were expected to kill a sheep or goat in his honor. Every evening we would enter a new village and sit outside under the stars, talking, smoking a water pipe, and waiting for the meat to cook. Then Qadir, at least a dozen other mujahidin, and the village notables would enter the house and stack their guns against the mud walls, sit around the carpet, and silently devour a repast that would include a sheep or a goat, chicken livers, rice, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, mangoes, and bananas. (Whether you were a journalist or a fighter, you always ate better when traveling with a big commander. The problem was trying not to break wind, something that Pathans consider to be far ruder and funnier than we Westerners do. An American relief worker did so in the presence of Abdul Haq, and the mujahidin spoke of the incident for months.)
Qadir even had a court jester, a sixty-year-old turbaned Afridi who was fat, didn’t carry a gun, and seemed to have no discernible function except to tell stories and jokes. Journalists dubbed him “Haji Ball Grabber,” because one of his pranks was to pretend to shake your hand while lunging for your testicles.
It was a leisurely stroll into Afghanistan with Qadir. He slept late and every night sat down to a huge feast. He had been in Peshawar for several weeks and told me he would need several more, to talk to Ashnagur, Habibullah, and other field commanders before planning a series of attacks against Soviet and Afghan regime positions near Jalalabad. This was in June
after the Soviet withdrawal had started, when pundits in America were speculating about the possibility of a mujahidin assault on the city of Jalalabad itself. But the war seemed to Qadir like a sport. He fought and risked his life at his own pace and didn’t consult much with other big commanders about what he was doing, as they didn’t consult with him. This was why the assault on Jalalabad didn’t come until February
and partly why it failed.
Qadir was like an English country squire taking up the hunt. But finally, after a month of sleeping late and leisurely consuiting with his subordinates, he surgically blasted the Afghan government post of Achin into near oblivion.
It was at Qadir’s headquarters, an eyrie of tents and heavy machine guns looking out onto Soviet and Afghan regime positions at Dihbala, that I got sick. It was dysentery. I couldn’t stop vomiting and had diarrhea. Unlike Qadir, however, I lacked the strength to climb a mountain.
Everyone I knew got sick in Afghanistan, and many of the books written about the country seemed to revolve exclusively around the writer’s illnesses and constant physical discomfort. Because of its humor and brilliant, tongue-in-cheek conclusion, the British travel writer Eric Newby’s 1958 classic,
Losing weight and dehydrating fast, I had no choice but to go back to Peshawar. Trekking was impossible, but riding for seventy-two hours on a mule without a saddle while suffering from dysentery proved to be far more difficult than walking the same distance in good health. It was hard to hold down any liquid in my stomach, especially since the green tea began to taste like urine and the tea boys insisted on serving it in small cups half filled with sugar. I could focus only on the negative aspects of Pathan existence. How sterile their life was! Everyone wore unkempt beards and seemed to go for months without sex. Wherever I looked there were wild herbs growing on the mountainsides, suitable for all kinds of exotic teas, but the Pathans preferred only this weak, awful stuff. Unlike the Arabs, they disdained coffee and, of course, alcohol too.
Then the mule boy accompanying me, Farouk Ali, did something that surprised me. He grabbed a pink rose that was growing all alone on a rock face and stuck it behind his ear and smiled, wearing it like that the rest of the day. Ill with nausea, sunstroke, and dehydration, choking dust and sandstone and thorn bushes all around me, I was deeply affected by the sight of that rose and the extravagant gesture Farouk AH made with it. It was like a revelation. This was a culture that had produced no painting or sculpture of any kind and boasted little original music or dance. Though Peshawar was the principal city of the Pathans, the Peshawar Museum was filled with Buddhist, Moghul, and Persian art only. But the Pathans did write poetry:
Those were the words of Khushal Khan Khatak. The wearing of a pink rose by an uneducated mule boy was, for me, a sign that the poetic impulse ran deep in the culture.
Of course, Arab and Persian culture offered similar contrasts between the barren and the baroque. But with the Pathans those contrasts seemed to be starker and more dramatic. On a later trip inside Afghanistan I stayed at a guerrilla base that was under constant mortar bombardment where the mujahidin raised petunias and had paid the equivalent of $175 — a fortune by Afghan standards — for a songbird.
The little tea or water I could keep down was not enough to soothe my throat, which grew more and more parched. Then my throat became so dry it was almost too painful to swallow, and pressure built up in my ears as if I were in an airplane. At a tea stall I noticed a rotting watermelon skin, and my self-discipline broke down. Just the thought of more green tea or water was enough to make me gag, but I knew I could hold down a watermelon. I began crying, almost, for a piece, but there was no more. Evidently, watermelons could be had in war-torn Nangarhar, but finding one at a tea stall was a matter of luck. The idea of rinsing my desiccated mouth with the juice began to obsess me, however. I began to imagine mountains of watermelons and waterfalls of watermelon juice. Then I started counting the hours to Landi Kotal, where I could buy a watermelon. Or a Coke. Fifty hours to go, forty-five… I was lost in childhood memories of root beer and cream soda flushing through my mind. It was comic. All restraint had dissolved. Afghanistan had completely broken me.
The pain of thirst was so all-encompassing that I was barely aware of the welts that were forming on my buttocks from the hours on the mule. I was becoming so dehydrated and overheated that just the sound of trickling spring water sent chills of relief through my body, and rinsing my fully clothed body in the cold streams was pure sensual annihilation.
And so was the photograph of my family by the Aegean Sea. Opening his eyes wide, Farouk Ali pointed at the blue water in the background. The sight of my wife in shorts and without a veil appeared to have no effect on him. Never having been out of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier, he had never even seen a lake, let alone a sea. The sight of what, for a Pathan, was the equivalent of a naked woman did not stir him as much as the idea of a large body of water. Given my thirst, I could understand his emotion.
Then came the Valley of Tirah Bazaar. At a small camp of Khalis mujahidin we picked up two bodyguards for the journey through Afridi territory. It took eight hours on the mule during the hottest hours of the day, stopping not once for water. Because of my illness, I was now a whimpering idiot.
In Landi Kotal, I bought Farouk Ali and myself four watermelons and six Coca-Colas. Suddenly he seemed as thirsty as I was. He had never complained, yet now he was devouring the watermelons and Cokes faster than I. We both slurped and drank until there was nothing left. After I paid him for the mule, Farouk Ali went back into the desert toward the Valley of Tirah Bazaar and Afghanistan. Back to that same thirst and other deprivations.
The ability to endure, year after harrowing year, such a monastic existence, as barren and as confined by self-denial as that of the most disciplined desert anchorites, constituted the most lethal weapon the Pathans had in their battle against the Soviets. Had the Afghans acquiesced to Soviet rule without a fight, no doubt there would have been more watermelon and other fruit, and perhaps even a bus and paved road in Nangarhar. And there would not have been any mines. The idea of fighting for political freedom is an easy one to grasp until you see in the flesh what the cost is.
Of course, I didn’t have to get dysentery to figure this out. But, in the manner of the surgeon learning about mines in the operating room, being sick in Afghanistan provided me with an experience through which I was better able to appreciate the concept — and the price — of freedom as I never had before.
