In the Danger Zone (3 page)

The car inches its way through the New Year's Eve traffic of cannibalized, filth-farting buses and knackered, dusty jalopies, and people stare at my white Western face peering out of the big 4×4. I can't tell if they look hostile or just interested – either way it adds to the sense of being way out of my depth.

I eventually make it to the WFP safe house on a backstreet. It's not luxurious, but it has decent machine gun-wielding security so it feels safe. The UN runs lots of these places for their staff, and journalists can stay in them for a small fee. There's a cook who makes basic Western foods (shame), there's satellite telly and even a small swimming pool (currently closed for the winter), but if I had to stay for more than a few nights in these siege conditions, I'd be pretty miserable.

Dining with the Taliban

I'm woken by a series of loud explosions from across the city, and The Fear floods back. I creep down to the dining room where the cook tells me it is just some celebratory explosions for the Afghan New Year. It's fair to say that Afghans like their explosions. It's tempting to make a link between that and the fact that they've experienced centuries of war, but that might be cheeky.

Back out on the road, Basir finds a brand new bad-tempered traffic jam and when we do finally arrive at our destination – a huge patch of muddy land grandly called 'the stadium' – we find that around 20,000 people and 300 horses have beaten us to it, and are busy having a massive fight. An enormous, sweaty melee of horses is gathered in the middle, pushing and shoving, and being whacked with sticks by their riders. Just to add to the confusion, a sandstorm whips up from nowhere, followed by a rainstorm, and the resulting mud is thick and strong.

This is
buzkashi,
the Afghan national game. The rules are brutally simple – anyone who's got a horse can play – you have to pick up the headless corpse of a goat, and drop it in a chalk circle to score a goal. The problem is that all the other 299 horsemen want to stop you, assault you, then rip the corpse out of your hands and score a goal themselves. That's about it. It's utter mayhem, and no one appears to be having a good time, not even the huge audience, who stand with frowns of confusion on their faces. Nobody seems to know who's winning as factions develop in a bid to ambush whoever's carrying the corpse, and then collapse as soon as someone snatches it. It's violent, incomprehensible, ancient and, to Afghan culture, very important.

The favoured garb is trad-bohemian filth, with Russian tank-commander helmets clearly very popular. An ancient chap sporting a blue nylon wig and riding a frail old Rosinante shouts jokes to the audience. He's obviously the court jester. I get caught in a few stampedes so I take refuge on a tiny seating area with some of the sponsors of the game, where I befriend a man who speaks a little English and says that he owns one of the horses that's competing. I ask him who's winning, and he shrugs 'nobody knows'. Is it always like this? 'Yeah.'

I ask him if the corpse gets eaten at the end of the game.

'What a bizarre idea,' he says, before turning back to watch 300 grown men on horseback beat each other up over a headless goat.

Finally there's a goal: a fearsome-looking fellow, resplendent in a purple velour judo outfit, sporting a vast moustache and quarter of a tonne of mud, manages to drop the goat into the circle. I'm told that this is Shamsull Haq, an important local figure. Eventually the final prize is announced: if anyone can get another goal, they will win themselves a new fridge. The entire horde of frenzied competitors turn . . . well . . . more frenzied. That poor bloody goat.

After much fighting, it's announced that everyone's knackered, cold, wet and confused, and no one looks likely to win, so the fridge will be up for grabs tomorrow instead. Shamsull Haq pulls his horse up to where I'm sitting and announces that a) he's in charge of the whole shebang, and b) I will be dining as his guest of honour that night. My sponsor friend suggests that it would be wise for me to accept Mr Haq's offer of dinner instead of his. Marc shakes his head. Bad idea, he mouths.

Nonetheless, and probably against our better judgement, later that night Marc and I draw up at Shamsull Haq's place. Aleem has said that I'll be fine, that he knows this man well, he's a powerful local leader, and in any case when you're a guest in an Afghan's house your safety is their responsibility and they must protect you as though you were family. It goes against everything in the hostile regions training manual, but on balance it seems more dangerous not to go – you don't want to go around offending an Afghan's hospitality.

Shamsull Haq lays on a vast spread for us and 25 of his friends. We sit on the floor around a huge red plastic cloth. Lamb is the only food on offer, and on the way Marc drops a bombshell: he can't eat lamb. Well that's just great! Lamb is pretty much the only meat they eat here, and turning down food is tantamount to betrayal around these parts. Hell, I'd probably shoot you in my own house if you turned down my food.

Shamsull chats for half an hour or so before revealing that he is actually Commander Haq, and was a Taliban commander himself a few years ago. I nearly choke on my lamb. I'm dining with the Taliban.

The Fear washes over me again, and I wonder if we ought to quietly leave before anything bad happens. But everyone's very friendly, including Commander Haq, and it would be more foolish to insult them by leaving. So instead we talk about the pros and cons of crushing repression, beards and burkas. I try to do the journalist thing by pushing him to answer some difficult questions, even though I'm woefully underqualified for this kind of thing. He flatly ignores my questions about women's rights under the Taliban and reminds me that the British were just one of many people who tried to conquer Afghanistan. He says it without malice, and when I apologize on behalf of my countrymen (you're not really supposed to do this, are your) he takes it with good grace.

I ask if he sees me as the enemy. He says no. These days his responsibility is to the people he commands, and he has to try to get along with everyone. 'We can't fight the whole world,' he says ruefully, as though he wouldn't actually mind giving it a bash.

The eating cloth is cleared away and we settle down to play cards. 'Put the camera away,' Haq says, 'betting is
haraam',
(forbidden by God). After playing a few hands we thank everyone for their wonderful hospitality and extremely lamby lamb, and leave. Marc is starving and ready to fall over. I am feeling giddy from this bizarre emotional rollercoaster of a trip, which lurches from terror to comedy without warning. But finally I feel as though I've made a connection with Afghanistan.

On the way back through Masr-i-Sharif we pass the vast, stunning Blue Mosque. Surely a country that can build anything this beautiful can't be beyond hope. On the streets, men are going crazy, dancing and partying – all without the aid of alcohol. I stop occasionally to talk to the dancers, but there's a strong sense of hostility, so I don't hang around. It generally takes about an hour to arrange everything required for a decent abduction, so it's best to move on every 40 minutes.

World Food Programme

In contrast to the feast of the previous night, we visit a World Food Programme plant nursery, where women are offered food in return for work. The UN tries to avoid giving food away as this creates a dependency on aid that can be hard to break, so instead they create jobs within their own projects.

I chat to a woman in a beautiful, finely-pleated, Yves Klein blue burka, who says she finds it very difficult to do weeding in her voluminous tent, but she wants to wear it. 'I'm very shy,' she says. 'I have no education, so I don't like talking to people. But I don't mind talking when I wear the burka.'

Her husband was killed by the Taliban, but she's not entirely sure why. I ask her how she feels about his death. 'I'm sad because I have to bring up the children on my own and there's no one to pay for food.' I ask about her emotions several times, but she always answers with facts, as though revealing an emotional response would be as bad as revealing her face. I ask if it's unfair that women suffer so badly, and men seem to have all the power. She doesn't understand the question – even when I rephrase it several different ways. It doesn't occur to her that things can be any different. She says that if she were literate things would be so much better. Her daughter is married but she is young, so doesn't wear the burka, but when she gets older she will.

She says that under the Taliban women weren't allowed to go out and work or tend crops, even if they were widows like her who had no one else to provide for their family.

'But you'd starve without food.'

'Yes. That didn't matter to the Taliban.'

We wander around a few crumbling rural villages, followed everywhere by hordes of excited, beautiful olive-skinned kids. This is how most Afghans live, with no infrastructure, no jobs, living in houses made of mud, and completely reliant on outside help just to get enough food to eat. The trouble is that from the outside, this poverty is mesmerizing. Cherubic kids in rags, simple lives with basic needs, few material possessions and living close to the land.

From the inside, it's very different, and I'm not sure if anyone in the world really has a simple life and basic needs.

I meet Sabra, a widow with six beautiful, mischievous daughters to look after. They are easily some of the poorest people I've ever met, and they live in a single mud room with two small kitchen rooms beside it. Sabra is lively and talkative and doesn't wear a burka. Unusually for an Afghan woman, she's happy to talk openly to me – she's fully aware of how gruesome her life is, she wants her story told and, crucially, she has no male relatives to beat her for talking to an unknown, unrelated man.

For the first time I ask one of the questions I'm here to ask: What does it feel like to be constantly hungry? To be starving? It's a horrible question, and smacks of poverty tourism, but surely it's more dangerous
not
to know.

Sabra is pleased that I've asked her – no one else ever has. It changes, she says, depending on how scarce food is. Today she's got food from the WFP, but when she can't work, the family goes without and she becomes lethargic, irritable, shaky and miserable. She says that she often lashes out at her kids when she's that desperate. When she says this, the kids all laugh and agree. Sabra is very aware of her poverty, and she laughs when I mention that people in the West sometimes romanticize the simple life of rural peasants.

So what
do
the poorest people in the world eat? Often plain starches. Sabra and her family eat a pathetically small amount of WFP split peas that are boiled to maceration into dhal. It tastes surprisingly good, though not, I suspect, if you eat it every day of your life. She also makes unleavened naan bread using WFP flour in a mud-built tandoor oven that reaches a frighteningly high temperature, having been stoked for three hours using anything she can lay her hands on, including carrier bags, twigs and dried turds.

The naans are dampened with a little water before they are slapped onto the side wall of the oven. In a few minutes they are ready and on the verge of burning, at which point they are slipped off the oven and left to cool.

I taste Sabra's food, but can't bring myself to eat the whole portion that she offers me. It seems wrong for a Western journalist to take food from someone this poor. But she tells me off and I realize that I've done the wrong thing – she is offended by my rejection of her hospitality, and if I am to be able to write about the experience of the Afghan poor, I need to get involved.

Sabra finds life tough, filthy, relentless, tiring and bleak. She hates the food that she has to eat, and both she and the kids yearn for rice and meat. I pull some modelling balloons out of my pocket and make some balloon dogs to amuse them, and as we get ready to leave, I ask Sabra if she thinks her daughters will have a better future. She says she just wants them to be able to go to school. I'm told it's not appropriate to shake hands with her, so I thank her profusely and put my hand on my heart in the Afghan custom. As I leave, I'm a bit of a mess: incensed at the desperate unfairness of her life, and wracked with guilt at being able to hop into a car and leave her behind. I tell myself that I'm here to expose and explain things, not to solve them, but my mood has undeniably darkened.

I set off on a two-day drive heading back to Kabul, passing hundreds of burnt-out Russian tanks on the way. They are
everywhere,
constant reminders of Afghanistan's violent history. We stop at the equivalent of a motorway service station – a row of creaky wooden stalls all selling exactly the same foods at exactly the same prices.

A man hears my voice and angrily accuses me of being American. I tell him I'm British and he roars his approval, produces a hellishly out-of-tune guitar and plays an extraordinary version of All You Need Is Love'. Or at least I think that's what he's playing. Whatever it is, it's great and about 40 men gather around to listen and cheer.

I try sticky dried watermelon that's surprisingly strong and pleasant, the tart dried yoghurt balls, and the huge, sweet, bright yellow sultanas.

That night myself, Marc and Aleem are guests of an Afghan Aid project. We eat another heady dinner of lamb and qabili rice (lamb, lamb fat and rice with a few sultanas) washed down with Coke. I'm grateful for our hosts' hospitality, although the Afghan custom of keeping the TV on during meals is a little odd.

The Hindu Kush

We wake early and our tiny room smells like a sheep's sweaty crotch, so we're happy to leave it and continue our journey south. We reach the Hindu Kush (rough translation: 'Killer of Hindus' – nice). The mountain scenery is stark, brutal and beautiful. We are stuck behind slow-crawling, smoke-spewing lorries and tiny cars that somehow manage to pack 12 people into the back, with the smallest kid on the rear shelf, head bouncing violently against the window as their car hits the frequent potholes.

Just after the mountains, the road suddenly drops to an open plain, and I spot a vast graveyard of tanks, rocket-launchers, Scud missiles and armoured personnel carriers rotting and rusting into the sand. I'm intrigued, so Aleem talks his way past the small group of soldiers guarding it so that we can wander around. It's mainly old Russian hardware, all the dials and directions written in Cyrillic. They must have been miserable machines to live in and terrible to die in. But it's a strangely peaceful place – maybe because these tanks have been decommissioned and their days of fighting are over. But there's also a ghostly, lingering sense of sorrow.