Stefaans Brmmer ponders the mysteries of this sad and enigmatic land
“Asia is a living body, and Afghanistan its heart. In the ruin of the heart lies the ruin of the body. So long as the heart is free, the body remains free. If not, it becomes a straw adrift in the wind.” Mohammed Iqbal (1876 1938)
‘Same old shit!” an American voice exploded where I slept on my bed of dusty concrete corridor. I dragged myself to a higher consciousness and mustered a croaky “What shit?”
“Lollipop!” the voice boomed back through layers of morning haze and the layers of sleep I had yet to penetrate. In that instant my week in Afghanistan made complete sense, which is to say it made no sense at all.
Sense and no sense seemed, at the time, perfect equivalents. I tried to verbalise that insight and to hang on to it, but the reader will have to excuse me if I failed and make less sense now. Welcome to Afghanistan, the land of seamless contradiction, the land where shit and lollipop are identical twins.
The loud American voice I learned that night belonged to Tom, a giant of a man and a senior staffer with a large United States television network. He, like I, was one of perhaps 500 journalists who had made it into Afghanistan in the weeks that followed September 11. He, unlike I, had brought with him a dozen or more colleagues and support staff, broadcast equipment and creature comforts to match and, of course, booze to fill a bar.
That morning, the morning of the booming revelation, was the morning I was to have left Afghanistan. I stumbled from my concrete patch determined to wash, but again there was no water in the drum that served 50-odd journalists with only a couple of refills a day, carted by a decrepit little man and his two donkeys. We were holed up in a compound belonging to the “foreign ministry” of the opposition Northern Alliance. The town was Khwaja-Bahawudin in the north-east, where the alliance maintained a military headquarters of sorts about 25km from the front line.
Before 8am I was at the ministry office, asking to leave town and cross the border back to neighbouring Tajikistan. Zubeir, the official who controlled our every move and dispensed or withheld permissions for reasons we all failed to fathom, told me to return at 10am. When I did so, he told me I should have come at nine “like all the others”. Catch.
I shall not bore the reader with a rendition of my endeavours the rest of the day, save to say that by nightfall a dozen of us had done enough clamouring for Zubeir to let us go and promise to radio the border guards to let us through. Three cars bumped and grinded into the night; past the “refugee hotel” where earlier I had photographed my little enigma girl; past the place where two more South Africans and I had crossed a river on overpriced horseback to get to the front; past two checkpoints manned by boys with guns.
At a third checkpoint we skidded to a halt a little late and the soldier on duty levelled his rifle first at the windshield; then settled on a front tyre a rather civilised gesture I thought. But then the soldier and one half of our Siamese driver greeted each other warmly and the tyre was spared.
The late stop appeared to be a function, or rather the dysfunction, of the Siamese driver. It was like this: we understood a jovial man named Shah Mahmood, who sang as he drove, to be the driver of the battered jeep three more journalists and I had piled into that evening. But Shah Mahmood wanted to take a friend and there was no more space. No problem. They shared the drivers’ seat, one on the lap of the other. In the darkness we saw a single body with two heads. Whether they shared the controls we could only speculate.
When we reached the Pyandzh river, the border with Tajikistan, talk was of the proximity of beer. Afghanistan is a dry country and few of us had that luxury during our stay. But the beer would have to wait. We waited half an hour, maybe more, for the painstaking process of passport inspection to begin and for the steel ferry, powered by an old tractor mounted on top, to crank into action. The wait was normal and punctuated by shots in the distance, which was also normal. But eventually word came that the Russian troops who controlled the border area on the Tajik side, our next hurdle, had “no programme for the night”.
Our consolation was that when we returned to the compound at Khwaja-Bahawudin at around midnight, Tom invited us into the rooms his network had been assigned by the Northern Alliance and promptly issued us with a beer and some shots of vodka each. But the mood was grim. Tom and his colleagues were still up, discussing the news that had just reached them of an anthrax attack on the US network NBC’s headquarters in New York among the first of many anthrax scares. Some of them knew the secretary who had contracted the disease after opening an envelope. They drank, and drank, to her health.
Tom boomed: “I say kill them all.” After some argument he toned it down: “Kill 50% or 25%. What would you say is a good place to draw the line?” Eventually he settled on the US colonising Afghanistan. Among the initiatives he suggested was that the tractor ferry at the Pyandzh be replaced with Daffy and Donald Duck boats. Journalists wanting to cross the border could do so in the Disney theme of their choice. I feared Tom’s diatribe was more prophetic than he intended.
The next day we got out. Shah Mahmood was a single driver again; the Russians had a programme and the ferry was running; the tank shells that were flying regularly now were exploding beyond the next hill; and on the Tajik side a stoned border guard with a half-deck of golden teeth and the apparent need for more let us pass for the small consideration of $25 each.
At one of the Russian checkpoints that followed we had an interesting conversation. The soldiers claimed their spies inside Afghanistan had just informed them of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. And so it is that I can report exclusively to you, the reader, that the most wanted man in the world is holed up near the village of Soboori, not far from the town of Jalalabad in Eastern Afghanistan. Scoop?
It was with scoop an exclusive in mind that I had left Johannesburg three weeks earlier, a fortnight after the September 11 attacks on the US. Fool!
I had motivated the trip to my editor by saying that the world’s media were congregating in Pakistan, clamouring to get into Afghanistan with little chance of success. Unlike they, I would get in, I told him, via the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan where I would link up with the Afghan opposition Northern Alliance and enter the sliver of territory they held. I could be one of a few journalists to reach Afghan soil. At the time that seemed truthful.
Dushanbe is an overgrown one-horse town. It is also the capital of Tajikistan, a country served mainly by one airline, Tajikistan Airlines, which connects it most days to Moscow and weekly to Istanbul and Munich. Tajikistan Airlines’ aircraft are the only I have encountered that are infested with flies (flies catching a flight) and where water drips from the ceilings. But these are not the hardships I want to talk about; rather let me share my grief at seeing my exclusive slip away.
In London, where earlier I picked up my Afghan and Russian visas, an initial drip of media reports from Northern Alliance territory turned into a shower. In Moscow, where a Tajik visa had to be obtained and days spent fighting on to a Tajikistan Airlines flight to Dushanbe, it became a cloudburst. CNN kept screening the same footage of a Northern Alliance tank firing into the distance, accompanied by the latest from “our correspondent in Afghanistan”.
And so it should have come as no surprise that when I arrived in Dushanbe, the town was bursting with others like me, a few hundred hopefuls clamouring to join the perhaps 300 who by then had already made it into Afghanistan. I filed a dispatch describing a constant stream of khaki camera jackets “as worn by gung-ho journalists everywhere” tracing a triangular route between the Tajik foreign ministry, the Northern Alliance representative office and the Hotel Tajikistan. The latter was a Soviet-era concrete monstrosity where most of the khaki jackets hung out. The Tajik ministry and the Alliance office were the bureaucratic hurdles the jackets had to negotiate before entry to Afghanistan became theoretically possible.
The next morning I got my first taste of Afghanistan. It clogged the taste buds, gritted the eyes, matted the hair. When later I reported to my editor that I had half the Afghan desert up my nostrils and that various bodily excretions consisted mainly of dust, the exaggeration was within the bounds of poetic license. What had first seemed to be a thick fog that rolled into Dushanbe turned out to be a storm of fine dust from the barren plains of Afghanistan 250km south.
The dust severely restricted visibility and the Northern Alliance suspended flights to the patch of north-eastern Afghanistan it controlled: no more lifts for the growing back-log of khaki jackets wanting to hop the border.
It was the Dushanbe-Pyandzh rally two days later that saved us. That Friday was the day Dushanbe’s traffic jams raced south to the border; the day its taxi-commuting public must have gone on foot; the day its taxi drivers got stinking rich with media dollars. Thirty taxis bearing a hundred hacks roared to the starting line outside the Tajik foreign affairs ministry, where officials had spent a day or more securing the necessary permissions for a land crossing from other government departments, from the Russians who controlled the border area by agreement with the Tajiks, and from the Afghans. Anything to get the clamouring hacks off their backs.
There was a final admonishment from a ministry official follow the van in front bearing the official passes, stay together and wait for anyone who falls behind and off we raced: the Charge of the Spotlight Brigade. Out of city limits the overtaking began. Along bumpy, potholed, narrow roads. Around blind bends in impossible mountain passes. In the face of oncoming traffic that veered at the last second.
Jamshed, the driver of the taxi that two SABC staffers (the only other South Africans) and I shared, was fast. After each stop he blindly clawed his way up the ranks until we were near the front of the convoy. Like many of his colleagues he drove an ancient Volga, the Mercedes of the Soviet Empire, although in appearance more akin to a Valiant. Jamshed, we decided, was the chairperson of the local Volga Solidarity Association. Whenever another Volga burst a tyre or developed mechanical problems, which was often, Jamshed stopped to help.
Jamshed’s chairmanshipllll almost cost us dearly. Afterll one particularly time-ll consuming Volga breakdown session, during which the non-Volgas and some Volga defectors pressed on, we came to a checkpoint in a town appropriately named Moscowski, manned by the Russian FSB, successor to the KGB. The officers on duty demanded to see our passes, which we couldn’t show because they were in the lead van that had long passed. It didn’t help when a Spanish TV reporter bitched at an officer: “Didn’t you know the KGB was disbanded in 1991?” His reply:lll “Really?”
Two hours of negotiations and phone calls later they let us go. Off roared the Volgas, save ours and two others. Volga number one’s driver was missing. Volga number two screeched off to find him, only to splutter to a halt occasioned by mechanical failure that had no remedy. Volga number three we waited, Jamshed ever mindful of his duties as chair.
After dark Volga one and three, now labouring under the added weight of the occupants and luggage of Volga two, reached the final Russian checkpoint just short of the Pyandzh ferry. There, mercifully, the rest of the convoy was waiting for us, although about to leave. The South African contingent was last in the stable, but we had made it. In absolute darkness we continued without lights duell to the proximity of the Taliban, said to hold positions two or three kilometres beyond the river 29 cars crawled down to the ferry.
But before we enter Afghanistan I owe the reader a glimpse of the land we had just traversed. Out of Dushanbe we entered a dusty countryside of rugged mountainous beauty and extreme deprivation. Tajikistan is the poorest of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, still showing the scars of a five-year civil war that came to a fragile end in 1997. Up to 50000 lives were lost in an orgy of clan fighting and ethnic cleansing. Tajikistan still struggles to cope with perhaps half a million llllllinternal refugees and twice as many people almost one sixth of the population threatened by starvation.
I could not take my eyes off the people we passed in our hurry. Small and sturdy, they were beautiful, their majestic features carved finely on smooth olive skins. Men wore loose pants covered with tunics and waistcoats, often crowned by a turban or embroidered cap. Women shone in bright velvet and cotton dresses; symbolic veils loosely draped adding colour. And they all wore what seemed like a permanent air of bemusement, a refusal to capitulate to their lot.
But it was not these people or their circumstances the media convoy had come for. We pressed on to take our ringside seats in the US’s “war on terrorism”. I assuage my guilt with the rationalisation that the historical accident of border demarcation means the people south of the Pyandzh are yet to experience much more hardship than those we abandoned north.
To Page 34
Khwaja-Bahawudin is a time machine in fast reverse. A biblical scene decorated our first Afghan morning. A dusty sky blended with a maze of dust streets, high mud walls and flat mud dwellings. Bearded men, the same we saw north of the Pyandzh but with life etched more deeply into hardened faces, sauntered or led their mules. Women were invisible under their cover-all burkas if they ventured on the streets at all. Giggly children, the only colour on the streets, gawked at us. This town could have been there since the start of time and never changed (a few clanging jeeps, bakkies and trucks apart).
Khwaja-Bahawudin appeared on no map we saw. The town in its present form was too new some three years old it was said. And that is when one realises that Afghanistan, or at least the territory that now goes by that name, is ancient. It cannot reproduce itself, spawn a new village or town, in ways recognisable to the modern eye.
Afghanistan is no state, either, as understood by the modern mind. To quote Jason Elliot in An Unexpected Light, an account of his travels in Afghanistan: “Yet there was a deeper obstacle to discovering the place: Afghanistan did not really exist. It was, more accurately, a fractured jewel, yielding a spectrum as broad or narrow as the onlooker’s gaze It had never been a single country but a historically improbable amalgam of races and cultures, each with its own treasuries of custom, languages and visions of the world; its own saints, heroes and outlaws; an impossible place to understand as a whole.”
Persian, Indian, Greek, Roman, Slavic, Mongol, Arab and Turkic blood courses through the Afghan veins. Each new invader of old Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and Tamerlane, among the more celebrated, each desirous of a foothold at the crossroads of Asia left his progeny. In more recent times Tsarist Russia, the British Empire and the Soviet Union have tried their luck but left with little more than a fleeting contribution in blood (whether spilled or contributed to the ethnic mix) and a greater resolve on the part of an otherwise fractured Afghanistan to resist intrusion.
But back to Khwaja-Bahawudin: its importance, and its value to our collective media gaze, lay in the fact that Ahmed Shah Massood had set up military headquarters there in the last years of his life. Massood was pre-eminent among the mujahedin who fought the Soviets after their 1979 invasion. The Soviets retreated a decade later and when the mujahedin defeated their Afghan puppet, President Najibullah, in 1992, Massood rode victorious on his tank into the capital Kabul to become defence minister and supreme military commander.
But things fell apart. Infighting racked the new government led by President Barhuddin Rabbani, Massood and their Jamiat-e-Islami party. More factions persisted knocking at the doors of Kabul with heavy artillery. The city was ready for a fall, which it did to the Taliban in 1996. Massood retreated to the forbidding Panjshir Valley, his stronghold during the anti-Soviet struggle, and further north to Khwaja-Bahawudin. Under the largely symbolic leadership of Rabbani, Massood patched together the Northern Alliance, the main armed opposition to the Taliban.
My bed of concrete corridor (for space at the compound was limited) was a bed adjoining fate. I studied the ceiling darkened by soot, a wall on one side dangerously cracked, the plaster on the opposite wall marked as if by flying shards. What had been a door to an adjoining room was a broken hole, boarded up to keep the curious at bay.
Beyond that door was where Massood, age 49, took the shrapnel that ended his life. It happened on September 9. Two bogus journalists, said to be from Algeria, exploded their television camera in his face, sacrificing their own lives. The Alliance blamed Bin Laden and the Taliban. The latter probably blamed it on Alliance infighting. The timing was curious.
The rest was history: two days later the attacks on the US. A superpower baying for blood. Bin Laden and the Taliban blamed and condemned. War talk. Aid from Russia, the US and others pouring to the Alliance, giving it a first chance to change its stalemate with the Taliban. I had a job to do: the front line, my microscopic view of a war that may yet change the world.
On October 7 the SABC crew and I set off for the front line. We didn’t get there. We queued an hour and more to get permission from Zubeir and his colleagues at the ministry. We bumped another hour along dusty roads to get to the headquarters of a General Mahebullah, front commander. His assistant waved us off saying too many journalists were on that tour already; we’d have to come another day. More despondent hacks lounged about Mahebullahs’ courtyard bitching about the unreliability of this “tourist agency”.
The consolation prize was a tour to Koukcha river, a defensive line a few kilometres short of the front. Under the glare of dug-in tanks and machine gun posts we found, on the river bank, an encampment that our translator, a young man with the beautiful name Baryolai Wazeen, called a “refugee hotel”. Here, Baryolai said, refugees stopped en route from Taliban territory. Clay dung stoves supplied heat for tea and meals. A volleyball net was strung aside. No one played.
And it is there that I thought I could learn something of Afghanistan but not in the guns that rumbled now and again in the background and not in the chapters of its disjointed and bloody history. I kidded myself, in that surreal landscape of desert dissected by fast-flowing river, that the faces of the people would reveal more. I stared at a leathery, bearded, turbaned face, which responded blankly. I peered at the fresh faces of the kids stoking fire. Unyieldingly they peered back. I chose the wide eyes of one little girl, who giggily dug into my strange features as I into the innocence I thought I would find. She remained my enigma girl. My Afghanistan.
Events soon after revealed little more. The Northern Alliance was publicly encouraged by the US after September 11. It was waiting for the US-led attack on the Taliban to begin, to exploit the new situation to its own ends. But when news reached us that same evening that the bombing of Kabul and more targets had started, and when all crowded around the sole television set at the compound, there was no jubilation, no prediction of imminent victory in fact no Alliance comment at all.
The sole quotes I could get that evening were from two Afghans at the compound, who bemoaned the fate of their country, the capital that was in the hands of their enemy, and their kin. Said one: “This [the bombing] is wrong. This is our city. I’m from Kabul. My wife, my children are there.”
Two days later we made it to the front. Already before we arrived at the Koukcha our jeep was surrounded by men on horseback. They wanted $20 a horse for a few hours (about the price to buy a donkey) to take us through the river and beyond. I was a tourist again, elated on my grey stallion. And then we reached our front line, a barren hill of trenches facing the Taliban a hill beyond, mercifully shrouded in a cloud of dust. Two things happened there. First the avuncular commander who was our guide, Abdul Qudoos, insisted the US was no ally to him: “The Americans fight for revenge. We fight our fight that we have been fighting for seven or eight years.”
Qudoos steadfastly refused to acknowledge his enemy’s enemy as his friend. But then, just as a piece of the puzzle Afghani pride and resentment at foreign interference seemed to fall into place, he added: “If America attacks Afghanistan like last night and the night before, there will be no benefit for us, the people of Afghanistan. They should be more serious about it [presumably the bombing].”
The second thing that happened was that when one of the young soldiers in the trenches saw our cameras, he started firing into the distance for show. I saw bullets bite into the dust well short of the Taliban hill, but I pray none found a target. This was not my war. But it was a media war, and that included me. When another group of journalists hurried up the hill to “our” piece of the front, the same performance was repeated. And in the days that followed we heard story upon story how journalists, eager to show action, cajoled and bribed soldiers to exercise even heavy artillery, to make war for audiences back home. The theatre of war.
In my time that remained in Khwaja-Bahawudin I did the rest of the media tour: refugee camps. It was a topic worth the collective media gaze, with drought and displacement pushing seven and a half million people to the absolute brink.
At one such “camp” just outside town the seething mass of destitute did not live in tents or under plastic sheets as elsewhere. They were in the mud ruins of a settlement clearly inhabited by others before. I pressed the refugees, mostly ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks pushed out by the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, on the identity of their predecessors. One relented: these houses used to belong to Pashtun who now, presumably, were refugees in Taliban territory. Not the standard story.
I bumped into a soft-spoken German, one of the few aid workers who had not deserted Afghanistan in anticipation of the US-led air strikes. Eric Engel told me the angels and the devils in this part of the world were not easy to distinguish. He feared the effects of the war on the suffering people and the power vacuum likely to follow the fall of the Taliban. “In the media the Talibs are presented as bad guys and the Northern Alliance as the good guys. That is a very simple view The [Taliban] oppression is bad, but they also brought some peace and order, which Afghanistan did not have before.”
As I write this the Taliban is already claiming 1000 civilian deaths, the direct result of the US-led “war on terror”. Numbers may be disputed, but in the weeks or months to come that figure will certainly surpass the casualties of the terror attacks on the US. And many, many times more in Afghanistan will succumb to their frailties induced by war. I see no outcome. Same old shit.
I cannot claim to understand Afghanistan or the forces, including the media, that moved the world’s remaining superpower to want to pulverise a country of dust. But as certainly as Siamese drivers exist in Afghanistan, the small things I saw make sense. Life continues.