Soldiers of God

Before the mujahidin hustled me off the main street and toward their local headquarters, I caught a brief glimpse of a railhead, where the Khyber Pass local used to start its run through no less than thirty-four tunnels down to Peshawar, until 1986 when the train was bombed by KhAD and the Pakistanis decided to stop the service. Paul Theroux devoted a chapter in The Great Railway Bazaar to this now-defunct train, which he described as a “pleasure” and an “engineering marvel.” He wondered about the danger faced by Pakistan from a Soviet-backed Afghan government — this was written four years before the appearance of a Communist regime in Kabul and six years before the war.

The iron door of a warehouse creaked open slightly, revealing a pair of suspicious eyes. We exchanged some words with the watchman and were quickly ushered in without the gate opening more than a few inches. As it was being bolted behind us, I saw we were in a courtyard about the size of a baseball diamond enclosed by high mud brick walls and smelling of dried mud, dung, urine, and gun oil. For a second it reminded me of an Ottoman caravansary out of a nineteenth-century Edward Lear watercolor of the Holy Land. American-supplied, Soviet- made Kalashnikov assault rifles were stacked in the far corner along with new bayonets, banana-clip magazines for 7.62 mm bullets, and crates of ammunition. An old man in a shalwar kameez and turban sat on a rush mat beside the weaponry, making notes in a ledger. He jumped up and embraced each of us with the greeting “Salaam aleikum” (Peace be upon you). We removed our shoes before entering a dark, mud-walled room with a wooden table in the corner, crowded with neat piles of stationery, and sat around a carpet on the floor.

This was the Landi Kotal headquarters of Yunus Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami. A blurry photo of Khalis appeared on a calendar hanging above me, and for the first time I found myself focusing on him as the mujahidin around me mumbled “Maulvi Khalis” this and “Maulvi Khalis” that (maulvi, in Pukhtu, means an Islamic scholar, a high-ranking imam). Though in reality a figurehead for a party that was run and controlled by Abdul Haq’s family, Khalis was the most respected of the seven Afghan resistance party leaders in Peshawar, the only one of an otherwise pathetic, squabbling bunch who was not thought of as a politician but as a mujahid. And though a fundamentalist, Khalis, unlike Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was truly respected by the moderate factions of the resistance. Everyone knew that he was the only resistance leader who spent much of his time — sometimes weeks on end — inside, living in the same awful and dangerous conditions as his troops. The other party leaders, especially Hekmatyar, went inside for “photo ops” and were out again within twenty-four hours.

Khalis, in his late sixties, was a lively character with a sense of humor, a trait that prevented him from being perceived as an Afghan version of Ayatollah Khomeini. Abdul Haq once told me a story about Khalis. In the first year of the war, when the mujahidin were fighting without any American aid and were so poor that they couldn’t even afford mules, Khalis, then sixty, was trekking with Haq in the deep snow and had to be helped down a hill on a makeshift sled. At the bottom, his face covered with snow, Khalis laughed and said, “My watch is broken. It cost me two thousand rupees. This jihad is getting expensive.”

Khalis was loved by every guerrilla, from Abdul Haq and Din Mohammed on down. Khalis was a figurehead only because of his age and lack of interest in details, not because he had been jostled aside in a power struggle. For the young mujahidin accompanying me, the personal example set by “Maulvi Khalis” carried great significance in their lives.

Khalis had given the Hizb-i-Islami its Spartan, no-frills, country-bumpkin personality. The party in Peshawar was so unsophisticated that it practically didn’t exist as a political organization at all, but rather as a political front for a purely military organization — which is why it was powerful and well positioned inside while being underestimated by diplomats and journalists in Pakistan. Among reporters, it was not a particularly well- recommended group to travel with. Though the “Khalis muj” were respected as experienced, trustworthy fighters who were not likely to blunder into an ambush or minefield, they rarely provided interpreters and disdained the occasional tin of beef or powdered soup — the kinds of items that kept your spirits up on the march and prevented you from becoming sick, and which other factions stocked in their military camps for visiting journalists and relief workers. A Jamiat commander in eastern Afghanistan, for example, not only stocked coffee, soft drinks, and canned food but had a video-cassette player as well. Khalis’s men wouldn’t know what a videotape was, and even in Peshawar never offered you anything to drink except tea and water, and the water was sometimes foul.

At least I had an interpreter, specially assigned to me by Abdul Haq’s middle brother, Abdul Qadir. Qadir was the chief commander in Shinwar, a district in Nangarhar province that was just over the border from Landi Kotal. The warehouse to which I had been brought and the mujahidin that had been accompanying me were under his command.

My interpreter, Wakhil Abdul Bedar, a twenty-fiye-year-old refugee from the village of Adah near Jalalabad, had graduated from an Islamic academy. He considered himself a mullah, and instead of a turban or pakol (a traditional flat woolen cap) he wore a knitted white prayer cap. Wakhil was the most laid-back mullah you could imagine. He smiled, laughed, and made jokes all the time. He was short for an Afghan, and not particularly rugged looking. Measured alongside the other mujahidin, Wakhil certainly seemed vulnerable. His brown spaniel eyes betrayed an underlying sadness and preoccupation at odds with his good humor. He was a tender soul, and it wasn’t until we were back in Peshawar that I was able to coax his story from him.

Wakhil had been a student at a madrassa (religious school) near Jalalabad. He left Afghanistan in 1979, prior to the Soviet invasion, after having served a short term in prison for refusing, along with other madrassa students, to sing in honor of the Marxist ruler of Afghanistan at the time, Nur Mohammed Taraki. But Wakhil had more recently suffered a tragedy worse than imprisonment that had also helped propel him to Pakistan: his father had deserted his family to work in a restaurant in Iran, leaving Wakhil alone with his mother and younger brothers. I can only guess how deeply this affected Wakhil. Pathan men look upon their dependents — particularly their wives — as possessions so private that few others may even know their names. To desert them and leave them exposed to shame and suffering is nearly unheard of. Though Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s was becoming increasingly repressive, especially for a former political prisoner, Wakhil equally needed to escape the humiliation of what his father had done to him.

Wakhil came alone to Peshawar, where he stayed at an uncle’s house. After finding temporary work painting cars, he sent for his mother and younger brothers. Eventually, he went looking for the Hizb-i-Islami office — an obvious decision, since Yunus Khalis had been a well-known figure in Jalalabad religious circles when Wakhil was a student there.

“It’s right over there in our house. Come, I’ll take you,” said a broad, imposing fellow who towered over Wakhil and introduced himself as Abdul Haq. Haq, twenty-two at the time, had already established a reputation as a leading guerrilla commander and was an instinctive judge of character, aware that everyone, even a “little guy” like Wakhil, had a value to the resistance. Haq took the eighteen-year-old under his wing and got him a job as an aide to Khalis in the offices of the seven-party alliance. Wakhil also had an opportunity to attend the madrassa in Peshawar and take courses in English. He saw Haq infrequently after that, but like many people considered himself close to the commander, whom he clearly idolized. When I met Wakhil in 1987, he was working for Abdul Qadir and married with three children. He supported them, in addition to his mother and younger brothers, on a salary of 800 rupees ($45) a month, plus a cost of living subsidy, from Hizb-i- Islami. It was the same salary the party paid all its members, from field commanders to night watchmen in Peshawar.

Wakhil sat with the other men and negotiated the price of a mule while we ate a meal of grilled goat kebab, flat bread, and curd washed down with green tea and a gooey Afghani sweet called nakal. The meat was nearly hidden in a pool of grease and for all I knew could have been putrefying for hours in the hot sun with flies dancing on it. But it was doubtless the tastiest and cleanest food I was going to get for some time. I ate heartily, sopping up the grease with my bread.

One mujahid gave a letter to Wakhil, laboriously handwritten in Pukhtu on Hizb-i-Islami stationery, stating who I was and where I was to be taken. My two bodyguards signed for their rifles and ammunition in a ledger. Either Wakhil wasn’t a skilled negotiator or at that moment there truly were no mules to spare for so trivial a task as transporting a soft, spoiled journalist and his fashionable new rucksack into Afghanistan. (Wakhil, like all other Afghans, brought nothing with him except a patou and the clothes on his back.)

Jihan-zeb and Lurang, my bodyguards, were in their mid-twenties, like Wakhil, and had wives and children