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any journalist I know, groups of Soviet or Afghan civilians were never deliberately singled out as targets. Because the mujahidin were innocent of the modern traitof terrorism, they did not inspire the horror and fascination of the car bombers and airplane hijackers, with their black hoods and nihilistic beliefs. The mujahidin, despite their many accomplishments, were not traditionally good subject matter for the media: they were neither complicated nor fanatical. They were the most understated of resistance fighters, and so, after a decade of war, they still had no face.
    What the television images did not translate was that despite their apparent primitiveness, as individuals the mujahidin were easy for a foreigner to talk to and befriend. There was none of the stiffness and forced probing that characterized relationships between Moslems and Westerners elsewhere. Because they had never been colonized, the Afghans didn't have the fears and prejudices toward the West with which other peoples in the Orient are burdened. “After the lowering fanaticism of Meshed [in Iran],” wrote Bruce Chatwin, crossing into the mountains of Afghanistan “was like coming up for air.” In
The Road to Oxiana,
the 1937 classic considered the
Ulysses
of twentieth-century travel writing, Robert Byron, having just arrived from the Middle East, exclaimed about Afghanistan: “Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex.” The Afghans seemed wonderfully straightforward, and journalists and relief workers took to them because in them we saw a stronger, more heroic version of ourselves.
    Sympathizing with guerrilla movements is an occupational hazard of foreign correspondents everywhere, but the Afghans were the first guerrillas whom journalists not only sympathized with but actually looked up to. As romantic and unprofessional as this was, we were not the first Westerners to fall under the spell. Generation after generation of British colonial officials who had fought the Afghans in defense of the Northwest Frontier of British India had learned to admire and identify with their foes. Mountstuart Elphinstone, who led a mission to the court of Afghan ruler Shah Shuja in 1809, noted that the Afghans “have not that indifference to truth, and thatstyle of habitual and gratuitous falsehoods, which astonishes a European … in India and Persia.” Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of the Northwest Frontier, wrote, “For the stranger who had eyes to see and ears to hear, … here was a people who looked him in the face and made him feel he had come home.”
    The British invaded Afghanistan three times, and on each occasion they were driven out. Out of an invasion force of 4,500 that retreated from Kabul in January 1842, only one man was left alive. Never had the British met such a formidable adversary. This forced them to meet the Afghans on an equal plane without a trace of condescension.
    Kipling paid the ultimate tribute to the Afghans in “The Ballad of East and West.” Because of its simple truth and catchy rhythm, the poem's first line,
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet/
‘has become a cliché. But read in its entirety, the ninety-six-line epic tells the story of how a friendship is forged between the son of a British colonel and an Afghan brigand named Kamal, whom the colonel's son was sent to capture.
    They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault.
    They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
    They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
    On the hilt and haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.
    Kipling, whose imperialism is often misunderstood by modern readers, ends the story with this uplifting truth:
    …
there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor
Birth,
    When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
    The poem, which was