Reporting from Afghanistan

Main Page

March 14, 2002
Islamabad, Pakistan

Today's first stop is the Institute of Strategic Studies to chat with its director general, Dr. Shireen Mazari, a political analyst who is very well known in Pakistan for her prime-time TV show, Pakistan's version of Larry King Live. Mazari, a short woman with a booming voice, is known for asking tough questions. I lob her some slow pitches to start off.

We talk about America's relationship with Pakistan, which has fluctuated according to political exigencies through the past 30 years. Mazari points out that Central Asia is a tangle of competing interests, but up until 9-11, the imbroglio broke down into two primary camps. America was allied with India. Pakistan was allied with China. Pakistan's association with China was problematic to the U.S., and the American strategic relationship with India, which included arms transfers, put a bug in Pakistan's ass.

Pakistan, dwarfed by its archrival India in almost every material way, searched for "strategic depth" and allied itself with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban, it was thought, were the best hope for peace in the war-torn country. According to Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Pakistan's version of the CIA, Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, funneled weapons to Mullah Mohammed Omar's men, set up a wireless network and helped out with cash. Pakistan hoped for a stable Afghanistan to provide secure trade routes to markets across the way in the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Pakistan also had ethnicity in common with the Taliban: many Pakistanis are Pashtun, which was the predominant ethnicity of the Taliban. Pakistan was on the verge of a pariah state in the United States.

In a May 2001 speech, George W. Bush listed countries with nuclear capacity that his administration had been consulted in regard to a planned missile shield and the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missle Treaty. While France, China, Australia and, gallingly to Islamabad, India had all been consulted, nuclear-armed Pakistan had not been. The exclusion was taken as a barometer in Islamabad of the strained state of relations with the United States. America, despoiler of Iraq, supporter of Israel, was viewed as a doctrinaire enemy of Islam.

Then the World Trade Center disappeared one morning in twin clouds of concrete dust. America vowed to bring the battle to the front step of the suspected perpetrators in Afghanistan. Suddenly, the U.S. needed a friend in neighboring Pakistan. Red phones started to ring all over Islamabad.

Pakistan has been in this position before. When the Soviets rolled tanks into Kabul in 1979, the U.S. kick-started a friendship with Pakistan in the way of $4 billion dollars in pledges. Only $1.2 billion of this money came through, and that money was used to buy F-16s, critical as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, nuclear nonproliferation was a condition for the arms transfers, and when it became impossible to ignore Pakistan's ambitions to possess nuclear bombs (it had been assembling the parts for a device slowly but steadily over the '80s with help from China), the U.S. killed the deal, and sent soybeans and wheat instead of spare parts.

Spare parts are probably high on the Pakistan wish list now that Uncle Sam has come bargaining for military bases.

This long story is told over and over, with all given dollar amounts subject to fluctuations, whenever Pakistani journalists find a Westerner who is willing to sit and listen, but I must be on the move.

Concluding the interview, Arif the fixer and I head over to the Afghan embassy to secure an entry visa. The embassy is in a diplomatic neighborhood, on a block of tony villas. Some have colonnaded entrances and marble patios. The tenor of the neighborhood changes within a half block of the Afghan embassy. Here, women walking in the street are swaddled in black robes. A phalanx of men in salwar kameez stand outside the gate of the compound. Some of the men look distinctively Asian. They are probably Hazars, descendants of Genghis Khan, whose Mongol hordes swept though Afghanistan in 1219. Khan's raiders left piles of corpses everywhere they went, and encouraged the birth rate through intermarriage with local tribes. The present day Hazaras are mountain folk, but they held part of Kabul until they were routed by the northern alliance in 1995. The Hazaras are locked in a blood feud with the Taliban. Their leader, Abdul Ali Mazari, was thrown out of a helicopter while in Taliban custody.

Three soldiers in green sweaters and red berets casually hold antique, wooden AK-47s and stand guard in front of the Afghan embassy. Across the street is a crowd of Muslims in tradition garb, waiting under a metal canopy at the Royal Danish embassy.

Now that a war is on, these Muslims are trying to emmigrate to Denmark, Arif explains. "They're trying to get the hell out of the refugee camps here."

A tiny yellow taxi sifts through people who block the street and stops in front of the embassy. A guard yells at the taxi driver, gestures down the road, as if to say, move on. Get the hell out of here. He whacks the taxi driver on the back of the head, hits him again, and gestures again with his other hand.

"Why is he hitting him?" I ask Arif.

"The taxi driver is always parking his car in front of the gate."

To avoid the throng at the gate, Arif asks some questions, and we learn that we can pick up forms from a window around back. A footpath hugs a low white wall. The scene in back is not encouraging. A patio has been converted into a waiting room. I can barely make out a barred window through the press of people clustered in front of it. There is no line, just a mass of people, and a mosh pit up close to the window. The man at the front of the "line" has the lip of the window counter jammed into his sternum. When he has his form, he'll have to fight his way out. Then he'll have to fight his way back to turn the form in. Afghans are pouring back into their country. I read about convoys leaving from a Pakistani refugee camp to repatriate people to the valley north of Kabul.

"Did you bring your elbow pads and knee pads from America?" Arif asks.

"I forgot them."

"Because you're going to need them to get through the line. Just wait, I'll make a phone call."

Arif disappears. I stand on the fringe of the crowd, and put my hands in my pockets. I scan the crowd for accusatory eyes. No one seems to notice me.

A young man who looks like a student approaches. He's wearing a button-down shirt and Western pants, is freshly shaved and speaks accent free English.

"Very crowded," he says

"Very crowded."

"You are trying to get a visa?"

"I'm trying to get to Afghanistan."

A pause. "Are you Afghan?" I ask.

"I am."

Arif reappears and interrupts. "Let's try the frontal assault." I note a feeling of relief at having an ally appear, just in case the "student" was sizing me up for a kidnapping. For all I know he just wanted to practice his English. For my part, I'm eager to practice not trusting friendly strangers.

We return to the babble at the front gate. Among them is a tall white man with a full salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a lether vest and sunglasses. He doesn't look American. He's smoking a cigarette, looking hard behind the mirrored glasses. He has an Afghan scarf tossed around his shoulders. I spot an Australian passport in a sleeve of papers in his hand. An Aussie. Poor bastard. Without a fixer, he'll be here all day, and get nowhere. This is precisely the kind of mess fixers are supposed to fix.

At the gate, a man in a long robe with a picket fence of thick white front teeth is seated at a wooden table with a log book open in front of him. The cord from a telephone on the table stretches into a guard booth. The robed man is the gatekeeper. This might be a place where being the white man might actually help.

"Let me do the talking," I tell Arif.

"Tell him you want to speak to Mr. Jabar."

I wedge my way between people to the front of the table and greet the gatekeeper.

"A salaam aleikum," I say to the man. "I'm trying to get a visa to travel to Afghanistan, and I would like to speak to Mr. Jabar."

The man pauses, and looks down at the telephone on his desk, as if he's thinking about letting me in. He looks up and asks a question in Urdu. I answer back with an empty stare. Arif breaks in with a burst of explanations. He makes little headway.

"We have to wait," Arif tells me.

Two Afghans in business suits step to the table and talk to the guard. I am sandwiched between them. I look at one of the men, fat, with a walrus moustache. An afghan JP Morgan, to my eye. He winks.

"You Americans are backing the losing side," he tells me.

I don't know what he's saying, or what my response is supposed to be. He winks again and walks through the gate.

Three men from the crowd slip through the gate with him. Two of the guards shout and grab them roughly by the shirtsleeves, pulling them out and shoving them into the street with a slap on the back of the head.

In Islamabad, laying someone out with a quick smack in the face seems to be preferable and easier than strong words or admonitions. A quick, brutal blow eliminates argument, puts the message across and expresses the serious point of view of the man doing the hitting. There's eloquence in the slap, one of the more benign forms of physical violence available to the short tempered in this part of the world.

"Arif, why don't we try to get an application form and come back later and turn it in?"

Arif reapproaches the man at the table and asks once again for admission. We have another interview set up for 11 with a Pakistani journalist, and I have less than an hour to deal with the visa.

The gatekeeper is growing impatient. His eyebrows knit in a frown. Arif argues, insists, explains, fans a sheaf of papers in the man's face, papers that include a copy of my passport and a letter of credentials from HUSTLER Magazine. The man stands up and with a dismissive gesture, points to the street.

But Arif has come away with a form. The form has something crossed out in front of the word Afghanistan.

"You two seemed to be getting along great," I tell Arif as we walk away.

"Oh, yes. He is my boyfriend."

A few minutes later, Arif pushes his luck and tries again. This time, we are allowed in. The black metal gate swings open, and we walk past the trio of armed guards.

"The bastard. He wasn't telling them my name," Arif says. "Mr. Jabar knows my family, but the bastard at the gate wasn't telling him my name."

We are escorted into Mr. Jabar's office, once again the drab, gray beaurocrats office I have seen all over Islamabad. Fluorescent lights run on the walls, parallel to the floors. On one wall is a map of the world; the place names are written in the flowing Urdu script, which resembles Arabic. Mr. Jabar is seated at a desk strewn with papers. He wears a stiff blue suit and a wide, blue polyester tie. His hair is thick, black, sculpted without gel into a sharp wing and parted to one side. His beard is trim; his eyes are sly, with long lashes. Two men sit in armchairs set along one wall in the office. They look like they have been sitting there so long, they are fused to the furniture.

"A salaam aleikum," I say. We shake hands. I sit. Arif hands the man my papers.

The phone rings. Jabar picks up. His cell phone rings. He carries out two conversations at once. Then he looks at my paperwork.

First, the form. We have put all the answer to the questions in the wrong boxes. Arif laughs. Next, a cursory glance at the photocopy passport. Then the letter from HUSTLER. Mr. Jabar reads it carefully. He is reading every word. The letter is printed on Larry Flynt Publications letterhead, but HUSTLER is written out in block letters in the text of the letter. My hands sweat. Afghanistan was an attempt to create the most pure Islamic state in the world. Under the Taliban, women were forbidden to show their faces in public, and the importation of lipstick was ended. HUSTLER is firmly dedicated to arousing prurient interests by way of the naked female form. Mr. Jabar shakes his head as he reads the letter. Time passes, and he is still reading, still shaking his head. He looks up and says something to Arif in Urdu. Arif breaks out an impassioned Urdu response. The man makes a curt reply, and then there is silence. I hear the drone of the fluorescent lights. Arif pleads. The phone rings. Arif turns to me.

"He says the letter won't do."

"Why?"

Arif bugs his eyes.

"Try again."

Arif tries again. He talks. Mr. Jabar stares at him impassively. My hands are sweating. Arif points to my new clothes. Mr. Jabar laughs. The two men in the chairs against the wall laugh. Arif is explaining how I lost my luggage. I laugh too, and gesture to my clothes, still creased from the packaging.

"My luggage," I begin, but Mr. Jabar is listening to Arif.

At this point, Mr. Jabar has firmly and finally decided that my paperwork is most definitely not in order. Arif is asking Mr. Jabar to approve the visa application as a personal favor.

"Can I see your passport, please?" Mr. Jabar asks me.

Progress. Tomorrow, Inshallah (God willing), I will pick up my visa.

Later in the day, after a chat with a prominent Pakistani journalist further obscured the politics of the region, it is time to shoot photographs in Islamabad.

"Show me where the people live," I ask Arif. "Show me Islam."

Arif drives to Rawalpindi. A row of houses breaks into a ravine, a river bank, which is packed with mud houses. People live on hillsides and river banks in capital cities all over the third world. In Brazil, they are called favelas. In Islamabad, they are generically referred to as shantytowns. The houses are made of mud from the river; the walls are smooth, the roofs are flat, mud, with bits of thatch poking through. Patties of dung, flattened like tortillas by hand, are plastered to the walls like portholes. The dung is used instead of wood for cooking fires. Trees are long gone.

We drive further into the slums. Women in burkas walk the increasingly narrow streets, clotted with foot traffic. The women move like ghosts, with a lacey grill in front of their faces so they can see and breath.

"They are Afghans," Arif tells me. "Sixty percent of the people that live in these slums are Afghans."

Later, another traffic jam. The chorus of car horns, a constant backdrop to travel on the streets, reaches a manic crescendo. Some buses have horns that move up and down the register. It sounds like the buses are honking in Urdu.

"Do you want to see a fight?" Arif asks.

"Sure."

On the side of the road a crowd has formed. There is no fight, but a body. A truck is crashed into an electric pole. Stretcher bearers lift a body into a waiting ambulance. The crowd is glued to the spot.

Arif takes me to the vegetable market. He wades the car into the crowds that throng the aisles, honking insistently. The people make way. The slums continue for miles and miles. We cross a bridge, and the mud-walled honeycomb of huts stretches as far as I can see. There are no freestanding structures; every house shares a wall with another. Every mound of garbage on the street has two or three people sifting through the orange peels, the wilted leaves of lettuce, the rotten turnips, looking for food. An old man, or a wizened woman, covered in a brown cloak, slowly bends, stoops, reaches a hand to the earth, and descends into a hole.

"All of this because the United States of America wants to drop some bombs," Arif says. "So they can get one man."

Main Page