Soldiers of God

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for
The Atlantic Monthly
and the author of eight other books on travel and foreign affairs, translated into many languages, including
Balkan Ghosts, The Coming Anarchy, The Ends of the Earth,
and
Eastward to Tartary.

Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

The Coming Anarchy:
Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War

An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future

The Ends of the Earth:
From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia
—
A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine

For my mother
and
for my late father,
Philip A. Kaplan

Introduction
xv

PROLOGUE
Walking Through a Minefield

ONE
Frontier Town

TWO
A World of Men

THREE
Going up Khyber

FOUR
Noble Savages

FIVE
The Growth of a Commander

SIX
Haji Babà and the Gucci Muj

EPILOGUE
to the Onginal Edition
Something I Only Imagined

SEVEN
The Lawless Frontier

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Soldiers of God,
which was first published in 1990 (with the subtitle “With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan”), provides the historical context for the emergence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. My new final chapter, “The Lawless Frontier,” which appeared as a long article in the September 2000 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly,
provides the follow-up. Both
Soldiers of God
and “The Lawless Frontier” also offer profiles of some of the prominent personalities in a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

I finished writing
Soldiers of God
at my home in Greece thirteen years ago, after several lengthy trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province in the mid- and late-1980s. It was the last phase of the Cold War, and while no one could predict how suddenly and definitively it would end, there were some premonitions in Afghanistan. The Afghan mujahidin (Islamic “holy warriors”) were in many respects a bunch of ornery backwoodsmen, whose religious and tribal creed seemed to flow naturally from the austere living conditions of the high desert — unlike the more abstract and ideological brand of Islam of the Taliban (“Knowledge Seekers”), who would emerge a few years later. The mujahidin in the 1980s were exacting a terrible price from the Soviet military occupiers of their country. I remember meeting captured Soviet soldiers, whom the mujahidin would make available to journalists: these Soviets were terrified and disillusioned
youngsters, unsure about what they had been fighting for. Failure and an abject lack of pride registered in their eyes. It was a common assumption among the journalists who covered the mujahidin that the war in Afghanistan would ultimately have a profound impact upon Soviet society.

In 1989 the world media spotlight soon shifted from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Empire was cracking apart, helped by the trauma of the Soviet catastrophe in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was forgotten, and partly as a consequence has come back to haunt the West: a failed, bankrupt state in which terrorists with fat wallets set up shop. The primitive defiles of eastern Afghanistan — lacking electricity and running water — are where the successful plan to destroy the World Trade Center towers and a wing of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, likely had its roots.

Soldiers of God is
a tale of strong-willed individuals as well as of ethnic groups formed by history and geography. I was a younger, less mature writer when I wrote
Soldiers of God.
I was caught up in the struggle to liberate Afghanistan, and my lack of objectivity shows; nor was I as fair to some people, or as critical of others, as I should have been.
Soldiers of God
is not a primer for current or future policy in Afghanistan. But it may succeed in giving the reader a sense of the mood, the beauty, and the heady politics of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier during the last phase of the Cold War.

Afghanistan, in addition to everything else that has been said about it, is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever known: the woodsmoke, the mudbrick redoubts, the purifying heat and emptiness, the tribal costumes in a part of the world unadulterated by cheap Western polyesters.….

Between the writing of
Soldiers of God
and “The Lawless Frontier,” much happened in Afghanistan that I do not cover in this volume. In those intervening years, Afghanistan dissolved into chaos. Though the mujahidin were successful in driving out the Soviets, they failed to consolidate their victory. The mujahidin suffered the classic weakness of many
guerrilla movements: they could defend their homes and make life miserable for the invader, but they lacked the unity and organization required to do what has been the central role of government since time immemorial: monopolize the use of force to create order, so that individuals and groups have no need to fear each other, and can consequently get on with their lives and engage in commerce. The early 1990s, after
Soldiers of God
was finished, were characterized by the wars of the mujahidin, in which one group of guerrillas would bomb the capital of Kabul in order to uproot another group from the city. In those years, Afghans learned to hate the very people who had liberated them from their Soviet occupiers.

Of all the mujahidin groups, the most ruthless and destructive was Hizb-I-Islami (the “Party of Islam”), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former student rabble rouser at Kabul University and one of the characters in
Soldiers of God.
In fact,
Soldiers of God
tells an early version of a story that other journalists have elaborated on over the years: how the Pakistani security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, favored Hekmatyar over more moderate mujahidin groups. The result was the rise of anarchy and extremism in Afghanistan, which provided a fertile petri dish for the growth of the Taliban. “The Lawless Frontier” provides the details of how the Taliban came into being in the mid-1990s.

Still, the criticisms of American policy during the period of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan may lack some historical and philosophical context. The United States, in the 1980s, was doing what great powers have done throughout history, in order to survive as great powers: pursue its strategic interests. A state that neglects the projection of power has little chance of spreading its values. Moreover, foreign policy is about priorities: in the 1980s, the welfare of Afghanistan was secondary to the defeat of the Soviet Union, America's adversary in a bipolar world. That is a brutal, tragic realization, but as someone who reported on Eastern Europe during the Cold War, it is one that I accept. And the fact that
towers above all others is that arming the mujahidin — however imperfectly it was done — played a significant role in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe. The imperfections in the Reagan administration's policy, of course, helped lead to a new challenge: that of terrorism. Just as the imperfections in our military strategy against Nazi Germany in the latter part of World War II helped lead to the domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union for forty-four years, necessitating the Cold War.

The United States armed Hekmatyar's radicals because that is what the Pakistanis wanted us to do. The U.S. demurred to the Pakistanis for several, somewhat understandable reasons. The CIA had a long-standing and fruitful relationship with the Pakistani security establishment that preceded the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (For example, the Pakistanis had been instrumental in helping the Nixon Administration reestablish ties with China in the early 1970s.) Defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan required the use of Pakistan as a rear base: something that was not altogether politically popular in Pakistan itself. Nevertheless, Pakistan's leader, Zia ul-Haq, supported the U.S. effort wholeheartedly, and obviously he wanted something in return. Zia required the leeway to arm Hekmatyar, whom the Pakistanis felt they could control more easily than the other mujahidin leaders — that way a post-Soviet Afghanistan would be an ally of Pakistan.

And there was another factor: our own insecurity that was partly a result of our experience in Vietnam, where we assumed a knowledge of the local people and their culture which we either did not have, or neglected to properly employ. So this time better to listen to the Pakistanis, they were the real experts on the region. Once again, trauma and guilt over Vietnam helped lead to a grave mistake. For Hekmatyar's ability to unleash chaos in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, and his inability to end what he had begun, led directly to the birth of the Taliban, who would provide Osama bin Laden with a safe haven for terrorizing the United States.

Hekmatyar went into exile for a time in Iran after the Taliban's ascension to power. But he should never be ruled out of any future scenario: he is charismatic, organized, and absolutely ruthless. As for some of the other characters in
Soldiers of God,
here is what has happened to them:

Ahmad Shah Massoud, the resourceful mujahidin leader in northern Afghanistan, held power for a time in Kabul in the early 1990s. But he was far less successful as a political leader than he had been as a guerrilla fighter. His minority status as an ethnic Tajik in a country dominated by Pathans (alternatively spelled as Pushtuns or Pashtoons) was a drawback. After the Taliban emerged, Massoud went back to the hills with his men. He represented the most potent military force against the Taliban, just as he had against the Soviets. Indeed, Massoud might be considered among the greatest guerrilla fighters of the twentieth century, putting the Afghans in the same category as the Vietnamese and the Eritreans. Unable to match Massoud in the field of battle, Osama bin Laden dispatched him with a suicide bomber disguised as a journalist, to whom Massoud unwittingly granted an interview. Massoud died in September 2001, the same week of the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Hamid Karzai, the most moderate and Westernized of the mujahidin in
Soldiers of God,
has, despite the radicalization of Afghanistan, remained central to its politics. Because of his talent, education, and royal lineage — Karzai's roots go back the first Afghan king, Ahmad Shah Durrani — he was a deputy foreign minister in a mujahidin government from 1992 to 1994, was even courted for a time by the Taliban, and will likely play a role in any post-Taliban government that emerges in Afghanistan. Karzai's father, Abdulahad Karzai, the headman of the Popolzai branch of the Pathans, was assassinated in July 2000, reportedly by the Taliban.

Abdul Haq, among the most notable Pathan commanders against the Soviets in the mid-1980s, was losing relevance as
Soldiers of God
went to press in January 1990. He lived for a time in the Arabian Gulf. Still, he remained a prominent figure in Afghan refugee circles, and as a moderate pro-Western ex-mujahidin commander with Islamic credentials, he has recently been reported to be playing a significant role in plans for a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Haq is smart, has a record of political prescience, and understands the West better than many other mujahidin. In 1999 Haq suffered a major tragedy. His wife and son were assassinated in their home in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier. Some reports linked the murderers to the Taliban, whose intention was to kill Haq. But he was not at home.

Yunus Khalis, the crusty red-beard who led the strongest mujahidin group in eastern Afghanistan, died some years ago. It was in the Islamic academies run by Khalis in the Pakistani borderlands where elements of the Taliban first emerged in the mid-1990s. A plantation owned by Khalis in eastern Afghanistan has been linked to one of bin Laden's training camps.

One night, in particular, summed up the mystery of the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. I had gone with another journalist to visit the headquarters in Peshawar of the mujahidin warlord of eastern Afghanistan, Jallalhuddin Haqqani. Haq-qani was a fierce fighter who was being helped not only by the CIA, via the Pakistani intelligence services, but also by wealthy Wahabi extremists from Saudi Arabia. It was dark and smoky that night in the room where Haqqani had been holding court to a group of leading Saudi radicals. Everywhere on the Northwest Frontier the mujahidin welcomed journalists into their homes. Suddenly, here it was different. I will never forget the anger in the eyes of those Saudis when my and friend and I, obviously Westerners, entered to talk with Haqqani. No tea was offered. We took the hint and left. When Osama bin Laden first appeared in news stories in the early 1990s, I began to wonder if, perhaps, he had been among the Saudis in the room that night.

Though he probably wasn't, I still missed the story. I never gave sufficient attention in my reporting to the incubating menace posed by some of the most radical elements attracted to the mujahidin from other parts of the Islamic world; or how a movement that for the moment served American interests might next turn against America. It was the knowledge of my failure that partly motivated my return to the region in the spring of 2000, a trip that resulted in “The Lawless Frontier,” which serves as a coda to
Soldiers of God.