We had driven to a hilltop command post to watch the attack. The position had a code name, Darya, which means “river” in Dari, the Persian dialect that’s Afghanistan’s lingua franca, and on the radio we could hear field commanders yelling, “Darya! Darya! Darya!” as they called in reports or shouted for artillery. The commander of the position, a gentle-looking man in his thirties named Harun, was dressed for war in corduroy pants and a cardigan. He was responsible for all the artillery on the front line; we found him in a bunker, studying maps by the light of a kerosene lantern. He was using a schoolboy’s plastic protractor to figure out trajectory angles for his tanks.
Harun was working three radios and consulting the map continually. After a while a soldier brought in tea, and we sat cross-legged on the floor and drank it. Calls kept streaming in on the radios. “We’ve just captured another position; it’s got a big ammo depot,” one commander shouted. Another reported, “The enemy has no morale at all; they’re just running away. We’ve just taken ten more prisoners.”
Harun showed us on the map what was happening. As we spoke, Massoud’s men were taking small positions around the ridgeline and moving into the hills on either side of a town called Khvajeh Ghar, which was at a critical part of the front line. Khvajeh Ghar was held by Pakistani and Arab volunteers, part of an odd assortment of foreigners—Burmese, Chinese, Chechens, Algerians—who are fighting alongside the Taliban to spread fundamentalist Islam throughout Central Asia. Their presence here is partly due to Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden, who has been harbored by the Taliban since 1997 and is said to repay his hosts with millions of dollars and thousands of holy warriors. The biggest supporter of the Taliban, however, is Pakistan, which has sent commandos, military advisers, and regular army troops. More than a hundred Pakistani prisoners of war sit in Massoud’s jails; most of them—like the Taliban—are ethnic Pashtuns who trained in the madrasahs.
None of the help was doing the Taliban fighters much good at the moment, though. Harun switched his radio to a Taliban frequency and tilted it toward us. They were being overrun, and the panic in their voices was unmistakable. One commander screamed that he was almost out of ammunition; another started insulting the fighters at a neighboring position. “Are you crazy are you crazy are you crazy?” he demanded. “They’ve already taken a hundred prisoners! Do you want to be taken prisoner as well?” He went on to accuse them all of sodomy.
Harun shook his head incredulously. “They are supposed to represent true Islam,” he said. “Do you see how they talk?”
I went into Afghanistan with Iranian-born photographer Reza Deghati, who knew Massoud well from several long trips he’d taken into the country during the Soviet occupation. Back then, the only way in was to take a one-to three-month trek over the Hindu Kush on foot, avoiding minefields and Russian helicopters, and every time Reza did it he lost twenty or thirty pounds. The conditions are vastly easier now but still unpredictable. Last summer, in a desperate effort to force international recognition for their regime, the Taliban launched a six-month offensive that was supposed to be the coup de grace for Massoud. Some fifteen thousand Taliban fighters—heavily reinforced, according to Massoud’s intelligence network, by Pakistani Army units—bypassed the impregnable Panjshir Valley and drove straight north toward the border of Tajikistan. Their goal was to move eastward along the border until Massoud was completely surrounded and then starve him out. They almost succeeded. Waiting to go into Afghanistan that September and October, Reza and I watched one town after another fall into Taliban hands, until even Massoud’s old friends began to wonder if he wasn’t through. “It may be his last season hunting,” as one journalist put it.
Massoud finally stopped the Taliban at the Kowkcheh River, but by then the season was so far advanced that the mountain roads were snowbound, and the only way for Reza and me to get in was by helicopter from the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. Massoud’s forces owned half a dozen aging Russian military helicopters, and the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe could put you on a flight that left at a moment’s notice, whenever the weather cleared over the mountains. On November 15, late in the afternoon, Reza and I got the word. We raced to the airfield, and two hours later we were in Afghanistan.
The helicopters flew to a small town just across the border called Khvajeh Baha od Din, and we were provided a floor to sleep on in the home of a former mujahidin commander who was now a local judge. Each night, anywhere from ten to twenty fighters stayed there, sleeping in rows on the floor next to us. The electricity was supplied by a homemade waterwheel that had been geared to a generator through an old truck transmission. Some fuel came in by truck over the mountains—a five-day trip—but farther north it all came in by donkey and cost twenty dollars a gallon. (The locals jokingly refer to donkeys as “Afghan motorcycles.”) We washed at an outdoor spring and subsisted on rice and mutton and kept warm at night around a woodstove; we lived comfortably enough. The situation around us, though, was unspeakable.
Eighty thousand civilians had fled the recent fighting, adding to the hundred thousand or so who were already displaced in the north, and thousands of them were subsisting in a makeshift refugee camp along the Kowkcheh River half a mile away. They slept under tattered blue UN tarps and had so little food that some were reduced to eating grass. Tribal politics have long dominated Afghanistan; many observers, in fact, say that Massoud, a Tajik, will never be able to unite the country. These refugees were mostly ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, and they claimed that when the Taliban, who are Pashtun, took over a town, they raped the women, killed the men, and sold the young into servitude. One old man at a refugee camp pulled back his quilted coat to show me a six-inch scar on his stomach. A Taliban soldier, he said, had stabbed him with a bayonet and left him for dead.
A week or so after we arrived inside Afghanistan, Reza and I were told that Massoud was coming in—he’d been in Tajikistan, negotiating support from the government—and we rushed down to the river to meet him. A lopsided boat made of sheet metal, powered by a tractor engine that had paddle wheels instead of tires, churned across the Kowkcheh with Massoud in the bow. He wore khaki pants and Czech Army boots and a smart camouflage jacket over a V-neck sweater. He looked to be in his late forties and was as lean and spare as the photographs of him from the Soviet days. He was not tall, but he stood as if he were. The great man stepped onto the riverbank along with a dozen bodyguards and greeted us. Then we all drove off to the judge’s compound in Khvajeh Baha od Din.
There he met with his commanders, listened to their preparations for the coming offensive, then hurried off. We later found out that he’d been forced to return to Tajikistan because of a chronically bad back; apparently the problem was so severe that it had put him in the hospital.
Finding ourselves once again waiting for Massoud, Reza and I decided to go out to the front line to see a position that had just been taken from the Taliban. We drove south along the Kowkcheh, past miles of trenches and bunkers, and stopped at an old Soviet base that had been gutted by artillery fire. The local commander was there, housed in the shell of the building. The wind whistled through the gaping windows, and his soldiers crouched in the shadows, preparing their weapons. The commander said that the position they’d taken was code-named Joy and that the bodies of the dead Taliban were still lying in the trenches.
He made a call on his radio and arranged for some men and packhorses to meet us on the other side of the river. Then he directed us to the crossing point; it was in a canyon a few miles away, just below a town called Laleh Meydan. When we stopped there to sort our gear, a Taliban MiG jet appeared and made a pass over the town, completely ignoring the antiaircraft fire that was directed at it. The townsmen scattered but drifted back within minutes to help us carry our gear down to the river. The raft that was to ferry us across was made from a design that must have been around since Alexander the Great: eight cowhides sewn shut and inflated like tires, each stoppered by a wood plug in one leg and lashed to a frame made of tree limbs. Four old men paddled it across the river and then tied our gear to some horses. Three soldiers with Kalashnikovs were waiting to take us to the front.