Though the Kuki Khel dominated the Valley of Tirah Bazaar, a family of Zakha Khel Afridis had been providing us with hospitality in the fort. The Zakha Khel were the most populous of all the Afridi clans, and their leader, Malik Nadar Khan Zakha Khel, was a colorful character whom I visited in his Peshawar and Landi Kotal homes. Nadar Khan Zakha Khel maintained a tenuous, on-again-off-again truce with the mujahidin. And because I wasn’t sure what Qadir’s attitude would be to my interviewing the Afridi leader, I kept my meetings with Nadar Khan a secret from all the mujahidin. It turned out to be a wise idea, I thought while lying on the bed in the Afridi fort.
Though Nadar Khan had a veritable palace in Landi Kotal, when in Peshawar — where he held court several times a week — he deliberately projected a relatively humble image in order to keep the respect of his tribesmen in the city, all of whom were very poor. His house was down a narrow alley with an open sewer in Peshawar’s old quarter. In the early morning, as many as a hundred Afridis would wait in a dim, dirty anteroom to pay their respects. Plainclothes Pakistani police loitered there too, casting an eye on every person who went into the
Nadar Khan was sitting on a soiled, unmade bed with a towel around his neck when I entered his air- conditioned room. On the table beside him was a half-eaten dinner, including a vat of sweets being devoured by flies. He didn’t seem bothered by the intrusion, however.
Nadar Khan had the dark skin and lilting, clicking accent of a Punjabi. He spoke passable English and was pleased to tell his life story to a foreign journalist. I was trying to cultivate Nadar Khan. This leader of eighty thousand Zakha Khel Afridis was a useful man to know: his word and written orders carried more weight in the Khyber Tribal Agency than those of the Pakistani authorities. When you traveled up the Khyber Pass in a vehicle owned by Nadar Khan, nobody questioned your permit, and the police just waved you on at the checkpoints.
To hear Nadar Khan tell it, he was an Afghan patriot who supported the mujahidin without restraint but who nevertheless, on account of his great political skill, was able to maintain cordial relations with the Communist regime in Kabul at the same time. Nadar Khan had lived nearly half of his fifty-nine years in Afghanistan and the rest of them in Pakistan, and he saw himself as the ultimate go-between, loyal to all sides without betraying anyone’s confidence. Among the many gifts in his palatial fortress in Landi Kotal was a 9 mm nickel-plated Makarov pistol given to him by Najib when the latter was head of KhAD and a Belgian 7.62 mm rifle with a gold-plated inscription from “General Zia ul-Haq, President of Pakistan.”
“All the mujahidin of the seven parties are my brothers,” Nadar Khan said, “and we allow all the refugees to go through our land in Tirah…. The Russians are godless people. Our mothers do not weep when their sons are killed by Russians. Instead they are proud.” He said that the kidnappings for ransom of mujahidin in the Bazaar Valley were the work of Soviet agents, perhaps of the Kuki Khel, which he had nothing to do with. “The KGB has its best agents in Washington, London, and Tirah,” he advised me with a knowing stare. “The Russians and Najib try to influence us through scholarships and the supply of guns. We took the guns, of course, but did not play the game of KGB.”
Still, Nadar Khan could not deny that he continued to own 150 acres of property in Kabul and Jalalabad that the regime had not confiscated. And he claimed to be in personal contact with Najib, and to be helping him arrange to leave office peacefully.
“Najib is little in mind, but he is not little in body,” he said, laughing. “You know what they call Najib in Farsi?
Nadar Khan’s fort in Landi Kotal, with its tomato patch, rose bushes, private mosque, and icebox stocked with Coca-Cola and Fanta, was certainly nicer than the place I was staying in the Valley of Tirah Bazaar. But the idea of the Afghan ruler’s spending the rest of his days there struck me as comic. Inside its long walls, the fort had several locked gates, past which I was not permitted to go. Some of Khalis’s mujahidin and Pakistanis said Nadar Khan kept smuggled Russian vodka and other contraband there. Once, Nadar Khan’s tribesmen had kidnapped a Khalis commander in a reprisal for the destruction of a vodka consignment by the mujahidin, and delicate negotiations had been necessary to secure his release.
After I had interviewed the Zakha Khel leader, Abdul Qadir told me, “Nadar Khan is talking out of all sides of his mouth and he is only thinking of money.” Qadir grimaced, as if he had just tasted something rotten. Though Qadir had a truce with the Zakha Khel Afridis and they were providing his mujahidin with food and lodging in Tirah, his feelings toward them were only slightly less hostile than those he harbored toward the Kuki Khel. “Now we must bargain with Nadar Khan. But after the war is finished, when mujahidin have power in Kabul, then we will deal with Nadar Khan and all of his people. The Afridis will be sorry that they ever made friends with Russia. Mujahidin suffer much and we forget nothing.” Qadir added that he hoped the Soviets would bomb Landi Kotal, since that “would teach Nadar Khan and his people a lesson.”
Lying in the jute bed atop my nylon sleeping bag that night in the Afridi fort, I knew that the hospitality extended to us was the result of chilling bargains over vodka and hostages and double-dealing with the Soviets, and that at some point in the not too distant future, Lurang and Jihan-zeb — or some other of Khalis’s men — might come here to shoot and butcher the very people who had fed and sheltered us.
We were up at 4:30 A.M. and, thankfully, our Afridi hosts offered us only bread and green tea. It was still dark when we left the fort and began walking. After several hours we passed between two low mountains and entered a rock-strewn wadi shaded with mulberry trees. In a moment the Bazaar Valley was just a hazy memory, like a half-dream between sleep and waking.
The wadi led ever upward in a grueling, twisting incline, steep enough to make me out of breath, but not quite so steep as to provide any visible goal or summit. The trees gave me hope that a stream ran nearby, but there was none. After a while, Lurang and Jihan-zeb were practically pulling and dragging me along.
“A little more and we will be in Afghanistan,” Wakhil said, trying to encourage me. He pointed to a vague area where the terrain leveled out.
Now Wakhil, Jihan-zeb, and Lurang quickened their pace, leaving me far behind. I struggled alone for half an hour until I saw the three of them sitting on a flat table of land in the distance. When I reached them I collapsed at their feet. They all laughed.
“Afghanistan!” Wakhil exclaimed to me, pointing a finger at the ground, which he stamped with his foot.
Behind me, the wadi we had just ascended fell away in a swirl of trees and gravel to reveal a panorama of mountains. For all their gray and dull green barrenness, they had a temperate, recognizable flavor. But ahead was something out of a sci-fi film: jagged ranks of sawtooth peaks that, despite the nearby web of lush riverbeds, seemed even more rain-starved than the land we were leaving. This was the so-called Durand Line, negotiated between the amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, and a special British envoy, Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893 as the border that would separate Afghanistan from the Northwest Frontier of British India. The Durand Line is usually described in books as an arbitrarily drawn division that was not based on particular geographical features, so it was difficult to know when you had crossed it. But every time I went over the Afghan border, it seemed fairly logical and straightforward: the border ran along a watershed where the landscapes were noticeably different on each side. I saw no water here at the moment, but the autumn rains would bring plenty of streams, and the small plateau on which we were sitting would be where the waters split into two opposite, downward directions. We were now roughly twenty-five miles southwest of the border station at Torcham, beyond Landi Kotal. We had
