Traveling the Afghan Archipelago
Stevenson, Matthew
mind here, and the left-wing contributors to his collection do not much help him. Professor Michael Walzer, who can always be relied upon to defend a radical position as well as it can be...
...In the turmoil, Amin died mysteriously, and Babrak Karmal, then Afghanistan's ambassador to Czechoslovakia, was brought in to run a puppet government...
...then, with urging from our guide, join the tour...
...The golden age of the artist," he wrote, "was the age of the capitalist...
...In Kabul and Herat and Kandahar, the principal Afghan cities, there are few men between the ages of eighteen and fortyfive to be seen on the streets...
...and other Western governments guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Pakistan...
...Not one begged for food or money, even though it was clear they could use both...
...their firm expressions were those of the old men at the tent village...
...Before he was assassinated, President Anwar Sadat said that the United States was purchasing some of Egypt's surplus of Russian arms for shipment to the Afghans...
...Nawaz, who was to accompany me to the camps, and then talked about the negotiations on Afghanistan in Geneva...
...Now, however, Pakistan is a long stop on these wanderings, a safe harbor from the war...
...Each looked me directly in the eye...
...Worse, for all concerned, is that the longer the war continues, the more the status of the refugees appears to be permanent...
...He introduced Mr...
...But these actions are far from the divisional-size attacks that would dislodge the Russians...
...The Russians control the cities and the major supply routes...
...It is no part of Professor Nisbet's argument, however, to claim that Orwell was a conservative in the full sense of that term: "liberal democratic socialist--albeit salted with skepticism-probably comes closest to describing his political views...
...First they would peek from behind a mud wall...
...Dupree is a short, vigorous man in his late fifties...
...During the Second World War he jumped into the Philippines with an American airborne division...
...and he would see no reason to rewrite 1984 in 1984...
...Secretary Shttltz told them: "Fellow fighters of freedom, we are with you...
...There again, I think, Professor Nisbet is correct...
...Inside was a couch, a few chairs, and an empty desk...
...Some of the stenciling showed landscapes...
...the Soviet THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 I 1 Union and China to the north...
...There is yet another reaction to the resistance in Afghanistan, one that sees it as "a self-sustaining revolt," which means: As long as the Afghans, with nineteenth-century guns and a few bombs, can keep bleeding the Soviet THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 13 army white in mountainous combat, why should the West do anything to disturb things...
...Besides, he insisted, all questions about the improvement of democracy were dwarfed by the overwhelming threat of a totalitarian conquest by force and by stealth...
...This is our home...
...General Azhar, a sturdy man in his late fifties, welcomed me in what had been the living room in a ranch-style house...
...As I left Nasir Bagh along the absurdly stately irrigation road, the villages seemed transplants not just from Afghanistan, but from the Middle Ages...
...Look at a map," he says, with a trace of irritation...
...The drab olive-green military tents recall the fate of refugees all over the world, except that this lot seems even more tenuous than most...
...Orwell might protest that providing blueprints of social democracy was none of his business...
...His enterprise resembles that of the equally stalwart radical theorist, Professor C.B...
...the rest of the settlement spreads out over an arid, almost lunar landscape whose hardpacked sandy soil is divided by culverts from the storms that sweep the plain...
...In the beginning," he said, "we were using the tactics that had defeated the British in the last century...
...Abdul Haq finished by talking about supplies for the refugees...
...The road was mostly two lanes, with an occasional aspiration to expressway status...
...Peshawar's importance lies in its location...
...Affridi, the local press attache...
...But the Russian army is here...
...He described the fighting in Afghanistan as a cross between the Spanish Civil War and the resistance against the Nazis in Yugoslavia...
...Because of his flawless English, Haq is occasionally pulled from the front lines and sent to Paris or Washington to state the Afghan cause...
...D e s p i t e such brave words, the war remains a stand-off...
...It is misleading to call the "refugee tent villages"--their bureaucratic description--camps...
...One of the influences in his upbringing was clearly the code of Pushtunwali, the ethos of a major tribe in eastern and southern Afghanistan, which serves as a guide for all Afghans...
...So far, however, the extent of the American commitment to the Afghans has been to use their suffering to score moralistic points against the Soviets...
...This would be different...
...One, I noticed, was the vivid detail of an armored vehicle shooting down a Russian plane...
...Then we came down the mountain...
...The problem, Louis Dupree said with exasperation, is one of accountability...
...Nevertheless, the principal commodity traded between Russian intelligence anti the divided Afghans is disinformation...
...So few people actually live there that one can't help wondering if, when the American embassy was sacked in 1979, the demonstrators were bused in for the performance...
...Before I could actually visit the camps, I needed yet another signature on my papers--this one from the district commissioner for Afghan refugees...
...Russian soldiers, he explained, are "very stupid...
...and if function follows form, Pakistan will soon resemble Gladstone's England...
...Now he is a village elder, looking after the women and children while the men are away fighting the Russians...
...We should be one of the policemen of the world...
...T h a t afternoon, I found Louis Dupree, the author of several books about Afghanistan, and his wife eating lunch and packing for departure to the U.S...
...Several showed the region: Iran and Afghanistan to the west...
...The resistance now began in earnest...
...I met my driver, Omar, in the hotel lobby at six a.m., and we set off through a cloudburst for Peshawar, seventy-five miles to the west...
...And every time I read of Afghan casualties in the newspaper, I think of the eyes that watched my car move down the narrow lane and turn onto the highway...
...When we attack, they have to wait for orders as to what to do next...
...It took some time...
...In 1973, after Sardar Daoud overthrew the monarchy of Mohammad Zahir Shah, a few hundred opponents of the new Afghan regime trickled across the border into Pakistan...
...Many Afghans are nomadic by tradition, and persist in their habit of migrating in summer from the mountains to the valleys, and back again in winter, despite the fighting...
...That would free up a lot of aid for the resistance...
...He was not a political theorist, but a moralist and journalist, "trying to make political writing into an art...
...The defectors take with them guns and ammunition, and as a consequence the Russian army is the greatest source of weaponry for the Afghan resistance...
...Only the few jeeps of the relief agencies interfered with a landscape that would have been familiar to anyone living 500 years ago...
...Little wonder that the military government in Islamabad has kept its defense establishment in Peshawar...
...A number of proposals have been put forward in Geneva to end the fighting in Afghanistan...
...It contained profiles of soldiers killed fighting the Russians...
...nor, I might add, with taking prisoners...
...The encampment's eastern boundary is an irrigation canal, edged by graceful hanging trees--no doubt the first water found by refugees filing out of the mountains...
...Now it is Islam's first suburb, a grid of neatly Matthew Stevenson writes for a number of national magazines...
...They have all the latest equipment...
...Professor Nisbet notes that Orwell acknowledged the past to be "an indispensable foundation of freedom...
...Afghanistan is also rich in minerals, which the Soviets are already exploiting...
...A t Dabgri Building, yet another dim municipal office with paper-strewn desks and languid ceiling fans, I met Mr...
...He was about forty and, although not in uniform, looked like a major on assignment...
...In the West, he notes, there has been some outrage at the Soviet use of poison gas against the Afghan s . But the greater problem for the villagers, he says, is the cluster bombs that the Russians scatter about...
...It's easier to think of them as entire villages that have migrated across the border...
...waiting for the supplies of food to arrive...
...Long before it became the shadow capital of free Afghanistan, Peshawar advertisements for Islam...
...President Carter canceled American participation in the Moscow Olympic games after the Russian invasion, but didn't do much else...
...Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, is through the Khyber Pass to the west, and, until the war started, a narrow-gauge train took passengers as far as the mountain town of Landi Kotal near the border...
...They took Afghanistan to drive a wedge into the subcontinent...
...Again the refugees took to the mountainous trails that lead into Pakistan...
...The tactics the Russians are using are worse than anything used by Franco, only nobody seems to care...
...his mother raised the family of eight children...
...No existing system satisfies his definition, so the menace of totalitarianism is removed, as it were, by sleight of hand...
...The Soviets may have lost 10,000 to 15,000 men killed, but neither side is especially concerned with body counts...
...He believed in the goodness of ordinary people...
...He made arrangements for me to see several near Peshawar the following day and then dropped me off at my hotel on his way home...
...We walked outside, and each Afghan came forward to shake my hand...
...The Russian army is trained to fight against governments...
...The next day began in the rain...
...Russian broadcasts would have it believed that the West, especially the United States, is funneling substantial arms to the resistance...
...What I would like to see," Dupree told me, "is the U.S...
...Abdul Haq struck me neither as a warrior nor as a poet...
...On the walls, in military fashion, were a number of maps, all seemingly charting Pakistan's proximity to danger...
...P a k i s t a n ' s capital, Islamabad, is a patch of tranquillity on the Asian mainland...
...He looked remarkably like Fidel Castro but had none of the Cuban's stridency...
...At the beginning, General Ahzar's agencies and colleagues provided emergency shelter, food, and clothing...
...Now we are in the valleys and the towns...
...so did the flight of the Afghans...
...Who knows how many more have crossed the border and ignored the bureaucracy...
...indifference to the Afghan cause...
...Wanting to find out more about the refugees from the war in Afghanistan, I arrived in Islamabad shortly before midnight on a cool evening late last summer...
...In the war's most crucial theater, he led possibly the largest single body of Afghan troops...
...But then we are gone...
...Affridi remarked, "The only thing that would change their mind on this would be heavy losses, heavier than those they are now suffering...
...Helicopters...
...Pakistan has been careful not to appear as a participant in the struggle...
...If you ask Abdul Haq why the Soviets decided to invade his country, his answer contains none of the qualification that a similar question might prompt at a symposium in the West...
...Twelve miles from Rawalpindi, the fading British way station between Kabul and Delhi, it appears at the end of a four-lane parkway, rather the way Washington, D.C., surfaces on the ride in from Dulles International Airport...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984...
...One suggestion even has the exiled king returning to Afghanistan from Rome...
...The rest, led by Abdul, are fighting the Russians...
...They are trained for tank battles in the desert...
...Peshawar is also the strategic intersection between Islamabad and the sometimes rebellious province of Baluchistan...
...The Soviet mission in Peshawar has lately taken to verifying Russian casualties in Afghanistan by buying back the dogtags that have been stripped from killed Russian soldiers and returned to the city as booty...
...N a s i r Bagh, which means "green garden," is the first piece of flatland down from the hills of the Khyber Pass...
...At first impression, Peshawar seems to have been built for the purpose of buying and selling guns...
...a taxi brought me the rest of the way...
...The office was a replica of so many on the subcontinent...
...Amid the monotony of mundane routine--school for the children, hauling water for the women--life in the refugee villages is reduced to a neverending series of expectations: waiting for the Russians to leave...
...1984 does not mean the possibility of relapsing into barbarism...
...The general summarized the refugee situation for me...
...A few minutes later in came Abdul Haq, a bearded man in his late twenties...
...These "quintessentially conservative themes," as Nisbet calls them, are central to Orwell's writing...
...On the way, we passed the ribbed-iron and marble skeleton of the unfinished parliament...
...Orwell also believed in state management of the economy...
...India to the east...
...nor, for that matter, of U.S...
...He was here to visit his wife and family...
...Everything...
...Nor could there be a better cover for both sides than a city of bazaars and narrow, cobbled streets through which intrigue passes as quietly as small boys with bare feet...
...Since then foreign invaders have come and gone with the regularity of supernatural tides, but the Afghans have always held on, somehow...
...China is reluctant to help the resistance for the same reason...
...They think, and rightly so, that they are fighting the West's fight against communism and the Soviets...
...he regarded the intellectual class as a sinister new aristocracy, rooted not in the law but in "word and symbol...
...One problem is how to supply guns to a badly divided resistance, whose armies tend to be tribal and rarely larger than 4,000 men...
...These were mujahidin, or holy warriors, on leave from the fighting, and they appeared uncomfortable away from the front lines, without their guns...
...The choice of hotels--between the Islamabad Hotel and the Holiday Inn-seemed a tidy symbol of modern-day Pakistan's dichotomies...
...The warrior-poet is one of the ideals of Afghan society...
...Orwell himself wrote in a letter in 1945, "I belong to the left, and must work inside it...
...The state within a state stretches from the red deserts of Baluchistan in the south to an area in the mountains near the ancient kingdom of Swat...
...Still, the struggle among the groups is almost as fanatical as the struggle with the Soviets...
...He said he was sorry that we could not talk further...
...Needless to say, Dupree is no supporter of the Karmal government...
...This summer both Secretary of State Shultz and Defense Secretary Weinberger--on separate occasions--flew by helicopter to the Khyber Pass to address the mujahidin...
...It would not be much good talking like this to Orwell--the "spirit of the cold war" was exactly what he wanted to keep alive...
...Haq spoke English effortlessly and said he had been in Peshawar for two weeks...
...You know," he said, "there is a proverb that says the Russians never withdraw...
...In any event, of the estimated 100,000 mujahidin, only about 30,000 have rifles...
...OrweU would almost certainly agree with this...
...Abdul H~q walked me to the car...
...To Abdul Haq, the war is simply a matter of geopolitics, but one of surprisingly little interest to the Western allies...
...For the Afghans the decisive battle of the war is Kabul, but the action there remains fragmented, if brutal...
...Just before the last coup and the Russian invasion he was jailed for a week in Kabul as an "undesirable" and then deported...
...Several other siblings live in the camps, taking care of the elderly and the children...
...the rulers of Russia today are very much like oldfashioned oligarchs--heavy, suspicious, uninspired, brutal . . . . Russia today is a dictatorship, resting on popular apathy, the hollow shell of a totalitarian regime...
...I chose the Islamabad, as it was nearer the ministry of public affairs, and the following day went next door to a small cluster of shops where, over a drug store, I found the department that handles press credentials for anyone wanting to visit the refugees...
...He grew up in Nangarhar, a province along the border with Pakistan...
...At the same time violent opposition to the Moscow-supported Amin threatened to topple his frail government...
...It was at this point, in December 1979, that the Soviet Union intervened, anxious to protect a potential client and buffer state...
...He went on to say: "They have two kinds of soldiers...
...Louis Dupree told me that a lot of poetry was coming out of Afghanistan these days--much of it dreary--and that, like it or not, many men were happy to be back in the traditional role of fighting an oppressor...
...In short, Orwell believed in just as much socialism as could be reconciled with freedom...
...While I was there, I heard someone refer to Peshawar as "a page from Homage to Catalonia, "" an allusion to the factionally divided Barcelona that George Orwell described in his memoir of the Spanish Civil War...
...As Mr...
...But what prevents any kind of settlement being reached is that neither the resistance nor the Soviet Union has any incentive to end the fighting...
...Without their officers, the soldiers are lost," he said...
...Still, Professor Robert Nisbet, in what is by far the best essay in this book, detects a strong element of conservative insight in Orwell's view of the world, and with this judgment one cannot disagree...
...Professor Michael Walzer, who can always be relied upon to defend a radical position as well as it can be defended, uses one of the ploys which (as readers may remember) OrweU condemned as a typical intellectual's stratagem, namely linguistic innovation...
...Another showed the archipelago of the nearly 350 refugee camps along the border with Afghanistan, yet another volcanic chain of islands forced to the surface by Soviet cruelty...
...Walking through the encampment was like touring an adobe village in the American southwest...
...One of the most perceptive contributors to Mr...
...It's fine to go all out in Latin America...
...Each then flew off to other appointments, leaving the Afghans still facing the Soviets with their muskets and axes...
...And from Peshawar one can take the only road north to Chitral, the northwest corner of Pakistan, close not only to Afghanistan but also to the Soviet Union, China, and India...
...Perhaps someday we would meet again...
...After an hour of polite conversation-interrupted by numerous phone calls and docmnent signings--it was arranged for me to visit some of the refugee camps in Peshawar, the provincial capital of the Northwest Frontier Province...
...They were there to listen to and watch their leader...
...True to form, I was greeted warmly and served lukewarm tea with milk...
...Signs advertising "Guns" and "Ammo" are everywhere, making the place look like one's idea of Cheyenne during the era of the six-shooter...
...As a supplement to the original emergency-supply tents, which keep one neither warm in winter nor cool in summer, the Afghans have put up their traditional houses from blocks of dried mud...
...All posed solemnly for the camera whenever asked...
...His tone was that of a man with many burdens and none of the breaks...
...And as long as the Soviet government is willing to tolerate high casualties, the war will continue as a vicious stalemate...
...With the support of the rural population--or what's left of it--the resistance can move freely through large portions of the country, especially in the mountains...
...The way the Russians see it, withdrawal would result in the overthrow of Babrak Karmal's government and perhaps the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic regime hostile to Moscow...
...F i r s t , however, I was scheduled to meet General Said Azhar, the high commissioner for Afghan refugees, whose office in Islamabad is literally on the edge of town...
...Who knew--maybe this would be the conversation that would secure substantial Western aid...
...Peshawar is indeed headquarters for the principal factions of the resistance in Afghanistan, though in the beginning, despite their common cause, these groups barely spoke...
...Man Nasrat, was described as having "girded up his loins as soon as the Red coup of communists gained victory...
...The guards near the front door of the twostory house said he was in, and the one with a machine gun slung across his chest showed me to a small office toward the back...
...Aiding the refugees is all very well, but the regime of President Zia ul-Haq fears that the war would spread if Pakistan openly supported the Afghan cause...
...One, the draftees, who don't want to be in Afghanistan...
...The greatest danger does not threaten us from reactionaries from unenlightened powers of the past, but from the most modern achievements of our technological and economic lifestyle...
...But this is indeed a frontier city--be it that of internal Pakistani squabbling or the Cold War...
...The Soviets have taken to door-to-door sweeps to bolster "enlistments" for the Afghan army, which averages about 30,000 men...
...Islamabad is a new city in the fashion of Brasilia and Canberra, capitals that have sprung fully formed from an architect's drafting table...
...Tanks...
...Children followed us everywhere...
...The Daoud family was eliminated and in the general upheaval more than 100,000 refugees fled Afghanistan...
...Several brothers are working abroad--in Saudi Arabia and West Germany--to earn money...
...Tents were supplied wherever the Afghans camped, producing the network of tent villages that is now, more or less, a permanent home for these uprooted Afghans...
...The Afghans may be fragmented, but they are at least 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 agreed on fighting until the Russians leave--even if that isn't for another hundred years...
...He was fighting because his country had been overrun...
...Johanno Strasser, suggests how this threat that Orwell dreaded takes shape today: The menace hovering over the eighties is not total dominance by some fanatical party elite, but rather the progressive undermining of democracy by the silent dictatorship of forces inherent in our reality...
...Those neighboring countries that also live in the Soviet Union's shadow are no less afraid of antagonizing the Russians...
...In 1983 the cost of maintaining the refugees came to $441 million, or about $12 for each refugee...
...For the rest, it's the way Jihad Days described it: a holy war fought with muskets and axes...
...I wished him well and said goodbye...
...The artist had then escaped from the patron, and had not yet been captured by the bureaucrat...
...But Jere Van Dyk, the author of In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey, described the military assistance as "rifles and sleeping bags...
...Before, it was a town, at best, surrounded by cool mountains and an expansive prairie...
...Not the regime, but the country...
...What choice did he have...
...The Russians might just as well be recruiting for the mujahidin, since there is a steady underground flow of troops out of the Afghan army to the resistance...
...laid-out bureaucracies and vacant lots reminiscent of an industrial park near Houston...
...No one wants to be responsible for aiding the Afghans and killing Russians, however indirectly...
...Howe's symposium, Dr...
...Pakistan paid just under half of this, no mere gesture for a country as poor as any in the Third World...
...That's when we get into trouble...
...But they are no good against the mujahidin...
...Helicopters, unchallenged by groundto-air missiles, can move Russian troops anywhere for a surprise, concentrated attack, often backed up by artillery and air support...
...Next we want Kabul...
...he saw the proletariat uprooted from tradition and moral code "played upon by their masters," and he interpreted the totalitarian state as "an outcome, and not a reversal, of socialized mass democracy...
...The resistance is reported to have suffered 100,000 casualties...
...The map, in fact, shows Afghanistan at the crossroads of Asia, midway between India and the Middle East...
...Since the Russian invasion, more than three million Afghans have actually registered in Pakistan as refugees...
...The United States committed itself to donating $8 million, 170,000 blankets, used clothing, and 240 International Harvester trucks...
...Nawaz and I were greeted by an elderly Afghan...
...Orwell's socialism was both positive and negative...
...But he mistrusted state planning of culture and the arts...
...Tribal discipline and rituals have remained intact...
...In a desperate last stand, according to the magazine, he killed thirty-five Russians before "the soul of this heroic man and of this brilliant beacon went loft high to the creator of the w o r l d . . . "There was another article entitled "A liberation gained through muskets and axes," a fairly accurate summary of both the weaponry of the resistance and its determination...
...But they can't do anything for themselves...
...He described how the Russians would march arrogantly into a battle behind all the latest machinery, but would be left vulnerable as soon as they were in hand-to-hand fighting...
...But then they don't see any help...
...L a t e that afternoon, before leaving Peshawar, I went to a house on the outskirts, hoping to find Abdul Haq, one of the leaders in the resistance...
...But casualties on both sides are difficult to estimate...
...Totalitarianism," writes Professor Walzer reassuringly, "has failed" and is "doomed to failure...
...Nearly half their troops are in or near Kabul, maintaining the Karmal government that is reportedly despised by a majority of the Afghans...
...Tell them that a Russian footprint in Pakistan is the same as a Russian footprint in Washington, D.C...
...He spoke of his experience in combat, but expressed none of the awe of the Soviet army currently in vogue in the West...
...And the Afghans feel bitter...
...Waiting in the district commissioner's office, I leafed through the Jihad Days, an English-language magazine of the resistance produced on faded newsprint...
...Each was decorated with colorful stencils and chrome embroidery, giving their front ends the silhouette of a mosque...
...The otherwise nondescript two-story building that housed his office was distinguished by a milling crowd of Afghan men near the front door and in the lobby...
...And though the names of the clandestine rivals have changed, the city still feels one part Kipling and one part Le CarrY...
...Secretary Weinberger said: "I want you to know that you are not alone...
...The idea is to discourage the villagers from aiding the mujahidin, but the effect has only been to lengthen the historical roster of massacres...
...This is not to say that he turned into a man of the Right...
...But considering that the Afghan dislocation constitutes the greatest population dispersal in the world since 1947, such assistance barely meets the needs of most refugees...
...As a commander in the Kabul sector, he organizes everything from guerrilla raids to major offensives--or at least what can be mounted with the weaponry available...
...Professor Walzer comes to the cheerful conclusion that the Soviet system is just another form of "authoritarianism," although he is somewhat ungracious towards those "conservatives" who persist in drawing a distinction between "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism" in order, as he puts it, to revive "the spirit of the cold war...
...Officials in traditional Pakistani cotton suits sat behind tired wooden desks...
...Their invasion, which has tapped deposits of iron, chrome, copper, and possibly uranium, can produce a balance of trade surplus--mineral profits less military costs--even if things stay exactly the way they are now...
...If Islamabad is a model city, this will be the model capitol...
...Louis Dupree stands in the doorway to his room at Dean's and says, rapidly: "I find that notion obscene...
...One, Dr...
...They wore pajama-like cotton suits and full beards and were remarkable for the intensity of their expressions, with eyes that seemed eternally fixed on distant enemy encampments...
...It is in the Soviets' interests to keep the resistance divided-fratricidal, if possible...
...Control of the country puts the Soviet Union within striking range of the Iranian oil fields and Baluchistan, which might like to be rid of both Pakistan and Iran...
...Only the strategic use of paperweights kept it from scattering in the jetstream created by the ceiling fans...
...Now they have was notorious for sheltering undergrounds...
...Yet the reluctance of the West is in supplying the mujahidin with the weaponry-notably heat-seeking "Red-eye" missiles--that will knock out Soviet helicopters...
...Other nations gave tea, medical supplies, food, tents, and other relief supplies...
...The Soviet response has been to concentrate large amounts of firepower against villagers and encampments...
...His father worked as a civil servant...
...It demands vengeance against injury or insult to one's kin, chivalry and hospitality toward the helpless and unarmed strangers, bravery in battle, and openness and integrity in individual behavior...
...We learn from experience...
...The trucks and buses on the highway looked like coalesced into two tenuous wartime alliances, "the group of seven" and "the group of three...
...Ahd it's easy to feed the bad blood with rumors and an occasional killing...
...According to The Struggle for Afghanistan, an excellent book about the war by Richard and Nancy Newell: "It is simple but demanding...
...Air conditioners, destined for the Afghan hospitals, were winding up in the houses of relief workers, he said...
...When each Afghan registers as a refugee in Pakistan, he is entitled to cash, food, and other assistance totaling 150 rupees a month--not much, with the Pakistan rupee worth about nine American cents...
...Said Azhar has visited all the 350 or so encampments under his jurisdiction...
...They receive food and shelter from local residents, and try to fight the Soviets in isolated guerrilla actions...
...Second, the regular army...
...That September Taraki himself was swept away in yet another coup and replaced by his prime minister, Hafizullah Amin...
...They know nothing...
...We have no teachers...
...It means the possibility of perverting progress--because progress has lost the gauge by which to measure what is both feasible and humane...
...In the spring of 1980 the number of refugee immigrants reached a high point of 130,000 a month...
...Is he to be reproached for not having suggested in detail how much that might be...
...He was over six feet tall, with a stringy white beard and the long, precise gait of someone who has spent a lifetime climbing through mountain passes...
...But the flow was insignificant until April 1978, when Muhammad Taraki staged a successful coup...
...Group survival is its primary imperative...
...In the days of the British empire it was a favorite of intelligence agents slipping in and out of Afghanistan, which the empire never managed to subdue in the course of three wars...
...They're scared of everything...
...Announce that you will defend Pakistan...
...He is now in Pakistan working on a book about the Afghan refugees...
...Last year, on a trip to the United States, a cousin actually took him to Disney World: There can hardly be a greater metaphor for the gap between the resistance and the West than the image of a commander from the Kabul region taking a trip around the Magic Kingdom...
...Paper the consistency of newsprint was stacked everywhere...
...The train from Lahore goes only as far as Rawalpindi...
...These small, black fragmented objects look to the children almost like candy or little toys, and more than one child has paid with a limb or a life for his curiosity...
...Others had portraits of departed war heroes...
...Since the end of World War II, ~ve've been backing regimes, not countries...
...Now we are learning, changing...
...Soon he would be going back to the fighting where he commanded 4,000 men in the Kabul region...
...Abdul Haq said that office workers in the Russian-occupied capital often join the resistance on their nightly raids...
...Macpherson, who redefined the word "democracy" not long ago in such a fashion that virtually every regime in the world today could claim to be democratic...
...No barbed wire or guards surround the Afghans, who are free to come and go as they please...
...As we talked, the room slowly filled up with mujahidin until they were crowding the door...
...The totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin are of the past...
...Abdul Haq likes to say: "We started on the mountaintops...
...We know the land: every stream, every hill...
...In accordance with this, the Haq family has divided the responsibility for the struggle...
...In 1984, it is the simple decent chap Winston Smith who resists totalitarianism, long after the intellectual elite has been corrupted...
...not the only policeman...
...He got a doctorate at Harvard and has taught and lived in Afghanistan whenever possible ever since...
...The one difference here," he said, "is that the Western world hasn't been drawn to the cause of the Afghans as it was to the Republicans in Spain...
...In any conflict larger than the present one in Afghanistan it would take on the significance of El Alamein...
...in their room at Dean's Hotel...
...It made the journey to the frontier a festive occasion...
...Walzer's proposal is to drop the word "totalitarianism" so far as the regimes of the present world are concerned...
...waiting for the men to return from the fighting...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
