Soldiers of God

other Hizb-i-Islami) was the only one of the seven resistance organizations that truly deserved the label “fundamentalist,” inasmuch as it was anti-Western and totalitarian. Because of its formidable public relations machine in Pakistan, which was funded by Zia, the party garnered frequent attention in the foreign press, despite the fact that the allegiance of its commanders to Hekmatyar was dubious and its field presence inside Afghanistan and influence in the refugee camps overrated. Were Hekmatyar eventually to triumph, it would happen only through Pakistani support and intervention.

Up close, Hekmatyar’s base resembled a stage set for a guerrilla camp rather than a real one. Rarely had I seen mujahidin who looked so well rested and clean, with perfectly wrapped turbans and new shiny leather bandoleers and shalwar kameezes. The buildings they inhabited were made of real stone rather than the mud brick and canvas of the other mujahidin camps, and on the floors were expensive, hand-stitched oriental carpets. They had new field phones, walkie-talkies, binoculars, ceramic plates, and fresh dates to eat, courtesy of Hekmatyar’s Saudi patrons. I filled my stomach with the dates, which Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb refused to touch. Hekmatyar’s men displayed an intense interest in my canteen and rucksack. They wanted to know where they could buy such equipment.

“Tourists,” Wakhil muttered angrily as we left Hekmatyar’s camp, after I had finished eating the dates. “From now on, you will meet real mujahidin.”

We followed a wadi for the next few hours until we had to climb a mountain just to meet our trail again. “Mines,” explained Wakhil. That part of the wadi was strewn with them, and it was safer to go around it, even if that meant climbing up one thousand feet and then down again. It occurred to me that the mujahidin were usually not the victims of mine blasts because they had mapped out all the trails in their minds. The peasant farmers, and their children in particular, were much less knowledgeable about the trails and the mines than the mujahidin.

Then the easy part ended.

Just as I was getting tired, Lurang, wearing a sadistic smile, pointed to a line of hills that rippled upward until they merged with a steep escarpment covered with thorns and cactus that led to a ridge about ten thousand feet up. This was the first of a series of mountain walls that would take us to the sixteen-thousand-foot, ice- flecked granite platforms of what the international maps called Safed Koh (Persian for White Mountain), a range that formed the border between Nangarhar province and a sliver of Pakistani tribal territory surrounded by Afghanistan on three sides.

Babur, the Mongol king and poet, wrote: “The Safed Koh runs along the south of Nangarhar… no riding-road crosses it; nine torrents issue from it. It is called Safed Koh because its snow never lessens; none falls in the lower parts of its valleys, a half-day’s journey from the snow-line. Many places along it have an excellent climate; its waters are cold and need no ice.” Instead of calling it Safed Koh, Pathans use the Pukhtu word for White Mountain, Spinghar. The waters Babur referred to were in the valley on the other side of the series of hills we had to cross.

At the top of the first hill I fell to the ground under a rucksack that suddenly felt as though it were weighted with stones. Except for the dates and the grease-soaked bread at the fort in Tirah, I had not eaten for thirty hours. I had finished the last of the canteen water, and we were still several hours from the cold waters of the valley. My eyes stung from salty sweat. Without being aware of it, I was licking sweat from my forehand in order to soothe my throat, irritated from dust and lack of water. As I came across the ridge before beginning another climb, one of the straps of my rucksack tore. I cursed. Jihan-zeb grabbed it by the other strap and surged ahead up the hill with the others, laughing at my weakness. Like the Tibetan lama who led Kim into Kashmir, the Pathans were hillmen, growing in strength in proportion to the difficulty of the terrain. Even Wakhil, so small and vulnerable looking in Landi Kotal, seemed to acquire stature as he drew a deep double- lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and panted, astonished.

I was so hungry and tired that I was hallucinating into Kim.

At the top of the next brow I allowed myself to drop to the ground a second time, thinking we had reached some sort of summit and would now be able to descend into the valley. But we were only on another shaved green platform below the main spur, and there was no shade. Again Kipling’s novel came to mind: Here one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile!

The next few hours were a blur of agony. On the downhill march my companions left the trail and bounded earthward on a forty-five-degree angle over a treacherous, rocky slope, rifles and my rucksack clanging against their shoulders, while I hobbled along the path, knees quaking, thinking that if mountain goats could talk and think like men, they would be equal to the mujahidin. Then a trickling noise sent chills through my body: the sound of running water. In the failing, dust-stained light I could make out an assemblage of pudding-stone houses at the bottom of the hill that merged with the dun-colored soil like sand castles on a beach. The trail became so steep and my knees so sore as I descended toward the village that I slid the last fifty yards through the packed dust into a mud embankment, which was channeling the spring water I had heard into a young fruit orchard. I must have looked like a chimney sweep.

A pitcher of water appeared magically out of the twilight, held by an old man with a stringy gray beard and apakol on his head. He squatted down in the mud and handed it to me.

As I started to drink he began yelling at me, raising a finger in the air. “Khabarnegah, khabarnegah!” It was the Pukhtu word for journalist.

“We told this man you are a journalist,” explained Wakhil, who along with Lurang and Jihan-zeb was washing his feet and hands in the irrigation ditch in preparation for evening prayers.

The old man exploded into a loud babble of Pukhtu that sounded like an insult. His contorted, sunburned face was inches away from me, suspended in the enveloping darkness. Every time I took another gulp of water or rinsed my face and hands he shook his head in a mocking manner. When Wakhil came over after the prayers were finished, the old man was silent for a moment, then started screaming again.

“He says his name is Gholam Issa Khan.” Wakhil had to shout so that I could hear his translation above the graybeard’s ranting. I struggled to retrieve my notebook. Two loud, simultaneous voices now pounded at my head. I was covered with dust and lightheaded from hunger. This incident gained a mystical quality in my mind; it was like listening to the voices of your own conscience.

“The Communists don’t like my God and his messenger,” the old man said. “They tried to wipe out my way of life. But my God gives me strength. My God always helps me. America is godless but America is good because America gives me guns to fight Communists. After we drive the shuravi [Soviet forces] out of Afghanistan, we will drive them out of Bukhara and Samarkand and Tashkent too. Allahu akbar!”

“How old are you?” I asked. I wanted to get his story straight from the beginning. The old man thought for a moment. I wondered if anybody had ever asked him this question.

“Forty,” Wakhil translated.

“Forty? He looks like seventy.”

“These people are not like you,” Wakhil said. “They don’t know exactly when they were born. Why do you always ask such questions about numbers and dates? What does it matter?”

Wakhil was angry. Maybe the man really was forty — or at least thought he was. Lurang and Jihan-zeb were both ten years younger than I, yet they looked older.

The old man continued to shout: “Taraki people tried to rape my wife, to stop me from praying. I have thirty hectares. Taraki people want to take ten hectares away from me. They say my daughters must go to Communist school. I say I kill you first!” He shook his fist. “Shuravi come with planes, helicopters, boom, boom. This, this” — he pointed in all directions — “all finished. We go to Pakistan. Then mujahidin come, shuravi leave. We make all this, this” — again he pointed — “all over again. Again bomb, again make.”

The graybeard jabbed furiously at my notebook, as if to say, “Write, write.” I wrote. Then for the first time he smiled. I took out my camera and aimed it at him.

“Ne, ne,” he shouted, covering his face with his hands.

“You must not take this man’s picture,” Wakhil said. “This man says his picture is only for God to see.”