When he had joined me on the roof, I introduced myself and began to tell him the story of the Kirghiz horsemen and our meeting at the southern end of the Irshad Pass. Before I was halfway through, his eyes lit up with astonishment and he wrapped me in a fierce bear hug.
“Yes! Yes! You are Doctor Greg!” he cried. Word of the promise to the horsemen had already filtered out of the Wakhan and reached Sadhar Khan. “This is incredible. And to think, I didn’t even arrange a meal or a welcome from the village elders. Forgive me.”
Later that evening, after eating dinner, Khan invited me to the roof of his own house so that we could discuss plans. He told me how eager the communities in his jurisdiction were to have schools, as well as many other services that his people so desperately lacked. He told me about all the girls who had nowhere to study, not only in the Wakhan but also in Baharak and across eastern Badakshan. He spoke of the destruction that had been wreaked over the course of two wars—the first against the Soviets and the second against the Taliban—and how much rebuilding needed to be done.
“Look here. Look at these hills,” he said as he pointed toward the mountains looming over the town, whose lower slopes were strewn with countless rocks and boulders. “There has been far too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my mujahadeen, shahids, martyrs, who sacrificed their lives fighting the Russians and the Taliban. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile.”
He turned to me with a look of fierce determination. “We must turn these stones into schools.”
The implication was clear. Sadhar Khan was more than happy to allow us to assist the Kirghiz, and he was eager to help this effort in any way he could. But before we could work our way out to the farthest reaches of the Wakhan, we needed to start by helping him to address the needs of his own community, right here in Baharak.
That was how our relationship began.
Over the next two years, I made several more trips to Baharak in order to cement our ties with Sadhar Khan and plan the school that would open the door for us to enter the Wakhan itself. Each of these visits took place inside his headquarters in the tiny village of Yardar, about three miles outside of Baharak. Here Khan maintained two compounds. The first was a modern, two-story, Soviet-style bunker with discreet defensive features that included false doors and hidden holes through which gunfire could be directed. This is where Khan entertained his guests. The other dwelling, a cluster of three mud-brick buildings five hundred yards east of the guesthouse, which featured dirt floors covered with dozens of tribal rugs, was his actual family home.
Inside the confines of the meager boundary wall that ran around the perimeter of this property, the numerous members of Sadhar Khan’s extended family all lived together, the same kind of “village within a village” that can be found anywhere in rural Afghanistan or Pakistan. The buildings were surrounded by fields of wheat, barley, spinach, and okra, while the edges of the irrigation canals were lined with neat rows of walnut, pistachio, almond, cherry, mulberry, apple, and pear trees. In the summer and fall, Khan would delight in plucking some of the choicest fruits and nuts from the trees and pressing them on his guests.
“Forget about war—farming is much better than fighting,” he once declared when he grew tired of my endless questions about his years during the Soviet occupation. On another occasion, he apologized for the fact that the pear he had selected for me was not as sweet as he thought it should be. “Most of my trees are too young,” he explained. “I am trying to catch up for the twenty-five years we lost when we were too busy with fighting to be able to farm.”
Whenever I rolled through the entrance gate to Khan’s compound, glassy-eyed after yet another harrowing thirty-hour drive from Kabul, I found myself surrounded by a scene that offered an incongruous blend of the ancient and the modern. It was almost always late afternoon or early evening when I arrived, and as smoke from the evening cooking fires filtered through the rays of the setting sun, the call of the muezzin resounded across the fields, punctuated by the tinkling of the little bells tied to the necks of cows and goats as small boys herded the animals home for the night. Meanwhile, a group of up to a dozen young men dressed in combat boots and army fatigues might be kicking a soccer ball near the entrance gate while their older comrades stood beneath the satellite dishes mounted to the thatched roofs, cradling AK-47s in the crooks of their arms and muttering into their cell phones.
If it was still daylight, Sadhar Khan usually met me beneath the branches of a massive walnut tree, where he held court on a cement platform that his men had built directly over the irrigation canal. He was a busy man, and there was almost always a line of several dozen people squatting at the edge of the dirt driveway patiently waiting for an audience. These petitioners might include a group of farmers who had fallen into a boundary disagreement and were hoping the commandhan could resolve their dispute or the widows of fallen soldiers coming to collect cash. Yet whenever I arrived, he would get up to exchange embraces, then usher me onto an enormous red Persian carpet, where we settled ourselves, cross-legged, in a nest of maroon pillows. Then the commandhan would pour green tea into a set of tiny porcelain cups while his bodyguards passed around dishes filled with raisins, pistachios, walnuts, and candy as a prelude to whatever business we needed to discuss.
Later, as darkness descended over the valley, I would be invited to walk with the rest of his visitors and family members across the compound and into the guesthouse’s long, narrow dining room. Only men were admitted, and after everyone was properly seated, Sadhar Khan would walk in and we would all stand up to formally shake his hand, then wait until he was seated before we resumed our places. (If another guest or male family member arrived, the same ritual would be repeated.) Once these courtesies had been properly observed, a group of three or four younger men, led by the host’s oldest son, would unfurl a red plastic tablecloth across the length of the floor, and upon this surface the banquet would be laid out. The dishes served were simple and delicious: lamb, chicken, dal, spinach, okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, and rice.
When the meal was finished, the oldest guest would offer up the dua, a blessing of thanks. As the words were spoken, everyone would cup his hands together, palms raised, and when the blessing was complete each guest would sweep his hands over his face and intone, “Alhamdulillah” (“praise be to God” in Arabic). Finally, cups of green jasmine tea with a small sprig of mint would be served, and then we would talk deep into the night.
These discussions could sometimes last until the muezzin sounded the morning call to prayer at 4:30 A.M., and it was during these rituals that I began to learn about Sadhar Khan’s past and to gain a sense of the experiences that had shaped him, especially the war against the Soviets.
In the first several years following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Khan and his mujahadeen had deployed a host of desperate guerrilla tactics in the hope of countering the Soviets’ overwhelming technological superiority. Along the narrow mountain roads to the east of Baharak, for example, his men would leap from ledges or boulders onto the tops of passing tanks and smear handfuls of mud over the drivers’ viewing ports, then fling Molotov cocktails fashioned from Coke bottles into the hatches. They also adopted ruses that included broadcasting the tape recordings of prayer chants on loudspeakers as a way of luring Russian infantry patrols into ambushes. During those early days of the struggle, they fought with whatever weapons they had—scythes, rocks, and sharpened sticks. Striking when they were able, they fled into the mountains, where they hid in caves, surviving on roots or dried cheese and, when necessary, eating grass.
For this resistance, they were made to pay dearly. Anytime a Russian soldier was killed, civilians were forced to flee as their homes were bombed by helicopters conducting reprisal raids. During the first five years of the war, it was not unusual for mujahadeen units like Sadhar Khan’s to suffer 50 percent casualties in battle, but the reprisals against their homes and families could be eve
n more devastating. While women and children spent weeks living in caves in the hills around Baharak, animals were machine-gunned, crops were torched, and fields were seeded with land mines in an effort to force the population into submission through hunger and starvation. Today many of the trails leading down to the streams are adorned with small stone cairns marking the places where children who were sent to collect water were killed by Soviet snipers.
As one of the most important commanders, Sadhar Khan featured prominently on the Soviets’ target list. During the decade in which the Soviets occupied eastern Badakshan, the village of Yardar was shelled more than sixty times. Even though every building in Khan’s compound had been completely destroyed by 1982, the Soviets’ Mi-24 helicopter gunships continued bombing what he called “my dead land” and seeding it with land mines more than a dozen times.
It was those helicopters, which the Afghans called Shaitan-Arba (“Satan’s chariots”), that wreaked the greatest destruction on the mujahadeen. The Mi-24s would conduct “hunter-killer” sorties, flying in formations of up to eight gunships, attacking mujahadeen positions with a range of weapons that included S-8 rockets mounted with fragmentation warheads and 30 mm high-explosive grenade launchers. No amount of bravery or guile on the part of the rebels could overcome such overwhelming firepower—until 1986, that is, when the American Central Intelligence Agency started supplying the Afghan insurgents with shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles equipped with heat-seeking guidance systems that were shockingly effective at taking out the slow-flying Mi-24s. During the next three years, the CIA flooded Afghanistan with over one thousand Stingers, resulting in hundreds of helicopters and Soviet transport aircraft being shot out of the sky.
In eastern Badakshan, the first mujahadeen to succeed in shooting down a helicopter with a Stinger was one of Sadhar Khan’s most important subcommanders, a man named Haji Baba, who is now married to one of Khan’s daughters. During our visits under the walnut tree, I was given the chance to hear Haji Baba himself recount the saga of his exploit, in exhaustive detail, on several different occasions. Each telling was slightly different, and the longest of them lasted more than an hour.
From Sadhar Khan I also learned about the sacrifices that the residents of Baharak and the surrounding countryside had made, after having fought the Russians from 1979 to 1989, in order to prevent the region from being overrun by the Taliban between 1994 and 2001. Out of these conversations I came to know a man who seemed to embody many of the contradictions and complexities of his torn and ravaged landscape, and also a man who was not ashamed to express his love of poetry, solitude, and flowers. Early one morning, he invited me to walk with him five or six hundred yards to the bank of the Warduj River, where two enormous boulders are suspended over the rushing water. Here, he explained, he often retreated to spend a few minutes alone before walking to the mosque to perform his evening prayers. As we sat there on the rock, I asked him if he would mind answering a question.
“Please,” he said, “ask anything.”
“You are a busy man with enormous responsibilities,” I said, “so why is it that you spend so much time just sitting here watching the river run by?”
Khan smiled to himself and said that I wouldn’t understand the answer to my question because I had never fought in a real war. “You may be a veteran, but you are not a warrior because you have never fought in battle,” he gently explained. Then he began to describe, in graphic terms, some of the horrors he had witnessed: the concussive shock of a grenade as it tears apart the body of a man he had shared breakfast with only thirty minutes earlier; the nauseating odor emanating from the flesh of another comrade incinerated by a rocket; the sound that escaped the lips of a man who was dying from infections because his commander lacked even the most rudimentary medical supplies to treat his wounds.
Unlike other mujahadeen, such as Haji Baba, who often cackle with delight when they recount the glorious struggle waged by the mujahadeen, Sadhar Kahn was neither gloating nor boastful. Instead, he described what it felt like to have a friend whom one has known since grade school bleed to death in one’s arms and then dump his body into a shallow grave. He talked of the impossibility of a normal life for women and children during war. He spoke of the mounting litany of loss as a life that should have been devoted to worthwhile pursuits, such as reading or music or the cultivation of pear trees, is given over to the business of death.
We talked—he talked—for almost two hours that afternoon, and in the end, he said this: “Sitting here watching the water rush past is the only way that I can justify having gone to war. The reason that I fought the Soviets and then the Taliban was for moments such as the one we’re having right now. Unless you have been inside the fire of a battle, this is something that you will never understand.”
About a year later, during another one of our encounters, Khan said that he had been thinking of our conversation next to the river that morning and was worried that he had failed to answer my question. Then he handed me a piece of paper. He explained that he had written a poem that might, perhaps, have succeeded in capturing the sentiments that he had been trying to express.
Here is the translation, from Dari:You wonder why I sit,
here on this rock,
by the side of this river,
doing nothing?
There is so much work to be done for my people.
We have so little food,
we have so few jobs,
our fields are in shambles,
and still there are land mines everywhere.
So I am here to listen to
the quiet,
the water,
and the singing trees.
This is the sound of peace
in the presence of Allah.
After thirty years as a mujahadeen,
I have grown old from fighting.
I resent the sounds of destruction.
I am so weary of war.
CHAPTER 5
Style Is Everything
“Greg is very important to me. Without him, I’d be nothing
more than a guy who trades yak butter.”
—SARFRAZ KHAN
Wakhi family hearth in Sarhad, Afghanistan
During our many encounters, Sadhar Khan was invariably a model of gracious and refined hospitality—and yet, for me at least, his wry smile and his elaborate rituals of courtesy somehow never quite managed to soften the intensity of his stare. His eyes were a merry shade of green and his laugh had a high-pitched timbre, but when he saw or heard something that displeased him, his face could darken into the kind of expression that made one want to take a step back. In such moments, he seemed to bear a disquieting resemblance to one of the Russian land mines he so despised: a small container, lying just below the surface, that housed the potential for enormous violence.
Despite this sense of menace, Khan ultimately personified the kind of man that I would encounter over and over again during my time in Afghanistan: a former mujahadeen who had emerged from the savageries of the Soviet occupation and the atrocities of the war against the Taliban with a desire to spend his remaining years repairing the damage to his community. Like almost all commandhans, he was savvy and shameless in the way he went about this, installing supporters and family members in plum jobs, dipping his hand into the lapis lazuli mines sixty miles south of Yardar, and exacting a stiff tariff from the heroin traffickers whose mule trains moved a significant chunk of Badakshan’s opium supply through his territory on the way to the Tajik border. Unlike his more corrupt colleagues, however, he was implacably determined to plow the bulk of these profits directly back into the welfare of his people. For the veterans who had served under his command, he had constructed a thriving bazaar in Baharak. He disbursed small loans so they could start businesses, helping to ease the transition from soldier to merchant, and handed out seeds and tools to almost any farmer who even hinted at needing help.
His special passion, however, was education, especially for girl
s. For almost twenty-five years there had been virtually no schooling in the rural villages of his region, and the loss this represented to the current and upcoming generations weighed on him deeply. “War has forced us to starve not only our bodies but also our minds,” he once said to me. “This should never again happen to my people.”
Unbeknownst to Sadhar Khan, the Central Asia Institute was about to be hit by a tsunami of cash that would enable us to take a dramatic step forward. In April 2003, Parade magazine ran a cover story about our school-building initiatives in Pakistan, and during the ten months following the publication of that story, our Bozeman office was flooded with more than nine hundred thousand dollars in donations. I had wired most of those funds to our bank in Islamabad and ordered the Dirty Dozen to embark on a score of new projects inside Pakistan, but I had also reserved a portion of the Parade money to launch our Wakhan initiative. In the spring of 2004, I informed Sadhar Khan that we were ready to begin building in Baharak.
As we sat on the red carpet under his walnut tree, I laid out exactly how the finances and other matters would be handled, explaining that these aspects of the project would not be subject to negotiation, even with a commandhan of his stature, because they were the only ways of guaranteeing that our projects are properly supervised and accounted for. The shura (local council of elders) in Baharak would be in charge of the funds, I told him, and he and his neighbors would be required to donate the land for the school. We would hire exclusively from within the local community for the basic labor, and we had budgeted fifty thousand dollars for construction and teachers’ salaries, plus another ten thousand dollars for supplies, furniture, and uniforms. We would deliver one-third of this financing up front, in cash. Another twenty thousand dollars would be paid only after the workers had finished the construction to roof level, and the last payment would be delivered upon completion. As a final condition, at least 33 percent of the students would have to be female from the first day of class, and this number would need to increase each year until the girls’ numbers reached parity with the boys’.