Soldiers of God

In the space of forty minutes you are transported through a confined, volcanic nether world of crags and winding canyons, from the lush, tropical floor of India to the cool, tonsured wastes of middle Asia; from a world of black soil, bold fabrics, and rich, spicy cuisine to one of sand, coarse wool, and goat meat. And some would add: from a land of subtle, slippery justifications to one of hard, upright decision.

Alexander the Great, accompanied by his teenage Bactrian bride, Roxanne, must have experienced this very sensation as he came down into India (Hindustan) near the Malakand Pass, sixty miles north of here, in the early winter of 327 B.C. Some of Alexander’s troops, under the command of his most trusted general, Hephaestion, trekked through these same Khyber defiles. So did Babur, the sixteenth-century Mongol king and descendant of Tamurlane, who had lost his father’s central Asian kingdom as a young man, but before his death had conquered Kabul and Delhi and founded the great Moghul dynasty. Babur was a poet, whose fantastically detailed memoirs, the Babur-nama, exude a sensitive, lyric intensity that captures the awe and pain of travel in this part of the world. (On finding a cave in the middle of a blizzard in the first days of January 1507, he wrote: “People brought out their rations, cold meat, parched grain, whatever they had. From such cold and tumult to a place so warm, cozy and quiet!”)

Though he conquered India, Babur preferred Afghanistan; his conquest of Kabul in 1504 had marked the turning point in his fortunes. And it was to Kabul, his favorite city, that his body was taken. He lies now under a garden of mulberry trees on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, in a marble monument built in the following century by Shah Jahan, the Moghul emperor responsible for the Taj Mahal. For the handful of journalists and relief workers in Peshawar enamored of such stuff, Babur’s marble tomb loomed as the longed-for summit of their Frontier Odysseys, where, under the shade of that mulberry arbor, they would one day rest their dirty, fatigued bodies and read Babur’s poetry after having witnessed — they hoped — the mujahidin conquest of Kabul: “0 Babur! dream of your luck when your Feast is the meeting, your New-year the face; For better than that could not be with a hundred New-years and Bairams.” Like Babur, some of us measured happiness by how close we were to going up Khyber for the last time.

The British first marched up the Khyber Pass in 1839, on their way to the first Afghan war, which was to end in disaster three years later with the massacre of every soldier save one, a Dr. William Brydon, who lived to tell the story. The British came back up the Pass in 1878 and again were forced by the Afghans to withdraw. The graves of British soldiers killed in the second Afghan war lie near the Masjid Mosque by the top of the Pass. Each time, the British lost hundreds of men just fighting their way through the Khyber territory, controlled by the Afridis, a tribal branch of the Pathans who since antiquity have served the function of “guardians of the Pass.”

In 1897, the British had to dispatch forty thousand troops to this area just to quell an Afridi uprising and regain control of the Pass. Alexander and Babur also fought pitched battles with the Afridis. It is these tribesmen, numbering over 300,000 in their mud brick redoubts that dot the hills of the Khyber Tribal Agency, who have given the Khyber Pass its allure of danger and epic drama throughout history — and never more so than in the 1980s.

In The Pathans by Sir Olaf Caroe, the definitive work on the subject, the author provides evidence that the Aparutai, mentioned by the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, are the ancestors of the Afridis of today. (As Caroe writes, the names sound similar when one recognizes that the Afridis, like other Pathans, “habitually change f into p”) The Afridis are also generally thought to have more ancient Greek blood than other Pathans who intermixed with Alexander’s soldiers, evinced by their sharp features and fairer complexions. They dress differently too: you can always spot an Afridi by his turban, wrapped tightly with an ostentatious bow around a bulbous red hat, called a kullah.

But these are all minutiae.

What really sets the Afridis apart from other Pathans is their deliciously devious, amoral character — a legacy of the physical landscape of the Northwest Frontier and the Khyber Pass in particular. Unlike other regions of the Frontier and eastern Afghanistan, the Khyber area has no arable land. Through these poor, barren defiles, conquerors from time immemorial have come to steal the wealth of the subcontinent. So the Afridis learned to play the only card they had: their power to murder, ambush, and in general make life hell for any invading army. What they have essentially said to everyone was: Rather than kill you, all we ask is that you share a certain portion of your wealth with us. And to their fellow Pathans in the Afghan resistance the Afridis’ attitude was: You fight the Russians, so they go after you but kill us too. So you must give us something in return. There had been frequent, violent clashes between the mujahidin and the Afridis. The Afridis were bristling with arms. They controlled the weapons trade at Darra, and in addition were supplied with guns by KhAD as a reward for fighting the guerrillas. So it had become more dangerous than ever to trek through Afridi territory on the way into Afghanistan, as I planned to do.

Smuggling, as well as bribes and thievery, was a source of income for the Afridis. A quarter of a century ago the Afridis in the Khyber Agency were among the poorest tribes in Pakistan. They had little to eat and were forced to weave shoes from grass. Their situation improved when they got involved in running Russian consumer appliances from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan into Pakistan. (A smuggled Russian air conditioner cost $300 in Peshawar; an Italian or Japanese one was four to five times the price.) But real fortunes were made with heroin, which, following the Islamic revolution in Iran, became the Khyber Agency’s main business. The Afridis set up laboratories in hillside caves, where they organized smuggling caravans to bring the heroin to Pakistani ports. They often bribed police at the various Khyber Pass checkpoints. Unlike other Pathans, the Afridis have managed to keep their fundamentalist beliefs and their livelihood in two separate, airtight mental compartments. A Pakistani government official explained: “To them, nothing is immoral when you are making money.” Often an Afridi will interrupt a drug sale if it is prayer time. Afridi merchants always close drug deals with the words “May God be with you.”

The long, buff walls of the British-built Shagai Fort, now manned by the Khyber Rifles, came into view as our bus mounted the first of a series of plateaus. I was not impressed. These Pakistani troops, despite their drums, sashes, and breast-beating tradition earned during the time of the Raj, were not able to hold more than twenty yards on either side of the highway. Beyond that, permission was needed from the heavily armed Afridi tribesmen in order to pass. The real power here lay within the even higher, longer walls of the fortresses that appeared farther up the road: the homes of the wealthiest Afridi khans (large landowners), not a few of whom were implicated in the international drug trade.

Every few miles I saw a military checkpoint, where a Pakistani soldier would mount the bus, cast a quick glance at anyone or anything that looked suspicious, and then wave the bus on. I instinctively looked down and away: Never ever establish eye contact with a border guard. It was one of a reporter’s more mundane nightmares out here that he would be pulled off a bus before even entering Afghanistan and be humiliated in the eyes of his colleagues and editors. This happened periodically to journalists in the course of the war, because the attitude of the Pakistani authorities was much more ambivalent than President Zia’s open support of the mujahidin suggested. Many in the lower reaches of the Pakistani security services did not share Zia’s enthusiasm for the resistance. Even Zia, though he was willing to help the mujahidin, did not want to be seen in the eyes of the Soviets as allowing Western journalists to cross an international border illegally in order to cover the war from the guerrilla side.

We got off the bus at Landi Kotal. We were still a few miles from the last Pakistani checkpoint and the thinly manned Afghan border post at Torcham. But that was not where we were planning to cross the border, and whatever the diplomats might believe, Landi Kotal was no longer in Pakistan. The air was cleaner and colder, and, as in Darra, I heard the constant sound of rifles going off. The streets were packed with mujahidin and Afridi cutthroats, who, in contrast to what I saw in Peshawar, were now armed. In the reeling jumble of fire-trap market stalls hashish and heroin could be purchased openly. Just behind the main road began a maze of high mud brick walls with imposing iron gates, which concealed warehouses full of guns, dope, electric appliances, and liquor, all destined for Zia’s booze-free Islamic republic. This was a lawless smuggler’s town and, more than any other spot on the Northwest Frontier, the nerve center of the most ambitious CIA arms program since the Vietnam war. But distinct from other Third World arms and drug bazaars where intelligence agencies operate and square off — Beirut and the Honduran border towns, for example — Landi Kotal gave no quarter to the demented affectations of the video age. There were no ghetto blasters, squealing tires of expensive cars, evil posters of rock stars and Ayatollah Khomeini, or gangs of teenage youths in tight-fitting khaki fatigues and gold chains around their necks. Landi Kotal may have been bad, but it wasn’t deranged. The town’s Kiplingesque charm just couldn’t be ignored; there was something almost wholesome about it.