Not long ago I was talking to Baba Jan, the jovial Northern Alliance general who used to command the front lines north of Kabul from his perch in the Bagram airport tower, about the two Arabs who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud. They'd been posing as journalists and had been given authorization by Massoud's deputy to visit Northern Alliance ammunitions sites. But Baba Jan, the gatekeeper to those sites, refused them entry. "I told the guard to tell them that Allah has sent many messengers to the Arab people, but the Arabs still haven't got the message," he said. "We can never trust the Arabs."
Your hear a lot of that these days. Afghans blame Arabs (and, to some extent, Pakistanis) for infecting their land with terrorist bases; for using it for their fundamentalist designs; for stealing their women by force. Some young men in Kabul even say the Arabs destroyed Afghanistan when they brought Islam here 1,400 years ago. And there's no doubt that Afghanistan has been invaded, exploited, and devastated by one foreign power after another in the name of ideology, religion, and control of the Central Asian trade routes. But as the war moves south, into hard-core Taliban-land, there seems to be a growing attempt to lay blame for the past years of perverse fundamentalist rule on foreigners, while letting the Afghan Taliban exchange their turbans for pakuls, rolled woolen hats worn by the Northern Alliance.
Maidan Shar, once fertile, now dry, is a key town for the Northern Alliance if it hopes to link up with the Pashtun opposition fighting the Taliban in Kandahar. Located just south of Kabul, it straddles two crossroads vital for trade, transport, and travel: the asphalt road (a rare gem here) that leads south to Kandahar, and the rougher dirt road that leads to the central provinces of Bamiyan, Baghlan, and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The battle for Maidan Shar offers a small window onto not only the opaque and intimate nature of Afghan war and politics, but also a foretaste of what's to come as Taliban rule crumbles.
A fox flitted across the desert. A soldier grabbed his Kalashnikov and aimed at the fox. Nothing unusual. Except that a few hundred meters away, amid tank rounds, rockets, and machine guns last Friday morning, the hunter's fellow soldiers were advancing up a scrappy mountain to force the Taliban in Maidan Shar to surrender. As I shouted at the soldier not to kill the fox, a commander shouted orders over the radio: "When you capture a place and the Taliban flee, put three or four soldiers on, and the rest advance. Those behind bring RPGs, rockets, Picas, Kalashnikovs, because now we are face to face with the Arabs and Pakistanis." He was probably just trying to rally his men: There were no Arabs and Pakistanis in Maidan Shar anymore.
Then a pickup came barreling down the road, carrying a Northern Alliance soldier from Maidan Shar named Amin, shot dead in the chest. Another wounded man needed to be picked up, but the driver on standby said he only had 15 liters of petrol, and his commander told him it must be saved for their unit only. The battle went on. And then suddenly, hundreds of Northern Alliance soldiers were running back down the hill they'd recently been advancing up. The retreat was baffling. A young Afghan said to me, "Don't ask questions, just look at the soldiers' faces." All their early-morning enthusiasm was gone. They were gloomy and ashamed. The journalists who had come from Kabul to watch assumed the Northern Alliance had botched the operation. Why didn't they have more men? Why did they retreat? And everyone drove back to the capital thinking that the Northern Alliance was a slipshod army that couldn't control its own backyard.
In fact, the story is much more mundane. It's about two brothers, Musa, who had been a high school teacher, and Gul Mohammad, who was jobless, and their cousin, Abdul Ahmad, who was jobless and illiterate. Pashtuns all. When the Russians invaded, they each joined different mujahedin political parties. They became commanders. An old Maidan Shar man summed up their behavior during that period: "They fought at night. They fought at day. They fought each month, each week. They built units. They built traps for each other. They attacked the houses, closed the roads. They conquered a village then lost it, then conquered it and hundreds of family members were killed. They never negotiated. They never had discussions. They only shot at each other." Never once, he said, did the three join forces to fight the Russians. If anything, when the Russians attacked one, the others took the opportunity to steal from him. Why? They wanted power. They wanted to recruit. They wanted to show their Pakistani patrons that they were capable. But most important, said the old man with a long laugh, they wanted to control those roads to make each car pay a toll. And last Friday's battle for Maidan Shar, which to us on the outside looked like the next stage in the Northern Alliance's war against the Taliban, was in fact a 22-year-old family feud.
The morning after the battle, I was sitting with the illiterate and once jobless cousin, Abdul Ahmad, a tall, hefty commander with a crooked nose and a foot-long beard. He was holding court in a makeshift teahouse--with no tea since it was midday during the month of Ramadan--adjoined to the petrol station that serves as his headquarters on the asphalt road to Kandahar. After the Russians withdrew, Ahmad joined Massoud's forces in Kabul. The brothers Gul and Musa also joined Massoud's forces; but when the Taliban reared its head, Musa went to Kandahar to join them. Gul took control of Maidan Shar and remained with the Northern Alliance--but only until the Taliban took over that town as well. Then he simply put on a Taliban turban and took his post at the Taliban front lines. In the current round of war, as the Northern Alliance took back Maidan Shar, Musa darted off to Pakistan. Gul stayed and fought with the Taliban. And Abdul Ahmad rushed to Maidan Shar and confiscated all the cars, jeeps, and trucks he could find.
In the teahouse, a man in a white skullcap and yellow sheet wrapped around him was writing out ration slips for each soldier who came in for petrol, travel, or weapons. "My friend is illiterate," the man said in English, pointing to Abdul Ahmad, who was now reclining and rubbing his chubby feet against each other. Throughout the rest of the morning, the mysterious man in the yellow sheet kept smiling at his friend and then explaining to me what was really going on.
In short, the Northern Alliance was having to baby-sit this old feud. Before the battle broke out on Friday, Gul had agreed to surrender with his Taliban forces--until he saw it was Abdul Ahmad of all people who'd come for the weapons. He'd hand over his weapons to a Tajik, he said, but never his old enemy Abdul Ahmad, even though he is a fellow Pashtun. That would be too humiliating. So Fahim, the Northern Alliance's defense minister, sent in a Tajik commander to negotiate. "So Abdul Ahmad has lost the game," said the man. "He secretly sent his people to Gul's village to provoke an uprising against Gul's soldiers." To make matters even more confusing, the man writing the ration slips said that Abdul Ahmad, who had stayed loyal to the Northern Alliance, was in fact an unreconstructed fundamentalist who would have no problem harboring Arabs. And Gul, the Taliban commander all these years, wanted nothing to do with the Taliban nor the Northern Alliance. His allegiance, according to the man, is and always was to the King Zahir Shah.
During a brief interlude in this Maidan Shar impasse, part of the village was opened up. Outside a school where the commanders were meeting I spoke to a longhaired, long-bearded Taliban perched on a wall with his gun. "In fact, I'm not a Taliban. I was with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar," he said, referring to an insane, fundamentalist commander responsible for rocketing to death much of Kabul during the civil war and who is now plotting to come back and wreak havoc here. "But we're all just tired of fighting. We want elections to choose someone who will help our country. We don't want any of these commanders in here. We just want the United Nations."
As soon as we drove back to the main road, the village was shut down again with Gul Mohammad refusing to surrender his weapons, and Abdul Ahmad not budging from his redoubt at the petrol station on the edge of town. Both of these men have switched sides several times. Their loyalties belong to power and money, not ideology. Which may explain why people here are not particularly interested in assigning individual responsibility, or flushing out the former Taliban in their midst. It's more expedient for them, politically and psychologically, to write a simpler story: The foreign terrorists created the Taliban, so get rid of the terrorists and the Taliban will disappear. Which also explains the longing among many here for UN forces, even for Americans, whom they distrust. As one 17-year-old computer fanatic who had studied in Pakistan told me, "What freedom will we lose if the Americans stay here? We don't have any freedom to lose. We lost it when the Russians came and maybe we're even sorry we won our freedom from the British, because we would have been powerful now like Hong Kong."