Rock and Hard Places (5 page)

This conversation is the least peculiar thing that will happen to me for a week.

 

ACROSS THE BORDER, I change some US dollars for Afghanis, the local currency. The Afghani is not one of the greats—children in low-slung hessian tents by the roadside sell it pretty much by weight, exchanging an inch-thick wad of purple 5000-Afghani notes for every 20-dollar bill. One kid holds my American money up to the sun and scrutinises it with an impatient eye, which is a bit rich considering that if I walk 50 metres back in the direction I’ve come, the notes he’s giving me will only be useful as novelty bookmarks.

The Afghan customs officer is friendlier than his appearance, which isn’t difficult, and asks about the purpose of my visit. I mumble some obsequious platitudes about coming to learn the truth about his beautiful, historic country and its sensitive, cultured, deeply misunderstood people. This is all true as far as it goes, though it’s interesting to reflect that a dangerous-looking chap with a gun and an attractive woman will, if for entirely different reasons, reduce the average bloke to spouting exactly the same sort of fawning drivel.

For my purposes, anyway, it serves better than “Well, think about it: you’ve got a country with no rule of law, other than that dictated by the whim of a bunch of crazy students, and not only that, but crazy students who control the world’s richest natural resources of recreational drugs—on paper, this place should be one gigantic Glastonbury. But, if we believe what we read, it’s a total no-fun zone populated by ill-educated peasants living in perpetual fear of bearded wackos with
rocket-launchers who think they’re working for God. What’s all that about?”

The customs officer stamps my passport, and walks me out to the bus station: a muddy lot behind the money-changing tents, full of merchants trying to sell each other shoes, bread and watches. He helps me buy two seats—one for me, one for my pack—on a crowded minibus headed for Jalalabad, shakes my hand, and waves me off.

 

THE REASON FOR my visit to Afghanistan is the reason that’s motivated every hack who’s come here since 1994. The Taliban, Afghanistan’s rulers, are the journalistic equivalent of an open goal with a keeper lying injured somewhere near the halfway line. You can’t miss. The Taliban are extremists so extreme they can’t be bothered pretending they’re not, and oppressors so oppressive they excite the liberal outrage of Iran. As if that wasn’t enough, they have an undeniable comedy value—the global guffaws that greeted the Taliban’s edict on facial hair were probably audible from deep space—and are also a convenient cipher for the image of Islam that so much of the western media, either through mendacity or ignorance, is keen to project. The Taliban, and their creed of the Koran and the Kalashnikov, are bloody good value, as long as you don’t have to live in Afghanistan.

Under the Taliban’s uncompromising reading of Islamic sharia law, Afghanistan is the most repressive society on earth, a place where everything is illegal, except beards and praying, which are compulsory. If you’re trying to have fun in Afghanistan, you can forget the following: cinema (closed), drink (punishable by flogging), dancing (illegal), or being outside for any reason at all after 9:00 PM (curfew, about which the Taliban aren’t kidding—a few days before I got into Afghanistan, two foreign aid workers, lost on their way home in Kabul at 9:15 PM, flagged down a Taliban patrol vehicle, apologised, and asked for a lift, whereupon they were arrested, locked up for four days and threatened with a public beating, before the poor sods’ employers interceded and the Taliban settled for driving them to the border and throwing them out of the country). If you’re male, you can go out for a meal, but you can’t take your girlfriend, because eating would necessitate her removing the mesh face-mask from her all-over veil—the burqa—and women may not show any part of themselves in public, on pain of a sound thrashing.

And if you decide, all things considered, to stay in and watch telly, you’re in for a slow night—there isn’t any. The only broadcaster permitted in Afghanistan is Radio Shariat, which offers a schedule consisting of religious programmes and heavily censored news bulletins, and is light on chuckles.

The sole legal amusement I detect in a week in Afghanistan is pestering foreigners. Everywhere I walk, I get followed by droves of people, children and adults alike, a few begging, most just curious. One afternoon in Kabul, while I’m standing outside a mosque watching punters arrive for prayers, a kindly shopkeeper scuttles up with a chair. When I sit down, I am surrounded by dozens of people, staring and gawping. They eventually crowd so close that the first few rows land in my lap. I have a sudden insight into how deeply tiresome it must be to be famous.

 

THE SPINGHAR HOTEL in Jalalabad is situated at the end of a gravel drive amid pretty and well-kept gardens. By the front door is a sign bearing a picture of a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a red cross painted over it. Classy place, obviously.

Jalalabad, capital of the province of Nangarhar, is a grim footnote in British imperial history. It was here, in January 1842, that an early attempt at bringing this wilful country to heel came to an end, when a Dr. Brydon, the only surviving member of a 17,000-strong British army that had marched to Kabul three years previously, rode into the city on a lame horse.

There’s not much of anything in Jalalabad today, except dust. The streets are paved with it, the people covered in it, the buildings apparently built from it, and the chicken I’m served at the Spinghar tastes of it. Jalalabad does have a bazaar, and though it’s a common fantasy among middle-class western dilettantes that markets in remote third world towns are full of picturesque natives selling each other exquisite hand-crafted jewellery and organic hair conditioner, there’s nothing for sale in Jalalabad except whatever crap fell off the back of the last truck that came through: plastic crockery from Uzbekistan, Azerbaijani chocolate and a startling amount of Pepsi Cola, stacked everywhere in blue crates.

In the centre of Jalalabad, there’s a traffic roundabout, around which
a large crowd is gathered. I gather with it for a bit to see what they’re waiting for. After an hour, I decide that maybe 300-a-side staring-silently-into-the-middle-distance has been decreed a right-on Islamic sport, or something, and leave them to it. That evening, when I go to meet someone in the UN compound, I’m told that the mob had been gathering to watch local Talibs administer a kicking to one of their own—for “dishonesty,” apparently. At the hotel at dusk, a few local women are sitting gossiping beneath a tree. When they see me approaching, they pull their masks back down over their faces, and fall silent.

I leave Jalalabad for Kabul the following morning with Noel Spencer, a genial Northern Irishman who, after years defusing things for the British Army in Northern Ireland and the Kuwaiti Royal Family in Kuwait, now does the same for the UN’s mine clearance operation in Afghanistan. His experienced driver and his new 4WD pick-up take nine hours to negotiate the 200 or so kilometres between the two cities. At best, the road, devastated by decades of neglect, tanks and mortars, is appalling. At worst, it just isn’t there, degenerating into interminable sequences of ridges and cracks that engender the strange feeling of being seasick on dry land. More than once, the horizon disappears behind the lip of potholes big enough to fit the entire truck in.

Which, given Afghanistan’s horizons, is an accomplishment. If the people of Afghanistan take the Almighty a little more seriously than most, they could rightly argue that this is where He’s done some of his best work. Snow-white and basalt-black mountain ranges as jagged as an Albanian bank’s profit-and-loss charts cradle the sort of sweeping green plains that make me wish that I had a troop of cavalry I could charge across them. Next to the road, the mighty Kabul River flows green, then grey, then silver, before disappearing as the road heads up to the plateau on which Kabul sits, and winds through immense gorges which look awesomely forbidding and final, like exits from the entire universe.

Villages, made entirely from mud, hunch along the roadside. In one, too small to merit a name, we stop for lunch in a mud room where the floor is also the table, and the only way to pick the difference between the flies and the sultanas in the stew is that the sultanas are marginally less animated. In another town, Sarobi, there is a shop, operating out of a converted shipping container, offering for sale an
impressive range of used assault rifles, mortars, grenade-launchers and anti-tank weapons. The shipping container next door is piled high with more crates of Pepsi.

 

WEDNESDAY MORNING, THE first thing I do is the first thing all visiting media in Kabul have to do: check in with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The press office is run by a cheery old buzzard called Dr. Aminzai, a career civil servant who had a reputation, during previous regimes, as an impeccably groomed, Armani-clad dandy trailing clouds of imported aftershave. He wanted to keep his job, and so now wears a traditional robe and turban, and a beard you could hide crates of bootlegged Pepsi in. He makes me fill in some forms, gives me a Taliban press card, and reads me the riot act.

“You must stay,” he says, “at the Intercontinental Hotel.”

I checked in last night. It’s up on a hill commanding glorious views of Kabul, though the swimming pool and the cocktail bar haven’t seen use in some time. It has 150 staff and 200 rooms, but only two are currently occupied—mine, and one up the hall by a hotel employee who opens his door and booms, “Hello, Mr. Andrew!” every time I walk in or out (as the week wears on, I will try to catch him by leaving again straight after arriving, or creeping out at four in the morning to run up and down the deserted upstairs corridors, but he doesn’t miss a trick).

“You must not take pictures of people,” continues Dr. Aminzai.

I wasn’t going to try. Several photographers have been attacked by the Taliban for committing photography, though it isn’t illegal, as such—I later get a smudged black-and-white portrait of myself taken by a bloke on a street corner with an ancient box camera.

“And,” he says, “you will not be able to talk to women.”

That’s okay, I tell him. It’s like that at home.

“It will mean trouble for you,” he says, ignoring my feeble, if heartfelt, attempt at levity, “and more trouble for them.”

With that, Dr. Aminzai introduces my Taliban-appointed translator/ minder, whom I’ll call Akbar. Akbar is a twenty-one-year-old student at Kabul University. He’s not Taliban himself, but is happy to make a few dollars conducting journalists around town for them. Akbar speaks excellent English, and we get on surprisingly well, given that we both, I think, feel like we’re trying to explain earth to a martian.

“You are not married?” enquires Akbar over lunch one day.

No.

“But you are twenty-nine.”

Correct.

“How is this?”

Oh, I don’t know. Stuff.

“But you have had girlfriends?”

Mmm.

“And you have. . . lain with them?”

In general, yes.

“What becomes of them, when you have finished with them?”

They struggle on.

“But what other man will want them?”

It’s a topic we return to frequently, especially when Akbar—a devout Muslim, and engaged to be married—introduces me to other people. The first thing he explains to them is my unattached status, which he seems to find more extraordinary the more he thinks about it—the people he tells couldn’t seem more surprised if he told them that I had a tail. I begin to wish that I’d said to Akbar from the off what I’d been saying to the equally curious merchants in the bazaar back in Peshawar (“Yes, her name’s Winona, she’s an actress. Yes, three sons, Jehosophat, Ezekiel and Susan—we’re a bit worried about Susan”).

In the Herat, one of Kabul’s few tolerable restaurants, we meet Kalahan, a twenty-four-year-old student (married, four children). He asks me earnestly about “prostitution houses.”

Brothels, I correct him.

“Please—what is that word?”

He writes it down as I spell it out.

“Please—are they legal where you live?”

I’ve no idea. Sort of, I think.

“But please,” he asks, “if everyone is allowed to sleep with each other anyway, what is the point of them?”

I try asking Kalahan about the civil war that ravaged Kabul and killed thousands of its citizens in the early 90s. There’s enough of Kabul still standing up to give me the idea that it must have been quite an attractive city, once. It was also rather fun, according to long-serving expats I meet in the UN Club, now Kabul’s only licensed premises
(“In 1992,” recalls one Belgian doctor, “you could stay out all night, and it was only about as far off the pace as Budapest, or somewhere like that”). Today, several suburbs of Kabul are uninhabitable ruins, though people still inhabit them. Even the less damaged areas look like English football fans have been staying in them (“And culturally,” the same doctor tells me, “this place has gone from 1976 to 1376”).

Kalahan and others his age don’t really want to talk about the war, or the Soviet invasion that preceded it, or the Taliban takeover that followed it. This is understandable—it’s all they’ve ever known. UNICEF estimates that 70 percent of Kabul’s children lost a family member between 1992 and 1996. It’s like trying to get Mauritanians excited about discussing drought.

“The Taliban,” explains Kalahan, resignedly, “stopped the war.”

But aren’t you frightened of them?

“Of course. But they won’t last. Nobody does.”

Nobody, least of all the Afghans themselves, has ever succeeded in governing Afghanistan’s volatile mix of tribes (half Pakhtun, with the balance made up by Tajiks, Turkomans, Uzbeks and Hazaras). Many have tried: the Sikh and Persian empires, Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain. In 1979, the USSR decided it was the nation for the job and, just as America had done in Vietnam, found its immense, sophisticated army locked in unwinnable combat with motivated guerillas—performing the military equivalent of trying to swat wasps with a steamroller.