Fire (27 page)

“I have already been up there to see it,” the young man said. “I have fixed tanks much worse than that.”

There were a total of three destroyed tanks; Massoud thought they all could be salvaged. One was stuck in an alleyway between two houses, and the young commander said the passageway was too narrow for them to drag it out. “Buy the houses, destroy them, and get it out,” Massoud said. “Get two more tanks from Rostaq; that's five. Paint them like new and show them on the streets so people will see them. Then the Taliban will think we're getting help from another country.”

On and on it went, commander by commander, detail by detail.
Don't shell from Ay Khanom Hill; you're just wasting your ammunition. Don't shell any positions near houses or towns; the Taliban are too deeply dug in in those spots and you'll just hurt civilians. Send your men forward in jeeps to save the heavy machinery and shell heavily beforehand to raise a lot of dust. That way, the Taliban won't see the attack.

When Massoud was growing up in Kabul, he was part of a neighborhood gang that had regular battles with other gangs. One particularly large gang would occupy a hilltop near his house, and he and his friends would go out and challenge them. Naturally enough, Massoud was the leader. He would split his force, sending one half straight up the hill while the other half circled and attacked from the rear. It always worked. It still worked.

Massoud sat cross-legged on the floor, bent forward at the waist, methodically opening and eating pistachios. His head hung low and swung from side to side as he spoke. He had a slight tic that ran like a shiver up his back and into his shoulders. “Get me your best guys,” he said, looking around. “I don't want hundreds. I want sixty of your best. Sixty from each commander. Tomorrow I want to launch the best possible war.”

 

L
ike so many fundamentalist movements, the Taliban were born of war. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, it ultimately sent in eight armored divisions, two enhanced parachute battalions, hundreds of attack helicopters, and well over a hundred thousand men. What should have been the quick crushing of a backward country, however, turned into the worst Soviet defeat of the Cold War. The very weaknesses of the fledgling resistance movement—its lack of military bases, its paucity of weapons, its utterly fractured command structure—meant that the Soviets had no fixed military objectives to destroy. Fighting Afghans was like nailing jelly to a wall; in the end there was just a wall full of bent nails. Initially using nothing but old shotguns, flintlock rifles, and Lee-Enfield .303s left over from British colonial days, the mujahidin started attacking Soviet convoys and military bases all across Afghanistan. According to a CIA report at the time, the typical life span of a mujahidin RPG operator—rocket-propelled grenades were the antitank weapon of choice—was three weeks. It's not unreasonable to assume that every Afghan who took up arms against the Soviets fully expected to die.

Without the support of the villagers, however, the mujahidin would never have been able to defeat the Soviets. They would have had nothing to eat, nowhere to hide, no information network—none of the things a guerrilla army depends on. The Soviets knew this, of course, and by the end of the first year—increasingly frustrated by the stubborn mujahidin resistance—they turned the dim Cyclops eye of their military on the people themselves. They destroyed any village the mujahidin were spotted in. They carpet-bombed the Panjshir Valley. They cut down fruit trees, disrupted harvests, tortured villagers. They did whatever they could to drive a wedge between the people and the resistance. Still, it didn't work. After ten years of war, the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind a country full of land mines and more than one million Afghan dead.

A country can't sustain that kind of damage and return to normal overnight. The same fierce tribalism that had defeated the Soviets—“radical local democracy,” the CIA termed it—made it extremely hard for the various mujahidin factions to get along. (It would be three years before they would be able to take Kabul from the Communist regime that the Soviets had left.) Moreover, the mujahidin were armed to the teeth, thanks to a CIA program that had pumped three billion dollars' worth of weapons into the country during the war. Had the United States continued its support—building roads, repatriating the refugees, clearing the minefields—Afghanistan might have stood a chance of overcoming its natural ethnic factionalism. But the United States didn't. No sooner had the Soviet-backed government crumbled away than America's Cold War–born interest in Afghanistan virtually ceased. Inevitably, the Afghans fell out among themselves. And when they did, it was almost worse than the war that had just ended.

The weapons supplied by the United States to fight the Soviets had been distributed through Pakistan's infamous Inter-Services Intelligence branch. The ISI, as it is known, had chosen a rabidly anti-Western ideologue named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to protect its strategic interests in Afghanistan, so of course the bulk of the weapons went to him. Now, using Hekmatyar to reach deep into Afghan politics, Pakistan systematically crippled any chance of a successful coalition government. As fighting flared around Kabul, Hekmatyar positioned himself in the hills south of the city and started raining rockets down on the rooftops. His strategy was to pound the various mujahidin factions into submission and gain control of the capital, but he succeeded merely in killing tens of thousands of civilians. Finally, in exchange for peace, he was given the post of prime minister. But his troops remained where they were, the barrels of their tanks still pointed down at the city they had largely destroyed.

While the commanders fought on, life in Afghanistan sank into a lawless hell. Warlords controlled the highways; opium and weapons smuggling became the mainstay of the economy; private armies battled one another for control of a completely ruined land. This was one of the few times that Massoud's forces are thought to have committed outright atrocities, massacring several hundred to several thousand people in the Afshar District of Kabul. There is no evidence, however, that Massoud gave the orders or knew about it beforehand. As early as 1994 Pakistan, dismayed by the fighting and increasingly convinced that Hekmatyar was a losing proposition, began to look elsewhere for allies. Its attention fell on the Taliban, who had been slowly gaining power in the madrasahs while Afghanistan tore itself apart. The Taliban were religious students, many of them Afghan refugees in Pakistan, who were trained in an extremely conservative interpretation of the Koran called Deobandism. Here, in the tens of thousands of teenage boys who had been orphaned or displaced by the war, Pakistan found its new champions.

Armed and directed by Pakistan and facing a completely fractured alliance, the Taliban rapidly fought their way across western Afghanistan. The population was sick of war and looked to the Taliban as saviors, which, in a sense, they were, but their brand of salvation came at a tremendous price. They quickly imposed a form of Islam that was so archaic and cruel that it shocked even the ultratraditional Muslims of the countryside. With the Taliban closing in on Kabul, Massoud found himself forced into alliances with men—such as Hekmatyar and former Communist Abdul Rashid Dostum—who until recently had been his mortal enemies. The coalition was a shaky one and didn't stand a chance against the highly motivated Taliban forces. After heavy fighting, Kabul finally fell to the Taliban in early September 1996, and Massoud pulled his forces back to the Panjshir Valley. With him were Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was the acting president of the coalition government, and a shifty assortment of mujahidin commanders who became known as the Northern Alliance. Technically, Rabbani and his ministers were the recognized government of Afghanistan—they still held a seat at the UN—but in reality, all they controlled was the northern third of one of the poorest countries in the world.

Worse still, there was a growing movement from a variety of Western countries—particularly the United States—to overlook the Taliban's flaws and recognize them as the legitimate government of the country. There was thought to be as much as two hundred billion barrels of untapped oil reserves in Central Asia and similar amounts of natural gas. That made it one of the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, and the easiest way to get it out was to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan. However appalling Taliban rule might be, their cooperation was needed to build the pipeline. Within days of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, a U.S. State Department spokesman said that he could see “nothing objectionable” about the Taliban's version of Islamic law.

While Massoud and the Taliban fought each other to a standstill at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, the American oil company Unocal hosted a Taliban delegation to explore the possibility of an oil deal.

 

T
he day before the offensive, Massoud decided to go to the front line for a close look at the Taliban. He couldn't tell if the attack, as planned, would succeed in taking their ridgetop positions; he was worried that his men would die in a frontal assault when they could just as easily slip around back. He had been watching the Taliban supply trucks through the binoculars and had determined that there was only one road leading to their forward positions. If his men could take that, the Taliban would have to withdraw.

Massoud goes everywhere quickly, and this time was no exception. He jumped up from a morning meeting with his commanders, stormed out to his white Land Cruiser, and drove off. His commanders and bodyguards scrambled into their own trucks to follow him.

The convoy drove through town, raising great plumes of dust, and then turned down toward the river and plowed through the braiding channels, muddy water up to their door handles. One truck stalled in midstream, but they got it going again and tore through no-man's-land while their tanks on Ay Khanom Hill shelled the Taliban to provide cover. They drove up to the forward positions and then got out of the trucks and continued on foot, creeping to within five hundred yards of the Taliban front line. This was the dead zone: Anything that moves gets shot. Dead zones are invariably quiet; there's no fighting, no human noise, just an absolute stillness that can be more frightening than the heaviest gunfire. Into this stillness, as Massoud studied the Taliban positions, a single gunshot rang out.

The bullet barely missed one of his commanders—he felt its wind as it passed—and came to a stop in the dirt between Massoud's feet. Massoud called in more artillery fire, and then he and his men quickly retraced their route to the trucks. The trip had served its purpose, though. Massoud had identified two dirt roads that split in front of the Taliban positions and circled behind them. And he had let himself be seen on the front line, reinforcing the Taliban assumption that this was the focus of his attack.

Late that afternoon Massoud and his commanders went back up to the command post. The artillery exchanges had started up again, and a new Ramadan moon hung delicately in the sunset over the Taliban positions. That night, in the bunker, Massoud gave his commanders their final instructions. The offensive was to be carried out by eight groups of sixty men each, in successive waves. They must not be married or have children; they must not be their families' only sons. They were to take the two roads Massoud had spotted and encircle the Taliban positions on the hill. He told them to cut the supply road and hold their positions while offering the Taliban a way to escape. The idea was not to force the Taliban to fight to the last man. The idea was just to overtake their positions with as few casualties as possible.

The commanders filed out, and Reza and Dr. Abdullah were left alone with Massoud. He was exhausted, and he lay down on his side with his coat over him and his hands folded under his cheek. He fell asleep, woke up, asked Reza a question, then fell asleep, over and over again for the next hour. Occasionally a commander would walk in, and Massoud would ask if he'd repositioned those mortars or distributed the fifty thousand rounds of ammunition to the front. At one point, he asked Reza which country he liked best of all the ones he'd worked in.

“Afghanistan, of course,” Reza said.

“Have you been to Africa?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been to Rwanda?”

“Yes.”

“What happened there? Why those massacres?”

Reza tried to explain. After a few minutes, Massoud sat up. “A few years ago in Kabul, I thought the war was finished, and I started building a home in Panjshir,” he said. “A room for my children, a room for me and my wife, and a big library for all my books. I've kept all my books. I've put them in boxes, hoping one day I'll be able to put them on the shelves and I'll be able to read them. But the house is still unfinished, and the books are still in their boxes. I don't know when I'll be able to read my books.”

Finally Massoud bade Reza and Dr. Abdullah good night and then lay back down and went to sleep for good. Though he holds the post of vice-president in Rabbani's deposed government, Massoud is a man with few aspirations as a political leader, no apparent desire for power. Over and over he has rejected appeals from his friends and allies to take a more active role in the politics of his country. The Koran says that war is such a catastrophe it must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. That, perhaps, is why Massoud has devoted himself exclusively to waging war.