Soldiers of God (31 page)

The following day I departed Arghandab with Akbar, Haji Babà, and several of his men. We planned to head south, across the Herat-Kandahar stretch of the ring road, and then east into the southern suburbs of Kandahar.

After forty-five minutes of bumpy circumvolutions to avoid mines and destroyed vehicles, we approached a battered bridge on the ring road, under which a tributary of the Arghandab River flowed. At the foot of the bridge was a bombed-out hotel. It was hard to imagine, but in prewar times upper-class Afghans held wedding receptions by the hotel's swimming
pool, and newlyweds spent their first amorous night in one of the rooms. The empty pool, with its peaceful view of the swampy river tributary, still appeared to be in good condition, but Soviet soldiers had occupied … and in the process trashed … the building. In their wake had come a unit of rugged Khalis mujahidin, who now sat with their guns and grenade launchers at poolside, brewing tea while keeping an eye on the bridge. They didn't seem to think much of the pool or the view.

As our Land Cruiser turned eastward onto the Herat-Kandahar highway to Kandahar, we saw the rusted carcasses of Soviet tanks lined up back to front for over a mile. There must have been close to a hundred of them. Each had a monumental, Rodinesque quality, bent and twisted into a separate archetype of destruction that made it easy to visualize the sheets of flame and the agony of the men as they died. Some of the tanks were burned almost completely black, others were brick-red. Severed cannons and turrets lay off to the side of the road. The desert was littered with many more tanks, transport trucks, and armored personnel carriers. I had visions of Egyptian-Israeli tank battles in the Sinai and World War II campaigns in North Africa. I thought of the opening scene of
Patton,
which depicted the wreckage of American armored vehicles destroyed by Rommel in Tunisia's Kasserine Pass. Other journalists had dubbed the Iran-Iraq war a replay of “World War I in the trenches;” I thought of the Kandahar front as “World War II in the desert.” Except that the desert campaigns in World War II were reported to the outside world, while men died by the thousands on these central Asian battlefields with barely a word of coverage.

The mujahidin had created this wall of tanks, moving each one into place after it had been destroyed, in order to protect a large outpost behind the road from a Soviet ground attack. The guerrilla outpost was inside the gardens of an early-eighteenth-century tomb, where the Pathan tribal leader Mirwais
Khan Hotaki lies buried. He fought many battles against the Safavid Persians in the decades preceding the rise of Ahmad Shah Durrani. Mirwais openly thought of the Persians as degenerate and effeminate; he was the first known Pathan leader to think of his race in the same heroic, masculine terms as did Kipling and other foreigners since. Miraculously, the blue faience dome of Mirwais's mausoleum, surrounded by poplar trees, was still in perfect condition behind the tanks … a badge of medieval glory amid the Kiplingesque turbans and bandoleers, and this World War II desert backdrop.

The driver turned off the paved highway a few miles west of Kandahar and headed southeast over a well-rutted track. Mortar and artillery fire became louder again, and for the first time I heard the rattle of light machine guns. The driver stopped and Akbar, ‘Haji Babà, and I climbed to the top of a sandstone cliff to espy the city.

Everything I saw and thought at that moment summoned up antiquity. The capital of southern Afghanistan lay spread out in front of the same chain of mountains that I had seen at Arghandab a few hours earlier from the other side. The city was a vast quilt of ruins etched on the barren sand, like Palmyra in the Syrian desert. Kandahar in 1988 looked not all that much different from the cities Alexander himself had seen and founded: a Hellenistic archeological site with a regular army holed up in a fortified perimeter and guerrillas firing in from all sides. The only real landmarks were the KhAD prison on the western edge of the city and the medieval blue dome to the east, which according to Moslem folklore holds the remains of some of the Prophet Mohammed's clothing-

This was a historic moment: the Soviets still left in the city

and at the airport were farther south than any of their other comrades had ever been, and their imminent departure would signal the first northward redrawing of the Kremlin's imperial map since the late seventeenth century. Kandahar airport,
once called an American white elephant, had become the Russian Khe Sanh.

Haji Babà sighed. “We have already given God over a million martyrs. That is more than enough.”

After only a few more minutes of driving we were in the cratered back streets of Mahalajat, the southern suburb adjacent to the main bazaar of Kandahar city, now reduced to rubble. Clusters oftall wooden poles affixed with ragged white
shaheedan
banners flared like porcupine quills out of the ground. On the cassette player inside the Land Cruiser blared the haunting, melodramatic voice of Ahmad Wali, an exiled Afghan singer.

Though Mahalajat was considered a mujahidin stronghold, once in the city the battle lines were haphazard, with Afghan regime posts only about two hundred yards away from our car in several directions. Small arms, light and heavy machine guns, and mortars and artillery pieces were all being fired simultaneously; after a few minutes I got used to the racket. Twice we had to cross an open field in sight of an enemy post. The driver swerved and accelerated, yet still we attracted fire. Then the Land Cruiser got stuck behind a tonga that was having difficulty negotiating an irrigation ditch. It was incredible: a tottering horse-drawn carriage with a veiled woman in the back seat holding a sack of groceries in the middle of a free-fire zone. The spotted white horse, decked out in red and purple pompoms as if out for a stroll in Central Park, was so emaciated that I could see the outline of its skeleton beneath the flesh. The horse served as an apt symbol for Afghanistan, I thought; almost dead, yet defiant to the last.

Our driver parked behind a fragment of stone wall. From there we made a dash to a small NIFA base near the point where Mahalajat merges with the heart of the city … an idyllic spot if you could ignore the bombs. The mujahidin kept a patch of daisies next to a carpeted terrace in the shade of a vine pergola. Here we stretched out and relaxed until tea and
mint-flavored curds were served. A cage with a singing canary hung from the vines. Despite the nearby explosions of artillery and mortar shells, I dozed off for a few minutes.

Haji Babà shook me awake to greet a group of city elders, who had crossed over from the regime-held sector of Kandahar that morning so I could interview them. They all had long beards like Haji Baba's and resembled wise men in their white
shalwar kameezes
and white turbans draped over gold-threaded caps.

Local custom enabled the honored elders to cross safely back and forth between the two halves of the divided city. Women and children were similarly protected. In fact, the mujahidin regularly used boys of about ten years of age to carry messages in and out of the regime sector; that was how the old men knew to come to the NIFA post that morning. Only army-age men were stopped at checkpoints, to catch defectors from the government's desertion-ridden ranks.

The stories the elders told me would be familiar to anyone who knows what goes on in a besieged Third World city. There was no medicine, and the price of produce was exorbitant. Makeshift market stalls were shut for days at a stretch, and when open they were looted and ransacked by the regime's soldiers. These troops, claiming to be from the northern Afghan province of Jozjan, were actually mercenaries brought in from Soviet central Asia, who roamed the streets in unruly gangs, holding people up and breaking into the ruins of homes in search of young boys to do menial labor for them in their barracks. Though the Soviets constantly charged the Pakistanis with violations of the Geneva accords, they themselves were guilty of much more basic offenses, such as bombing populated areas from air bases inside the Soviet Union and putting Soviet troops in Afghan regime uniforms, as they evidently were doing in Kandahar.

The city elders I interviewed desperately wanted a negotiated settlement with the Communist governor of Kandahar, a
disaffected Parchami named Nur-ul Haq Ulumi. That, of course, was what NIFA wanted too, so that the only Afghan city with a strong royalist base would fall first and serve as a springboard for King Zahir Shah's return. But since the fundamentalist parties, the Pakistanis, and the Americans did not back a settlement, Kandahar's inhabitants were doomed to go on suffering. (Had the Pakistanis and Americans supported NIFA's course of action, it is possible that Kandahar would have fallen to the mujahidin before the end of 1988, leading to mass army desertions in Kabul and the subsequent collapse of the Najib regime … making unnecessary the badly organized, bloody siege of Jalalabad that began in March 1989, in which large numbers of civilians were killed. Kandahar was bigger than Jalalabad, psychologically almost as vital to the regime, already destroyed, and much harder for the Communists to defend. But because the fundamentalists were stronger in Jalalabad, the Pakistani intelligence services controlling mujahidin arms supplies concentrated on that city.)

I had wanted to get as close to the city center as possible without running the risk of being stopped at a regime checkpoint. The youth who accompanied Akbar and me on this foray had lost a leg in a mine explosion, but he was as fast and agile as most people are with two. He led the way, checking for mines and enemy lookouts hidden behind sandbag emplacements, then waved when it was safe for us to follow.

We had to cross one of several open fields in sight of hostile machine gun nests, where, incredibly, a shepherd was grazing his sheep. Bullets sprayed the field a few seconds after we had crossed it: a sheep lay bleeding as I looked back. The shepherd cursed aloud, caressed the dying animal, and by tossing a few stones moved the flock on. The stones startled the sheep; the bullets hadn't.

“The bullets they are more used to,” Akbar observed.

The scene was not what I expected on the basis of my visit
to Kandahar fifteen years earlier. I imagined an urban setting: streets, shops, and pavements, some in place, some destroyed. But as we moved northward from Mahalajat toward the Herat Gate area, where I had spent that miserable night in 1973, there was no sign of a true cityscape. The ashen monotony of an archeological site continued almost to the center of Kandahar. We ran along remnants of walled streets and arched portals with smashed networks of ceramic underground plumbing systems, and past weeds and wildflowers that grew in stony places where ground had been churned up. People had once lived in these ruins, I knew, but it seemed as if that must have been thousands of years ago. Only the bombs and bullets and that dead sheep kept me from believing I was a tourist visiting an ancient city,

This was not a military landscape of the past but of an eerie doomsday future. The twentieth century had come late to Afghanistan, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. The Soviets had sown so many mines, dropped so many bombs, and fired so many mortars and artillery shells over such a wide swath of territory that the effect of a nuclear strike had been achieved.

No city in North Vietnam was destroyed to the extent that Kandahar was. Whereas American air strikes on the North early in the Vietnam war were initially so restrictive that President Lyndon Johnson had personally to approve the targets in advance, the Soviets engaged in indiscriminate carpet bombing throughout their war. Whereas the American military tended to use attack helicopters against specific targets or to insert troops, the Soviets usually used those helicopters against mud brick villages. Whereas the Americans at least tried to carefully map their minefields, and deploy mines mainly along strategic routes like the Ho Chi Minh trail and around their base perimeters, the Soviets kept few maps and sowed millions of mines. The Soviets lost between 12,000 and 50,000 men in Afghanistan, considerably fewer than the 58,000
troops the Americans lost in Vietnam. Yet the number of Afghan civilians who were killed … estimated at over a million … probably exceeded civilian Vietnamese fatalities, even though North and South Vietnam had a combined population two and a half times larger than Afghanistan.

Another sign of the future was the absence of battle and its attendant drama: I saw only monotonous images of mass destruction. In
The Face of Battle,
the military historian John Keegan intimates that the totality of future wars will render battle itself obsolete. Battle implies limits, but in Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan there was little ebb and flow to the killing. The Soviets carpet bombed Kandahar and the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul for months at a time. Mines killed about thirty Afghans, more or less, every day of the entire decade.

Kipling's vision only partially illuminated the true symbolism of the war in Afghanistan. Kipling could be an imperialist and a moralist at the same time precisely because he had little inkling of modern totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism and the extremes to which they would take the imperialist impulse. Though Kipling's chivalrous world of manly honor had in Afghanistan vanquished the modern world of mechanized destruction, Afghanistan in the 1980s was still no Kiplingesque war … the glorious escapades of the likes of John Wellesley Gunston and Savik Shuster notwithstanding. These two were brave men and brave journalists. But, like me, they were living an illusion. Abdul Haq, and Haji Babà too, despite what we thought, were only in a small sense Kiplingesque Pathans. They represented some sort of primitive, vestigial lone warrior from the past but also of the future, when the only people willing and able to fight a superpower will be poverty-stricken peasant guerrillas who have no motive to surrender because they have no material possessions at risk.

Because the historical images, particularly in Kandahar, were so vivid and intimidating, the relatively few journalists
who went inside, like myself, were for the most part blind to these revelations. We tended to look backward only … to World War II, to Kipling, and to Alexander the Great.