Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

The central government had never provided much in the way of support or services to the 85 percent of Afghans who lived outside of Kabul or other major cities. In the chaos of the Soviet-Afghan War, as this support dwindled to nothing, rural Afghans looked exclusively to their mullahs, village elders, and the mujahideen commanders for protection and governance. With the national economy in ruins, these commanders and their followers turned to the cultivation of opium poppies as their primary source of revenue. By the early 1990s, Afghanistan was well on its way to supplying the lion’s share of the world’s heroin. Although the mujahideen factions continued to regard Najibullah and the DRA as their main enemy, they increasingly began fighting each other for control of the drug trade, and for weapons supplied by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the CIA. Increasingly as well, they appeared to direct their efforts at least as much toward looting and pillaging as liberating their country. In important ways they started to resemble the Latin American drug cartels—except the mujahideen had a much greater penchant for brutality and carried out their depredations in the name of God. With some justification, Western journalists began referring to mujahideen commanders as warlords. Meanwhile, even though the Soviet Army had evacuated the country, the CIA continued to provide the Afghan holy warriors with about $250 million per year as a counterbalance to the billions spent to prop u...