carried again.” Strangely, he recalled, the pain was less vivid than the cold and the nausea.
Four hours later, Haq was lying on a jute bed in the house of another mujahidin commander in the town of Maidan Shahr (twenty-five miles southwest of Kabul), and the pain was “everywhere.” The guerrillas found a local doctor with some sort of knife, but he had no anesthetic and liquor is prohibited under Islamic law. A piece of bone hanging from what remained of his right foot had to be cut. “When the knife hit the bone, that was a bit difficult for me. Mujahidin rubbed my palms to take my mind off the pain. It didn’t help much.” Haq laughed when he told me this.
Someone took a snapshot of the commander five days later, after he had been transferred to a medical compound in Wardak province run by Medecin du Monde, a Paris-based relief group. Part of his foot had just been amputated by a French-trained Hungarian doctor, a refugee of the 1956 revolution against the Soviets. (This time an anesthetic was available.) In the photograph, Haq is pointing his exposed stump toward the camera and smiling. “Because I knew I lost part of my foot for a logical reason, I felt less depressed,” he said to me. “I pity such people who lose limbs in car accidents and other stupid things.” Haq was lucky. The mine that wounded him was a pressure-pad mine, a powerful antipersonnel weapon that would have blown off his whole leg or killed him if he had stepped on it directly rather than slid down on it at an angle.
His pain seemed to grow day by day. I rarely saw Haq when he wasn’t in some physical discomfort. Always, he would be taking off his Reebok running shoe, fitted with a special plastic shin support, to massage the ball of his foot. I met him for the first time a week after the snapshot was taken. He was drawing deep, wheezing breaths against the pain and sweating in streams. Fie had just been jammed into the back seat of a car, without any drugs, for a three-hour trip to Islamabad in order to meet with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, before being flown to a hospital in Pittsburgh at the U.S. government’s expense. There he was to have a second amputation, to remove more bone fragments and damaged nerves. When he got to Pittsburgh he was given painkillers for the first time since his accident.
I sat in the front seat of the car and asked him how he felt. He was told only a few minutes earlier that I was a journalist who wanted to ask him some questions. He had a huge round head covered with short black hair, graying sideburns, and a close, scruffy beard, which partially concealed a mild case of acne. Though he was personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Soviet soldiers, his eyes didn’t reflect this. Haq’s small, dark eyes registered considerable pain, but they weren’t jaded, nor were they lifeless or cynical looking. He could have been a Jewish actor hired to play the role of a Third World guerrilla leader.
Speaking was hard for him. Between breaths, he explained that the only thing he wanted to do was return to Afghanistan to fight. It was what every Afghan said when wounded, so the words had little effect on me. He was a burly man but his voice was not deep at all. There was almost nothing about him that was menacing. He thanked me profusely for my concern and I left the car. I was with him for less than five minutes. When I saw him next, three months later, he remembered me instantly and apologized for not having been able to say more.
I had met Palestinian leaders in Syria and Jordan, Polisario leaders in Algeria, Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq and Iran, and Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas in northern Ethiopia. Most had eyes that appeared to undress you and peer into your innermost secrets. All of them were burdened by an emotional austerity bordering on asceticism which saw individual people only in the abstract, as mere symbols that could be wiped off a board without remorse. The Eritreans were less like this, but they had a sadness and a cynicism that was beyond belief. You couldn’t really get to know any of those leaders; it seemed as if there were an invisible, high-voltage field between you and them. You could observe them, and write about them, but you couldn’t get to know them.
Abdul Haq emitted no intimidating emotional charge. He threw up no barriers when he spoke. Because he wasn’t paranoid, you weren’t. With him, at least, you had the feeling that you were innocent until proved guilty.
WOMEN ARE OPPRESSED in all Moslem societies. But among the rural Pathans, women simply don’t exist. “They’re not even in the background. They’re just not there,” said a Pathan woman who left the Northwest Frontier to live in New Jersey. Here are three Pathan proverbs:
Women have no noses. They will eat shit.
One’s own mother and sister are disgusting.
Women belong in the house or in the grave.
You rarely see women on the Northwest Frontier or in Afghanistan; you do see moving tents with narrow holes for the eyes. Photographers who walked through minefields and sneaked into Soviet bases were afraid to take close-ups of Pathan women unless they were at least a hundred yards away and had a lens the size of a mortar — and provided not a single mujahid was looking. A close-up of a Pathan woman was more prized and difficult to get than a photograph of the undercarriage of an MI-24 helicopter gunship.
The only Pathan females I was ever allowed to see were all five years old and younger. Some of those girls were beautiful, with long, dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and doe eyes. What Pathan women look like when they are older is a secret that only Pathan men know.
A desert Arab, after he gets to know you, may invite you to his home, where you may steal a brief glance at his wife while she serves the food. A Pathan may also invite you to his home, but either he or another man will carry in the food that has been prepared in the women’s quarters. The food, in turn, is often the traveler’s only clue to the presence of a woman nearby. If the dish is relatively clean and the meal appetizing, it means there is a woman in the adjoining room who cooked it; if the food is inedible, a Pathan man did the deed.
A Pathan won’t even tell you the names of his wife and mother. To ask him is an insult. It would be like asking him to undress in front of a crowd. “Women are as private to a Pathan as his private parts,” a Pathan lawyer remarked to me. “Women are the holy of holies in a culture where the men act as the barricades.” The first time I interviewed Abdul Haq I made the mistake of asking him the names of the men and women in his family. The names of the men he told me. Concerning the women, he blushed and turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t ask such personal questions,” he said. I felt ridiculous for days afterward and worried whether he would agree to see me again.
The very existence of women in a Pathan’s life is an intimate secret, sacred to him but also a source of shame. Women threaten the facade of splendid male isolation that is central to a Pathan’s sense of self. A Pathan knows women are needed for procreation, but that is an unfortunate and embarrassing fact to him, and if he could change it, he would. In the Arab world and even in Iran, pregnant women are a common sight. Among the Pathans, one never sees them, for as soon as a woman’s womb begins to expand, she is locked away in the house.
After enough time on the Northwest Frontier you forgot about Pathan women altogether. They became invisible. You forgot that the mujahidin had wives and mothers, because you never saw them and the men encouraged you to forget. Only rarely did that other, hidden world break through to the surface, as when a colleague of mine asked Abdul Haq why he always kept his hair short. “Because my mother would slap my face if I grew my hair long,” he said, turning his head away, embarrassed.
In Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan, many women were educated, held proper jobs, and didn’t hide themselves in black sheets. That was more because of Westernization than Communist influence. The mujahidin were, for the most part, backwoodsmen, and they suffered no threats or complexities in any of their personal relationships. They inhabited a self-contained world of men, a world of sharp cutouts, where women were held in contempt and the only sure touchstones of masculinity were bravery, the ability to endure physical pain, prowess with a rifle, and the length and thickness of one’s beard.
Men without beards were distrusted by the mujahidin. After all, women didn’t have beards — and neither, thought the mujahidin, did homosexuals. Nor did the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies. Nor, for that matter, did the more modern, secular mujahidin within the seven-party resistance — the ones who drank Coca-
