The Afghan

There was another organization handing out food and blankets. Its insignia was a stumpy red cross. Izmat Kahn had never seen one of those, either, but he knew hot soup, and after the arduous crossing of the mountains he drank his fill. There was one more condition required of inhabitants of the camps and those benefiting from the largesse of the West, fu

The imams of these madrassahs were, in the main, donated, salaried and funded by Saudi Arabia, and many were Saudis. They brought with them the only version of Islam permitted in Saudia Arabia: Wahhabism, the harshest and most intolerant creed within Islam. Thus, within sight of the sign of the cross dispensing food and medications, a whole generation of young Afghans was about to be brainwashed into fanaticism.

Nuri Khan visited his family as often as he could, two or three times a year, leaving his lashkar in the hands of his elder son. But it was a harsh journey, and Nuri Khan looked older each time. In 1987, when he arrived, he looked lined and drawn. Izmat’s elder brother had been killed in a bombing raid while ushering others toward the safety of the caves. Izmat was fifteen, and his chest nearly burst with pride when his rather bade him return, join the resistance and become Mujahid.

There was much weeping from the women, of course, and mumbling from Grandfather, who would not survive another winter on the plain outside Peshawar. Then Nuri Khan, his remaining son and the eight men he had brought with him to see their families turned west to cross the peaks into Nangarhar Province and the war. The boy who came back was different, and the landscape he found was shattered. In all the valleys, hardly a stone bothy was standing. The Sukhoi fighter-bombers and the Hind helicopter gunships had devastated the valleys in the mountains from the Panj-shir to the north, where Shah Massoud had his fighting zone, down to Paktia and the Shinkay range. The people of the plains could be controlled or intimidated by the Afghan Army or by the KHAD, the secret police taught and stiffened by the Soviet KGB.

But the people of the mountains, and those from the plains and cities who chose to join them, were intractable, and, as it later turned out, unconquerable. Despite air cover, which the British had never had, the Soviets were experiencing something like the fate of the British column cut to pieces on the suicidal march from Kabul to Jalalabad.

The roads were unsafe from ambush, the mountain unapproachable save by air. And the deployment in muj hands of the American Stinger missile since September 1986 had forced the Soviets to fly higher-too high to be accurate-or risk being hit. The Soviet losses were mounting relentlessly, with further manpower reductions due to wounds and disease, and even in a controlled society like the USSR the morale was dropping like a falcon on the swoop. It was a savagely cruel war. Few prisoners were ever taken, and the quickly dead were the lucky ones. The mountain clans especially hated the Russian fliers, and, if taken alive, they could be pegged out in the sun with a small cut in the stomach wall so the entrails would burst forth and fry in the sun until death brought release. Or they could be given over to the women and their ski

The Soviet response was to bomb, rocket and strafe anything that moved: man, woman, child or animal. They seeded the mountains with untold millions of air-dropped mines, which eventually created a nation of crutches and prosthetic limbs. Before it was over, there would be a million Afghans dead, a million crippled and five million refugees.

Izmat Khan knew all about guns from his time in the refugee camp, and the favorite was, of course, the Kalashnikov AK-47. It was a supreme irony that this Soviet weapon, the preferred assault rifle of every dissident movement and terrorist in the world, was now being used against them. But the Americans were providing them for a reason: Ever)’ Afghan could replenish his ammunition from the packs of a dead Russian, which saved carrying time across the mountains if the ammunition had been noncompatible.

Assault rifle apart, the weapon of choice was the rocket-propelled grenade, the RPG-simple, easy to use, easy to reload and deadly at short-to-medium range. This, too, was provided by the West.

Izmat Khan was big for fifteen, desperately trying to grow a fuzz round the chin, and the mountains soon made him as hard as he had ever been. Witnesses have seen the Pashtun mountain men moving like mountain goats through their own terrain, legs seemingly immune to exhaustion, breathing unlabored when others are gasping for breath.

He had been back home for a year when his father summoned him. There was a stranger with him; face burned dark from the sun, black-bearded, wearing a gray woolen shalwar kameez over stout hiking boots and a sleeveless jerkin. On the ground behind him stood the biggest backpack the boy had ever seen, and two tubes wrapped in sheepskin. On his head was a Pashtun turban. “This man is a guest and a friend,” said Nuri Khan. “He has come to help us and fight with us. He has to take his tubes to Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, and you will guide him there.”

CHAPTER 5

The young Pashtun stared at the stranger. He did not seem to have understood what Nuri Khan had said.

“Is he Afghan?” he asked.

“No, he is Angleez.”

Izmat Khan was staggered. This was the old enemy. More, he was what the imam in the madrassah had condemned with constant venom. He must be kafir, an unbeliever, a Nasrani, a Christian, destined to burn for all eternity in hell. And he was to escort this man over a hundred miles of mountainside to a great valley in the north? To spend days and nights in his company? Yet his father was a good man, a good Muslim, and he had called him friend. How could this be? The Englishman tapped his forefingers lightly on his chest near the heart. “Salaam aleikhem, Izmat Khan,” he said. The father spoke no Arabic, even though there were now many Arab volunteers farther down the mountain range. The Arabs kept themselves to themselves, always digging, so there was no cause to mix with them and learn some of their language. But Izmat had read the Koran over and over again; it was written in Arabic only, and his imam had spoken only his native Saudi Arabic. Izmat had a good working knowledge. “Aleikhem as-salaam,” he acknowledged. “How do you call yourself?”

“Mike,” said the man.

“Ma-ick.” Izmat tried it. Strange name.

“Good, let us take tea,” said his father. They were sheltering in a cave mouth about ten miles from the wreckage of their hamlet. Farther inside the cave, a small fire glowed, too far inside to let a visible plume of smoke emerge to attract a Soviet aircraft.

“We will sleep here tonight. In the morning, you will go north. I go south to join Abdul Haq. There will be another operation against the Jalalabad-to- Kandahar road.”

They chewed on goat and nibbled rice cakes. Then they slept. Before dawn, the two heading north were roused, and left. Their journey led them through a maze of linking valleys where there would be some shelter. But between the valleys were mountain ridges, and the sides of the mountains had steep slopes covered in rock and shale but with little or no cover. It would be wise to scale these by moonlight and stay in the valleys by day.

Bad luck struck them on the second day out. To speed the rate of march, they had left night camp before dawn, and just after first light they found themselves forced to cross a large expanse of rock and shale to find cover on the next spine of hills. To wait would have meant hiding all day until nightfall. Izmat Khan urged that they cross in daylight. Halfway across the mountainside, they heard the growl of the gunship engines.