A Journey Into Afghanistan

Hindu Kush, Sir Olaf Caroe noted in his classic work The Pathans, means Crusher of Hindus.

As the tractor engine on the raft is cut, we quietly bob towards the southern banks of the River Oxus in the dark. Jeep headlights on the other side suddenly illuminate the river and its shore and, along with a dozen Russian soldiers and a dozen reporters, I walk onto Afghan soil. The mountains loom menacingly in the distance.

For all journalists covering the war, it is an exhilarating experience to enter a land whose men destroyed the greatest superpower of its time, Russia. For an Indian, the moment is marked by flaring gooseflesh and a large lump in the throat.

How else to feel about a nation whose terrain is dotted by small, forgotten, towns called Ghazna, Ghor and Aibak?

The first of these gave birth to a son called Mahmud, whose name is still used in my native Gujarat by Hindus as a rallying cry during riots.

The land of our conquerors is beautiful.

Afghanistan is cold and it is stark. All of it is rock and dust -- all of it. Our jeep bounces off the surface from the border towards the small town of Khwaja Bahauddin and we are immediately coated in a fine brown layer that does not leave us until we leave the country. Driving through Afghanistan is surreal.

There are no petrol pumps; there are no roads; there is no electricity in the provinces I travel.

There are no women.

Afghanistan, it appears, is just like its people: masculine, hard, unyielding. If there is a soft side, it appears fleetingly, in the form of a stream through whose bed jeeps and trucks and tanks trundle towards combat. Or it appears in the form of the wraithlike Afghan burqa whose wearer seems to float around, appearing just for the flash of a second before disappearing into obscurity as much physical as social. In my entire trip I did not see the face of a single woman: I have no idea what Afghan women, famed for their beauty, look like.

The land is uniformly harsh: this is the toughest terrain I have ever seen, and that could be said of any acre of Afghanistan. In its harshness, however, there is an elegance that does not leave you when you leave the country.

Aside to President Bush: Afghans have been conquered and made to submit by only two men, both the greatest warriors of their age. The first was Alexander the Great rode through Kabul in 329 BC. The Afridi, the Pakhtun bandit tribe who infest the Khyber Pass, claim descent from the Macedonian's soldiers. The second man to conquer Afghanistan was Genghiz Khan. When he attacked Herat in 1221, the Mongol left only 40 alive from a population of over 100,000.

After Genghiz, his descendant Timurlane ruled over this area, and after Timur, his grandson, Zaheeruddin Babar crossed it to conquer India.

Afghanistan is known as the Graveyard of Empires. The British discovered that in 1841, when their garrison in Kabul was attacked. As the British attempted to retreat up the Khyber Pass, their garrison was wiped out -- of 16,000 men only one survived.

The modern nation of Afghanistan was founded two centuries before the modern nation of India. In October 1747, a young soldier from Nadir Shah's army rallied the Pashtun tribes with the promise of loot from India. The young man called a Loya Jirga, a meeting of tribal heads in the area, much as Alexander and Genghiz had before him. The tribes decided to unite and form the nation of Afghanistan. The young man, and his tribe, were honoured and renamed Durrani, from Durr-e-Durran, Persian for 'Pearl of Pearls.' The young Durrani began immediately a series of conquests and raids into northern India. Khushwant Singh in his seminal work The Sikhs writes of a ditty that the early Sikhs sang when describing the savage effectiveness of the young conqueror from Afghanistan, who blew up the Golden Temple twice and filled its moat with dead cows:

Khada-pita laye da

Baki Ahmed Shahe da

(What you have eaten and drunk is yours;

everything else belongs to Ahmed Shah)

Ahmed Shah Abdali began the chain of Durrani rulers of Afghanistan that was more or less unbroken till King Zahir Shah was dethroned by his nephew Daud in 1973, and Afghanistan was declared a republic. A series of coups later, Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul in December 1979. Indira Gandhi decided not to condemn this act of aggression.

A digression here to mention the only Indian ever to have captured Afghanistan in the last millennium was Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose Muslim general rode into Kabul the week the Maharaja died, only to lose it again almost immediately.

The Durrani are one of the two major tribes of Afghanistan; the other being the Ghilzai. This name is more familiar to Indians as that of another conqueror, Khilji.

The first significant Ghilzai ruler of Afghanistan is the current one, the man who six years ago appeared before a Jirga of Pashtun clergymen dramatically enrobed in the Cloak of Muhammad. His act stunned those gathered into submission and his name was cried out as the Commander of the Faithful, Amir-ul-Momineen Mullah Muhammad Omar.

Though a Ghilzai, Mullah Omar leads the Taliban through essentially a Durrani council called the Qandaharis. As much as Ahmed Shah was adored by all his people, Mullah Omar is despised -- certainly outside the territory he commands, and certainly by those who are not Pashtun. The peace that the Taliban brought to Afghanistan in 1996 is fast turning into the war that could be worse than anything Afghans had ever imagined.

The people of Afghanistan are caught in a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, they hate having to continue with war, having lived with the gun for 23 years. On the other hand, having lived with the gun for 23 years, they know of no other skill. In my travels around the country I hardly saw anybody work, apart from a few shopkeepers and goatherds. The overwhelming majority of males over 15 carry Kalashnikovs. There is no civilian traffic at all. The only vehicles on the road are jeeps ferrying soldiers around, jeeps mounted with Russian BM-12 missile launchers, T-55 tanks lumbering to their next position or trucks lurching over the rocky terrain moving heavy military equipment.

The men talk of war over cups of green Afghan tea with muddy-brown naan. Twenty-one year old commander Abdullah Khan, a handsome Uzbek who hosted us for a night, told me his story. His father was a commander in Taloqan and after its fall was captured and executed by the Taliban. In revenge he had killed 10 Taliban but was hoping to kill many more. Asked if he would, if he could, kill all the Taliban in Afghanistan, he shrugged and said, "of course." He leads 800 men, inherited from his father.

Twenty-year old Zmarai Khan, who commanded a tank overlooking the Taliban frontlines in the province of Taloqan, lives in a bunker next to his tank. The sharp crack of the machine gun that he lets off with regularity at the Taliban has no effect on him, even as it sends onlookers scurrying for cover. He has been a soldier since puberty and knows of nothing else he can do.

The currency has been shot to pieces. One dollar buys you anywhere between 80,000 to 1 lakh Afghanis. The Afghans also use the word lakh and it is strange to hear people ask for "teen lakh" for a Parqool, the local wooly hat made famous by Ahmed Shah Massoud, or as the price of a small meal.

Massoud's face is the only one that is publicly visible and it is visible everywhere. From the walls of buildings to the windscreens of jeeps, there is no escaping the Lion of the Panjshir. His assassination two days before the September 11 attacks is a blow the Afghans are yet to recover from.

Massoud's leader, the head of the Jamiat-e-Islami and the 'President of the Islamic State of Afghanistan' is Prof Burhanuddin Rabbani.

The American journalist Eric Margolis wrote about meeting Rabbani in Canada in 1980 when the Mujahideen leader told him he would fight till he freed his land of the Russians. "May we meet in free Kabul," Margolis told him. "And in free Kashmir, Inshallah," Rabbani replied.

Fate is strange: today Rabbani's government lives on the handouts of the Russians and the support from the Indians.

Ordinary Afghans adore India and Indians. The question "Hindustani?" is always accompanied with a smile and an answer in the affirmative leads to many handshakes and names of film stars. More than one soldier made me write a promissory note to the effect that when he, Nasir (as one of them was called), came to Bombay, I would take them to meet Shah Rukh Khan and Raveena Tandon.

"Our family listens to Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar and cries at night," one tarjumand (interpreter) called Zaid Khan told me, before launching into a Rafi song.

Afghans dream of coming to India much as some of us dream of moving to America. For them, after two decades of war, ours is the promised land.