One such traveler was Adam Rashid, a young Pakistani brought up in Britain's West Midlands. Nine months ago, he crossed the border in a bus with nine other Pakistanis. They were headed to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second city and spiritual capital of the Taliban movement.
Today Rashid (not his real name) is a survivor of Pakistan's other covert conflict, a curious mirror-image of the Kashmir battle that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a potential nuclear war. A proxy struggle waged for control of Pakistan's corridor to Central Asia, it involves a murky alliance of the Taliban, their backers in Islamabad's military intelligence, Pakistani religious extremists and Arab radicals loyal to suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. They are pitted against Afghanistan's stubborn northern opposition.
According to intelligence sources, no fewer than 8,000 Pakistani citizens in Afghanistan are serving in combat and support roles. As the Taliban prepare for a final offensive, hundreds more young Pakistanis have been crossing the border in recent weeks. "Pakistan is alone in encouraging thousands of its own citizens to join the war," says a Western Afghanistan-watcher in Islamabad. "The state is privatizing war to advance its own goals."
There are of course the true believers in Islam. But Pakistan's covert wars also tend to suck in and consume the bored, the curious, the shiftless - youths in search of purpose and allegiance. By his own description, Rashid was no stranger to trouble. When he left Britain last fall, the streetwise 22-year-old had a heroin habit and several police convictions. It was time for a long break. Two days after leaving a young wife and baby son, Rashid was barreling along the tree-lined Grand Trunk Road across the Punjabi plains to Pakistan's Frontier province and a family home near Nowshera.
In Britain, religion had been a "now and then" thing. In Pakistan, at his father's urging, Rashid rediscovered the mosque and his mother-tongue Pashto, long overlaid by the thick English of the Midlands. "Mainly the reason I went to the mosque was because of my drugs habit," he says. "It was like rehabilitation, gave me peace of mind. Plus I had nothing else to do."
At the mosque he met other youths with hard-eyed loyalties and agendas. Several were affiliated with Harakat-ul-Ansar, an organization sworn to defend Islam by the gun. In the mosque, talk turned often to Afghanistan and, sometimes, the U.S. missile strikes that destroyed bin Laden training camps at Khost last August. Several of the men killed were Harakat men. Rashid recalls: "A few of us youngsters decided to go off and see what was going on."
Rashid and several friends presented themselves at the local Harakat office. "They asked about our backgrounds and explained what the rules were." They weren't complicated: "You had to keep a beard and pray five time a day. Basically, you had to be a religious guy." Days later the young men were on their way to the Afghan capital, Kabul - more than 100 holy warriors crammed into six minivans.
In Kabul, Rashid and the others reported to an office where they met local Harrakat representative Abdul Jabbar. A thick-set Punjabi who divides his time between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Jabbar organizes training and combat postings for recruits while liaising with the Taliban and military intelligence officials based at Pakistan's embassy. Jabbar promptly dispatched the new recruits to Rishkhor on the southern edge of Kabul for military training.
The Rishkhor training camp is the successor to the several facilities hit by the U.S. cruise missiles - a place used exclusively by Pakistani and Arab recruits for wars in Afghanistan and beyond. Sources say Rishkhor is bigger and better organized than the former camps. At any one time, between 1,000 and 1,500 recruits train at Rishkhor in the use of small arms, mortars and rockets, demolition techniques and other specialist skills.
Rishkhor imposes none of the harsh drill or spit-and-polish discipline typical of conventional boot-camps. But for youths straight from civilian life it is a shock. Between dawn prayers and breakfast recruits are expected to jog, do push-ups and go on sudden mountain runs. Then the day's classes begin. Training is at first theoretical, later practical, endlessly stripping down, reassembling and firing a range of weapons. Recruits are forbidden to leave the camp; for those with money, a canteen dispenses the only luxuries - cartons of juice and milk.
"For a person of my physical standard it wasn't easy," says Rashid. "Climbing the mountains was tough. I mean my lungs were full of smoke when I first got there." Not by the time he left; in line with Taliban puritanism, cigarettes were strictly banned, as was naswar, the snuff widely used in Afghanistan. He signed on for a full 40-day course. But three weeks into it, Rashid was restless. "See, I'm the kind of guy who can't settle in one place for a long time," he smiles. "I was seeing young lads going [to the front] and some were coming back. They'd talk: this and that happened, we need your help, stuff about sacrifice and what have you. It was getting more and more when I got to the stage where I really wanted to go and see what was happening."
Finally, with permission from Harakat and his instructors, Rashid cut short his training and joined a group of graduates headed to the front. Piled onto pick-ups, they raced through the blitzed ruins of Kabul and out onto the sweeping plains to the north. It was a relatively gentle introduction to war because the lines outside Kabul had been static for months. The front, Rashid discovered, was divided between the Taliban and their Urdu- and Arabic-speaking allies. "It was like one line. A quarter of it is held by the Pakistanis, the other quarter is looked after by the Arabs and the other half or whatever is looked after by the Afghans," he says. "They don't mix 'em."
The units were usually 30-strong, each commanded by older men with military experience. Often ex-regular non-commissioned officers, officially retired - so Islamabad could deny supporting them - these men form the backbone of Pakistan's Limited Contingent in Afghanistan. "There was one bloke we used to call Fauji Bai - Brother Soldier. I found he'd spent quite a while in the army in Pakistan and had been in Kashmir. He knew the ropes, what to do, where to patrol, where mines were, how to position the mortar."
Rashid quickly learned one of war's basic truths: when it's not hell, it's mostly boring. He arranged for a transfer and for a week joined a Pakistani position at Qala i Murad Beg, just north of Kabul - a "pretty crazy place." On lower ground and close to enemy lines, it provided more dangerous distractions. Pakistani positions were pounded daily by rebel mortar fire that sent fighters scrambling to the trench floor as geysers of earth and shrapnel erupted around them.
Unlike most of his comrades, Rashid was a soldier of fortune with money in his pocket - a volunteer able to come and go much as he liked. Less than two weeks after arriving at his new post, he had turned in his rifle and jumped a truck back to Kabul for rest and recreation. He amused himself calling home from the post office, shopping, picking up a fine Taliban-style black silk turban and visiting the graveyards of the shaheed, or war martyrs.
For Harakat chief Abdul Jabbar, Rashid's visit to Kabul smacked more of adventure tourism than holy war. "He wasn't too happy about me moving here and there and he asked me to go to Kunduz." Rashid had heard a thing or two about Kunduz, the Taliban-held province in Afghanistan's far north that flanks the opposition stronghold of Takhar. For months, bitter fighting between the two sides had see-sawed back and forth along the provincial border. For thousands of southern Taliban, the flight north had been a one-way trip.
"First of all I disagreed. There were rumors that they'd send you there for three months to a year or whatever." Yet Rashid had a nagging urge to see the "real" war and eventually Jabbar's wheedling insistence wore him down. "He really got up my nose. Whenever he spoke to me he'd give me this bribery bullshit: 'You've come so far, spent so much time. Go to Kunduz. If you don't get to see what you want, come back and tell me.'"
On a clear afternoon in early December Rashid and other Pakistanis sat wedged on the cold metal benches in the cargo bay of a Russian-built military transport. To avoid enemy missiles, the twin-engine Antonov corkscrewed up in tight circles over Kabul, before setting a course for the 45-minute flight north. Against the throbbing roar of the engines, conversation was impossible. Each man sat sunk in his own thoughts as they flew to war over the tangled, snowbound peaks below. Rashid had little real notion of what awaited him on the ground.
East of Kunduz, his unit was one of three interlinked Pakistani positions flanked by their Taliban allies. This was nothing like the frontlines outside Kabul. The Opposition was aggressive and on the attack. Rashid did not have to wait long to see all he wanted to see - and then some.
The night attack that drove him and his companions from their trenches unleashed a terrifying concentration of fire, the fear of panic, then panic itself. "There were tanks first, then the rockets, cannons, heavy machineguns. You can't see them, just hear them fire." Initially the unit attempted to fire back, shooting wildly into the darkness. Then, with shells exploding around them, they simply hunkered down.
Command was soon overwhelmed by confusion. "At first they kept giving us radio messages: 'Stay put! Stay! Stay!' recalls Rashid. "But we were a bit forward of the other positions and we were getting cut off." At about nine p.m. the Pakistani unit commander gave his own order to pull back. But by then it was already too late; along the valley floor below, the enemy had already broken through and was advancing.
The only hope for Rashid and his comrades was to fall back and try to rejoin the Taliban. For the rest of that night Rashid and five others stumbled across the hills. At dawn they reached the bank of a river across which the Taliban had retreated. All six were exhausted. As they crouched in bushes along the river bank they were discovered by an enemy patrol.
Three of their number broke cover and attempted to run. They were promptly cut down by automatic fire. Shakily, Rashid and his remaining two companions rose to their feet, hands raised high. His jihad was over.
Six months later he spends his days among more than 100 other Pakistani prisoners of war whose numbers are growing by the week. Tucked into a remote valley on the northern Hindu Kush, the prison, says Rashid, is "not exactly a five-star hotel."
Life is spartan but prisoners receive access to the Red Cross, an adequate diet, bathing and exercise areas. Friendly villagers provide the PoWs religious reading material. Many have only now discovered that the Islamic piety of the enemy is no less than their own.
No such solicitude has been shown by their own government in Pakistan. While happy to see hundreds of volunteers fill the places of the killed or captured, Islamabad still pushes the tired line that it is neutral in the Afghanistan conflict. Attempts by the PoWs to send messages to their government have been rebuffed.
"The blokes here are saying Pakistan doesn't want to know about us," says Rashid. Meanwhile, as Rashid puts it: "The government is not telling them not to go. Obviously it's helping them." And young men like him will continue to cross the border unchallenged - pawns in a cause they hardly understand.
