Soldiers of God

1 Frontier Town

THE CEILING FAN rattled like an airplane propeller in the breathless, mud-baked heat of the room, blowing new, crisp 100-afghani notes all over the floor. The money changer in the Peshawar bazaar had handed me the notes in heaps of 10,000. The afghani was devaluing fast. For years already, in one of the CIA’s most successful covert operations, millions of counterfeit afghanis had been printed in order to wreck the Kabul regime’s economy and allow the mujahidin to buy weapons and ammunition on the open market on the Northwest Frontier. But the CIA program wasn’t good enough for the KGB. Near the end of the war the Soviets, needing to handcuff the Afghan economy to their own in the wake of a troop withdrawal, started buying up vast amounts of U.S. dollars on the black market in Kabul, driving down the afghani further in order to make Western products prohibitively expensive for the Afghan population. So there I sat, sweating on a sagging jute bed with a draft at my back, stuffing stacks of possibly counterfeit money into my rucksack, just to pay for a mule in case I got sick.

My room was on the roof of a house that overlooked an expanse of rice fields, through which the same water buffalos plodded home every day at dusk, as in a silk screen or bas-relief. On my last evening in Peshawar, my eyes were drawn to a shimmer of fire-red in the distance: the gossamer chador (veil) of the young woman driving the herd along a mud embankment. To me, that lone flash of a primary color symbolized the rich and voluptuous civilization of the Indian subcontinent that ended, literally, beyond those fields, where the landscape lost its watery, terra cotta glow and was replaced by a mass of corrugated, pie-crust hills, whose scarred, cindery gradients warned of heat and cold and all other means of physical discomfort. That was where the war was, and to understand who the mujahidin really were, you had to go there.

On the bed I’d laid out the native costume I had just purchased for a total of 400 rupees ($25) from a Pathan merchant in the bazaar. It consisted of a pakol, a flat woolen hat from the Hindu Kush mountain region of Chitral, and the traditional shalwar kameez worn by the Pathans — a pair of baggy cotton pants held up by a string and a long, flowing shirt with a collar and deep side pocket. I tried the costume on, wearing no underwear as recommended, since among the guerrillas, the only opportunity to bathe would be in a stream with all my clothes on. Like Kim in Rudyard Kipling’s novel, I “felt mechanically for the moustache” and beard that were just beginning to sprout on my face. Kim, too, had put on a native costume given him by a Pathan to espy the Northwest Frontier. And if I thought of Kim as I looked at the pathetic imposter in the mirror, it was not, I hoped, the effect of a romantic inclination but simply because, as in so many other instances, Kipling’s writing offered the only sure guide to this war. (One of my colleagues, Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, had told me, “Had the Russians read Kipling more carefully, they might never have invaded Afghanistan.”)

In the side pocket of the shalwar kameez I placed my notebook, camera, and water purification tablets. My rucksack was small, since I might have to carry it everywhere. There was room inside only for the afghanis, a second shalwar kameez, a sleeping bag, towel, comb, toothbrush and toothpaste, flashlight, film, pocketknife, short-wave radio, toilet paper, flea powder, mosquito repellent, painkillers, antibiotics, and malaria pills. The canteen I would carry separately.

Reporters permanently covering the Afghan war were tied to a wheel of psychological torture that never stopped turning. First there was the boredom and insecurity of waiting in Peshawar for the trip inside to materialize, something that didn’t always happen, and when it did it was often weeks later than the mujahidin had promised. Then there was the attack of fear and dread when you suddenly found out — usually the night before departure — where exactly you would be going and that it was too late to back out. Finally came the loneliness, physical torment, and pure wonder of the trip itself. I was now in the second phase of that cycle, surrounded by four walls and a glimpse of desolation from my room, about to travel alone with a group of mujahidin into Afghanistan and feeling more scared and lonely than I ever felt before.

The fact that I had a wife and son back in Greece only increased my sense of isolation. Among the journalists who regularly went inside, I knew of only one who had a family, and he had told me never to carry along pictures of loved ones in Afghanistan. “You should put your family out of your mind completely,” he said. “Just do what you have to do, survive, and get out.” Looking at the picture of my wife and son at the harbor on the Aegean island of Paros, I decided not to take his advice. I slid the color photograph into my pocket.

“May you never be tired, pathan!” said the horse dealer Mahbub Ali to Kim when the boy departed. I hoped this benediction might apply to me too.

Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, was always a city of colonial cliches where adventures, both real and imagined, began. Edward Behr, an Indian army veteran and for years a foreign correspondent for Time and Newsweek, once observed: “Though the British Raj was about to fall apart with terrifying suddenness, Peshawar…was still a bastion of tradition and Kiplingesque behavior.” The Afghan war made this even more true in the 1980s than in the 1940s, the period Behr was writing about.

Peshawar (literally, Frontier Town) lies on a teeming panel of reddish-black earth at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the fabled gateway between the Indian subcontinent and the gaunt mountains and plateaus of central Asia, over which the sun sets in a blaze of garish pigments every night. Layered with mud and fine dust and smelling of baked brick, diesel exhaust, sickly sweet incense, and dung, Peshawar is a typical Dickensian town of the industrialized Third World.

Only in the old cantonment, built and formerly occupied by the British, is the city’s soot-smudged tableau lightened somewhat by green lawns and stately red brick mansions, built in Anglo-Indian Gothic style. In the tidy parade grounds, if you use your imagination, Peshawar evokes a smoky nineteenth-century lithograph of British India. But everywhere outside the cantonment there is only noise, traffic, and a hot, dense bath of electrified air suffused with embers and metallic sparks. The warrened, cratered streets are cluttered with horse-drawn tongas, careening auto rickshaws, and gaudy Bedford trucks, which feature gruesome examples of popular art on their sideboards, such as a picture of an F-16 squadron zooming out of the lipstick-smeared mouth of an Asian diva. Despite such vulgar touches, the city still retains enough potted, old-fashioned romance to seduce a foreign correspondent in search of the exotic.

Peshawar has a bazaar, of course — where I had bought my costume and Afghan money — filled with all sorts of gongs, trinkets, and the best selection of reasonably priced oriental carpets in Asia. There’s an eccentric hotel too: a run-down, rambling hostelry dating from the time of the Raj, called Dean’s after a British colonial governor, staffed by zombielike waiters and known as a hangout for spies and other intriguers. And then there are the Pathans, who with their beards, turbans, bandoleers, and eyes darkened with kohl are like extras in a Hollywood movie. At the far end of town, just before the road begins its dramatic, winding ascent toward Afghanistan,is an official Khyber Gate that is inscribed with several verses from a Kipling poem, “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:

Was there ever such rich terrain for romantic self-delusion?

At the end of the 1970s, Peshawar went from being a quaint backwater to a geopolitical fault zone, and new, worse cliches were piled on the Kiplingesque ones. The Islamic revolution in Iran closed off an important route for international drug smugglers. No longer could opium, extracted from locally grown red poppies, be transported west from Pakistan. Instead, laboratories were set up in the barren, dun-brown hills that loom on either side of the Khyber Pass. In small, concealed mud brick redoubts the opium was refined into billions of dollars’ worth of heroin before being brought by truck and airplane to the port of Karachi and smuggled to Europe and America. A year after the Iranian revolution, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and placed the Red Army at Peshawar’s doorstep. Refugees poured down the mountains into the plain surrounding the city. Mujahidin political parties set up their headquarters in the refugee camps. Peshawar’s population doubled, from 500,000 to a million. And journalists, relief workers, drug enforcement agents, aspiring mercenaries, both real and would-be spies, and a rabble of weirdos who defied categorization filled Dean’s and nearby Green’s Hotel, a gloom-ridden, poured-concrete sepulcher that was half the price of Dean’s.

But it was Dean’s, more than Green’s, that began to evoke a setting for low-grade intrigue. It was said that every room was bugged, and some even believed that the awful posters and oil paintings on the walls were really huge microphones in disguise. But that didn’t stop reporters from screaming at the top of their lungs. One night I listened to a Scandinavian writer rant and rave about why a certain mujahidin commander was secretly a Maoist. Another night, a drunken American journalist loudly accused a British colleague of being a Communist merely because she had dared to criticize the guerrillas.

The hotel staff couldn’t cope with the onslaught, and the food at Dean’s, never very good, suddenly got much worse. But the hotel drivers prospered, for the journalists and aid workers needed to be chauffeured from one sprawling refugee camp to another. The most popular driver was a fellow named Gujar, whose lugubrious manner, nervous twitch, and white beardlike stubble on his chocolate-brown head made him, along with the terrible food at Dean’s, a Peshawar “in” joke that got mentioned in nearly every recent book and article about the place.

Because of Islamic law in Pakistan, alcohol could be served only at foreign “clubs” with special liquor licenses. Given the nature of the clientele, the Peshawar bar scene was rowdy. Proud locals compared the atmosphere at the Bamboo Garden to the scene in the movie Star Wars in which space cowboys, alien monsters, and robots collide at an intergalactic truck stop. In the summer of 1987, two strung-out West German hippies at the Bamboo Garden were badgering a young Swiss woman to take heroin. She tried to ignore them, but they injected the drug into her buttocks while she talked to a friend at the bar. It turned out to be an overdose. The woman was rushed back to Europe but died en route. The bar closed before the year was over.

After that, the only place left in town to drink was the bar at the air-conditioned American Club, which was soon being mentioned in international travel magazines as one of the “great journalist bars in the world” — on par even with the bar at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut. An American friend, who for years had been writing in obscurity about Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier at a time when nobody cared, became so intoxicated by the sudden interest in Peshawar that he innocently exclaimed to me, “Peshawar in the 1980s is one of the great place-dates of the century, like Paris in the twenties!”

Peshawar became a place where men could act out their fantasies. Koshiro Tanaka, a struggling Japanese businessman in his late forties who had a sixth-degree black belt in karate, believed that “since World War II, there has not been an honorable way for a Japanese man to die in the true samurai spirit.” So he exchanged his cubbyhole in a Tokyo trading office for a bare room and sagging jute bed in the $i.i5-a-night Khyber Hotel. This was Tanaka’s base for going out on Rambo-style combat missions with the mujahidin. He also trained hundreds of guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat. The only medical supplies he brought with him on his missions inside were three elastic tubes to use as tourniquets. “Three is enough,” he explained to me. “If all four of my limbs are cut, then I am finished.” Tanaka always carried at least two hand grenades, one for throwing at the enemy and the other for killing himself. “I can’t be taken alive, because if I’m captured — big diplomatic problem for Japan.” Tanaka’s reputation was secured when Tass, the Soviet news agency, actually taking the threat he posed seriously, reported him killed in action in September 1986. “I was in Japan at the time, training,” Tanaka said with a crazed, jack-o’-lantern grin. He was on his way back inside when I last saw him. Though he had killed quite a few Soviets with grenades and his AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle, he still had not attained his ultimate goal: killing a Russian with his bare hands.

I met an East German refugee in his late twenties who came to Pakistan “to even the score with the Russians.” Imprisoned for two years in East Berlin for trying to scale the Berlin Wall, he was eventually allowed to immigrate to West Germany. He was happy there until the letters he wrote to his father and girlfriend in East Berlin started to be returned unopened. “The Communists wouldn’t let me communicate with my family, so I decided to fight back.” Afghanistan provided him with an opportunity. He converted to Islam, learned Pukhtu, and took the nom de guerre of Ahmedjan in order to protect his family in East Germany from Communist retribution. Ahmedjan made three trips as a mujahid into the Kandahar region, participating in several battles before handing in his assault rifle to take the job of project manager for the German Humanitarian Service in Afghanistan. But he swore that he wouldn’t “withdraw from Afghanistan until the Russians do.”

No one I knew fought for money; mercenaries quickly learned that they were unwelcome in Peshawar and stopped coming, because the mujahidin didn’t understand the concept of paying someone to fight their war. Typical of the kind of person who occasionally passed through the frontier town’s revolving door was a London window cleaner whose father had given him a one-way air ticket to Peshawar. The fellow casually mentioned to anybody who would listen that he had “always wanted to kill someone.” Eventually, he went on a mission with an obscure guerrilla group, whose members let him pull the trigger of a rocket launcher aimed at a tent full of Afghan regime troops. After the explosion, in the distance he saw two bodies lying on the ground. The window cleaner then went home to London. This time his wife paid the airfare.

Fantasy, reality, and cliché carne together at Darra, an hour’s drive south of Peshawar. The dusty storefronts and jagged, biscuit-brown hills rising from behind the line of shops evoked a Disney re-creation of Dodge City, except that Darra was real, and the gunslingers were Pathans. Also, even Dodge City had some kind of law; there never was any law in Darra. The town is in a “tribal agency,” a belt of land adjacent to the Afghan border that the Pakistanis, like the British before them, have never been able to control.

In the last century, having failed to subdue the border-area Pathans, and discouraged over the number of rifles they were stealing, the British decided to help the tribesmen in a very unhelpful way. They taught the Pathans of Darra how to make their own guns and gave them the lathes to do it, knowing that the metal mined from the surrounding hills was of poor quality. This ensured that after a few hundred rounds, the barrels would expand and the guns would lose their accuracy. Today, making guns is Darra’s one and only industry. The garishly painted shops along the main street sell locally made versions of AK-47 assault rifles, as well as M-16s, Stens, Uzi submachine guns, Makarov pistols, single-action Lee-Enfields, rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, antiaircraft guns and rockets of all sizes, and much more. You can even buy a pen gun that fires a .22 caliber bullet and costs under $6. But it dropped from popularity after nine foreigners were arrested at Pakistani airports when the x-ray machines spotted the weapons-grade metal.

In one shop, grinning Pathans feverishly work the lathes and smooth the gun barrels under a sign reading, “God helps those who help themselves.” Mujahidin, blood-feuding Pathan tribesmen, and the occasional Sikh extremist from the Indian Punjab are among those who purchase Darra’s wares. Prospective customers can fire as many rounds as they want right on the streets, provided they pay for the bullets.

Darra has two smells: cordite and hashish. A shop with a sheepskin or goat’s tail hanging outside indicates a place where drugs are sold. There are plenty of those shops at the north end of town. A kilo of brown heroin sells for under $100 in Darra; the New York City street value would be around $1 million. The going price for a credit card-size brick of opium is $4 in Darra. At dusk, the shops are bolted shut because of the risk of brigands. I never met a relief worker or journalist who hadn’t visited the town at least once. It’s what the Northwest Frontier is all about.

On the map, the Northwest Frontier is just another province of Pakistan, along with Sind, Punjab, and Baluchistan. But for Westerners what made the Northwest Frontier the Northwest Frontier was not just its proximity to Afghanistan but the fact that culturally, topographically, and even, to a degree, politically — as far as the tribal areas were concerned — the province was part of Afghanistan, despite what the maps said.

For Afghan war freaks, a group that included locally based journalists, relief workers, and an odd assortment of barflies with questionable life stories, the Northwest Frontier’s tenuous link to Pakistan was something to be ignored, and even irritated and embarrassed about. In their minds, the very word Pakistan suggested the Indian subcontinent: a noisy, overcrowded, polluted, and closed-in space seething with devious, money-hungry, and weak people who were morally and physically inferior to the heroic men who inhabited the pure open spaces of central Asia on the other side of the Khyber Pass, where adventure beckoned. An American from Wyoming or Montana might look upon New Yorkers in much the same way. This was, in fact, how the wild and woolly Afghans, particularly the Pathans, looked upon their Pakistani hosts. The same prejudices were transferred to many of the Afghans’ foreign supporters.

On the Northwest Frontier, a Pakistani usually meant a Punjabi, someone originally from the adjacent province of Punjab, in the industrial and agricultural heartland of Pakistan. To an Afghan — and therefore to the war freaks — all Punjabis looked and acted the same. They were dark, beaky, and mustachioed, and oozed a false sophistication. They jabbered like birds in their piercing rattle of a language and banged into you on the street with their “Third World briefcases”: cheap, pretentious-looking constructions of plastic and cardboard with cumbersome locks, which held nothing but a few slices of flat bread and soft-porn movie magazines. Punjabis were physically frail compared to Afghans and were either too skinny or too fat. Pathans ate meat; Punjabis ate dal, a lentil-based gruel. Punjabis were thought to be spineless and without principles; regardless of their commitments, they were poised to sell you out once the price became high enough. In The Way of the Pathans, James W. Spain, a U.S. diplomat in the region, relates how his Pathan guide looked down on his Punjabi tonga driver: “I know that fat Punjabi,” the guide told him. “He is a snake.”

In the Pathan mind, Punjabis acted like women. And women, according to a Pathan, are physically weak, shifty, and tempestuous. The war freaks went a step or two further, declaring Punjabis “brain dead,” unable to follow even simple orders or to think for themselves. On the Northwest Frontier, the only thing worse than a Punjabi was a Hindu. At least Punjabis on the Pakistan side of the India-Pakistan border were Moslems, and that connoted a fierce, fanatical, and therefore martial (read manly) culture — even if, as everyone on the Frontier supposed, Punjabis had “religion on their lips and money in their hearts.” Hindus practiced a religion that was subtle and introverted, which meant it was feminine. Hindus were concerned only with their personal salvation and not with the duty of a man to his tribal kinsmen. Their religion attracted hippies, mystics, and homosexuals. Hindus lacked all honor: the official policy of their country, India, was to support the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan at least backed up the mujahidin and was caring and providing a home for three and a half million fellow Moslems from Afghanistan, though not even this fact would get the war freaks to change their minds about the Punjabis.

That’s because they all knew that it wasn’t the “filthy Punjabis” who were providing a home for the refugees but Pakistan’s president, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, backed up by hundreds of millions of American taxpayers’ dollars. Without Zia, the refugees might have been turned back at the border and massacred or starved to death in their own country.

Zia’s most prominent opponent was Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of former Premier Zulfìkar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by Zia in April 1979. The Bhutto family was Sindhi, but in the lexicon of the Northwest Frontier, Benazir, as she was always called, might as well have been a Punjabi because she thought like one. Throughout the 1980s, her Pakistan People’s Party was on record as opposing the very presence of the Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil. Benazir was attractive and telegenic, but she was also willing to consign millions of refugees to a horrible fate. Only when it became clear that Zia’s gamble had paid off and the Soviets were going to withdraw from Afghanistan did she begin to shift her position regarding the refugees.

Benazir, the thinly disguised “Virgin Ironpants” of Shame, Salman Rushdie’s novel about Pakistan, fooled no one on the Frontier with her Oxbridge English and her calls for “free elections.” Free elections were the war freaks’ nightmare: Why should those millions of treacherous Punjabis be allowed to decide the fate of the refugees and mujahidin? No, never. “Not for another twenty years should there be free elections in Pakistan,” said one Western relief worker. Many stories circulated about the things Punjabis said about the Afghans: “They’re making so much trouble for us.” “Why don’t they just go back home?” (Never mind that there was a war on, millions of land mines, and no food.) “It’s those refugees who are planting all the bombs in our cities.” (Never mind that the evidence indicated that it was the Communist authorities in Kabul, through their Soviet-backed intelligence service, KhAD, who were responsible for the terrorist bombs.)

Zia, with his slicked-back hair, deep-set hypnotic eyes, and trimmed black mustache, looked like the quintessential Punjabi — touched by the devil. But he was also a tough Islamic disciplinarian who armed the mujahidin to the teeth. Benazir would never have come to power had Zia not been killed in an air crash in August 1988, for which KhAD and the KGB likely bear responsibility. As far as the war freaks and the Afghans were concerned, Zia was less a Punjabi than an honorary Pa-than.

After just a few weeks on the Northwest Frontier, a Westerner’s thinking along such sharp racist lines became natural. The Pathans really were waging a noble struggle. And many Pakistanis really were willing to cave in to Communist terrorism and run for cover behind flowery rationalizations. But as in other places in the Third World where journalists and relief workers inevitably found themselves on one side of a conflict, the border between “clientitis” and outright prejudice against the clients’ enemies was crossed too easily.

The journalists who covered the Afghan war regularly were different from any journalists I encountered before. Because traveling in the country was so dangerous, so physically punishing, and because the war rarely made the headlines, those who made going inside a full-time occupation were of necessity either deeply committed to the mujahidin cause or were war freaks who weren’t satisfied unless they were in danger and physical distress. Almost all were stringers on special contract or earning a living on a story-by-story basis. Most were weapons enthusiasts; Soldier of Fortune was among the most widely read magazines in Peshawar. If you had a story in S.O.F., every journalist in town soon knew about it — and nobody snickered, either.

Journalism in Peshawar was a self-consciously macho activity. Locally based newsmen made a point of smoking a lot and drinking hard. There was a distinct hostility toward the elite establishment media and the new brand of 1980s foreign correspondents who stocked their fridges with Perrier water and talked incessantly about their computer modems — the kind of journalists who came out to Peshawar for short visits, stayed at the deluxe Pearl Continental Hotel rather than at Dean’s, directed “hostile” questions at the mujahidin, and never went inside. The objectivity and priggish yuppie values of the establishment media had no place on the Northwest Frontier — a Wild West, sepia-toned outpost of masculinity where it was still possible to escape from the modern world.

Objectivity didn’t help you much in Peshawar, and there was a reason for this. Arranging a trip over the border was not always easy, and getting inside on short notice, if an editor in America or Europe requested it, was often exceedingly difficult. Not all of the seven main resistance parties were actively engaged in the fighting, and the most important groups were selective about whom they took in. The mujahidin sized you up. A big expense account and a business card from a world-class newspaper meant nothing to them. They had only two criteria: your physical and mental ability to cope in a war zone and your degree of sympathy for their cause. You had to be trusted. Getting inside all the time, whenever you wanted — which was what the resident stringers were paid to be able to do — required a close personal relationship with a leading figure in a guerrilla group. Since each group was suspicious of every other group, and since everyone in Peshawar knew everyone else, having a close relationship with one resistance organization often precluded a relationship with the others. The result was that most every resident journalist was identified with a particular faction, and the enmities dividing the guerrilla movement were mirrored in the foreign press corps. The situation in the aid community was similar, as relief projects in Afghanistan or the refugee camps in Pakistan depended on cooperation from one or another mujahidin organization. The seating arrangements around the bar at the American Club often told a visitor who was aligned with whom.

Generally, most of the journalists and aid workers in Peshawar were split into two principal factions, with allegiance to the two most militarily powerful guerrilla groups, which in turn reflected the major ethnic division within Afghanistan: that between Pathans and Tajiks. Never mind that because both Pathans and Tajiks were religious Sunni Moslems and operated in different areas of Afghanistan — each isolated from the other — they were rarely in serious conflict during the Soviet phase of the war. Never mind that the leading Pa-than commanders tried not to criticize their Tajik allies in the presence of outsiders and that Tajik commanders avoided criticizing Pathans. Each group’s foreign supporters observed no such truce. In the dining room or bar at the American Club, where everyone intimately familiar with the war talked in code — using first names and abstruse abbreviations for mujahidin commanders and their parties — a person was quickly identified with one ethnic faction or the other. Subtle hints alone were required, though sometimes they weren’t so subtle. One night at dinner, an aid worker said, “Don’t ever trust a greasy Tajik. I just hate Tajiks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At about 7:15 in the evening, Haq and a forward guerrilla unit were advancing on Qarga from the west. The Soviets, perhaps anticipating an attack, had flown over the region several hours before, peppering the bare, eroded mountainside with butterfly mines. To avoid the mines, the mujahidin took a detour. It was dark, with strong winds and heavy rain mixed with snow. The mud might have been as deep as two feet in some spots.

“There was a mud trench, about six or seven meters long, which we had to cross to get to the road,” Haq told me. “Four or five mujahidin were walking in front of me. There was some shooting and firing nearby, which you know there always is in Afghanistan. Each of us placed our foot into the hole made by the one ahead. Though we took the long way around, we still had to be careful of mines.

“You have to remember how dark and muddy it was. Anyway, because of the mud I did a stupid thing. I slid a few centimeters off the path, something I never did before. Then I saw my boot fly up in the air in front of me. It was like I was dreaming. I was wounded fourteen times before, but this time I really felt nothing at first. I tried to take a few more steps, but then the rocks crushed against the exposed bone and nerves of my right foot and suddenly I got dizzy and fell. I told the major behind me that I needed a tourniquet. When he saw the blood pouring out on the snow he started screaming and all the others came. You see, they were all afraid to touch me because I was their commander. We had no doctor or medical supplies. We Afghans are so stupid sometimes.

“So what did we do? We started arguing. I argued against going back. I said I must write a letter explaining how the operation is to continue without me. But it was difficult to write because it was so dark and cold. I must have been completely delirious.”

The men made tourniquets out of a turban and tied them above and below his knee. Haq, who weighed over two hundred pounds, was carried piggyback for almost a mile until someone found a horse. Even with help he had trouble putting his good left foot in the stirrup. “By now there was so much blood and it was snowing harder,” Haq said. “All I could think of was how cold I was. On the horse I started vomiting so I had to get off and be carried again.” Strangely, he recalled, the pain was less vivid than the cold and the nausea.

Four hours later, Haq was lying on a jute bed in the house of another mujahidin commander in the town of Maidan Shahr (twenty-five miles southwest of Kabul), and the pain was “everywhere.” The guerrillas found a local doctor with some sort of knife, but he had no anesthetic and liquor is prohibited under Islamic law. A piece of bone hanging from what remained of his right foot had to be cut. “When the knife hit the bone, that was a bit difficult for me. Mujahidin rubbed my palms to take my mind off the pain. It didn’t help much.” Haq laughed when he told me this.

Someone took a snapshot of the commander five days later, after he had been transferred to a medical compound in Wardak province run by Médecin du Monde, a Paris-based relief group. Part of his foot had just been amputated by a French-trained Hungarian doctor, a refugee of the 1956 revolution against the Soviets. (This time an anesthetic was available.) In the photograph, Haq is pointing his exposed stump toward the camera and smiling. “Because I knew I lost part of my foot for a logical reason, I felt less depressed,” he said to me. “I pity such people who lose limbs in car accidents and other stupid things.” Haq was lucky. The mine that wounded him was a pressure-pad mine, a powerful antipersonnel weapon that would have blown off his whole leg or killed him if he had stepped on it directly rather than slid down on it at an angle.

His pain seemed to grow day by day. I rarely saw Haq when he wasn’t in some physical discomfort. Always, he would be taking off his Reebok running shoe, fitted with a special plastic shin support, to massage the ball of his foot. I met him for the first time a week after the snapshot was taken. He was drawing deep, wheezing breaths against the pain and sweating in streams. Fie had just been jammed into the back seat of a car, without any drugs, for a three-hour trip to Islamabad in order to meet with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, before being flown to a hospital in Pittsburgh at the U.S. government’s expense. There he was to have a second amputation, to remove more bone fragments and damaged nerves. When he got to Pittsburgh he was given painkillers for the first time since his accident.

I sat in the front seat of the car and asked him how he felt. He was told only a few minutes earlier that I was a journalist who wanted to ask him some questions. He had a huge round head covered with short black hair, graying sideburns, and a close, scruffy beard, which partially concealed a mild case of acne. Though he was personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Soviet soldiers, his eyes didn’t reflect this. Haq’s small, dark eyes registered considerable pain, but they weren’t jaded, nor were they lifeless or cynical looking. He could have been a Jewish actor hired to play the role of a Third World guerrilla leader.

Speaking was hard for him. Between breaths, he explained that the only thing he wanted to do was return to Afghanistan to fight. It was what every Afghan said when wounded, so the words had little effect on me. He was a burly man but his voice was not deep at all. There was almost nothing about him that was menacing. He thanked me profusely for my concern and I left the car. I was with him for less than five minutes. When I saw him next, three months later, he remembered me instantly and apologized for not having been able to say more.

I had met Palestinian leaders in Syria and Jordan, Polisario leaders in Algeria, Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq and Iran, and Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas in northern Ethiopia. Most had eyes that appeared to undress you and peer into your innermost secrets. All of them were burdened by an emotional austerity bordering on asceticism which saw individual people only in the abstract, as mere symbols that could be wiped off a board without remorse. The Eritreans were less like this, but they had a sadness and a cynicism that was beyond belief. You couldn’t really get to know any of those leaders; it seemed as if there were an invisible, high-voltage field between you and them. You could observe them, and write about them, but you couldn’t get to know them.

Abdul Haq emitted no intimidating emotional charge. He threw up no barriers when he spoke. Because he wasn’t paranoid, you weren’t. With him, at least, you had the feeling that you were innocent until proved guilty.