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published in 1889, captures the spirit of the naive and idealized friendships that existed one hundred years later between mujahidin commanders and some extremely brave journalists and relief workers whom I knew in Peshawar.
    Kamal, the hero of Kipling's poem, was more than just an Afghan. He was a Pathan (pronounced “pah-tahn”), as were most of the mujahidin and the Afghans whom the British encountered on the Northwest Frontier. The Pathans are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan (one of every two Afghans is a Pathan) and the largest existent tribal society in the world. They live by a medieval code of honor called Pukhtunwali and have given the country all of its kings and polical leaders. Until recent decades, in fact, “Pathan” and “Afghan” have been synonymous. The Pathans inhabit a huge arc of territory in the eastern, southern, and southwestern part of Afghanistan. They speak Pukhtu, an Aryan tongue that borrows much from Persian and Hindustani, and employs Arabic script. R. T. I. Ridgway, an officer in the British colonial service, described Pukhtu as “a stong virile language, capable of expressing ideas with neatness and accuracy.” Actually, the Pathans prefer to call themselves Pukhtuns, or Pushtuns if they live in southern Afghanistan, where their accent is softer. But the name Pathan, first used by the Indians to describe the Afghans on the Northwest Frontier, has become commonly accepted.
    The origins of the Pathans are shrouded in myth. By various accounts, they are descended from the ancient Hebrews, from an Aryan race called the White Huns, and from the Greek troops of Alexander the Great who passed through Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C. Pathan genealogies read like tracts from the Old Testament. According to one legend, the Pathans are descendants of Afghana, a grandson of the Israelite king Saul, whose ancestors were carried away from Palestineby Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, and planted as colonists in Persia, from where they migrated eastward to present-day Afghanistan. The name Afghana cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible, but many Pathans still believe the story. Even more believe themselves to be Aryans, but all will admit that they are not certain of their own ancestry.
    Almost every one of Afghanistan's twenty-odd ethnic groups took part in the struggle against the Soviets, but it was the Pathans who gave the resistance its mythic, larger-than-life quality, its lack of political pretensions, and its chivalry — as well as its primitiveness, tribal disorder, and recklessness. Only Pathans could have invented a game that requires a man to pick up a butterfly mine and toss it in the air without losing a hand (not all succeeded). Only Pathans could make walking through a minefield a test of manhood.
    The Pathans are a purer, crystallized version of everything that is good and bad in the Afghan character. More than any other single factor, it was their harsh and unforgiving tribal culture, free of subtleties and introspection and unaffected by the modern world, that defeated the mines and other weapons of the Soviet invaders. As the seventeenth-century Pathan poet Khushal Khan Khatak wrote:
    The very name Pukhtun spells honor and glory,
Lacking that honor, what is the Afghan story?

1

Frontier Town
    T HE CEILING FAN rattled like an airplane propeller in the breathless, mud-baked heat of the room, blowing new, crisp 100-afghani notes all over the floor. The money changer in the Peshawar bazaar had handed me the notes in heaps of 10,000. The afghani was devaluing fast. For years already, in one of the CIA's most successful covert operations, millions of counterfeit afghanis had been printed in order to wreck the Kabul regime's economy and allow the mujahidin to buy weapons and ammunition on the open market on the Northwest Frontier. But the CIA program wasn't good enough for the KGB. Near the end of the war the Soviets, needing to handcuff the Afghan economy to their own in