During the Afghan war, Baluchistan was especially important strategically. It was the only remaining barrier that kept the Russians from reaching the Indian Ocean… the ultimate dream of the czars. Like so many strategic places, Quetta was a shithole. Only in July 1988 was a decent hotel opened. Before that, you stayed at the New Lourdes. To flush the toilet in your room you needed a raincoat and Wellingtons because the water exploded in all directions. The place had no heating and the boiler rarely worked, so during the cold plateau winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing at night, you faced the choice of a cold shower or none at all. The Bloom Star, the only other hotel at the time, was just marginally better.
Baluchistan was the ultimate free-trade zone and smuggler’s haven: an unregulated void of hazy identity set between Iran, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani province of Sind, with its back to the Indian Ocean. Despite the awful accommodations, you could get almost anything in Quetta… heroin, Japanese cameras, cans of Heinz soup, relatively recent copies of
Even the ethnic identity that gave the province its name was at risk in the 1980s, as the influx of Pathan refugees from Afghanistan tipped the demographic balance against the Baluchis, a people of Middle Eastern origin who speak an Indo-European language similar to Pukhtu. Because Quetta, with a population of 250,000, was one fourth the size of Peshawar, and because Baluchistan was inundated with close to a million refugees from southern Afghanistan, the Afghan influence on Quetta appeared even more dramatic than in Peshawar. Quetta seemed to have
Everything about Quetta had an air of unreliability, and I was apt to distrust much of what I saw and heard.
The first person I met there was Atta Mahmoud, a twenty-eight-year-old refugee from Kandahar, who lured me to his carpet shop. Inside, we sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping cup after cup of green tea. He wore a psychedelic black, green, and gold turban; his eyes were crazed. He implored with his hands as if speaking to a multitude and kept calling me Baba, which means father and is a sign of respect. But there was a fawning quality to his voice; his words had the tone of a sales pitch. Having had previous experiences with carpet dealers in the East, I was deeply suspicious, especially after Atta Mah-moud told me he had worked at the Sunshine Hotel in Kandahar before the war, and had sold drugs there to European hippies.
But Atta Mahmoud wanted to talk about Kandahar, not about carpets. “Kandahar city, Baba, is no more. No more, I tell you. There is not a street or a building standing, Baba. No more nut or apple trees. No bazaars. Just one meter of dust and new paved roads for Russian tanks and security patrols.” This was the first eyewitness account I had heard concerning the destruction of Kandahar. I wanted more specifics, but he was hard to interrupt and his oration soon disintegrated into a mad tirade, much of it incomprehensible. “The only thing you can do with a Russian is slit his throat, Baba… If you don’t want to slit his throat, you are a Communist.”
He casually mentioned that his two small sons had been killed in a Soviet artillery bombardment of Kandahar the year before, in 1986. This seemed so horrible that I didn’t know how to react, or even whether to believe him. I told him I was sorry, and then, in order to break the silence, I asked the price of some of his carpets. But he brushed aside my query, treating it as an insult. He said we could discuss carpets another day. I decided that this man was not after my money and that much of what he told me about Kandahar might actually be true.
Next I wanted to see Zia Mojadidi, who, though related to Sibghatullah Mojadidi of the Afghan National Liberation Front, was not connected with the party. Rather, he was a former faculty member at Kabul University and the local stringer for the Voice of America. Western journalists in Islamabad told me that Zia Mojadidi was a thoroughly professional reporter and the most reliable source of information in Quetta. But his phone was out of order, and the directions to his house were vague: “near the Helper’s High School and the orphanage.” After searching for half an hour and banging on several doors I found him… miraculously, it seemed to me. He looked like a professor, with thick glasses and a courteous, serious way of speaking. The room he took me to was completely bare, save for carpets on the floor. Since he did not show me the other rooms in the house, he gave the impression of living a marginal existence, and this made me uncertain. After twenty-four hours in Quetta, my instinct told me that if a man possessed no furniture, he also possessed no useful information. His precise speech dispelled some of my doubts, however. He did have information, and filled the holes in Atta Mahmoud’s description of Kandahar with hard facts. Basically, Zia Mojadidi, the respected local journalist, backed up the carpet dealer Atta Mahmoud’s story of how the Soviets were destroying Kandahar.
At a Red Cross hospital for war victims, my feet finally touched solid ground. Real people packed the corridors; bullets, mortar fire, and mine fragments had torn up their flesh. The day I visited there were 103 patients, and since the hospital had room for only 60, the staff had set up tents on the lawn. The surgeons were working nonstop. A nurse shaved a little boy’s head in preparation for surgery. He shrieked with terror. Orderlies wheeled by with carts stacked with bottles of blood. The smell of disinfectant was everywhere. The situation was the same at the thirteen other hospitals in Baluchistan, I was told. But these patients, the doctors said to me, were the lucky few: the ones who had made the three-week trek on foot from Kandahar to the border and the grueling, bumpy drive from the border to Quetta without dying of their injuries or being killed by Afghan regime border guards. It was in the interest of the Communists that wounded civilians never reach the border alive; that way there would be no witnesses to what was happening.
I had never seen indications of this level of carnage in the hospitals I had visited in Basra, Iraq, in the company of a horde of other Western journalists writing about the Gulf war. Basra had a Sheraton, though. Quetta then had only the New Lourdes and the Bloom Star. Sure enough, when the swank Sareena Hotel opened in 1988, the number of journalists in Quetta increased dramatically. Still, stories about the Kandahar fighting in the American press and on television were practically nonexistent.
I wrote as much as I could about Kandahar for a radio network and a magazine. But the Red Cross hospital was as close to the reality of the fighting as I was able or willing to get at the time. I was scared. The vision of Charles Thornton, the
The NI FA villa, from where I began my trip to Kandahar, was in a Quetta suburb. It had only a few guns, but it was luxurious in comparison with more rough and ready mujahidin headquarters: there was air conditioning, marble floors, a tiled bathroom with Head and Shoulders shampoo, and a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and mineral water. Fashionable wicker furniture and a Persian carpet filled the living room. A Russian ceramic tea set from the czarist period sat in a cabinet against the wall. On the wall were photographs of King Zahir Shah, in exile in Italy. There was also a photograph of the Baghdad mausoleum of Sheikh Abdul Khader, reputedly the fourteenth direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and a distant relative of the Aga Khan and of King Hussein of Jordan, the great-grandfather of Pir Gailani. (The Pir’s family had migrated to Afghanistan from Iraq at the turn of the century.) Everything in this villa suggested comfort and privilege, but not even privately was I critical. Having gone into Afghanistan several times with the Khalis fundamentalists, I was grateful for the pampering. Whatever the fear and danger, I knew that being relatively clean and well fed would keep me happy for now.
A NIFA staff man brought me to the villa from my downtown Quetta hotel in a spanking new Land Cruiser with racing stripes, the latest addition to NIFA’s car fleet. As soon as I arrived, I met the mujahid who was to be my interpreter, Mohammed Akbar. He was twenty-one, spoke excellent English, and was a sophisticated Kabuli to the core. Had the Soviets not invaded, he would undoubtedly have gone abroad to study in England or America. His first remark was to ask if I had brought a sleeping bag, toilet paper, and water purification tablets for the trip. I all but laughed aloud. The gulf between
NIFA supplied Akbar and me with a Land Cruiser (though not a new one), a driver, and several bodyguards. Kandahar was 150 miles northwest of Quetta. Before the war, the journey on the all-weather road took as little as six hours. By that idyllic standard, our route would be circuitous: straight on the all-weather road for 40 miles… halfway to the border… then northeast and east over the Baluchistan desert, hugging the Pakistan side of the border, then over the border into the Arghastan desert in a northwesterly direction, arcing north and west over Kandahar in order to enter the city’s environs from the southwest. This meant eighteen hours of continuous
