Soldiers Reach Out and Touch Their Enemies

During long lulls in the war, when Afghan enemies aren’t shooting at one another, they often switch their field radios to the same frequency and talk.

It’s usually rote taunting, the back-and-forth propaganda that makes it simpler for soldiers to hate soldiers who are countrymen. But sometimes, through the electronic whine and static, the voices sound human, and for a moment, enemies become people.

Sitting on a cushion in a farmhouse Saturday, opposition Northern Alliance soldier Mohammed Nahim unscrewed the small antenna from his Russian-made walkie-talkie, attached it to the cable from a roof aerial and called out to the Taliban.

“Fifty-two, fifty-two,” he said, repeating the radio frequency. “Talib, Talib, Talib.”

It took a while to get a clear response. Then Nahim’s commander, Abdul Wakil, spoke to his Taliban counterpart for about 15 minutes. They sounded more like two neighbors grousing over the back fence than warriors goading each other across the front line here in northern Afghanistan.

At least they had something new to talk about Saturday: the raid by more than 100 U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces on a Taliban camp in southern Afghanistan in the early morning darkness.

“I want to ask you, son, a question about the arrival of the American soldiers near Kandahar,” Wakil said to the Taliban commander, who identified himself only as Zilgai.

“That’s none of my business,” the Taliban soldier’s voice crackled back. “If I tell you I don’t know about them, you will laugh.”

“I just want to ask you: Is it real or not?” Wakil said, and he stuck the tip of his tongue out like a teasing child. “You don’t understand? You don’t know about them?”

“If I say that, you will laugh and say: ‘How can you not know? You are a Talib,’ ” Zilgai replied, sounding more beleaguered than angry. “These are not good words. Just leave it alone.”

Taliban forces are still defiant and fighting hard on the battlefield. But they are clearly feeling the pressure as the U.S.-led air and ground assault intensifies and Northern Alliance troops step up their attacks. The fatigue was plain in Zilgai’s voice.

The Northern Alliance claims regular defections from the Taliban, and Wakil said almost 200 of the hard-line Islamic regime’s fighters surrendered in his zone Thursday.

The Taliban insists that its forces are still very strong despite two weeks of U.S.-led airstrikes, and claims that the U.S. commandos raided an empty camp and then fled without firing a shot as Taliban troops moved in.

Wakil said he hadn’t seen or heard from any U.S. troops on this front line about 25 miles northeast of the capital, Kabul, but certainly would be happy to as long as their goal was only to remove the Taliban from power and destroy the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

“If American soldiers come to capture Afghanistan, we and the Taliban will join with each other to fight them,” he said.

Alliances have shifted constantly throughout almost 23 years of war in Afghanistan, where military and political loyalties often go to the highest bidder.

At least two of Wakil’s regular radio contacts on the Taliban’s front lines are former brothers in arms who left the Northern Alliance to join the fundamentalist regime after it seized Kabul in 1996.

Wakil identified them as Mohammed Amin and Habib Allah, but when he wants to reach them by radio, he uses their call names, Gulab and Almas.

“How do you know Almas?” a miffed Taliban radio operator asked Wakil.

“He is from our side,” the commander replied. “He used to be a moujahed [holy warrior]. When he comes in, tell him we are waiting on this frequency.”

Commander Zilgai said he was speaking from Kuwasafi, a village about halfway to Kabul from Wakil’s post.

“I’m just in front of you,” Wakil replied, and he leaned closer to the walkie-talkie. “Is there a person there named Abdulhai Khan? Tell him I say hello.”

Because Afghans fight with Soviet-era equipment, enemies share radio frequencies, which makes eavesdropping, and hectoring, as easy as surfing the airwaves with the twist of a knob.

Another Taliban soldier cut in on the conversation with a high-pitched voice that amused Wakil and his teenage guards, who snickered from the corner where they sat leaning on their AK-47 assault rifles.

“Please, let us speak to our soldiers,” the Taliban soldier said, and the tone was civil if curt. “Why are you calling so many times saying, ‘Talib, Talib, Talib?’ What do you want from the Taliban?”

“The Talib has become a hen,” Wakil said to his men, and they all laughed some more.

Then he asked Zilgai how he was holding up under the airstrikes.

“American fighters come and bomb us,” he replied. “It doesn’t affect us. It’s none of our business. Leave it alone.”

“I just want to make sure other people, villagers, are not being killed. Are they?” Wakil asked, and his eyebrows rose in a mischievous arc.

“It is both of our sides’ problem,” the Taliban commander’s voice came back through the distance. “They came and killed villagers, common people. They can’t kill us [Talibs]. They can’t capture us. They can only kill villagers.”

The two enemies signed off with the same words: “I’m OK. Goodbye,” and Wakil thought about what might come. He could imagine being commander Zilgai’s friend once the war is over, he said, but only if the Taliban soldier swore against any links to countries such as neighboring Pakistan.

The Northern Alliance accuses the Pakistanis of trying to control Afghanistan by using the Taliban as a ruthless proxy. Although Pakistan and the United States say so-called moderate Taliban leaders should be included in a postwar government, longtime Northern Alliance supporters such as Iran, Russia and India insist that is out of the question.

Nahim knows the Taliban as voices that taunt him on good days, and fierce fighters who try to kill him on the worst ones, and he wants to make sure Afghanistan is rid of every last one of them.

“They say to us: ‘You are Americans. That’s why you brought Americans to Afghanistan,” he said as the walkie-talkie hissed in his lap. “We tell them: ‘You are not really for the Afghan people. You are not Muslims. You are terrorists, and we will fight your kingdom until we get rid of it.

“We hate them all,” he said. “Talibs are Talibs.”