Soldiers of God

In the gas-lit darkness, we sat around the sides of the tent and ate a meal of flat bread, raw turnips, onions, and green tea. Away from the villages there were no goats and therefore no curds. The only luxury was the water pipe, assembled from a brass pitcher and bamboo pole. After the repast, Commander Habibullah read a passage from the Koran while we all listened. It was one of the few occasions when everyone prayed together.

Habibullah was constantly busy, writing messages, communicating by walkie-talkie, or going off to a nearby tent on an inspection or to confer. He appeared efficient, competent, and unfriendly — disdainful of the world I seemed to represent. Only very late at night did he agree to talk to me.

Habibullah, one of Abdul Qadir’s top lieutenants, had a dark Indian’s complexion, a long black beard, and an aquiline nose. He reminded me of a Sikh warrior rather than a Pathan, and in the dim, smoky light he looked like a Greek or Syrian saint in an early Christian fresco. Habibullah was twenty-six years old and from the Kuchi tribe, a nomadic branch of the Pathans. Being a Kuchi explained a lot about his demeanor. The British writer Peter Levi, in an erudite travelogue about Afghanistan, The Light Garden of the Angel King, described the Kuchis this way: “Kuchi means travelers and they are hard to know. We found them stoical about disease and distrustful of the local doctors, and in their tents their behavior was regal.” Erect and motionless, Habibullah spoke impassively through Wakhil’s translation.

As in the case of Gholam Issa Khan, in the late 1970s Taraki’s Communist regime seized Kuchi land in Nangarhar and hauled the local mullah and headman of Habibullah’s nomadic encampment off to prison. They were never seen again. Many of his kinsmen fled to refugee camps in Pakistan. Habibullah joined Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami to fight the Communists south of Jalalabad, near the town of Rodat Baru, where his family used to live. He described how Soviet troops entered the Kuchi camp in 1982, “robbing houses, killing the goats, taking money and the cows.” Then this Kuchi area was bombed from the air, and all the irrigation canals were destroyed. “Less than ten people out of two thousand are still left there. Many are in Peshawar, many we don’t know if they are alive or dead.”

About that time, Habibullah returned temporarily to Pakistan, where he married. He now had a wife and two children living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar. Amid strangers in the impersonal, barrackslike arrangement of the sprawling camp, his wife was obliged to wear the veil, something Kuchi women didn’t have to do in Afghanistan, where everyone in the encampment was a close relative. Living as a guerrilla, Habibullah had seen his wife and children only a few times over the years, and he worried about them. He said over a third of the members of his extended family had been killed, “but if we stopped fighting and went to live in the camps in Pakistan, we would all become refugee slaves and the Communists would have everything.”

Habibullah was not vehement or even enthusiastic about what he said. There was an almost bored look in his olive-pit eyes. Jihad was obviously no joy for him, but a fundamental duty that grew out of the unfortunate circumstances of his life. Oppression had forced Habibullah — against his better nature, it seemed — to hate. The Afghans, I was beginning to notice, were not really good haters, not like the kind that existed in Iran, Lebanon, and other places Moslems felt themselves to be oppressed. The differences between those places and Afghanistan were, among other things, politics and urbanization. The mujahidin were not politicized to the degree that Arabs and Iranians were. The Afghan fundamentalists were mainly simple village people, not an angry peasant proletariat that had fled to city slums in search of jobs, as in Iran and Egypt, and in the process had sacrificed their cultural underpinnings. Habibullah had lost a lot, but one thing he hadn’t lost was a sense of who he was.

Scurrying field mice and the drone of helicopter gunships again disturbed my sleep. When Habibullah saw my fear he laughed. It was the only time I ever saw a smile cross his face. He explained to Wakhil that the gunships never came in low over Spinghar anymore because of the enemy’s fear of Stingers. “We don’t have Stingers here,” Habibullah said. “But we always say we do when communicating by radio, which we know they intercept.”

After daybreak the bombs came. The earth vibrated from the thousand-pounders dropped by the fighter jets overhead. Clouds of dust from exploding earth filled the air. The nearest bomb hit several hundred yards away from us and, as it turned out, nobody was hurt. It had been a useless exercise: the jets had taken off from the military air field at Jalalabad, dropped their bombs from about ten thousand feet, and flew home. The jets were flying so high that from the ground they appeared no larger than specks. Even with television-guided missiles — which these planes were not equipped with — hitting a target as small as a pup tent from that altitude is exceedingly difficult. It was another potent illustration of how the Stingers had changed the face of the war. Weighing only thirty pounds, the heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles were mobile and cost only $75,000 apiece, and in two out of three times that they were fired in Afghanistan, a Stinger destroyed a Soviet jet or helicopter that cost about $4 million each. So the Soviet and Afghan government pilots weren’t taking any chances.

Wakhil and I said our goodbyes to Lurang and Jihan-zeb, who would now rejoin Habibullah’s forces on Spinghar for guerrilla sorties in the Jalalabad area. We were headed down into the Kot Valley toward that city. Habibullah gave us a new guide, a raw-boned old man whose name I never found out and who I thought, gratefully, would be unable to move along at the same demanding pace set by Lurang and Jihan-zeb.

I was wrong.

The trek from Spinghar was all downhill and took only five hours, which must have been like a sprint for the mujahidin but was among the most difficult of the marches I made inside. The geezer practically jogged the whole way, holding his Kalashnikov in his hand rather than using the shoulder strap. The entire journey was in a canyon floor along a treacherous mountain stream. After days of walking for hours on almost no water, suddenly I was deluged by it. As we descended toward the plain, the weather became hot again, yet the spring water was as cold as melting snow and filled with sharp stones and pebbles. And it was moving fast. We had to ford the stream twenty-three times (masochistically, I was keeping count). My feet were numb inside my soaking running shoes, but I needed the traction to keep from falling in the water — anyway, our guide was not going to wait for me to take my shoes off and put them on again. Near the bottom of the canyon Wakhil noticed several butterfly mines that the mujahidin had surrounded with stones so a passer-by wouldn’t easily stumble onto them. In such circumstances there would often be other mines in the vicinity that they hadn’t spotted. The old man casually waved at us to come ahead and jogged on, and so did we. After a while I got so tired and out of breath that I stopped thinking about mines. If I was fated to step on one I would, and that was that. My principal fear was the immediate one: falling behind Wakhil and our guide.

The Kot Valley unrolled like a plush green carpet at the foot of Spinghar, a jungly world in sight of the snows. We alighted under a large plane tree on a raised table of earth about a hundred feet over the valley, providing a prospect from which to espy the terrain we were about to enter. A local farmer laid out a rush mat and Turkoman rug for us. His son, wearing a gold Sindhi cap, brought ceramic cups for tea. I took off my shoes and smelly socks and let the hot sun dry my feet while I drank tea under a blue sky on a rug I would have been proud to have in my living room back in Greece. It was the kind of moment that a traveler files away in his mind in order to impress people later on. But what I also remember about that moment was what the farmer told Wakhil about all the irrigation ditches that had been blown up by fighter jets, and the flooding in the valley and malaria outbreak that followed. Malaria, which on the eve of Taraki’s Communist coup in April 1978 was at the point of being eradicated in Afghanistan, had returned with a vengeance, thanks to the stagnant, mosquito-breeding pools caused by the widespread destruction of irrigation systems. Nangarhar was rife with the disease. This was another relatively minor, tedious side effect of the Soviet invasion that lacked drama and would only have numbed newspaper readers if written about or even mentioned in passing — which it never was.

We crossed rice, grain, and maize fields, walking along rebuilt irrigation embankments and down dusty trails partially shaded by apple and apricot trees. It was hot and, for the first time since I left Peshawar, a bit humid too. Almost every mud brick dwelling we saw had been hit by a bomb. Yet more civilians lived here than elsewhere in the Spinghar region, and women in colorful chadors were ubiquitous in the fields, separating the strands of grain and carrying bundles of it on their heads. Only since the end of 1986 had refugees started to come back to the Kot Valley from Pakistan. The upsurge in cultivation was the result of one thing: Stingers. High-altitude Soviet bombing notwithstanding, the missiles were providing enough air cover to frighten away low-flying gunships, allowing some peasant farmers to return and start growing crops. Relief workers in other parts of Afghanistan where the mujahidin had Stingers had also noticed this phenomenon. The antiaircraft missiles were actually putting food in people’s mouths.

We rested again in an apple orchard, and a farmer brought us the best meal I had eaten so far in