Soldiers of God (27 page)

In 1987, the Soviets carpet bombed Kandahar for months on end. After reducing part of the city center and almost all of the surrounding streets to rubble, they bulldozed a grid of roads to enable tanks and armored cars to patrol the city in sectors, indiscriminately destroying shops and homes in the
process. Then they tried to win back local sympathies through a rebuilding campaign. But mujahidin filtered back into the area and besieged Soviet positions. Probably more than ten thousand soldiers and civilians were killed and wounded in Kandahar in that year alone.

By 1988, the population of Kandahar, about 200,000 before the war, amounted to, by one estimate, no more than 25,000 inhabitants. The only people in the West aware of what was happening were officials in Washington with access to satellite photographs and Pakistan-based diplomats, journalists, and relief workers. The American media not only ignored the Kandahar story but in most cases probably weren't even aware of it. The grinding, piecemeal destruction of Afghanistan's second-largest city constituted an enormous black hole in foreign news coverage in our time.

Throughout the decade, Haji Latif was in the thick of this carnage, which meant that NIFA, whatever its reputation elsewhere, was a major player in the Kandahar fighting. One NIFA official was quick to boast about this: “We have the most fighters in Kandahar, so why don't the Pakistanis and the Americans help us more?”

It was questionable whether NIFA really did have the most fighters in Kandahar, since Khalis and the other fundamentalist parties had considerable presence as well. But beneath the claims were fascinating little truths that gave the Kandahar fighting an importance far beyond the quantity of blood shed there.

Ideology mixed with a moderate dose of self-interest drew Haji Latif and NIFA together. NIFA was in fact at its core a royalist party, favoring the return to Afghanistan of exiled King Zahir Shah. This sat well with Haji Latif, since the king had represented a loose, rather corrupt power structure that had allowed his banditry to flourish.

King Zahir Shah's forty-year tenure on the throne in Kabul … from his ascension in 1933 at the age of eighteen to the
1973 coup engineered by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, which toppled him … was by any reckoning a less than glorious time in Afghan history. Though Afghanistan enjoyed relative peace and development, it was the king's lazy, uninspired leadership that permitted the Soviets to gain a foothold inside the state bureaucracy. One Western specialist on Afghanistan, with reference to the king's philandering ways, puts it this way: “While Daoud and the Communists were busy building a power structure in Kabul, the king was busy following his dick around Europe.”

The fundamentalist parties loathed the king with a passion, almost as much as they did the Soviets. For men like Yunus Khalis, Din Mohammed, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the king was the living symbol of the cowardice and moral corruption that had brought the godless Soviets down on the nation's head. Din Mohammed once explained to me: “How often, during his years of comfortable exile in Italy, has the king spoken out against the sufferings of our people and the crimes of the Russians? Thousands of Afghan children die, and what sacrifice has the king, in his Italian villa, made for the
jihad?
None.” The political attitude not only of Khalis's party but of the other fundamentalist groups could be summed up in one phrase, which I heard often in Peshawar: “No king, no Communists!”

Afghan fundamentalists liked to compare King Zahir Shah to Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, the early-nineteenth-century ruler of Kabul, who owed his throne to the British during their brief occupation and was therefore the puppet of a foreign army. The fundamentalists thought that King Zahir Shah was as bad as Babrak Karmal and Najib, the Soviet-imposed rulers. At a rally of fundamentalist parties on the Northwest Frontier in February 1988,1 saw an impassioned mujahid grab the microphone and yell, “Death to Zahir Shah! So many mujahidin have been sacrificed for Islam that we don't want to be ruled by anyone except God!”

When the peasant fundamentalists of Yunus Khalis's Hizbi-Islami
looked at the mujahidin of Pir Gailani's NIFA they saw a group of pampered, Westernized, not particularly religious aristocrats who were sacrificing less for the
jihad
than they were.

Indeed, all of NIFA's top officials were related either to the king or to Pir Gailani. All were educated abroad or in the few Western-style schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They began their
jihad
after the fundamentalists (Pir Gailani didn't proclaim
jihad
until 1979). And their families were making much less of a sacrifice than the fundamentalists: whenever a mujahid from NIFA talked about his relatives, he mentioned brothers and cousins in the United States or Europe. Whenever one of Khalis's fighters discussed his family, he referred to brothers and cousins who were
shaheedan
(war martyrs) or were still fighting.

The hatred of the fundamentalist parties like Khalis's for the nonfundamentalist parties like NIFA was therefore easy to comprehend, since it had to do not only with politics but with class divisions as well. But this didn't mean that the mujahidin of NIFA weren't patriots too. By any standards other than Afghan ones, they were extremely religious … certainly more so than most Pakistanis, Arabs, or urban, middle-class Iranians I ever encountered. If not five times a day, they prayed three or four times. Whatever the Pir may or may not have been doing in London, his mujahidin in Pakistan and Afghanistan observed the Ramadan fast. The fact that many members of their families were abroad meant that they had other options; they didn't have to live in the heat and filth of Pakistan or risk their lives inside if they didn't want to. By their own lights, the NIFA fighters were indeed making a sacrifice; very few of them were pompous exhibitionists like Major General Rahim Wardak. And their hatred of the Soviets and the Afghan Communists was every bit as authentic as that of the fundamentalists, no matter what the fundamentalists themselves claimed.

But the NIFA guerrillas’ hatred of the Soviets took a different form: it was fired by tradition, not religion. The difference between NIFA and Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami was that Khalis's men were revolutionaries, while the NIFA mujahidin were simple patriots. They wanted a restoration of the days prior to 1973, when Daoud's coup against the king set the country on the ignoble path toward communism. Khalis, on the other hand, wanted a new Afghanistan entirely: an Islamic republic, free of both king and Communists. Unlike Iran's Islamic republic to the west, it would not be repressive. Unlike Zia's Islamic republic to the east, it would not overflow with hypocrisy.

Because NIFA was willing to settle for less, and was also doing less of the fighting, it was more willing to talk to the enemy. As the Kremlin began to realize that communism, as an ideology, had no future in Afghanistan and the best it could hope for was a return to the status quo ante, NIFA and the other nonfundamentalist parties became even more inclined to make a deal. By late 1987, NIFA and Moscow were each willing to settle for a return to mid-1973 conditions.

This was why these parties were labeled moderate. The irony throughout the war was that, politically, the moderate parties were in sync with official U.S. policy, which stated that the Soviets must leave and that the Afghans should determine their own future, preferably along pro-Western lines. But it was the radical mujahidin, sworn to fight to the death and compromise be damned, who got American aid, and not the moderates, who echoed U.S. policy from closer to the sidelines.

As Khalis symbolized the religious and warrior strands of the Pathan personality, Pir Gailani symbolized another rich heritage … based on royalty, history, and myth … that was also Pathan. The Pir's only real political ally in Peshawar was Sib-ghatullah Mojadidi's Jabha-i-Nijat-Milli (Afghan National Liberation
Front). Mojadidi had fewer troops in the field than NIFA. A standingjoke in Peshawar was: “There are two things you never see in Afghanistan … Hindu graves and Mojadidi's mujahidin.” Still, Mojadidi was more respected than Gailani. Though a staunch royalist distantly related to King Zahir Shah, Mojadidi … who carried a pistol in his belt and had once threatened to shoot Hekmatyar … had a record of opposing not only the Communists but the king too, whenever he felt the king was straying too far from Islamic ideals.

The march of current history had favored Khalis. As Abdul Haq first realized as a youngster, communism was an ideology so extreme that it required another ideology, equally extreme, to repel it. Khalis's politics proved more useful and virile than Mojadidi's and Gailani's. Mojadidi and Gailani stood for an Afghanistan that was disappearing, a country of chivalrous ballads, ancient myths, and genealogies in unlikely confrontation with brutal, mechanized twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Kandahar symbolized this brutal confrontation more than any other place, not only because of the intensity of the fighting there but because it was the ancestral home of Afghanistan's kings and the hearth of the country's cultural tradition. Isolated in the southern outback of central Asia, Kandahar's culture was pure Afghan, untouched by the culturally corrupting influences of Iran that had bastardized Herat or those of the Indian subcontinent that had bastardized Kabul. Kandahar in the 1980s represented past centuries being destroyed by this one.

Kandahar's glory began with one man on horseback. The man was Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent in the army of Nadir Shah the Great, the Persian king whose forces had conquered Moghul India in 1739. Ahmad Khan and his Abdali kinsmen, though proud Afghans, were personally loyal to Nadir Shah, for even though the king had defeated them in
battle, he generously incorporated them into his army. When, in his later years, Nadir Shah grew suspicious and brutal, he relied increasingly on Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis against his own Persian and Turkish forces, who he was convinced were out to kill him.

One night in 1747, sensing a plot against the king, Ahmad Khan and the Abdalis rode into the royal camp at Quchan, in eastern Iran, to protect him. At dawn, the sight of Nadir Shah's headless body greeted the Abdali force in one of the tents. Ahmad Khan and his four thousand horsemen fled the camp as the king's erstwhile followers looted it. Pursued by these hostile troops, Ahmad Khan sent a diversionary force to Herat and led the bulk of his cavalry southeast toward Kandahar.

“On his ride to Kandahar, Ahmad Khan thought quickly,” Sir Olaf Caroe wrote in
The Pathans.
Kandahar was in a frontier zone between the Persian homeland and the Moghul territories to the east that the Persians and their murdered leader, Nadir Shah, had recently vanquished. In this sea of blood and turmoil, Ahmad conceived of an island of order: a native Afghan kingdom that would be sanctioned by whoever would now rule Persia, in exchange for which he would aggressively patrol the mother kingdom's new territories to the east. Pa-than legend has it that just then he fell upon a caravan spiriting to Persia the very Indian treasures Nadir Shah had looted eight years earlier. This treasure included the Koh-i-noor diamond, which was to finance Ahmad Khan's new Afghan state.

Ahmad Khan was only twenty-four when he became King Ahmad Shah. In a camp outside Kandahar, as Caroe tells it, the other Abdali tribesmen “took pieces of grass in their mouths as a token that they were his cattle and beasts of burden.” Because Ahmad Shah liked to wear an earring fashioned of pearls, he became known by the title Durr-i-Durran (Pearl of Pearls). Henceforth, he and his Abdali kinsmen would be known as the Durranis.

The Durrani empire, which would eventually become modern Afghanistan, began in Kandahar. From there Ahmad Shah Durrani conquered Kabul and Herat, and Meshed in Iran. He invaded India eight times, sacking the Punjab as far as Delhi. But it was always to Kandahar that he returned after his conquests, and that is where he is buried.

Ahmad Shah's empire in Persia and India began to crumble even before his death, but the Durranis were to rule Afghanistan until 1973, when Daoud deposed the last Durrani monarch, King Zahir Shah. Though political power in Afghanistan shifted to Kabul following Ahmad Shah's death, Kandahar remained the region where tribal support for the Durrani kings was strongest right into the 1980s. One nineteenth-century historian wrote that the Durrani tribes viewed Kandahar “with a species of reverence as being the burial-place of the kings and heroes of their tribe.” This was why NIFA supporters, and Mojadidi too, werejustified in claiming Kandahar as their city, the only place in Afghanistan where their parties were more significant than those of the fundamentalists.

My own fascination with Kandahar began with the name itself. According to Peter Levi, Kandahar is probably the only Greek place name to have survived in Afghanistan, stemming from the Arabic form of Alexander's name, Iskander. In 330
B.C.,
a year after his decisive victory over the Persian forces of Darius at Gaugamela, east of modern-day Mosul in Iraq, Alexander the Great led his army of thirty thousand men through what is now Kandahar. He left his elephants in the mud swamps west of the present-day city, then crossed the snowy summits of the Hindu Kush on foot.

I visited Kandahar briefly in November 1973, passing through by bus on my way from Herat to Kabul. I stopped for a night at a cheap hotel by the bus station near the city's Herat Gate. The darkness and my own discomfort … I was slightly ill and horribly cold in the unheated hotel room … gave the
evening a surreal quality. All I could recall later was a windblown square rilled with bearded men in high black turbans smoking a water pipe. I sometimes wondered whether that square in my memory survived the years of bombing.

More recently, I came to know Hamid Karzai, a thirty-year-old Kandahar native and spokesman for Mojadidi's Afghan National Liberation Front. Hamid was the son of Abdulahad Karzai, the
khan
(headman) of the Popalzai tribe, the branch of the Abdalis that produced Ahmad Shah Durrani. With Abdul Haq, Hamid Karzai represented for me all that was larger than life in the Afghan character. He was tall and cleanshaven, with a long nose and big black eyes. His thin bald head gave him the look of an eagle. Wearing a sparkling white
shal-war kameez,
he affected the dignity, courtly manners, and high breeding for which the Popalzai are known throughout Afghanistan. Hamid, unlike the crowd at NIFA, whose royalist sentiments and moderate politics he shared, was not a “Gucci muj.” When he did wear Western dress, he preferred conservative blazers and slacks or a leather jacket. He moved between the Occidental and Oriental worlds without pretension or falsity. I remember him in his Peshawar villa, sitting on a carpet in a
shalwar kameez,
speaking Pukhtu with his turbaned Kandahari kinsmen, a copy of George Eliot's
The Mill on the Floss
nearby. Hamid was one of six sons, but the only one who had not gone into exile in Europe or North America and who aspired to succeed his father as head of the Popalzai.