AFGHAN RESISTANCE

...Then there are the political tourists...

...We have a war, all in all, that no one powerful has an interest in ending, since the only real price for it is paid by the Afghan peasants and they, in the eyes of the main actors, are eminently dispensable...

...Six groups have opened their offices here, and about a million refugees have arrived (Pakistani officials triple the number in order to triple the amount of aid received for them...

...Two Pakistani doctors, summoned by an elderly Afghan widow to treat her unconscious daughter, were shot and killed along with the two 245 women by an angry mob of fundamentalist vigilantes who saw the men enter the tent of two women and drew their own conclusions...

...The Agence France Press representative on the spot, a man who has lived in the region for ten years and has accompanied rebel soldiers into the country seven times, has since taken refuge in cynicism...

...This has obliged many widows, thrown upon the tender mercies of distant male relations, to provide for their daughters by marrying them off at the age of seven or eight...

...They tell me they're fighting the Russians because the Russians tried to force them to change...

...Am I not a Muslim...

...Latifa's colleague, a surgeon from Kabul, explains, "When I try to talk to them about their attitudes, the village elders confront me...

...The Saudis and Iranians are solidly behind Hekmatiar, and the Pakistani authorities assure that he is also the recipient of most of the U.S...

...There are, of course, the journalists...

...For the idealistic young Afghan doctors from the cities who have stayed in Pakistan to help their compatriots rather than become part of the migration to the West, it all seems very grim...

...FEAR AND PARANOIA ABOUND, and it is hard for an outsider to distinguish between the two...

...Today it is the headquarters of the Afghan resistance...

...she shrugs her shoulders...

...A water pipeline project initiated by the U.N...

...HOPE IS NOT EASY to hang on to, in this particular crisis...

...But, without a party affiliation you don't get refugee papers, you don't get food rations or tents or medical supplies, and you don't get a gun...

...And the rest of the world has more pressing concerns...

...The provisions that reach the women are in any case meager, and resourceful U.N...

...and blatantly stamped "International Aid to Afghan Refugees...

...Don't tell the Red Cross that Doctor H. is still alive...

...In their haste to settle this matter, the groups have already embarked on their civil war, and in several Afghan provinces Soviet victories were achieved by simply waiting until the opposing rebel factions had wiped each other out, and then moving in to claim the area...

...The rest of the leadership, while less well armed and equipped, is not much more inspiring, and to call the Afghan rebel organizations "freedom fighters" requires granting the word "freedom" more elasticity than even liberal persons scrupulous to avoid imposing their own values on another cultural setting can provide...

...Ask Afghan rebels in Peshawar which of the parties they belong to, and they will frequently make this clear in their reply...

...Why didn't the family, who lives 500 yards from the medical tent, call Latifa sooner...

...Afghan widows become victims of the brotherly concord between Pakistan's fundamentalist regime and the fundamentalist rebel parties, who agree on the following bit of impeccable logic: since women may not be seen by anyone except their closest relatives, obviously, they may not have their photograph taken...

...Group and camp leaders—landowners, tribal chiefs, village elders, and fundamentalists who want to remodel Afghanistan along the lines of Khomeini's Iran—are determined not to lose their grip on the population, which means vigorously opposing anything resembling social change...

...officials finally hit upon the idea of distributing Australian protein biscuits to these refugees: whereas the men are not willing to share the meat or eggs with women and girls, the biscuits are taken to be dry bread and therefore undesirable and suitable for female consumption...

...THIS IS PESHAWAR TODAY, and it probably is much the same as Peshawar in the past, with one difference...

...Ruling over this peculiar Pakistani town is the most powerful of the rebel leaders, Hekmatiar...

...The fundamentalists, who as a result of international support are becoming the most powerful factor in Afghan politics, are determined to maintain their stranglehold on the population by fending off such dangerous harbingers of new ideas as schools, more freedom for women, and social reform...

...The Pakistani authorities, called upon to do justice, accepted the camp leader's "apology" for the "incident...

...In the bazaars, ominous male figures clothed in blankets trade in various goods, and their demeanor of sinister illegality is the same whether they are offering opium, plastic sandals, or sacks of rice pilfered from the U.N...

...a note is attached to each body and the note reads "Maoist" or "Communist...

...And there are numerous other young Europeans who are disgusted with life in the affluent West, living as a new kind of groupies on the fringes of one or another of the rebel groups, having themselves photographed in turbans and robes and sentimentalizing about the ferocious warrior Pashtuns in tones reminiscent of an S/M phantasy made respectable by the note of politics...

...If European and American liberals understood the social values of the Afghan resistance," he said, "they would send their money to Moscow...

...246...

...In health care, the iron rules laid down by the village elders and the fundamentalist parties have brought about the paradoxical result that while health care is abundant and most camps have their own clinic, medical care is defined as a privilege not everyone is entitled to...

...It is the refugees and the Afghan villagers who are caught in the crossfire as their most socially backward leadership is bolstered by foreign money and support...

...after all, Central Asia was not pacified in a day, either...

...The journalists, on expense accounts, can, and it is their custom to sit together in the lounge in the mornings and compare how many times the salary of a Pakistani doctor they consumed in liquid form the previous night...

...The U.S., delighted that for once it's the other superpower that is in trouble with the Third World, is content that Soviet soldiers busy in Afghanistan will not be free to invade a country and kill a population one cares rather more about, such as Boland...

...One can't predict who will win the war in Afghanistan, but one can safely predict this much: whoever wins, the Afghans will lose...

...Obviously, a superpower invasion of a small state is wrong...

...While we were in the camp she was asked to come to a tent...

...Peshawar is a small border town in Pakistan's northwestern frontier province...

...They can be 244 found in the Foreigners' Bar of the Hotel Khyber Intercontinental, where upon exhibition of a passport from a non-Muslim country one may drink oneself into a stupor provided one can pay $150 for a bottle of whiskey...

...This is the work of Hekmatiar, and any Afghan to the left of Khomeini lives in a state of fear...

...He resides in a fortress that includes a private prison, a training camp, barracks for his troops, and offices for a large staff...

...And clearly it is not all imagination, bad nerves, stress...

...the young Germans fleeing unhappy love affairs and determined to commit suicide by leading a human-wave attack against Russian tanks—these are eventually collected by the German consul and sent home...

...Your head will soon be dizzy from all these admonitions, the deceptions you are supposed to keep track of...

...people, remember they know me by the name of Majid, not Pashtun...

...These people come from the mountains, where a trip to the doctor took several days and cost a lot of money, certainly more money than one would spend for a woman...

...interests helped bring the most repressive forces in Afghan society to the forefront...

...Arriving there, we found a young woman who had been in a coma for three days, had meningitis and would probably die because treatment began too late...

...Zia wants the fighting to go on at a low level, so the Russians won't get the idea of attacking Afghan bases in Pakistan while the money and weapons continue to arrive...

...Within two months, ten people are found dead in their rooms, heads severed...

...The aid organizations have had less success in the areas of medical care and education...

...In the latter field, the battle was given up when the Pakistani refugee authority, pressured to provide a textbook that would be a neutral alternative to the indoctrination literature published by Hekmatiar, finally issued a reader that featured such sentences as "This is an airplane...

...The actors: Pakistan, a military dictatorship suddenly elevated to the rank of last bastion against Soviet aggression, and consequently the recipient not only of money and military supplies from the U.S...

...This is a good airplane...

...He is losing hope of a positive outcome...

...Now the clinic is free and only a few yards away—but they haven't adjusted to that yet...

...Efforts on the part of urban Afghans to educate their countryfolk meet the resistance of the old leaders...

...This is an Islamic airplane...

...There may also be a few very young girls wrapped in an assortment of cloths that they struggle to keep in place while rinsing pots and dishes in the gutter...

...A youthful Afghan version of Khomeini, he parades through the streets escorted by his personal bodyguards, about 25 men armed with machine guns...

...When you talk to the U.N...

...arms and aid destined for the rebels...

...Occasionally a shriek and a flurry of arms, of blankets and handbag will reveal that an "emancipated" young woman student has given in to the impulse to do her own shopping instead of sending her brother, and has met her inevitable fate: she has been mauled, she has protested, and a huge crowd of men has assembled and is lecturing her assailant on the Islamic impropriety of his action while the young woman makes her escape...

...Frustrations are highest among the idealists, the Afghan and foreign individuals who rallied when news of the invasion came, only to watch with growing resignation as the maneuvers of Pakistani, Saudi, and U.S...

...Then there are the Afghan rebel groups, whose leaders see that their chance has come: their chance to get back the land that was confiscated when previous Afghan governments moved against the large landowners, their chance to come to power...

...It has always been the turnover point for drugs and stolen and smuggled goods from various Asian locations, and it still is...

...had to be abandoned because heavily armed delegations from outlying settlements kept arriving at the site to announce that unless the pipeline was instantly diverted to their camp, they would shoot down everyone working on it...

...At night this doctor studies English from a textbook, in the hope of getting a visa for Canada...

...and from Saudi Arabia but also of a rapid upgrading of its international standing...

...Latifa, in her one and a half years of refugee work, has gone beyond anger, surprise, or depression...

...One of these is Latifa, a young Afghan woman who studied medicine in Poland and is now part of a team looking after a camp population of 30,000...

...FRUSTRATIONS over this state of affairs are growing, even among the "freedom fighters" themselves...

...There are practically no women in sight anywhere...

...Don't let anyone know I studied in Germany...

...Hizbi Islami," they will say (Hekmatiar's fundamentalist party) and spit on the ground to show their contempt for Hekmatiar...

...In their wake has followed a motley assortment of Westerners...

...If you have an interview with Hekmatiar, the people whose house you are staying at will implore you to take a rickshaw cab to the Intercontinental, have a cup of tea in the restaurant, change to a taxi, drive to Green's Hotel, change to another taxi, and never under any circumstances tell Hekmatiar or anyone associated with him where you are staying in Peshawar...

...It also means fighting each other over the distant prospect of ruling the country once the Russians leave...

...And then, of course, you have the Soviet Union, from all indications content to outwait the rebels...

...To get the feel of contemporary history you ought to go to Peshawar...

...Since they may not have their photograph taken, they cannot be issued refugee documents, and since they do not have such documents, they cannot receive food rations...

...this was the work of local leaders intent on impressing their constituency by making theirs the first settlement with running water...

...Why am I talking like these Russians then...

...Am I perhaps a Communist...

...The Reagan administration's choice to support a "liberation movement" already provides a clue that something out of the ordinary must be going on, and a second look at Afghanistan confirms that here, even in an age resplendent with political paradox, you have the ultimate show...

...Finally, there are the Afghan students who have abandoned their scholarships in Paris or Vienna in order to assist in the establishment of the social democratic, or Maoist, or Islamic fundamentalist —whichever they prefer—government that they believe must invariably follow once the dust of the war has settled...

...Needless to say, efforts to persuade the camp leaders to allow girls to attend these classes were rejected out of hand...