Soldiers of God

2 A World of Men

WOMEN ARE OPPRESSED in all Moslem societies. But among the rural Pathans, women simply don’t exist. “They’re not even in the background. They’re just not there,” said a Pathan woman who left the Northwest Frontier to live in New Jersey. Here are three Pathan proverbs:

You rarely see women on the Northwest Frontier or in Afghanistan; you do see moving tents with narrow holes for the eyes. Photographers who walked through minefields and sneaked into Soviet bases were afraid to take close-ups of Pathan women unless they were at least a hundred yards away and had a lens the size of a mortar — and provided not a single mujahid was looking. A close-up of a Pathan woman was more prized and difficult to get than a photograph of the undercarriage of an MI-24 helicopter gunship.

The only Pathan females I was ever allowed to see were all five years old and younger. Some of those girls were beautiful, with long, dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and doe eyes. What Pathan women look like when they are older is a secret that only Pathan men know.

A desert Arab, after he gets to know you, may invite you to his home, where you may steal a brief glance at his wife while she serves the food. A Pathan may also invite you to his home, but either he or another man will carry in the food that has been prepared in the women’s quarters. The food, in turn, is often the traveler’s only clue to the presence of a woman nearby. If the dish is relatively clean and the meal appetizing, it means there is a woman in the adjoining room who cooked it; if the food is inedible, a Pathan man did the deed.

A Pathan won’t even tell you the names of his wife and mother. To ask him is an insult. It would be like asking him to undress in front of a crowd. “Women are as private to a Pathan as his private parts,” a Pathan lawyer remarked to me. “Women are the holy of holies in a culture where the men act as the barricades.” The first time I interviewed Abdul Haq I made the mistake of asking him the names of the men and women in his family. The names of the men he told me. Concerning the women, he blushed and turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t ask such personal questions,” he said. I felt ridiculous for days afterward and worried whether he would agree to see me again.

The very existence of women in a Pathan’s life is an intimate secret, sacred to him but also a source of shame. Women threaten the facade of splendid male isolation that is central to a Pathan’s sense of self. A Pathan knows women are needed for procreation, but that is an unfortunate and embarrassing fact to him, and if he could change it, he would. In the Arab world and even in Iran, pregnant women are a common sight. Among the Pathans, one never sees them, for as soon as a woman’s womb begins to expand, she is locked away in the house.

After enough time on the Northwest Frontier you forgot about Pathan women altogether. They became invisible. You forgot that the mujahidin had wives and mothers, because you never saw them and the men encouraged you to forget. Only rarely did that other, hidden world break through to the surface, as when a colleague of mine asked Abdul Haq why he always kept his hair short. “Because my mother would slap my face if I grew my hair long,” he said, turning his head away, embarrassed.

In Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan, many women were educated, held proper jobs, and didn’t hide themselves in black sheets. That was more because of Westernization than Communist influence. The mujahidin were, for the most part, backwoodsmen, and they suffered no threats or complexities in any of their personal relationships. They inhabited a self-contained world of men, a world of sharp cutouts, where women were held in contempt and the only sure touchstones of masculinity were bravery, the ability to endure physical pain, prowess with a rifle, and the length and thickness of one’s beard.

Men without beards were distrusted by the mujahidin. After all, women didn’t have beards — and neither, thought the mujahidin, did homosexuals. Nor did the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies. Nor, for that matter, did the more modern, secular mujahidin within the seven-party resistance — the ones who drank Coca-Cola with journalists at the Pearl Continental Hotel and who were thought to do little of the fighting. In Peshawar, a beard meant credibility. It was striking how many Western journalists and relief workers who had contact with the guerrillas had beards. You would grow one before you arrived in Pakistan and shave it off as soon as you went back home. Once, when I shaved off my beard before leaving Peshawar, a mujahid friend laughed at me and said, “You look like a woman — no, like a Christian!”

The Pathans had no patience with the fine lines or ambiguities of other cultures. Either you were a man or you weren’t. It was a barren, stunted vision of life that made sense only under impossible conditions — which was why it flourished in the 1980s. In such a harsh and sterile social environment, male friendships took on an archetypal character, based on the bread and salt of absolute trust and the respect that could be earned only by bravery and the willingness to endure terrible physical hardships. It took a rare kind of individual to be able to pass through the crucible of Pathan friendship, especially if the friendship was with someone like Abdul Haq.

In a decade of war, a few foreign journalists managed to become close friends of Haq. They were the only people he trusted outside his family and guerrilla organization. Haq would often agree to meet a journalist only if he was recommended by one of Haq’s friends — getting close to the commander meant first getting close to the commander’s friends. By ordinary, conventional standards, none of the journalists whom Haq considered his friends were well-established professionals, and they lacked the clout of other media personages to whom he wouldn’t give the time of day. But Haq had his own ideas about what constituted a good newsman. To him, a good journalist was a strong, brave man who would regularly risk his life just as any fighter would. And when it came to spotting brave men, Abdul Haq was an expert and an uncanny judge of character.

John Wellesley Gunston did not have a beard, and he was the only journalist in Peshawar who wore a suit and tie to some appointments. Of average height and weight, Gunston had a smiling, cherubic countenance and the pale English complexion that seemed the epitome of youthful innocence and vulnerability. No matter whom he was with, his light brown eyes always sparkled with friendliness and enthusiasm. Gunston was one man in Peshawar who was not trying to prove himself: he possessed the absolute self-confidence that came from being born into a wealthy British colonial family and having served in the commonwealth’s best army units. Unlike other Westerners in Peshawar, who preferred hiking boots, khaki pants, and sleeveless military jackets from Banana Republic, Gunston was a real soldier and was therefore content to dress as a civilian. In the cowboy environment of the American Club bar, he always wore pressed slacks, a pin-striped shirt, and well-shined loafers.

Gunston was born in July 1962 in Nyasaland (later Malawi), where his father was the local British commissioner in the town of Blantyre. Gunston gave his address on business cards as the Cavalry & Guards Club, one of London’s few remaining gentlemen’s clubs, where officers, both serving and retired, of Her Majesty’s Footguards and the Cavalry can dine together in an atmosphere reminiscent of glories past. Gunston would use such exclusive surroundings to entertain visitors before showing them his personal library of over two thousand books on travel, photography, military history and tactics, and opera. He owned eighty books on Afghanistan alone. Having never finished secondary school, he considered himself self-taught. His room at Dean’s Hotel was always littered with good books, lying all over the tables, beds, even the floor. He had a particular affinity for Lord Byron and could recite sections of Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by heart. Gunston was only twenty-five when I met him, yet he exuded an air of seasoned maturity of the sort that members of the British upper class display like a coat of arms. His passion for Byron may have been his only youthful affectation, but given everything else I knew about him, I never dismissed it as ridiculous.

You couldn’t help but like Gunston; for one thing, he genuinely liked everybody else. He could talk for hours on the most banal subjects with embassy mechanics and security officers who probably didn’t know who Byron was. If he harbored a trace of condescension toward anyone, I never noticed it. Perhaps it was just good breeding, but he never spoke badly of others behind their backs, even the few people in Peshawar who he knew disliked him. Gunston was like a relic from a bygone era, without the doubts and complexes of most people.

Gunston had lived in Blantyre, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London before being enrolled, when he was fifteen, at Harrow, where Byron himself was educated. (Byron wrote poetry atop a grave in St. Mary’s churchyard, near the dormitory Gunston would live in.) Harrow was also a family tradition. Gunston’s was the fourteenth-oldest Harrovian family, going back to the 1700s.

Gunston lasted a year at the school. “I got bored of studying,” he once told me. “I thought it necessary to join up and fight communism in Rhodesia. I was running the British branch of the Save Rhodesia Campaign from Harrow. Politically naive, I now readily admit, but I was only sixteen. I had a terrible row with my family about it.”

Lying about his age, and making use of his father’s colonial service connections, Gunston returned to Africa and joined the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit of the British-South African Police, which was founded by Cecil Rhodes. Gunston was one of nine whites and ninety blacks who patrolled an area in the Zambezi escarpment the size of Wales, at the point where Rhodesia, Zambia, and Mozambique met. The man he replaced in the unit had been killed a few days before Gunston joined. In April 1980, after he served in the unit for eighteen months, Rhodesia became the independent state of Zimbabwe. Gunston was given forty-eight hours to leave the country.

He returned to England and a few months later enrolled at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where, after a six-month course, he was given a short service commission. It was a stormy period. Gunston kept getting into trouble with his weapons instructors. “Their way of teaching was pedantic,” he said. “They hadn’t seen action, I had.”

The next step was a place in the Queen’s Household Troops, better known as the Irish Guards, a branch of Her Majesty’s Footguards who patrol and troop the colors outside Buckingham Palace. “It was the sort of regiment where you were never asked how much money your father made but how many acres he owned.” Gunston’s career at the palace came to an abrupt end after two years as a lieutenant when a car he was driving hit a brick wall, resulting in broken ribs, arm, and leg.

Having recovered, at age twenty-one he was offered jobs at a merchant bank and the stock exchange, traditional careers of Irish Guardsmen. Instead, in August 1983, Gunston decided to win his spurs as a war photojournalist. “I was always good at drawing and composition, and it seemed to be one of the few professions where I could make use of my experience as a soldier, get paid, and be on the fringes of history at the same time.” Afghanistan in particular had caught his eye for personal reasons. Gunston’s step-grandfather, a Colonel Bertie Walker, had commanded a cavalry unit on the Northwest Frontier after the third British-Afghan war of 1919 and was decorated twice. Moreover, Afghanistan seemed like the kind of place where Byron might have turned up. And, like so many Brits, Gunston was enamored of Kipling. In addition to quoting Don Juan, he could recite “Arithmetic on the Frontier” by heart.

First Gunston did a little research on Afghanistan at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London, where he learned about a maverick mujahidin leader called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who it seemed should be avoided at all costs. Hekmatyar ran Hizb-i-Islami (Party of Islam), an extremist, anti-Western resistance faction that, though it went by the same name as Yunus Khalis’s party, shared few of its values. Traveling with Hekmatyar’s men, Gunston learned, was not considered wise. They had a reputation for stealing journalists’ gear, leaving them stranded in the war zone, and occasionally killing them.

“But, as it happened, two days before I left London on my first trip to the Northwest Frontier, I met a charming old Pakistani major at the Cavalry & Guards Club who gave me a personal introduction to General Fazle Haq, the governor of the Northwest Frontier at the time, who arranged for Hekmatyar to take me inside. I decided to let fate take its course.”

The foray had a mad, magical quality to it. Gunston and a group of Hekmatyar’s fighters made it into the center of Kabul in the middle of the night undetected. But the guerrillas couldn’t decide whether to aim their mortar and recoilless rifle at the Afghan Defense Ministry or the headquarters of the Soviet High Command, some four hundred yards apart. They asked Gunston what they should do. “I held no strong views either way,” he said. Eventually, they picked the Defense Ministry. Then the mujahidin realized that they had neglected to bring a shovel to dig in the mortar and rifle. So they knocked on house doors, waking people up, until they found someone who would lend them a shovel. The mujahidin made a lot of noise digging up the street only twenty yards from the mud wall surrounding the Ministry building. Finally, after shouts of “Allahu akbar” (God is great), they opened fire with five bursts of the rifle and a half-dozen mortar shells. A section of the Defense Ministry erupted in flames. With no ammunition left, the guerrillas and Gunston ran away as every Communist position in the area haphazardly opened fire. “It wasn’t such a bad trip,” Gunston said, and he recalled a stirring snippet from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

The following year, he went back with Hekmatyar’s forces. In Laghman province, north of the Kabul-Jalalabad road, Gunston and his escort from Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami were caught in an ambush mounted by Tajiks from Jamiat. In the fracas, Gunston was bayoneted in the leg with the needle-point blade of a Chinese assault rifle by a fourteen-year-old who Gunston claims was “high on dope.” Next, his horse was killed by a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade. Hekmatyar reported Gunston dead, a fact that the British Foreign Office relayed to his family in England. As it turned out, Gunston was taken prisoner by Jamiat forces and sent to the Panjshir Valley, where he met up with the Lion of the Panjshir, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

“I arrived the unwanted guest of Massoud in June 1984,” Gunston recalled. “He was as displeased with my appearance as I was to be there. Those mountains in the Hindu Kush are damned high, and it took ten days of tramping about to find him. I hate mountains! I followed Massoud for a week. He was terribly charismatic, with the same military professionalism I recognized from my army days. He would start after dawn, listening to commanders’ problems before leaving for another location four or five hours and another bloody mountain away. Then he would listen to sitreps [situation reports] and give orders, working through the night. All the while there was heavy, high-altitude carpet bombing by Tu-16s. I never established a rapport with Massoud — my French is as bad as my Farsi — though I did manage an interview, printed on the back page of Newsweek.” It appeared in the magazine on October 8, 1984.

Another positive outcome of his detour in the Panjshir Valley was a photograph that is still Gunston’s most famous: of a Soviet MiG pilot who lies dead, parachute collapsed, still in his ejection seat in an open field. The pilot’s empty hand is cocked to his head, through which there is a hole, with a heap of brain tissue beside it. Rob Schultheis, in the February 15, 1987, issue of The Washington Post Magazine, wrote that “you could see the whole harsh story”: the pilot’s leg had broken off as his ejection seat cleared the cockpit. In terrible pain, he then shot himself after he landed to avoid falling into the hands of the mujahi-din. A guerrilla came along later and stole the pistol from the dead man’s hand.

It was an eight-hour trek to the crash site, seven hours of which were uphill, and he had to walk through a field of butterfly mines. “There was still a whiff of aviation fuel in the air, I remember,” Gunston told me. “The pilot had been there for several weeks and had turned black in the sun, though the snow had kept his body from decaying. Maggots were eating a hole in his face. I found his radio sigs and MiG-21 instruction book. But damn, the muj wouldn’t let me keep it.”

Gunston parted company with Massoud and arrived at Hekmatyar’s headquarters in Laghman over two months late, sick with hepatitis, and was put under the protection of a Commander Niazi. The next morning, the guerrillas and Gunston were caught in a rocket attack. Niazi was killed. “The program Niazi had arranged for me was now in grave doubt.”

To fill the time while new plans were made, the mujahidin took Gunston to photograph the largest Soviet air base in Afghanistan, at Baghram, about thirty-five miles north of Kabul and west of Hekmatyar’s base. Gunston took refuge in a deserted house near the main gate. When a squad of Soviet soldiers came out for a run in the direction of the house, Gunston took cover under a mulberry tree in a field close to the runway just as an Antonov-12 troop transport plane came thundering overhead. He began clicking away with his camera. Two Su-17 fighter jets followed close behind. “I started to get clobbered by a shower of stones from gibbering muj anxious to leave. But I was having too much fun,” Gunston said and grinned at me, blushing like a little boy, something he did often.

The shots taken at Baghram, along with the one of the dead pilot in the Panjshir, were published as an exclusive in the October 12-18, 1984, issue of the French news weekly L’Express. They were the first of what Gunston would later call his “pickies,” described by Rob Schultheis, in The Washington Post Magazine, as “close-ups of high-tech Soviet bloc equipment, unsuspecting Soviet officers and other ultra-sensitive subjects that must have caused the ulcers to burn at the Kremlin when they appeared in the world press.”

Gunston had expected to spend four weeks traveling with Hekmatyar’s men. But when he arrived back in Peshawar in September 1984, he had been inside Afghanistan for five months. The experience only whetted his appetite for more.

It was around this time that Gunston first met Abdul Haq. The two were introduced to each other in the lobby at Green’s Hotel. Haq listened silently as Gunston related his experiences, giving names, dates, and descriptions of various weapons and battle formations in the clipped, technical style of an army officer. He talked about how the Soviets used transport aircraft to provide battlefield illumination during night engagements. He went on to describe the actual configurations of the flares. Unlike the other journalists, Gunston was able to judge the fighting ability of the mujahidin as a military professional and was quite direct in his criticisms. “You have a very good memory,” Haq told him somewhat cryptically. “Get in touch with me if you want to make more trips inside.”

Gunston gave Haq color enlargements of all the pictures he had taken of the Soviet planes at Baghram. Every photograph that Haq put up in his war room was taken by Gunston. Like Gunston’s step-grandfather, Haq also had relatives who fought in the third British-Afghan war, in 1919 — but on the other side. The two ribbed each other with tales of their forebears. It was a natural friendship: both men were soldiers. And Gunston was a bit mad, free of Western hang-ups and complexes, and convinced of his own soldierly virtues —just like all Pathans.

Gunston was equally impressed with Haq. “The first time I was able to observe him inside was in May 1985, right after Ramadan had started. It was hot and dusty, and we were traveling constantly. But Haq kept the fast. He never ate or drank during the daylight hours, not even when walking, fighting, or meeting deputations of other commanders. The muj loathed him for this, because it meant that they had to keep the fast as well. But I suppose they respected him too, or at least feared him. Keeping the fast while on the move was something that not even Massoud did.”

In February 1988, Haq offered Gunston the ultimate trip inside. No Western journalist had been in Kabul with the mujahidin since 1985. In the mid-1980s, Gunston and several others had been able to penetrate the capital’s single security perimeter. Then the Soviets built two more security belts; there were now three checkpoints to pass through, each with barbed wire and minefields. Haq told Gunston not only that he could get him into Kabul but that he could also arrange meetings for him there with the regime’s army officers and KhAD agents who were secretly working for the mujahidin. “I know you won’t crack up and tell everything if you’re caught,” Haq told him. Gunston swore it was the first time in his life that he was humbled. “Anyway,” Haq added, “if you are caught, you can scream a lot, then you’ll be too busy to talk.”

It wasn’t until late April that Gunston got the go-ahead from Abdul Haq to cross the border. Haq gave Gunston a thirty-eight-year-old former Afghan army major, Syed Hamid, as an escort. In 1984, Hamid had defected from an army transport division in the southern city of Kandahar and joined Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, which is how Haq had met him. For the Khalis organization, Hamid was a rare kind of mujahid. He was a dandy who doused himself with Estelle perfume (not knowing it was for women), preferred a trimmed, Pakistani-style mustache to a beard, and was always dressed in a clean, tailor-fit shalwar kameez (the traditional Afghan trousers and shirt were loose and baggy). An educated Tajik from around Kabul, Hamid was also a bit of a wheeler-dealer. In a few short years since defecting from the Afghan army he had managed to procure himself a new Honda car and a partial ownership in an Islamabad video rental shop. He had the same qualities that help make a good intelligence agent, and that was why Haq recruited him. Later, Hamid merged his own network of Kabul friends into Haq’s much larger underground labyrinth in the capital.

Haq was the only commander in the whole Afghan resistance who was fighting an urban, Beirut-style war, and this required not only the backwoods mujahidin but city slickers like Hamid too. The fact that Hamid was a Tajik meant little to Haq. “I don’t give a shit,” Haq told me. “I’ll take a hardworking Tajik or Turkoman any day over a lazy, stupid Pa-than.” Haq’s chief accountant, who handled all the money for the Kabul underground, was also a Tajik.

Hamid and Gunston crossed the border at Terri-Mangal, a smuggler’s town one hundred miles west of the Khyber Pass that was perched at the edge of a salient of Pakistani territory, which brought the pair directly into Logar province, only a three-day trek from the Gardez—Kabul highway. Hamid bought himself a horse for 80,000 afghanis ($400). Gunston walked the whole way.

They reached the vicinity of the highway, patrolled by Soviet paratroopers, at the town of Kolangar, thirty-five miles south of Kabul, where Hamid’s Tajik friends from Jamiat gave him and Gunston a place to stay. Here they waited for Haq’s vehicle that was supposed to sneak them into Kabul. It was scheduled to arrive within a few days, but more than two weeks went by without any sign of it. They dispatched runners with messages for Haq. Meanwhile Hamid was up to three packs of cigarettes a day, and pushing four, trying to work out alternative schemes. One such scheme involved hiding inside the tank of an empty hijacked gasoline truck with Hamid’s cross-eyed brother at the wheel. “I had accompanied a few hare-brained muj missions in the past, but this promised to surpass them all,” Gunston later remarked to me. At the time Gunston pleaded with Hamid: “Don’t you realize that the fumes would kill us both if we sit inside the petrol tank? And anyway, you can’t even stop smoking!” According to Gunston, it was the last taunt, about his smoking habit, that decided Hamid against the idea.

Hamid eventually left for Kabul on his own, using his brother’s identity card, to find out what was causing Haq’s delay. Hamid promised to send for Gunston when he arrived. Though the wait was nerve-racking, it was without physical hardships. “Hamid insisted on living well,” said Gunston. “When we first got to Kolangar, the food was okay, but Hamid always sent it back, shouting and complaining. Then the food got exceptionally good — for Afghanistan, I mean. The man was nothing if not resourceful. He could stretch the law of hospitality quite far.”

Gunston spent three weeks in Kolangar, but Hamid was as good as his word. A civilian sedan finally arrived, driven by an Afghan army major who secretly worked for Abdul Haq. Gunston was stuffed into a specially built secret compartment in the trunk with an air hole and view outside. “The muj kissed a copy of the Koran as we left,” Gunston said. “I rather selfconsciously crossed myself.” Hamid put on a pair of Christian Dior sunglasses and sprayed himself liberally with perfume. He intended to run the gauntlet into Kabul disguised as a rich trader.

On the road to Kabul, the car fell in behind a Soviet convoy of tanks, trucks, artillery, and airborne troops in armored personnel carriers who were firing long bursts of cannon into the surrounding farm area, trying to provide cover for a retreating group of comrades on their way back to the Soviet Union.

After passing through two checkpoints, the car was abruptly flagged down by three Soviet paratroopers led by a junior sergeant with a Lenin badge on his khaki shirt, the kind awarded for meritorious service to the Party. The three, who were on their way out of Afghanistan, offered to sell Gunston’s driver a toolbox for 150 afghanis (under $1). Rather than arousing suspicion by giving them the brush-off or buying the toolbox for the asking price, the driver haggled noisily with the paratroopers until he got the price down to 100 afghanis — while Gunston crouched in the secret compartment. “I was shaking with fear,” Gunston told me. “I wanted to shout, ‘Take it for 150 afghanis, man. Just get us out of here!’ “ But his fear didn’t stop him from snapping away with his camera through the view hole.

At the last checkpoint, Afghan Communist troops were looking under the seats and even unscrewing the door panels of the other cars. But as it turned out, Gunston’s driver knew one of the guards, a cousin of a friend, and the vehicle passed into the city without a search.

“At a bus station, an Afghan army major in full uniform greeted us with embraces. We ducked into his waiting Volga staff car — courtesy of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, where the major worked — and drove to the safe house. We were saluted at all the checkpoints. Wearing civilian clothes, I was taken for just another Russian out for a drive with his Afghan comrade.”

Hamid, meanwhile, put on a three-piece suit with flared trousers and platform shoes for his clandestine meeting.

One of the safe houses where Gunston was hidden in the capital was right near the Soviet embassy. It was there that he interviewed an Afghan army general and a KhAD captain, both members of Haq’s underground. The general gave Gunston a bottle of Russian vodka to take back to Pakistan with him.

The reason the vehicle that was to take Gunston into Kabul had not arrived in Kolangar on time had to do with Abdul Haq’s temperamental aide-de-camp, Khairullah. The youngest son of a wealthy Jalalabad trading family, Khairullah had literally been given to Haq as one of the family’s many contributions to the jihad against the Soviets — in sort of the same way that sons are still given to the church to become monks in Orthodox Christian countries. Khairullah was a tall, elegant, urbanized guerrilla much like Hamid, with wavy, light brown hair and a mustache instead of a beard. Hamid and Khairullah had business dealings together in Pakistan, and they had had a falling out over money prior to Gunston’s departure over the border. Khairullah threw a temper tantrum and deliberately did not send Haq’s message to Kabul ordering the car and driver. With his bear paw of a hand slapping back and forth across Khairullah’s face, Haq later beat the whole tale out of him in front of an office full of mujahidin. Khairullah left in tears, utterly humiliated. Beating subordinates in front of others was something that the big, soft-spoken commander did frequently.

This episode spoke volumes about the problems Abdul Haq was encountering, more and more, since the mine injury had forced him to remain in Peshawar. Unable to communicate face to face with his Kabul-area network, he was losing his grip on it. Haq tried to compensate through increased efficiency. He kept more detailed files on dozens of subcommanders. He dispatched more messages to the field, using hand-carried messages and a cipher machine with a complicated number code he had thought up himself. He had his Tajik accountant monitor more closely the flow of money that kept the Kabul front going. Lumbering around his office like an injured football linebacker with a nervous, fatigued look on his face, Haq became compulsive about every facet of organization. He would send me a written note just to change the time of our next meeting by fifteen minutes. Such fastidiousness was not all that common in my own culture, and in the midst of the chaos of the Pathan world it seemed utterly bizarre.

Haq was not a happy man when I first got to know him. He confided much more to Gunston than he would to me. Still, Gunston was close to Haq only as one brave soldier could be to another.

It hadn’t taken Abdul Haq more than a few seconds to see beyond Gunston’s spiffy, boyish exterior to the sterner stuff beneath. In 1983, after meeting with Savik Shuster, a Lithuanian Jew and former Soviet citizen, Haq, an extremely devout Moslem at war with the Soviet Union, trusted him enough to arrange a series of trips inside for him.

“At first, I didn’t tell Abdul Haq that I was Jewish,” Shuster told me. “I wasn’t sure how he would react. When I did tell him, I quickly mentioned that I was an agnostic, that I didn’t really believe in God. This second admission made him suddenly angry. ‘Now you sound like a Soviet,’ he said. So I told him, as kind of an apology, that I questioned everything in life, but that I was prepared to accept the existence of God. Eventually, Abdul Haq learned to live with my disbelief.”

Shuster took risks inside that not even Gunston would take. If Gunston had been caught, the Afghan government would have accused him of spying and sent him to Kabul’s infamous Pul-i-Charki prison, where he would have experienced several months of terror until the British government struck a behind-the-scenes bargain for his release. Shuster, who had lived in the Soviet Union until he was twenty, would simply have been shot.

“I was scared out of my mind by the things I did, sure.” Shuster, who was thirty-five, always talked with the wry, self-questioning grin of an Eastern European intellectual. Growing up in the Soviet Republic of Lithuania had provided him with wisdom and pessimism in abundant amounts. Shuster seemed much older than his years. His eyes had a warm, intimate glow common to exiled Eastern Europeans, whose outer lives have been so restricted that their inner ones have taken on an ornate texture and symbolism that few in the West could approximate. He had dark curly hair, a dark complexion, and thin aviator glasses. Sometimes, because of the way his eyes lit up like sparks whenever he talked, he reminded me of Einstein.

Shuster claimed he did what he did in Afghanistan “out of historical memory.” He considered himself a “Lithuanian nationalist.” He could draw many parallels between the Soviet rape of his land and the rape of Afghanistan. He recited for me the whole sordid history of how Lithuania was grabbed by Stalin after the 1939 pact with Hitler, then grabbed by Hitler after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and taken back by Stalin near the end of the war. Anti-Semitism in Lithuania didn’t bother him. Shuster believed that “the true partisans and resistance fighters against the Soviets were not anti-Semites.”

But I knew that Shuster, like most everybody else in Peshawar, had a stated reason for taking risks inside and a real reason. The stated reason was “Lithuania;” the real reason I could only guess at.

In the fifteen years since Shuster left the Soviet Union, he had tone to medical school, worked as a doctor and journalist, and taught himself French, English, and Italian. He wrote in English for Newsweek and in Russian for his current employer, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. He had reported from Lebanon, Chad, Nicaragua, and numerous other places. He had an Italian wife and newborn baby and was studying German. He was writing two books simultaneously. Like his friend Abdul Haq, he never seemed to sleep, and the two often spent half the night talking. When Shuster would finally return to his room at Dean’s, Haq would phone him about something they had forgotten to discuss, or Shuster would phone Haq. After he went back to Munich, the headquarters for Radio Liberty, Shuster phoned Haq often.

Shuster took life so seriously that he could only live it in overdrive. There was an intensity and self-awareness about him that reminded me of the characters in a Milan Kundera novel. Like many Eastern Europeans, only with alcohol did Shuster unwind; his personality then became like that of an ordinary person when sober.

When Shuster came to Peshawar for two weeks in late May 1988, he produced over a dozen long radio reports, went inside near Kandahar for two days, drank every other night at the American Club, and helped negotiate a three-way deal between Abdul Haq, Haq’s oldest brother, Din Mohammed, and the office of Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuéllar for Haq to visit the United Nations. Shuster finished these negonations at 1:00 on the morning of his departure and dashed out at 1:30 on a three-wheel auto rickshaw to pick up a friend’s tape of traditional Afghan music, which he needed for one of his radio shows.

UN officials had told Shuster that they were willing to welcome Haq in New York as a representative of the mujahidin commanders. Haq was willing to go, but only under certain conditions, conditions that were still unacceptable to perhaps the one person on earth whose respect Haq himself psychologically required: that of his oldest brother, the de facto head of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami. Din Mohammed was not in favor of Haq’s “exposing himself as a politician.” Until now, Din Mohammed thought, his younger brother was seen by other Afghans as purely a soldier. It was in that context — or such was the perception in Afghanistan and Peshawar — that Haq had met with President Reagan at the White House in 1985 and with Prime Minister Thatcher in London the following year. At any rate, for all the press coverage these meetings brought, they stirred no controversy among the various mujahidin political factions in Peshawar. Reagan and Thatcher were so friendly to the mujahidin that meetings with them aroused no suspicions. But the United Nations, influenced as it was by the Soviets and their allies, was considered an enemy camp. Meetings with UN officials did arouse suspicions in Peshawar and were the responsibility of politicians, not soldiers. If he now came to be thought of as a politician, Haq could be in danger. Though the commanders and leaders of other resistance parties besides Hizb-i-Islami wanted Haq to represent them, he could never go to New York without his brother’s approval. Shuster’s challenge was to mediate between the two brothers and convince Din Mohammed that Haq should go to the United Nations.

Abdul Haq’s father died when he was still a small boy, making Din Mohammed the family’s father figure. He even looked the part. Although Haq, on account of his hefty size, appeared older than his twenty-nine years, Din Mohammed, with a bald head and long gray beard, looked like an old man at forty. And while Din Mohammed, Haq, and the middle brother, Abdul Qadir, had all gone on the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, only Din Mohammed was always referred to as Haji — Haji Din Mohammed, he was called. It was a title that seemed to suit the crusty graybeard better than it did the other two brothers.

In the 1970s, Din Mohammed had experienced the same trauma as his younger brothers: he watched as his house west of Jalalabad was burned down, his cattle were shot, and the village mullah and headmen were taken away to prison for summary execution by Afghan Communists. The soldiers even defecated on the ritually cleansed dishes, the most sacred items in a Moslem household. Unlike Abdul Haq, Din Mohammed seemed truly transformed and hardened by this experience. Whereas Haq, in his role as a field commander, had killed Soviets, he didn’t seem to hate with the same fanatical intensity as his brother. “Din Mohammed is a bitter, inflexible man” was a remark I frequently heard from Afghans outside the fundamentalist fold.

I was one of the only reporters ever to talk with Din Mohammed at length, and the experience was disconcerting. For several hours he suffered me. He certainly did not feel comfortable with non-Moslem foreigners, although he would spend long stretches with Shuster, chatting and drinking tea.

Shuster, himself a product of totalitarianism, seemed to think in the same cynical, conspiratorial framework as Din Mohammed. He badgered Din Mohammed with a harsh reality designed to force the Haji’s hand, in order to allow Haq to go to the United Nations.

President Zia of Pakistan was conspiring, in early and mid-1988, to make the anti-Western Afghan extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the permanent chairman of the seven-party mujahidin alliance. Hekmatyar, whose three-month term of office as temporary chairman was set to expire, was loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike. He was young, charismatic, highly educated, and power hungry, but his organization lacked fighting ability and squandered much of its resources attacking other guerrilla factions. Hekmatyar wanted personal power first, a mujahidin victory second. He was a Pathan from the northern Afghan province of Badakshan, but his eyes were not those of a Pathan. They resembled an Arab’s or Persian’s: pellets of hard black ice that never stopped moving unless they were looking down and away from you. A spellbinding demagogue before a crowd, in private he was eerily soft-spoken; his mouth flowed with honey that denied all bad intentions. Hekmatyar was forever calling press conferences, accusing the other parties of selling out to the Soviets while claiming credit for military operations that the other parties had carried out. It was a Peshawar truism that the split in the “hopelessly divided mujahidin” — as the media phrased it — was basically six against one. At times it seemed that the only issue all the factions of Westerners at the American Club could agree on was a hatred of Hekmatyar for “giving the mujahidin a bad name” in the outside world.

Yet Zia favored the thirty-nine-year-old leader. In addition to being a militant fundamentalist like Zia himself, Hekmatyar was a talented politician backed up by almost no grassroots support and no military base inside. He was therefore wholly dependent on Zia’s protection and financial largess (courtesy of American taxpayers) for his party’s existence. Hekmatyar, a former student leader at Kabul University, was the classic artificial creation of an outside power. But the mujahidin could not openly oppose Zia’s choice, because it was Zia’s personal support that allowed the guerrillas to operate from Pakistani territory over the opposition of most of his countrymen, who would have gladly cut a deal with the Kabul Communists in return for getting the 3.5 million refugees off their soil. And the price for Zia’s protection was a mujahidin leader who was completely subservient to him.

Shuster pleaded his case to Din Mohammed: Abdul Haq and the other alliance leaders were the way around Zia’s machinations. By accepting the invitation from Perez de Cuéllar’s office, which Shuster was asked to help relay, Haq could become, overnight, a unifying figure in the mujahidin alliance, overshadowing Hekmatyar and thus blunting the force of Zia’s gambit without openly crossing him. Also, at that very moment in mid-1988, Ahmad Shah Massoud was forming a grand alliance of Tajik, Turkoman, and Uzbek commanders all over northern Afghanistan. With the Soviets starting to pull out of the country, it was critical that a Pathan commander get a quick dose of diplomatic legitimacy. It was time, Shuster dared to say to the graybeard Haji, for the Pathans “to stop looking backward to their own suffering and to start showing political ability.” And whether Din Mohammed liked it or not, Abdul Haq was already being thought of in Peshawar as a politician, a role for which he had greater talent than several of the seven party leaders.

Even so, Shuster pointed out, whatever took place in New York between Haq and UN officials would probably turn out to be of little relevance, since the United Nations served only Soviet interests. The most important thing was how Abdul Haq’s visit would be perceived in Peshawar by the refugees and party leaders. Shuster, ever the realist, was less optimistic about toppling the Kabul regime than anyone else I knew on the Frontier. He desperately wanted Haq to take over the mujahidin alliance because he knew that if Hekmatyar and the Pakistanis continued to run the war, the guerrillas would falter once the Soviet troop withdrawal was completed — which is exactly what happened.

After the final, four-hour session with Shuster, in broken English, Din Mohammed relented. Shuster had merely played back to him the Haji’s own private thoughts in a more concise, pointed form. Abdul Haq departed for New York five days after Shuster left Peshawar. Haq’s visit to the United Nations helped force Hekmatyar out of the chairman’s post in mid-June 1988. This proved, however, to be only a temporary setback for Hekmatyar.

During his last days in Peshawar, Shuster would wait in his hotel room or in the dim, gloomy dining hall at Dean’s Hotel for Abdul Haq’s driver to fetch him. Haq would be reclining in the back seat of the well-upholstered Toyota Corolla with darkened windows like some mafia don, massaging his injured right foot and moving over to make room for his friend beside him. In the car, Shuster would begin patiently making his case about every nuance of the military and diplomatic struggle facing the mujahidin. Shuster could handle Haq, who occasionally fell into bad moods and acted like a spoiled child — as when he refused to answer calls from the State Department while recovering from his mine injury in the Pittsburgh hospital. (Actually, Haq was convinced that the Americans were trying to kill him. The reason? Since the U.S. government was paying his medical expenses, Washington regulations stipulated that he fly on an American carrier on the last leg of his journey to the United States. In horrible pain, Haq was forced to wait hours at a London airport for a connecting flight.)

Faced with Shuster’s arguments, Haq would ease into a smile. He’d make a joke about getting diarrhea from the food at Dean’s and ask about the latest gossip in the foreign community. Shuster would in turn loosen up. As though they were on stage, they would look deep into each other’s eyes when they talked. There was something a bit pretentious about the way they acted in each other’s presence. It was a self-conscious dialogue. Each was aware that the other came from the other side, and that was perhaps why, although they argued, they never really fought. What kept the relationship from being a cliché was the fact that they had been together under life-threatening conditions.

In the early years of the war, whenever Abdul Haq was in Peshawar he went everywhere on his motorcycle and ate many of his meals in local Afghan restaurants with a large group of friends. Assassinations by KhAD had later forced him out of public places and into a protected car. His world had narrowed, and consequently Shuster’s role in it loomed larger. While John Gunston was the brash, soldierly comrade — the good mate who was forever slapping you on the back — Shuster was a sounding board for ideas with whom Haq could have late-night heart-to-hearts and do what was impossible to do with another Pathan: talk about his fears and vulnerabilities.

Haq felt himself to be a man alone. Even to his older brothers he wouldn’t talk about many aspects of his Kabul operation, which he saw as something he created on his own without their help. He spent little time with his wife. Unlike other Pathans, he was satisfied with only two children and didn’t want any more — something she couldn’t understand. Like other mujahidin commanders I’ve met, he appeared to view sex as an undisciplined act of self-indulgence — something that Westerners needed, not toughened Pathans like himself. Sometimes he didn’t tell his wife when he was leaving Peshawar to go to war inside Afghanistan. At home he smoldered. His wife and other family members feared his temper, which could turn violent. This fear was mixed with awe after his mine injury, when even deliberate pampering by the women in the family failed to soften his disposition. When his sister pleaded with him to talk, he once responded, “What do you know? You’re only a woman.” The one woman he felt truly at ease with was his mother. He always told her when he was going on jihad.

Charles Lindholm, a Columbia University anthropologist who lived for two years in a Pathan village, observed that the Pathans “live within a system which obliges men to present themselves as completely self-reliant…. Suspicion, defensiveness, bravery, vengefulness, pride, envy,” and “a Hobbesian vision” characterize their world view and interpersonal relationships — meaning, the Pathan can trust no one but an outsider “to fill the role of friend.” This was the basis of friendships between British colonial administrators and tribal Pathans in the last century.

At first I dismissed Lindholm’s analysis as mere anthropological twaddle. But there was clearly something to it. Haq’s men were known to resent their commander’s emotional dependence on foreigners, but Haq required these friendships. There was a side of his personality that could find release only with outsiders. He needed contact with values that were vastly different from his own. And this need increased when he was sidelined in Peshawar, recovering from the mine injury, at a time when the Soviets were starting their withdrawal and the war was entering a complex military and diplomatic phase that forced him to think in ways that he was not used to.

By journalistic definition, Haq was a Moslem fundamentalist. He prayed five times a day. He kept the Ramadan fast. He didn’t smoke or drink. When traveling, he refused to wear Western clothes or eat Western food: in London to meet Prime Minister Thatcher, he wouldn’t eat in a Moslem Lebanese restaurant until the cook assured him that the food was hallal. The idea of a free Afghanistan not ruled by Islamic law was anathema to him. The media, and especially American think-tank specialists, sometimes lumped Haq and Hekmatyar together in the same category as “Iranian-style fundamentalists.” But with us Haq laughed, made jokes, and liked to gossip. And he was not driven by ideology. He was the only man in all the fundamentalist parties whom the nonfundamentalist Afghans, especially the intellectuals, liked and respected. I kept asking myself whether, in the final analysis, Haq was, in effect, just a military tool of others in the alliance — and in his own family, in particular — who were fundamentalists.

Great as Abdul Haq’s need for outside friendships was, he was still a Pathan, and a Kabul-area commander at that. Shuster’s closeness to Haq and Din Mohammed was ultimately a measure of what Shuster had accomplished inside Afghanistan and of the physical risks he had taken. Haq and his brother never confided anything to Shuster until after he had made several cross-border forays.

Everything in Peshawar always went back to time spent inside. Whatever other factors influenced a journalist’s access to a mujahidin commander — his personality, his knowledge of Pukhtu or Dari, his years covering the story, his commitment to the cause — the reporters closest to the commanders were those who had performed best under fire. There were no exceptions. From anywhere in town you could see the brown Khyber hills. Up there was where it was all taking place. As long as you didn’t go up there, the hills were a constant reminder of your fear, your guilt over remaining in Peshawar, and your burning curiosity about what was happening over the border. And once you returned from inside, the hills reminded you of how lucky you were to be back in Peshawar. I really knew nothing about Haq or Gunston or Shuster or much else about the war that was important until I went into Afghanistan. Only then did I begin to understand about the people I was interviewing, and why inside was all that mattered in a journalist’s relationship with a guerrilla commander.

Shuster went over the border with Abdul Haq for the first time in October 1984. The trip lasted four weeks. The Soviets were in the midst of an offensive, spearheaded by airborne troops, to regain swaths of territory in the area south and east of Kabul. This was around the time a French television reporter was captured by Communist regime soldiers, when the mujahidin group he had been traveling with fell into an ambush. Haq’s force of three hundred was snaking fast through the same territory as the Soviets, who were equipped with troop-carrying helicopters and fighter jet support. Haq and Shuster were bombed several times by the jets. Because Haq, as the commander, had to be the last to run for cover, Shuster was forced to crouch beside him in the open, his bowels loosening from fear and bad food. The hardest thing to do was run toward a falling projectile, not away from it. Haq had taught Shuster that a bomb always drops at an angle; only by running toward its source are you safe from being hit.

Shuster admitted that he was perpetually frightened of either being killed or being caught. But he could never even start to explain why he persisted in going inside. I didn’t buy his Lithuanian nationalism argument, even though he was an intellectual who clearly lacked the macho mentality of other journalists. Shuster seemed determined to earn Haq’s respect, as if he knew that he and Haq were destined to be friends and he had no choice in the matter. Once Shuster tried to describe to me how he and Haq had stripped down to their waists and gone swimming in a deserted reservoir east of Kabul with all of Haq’s men looking on. “You don’t know what it is to be with Abdul Haq at such a moment!…” Words deserted him. Perhaps, like the Japanese karate master and the London window cleaner, Shuster was merely acting out a fantasy — another foreign male in the war zone who saw himself as a character in a movie.

But as so often happened on the Northwest Frontier, a great, irrational act of will had made the movie real. Shuster’s first trip to Kabul, arranged by Haq in the fall of 1983, was such an act, during which his bravery and ingenuity endeared him forever to Haq, Din Mohammed, and the rest of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami.

He and his escort of Haq’s mujahidin (Haq himself didn’t make the trip) had just climbed to the top of a mountain from where one descends into Kabul from the south. Soviet helicopter activity forced them to wait for four days at the summit, hiding in rock crevices from the snooping gunships constantly patrolling the environs of the capital. After the group finally started to descend into the city at 4:30 P.M. on a mid-October evening, two gunships, flying back from a raid near the Kabul airport, sprayed the ground with their remaining bullets. A few minutes later, Shuster’s group was attacked by artillery. Evidently, the helicopter pilots had radioed to government ground posts in the area about the mujahidin presence. “There were explosions all around,” Shuster recalled. “The muj lying next to me, an old man, threw a patou over both of us, as if the blanket could protect us from the artillery shells. Then he started to pray loudly. I didn’t know how to pray, so I just trembled. After the shelling ended, we began walking again.

“Suddenly we heard footsteps in the dark. The mujahidin yelled ‘Dresht,’ which means stop. But the sound of someone walking continued. Gun barrels clicked all over the place. There is nothing so frightening as being in a war zone and hearing bullets being slipped into breeches in complete darkness. ‘Dresht,’ the muj shouted again. It turned out to be only an old man who didn’t hear so well. One of the muj slapped him hard across the face for not identifying himself. Then we continued walking toward Kabul.”

A little boy, a member of Abdul Haq’s underground, led Shuster into downtown Kabul. Haq had provided his friend with mujahidin bodyguards after Shuster had explained to Haq what he planned on doing once inside the Soviet-occupied capital.

At eleven at night the boy brought Shuster to the house of a guerrilla in the central bazaar, where he had some tea. Shuster said he needed water in order to mix the glue he had brought with him, to paste anti-Communist newspapers on the walls of Mirwas Maidan, a square in the heart of town. He was told not to worry; when he got there, someone would have water for him. Then several mujahidin, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades, arrived to accompany him to Mirwas Maidan, with two guerrillas falling out at each street corner to cover the retreat. Shuster and another mujahid were the only ones who weren’t armed: they carried plastic bags filled with copies of the newspaper.

“We came to a lighted paved road where we could see groups of government soldiers about a hundred fifty feet away on either side. I asked the muj about the water. They handed me a glass. Can you believe it? One glass of water! I needed several barrels to dissolve the glue.” As was the case with Gun-ston, the men started knocking on doors, waking people up. And again, after making a lot of noise, which the government soldiers ignored — it was they who were the more frightened… the mujahidin found someone who started bringing out kettles of water. Shuster himself glued sixteen copies of the newspaper to the walls around the square, then let the guerril las do the rest after he was escorted out of the city. All he could say about the experience was that “it was unreal.”

The newspapers were forged copies of the four-page Soviet Ministry of Defense daily, Red Star, produced in Italy by Shuster in cooperation with several European periodical publishers, including the Italian youth monthly Frigidaire (literally, FreezedNews). The cover design was Shuster’s idea. It depicted a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan breaking his Kalashnikov over his knee, exclaiming in Russian, “Stop the war, let’s go home”… the same phrase Lenin had used during World War I to get Russian soldiers to desert the czar’s army. Inside was a lengthy satire by Vladimir Voinovich, an exiled Russian writer living in Munich, about how a dynasty of cooks had taken over the Red Army and had convinced all the soldiers to withdraw from Afghanistan. That morning, Abdul Haq’s subcommander, Abdul Wakhil, had six hundred copies of the newspaper distributed throughout the downtown area, including the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel.

A few hours later, Soviet troops surrounded the neighborhood of the square, searching all the houses for copies of the paper. Two Afghan regime officers were reportedly shot on account of the incident. The Soviet publication Literaturnaya Gazeta, in an article entitled “Forgers of Newspapers,” said the prank was the work of the CIA. The West German weekly Stern also wrote a story about the affair in a 1984 issue. “Now you are a real journalist,” Abdul Haq told Shuster when he returned to Peshawar. From then on it wasn’t a problem for Shuster to see Din Mohammed whenever he wanted.

When I first met Shuster and Gunston, I was having difficulty getting access to Haq. I had originally been recommended to him by another journalist who knew him well, and this was enough for Haq to grant me an interview about once every seven or ten days, which I was not satisfied with. But Shuster and Gunston opened more doors for me, and soon I was with the commander several times a week.

Then one night Haq told me suddenly, “Be ready in the morning. You’re going inside.”