A number of years ago a friend of a friend introduced me to an American adventurer who had explored Afghanistan and Pakistan on horseback. His colorful and fascinating story is unlike that of John Walker Lindh, the American Talib currently in the news. This American roamed the steppes of Central Asia searching for solace and thrills rather than take up arms in support of quasi-religious causes.
In the early seventies CuChullaine (pronounced Ka-Kullen) O'Reilly a.k.a. Asadullah Khan followed the beaten hippie path to Afghanistan. He dropped anchor in the northern Afghan City of Mazar-e-Sharif and after living among the Afghans for a few years he converted to Islam. With Afghans he also shared a common passion for horses and proved his equestrian skills by participated in the famous Afghan game of Buz Kashi. He worked as a freelance journalist for some of the western publications and reported on Afghanistan literally from the back of a horse. Had it not been for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he would still be an American nomad living among the Afghans and the world would have been deprived of a fascinating story that I am about to tell you.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, O'Reilly moved to the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar to cover the war and also to teach basic journalism to Afghan refugees under a Boston University program. He fell in love with Peshawar and it was his abiding love for the city that brought us together. It was in Peshawar, a cross between Casablanca and Dodge City, that according to his own account he came across 'the swirling cocktail of turbaned freedom fighters, tight lipped foreign mercenaries, naïve foreign aid workers, cruel Pathan warlords and more spies than ever lurked in Berlin'. It was also from that vantage point that he saw the destruction of Afghanistan and the Afghan society that he loved so much at the hands of the Soviet Union.
He lived in the inner city, wore native clothes, ate the common fare and felt at home with the natives. From Peshawar he forayed into the remote tribal areas of the wild western frontier of Pakistan where honor, deceit, hospitality and religion rule side by side. From the back of a horse he peered into the secretive underworld of prostitution, drugs and guns and came face to face with death on more than one occasion. Once he was almost blown to pieces from a Soviet planted bomb near the Clock Tower in Peshawar City. Asadullah had just left the roadside restaurant when a powerful bomb flattened the building and killed score of bystanders.
He spent months in the notorious Rawalpindi jail waiting trial for his arrest on trumped up charges of heroin possession. The Pakistani narcotic police in order to impress the visiting American drug enforcement officials went in overdrive to prove their efficiency. They planted heroine on him, beat him up and threw him in jail. He was eventually set free by a kindly magistrate who apologized for the terrible mistake and chastised the narcotic police for their conniving and their brutality. At that juncture some of his influential Pakistani friends advised him to get as far away as possible from the grasp of the vengeful narcotic police. He did. And the result was an extraordinary equestrian journey that earned him entry into the prestigious Long Riders Guild, an exclusive fraternity of men and women who have logged more than thousand miles on horseback. He rode out of Peshawar and made the perilous journey to some of the most inaccessible places along the ancient Silk Route snaking through the Malakand, Karakoram and Hindu Kush Mountains in northern Pakistan.
Near Malakand he was mistaken for a Soviet spy and was spared a certain death at the hands of some Afghan zealots by the sudden appearance of a high government official on the scene. In Kafirstan, the land of the infidels, as he lay in a roadside hovel with hepatitis, the owner of the hotel served charged him large sum of money to bury one of his dead horses but instead served the horse at a community meal. Afraid of loosing his life and his meager possessions to the local thieves, he climbed on his remaining horse and escaped. It was a scene reminiscent of arrival in Jalalabad of the sole survivor of the first Anglo-Afghan war in mid-nineteenth century. Just as half dead Dr. William Brydon had entered the camp in Jalalabad clinging to the back of a half-dead horse, our man, Asadullah Khan, also arrived in Chitral unconscious and nearly dead clinging to the back of his faithful horse. He finally reached Gilgit in the remote north and then trekked back to Peshawar following the Indus River.
He has written the account of his interesting but harrowing experiences in an autobiographic novel. Khyber Knights, a 620-page tome, is a gripping account of Asadullah Khan's Pakistani journey. It was recently released by the Long Riders Guild to glowing reviews and can be ordered for $30 from
The unvarnished account of this young American's foray into the secret and forbidding world of Central Asia is a real-life thriller. Once you start the journey with Asadullah Khan, you would not be able to get off until the horseman himself dismounts at the end of his story.