Eight Pieces of Empire (32 page)

When we finally reached the vicinity of the Khanabad air base, we realized the Uzbeks had thrown a “special perimeter” around the “military secret.” It was not possible to get within closer range, but we did have the opportunity to catch sight of a C-17 cargo plane making a landing. We asked one of the police officers standing nearby if there had been many such landings over previous days. “President Karimov has already answered all your questions,” he grunted.

• • •

BEFORE THE AFGHAN
war, foreign reporters were a rarity in Uzbekistan. But part of the improved US-Uzbek ties included loosening strict Uzbek visa requirements for foreigners. With this, a flood of reporters representing virtually every major Western newspaper outlet and TV and radio network poured in. The point was to use the area to cross into Afghanistan and not to cover Uzbekistan itself, which was convenient, as that was the last thing in the world Papa Karimov’s regime wanted.

But the bridge over the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan used by Soviet troops to quit the country in 1987 had been closed for years, and the Uzbeks were resisting reopening it, even for desperately needed United Nations humanitarian supplies—and even though the Taliban were no longer in control of the area on the other side of the river.

So the TV crews and reporters bided their time with stories about little-known Uzbekistan and what life was like there. For me, this included stories of Uzbekistan’s terrifying problem with drug addiction (fueled by its proximity to Afghanistan and use as a transit route for opium); a story about a young man tortured to death (cranial bruises, cigarette burns, bones broken, fingernails extracted) by police because he was suspected of being an Islamist “fundamentalist”; and the yearly forced march into the countryside of an army of state workers and schoolchildren to collect the state cotton harvest.

Running out of story ideas, and becoming impatient in Tashkent’s hotels with Uzbek’s dawdling over opening the closed border, Dima and I rented a taxi and shoved off for the twelve-hour drive to Termez, a formerly closed city on the Afghan border. By midday we were getting hungry, and Dima told me he knew of a special place—an ethnic Korean collective farm that ran its own restaurant.

We sat on the floor of one of the rooms in the collective farm restaurant. Everything was as if it had been directly brought from Korea, with big pillows and a table piled high with kimchee and
bulgogi
. I casually noticed that a very loud dog had been barking behind the building when we arrived and sat down. The barking came to an abrupt end. We were then given big bowls of soup. Dima watched me slurping down the hot, slightly fatty soup a wee bit too carefully.

“Congratulations. You’ve just consumed your first canine cuisine,” he chuckled.

The Uzbeks had sent a lower-level Foreign Ministry official named Ramazan to Termez to deal with the growing horde of journalists gathering in the city. A tiny man of around fifty, Ramazan had a great sense of humor, but absolutely no power to open the border, even though UN pressure to let humanitarian supplies in was mounting. At least we could see Afghanistan on the far bank.

The days spent in Termez were as tedious as the city was dusty beyond description. There was an open-air market selling cheap Chinese clothes and an all-night outdoor area with three or four bars with plastic chairs where old men drank vodka and ate plates piled high with fish and potatoes fried in the local cottonseed oil, which gives off a unique pungent smell that I’ll never forget.

On the second day in the city, we became engulfed in a so-called “Afghan,” or dust storm, kicked up across the river. The storm lasted three days and made it difficult to see your hand in front of your face, or even to open the hotel balcony door for fear of being buried under dust.

The numbers of journalists kept multiplying, and the pressure to get into Afghanistan continued to grow. Apparently in exchange for a bribe, an Uzbek official briefly took a small group of reporters on a short boat ride along the Amu Darya, docking for a few minutes on the other side in Afghanistan so that the reporters could claim an Afghanistan dateline. One of the six reporters on board then bolted, “escaping” into Afghanistani territory and leaving the rest of us seething with envy.

A group of about fifty reporters elected delegates to speak with the Uzbek officials in the city again about getting us into Afghanistan. We were seated behind a long table, one similar to those used for diplomatic discussions. The Uzbeks explained that the border was officially closed and therefore that there were no customs procedures in place for letting us cross, that it would be best if we all returned to Tashkent. I explained that we would not leave Termez unless we got into Afghanistan. I also explained that the intransigence was not good for the country’s image—UN food aid to head off a predicted winter famine was being held up.
Finally, the Uzbeks offered a compromise. Rather than cross the imposing bridge between the two countries, they would agree on a deal to ship us all out of Uzbekistan and over into Afghanistan on a special barge. They warned us we could float away but added we might not be able to float back, no matter what happened on the other side. “You mean we might not be allowed back into the country?” I asked Ramazan. “I’m sorry, I cannot answer that question,” Ramazan said, and smiled. This time I just laughed.

The next day, taciturn customs officials came armed with a card table and an array of stamps and ink pads. They set up the card table in the sand along the riverbank and sat down next to it. We were all allowed to board the barge after having our passports stamped.

We floated up to the other side, where a gaggle of Afghans was waiting for us. We had what we wanted—Afghanistan—within our sights. The Uzbeks had what they wanted—us out of the way. The deluge of stories by international journalists about the repressive nature of their country—torture of government opponents or suspected Islamist insurgents, and the closed, Orwellian nature of the place—was now reduced to a trickle.

AN AFGHAN INTERLUDE

November 25, 2001

O
ur coughing diesel barge–
captained by a Uzbek who jokingly referred to it as “our navy” (being landlocked, Uzbekistan had no “navy”)—slowly chugged up the Amu Darya River toward a landing spot just under the Bridge of Friendship.

The steel rail and road link had been put up by Soviet troops in 1982. The bridge was built to send Soviet fighting men to the fraternal socialist people of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. But its real claim to fame was to become as a way home for the dead, injured, bedraggled, and PTSD’d out Soviet soldiers as the Kremlin exited the country.

The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, ten years and fifty thousand casualties after the first had entered on December 27, 1979, leaving one country, Afghanistan, bombed back to the Stone Age, and leaving the USSR so crippled economically, morally, and financially that it too would end up in the unenviable category of political entities known as “failed states.”

The first Soviet commandos entered Afghanistan to aid the embattled communist ruler Hafizullah Amin, who had deposed the government of fellow Afghan communist Muhammad Taraki, who had gotten rid of the previous prime minister, Muhammad Daoud Khan, by the tried-and-true method of executing Daoud and most of his family in painful ways.
Amin thought he had called on friends, but once under Soviet “protection,” he was in turn murdered by yet another Afghan communist named Babrak Karmal, who would stay in power until the security situation had so deteriorated that he was “democratically” replaced by security chief Mohammad Najibullah in 1986. This last gentleman would remain in power until murdered and mutilated in 1992 with the triumph of the (covert) Saudi/CIA-backed mujahideen, who then morphed into the al-Qaeda-friendly Taliban.

I was not there at the time, nor during the subsequent brutal inter-mujahideen power struggles that eventually resulted in the Taliban’s seizure of power in Kabul and their granting safe haven to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. And thus I am reluctant to comment on the decade or so between the last Soviet soldier’s leaving in early 1989 and the next batch of would-be Afghan tamers when the country once again appeared on the world media radar following the attacks on the World Trade Center (and Pentagon) on September 11, 2001.

But after crossing the churning water of the Amu Darya from now-independent Uzbekistan to our muddy dock in “free” Afghanistan to observe the progress of the US/NATO response to 9/11, I was filled with foreboding that yet another glorious effort to liberate the noble Afghan people from themselves had just begun, and that I was to be a witness to it.

The date was November 25, 2001.

Operation “Enduring Freedom” had been launched on October 7, after a final ultimatum from the White House to the Taliban government in Kabul to turn over Osama bin Laden had been ignored, and bombs began to fall. Indeed, almost all the US firepower was coming from B-52s, F-15s, and other expensive toys; there had been little hand-to-hand fighting to date, and a sense of euphoria was building among the United States and its allies. After all, well into the second month of the war in Afghanistan, the United States had not suffered a single combat death. Not one.

Mazar-e-Sharif, the main city in the north, had fallen from Taliban control to the Afghan-Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum,
and a few days later, the Taliban practically sprinted away from Kabul. Women would be throwing off the burqas! People would play music again! And as for the politics of overthrowing the repressive fundamentalist regime, we were not seeking to impose Soviet Communism on the Afghans but were determined to bring them Western democracy. And in doing so, if we met resistance, we would be careful about not harming civilians, and only kill bad guys. In essence, ours would not be the Russian experience. We would not be forced out ignominiously by a determined resistance, as had the USSR, because we were there to build, not to break. Or so went the logic. In those first weeks and months of war, this was hard to argue with, as the Taliban were barely putting up a fight. A cruel, oppressive, Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship loathed by any thinking person in the country—and indeed, the world—had been removed with extraordinary ease, and that was just plain good, and the facts plain for any eye to see.

WE DOCKED ON
the Afghan side of the brownish gray Amu Darya, a color it absorbed from the area’s moonscapelike relief, which spawned those nonstop dust storms. To say it was a motley crew waiting for us war pilgrims would be an understatement. The welcoming committee, such as it was, consisted of a few Northern Alliance guys wearing nonmatching uniforms and knots of would-be fixers and alleged English speakers (most of whom, as it turned out, spoke little or no English) hoping to land lucrative translating gigs.

War, as they say, is good business—and almost immediately, negotiations began, the biggest selling point seeming to be who could promise better access to General Dostum, the longtime regional strongman in the area who had come back as the Taliban fled.

“Hallo, Meester! You want talk Genril Doostum?”

It was all too easy to be cynical, watching the hustlers at work, aside from one very interesting thing: On the Afghani, southern side of the river, people actually spoke about the war; on the northern, Uzbek side, they did not.

The second thing of interest to me related to the Friendship Bridge. After trying to persuade me in broken or even often incomprehensible English to hire them as guides, it rapidly became apparent that many of the amateur translators spoke Russian—ranging from the profanity-filled street variety accrued from years of interaction and proximity to the Soviet Union, to grammatically correct Russian learned at the USSR’s vast higher-education system—military institutes in Minsk to medical schools in Murmansk. Accordingly, I struck up a conversation with one Bahuladin, a barrel-chested bear of a man who seemed to have a smile permanently stretched on his face. He sported a long salt-and-pepper beard that looked like it had never been cut or combed and was filming our arrival with a cheap Sony Hi8 video camera. But after a few attempts to chat with me in broken English, Bahuladin switched into much better Russian, which caught many of the newly arrived foreign journalists by surprise.

Russian? The language of the Soviet invader?
In fact, I would end up hearing much more Russian in Afghanistan than I ever anticipated, illustrative of how much the empire had penetrated the country in just a few short, bloody years.

We were next herded into an aging bus to get us off the riverbank and closer to our destination—the war, wherever that was. Now knowing that I spoke Russian, Bahuladin sat down next to me. He explained that he had been an actor in the Kabul Theater before the Taliban had banned theatre along with virtually all other forms of entertainment because such distractions were against Islam, according to the Taliban’s rigorous so-called Wahhabi creed. One could have drowned in the details.

Bahuladin was boisterous to the point of being irritating about almost any subject that came to mind, rattling nonstop into my ear the entire drive to Mazar-e-Sharif, which thankfully took only an hour.

PART OF THE
Uzbek claim for not letting us traverse into Afghanistan had been expressed as government “concerns over our safety.” This was ridiculous, but it was the excuse that Ramazan and the other Uzbek bureaucrats
had dreamt up (or more likely ordered to be repeated again and again), and so they pretended to believe in it themselves.

The irony was that on this very day, November 25, one of the bloodiest battles of the entire Afghan war had gotten under way—and just as we were arriving in Mazar-e-Sharif, a city in northern Afghanistan that the Uzbeks actually believed was safe, relatively speaking, because it was controlled by “their man” in Afghanistan, that unpredictable, ever-switching-sides ethnic Uzbek general, Abdul Rashid Dostum.