Soldiers of God

3 Going up Khyber

IT HAPPENED within the space of a few seconds. Three mujahidin arrived at the door at seven the next morning. Without speaking, one of them took my rucksack and hid it, along with the canteen, inside a filthy patou (Pathan blanket), which he tied into a bundle and slung over his shoulder. I gave another my watch and gold wedding band to hold until we crossed the last Pakistani checkpoint. “Bob,” said the one who would be my interpreter, “from now on, your name will be Babar Khan.” I nodded. Then the four of us, all dressed the same, left. Abrupt as that.

We jammed into a horse-drawn tonga. Bumping along in the back seat as the road unrolled below me, I felt the sudden exhilaration of total freedom and total loss. I was vulnerable in a way I had never been before. But I also felt the security that rests in anonymity, the sensation familiar to army recruits of being welded to something sturdier than the self you are giving up.

This was a false and temporary notion. It took no time at all to find out how different I was from the young men I was with.

The mujahidin paid the tonga driver 5 rupees (30 cents) as we jumped off the creaking carriage and onto a slow-moving bus, painted in garish psychedelic designs and rebuilt from the battered carcass of a Bedford truck. Inside, the bus was a scarred shell of sharp, twisted metal and plastic seat cushions running with sweat. I stumbled to the rear, where my handlers packed me among a crowd of refugees and their squawking chickens. With my dark complexion and new beard, I caught only a few sideward glances. I felt almost invisible.

The bus rambled straight ahead on a flat table of increasingly dry earth that bred nothing, it seemed, except a rash of cinder block and mud brick shanties inhabited by refugees. The throngs of people and roadside stalls gradually thinned as the wall of mountains came closer. At the edge of the plain, just past the stone gate with the inscription from Kipling’s “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” stood the tan battlements of Jamrud Fort, built by the Sikh governor of Peshawar, Hari Singh, in 1836 to defend the entrance to the Pass. It was like a stage set for Gunga Din.

Then, quickly, the earth heaved upward, and what had minutes before seemed like a solitary sandstone wall disintegrated into a labyrinth of scooped-out riverbeds and folds reflecting the dull soldierly hues of gunmetal gray and plankton green. I had the sensation of being trapped in a tunnel. Topping each rise was a slash of red or ocher as the sun caught a higher, steeper slope at a different angle. Lifts of cooler air penetrated the bus, momentarily drying my sweat — my first fresh taste of the mountains after the gauzy heat film of Peshawar. The machine-gun rhythm of Pakistani popular music filled my ears as the winding bed of a Kabul River tributary led to a series of long, slowly rising switchbacks that constituted the heart of the twenty-five-mile-long Khyber Pass.

Disguised as a Pathan in this metal crate hurtling upward toward Afghanistan, I thought it was hard not to be a little impressed with myself. But I had just showered and eaten a hearty breakfast. I doubted that I would feel the same after two weeks of bad food and little sleep.

By themselves, the dimensions of the Khyber Pass are not impressive. The highest peak in the area is under seven thousand feet, and the rise is never steep. What makes the Pass spectacular is sheer scenery, historical association, and a present-day reality every bit as gripping and dangerous as in former epochs. Perhaps nowhere else on the planet are the cultural, climatic, and topographic changes quite so swift and theatrical. In a world of arbitrary boundaries, here is one border region that lives up to the definition.

In the space of forty minutes you are transported through a confined, volcanic nether world of crags and winding canyons, from the lush, tropical floor of India to the cool, tonsured wastes of middle Asia; from a world of black soil, bold fabrics, and rich, spicy cuisine to one of sand, coarse wool, and goat meat. And some would add: from a land of subtle, slippery justifications to one of hard, upright decision.

Alexander the Great, accompanied by his teenage Bactrian bride, Roxanne, must have experienced this very sensation as he came down into India (Hindustan) near the Malakand Pass, sixty miles north of here, in the early winter of 327 B.C. Some of Alexander’s troops, under the command of his most trusted general, Hephaestion, trekked through these same Khyber defiles. So did Babur, the sixteenth-century Mongol king and descendant of Tamurlane, who had lost his father’s central Asian kingdom as a young man, but before his death had conquered Kabul and Delhi and founded the great Moghul dynasty. Babur was a poet, whose fantastically detailed memoirs, the Babur-nama, exude a sensitive, lyric intensity that captures the awe and pain of travel in this part of the world. (On finding a cave in the middle of a blizzard in the first days of January 1507, he wrote: “People brought out their rations, cold meat, parched grain, whatever they had. From such cold and tumult to a place so warm, cozy and quiet!”)

Though he conquered India, Babur preferred Afghanistan; his conquest of Kabul in 1504 had marked the turning point in his fortunes. And it was to Kabul, his favorite city, that his body was taken. He lies now under a garden of mulberry trees on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, in a marble monument built in the following century by Shah Jahan, the Moghul emperor responsible for the Taj Mahal. For the handful of journalists and relief workers in Peshawar enamored of such stuff, Babur’s marble tomb loomed as the longed-for summit of their Frontier Odysseys, where, under the shade of that mulberry arbor, they would one day rest their dirty, fatigued bodies and read Babur’s poetry after having witnessed — they hoped — the mujahidin conquest of Kabul: “0 Babur! dream of your luck when your Feast is the meeting, your New-year the face; For better than that could not be with a hundred New-years and Bairams.” Like Babur, some of us measured happiness by how close we were to going up Khyber for the last time.

The British first marched up the Khyber Pass in 1839, on their way to the first Afghan war, which was to end in disaster three years later with the massacre of every soldier save one, a Dr. William Brydon, who lived to tell the story. The British came back up the Pass in 1878 and again were forced by the Afghans to withdraw. The graves of British soldiers killed in the second Afghan war lie near the Masjid Mosque by the top of the Pass. Each time, the British lost hundreds of men just fighting their way through the Khyber territory, controlled by the Afridis, a tribal branch of the Pathans who since antiquity have served the function of “guardians of the Pass.”

In 1897, the British had to dispatch forty thousand troops to this area just to quell an Afridi uprising and regain control of the Pass. Alexander and Babur also fought pitched battles with the Afridis. It is these tribesmen, numbering over 300,000 in their mud brick redoubts that dot the hills of the Khyber Tribal Agency, who have given the Khyber Pass its allure of danger and epic drama throughout history — and never more so than in the 1980s.

In The Pathans by Sir Olaf Caroe, the definitive work on the subject, the author provides evidence that the Aparutai, mentioned by the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, are the ancestors of the Afridis of today. (As Caroe writes, the names sound similar when one recognizes that the Afridis, like other Pathans, “habitually change f into p”) The Afridis are also generally thought to have more ancient Greek blood than other Pathans who intermixed with Alexander’s soldiers, evinced by their sharp features and fairer complexions. They dress differently too: you can always spot an Afridi by his turban, wrapped tightly with an ostentatious bow around a bulbous red hat, called a kullah.

But these are all minutiae.

What really sets the Afridis apart from other Pathans is their deliciously devious, amoral character — a legacy of the physical landscape of the Northwest Frontier and the Khyber Pass in particular. Unlike other regions of the Frontier and eastern Afghanistan, the Khyber area has no arable land. Through these poor, barren defiles, conquerors from time immemorial have come to steal the wealth of the subcontinent. So the Afridis learned to play the only card they had: their power to murder, ambush, and in general make life hell for any invading army. What they have essentially said to everyone was: Rather than kill you, all we ask is that you share a certain portion of your wealth with us. And to their fellow Pathans in the Afghan resistance the Afridis’ attitude was: You fight the Russians, so they go after you but kill us too. So you must give us something in return. There had been frequent, violent clashes between the mujahidin and the Afridis. The Afridis were bristling with arms. They controlled the weapons trade at Darra, and in addition were supplied with guns by KhAD as a reward for fighting the guerrillas. So it had become more dangerous than ever to trek through Afridi territory on the way into Afghanistan, as I planned to do.

Smuggling, as well as bribes and thievery, was a source of income for the Afridis. A quarter of a century ago the Afridis in the Khyber Agency were among the poorest tribes in Pakistan. They had little to eat and were forced to weave shoes from grass. Their situation improved when they got involved in running Russian consumer appliances from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan into Pakistan. (A smuggled Russian air conditioner cost $300 in Peshawar; an Italian or Japanese one was four to five times the price.) But real fortunes were made with heroin, which, following the Islamic revolution in Iran, became the Khyber Agency’s main business. The Afridis set up laboratories in hillside caves, where they organized smuggling caravans to bring the heroin to Pakistani ports. They often bribed police at the various Khyber Pass checkpoints. Unlike other Pathans, the Afridis have managed to keep their fundamentalist beliefs and their livelihood in two separate, airtight mental compartments. A Pakistani government official explained: “To them, nothing is immoral when you are making money.” Often an Afridi will interrupt a drug sale if it is prayer time. Afridi merchants always close drug deals with the words “May God be with you.”

The long, buff walls of the British-built Shagai Fort, now manned by the Khyber Rifles, came into view as our bus mounted the first of a series of plateaus. I was not impressed. These Pakistani troops, despite their drums, sashes, and breast-beating tradition earned during the time of the Raj, were not able to hold more than twenty yards on either side of the highway. Beyond that, permission was needed from the heavily armed Afridi tribesmen in order to pass. The real power here lay within the even higher, longer walls of the fortresses that appeared farther up the road: the homes of the wealthiest Afridi khans (large landowners), not a few of whom were implicated in the international drug trade.

Every few miles I saw a military checkpoint, where a Pakistani soldier would mount the bus, cast a quick glance at anyone or anything that looked suspicious, and then wave the bus on. I instinctively looked down and away: Never ever establish eye contact with a border guard. It was one of a reporter’s more mundane nightmares out here that he would be pulled off a bus before even entering Afghanistan and be humiliated in the eyes of his colleagues and editors. This happened periodically to journalists in the course of the war, because the attitude of the Pakistani authorities was much more ambivalent than President Zia’s open support of the mujahidin suggested. Many in the lower reaches of the Pakistani security services did not share Zia’s enthusiasm for the resistance. Even Zia, though he was willing to help the mujahidin, did not want to be seen in the eyes of the Soviets as allowing Western journalists to cross an international border illegally in order to cover the war from the guerrilla side.

We got off the bus at Landi Kotal. We were still a few miles from the last Pakistani checkpoint and the thinly manned Afghan border post at Torcham. But that was not where we were planning to cross the border, and whatever the diplomats might believe, Landi Kotal was no longer in Pakistan. The air was cleaner and colder, and, as in Darra, I heard the constant sound of rifles going off. The streets were packed with mujahidin and Afridi cutthroats, who, in contrast to what I saw in Peshawar, were now armed. In the reeling jumble of fire-trap market stalls hashish and heroin could be purchased openly. Just behind the main road began a maze of high mud brick walls with imposing iron gates, which concealed warehouses full of guns, dope, electric appliances, and liquor, all destined for Zia’s booze-free Islamic republic. This was a lawless smuggler’s town and, more than any other spot on the Northwest Frontier, the nerve center of the most ambitious CIA arms program since the Vietnam war. But distinct from other Third World arms and drug bazaars where intelligence agencies operate and square off — Beirut and the Honduran border towns, for example — Landi Kotal gave no quarter to the demented affectations of the video age. There were no ghetto blasters, squealing tires of expensive cars, evil posters of rock stars and Ayatollah Khomeini, or gangs of teenage youths in tight-fitting khaki fatigues and gold chains around their necks. Landi Kotal may have been bad, but it wasn’t deranged. The town’s Kiplingesque charm just couldn’t be ignored; there was something almost wholesome about it.

Before the mujahidin hustled me off the main street and toward their local headquarters, I caught a brief glimpse of a railhead, where the Khyber Pass local used to start its run through no less than thirty-four tunnels down to Peshawar, until 1986 when the train was bombed by KhAD and the Pakistanis decided to stop the service. Paul Theroux devoted a chapter in The Great Railway Bazaar to this now-defunct train, which he described as a “pleasure” and an “engineering marvel.” He wondered about the danger faced by Pakistan from a Soviet-backed Afghan government — this was written four years before the appearance of a Communist regime in Kabul and six years before the war.

The iron door of a warehouse creaked open slightly, revealing a pair of suspicious eyes. We exchanged some words with the watchman and were quickly ushered in without the gate opening more than a few inches. As it was being bolted behind us, I saw we were in a courtyard about the size of a baseball diamond enclosed by high mud brick walls and smelling of dried mud, dung, urine, and gun oil. For a second it reminded me of an Ottoman caravansary out of a nineteenth-century Edward Lear watercolor of the Holy Land. American-supplied, Soviet-made Kalashnikov assault rifles were stacked in the far corner along with new bayonets, banana-clip magazines for 7.62 mm bullets, and crates of ammunition. An old man in a shalwar kameez and turban sat on a rush mat beside the weaponry, making notes in a ledger. He jumped up and embraced each of us with the greeting “Salaam aleikum” (Peace be upon you). We removed our shoes before entering a dark, mud-walled room with a wooden table in the corner, crowded with neat piles of stationery, and sat around a carpet on the floor.

This was the Landi Kotal headquarters of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami. A blurry photo of Khalis appeared on a calendar hanging above me, and for the first time I found myself focusing on him as the mujahidin around me mumbled “Maulvi Khalis” this and “Maulvi Khalis” that (maulvi, in Pukhtu, means an Islamic scholar, a high-ranking imam). Though in reality a figurehead for a party that was run and controlled by Abdul Haq’s family, Khalis was the most respected of the seven Afghan resistance party leaders in Peshawar, the only one of an otherwise pathetic, squabbling bunch who was not thought of as a politician but as a mujahid. And though a fundamentalist, Khalis, unlike Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was truly respected by the moderate factions of the resistance. Everyone knew that he was the only resistance leader who spent much of his time — sometimes weeks on end — inside, living in the same awful and dangerous conditions as his troops. The other party leaders, especially Hekmatyar, went inside for “photo ops” and were out again within twenty-four hours.

Khalis, in his late sixties, was a lively character with a sense of humor, a trait that prevented him from being perceived as an Afghan version of Ayatollah Khomeini. Abdul Haq once told me a story about Khalis. In the first year of the war, when the mujahidin were fighting without any American aid and were so poor that they couldn’t even afford mules, Khalis, then sixty, was trekking with Haq in the deep snow and had to be helped down a hill on a makeshift sled. At the bottom, his face covered with snow, Khalis laughed and said, “My watch is broken. It cost me two thousand rupees. This jihad is getting expensive.”

Khalis was loved by every guerrilla, from Abdul Haq and Din Mohammed on down. Khalis was a figurehead only because of his age and lack of interest in details, not because he had been jostled aside in a power struggle. For the young mujahidin accompanying me, the personal example set by “Maulvi Khalis” carried great significance in their lives.

Khalis had given the Hizb-i-Islami its Spartan, no-frills, country-bumpkin personality. The party in Peshawar was so unsophisticated that it practically didn’t exist as a political organization at all, but rather as a political front for a purely military organization — which is why it was powerful and well positioned inside while being underestimated by diplomats and journalists in Pakistan. Among reporters, it was not a particularly well-recommended group to travel with. Though the “Khalis muj” were respected as experienced, trustworthy fighters who were not likely to blunder into an ambush or minefield, they rarely provided interpreters and disdained the occasional tin of beef or powdered soup — the kinds of items that kept your spirits up on the march and prevented you from becoming sick, and which other factions stocked in their military camps for visiting journalists and relief workers. A Jamiat commander in eastern Afghanistan, for example, not only stocked coffee, soft drinks, and canned food but had a video-cassette player as well. Khalis’s men wouldn’t know what a videotape was, and even in Peshawar never offered you anything to drink except tea and water, and the water was sometimes foul.

At least I had an interpreter, specially assigned to me by Abdul Haq’s middle brother, Abdul Qadir. Qadir was the chief commander in Shinwar, a district in Nangarhar province that was just over the border from Landi Kotal. The warehouse to which I had been brought and the mujahidin that had been accompanying me were under his command.

My interpreter, Wakhil Abdul Bedar, a twenty-fiye-year-old refugee from the village of Adah near Jalalabad, had graduated from an Islamic academy. He considered himself a mullah, and instead of a turban or pakol (a traditional flat woolen cap) he wore a knitted white prayer cap. Wakhil was the most laid-back mullah you could imagine. He smiled, laughed, and made jokes all the time. He was short for an Afghan, and not particularly rugged looking. Measured alongside the other mujahidin, Wakhil certainly seemed vulnerable. His brown spaniel eyes betrayed an underlying sadness and preoccupation at odds with his good humor. He was a tender soul, and it wasn’t until we were back in Peshawar that I was able to coax his story from him.

Wakhil had been a student at a madrassa (religious school) near Jalalabad. He left Afghanistan in 1979, prior to the Soviet invasion, after having served a short term in prison for refusing, along with other madrassa students, to sing in honor of the Marxist ruler of Afghanistan at the time, Nur Mohammed Taraki. But Wakhil had more recently suffered a tragedy worse than imprisonment that had also helped propel him to Pakistan: his father had deserted his family to work in a restaurant in Iran, leaving Wakhil alone with his mother and younger brothers. I can only guess how deeply this affected Wakhil. Pathan men look upon their dependents — particularly their wives — as possessions so private that few others may even know their names. To desert them and leave them exposed to shame and suffering is nearly unheard of. Though Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s was becoming increasingly repressive, especially for a former political prisoner, Wakhil equally needed to escape the humiliation of what his father had done to him.

Wakhil came alone to Peshawar, where he stayed at an uncle’s house. After finding temporary work painting cars, he sent for his mother and younger brothers. Eventually, he went looking for the Hizb-i-Islami office — an obvious decision, since Yunus Khalis had been a well-known figure in Jalalabad religious circles when Wakhil was a student there.

“It’s right over there in our house. Come, I’ll take you,” said a broad, imposing fellow who towered over Wakhil and introduced himself as Abdul Haq. Haq, twenty-two at the time, had already established a reputation as a leading guerrilla commander and was an instinctive judge of character, aware that everyone, even a “little guy” like Wakhil, had a value to the resistance. Haq took the eighteen-year-old under his wing and got him a job as an aide to Khalis in the offices of the seven-party alliance. Wakhil also had an opportunity to attend the madrassa in Peshawar and take courses in English. He saw Haq infrequently after that, but like many people considered himself close to the commander, whom he clearly idolized. When I met Wakhil in 1987, he was working for Abdul Qadir and married with three children. He supported them, in addition to his mother and younger brothers, on a salary of 800 rupees ($45) a month, plus a cost of living subsidy, from Hizb-i-Islami. It was the same salary the party paid all its members, from field commanders to night watchmen in Peshawar.

Wakhil sat with the other men and negotiated the price of a mule while we ate a meal of grilled goat kebab, flat bread, and curd washed down with green tea and a gooey Afghani sweet called nakal. The meat was nearly hidden in a pool of grease and for all I knew could have been putrefying for hours in the hot sun with flies dancing on it. But it was doubtless the tastiest and cleanest food I was going to get for some time. I ate heartily, sopping up the grease with my bread.

One mujahid gave a letter to Wakhil, laboriously handwritten in Pukhtu on Hizb-i-Islami stationery, stating who I was and where I was to be taken. My two bodyguards signed for their rifles and ammunition in a ledger. Either Wakhil wasn’t a skilled negotiator or at that moment there truly were no mules to spare for so trivial a task as transporting a soft, spoiled journalist and his fashionable new rucksack into Afghanistan. (Wakhil, like all other Afghans, brought nothing with him except a patou and the clothes on his back.)

Jihan-zeb and Lurang, my bodyguards, were in their mid-twenties, like Wakhil, and had wives and children living in Pakistani refugee camps. Jihan-zeb had some missing teeth and only one eye; the other he had lost in 1984 in a mine explosion. But he had a ready smile and seemed desperate to communicate with me. Lurang, in contrast, had a handsome face with dark, perfectly sculpted features and good teeth — another Hollywood actor playing the part of a Third World guerrilla. But Lurang was sullen, not happy at all about this situation. He sized me up for what I was: another burdensome foreigner who was going to get sick, slow down the pace, and end up doing nothing of provable importance to the war effort. Whatever it was I did, he didn’t understand and he didn’t care to. After all, I didn’t have a gun and I wasn’t supplying guns. I was without a proper camera with those wondrously large lenses that other, obviously more impressive foreigners carried.

After a few minutes of walking we left the last telephone pole behind us and descended into a bald, windswept tableland scorched the color of zinc that reminded me of the Judean wilderness. The earth cambered as my sweat-rinsed eyes worked to adjust to the dazzling white sunlight. There wasn’t a tree or a water source in view. I was careful to offer my canteen to the others before I drank, but they refused it with such a contemptuous flick of the wrist that I never offered again, and neither did they ask. They watched me drink with gaping, dumfounded eyes, as though I were a creature from another planet whose physiological composition was strange and incomprehensible to them.

I asked how far it was to the Afghan border.

“A few hours,” said Jihan-zeb to Wakhil, who translated.

It would turn out to be a very foolish question.

We marched quickly for over an hour before the plateau collapsed into a nest of canyons whose floors were carpeted with sharp rocks and pebbles that threatened to turn your ankle at every step. Suddenly a sprained ankle became the most terrifying of the many pathetic little nightmares that flashed through my mind as I stumbled beside the soaring walls of the canyon we were following.

Journalists had dubbed this and other tracks leading into Afghanistan “the jihad trail.” Soon we began to meet small groups of mujahidin coming out of the war zone in the other direction. As they passed us on the road, the men embraced one another with a studied passion I had never seen before. All over the Moslem world, strangers greet each other with calls of Salaam aleikum and a partial, perfunctory grip of the hands on the other man’s shoulders. But here the squeezes were tight, and followed by a deep, longing look in the eyes. The sufferings of war, coupled with the bonds of male friendship among the Pathans, had broken down the psychological barriers that normally existed between strangers. They were transmitting real emotion dozens of times a day. And though my new beard, new clothes, rucksack, and lack of a gun instantly betrayed me as a foreigner to these men, just the fact that I was with them on this trail earned me an embrace, which I was expected to return with equal force. Now I saw myself as even more of an imposter. I was not worthy of the trust that such a display of feeling bestowed. No matter what I chose to tell myself or others, deep within me I knew I was there solely out of professional ambition. Without my realizing it, the mujahidin had made me contemptuous of myself.

I hugged the shade cast by the silvery black granite walls and leaped across the patches of painful sunlight as though they were rushing streams. My canteen was empty, but out of shame I dared not ask where I could fill it. After another forty-five minutes of marching, Jihan-zeb casually walked over to a hollow in the rocks, cupped his hands, and withdrew a mouthful of water, which he slurped while observing me with an impish smile. It was barely a trickle, and it took a full two minutes to fill up the plastic canteen, but it was clear and clean and ice cold — the best I had ever tasted, it seemed to me then. Jihan-zeb and Wakhil laughed as I drank up the contents of the canteen before filling it a second time. Each of them had taken only a single mouthful. Lurang gave me a disapproving stare: he hadn’t drunk at all.

It was only a short walk before we reached another, more plentiful spring at the foot of a mountain bearded with thorns and lichen. “Rest and drink all you can,” advised Wakhil. “It will be the last good water for a while.”

It was about three in the afternoon when we started up the mountain. At first the climb was easy, but by the time we neared the seven-thousand-foot summit I was sweating and out of breath. The view from the top, like many scenes I was to see, was one of both beauty and horror. Ahead, unfurled below us, was a dust-wrapped, sulfurous plain marked by landslides and vibrating with intense heat. It billowed on for miles before finally rising into a wave of cathedrallike mountains that towered above the mere hill I had, with some difficulty, just scaled.

“There’s water down there?” I asked Wakhil, already losing my discipline.

“Yes, but we must walk for some hours first.”

“And where does Afghanistan begin?” I asked.

“After some hours will be Afghanistan, inshallah [God willing],” Wakhil said, hesitating. He probably never thought about the border in such terms.

“How many more hours?”

“Oh, I don’t know that question.” Wakhil smiled and turned up his palms, as though I had asked him to explain the meaning of a difficult Koranic parable.

We descended into the plain known as the Valley of Tirah Bazaar, the sanctum sanctorum of the Afridis — several hundred square miles of butchered, cursed terrain southwest of the Khyber Pass that few foreigners ever really penetrated, except to slip through surreptitiously.

“You know some Arabic,” Wakhil stated.

I had told him that I had studied the language briefly in Egypt.

“Good. Then you will tell anyone who asks us on the road that you are an Arab. They cannot know that you are American. Otherwise do not talk or take pictures or look at anyone. And don’t ask for water. Afridi people — bad people, like dogs. They are the agents of Najib [the Afghan Communist ruler],” said Wakhil, lobbing a thick gob of spit on the ground, as if to emphasize his disgust with the people we were about to encounter.

Jihan-zeb just smiled and placed his finger over his lips, warning me not to talk, then took my rucksack to carry. I was grateful. (The rule amongjournalists was that if the mujahidin offer to carry your pack, don’t be a hero — accept the help. If you refuse, later on when you really do need help, they might not offer.)

They are “amongst the most miserable and brutal creatures of the earth,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1897, referring mainly to the Tirah Afridis, after they had littered this plain with the bodies of hundreds of British soldiers. “Their intelligence only enables them to be more cruel, more dangerous, more destructive than wild beasts.”

Of all the difficult places on the Northwest Frontier that the British had to control, Tirah gave them the most trouble. Their running battle with the local Afridis over safe-conduct and the trade in weapons was never won, and occasionally the Afridis would resort to such outrages as the kidnapping of a seventeen-year-old English girl. Molly Ellis was abducted on April 14, 1923, and released unharmed several days later, after the British had burned down the village of the kidnapper, one Ajab Khan, who was a suspect in the murder of an English couple three years earlier. Kidnappings still occurred here, and that was why I had to be smuggled in and out of Tirah as quickly as possible: an American journalist would require an exorbitant ransom.

The greater Tirah was divided into two smaller valleys, the Maidan and the Bazaar. The Bazaar was so named by the British because of a tribal market there, which might not have contained more than a few stalls. It was the more remote and inaccessible of the two, and in it tribal law still applied: there have been actual cases of adulterers being stoned to death in the 1980s. In 1984, a twelve-year-old boy was ordered by a tribal Jirga (council) to execute a grown man who was the proven killer of his father. In an area not far away, after two teenagers had tried to elope, ajirga ordered the girl’s father to shoot the boy and the boy’s father to shoot the girl, and thus the matter was settled.

The Valley of Tirah Bazaar lived in a time warp. At least inside Afghanistan the population had been introduced, however rudely, to the modern world through the Soviet invasion and the refugee migrations and influx of Western-supplied weapons it provoked. But the Bazaar Valley, without a usable road until 1988, remained untouched. The mujahidin, the Afghan Communist regime, and the Pakistani government dealt with its miserably poor Afridi inhabitants exactly as the British had: through a pattern of raids, bribes, threats, and negotiations. “In these remote valleys, even more so than on Hadrian’s wall in Britain, a thousand years pass as a dream,” wrote Sir Olaf Caroe. “It has been but the fashion of arms that changes; Lee-Enfield going back to carbine, carbine to jezail, and jezail to bows and arrows.”

The first sensation I had upon entering the valley was a pleasant one: that of being washed by soft, fresh breezes rolling over a yellow-green steppe. On each side of us as we plodded through fields of tall, withered grass was a long, low wall of chocolate-black hills. In the distance, like a two-dimensional cutout, was a crude mud brick fort with a square tower leaning slightly to one side as though it might tip over. I was tired, thirsty, and hungry, and the closer we came to that leaning tower, the farther away it seemed. Then suddenly we were passing it, and other mud brick forts — exactly like the first one and painted a fabulous golden yellow by the late afternoon sun — loomed ahead, punctuating the bleak, abstract landscape. The shrill sound of the wind in the grass was strangely deafening in the otherwise silent terrain. The grass thinned away and we were encased in a mist of fine dust. I felt I was dreaming, and in my dream I was traveling along the Silk Route of western China with Marco and Maffeo Polo. Had they also been struck by the alienation of the central Asian plateaus?

We marched steadily until late evening across flat stretches of land broken every so often by a landslide several hundred feet deep, which we had to walk down and then up again on the other side. At dusk the sky turned a nacreous, heavenly white for a few moments before going purple and black. Groups of Afridis in white turbans were leading their sheep and mules to stagnant pools of water to drink before disappearing behind the walls of those massive fortresses. We avoided their suspicious glances. Like Lurang and Jihan-zeb, they were all armed with assault rifles. I watched enviously as two Afridi boys hauled up a bucketful of water from a well. Sensing my thoughts, Wakhil tapped me on the shoulder, clucked his tongue, and shook his head at me. Instead, the four of us rested by the muddy bank of a pool after the Afridi shepherds had gone. Lumps of animal dung floated in the water; Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb drank heartily. I filled my canteen and dropped an iodine pellet inside when the others weren’t looking. According to the instructions, I had to wait twenty minutes before drinking. Lurangjerked my shoulder with an open palm, gesturing to me to slurp directly from the pool, as he did. When I politely refused, he turned his head away in disgust, as though there were no hope for me. As night fell and guns began going off in the distance, we started walking again. I couldn’t believe that the hike through Tirah Bazaar had been much different for Alexander’s soldiers over 2,300 years ago.

An hour later, in pitch darkness, we reached our first chaikanah, a mice-ridden wooden platform with benches and jute beds where tea and biscuits were sold. A boy of about nine poured the syrupy-sweet green tea into ceramic cups on a rush mat. I had a pounding headache from thirst. Carefully, I gripped the cup’s rim but it was still too hot for me to hold. I was so thirsty that I got down on my stomach and tried sipping the tea with my chin resting on the ground, but it was so hot I jerked back in pain. Almost in tears, I waited the long minutes for the tea to cool just enough to slurp it, scalding my tongue, until the boy refilled the cup. The biscuits were stale and dry. They must have been in their wrappers for years in the hot sun. After a few cups of tea I felt better and could enjoy the pleasant breezes and feeling of absolute peace and silence that overtook me, despite the echoing pop of rifles coming from over the border — not far away now, I hoped.

“We will spend the night near here and cross into Afghanistan in the morning,” said Wakhil.

The tea boy led us to an Afridi fort a few hundred yards away. Wakhil explained that this particular Afridi family was of a clan that had a truce with Khalis’s mujahidin, who were allowed to stay with them while passing through the valley. So the fact that we had interrupted our journey at this point was no accident.

Inside the mud brick walls of the fort was a dirt courtyard with rooms off to the side. Along the inner wall, jute beds and brass water pipes were set out. My mouth was choked with dirt and dust.

“Salaam aleikum” shouted the dark, turbaned Afridi elders, who gripped each of us hard and took my gear off to a corner by the wall. They told us to sit on the jute beds and cross-examined us. Lurang and Jihan-zeb knew these men from previous trips. There was a distinct air of tense, exaggerated friendliness, in the way enemies and rivals in all cultures compensate for their hostility when meeting face to face. One of the Afridis, an obese fellow who never stopped coughing, spitting, and blowing snot out of his nostrils with two bare fingers, kept harassing me with the only English phrase he knew, which he bellowed over and over again: “How dooo you dooo! How dooo you dooo!” I was too tired and dirty to appreciate his awkward attempts at amicability, though, and I just nodded back at him with a forced smile. Before leaving Peshawar I had promised myself that no matter how physically awful I might feel during the journey, I would try my best never to act irritable in front of the mujahidin. This man gave me my first challenge.

Someone unfurled a large carpet in the middle of the courtyard, sending up small clouds of dirt. It might have been a cheap machine-made rug bought in Peshawar or Landi Kotal, but in the gas-lit darkness, surrounded by all the dismal earthen shades of dust, dried mud, and dung, it seemed magnificent. Round loaves of flat bread were thrown down, and a boy came around with a brass pitcher and bowl so we could wash our hands before eating. I’ll never forget the damp, mildewy reek of the towel he gave me. It must have been wiped by hundreds of pairs of hands since it was last washed. We turned up our palms toward the starscape, moved them down over our faces in unison, and said “Allahu akbar,” thanking God for the meal we were about to eat.

Except for a bowl of shriveled, overdone fried eggs swimming in thick oil, there was nothing on any of the plates that I could identify: no meat, chicken, or curd even. All the other bowls contained only oil and grease of differing shades of brown and green into which everyone dipped their bread. After green tea was poured from a blackened kettle, everyone said prayers again and the plates and carpet were quickly removed from the ground. One of our hosts filled a water pipe for the men to smoke while lying on the jute beds. There was a sweet, acrid odor to the tobacco; perhaps it had a trace of hashish in it. Wakhil, Jihan-zeb, and Lurang took only one or two puffs and then declined to smoke more. The Afridis then withdrew naswar from their shirt pockets — a potent Afghan chewing tobacco laced with opium and other stimulants. Several months later I tried some. One pill-sized ball placed along my gums was enough to make me dizzy and nauseated five minutes later. I never used it again.

The moon rose over the mud walls of the fort and shone into the courtyard like a searchlight, disturbing my sleep. Finally, I drifted off to the sound of distant gunfire, wild barking dogs, and Afridis coughing up and spitting the tobacco a few inches away from my head.

“Afridis bad people, very dirty people,” Wakhil muttered while washing his feet, before saying his last prayers of the day.

The relationship between the mujahidin and their Pathan cousins the Afridis was full of so many layers of intrigue and games played within games that at times it seemed that every commander and malik (tribal headman) had his own foreign policy with regard to KhAD, the KGB, and the Pakistani intelligence service. Truces were so short-lived and based on such a degree of subtlety that each new fact or insight I gained seemed to contradict much of what I had heard before. After a while I gave up and realized that this whole tribal system I was studying was just what the dictionaries called anarchy.

To begin with, the Afridis are divided into eight separate clans, or khels. One clan, the Adam Khel Afridis, controls the weapons market at Darra. Another, the Kuki Khel Afridis living in the Valley of Tirah Bazaar, had made pacts with Na-jib’s Communist regime in Kabul, hence the danger of transporting an American journalist through their area (though it was yet another, rival clan who had put us up for the night).

The pro-Communist Kuki Khel Afridis were led by Malik Wali Khan Kuki Khel, a man in his fifties with a dour expression stamped permanently on his face. I met him once briefly in Peshawar. When I asked him about accusations concerning the kidnapping of Khalis mujahidin by the Kuki Khel in the Bazaar Valley, Wali Khan Kuki Khel gave me a syrupy smile and said that such acts were rare and those responsible had had their houses burned down as punishment. Abdul Haq and his brother Abdul Qadir claimed that this was nonsense and that the malik was a liar.

“Kuki Khel people — stupid people,” Abdul Qadir had said. “Wali Khan is a stupid man. He has the face of a rat coming out of mud. He is an agent of KhAD and KGB.”

Qadir himself had the delicate, distinguished features of a Dürer portrait, enhanced by white sideburns and a fine gray beard. His eyes glowed with an intelligence that reminded me of a Talmudic scholar. But when it came to Afridis or other Pathans who had sided with the Soviets, every trace of humanity left him.

“In 1986, Kuki Khel people in Maidan Valley get nine hundred guns from Najib in Kabul,” Qadir had told me. “They make trouble for mujahidin and mule caravans bringing supplies into Afghanistan. So I say to Wali Khan Kuki Khel, ‘If you want to make trouble, I have artillery on this mountain and that. Mujahidin there will blow up your houses and your mosques and your schools.’ So we bomb some houses of Kuki Khel and then there is no more trouble for our mujahidin passing through this valley. Kuki Khel become very easily afraid.” Qadir sneered and spat a gob oinaswar on the ground.

Though the Kuki Khel dominated the Valley of Tirah Bazaar, a family of Zakha Khel Afridis had been providing us with hospitality in the fort. The Zakha Khel were the most populous of all the Afridi clans, and their leader, Malik Nadar Khan Zakha Khel, was a colorful character whom I visited in his Peshawar and Landi Kotal homes. Nadar Khan Zakha Khel maintained a tenuous, on-again-off-again truce with the mujahidin. And because I wasn’t sure what Qadir’s attitude would be to my interviewing the Afridi leader, I kept my meetings with Nadar Khan a secret from all the mujahidin. It turned out to be a wise idea, I thought while lying on the bed in the Afridi fort.

Though Nadar Khan had a veritable palace in Landi Kotal, when in Peshawar — where he held court several times a week — he deliberately projected a relatively humble image in order to keep the respect of his tribesmen in the city, all of whom were very poor. His house was down a narrow alley with an open sewer in Peshawar’s old quarter. In the early morning, as many as a hundred Afridis would wait in a dim, dirty anteroom to pay their respects. Plainclothes Pakistani police loitered there too, casting an eye on every person who went into the malik’s chambers; Nadar Khan’s name was often mentioned in connection with all sorts of unsavory dealings on the Northwest Frontier. Outside his room stood four Afridi bodyguards with bandoleers and Kalashnikov rifles.

Nadar Khan was sitting on a soiled, unmade bed with a towel around his neck when I entered his air-conditioned room. On the table beside him was a half-eaten dinner, including a vat of sweets being devoured by flies. He didn’t seem bothered by the intrusion, however. “Salaam aleikum” he called to me, raising his thick black eyebrows with a lively smile. He was wearing a white shalwar kameez and yellow vest, and playing with prayer beads. I was struck by his impressive turban and kullah resting on a shelf next to a plastic, heart-shaped sign with gold lettering that said in English, “God Bless Our Home.” A Western-style suit hung from a nail on the wall. On the floor in the corner was a cheap cardboard suitcase with a First Class sticker on it. In the eyes of his tribesmen in the anteroom, such objects implied a certain wealth and sophistication.

Nadar Khan had the dark skin and lilting, clicking accent of a Punjabi. He spoke passable English and was pleased to tell his life story to a foreign journalist. I was trying to cultivate Nadar Khan. This leader of eighty thousand Zakha Khel Afridis was a useful man to know: his word and written orders carried more weight in the Khyber Tribal Agency than those of the Pakistani authorities. When you traveled up the Khyber Pass in a vehicle owned by Nadar Khan, nobody questioned your permit, and the police just waved you on at the checkpoints.

To hear Nadar Khan tell it, he was an Afghan patriot who supported the mujahidin without restraint but who nevertheless, on account of his great political skill, was able to maintain cordial relations with the Communist regime in Kabul at the same time. Nadar Khan had lived nearly half of his fifty-nine years in Afghanistan and the rest of them in Pakistan, and he saw himself as the ultimate go-between, loyal to all sides without betraying anyone’s confidence. Among the many gifts in his palatial fortress in Landi Kotal was a 9 mm nickel-plated Makarov pistol given to him by Najib when the latter was head of KhAD and a Belgian 7.62 mm rifle with a gold-plated inscription from “General Zia ul-Haq, President of Pakistan.”

“All the mujahidin of the seven parties are my brothers,” Nadar Khan said, “and we allow all the refugees to go through our land in Tirah…. The Russians are godless people. Our mothers do not weep when their sons are killed by Russians. Instead they are proud.” He said that the kidnappings for ransom of mujahidin in the Bazaar Valley were the work of Soviet agents, perhaps of the Kuki Khel, which he had nothing to do with. “The KGB has its best agents in Washington, London, and Tirah,” he advised me with a knowing stare. “The Russians and Najib try to influence us through scholarships and the supply of guns. We took the guns, of course, but did not play the game of KGB.”

Still, Nadar Khan could not deny that he continued to own 150 acres of property in Kabul and Jalalabad that the regime had not confiscated. And he claimed to be in personal contact with Najib, and to be helping him arrange to leave office peacefully.

“Najib is little in mind, but he is not little in body,” he said, laughing. “You know what they call Najib in Farsi? Gow, the ox. My son, Miraiz, I call him Little Najib. Look at him.” Nadar Khan pointed out his teenage son, who, with his short, massive build, did in fact resemble the Afghan ruler. “I know Najib well,” Nadar Khan went on. “His father used to work as a transport manager in the Kissakhani Bazaar here in Peshawar. His sister is the wife of Mamul Khan, a great friend of my father’s. Najib will try to hold on in Kabul, but he will fail. Then he will come and live with me in my palace in Landi Kotal. This will provide a peaceful solution for Afghanistan.”

Nadar Khan’s fort in Landi Kotal, with its tomato patch, rose bushes, private mosque, and icebox stocked with Coca-Cola and Fanta, was certainly nicer than the place I was staying in the Valley of Tirah Bazaar. But the idea of the Afghan ruler’s spending the rest of his days there struck me as comic. Inside its long walls, the fort had several locked gates, past which I was not permitted to go. Some of Khalis’s mujahidin and Pakistanis said Nadar Khan kept smuggled Russian vodka and other contraband there. Once, Nadar Khan’s tribesmen had kidnapped a Khalis commander in a reprisal for the destruction of a vodka consignment by the mujahidin, and delicate negotiations had been necessary to secure his release.

After I had interviewed the Zakha Khel leader, Abdul Qadir told me, “Nadar Khan is talking out of all sides of his mouth and he is only thinking of money.” Qadir grimaced, as if he had just tasted something rotten. Though Qadir had a truce with the Zakha Khel Afridis and they were providing his mujahidin with food and lodging in Tirah, his feelings toward them were only slightly less hostile than those he harbored toward the Kuki Khel. “Now we must bargain with Nadar Khan. But after the war is finished, when mujahidin have power in Kabul, then we will deal with Nadar Khan and all of his people. The Afridis will be sorry that they ever made friends with Russia. Mujahidin suffer much and we forget nothing.” Qadir added that he hoped the Soviets would bomb Landi Kotal, since that “would teach Nadar Khan and his people a lesson.”

Lying in the jute bed atop my nylon sleeping bag that night in the Afridi fort, I knew that the hospitality extended to us was the result of chilling bargains over vodka and hostages and double-dealing with the Soviets, and that at some point in the not too distant future, Lurang and Jihan-zeb — or some other of Khalis’s men — might come here to shoot and butcher the very people who had fed and sheltered us.

We were up at 4:30 A.M. and, thankfully, our Afridi hosts offered us only bread and green tea. It was still dark when we left the fort and began walking. After several hours we passed between two low mountains and entered a rock-strewn wadi shaded with mulberry trees. In a moment the Bazaar Valley was just a hazy memory, like a half-dream between sleep and waking.

The wadi led ever upward in a grueling, twisting incline, steep enough to make me out of breath, but not quite so steep as to provide any visible goal or summit. The trees gave me hope that a stream ran nearby, but there was none. After a while, Lurang and Jihan-zeb were practically pulling and dragging me along.

“A little more and we will be in Afghanistan,” Wakhil said, trying to encourage me. He pointed to a vague area where the terrain leveled out.

Now Wakhil, Jihan-zeb, and Lurang quickened their pace, leaving me far behind. I struggled alone for half an hour until I saw the three of them sitting on a flat table of land in the distance. When I reached them I collapsed at their feet. They all laughed.

“Afghanistan!” Wakhil exclaimed to me, pointing a finger at the ground, which he stamped with his foot.

Behind me, the wadi we had just ascended fell away in a swirl of trees and gravel to reveal a panorama of mountains. For all their gray and dull green barrenness, they had a temperate, recognizable flavor. But ahead was something out of a sci-fi film: jagged ranks of sawtooth peaks that, despite the nearby web of lush riverbeds, seemed even more rain-starved than the land we were leaving. This was the so-called Durand Line, negotiated between the amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, and a special British envoy, Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893 as the border that would separate Afghanistan from the Northwest Frontier of British India. The Durand Line is usually described in books as an arbitrarily drawn division that was not based on particular geographical features, so it was difficult to know when you had crossed it. But every time I went over the Afghan border, it seemed fairly logical and straightforward: the border ran along a watershed where the landscapes were noticeably different on each side. I saw no water here at the moment, but the autumn rains would bring plenty of streams, and the small plateau on which we were sitting would be where the waters split into two opposite, downward directions. We were now roughly twenty-five miles southwest of the border station at Torcham, beyond Landi Kotal. We had walked a total of twelve hours since the day before, zigzagging in a direction parallel to the border so that we might cross where there were no regime troops.

I groaned as Wakhil and the others stood up; that usually meant it was time to move on.

“No, you can sit for a while,” Wakhil said. “We only go to pray.”