Soldiers of God Read online

  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 chador (veil) of the young woman driving the herd along a mud embankment. To me, that lone flash of a primary color symbolized the rich and voluptuous civilization of the Indian subcontinent that ended, literally, beyond those fields, where the landscape lost its watery, terra cotta glow and was replaced by a mass of corrugated, pie-crust hills, whose scarred, cindery gradients warned of heat and cold and all other means of physical discomfort. That was where the war was, and to understand who the mujahidin really were, you had to go there.

  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 of a pakol, a flat woolen hat from the Hindu Kush mountain region of Chitral, and the traditional shalwar kameez worn by the Pathans — a pair of baggy cotton pants held up by a string and a long, flowing shirt with a collar and deep side pocket. I tried the costume on, wearing no underwear as recommended, since among the guerrillas, the only opportunity to bathe would be in a stream with all my clothes on. Like Kim in Rudyard Kipling’s novel, I “felt mechanically for the moustache” and beard that were just beginning to sprout on my face. Kim, too, had put on a native costume given him by a Pathan to espy the Northwest Frontier. And if I thought of Kim as I looked at the pathetic imposter in the mirror, it was not, I hoped, the effect of a romantic inclination but simply because, as in so many other instances, Kipling’s writing offered the only sure guide to this war. (One of my colleagues, Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, had told me, “Had the Russians read Kipling more carefully, they might never have invaded Afghanistan.”)

  In the side pocket of the shalwar kameez I placed my notebook, camera, and water purification tablets. My rucksack was small, since I might have to carry it everywhere. There was room inside only for the afghanis, a second shalwar kameez, a sleeping bag, towel, comb, toothbrush and toothpaste, flashlight, film, pocketknife, short-wave radio, toilet paper, flea powder, mosquito repellent, painkillers, antibiotics, and malaria pills. The canteen I would carry separately.

  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.

  “May you never be tired, pathan!” said the horse dealer Mahbub Ali to Kim when the boy departed. I hoped this benediction might apply to me too.

  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 Time and Newsweek, once observed: “Though the British Raj was about to fall apart with terrifying suddenness, Peshawar…was still a bastion of tradition and Kiplingesque behavior.” The Afghan war made this even more true in the 1980s than in the 1940s, the period Behr was writing about.

  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 hotel too: a run-down, rambling hostelry dating from the time of the Raj, called Dean’s after a British colonial governor, staffed by zombielike waiters and known as a hangout for spies and other intriguers. And then there are the Pathans, who with their beards, turbans, bandoleers, and eyes darkened with kohl are like extras in a Hollywood movie. At the far end of town, just before the road begins its dramatic, winding ascent toward Afghanistan,is an official Khyber Gate that is inscribed with several verses from a Kipling poem, “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:

  A scrimmage in a Border Station —

  A canter down some dark defile —

  Two thousand pounds of education

  Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —

  The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,

  Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

  Was there ever such rich terrain for romantic self-delusion?

  At the end of the 1970s, Peshawar went from being a quaint backwater to a geopolitical fault zone, and new, worse cliches were piled on the Kiplingesque ones. The Islamic revolution in Iran closed off an important route for international drug smugglers. No longer could opium, extracted from locally grown red poppies, be transported west from Pakistan. Instead, laboratories were set up in the barren, dun-brown hills that loom on either side of the Khyber Pass. In small, concealed mud brick redoubts the opium was refined into billions of dollars’ worth of heroin before being brought by truck and airplane to the port of Karachi and smuggled to Europe and America. A year after the Iranian revolution, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and placed the Red Army at Peshawar’s doorstep. Refugees poured down the mountains into the plain surrounding the city. Mujahidin political parties set up their headquarters in the refugee camps. Peshawar’s population doubled, from 500,000 to a million. And journalists, relief workers, drug enforcement agents, aspiring mercenaries, both real and would-be spies, and a rabble of weirdos who defied categorization filled Dean’s and nearby Green’s Hotel, a gloom-ridden, poured-concrete sepulcher that was half the price of Dean’s.

  But it was Dean’s, more than Green’s, that began to evoke a setting for low-grade intrigue. It was said that every room was bugged, and some even believed that the awful posters and oil paintings on the walls were really huge microphones in disguise. But that didn’t stop reporters from screaming at
the top of their lungs. One night I listened to a Scandinavian writer rant and rave about why a certain mujahidin commander was secretly a Maoist. Another night, a drunken American journalist loudly accused a British colleague of being a Communist merely because she had dared to criticize the guerrillas.

  The hotel staff couldn’t cope with the onslaught, and the food at Dean’s, never very good, suddenly got much worse. But the hotel drivers prospered, for the journalists and aid workers needed to be chauffeured from one sprawling refugee camp to another. The most popular driver was a fellow named Gujar, whose lugubrious manner, nervous twitch, and white beardlike stubble on his chocolate-brown head made him, along with the terrible food at Dean’s, a Peshawar “in” joke that got mentioned in nearly every recent book and article about the place.

  Because of Islamic law in Pakistan, alcohol could be served only at foreign “clubs” with special liquor licenses. Given the nature of the clientele, the Peshawar bar scene was rowdy. Proud locals compared the atmosphere at the Bamboo Garden to the scene in the movie Star Wars in which space cowboys, alien monsters, and robots collide at an intergalactic truck stop. In the summer of 1987, two strung-out West German hippies at the Bamboo Garden were badgering a young Swiss woman to take heroin. She tried to ignore them, but they injected the drug into her buttocks while she talked to a friend at the bar. It turned out to be an overdose. The woman was rushed back to Europe but died en route. The bar closed before the year was over.

  After that, the only place left in town to drink was the bar at the air-conditioned American Club, which was soon being mentioned in international travel magazines as one of the “great journalist bars in the world” — on par even with the bar at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut. An American friend, who for years had been writing in obscurity about Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier at a time when nobody cared, became so intoxicated by the sudden interest in Peshawar that he innocently exclaimed to me, “Peshawar in the 1980s is one of the great place-dates of the century, like Paris in the twenties!”

  Peshawar became a place where men could act out their fantasies. Koshiro Tanaka, a struggling Japanese businessman in his late forties who had a sixth-degree black belt in karate, believed that “since World War II, there has not been an honorable way for a Japanese man to die in the true samurai spirit.” So he exchanged his cubbyhole in a Tokyo trading office for a bare room and sagging jute bed in the $i.i5-a-night Khyber Hotel. This was Tanaka’s base for going out on Rambo-style combat missions with the mujahidin. He also trained hundreds of guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat. The only medical supplies he brought with him on his missions inside were three elastic tubes to use as tourniquets. “Three is enough,” he explained to me. “If all four of my limbs are cut, then I am finished.” Tanaka always carried at least two hand grenades, one for throwing at the enemy and the other for killing himself. “I can’t be taken alive, because if I’m captured — big diplomatic problem for Japan.” Tanaka’s reputation was secured when Tass, the Soviet news agency, actually taking the threat he posed seriously, reported him killed in action in September 1986. “I was in Japan at the time, training,” Tanaka said with a crazed, jack-o’-lantern grin. He was on his way back inside when I last saw him. Though he had killed quite a few Soviets with grenades and his AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle, he still had not attained his ultimate goal: killing a Russian with his bare hands.

  I met an East German refugee in his late twenties who came to Pakistan “to even the score with the Russians.” Imprisoned for two years in East Berlin for trying to scale the Berlin Wall, he was eventually allowed to immigrate to West Germany. He was happy there until the letters he wrote to his father and girlfriend in East Berlin started to be returned unopened. “The Communists wouldn’t let me communicate with my family, so I decided to fight back.” Afghanistan provided him with an opportunity. He converted to Islam, learned Pukhtu, and took the nom de guerre of Ahmedjan in order to protect his family in East Germany from Communist retribution. Ahmedjan made three trips as a mujahid into the Kandahar region, participating in several battles before handing in his assault rifle to take the job of project manager for the German Humanitarian Service in Afghanistan. But he swore that he wouldn’t “withdraw from Afghanistan until the Russians do.”

  No one I knew fought for money; mercenaries quickly learned that they were unwelcome in Peshawar and stopped coming, because the mujahidin didn’t understand the concept of paying someone to fight their war. Typical of the kind of person who occasionally passed through the frontier town’s revolving door was a London window cleaner whose father had given him a one-way air ticket to Peshawar. The fellow casually mentioned to anybody who would listen that he had “always wanted to kill someone.” Eventually, he went on a mission with an obscure guerrilla group, whose members let him pull the trigger of a rocket launcher aimed at a tent full of Afghan regime troops. After the explosion, in the distance he saw two bodies lying on the ground. The window cleaner then went home to London. This time his wife paid the airfare.

  Fantasy, reality, and cliché carne together at Darra, an hour’s drive south of Peshawar. The dusty storefronts and jagged, biscuit-brown hills rising from behind the line of shops evoked a Disney re-creation of Dodge City, except that Darra was real, and the gunslingers were Pathans. Also, even Dodge City had some kind of law; there never was any law in Darra. The town is in a “tribal agency,” a belt of land adjacent to the Afghan border that the Pakistanis, like the British before them, have never been able to control.

  In the last century, having failed to subdue the border-area Pathans, and discouraged over the number of rifles they were stealing, the British decided to help the tribesmen in a very unhelpful way. They taught the Pathans of Darra how to make their own guns and gave them the lathes to do it, knowing that the metal mined from the surrounding hills was of poor quality. This ensured that after a few hundred rounds, the barrels would expand and the guns would lose their accuracy. Today, making guns is Darra’s one and only industry. The garishly painted shops along the main street sell locally made versions of AK-47 assault rifles, as well as M-16s, Stens, Uzi submachine guns, Makarov pistols, single-action Lee-Enfields, rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, antiaircraft guns and rockets of all sizes, and much more. You can even buy a pen gun that fires a .22 caliber bullet and costs under $6. But it dropped from popularity after nine foreigners were arrested at Pakistani airports when the x-ray machines spotted the weapons-grade metal.

  In one shop, grinning Pathans feverishly work the lathes and smooth the gun barrels under a sign reading, “God helps those who help themselves.” Mujahidin, blood-feuding Pathan tribesmen, and the occasional Sikh extremist from the Indian Punjab are among those who purchase Darra’s wares. Prospective customers can fire as many rounds as they want right on the streets, provided they pay for the bullets.

  Darra has two smells: cordite and hashish. A shop with a sheepskin or goat’s tail hanging outside indicates a place where drugs are sold. There are plenty of those shops at the north end of town. A kilo of brown heroin sells for under $100 in Darra; the New York City street value would be around $1 million. The going price for a credit card-size brick of opium is $4 in Darra. At dusk, the shops are bolted shut because of the risk of brigands. I never met a relief worker or journalist who hadn’t visited the town at least once. It’s what the Northwest Frontier is all about.

  * * *

  On the map, the Northwest Frontier is just another province of Pakistan, along with Sind, Punjab, and Baluchistan. But for Westerners what made the Northwest Frontier the Northwest Frontier was not just its proximity to Afghanistan but the fact that culturally, topographically, and even, to a degree, politically — as far as the tribal areas were concerned — the province was part of Afghanistan, despite what the maps said.

  For Afghan war freaks, a group that included locally based journalists, relief workers, and an odd assortment of barflies with questionable life stories, the Northwest Frontier’s tenuous link t
o Pakistan was something to be ignored, and even irritated and embarrassed about. In their minds, the very word Pakistan suggested the Indian subcontinent: a noisy, overcrowded, polluted, and closed-in space seething with devious, money-hungry, and weak people who were morally and physically inferior to the heroic men who inhabited the pure open spaces of central Asia on the other side of the Khyber Pass, where adventure beckoned. An American from Wyoming or Montana might look upon New Yorkers in much the same way. This was, in fact, how the wild and woolly Afghans, particularly the Pathans, looked upon their Pakistani hosts. The same prejudices were transferred to many of the Afghans’ foreign supporters.

  On the Northwest Frontier, a Pakistani usually meant a Punjabi, someone originally from the adjacent province of Punjab, in the industrial and agricultural heartland of Pakistan. To an Afghan — and therefore to the war freaks — all Punjabis looked and acted the same. They were dark, beaky, and mustachioed, and oozed a false sophistication. They jabbered like birds in their piercing rattle of a language and banged into you on the street with their “Third World briefcases”: cheap, pretentious-looking constructions of plastic and cardboard with cumbersome locks, which held nothing but a few slices of flat bread and soft-porn movie magazines. Punjabis were physically frail compared to Afghans and were either too skinny or too fat. Pathans ate meat; Punjabis ate dal, a lentil-based gruel. Punjabis were thought to be spineless and without principles; regardless of their commitments, they were poised to sell you out once the price became high enough. In The Way of the Pathans, James W. Spain, a U.S. diplomat in the region, relates how his Pathan guide looked down on his Punjabi tonga driver: “I know that fat Punjabi,” the guide told him. “He is a snake.”