Soldiers of God

Afghanistan: curds, lentils, greasy fried eggs, apples, and green tea. The heat, the greenery, the water slowly trickling in the stagnant canals, and the timelessness of the setting evoked a town in the Nile Delta in Egypt.

Our guide took Wakhil and me to meet the commander in the valley. His name was Ashnagur. He was tall and lanky, and with his rifle, bandoleer, and high, bright green turban wrapped tightly around his head he resembled an Afridi bandit. Ashnagur had the visage of a hawk, with a long hooked nose, huge forehead, and black beard. He seemed cocky and reckless. Besides the rifle, he had an old Spanish Star pistol stuck inside his belt with the safety catch off. He was surrounded by about thirty young boys, all armed and constantly staring at him, even though I was the one who was surely the novelty. It was a charisma that rubbed off on me too. Ashnagur hugged me and explained — without my asking — how he would send a prearranged coded signal on the walkie-talkie to Habibullah, announcing my safe arrival. Then he smacked his huge calloused hand on the ground and said, “Sit. I am here to answer your questions.”

Ashnagur was twenty-eight years old, the only child of a peasant couple in a Peshawar refugee camp. Since almost every other Pathan I ever met had at least half a dozen brothers and sisters, growing up as an only child here struck me as a much more intense experience than in my own culture. I wondered if his extreme sociability was a way to compensate for a lonely childhood.

Now Ashnagur seemed to have thirty siblings, all younger and looking up to him as the adored older brother. There was something scary and magical about this band of mujahidin. They suggested a Gypsy troupe, a Central American terrorist outfit, a Puerto Rican street gang, and the orphan thieves of Oliver Twist all rolled into one. Their Kalashnikov rifles and grenade launchers were emblazoned with purple and red talismans and pompoms. In place of dull brown pakols, some of the boys wore colorful bandannas around their heads. One boy carried an old megaphone for Ashnagur to shout orders through during a battle, but there were no medical supplies except for a half-used and expired package of cold pills. Others had rag-wrapped bundles tied on branches over their shoulders that contained lumps of American- supplied C-4 plastic explosive for nightly sorties against Soviet and Afghan regime installations in the area. Proudly, Ashnagur took out a fistful of the substance, stuck a copper wire into it that was affixed at the end to a “time pencil,” and blew up a section of mud embankment to demonstrate the explosive power. The boys, who must have seen him do this many times before, nevertheless watched with awe. Isolated in this lush central Asian valley, with all their family members dead or in refugee camps, the boys had dreamed up their own rich pantheon of gods and sacred objects, including Allah, C-4 plastique, magic charms, and Ashnagur. For these homeless boys, Ashnagur was everything: older brother, father figure, and supreme role model.

There was one old man in the unit, sixty-year-old Said Hamidullah. Trachoma blinded him in one eye. He told me that one of his three sons had been killed here in 1986 during a Soviet ground assault. “As long as I can still see out of the other eye I will fight and kill Russians,” he shouted at me in a hoarse, eccentric tone. “In the Gulf, Moslems are killing Moslems. The Palestinians are all Communists. Ours is the only true jihad.” None of the teenagers laughed or at any time seemed to make fun of him.

They all lived off the land, eating wild maize, rice, fruit, raw turnips and onions, and the occasional egg or bowl of curds given to them by the local farmers. Almost every evening after dark they set out for the Jalalabad plain to blow up a small bridge or a section of road or just to take a few pot shots at an enemy base, since at this late stage in the war, neither the Soviets nor the Afghan regime’s troops ventured from their bases. A siege mentality had overcome them.

Wakhil and I stayed with Ashnagur’s unit for the better part of a week. I heard gunfire and the thud and shake of artillery throughout each day and early evening, and several times Soviet aircraft bombed the valley to no great effect. One evening, the boys in the unit brought me a chicken to eat, but it tasted rotten and had a maggot inside. I went behind a tree to vomit. Wakhil remonstrated me for insulting our hosts. I apologized. Another night, I was sound asleep under a plane tree when, at about four A.M., we were all awakened by the rumble of feet and the clanging of rifles. Clack, clack, clack — bullets slid into breeches as the mujahidin prepared for a firelight. My stomach turned. I rolled off the jute bed onto the ground. My ultimate nightmare was being killed or captured in an ambush by Communist troops, who from time to time found it necessary to prove that they were still to be taken seriously. It was a false alarm. Another guerrilla unit had just arrived from an all- night trek and had forgotten to give the password. Everyone laughed, and I felt like a fool again, lying on the ground, shaking.

Ashnagur conducted most of his sorties near the Soviet base at Dihbala, a complex of sandbagged bunkers at the edge of the Spinghar foothills that looked out on the Jalalabad plain. The pattern was always the same. At dusk, the mujahidin would eat a meager meal on the ground and then pray while Ashnagur split the plastique into small pieces and prepared them with the copper wire and time pencils, which had breakable seals releasing acid that burned down the wire. The march to the road linking the Soviet base with Jalalabad took several hours. As usual, a bridge or section of the road would be blown up and the guerrillas would beat a fast retreat. The pace was impossible, so I went only partway to the target, staying behind with a member of the unit. I heard the explosion and a volley of shots fired from the nearby enemy position in response. Then the young fighter I was with badgered me to run as fast as I could behind him. He cursed me all the way back to Ashnagur’s base area. Still, the others who had carried out the sabotage operation arrived back first. Thank God Abdul Haq wasn’t there to see me, I thought. The entire experience had the humiliating quality of army basic training. Each day, more and more of me was being broken down.

When I staggered back I saw Ashnagur’s boys collapsed on the jute beds. Dawn had peeled away the darkness from their faces to reveal glazed, jubilant expressions. Backfire from a malfunctioning grenade launcher had blistered one boy’s face. Ashnagur gave him a cold pill. The boy, his eyes dazed and watery, smiled and swallowed the pill with a serious expression, as if it could actually help. I gave him one of my painkillers. The others cleaned their rifle barrels and grenade launchers with kerchiefs wrapped around branches. This was the base of rural resistance upon which more impressive actions of other, more famous commanders rested.

* * *

Despite the constant fatigue and physical discomfort, I rarely felt cynical or let down. Because of the war, Afghanistan offered a form of travel that had all but died out in the last part of the twentieth century. I considered myself privileged to be crossing frontiers without the need of a passport and trekking over new and fascinating landscape that had not been altered by modern development. As selfish and retrograde as this attitude was, it was irresistible. I never felt uneasy, either, despite being at the mercy of a band of seared, scrappy young men.

As fighters, Ashnagur’s band may not have been the most impressive, but they and the other mujahidin I met embodied characteristics that were unique in the Third World, and my awareness of this fact kept my enthusiasm from flagging. Not only were they fanatical Moslems who were exceedingly tolerant of nonbelievers; they were also probably the only group of their kind with whom a Western woman would have been absolutely safe. (Several female journalists, who would not necessarily think of themselves as tough, traveled with the guerrillas.) I saw no hint of overt homosexuality or any kind of sexual deviation, though, as in all cultures, such things undoubtedly existed.

Rarely in Afghanistan or the Northwest Frontier did I encounter a mujahid with a lewd look in his eyes, as if he were staring at someone through a keyhole — an expression I had seen throughout the Middle East. Displays of excessive politeness toward Western women, also common in that part of the world, were absent among the Pathans. Abdul Haq treated the occasional female journalist as if she were one of the boys — primitive though his attitude was toward women of his own culture. After Abdul Qadir had had the opportunity to pass through Bangkok, I asked him if he had taken advantage of the city’s easily available sexual delights. “You think I am a donkey,” Qadir hissed, as if I had insulted him.

You could come up with various explanations for the genuine respect accorded to foreign women by Pathans, as well as for the Pathans’ apparent lack of sexual frustration and conflict when away from their wives for months at a time. A university-educated Pathan in Peshawar told me the fact that the Pathans were never urbanized, as Arabs and Iranians were, may have something to do with it. The exigencies of war may be another reason. In The Danger Tree, a novel about the World War II desert campaign in Egypt, the British writer Olivia Manning observed:

Here in the desert, either from lack of stimulus or some quality in the air, the men were not much troubled by sex. The need to survive was their chief preoccupation.… In spite of the heat of the day, the cold of the night, the flies, the mosquitoes, the sand-flies, the stench of death that came on the wind, the sand blowing into the