In Salang Pass, No Villagers Are Left to Hear Songs of Love

On the mud roof of a bombed-out house in this strategic mountain village, two Afghan women in sequined dresses sang love songs Wednesday to the accompaniment of a clarinet, a harmonium and some ancient Afghan instruments.

The women’s songs, traditional ghazals , echoed off the towering walls of the Hindu Kush, rising on both sides of Hai Jan, which is situated in the strategic Salang Pass 100 miles due north of Kabul, the capital.

Villages Are Ghost Towns

But there were no villagers left in Hai Jan to hear the music. Those who have not been killed have been driven away by the war. Only a few dozen soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division danced on the roof of what is now a key government military outpost, site of the Afghan army’s version of a USO show.

Hai Jan is hardly alone in its misery. No one now lives anywhere in the Salang Pass, a breathtaking gorge with cascading waterfalls amid snow-capped peaks. Three months ago, there were 180 terraced villages of mud, brick and timber, and there were thousands of families.

Hundreds of them are dead now, and hundreds more maimed. The villages are ghost towns, reduced to heaps of mud and splinters. This, the soldiers say, is the result of intensive bombing in the weeks before the Soviet Union withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan in February.

On Wednesday, for the first time since Jan. 23, when the military mounted its effort to keep the pass open, the Afghan government allowed Western reporters to visit the pass, which is the only land route through the mountains of the Hindu Kush linking Kabul and the Soviet Union. Kabul still relies on the Soviet Union for most of its supplies.

At the time of the bombing, the State Department’s spokesman, Charles Redman, accused the Soviet military of pursuing a “scorched earth policy” in Afghanistan. Western diplomats in Kabul at the time said more than 500 civilians had been killed in the bombing.

A few days after Redman made the charge, Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, at the time commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, said it was ridiculous, though he conceded that there had been heavy civilian casualties in a joint Soviet-Afghan effort to clear the pass of armed Islamic rebels called moujahedeen.

General Defended Bombing

Gromov said the bombing was necessary to keep the 2 million people of Kabul from starving and to prevent expected attacks from the villages on convoys of withdrawing Soviet troops. Tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers were moved through the pass in the first two weeks of February.

“Where did the State Department get this information?” Gromov said mockingly at his last press conference before leaving Kabul. “When did a representative of the State Department visit the area?”

On Wednesday, a group of 20 Western journalists visited the area. On five Afghan armored personnel carriers, they passed village after village that had been blown to pieces by bombs. Trees that once bore cherries, apricots and almonds along the Salang River had been burned to cinders. All along the Salang Highway there were burned-out tanks and supply trucks.

The spectacular pass, which had been a favored place for picnicking, has become a wasteland of mud and the debris of war.

Blames Rebels for Damage

Gen. Mohammed Shafi, commander of the 2nd Infantry Division and escort for the press party, blamed the devastation on the rebels. He said they had occupied many of the villages after the Soviet troops pulled out.

“These villages were destroyed in the fighting between our forces and the extremists under Commander Ahmed Shah Masoud,” he said, referring to the best-known moujahedeen commander, who says he controls much of an area that includes the northern provinces and has some support even in Kabul.

But other officers in the pass told reporters that most of the destruction had been done by Soviet bombing in last-minute clearing operations in late January and early February. Most of the officers put the civilian death toll at 500 in a two-week period.

But the Afghan government did not bring the reporters here just to see the devastation. It wanted to demonstrate that it is in firm control of the pass, at one end of which there is a 1.7-mile-long tunnel built by the Soviets in the 1950s.

Vehicles Pass Unmolested

As Gen. Shafi’s tanks and armored personnel carriers snaked along the pass unmolested, accompanied by an armored sound truck blaring revolutionary slogans and nationalist music, it was clear that Afghan forces were indeed in control.

The Afghans have taken over strategic outposts on virtually every peak in the pass. With no villagers left to harbor the rebels, artillerymen have occupied several of the scorched houses. Army engineers are scouring the gorge for thousands of land mines left behind by the rebels.

Although the road is clearly open, the reporters saw only a few civilian buses and cars. Not a single civilian was seen along the way or in any of the villages.

“The Salang Highway is open from Kabul to Haritan,” Gen. Shafi said proudly, referring to the northernmost city in Afghanistan, not far from the Soviet border. “It has been for the past month.”

Captured a Month Ago

A month ago, Shafi’s division took Hai Jan, the one holdout village in the pass. He said it was a strategic position that had enabled the rebels to choke the supply line between Kabul and the Soviet Union for several weeks after the Soviet troops had departed.

He said a rebel commander named Abdul Basir and about 400 men reoccupied what was left of the village after a 20-day battle following the February bombings. They held it for 10 days before the army counterattacked and drove them out after another 12-day battle, reopening the road.

Shafi said his men killed 250 of the rebels (“They’re buried over there by the river”) and that he lost only seven men, most of them to land mines.

“Since then,” he said, “there has been no fighting at all in the Salang Pass. We control it and it is peaceful.”

Shafi said the taking of Hai Jan raised the morale of his men, and this was confirmed by the soldiers, many of whom are stationed on frigid ridge-top outposts with little heat. Morale was also raised, he said, by the Soviet withdrawal, which hardened the resolve of some men who may have been secretly critical of the Soviet presence.

“This is one reason we are celebrating with these ghazal singers,” Shafi said, as some of his men danced a jig on the roof.

When the music stopped, and the press party prepared to move on, there was only the rushing sound of the waterfalls and the snow-swollen Salang River, a sure sign that spring has come to the Salang Pass even though no one lives there anymore.