Reporting from Afghanistan

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March 12, 2002
Islamabad, Pakistan

Islamabad is a broad, dry city that was hacked out of the jungle at the foot of the Margalla Mountains in the 1960s to make way for a new capital. The old capital was Karachi. As the name Islamabad suggests, the residents of Pakistan's capital city are mostly Muslim. The voice of the muezzin echoes in the jungle outside my hotel window. The mournful (to my western ears) long, slow wail of devotion is Isha, the fifth and final prayer of the day. I ask Arif, my fixer, why the muezzin's voice is projected by loudspeaker.

"Because if you can hear his voice, you should go," he tells me.

Early this morning, Arif picked me up at my hotel room, and we zipped around the city in his tiny, abbreviated, white four-door sedan; we bled into the stream of oversized, motorized toys that clog the arteries of the city's streets. I am renting the car for $50 a day. At the end of the block that includes my hotel is a sand bag bunker. A soldier peers over the edge; his rifle juts above his shoulder. Two other soldiers lounge outside the safety of the bunker in lounge chairs. They wear green ribbed sweaters, leather belts with brass buckles, green pants, berets and white spats. They are armed with unimpressive bolt-action rifles.

Reflectors, bright plastic chains, paint and designs adorn passing trucks, making them look like ornate, circus vehicles. The trucks are loaded to twice their height; canvass tops stretched up a dozen feet above the walls of the cab, sealing in chaff from wheat. Arif says they are headed for Afghanistan, to feed cows.

Our first stop of the day is the money trader; I need Pakistani Rupees for my American dollars. "Where do we change money?" I ask.

"You'll see."

We pull onto a vast, broad boulevard that bisects the city. Sleek streetlights tower over a middle median, and disappear into a tromp l'oeil infinity. This road is called Blue Area, and is the city's commercial center. Purple daisies and pine trees grow in patches in the grass islands on either side. The endless row of shops are all situated in four- to five-story buildings that share an architectural uniformity. The structures look like they were also built in the 1960s, when the city was engineered, laid out and put up. In this way, Islamabad is like Brasilia, Brazil-a capital that was hacked out of jungle in the sixties, and adorned with whimsical, high modernist federal buildings marked by gigantism. In Islamabad, the Supreme Court is like a archetypical Frank Gehry, with massive concrete wings angling out from a triangular base.

We stop in a row of shops that all have dollar signs in the window. Arif wedges his car into a spot no wider than a bathtub is long. He picks a merchant and deals in Urdu with the moneychangers, who argue vehemently from behind bulletproof glass windows. I trade in five twenties, and we lose 35 rupees in the exchange, less than 50 cents. The Chinese currency traders who come to Islamabad to buy dollars, I am told, prefer higher denominations. In dollars, as in Rupees, volume is a serious consideration, at least in Islamabad.

Our next stop is the clothes store. I have lost my luggage. Arif narrates the city as he drives.

"This is the Egyptian embassy. It was blown off three to four years ago. Many people died...That is the secretariat; when foreign dignitaries come. They sit there...that is where Musharaf lives, in that central house, with the three flags, all the same. I don't know why they have three flags. It was somebody's bright idea...this is the guesthouse where Daniel Pearl lived. It is owned by a minister; he only rents it out to honkies.... This is Constitution Avenue. In emergency warfare, they can just cut down the light poles, throw them away, and land jets there, if they bomb the airport. This is where the people live; there are four to five hundred small ten-by-ten foot houses by the dirty river, the sewage river. Once upon a time it was a river, now it is a sewage river."

Arif has an excellent command of the English language, including slang, and especially including curse words: "bullshit, deep shit, dude, dudette," he rattles off at one point. He tells me that he learned English from watching American movies. He tells me his favorite American movies and actors, but I tune him out. I'm jet lagged, still stunned at the surreal way jet airplanes erase geography so I don't have much to say. Arif's talking buys me time to adjust.

We run errands for the first part of the day- clothes cost about 40 dollars, including two khaki shirts and a pair of chinos. Spare passport photos, a telephone cable for my Internet connection at the Marriott, microcasette tapes, which cost $1 each. Arif drives casually in the middle of the raod. There are no lines in the middle, and he floats from side to side, squeezing into spots that appear not to exist. While we are driving, a sandal flies into the air. A boy has been hit by a car ahead of us. He holds one hand to his head, which is gushing blood, and he snaps the other hand, as if he's trying to shake off a stinger. "He was chasing a kite," Arif says. "Stupid. Running into the street, and all he sees is the kite. It's his own fault. I know the driver well. I would stop, but we are busy, and he would ask me for many favors."

I have to go to the American embassy. My first priority is to get a security briefing from the second secretary, but I miss the weekly briefing by an hour. My real purpose is to convince them to send my mail. I have brought all my bills-my phone bill, water bill, electric bill--with me to Pakistan. A pasty white woman, flabby, very American in her physique, tells me no, the diplomatic pouch is for diplomatic personnel only.

We return to the Marriott to have lunch. Twenty dollars by the pool with a pair of American journalists who have recently Returned from Kabul and have excellent contact with military.

A fixer is a person contracted by a journalist to make things happen. A fixer's duties are various. The reporters I talked to before I arrived impressed upon me the need for a fixer. He is the person who makes things happen. He is the person with the contacts. The better the fixer, the better the contacts, and consequently, the higher the price. Channel, a Pakistani, is a premier fixer, who stays at the Marriott. Very well connected, she commands $450 per day. She recommended Arif to Peter Landesman, a New York based reporter, and a friend of a friend of a friend, and Peter recommended Arif to me.

Fifteen hours after Arif picked me up he drops me off. He calls me boss. He wears a sharp handlebar moustache and slicked back hair. I forgive myself for thinking he looks like Omar Sharif. We drive past a checkpoint with concrete blocks. "I have a honkie in the car so they don't even look," he says, referring to me. "If I was by myself, they'd look even in my ass."

Arif is from a family of security men. He tells me that his uncle was a minister, his brother a captain, another uncle a member of the ISI, the Pakistani version of the CIA. Arif, on the other hand, started growing bees from the time he was eight years old. He wants to show me his hives. He pulls the car into the jungle and parks. We walk down into a roughly hewn clearing in the trees, the trees cut in half, the stumps left. It is springtime, and green buds are bursting from the trees, the very beginnings of leaves. In a month, the forest will be a thick canopy of green. Four men emerge from a tent. Greetings go around. Salaam aleikum. All Shake hands. The bee hives are in busted blue crates with sackcloth tied over. Buzzing like crazy. The men wear shalwar qamiz, the Pakistani national dress of a billowy, knee-length shirt worn over matching cotton pants. Always white, somehow immaculate.

"The bees are happy; they're working."

Down the road is the Jungle Spot, Arif's kiosk that he has bought with his fixing money. He figures if he gets a couple more fixes, he can finish. He introduces me to his dogs. One an Afghan, looks like a husky.

"What's his name?"

"No name."

"Does he speak Urdu?"

"Pashtou."

Unleashed, the dog sprints manic laps around the Jungle Spot's a few tables and chairs, Pepsi umbrellas, tables chairs, a chill spot off the side of the road in a hard-packed dirt clearing in the woods. Mulberry trees and native shesham form a canopy. The bottoms of the trunks are painted white. I ask why.

"If people are driving at night, they see the trees with the lights. It proves that something living in this area. It's not part of the jungle."

A warm breeze blows through the trees, stirs against my ears. The husky is chained back up, and whines, squealing like a squeeze toy.

A servant prepares beverages. He stirs instant coffee for ten minutes, to beat it into a frothy foam. There is a straw mat next to the kiosk where he sleeps. A straw broom. Bikes chained to trees.

"Those belong to the villagers. They live in the mountains. Not this one, but after the next one, and the next. After four mountains, there are the villages. You can tell the peasants, because they spit. You can hear them hock and spit. The people with the dark faces are Christian."

Arif is on the phone arranging a meeting with a Pakistani general for tomorrow. He speaks rapid fire Urdu, but I make out a few phrases: General Musharaf...pain in the ass...Ustler Magazine...journalist...."

He pauses, his hand over the receiver. "Six years back in Peshawar, the Shama cinema showed pornos. The Billor family politicians. >From ANP party. Pakistan is full of hypocrites. I can get champagne, red wine, white wine, whasky."

Arif, I suspect, hates Americans, in the abstract at least.

"How many states does America have?" he asks.

"Fifty."

"Afghanistan is the 51st.," he says. "They will even use the American dollar there. Watch. Later, I want them to fry 150 marines in one single lot. Then Uncle Sam is great. He tests his weapons on us; then he makes us pay for them. He kills the Iraqis in the gulf war, then makes the Saudis pay for it. This war, they are worried, because they have to pay for the whole thing themselves. They would like to find a way to make the Afghans pay for the bombs."

I speak with three Pakistani journalists. One is reputed to be the country's biggest importer of illegal alcohol. He plays a cat and mouse game with the police. They catch him, he pays them off, brings in more--vodka, whisky, beer, even Bailey's Irish cream. I ask these men what American bases exist. "Karachi, Pasni, Jackum Abat. Has Musharaf ever said no to America?" Behind America they see the Jews. They see a vast plot to squash Islam--Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya. They see the Jews controlling America.

At night, I talk to women from a group just returned from Kabul. They talk of seeing empty villages, discarded material, abandoned tanks.

Later, I join the UN Club. Membership is 20 dollars for one week. Pakistanis are strictly forbidden. Arif drives me and two American journalists. The UN has created a Pakistani free zone. Good place to make contacts. I see a black man. At least black people are allowed in. And of course the wait staff. We talk war. The muzak is awful--Eric Clapton on pipes of Pan.

A female photographer is fresh back from two months straight in Kabul. She is eating her second lobster meal in a row, savoring every bite. A male TV producer has been in Islamabad for as long. He is outraged that the club has run out of red wine. I get a phone number for a one-star American general who is staying in my hotel. He may be able to help me liaise with U.S. military in Afghanistan.

At the bar, two Brits with tattoos on forearms and polo shirts impersonate foul-mouthed shit-kickers. The bar a reminder of home.

Back late, I run into Bianca Jagger in the lobby. I have heard several times that she is recently returned from Kabul, where she was said to be a key organizer of a rave behind the American embassy, recently started back up. She is very pretty, swathed in white traditional garb, a long orange scarf to the ground. We walk together to the elevator. She has to pack, she tells me, she leaves tomorrow morning at seven. We ride the elevator together. She wants to know where I am going next. Such a long day. I'm nearly at my floor, and I can't remember the word. "Kabul," I say as the doors open to my floor.

"When?" She asks.

"As soon as I find my luggage."

"Not you too. Goodnight."

HUSTLER and Bianca Jagger have showed up in the war zone.

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