Soldiers of God (22 page)

Back in 1973, when King Zahir Shah was overthrown by his first cousin and former prime minister, Mohammed Daoud, fundamentalists like Khalis and Haq's older brothers, Din Mohammed and Abdul Qadir, cheered. Zahir Shah had held the throne for forty years, since he was eighteen, and to the fundamentalists he was a corrupt profligate who fiddled while Afghan Communists busily burrowed into the state bureaucracy. But the fundamentalists feared Daoud even more. He was known to be a friend of the Soviet Union and stood for a stronger, more efficient central government.

Daoud's coup was made possible by the assistance of cells of junior officers controlled by Parcham (Banner), the less extreme of the two branches of the Afghan Communist party. Parcham's influence in the army's lower echelon complemented Daoud's own clout among the generals. The combination
made for a bloodless coup, in which all potential resistance was snuffed out. Because the Parcham Communists were crucial to Daoud when he first assumed power, he let them dominate the ruling revolutionary council. Eventually, Daoud purged the Parchamis from the council and tried to steer a less pro-Soviet path. As a result, not only were the disaffected Khalqis … the more extreme of the Afghan Communists … busy plotting against Daoud's government, but the Parchamis were too.

To Khalis and Din Mohammed especially, the Kabul government under Daoud was a godless force seeking to extend its dominion into the countryside in order to subvert age-old religious and tribal traditions. As reactionary and paranoid as this vision may have seemed in 1973, subsequent events were to bear it out completely, when the more extreme Khalqis overthrew Daoud. The most powerful mujahidin groups in the 1980s were the fundamentalist ones, simply because the fundamentalists were the first to decipher the course of events in the 1970s, and therefore the first to act.

Abdul Haq continued his story the next time we met: “Just after Daoud came to power, I remember we had a teacher at our school who, like the other one, tried to introduce Socialist ideas into the class. I objected to this.” Haq formed a delegation that protested to the headmaster and demonstrated outside the school. “My family had a few acres of land, so I had a little money to spend on making posters and placards. I was arrested.” That was the end of Haq's formal education.

“I learned how to use a Lee-Enfield rifle and explode dynamite at an early age. It was an easy way to hunt and fish and kill cats. I once killed a hundred fifty cats with dynamite,” Haq bashfully admitted. “I attacked my first police station when I was sixteen. It was easy, but we didn't know what to do once we were inside. One of us was captured and tortured. I promised myself that I would never do anything like that again
without planning every detail in advance. It was about then that I took the name of Abdul Haq, so I wouldn't get my family into trouble. But for months at a time I would use the name Saleh to confuse the police. I had other names too during that period. I can't remember them all.

“The first time I was caught with plastic explosive I told the policeman it was soap. He said, ‘All right, light a match to it. We'll see if it's really soap.’ I lit the match, and of course it didn't explode. It was a type of plastique called
kama,
which only explodes if it is lit from inside. You can hold a match around the edges all day and nothing is going to happen.

“I used to hide large amounts of it in a shop. Then one day the police came and took away the shopkeeper. The plastique was taken too. Nobody ever saw the shopkeeper again. I never knew exactly what happened, whether the police had found the plastique or whether the shopkeeper was arrested for something unrelated. No, I didn't feel guilty. I didn't will the police to arrest him. If I was the one arrested, who was going to weep for me? By this time … it was 1976 … my family was split up and Khalis and Din Mohammed and Abdul Qadir were all in hiding or already in Pakistan. No, never in my life have I known any self-doubt.”

Before his twentieth birthday, Haq was involved at the fringes of two coup attempts against Daoud, shuttling messages and explosives between various rebel officers in the Afghan military. Haq was an early bloomer: a roughneck who thought quickly and clearly on his feet, undoubtedly blessed with an extraordinary natural intelligence … the quintessential guerrilla. He was becoming every bit an equal to those who had once inhabited the jungle of Algiers and were now dismantling Beirut, places where the competence of the inner-city combatants was much higher than the crude, comic-opera attempts of the Pathans, who fought well only in their mountains.

In April 1978, Haq slipped and fell off a friend's roof. So when the police caught up with him near Mirwas Maidan in
downtown Kabul, with an unloaded gun he had just purchased, it was impossible for him to run away. “I just said, ‘Bullshit,’ and threw the gun at one of the policemen as hard as I could and then punched him in the face.”

Haq was thrown into Pul-i-Charki. (Daoud had built the prison, and there, as fate would have it, Daoud would spend his last days, together with his family.) In the cell across from him was the infamous Khalqi leader Nur Mohammed Taraki. Haq studied his face for hours at a time. “So that's Taraki, I said to myself, the top Communist. Everybody in the prison knew who he was. No, I never spoke to him. I only stared. He was old. I thought, He's not so goddamned tough.”

One overcast day the soldiers came to remove Taraki's handcuffs. It was the morning of April 27, 1978. Haq would never forget the moment. The Khalqi's expression was fixed in stone. One minute a prisoner, the next the keeper and tormentor of other prisoners. Taraki inhabited a world of power and violence and terror; maybe it was all the same to him. Whatever his emotions were, he kept them hidden. The eighteen-year-old fundamentalist guerrilla, who to the new Communist ruler of Afghanistan was just another prisoner, read nothing in the old man's face. Taraki was murdered the next year by fellow Communist Hafizullah Amin, the same man who had let him out of prison that morning.

“A few hours later we were all freed. The warden said, ‘Everybody out and fight the Daoud regime.’ The next day I was arrested again and taken back to Pul-i-Charki. This time I was not allowed a radio or my Koran. I had to sleep on the cement floor. That's where I pissed, since I was no longer permitted to use the toilet.” Others were soon being tortured. A broken Fanta bottle rammed up the anus was the most common method. Months later, when Soviet advisers came, the guards were taught how to wire the rectum, in addition to the ears, nose, and testicles, so they could administer electric shocks. When they came to take a man away, he gave his clothes
and whatever else he had to the other prisoners. The man then simply vanished. The family was told nothing, not even that the man had been arrested in the first place. All that remained of him were his clothes, worn by other men who would give them away a second time when their turn came. Whenever the prisoners heard the rumble of trucks and buses outside, they knew that a lot of men were to be taken away at once to the “firing range.” Sometimes they were killed with machine guns in the courtyard. Over a seventeen-month period, Taraki killed roughly twenty thousand people in this manner, more than the number of Egyptians and Israelis who died in the 1973 Middle East war. To Afghan Communists, this was the Saur Revolution, named for the Moslem month that corresponded with April 1978, when they removed Ta-raki's handcuffs.

When guards came to take away Haq, they placed a black hood and sheet over his head and body. “I gave one man my watch and another my
shalwar kameez.
I figured they were going to kill me.” Instead, they shoved him into an automobile, and after driving for about forty-five minutes they took the hood off. “I was in the parking lot behind the Interior Ministry and KhAD headquarters. Okay, I said to myself. Now they're going to torture me. I knew this was where the special cases were brought. But they just held me for three months. I was treated better than in the prison. Then one night, around two
A.M.,
they put me in a Volga and drove me to my sister's house and released me.” As is so often the case in Afghanistan … where men keep in close contact all their lives with second, third, and fourth cousins through extended tribal networks; where blood is not only thicker than water but as persistent as the law and politics too … a distant relative was found who in turn had a relation at the Interior Ministry, and with their help, plus a $7,500 bribe, Haq was released. He was “young and just irresponsible,” Haq's relative told KhAD officials during the negotiations.

“A few days later I escaped to Pakistan,” Haq said. “That's when I really started fighting.”

Abdul Haq spent only two weeks in Peshawar before joining the forces of an older and already established mujahidin leader, Jallaluddin Haqqani, who had just opened a front against Taraki's regime in Paktia, an eastern province south of Nangarhar, along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Jallaluddin taught Haq how to fire and repair all types of machine guns and other ordnance that Haq had not yet encountered.

But fighting with Jallaluddin had made Haq realize “how stupid the mujahidin were. We would build huts that leaked snow from the roof. We would start a fire and burn our faces while feeling cold on our backs. We would go for days without food, when a little planning would have allowed us to eat whenever we wanted. We suffered for no reason because we had no experience in surviving for long periods outside in the snow.”

Haq left Jallaluddin after a few months and started his own front in Nangarhar, where Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami enjoyed strong local support, thanks to the stunning personal example set by Khalis himself in the
jihad:
here was a man in the seventh decade of life, with one kidney, who nevertheless sported a pistol in his belt and had lived outside in the snows of Nangarhar with Din Mohammed since the first year of the fundamentalist revolt against the Daoud regime.

Haq harbored deep love and respect for his older brother and Yunus Khalis, but he was not blind to their faults. Din Mohammed and Khalis both had plenty of faith and heart, but that's all they had. In the eyes of Western diplomats they may have been fundamentalist radicals, but Haq saw them as overly conservative and hopelessly out of date when it came to developing a strategy that would allow the mujahidin to survive against a modern superpower's army.

“I knew I must start a front on my own in Kabul,” Haq told me. “Khalis had nothing there at the time. All of our strength
was in Nangarhar and Paktia. Khalis and my brother said, ‘No, the government is going to kill you. You are too young and don't know what it is to fight the regime in Kabul. You are not ready to fight there.’ I had lots of arguments with them about it. It was the first time I ever fought with them. Finally I said, ‘Look, I'm going to start a front in Kabul whether you want me to or not. Can you help me with money or arms?’ They said no. I got really angry and told them that the machine guns and other arms I captured in Nangarhar were mine to keep, and I was going to take the guns with my friends to Kabul. I left Peshawar without saying goodbye. I was really mad. I felt deserted.”

Abdul Haq once claimed to have started his Kabul front with three other mujahidin and 300 afghanis (under $5 at the time). No doubt he exaggerated. Nevertheless, in his mind it was something he accomplished on his own, without the help or encouragement of those he had always loved and looked up to. He had at last broken away from the family fold. Years later, when Western analysts discerned that Haq had kept his distance from the family interest in Khalis's Hizb-i-Islami, they couldn't have known how right they were.

Of the three original fighters who crossed into Afghanistan with Abdul Haq in the first weeks of 1980, two are now dead. One of the two was a Kabul police officer, Zabet Halim, who defected with arms, a car, and several other men and joined up with Haq in the forests of Paghman, west of the city. More weapons came from Haq's other brother, Abdul Qadir, who had more confidence in Haq than Din Mohammed or Khalis had. Qadir had smuggled the guns across the border from the arms bazaar at Darra without Din Mohammed's knowledge.

Haq's mujahidin then numbered about a dozen. They lived in the fields, in the snow, and attacked small Communist posts in the outskirts of Kabul. Halim's stolen car was used to make night forays into the city … easy at the time, since this was before the Soviets had established a formal security perimeter.
Haq spent his time in the capital meeting with the few friends he could trust, to explain what he was trying to do and to ask for their help. He also sent messages to Khalis and Din Mohammed, begging them to reconsider. He needed more arms and more money. No answers came. He eventually cut off all contact with them.

The culture Abdul Haq was operating in, though riddled with treachery and intrigue, didn't include a modern, sophisticated underground guerrilla network. Haq didn't learn such a technique on his feet, either: even a few small mistakes in 1980 would have cost him his life. He just seemed to know instinctively what an intelligence network was. Later in his career he would use file cards for everything, but that was because his mind seemed to be divided into airtight compartments, each keeping track of a different underground operation simultaneously. His ability to think analytically was his single greatest asset, even more developed than his talent with explosives.

“I realized that not everyone can pick up a gun and fight. Not everyone was a tough guy like me. But everyone could do something. Those who had money could buy boots and field jackets for us. And those who couldn't fight and didn't have money could just work their way up behind desks in the government and listen … and tell us what was going on. You have to make even the weakest and stupidest people feel they have an important job to do. That way everyone will help you.”

The first months of 1980, as the Red Army was implanting itself in Afghanistan, parading up and down the main roads with tanks, showing the flag … in effect telling the citizenry that armed, popular resistance was a quaint, romantic notion that just didn't work in the real world of massive Soviet arms … Haq spent more of his time talking than he did fighting. It was an elementary apparatus he was setting up: clandestine groups of five or less, all people he knew, who in turn would organize similar groups of people they could trust absolutely.
One secret group did nothing but print leaflets. Another distributed them. Another passed messages between printer and distributor. One unit hid the explosives while another transferred them to a third, which carried out the operation. No group knew very much about what the others were doing. Haq invented a language of code words, coded clothing, even an umbrella code for street signals. One month, someone holding a black umbrella meant an operation was on, while the next month the same color meant it was postponed. Because such a basic intelligence system had never been attempted with any discipline in Afghanistan before, and because the Soviets weren't expecting one, it was effective.