Down, Dirty and Aching for a Fight

This is not a good place," says allah Mahmad, quickening his pace. "But this is where we live."

The approach road to what in better times was the base of the Afghan army's 40th Division in the northeast of the country does not inspire confidence. To our left is a row of farmhouse walls scarred by shrapnel and bullets. To our right, in the fading light, an empty expanse of ground stretches to Taliban positions 600 m distant. Both sides of the road are heavily mined. The road itself is totally exposed. "We're in a salient out here," says Allah Mahmad, who defends the ruins ahead. "We've got Talibs and Arabs to the left flank, the right flank and out front. For the past two years they've hit us with everything they've got. We've lost a lot of people but we're still here and we're staying."

This former army base next to the Bagram airfield 50 km north of Kabul is a tiny slice of Stalingrad, circa 1942. Beyond the gates there's scarcely a building intact—just broken walls, smashed stonework, and ground littered with spent shell casings and twisted metal. Allah Mahmad exaggerates a bit when he says his men are holding the 40th Division base. For the past two years his platoon has been hanging on to about 100 sq m of ground inside the gate. Two small buildings still have roofs and their dark, fetid rooms serve as living quarters. There are a couple of underground bunkers. And through the shredded remains of some trees is what was once the base's cinema hall.

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It's now a charred skeleton open to the sky. One side wall, chipped and broken, serves as a firing line targeting Taliban positions 600 m away. As the sun sets behind the western mountains, we watch the enemy moving behind their lines. Between us lies a wasteland of smashed masonry, burned-out vehicles and many, many unseen mines. "For now we stay in our positions and they in theirs," says Allah Mahmad.

Allah Mahmad is an example of the human cement that holds together the opposition Northern Alliance. In other times he would have been a farmer, working in the lush wheat fields and fruit orchards of the Shomali Plain around Bagram. Instead, at 27, he has seen six years of combat. With his high-set cheekbones, goatee, checked shawl and round woolen cap he bears a passing resemblance to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the assassinated commander who assembled these forces. In a conventional army Allah Mahmad would be a captain. Here he's called commander, a hard-earned rank denoting his seniority not over some alphabet-soup unit in a regimental chain of command but instead over a specific band of 20 men and boys who know each other and fight as much for the guy next to them as for any grand cause.

These teenage and twentysomething sons of local farming families have homes within half an hour's walk from the ruins they've defended since the Taliban first took this terrain north of Kabul in late 1996. Their generals talk of the war on global terrorism but war doesn't get much more local—or personal—than this. "The Taliban has burned our fields, cut down our trees, destroyed our homes," growls Allah Mahmad. "They're making refugees of us, but we're refugees who have not forgotten how to fight."

"Twenty boys is all we need to defend this base," he says with a glance around his embattled domain. "Plus a couple of rocket launchers and a machine gun. We can also call on fire support from tanks back at the second line." The boys come up for four or five days at a time, then rotate with a brother or cousin.

In the gathering darkness, we stand staring out toward Talib lines. Save for the occasional crump of a mortar or burst of tracer fire the front is quiet. Then toward 7 p.m. the evening exodus begins. Since the start of U.S. air strikes against targets in Kabul, there has been a nightly parade of vehicles from the city. On what they call the New Road, in front of the base, convoys of trucks, pickups and armored vehicles cross a low pass, their headlights visible as they head toward villages behind the Bagram front.

Since Oct. 16 limited U.S. bombing has shifted to the zone behind the Taliban lines. Northern Alliance political leaders have expressed a cautious satisfaction. But on the front lines they want more, much more, and they want it now. Staring through binoculars at the headlights cresting the pass, Allah Mahmad can hardly contain his frustration. "If the Americans hit the pass now, they'd cream the bastards," he mutters. "All the bloody terrorists move out of Kabul at night. Hitting the city isn't touching a hair on their heads."

The base comedian, Khwaja, short, tousle-haired with a square face, mustache and three days of stubble, gets one of the Pakistani "terrorists" from across the line on the walkie-talkie. Opening greetings rapidly degenerate into an exchange of obscenities featuring enemy womenfolk and various farmyard animals. Allah Mahmad and the boys gathered around him listening are doubled over in laughter.

At 8 p.m. three men are left on guard, the rest crammed into a tiny room lined with iron beds. Squatting around a smoky hurricane lamp we eat a meal of stale bread dunked in thin soup and drink strong black tea. After finishing, two of the boys turn to karambol, a game like pool in which flat counters are flicked across a board. Farid, another section commander, sits intently loading an ammunition belt with machine-gun rounds. Allah Mahmad lounges on one of the beds and talks wistfully of wanting the kind of education for his four sons that he never got. "Right now the two eldest are being taught by mullahs," he says with a laugh. "It's not great."

He doesn't try to sleep before 2 a.m. Guards posted in the ruined cinema and at the gate are changed every two hours and Allah Mahmad makes his own rounds of the perimeter twice nightly. No one sleeps much: there are challenges shouted into the darkness, bursts of fire, the coming and going of guards. At 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. unseen American planes blitz the area near the pass with what look like cluster bombs.

At 4:30 a.m. the room stirs. We stumble outside. The air is frigid and the last stars hang like frozen embers. With Khwaja, I move up to the firing line in the cinema to join the machine gunner and watch the milky whiteness of dawn. Orders are not to start any firefights but Khwaja has a powerful pair of lungs. "Hey, mullahs!" he bellows across no-man's land. "Ragheads! Have you said your prayers yet?" Out of the half-light come return salvos of insults and laughter. It's the beginning of another day in a war that, north of Kabul, has yet to begin.

When it does Allah Mahmad expects to advance quickly on Kabul. "Just days," he says. His men will be reinforced by the thousands of troops that have been massing in the Panjshir Valley and the northern end of the Shomali Plain. But the Taliban and its Arab and Pakistani allies have also been reinforcing their front lines, digging new bunkers within sight of the 40th Division base. How many of Allah Mahmad's men die in the impending offensive hinges on whether, in the coming days, American bombing increases its intensity and moves closer to the lines.

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