Magic Bus (16 page)

I try to explain to them the West's long struggle against communism and how the
mujaheddin
contributed to the collapse of the USSR. And why, to this end, in 1988 Washington supported the formation of the anti-Soviet quasi-independent terrorist cells
which later became al-Qaeda. But I can offer no explanation for the subsequent, myopic betrayal of Afghanistan. If, in 1989, the United States had looked beyond the short term and supported the forces working for a multiethnic government, then the radicals – the Taliban – could not have seized power in Kabul. Osama bin Laden would have been denied a base – al-Qaeda means ‘the base' – from which to attack America.

‘What business do Americans have in our fields?' blurts the bicycle repairman. ‘The Americans are the terrorists. We are on our knees but where is their humility?'

‘Why do you think America attacked Afghanistan?' I ask them.

‘To steal our oil.'

‘To take our gold and diamonds.'

‘To destroy Islam.'

No one mentions the Sunni Taliban's murder of thousands of ethnic Shia Hazara, the public executions for adultery, the destruction of the giant statues of Buddha at Bamiyan. No one mentions 9/11.

‘What of bin Laden's attack on America?' I ask, the event in 2001 which reminded Washington of Afghanistan's existence.

‘We have heard that some of his men bombed a five-storey building,' shrugs the white beard. ‘I do not believe it is true.'

‘It is true,' I tell them. ‘Almost three thousand people were killed.'

‘Against the millions we have lost.'

‘But it is not Islamic to kill innocents,' I say.

‘It is the will of Allah and the word of the Prophet, peace be upon him, that we defend ourselves,' says the round-faced joker, cracking his fingers. He speaks slowly, softly, now without a smile. ‘The Soviets bombed our land so hard that I don't know if anything will grow ever again.' As he speaks he touches his heart. ‘Then America promised to bring us peace, promised to rebuild our country. Tell me one place where they have built a factory? Tell me one place where I can find work?' His voice breaks with emotion. ‘I went to Kabul last month, in secret, just to look. I could not rent a shop there with Afghan money. Some taxis
accepted only dollars. How can I not now fight for my country, my faith? Do God's work?' He bites his lip, falls silent, shakes with such violence that he cannot unwrap a foil-wrapped sweet.

‘We are injured – both our souls and bodies are injured – and now America is pouring salt in the wounds.'

I try to assure them that the West does not want to ‘destroy Islam', that many Americans – and most Europeans – were against the war.

‘We have been lectured that Western countries are democratic. We consider your people to be behind their governments. If they weren't, they would have stopped the invasion.'

‘If any occupier comes to our country, it is our right to kill him. We do not differentiate any more between Americans and Russians.'

‘Americans have the watches,' says the joker, not looking up from his glass, ‘but the Taliban have the time.'

The arrival of more tea eases the tension. The white beard asks how many children I have. Conversation turns to marriages and the distribution of food aid. The bicycle repairman twirls his turquoise-blue prayer beads. We pass around the boiled sweets. I ask if – after a generation of war – the men can imagine their country at peace.

‘When the invaders forget about us again,' says the white beard, ‘then we will rebuild our Afghanistan.'

‘As a fundamental Islamic state?' I ask. ‘Without the possibility of diversity?'

‘
Inshallah
.' If God wills it.

The raisin-cleaner indicates that it is time for me to leave. I thank the elders for the privilege of the meeting. I promise to relay their stories. The white beard recites a short prayer, his palms turned upward to heaven, then rubs his hand down his face as if to wipe away sin. Each man shakes my hand. The joker pauses beside me, closing both his hands around mine, touching his heart again.

‘Stay for dinner, my brother,' he says to me. ‘We will split open a lamb.'

I doubt any of them own livestock.

‘Mountains do not come to other mountains but man can come to man.'

On the walk back to the road, the raisin-cleaner, Kalashnikov hoisted again on his shoulder, says, ‘Those men have led a difficult, holy life.' After a few steps, he adds, ‘When I was a child we had a sheep. Life was good.'

A sweltering heat shimmers over the broken earth. In the distance, a bulldozer flattens another clay wall. Reams of torn plastic sheeting – printed with the words ‘Gift of People of the United Kingdom' and ‘USAID' – drift in the breeze.

In the 1960s, the Family of Man – in flowing turbans, gaily striped
chapans
and embroidered dresses – streamed through Afghanistan's crossroads. School girls in white scarves swept by sweet-smelling
mullahs
and ponytailed Cockneys in stinking Afghan coats. Donkey caravans and camper vans wound between carts of apricots and wads of money-changers. Handmade kites soared above the haze of hash shops. Travellers thickened the air with rollie smoke and road news. French couples lingered over onion omelettes in crammed, cupboard-sized Chicken Street eateries. Americans sidestepped the lean boys waiting outside the Kabul AmEx office. ‘Hotel, my friend?' they asked, taking hold of a hand. ‘Tourist's hotel?' A Dutchman – no one knew his name – lived on an abandoned bus teaching himself medical Dari. His dream was to become a doctor, to build a mobile hospital and to distribute free health care. Sandals, Hush Puppies and bare, hardened soles stepped out of the desert and towards the Himalayas. The proud, medieval, easygoing country got under everyone's skin.

Forty years on, the US State Department advises Americans that ‘travel in all areas is unsafe due to military operations, landmines, banditry, armed rivalry among political and tribal groups, and the possibility of terrorist attacks.' In recent months, there have been rocket killings, a suicide car bombing of ISAF peacekeepers and the murders of a dozen aid workers. The British FCO warns that ‘the security situation remains serious and the threat to Westerners is high.' Australians are told to hire ‘permanent armed protection'. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs states plainly that ‘Canadians should not travel to Afghanistan. Canadians in Afghanistan should leave.' At the lower end of the Richter Scale, it points out that homosexuality is illegal and that ‘traffic laws are non-existent or not enforced.' It also advises against travelling after dark.

I never expected Herat to be as safe as Ottawa because Afghanistan's history is one of invasion, subversion and bloody pipe-dreams. Its geography has made it the battlefield and graveyard of empires. Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Mongols and the British tramped through this place in-between. In 1898, Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, wrote that Afghanistan, Transcaspia and Persia were ‘the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world'. The country buffered British India from Russian expansion. The Soviets invaded to tighten their grip on the region. Pakistan, pursuing its own agenda, worked throughout the 1980s to make Afghanistan its client state. The first salvos of the ‘war on terror' were fired from the Hindu Kush where al-Qaeda hijackers began training to attack New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now, America is in town.

At first,
Pax Americana
promised to bring stability to the region. In the
Economist
and
New Republic
, political analysts wrote of a turning-point – much like the fall of the Berlin Wall – in the battle of ideas, in defence of the open and tolerant against totalitarian ideologies, both religious and secular. A month ago in Turkey, I had met two Belgian travellers following the overland trail from east to west. They'd crossed Afghanistan by bus, drunk tea with former
mujaheddin
gunmen and slept in villagers' houses. Along the road they met only kindness, as I did with the Pashtun white beards. But not long after the Belgians had crossed into Iran, the reclusive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, dressing up his political ambition in religious garments, called for attacks on Westerners and charities.

‘Oh Muslims, know the enemies of your religion – the Jews and Christians, America, Britain, the UN and all Western aid groups are the greatest enemies of Islam and humanity.'

Black-turbanned guerrillas then started attacking UN mineclearers. An Italian journalist was ambushed and shot dead near Kandahar. Local administrators were dismembered ‘for collaborating with the US military and Hamid Karzai's puppet regime'. According to some (including the late travel writer Bruce Chatwin), Afghanistan's long slide into anarchy had begun not with the Soviet invasion, or even the communist coup, but with the
pony-tailed, peace-loving hippies who drove ‘educated Afghans into the arms of the Marxists'.

I'm thinking these thoughts whilst standing at the roadside outside the camp. My driver has vanished, so I'm on my own in the land of legendary hospitality and ten million landmines. I'm counting on a passing Toyota HiAce taking me back to Herat. Then, something small and hard strikes me on the back. I think the worst. Hit the dirt. Roll into a ditch. Look up at the towering silhouette of a man – carrying a golf club on his shoulder.

‘Aren't you supposed to shout “Fore!”' I say.

‘Surprise attack,' he replies.

He's about thirty-five years old, with Atlantic-blue eyes, a solid Mount Rushmore nose and a taste for unorthodox spots to practise his golf swing.

‘You look like you need a ride,' he says, picking up the offending ball and gesturing at the white LandCruiser pulling up on the opposite side of the road. ‘Just shove my stuff out of the way.'

The softly spoken American has a firm handshake, broad shoulders and Callaway clubs. His Cobra shades are pushed up his high, almost precipitous, forehead. His driver – hard-eyed, hazel-skinned and cleanshaven – turns around and introduces himself. ‘Hi, I'm Rashid.'

‘Jim,' says the American. ‘Sunny Jim.'

I make room on the back seat. Jim's ‘stuff', scattered like so many road-trip burger boxes, includes two laptops, a satellite phone and dozens of rolled Russian charts. I wonder who's more out of place here? I try to guess what
they're
doing. Mine-clearance? Surveys? Golf enthusiasts ready to call in an American air strike?

‘I'm a geologist,' says Jim.

‘Looking for…?'

‘Oil, man. Welcome to the Wild East.'

Rashid hits the gas. Maslakh is left behind in a dust cloud. I'm learning that Afghanistan lends itself to coincidences.

I'd read about the Caspian energy reserves, the last, great untapped fossil-fuel resource, second only to Saudi Arabia's in size. Between 1880 and 1910, the Rockefeller, Rothschild and Nobel
families made fortunes there. In the Second World War, Caspian oil fuelled the Red Army, and Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, was the decisive prize that Hitler failed to capture. As OPEC extends its dominance of the market, America is racing to diversify its sources of energy. The new BTC pipeline, which I drove alongside in eastern Turkey, will ease its reliance on the Gulf. A million barrels of crude will be pumped from the Caspian each day, into tankers on the Mediterranean and then US gas-guzzlers. A second pipeline has been proposed by Union Oil of California – along with the Japanese and Argentinians – to run across Afghanistan to Pakistan and the sea. In this last oil-rush, government geologists like Jim are picking over the ancient steppe, backed up by US Special Forces in Kyrgyzstan, Green Berets in Georgia and the 2nd Battalion, Royal Anglian Regiment in Jowzjan province.

‘I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian,' said Dick Cheney in 1998, then CEO of the oil-supply corporation Halliburton. Two years later, he became America's vice-president. A year after that, the US Army drove into Kabul.

‘Striking oil is more fun than hitting a birdie into a minefield,' volunteers Jim.

The LandCruiser rushes past an Iranian truck pitching and yawing under a top-heavy load of Japanese televisions. Beside us, the old road, built by USAID in the late sixties, is cratered and ruined, its ragged concrete surface twisted like a scattered shuffle of playing cards. The ends of bridges have been blown out by precision missiles. The new UNOPS road, built by the Germans in the last months, is smooth, straight and black. Beyond rusting shells of Russian tanks, a barren landscape rises towards northern, purple mountains.

The Eagles are on the CD player and the quiet American is in a talkative mood. He tells me he was conceived on China Beach in the Bay of Danang in December 1967. His father had been a US Marine on R&R. His mother was a nurse with politics and legs like Jane Fonda. On the morning she found that she was pregnant, Jim's mother ran the half-mile from the cafeteria to the
chopper pad. Ten minutes earlier, a Chinook, forty feet long with rotors front and rear, had carried her lover back to the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The next day, on a routine Search-and-Destroy operation, he was pinned down and killed by ‘friendly fire'.

Not long afterwards, Jim's mother – broken-hearted and big-bellied – returned to the States. She raised Jim in the redwoods of La Honda, just over the hill, in fact, from Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster Nest. At eighteen, he won a scholarship to Northern Arizona University and then MIT, studying geology because it had prospects. After graduation, he joined Unocal, then the US Geological Survey. His life was as straight as a bore hole. Like many post-sixties babies, Jim reached out for the security of wealth and, in a meteoric career, he set up his instruments on the Alaskan slope, on rigs off the Mozambican coast and in Central Asia. He was grounded, patriotic and got a buzz from playing golf in war zones.