Day 153: Book Excerpt: Soldiers of God

“The future battlefield is to be liberally sown with mines,” wrote the British military historian John Keegan in his prophetic work The Face of Battle. Never before in history have mines played such an important role in a war as in Afghanistan. Nobody knows precisely how many were sown by Soviet troops and airmen in the ten years between their invasion and their withdrawal. The figures offered are biblical. The British Broadcasting Corporation, on June 8, 1988, simply stated “millions.” The Afghan resistance claimed five million. The U.S. government's first estimate was three million. Later, on August 15, 1988, State Department spokesman Charles Redmon said the figure was more likely “between 10 and 30 million.” That would be 2 mines for every Afghan who survived the war; between 40 and 120 mines per square mile of Afghan territory. Tens of thousands of civilians, if not more — many of them small children — have already been disabled by mine detonations in Afghanistan. Even though the Russian phase of the war has ended, mines threaten to kill and maim thousands more, some of whom haven't been born yet.
“The widespread sowing of millions of land mines has added an ominous new dimension to the rehabilitation effort,” Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 23, 1988. According to both American and United Nations officials, mines will cripple Afghanistan's economic life for years to come, inhibiting the tilling of fields, access to pasture areas, and collection of firewood.
No group of people knew as much about mines in Afghanistan as news photographers and television cameramen. Getting close-ups of the war meant traveling with the mujahidin, the “holy warriors of Islam.” And the muj — as journalists called them — walked through minefields. “It's like walking a tightrope,” said Tony O’Brien, a free-lance photographer who would later be captured and then released by Afghan regime forces. “You're in a group, yet you're totally alone. Still, there's this absolutely incredible bond with the person ahead of you and behind you. You forget the heat, the thirst, the diarrhea. Then you're out of the minefield and instantaneously you're hot and thirsty again. The minute I start thinking about it I start worrying and I get totally freaked.”
For several days I rode in a Toyota Land Cruiser through the mine-strewn desert outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The trails were marked with the rusted carcasses of trucks that told you it was almost better not to survive such an explosion. My driver kept safely to previous tread marks. But when another vehicle approached from the opposite direction we had to make room for each other, and I became so afraid that I held my breath just to keep from whimpering. At night, or in the frequent dust storms when we lost the track, the fear went on for hours at a stretch, leaving me physically sick.
Joe Gaal, a Canadian photographer for the Associated Press, had been around so many minefields and had collected enough fragments of different mines that he had developed a sapper's tactile intuition about them, which was apparent in the movements of his hands and fingers whenever we discussed the matter. An intense, gutsy fellow, Gaal had an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet mines. His terror had turned into an obsession.
The mine that could really put him in a cold sweat was what the mujahidin called a “jumping” mine, a Russian version of the “Bouncing Betty,” used by the Americans in Vietnam. It is activated by a trip wire that causes a projectile to shoot up from underground a few feet ahead. The mine is designed to go off several seconds later and explode at waist level, just as you pass over it. “It blows off your genitals and peppers your guts with shrapnel,” Gaal explained.
The Bouncing Betty was one of several different antipersonnel mines the Soviets employed, mines that had to be dug into the ground by special units and were meant to kill or maim anyone within a radius of twenty feet. But the vast majority of mines in Afghanistan were dropped from the air. The most common of these was the “butterfly” mine. The butterfly was the mine of Afghanistan, so much so that it had become part of the country's landscape, like the white flags above the graves of martyred mujahidin. Soviet helicopter gunships would fly in at one or two thousand feet and litter the ground with mines. The butterfly's winged shape caused it to go into a spin, slowing its descent. The detonator pin was set on impact with the ground. Green was the most common color, but the Soviets had a light brown version for desert areas and a gray one for riverbeds. Some mujahidin, not knowing this, thought the mines actually changed color.
Only eight inches long and blending in with the ground, the butterfly mine was hard to spot, especially if you were fatigued from hours of walking, which was most of the time. Except for the light aluminum detonator it was all plastic, so it was difficult to detect with mine-sweeping equipment. The mine was often mistaken for a toy by Afghan children, who paid with the loss of a limb or an eye. Its explosive power was about equal to that of the smallest hand grenade: sufficient to maim, not to kill. Contrary to Soviet claims, the mine has no self-destruct mechanism, and will be mutilating Afghans for a long time to come.
Butterfly mines, along with aerial bombardment, were the centerpiece of Moscow's strategy of depopulation. Depopulation had come after pacification had failed and before the Communist-inspired bombing campaign in Pakistani cities. During the heyday of depopulation, in the early and mid-1980s, the Soviets dropped plastic mines disguised as wrist-watches and ball-point pens over Afghan villages in the heavily populated Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul.
There were even reports of mines disguised as dolls. The New York-based Afghanistan Relief Committee ran an advertisement in a number of American magazines featuring a photograph of a doll with its left arm blown off and a caption that read, “The toy that's making a lasting impression on thousands of Afghan children.” The larger version of these ads contained a line in small type advising the reader that the doll in the photograph was not a real Soviet bomb, but a replica constructed on the basis of refugee accounts. In fact, no photographs of such dolls exist, even though one would have been worth thousands of dollars to a news photographer. Peter Jouvenal, a British television cameraman who made over forty trips inside Afghanistan with the mujahidin and saw every other kind of Soviet mine, suspected that the story of the dolls was apocryphal. “The Soviets were guilty of so much in Afghanistan. Why exaggerate?” he remarked.

~~Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors In Afghanistan and Pakistan -by- Robert D. Kaplan

Day 120: Book Excerpt: America's Secret War

Al Qaeda was born out of the end of the Afghan war. Thousands of young mujahideen, or holy warriors, had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Russians, urged to do so by their own governments, religious leaders, and the Americans. They came from everywhere in the Islamic world, among them the brightest, most idealistic, and most courageous. Many died, and all were scarred by combat against a brutal enemy whose actions were not encumbered by CNN crews filming the fighting.

In many ways, the fate of the survivors was much worse than what happened to America's Vietnam veterans. The latter came home to a country that treated their sacrifice with indifference and contempt. The mujahideen, in many cases, weren't able to go home at all.

When the Afghan war ended, those who remained alive were a special breed. They had been hardened by the war physically and spiritually. Their contact with the relatively primitive Afghan tribesmen, whose faith was both simple and violent, intensified their own personal beliefs. These were men who prayed with an intensity that was rare in the Islamic world, and who also knew how to handle hand grenades and rocket launchers. Before the war, countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt had been afraid of the Soviets, wanted to please the United States, and—in some cases—were frightened of the religious fervor of these young warriors. The governments thought these passionate young men would be much better off getting killed in Afghanistan than staying at home and causing trouble. After the war, the last thing that most Islamic regimes wanted was to have these men return home.

The United States, which had been instrumental in arming, training, and deploying these men, lost interest in Afghanistan once the Soviet Union withdrew its troops and began to collapse. Afghanistan was not of great strategic interest to the U.S., and the cost of maintaining its network of operatives—let alone its secret army—was high. The first Bush administration made a decision that was obvious at the time and disastrous in retrospect: to pull the plug on the Afghani operations. It shut down all operations and left its erstwhile allies dangling in the breeze.

Many of these operatives had been functioning covertly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their own passports and identity papers had been replaced by Afghan and Pakistani documents. That was standard operating procedure for everyone's protection. However, as the United States shut down its operations, it did not return the original papers—which were in Washington or had been destroyed—nor did it make any provisions for returning the Islamic international brigade to their homes. This was partly due to U.S. indifference. Even more, however, it was a response to the pressure of allied Islamic governments, which didn't want these holy warriors back.

The best of them, a few thousand perhaps, were left stranded thousands of miles from their homes in a foreign country that was in shambles. There is a Western medieval term: paladin, meaning a knight who is somewhere outside of the normal social structure. Skilled at war, he is available for hire, as long as the cause is just. The paladin is also seen as a force for good, serving and protecting the faith as he travels homeless through the world. The end of the Afghan war created a band of paladins, bound together by the shared agony of Afghanistan and their betrayal by their own government and the Americans. Homeless but skilled in war, they were stranded in a strange land. But it was a land where their skills were needed by the factions fighting one another in the long civil war that followed victory over the Soviets.

In due course, some were able go home either because they were well connected or because they obtained forged papers. The rest remained scattered. They were bound together by the memory of war, the sense of victory, and the profound feeling of betrayal. The sentiment was aimed not only at the United States—the U.S. was to them just a Christian country that was using them, something that was not unexpected. The much deeper wounds of betrayal were attributed to their own governments—particularly the Islamic monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula that they labeled “hypocrites.”

This is a subtle aspect of the warriors' psyche—but crucial to understanding them. They did not regard this as simply a personal betrayal. For them, it represented the fundamental disease of the Islamic world. The outside threats to Islam (the Soviet Union and the United States) were manageable, but the real problem was the internal corruption of the Islamic world. Until that was dealt with, the Islamic world could never deal with Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Communists who were using, abusing, and oppressing the Islamic world for their own ends.

It is vital to remember that the Afghan warriors were among the best and brightest. Like the International Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War, many were well educated. Obviously, all had traveled a bit, and all knew the arts of warfare. They knew more than a little about the world and its history and could analyze events through their religious prism. A theory developed among them as to what was wrong and what was to be done.

The Problem

From their point of view, the problem of the Islamic world went back to the Christian Crusades and the loss of the Caliphate. Islam, which originated in the Arabian Peninsula, had swept through North Africa and the Indian Ocean basin in a series of brilliant political and military maneuvers. At various times, this vast empire covered points from the Pyrenees to the Philippines, as far south as Zanzibar and as far north as Grozny and Vienna. The range of the empire over time was far grander than the Roman Empire ever was.

At the heart of the empire was the Caliph, a ruler who combined political, military, and religious authority. His task—and that of the political and religious bureaucracy through which he governed—was to hold the Caliphate together, to protect it from foreign encroachment, and to extend its sway. In one sense, it was simply one of many human empires and behaved like it. In another sense, like the Holy Roman Empire in its earliest conception, it represented a divine presence in the world.

It was the intention of the mujahideen to resurrect the Caliphate and ultimately to raise it to the greatness it once had. This did not strike them as at all improbable. Empires come and go. They had—in their minds—brought down the Soviet Union. Israel had been resurrected after 2,000 years. The United States, a relatively unpopulated continent 200 years ago, was now a global empire. In 1600, Britain was a savage island of warring tribes, and 250 years later, it ruled the world. The Islamic world had much fewer challenges than any of these. Nothing had to be invented. The pieces simply had to be put together again.

~~America's Secret War: Inside The Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies -by- George Friedman