General Akhtar had been correct. For one thing, in my rush for results, I had been ignoring security. To train Mujahideen in insecure bases was risking our support becoming common knowledge, as, despite our precautions, these places were full of informers. This was particularly so with the refugee camps.
Refugee camps shelter over three million people. There are more than 350 of them, administered by Pakistani officials with assistance from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Camps originally intended to house 10,000 are occupied by 100,000, with one holding 125,000, making it the largest concentration of refugees anywhere in the world. They are squalid places, teeming with humanity. Overcrowding has put impossible strains on rudimentary water, sanitation, and medical facilities. Refugees arrive weak and exhausted, many are sick or wounded, all are virtually destitute. A massive influx of aid in terms of money, food and materials is required to cope with what amounts to half of the world’s refugees.
Our interest in the camps was that they provided a safe refuge from the war for the families of the Mujahideen who could fight in Afghanistan in the knowledge that their relatives were immune from reprisals. They also acted as places to which the Mujahideen could return for a rest and to see their families without compromising themselves. Also, inside these camps was a huge reservoir of potential recruits for the Jehad. Thousands of young boys came to the camps as refugees, grew up, and then followed their fathers and brothers to the war.
But the camps had their disadvantages as well. They became a prime target for Soviet subversion. As they grew in number and size, so did the strain they put on the hospitality of the local population. The refugees took both land and business from tribal owners and traders. Their popularity with many Pakistanis was brief, and the subsequent build-up of hostility was exploited by the hundreds of KHAD agents who infiltrated the camps. It became an important Soviet objective to foster discord between the refugees and the Pakistanis. The more the violence, the more the hatred, the greater the pressure on our government to reduce its support for the Jehad. These camps and their inhabitants were used by our enemies as a means of increasing the feuding within Pakistan. We at ISI sought to use them to sustain the fighting.
Our problems were exacerbated by the rampant corruption in every camp. I will illustrate this through the experiences of a Mujahid called Farid Khan (not his real name) who fled from Kabul with his family in 1984. Their first difficulty was in obtaining registration documents. Without registration there can be no passbook for the head of the family, and without this Farid could receive no aid. Possession of a passbook would entitle Farid to a monthly ration of wheat, oil, sugar, tea, dried milk and, sometimes, a small subsistence allowance of cash amounting to 50 rupees per person, up to a maximum of 350 rupees (about $21). This was where Farid’s frustrations started. The slow, bureaucratic process of registration can take months, during which time refugees must hang around the fringes of the camps, the lucky ones relying on relatives who are registered. Some never register at all. The only way to cut the delays is to pay the requisite bribe to one of the Pakistani officials. To be employed in the camps is popular, as the opportunities to lord it over people in desperate poverty and supplement salaries with dishonest practices are legion.
Farid eventually got his passbook, which permitted him to pitch a tent in a camp located on barren waste ground, but, as he quickly discovered, it did not guarantee all his entitlements. For example, the issue of milk, sugar, or tea was somehow always unavailable. If Farid wanted these items, as he bitterly complained, he was obliged to buy them on the black market. It was one of the Pakistanis’ perks to be able to withhold rations to sell. This was made easy by officials being able to draw food and money for non-existent refugees.
One particular racket that Farid experienced had a detrimental effect on our recruitment of Mujahideen replacements. If a head of family was absent from the camp for any reason the passbook was cancelled, making the dependents ineligible for further assistance. This happened when Farid went to join the Jehad. While he was away the officials made one of their periodic checks by counting heads. Farid was listed as missing and his passbook withdrawn. It cost his wife 500 rupees to get it back. Of course the camp officials continued to use the confiscated passbooks to draw rations—for sale.
Much of the misery of life was caused by health hazards related to the water supply and pollution. The water ration of 6.5 gallons a day per person was seldom available as the tube wells were too few, while the water trucks were often broken down, and always late—unless you kept the driver happy. Diseases are endemic, as sanitation is frequently non-existent, with everybody using the surrounding fields as one vast communal latrine. Malaria, measles, tetanus, typhoid, diarrhoea and tuberculosis are but a few of the sicknesses that plague most camps.
It is the women who suffer the worst. Eighty per cent of the refugees in the camps at any one time are women and children. Many are widows. For the first time in their lives they must fend for themselves when they are suffering from shock, depression and grief. Into these hotbeds of suffering and squalor the Afghan secret police, KHAD, sends its female agents to intimidate and subvert. Farid’s wife had first-hand experience of their methods. At first she did not realize the young woman who befriended her was an agent, but slowly it dawned on her that the woman’s persistent railing and complaining about the Jehad was aimed at subverting her. Her ‘friend’ would continually protest at the suffering caused by the war, at the disgraceful conditions in the camps, emphasizing how the Mujahideen were dying while their political leaders lived a life of luxury around Peshawar, driving cars, spending money and seldom exposing themselves to danger. “We are not fighting a Jehad,” she would say, “we are fighting each other, Afghan against Afghan. This is not a Jehad, but a war between foreign superpowers. Our men die for America or the Soviet Union.”
Agents would also do their utmost to stir up Pakistanis against the refugees. It was not hard to create hostility, even hatred. They would make a sweeping gesture with their arms, saying, “Before the war this was your land; now all these foreigners camp on it. They take away your business, your grazing rights, they are the cause of rising inflation. They will soon outnumber you in your own province. It is these wretched refugees that cause the water shortages. Why does Pakistan spend so much to support them? They should return to Afghanistan.”
After a few weeks it became obvious to Farid’s wife that her companion was working for KHAD so she reported her to a camp official who in turn had her arrested by the police. The end of the problem? Not a bit of it, as within 24 hours she was back again. She had been well able to afford the 250 rupees which was the going rate for the police to forget the charges.
By the end of 1985, which had seen some of the fiercest fighting of the war, I remained confident that the Mujahideen were still holding their own. Except around Kabul, where the situation was worsening for reasons to be explained in chapter nine, the Mujahideen had not suffered any major setbacks. This was despite greatly increased pressure from the Soviets, and the improved performance of the Afghan Army.
The best-coordinated offensive, and most dangerous to ourselves, was the August/September Paktia operation. It involved an elaborate pincer movement, aimed at the Mujahideen bases just west of the Parrot’s Beak, by an armoured column from Kabul moving up the Logar Valley, and another advancing SW from Jalalabad. At the end of August the enemy force around Khost moved against our forward bases at Ali Khel and Zhawar, only a few kilometres from the Pakistan frontier. There was bitter fighting before these attacks petered out. Although this Paktia offensive cost us casualties, and the loss of several supply dumps, we did not suffer as severely as the Soviet propaganda and press would have had the world believe. As in 1984, foreign journalists proclaimed that the Mujahideen were on the run, that the Soviets were coming close to a military victory and that the Kabul regime was secure.