Soldiers of God

“Jihan-zeb asks if you know why mujahidin are brave and feel no pain.”

“No, why?” I asked.

“Because mujahid is a man who has already given himself to God. Though he still breathes, he is like the dead. He isn’t afraid.”

Jihan-zeb smiled again. His simpleminded expression was like that of a fanatic. He reminded me of the Iranian youths at the Gulf war front, with headbands bearing the inscription “Ready for martyrdom” — the kind who, in slightly altered circumstances, were capable of switching from naive kindness to cruelty, and butchery even.

In some cases, the mujahidin had been guilty of just that.

The guerrillas routinely executed enemy pilots upon capture (until American advisers prevailed upon them to at least interrogate the airmen first). In a region of Paktia province controlled by a Khalis commander, Jallaluddin Haqqani, they once took a group of Afghan Communist troops prisoner, lined them up in a ditch, and shot them in the head. After the negotiated surrender of the Communist border post at Torcham at the beginning of 1989, mujahidin alleged to belong to the Khalis organization killed the disarmed Communist soldiers and mutilated their bodies. Still, in most cases, the guerrillas held prisoners, whether Soviets or Afghans, and forced them to survive in the same Spartan manner as their captors. Documented accounts of mujahidin savagery were relatively rare and involved enemy troops only. Their cruelty toward civilians was unheard of during the war, while Soviet cruelty toward civilians was common. On January 16, 1988, for instance, after Soviet troops and an Afghan Communist militia unit captured the village of Kolagu in Paktia province from the mujahidin, they bound together twelve villagers, seven of whom were children, inside the local mosque before they burned it to the ground; nine of the twelve died. (Amnesty International later confirmed the details of the incident.) “Civilian massacres [perpetrated by Soviet and Afghan Communist troops] like the one at My Lai were the norm rather than the aberration,” said David Isby, a military analyst and the author of several books about the war in Afghanistan.

To judge by the overall record, Jihan-zeb and his fellow resistance fighters were not fanatics but simply coarse peasants reacting to the invasion of their land in an uncompromising way. Because the Afghans lacked the material wealth that people elsewhere are terrified of losing, they were able to go on fighting and suffering. That is how they saved Afghanistan from the humiliating fate of so many countries in Eastern Europe. (Whether the Afghan Communist regime falls is to some extent beside the point, since the countryside will always be held by the resistance.)

By the standards of the Middle East, the mujahidin were paragons of virtue. Yet because they were so primitive, they were assumed to be barbaric. And the glasnost-happy Soviet media were masters at playing on this confusion of characteristics, weaving into their reports of Soviet battle losses a sequence of manufactured tales of mujahidin savagery.

The landscape became waterless again as we plodded through a rolling sandstone desert that made me think of mounds of ground curry. Then we began climbing up sandy slopes sprinkled with thorns, cactus, and the odd pine tree or two. Another day of thirst and sore knees — the fourth of our trek — brought us through the tree line to the Spinghar command post of the Khalis mujahidin.

Small bands of guerrillas were spread out in canvas pup tents over the chain of snow-dusted granite peaks and plateaus. From there they could look down on the Kabul-Jalalabad-Torcham highway, the ten-thousand-man Soviet armored division at Samar Khel, and the Soviet-occupied city of Jalalabad in the vast plain thousands of feet below.

It was a perfect guerrilla setup: from the air, the tiny green tents were practically indistinguishable from the stubble of dark lichen. The mujahidin had mounted captured Soviet-made heavy machine guns in ditches dug into the spurs, from where they could bag a low-flying gunship with a lucky shot. (It was near here that Khalis’s men had shot down and captured the first Soviet pilot of the war, in July 1981.) The region’s commander, Habibullah, lived with eleven other men in a tent about fifteen feet long and seven feet wide.

In the space of a few hours, I had gone from extreme heat to extreme cold. My sweat-soaked body was suddenly shivering under my cotton shalwar kameez and the woolen patou that Wakhil wrapped around me. I was reminded of Arnold Toynbee’s description of Afghanistan: “a Turkish bath on a gigantic scale, with the chilly room at an altitude of 7,000 feet and upwards, opening out of the steam room at 3,000 feet and under.” Just as we arrived at Habibullah’s tent, dark clouds tumbled over the plateau and the sky exploded in thunder. The first hailstones hit the ground, and the dozen men huddled inside with patous to keep warm. The temperature was now below freezing, and the mujahidin were without socks, boots, jackets, and sleeping bags. As they watched the sharp pellets of ice rattle on the ground, they smiled and looked grateful. Wakhil explained to me that the mujahidin called hail “Allah’s mine sweeper,” since the force of the pellets was often enough to set off the butterfly mines.

It was pathetic. Though by the late 1980s U.S. taxpayers were aiding the Afghan resistance to the tune of $400 million annually, the guerrillas still had no mine-clearing equipment, and the walkie-talkies that Commander Habibullah used to communicate with his units throughout Spinghar and adjacent valleys were cheap transceivers whose signals the Soviets could easily intercept. Out of habit, the mujahidin still relied on runners carrying handwritten notes through the mountains, a method that provided much tighter security. When better quality Japanese transceivers finally did arrive, they came with English-language instructions that nobody in these mountains could understand. You would have thought that someone in the massive American bureaucracy dealing with the largest covert operation since the Vietnam war would have had the instructions translated into Pukhtu and photocopied. The aid program certainly seemed more impressive from Washington than it did from Spinghar.

The racket of pellets on the canvas grew louder, and wind ruffled the tent, which was beginning to feel like a ship at sea. The mujahidin inside ranged in age from teenagers to old men, and they all had been living together on this isolated peak for years already. In guerrilla armies there is no recruitment period, and some of the men had been away from their families since 1978, when the Taraki regime first forced them underground. I noted the disparity in their ages but was not particularly conscious of it, since they themselves didn’t appear to be. They all wore the same shalwar kameezes and pakols. The younger ones had lived through the same experiences as the old men, and although they lacked white hair and wrinkles, the look in their eyes was just as old.

The hail turned into intermittent freezing rain. As evening fell, the oldest-looking mujahid, white-bearded Yar Mohammed, silently walked out of the tent to the edge of the escarpment, where the gusts of icy wind were fiercest. Split curtains of cloud flew quickly across the fairy tale light of the heavens, as though in a scene from the Bible. The old man sat on a clump of white hail and rinsed his bare feet with a pitcher of cold water. Then he bowed down on his knees in the wet ice and began to repeat Allahu akbar thirty-four times, his hands and forehead falling to the earth, where he kept them fastened while softly, almost inaudibly whispering the name of God to himself. He was absolutely rigid against the wind. Though barefoot and without apatou, he never once shivered. Inside the open-flapped tent, tucked deep in my sleeping bag, I shivered just looking at him.

What could you say about this spindly old man quietly praying barefoot in the ice? Compare him to a sword swallower or a yogi who walks over hot coals? As with Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb praying in the dirt, a visual report of this man’s behavior would only portray him as a fanatic.

Mujahidin life, and that of the Pathans in particular, was stark. Likewise, my thoughts and experiences over these last few days were intense but not varied — like the act of survival itself. Variety was more easily conveyed in journalistic prose than intensity because variety was horizontal, and reporters were conditioned to cover stories horizontally, aspect by aspect. But what did you do with people who were essentially uncomplicated? The mujahidin had few aspects to their personalities, but each aspect required boring deep down to a level of experience that went beyond speech itself. “Damn it, there’s nothing you can say about the muj. You have to feel them,” said Tony O’Brien, a photographer friend.

No one else paid much attention to Yar Mohammed’s praying. The mujahidin, even when in a cohesive group like this one, often prayed alone, whenever each man felt like it. One after another they performed their evening prayers, if not alone, then in groups of two or three. Some shouted; others, like Yar Mohammed, just whispered. Up here on this plateau, in the hail and freezing rain, each man communicated with God in his own style. The chanting crowd in the mosque was absent, and the Koran seemed less like a monologue. This was as close to democracy as one was likely to get in central Asia.