Soldiers of God

body’s interstices and gritting in everything one ate, the human animal not only survived but flourished. Simon felt well and vigorous and he thought of women, if he thought of them at all, with a benign indifference. He belonged now to a world of men; a contained, self-sufficient world where life was organized from dawn till sunset. It had so complete a hold on him, he could see only one flaw in it: his friends died young.

Except for the desert sand, of which there was less in Afghanistan, it would have been an accurate description of the Pathan world in the 1980s.

Up to a point, that is. For the aura of masculinity and self-containment is common to men at war in general. But how many warrior societies were so primitive, so free of Western influence, and so chock-full of literary references?

At the turn of the century there were the Cossacks, the fabled horsemen of southern Russia. To Russian intellectuals like Tolstoy, the Cossack was a man of “primitive energy, passion, and virtue. He was the man as yet untrammelled by civilization, direct, immediate, fierce.” That, at least, is how Lionel Trilling once described Tolstoy’s attitude toward the Cossacks, comparing it to that of Isaac Babel:

We have devised an image of our lost freedom which we mock in the very phrase by which we name it: the noble savage. No doubt the mockery is justified, yet our fantasy of the noble savage represents a reality of our existence, it stands for our sense of something unhappily surrendered, the truth of the body,…the truth of open aggressiveness. Something, we know, must inevitably be surrendered for the sake of civilization; but the “discontent” of civilization which Freud describes is our self-recrimination at having surrendered too much. Babel’s view of the Cossack was more consonant with that of Tolstoy than with the traditional view of his own people [the Jews]. For him, the Cossack was indeed the noble savage, all too savage, not often noble.

No, the Cossack of a hundred years ago was not often noble. The horseman of the steppes was the instrument of czarist violence against the Jews, raping and murdering women and children in sadistic pogroms. This was the problem with Babel’s worship of the Cossacks. But to imagine the Pathans going into a village in Afghanistan and doing the same things strains credibility. Were this ever to occur, it would be so at odds with Pathan behavior that other Pathans would unite to condemn it.

For decades, Western journalists, relief workers, and other intrepid romantics had scoured the East in search of an exotic human specimen who was undefiled by the bastardizing influences of the West, yet was also without the perversions and hypocrisies for which the East was famous. The Afghan war brought their search to an end; on the Northwest Frontier they rediscovered Kipling’s Pathans.

For the Americans who went to the Northwest Frontier in the 1980s, the attraction was particularly intense, perhaps because, unlike generations of British schoolboys brought up on Empire, Americans came late to the discovery that Kamal and Mahbub Ali and the characters in Kipling’s stories and poems were not Arabs but Pathans — and set apart.

“At first, I knew only that Kamal and his fellows were some unusual kind of Indians, rather like our own Indians of the American West, devoted to brave and warlike deeds…. Then I began to have a dim idea of the great tribal brotherhood which sprawled across northern India and Afghanistan,” wrote the American diplomat James W. Spain in his memoir The Way of the Pathans. Actually, the Pathans were more like our cowboys than like American Indians; they lived by the law of the gun and had an unambiguous code of honor, Pukhtunwali, whose preeminent precepts are nang (pride), badai (revenge), and melmastia (hospitality).

Distinct from all other Moslem peoples in the Near East, the Pathans were essentially democratic and egalitarian, with political life dominated by the jirga, a kind of ancient Athenian parliament of tribal elders, and no tradition of especially cruel, autocratic rulers. Yet like the Arabs, they lived a harsh, sterile existence that was nevertheless baroque and romantic: “They have bred poets as copiously as they have bred warriors,” Spain said. The Pukhtu ballads of Khushal Khan Khatak, reeking as they do of blood and flowers and noble deeds, are as Arthurian as those of the greatest Arab poets. The Pathans, then, were an American romantic’s dream come true: as exotic as the Arabs, but without the Arabs’ reputation for authoritarianism. The Pathans were men. As some Americans on the Northwest Frontier saw it, you didn’t have to be an aesthete or moral relativist like those goddamn Europeans who worshiped the Cossacks and Arabs to justify them.

As the young mujahidin in the Kot Valley looked up to Ashnagur, Ashnagur — and Habibullah too — looked up to Abdul Qadir. Qadir, Abdul Haq’s brother, was the chief guerrilla commander in Shinwar, the region of Nangarhar closest to the Khyber Pass. Ashnagur and Habibullah talked about Qadir as though he were some kind of god. “Qadir is our father, our brother. We follow him everywhere. He teaches us about religion. He is a wise judge,” Ashnagur once said. In reality, what prompted these accolades was Qadir’s social status: he was an educated man from a wealthy landowning family among poor peasants like Ashnagur and Habibullah. Whenever Qadir translated the newscasts on the BBC World Service into Pukhtu for his field commanders, an awed look came over their faces. They were obviously impressed with his education and knowledge of English. And Qadir was generous — always passing out wads of afghanis to the mujahidin and the peasants of Shinwar.

I got to know Qadir on my second trip inside, which Abdul Haq had arranged. Qadir’s thirty-eight-year-old cousin had died of a heart attack two days before our departure for Afghanistan, and Qadir walked into the stone dwelling where we were staying near the border with tears in his eyes. “This fate comes from God,” he said to me, boring his eyes deep into mine. “All of us must face it someday.”

Qadir himself had serious kidney and liver problems, the same illness that had killed his father and that Abdul Haq suffered from too. Qadir, unlike Haq, was a chain smoker and naswar addict, chewing gobs of the opium-laced stuff throughout the day, and as a consequence was always coughing and spitting. He was thirty-five and easily looked fifty. He complained of stomach and chest pains before we even started out on our journey, and I wondered how he was going to climb the fourteen-thousand-foot pass that lay ahead of us. I also wondered how this fretful physical wreck of a man could maintain the respect and adoration of the likes of Ashnagur and Habibullah.

Qadir was in a particularly foul mood that day. Chewing naswar and puffing on a water pipe, he said sarcastically: “Where is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? I thought he was Zia’s big mujahid! Gulbuddin is afraid to cross the border. You know what Zia told Charlie Wilson [a Democratic congressman from Texas and an enthusiastic supporter of the mujahidin]? Zia told him, I will give you Jalalabad as a Christmas present, with Hekmatyar in charge.’ Why do you Americans believe all this bullshit? Jalalabad will not fall so soon. The mujahidin are not ready for conventional battles. I know, because I and ‘Engineer’ Mahmoud [another Khalis party commander] will take Jalalabad when we are ready.” Qadir then went outside to pray and sip tea on a carpet. Listening to the birds at sunset, he closed his eyes and seemed to enter a kind of nirvana.

The next day, taking a route different from the one I had traveled with Wakhil, we climbed the highest pass in the Spinghar range. At the foot of the fourteen-thousand-foot pass, before beginning the ascent, Qadir squatted on the ground and vomited, and in addition had an attack of diarrhea. But after a few minutes of groaning, Qadir slowly got up, draped a cloth over his pakol to further protect his head from the sun, and proceeded to climb the mountain, arriving at the windy, icy summit — the Durand Line — only a few minutes behind me. And, despite all the tobacco smoking he did, Qadir was not breathing hard. “This is good,” he said, looking down the other slope at a lovely forest of firs, cedars, and spruces. “Now that I am in Afghanistan I feel better.” From that moment on, I had trouble keeping up with him. Like Wakhil and every other mujahid I knew, Qadir grew in strength with the difficulty of the terrain while I always weakened.

His tenacity was unquestioned. In November 1986, Qadir led seven hundred guerrillas, clothed only in open leather sandals and cotton shalwar kameezes, against upward of two thousand Soviet and Afghan regime troops in a snowstorm near Dihbala. The battle was a stand-off. Several of Qadir’s men had to have their frostbitten toes amputated afterward.

Other aspects of Qadir’s personality were less entrancing. His strengths and weaknesses derived from the fact that he was a typical Pathan. Traveling with him was like going back to the days of Chaucer’s knights; meals with him were medieval spectacles. As he was the leading guerrilla commander for the region, Shinwar peasants