Soldiers of God (11 page)

Abdul Haq's father died when he was still a small boy, making Din Mohammed the family's father figure. He even looked the part. Although Haq, on account of his hefty size, appeared
older than his twenty-nine years, Din Mohammed, with a bald head and long gray beard, looked like an old man at forty. And while Din Mohammed, Haq, and the middle brother, Abdul Qadir, had all gone on the
haj,
the pilgrimage to Mecca, only Din Mohammed was always referred to as Haji — Haji Din Mohammed, he was called. It was a title that seemed to suit the crusty graybeard better than it did the other two brothers.

In the 1970s, Din Mohammed had experienced the same trauma as his younger brothers: he watched as his house west of Jalalabad was burned down, his cattle were shot, and the village
mullah
and headmen were taken away to prison for summary execution by Afghan Communists. The soldiers even defecated on the ritually cleansed dishes, the most sacred items in a Moslem household. Unlike Abdul Haq, Din Mohammed seemed truly transformed and hardened by this experience. Whereas Haq, in his role as a field commander, had killed Soviets, he didn't seem to hate with the same fanatical intensity as his brother. “Din Mohammed is a bitter, inflexible man” was a remark I frequently heard from Afghans outside the fundamentalist fold.

I was one of the only reporters ever to talk with Din Mohammed at length, and the experience was disconcerting. For several hours he suffered me. He certainly did not feel comfortable with non-Moslem foreigners, although he would spend long stretches with Shuster, chatting and drinking tea.

Shuster, himself a product of totalitarianism, seemed to think in the same cynical, conspiratorial framework as Din Mohammed. He badgered Din Mohammed with a harsh reality designed to force the Haji's hand, in order to allow Haq to go to the United Nations.

President Zia of Pakistan was conspiring, in early and mid-1988, to make the anti-Western Afghan extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the permanent chairman of the seven-party mujahidin alliance. Hekmatyar, whose three-month term of office as temporary chairman was set to expire, was loathed by all the
other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike. He was young, charismatic, highly educated, and power hungry, but his organization lacked fighting ability and squandered much of its resources attacking other guerrilla factions. Hekmatyar wanted personal power first, a mujahidin victory second. He was a Pathan from the northern Afghan province of Badakshan, but his eyes were not those of a Pathan. They resembled an Arab's or Persian's: pellets of hard black ice that never stopped moving unless they were looking down and away from you. A spellbinding demagogue before a crowd, in private he was eerily soft-spoken; his mouth flowed with honey that denied all bad intentions. Hekmatyar was forever calling press conferences, accusing the other parties of selling out to the Soviets while claiming credit for military operations that the other parties had carried out. It was a Peshawar truism that the split in the “hopelessly divided mujahidin” — as the media phrased it — was basically six against one. At times it seemed that the only issue all the factions of Westerners at the American Club could agree on was a hatred of Hekmatyar for “giving the mujahidin a bad name” in the outside world.

Yet Zia favored the thirty-nine-year-old leader. In addition to being a militant fundamentalist like Zia himself, Hekmatyar was a talented politician backed up by almost no grassroots support and no military base inside. He was therefore wholly dependent on Zia's protection and financial largess (courtesy of American taxpayers) for his party's existence. Hekmatyar, a former student leader at Kabul University, was the classic artificial creation of an outside power. But the mujahidin could not openly oppose Zia's choice, because it was Zia's personal support that allowed the guerrillas to operate from Pakistani territory over the opposition of most of his countrymen, who would have gladly cut a deal with the Kabul Communists in return for getting the 3.5 million refugees off their soil. And the price for Zia's protection was a mujahidin leader who was completely subservient to him.

Shuster pleaded his case to Din Mohammed: Abdul Haq and the other alliance leaders were the way around Zia's machinations. By accepting the invitation from Perez de Cuéllar's office, which Shuster was asked to help relay, Haq could become, overnight, a unifying figure in the mujahidin alliance, overshadowing Hekmatyar and thus blunting the force of Zia's gambit without openly crossing him. Also, at that very moment in mid-1988, Ahmad Shah Massoud was forming a grand alliance of Tajik, Turkoman, and Uzbek commanders all over northern Afghanistan. With the Soviets starting to pull out of the country, it was critical that a Pathan commander get a quick dose of diplomatic legitimacy. It was time, Shuster dared to say to the graybeard Haji, for the Pathans “to stop looking backward to their own suffering and to start showing political ability.” And whether Din Mohammed liked it or not, Abdul Haq was already being thought of in Peshawar as a politician, a role for which he had greater talent than several of the seven party leaders.

Even so, Shuster pointed out, whatever took place in New York between Haq and UN officials would probably turn out to be of little relevance, since the United Nations served only Soviet interests. The most important thing was how Abdul Haq's visit would be perceived in Peshawar by the refugees and party leaders. Shuster, ever the realist, was less optimistic about toppling the Kabul regime than anyone else I knew on the Frontier. He desperately wanted Haq to take over the mujahidin alliance because he knew that if Hekmatyar and the Pakistanis continued to run the war, the guerrillas would falter once the Soviet troop withdrawal was completed — which is exactly what happened.

After the final, four-hour session with Shuster, in broken English, Din Mohammed relented. Shuster had merely played back to him the Haji's own private thoughts in a more concise, pointed form. Abdul Haq departed for New York five days after Shuster left Peshawar. Haq's visit to the United Nations
helped force Hekmatyar out of the chairman's post in mid-June 1988. This proved, however, to be only a temporary setback for Hekmatyar.

During his last days in Peshawar, Shuster would wait in his hotel room or in the dim, gloomy dining hall at Dean's Hotel for Abdul Haq's driver to fetch him. Haq would be reclining in the back seat of the well-upholstered Toyota Corolla with darkened windows like some mafia don, massaging his injured right foot and moving over to make room for his friend beside him. In the car, Shuster would begin patiently making his case about every nuance of the military and diplomatic struggle facing the mujahidin. Shuster could handle Haq, who occasionally fell into bad moods and acted like a spoiled child — as when he refused to answer calls from the State Department while recovering from his mine injury in the Pittsburgh hospital. (Actually, Haq was convinced that the Americans were trying to kill him. The reason? Since the U.S. government was paying his medical expenses, Washington regulations stipulated that he fly on an American carrier on the last leg of his journey to the United States. In horrible pain, Haq was forced to wait hours at a London airport for a connecting flight.)

Faced with Shuster's arguments, Haq would ease into a smile. He'd make a joke about getting diarrhea from the food at Dean's and ask about the latest gossip in the foreign community. Shuster would in turn loosen up. As though they were on stage, they would look deep into each other's eyes when they talked. There was something a bit pretentious about the way they acted in each other's presence. It was a self-conscious dialogue. Each was aware that the other came from the
other
side, and that was perhaps why, although they argued, they never really fought. What kept the relationship from being a cliché was the fact that they had been together under life-threatening conditions.

In the early years of the war, whenever Abdul Haq was in Peshawar he went everywhere on his motorcycle and ate many of his meals in local Afghan restaurants with a large group of friends. Assassinations by KhAD had later forced him out of public places and into a protected car. His world had narrowed, and consequently Shuster's role in it loomed larger. While John Gunston was the brash, soldierly comrade — the good mate who was forever slapping you on the back — Shuster was a sounding board for ideas with whom Haq could have late-night heart-to-hearts and do what was impossible to do with another Pathan: talk about his fears and vulnerabilities.

Haq felt himself to be a man alone. Even to his older brothers he wouldn't talk about many aspects of his Kabul operation, which he saw as something he created on his own without their help. He spent little time with his wife. Unlike other Pathans, he was satisfied with only two children and didn't want any more — something she couldn't understand. Like other mujahidin commanders I've met, he appeared to view sex as an undisciplined act of self-indulgence — something that Westerners needed, not toughened Pathans like himself. Sometimes he didn't tell his wife when he was leaving Peshawar to go to war inside Afghanistan. At home he smoldered. His wife and other family members feared his temper, which could turn violent. This fear was mixed with awe after his mine injury, when even deliberate pampering by the women in the family failed to soften his disposition. When his sister pleaded with him to talk, he once responded, “What do you know? You're only a woman.” The one woman he felt truly at ease with was his mother. He always told her when he was going on
jihad.

Charles Lindholm, a Columbia University anthropologist who lived for two years in a Pathan village, observed that the Pathans “live within a system which obliges men to present themselves as completely self-reliant…. Suspicion, defensiveness, bravery, vengefulness, pride, envy,” and “a Hobbesian
vision” characterize their world view and interpersonal relationships — meaning, the Pathan can trust no one but an outsider “to fill the role of friend.” This was the basis of friendships between British colonial administrators and tribal Pathans in the last century.

At first I dismissed Lindholm's analysis as mere anthropological twaddle. But there was clearly something to it. Haq's men were known to resent their commander's emotional dependence on foreigners, but Haq required these friendships. There was a side of his personality that could find release only with outsiders. He needed contact with values that were vastly different from his own. And this need increased when he was sidelined in Peshawar, recovering from the mine injury, at a time when the Soviets were starting their withdrawal and the war was entering a complex military and diplomatic phase that forced him to think in ways that he was not used to.

By journalistic definition, Haq was a Moslem fundamentalist. He prayed five times a day. He kept the Ramadan fast. He didn't smoke or drink. When traveling, he refused to wear Western clothes or eat Western food: in London to meet Prime Minister Thatcher, he wouldn't eat in a Moslem Lebanese restaurant until the cook assured him that the food was
hallal.
The idea of a free Afghanistan not ruled by Islamic law was anathema to him. The media, and especially American think-tank specialists, sometimes lumped Haq and Hekmatyar together in the same category as “Iranian-style fundamentalists.” But with us Haq laughed, made jokes, and liked to gossip. And he was not driven by ideology. He was the only man in all the fundamentalist parties whom the nonfundamentalist Afghans, especially the intellectuals, liked and respected. I kept asking myself whether, in the final analysis, Haq was, in effect, just a military tool of others in the alliance — and in his own family, in particular — who were fundamentalists.

Great as Abdul Haq's need for outside friendships was, he was still a Pathan, and a Kabul-area commander at that. Shuster's
closeness to Haq and Din Mohammed was ultimately a measure of what Shuster had accomplished inside Afghanistan and of the physical risks he had taken. Haq and his brother never confided anything to Shuster until after he had made several cross-border forays.

Everything in Peshawar always went back to time spent inside. Whatever other factors influenced a journalist's access to a mujahidin commander — his personality, his knowledge of Pukhtu or Dari, his years covering the story, his commitment to the cause — the reporters closest to the commanders were those who had performed best under fire. There were no exceptions. From anywhere in town you could see the brown Khyber hills. Up there was where it was all taking place. As long as you didn't go up there, the hills were a constant reminder of your fear, your guilt over remaining in Peshawar, and your burning curiosity about what was happening over the border. And once you returned from inside, the hills reminded you of how lucky you were to be back in Peshawar. I really knew nothing about Haq or Gunston or Shuster or much else about the war that was important until I went into Afghanistan. Only then did I begin to understand about the people I was interviewing, and why inside was all that mattered in a journalist's relationship with a guerrilla commander.

Shuster went over the border with Abdul Haq for the first time in October 1984. The trip lasted four weeks. The Soviets were in the midst of an offensive, spearheaded by airborne troops, to regain swaths of territory in the area south and east of Kabul. This was around the time a French television reporter was captured by Communist regime soldiers, when the mujahidin group he had been traveling with fell into an ambush. Haq's force of three hundred was snaking fast through the same territory as the Soviets, who were equipped with troop-carrying helicopters and fighter jet support. Haq and Shuster were bombed several times by the jets. Because Haq, as the
commander, had to be the last to run for cover, Shuster was forced to crouch beside him in the open, his bowels loosening from fear and bad food. The hardest thing to do was run
toward
a falling projectile, not away from it. Haq had taught Shuster that a bomb always drops at an angle; only by running toward its source are you safe from being hit.

Shuster admitted that he was perpetually frightened of either being killed or being caught. But he could never even start to explain why he persisted in going inside. I didn't buy his Lithuanian nationalism argument, even though he was an intellectual who clearly lacked the macho mentality of other journalists. Shuster seemed determined to earn Haq's respect, as if he knew that he and Haq were destined to be friends and he had no choice in the matter. Once Shuster tried to describe to me how he and Haq had stripped down to their waists and gone swimming in a deserted reservoir east of Kabul with all of Haq's men looking on. “You don't know what it is to be with Abdul Haq at such a moment! …” Words deserted him. Perhaps, like the Japanese karate master and the London window cleaner, Shuster was merely acting out a fantasy — another foreign male in the war zone who saw himself as a character in a movie.