driving. But compared to the previous year, 1987, and the year before that, our trip did not seem circuitous at all. Back then, the northern arc over and around the city was much wider, and the journey took several days. Despite the Soviet-driven orgy of destruction in Kandahar, the military situation in southern Afghanistan had been steadily shifting in favor of the mujahidin, and this was reflected in the traveling distance from Quetta to Kandahar.
A turning point in the southern front of the war was the capture of the Afghan border garrison of Spinboldak, on the main road between Quetta and Kandahar, by the mujahidin in early September 1988, a few weeks before my journey. The Spinboldak fighting cost, at the very least, several hundred lives between May and September. The two or three paragraphs about Spinboldak that could be found on the inside pages of American newspapers described the fight as between the mujahidin and the Afghan regime’s forces. This was not exactly the case. The battle actually had little to do with the struggle against the Communists, and for that reason made for a revealing story about the guerrillas: it was the best case study of Pathan tribalism that the war produced.
On paper, the mujahidin of the fundamentalist parties, led by Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, fought the forces of General Ismatullah Muslim of the Afghan regime’s militia. In reality, it was a battle between the Achakzais and the Nurzais, two hostile clans within the Abdali (Durrani) tribal family. The Achakzais inhabited the plateau region between Kandahar and Quetta on the Afghan side of the frontier. As far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, the Achakzais had a tough, unruly reputation… even by the standards of the Kandahari Pathans. Ismatullah Muslim was a living monument to this tradition.
Ismatullah was a warlorci who in 1984, unhappy with the amount of weaponry the mujahidin were giving him, promptly switched to the side of the Afghan Communists, who made Ismatullah a general and paid him and his Achakzais handsomely.
One of Ismatullah’s first moves was to fortify Spinboldak, a sheer rock mountain rising from the flat desert. This offended the Nurzais, who claimed it as their territory and who held a pistol to the head of Yunus Khalis. Khalis’s teenage bride was one of the twin daughters of Nadir Khan Nurzai, the head of the clan. Nadir Khan had reportedly blackmailed Khalis the day before the wedding, saying, in effect, “I’ll give you my daughter only if you give me and my men weapons to fight Ismatullah.”
It was evening when the Land Cruiser pulled out of the driveway of NIFA headquarters in Quetta. One of the gate guards splashed a pail of water against the rear windshield… a Pathan blessing for good luck on the journey.
Even before leaving the all-weather road we got a flat tire. The jack was too short, so the driver had to build a platform of stones for it. When the vehicle wobbled, the driver crawled completely underneath it to adjust the stones with his hands. He was smiling and laughing, oblivious of the danger. When we were up and running again, I noticed he was missing several fingers… the result of a mine accident, he told me.
We left the all-weather road halfway between Quetta and the border. Suddenly we were bouncing as if on a trampoline. The air inside the Land Cruiser was filled with a fine dust, though all the windows were shut. The tires kicked up a dust cloud so thick that our headlights did more harm than good, for light thrown against the dust cut down visibility. Off the track, I noticed that the dust had collected in high ridges, reminding me of photographs of the moon. I had seen dust this bad once before, in Tigre in northern Ethiopia. There the soil was eroded from drought and the neglect spawned by civil war. Here in Baluchistan we were in a desert where nothing had ever grown. It felt as though we were scratching our way across the burned, powdery crust of a giant pie that had been left too long in the oven.
“This is Baluchistan, but we call it Powderistan,” Akbar joked.
After driving northeast along the border for several hours we crossed into Afghanistan at a point where NIFA had built a small, permanent camp for mujahidin coming in and out of the war zone. This was where the guerrillas picked up their weapons.
It was 2 a.m. and freezing cold as only the desert can be. The starscape was out of a fairy tale. There was no room in any of the mud huts so we slept outside, our faces covered in dust. I crawled deep into my sleeping bag, shaking from the cold. Akbar and the others had already fallen asleep. Away from their air-conditioned offices, the “Gucci muj” turned out to be just as tough as the Khalis boys, and in the case of the driver, just as reckless too. I wondered if back in Quetta and Peshawar their pretensions to fashion were merely an effort to look Western. Since we foreigners required “noble savages” to feed our own fantasies, what we really held against the “Gucci muj” was their yearning to be like us.
My first sight on awakening the next morning was the black NIFA flag snapping in the wind against the toneless predawn sky.
“Why is it black?” I asked Akbar.
“Because we are in mourning. Our freedom is lost,” Akbar explained.
The flag of Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami was green, the symbol of Islam, the warrior faith of the future that seemed to give its fighters a kind of superhuman strength. The truth of each party was in the color of its flags, I thought: NIFA looked backward, lost in mourning over the past.
Over the border in Afghanistan, this desert region’s name changed from Baluchistan to Arghastan. The landscape changed too, from deathlike to more deathlike. We were still scratching our way across the same greasy pie, but now the crust was a mere chalky film that covered our faces with white inside the Land Cruiser. Long ribs of cindery hills marked a horizon that appeared to curve, as though we were on a smaller planet. Between the lines of hills, carved as if by a knife, was only an ashy nothingness: not a single thorn grew here. I thought of the landscapes in Paul Bowles’s novels, in which the abstract, cubist features of the Sahara are symbols of madness, nihilism, and sensual annihilation.
A moving cloud of dust kicked up by even a small motorcycle on this desert would be easily visible from the air. I listened fearfully, hoping not to hear the hum of a plane overhead.
A village of domed mud brick houses sprinkled a hillside just as we came over the horizon and got our second flat tire. If a landscape is bleak and primitive enough, I thought, the distant past starts to blend with the future.
In one of the houses we sipped our tea in a mud-walled room, leaning against pink cushions while our driver worked on the tire. The pink startled me: it was the first bright color I had seen since leaving Quetta.
We moved on across the ocean of sand, wrinkled occasionally by a bed of limestone or a long fang of cliffs. We came upon the only pit stop in Arghastan: a cluster of mud huts where a few Land Cruisers, Bedford and Japanese diesel trucks, and Yamaha motorcycles had gathered. Old men in turbans approached and kissed my hand. Most were mujahi-din. The rest were traders transporting fresh produce back and forth across enemy lines. Fighters of the fundamentalist parties could be distinguished by the ghoulish Zia posters stuck to their truck windshields. Zia, with his deep-set bedroom eyes, looked like a vampire, set against a background with a plane exploding in midair. The caption read
Gruel bubbled in pots. Men repaired tires. Akbar and I bought and devoured about a dozen blood-red pomegranates. It was like a daydream: to be so thirsty and then have your thirst quenched in such a sensuous way, with sticky, tangy juice bleeding down the sides of your mouth onto the ground. Like the pink cushions, the red of the pomegranates clashed with the whitish hues of the landscape.
I noticed that while Akbar and I indulged ourselves in slurping fruit, our driver prayed in the corner of one of the huts. Next to him, other mujahidin drank tea, oblivious of his prayers. I turned around and saw a medieval diorama: three levels of mud rooms, in each of which a man kneeled in prayer on a carpet, wearing either a turban or a
After a few more hours of plowing through the dust we began to hear that sinister, stomach-churning sound: the drone of airplanes. We were now closing in on the main “ring road,” the paved track linking the three main cities of Afghanistan… Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul… from west to east. The section of the road linking Kandahar with Kabul was tenuously controlled by the mujahidin, so vehicles using it were often targets of
