Soldiers of God

with Hitler, then grabbed by Hitler after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and taken back by Stalin near the end of the war. Anti-Semitism in Lithuania didn’t bother him. Shuster believed that “the true partisans and resistance fighters against the Soviets were not anti-Semites.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the final, four-hour session with Shuster, in broken English, Din Mohammed relented. Shuster had