In Afghanistan, a Culture of War
Fiefdoms of
Disparate Warlords Fuel Shifting Alliances and Foes
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday,
September 30, 2001; Page A01
JABAL SARAJ, Afghanistan, Sept. 29 -- They were two boys, Mohammad and Asadullah, growing up in the northern part of Kabul, playing soccer, and for a few precious years oblivious to the chaos around them. Then one day young Mohammad noticed the tanks.
He was about 6 years old then. The tanks were Russian. They rumbled down the street, and he ran home crying to his parents, who told him the Soviet Union was finally leaving Afghanistan.
"It was frightening," he recalled. "I was scared. I never forget."
Not much later, his older brother showed him a gun. Ubaidulla was a guerrilla fighting in the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. He urged the little boy to pick up the gun, to feel it, to hold it in his hands. To shoot it. "I felt like a man," Mohammad remembered. "I wasn't afraid."
Mohammad joined his brother in the guerrilla army. Today, he is 18, still young enough to have a clean chin while every man around him wears a beard, yet old enough to fight for his people and suffer combat wounds. He and his friend Asadullah serve together at a rebel post here, about 40 miles north of Kabul.
Mohammad Jared and Asadullah Mulomahamad were born four years after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They have known little but war. It raged around them as children, it rages around them now and seems likely to continue to rage around them for some time to come.
In a country where it is often hard to find food, clothes or fuel, the culture of war pervades every facet of life.
Men stroll through the bazaar carrying weapons. Buildings, bridges and byways have been shattered for so long that no one attempts to fix them. The cement factory bombed out nine years ago still has armed guards, even though it produces no cement. No one flinches at the sound of gunfire.
In today's Afghanistan, perpetual fighting and shifting alliances are part of everyday life.
Here in the Panjshir Valley, many Afghans are now attaching great hope to the prospect of yet another turn in the long conflict -- an anticipated military strike by the United States against the Taliban militia that controls most of Afghanistan and is believed to harbor the suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.
But such an attack may do little to change daily life here, so deeply etched by war, just as it was on that day when Mohammad noticed the retreating Soviet tanks rumble down his street.
When U.S.-backed Afghan guerrillas forced the Soviets to leave in 1989, the fighters attempted to form a coalition government from among seven distinct groups. The guerrillas brought different ethnic and tribal differences, as well as outside supporters. The coalition splintered, leading to a civil war that left Kabul in ruins.
From this mayhem rose the Taliban, a group of Islamic students and veterans of the resistance war. The Taliban swept across Afghanistan from 1994 to 1996, driving the old warring factions into an uneasy coalition, called the Northern Alliance or the United Front.
Not only were there sharp ethnic divisions between the new rulers and the old -- the Taliban's members are primarily ethnic Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan, and most of the Northern Alliance leaders are affiliated with northern ethnic groups, such as Tajiks and Uzbeks -- but different strains of Islam also split them.
Today, with the help of young fighters like Mohammad, the anti-Taliban coalition in the north resembles not so much an army as a collection of feudal barons who have banded together. There are no formal uniforms, no hierarchy or organization charts.
Each regiment is headquartered in its own mud or stone fortress, with a metal gate and a green, white and black rebel flag, usually guarded by a young soldier like Mohammad or Asadullah. Each is ruled by its own warlord, who commands the personal loyalty of the men under him. They have often switched sides, when it suited their interests.
Haji Almaz is one of the local potentates. He has his own regiment in Charikar, about 12 miles south of here. A lion of a man with heavy eyelids and a dry wit, Almaz controls part of the front lines north of Kabul, and would be among the first commanders in the capital -- if the rebels ever get the chance to take it back.
A visitor is invited inside to sit, shoes off, on a Persian rug while plates of green grapes and pots of tea are served. The warlord enters in a flowing Afghan robe and sandals, full of smiles and handshakes. He does not carry a gun himself. The men around him take care of security.
Whatever personal ambitions Almaz harbors have been sublimated to the greater cause of defeating the Taliban. Like many commanders in the Panjshir, Almaz is disciplined. He said he will move on Kabul only when ordered. For now, Kabul is too well defended. Almaz admitted that the rebel alliance could not maintain the sort of supply lines it would need to mount an effective assault.
This discipline has survived even the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik guerrilla leader who by sheer force of personality had managed to hold together this eclectic group of warriors, but was mortally wounded by a suicide bomber on Sept. 9. "Our forces, all the forces, are as unified as they were before," Almaz said. "We're working together, we won't disagree. Nobody can replace Ahmed Massoud but we are still unified."
Mohammad Jared was away at the front one day three years ago when the Taliban launched a bombardment in his home neighborhood. Ubaidulla, his brother and idol who was then 23, was killed in the shelling.
It was a devastating blow for Mohammad, but not his last. A year later, during a pitched back-and-forth battle for control of the Panjshir Valley, an artillery shell landed in front of the young fighter and exploded, opening a five-inch gash in his leg and slicing into his belly. He lost consciousness, but his compatriots hefted him onto a donkey to carry him away from the battlefield. He spent two months in a hospital.
He was 15 at the time.
"I thought I would die," he recalled.
His friend, Asadullah, has never been wounded. But he too, nurses grudges. He vividly recalled being forced to flee by the approach of Taliban forces who burned down his house. "Other than the clothes we were wearing, we had to leave everything behind," he said. "We hate them. They're very bad people."
For all they have been through, both still seem impossibly young. Mohammad has penetrating eyes, a bright smile, fluoride-white teeth and a quiet, shy manner. Asadullah has a little more baby fat on the cheeks, and is a little more talkative.
Their sense of suffering at the hands of the Taliban resonates in every conversation here, with fighters and civilians alike. At the bazaar in Jabal Saraj, shopkeepers recalled the various Taliban occupations, and how they were forced to flee, while the Taliban forces punished men for not having long enough beards, or simply for living in the rebellious zone of Panjshir.
Mohammad Zarif, a 58-year-old shopkeeper, said they came to his house, forced him outside in the snow without his shoes. "They arrested me and beat me and crushed my nose," he recalled. His daughter brought a Koran to the Taliban to try to win his freedom, to no avail. Only later was he released.
Outside another warlords' compound, the 19-year-old guard, Rakhmatula Azimullah, recalled how the Taliban showed up at his family house in the middle of the night in 1996, demanded guns, beat his father and burned the house to the ground.
"If I saw the person who burned my house," he said, "I'd kill him."
Fazle Allah, who is not sure whether he is 55 or 56 years old, is also vengeful. His uncle was killed by the Taliban two years ago, his two sons were imprisoned and another uncle was hit in the head so hard that he has never recovered fully. The last time the Taliban controlled the area, he recalled, it sold young women and publicly killed six townspeople, two by stuffing money up their noses and slitting their throats.
Sitting in the cement factory that was closed after it was shelled in 1992, wearing a white cap that matched his beard, Allah seethed with anger. "If I could, if I had the chance, I wouldn't shoot them," he said. "I would use a razor blade on them."
He traced his finger across his neck to make the point clear.
Shooting would not be painful enough.
At their guard post, Mohammad and Asadullah took a few minutes to contemplate what life might be like if peace ever were to come to Afghanistan. For them, it was a completely unfamiliar concept, nothing more than stories retold by older relatives, recalling a gentler age.
Asadullah would like an education. The school in his neighborhood was destroyed. He wants to become a doctor or an engineer. "It's clear that if there wasn't a war, I would live a normal life in a regular home," he said.
That sounded good to Mohammad. He wants to learn to read and write, maybe have a garden and work in the government.
"My whole life I've fought," he said. "I have a dream that there would be peace in our country."
For now, it is only a dream.