Free Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan Page B

a culture where the men act as the barricades.” The first time I interviewed Abdul Haq I made the mistake of asking him the names of the men and women in his family. The names of the men he told me. Concerning the women, he blushed and turned away. “I wish you wouldn't ask such personal questions,” he said. I felt ridiculous for days afterward and worried whether he would agree to see me again.
    The very existence of women in a Pathan's life is an intimate secret, sacred to him but also a source of shame. Women threaten the facade of splendid male isolation that is central to a Pathan's sense of self. A Pathan knows women are needed for procreation, but that is an unfortunate and embarrassing fact to him, and if he could change it, he would. In the Arab world and even in Iran, pregnant women are a common sight. Among the Pathans, one never sees them, for as soon as a woman's womb begins to expand, she is locked away in the house.
    After enough time on the Northwest Frontier you forgot about Pathan women altogether. They became invisible. You forgot that the mujahidin had wives and mothers, because you never saw them and the men encouraged you to forget. Only rarely did that other, hidden world break through to the surface,as when a colleague of mine asked Abdul Haq why he always kept his hair short. “Because my mother would slap my face if I grew my hair long,” he said, turning his head away, embarrassed.
    In Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan, many women were educated, held proper jobs, and didn't hide themselves in black sheets. That was more because of Westernization than Communist influence. The mujahidin were, for the most part, backwoodsmen, and they suffered no threats or complexities in any of their personal relationships. They inhabited a self-contained world of men, a world of sharp cutouts, where women were held in contempt and the only sure touchstones of masculinity were bravery, the ability to endure physical pain, prowess with a rifle, and the length and thickness of one's beard.
    Men without beards were distrusted by the mujahidin. After all, women didn't have beards — and neither, thought the mujahidin, did homosexuals. Nor did the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies. Nor, for that matter, did the more modern, secular mujahidin within the seven-party resistance — the ones who drank Coca-Cola with journalists at the Pearl Continental Hotel and who were thought to do little of the fighting. In Peshawar, a beard meant credibility. It was striking how many Western journalists and relief workers who had contact with the guerrillas had beards. You would grow one before you arrived in Pakistan and shave it off as soon as you went back home. Once, when I shaved off my beard before leaving Peshawar, a mujahid friend laughed at me and said, “You look like a woman — no, like a Christian!”
    The Pathans had no patience with the fine lines or ambiguities of other cultures. Either you were a man or you weren't. It was a barren, stunted vision of life that made sense only under impossible conditions — which was why it flourished in the 1980s. In such a harsh and sterile social environment, male friendships took on an archetypal character, based on thebread and salt of absolute trust and the respect that could be earned only by bravery and the willingness to endure terrible physical hardships. It took a rare kind of individual to be able to pass through the crucible of Pathan friendship, especially if the friendship was with someone like Abdul Haq.
    In a decade of war, a few foreign journalists managed to become close friends of Haq. They were the only people he trusted outside his family and guerrilla organization. Haq would often agree to meet a journalist only if he was recommended by one of Haq's friends — getting close to the commander meant first getting close to the commander's friends. By ordinary, conventional standards, none of the journalists whom Haq considered his friends were