Afghan Army

The Afghan Army is depicted as a military force operating alongside Russian forces in Afghanistan during the campaign to capture Habib Abdur Rahman. Its role in the mountain fighting is defined less by a clear account of its command or organization than by the dangers of operating amid competing forces, uncertain identifications, and rapidly shifting attacks. In Lin’s account, Afghan soldiers fire on the escaping group; later, he learns that the battle’s opening and the pursuit of Habib’s captors had become entangled with Ahmed Shah Massoud’s planned assault. The resulting friendly fire makes the Afghan Army’s appearance a study in the confusion and human cost of war rather than a portrait of the institution as a whole.

Role in the hunt for Habib

In the Shar-i-Safa Mountains, a force of Russian and Afghan soldiers surrounds the mountain where Lin and his companions are caught. The force is described as approaching the size of a company and probably led by a captain. Its objective is to capture and kill Habib, for whose arrest a substantial reward has been posted. The account also stresses that the pursuit is driven by more than the reward: Habib’s atrocities have made his capture intensely personal to the soldiers searching for him.

The force’s concentration on Habib leaves it vulnerable to an attack it does not detect. Ahmed Shah Massoud’s forces are advancing stealthily while the Russians and Afghans search the mountain. When Lin’s group attempts to escape, they act on Habib’s information that most of the surrounding troops are occupied with laying mines and other traps on the mountain’s far side. The enemy camp appears deserted, but sentries there open fire. Lin later understands that the shots were wild and undisciplined, possibly because the sentries believed Habib himself was approaching. Their firing helps precipitate the attack already being planned by Ahmed Shah Massoud’s forces.

Fire during the escape

The Afghan Army’s most direct action in the scene is also its most disorienting. During the escape down the mountain, Afghan soldiers shoot at Lin’s group. Lin initially learns from the survivors that everyone was firing at once: the Afghan Army was shooting at them, while mortars that struck their line were believed to have come from their own side. The distinction between incoming enemy fire and friendly fire is therefore uncertain to those caught in the fighting, even as they are trying to get off the mountain.

The later reconstruction clarifies the chain of events without making the violence purposeful on every side. The first shots from the enemy camp are mistaken for a pre-emptive Russian attack by Ahmed Shah Massoud’s forces, who respond with mortars. The explosions Lin had taken for successful strikes on the enemy positions were, in fact, direct hits by Massoud’s mortars; the wider mortar strikes tearing into Lin’s line are identified as accidental friendly fire. The Afghan Army is thus part of a battle in which forces fighting the same larger enemy cannot reliably distinguish one another. The narrative does not attribute the mistaken fire to a deliberate decision by the Afghan soldiers.

After Lin’s group falls, Ahmed Shah Massoud’s men pursue the fleeing enemy around the mountain and encounter a returning company of minelayers. The ensuing battle is described as a massacre; none of the force sent to capture Habib survives. The account places the Afghan soldiers within that defeated force, but does not specify individual casualties or separate the Afghan and Russian losses. Their fate is conveyed as part of the destruction of the operation as a whole.

Historical Afghan resistance

The account also invokes an earlier conflict as Khader Khan recounts the Second Anglo-Afghan War from the mountain camp. In June, Prince Ayub Khan announces a jihad against the British and leaves Herat with ten thousand men. Khader identifies Ayub as an ancestor and says that many of his own kinsmen served in the army Ayub raised. This episode concerns an earlier Afghan force, not the contemporary Afghan Army pursuing Habib; the narrative offers no basis for treating the two as one continuous organization.

At Maiwand, Ayub’s army meets a British and Indian force of fifteen hundred soldiers led out of Kandahar by Burrows. The battle brings the armies into close-range fighting and causes severe losses. The Afghans lose two thousand five hundred men, but win, forcing the British to retreat to Kandahar; Ayub then surrounds the city, beginning its siege. Khader’s account connects Afghan resistance to the landscape the characters can see and to family memory, setting the contemporary fighting against an earlier struggle over the same country. It gives the Afghan soldiers a history of both victory and immense loss, without making that past a simple explanation for the present battle.

Narrative significance and limits

The two military episodes show different dimensions of Afghan armed resistance. At Maiwand, the Afghan force fights an identifiable British and Indian army and wins despite heavy losses. In the Shar-i-Safa Mountains, the Afghan Army is embedded in a confused pursuit involving Russian forces, Habib, and Ahmed Shah Massoud’s advancing men; its soldiers’ fire contributes to the dangers faced by Lin’s party, while friendly fire also strikes their side. The contrast prevents the later battle from being reduced to a straightforward contest between clearly separated armies.

The Afghan Army remains a collective presence rather than a developed cast of individual characters. The narrative identifies its participation in the encirclement, the firing during the escape, and the force’s eventual destruction, but gives no names for its soldiers or detailed account of its internal structure. Through that limited perspective, the institution’s significance lies in the consequences of military entanglement: a mission focused on capturing one man is overtaken by an attack, mistaken signals, and fire from forces that cannot reliably recognize one another.