ancestors were carried away from Palestine by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, and planted as colonists in Persia, from where they migrated eastward to present-day Afghanistan. The name Afghana cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible, but many Pathans still believe the story. Even more believe themselves to be Aryans, but all will admit that they are not certain of their own ancestry.
Almost every one of Afghanistan’s twenty-odd ethnic groups took part in the struggle against the Soviets, but it was the Pathans who gave the resistance its mythic, larger-than-life quality, its lack of political pretensions, and its chivalry — as well as its primitiveness, tribal disorder, and recklessness. Only Pathans could have invented a game that requires a man to pick up a butterfly mine and toss it in the air without losing a hand (not all succeeded). Only Pathans could make walking through a minefield a test of manhood.
The Pathans are a purer, crystallized version of everything that is good and bad in the Afghan character. More than any other single factor, it was their harsh and unforgiving tribal culture, free of subtleties and introspection and unaffected by the modern world, that defeated the mines and other weapons of the Soviet invaders. As the seventeenth-century Pathan poet Khushal Khan Khatak wrote:
THE CEILING FAN rattled like an airplane propeller in the breathless, mud-baked heat of the room, blowing new, crisp 100-afghani notes all over the floor. The money changer in the Peshawar bazaar had handed me the notes in heaps of 10,000. The afghani was devaluing fast. For years already, in one of the CIA’s most successful covert operations, millions of counterfeit afghanis had been printed in order to wreck the Kabul regime’s economy and allow the mujahidin to buy weapons and ammunition on the open market on the Northwest Frontier. But the CIA program wasn’t good enough for the KGB. Near the end of the war the Soviets, needing to handcuff the Afghan economy to their own in the wake of a troop withdrawal, started buying up vast amounts of U.S. dollars on the black market in Kabul, driving down the afghani further in order to make Western products prohibitively expensive for the Afghan population. So there I sat, sweating on a sagging jute bed with a draft at my back, stuffing stacks of possibly counterfeit money into my rucksack, just to pay for a mule in case I got sick.
My room was on the roof of a house that overlooked an expanse of rice fields, through which the same water buffalos plodded home every day at dusk, as in a silk screen or bas-relief. On my last evening in Peshawar, my eyes were drawn to a shimmer of fire-red in the distance: the gossamer
On the bed I’d laid out the native costume I had just purchased for a total of 400 rupees ($25) from a Pathan merchant in the bazaar. It consisted
In the side pocket of the
Reporters permanently covering the Afghan war were tied to a wheel of psychological torture that never stopped turning. First there was the boredom and insecurity of waiting in Peshawar for the trip inside to materialize, something that didn’t always happen, and when it did it was often weeks later than the mujahidin had promised. Then there was the attack of fear and dread when you suddenly found out — usually the night before departure — where exactly you would be going and that it was too late to back out. Finally came the loneliness, physical torment, and pure wonder of the trip itself. I was now in the second phase of that cycle, surrounded by four walls and a glimpse of desolation from my room, about to travel alone with a group of mujahidin into Afghanistan and feeling more scared and lonely than I ever felt before.
The fact that I had a wife and son back in Greece only increased my sense of isolation. Among the journalists who regularly went inside, I knew of only one who had a family, and he had told me never to carry along pictures of loved ones in Afghanistan. “You should put your family out of your mind completely,” he said. “Just do what you have to do, survive, and get out.” Looking at the picture of my wife and son at the harbor on the Aegean island of Paros, I decided not to take his advice. I slid the color photograph into my pocket.
Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, was always a city of colonial cliches where adventures, both real and imagined, began. Edward Behr, an Indian army veteran and for years a foreign correspondent for
Peshawar (literally, Frontier Town) lies on a teeming panel of reddish-black earth at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the fabled gateway between the Indian subcontinent and the gaunt mountains and plateaus of central Asia, over which the sun sets in a blaze of garish pigments every night. Layered with mud and fine dust and smelling of baked brick, diesel exhaust, sickly sweet incense, and dung, Peshawar is a typical Dickensian town of the industrialized Third World.
Only in the old cantonment, built and formerly occupied by the British, is the city’s soot-smudged tableau lightened somewhat by green lawns and stately red brick mansions, built in Anglo-Indian Gothic style. In the tidy parade grounds, if you use your imagination, Peshawar evokes a smoky nineteenth-century lithograph of British India. But everywhere outside the cantonment there is only noise, traffic, and a hot, dense bath of electrified air suffused with embers and metallic sparks. The warrened, cratered streets are cluttered with horse-drawn tongas, careening auto rickshaws, and gaudy Bedford trucks, which feature gruesome examples of popular art on their sideboards, such as a picture of an F-16 squadron zooming out of the lipstick-smeared mouth of an Asian diva. Despite such vulgar touches, the city still retains enough potted, old-fashioned romance to seduce a foreign correspondent in search of the exotic.
Peshawar has a bazaar, of course — where I had bought my costume and Afghan money — filled with all sorts of gongs, trinkets, and the best selection of reasonably priced oriental carpets in Asia. There’s an eccentric
