Author: John F. Burns
Publication: The New York Times
Date: December 10, 2001
Wat Valley, Pakistan, Dec. 4 - From
this lush valley alone, a sinuous reach of sugar cane fields and citrus
groves that runs a morning's drive north of the old frontier city of Peshawar,
villagers say 10,000 to 15,000 men marched off to Afghanistan to fight
America in October, and 2,000 to 3,000 have not returned.
Defeat in the war against America
has been bitter in this lovely corner of northwest Pakistan.
It has roused angry voices among
thousands of Pashtun tribesmen who volunteered to fight with the Taliban,
and bitter grief among families whose fathers, brothers and sons - some
as old as 75, some as young as 13, many with old breech-loading rifles,
muskets and pistols, and running shoes for boots - have not returned.
Precise figures on the numbers of
volunteers, or jihadis, as they known among Islamic militants, are impossible
to find.
If anybody knows how many went,
and how many may have died, it is the Islamic militant leaders who ignited
religious passions with cries of "Jihad!" - or holy war - then dispatched
legions of untrained men and boys across the border to face the terrors
of American B-52 bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Like their kind down the ages, the
militant leaders mostly stayed home, or crossed the frontier only long
enough to declare themselves holy warriors before hastening back.
Many of those firebrands are in
detention now, prisoners of a Pakistani government that has taken the debacle
of the jihadis as an opportunity to tighten its crackdown on the militant
groups so as to sever their hold on millions of the country's poor and
illiterate.
In any event, those leaders - elderly
men grown rich and pampered from their preachings, men who saw to it that
their own sons and grandsons stayed out of the war - have powerful reasons
now to disguise the extent of the miseries they caused.
While their deputies storm up and
down the valley, calling meetings after Friday Prayers to heap venom on
America, many tribe members blame the disaster on the militant leaders,
saying they sent the valley's sons to their deaths, then did nothing to
help the families left behind.
That has left the accounting to
survivors and relatives of the missing. The figures they give, in village
after village, checking lists of those who went and those have not come
back, are woeful.
Talk to any jihadi who made it back,
and he will list the names of those who are missing. "There is Ehsanullah,
from Dara Ramora," one man said, his eyes filling with tears. "Then there's
Salim, from Chakdara. And there's another Salim. He lived a little out
from Chakdara. The ones who died were mostly young. They were 18 to 20
years old."
Some who made it back make a brave
face of it, saying it was a glorious chance to "fight in the path of Allah"
and vowing to "make jihad" again if asked, especially if the enemy is America.
Men like Bakht Wali - the name is
a pseudonym, chosen after Islamic leaders threatened to kill followers
caught talking to Western reporters - even say, without much conviction,
that they wish they had fallen to the American bombs and missiles, earning
the reverential title of shahid, or martyr, bestowed on any Muslim who
dies fighting for the faith.
Could these really have been the
favored ones, a visitor asked his host, a man who gave his age as 47 but
looked 10 to 15 years older, with a sun-wizened face and a proud, jutting
salt-and-pepper beard at least six inches long, like the Taliban?
Bakht Wali smiled as he sat on a
bed of woven rattan in the courtyard of a farmer's mud-walled home in Chakdara,
perhaps because he knew his answer might sound false, after discussing
the miserable deaths some of those who went with him into Afghanistan almost
certainly met.
"In the sight of Allah, the ones
who died are the lucky ones," he said, "because they died fighting for
his cause. And from my point of view too, they are the lucky ones, because
they have gone to Paradise now, with all the pleasures they have been promised
in the Koran.
"Now they will have girls, and wine,
and music, and all the things forbidden to them here on earth. Now they
will be happy, as we who remain can never be here on earth."
Only later did the visitor learn
that this man's pseudonym meant "man of sacred fortune" in Pashto, the
language of 20 million to 30 million Pashtuns who straddle the Pakistan-
Afghanistan border - the ethnic group that made up an overwhelming majority
of the Taliban, and of the volunteer legions who rushed from Pakistan to
fight beside them.
Adopted after much bantering with
his friends, the name suggested that they, at least, considered him fortunate
not to have been killed.
The fundamentalist form of Islam
espoused by the militant leaders, and turned into state policy by the Taliban,
is a powerful weapon in these parts, made more so by poverty.
According to the families of the
missing jihadis, few of them had ever had a job, and those who had rarely
earned more than the equivalent of $1.20 for a day of backbreaking work
in the fields, and that only in the planting and harvesting seasons.
Those men, in districts like Malakand,
Mohmand and Dir, were cannon fodder to the militants, even if they sang
the praises of Allah and the Taliban as they marched to war.
Bakht Wali, like many others, did
not expect to return. After attending a rally called by Sufi Muhammad,
an octogenarian militant leader whose will is paramount in the Swat Valley,
Bakht Wali, the father of eight children, aged 1 to 21, wrote a will, gave
it to his wife and listed debts to other villagers that should be paid
if he died. And who would have looked after his family, had he been killed?
"My conviction is that God looks
after everybody," he said, again without much conviction. "I suppose they
would have been looked after by my relations." Notably, in the light of
the abandonment of other families, he made no mention of the militant groups.
What awaited Sufi Muhammad's jihadis
across the frontier would be hard to square with anybody's vision of a
path to Paradise. At best, as those who returned described it, there were
days of camaraderie in training camps set up at remote villages inside
Pakistan, places where the younger men, at least, were shown the workings
of Kalashnikov rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, the Taliban's
basic armory. For the older men, and the boys, though, there was little
but talking and running menial errands.
Afterward, there was the frontier
crossing, sometimes on foot across mountain paths, sometimes in trucks
that halted at Pakistani border posts long enough for the men to register
their names, villages and weapons with Pakistan's frontier constabulary.
It is to those posts that families
of the missing go, day after day, hoping their loved ones will show up
on the ever-shortening lists of those re-entering Pakistan. With the Taliban
now routed from every city in Afghanistan, hope dwindles by the day.
Once in Afghanistan, many of the
jihadis found themselves unwanted.
The fittest and best-trained were
hived off and sent quickly to the front lines, which until the Taliban's
sudden collapse in late November, defined the war. Trenches there faced
the mustering forces of the Northern Alliance, and American bombs, north
of Kabul and outside Mazar-i- Sharif, Herat and Kunduz, cities north and
west of the Hindu Kush mountain range that divides Afghanistan. These were
the men, mostly, who never came back.
But others, like Bakht Wali, endured
weeks of aimless waiting and wandering, unwanted and even resented by the
Taliban, who seem to have considered the untrained Pakistanis a drain on
their time and their resources, especially the limited supplies of food.
Bakht Wali's group, originally about
130 men, all from Chakdara, moved from the eastern city of Jalalabad to
Kabul, the capital, where they were quartered in an abandoned building
on the outskirts until 40 of the fittest men were chosen by the Taliban
to go to the front lines.
For three weeks the closest Bakht
Wali's group came to the enemy were the vapor trails in the skies above
Kabul left by B-52's heading for the Taliban front lines further north.
Then, suddenly, they were moved to an old mud-walled fort outside the town
of Tagab Bazaar, about 50 miles northeast of Kabul.
Outflanked, the Pakistanis in the
fort found themselves under heavy rifle, rocket and mortar fire from Northern
Alliance troops, with nobody to command them.
The Taliban, as they did at Kabul
and at Mazar-i-Sharif, had pulled out under cover of darkness, not telling
the Pakistanis. Alone, muddled and frightened, the Pakistanis talked among
themselves about resisting, then surrendered by the light of a crescent
moon.
For them, abandoned by Afghans they
had gone to help, the jihad was over without a shot fired, their pitiful
old rifles, muskets and pistols seized by alliance soldiers, their wallets
and even their sweaters and shoes stolen.
They were many days from home, with
no telephones, no food, many of them now barefoot. But they were alive,
and they had learned some lessons about the Taliban, about abandoned loyalties
and about the uncertainties of faith.
"When the attack on the fort came,"
Bakht Wali said, "the Taliban were not there. We didn't know the area.
We knew nothing. We were alone."
What then, he was asked, did the
Pakistanis make of the Taliban's promise to fight to the death beside them?
"Well," he said, "not every Taliban is a bad person. There are good men
among them. But our strong complaint is they never told us we should retreat."
To Bakht Wali's group, the conclusion
as they made their way back to Pakistan, clambering aboard trucks heading
for the border, was that the alliance troops, if not better than the Taliban,
were at least no worse.
"They're all Afghans," he said.
"The only difference is in the beards and the turbans."
But further north, where the 40
younger men from the group had been sent, around Taliban entrenchments
at Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, things were different. So far, none of those
men have made it back to Chakdara, and the likelihood is that none ever
will.
Here in the Swat Valley, it is the
Islamic militant leaders who seem likely to have to answer for those men
who have not come back. Sufi Muhammad, like most of the other top militant
leaders, is in jail now, sentenced last week to three years' imprisonment
on charges of inciting the Pakistani Army to revolt.
In his absence, his lieutenants
are still preaching hellfire against America up and down the valley and
still raising money, though not for the families grieving for jihadis who
have not come home.
"The people who went to Afghanistan
were not soldiers," said Syed Zaffar Saghir, a disillusioned activist for
Sufi Muhammad's group who "made jihad" against Soviet forces in Afghanistan
but stayed behind this time. "Just having a gun does not make you a warrior.
"So a lot of innocent people have
died, and Sufi Muhammad and other religious leaders are responsible for
this. They sent people who had no training whatsoever to war, and then
they stayed back in Pakistan. They are still alive, while so many others
have died."
