Magic Bus (17 page)

‘I saw the start of the Afghan project,' he tells me, turning around in his seat. ‘I was in Texas in '97 when Unocal flew in a Taliban delegation. I met Hamid Karzai – you know he's the Afghan president now – when he worked as a company adviser.'

‘Unocal went into business with the Taliban?' I ask.

‘Tried to.'

To corporate America, Afghanistan's significance was as a potential transit route. The Caspian oil was worthless unless it could reach the market. Unocal hatched the plan to build the 900-mile line from Turkmenistan to Gwadar, the Pakistani ocean terminal east of the Persian Gulf. The Taliban would have collected millions of dollars in fees.

‘The company sent a guy named Boardman to Kandahar to win them over. He dressed in traditional robes, grew the prescribed beard, handed out gifts: fax machines, generators, Frisbees.'

‘You gave Frisbees to the Taliban?' I'm thinking about their banning of kites and music.

‘Nobody was going to tell the
mullahs
to stop beating their wives, but the pipeline wasn't built.'

‘Because of human rights abuses?'

‘Because al-Qaeda started blowing up our embassies in Africa,' says Jim. ‘Now who knows what will happen?'

‘Well, I'm running down the road, trying to loosen my load, got a world of trouble on my mind…'

‘Take It Easy' fills the cab as the minarets of Herat rise beyond the windscreen. Or at least what remains of them. Herat was once the most civilized city in the Islamic world, an oasis on the Middle Silk Road between ancient Merv and Neishabur. Here is Asia, Robert Byron wrote in 1934, ‘without an inferiority complex'. As late as 1962, Chatwin saw here ‘men in mountainous turbans, strolling hand in hand, with roses in their mouths and rifles wrapped in flowered chintz'. Then, earthquakes and Soviet carpet-bombing flattened the city. Today, it's both a shattered Timurid jewel and an Iranian shanty town; a city as much Persian as it is Afghan. Broken glazed tiling – jade-green, grape-blue and turquoise – glints in the dust. The ringing of bells, from horse-drawn traps and unanswered telephones, rises into the pine trees.

‘Where are you staying?' Jim asks me.

‘At the Marco Polo,' I say.

‘Come join us first for a bowl of turkey fricassee.'

Rashid swings the LandCruiser through a blue wave of women in
burquas
rolling down a narrow dirt street like fresh water released by flood gates. They wash past us, on the way home from school, parasols and spirits carried on the froth. A guard wearing a black-and-white Palestinian
keffiyeh
scarf steps down from his sentry box, wades through the swell and swings back the sheet-metal gate.

Jim's residence is a squat, walled guest-house on the slope next to the provincial governor's palace. Behind its barbed wire is a putting green and a well-tended, irrigated garden. Five or six turkeys gobble beneath the bougainvillaea. Rows of organic American vegetables – scallions, yams, eggplants and snow peas – grow beyond the staff compound. I think back to Maslakh camp. This is not an Afghanistan I expected to find.

‘We'll eat in an hour,' says Jim.

His guest room has an en suite power shower. Green bottles of Aveda cleanser are set in a neat row above the sink. Michael
Herr's
Dispatches
and copies of
Sports Illustrated
are on the reading table.

Later, in the kitchen, Rashid slices fresh carrots and celery, dices turkey pieces, shapes the dumplings. He moves with economy and agility. No motion is overstated or spare.
The Joy of Cooking
is open on the counter.

Jim strides into the lounge wearing a long white
shalwar kameez
. His sneakers are decorated with silver stars and purple butterfly-winged skulls.

‘Tell me about the golf,' I say.

‘I try to play a round every evening,' he says, uncorking a Napa Valley Zinfandel and pouring two glasses.

‘There's a course in Herat?'

‘More a dirt-and-scrub fairway. The problem is with shell casings and craters. And that the hazards might explode.'

‘That could ruin your game,' I say.

Rashid lays out olives and rolled asparagus canapés on the coffee table. Jim drops down into the sofa and asks me about my writing. I could be in Tucson or Seattle discussing books and careers, looking forward to an evening on the green after dinner, except that outside the barred window rises Alexander the Great's Citadel. I gesture towards it and say, ‘That's probably the only thing in town that hasn't changed since the sixties.'

‘The whole world has changed since then,' says Jim.

‘Bruce Chatwin – an English travel writer – wrote that Western kids nudged Afghanistan along the road to ruin.'

‘How's that?'

‘By propagating the idea of ideal society,' I say. ‘The hippies believed in Afghans' right to self-determination. Maybe that's why in the seventies there was a sign at their consulate in Mashhad which read, “Visas will not be issued to people with hair like beetle.”'

‘The dream of new political ideas changing the world has died,' says Jim, spitting away a decade's – a century's – idealism along with an olive stone. ‘Have a serviette.'

‘Died with Vietnam?' I ask.

‘Died with the Wall. Died with the Muslim Brotherhood. The only viable, enduring philosophy now is wealth creation. Everyone wants to make money.'

‘Do they?' I ask.

‘You tell me what else holds us together?' he says, sipping his Zinfandel. ‘Afghanistan isn't like anywhere else in the world. Anyone who claims to understand the country is missing something crucial: it's a complex, diverse place. But the Afghans are pragmatic. They tolerate us clumping around in big boots and Humvees because we've promised them so much.'

‘Dollars,' smiles Rashid while laying out dinner.

‘Come on, let's eat,' says Jim, and we make our way to the table.

I sit between them. The glasses and cutlery are matching sets. A candle floats in a water bowl of pebbles.

‘Everyone wants a comfortable life with home electronics,' Jim says, spooning out the carrots. ‘Look at Rashid. He was one of the Afghans trained by Unocal to construct and operate a pipeline. That gave him a start. Now, he never stops running.'

‘I never turn down work,' he says, passing me a plate of home-baked cornbread.

‘I always tell Rashid to take it easy, that he's stretching himself too thin.'

‘At school I was the dunce,' admits Rashid. ‘I sat at the back of the class, and all the clever students were killed, by the communists or the Taliban.' The smile never fades from his lips. ‘So now there is no one in front of me. I have to stretch myself.'

Sunny Jim picks up his knife and fork and says, ‘Enjoy.'

I spend a couple of days in Herat, exploring the old city, losing a golf ball in a
real
bunker. At sunset, I stand on top of the Citadel and watch Jim practise his drive toward the distant ridges of the Safed Koh and the old trail to China. Then I turn away from him to stare south-east to Kandahar and the Indian subcontinent.

Like many Intrepids, I planned to catch the bus along that road to Kabul. But on my second morning, a UN employee, twenty-nine-year-old Bettina Goislard, is shot dead while driving through a bazaar in nearby Ghazni. She is the fourteenth aid-worker murdered in the last months. A hand-grenade attack follows in Kandahar. Then, a bicycle bomb explodes in a market.
Médicin Sans Frontières
blames the killings on heavy-handed and naive American policy. UN staff are ordered off the streets and into their compounds.

‘Six weeks ago, that road was safe,' says Jim over breakfast. ‘Now, even Afghans think twice before travelling it.'

I consider the alternatives.

The northern route is a hard, four-day slog through steppe and desert by way of Maimana and Mazar-e Sharif. But recent disagreements between rival warlords – using tanks and artillery to settle the argument – reduce its attraction.

The central route isn't really a road at all, rather a succession of broken paths and animal tracks. To cross its half-dozen 3,000-metre passes, survive lawless Chaghcheran and reach the lakes of Band-e Amir can take a week. Along the way are landmines, unexploded US bombs, and wolves, both the two- and four-leg variety.

‘I'm a local,' Rashid tells me while passing another English muffin, ‘and I wouldn't drive to Kabul.'

His advice is convincing. I've already seen enough to know that, even if I make it to Kandahar, no one alive there will remember the
Intrepids. Any echo of the sixties will have been drowned out by the howl of intervening years. I also don't want to get shot. Or to lose testicles to a venerable Soviet butterfly mine, designed to spring to hip-height before exploding.

Ariana Afghan operates a daily service to Kabul. Usually. The two-room office on Bagh-e Azadi appears to be shut but, after five minutes hammering on the door, a yawning employee with a mangled hand opens up and sells me a ticket. Rashid runs me out to the airport, a barrack-like building with splintered walls and windows boarded with planks. I check in, take a seat in the so-called departure lounge and, through a shell-hole, watch our 727 take off. My fellow passengers – traders in mud-pie
pakoul
hats, a congenial Tajik family, a pair of Chinese businessmen – and I wait for its return. One hour. Two hours. No surprise that Ariana is known as the
Inshallah
airline. At the end of the third hour, word filters through to us that a government minister borrowed the aircraft to visit his father in a distant town. The minister intended only a short stay but his father has invited him to stay for lunch. In the lounge, the Tajiks resign themselves to the delay, setting up a gas brazier to cook their own midday meal. I, on the other hand, run out of patience after five hours' waiting.

At exactly that moment, a white UNHAS Fokker F-28 touches down on the tarmac. The United Nations Humanitarian Air Service ferries UN and NGO personnel, medicine, anti-locust pesticides and de-mining dogs around the country. Its three twin-prop Beechcraft and single Fokker hold the cities together while gunmen block the roads. At the UNHAS desk I discover that the incoming Fokker is due to return to Kabul. There are seats available. I explain my predicament to the Afghan behind the desk. I hand over my Ariana ticket. I weep.

‘What is your agency?' he asks me.

‘No agency.'

‘What is your country?'

‘Canada and Britain.'

‘Then we will say you are with CIDA,' he replies, noting
down the aid agency's name. Canadian International Development Agency. ‘This is how we help our friends in Herat,' he goes on, giving me a photocopied ticket. I hand him $100. ‘Welcome to
my
Afghanistan.'

On board, a
Médicin Sans Frontières
doctor opens a week-old copy of
Libération
. A Nigerian working for the Aga Khan Development Network reads the collected sayings of Mohammed. An Irish vet explains Edward Thomas's poetry to a CARE officer from Virginia. In the back row, a Danish MP chats to her minders. The Fokker is leased by the UN from a South African charter airline called AirQuarius, but the Kiwi stewardess doesn't break into a medley of songs about universal harmony. Instead, she asks me, ‘Are you willing to help us when something goes wrong?' She points belatedly at the over-wing emergency exit. ‘In the unlikely event something goes wrong.'

‘Have a safe journey,' says the Kuwaiti in the row behind me.

The take-off is fast and steep to avoid – according to the Frenchman – any Stinger ground-to-air missiles. I laugh, but he doesn't.

We rise above the apricot earth, scattering a flock of fat-tailed sheep. Behind me in the lounge, the Ariana passengers brew another pot of black tea. Ahead, the purple Paropamisus – named by the Greeks from the Persian ‘peaks over which eagles cannot fly' – slip beneath the port wing.

‘
My
Afghanistan,' the UNHAS agent had said; proud, independent and defiant. His ravaged land unfolds beneath me. Deserted Tajik hamlets crumble into banks of shale. Cultivatable fields lie barren after four years of drought. The plain gathers into the hill country of Ghowr, its high pastures impoverished since the last caravans used the Silk Road. The province of an estimated 300,000 people does not have a single doctor.

I gaze in wonder at the earth's beauty, so rich and varied even in this war-torn land. I catch a flash of incredible deep blue; the Band-e Amir lakes glittering on a distant plateau. Below, I see no electricity pylons, no paved roads, no windscreen flash of a moving vehicle. The stewardess serves plastic tumblers of bottled Pakistani water as the Koh-e Baba range melts into the vast deserts of
Wardak. I press my cheek against the window to catch sight of the cedar-forested slopes of the Hindu Kush. Then the intercom crackles to life.

‘Folks, I've just been informed of a little incident at Kabul,' says the captain. ‘We can't land until the pieces have been… uh… picked off the runway.'

The Frenchman lowers his newspaper.

We're told that an Ariana Airbus on a return flight from Islamabad made a heavy landing. Its starboard wing tip dug into the earth and the undercarriage disintegrated. No passengers were injured but the German ISAF contingent needed a couple of hours to tow the aircraft on to the apron.

‘Why so long?' I ask.

‘Because there are still minefields alongside the runway.'

The AirQuarius pilot's fuel and options are limited. He can return to Herat or fly on to Peshawar in Pakistan. No nearby airfield is long enough for a Fokker. Except for one.

‘Listen up,' he then announces, with a relief which doesn't resonate along the cabin, ‘we've been given permission to land… uh… at Bagram.'

Forty miles north of Kabul, Bagram is a central hub in the US military's five global commands. At the sprawling former Soviet air base are stationed 15,000 of the one million Americans maintained at arms in 137 countries on four continents. From here, round-the-clock missions are launched against al-Qaeda and the Taliban by the 82nd Airborne Division, the Task Force Panther Light Infantry Brigade and the 3rd Special Forces Group. The 354th Fighter Squadron, the Army XVIII Airborne Corps' 18th Air Support Operations Group and the Nevada National Guard also fly from the base, as well as the Coalition's Task Force Sword, ‘tasked with pursuing high-value targets'. In addition, Bagram houses about 500 Afghan ‘detainees', two of whom will die from ‘blunt force injuries' while in US custody only a few months after my visit. It's not just the hippies who would hate this presence.