Soldiers of God

merely played back to him the Haji’s own private thoughts in a more concise, pointed form. Abdul Haq departed for New York five days after Shuster left Peshawar. Haq’s visit to the United Nations helped force Hekmatyar out of the chairman’s post in mid-June 1988. This proved, however, to be only a temporary setback for Hekmatyar.

During his last days in Peshawar, Shuster would wait in his hotel room or in the dim, gloomy dining hall at Dean’s Hotel for Abdul Haq’s driver to fetch him. Haq would be reclining in the back seat of the well-upholstered Toyota Corolla with darkened windows like some mafia don, massaging his injured right foot and moving over to make room for his friend beside him. In the car, Shuster would begin patiently making his case about every nuance of the military and diplomatic struggle facing the mujahidin. Shuster could handle Haq, who occasionally fell into bad moods and acted like a spoiled child — as when he refused to answer calls from the State Department while recovering from his mine injury in the Pittsburgh hospital. (Actually, Haq was convinced that the Americans were trying to kill him. The reason? Since the U.S. government was paying his medical expenses, Washington regulations stipulated that he fly on an American carrier on the last leg of his journey to the United States. In horrible pain, Haq was forced to wait hours at a London airport for a connecting flight.)

Faced with Shuster’s arguments, Haq would ease into a smile. He’d make a joke about getting diarrhea from the food at Dean’s and ask about the latest gossip in the foreign community. Shuster would in turn loosen up. As though they were on stage, they would look deep into each other’s eyes when they talked. There was something a bit pretentious about the way they acted in each other’s presence. It was a self-conscious dialogue. Each was aware that the other came from the other side, and that was perhaps why, although they argued, they never really fought. What kept the relationship from being a cliche was the fact that they had been together under life-threatening conditions.

In the early years of the war, whenever Abdul Haq was in Peshawar he went everywhere on his motorcycle and ate many of his meals in local Afghan restaurants with a large group of friends. Assassinations by KhAD had later forced him out of public places and into a protected car. His world had narrowed, and consequently Shuster’s role in it loomed larger. While John Gunston was the brash, soldierly comrade — the good mate who was forever slapping you on the back — Shuster was a sounding board for ideas with whom Haq could have late-night heart- to-hearts and do what was impossible to do with another Pathan: talk about his fears and vulnerabilities.

Haq felt himself to be a man alone. Even to his older brothers he wouldn’t talk about many aspects of his Kabul operation, which he saw as something he created on his own without their help. He spent little time with his wife. Unlike other Pathans, he was satisfied with only two children and didn’t want any more — something she couldn’t understand. Like other mujahidin commanders I’ve met, he appeared to view sex as an undisciplined act of self-indulgence — something that Westerners needed, not toughened Pathans like himself. Sometimes he didn’t tell his wife when he was leaving Peshawar to go to war inside Afghanistan. At home he smoldered. His wife and other family members feared his temper, which could turn violent. This fear was mixed with awe after his mine injury, when even deliberate pampering by the women in the family failed to soften his disposition. When his sister pleaded with him to talk, he once responded, “What do you know? You’re only a woman.” The one woman he felt truly at ease with was his mother. He always told her when he was going on jihad.

Charles Lindholm, a Columbia University anthropologist who lived for two years in a Pathan village, observed that the Pathans “live within a system which obliges men to present themselves as completely self-reliant…. Suspicion, defensiveness, bravery, vengefulness, pride, envy,” and “a Hobbesian vision” characterize their world view and interpersonal relationships — meaning, the Pathan can trust no one but an outsider “to fill the role of friend.” This was the basis of friendships between British colonial administrators and tribal Pathans in the last century.

At first I dismissed Lindholm’s analysis as mere anthropological twaddle. But there was clearly something to it. Haq’s men were known to resent their commander’s emotional dependence on foreigners, but Haq required these friendships. There was a side of his personality that could find release only with outsiders. He needed contact with values that were vastly different from his own. And this need increased when he was sidelined in Peshawar, recovering from the mine injury, at a time when the Soviets were starting their withdrawal and the war was entering a complex military and diplomatic phase that forced him to think in ways that he was not used to.

By journalistic definition, Haq was a Moslem fundamentalist. He prayed five times a day. He kept the Ramadan fast. He didn’t smoke or drink. When traveling, he refused to wear Western clothes or eat Western food: in London to meet Prime Minister Thatcher, he wouldn’t eat in a Moslem Lebanese restaurant until the cook assured him that the food was hallal. The idea of a free Afghanistan not ruled by Islamic law was anathema to him. The media, and especially American think-tank specialists, sometimes lumped Haq and Hekmatyar together in the same category as “Iranian-style fundamentalists.” But with us Haq laughed, made jokes, and liked to gossip. And he was not driven by ideology. He was the only man in all the fundamentalist parties whom the nonfundamentalist Afghans, especially the intellectuals, liked and respected. I kept asking myself whether, in the final analysis, Haq was, in effect, just a military tool of others in the alliance — and in his own family, in particular — who were fundamentalists.

Great as Abdul Haq’s need for outside friendships was, he was still a Pathan, and a Kabul-area commander at that. Shuster’s closeness to Haq and Din Mohammed was ultimately a measure of what Shuster had accomplished inside Afghanistan and of the physical risks he had taken. Haq and his brother never confided anything to Shuster until after he had made several cross-border forays.

Everything in Peshawar always went back to time spent inside. Whatever other factors influenced a journalist’s access to a mujahidin commander — his personality, his knowledge of Pukhtu or Dari, his years covering the story, his commitment to the cause — the reporters closest to the commanders were those who had performed best under fire. There were no exceptions. From anywhere in town you could see the brown Khyber hills. Up there was where it was all taking place. As long as you didn’t go up there, the hills were a constant reminder of your fear, your guilt over remaining in Peshawar, and your burning curiosity about what was happening over the border. And once you returned from inside, the hills reminded you of how lucky you were to be back in Peshawar. I really knew nothing about Haq or Gunston or Shuster or much else about the war that was important until I went into Afghanistan. Only then did I begin to understand about the people I was interviewing, and why inside was all that mattered in a journalist’s relationship with a guerrilla commander.

Shuster went over the border with Abdul Haq for the first time in October 1984. The trip lasted four weeks. The Soviets were in the midst of an offensive, spearheaded by airborne troops, to regain swaths of territory in the area south and east of Kabul. This was around the time a French television reporter was captured by Communist regime soldiers, when the mujahidin group he had been traveling with fell into an ambush. Haq’s force of three hundred was snaking fast through the same territory as the Soviets, who were equipped with troop-carrying helicopters and fighter jet support. Haq and Shuster were bombed several times by the jets. Because Haq, as the commander, had to be the last to run for cover, Shuster was forced to crouch beside him in the open, his bowels loosening from fear and bad food. The hardest thing to do was run toward a falling projectile, not away from it. Haq had taught Shuster that a bomb always drops at an angle; only by running toward its source are you safe from being hit.

Shuster admitted that he was perpetually frightened of either being killed or being caught. But he could never even start to explain why he persisted in going inside. I didn’t buy his Lithuanian nationalism argument, even though he was an intellectual who clearly lacked the macho mentality of other journalists. Shuster seemed determined to earn Haq’s respect, as if he knew that he and Haq were destined to be friends and he had no choice in the matter. Once Shuster tried to describe to me how he and Haq had stripped down to their waists and gone swimming in a deserted reservoir east of Kabul with all of Haq’s men looking on. “You don’t know what it is to be with Abdul Haq at such a moment!…” Words deserted him. Perhaps, like the Japanese karate master and the London window cleaner, Shuster was merely acting out a fantasy — another foreign male in the war zone who saw himself as a character in a movie.

But as so often happened on the Northwest Frontier, a great, irrational act of will had made the movie real. Shuster’s first trip to Kabul, arranged by Haq in the fall of 1983, was such an act, during which his bravery and ingenuity endeared him forever to Haq, Din Mohammed, and the rest of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami.

He and his escort of Haq’s mujahidin (Haq himself didn’t make the trip) had just climbed to the top of a mountain from where one descends into Kabul from the south. Soviet helicopter activity forced them to wait for