Soldiers of God (14 page)

One mujahid gave a letter to Wakhil, laboriously handwritten in Pukhtu on Hizb-i-Islami stationery, stating who I was and where I was to be taken. My two bodyguards signed for their rifles and ammunition in a ledger. Either Wakhil wasn't a skilled negotiator or at that moment there truly were no mules to spare for so trivial a task as transporting a soft, spoiled journalist and his fashionable new rucksack into Afghanistan. (Wakhil, like all other Afghans, brought nothing with him except a
patou
and the clothes on his back.)

Jihan-zeb and Lurang, my bodyguards, were in their mid-twenties, like Wakhil, and had wives and children living in Pakistani refugee camps. Jihan-zeb had some missing teeth and only one eye; the other he had lost in 1984 in a mine explosion. But he had a ready smile and seemed desperate to
communicate with me. Lurang, in contrast, had a handsome face with dark, perfectly sculpted features and good teeth — another Hollywood actor playing the part of a Third World guerrilla. But Lurang was sullen, not happy at all about this situation. He sized me up for what I was: another burdensome foreigner who was going to get sick, slow down the pace, and end up doing nothing of provable importance to the war effort. Whatever it was I did, he didn't understand and he didn't care to. After all, I didn't have a gun and I wasn't supplying guns. I was without a proper camera with those wondrously large lenses that other, obviously more impressive foreigners carried.

After a few minutes of walking we left the last telephone pole behind us and descended into a bald, windswept tableland scorched the color of zinc that reminded me of the Judean wilderness. The earth cambered as my sweat-rinsed eyes worked to adjust to the dazzling white sunlight. There wasn't a tree or a water source in view. I was careful to offer my canteen to the others before I drank, but they refused it with such a contemptuous flick of the wrist that I never offered again, and neither did they ask. They watched me drink with gaping, dumfounded eyes, as though I were a creature from another planet whose physiological composition was strange and incomprehensible to them.

I asked how far it was to the Afghan border.

“A few hours,” said Jihan-zeb to Wakhil, who translated.

It would turn out to be a very foolish question.

We marched quickly for over an hour before the plateau collapsed into a nest of canyons whose floors were carpeted with sharp rocks and pebbles that threatened to turn your ankle at every step. Suddenly a sprained ankle became the most terrifying of the many pathetic little nightmares that flashed through my mind as I stumbled beside the soaring walls of the canyon we were following.

Journalists had dubbed this and other tracks leading into
Afghanistan “the
jihad
trail.” Soon we began to meet small groups of mujahidin coming out of the war zone in the other direction. As they passed us on the road, the men embraced one another with a studied passion I had never seen before. All over the Moslem world, strangers greet each other with calls of
Salaam aleikum
and a partial, perfunctory grip of the hands on the other man's shoulders. But here the squeezes were tight, and followed by a deep, longing look in the eyes. The sufferings of war, coupled with the bonds of male friendship among the Pathans, had broken down the psychological barriers that normally existed between strangers. They were transmitting real emotion dozens of times a day. And though my new beard, new clothes, rucksack, and lack of a gun instantly betrayed me as a foreigner to these men, just the fact that I was with them on this trail earned me an embrace, which I was expected to return with equal force. Now I saw myself as even more of an imposter. I was not worthy of the trust that such a display of feeling bestowed. No matter what I chose to tell myself or others, deep within me I knew I was there solely out of professional ambition. Without my realizing it, the mujahidin had made me contemptuous of myself.

I hugged the shade cast by the silvery black granite walls and leaped across the patches of painful sunlight as though they were rushing streams. My canteen was empty, but out of shame I dared not ask where I could fill it. After another forty-five minutes of marching, Jihan-zeb casually walked over to a hollow in the rocks, cupped his hands, and withdrew a mouthful of water, which he slurped while observing me with an impish smile. It was barely a trickle, and it took a full two minutes to fill up the plastic canteen, but it was clear and clean and ice cold — the best I had ever tasted, it seemed to me then. Jihan-zeb and Wakhil laughed as I drank up the contents of the canteen before filling it a second time. Each of them had taken only a single mouthful. Lurang gave me a disapproving stare: he hadn't drunk at all.

It was only a short walk before we reached another, more plentiful spring at the foot of a mountain bearded with thorns and lichen. “Rest and drink all you can,” advised Wakhil. “It will be the last good water for a while.”

It was about three in the afternoon when we started up the mountain. At first the climb was easy, but by the time we neared the seven-thousand-foot summit I was sweating and out of breath. The view from the top, like many scenes I was to see, was one of both beauty and horror. Ahead, unfurled below us, was a dust-wrapped, sulfurous plain marked by landslides and vibrating with intense heat. It billowed on for miles before finally rising into a wave of cathedrallike mountains that towered above the mere hill I had, with some difficulty, just scaled.

“There's water down there?” I asked Wakhil, already losing my discipline.

“Yes, but we must walk for some hours first.”

“And where does Afghanistan begin?” I asked.

“After some hours will be Afghanistan,
inshallah
[God willing],” Wakhil said, hesitating. He probably never thought about the border in such terms.

“How many more hours?”

“Oh, I don't know that question.” Wakhil smiled and turned up his palms, as though I had asked him to explain the meaning of a difficult Koranic parable.

We descended into the plain known as the Valley of Tirah Bazaar, the sanctum sanctorum of the Afridis — several hundred square miles of butchered, cursed terrain southwest of the Khyber Pass that few foreigners ever really penetrated, except to slip through surreptitiously.

“You know some Arabic,” Wakhil stated.

I had told him that I had studied the language briefly in Egypt.

“Good. Then you will tell anyone who asks us on the road that you are an Arab. They cannot know that you are American.
Otherwise do not talk or take pictures or look at anyone. And don't ask for water. Afridi people — bad people, like dogs. They are the agents of Najib [the Afghan Communist ruler],” said Wakhil, lobbing a thick gob of spit on the ground, as if to emphasize his disgust with the people we were about to encounter.

Jihan-zeb just smiled and placed his finger over his lips, warning me not to talk, then took my rucksack to carry. I was grateful. (The rule amongjournalists was that if the mujahidin offer to carry your pack, don't be a hero — accept the help. If you refuse, later on when you really do need help, they might not offer.)

They are “amongst the most miserable and brutal creatures of the earth,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1897, referring mainly to the Tirah Afridis, after they had littered this plain with the bodies of hundreds of British soldiers. “Their intelligence only enables them to be more cruel, more dangerous, more destructive than wild beasts.”

Of all the difficult places on the Northwest Frontier that the British had to control, Tirah gave them the most trouble. Their running battle with the local Afridis over safe-conduct and the trade in weapons was never won, and occasionally the Afridis would resort to such outrages as the kidnapping of a seventeen-year-old English girl. Molly Ellis was abducted on April 14, 1923, and released unharmed several days later, after the British had burned down the village of the kidnapper, one Ajab Khan, who was a suspect in the murder of an English couple three years earlier. Kidnappings still occurred here, and that was why I had to be smuggled in and out of Tirah as quickly as possible: an American journalist would require an exorbitant ransom.

The greater Tirah was divided into two smaller valleys, the Maidan and the Bazaar. The Bazaar was so named by the British because of a tribal market there, which might not have
contained more than a few stalls. It was the more remote and inaccessible of the two, and in it tribal law still applied: there have been actual cases of adulterers being stoned to death in the 1980s. In 1984, a twelve-year-old boy was ordered by a tribal
Jirga
(council) to execute a grown man who was the proven killer of his father. In an area not far away, after two teenagers had tried to elope,
ajirga
ordered the girl's father to shoot the boy and the boy's father to shoot the girl, and thus the matter was settled.

The Valley of Tirah Bazaar lived in a time warp. At least inside Afghanistan the population had been introduced, however rudely, to the modern world through the Soviet invasion and the refugee migrations and influx of Western-supplied weapons it provoked. But the Bazaar Valley, without a usable road until 1988, remained untouched. The mujahidin, the Afghan Communist regime, and the Pakistani government dealt with its miserably poor Afridi inhabitants exactly as the British had: through a pattern of raids, bribes, threats, and negotiations. “In these remote valleys, even more so than on Hadrian's wall in Britain, a thousand years pass as a dream,” wrote Sir Olaf Caroe. “It has been but the fashion of arms that changes; Lee-Enfield going back to carbine, carbine to jezail, and jezail to bows and arrows.”

The first sensation I had upon entering the valley was a pleasant one: that of being washed by soft, fresh breezes rolling over a yellow-green steppe. On each side of us as we plodded through fields of tall, withered grass was a long, low wall of chocolate-black hills. In the distance, like a two-dimensional cutout, was a crude mud brick fort with a square tower leaning slightly to one side as though it might tip over. I was tired, thirsty, and hungry, and the closer we came to that leaning tower, the farther away it seemed. Then suddenly we were passing it, and other mud brick forts — exactly like the first one and painted a fabulous golden yellow by the late afternoon sun — loomed ahead, punctuating the bleak, abstract landscape.
The shrill sound of the wind in the grass was strangely deafening in the otherwise silent terrain. The grass thinned away and we were encased in a mist of fine dust. I felt I was dreaming, and in my dream I was traveling along the Silk Route of western China with Marco and Maffeo Polo. Had they also been struck by the alienation of the central Asian plateaus?

We marched steadily until late evening across flat stretches of land broken every so often by a landslide several hundred feet deep, which we had to walk down and then up again on the other side. At dusk the sky turned a nacreous, heavenly white for a few moments before going purple and black. Groups of Afridis in white turbans were leading their sheep and mules to stagnant pools of water to drink before disappearing behind the walls of those massive fortresses. We avoided their suspicious glances. Like Lurang and Jihan-zeb, they were all armed with assault rifles. I watched enviously as two Afridi boys hauled up a bucketful of water from a well. Sensing my thoughts, Wakhil tapped me on the shoulder, clucked his tongue, and shook his head at me. Instead, the four of us rested by the muddy bank of a pool after the Afridi shepherds had gone. Lumps of animal dung floated in the water; Wakhil, Lurang, and Jihan-zeb drank heartily. I filled my canteen and dropped an iodine pellet inside when the others weren't looking. According to the instructions, I had to wait twenty minutes before drinking. Lurangjerked my shoulder with an open palm, gesturing to me to slurp directly from the pool, as he did. When I politely refused, he turned his head away in disgust, as though there were no hope for me. As night fell and guns began going off in the distance, we started walking again. I couldn't believe that the hike through Tirah Bazaar had been much different for Alexander's soldiers over 2,300 years ago.

An hour later, in pitch darkness, we reached our first
chaikanah,
a mice-ridden wooden platform with benches and jute
beds where tea and biscuits were sold. A boy of about nine poured the syrupy-sweet green tea into ceramic cups on a rush mat. I had a pounding headache from thirst. Carefully, I gripped the cup's rim but it was still too hot for me to hold. I was so thirsty that I got down on my stomach and tried sipping the tea with my chin resting on the ground, but it was so hot I jerked back in pain. Almost in tears, I waited the long minutes for the tea to cool just enough to slurp it, scalding my tongue, until the boy refilled the cup. The biscuits were stale and dry. They must have been in their wrappers for years in the hot sun. After a few cups of tea I felt better and could enjoy the pleasant breezes and feeling of absolute peace and silence that overtook me, despite the echoing pop of rifles coming from over the border — not far away now, I hoped.

“We will spend the night near here and cross into Afghanistan in the morning,” said Wakhil.

The tea boy led us to an Afridi fort a few hundred yards away. Wakhil explained that this particular Afridi family was of a clan that had a truce with Khalis's mujahidin, who were allowed to stay with them while passing through the valley. So the fact that we had interrupted our journey at this point was no accident.

Inside the mud brick walls of the fort was a dirt courtyard with rooms off to the side. Along the inner wall, jute beds and brass water pipes were set out. My mouth was choked with dirt and dust.

“Salaam aleikum”
shouted the dark, turbaned Afridi elders, who gripped each of us hard and took my gear off to a corner by the wall. They told us to sit on the jute beds and cross-examined us. Lurang and Jihan-zeb knew these men from previous trips. There was a distinct air of tense, exaggerated friendliness, in the way enemies and rivals in all cultures compensate for their hostility when meeting face to face. One of the Afridis, an obese fellow who never stopped coughing, spitting, and blowing snot out of his nostrils with two bare fingers,
kept harassing me with the only English phrase he knew, which he bellowed over and over again: “How dooo you dooo! How dooo you dooo!” I was too tired and dirty to appreciate his awkward attempts at amicability, though, and I just nodded back at him with a forced smile. Before leaving Peshawar I had promised myself that no matter how physically awful I might feel during the journey, I would try my best never to act irritable in front of the mujahidin. This man gave me my first challenge.