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Authors: Sarah Chayes

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CHAPTER 6
THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR

DECEMBER 11, 2001

“W
E ENTERED THE CITY BY FORCE
!”

I wonder how many times that has been said about Kandahar.

It is four days later, and I am on my way there. I am riding in our yellow Pakistani taxi, its back window repaired, on my way to Kandahar, at last.

I've managed to talk my frightened driver and interpreter into coming with me. This time I did not bother with a visa; I hitched a ride on an Achekzai motorcycle that headed out a desert trail. At the isolated shack that passed for a border post, my escort lifted an arm in greeting; the border guard did the same, and we were across. I rejoined my staff and our taxi on the main road. First stop was a barracks belonging to Mahmad Anwar's Achekzais. They detailed me a young fighter named Fayda, supposedly as a bodyguard, but in fact to afford the most potent protection of all in these parts: a visible mark of tribal affiliation.

Now we're on the road. Fayda is sitting in front. Kalashnikov cradled between his knees, he is casting loving glances at his reflection in the side-view mirror, adjusting a lock of hair that lies languidly upon his forehead. Perched on the edge of the backseat, straining forward to hear, I have my microphone out; I'm trying to prop my arm against the driver's jolting headrest, tilting the mike casually toward Fayda so I can catch his words without its presence distracting him. I know the effort is futile. For broadcast purposes, a microphone has to be within about two inches of the speaker's mouth—no hope of discretion. Anyway, above the noise of the car engine and the sickening lurches, my recording will be unusable no matter how I hold the mike. Still, I have to try.

I lean forward. “We entered the city by force,” Fayda is exclaiming as we jounce along. He gestures out the window at a stony rise, not far from the Kandahar airport. “We left from here!” Eyes alight, he describes how the motley anti-Taliban fighters in the train of former governor Gul Agha Shirzai stormed the city three days before. Not to rid it of remnants of the Taliban who remained behind after the surrender, or holed-up Al-Qaeda fighters with hand grenades taped to their vitals. The Taliban and all but a handful of Arabs were gone, vanished the night they grabbed their wounded from the hospital four days back. The war was over.

The attack Fayda is describing was part of the quarrel afterward, among the victors for the spoils. Gul Agha Shirzai decided to disobey President Karzai's order. He decided to wrest control of Kandahar for himself.

This is crucial. I know it. My tuning fork is partly forged, and it is ringing. This incident, I am sure, will be decisive in shaping the character of the “new” Afghanistan. It indicates the kind of Afghan nation that will be built under U.S. aegis—this experiment upon which the world's eyes are trained.

But I cannot work out the precise meaning of the prophecy. The picture in my mind, from stories I have been hearing for several days, is too blurry, drawn thirdhand. Fayda was there. I pump him for absolutely everything, all the details.


Speed, speed,
we went,” he reaches for one of the English words he knows to stress the excitement of the moment. “Mr. Karzai ordered Gul Agha to stay outside Kandahar, at the airport. But we didn't accept.”

I am trying to think visually, for the story I will write. I try to picture this impromptu invasion of Kandahar: dozens of battered Toyota pickup trucks, their open backs packed with fighters rank from weeks in the field, signature embroidered shawls crossed tightly over their heads and shoulders against the chill December wind as they streamed across that sullen plain, their mismatched arsenals of Kalashnikovs, Chinese-made machine guns, and the occasional stub-nosed artillery piece bristling like hackles on a mangy dog. And for banners, grenade launchers tied up in bunches to the vertical struts of their trucks.

“No one invited us,” Fayda exclaims defiantly, “so we didn't fly Afghan flags out the windows of our trucks. We stuck our guns out.”

“What about the Americans,” I ask, working to quell a rising disbelief. “Where were they?”

That U.S. “advice” to this proxy militia included a group of American Special Forces soldiers planted in its midst is hardly a secret by now. I reported their presence days back. Several Afghans saw them and mentioned them to me. Mahmad Anwar boasted about them, with an oblique glance and pantomimed solemnity at conveying the secret news.

“The Americans?” Fayda answers. “They
told
us to move on Kandahar! All our instructions were given by the Americans.”

I actually gasp. How could that be? When Kandahar was in the hands of the other anti-Taliban militia, advised by its own special forces group, and led by President Karzai?

Karzai's people held the town by then; even I know that. They moved in quickly to reinforce Mullah Naqib's Alokozais. Shirzai and his contingent, with Akrem and Mahmad Anwar and this Fayda, were still out by the airport when Karzai's call came in on the satellite phone, ordering them to stay there. Why, I wonder, aghast, would one set of U.S. advisers tell its protégés to attack Kandahar when the enemy—the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—was beaten and the city was already held by another group of U.S. protégés? Why would U.S. soldiers tell Shirzai to disobey the president? It beggars belief. And yet the bare-faced innocence with which Fayda let this sentence escape, his genuine surprise at my question, are too spontaneous to be feigned. I admonish myself to verify this later on, but, with a stone in my gut, I register that it is probably right.

Foreboding rises in me: The Taliban have scarcely fallen, and already U.S. policy seems at cross-purposes with itself.

Well, what a story, anyway. I can't wait to reach town and begin writing it up.

We crawl along. The road is in appalling repair. Just inside Afghanistan, the paving disintegrated. First, pieces broke apart like chunks of ice on a melting river, lethal to tires and shock absorbers. Then the asphalt gave way altogether, leaving only the underlying river of iron-hard clay, pitted and rutted and studded with rocks. Drivers are negotiating it like rapids, careening from one side to the other in search of a channel through the hardened chop.

At last, by the airport access on our left, asphalt returns and knits into a decent surface so we can drive properly again. We ascend a rise. It is a saddle, really, with rocky hills stalking away from us on right and left. And suddenly, Kandahar appears, spread out wide in the distance, across our line of sight.

Mountains, glowering masses of cragged rock, tower over it from behind, coloring to a purplish blue as the sun tips toward evening. Dwarfed at their feet, the town is sketched in tawny lines, barely distinguishable from the land around. Between us and it, nothing. Not a tree, not a river or a road sign, not a patch of grass.

At this juncture, when we catch our first glimpse of it, Kandahar's reputation could not be worse. It is the Other Ground Zero, the epicenter of the explosive forces the world is suddenly confronting, the place Usama bin Laden made his home as he ratcheted up his campaign against the United States and what he thought it stood for, notch after notch. It is foreboding, glowering, mysterious, defiant. In other words, irresistible.

We cross the plain. The fabled city is finally going to come to life.

But no. As we pass under the arched gateway that marks the entrance, it is as though we are entering a ghost town. There are no cars on the avenue we drive upon, except the occasional pickup truck packed with fighters, speeding past with an urgent pride of place. Rows of mud-brick shops are barred and shuttered. There are no people out walking; there is no sign of joy or emancipation or anticipation, no sign of anything. It is as though we are driving through the corpse of a city, or through a city that has retreated deep behind its walls, to a small dark corner of itself, where it can watch and wait, unseen.

Built out of the living clay of its harsh plateau, of bricks fashioned by hand in wooden molds and hardened in the sun, Kandahar is like some austere sand-fort city. Soviet-era destruction has torn off great chunks of buildings. With time the scars have softened, and the jumbled rubble has been carried off for reuse, or else has melted back into the contours of the earth, as if the sand fort were partially washed away by the sea. Only a few pastel-painted villas stick out. Al-Qaeda Arabs rented them, and several were bombed. The American bomb damage blends in; just the edges of the debris are sharper.

We are looking for a building called the Maymuria. This is where, I was told at the Achekzai barracks on the border, I will find my friend Mahmad Anwar. He'll fill me in on what is going on.

Following someone's directions, we reach quite a stately building, set off from the main road by a broad dirt midden, planted with trees. It has a round tower marking one corner, with a dome on top. In front of the narrow door stands a line of cars idling, like the others that seem to have the streets to themselves this day: two newly minted Toyota SUVs, plastic still covering their immaculate interiors, and behind them, three pickup trucks packed with rowdy fighters. The men in the second truck wear the distinctive, loopy black turbans the Taliban made famous. Before I have a chance to wonder what I have blundered into, Mahmad Anwar bursts out of the front SUV: “Sarah!” The first syllable is long,
SAH,
the
r
the slightest kiss of the tongue behind the front teeth. Mahmad Anwar grips my hand, claps my shoulder, and bundles me into his SUV, right next to him. I do not have a chance to decide. My staff finds room in one of the pickups.

Mahmad Anwar was the follower of a particularly brutal and treacherous 1980s gun lord, whose wild-eyed marijuana-smoking devotees are to this day known for their lack of restraint. Yet he, too, strikes an unlikely figure as a cutthroat. Apart from a great scar that plows a furrow down the length of one forearm, much about him exudes a wide-eyed sweetness. He boasts shamelessly, in pure Achekzai style, elaborating on his enemies' fear of him. But there is something boyish about these tall tales. His voice cracks, especially when he laughs, as though he has laryngitis. And he is endlessly tender with his friends, no matter who they are or what their station.

We have hardly made it a half mile down one of Kandahar's dirt streets when he slams to a stop, leaps out of the Land Cruiser, and rushes to en-fold a stick of a man in his arms. It is a tattered, impoverished Hindu, selling fried food from a cart. The two were friends long ago and lost sight of each other. The friendship is dearer to Mahmad Anwar than any lapse in dignity the gesture may carry. That is Mahmad Anwar.

Our convoy's trucks bristle with Kalashnikovs, a machine gun or two pointed out the back of each, and rocket launchers taped, according to the local fashion, upright to the backs of the cabs like menacing flag poles. Our fighters—fierce looking in their Taliban-style turbans, ammo belts crisscrossed under their shawls—are piled in every which way.

We may not look like it, but we are the police. In fact, we're working for Zabit Akrem. But I did not know that; I did not know who Akrem was yet. Our mission, I learn, is to start establishing some order. In the chaotic few days since the Taliban collapse, aid offices were ransacked and taken over by militia toughs. We are going to clear them out of their newly acquired aeries. First stop, the Kandahar Red Crescent office. The riffraff there refuses to budge. It takes Mahmad Anwar long minutes of discussion, Pashtun style, to “reason” their leader into leaving.

Next, we make for a former den of Al-Qaeda fighters to pick up gear they left behind. I swarm with the men up narrow steps, crowd into one cell-like room, then a second, then watch as the fighters divvy up the Al-Qaeda stuff. Within five minutes, half a dozen have exchanged their traditional Kandahari garb of loose trousers and a long blousy tunic for dappled United Arab Emirates desert fatigues, struggling into the tight pants. I watch blankets and other useful accoutrements disappear, while ammo boxes and a couple each of Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, and old-fashioned pie-plate machine guns are hauled downstairs and turned over to Mahmad Anwar. I even confess to taking a trophy, the wooden stock of an Al-Qaeda gun, for my brother Lincoln in Los Angeles. It never got to him.

The sun is closing in on the horizon now. We have to hurry. This is Ramadan; we've all been fasting since dawn. We have to rush to be in our places, ready to attack our food the instant we hear the first notes of the hungrily awaited call to sunset prayer.

We make for the house of one of Mahmad Anwar's relatives. I remember a narrow passageway, and going down some steps to the guest room, where visiting males are received. The floor is covered in rich rugs from Herat and Mazar-i-Sherif. The furnishings are familiar to me from years I spent in the Peace Corps in Morocco: carpets on the floor, mattresses around the edges of the room for seating, and not much else. You settle down cross-legged, in a rough circle. On a plastic mat spread over the rugs, communal dishes are placed within reach of everyone, along with great sheets of homemade bread, two feet long. There is chicken in a kind of caramelized onion sauce, and lamb in something else delicious. Salad consists of slices of long, mild radishes, bunches of mint and coriander, and some scallions. I remember a white-headed uncle of Mahmad Anwar talking endlessly, God knows about what. No one else could slip a word in. The uncle is an elder; he has to be respected.

After dinner, Mahmad Anwar gives me my own room upstairs in a neighbor's house, with a guard whose job seems to be to serve me tea and make the occasional round outside on the roof. I look at my watch, one of those double-dial jobs I bought from the duty-free shop on British Airways. It is just about 7:00
P.M
. Kandahar time—10:30 in the morning in Washington, the lower dial informs me. I have less than five hours to do it: to turn the kaleidoscopic hours I have just lived through into a four-and-a-half-minute radio report for
All Things Considered
. And somehow I have to convey the biggest piece of news: that the chaos I experienced that afternoon in Kandahar was due to U.S. policy. American soldiers escorted the gunslingers into town.

BOOK: The Punishment of Virtue
12.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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