Soldiers of God

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Soldiers of God, which was first published in 1990 (with the subtitle “With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan”), provides the historical context for the emergence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. My new final chapter, “The Lawless Frontier,” which appeared as a long article in the September 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, provides the follow-up. Both Soldiers of God and “The Lawless Frontier” also offer profiles of some of the prominent personalities in a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

I finished writing Soldiers of God at my home in Greece thirteen years ago, after several lengthy trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province in the mid- and late-1980s. It was the last phase of the Cold War, and while no one could predict how suddenly and definitively it would end, there were some premonitions in Afghanistan. The Afghan mujahidin (Islamic “holy warriors”) were in many respects a bunch of ornery backwoodsmen, whose religious and tribal creed seemed to flow naturally from the austere living conditions of the high desert — unlike the more abstract and ideological brand of Islam of the Taliban (“Knowledge Seekers”), who would emerge a few years later. The mujahidin in the 1980s were exacting a terrible price from the Soviet military occupiers of their country. I remember meeting captured Soviet soldiers, whom the mujahidin would make available to journalists: these Soviets were terrified and disillusioned youngsters, unsure about what they had been fighting for. Failure and an abject lack of pride registered in their eyes. It was a common assumption among the journalists who covered the mujahidin that the war in Afghanistan would ultimately have a profound impact upon Soviet society.

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