was razing Afghanistan with the same abandon as the thirteenth-century Mongol hordes.
Tactically speaking, the cease-fire was smart, but it certainly wasn’t the way the mujahidin were going to drive the Soviets out. The Pathans would never have considered something so logical and prudent as a temporary truce. It would have been an affront both to their manhood and to Pukhtunwali, their code of honor, whose supreme precept is
So Massoud was the exception to the general reason the Soviets were losing the war: because of the wild, quixotic, completely unreasonable mentality of the Pathans, to whom the whole notion of tactics was anathema because it implied distinctions, and Pathans at war thought only in black and white.
Like the Tajiks, the Pathans also had a great commander. To Abdul Haq’s supporters in Peshawar, he, not Ahmad Shah Massoud, was — in the words of a glossy poster with Haq’s picture on it — “the Afghan lion.” Actually, Abdul Haq wasn’t a lion at all. He was a big, friendly bear of a man with black hair, a beard, and an impish smile who had a much more difficult task to accomplish than Massoud.
While Massoud’s lair was a valley perfectly laid out for a guerrilla struggle, Abdul Haq stalked the Afghan capital of Kabul and its environs, the center of the Soviet and Afghan Communist power structure, which was packed with government ministries, division-size military bases, KhAD agents, barbed wire fences, checkpoints, and minefields. Haq had to fight an urban war of sabotage, as well as a guerrilla war in the adjacent mountains and villages. This called for even greater organization than Massoud required in the Panjshir Valley. And Haq had to do this with Pathans, who, because of their tribal rivalries, were more difficult to organize than Tajiks.
Yet, compared to Massoud, Abdul Haq had little written about him until the last years of the Soviet occupation. Few knew him well, and those who did were not print journalists. In the early and mid-1980s, Haq moved swiftly and constantly around the Kabul region, stopping briefly in Peshawar every few months in order to straighten out matters of manpower, logistics, and financing. He had family concerns to attend to as well, and those were far more important than his military problems. Haq’s family was a highly unusual one, and the Pathan war effort was inextricably tied up with the complicated relationships among its members.
Born in April 1958, Abdul Haq had two older brothers, Abdul Qadir, who was about five years older than Haq, and Din Mohammed, who was ten years older. (Pathans don’t use family names, and noms de guerre further complicate matters.) Abdul Qadir was the mujahidin commander of Shinwar, an Afghan district just over the border from the Khyber Pass, on the main route linking Kabul with Pakistan. Din Mohammed was the chief political and administrative operative for Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami (Party of Islam), one of the two most militarily powerful Afghan resistance organizations. (The other was Jamiat-i-Islami — Islamic Society — which Ahmad Shah Massoud was affiliated with.)
While Jamiat was a Tajik-dominated party, Hizb-i-Islami was the ultimate Pathan party: it presented a facade of Moslem fundamentalism, but in reality it was tribal. Yunus Khalis, a respected Moslem cleric and former schoolteacher, played the role of figurehead and spiritual guide; Din Mohammed ran the party’s daily operations. This party, which constituted the strongest mujahidin force in the major cities of Kabul, Jalalabad, and Ghazni, appeared to the uninitiated outsider as one big, disorganized mess.
Hizb-i-Islami had few foreign-language speakers. Its spokesmen rarely kept appointments. Its leaders seemed unable to keep track of one another. Trips inside for journalists, postponed for weeks, often fell through at the last moment. Nor was the party especially interested in help or attention from the Western relief community. The only aid worker whom Hizb-i-Islami appeared to have any regular dealings with was Anne Hurd, an American from Mobile, Alabama, who worked for the Washington-based Mercy Fund. Hurd’s friendly Southern accent concealed a tough, militarylike personality that was neither intimated nor discouraged by the party’s diffident, fundamentalist exterior. Hurd always took care to “dress up” as if she had a “business appointment in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Even though I’m a woman, the Afghans treat me as an equal because I try to be perceived as being totally outside their culture and range of control.” Still, it took her years of daily effort to establish a working relationship with Hizb-i-Islami officials.
To judge by its power, Hizb-i-Islami obviously
Abdul Haq himself was the only exception to the confusion. He spoke English, albeit with a lot of profanities mixed in (courtesy of a Dutch journalist who taught him in the early 1980s). He kept appointments and had a reputation as one of the few mujahidin leaders who had really interesting things to say. It was thought that the forceful impression Haq made on President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was pivotal in the subsequent American decision to supply the mujahidin with Stinger missiles in 1986. “I told Mrs. Thatcher,” Haq said, “that my great-grandfather and his father before him fought the British, who invaded Afghanistan to keep the Russians out. So I asked her: Now that the Russians have finally come, as the British once feared, why are you so quiet? Why did you send everything a hundred years ago and yet now you send nothing?”
The Tajiks at Jamiat headquarters spoke in catchy soundbite phrases (“In six years we’ve gone from stones to Stingers” and “We ask for mine-clearing equipment and our allies give us coin detectors”); Haq offered substance. Jamiat’s people in Peshawar were just spokesmen; Haq was a commander with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a good analytical mind, and a sense of rebellion against his own family and party, all of whose members seemed very different from him. But Haq was not usually in Peshawar in the mid-1980s, and he rarely took journalists inside with him.
It was only because of a terrible injury that I got to know Abdul Haq and Hizb-i-Islami. It was the kind of accident that occurred all the time in Afghanistan. Months later, after I knew him better, Haq told me how it had happened.
It was in early October 1987. At eight thousand feet in the mountains overlooking Kabul, winter had already come. The plan was to attack six Soviet targets: the Kabul airfield and radar station and several military bases north and west of the capital. On October 11, Haq’s particular destination was Qarga, a lake region that was the site of a golf course used by foreign diplomats and a major Soviet base. Qarga had once before been lucky for him: fourteen months earlier, in August 1986, he launched a spectacular raid that destroyed the base’s ammunition dump.
At about 7:15 in the evening, Haq and a forward guerrilla unit were advancing on Qarga from the west. The Soviets, perhaps anticipating an attack, had flown over the region several hours before, peppering the bare, eroded mountainside with butterfly mines. To avoid the mines, the mujahidin took a detour. It was dark, with strong winds and heavy rain mixed with snow. The mud might have been as deep as two feet in some spots.
“There was a mud trench, about six or seven meters long, which we had to cross to get to the road,” Haq told me. “Four or five mujahidin were walking in front of me. There was some shooting and firing nearby, which you know there always is in Afghanistan. Each of us placed our foot into the hole made by the one ahead. Though we took the long way around, we still had to be careful of mines.
“You have to remember how dark and muddy it was. Anyway, because of the mud I did a stupid thing. I slid a few centimeters off the path, something I never did before. Then I saw my boot fly up in the air in front of me. It was like I was dreaming. I was wounded fourteen times before, but this time I really felt nothing at first. I tried to take a few more steps, but then the rocks crushed against the exposed bone and nerves of my right foot and suddenly I got dizzy and fell. I told the major behind me that I needed a tourniquet. When he saw the blood pouring out on the snow he started screaming and all the others came. You see, they were all afraid to touch me because I was their commander. We had no doctor or medical supplies. We Afghans are so stupid sometimes.
“So what did we do? We started arguing. I argued against going back. I said I must write a letter explaining how the operation is to continue without me. But it was difficult to write because it was so dark and cold. I must have been completely delirious.”
The men made tourniquets out of a turban and tied them above and below his knee. Haq, who weighed over two hundred pounds, was carried piggyback for almost a mile until someone found a horse. Even with help he had trouble putting his good left foot in the stirrup. “By now there was so much blood and it was snowing harder,” Haq said. “All I could think of was how cold I was. On the horse I started vomiting so I had to get off and be
