Soldiers of God

4 Noble Savages

THE MUJAHIDIN dropped down on their knees and moved their hands lightly over the ground until their palms and fingertips were coated with dust. Holding their blackened palms before their faces, they each began to recite from the Koran:

On this parched and stony plate of earth, without a trickle of water in sight, they smeared their temples and foreheads, purifying themselves with the dust. Then each, at his own pace, began moving prayer beads through his fingers, silently mouthing the words “Allahu akbar” (God is great) 34 times, “Subhan iVaha” (God is pure) 33 times, and “Hamd-u-lilah” (Praise be to God) 33 times, so that the name of God was repeated 100 times. Five times throughout the day they performed the service.

My interpreter, Wakhil, had studied Arabic in the course of becoming a mullah, but the other two could not have understood much, or any, of what they recited. (Pukhtu, though employing the Arabic script, is no closer to Arabic than French is to English.) But as with Hebrew in the mouths of many Jews of the Diaspora, the incomprehensibility of those harsh, ancient gutturals seemed only to increase the power of the language over my bodyguards, Lurang and Jihan-zeb, whose faces were flushed with awe and tranquility.

I had traveled in enough Moslem countries to cease being enamored of such rituals. I had already seen these prayers performed many more times in my life than their Christian or Jewish equivalents, and I no longer found them strange or exotic. Nor was I blind to the hypocrisies that so often accompanied religious fervor. To me, the monologue of the Koran had always symbolized the sterile authoritarianism of the East, where all public debate was drowned out. Arabic (and Persian too) was a language I disdained, even though I knew the alphabet and many simple phrases. Like Greek, Arabic struck me as a flowery, ostentatious language structured for poetry and demagoguery, but without Greek’s flare for intellectual subtlety. Concerning the peoples of the Middle and Near Eastern deserts, I had always subscribed to the opinion of T. E. Lawrence, who in Seven Pillars of Wisdom wrote: “Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible options to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity.” In short, I was cynical toward the culture of Islam, and the more Islamic countries I visited and the more I listened to the relativist thinking of the region’s experts in the media and the State Department, the more cynical I became — even though I knew my attitudes might be viewed by others as merely the prejudices and self-justifications of an American Jew who spoke Hebrew and had lived for several years in Israel.

Afghanistan, however, was a new and radical experience for me. The whole psychology of the Islamic faith was different here from how I had ever seen it. True, the awful denigration of women was both unjustifiable and tragic: male-dominated cultures tend to be emotionally underdeveloped as well as intellectually sterile. Still, because Afghans harbored no political insecurities and were more relaxed in their faith than Arabs or Iranians, Islam in Afghanistan manifested a certainty and unintimidating dynamism that did not exist in Iran, Pakistan, or any of the Arab countries I had visited. It was only in Afghanistan that I was able — at least I think I was — to see Islam objectively for the first time.

Religion in Iran and the Shiite suburbs of south Beirut possessed fury. In Iran, tens of thousands prayed en masse, reciting the words, syllable by heated syllable, in unison, begetting a collective hysteria reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies. The cries of Allahu akbar carried a shrill, medieval, bloodcurdling ring. This was Islam’s perverse reaction to the political challenges of the twentieth century: to the pressures of nationhood; to the West’s military, economic, and cultural penetration of the Middle East; and to the creation of a Western-style Jewish state in its midst. But the young men with whom I was traveling in Afghanistan were, in an emotional sense, free and ignorant of those events. Afghanistan had never been industrialized, let alone colonized or penetrated much by outsiders. Unlike the Iranians, who seemed to pray just as fervently, the Afghans had never been seduced by the West and so had no reason now to violently reject it: Afghanistan did not require a resurgence of faith, for the Afghans had never lost it. Unlike most people in the Middle East, the Afghans were psychologically sure of themselves. Soviet bombs were the Afghans’ first and only contact with the modern world. And even toward the Soviets, who had killed Afghans on a scale that rendered Western crimes against Arabs and Iranians statistically infinitesimal, the Afghans cultivated a simpler, less personalized hatred, one that did not reduce noncombatants to enemies the way the Middle Eastern terrorists did.

Away from the tensions of the refugee camps in Pakistan, Islam had infused hope into the Afghan resistance without being too politicized by it.

In Pakistan, Islam was imposed from above, as a glue to hold together an artificially constructed nation of feuding ethnic groups. The religious passion that Zia sought for his people was something the Afghans had already inculcated in their bones without realizing it and without the need of an Islamic republic. Once inside Afghanistan, Islam, like so many of the customs of these mountains, existed in a time vacuum — in vitro, like a museum piece or laboratory specimen — purified of what the twentieth century had done to it in Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere. Islam may not have responded well to modern pressures, but at least now I could respect it for what it was originally intended to be — something I couldn’t do before.

Racked with thirst and fatigue, I watched in admiration as my companions spiritually and, it seemed, physically refreshed themselves with that dust. Of course, my respect was based on what I already knew about these young men rather than on what I was actually seeing. The image of Pathan tribesmen in Afghanistan rubbing their faces with dust and mouthing the name of Allah one hundred times was graphically indistinguishable from the many images of Moslem fanaticism. But because I had spoken with these mujahidin, and knew why they smiled and what they laughed at and what made them angry, because of the well of gratitude I felt when Wakhil said, after his prayers, “Don’t worry, Babar Khan, we will find water for you,” I knew that prayer had softened them, not made them harder or more intolerant.

What I knew most of all was that for Lurang, Jihan-zeb, and Wakhil religion was a private matter, just as it is for most Americans. They never spoke about it to me unless I asked, and they never proselytized. When I told Wakhil that I was Jewish, his only comment was: “Jews and Christians are people of the Book.” (Another mujahid had said, “Are Jews anti-Soviet?” After thinking for a second, I said yes.) At no time did these so-called Moslem fundamentalists make me feel uncomfortable. Never were they overbearing. These were not the sorts of perceptions that would have survived the brutal reductions of the television camera, the narrow boundaries of hard-news writing, or the quantifications of the think-tank analysts in Washington and London. What the American public really needed to know about the guerrillas it was supporting with billions of taxpayers’ dollars could never be provided by many of the people being paid to tell us.

It was only a fifteen-minute walk to water, which was provided at a camp of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s mujahidin. How like Hekmatyar to have a base just inside the Afghan border! He could then make the claim of having fighters inside while still being far removed from the fighting. Hekmatyar’s party (the other Hizb-i-Islami) was the only one of the seven resistance organizations that truly deserved the label “fundamentalist,” inasmuch as it was anti-Western and totalitarian. Because of its formidable public relations machine in Pakistan, which was funded by Zia, the party garnered frequent attention in the foreign press, despite the fact that the allegiance of its commanders to Hekmatyar was dubious and its field presence inside Afghanistan and influence in the refugee camps overrated. Were Hekmatyar eventually to triumph, it would happen only through Pakistani support and intervention.

Up close, Hekmatyar’s base resembled a stage set for a guerrilla camp rather than a real one. Rarely had I seen mujahidin who looked so well rested and clean, with perfectly wrapped turbans and new shiny leather bandoleers and shalwar kameezes. The buildings they inhabited were made of real stone rather than the mud brick and canvas of the other mujahidin camps, and on the floors were expensive, hand-stitched oriental carpets. They had new field phones, walkie-talkies, binoculars, ceramic plates, and fresh dates to eat, courtesy of Hekmatyar’s Saudi patrons. I filled my stomach with the dates, which Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb refused to touch. Hekmatyar’s men displayed an intense interest in my canteen and rucksack. They wanted to know where they could buy such equipment.

“Tourists,” Wakhil muttered angrily as we left Hekmatyar’s camp, after I had finished eating the dates. “From now on, you will meet real mujahidin.”

We followed a wadi for the next few hours until we had to climb a mountain just to meet our trail again. “Mines,” explained Wakhil. That part of the wadi was strewn with them, and it was safer to go around it, even if that meant climbing up one thousand feet and then down again. It occurred to me that the mujahidin were usually not the victims of mine blasts because they had mapped out all the trails in their minds. The peasant farmers, and their children in particular, were much less knowledgeable about the trails and the mines than the mujahidin.

Then the easy part ended.

Just as I was getting tired, Lurang, wearing a sadistic smile, pointed to a line of hills that rippled upward until they merged with a steep escarpment covered with thorns and cactus that led to a ridge about ten thousand feet up. This was the first of a series of mountain walls that would take us to the sixteen-thousand-foot, ice-flecked granite platforms of what the international maps called Safed Koh (Persian for White Mountain), a range that formed the border between Nangarhar province and a sliver of Pakistani tribal territory surrounded by Afghanistan on three sides.

Babur, the Mongol king and poet, wrote: “The Safed Koh runs along the south of Nangarhar… no riding-road crosses it; nine torrents issue from it. It is called Safed Koh because its snow never lessens; none falls in the lower parts of its valleys, a half-day’s journey from the snow-line. Many places along it have an excellent climate; its waters are cold and need no ice.” Instead of calling it Safed Koh, Pathans use the Pukhtu word for White Mountain, Spinghar. The waters Babur referred to were in the valley on the other side of the series of hills we had to cross.

At the top of the first hill I fell to the ground under a rucksack that suddenly felt as though it were weighted with stones. Except for the dates and the grease-soaked bread at the fort in Tirah, I had not eaten for thirty hours. I had finished the last of the canteen water, and we were still several hours from the cold waters of the valley. My eyes stung from salty sweat. Without being aware of it, I was licking sweat from my forehand in order to soothe my throat, irritated from dust and lack of water. As I came across the ridge before beginning another climb, one of the straps of my rucksack tore. I cursed. Jihan-zeb grabbed it by the other strap and surged ahead up the hill with the others, laughing at my weakness. Like the Tibetan lama who led Kim into Kashmir, the Pathans were hillmen, growing in strength in proportion to the difficulty of the terrain. Even Wakhil, so small and vulnerable looking in Landi Kotal, seemed to acquire stature as he drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and panted, astonished.

I was so hungry and tired that I was hallucinating into Kim.

At the top of the next brow I allowed myself to drop to the ground a second time, thinking we had reached some sort of summit and would now be able to descend into the valley. But we were only on another shaved green platform below the main spur, and there was no shade. Again Kipling’s novel came to mind: Here one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile!

The next few hours were a blur of agony. On the downhill march my companions left the trail and bounded earthward on a forty-five-degree angle over a treacherous, rocky slope, rifles and my rucksack clanging against their shoulders, while I hobbled along the path, knees quaking, thinking that if mountain goats could talk and think like men, they would be equal to the mujahidin. Then a trickling noise sent chills through my body: the sound of running water. In the failing, dust-stained light I could make out an assemblage of pudding-stone houses at the bottom of the hill that merged with the dun-colored soil like sand castles on a beach. The trail became so steep and my knees so sore as I descended toward the village that I slid the last fifty yards through the packed dust into a mud embankment, which was channeling the spring water I had heard into a young fruit orchard. I must have looked like a chimney sweep.

A pitcher of water appeared magically out of the twilight, held by an old man with a stringy gray beard and apakol on his head. He squatted down in the mud and handed it to me.

As I started to drink he began yelling at me, raising a finger in the air. “Khabarnegah, khabarnegah!” It was the Pukhtu word for journalist.

“We told this man you are a journalist,” explained Wakhil, who along with Lurang and Jihan-zeb was washing his feet and hands in the irrigation ditch in preparation for evening prayers.

The old man exploded into a loud babble of Pukhtu that sounded like an insult. His contorted, sunburned face was inches away from me, suspended in the enveloping darkness. Every time I took another gulp of water or rinsed my face and hands he shook his head in a mocking manner. When Wakhil came over after the prayers were finished, the old man was silent for a moment, then started screaming again.

“He says his name is Gholam Issa Khan.” Wakhil had to shout so that I could hear his translation above the graybeard’s ranting. I struggled to retrieve my notebook. Two loud, simultaneous voices now pounded at my head. I was covered with dust and lightheaded from hunger. This incident gained a mystical quality in my mind; it was like listening to the voices of your own conscience.

“The Communists don’t like my God and his messenger,” the old man said. “They tried to wipe out my way of life. But my God gives me strength. My God always helps me. America is godless but America is good because America gives me guns to fight Communists. After we drive the shuravi [Soviet forces] out of Afghanistan, we will drive them out of Bukhara and Samarkand and Tashkent too. Allahu akbar!”

“How old are you?” I asked. I wanted to get his story straight from the beginning. The old man thought for a moment. I wondered if anybody had ever asked him this question.

“Forty,” Wakhil translated.

“Forty? He looks like seventy.”

“These people are not like you,” Wakhil said. “They don’t know exactly when they were born. Why do you always ask such questions about numbers and dates? What does it matter?”

Wakhil was angry. Maybe the man really was forty — or at least thought he was. Lurang and Jihan-zeb were both ten years younger than I, yet they looked older.

The old man continued to shout: “Taraki people tried to rape my wife, to stop me from praying. I have thirty hectares. Taraki people want to take ten hectares away from me. They say my daughters must go to Communist school. I say I kill you first!” He shook his fist. “Shuravi come with planes, helicopters, boom, boom. This, this” — he pointed in all directions — “all finished. We go to Pakistan. Then mujahidin come, shuravi leave. We make all this, this” — again he pointed — “all over again. Again bomb, again make.”

The graybeard jabbed furiously at my notebook, as if to say, “Write, write.” I wrote. Then for the first time he smiled. I took out my camera and aimed it at him.

“Ne, ne,” he shouted, covering his face with his hands.

“You must not take this man’s picture,” Wakhil said. “This man says his picture is only for God to see.”

Behind the graybeard’s frantic bursts of speech lay a familiar, well-documented story. Had I been traveling in South Africa, the West Bank, or Lebanon, where quantitatively the destruction and suffering were a mere fraction of what it was in Afghanistan, I would not even have taken out my notebook, because the contents of his story would already have formed part of the well of knowledge available to all serious newspaper readers. In those places, books were written about nuances because the basics were already known from the daily press. In Afghanistan, the basics had yet to be proclaimed. So the most fundamental feature of its history, which has never been fully appreciated, must be set down here.

While the country had always been horribly poor, dirty, and underdeveloped, Afghans had never known very much political repression until after the April 27, 1978, coup that brought the sixty-one-year-old poet and self-declared Marxist idealist Nur Mohammed Taraki to power. Until the 1970s, Afghanistan was relatively civilized by the standards of Amnesty International. The soldiers’ knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries, was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside Kabul.

Taraki’s coup changed all that. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. (That’s 7,000 more people than were killed during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.) Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. The keystones of Taraki’s revolution were land reform and the extension of secular education into the villages. By Western standards, this was a salutary idea in the abstract. But it was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets, who through Taraki wanted to transform Afghanistan into a satellite.

“Land reform” to the graybeard Gholam Issa Khan and to Din Mohammed, Abdul Haq, Abdul Qadir, and others meant soldiers breaking into houses, raping or trying to rape the women, defecating on the dishes, executing the local mullah and headman, and confiscating land in a haphazard manner that enraged everyone, benefited no one, and reduced food production. It was the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese destruction of Tibet all over again, with hundreds of thousands of people affected. As in China and Tibet, it was perpetrated in darkness, with barely a scratch of interest from the normally aggressive Western media. The mujahidin revolt against the Kabul authorities and the refugee exodus to Pakistan were ignited not by the Soviet invasion, as most people in the West suppose, but by Taraki’s land reform program, which represented the first instance of organized, nationwide repression in Afghanistan’s modern history.

Taraki fell in mid-September 1979, toppled by his fellow Communist conspirator Hafizullah Amin, who was described by foreign diplomats as a “brutal psychopath.” He had Taraki strangled and Taraki’s family thrown into Pul-i-Charki prison. The mujahidin rebellion gathered strength as a reaction to Amin’s crescendo of purges, mass executions, and land confiscations. It was a war that pitted an urban elite against rural peasants. The East bloc, contrary to its stated ideology, was behind the urban elite. “During 1978 and 1979 the people of Afghanistan were forced into a bloody struggle to defend themselves against incorporation into a new form of colonial empire ruled from Moscow,” wrote Henry S. Bradsher, a former Associated Press correspondent.

When the Soviet army invaded on December 27, 1979, it was not so much a bold, new aggression as a last-ditch effort by the Kremlin to save a nascent satellite from being overthrown by Moslem guerrillas, as a result of the overzealousness of the Kremlin’s own hand-picked men. To an extent, one could argue that the Soviet Union won and lost Afghanistan in 1978 and 1979, when few in the West were paying attention. The more than one million deaths and the planting of millions of land mines in the 1980s were merely part of the long, drawn-out, bloody aftermath of an already foregone conclusion.

Taraki’s and Amin’s oppression had depopulated Gholam Issa Khan’s mud brick village and sent him and his kinsmen to refugee camps in Pakistan. The two leaders were Khalqis, sons of poor families who were members of an extremist, Pukhtuspeaking Communist faction called Khalq (Masses). The Soviet invasion replaced Amin with a more suave, moderate brand of Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal. Karmal, then fifty years old, was born into a wealthy Kabul family and had been educated in the capital’s foreign schools. He had helped form Parcham (Banner), an urban, Dari-speaking Communist faction that favored a more conciliatory approach toward the peasants. It was sometimes said that had Karmal and his Parcham allies been in power in the late 1970s instead of the more brutal Khalqi fanatics, land reform might have been implemented more intelligently, the mujahidin revolt might have lost momentum, and Afghanistan might have evolved into a quiescent Soviet satellite state like Bulgaria.

Karmal released political prisoners and relaxed the repression. But it was too late. Gholam Issa Khan and tens of thousands of others like him had already joined such mujahidin groups as Jamiat and Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami and had liberated large chunks of the countryside. Karmal’s Soviet backers responded with mines, aerial bombardments, and ground troop assaults. Gholam Issa Khan’s village had been destroyed and rebuilt several times before I saw it. It was uninhabited. But now, with the guerrillas in complete control of the area, Gholam Issa Khan and a few of his kinsmen and their wives came back periodically throughout the year to plant and harvest wheat, maize, and some other crops. The graybeard’s story was a dramatic one. Still, with so much land to traverse and so relatively few journalists inside, I could have been the first to stop at his village and talk to him.

Gholam Issa Khan took us to an earthen house supported by hardwood beams. A ladder led to an upper level, where jute beds were arranged around a dusty carpet. Under the dim white light of a hissing gas lamp, one-eyed Jihan-zeb, using a rusted needle and thread, began repairing the torn strap of my rucksack without my asking. He looked up and smiled at me. I felt shamed, helpless, and grateful, all at the same time. Someone brought moldy, moth-eaten pillows for us. Through the beams, I saw a brilliant, breathing starscape. As sore and dirty as I was, I felt like a baby in a cradle and nearly fell asleep. A boy came with a brass pitcher of water and loaves of flat bread in a bundle of cloth. I moved over to the edge of the carpet when the boy brought a large bowl of thin, sour goat’s milk curd, called shlombeh. We took turns drinking from it. The boy came with a second bowl and then with a kettle of green tea, all of which I slurped greedily. I remember the aromatic smell of burning deodar wood from the fire. After the boy cleared the carpet, Wakhil, ever the mullah, led the group in prayers.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the drone of helicopter gunships dropping “fishing flares” in the black sky over the mud brick village: huge, space-age insects disturbing the silence. The Reagan administration’s delivery of over a thousand Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahidin since 1986 had forced the Soviets into flying only after dark or at high altitudes. My stomach knotted. Gholam Issa Khan lifted his head for a moment, looked around, then fell back to sleep with a dismissive wave of his hand. The helicopters were a nightly occurrence for him. The others just grunted.

Morning found us in a paradise lost. This lush valley, arrayed with walnut, mulberry, black plum, and oriental plane trees and noisy with sparrows and magpies, had become a zone of death. Bomb-cratered fields lay fallow. Antipersonnel mines lay not far from the path. Once-soaring minarets were cut off at their midsections, and village after mud brick village that we passed through was nothing but a roofless jigsaw of collapsed walls adjoining mounds of rubble. I had seen similar places in eastern Turkey leveled by earthquakes: pathetic little toy towns that looked as though an unruly child had smashed them during a tantrum. But here was something else: clusters of tattered white flags flying on swaying bamboo poles signifying the graves of shaheedan — mujahidin martyred by the Soviets and Afghan Communists.

Still, as Wakhil never stopped pointing out, the province of Nangarhar was a beautiful land. Arriving from the arid north, Babur had observed: “In Nangarhar another world came to view — other grasses, other trees, other animals, other birds, and other manners and customs of clan and horde. We were amazed, and truly there was ground for amaze.”

We stopped by a stream, and Jihan-zeb constructed a bath for me with a pile of stones. I took out my spare shalwar kameez from my rucksack and changed while in the water. Soaking wet in my new clothes, I washed the others by smashing and rubbing them against the stones. The men didn’t wash, but they looked and smelled the same as when they left Peshawar: nothing at all seemed to affect them.

Walnuts and dried mulberries appeared with the curds at meals now. And maize too, which Jihan-zeb slowly turned in the fire. He held his whole hand in the flames for several seconds, turning the corn and smiling at me. Barking in Pukhtu, he beckoned Wakhil to translate.

“Jihan-zeb asks if you know why mujahidin are brave and feel no pain.”

“No, why?” I asked.

“Because mujahid is a man who has already given himself to God. Though he still breathes, he is like the dead. He isn’t afraid.”

Jihan-zeb smiled again. His simpleminded expression was like that of a fanatic. He reminded me of the Iranian youths at the Gulf war front, with headbands bearing the inscription “Ready for martyrdom” — the kind who, in slightly altered circumstances, were capable of switching from naive kindness to cruelty, and butchery even.

In some cases, the mujahidin had been guilty of just that.

The guerrillas routinely executed enemy pilots upon capture (until American advisers prevailed upon them to at least interrogate the airmen first). In a region of Paktia province controlled by a Khalis commander, Jallaluddin Haqqani, they once took a group of Afghan Communist troops prisoner, lined them up in a ditch, and shot them in the head. After the negotiated surrender of the Communist border post at Torcham at the beginning of 1989, mujahidin alleged to belong to the Khalis organization killed the disarmed Communist soldiers and mutilated their bodies. Still, in most cases, the guerrillas held prisoners, whether Soviets or Afghans, and forced them to survive in the same Spartan manner as their captors. Documented accounts of mujahidin savagery were relatively rare and involved enemy troops only. Their cruelty toward civilians was unheard of during the war, while Soviet cruelty toward civilians was common. On January 16, 1988, for instance, after Soviet troops and an Afghan Communist militia unit captured the village of Kolagu in Paktia province from the mujahidin, they bound together twelve villagers, seven of whom were children, inside the local mosque before they burned it to the ground; nine of the twelve died. (Amnesty International later confirmed the details of the incident.) “Civilian massacres [perpetrated by Soviet and Afghan Communist troops] like the one at My Lai were the norm rather than the aberration,” said David Isby, a military analyst and the author of several books about the war in Afghanistan.

To judge by the overall record, Jihan-zeb and his fellow resistance fighters were not fanatics but simply coarse peasants reacting to the invasion of their land in an uncompromising way. Because the Afghans lacked the material wealth that people elsewhere are terrified of losing, they were able to go on fighting and suffering. That is how they saved Afghanistan from the humiliating fate of so many countries in Eastern Europe. (Whether the Afghan Communist regime falls is to some extent beside the point, since the countryside will always be held by the resistance.)

By the standards of the Middle East, the mujahidin were paragons of virtue. Yet because they were so primitive, they were assumed to be barbaric. And the glasnost-happy Soviet media were masters at playing on this confusion of characteristics, weaving into their reports of Soviet battle losses a sequence of manufactured tales of mujahidin savagery.

The landscape became waterless again as we plodded through a rolling sandstone desert that made me think of mounds of ground curry. Then we began climbing up sandy slopes sprinkled with thorns, cactus, and the odd pine tree or two. Another day of thirst and sore knees — the fourth of our trek — brought us through the tree line to the Spinghar command post of the Khalis mujahidin.

Small bands of guerrillas were spread out in canvas pup tents over the chain of snow-dusted granite peaks and plateaus. From there they could look down on the Kabul-Jalalabad-Torcham highway, the ten-thousand-man Soviet armored division at Samar Khel, and the Soviet-occupied city of Jalalabad in the vast plain thousands of feet below.

It was a perfect guerrilla setup: from the air, the tiny green tents were practically indistinguishable from the stubble of dark lichen. The mujahidin had mounted captured Soviet-made heavy machine guns in ditches dug into the spurs, from where they could bag a low-flying gunship with a lucky shot. (It was near here that Khalis’s men had shot down and captured the first Soviet pilot of the war, in July 1981.) The region’s commander, Habibullah, lived with eleven other men in a tent about fifteen feet long and seven feet wide.

In the space of a few hours, I had gone from extreme heat to extreme cold. My sweat-soaked body was suddenly shivering under my cotton shalwar kameez and the woolen patou that Wakhil wrapped around me. I was reminded of Arnold Toynbee’s description of Afghanistan: “a Turkish bath on a gigantic scale, with the chilly room at an altitude of 7,000 feet and upwards, opening out of the steam room at 3,000 feet and under.” Just as we arrived at Habibullah’s tent, dark clouds tumbled over the plateau and the sky exploded in thunder. The first hailstones hit the ground, and the dozen men huddled inside with patous to keep warm. The temperature was now below freezing, and the mujahidin were without socks, boots, jackets, and sleeping bags. As they watched the sharp pellets of ice rattle on the ground, they smiled and looked grateful. Wakhil explained to me that the mujahidin called hail “Allah’s mine sweeper,” since the force of the pellets was often enough to set off the butterfly mines.

It was pathetic. Though by the late 1980s U.S. taxpayers were aiding the Afghan resistance to the tune of $400 million annually, the guerrillas still had no mine-clearing equipment, and the walkie-talkies that Commander Habibullah used to communicate with his units throughout Spinghar and adjacent valleys were cheap transceivers whose signals the Soviets could easily intercept. Out of habit, the mujahidin still relied on runners carrying handwritten notes through the mountains, a method that provided much tighter security. When better quality Japanese transceivers finally did arrive, they came with English-language instructions that nobody in these mountains could understand. You would have thought that someone in the massive American bureaucracy dealing with the largest covert operation since the Vietnam war would have had the instructions translated into Pukhtu and photocopied. The aid program certainly seemed more impressive from Washington than it did from Spinghar.

The racket of pellets on the canvas grew louder, and wind ruffled the tent, which was beginning to feel like a ship at sea. The mujahidin inside ranged in age from teenagers to old men, and they all had been living together on this isolated peak for years already. In guerrilla armies there is no recruitment period, and some of the men had been away from their families since 1978, when the Taraki regime first forced them underground. I noted the disparity in their ages but was not particularly conscious of it, since they themselves didn’t appear to be. They all wore the same shalwar kameezes and pakols. The younger ones had lived through the same experiences as the old men, and although they lacked white hair and wrinkles, the look in their eyes was just as old.

The hail turned into intermittent freezing rain. As evening fell, the oldest-looking mujahid, white-bearded Yar Mohammed, silently walked out of the tent to the edge of the escarpment, where the gusts of icy wind were fiercest. Split curtains of cloud flew quickly across the fairy tale light of the heavens, as though in a scene from the Bible. The old man sat on a clump of white hail and rinsed his bare feet with a pitcher of cold water. Then he bowed down on his knees in the wet ice and began to repeat Allahu akbar thirty-four times, his hands and forehead falling to the earth, where he kept them fastened while softly, almost inaudibly whispering the name of God to himself. He was absolutely rigid against the wind. Though barefoot and without apatou, he never once shivered. Inside the open-flapped tent, tucked deep in my sleeping bag, I shivered just looking at him.

What could you say about this spindly old man quietly praying barefoot in the ice? Compare him to a sword swallower or a yogi who walks over hot coals? As with Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb praying in the dirt, a visual report of this man’s behavior would only portray him as a fanatic.

Mujahidin life, and that of the Pathans in particular, was stark. Likewise, my thoughts and experiences over these last few days were intense but not varied — like the act of survival itself. Variety was more easily conveyed in journalistic prose than intensity because variety was horizontal, and reporters were conditioned to cover stories horizontally, aspect by aspect. But what did you do with people who were essentially uncomplicated? The mujahidin had few aspects to their personalities, but each aspect required boring deep down to a level of experience that went beyond speech itself. “Damn it, there’s nothing you can say about the muj. You have to feel them,” said Tony O’Brien, a photographer friend.

No one else paid much attention to Yar Mohammed’s praying. The mujahidin, even when in a cohesive group like this one, often prayed alone, whenever each man felt like it. One after another they performed their evening prayers, if not alone, then in groups of two or three. Some shouted; others, like Yar Mohammed, just whispered. Up here on this plateau, in the hail and freezing rain, each man communicated with God in his own style. The chanting crowd in the mosque was absent, and the Koran seemed less like a monologue. This was as close to democracy as one was likely to get in central Asia.

In the gas-lit darkness, we sat around the sides of the tent and ate a meal of flat bread, raw turnips, onions, and green tea. Away from the villages there were no goats and therefore no curds. The only luxury was the water pipe, assembled from a brass pitcher and bamboo pole. After the repast, Commander Habibullah read a passage from the Koran while we all listened. It was one of the few occasions when everyone prayed together.

Habibullah was constantly busy, writing messages, communicating by walkie-talkie, or going off to a nearby tent on an inspection or to confer. He appeared efficient, competent, and unfriendly — disdainful of the world I seemed to represent. Only very late at night did he agree to talk to me.

Habibullah, one of Abdul Qadir’s top lieutenants, had a dark Indian’s complexion, a long black beard, and an aquiline nose. He reminded me of a Sikh warrior rather than a Pathan, and in the dim, smoky light he looked like a Greek or Syrian saint in an early Christian fresco. Habibullah was twenty-six years old and from the Kuchi tribe, a nomadic branch of the Pathans. Being a Kuchi explained a lot about his demeanor. The British writer Peter Levi, in an erudite travelogue about Afghanistan, The Light Garden of the Angel King, described the Kuchis this way: “Kuchi means travelers and they are hard to know. We found them stoical about disease and distrustful of the local doctors, and in their tents their behavior was regal.” Erect and motionless, Habibullah spoke impassively through Wakhil’s translation.

As in the case of Gholam Issa Khan, in the late 1970s Taraki’s Communist regime seized Kuchi land in Nangarhar and hauled the local mullah and headman of Habibullah’s nomadic encampment off to prison. They were never seen again. Many of his kinsmen fled to refugee camps in Pakistan. Habibullah joined Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami to fight the Communists south of Jalalabad, near the town of Rodat Baru, where his family used to live. He described how Soviet troops entered the Kuchi camp in 1982, “robbing houses, killing the goats, taking money and the cows.” Then this Kuchi area was bombed from the air, and all the irrigation canals were destroyed. “Less than ten people out of two thousand are still left there. Many are in Peshawar, many we don’t know if they are alive or dead.”

About that time, Habibullah returned temporarily to Pakistan, where he married. He now had a wife and two children living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar. Amid strangers in the impersonal, barrackslike arrangement of the sprawling camp, his wife was obliged to wear the veil, something Kuchi women didn’t have to do in Afghanistan, where everyone in the encampment was a close relative. Living as a guerrilla, Habibullah had seen his wife and children only a few times over the years, and he worried about them. He said over a third of the members of his extended family had been killed, “but if we stopped fighting and went to live in the camps in Pakistan, we would all become refugee slaves and the Communists would have everything.”

Habibullah was not vehement or even enthusiastic about what he said. There was an almost bored look in his olive-pit eyes. Jihad was obviously no joy for him, but a fundamental duty that grew out of the unfortunate circumstances of his life. Oppression had forced Habibullah — against his better nature, it seemed — to hate. The Afghans, I was beginning to notice, were not really good haters, not like the kind that existed in Iran, Lebanon, and other places Moslems felt themselves to be oppressed. The differences between those places and Afghanistan were, among other things, politics and urbanization. The mujahidin were not politicized to the degree that Arabs and Iranians were. The Afghan fundamentalists were mainly simple village people, not an angry peasant proletariat that had fled to city slums in search of jobs, as in Iran and Egypt, and in the process had sacrificed their cultural underpinnings. Habibullah had lost a lot, but one thing he hadn’t lost was a sense of who he was.

Scurrying field mice and the drone of helicopter gunships again disturbed my sleep. When Habibullah saw my fear he laughed. It was the only time I ever saw a smile cross his face. He explained to Wakhil that the gunships never came in low over Spinghar anymore because of the enemy’s fear of Stingers. “We don’t have Stingers here,” Habibullah said. “But we always say we do when communicating by radio, which we know they intercept.”

After daybreak the bombs came. The earth vibrated from the thousand-pounders dropped by the fighter jets overhead. Clouds of dust from exploding earth filled the air. The nearest bomb hit several hundred yards away from us and, as it turned out, nobody was hurt. It had been a useless exercise: the jets had taken off from the military air field at Jalalabad, dropped their bombs from about ten thousand feet, and flew home. The jets were flying so high that from the ground they appeared no larger than specks. Even with television-guided missiles — which these planes were not equipped with — hitting a target as small as a pup tent from that altitude is exceedingly difficult. It was another potent illustration of how the Stingers had changed the face of the war. Weighing only thirty pounds, the heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles were mobile and cost only $75,000 apiece, and in two out of three times that they were fired in Afghanistan, a Stinger destroyed a Soviet jet or helicopter that cost about $4 million each. So the Soviet and Afghan government pilots weren’t taking any chances.

Wakhil and I said our goodbyes to Lurang and Jihan-zeb, who would now rejoin Habibullah’s forces on Spinghar for guerrilla sorties in the Jalalabad area. We were headed down into the Kot Valley toward that city. Habibullah gave us a new guide, a raw-boned old man whose name I never found out and who I thought, gratefully, would be unable to move along at the same demanding pace set by Lurang and Jihan-zeb.

I was wrong.

The trek from Spinghar was all downhill and took only five hours, which must have been like a sprint for the mujahidin but was among the most difficult of the marches I made inside. The geezer practically jogged the whole way, holding his Kalashnikov in his hand rather than using the shoulder strap. The entire journey was in a canyon floor along a treacherous mountain stream. After days of walking for hours on almost no water, suddenly I was deluged by it. As we descended toward the plain, the weather became hot again, yet the spring water was as cold as melting snow and filled with sharp stones and pebbles. And it was moving fast. We had to ford the stream twenty-three times (masochistically, I was keeping count). My feet were numb inside my soaking running shoes, but I needed the traction to keep from falling in the water — anyway, our guide was not going to wait for me to take my shoes off and put them on again. Near the bottom of the canyon Wakhil noticed several butterfly mines that the mujahidin had surrounded with stones so a passer-by wouldn’t easily stumble onto them. In such circumstances there would often be other mines in the vicinity that they hadn’t spotted. The old man casually waved at us to come ahead and jogged on, and so did we. After a while I got so tired and out of breath that I stopped thinking about mines. If I was fated to step on one I would, and that was that. My principal fear was the immediate one: falling behind Wakhil and our guide.

The Kot Valley unrolled like a plush green carpet at the foot of Spinghar, a jungly world in sight of the snows. We alighted under a large plane tree on a raised table of earth about a hundred feet over the valley, providing a prospect from which to espy the terrain we were about to enter. A local farmer laid out a rush mat and Turkoman rug for us. His son, wearing a gold Sindhi cap, brought ceramic cups for tea. I took off my shoes and smelly socks and let the hot sun dry my feet while I drank tea under a blue sky on a rug I would have been proud to have in my living room back in Greece. It was the kind of moment that a traveler files away in his mind in order to impress people later on. But what I also remember about that moment was what the farmer told Wakhil about all the irrigation ditches that had been blown up by fighter jets, and the flooding in the valley and malaria outbreak that followed. Malaria, which on the eve of Taraki’s Communist coup in April 1978 was at the point of being eradicated in Afghanistan, had returned with a vengeance, thanks to the stagnant, mosquito-breeding pools caused by the widespread destruction of irrigation systems. Nangarhar was rife with the disease. This was another relatively minor, tedious side effect of the Soviet invasion that lacked drama and would only have numbed newspaper readers if written about or even mentioned in passing — which it never was.

We crossed rice, grain, and maize fields, walking along rebuilt irrigation embankments and down dusty trails partially shaded by apple and apricot trees. It was hot and, for the first time since I left Peshawar, a bit humid too. Almost every mud brick dwelling we saw had been hit by a bomb. Yet more civilians lived here than elsewhere in the Spinghar region, and women in colorful chadors were ubiquitous in the fields, separating the strands of grain and carrying bundles of it on their heads. Only since the end of 1986 had refugees started to come back to the Kot Valley from Pakistan. The upsurge in cultivation was the result of one thing: Stingers. High-altitude Soviet bombing notwithstanding, the missiles were providing enough air cover to frighten away low-flying gunships, allowing some peasant farmers to return and start growing crops. Relief workers in other parts of Afghanistan where the mujahidin had Stingers had also noticed this phenomenon. The antiaircraft missiles were actually putting food in people’s mouths.

We rested again in an apple orchard, and a farmer brought us the best meal I had eaten so far in Afghanistan: curds, lentils, greasy fried eggs, apples, and green tea. The heat, the greenery, the water slowly trickling in the stagnant canals, and the timelessness of the setting evoked a town in the Nile Delta in Egypt.

Our guide took Wakhil and me to meet the commander in the valley. His name was Ashnagur. He was tall and lanky, and with his rifle, bandoleer, and high, bright green turban wrapped tightly around his head he resembled an Afridi bandit. Ashnagur had the visage of a hawk, with a long hooked nose, huge forehead, and black beard. He seemed cocky and reckless. Besides the rifle, he had an old Spanish Star pistol stuck inside his belt with the safety catch off. He was surrounded by about thirty young boys, all armed and constantly staring at him, even though I was the one who was surely the novelty. It was a charisma that rubbed off on me too. Ashnagur hugged me and explained — without my asking — how he would send a prearranged coded signal on the walkie-talkie to Habibullah, announcing my safe arrival. Then he smacked his huge calloused hand on the ground and said, “Sit. I am here to answer your questions.”

Ashnagur was twenty-eight years old, the only child of a peasant couple in a Peshawar refugee camp. Since almost every other Pathan I ever met had at least half a dozen brothers and sisters, growing up as an only child here struck me as a much more intense experience than in my own culture. I wondered if his extreme sociability was a way to compensate for a lonely childhood.

Now Ashnagur seemed to have thirty siblings, all younger and looking up to him as the adored older brother. There was something scary and magical about this band of mujahidin. They suggested a Gypsy troupe, a Central American terrorist outfit, a Puerto Rican street gang, and the orphan thieves of Oliver Twist all rolled into one. Their Kalashnikov rifles and grenade launchers were emblazoned with purple and red talismans and pompoms. In place of dull brown pakols, some of the boys wore colorful bandannas around their heads. One boy carried an old megaphone for Ashnagur to shout orders through during a battle, but there were no medical supplies except for a half-used and expired package of cold pills. Others had rag-wrapped bundles tied on branches over their shoulders that contained lumps of American-supplied C-4 plastic explosive for nightly sorties against Soviet and Afghan regime installations in the area. Proudly, Ashnagur took out a fistful of the substance, stuck a copper wire into it that was affixed at the end to a “time pencil,” and blew up a section of mud embankment to demonstrate the explosive power. The boys, who must have seen him do this many times before, nevertheless watched with awe. Isolated in this lush central Asian valley, with all their family members dead or in refugee camps, the boys had dreamed up their own rich pantheon of gods and sacred objects, including Allah, C-4 plastique, magic charms, and Ashnagur. For these homeless boys, Ashnagur was everything: older brother, father figure, and supreme role model.

There was one old man in the unit, sixty-year-old Said Hamidullah. Trachoma blinded him in one eye. He told me that one of his three sons had been killed here in 1986 during a Soviet ground assault. “As long as I can still see out of the other eye I will fight and kill Russians,” he shouted at me in a hoarse, eccentric tone. “In the Gulf, Moslems are killing Moslems. The Palestinians are all Communists. Ours is the only true jihad.” None of the teenagers laughed or at any time seemed to make fun of him.

They all lived off the land, eating wild maize, rice, fruit, raw turnips and onions, and the occasional egg or bowl of curds given to them by the local farmers. Almost every evening after dark they set out for the Jalalabad plain to blow up a small bridge or a section of road or just to take a few pot shots at an enemy base, since at this late stage in the war, neither the Soviets nor the Afghan regime’s troops ventured from their bases. A siege mentality had overcome them.

Wakhil and I stayed with Ashnagur’s unit for the better part of a week. I heard gunfire and the thud and shake of artillery throughout each day and early evening, and several times Soviet aircraft bombed the valley to no great effect. One evening, the boys in the unit brought me a chicken to eat, but it tasted rotten and had a maggot inside. I went behind a tree to vomit. Wakhil remonstrated me for insulting our hosts. I apologized. Another night, I was sound asleep under a plane tree when, at about four A.M., we were all awakened by the rumble of feet and the clanging of rifles. Clack, clack, clack — bullets slid into breeches as the mujahidin prepared for a firelight. My stomach turned. I rolled off the jute bed onto the ground. My ultimate nightmare was being killed or captured in an ambush by Communist troops, who from time to time found it necessary to prove that they were still to be taken seriously. It was a false alarm. Another guerrilla unit had just arrived from an all-night trek and had forgotten to give the password. Everyone laughed, and I felt like a fool again, lying on the ground, shaking.

Ashnagur conducted most of his sorties near the Soviet base at Dihbala, a complex of sandbagged bunkers at the edge of the Spinghar foothills that looked out on the Jalalabad plain. The pattern was always the same. At dusk, the mujahidin would eat a meager meal on the ground and then pray while Ashnagur split the plastique into small pieces and prepared them with the copper wire and time pencils, which had breakable seals releasing acid that burned down the wire. The march to the road linking the Soviet base with Jalalabad took several hours. As usual, a bridge or section of the road would be blown up and the guerrillas would beat a fast retreat. The pace was impossible, so I went only partway to the target, staying behind with a member of the unit. I heard the explosion and a volley of shots fired from the nearby enemy position in response. Then the young fighter I was with badgered me to run as fast as I could behind him. He cursed me all the way back to Ashnagur’s base area. Still, the others who had carried out the sabotage operation arrived back first. Thank God Abdul Haq wasn’t there to see me, I thought. The entire experience had the humiliating quality of army basic training. Each day, more and more of me was being broken down.

When I staggered back I saw Ashnagur’s boys collapsed on the jute beds. Dawn had peeled away the darkness from their faces to reveal glazed, jubilant expressions. Backfire from a malfunctioning grenade launcher had blistered one boy’s face. Ashnagur gave him a cold pill. The boy, his eyes dazed and watery, smiled and swallowed the pill with a serious expression, as if it could actually help. I gave him one of my painkillers. The others cleaned their rifle barrels and grenade launchers with kerchiefs wrapped around branches. This was the base of rural resistance upon which more impressive actions of other, more famous commanders rested.

Despite the constant fatigue and physical discomfort, I rarely felt cynical or let down. Because of the war, Afghanistan offered a form of travel that had all but died out in the last part of the twentieth century. I considered myself privileged to be crossing frontiers without the need of a passport and trekking over new and fascinating landscape that had not been altered by modern development. As selfish and retrograde as this attitude was, it was irresistible. I never felt uneasy, either, despite being at the mercy of a band of seared, scrappy young men.

As fighters, Ashnagur’s band may not have been the most impressive, but they and the other mujahidin I met embodied characteristics that were unique in the Third World, and my awareness of this fact kept my enthusiasm from flagging. Not only were they fanatical Moslems who were exceedingly tolerant of nonbelievers; they were also probably the only group of their kind with whom a Western woman would have been absolutely safe. (Several female journalists, who would not necessarily think of themselves as tough, traveled with the guerrillas.) I saw no hint of overt homosexuality or any kind of sexual deviation, though, as in all cultures, such things undoubtedly existed.

Rarely in Afghanistan or the Northwest Frontier did I encounter a mujahid with a lewd look in his eyes, as if he were staring at someone through a keyhole — an expression I had seen throughout the Middle East. Displays of excessive politeness toward Western women, also common in that part of the world, were absent among the Pathans. Abdul Haq treated the occasional female journalist as if she were one of the boys — primitive though his attitude was toward women of his own culture. After Abdul Qadir had had the opportunity to pass through Bangkok, I asked him if he had taken advantage of the city’s easily available sexual delights. “You think I am a donkey,” Qadir hissed, as if I had insulted him.

You could come up with various explanations for the genuine respect accorded to foreign women by Pathans, as well as for the Pathans’ apparent lack of sexual frustration and conflict when away from their wives for months at a time. A university-educated Pathan in Peshawar told me the fact that the Pathans were never urbanized, as Arabs and Iranians were, may have something to do with it. The exigencies of war may be another reason. In The Danger Tree, a novel about the World War II desert campaign in Egypt, the British writer Olivia Manning observed:

Except for the desert sand, of which there was less in Afghanistan, it would have been an accurate description of the Pathan world in the 1980s.

Up to a point, that is. For the aura of masculinity and self-containment is common to men at war in general. But how many warrior societies were so primitive, so free of Western influence, and so chock-full of literary references?

At the turn of the century there were the Cossacks, the fabled horsemen of southern Russia. To Russian intellectuals like Tolstoy, the Cossack was a man of “primitive energy, passion, and virtue. He was the man as yet untrammelled by civilization, direct, immediate, fierce.” That, at least, is how Lionel Trilling once described Tolstoy’s attitude toward the Cossacks, comparing it to that of Isaac Babel:

No, the Cossack of a hundred years ago was not often noble. The horseman of the steppes was the instrument of czarist violence against the Jews, raping and murdering women and children in sadistic pogroms. This was the problem with Babel’s worship of the Cossacks. But to imagine the Pathans going into a village in Afghanistan and doing the same things strains credibility. Were this ever to occur, it would be so at odds with Pathan behavior that other Pathans would unite to condemn it.

For decades, Western journalists, relief workers, and other intrepid romantics had scoured the East in search of an exotic human specimen who was undefiled by the bastardizing influences of the West, yet was also without the perversions and hypocrisies for which the East was famous. The Afghan war brought their search to an end; on the Northwest Frontier they rediscovered Kipling’s Pathans.

For the Americans who went to the Northwest Frontier in the 1980s, the attraction was particularly intense, perhaps because, unlike generations of British schoolboys brought up on Empire, Americans came late to the discovery that Kamal and Mahbub Ali and the characters in Kipling’s stories and poems were not Arabs but Pathans — and set apart.

“At first, I knew only that Kamal and his fellows were some unusual kind of Indians, rather like our own Indians of the American West, devoted to brave and warlike deeds…. Then I began to have a dim idea of the great tribal brotherhood which sprawled across northern India and Afghanistan,” wrote the American diplomat James W. Spain in his memoir The Way of the Pathans. Actually, the Pathans were more like our cowboys than like American Indians; they lived by the law of the gun and had an unambiguous code of honor, Pukhtunwali, whose preeminent precepts are nang (pride), badai (revenge), and melmastia (hospitality).

Distinct from all other Moslem peoples in the Near East, the Pathans were essentially democratic and egalitarian, with political life dominated by the jirga, a kind of ancient Athenian parliament of tribal elders, and no tradition of especially cruel, autocratic rulers. Yet like the Arabs, they lived a harsh, sterile existence that was nevertheless baroque and romantic: “They have bred poets as copiously as they have bred warriors,” Spain said. The Pukhtu ballads of Khushal Khan Khatak, reeking as they do of blood and flowers and noble deeds, are as Arthurian as those of the greatest Arab poets. The Pathans, then, were an American romantic’s dream come true: as exotic as the Arabs, but without the Arabs’ reputation for authoritarianism. The Pathans were men. As some Americans on the Northwest Frontier saw it, you didn’t have to be an aesthete or moral relativist like those goddamn Europeans who worshiped the Cossacks and Arabs to justify them.

As the young mujahidin in the Kot Valley looked up to Ashnagur, Ashnagur — and Habibullah too — looked up to Abdul Qadir. Qadir, Abdul Haq’s brother, was the chief guerrilla commander in Shinwar, the region of Nangarhar closest to the Khyber Pass. Ashnagur and Habibullah talked about Qadir as though he were some kind of god. “Qadir is our father, our brother. We follow him everywhere. He teaches us about religion. He is a wise judge,” Ashnagur once said. In reality, what prompted these accolades was Qadir’s social status: he was an educated man from a wealthy landowning family among poor peasants like Ashnagur and Habibullah. Whenever Qadir translated the newscasts on the BBC World Service into Pukhtu for his field commanders, an awed look came over their faces. They were obviously impressed with his education and knowledge of English. And Qadir was generous — always passing out wads of afghanis to the mujahidin and the peasants of Shinwar.

I got to know Qadir on my second trip inside, which Abdul Haq had arranged. Qadir’s thirty-eight-year-old cousin had died of a heart attack two days before our departure for Afghanistan, and Qadir walked into the stone dwelling where we were staying near the border with tears in his eyes. “This fate comes from God,” he said to me, boring his eyes deep into mine. “All of us must face it someday.”

Qadir himself had serious kidney and liver problems, the same illness that had killed his father and that Abdul Haq suffered from too. Qadir, unlike Haq, was a chain smoker and naswar addict, chewing gobs of the opium-laced stuff throughout the day, and as a consequence was always coughing and spitting. He was thirty-five and easily looked fifty. He complained of stomach and chest pains before we even started out on our journey, and I wondered how he was going to climb the fourteen-thousand-foot pass that lay ahead of us. I also wondered how this fretful physical wreck of a man could maintain the respect and adoration of the likes of Ashnagur and Habibullah.

Qadir was in a particularly foul mood that day. Chewing naswar and puffing on a water pipe, he said sarcastically: “Where is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? I thought he was Zia’s big mujahid! Gulbuddin is afraid to cross the border. You know what Zia told Charlie Wilson [a Democratic congressman from Texas and an enthusiastic supporter of the mujahidin]? Zia told him, I will give you Jalalabad as a Christmas present, with Hekmatyar in charge.’ Why do you Americans believe all this bullshit? Jalalabad will not fall so soon. The mujahidin are not ready for conventional battles. I know, because I and ‘Engineer’ Mahmoud [another Khalis party commander] will take Jalalabad when we are ready.” Qadir then went outside to pray and sip tea on a carpet. Listening to the birds at sunset, he closed his eyes and seemed to enter a kind of nirvana.

The next day, taking a route different from the one I had traveled with Wakhil, we climbed the highest pass in the Spinghar range. At the foot of the fourteen-thousand-foot pass, before beginning the ascent, Qadir squatted on the ground and vomited, and in addition had an attack of diarrhea. But after a few minutes of groaning, Qadir slowly got up, draped a cloth over his pakol to further protect his head from the sun, and proceeded to climb the mountain, arriving at the windy, icy summit — the Durand Line — only a few minutes behind me. And, despite all the tobacco smoking he did, Qadir was not breathing hard. “This is good,” he said, looking down the other slope at a lovely forest of firs, cedars, and spruces. “Now that I am in Afghanistan I feel better.” From that moment on, I had trouble keeping up with him. Like Wakhil and every other mujahid I knew, Qadir grew in strength with the difficulty of the terrain while I always weakened.

His tenacity was unquestioned. In November 1986, Qadir led seven hundred guerrillas, clothed only in open leather sandals and cotton shalwar kameezes, against upward of two thousand Soviet and Afghan regime troops in a snowstorm near Dihbala. The battle was a stand-off. Several of Qadir’s men had to have their frostbitten toes amputated afterward.

Other aspects of Qadir’s personality were less entrancing. His strengths and weaknesses derived from the fact that he was a typical Pathan. Traveling with him was like going back to the days of Chaucer’s knights; meals with him were medieval spectacles. As he was the leading guerrilla commander for the region, Shinwar peasants were expected to kill a sheep or goat in his honor. Every evening we would enter a new village and sit outside under the stars, talking, smoking a water pipe, and waiting for the meat to cook. Then Qadir, at least a dozen other mujahidin, and the village notables would enter the house and stack their guns against the mud walls, sit around the carpet, and silently devour a repast that would include a sheep or a goat, chicken livers, rice, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, mangoes, and bananas. (Whether you were a journalist or a fighter, you always ate better when traveling with a big commander. The problem was trying not to break wind, something that Pathans consider to be far ruder and funnier than we Westerners do. An American relief worker did so in the presence of Abdul Haq, and the mujahidin spoke of the incident for months.)

Qadir even had a court jester, a sixty-year-old turbaned Afridi who was fat, didn’t carry a gun, and seemed to have no discernible function except to tell stories and jokes. Journalists dubbed him “Haji Ball Grabber,” because one of his pranks was to pretend to shake your hand while lunging for your testicles.

It was a leisurely stroll into Afghanistan with Qadir. He slept late and every night sat down to a huge feast. He had been in Peshawar for several weeks and told me he would need several more, to talk to Ashnagur, Habibullah, and other field commanders before planning a series of attacks against Soviet and Afghan regime positions near Jalalabad. This was in June

after the Soviet withdrawal had started, when pundits in America were speculating about the possibility of a mujahidin assault on the city of Jalalabad itself. But the war seemed to Qadir like a sport. He fought and risked his life at his own pace and didn’t consult much with other big commanders about what he was doing, as they didn’t consult with him. This was why the assault on Jalalabad didn’t come until February

and partly why it failed.

Qadir was like an English country squire taking up the hunt. But finally, after a month of sleeping late and leisurely consuiting with his subordinates, he surgically blasted the Afghan government post of Achin into near oblivion.

It was at Qadir’s headquarters, an eyrie of tents and heavy machine guns looking out onto Soviet and Afghan regime positions at Dihbala, that I got sick. It was dysentery. I couldn’t stop vomiting and had diarrhea. Unlike Qadir, however, I lacked the strength to climb a mountain.

Everyone I knew got sick in Afghanistan, and many of the books written about the country seemed to revolve exclusively around the writer’s illnesses and constant physical discomfort. Because of its humor and brilliant, tongue-in-cheek conclusion, the British travel writer Eric Newby’s 1958 classic, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, is the finest book of this genre. Having just scaled a twenty-thousand-foot peak despite awful weather and illness, and with little to eat, Newby and his companion, Hugh Carless, met up with the world-famous explorer Wilfred Thesiger on their trek back to Kabul. ‘Tansies,” Thesiger called them, watching Newby and Carless inflate their air mattresses on the stony ground.

Losing weight and dehydrating fast, I had no choice but to go back to Peshawar. Trekking was impossible, but riding for seventy-two hours on a mule without a saddle while suffering from dysentery proved to be far more difficult than walking the same distance in good health. It was hard to hold down any liquid in my stomach, especially since the green tea began to taste like urine and the tea boys insisted on serving it in small cups half filled with sugar. I could focus only on the negative aspects of Pathan existence. How sterile their life was! Everyone wore unkempt beards and seemed to go for months without sex. Wherever I looked there were wild herbs growing on the mountainsides, suitable for all kinds of exotic teas, but the Pathans preferred only this weak, awful stuff. Unlike the Arabs, they disdained coffee and, of course, alcohol too.

Then the mule boy accompanying me, Farouk Ali, did something that surprised me. He grabbed a pink rose that was growing all alone on a rock face and stuck it behind his ear and smiled, wearing it like that the rest of the day. Ill with nausea, sunstroke, and dehydration, choking dust and sandstone and thorn bushes all around me, I was deeply affected by the sight of that rose and the extravagant gesture Farouk AH made with it. It was like a revelation. This was a culture that had produced no painting or sculpture of any kind and boasted little original music or dance. Though Peshawar was the principal city of the Pathans, the Peshawar Museum was filled with Buddhist, Moghul, and Persian art only. But the Pathans did write poetry:

Those were the words of Khushal Khan Khatak. The wearing of a pink rose by an uneducated mule boy was, for me, a sign that the poetic impulse ran deep in the culture.

Of course, Arab and Persian culture offered similar contrasts between the barren and the baroque. But with the Pathans those contrasts seemed to be starker and more dramatic. On a later trip inside Afghanistan I stayed at a guerrilla base that was under constant mortar bombardment where the mujahidin raised petunias and had paid the equivalent of $175 — a fortune by Afghan standards — for a songbird.

The little tea or water I could keep down was not enough to soothe my throat, which grew more and more parched. Then my throat became so dry it was almost too painful to swallow, and pressure built up in my ears as if I were in an airplane. At a tea stall I noticed a rotting watermelon skin, and my self-discipline broke down. Just the thought of more green tea or water was enough to make me gag, but I knew I could hold down a watermelon. I began crying, almost, for a piece, but there was no more. Evidently, watermelons could be had in war-torn Nangarhar, but finding one at a tea stall was a matter of luck. The idea of rinsing my desiccated mouth with the juice began to obsess me, however. I began to imagine mountains of watermelons and waterfalls of watermelon juice. Then I started counting the hours to Landi Kotal, where I could buy a watermelon. Or a Coke. Fifty hours to go, forty-five… I was lost in childhood memories of root beer and cream soda flushing through my mind. It was comic. All restraint had dissolved. Afghanistan had completely broken me.

The pain of thirst was so all-encompassing that I was barely aware of the welts that were forming on my buttocks from the hours on the mule. I was becoming so dehydrated and overheated that just the sound of trickling spring water sent chills of relief through my body, and rinsing my fully clothed body in the cold streams was pure sensual annihilation.

And so was the photograph of my family by the Aegean Sea. Opening his eyes wide, Farouk Ali pointed at the blue water in the background. The sight of my wife in shorts and without a veil appeared to have no effect on him. Never having been out of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier, he had never even seen a lake, let alone a sea. The sight of what, for a Pathan, was the equivalent of a naked woman did not stir him as much as the idea of a large body of water. Given my thirst, I could understand his emotion.

Then came the Valley of Tirah Bazaar. At a small camp of Khalis mujahidin we picked up two bodyguards for the journey through Afridi territory. It took eight hours on the mule during the hottest hours of the day, stopping not once for water. Because of my illness, I was now a whimpering idiot.

In Landi Kotal, I bought Farouk Ali and myself four watermelons and six Coca-Colas. Suddenly he seemed as thirsty as I was. He had never complained, yet now he was devouring the watermelons and Cokes faster than I. We both slurped and drank until there was nothing left. After I paid him for the mule, Farouk Ali went back into the desert toward the Valley of Tirah Bazaar and Afghanistan. Back to that same thirst and other deprivations.

The ability to endure, year after harrowing year, such a monastic existence, as barren and as confined by self-denial as that of the most disciplined desert anchorites, constituted the most lethal weapon the Pathans had in their battle against the Soviets. Had the Afghans acquiesced to Soviet rule without a fight, no doubt there would have been more watermelon and other fruit, and perhaps even a bus and paved road in Nangarhar. And there would not have been any mines. The idea of fighting for political freedom is an easy one to grasp until you see in the flesh what the cost is.

Of course, I didn’t have to get dysentery to figure this out. But, in the manner of the surgeon learning about mines in the operating room, being sick in Afghanistan provided me with an experience through which I was better able to appreciate the concept — and the price — of freedom as I never had before.