Soldiers of God

government!”

Considering the contempt Amin Wardak had for Pir Gailani, it was amazing that the relationship lasted as long as it did. It wasn’t until the beginning of 1988 that Amin Wardak formally broke away from NIFA and joined up with Khalis. The final straw was nothing that the Pir precipitated; rather, it had to do with Abdul Haq’s injury. The medical compound where Haq was taken after he had stepped on the mine was in Wardak province, and so under Amin’s control. Haq felt that he owed his life to him and showed his appreciation by sending Amin several truckloads of weapons and ammunition. Some bargaining ensued, and as a result NIFA was suddenly without one of its only two big commanders.

NIFA still had Haji Abdel Latif, though. Haji Latif was about the last person on earth one would normally associate with the “Gucci muj.” He was in his eighties and, even more so than Khalis, spent most of his time inside, fighting. Haji Latif had a particularly unsavory reputation before the war. He had served twenty-one years in prison on a murder charge and was a strange sort of brigand: he was the leader of a gang of Kandahar cutthroats that functioned as a benevolent mafia, robbing rich merchants by making them pay exorbitant rates for “protection” and, occasionally, giving some of the money to the poor. NIFA officials defined him as a “Robin Hood figure.” His gang was called Pagie Louch, Farsi for “bare feet,” because along with special prayers and magic incantations, its initiation rites involved walking barefoot on a bed of hot coals. New members also had to suffer nails to be driven into their heels without showing pain.

Switching gears from gang leader to mujahidin commander was easy in Afghanistan, particularly in the southern desert city of Kandahar, the wildest part of perhaps the wildest country on earth.

In a war that was in many ways the most dangerous ever for a reporter to cover, Kandahar was the most dangerous theater of the war. Its desert land was flat and cluttered with land mines. When MI-24 helicopter gunships swept in low after their prey, you could run but you couldn’t hide. Because you didn’t have to walk, the Kandahar area was physically less demanding than everywhere else in the country. But never in the mountainous north did a reporter feel as scared and vulnerable as when jammed inside a Toyota Land Cruiser, slowed down by deep pockets of sand, with Soviet helicopters in the sky. The Kandahari guerrillas, more than the other mujahidin, had a reputation for reckless bravado. When mines and helicopters were reported ahead, they slammed on the accelerator.

Kandahar really got to me; it wiped out what was left of my so-called objectivity. Being there made me think that the Western media really were a bunch of pampered, navel-gazing yuppies, too busy reporting illegal detentions and individual killings in South Korea and the West Bank… before dashing back to their luxury hotels in Seoul and Jerusalem… to bother about the nuclearlike wasting of an entire urban center by the Soviet military. The throngs of reporters in places like Israel, South Korea, and South Africa, and the absence of them in Kandahar, or even in the Pakistan border area that abuts it, made me think that “war reporting” was fast becoming a misnomer.

Blazers were replacing flak jackets. The warfare most often videotaped and written about was urban violence in societies that have attained a level of development sufficient to allow large groups of journalists to operate comfortably. The worldwide profusion of satellite stations, laptop computers, computer modems, and luxury hotels with digital phone and telex systems was narrowing the media’s horizons rather than widening them. If there wasn’t a satellite station nearby, or if the phones didn’t work, or if the electricity wasn’t dependable, you just reported less or nothing at all about the place. Although the South Africans, for example, merely curtailed your movements, the Soviets tried to hunt you down and kill you. So you covered South Africa while at the same time denouncing its government for the restrictions it placed on your work. But you didn’t fool around with the Soviets, because they were serious about keeping reporters out. I couldn’t think about Kandahar; I could only rant and rage about it.

The modern destruction of Kandahar had its origins in the American decision to build an airport there in 1956. By the time the airport was completed in December 1962, at a cost of $15 million, it was already considered a white elephant. According to Louis Dupree, in his 1973 book Afghanistan, the airport, in theory, “would have been a refueling stop for piston aircraft on their way across the Middle East and South Asia…. The introduction of the jet age smashed this dream before the completion of the project, and the magnificent facilities now sit, virtually unused, in the desert” outside Kandahar.

Of course Dupree, when he wrote that passage, had no way of knowing what was going to happen. It turned out that the Americans did not build a white elephant after all. Following the Soviet invasion, that airport, about fifteen miles southeast of the city, became the heart of the southernmost concentration of Soviet soldiery in the three-hundred-year history of Russian imperialism in central Asia. Not since Czar Peter the Great first moved against the Tartars had the Russians been so tantalizingly close to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean: five hundred miles across the Baluchi desert, to be exact; or, to put it another way, thirty minutes’ flying time by strike aircraft or naval bomber to the Persian Gulf.

The Soviets garrisoned the airport and the nearby city against mujahidin attacks. Early in the war, when the attacks grew more bold, the Soviets, as they had begun to do in the Panjshir Valley in the north, stretched the definition of counterinsurgency in Kandahar to a point beyond any that the Americans in Vietnam had ever conceived of. They peppered the surrounding desert with tens of thousands of land mines, which they usually dropped from the air but sometimes shot from mortars. Soviet rockets fired from the city and the airport blasted the villages around Kandahar. These villages became lifeless archeological sites, overgrown with weeds and silent except for the buzzing of flies and wasps. But the Kandahari mujahidin were every bit as hell-bent as the Soviets. They zigzagged through minefields on the dust-packed, gravelly wastes with double-barreled 23 mm antiaircraft guns mounted on the backs of their pickup trucks, firing away at anything that moved in the sky. The guns made a harsh, piercing noise that felt like sharp metal inside your stomach, but the gunners never used ear plugs. In 1986, the year after Charles Thornton of the Arizona Republic was killed in a helicopter ambush, when even the bravest journalists avoided Kandahar, the fighting there became truly awful.

James Rupert of the Washington Post was one of a handful of American reporters to visit Kandahar before the Soviet troop withdrawal and the only one I’m aware of who visited the city in 1986. His October 6 dispatch was the most graphic news story about the war in Afghanistan by an American journalist:

Kandahar at night is a lethal fireworks display. During a week-long stay here, I saw red tracer bullets streak through the streets each night, while green, white and red flares garishly lit up the landscape… all amid the crash of artillery shells, mortars and gunfire.

Rupert described a group of mujahidin listening to a radio report about a bombing in Beirut. “Why do they always talk about Beirut?” the man asked Rupert. “Kandahar had a hundred bombs last night.” Rupert’s story made little impact and was quickly forgotten.

The following year, 1987, the situation in Kandahar worsened still. A State Department publication noted, “By the onset of summer, the capital of southern Afghanistan and its surrounding areas had become the scene of what has been probably the heaviest concentration of combat of the war.” The Soviets, who by this time were starting to tell their own people the truth about what was happening in Afghanistan, brought an Izvestia correspondent to Kandahar in September. He wrote that the city “is one big ruin. There is shooting all the time. Nobody would give a brass farthing for your life if you took it into your head, say, to walk down the street unarmed.”

In 1987, the Soviets carpet bombed Kandahar for months on end. After reducing part of the city center and almost all of the surrounding streets to rubble, they bulldozed a grid of roads to enable tanks and armored cars to patrol the city in sectors, indiscriminately destroying shops and homes in the process. Then they tried to win back local sympathies through a rebuilding campaign. But mujahidin filtered back into the area and besieged Soviet positions. Probably more than ten thousand soldiers and civilians were killed and wounded in Kandahar in that year alone.

By 1988, the population of Kandahar, about 200,000 before the war, amounted to, by one estimate, no more than 25,000 inhabitants. The only people in the West aware of what was happening were officials in Washington with access to satellite photographs and Pakistan-based diplomats, journalists, and relief workers. The American media not only ignored the Kandahar story but in most cases probably weren’t even aware of it. The grinding, piecemeal destruction of Afghanistan’s second-largest city constituted an enormous black hole in foreign news