in the photograph was not a real Soviet bomb, but a replica constructed on the basis of refugee accounts. In fact, no photographs of such dolls exist, even though one would have been worth thousands of dollars to a news photographer. Peter Jouvenal, a British television cameraman who made over forty trips inside Afghanistan with the mujahidin and saw every other kind of Soviet mine, suspected that the story of the dolls was apocryphal. “The Soviets were guilty of so much in Afghanistan. Why exaggerate?” he remarked.

Right up to the time of their withdrawal, the Soviets kept introducing new kinds of mines. When journalists entered the garrison town of Barikot, in Kunar province near the Pakistan border, after the Soviets had evacuated it in April 1988, they discovered mines stuck on stakes in the bushes. They dubbed them Noriega mines, on account of their pineapple texture. These were sonic mines, fitted with diaphragms that picked up the lightest footstep and sprayed shrapnel thirty feet in all directions.

In Barikot, the Soviets also booby-trapped grain bags in some of the places they evacuated, using a grenade with its detonator pin pulled, hooked up to a trip wire concealed in the sack. Several mujahidin and a dozen refugees were wounded when they opened the bags.

The overwhelming majority of hospital patients in Peshawar and Quetta were mine victims. After Red Cross doctors operated on them, the wounded were dispatched to clinics run by the various mujahidin political parties to recover. These clinics lived on donations from the refugees themselves and usually received little or no aid from either international relief organizations or the Pakistani government. Pakistani landlords owned the clinics and charged as much rent as they could. In the heat of summer, when temperatures rarely dipped below ninety degrees in daytime, there were no fans or air conditioners for the patients, who were accustomed to the bracing mountain climate of Afghanistan. The clinics were short of nearly everything, including food.

Of the twenty patients I saw at a clinic in Quetta one day in July 1988, sixteen were missing at least one limb. Many of the mine accidents had occurred only two or three weeks earlier. But there were no signs of illness or general physical weakness on the victims’ faces, even though most of them not only had lost large quantities of blood and eaten little in the intervening period, but also had to endure days of travel on a mule or in a lolloping four-wheel-drive vehicle before getting to a proper medical facility.

Many people have the idea that once a limb is amputated the pain stops. That’s not true. Pain from damaged nerve tissue lasts for months, usually longer if a clean amputation is not done soon after the accident, which was always the case in Afghanistan, where painkillers were not always available. Add this to weeks of drugged discomfort, for patients were all but drowned in antibiotics in order to prevent tetanus and other infections caused by mine fragments.

Yet, despite the pain and a missing arm or foot, the patients in these wards looked healthy and normal. There was a vibrancy in their faces, a trace of humor even, and a total absence of embarrassment. “I have given my foot to Allah,” said a twenty-seven-year-old man who also had only one eye and a burned, deformed hand. “Now I will continue my jihad [holy war] in another way.” This man had a wife and three children. At first, I dismissed what he said as bravado meant to impress a foreigner. I found it impossible to believe that he really felt this emotion, that he truly accepted what had happened to him. His eyes, however, evinced neither the rage of a fanatic, which would have accounted for his defiance, nor the shocked and sorrowful look of someone who was really depressed. If anything registered on his face when I spoke to him, it was bewilderment. He didn’t seem to understand why I thought he should be unhappy. He had lost an eye, a foot, and part of a hand — and that was that.

The Afghan mujahidin came equipped with psychological armor that was not easy to pierce or fathom. They had the courage and strength of zealots, but their eyes were a mystery. Their eyes were not the bottomless black wells of hatred and cunning that a visitor grows accustomed to seeing in Iran and elsewhere in the Moslem world. There was a reassuring clarity about them. Sometimes, while I was talking and sipping cups of green tea with the mujahidin, their eyes would appear so instantly recognizable to me that I thought they could have been those of my childhood friends. How could people with such familiar, nonthreatening eyes walk so readily through minefields?

Western journalists and relief workers were not so brave. We were afraid of going “inside” — crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan. And the more often you went “inside,” the more terrified you became. Only a handful of photographers and cameramen went repeatedly, for after a few trips over the border, a print reporter could understand the story from Pakistan. This was why so many of us didn’t venture far from Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, which functioned as the rear base of the Afghan resistance. The relief workers who went “inside” were doctors trained in emergency surgery and vetted for mental and physical toughness. “The longest, most searching interview I ever had for a job was with Aide Medicale Internationale prior to being sent to Afghanistan,” said Simon Mardel, a London surgeon and an accomplished mountain climber who had also worked in a state hospital in India.

In addition to Afghanistan’s mines, a reporter had to contend with boredom, disease, and exhaustion. The food, when there was more than plain rice and onions to eat, was abominable. The meat was often filled with maggots. You could be felled by bad water. Dysentery was prevalent, along with hepatitis; getting a mild case of vivax malaria was definitely preferable. And all this was what a journalist went through merely to get to the fighting.

Every war, particularly in the Third World, involves risks of disease and danger. But no other war in recent times required journalists to walk up and down mountains as much as fourteen hours a day. Vietnam had helicopters. Every country in Africa has small planes and jeeps. Beirut offered luxury hotels with first-class cuisine next door to the fighting. Afghanistan, though, had only mules for carrying your backpack. In the south, near Kandahar, where vehicles were available, it was too dangerous to travel until the last phase of the Soviet war because the flat terrain was good not only for four-wheel-drive trucks but for helicopter gunships on the lookout for moving mujahidin units. Charles Thornton, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, tried traveling by truck. He was killed in an ambush in September 1985 as soon as he crossed the border.

In “The Man Who Would Be King,” Kipling’s story about two Englishmen who depart the Northwest Frontier to seek their fortune in Afghanistan, one returns to Peshawar a “rag-wrapped, whining cripple.” As for the other, only his “dried, withered head” remained. Nothing like that happened to any journalist I knew, but some came pretty close. Richard Mackenzie, an Australian writer for the Washington Times’s publication Insight, lost forty-five pounds from dysentery during his three and a half months in northeastern Afghanistan in late 1987. Very early in his journey, he was abandoned by his guide and horseman, and later on, while very ill, he was taken prisoner by an extremist mujahidin faction. When Mackenzie showed up in Peshawar, his friends described his physical appearance as “frightening.” Hugo Eriksen, a Norwegian journalist, arrived at a friend’s doorstep in Peshawar in June 1988, after a two-week trip “inside,” with a peptic ulcer and malaria. The rugged, six-foot-plus army veteran collapsed in a chair and whimpered, “I couldn’t take the food, I just couldn’t.” A week later, Eriksen went back inside.

Kipling’s Afghanistan was described by Louis L. Cornell as “a place of externes,” where “circumstances corrode and destroy false appearances.” In the 1980s that was still true. There was no journalist covering the war who didn’t become fearfully ill at least once. If only about a dozen reporters were killed or imprisoned during the ten years of Soviet occupation, it was only because relatively few ventured over the border in the first place.

Many were intimidated by Soviet threats. The Soviet ambassador to Pakistan, Vitaly Smirnov, told Agence France Presse on October 5, 1984, that journalists traveling with the mujahidin “will be killed. And our units in Afghanistan will help the Afghan forces to do it.” This statement drew almost no response or criticism from the media establishment in America, but every newsman assigned to the war heard about it.

This was the only war in which having large amounts of money to spend on coverage did absolutely no good. Elsewhere in the world, Amercian television networks leased vehicles and planes to get to remote areas. In Afghanistan there were none to lease, but mules were cheap enough that the poorest freelancer could afford them.

By mule, the fighting in Afghanistan was at least several days of hard traveling from a television satellite transmission station, sometimes as far as several weeks. Had the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1950s, before the satellite age, the war might have seemed less remote and certainly would have garnered more attention than it did in the 1980s.

CBS News based a full-time cameraman, Kurt Lohbeck, in Peshawar. He was one of the handful of journalists who repeatedly risked their lives for several years running in order to cover the war from inside. Lohbeck used to say that part of his “soul was up in those mountains, and you have to go back there and check on yourself from time to time.” But none of the American TV networks had a bureau for a war in which — according to a study by the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the Gallup organization in Pakistan — a superpower killed 1.3 million people. That is more deaths than in the Iraq-Iran war and ten times more than the number killed in Lebanon in all the years of civil conflict there since 1975. The Israelis would have to repeat their 1982 invasion of Lebanon seventy-five times over before equaling the Kremlin’s Afghan carnage.

Five and a half million Afghans were made refugees in Pakistan and Iran, a third of the prewar population of the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan. Considering that another two million Afghans were forced by the war to migrate within the country, no conflict since the end of World War II created more homeless people save for the 1971 Bangladesh war.

The bloodiest year in Afghanistan was 1985, the first year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule in the Soviet Union. In that year, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over a quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or Afghan Communist troops.

Lars Grahnstrom, a shy, relaxed Swedish nurse with piercing blue eyes, arrived in Afghanistan a few weeks after Gorbachev came to power. Grahnstrom spent six months with four other male nurses and doctors in a cave near the Soviet-held city of Mazar-i-Sharif. They treated over a hundred patients a day, the majority of whom had war-related injuries. This was in the extreme north of Afghanistan, where the fighting was heaviest. “In the little part of Afghanistan where I lived, there were more people killed while I was there than in South Africa or Lebanon the whole year,” Grahnstrom said. “Every day I listened to the news on my short-wave radio. It was always South Africa, Lebanon, Sri Lanka — two people killed here, three killed there… I was always hoping to hear something about Afghanistan. But there was nothing.”

In his book Under a Sickle Moon, the British travel writer Peregrine Hodson recalled his three months in Afghanistan: “Every evening we tuned in to the [BBC] World Service but there was no mention of any new offensive in the Panjshir Valley. It was disturbingly unreal to be caught in the middle of a forgotten war. At times it was like being in the grip of a massive hallucination: living on nuts and berries in a cave, being bombed by Soviet jets.”

The Soviet bombing had little effect on the mujahidin. By 1987, it seemed that the Soviets’ last, best hope was to destabilize the guerrillas’ rear base, over the border in Pakistan. The State Department reported 127 terrorist incidents in Pakistani cities that year, resulting in 234 deaths — more than in any Middle Eastern country. Pakistan suffered one third of all the fatalities and one half of all the wounded in terrorist attacks worldwide in 1987.

The terrorists whom the Pakistani police managed to capture testified to working for the Afghan Communist Bureau of State Security, Khedamat-e Aetelaat-e Dawlati, known as KhAD. Neither the State Department nor any Western diplomat in Pakistan had any doubt that this was true. KhAD (which has been called the WAD Ministry of State Security since 1988) had been built up by the KGB into a force of 25,000 agents soon after the Soviet invasion, and about 1,500 Soviets were thought to be working at KhAD’s Kabul headquarters. According to State Department officials, KhAD was the largest known sponsor of terrorism in the world, next to which the record of Abu Nidal and other Palestinian terrorists was — until the December 1988 bombing of the Pan American jetliner — statistically insignificant.

In the same week in April 1988 that the Soviet Union signed an agreement in Geneva to withdraw its troops, terrorists blew up an ammunition depot outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, killing one hundred and injuring more than one thousand people. It was one of four terrorist incidents in Pakistan over a forty-eight-hour period. The equipment destroyed at the depot was destined for the mujahidin. It included a large shipment of primacord, a rocket-fired cable that explodes two feet above the ground, used to clear a path through minefields.

This would have been the first mine-clearing equipment that the mujahidin received. Indeed, throughout the Soviet occupation the only such “equipment” that the guerrillas ever had was the winter hail, dubbed “Allah’s mine sweeper” because the crashing pellets of ice sometimes triggered the mines.

Hundreds of journalists covered the signing of the Geneva agreement. Close to a hundred more arrived in Kabul afterward to watch the start of the Soviet withdrawal on May 15, 1988, when the press began to speculate about the return of the five and a half million refugees.

A month later, in Nangarhar province near the Pakistan border, I encountered a group of refugees ascending a mountain with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They asked me for water from my canteen, something Afghans rarely do unless they are ill. The refugees were not walking back to their homes in Afghanistan but leaving them. Soviet jets had bombed their village in the Kot Valley south of Jalalabad a few days earlier, killing thirty-four people. This was nothing unusual; since the start of their withdrawal, the Soviets had been bombing civilian areas around major cities in order to create free-fire zones where minefields could be extended and invading mujahidin units easily spotted. The Soviets were determined not to leave Afghanistan “clinging to helicopters,” like the Americans in Vietnam. Anyway, the idea of millions of refugees returning home while millions of mines littered the countryside was considered absurd by relief workers in Peshawar.

None of this mattered, however. As soon as the Red Armywithdrawal commenced, even as the Soviets were still dropping mines and bombing villages, the press shifted elsewhere what limited attention it had bestowed on Afghanistan. (Only at the conclusion of the Soviet withdrawal, in February 1989, did the media tune in.) “Afghanistan is already being forgotten,” lamented Zia Rizvi, a top UN official involved in the refugee repatriation program. “The worst enemy of the Afghan refugees is the short memory of world public opinion.”

Everybody in the West was at least aware of Afghanistan, and regarding the role of the Soviets, most people probably assumed the worst. But even for these people, the war was an opaque presence half a world away. It wasn’t felt with the immediacy of other news. Political conservatives in America believed the fault rested with the liberal media. There was certainly an element of truth in this, but less than was thought. And it wasn’t a revealing truth: liberals I knew cared deeply about this war and occasionally risked their lives to report it.

Even from Peshawar, thirty-five miles from the Afghan border, the war was, in a visual sense, inaccessible. Television cameramen trekked for weeks on little food, only to return ill and half starved, with almost no footage that could compete against the heartbreaking backdrops of black townships in South Africa or the spectacle of a hijacked jumbo jet on the tarmac at a Mediterranean airport — images that people in the West could immediately relate to. Though a few journalists managed to get close to the fighting, the war was never brought close to the audience. Over a million were killed, but there were no images of epic battles, as there were in the Middle East, or of mass death, as in Ethiopia.

There were major battles in Afghanistan, but the only way to get to them on short notice was to fly, which was impossible, since the only people with planes were the Communists. Instead, for nearly a decade, the public was shown the same monotonous film clips of smoke billowing in the distance and of bearded, turbaned guerrillas with old rifles sniping at convoys — images that only increased the war’s unreality.

Afghanistan was too physically rough an assignment and offered too few rewards to draw the world’s best television cameramen. And it is the cameramen — not the high-profile correspondents — who hold the key to a television story’s impact. Had the very best cameramen traveled to the front lines, however, they would have been frustrated by the visual material they had to work with. The mujahidin were exotic all right, with their wide turbans, Lee-Enfield rifles, and great black beards. But the effect was static, flat. In Afghanistan, there was absolutely no clash between the strange and the familiar, which gave Vietnam and Lebanon their rock-video quality, with zonked-out GIs in headbands and rifle-wielding Shiite terrorists wearing Michael Jackson T-shirts.

Afghanistan existed without bridges to the twentieth century. The country was mired in medievalism; a “mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers,” as Kipling noted; a place where terrible things always happened to people. The Soviets destroyed it — but didn’t the Mongols too! In the January 20, 1980, issue of the Village Voice, the left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn employed such a rationale to justify the Soviet invasion of the month before:

Cockburn’s tone was, of course, politically motivated. But given the West’s tepid public response to the subsequent Soviet occupation, it appeared that many people, deep down inside, reacted to Afghanistan in similar terms.

The images coming out of Afghanistan were simply beyond the grasp of the Western television audience. The Soviets had taken American tactics in Vietnam several steps further and fought a twenty-first-century war, a war that was completely impersonal and therefore too dangerous for journalists to cover properly, in which the only strategy was repeated aerial carpet bombings, terrorism, and the laying of millions of mines. The Hind helicopter gunship, the workhorse of the Soviet military in Afghanistan, packed no less than 128 rockets and four missiles. It was able to incinerate an entire village in a few seconds. Against such measures, the very concept of battle had become nearly obsolete.

While the Soviets waged a twenty-first-century war, the Afghans fought a nineteenth-century one. The Afghans were able to survive and drive out the Soviets precisely, and only, because they were so primitive. High birth and infant mortality rates in an unforgiving mountain environment, where disease was rife and medical care absent, had seemed to accelerate the process of evolution in rural Afghanistan, making the inhabitants of the countryside — where most of the mujahidin came from — arguably the physically toughest people on earth. They could go long periods of time without food and water, and climb up and down mountains like goats. Keeping up with them on their treks and surviving on what they survived on reduced me and other Westerners to tears. They seemed an extension of an impossible landscape that had ground up one foreign invader after another.

The mujahidin borrowed little from other modern guerrilla struggles. They had a small number of vehicles and, until the later stages of the war, few walkie-talkies, leaving the enemy without communications to intercept. Like the ancient Greeks, the mujahidin used runners to carry messages between outposts. Some areas of the country were blessed with exceptionally talented guerrilla commanders. But for the most part, the resistance fighters had no strategy to speak of, and their command structure was often so informal as to be nonexistent. A KhAD or KGB agent in their midst would have been hopelessly confused: there was nothing to infiltrate, and no pattern — often no logic or planning — to guerrilla attacks. Predicting the mujahidin’s actions was like forecasting the wind direction. In Peshawar, it was said that their very incompetence helped to defeat the Soviets (though after the Soviets departed, the complete disorganization of the resistance hindered its efforts to capture major Afghan cities still held by the Afghan Communists).

The mujahidin were a movement without rhetoric or ideology or a supreme leader — they had no Arafat or Savimbi or Mao. Their Moslem fundamentalism lacked political meaning because Afghanistan, unlike the Arab world and Iran, never had an invasion of Western culture and technology to revolt against. The guerrillas had no complexes, no chips on their shoulders regarding the modern world, since they had never clashed with it until the Soviets came. Religion for them was inseparable from the other certainties of a harsh and lonely mountain existence. In sum, the mujahidin had no politics; therefore, with few exceptions, they could not be extremists. Concepts like “the Third World” and “national liberation” had absolutely no meaning for them. After a trip to Paktia province in November 1987, William McGurn wrote in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal that the Afghan guerrillas were “simply ornery mountain folk who have not cottoned to a foreign power that has seized their land, killed their people and attacked their faith.”

If the mujahidin resembled anyone, it was the early-nineteenth-century Greek klephts, who with foreign help liberated their country from Ottoman Turkish occupation. Like the Afghans, the Greeks then were an unruly hodgepodge of guerrilla bands driven by a fervid religious faith (in their case, Orthodox Christianity). They were at a stage of development similar to that of Afghan peasants today: they lived an austere life in the mountains, were riven by blood feuds, and never forgot an insult. Lord Byron and the other foreign eccentrics who flocked to Greece in the 1820s to assist the rebels might have felt at home among the relief workers and journalists in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Afghans were able to withstand a late-twentieth-century military onslaught by relying on nineteenth-century values and methods. In The Face of Battle, John Keegan observed: “Impersonality, coercion, deliberate cruelty, all deployed on a rising scale, makes the fitness of modern man to sustain the stress of battle increasingly doubtful.” There is an awful lesson here: even conventional warfare is now so horrible that only the values of the past may make victory possible. And in Afghanistan, the lack of all-weather roads and a national press left the Afghans only the values of the past to fall back on, inward-oriented village codes that were undiluted by the rationalism that pervades not just the West but the more technologically developed parts of the Third World.

The Soviets killed a larger percentage of Afghans than the Nazis killed Soviets in World War II. Were Americans or Europeans to suffer the same level of mass violence today, it is questionable whether they would fight back as the Afghans have. More likely, they would seek some sort of compromise with their occupier.

The Afghan mujahidin, numbering over 100,000, were the first group of insurgents to drive out a Russian army since Czar Peter the Great began his empire’s southward expansion three hundred years ago. The mujahidin were attacked with more firepower than any Moslem group in the Middle East could imagine, yet almost never did they resort to terrorism. Though the guerrillas were responsible for political assassinations, the brutal treatment of enemy soldiers, and rocket attacks in Kabul and other cities that killed civilians, to my knowledge or that of any journalist I know, groups of Soviet or Afghan civilians were never deliberately singled out as targets. Because the mujahidin were innocent of the modern trait of terrorism, they did not inspire the horror and fascination of the car bombers and airplane hijackers, with their black hoods and nihilistic beliefs. The mujahidin, despite their many accomplishments, were not traditionally good subject matter for the media: they were neither complicated nor fanatical. They were the most understated of resistance fighters, and so, after a decade of war, they still had no face.

What the television images did not translate was that despite their apparent primitiveness, as individuals the mujahidin were easy for a foreigner to talk to and befriend. There was none of the stiffness and forced probing that characterized relationships between Moslems and Westerners elsewhere. Because they had never been colonized, the Afghans didn’t have the fears and prejudices toward the West with which other peoples in the Orient are burdened. “After the lowering fanaticism of Meshed [in Iran],” wrote Bruce Chatwin, crossing into the mountains of Afghanistan “was like coming up for air.” In The Road to Oxiana, the 1937 classic considered the Ulysses of twentieth-century travel writing, Robert Byron, having just arrived from the Middle East, exclaimed about Afghanistan: “Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex.” The Afghans seemed wonderfully straightforward, and journalists and relief workers took to them because in them we saw a stronger, more heroic version of ourselves.

Sympathizing with guerrilla movements is an occupational hazard of foreign correspondents everywhere, but the Afghans were the first guerrillas whom journalists not only sympathized with but actually looked up to. As romantic and unprofessional as this was, we were not the first Westerners to fall under the spell. Generation after generation of British colonial officials who had fought the Afghans in defense of the Northwest Frontier of British India had learned to admire and identify with their foes. Mountstuart Elphinstone, who led a mission to the court of Afghan ruler Shah Shuja in 1809, noted that the Afghans “have not that indifference to truth, and that style of habitual and gratuitous falsehoods, which astonishes a European… in India and Persia.” Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of the Northwest Frontier, wrote, “For the stranger who had eyes to see and ears to hear,… here was a people who looked him in the face and made him feel he had come home.”

The British invaded Afghanistan three times, and on each occasion they were driven out. Out of an invasion force of 4,500 that retreated from Kabul in January 1842, only one man was left alive. Never had the British met such a formidable adversary. This forced them to meet the Afghans on an equal plane without a trace of condescension.

Kipling paid the ultimate tribute to the Afghans in “The Ballad of East and West.” Because of its simple truth and catchy rhythm, the poem’s first line, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet/‘has become a cliché. But read in its entirety, the ninety-six-line epic tells the story of how a friendship is forged between the son of a British colonel and an Afghan brigand named Kamal, whom the colonel’s son was sent to capture.

Kipling, whose imperialism is often misunderstood by modern readers, ends the story with this uplifting truth:

The poem, which was published in 1889, captures the spirit of the naive and idealized friendships that existed one hundred years later between mujahidin commanders and some extremely brave journalists and relief workers whom I knew in Peshawar.

Kamal, the hero of Kipling’s poem, was more than just an Afghan. He was a Pathan (pronounced “pah-tahn”), as were most of the mujahidin and the Afghans whom the British encountered on the Northwest Frontier. The Pathans are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan (one of every two Afghans is a Pathan) and the largest existent tribal society in the world. They live by a medieval code of honor called Pukhtunwali and have given the country all of its kings and polical leaders. Until recent decades, in fact, “Pathan” and “Afghan” have been synonymous. The Pathans inhabit a huge arc of territory in the eastern, southern, and southwestern part of Afghanistan. They speak Pukhtu, an Aryan tongue that borrows much from Persian and Hindustani, and employs Arabic script. R. T. I. Ridgway, an officer in the British colonial service, described Pukhtu as “a stong virile language, capable of expressing ideas with neatness and accuracy.” Actually, the Pathans prefer to call themselves Pukhtuns, or Pushtuns if they live in southern Afghanistan, where their accent is softer. But the name Pathan, first used by the Indians to describe the Afghans on the Northwest Frontier, has become commonly accepted.

The origins of the Pathans are shrouded in myth. By various accounts, they are descended from the ancient Hebrews, from an Aryan race called the White Huns, and from the Greek troops of Alexander the Great who passed through Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C. Pathan genealogies read like tracts from the Old Testament. According to one legend, the Pathans are descendants of Afghana, a grandson of the Israelite king Saul, whose ancestors were carried away from Palestine by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, and planted as colonists in Persia, from where they migrated eastward to present-day Afghanistan. The name Afghana cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible, but many Pathans still believe the story. Even more believe themselves to be Aryans, but all will admit that they are not certain of their own ancestry.

Almost every one of Afghanistan’s twenty-odd ethnic groups took part in the struggle against the Soviets, but it was the Pathans who gave the resistance its mythic, larger-than-life quality, its lack of political pretensions, and its chivalry — as well as its primitiveness, tribal disorder, and recklessness. Only Pathans could have invented a game that requires a man to pick up a butterfly mine and toss it in the air without losing a hand (not all succeeded). Only Pathans could make walking through a minefield a test of manhood.

The Pathans are a purer, crystallized version of everything that is good and bad in the Afghan character. More than any other single factor, it was their harsh and unforgiving tribal culture, free of subtleties and introspection and unaffected by the modern world, that defeated the mines and other weapons of the Soviet invaders. As the seventeenth-century Pathan poet Khushal Khan Khatak wrote: