Soldiers of God Read online

  No group of people knew as much about mines in Afghanistan as news photographers and television cameramen. Getting close-ups of the war meant traveling with the mujahidin, the “holy warriors of Islam.” And the muj — as journalists called them — walked through minefields. “It’s like walking a tightrope,” said Tony O’Brien, a free-lance photographer who would later be captured and then released by Afghan regime forces. “You’re in a group, yet you’re totally alone. Still, there’s this absolutely incredible bond with the person ahead of you and behind you. You forget the heat, the thirst, the diarrhea. Then you’re out of the minefield and instantaneously you’re hot and thirsty again. The minute I start thinking about it I start worrying and I get totally freaked.”

  For several days I rode in a Toyota Land Cruiser through the mine-strewn desert outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The trails were marked with the rusted carcasses of trucks that told you it was almost better not to survive such an explosion. My driver kept safely to previous tread marks. But when another vehicle approached from the opposite direction we had to make room for each other, and I became so afraid that I held my breath just to keep from whimpering. At night, or in the frequent dust storms when we lost the track, the fear went on for hours at a stretch, leaving me physically sick.

  Joe Gaal, a Canadian photographer for the Associated Press, had been around so many minefields and had collected enough fragments of different mines that he had developed a sapper’s tactile intuition about them, which was apparent in the movements of his hands and fingers whenever we discussed the matter. An intense, gutsy fellow, Gaal had an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet mines. His terror had turned into an obsession.

  The mine that could really put him in a cold sweat was what the mujahidin called a “jumping” mine, a Russian version of the “Bouncing Betty,” used by the Americans in Vietnam. It is activated by a trip wire that causes a projectile to shoot up from underground a few feet ahead. The mine is designed to go off several seconds later and explode at waist level, just as you pass over it. “It blows off your genitals and peppers your guts with shrapnel,” Gaal explained.

  The Bouncing Betty was one of several different antipersonnel mines the Soviets employed, mines that had to be dug into the ground by special units and were meant to kill or maim anyone within a radius of twenty feet. But the vast majority of mines in Afghanistan were dropped from the air. The most common of these was the “butterfly” mine. The butterfly was the mine of Afghanistan, so much so that it had become part of the country’s landscape, like the white flags above the graves of martyred mujahidin. Soviet helicopter gunships would fly in at one or two thousand feet and litter the ground with mines. The butterfly’s winged shape caused it to go into a spin, slowing its descent. The detonator pin was set on impact with the ground. Green was the most common color, but the Soviets had a light brown version for desert areas and a gray one for riverbeds. Some mujahidin, not knowing this, thought the mines actually changed color.

  Only eight inches long and blending in with the ground, the butterfly mine was hard to spot, especially if you were fatigued from hours of walking, which was most of the time. Except for the light aluminum detonator it was all plastic, so it was difficult to detect with mine-sweeping equipment. The mine was often mistaken for a toy by Afghan children, who paid with the loss of a limb or an eye. Its explosive power was about equal to that of the smallest hand grenade: sufficient to maim, not to kill. Contrary to Soviet claims, the mine has no self-destruct mechanism, and will be mutilating Afghans for a long time to come.

  Butterfly mines, along with aerial bombardment, were the centerpiece of Moscow’s strategy of depopulation. Depopulation had come after pacification had failed and before the Communist-inspired bombing campaign in Pakistani cities. During the heyday of depopulation, in the early and mid-1980s, the Soviets dropped plastic mines disguised as wrist-watches and ball-point pens over Afghan villages in the heavily populated Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul.

  There were even reports of mines disguised as dolls. The New York-based Afghanistan Relief Committee ran an advertisement in a number of American magazines featuring a photograph of a doll with its left arm blown off and a caption that read, “The toy that’s making a lasting impression on thousands of Afghan children.” The larger version of these ads contained a line in small type advising the reader that the doll in the photograph was not a real Soviet bomb, but a replica constructed on the basis of refugee accounts. In fact, no photographs of such dolls exist, even though one would have been worth thousands of dollars to a news photographer. Peter Jouvenal, a British television cameraman who made over forty trips inside Afghanistan with the mujahidin and saw every other kind of Soviet mine, suspected that the story of the dolls was apocryphal. “The Soviets were guilty of so much in Afghanistan. Why exaggerate?” he remarked.

  Right up to the time of their withdrawal, the Soviets kept introducing new kinds of mines. When journalists entered the garrison town of Barikot, in Kunar province near the Pakistan border, after the Soviets had evacuated it in April 1988, they discovered mines stuck on stakes in the bushes. They dubbed them Noriega mines, on account of their pineapple texture. These were sonic mines, fitted with diaphragms that picked up the lightest footstep and sprayed shrapnel thirty feet in all directions.

  In Barikot, the Soviets also booby-trapped grain bags in some of the places they evacuated, using a grenade with its detonator pin pulled, hooked up to a trip wire concealed in the sack. Several mujahidin and a dozen refugees were wounded when they opened the bags.

  The overwhelming majority of hospital patients in Peshawar and Quetta were mine victims. After Red Cross doctors operated on them, the wounded were dispatched to clinics run by the various mujahidin political parties to recover. These clinics lived on donations from the refugees themselves and usually received little or no aid from either international relief organizations or the Pakistani government. Pakistani landlords owned the clinics and charged as much rent as they could. In the heat of summer, when temperatures rarely dipped below ninety degrees in daytime, there were no fans or air conditioners for the patients, who were accustomed to the bracing mountain climate of Afghanistan. The clinics were short of nearly everything, including food.

  Of the twenty patients I saw at a clinic in Quetta one day in July 1988, sixteen were missing at least one limb. Many of the mine accidents had occurred only two or three weeks earlier. But there were no signs of illness or general physical weakness on the victims’ faces, even though most of them not only had lost large quantities of blood and eaten little in the intervening period, but also had to endure days of travel on a mule or in a lolloping four-wheel-drive vehicle before getting to a proper medical facility.

  Many people have the idea that once a limb is amputated the pain stops. That’s not true. Pain from damaged nerve tissue lasts for months, usually longer if a clean amputation is not done soon after the accident, which was always the case in Afghanistan, where painkillers were not always available. Add this to weeks of drugged discomfort, for patients were all but drowned in antibiotics in order to prevent tetanus and other infections caused by mine fragments.

  Yet, despite the pain and a missing arm or foot, the patients in these wards looked healthy and normal. There was a vibrancy in their faces, a trace of humor even, and a total absence of embarrassment. “I have given my foot to Allah,” said a twenty-seven-year-old man who also had only one eye and a burned, deformed hand. “Now I will continue my jihad [holy war] in another way.” This man had a wife and three children. At first, I dismissed what he said as bravado meant to impress a foreigner. I found it impossible to believe that he really felt this emotion, that he truly accepted what had happened to him. His eyes, however, evinced neither the rage of a fanatic, which would have accounted for his defiance, nor the shocked and sorrowful look of someone who was really depressed. If anything registered on his face when I spoke to him, it was bewilderment. He didn’t seem to understand why I thoug
ht he should be unhappy. He had lost an eye, a foot, and part of a hand — and that was that.

  The Afghan mujahidin came equipped with psychological armor that was not easy to pierce or fathom. They had the courage and strength of zealots, but their eyes were a mystery. Their eyes were not the bottomless black wells of hatred and cunning that a visitor grows accustomed to seeing in Iran and elsewhere in the Moslem world. There was a reassuring clarity about them. Sometimes, while I was talking and sipping cups of green tea with the mujahidin, their eyes would appear so instantly recognizable to me that I thought they could have been those of my childhood friends. How could people with such familiar, nonthreatening eyes walk so readily through minefields?

  Western journalists and relief workers were not so brave. We were afraid of going “inside” — crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan. And the more often you went “inside,” the more terrified you became. Only a handful of photographers and cameramen went repeatedly, for after a few trips over the border, a print reporter could understand the story from Pakistan. This was why so many of us didn’t venture far from Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, which functioned as the rear base of the Afghan resistance. The relief workers who went “inside” were doctors trained in emergency surgery and vetted for mental and physical toughness. “The longest, most searching interview I ever had for a job was with Aide Medicale Internationale prior to being sent to Afghanistan,” said Simon Mardel, a London surgeon and an accomplished mountain climber who had also worked in a state hospital in India.

  In addition to Afghanistan’s mines, a reporter had to contend with boredom, disease, and exhaustion. The food, when there was more than plain rice and onions to eat, was abominable. The meat was often filled with maggots. You could be felled by bad water. Dysentery was prevalent, along with hepatitis; getting a mild case of vivax malaria was definitely preferable. And all this was what a journalist went through merely to get to the fighting.

  Every war, particularly in the Third World, involves risks of disease and danger. But no other war in recent times required journalists to walk up and down mountains as much as fourteen hours a day. Vietnam had helicopters. Every country in Africa has small planes and jeeps. Beirut offered luxury hotels with first-class cuisine next door to the fighting. Afghanistan, though, had only mules for carrying your backpack. In the south, near Kandahar, where vehicles were available, it was too dangerous to travel until the last phase of the Soviet war because the flat terrain was good not only for four-wheel-drive trucks but for helicopter gunships on the lookout for moving mujahidin units. Charles Thornton, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, tried traveling by truck. He was killed in an ambush in September 1985 as soon as he crossed the border.

  In “The Man Who Would Be King,” Kipling’s story about two Englishmen who depart the Northwest Frontier to seek their fortune in Afghanistan, one returns to Peshawar a “rag-wrapped, whining cripple.” As for the other, only his “dried, withered head” remained. Nothing like that happened to any journalist I knew, but some came pretty close. Richard Mackenzie, an Australian writer for the Washington Times’s publication Insight, lost forty-five pounds from dysentery during his three and a half months in northeastern Afghanistan in late 1987. Very early in his journey, he was abandoned by his guide and horseman, and later on, while very ill, he was taken prisoner by an extremist mujahidin faction. When Mackenzie showed up in Peshawar, his friends described his physical appearance as “frightening.” Hugo Eriksen, a Norwegian journalist, arrived at a friend’s doorstep in Peshawar in June 1988, after a two-week trip “inside,” with a peptic ulcer and malaria. The rugged, six-foot-plus army veteran collapsed in a chair and whimpered, “I couldn’t take the food, I just couldn’t.” A week later, Eriksen went back inside.

  Kipling’s Afghanistan was described by Louis L. Cornell as “a place of externes,” where “circumstances corrode and destroy false appearances.” In the 1980s that was still true. There was no journalist covering the war who didn’t become fearfully ill at least once. If only about a dozen reporters were killed or imprisoned during the ten years of Soviet occupation, it was only because relatively few ventured over the border in the first place.

  Many were intimidated by Soviet threats. The Soviet ambassador to Pakistan, Vitaly Smirnov, told Agence France Presse on October 5, 1984, that journalists traveling with the mujahidin “will be killed. And our units in Afghanistan will help the Afghan forces to do it.” This statement drew almost no response or criticism from the media establishment in America, but every newsman assigned to the war heard about it.

  This was the only war in which having large amounts of money to spend on coverage did absolutely no good. Elsewhere in the world, Amercian television networks leased vehicles and planes to get to remote areas. In Afghanistan there were none to lease, but mules were cheap enough that the poorest freelancer could afford them.

  By mule, the fighting in Afghanistan was at least several days of hard traveling from a television satellite transmission station, sometimes as far as several weeks. Had the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1950s, before the satellite age, the war might have seemed less remote and certainly would have garnered more attention than it did in the 1980s.

  CBS News based a full-time cameraman, Kurt Lohbeck, in Peshawar. He was one of the handful of journalists who repeatedly risked their lives for several years running in order to cover the war from inside. Lohbeck used to say that part of his “soul was up in those mountains, and you have to go back there and check on yourself from time to time.” But none of the American TV networks had a bureau for a war in which — according to a study by the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the Gallup organization in Pakistan — a superpower killed 1.3 million people. That is more deaths than in the Iraq-Iran war and ten times more than the number killed in Lebanon in all the years of civil conflict there since 1975. The Israelis would have to repeat their 1982 invasion of Lebanon seventy-five times over before equaling the Kremlin’s Afghan carnage.

  Five and a half million Afghans were made refugees in Pakistan and Iran, a third of the prewar population of the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan. Considering that another two million Afghans were forced by the war to migrate within the country, no conflict since the end of World War II created more homeless people save for the 1971 Bangladesh war.

  The bloodiest year in Afghanistan was 1985, the first year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule in the Soviet Union. In that year, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over a quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or Afghan Communist troops.

  Lars Grahnstrom, a shy, relaxed Swedish nurse with piercing blue eyes, arrived in Afghanistan a few weeks after Gorbachev came to power. Grahnstrom spent six months with four other male nurses and doctors in a cave near the Soviet-held city of Mazar-i-Sharif. They treated over a hundred patients a day, the majority of whom had war-related injuries. This was in the extreme north of Afghanistan, where the fighting was heaviest. “In the little part of Afghanistan where I lived, there were more people killed while I was there than in South Africa or Lebanon the whole year,” Grahnstrom said. “Every day I listened to the news on my short-wave radio. It was always South Africa, Lebanon, Sri Lanka — two people killed here, three killed there… I was always hoping to hear something about Afghanistan. But there was nothing.”

  In his book Under a Sickle Moon, the British travel writer Peregrine Hodson recalled his three months in Afghanistan: “Every evening we tuned in to the [BBC] World Service but there was no mention of any new offensive in the Panjshir Valley. It was disturbingly unreal to be caught in the middle of a forgotten war. At times it was like being in the grip of a massive hallucination: living on nuts and berries in a cave, being bombed by Soviet jets.”

  The Soviet bombing had little effect on the mujahid
in. By 1987, it seemed that the Soviets’ last, best hope was to destabilize the guerrillas’ rear base, over the border in Pakistan. The State Department reported 127 terrorist incidents in Pakistani cities that year, resulting in 234 deaths — more than in any Middle Eastern country. Pakistan suffered one third of all the fatalities and one half of all the wounded in terrorist attacks worldwide in 1987.

  The terrorists whom the Pakistani police managed to capture testified to working for the Afghan Communist Bureau of State Security, Khedamat-e Aetelaat-e Dawlati, known as KhAD. Neither the State Department nor any Western diplomat in Pakistan had any doubt that this was true. KhAD (which has been called the WAD Ministry of State Security since 1988) had been built up by the KGB into a force of 25,000 agents soon after the Soviet invasion, and about 1,500 Soviets were thought to be working at KhAD’s Kabul headquarters. According to State Department officials, KhAD was the largest known sponsor of terrorism in the world, next to which the record of Abu Nidal and other Palestinian terrorists was — until the December 1988 bombing of the Pan American jetliner — statistically insignificant.

  In the same week in April 1988 that the Soviet Union signed an agreement in Geneva to withdraw its troops, terrorists blew up an ammunition depot outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, killing one hundred and injuring more than one thousand people. It was one of four terrorist incidents in Pakistan over a forty-eight-hour period. The equipment destroyed at the depot was destined for the mujahidin. It included a large shipment of primacord, a rocket-fired cable that explodes two feet above the ground, used to clear a path through minefields.

  This would have been the first mine-clearing equipment that the mujahidin received. Indeed, throughout the Soviet occupation the only such “equipment” that the guerrillas ever had was the winter hail, dubbed “Allah’s mine sweeper” because the crashing pellets of ice sometimes triggered the mines.