PEOPLE

A MULE, ONE MILLION DOLLARS, THREE SOVIET DESERTERS, MUJAHIDEEN AND TALIBAN

By: Nasser Yousaf

Pa hagha Jahaan ba khlas v la azaaba

Ka dale e sarikaar v la kitaba

Da Khushal Khattak pa zhaba barakat sha

Che wail ka pa Pukhthu la hara ba'ba

Hellfire will they steer clear of

A bond with the book who form

Blessed be the tongue of Khushal Khattak

All topics in Pashto who has broached

Afghan conflict has brought us both riches and misery. From building our houses and roads to selling us groceries and collecting our wastes, there is precious little that the Afghans living in Pakistan wouldn't do, and more often than not for a mere pittance.

It all began three and forty years ago in December 1979 when the then Soviets crossed over the Oxus (Amu River) into Afghanistan. Those were the teen-years, and the age of innocence in some sense of the word as the voracious internet was still in its incipient stage.

One thus was quite oblivious of the geo-politics and its wider ramifications. But one couldn't afford to stay aloof for long as Pakistan soon thereafter started feeling the fallouts. Pakistan was supporting both the resistance and its backers in the West to the great chagrin of the Soviets.

Every few days, therefore, media would report intrusion and shelling by the Soviet fighter planes in the Arandu area of Chitral and Shilman on the Durand Line in the Khyber Agency. 

The story of the Afghan conflict needs no retelling; it is being enacted and told every single day of its calamitous journey. One would only be repeating it at the risk of employing undesirable clichés, rhetoric and platitudes.

Nonetheless, one would like to very briefly recollect some aspects of the conflict.

In the late eighties, one day on a singularly unremarkable evening, one gingerly walked into the Peshawar bureau office of the now defunct newspaper 'The Muslim.' 

The office was located in a small street in the heart of Peshawar's cantonment bazaar in an equally small claustrophobic building, perhaps built to house a lower-income typical Peshawari family.

A fair-complexioned man who looked to be fairly tall sat on a chair with a typewriter placed in front of him on a table cluttered with handouts and press releases. The room looked to be poorly lit, and the gentleman was wearing old-fashioned glasses. This unpretentious man was Rahimullah Yusufzai, the bureau chief of 'The Muslim.' 

When he came to know that one was interested in working in the bureau, Mr. Yusufzai wasted no time before asking which particular school of political thought the visitor identified with.

Without ever having known what the boss wanted to hear, one minced no words telling him of one's political choices and affiliations hearing which one was handed over a handout with the direction of how to develop that into a news. 

Pretty soon one found out that Rahimullah didn't want  any rightist to gatecrash into the bureau office. Also, he had no love lost for the leadership of the seven-party Peshawar-based Afghan resistance alliance. He considered the resistance to be the antithesis of progressive politics. 

In a couple of days after joining'The Muslim' as a trainee, one started reporting mostly on the Afghan conflict from the street which one would later jokingly call as the 'Vodka Street.' 

As things stood then, one would never know what the street owed its fame more to: the bureau office of Pakistan's most popular English-language newspaper or to 'Gullu' the bootlegger sitting on his haunches in the street, waiting all day long for his countless customers. 

Rahimullah in those days was no ordinary journalist; he was the most sought after reporter among the journalists as his repute had traveled far and wide. 

It was incredible how journalists and diplomats working in Islamabad were attracted to that filthy little street like bees to their hive. 

In a word it would be enough to say that at the peak of Soviet intrusion and their imminent withdrawal, not knowing Rahimullah was risking total ignorance of the Afghan conflict. 

This soft-spoken gentleman from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's central district of Mardan knew Afghanistan like the back of his hand. It looked as if he had learnt every little bit about that unfortunate country by rote.

Every few days, one would find a renowned foreign journalist reclining on the steel sofa, either talking to Rahimullah or waiting for him to come downstairs from his upper floor lodging. 

Rahimullah would type his stories, which he would then handover to the telex operator Ismail. But whenever needed, he would write them in his neat handwriting, ensuring to encircle every period so that Ismail didn't get them wrong. While thus engaged in writing he would keep balancing his glasses. He loathed being distracted by his colleagues while he thus worked assiduously on his stories.

A dyed in the wool journalist, Mr. Yusufzai was a pain in the neck of Pakistani establishment in the Zia's era. But nobody could dare touch him due to his extremely affable and gentlemanly character. You could really trust him to throw spanners in the establishment's work at will,  howsoever hard the latter would try to assure the Soviets that Pakistan was not helping the resistance.

In one such incident when the Soviet withdrawal looked to be just around the corner, Rahimullah produced an incontrovertible proof of a convoy bound for the Mujahideen. 

He had left Peshawar for Kurram Agency at the break of dawn and returned home at midnight. Without caring to soothe his limbs and nerves, he sat before his typewriter and ensured that the story appeared in the next morning's paper as he had already alerted the head office with a 'stop press' request. 

Next morning, the headline in 'The Muslim' read: convoy consisting of many dozens of trucks loaded with weapons for Mujahideen found at the Durand Line.  The news report created a furore, but Rahimullah remained unharmed.

Among Rahimullah's admirers was Sandy Gall.

One recalled all these stories when just by chance one recently came across a 1984 video that shows Sandy Gall embedded with the resistance fighters in the faraway gullies, canyons, hamlets and rugged mountains of Afghanistan.

Sandy Gall was synonymous with the Afghan resistance movement, especially his fabled friendship with Ahmad Shah Massoud. 

The video shows three Soviet deserters helping the Mujahideen defuse landmines and helping them do scores of other chores. Of particular interest is a mule that Gall in his running commentary says was loaded with one million dollars worth of weaponry. 

As it happened then, most of the rockets and missiles fired by the foot soldiers missed their targets to the bemusement of everyone in the group. Dressed in their ragtag traditional Pashtun attire, wherever possible the fighters would feast on sheep meat along with Gall.

Those were the times before the resistance was supplied with stingers; a lethal stroke by the Texas representative Charlie Wilson that changed the game decisively against the Soviets.

The video is a classic historical record that more than anything else brings out the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets as the exact opposites of the present-day Taliban. While the Mujahideen stayed focused only on the withdrawal of foreign troops from their motherland, the Taliban could be seen not only at war with their countrymen but also at war with themselves. 

The Mujahideen looked to be swatting the enemy from their door while the merciless Taliban seem bent on smashing every door and intruding into every household's private affairs.

There is little doubt that the resistance leadership was corrupt and given to ostentatious lifestyle, but their footsoldiers looked miserable and earnest. On the other hand, both the Taliban leadership and their rank and file look sated, nosy and brutal.

In a lighter mood Rahimullah once said that people in his village wanted him to grow beard. Now, Pashtuns may not be very keen to give their daughters and sisters their rightful share in the property, and love to be indulging in usury and other vices, but they would love that every man must sport a beard in order for him to be pious.

Somewhere in the late 90s, after having met the Taliban founder Mullah Omar, an outright change was noticed in Rahimullah's thoughts, writings and appearance. In fact, his detractors accused him of supporting the Afghan Taliban. 

Some people thought being a Pashtun nationalist by instincts, Rahimullah Yusufzai considered the Taliban to be espousing the cause of nationalism. But one must not forget that most of the fiercest critics of the Taliban were and still are the Afghan Pashtun nationalists.

Rahimullah died in September 2021. He once said fiction didn't fascinate him much; but of facts he had a vast repertoire with which he would liberally build and embellish his stories. 

One must now be forgiven for employing a cliché; Rahimullah was a larger than life figure. Sadly, the obituaries that were scribed in his memory fell short of doing justice to his class, intellect and stature. Having known him all my adult life, I am sure he wouldn't have been pleased by any of those charitable elegies.

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