An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (8 page)

The household was headed by Tariq’s father, Major General N., a fine old man who influenced the guest more than anyone else in Pakistan, for in the end he stayed not a night, but a month. The General’s
family gave him food, lodging, clothes and presents. He came to feel love for them.

I no longer have the plastic scraps of a butterfly mine from Afghanistan, because I gave them to Dr. Tariq’s younger brother Zahid (since become a doctor in his own right). One of the yellow glass bangles that the family gave me for my fiancée broke on the trip home; the others left with her when she left me. I do still have a stack of photographs, through which I used to flip with some complacency, the vividness of the color dyes convincing me that I must not have failed in Afghanistan after all, and for a while I busied myself with them, blowing them up into fund-raising posters that cost more than the money they brought in—for I was and still am a most lamentably ludicrous Young Man—but within three or four years I had studied those pictures so many times that not a single image was real. I retain my illegal pen-pistol from Darra, but seldom roll its fat coldness between my fingers. My best aid to memory (for I doubt that I will ever go to Afghanistan again) is the set of clothes that General N.’s family gave me. —They hang in the back of the closet, whose white door is now shut, with its black knob like a sphere of darkness extruded from the darkness inside. —My shirt (which I think once belonged to Zahid) is a baggy affair that hangs down to my knees like an apron. The pants are wide enough around the waist for two people; they tighten with a drawstring. —On hot days, this loose cotton skin of mine feels cool, luxurious.

The other guest of the N. household was, of course, the Brigadier, with whom the Young Man shared the double bed. Thirty-six years ago the General and the Brigadier had been pals, back in British days, when the Pakistanis (or Indians, as they then were) had been involved in an
insurrection in Kashmir.
^†
—“I was his teacher,” said the General, “and I regarded him as an honest man.

“You think I have picked him up now for no reason? I am convinced he will be of use. He has been with me now for six months. Every day he writes letters. He is the leader of a national party
inside
, you see, and he is trying to obtain weapons. If he had not been of use I would have gotten rid of him long ago. But if your people would just give him weapons, he would be a great thorn in the side of the Russians. When you go back to America, Young Man, you must tell people about him.”

The Young Man was given a copy of the letter that the Brigadier had written to President Reagan in October of 1981 (receiving, of course, no reply). It is a remarkable and pathetic document, and is here given as is. (It should be noted again that the Brigadier spoke minimal English; the peculiar spelling and syntax are the fault of the translator employed.)

In the course of time the Brigadier grew angry at America, for Reagan and the C.I.A. ignored his letters; and the people at the consulate were less and less polite about his coming by. It was clear enough to the Young Man that if the Ox-Fox Agreement had ever been made, it would long since have been written off the books by Mr. Fox Marten’s organization; for who would want to support a man whose plot had not been airtight? —Then again, Napoleon had made a comeback; so had Lenin. The Young Man, who did not understand very much about political change in Asia, decided to maintain an attitude of genial neutrality until more facts came in.

He is still waiting.

“I was in the jail for three days without food or water, in summer,” he told the Young Man in his slow, earnest English.
^‖
“Then three years I was there, and I took up the fight against the
Roos
.” —The story went that he had been Zaher Shah’s bodyguard, and a jewel dealer on the side. Soon after the invasion, the Russians napalmed his house and confiscated his jewels—“ten kilos of emeralds,
fif—
fifty kilos rubies, many other—
jools!
” cried the Brigadier fiercely. Some of his fortune remained hidden; this he disposed of by equipping a group of freedom fighters personally loyal to him. Then he set off for Pakistan to obtain the arms due him according to the Ox-Fox Agreement. Here he was. —One of his sons was missing in action; another had been conscripted by the
Roos
and every night supplied the guerrillas with ammunition for their Kalashnikovs. His wife was sick somewhere in Afghanistan,
and his daughter (if I understood his pantomime) had a bullet wound in the chest. At intervals he heard from his family. A messenger would come to the General’s house and deliver a square of linen, covered with Pushto cursive, which had been sewn into his garments. The Brigadier would read it over and over to himself for hours. When he had not gotten a letter for a long time, the Young Man saw him going through the other bits of cloth which had come to him, and slowly shaking his head.

“What he says, it is a tissue of fictions,” said the Young Man’s Afghan translator back in California. “I was in Kabul many years and I have never heard of this man. He was no bodyguard; he is no leader; he is nothing.” —But perhaps the translator supported a different party.

In the morning and in the afternoon the Brigadier sat working on new letters to various heads of state. He read each draft aloud to the General, who patiently suggested insertions and modifications. Between his siesta and the evening prayer the Brigadier read his Qur’an aloud to himself in the low singsong of custom. The Qur’an was kept wrapped in a bright, supple cloth whenever it was not in use. As the Brigadier picked up the bundle or replaced it on the guest-room table, he kissed it. He prayed outside in the garden with the General, touching head, hands and feet to the prayer mat.

“M
y dear son,” said the Brigadier one dizzily hot day, “I am very sorry that I have come to the Pakistan to get help. I want to be back at the fight.”

“I hope you can go back soon,” the Young Man said. He had a feeling that the Brigadier would still be waiting for arms on his dying day.

Over the course of that afternoon the old Brigadier became more and more agitated. He decided that democracy was the problem. —“Why the Amerikis no help in the fight?” he asked over and over. “
Why
they keep me sitting here?” —The Young Man made the mistake of trying to explain checks and balances. (What a theoretical Young
Man!) He did not have the heart to tell the Brigadier that the Americans did not want to help him, which fact he knew from the consulate. (And it was even possible that checks and balances had something to do with that.) —He said, “Maybe part of the American government wants to help you, Brigadier. Maybe another part doesn’t want to help you. Our government argues with itself before it decides anything.” —The Brigadier was astounded and infuriated. If the Amerikis had a dictator like Zaher Shah, he said, there would be no vacillation; the Ox-Fox Agreement would be adhered to with honor. —“Democracy,” he cried urgently, “road—to—
Communism!”
—He picked up an embroidered cushion. “Democracy: He want it there”—he touched the cushion and pointed to the bed;
“he
want it
there”
—he pointed to the floor. “Dictatorship:
one
place. Very bad, democracy!”

Well, it was better, the Young Man supposed, that he believe the problem to be one of inefficiency rather than intention. But he felt some revulsion all the same. This was the General’s prize candidate, our pro-Western friend, faithful unto death … Spitefully, the Young Man told him that he should be happy, that thanks to the
Roos
there was a good, solid dictatorship in Afghanistan now. Fortunately the Brigadier did not understand. Later the Young Man was ashamed of himself.

In Peshawar at that time the Mujahideen were divided into six major factions based on tribal antagonisms and on ideological ambitions. They had formed two coalitions, each of which (typically enough) was called the Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. The first Islamic Unity was composed of the fundamentalists and mullahs: Jamiat-i-Islami, Gulbuddin and Khalis.
^a
The second was made up of the liberals and social democrats: Hazarat, Mahaz-i-Islami, Herakat. The Brigadier’s party, Wahdati-i-Islami, or National Liberation Front, was not officially recognized. Through an interpreter the Brigadier explained that many
of the administrators in the liberal parties, and a few in those of the fundamentalists, were working secretly for him and diverting arms to the N.L.F. Naively, the Young Man asked the interpreter why, in that case, the Brigadier needed American weapons. But this made the interpreter angry, and the interview came to an end.

For a time the Young Man paid court to the Jamiat-i-Islami fundamentalists. They were strong in Afghanistan’s Panjsher Province, where the fighting was heaviest at that time, and the Young Man wanted very much to go there. But the Jamiat distrusted him. He spent many hot afternoons in their offices, listening to the buzzing of the fans, watching their leader, the famous scholar Dr. Rabbani, talking behind his desk; Dr. Rabbani resembled a saint with his long silver-white beard; and the fans buzzed and the Young Man drank Sprite after Sprite sitting on the carpet between Jamiat warriors, who teased him and told him that since he was pale-skinned he must pretend to be a Nuristani to fool the
Roos
when he went
inside
, and in his intoxication at the idea of going to Afghanistan the Young Man was not even afraid. —At first the Jamiat said that they could not take him because he did not know the Qur’an, and so could not represent their point of view to the Amerikis. But the Young Man had learned to bluff his knowledge in school; he quoted a few passages of the Qur’an back at them. —Next they told him that they could not take him because he was too young; it was too dangerous. He pointed out that many of their Mujahideen were younger than he, and that he could surely help them by taking his pictures.
^b
Then they said they’d let him know if something came up.