Soldiers of God

coverage in our time.

Throughout the decade, Haji Latif was in the thick of this carnage, which meant that NIFA, whatever its reputation elsewhere, was a major player in the Kandahar fighting. One NIFA official was quick to boast about this: “We have the most fighters in Kandahar, so why don’t the Pakistanis and the Americans help us more?”

It was questionable whether NIFA really did have the most fighters in Kandahar, since Khalis and the other fundamentalist parties had considerable presence as well. But beneath the claims were fascinating little truths that gave the Kandahar fighting an importance far beyond the quantity of blood shed there.

Ideology mixed with a moderate dose of self-interest drew Haji Latif and NIFA together. NIFA was in fact at its core a royalist party, favoring the return to Afghanistan of exiled King Zahir Shah. This sat well with Haji Latif, since the king had represented a loose, rather corrupt power structure that had allowed his banditry to flourish.

King Zahir Shah’s forty-year tenure on the throne in Kabul… from his ascension in 1933 at the age of eighteen to the 1973 coup engineered by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, which toppled him… was by any reckoning a less than glorious time in Afghan history. Though Afghanistan enjoyed relative peace and development, it was the king’s lazy, uninspired leadership that permitted the Soviets to gain a foothold inside the state bureaucracy. One Western specialist on Afghanistan, with reference to the king’s philandering ways, puts it this way: “While Daoud and the Communists were busy building a power structure in Kabul, the king was busy following his dick around Europe.”

The fundamentalist parties loathed the king with a passion, almost as much as they did the Soviets. For men like Yunus Khalis, Din Mohammed, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the king was the living symbol of the cowardice and moral corruption that had brought the godless Soviets down on the nation’s head. Din Mohammed once explained to me: “How often, during his years of comfortable exile in Italy, has the king spoken out against the sufferings of our people and the crimes of the Russians? Thousands of Afghan children die, and what sacrifice has the king, in his Italian villa, made for the jihad? None.” The political attitude not only of Khalis’s party but of the other fundamentalist groups could be summed up in one phrase, which I heard often in Peshawar: “No king, no Communists!”

Afghan fundamentalists liked to compare King Zahir Shah to Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, the early-nineteenth- century ruler of Kabul, who owed his throne to the British during their brief occupation and was therefore the puppet of a foreign army. The fundamentalists thought that King Zahir Shah was as bad as Babrak Karmal and Najib, the Soviet-imposed rulers. At a rally of fundamentalist parties on the Northwest Frontier in February 1988,1 saw an impassioned mujahid grab the microphone and yell, “Death to Zahir Shah! So many mujahidin have been sacrificed for Islam that we don’t want to be ruled by anyone except God!”

When the peasant fundamentalists of Yunus Khalis’s Hizbi-Islami looked at the mujahidin of Pir Gailani’s NIFA they saw a group of pampered, Westernized, not particularly religious aristocrats who were sacrificing less for the jihad than they were.

Indeed, all of NIFA’s top officials were related either to the king or to Pir Gailani. All were educated abroad or in the few Western-style schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They began their jihad after the fundamentalists (Pir Gailani didn’t proclaim jihad until 1979). And their families were making much less of a sacrifice than the fundamentalists: whenever a mujahid from NIFA talked about his relatives, he mentioned brothers and cousins in the United States or Europe. Whenever one of Khalis’s fighters discussed his family, he referred to brothers and cousins who were shaheedan (war martyrs) or were still fighting.

The hatred of the fundamentalist parties like Khalis’s for the nonfundamentalist parties like NIFA was therefore easy to comprehend, since it had to do not only with politics but with class divisions as well. But this didn’t mean that the mujahidin of NIFA weren’t patriots too. By any standards other than Afghan ones, they were extremely religious… certainly more so than most Pakistanis, Arabs, or urban, middle-class Iranians I ever encountered. If not five times a day, they prayed three or four times. Whatever the Pir may or may not have been doing in London, his mujahidin in Pakistan and Afghanistan observed the Ramadan fast. The fact that many members of their families were abroad meant that they had other options; they didn’t have to live in the heat and filth of Pakistan or risk their lives inside if they didn’t want to. By their own lights, the NIFA fighters were indeed making a sacrifice; very few of them were pompous exhibitionists like Major General Rahim Wardak. And their hatred of the Soviets and the Afghan Communists was every bit as authentic as that of the fundamentalists, no matter what the fundamentalists themselves claimed.

But the NIFA guerrillas’ hatred of the Soviets took a different form: it was fired by tradition, not religion. The difference between NIFA and Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami was that Khalis’s men were revolutionaries, while the NIFA mujahidin were simple patriots. They wanted a restoration of the days prior to 1973, when Daoud’s coup against the king set the country on the ignoble path toward communism. Khalis, on the other hand, wanted a new Afghanistan entirely: an Islamic republic, free of both king and Communists. Unlike Iran’s Islamic republic to the west, it would not be repressive. Unlike Zia’s Islamic republic to the east, it would not overflow with hypocrisy.

Because NIFA was willing to settle for less, and was also doing less of the fighting, it was more willing to talk to the enemy. As the Kremlin began to realize that communism, as an ideology, had no future in Afghanistan and the best it could hope for was a return to the status quo ante, NIFA and the other nonfundamentalist parties became even more inclined to make a deal. By late 1987, NIFA and Moscow were each willing to settle for a return to mid-1973 conditions.

This was why these parties were labeled moderate. The irony throughout the war was that, politically, the moderate parties were in sync with official U.S. policy, which stated that the Soviets must leave and that the Afghans should determine their own future, preferably along pro-Western lines. But it was the radical mujahidin, sworn to fight to the death and compromise be damned, who got American aid, and not the moderates, who echoed U.S. policy from closer to the sidelines.

As Khalis symbolized the religious and warrior strands of the Pathan personality, Pir Gailani symbolized another rich heritage… based on royalty, history, and myth… that was also Pathan. The Pir’s only real political ally in Peshawar was Sib-ghatullah Mojadidi’s Jabha-i-Nijat-Milli (Afghan National Liberation Front). Mojadidi had fewer troops in the field than NIFA. A standingjoke in Peshawar was: “There are two things you never see in Afghanistan… Hindu graves and Mojadidi’s mujahidin.” Still, Mojadidi was more respected than Gailani. Though a staunch royalist distantly related to King Zahir Shah, Mojadidi… who carried a pistol in his belt and had once threatened to shoot Hekmatyar… had a record of opposing not only the Communists but the king too, whenever he felt the king was straying too far from Islamic ideals.

The march of current history had favored Khalis. As Abdul Haq first realized as a youngster, communism was an ideology so extreme that it required another ideology, equally extreme, to repel it. Khalis’s politics proved more useful and virile than Mojadidi’s and Gailani’s. Mojadidi and Gailani stood for an Afghanistan that was disappearing, a country of chivalrous ballads, ancient myths, and genealogies in unlikely confrontation with brutal, mechanized twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Kandahar symbolized this brutal confrontation more than any other place, not only because of the intensity of the fighting there but because it was the ancestral home of Afghanistan’s kings and the hearth of the country’s cultural tradition. Isolated in the southern outback of central Asia, Kandahar’s culture was pure Afghan, untouched by the culturally corrupting influences of Iran that had bastardized Herat or those of the Indian subcontinent that had bastardized Kabul. Kandahar in the 1980s represented past centuries being destroyed by this one.

Kandahar’s glory began with one man on horseback. The man was Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent in the army of Nadir Shah the Great, the Persian king whose forces had conquered Moghul India in 1739. Ahmad Khan and his Abdali kinsmen, though proud Afghans, were personally loyal to Nadir Shah, for even though the king had defeated them in battle, he generously incorporated them into his army. When, in his later years, Nadir Shah grew suspicious and brutal, he relied increasingly on Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis against his own Persian and Turkish forces, who he was convinced were out to kill him.

One night in 1747, sensing a plot against the king, Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis rode into the royal camp at Quchan, in eastern Iran, to protect him. At dawn, the sight of Nadir Shah’s headless body greeted the Abdali force