The Punishment of Virtue (4 page)

Soon, headlights probing, another several dozen trucks drove up—Gul Agha Shirzai's personal contingent—and the militiamen gunned it for the border, Pakistanis before and behind. The herd of trucks thundered through a half dozen police checkpoints along the rough dirt road, Pakistani escorts signing to their colleagues to lower the ropes. When they reached the border, the Pakistanis stopped and pulled aside.

The Afghans' trucks leaped forward, shouldering one another aside on the inky road, passing and being passed in a testosterone-fueled competition. Mahmad Anwar boasts that only he was able to keep up with Shirzai. It was wintertime in the desert night—opposite as negative is to photograph of the withering summer days. “We could hardly move our fingers.” After a while, the former governor stopped and had his men collect some twigs and light a fire. “We didn't even have any weapons yet,” Mahmad Anwar recalled, still dumbfounded at the memory. What kind of an invasion was this, anyway? “And now the Pakistanis knew all about us. I was terrified. I was sure we'd all be killed.” Furious, he strode over to join Gul Agha.

“We agreed not to tell Pakistan about our plans. What happened?”

“We couldn't cross the border without Pakistan's permission,” replied Shirzai.

“We have the Americans with us,” Mahmad Anwar retorted. “What do we need with Pakistan?”

Looking back, Mahmad Anwar thinks Gul Agha Shirzai was putting his fealty on display. He assumes the Pakistani government must have realized by then that its protégés the Taliban were doomed. And, with characteristic versatility, it was already switching its bets. It was maneuvering to get some trusty of its own placed in charge of strategic Kandahar under the new Afghan regime. Gul Agha Shirzai, it seemed, was the man.

A few hours later, the ragtag invasion force reached its staging point just inside Afghanistan. “I couldn't make out what was going on,” Mahmad Anwar remembered. “How could we fight without guns? So I asked Shirzai: ‘Where are we going to get weapons for this fighting?' Shirzai answered, ‘Maybe the Americans will give us some.'”

As if on signal, the fighters sighted a ball of dust spinning toward them across the barren landscape in the pale, rising light. It was a truck. When it pulled up and a press of excited men rolled its tarps back, Mahmad Anwar eyeballed some six hundred brand-new Kalashnikovs and machine guns and grenade launchers—straight from Pakistan. He watched his comrades crowd around the truck like starving men at a food distribution. So this was why Shirzai had been so blasé, he thought.

Throughout the morning, meanwhile, new fighters were drifting in to join the force. Among them was Zabit Akrem.

A year and a half later, when I was fitting the pieces of this story together, realizing how much of it I had gotten wrong in my reporting at the time, I asked Akrem for his version. “Could I have an interview?” I said, with teasing deference—in other words, not one of our usual comparisons of notes between co-conspirators. He invited me to come by his house around four in the afternoon, when he had some quiet time. It was July, hot beyond imagination. Most of Kandahar was still asleep, the afternoon's leaden torpor not yet broken. I joined Akrem at his silent house, and, as he spread himself comfortably on his side, leaning one arm on a carpet-covered cushion, I flipped back the cover of a new notebook, bought especially for the purpose.

Akrem recalled the truckload of weapons that had arrived the same morning he did, confirming Mahmad Anwar's estimate of six hundred automatic rifles, plus sixty to a hundred rocket launchers. “I asked Gul Agha where he got them; they were not the kind you find in the bazaar. He said the Americans had given them to him.”

A second weapons delivery came about a week after Akrem joined the force. “They told us to build fires to guide the plane,” he said, grimacing at the strenuous nighttime hike. The airdrop included heavy machine guns, ammunition, and food—cases of standard-issue MREs (meals ready to eat) sealed in heavy, dun-colored plastic. You have to open up the outside envelope, pour about two fingers of water in, and lean it up against a rock to let the chemical heat warm the food. Whether the Afghans figured that out is anyone's guess.

In any case, they got a tutorial the next day. Two U.S. helicopters angled noisily at them and, touching down in a blizzard of dust and stones, deposited a half dozen Special Forces soldiers near the Afghan encampment. The Americans set up their sophisticated communications devices on the hoods of some trucks Gul Agha provided, all stems and antennas like a daddy longlegs.

The next day, this patchwork anti-Taliban force struck out toward the main road to Kandahar. The plan was to cut the Taliban's supply lines.

Circling overhead—droning away, then tipping to circle back, in maddening figure eights like flies—two U.S. jets followed the force. The sound reassured the Afghans, with its promise of overpowering backup. But it also emphasized the danger of their position as their convoy picked its way along a stony track.

“We were really scared.” An unadulterated admission. “We thought the Taliban would kill us any second.”

But apart from the noise of the planes—mosquito whines in a lower register—silence. At sundown, a moment of chest-constricting peace in that desert, when the slanting light paints the hills in burnished gold, the militiamen stopped at a stream to wash and pray.

And then the moment shattered like exploding glass. The stuttering bark of automatic weapons ripped the air, the sound ricocheting against the rocks, amplified a thousand times. The men scattered from the stream. They dove for cover. Stony splinters shot past them; the whine of deflected bullets lanced their ears. And this irreligious attack was not all they had to deal with: another group of Taliban fighters was closing in behind.

“The American soldiers told us they had heard some phone calls on the Taliban's satellite, and they were after us,” recalled Akrem. “The Americans said their friends in the planes would try to bomb them.”

The Special Forces soldiers struggled to bring some order to their proxies' pell-mell retreat.

The droning bombers did manage to get a bead; they let loose, blowing up some seven trucks, Akrem estimated. And that settled the fight. The anti-Taliban militia captured a heavy gunand twenty prisoners. But the next day, Shirzai let the Taliban captives go, even giving them some money to speed them on their way. Hamid Karzai did the same thing, say men who were with him on the far side of Kandahar, in the mountains to the north. Asked why, the fighters shrug their shoulders, disapproval manifest, if unspoken.

Perhaps the leniency was aimed at postwar reconciliation, making a distinction between the Taliban rank and file—conscripted boy soldiers, mostly—and the leaders of the movement. Maybe it indicated that the lines separating the opposing camps were not traced as sharply as they were in the mind's eye of Western observers.

The next day, the fighters reached the main road, at a strategic pass. They were alone, unopposed. Celebrating their fortune, they began deploying in the hills above, when a car approached, a single Arab at the wheel. “He thought we were Taliban, and when he realized his mistake, he started shooting,” Akrem recounted. “But we caught him and tied his hands.” Half an hour later, a second vehicle drew up, guns blazing. Its occupants were shot to pieces inside the death trap they were driving.

After that, for fully three weeks, Akrem said, “not a single Talib, by God, did we see.”

Mahmad Anwar remembers the same thing. “There was no fighting at all,” he confesses. “The Americans did everything.” After the one skirmish by the brook, the Americans laid down the rule: “‘From now on, don't you move without our order.' We didn't kill a single person with a gun,” Mahmad Anwar swears, innocently. Indeed, he remembers a rather embarrassing exchange with some of the U.S. Special Forces soldiers after they all had reached Kandahar. “So,” he remembers boasting to the American troops. “We brought you to Kandahar at last.”

“What are you talking about,” the U.S. soldiers retorted. “We brought
you
to Kandahar.”

I must say I blushed to hear these revelations after the fact.

Being a journalist, even one of good faith, is always an exercise in approximation. There is just not enough time, at least in radio, to be sure you got it right.
Morning Edition
has a four-and-a-half-minute hole in tomorrow's show. You have to come up with something by the end of the day, almost anything. So you charge around talking to as many people as you can lay hands on in the closing window of time. You sort through the suspected manipulations. You work to put a story together that adds something, and feels plausible—given what you've been told and what you think of the people who did the telling. And, when in doubt, you stick close by your colleagues. It is the safest course, and it is the course your editors feel comfortable with. That stuff about scoops was never my experience. NPR, at best, strives to add a new angle or some needed depth to a story someone else has broken. My editors never really wanted me to do the breaking. They never liked having me out on a limb.

But Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time. It takes a long time to learn to read the signs, to learn how to discover behind people's words a piece of the truth they dissemble—to begin to grasp the underlying pattern.

Like other journalists that November of 2001, I reported frequent fighting between the Taliban and Gul Agha Shirzai's militia, the two sides, for example, “battling for control of the main road to Kandahar.”
³
I told of the strategic pass changing hands;
⁴
I told how, by contrast, the forces under Hamid Karzai “negotiated—not fought—their way toward the Kandahar from the north.”
⁵
The military pressure that Shirzai's group was exerting from the other side, to help accelerate Karzai's negotiations, seemed at least partially to warrant the friendship that developed between the warlord and his American patrons.

But the whole picture was false. This din of battle was an illusion that both elements of the anti-Taliban alliance south of Kandahar wanted conveyed—the Americans to demonstrate the strength of the local resistance to the fundamentalist militia and Gul Agha Shirzai, displaying a brilliant flair for the value of PR, to “gain prestige,” as Akrem put it. “Gul Agha kept saying there were battles,” he told me. But
“Hitz jang nawa.”
(There was zero fighting.) The ruse would repay Shirzai handsomely in the months to come.

And I, like so many other reporters, fell for it.

NOVEMBER 2001

D
URING ALL THIS TIME
, my colleagues and I, at least a hundred strong, were stuck in Quetta. While Akrem was picking his way with Shirzai's force toward Kandahar from the south or was dug in among the rocks overlooking the main road, while Karzai's people were approaching the city from the north, “reasoning” with tribal elders along the way, we foreign journalists lived in the marble-clad luxury of the Quetta Serena Hotel, under the close and many-eyed scrutiny of the Pakistani intelligence agency.

From that remove, by way of the unverifiable and sometimes disjointed accounts of Afghans fleeing the bombing, and pronouncements by members of the exiled Afghan elite, we struggled for purchase. We fought to glean some sense of what was going on in Kandahar. How did it look, how did it feel, to be living the last days of the outlandish and now doomed Taliban regime?

Missing from the harlequin Quetta scene were any visible representatives of the country that was making all this happen: the United States. When once I tried to get some input from the Pentagon for a story, I received a curt editorial knuckle rapping. NPR had plenty of correspondents in the Pentagon, I was informed. I was to do the Quetta story. And so I operated in a strange kind of bubble: isolated from the gripping events unwinding across the border in Kandahar, and just as cut off from the prevailing American understanding of those events. I had no idea what kind of spin they were being given back home. And so I had no idea whether, and to what extent, my reporting clashed.

Yet it clearly came as an unpleasant surprise when the November 13 capture of Kabul by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance did not automatically equate to the fall of the Taliban regime. Washington, like Moscow before it, had apparently mistaken the trappings of the Afghan state for Afghanistan itself. But the two are separate.

In the excitement of the day that saw jubilant Northern Alliance fighters pouring into Kabul, I, too, parroted the received prognostications that Kandahar would go down “within twenty-four hours.” I quickly had to revise that prediction.

Abandoning token Kabul, the Taliban fell back on what had always been their true capital, Kandahar. And they stopped there for a moment, suspended, as the BBC's Adam Brookes and I began reporting almost immediately—and as I was to fully understand the minute I made the trip from Quetta up to Chaman on the Afghan border.

It was an ordeal to get there. The Pakistani government imposed police-state conditions on journalists. Before leaving our opulent digs at the Serena, we were required to make room in our vehicles for a police “guard” whose job was not so much to protect us as to report to his superiors on where we had been. The hotel crawled with Pakistani intelligence agents, many of whom landed jobs as our interpreters.

Each time we wanted to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip up the switch backing road to Chaman, we were required to submit an application to the Home Office, the equivalent of the provincial interior ministry, for an “NOC”: a no-opposition certificate, I think it meant. Each such application—even if we had just submitted one the previous day—had to be accompanied by a formal request on letterhead, photocopies of our passport picture and visa pages, and sign-offs by at least two different administrative offices.

Once all these formalities were accomplished and authorization was duly received, we and our assorted drivers and guides and interpreters were only permitted to travel to Chaman in a convoy, escorted by several vehicles of ISI intelligence officers, who, radios in hand, would herd us to the border crossing and hover over us as we worked. The convoy lumbered out the hotel gates sometime between 10:00 and 11:00
A.M
. I knew from local taxi drivers that the busy time for border crossing was around eight in the morning.

My aversion to pack journalism was such that I avoided these guided tours, doing most of my work in Quetta among the Afghan refugees there. Still, after the fall of Kabul, a trip to Chaman was mandatory. Indeed, I ended up spending much of my time there in the three weeks or so that remained until Kandahar finally succumbed on December 6, 2001. I even managed to evade the ISI and spend a few nights up there.

True to the lawlessness of the two countries that meet at its gates, Chaman, Pakistan, is the archetype of a frontier town. It is like a seashore under a menacing cloud, its life defined by the incessant tide of travelers, traders, laborers, refugees, soldiers, scavengers, scholars, spies, trucks piled with crates or sacks of wheat, scrap metal, smuggled electronic goods, contraband, dust, rumors, and news that sweeps back and forth across the border each day. The time I spent there in late November 2001, real clouds gathered for the first time in months, and a warm wind filled the air with blinding dust. Everyone had his shawl pulled tight across his face, crossed over his mouth in a perfect V.

It was Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. Hungry believers obsess about food, and the roads were an indescribable crush of carts bearing mounds of oranges, dates, big lumps of caramelized sugar, raisins, long, mild white radishes, pomegranates, but also socks, shirts, and other sundries, and men walking in their gorgeously embroidered shawls or crowding around the fry stalls cooking up Ramadan delicacies. It could take fifteen minutes to drive three hundred yards. Once, a hobbled donkey was planted in the middle of the road, making an even more inextricable tangle of the traffic. No one seemed overly troubled. Amid my young interpreter's stricken cries (“No, Sarah, get back in the car!”), I hopped out and began to drag the creature bodily to the curb, to the hilarity of onlookers. They came and “helped” by delivering thudding blows to its rear end. We circled past ten minutes later and they were still kicking the poor donkey.

The way to talk to travelers, unfortunately, was to stand by the border gate—a bar across the road—and try to snag them on their way past, walking beside them as they hustled along, exchanging greetings and begging them to stop for a moment and give some news about the situation in Kandahar. This under the eyes of the border police, who invariably hovered and tried to listen. But seeing me often there alone after I had begun overnighting in Chaman, the officers warmed to me a little and helped by swatting away the clouds of barefoot young adolescents who made the job a trial. On one occasion, a rather older adolescent made a specialty of slipping behind me in the crowd and touching my ass, looking innocently away when I whipped around. The third time he did it I warned him, wagging a finger; the fourth time, I hauled off and slugged him.

It was in Chaman that I made a decision that people have asked me about ever since. I began to dress in the traditional clothing worn by Afghan men: vast trousers gathered at the waist with a woven belt, a flowing calf-length tunic of the same fabric, and a large shawl, embroidered at both ends, wrapped around the upper body, draping to a point between the heels. The decision was based on a rudimentary notion of optics, nothing more sinister.

Before leaving Islamabad for Quetta in October, I had some Pakistani women's clothes made up in the bazaar. The outfit is similar, but more closely tailored and done in bright colors. This is what I wore while reporting in Quetta. But Chaman, a mere two-hour drive away, on the border with Afghanistan, was in reality very distant indeed. There was not a single woman to be seen on the streets, let alone one without a burka, that ghostlike, powder-blue garment the Taliban made famous.
¹
My—to Chamani eyes—garishly bright Quetta clothes were the textile equivalent of flashing neon lights. People would rush to flock round me from a hundred yards away when they spied me stepping out of my car. It made for difficult reporting, not to mention psychological discomfort. So I considered: What were my choices? I could wear a
burqa.
Fat chance. I could give up the effort altogether and don Western garb. That would not solve the problem, since there were no more Westerners in Chaman than there were women. Cargo pants and a parka would draw gawkers to me just the same.

I remembered the principle of optics: that the human eye does not actually see everything the brain registers; it only picks up most of the visual data, and the brain, trained, connects the dots. I decided to go for the optical illusion. If I wore men's clothes, I figured, then idle observers, from a distance anyway, would “see” me as the man they expected and leave me alone. It worked, more or less, and I could get on with my job.

Every kind of person was crossing that border those November days—from children trudging to and from jobs on the “auto mile” across the Afghan border in Spin Boldak, or other children, their faces painted with a foundation of desert dust and their eyes lined with kohl to protect against it, who guided donkey carts of scrap metal along desert tracks well away from the main road; or wood gatherers driving tractors loaded with towers of brush from in the faraway Rigistan Desert, which stretches from Kandahar to the Iranian border; to neatly tricked out Taliban, who did not bother to disguise their affiliations to the Pakistani Frontier Guards, who never asked them questions; to the latest representatives of the region's ever-present transit traders: truck drivers, sitting on the bumpers of their riotously decorated vehicles, waiting to be checked in by customs officers. I wanted to evoke a picture of these trucks in one story, so I squatted down to jingle the ornaments that hung about the skirts of one of them, with microphone cocked to catch the sound. The drivers found this behavior exceedingly peculiar, even in a foreigner—that infinitely peculiar breed.

Kandahar, as the various cross-border travelers described it in late November 2001, was still firmly in the Taliban's grip. But tension was rising. It seemed the “Arab Taliban,” as Kandaharis dubbed Al-Qaeda members, were growing nervous and tightening their direct control over the town. There was a strict curfew, and by sundown each day they would take over the main checkpoints themselves. The Arabs had begun to mistrust their Taliban hosts, some of whom were now negotiating Kandahar's surrender. The drivers told about probing searches, the Arabs literally turning people's pockets inside out. A man who was caught with a satellite phone was ostentatiously hung in the middle of town. The Al-Qaeda fighters swabbed dirt on their trademark Toyota four-wheel drive pickup trucks as camouflage for runs into the desert, where they would spend the nights for safety. But they were still arrogantly cruising around in those trucks.

In other words, though the end was inevitable, I could no longer report that it was imminent. I tried to depict the complexity of the situation, with alternating negotiations between Taliban leaders and Karzai's representatives for the bloodless surrender of Kandahar, and military posturing by the American proxy forces deployed on either side of the city—the whole punctuated by the deafening, implacable message of the U.S. bombing.

This was when I first encountered Mahmad Anwar, sitting with some of his men behind the darkened windows of a public call office. They were Achekzais—hard-swearing, ill-famed rogues who dominate the border area and its attendant opportunities for a thousand forms of smuggling. With an ancestral feeling for their territory predating any international boundary, members of the Achekzai tribe move easily between their fiefdoms of Chaman, Pakistan, and its sister town across the border, Spin Boldak, Afghanistan. They are known as people with no loyalty, except maybe to themselves.

Tribal epithets like this were entering even my vocabulary by then. I kept hearing them, so it was hard to miss how key such labels were to the way most southern Afghans defined each other, even if they denied the fact. I would sit around in my Serena hotel room, trading jokes with my driver and cousins or friends of his in what developed into an evening tea ritual, and I discovered I could make the guys laugh—and warm up to me—with self-deprecating comments, playing on the tribal stereotypes. Then and there I decided to bone up on the tribes.

They were an intimidating lot, the Achekzai fighters lounging in the neighborhood public call office, sporting characteristic hooked noses and great mats of hair. And yet they welcomed me kindly—and were having difficulty removing the smiles from their faces. This, more than any other sign, foretold the end of the Taliban for my driver and interpreter. “These people were afraid to
breathe
around here three months ago,” my young interpreter exclaimed. One of the fiercest looking of the lot, with wild black hair and beard, kept bringing a little bouquet of flowers up to his positively ferocious nose. A picture out of a Persian miniature.

I think I amused these Achekzai fighters with my unabashed persistence—once picking my way all the way to Mahmad Anwar's house on Chaman's frayed, baked-mud edges. They became my chief informants. They gave me the satellite numbers of their commanders in the field, whom I would call from Quetta, and who, it is true, often led me astray with tales of fierce fighting. After announcing ultimatums before a threatened battle to the death, they would inform me that their absolute final deadline for the surrender of nearby Spin Boldak had just been delayed for yet another twenty-four hours. “Some tribal elders reasoned with us, saying we should do things differently this time,” Mahmad Anwar would explain. “For the past twenty-three years Afghanistan has been destroyed by war, and too many people were killed. We don't want to repeat this mistake. That's why we keep changing our minds and putting off our deadline.”

Trying to make sense of these things—the bewildering oscillation between ferocity and patience—I emphasized in my stories the Pashtun penchant for negotiation. For I had a tutor. My other main source of information during that month of November was Hamid Karzai's sharp-eyed uncle, Aziz Khan.