evinced neither the rage of a fanatic, which would have accounted for his defiance, nor the shocked and sorrowful look of someone who was really depressed. If anything registered on his face when I spoke to him, it was bewilderment. He didn’t seem to understand why I thought he should be unhappy. He had lost an eye, a foot, and part of a hand — and that was that.
The Afghan mujahidin came equipped with psychological armor that was not easy to pierce or fathom. They had the courage and strength of zealots, but their eyes were a mystery. Their eyes were not the bottomless black wells of hatred and cunning that a visitor grows accustomed to seeing in Iran and elsewhere in the Moslem world. There was a reassuring clarity about them. Sometimes, while I was talking and sipping cups of green tea with the mujahidin, their eyes would appear so instantly recognizable to me that I thought they could have been those of my childhood friends. How could people with such familiar, nonthreatening eyes walk so readily through minefields?
Western journalists and relief workers were not so brave. We were afraid of going “inside” — crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan. And the more often you went “inside,” the more terrified you became. Only a handful of photographers and cameramen went repeatedly, for after a few trips over the border, a print reporter could understand the story from Pakistan. This was why so many of us didn’t venture far from Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, which functioned as the rear base of the Afghan resistance. The relief workers who went “inside” were doctors trained in emergency surgery and vetted for mental and physical toughness. “The longest, most searching interview I ever had for a job was with Aide Medicale Internationale prior to being sent to Afghanistan,” said Simon Mardel, a London surgeon and an accomplished mountain climber who had also worked in a state hospital in India.
In addition to Afghanistan’s mines, a reporter had to contend with boredom, disease, and exhaustion. The food, when there was more than plain rice and onions to eat, was abominable. The meat was often filled with maggots. You could be felled by bad water. Dysentery was prevalent, along with hepatitis; getting a mild case of vivax malaria was definitely preferable. And all this was what a journalist went through merely to get to the fighting.
Every war, particularly in the Third World, involves risks of disease and danger. But no other war in recent times required journalists to walk up and down mountains as much as fourteen hours a day. Vietnam had helicopters. Every country in Africa has small planes and jeeps. Beirut offered luxury hotels with first-class cuisine next door to the fighting. Afghanistan, though, had only mules for carrying your backpack. In the south, near Kandahar, where vehicles were available, it was too dangerous to travel until the last phase of the Soviet war because the flat terrain was good not only for four-wheel-drive trucks but for helicopter gunships on the lookout for moving mujahidin units. Charles Thornton, a reporter for the
In “The Man Who Would Be King,” Kipling’s story about two Englishmen who depart the Northwest Frontier to seek their fortune in Afghanistan, one returns to Peshawar a “rag-wrapped, whining cripple.” As for the other, only his “dried, withered head” remained. Nothing like that happened to any journalist I knew, but some came pretty close. Richard Mackenzie, an Australian writer for the
Kipling’s Afghanistan was described by Louis L. Cornell as “a place of externes,” where “circumstances corrode and destroy false appearances.” In the 1980s that was still true. There was no journalist covering the war who didn’t become fearfully ill at least once. If only about a dozen reporters were killed or imprisoned during the ten years of Soviet occupation, it was only because relatively few ventured over the border in the first place.
Many were intimidated by Soviet threats. The Soviet ambassador to Pakistan, Vitaly Smirnov, told Agence France Presse on October 5, 1984, that journalists traveling with the mujahidin “will be killed. And our units in Afghanistan will help the Afghan forces to do it.” This statement drew almost no response or criticism from the media establishment in America, but every newsman assigned to the war heard about it.
This was the only war in which having large amounts of money to spend on coverage did absolutely no good. Elsewhere in the world, Amercian television networks leased vehicles and planes to get to remote areas. In Afghanistan there were none to lease, but mules were cheap enough that the poorest freelancer could afford them.
By mule, the fighting in Afghanistan was at least several days of hard traveling from a television satellite transmission station, sometimes as far as several weeks. Had the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1950s, before the satellite age, the war might have seemed less remote and certainly would have garnered more attention than it did in the 1980s.
CBS News based a full-time cameraman, Kurt Lohbeck, in Peshawar. He was one of the handful of journalists who repeatedly risked their lives for several years running in order to cover the war from inside. Lohbeck used to say that part of his “soul was up in those mountains, and you have to go back there and check on yourself from time to time.” But none of the American TV networks had a bureau for a war in which — according to a study by the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the Gallup organization in Pakistan — a superpower killed 1.3 million people. That is more deaths than in the Iraq-Iran war and ten times more than the number killed in Lebanon in all the years of civil conflict there since 1975. The Israelis would have to repeat their 1982 invasion of Lebanon seventy-five times over before equaling the Kremlin’s Afghan carnage.
Five and a half million Afghans were made refugees in Pakistan and Iran, a third of the prewar population of the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan. Considering that another two million Afghans were forced by the war to migrate within the country, no conflict since the end of World War II created more homeless people save for the 1971 Bangladesh war.
The bloodiest year in Afghanistan was 1985, the first year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule in the Soviet Union. In that year, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over a quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or Afghan Communist troops.
Lars Grahnstrom, a shy, relaxed Swedish nurse with piercing blue eyes, arrived in Afghanistan a few weeks after Gorbachev came to power. Grahnstrom spent six months with four other male nurses and doctors in a cave near the Soviet-held city of Mazar-i-Sharif. They treated over a hundred patients a day, the majority of whom had war-related injuries. This was in the extreme north of Afghanistan, where the fighting was heaviest. “In the little part of Afghanistan where I lived, there were more people killed while I was there than in South Africa or Lebanon the whole year,” Grahnstrom said. “Every day I listened to the news on my short-wave radio. It was always South Africa, Lebanon, Sri Lanka — two people killed here, three killed there… I was always hoping to hear something about Afghanistan. But there was nothing.”
In his book
The Soviet bombing had little effect on the mujahidin. By 1987, it seemed that the Soviets’ last, best hope was to destabilize the guerrillas’ rear base, over the border in Pakistan. The State Department reported 127 terrorist incidents in Pakistani cities that year, resulting in 234 deaths — more than in any Middle Eastern country. Pakistan suffered one third of all the fatalities and one half of all the wounded in terrorist attacks worldwide in 1987.
The terrorists whom the Pakistani police managed to capture testified to working for the Afghan Communist Bureau of State Security, Khedamat-e Aetelaat-e Dawlati, known as KhAD. Neither the State Department nor any Western diplomat in Pakistan had any doubt that this was true. KhAD (which has been called the WAD Ministry of State Security since 1988) had been built up by the KGB into a force of 25,000 agents soon after the Soviet
