Reporting from Afghanistan

Main Page

March 13, 2002
Islamabad, Pakistan

Islamabad's United Nations headquarters is in a neighborhood diplomats' residences. The streets are lined with trees; the houses have gates in front and are typically two story affairs, some with lava rock walls, others looking like Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs. Some homes have an armed guard planted in a folding chair with a bandolier strung across his chest. These men are invariably stocky, even chubby, and sport bushy black mustaches. The pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip appears to be the firearm of choice.

Arif the fixer drives to Cathy's house. Cathy is a photographer. Recently returned from Kabul; she is 24 and shoots for prominent news magazines. She was one of the journalists at the UN club last night. She lives near the UN compound. She has offered to help me get on the UN flight to Kabul, Afghanistan.

The UN compound is no more than a converted house, a two-story cookie-cutter modernist indistinguishable from the rest. Two armed guards in blue uniforms wave us in. Two white people. No problem here. A balding Pakistani emerges from behind a bunkerlike partition separating the waiting area from the office area and greets Cathy effusively. She asks for two forms which we fill out. The man reads mine aloud.

"Larry Flynt Publications."

"That's right," I say.

"This is a new one," he says.

I don't think a response is necessary; so I say nothing. After a pause of a few seconds, during which time I give the man no reason to do otherwise, the form is signed, stamped in duplicate, and stapled to a new form. I am to please pay in the other room.

A Japanese photographer is already there, paying $600 in freshly minted twenties for the one-way, 45-minute flight to Kabul. The bills are run through with steel staples. The cashier peels them off one by one, and then suspiciously, almost surgically, turns some over, shifts them on the pile, teases the bills, as though he is checking for counterfeits, but has no idea what to look for. Counterfeit bills are rampant. I meet a man later, Habib, who speaks of a prolific master counterfeiter who owns presses and cranks out Benjamins so sophisticated that they can be run through an infrared testing device and pass. Habib tells me that since so many white people are now in Islamabad, passing around so much real cash, no one has time to check the bills anymore.

Arif alerts me after a few minutes of money counting that we will be late for our first appointment of the day, with a retired Pakistani general who was the chief of staff under Benazir Bhutto, the country's prime minister in 1988 and 1993. Benazir's father, Aulfikar Ali Bhutto was Pakistan's prime minister during the late '70s. He was ousted in a military coup in 1977 and hanged two years later. I ask Cathy if she can cut the line, and she bulls us through. The cashier regards our hundred dollar bills with disdain, counts them compulsively. He has dark shadows under his eyes, wears a black suit.

Arif turns to me. "He doesn't know what fake money looks like."

I laugh, too loud though. The man handling the cash knows he's being laughed at. He probably doesn't know why. He looks secretly, quietly angry.

On the road to the general's, we fly. Arif passes tiny, four-cylinder cars that travel in flocks on the city streets. He honks at those in the fast lane, careers around turns, goes the wrong way up one-way streets, jumps lights, passes a donkey cart loaded with unfinished chairs, threads the needle between pedestrians who must think their lives are nearly over. He tailgates, sprints the straight-aways on the two-way highways, creates a middle lane between oncoming and passed traffic, honks his horn gratuitously, reflexively, absent-mindedly. He nods to traffic officers before he disobeys their clear instructions to wait.

"How far are we?" I ask. "Fifteen minutes?"

"Twelve, 13, maybe 14 minutes," he says.

That would makes us only two or three minutes late. It takes us half an hour to leave Islamabad and travel to Rawalpindi, an adjacent suburb, what the San Fernando Valley is to Los Angeles. Rawalpindi has no pretensions to greatness. There are more military installations, which are marked by long brick walls that look as if they were thrown up in the 12th century, crumbling, ancient rounded bricks, sloppy, weathered, pitted like sugar. Rusted barbed wire with long, thick seemingly homemade barbs, tops the walls. We pass a hospital, the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology, which has a gold statue of a gigantic heart held in an uplifted hand out front.

Arif says, "Over there, this is the place where our first prime minister was assassinated. You see that white wall. This is Liaquat Khan."

Arif has told me that his home state, a province in the northwest frontier, is like Texas because everyone has a gun.

"Arif," I ask, "why is it important to have a weapon?"

"Honor," he says. "Old guns, more honor."

"How many guns do you have?"

"I have many," he says. "Two Kalashnikovs, an M-16, an automatic pistol, nine mm, 30-shot."

The guns cost him about $1,000 each, if I make the conversion right. Circumstances have forced him to sell a shotgun that was very old and very honorable to possess, inlaid with gold, given to his father by Mohammad Zahir Shah, the former king.

We arrive at the general's office late. He is situated in a remote neighborhood. The general is kind faced, placid, smooth of voice. His place of business is the classic Pakistani office: the inevitable drab beige wall-to-wall carpet with a colorful rug of the region on the floor. Two fluorescent bulbs mounted horizontally on the wall behind the general's desk light the room. The desk is shiny, polished oak. There is nothing to look at except a trio of bronze sculptures. One depicts a tribal warrior on a horse, charging into battle with flintlock pointed. Another shows a helmeted soldier advancing into combat, Korean war era carbine brandished.

The general is unhappy with the relationship between Pakistan and the United States.

"We have been let down," he says. "The Americans needed Pakistan during the '80s, when Russia was in Afghanistan."

We talk about Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan. A common Western perception is that Pakistan provided weapons, a wireless telephone system and cash to the Taliban. The Taliban are largely Pashtun, and Pakistan has a formidable Pashtun population, an ethnic affiliation that went a long way toward determining allegiances. Plus, Pakistan was looking for strategic depth in having Afghanistan allied as a friendly state. The general is familiar with allegations that Pakistan had paid the salaries of Taliban officials in Kabul, to the tune of $6 million per year, and that Pakistan hid these expenses from international lending institutions in its annual budgets.

The general dismisses such charges as overblown. He downplays the history of Pakistan's Pashtun involvement. The Pashtun belt straddles the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Many thousands of Pakistanis studied in madrassas, religious schools, in this area. The commonly accepted version of events is that when the Taliban rose in 1996 to attempt to establish an Islamic state, many sympathetic Pashtuns crossed the border and joined the Taliban. The general denies that the Pashtun migration ever occurred.

The general adds that there is no way to assemble a peace platform in Afghanistan until there is an accurate census. He estimates that Pashtuns make up 60 percent of the Afghan population. My almanac places the figure at 45 percent. When I mention the disparity, the general raises his hand and shakes his head. "Those numbers are wrong, and distorted by political considerations."

A servant brings in tea; bowing and shuffling as though he fears for his life should he spill a drop of tea from the cup to the saucer. The general and I have a friendly chat about geopolitics. He gives me a sheaf of literature to take home and peruse. In the days to come, he will send me e-mails of recent articles that seem clearly pro-Taliban.

After we leave the general, Arif discovers he has misplaced his phone book and insists that we return to the jungle spot.

"I have lost my diary. I don't know where it is. Haven't seen it. Perhaps I left it at the jungle spot. Let's go."

It's night. We drive to the spot. The police see us coming. They step into the middle of the road and flash a light into the car, then wave us past.

"Once again the white skin gets us through," I say.

"To the contrary," Arif says. "They are wondering, Why are you taking a white man into the jungle at this time of night?"

Good question, I think. Why is he taking me to the jungle? All of a sudden he's lost his "diary"?

Arif pulls off the road and parks. At the back of the clearing, two men emerge from the shack that holds the sodas, cigarettes and candies that are for sale. Arif yells to his two cronies. He says something in Urdu. He might be saying, "Slip behind this guy and slit his throat." Or he could be asking if he forgot his diary here. The two men take a cursory peek in and around the boxes of soda bottles and look back at Arif. Are they just making a show of searching? Arif barks at them again. One of his men moves, then freezes and looks back at Arif. Arif yells and gestures angrily to the side of the shack. The man steps around, and fiddles with something behind the counter. I look around at the Mulberry trees, the picnic tables and the packed dirt floor. Is this were I'm going to die? Here, in this clearing?

I hear a pop, and a buzz. Light flickers above the shack. A huge electric signs leaps to life. The Jungle Spot is spelled out in fluorescent white. A neon monkey is eating a banana, and a tiger peeks out from a flashing-green thicket of palm fronds.

"What do you think?" Arif asks.

"It looks great."

We climb into the car and pull onto the main road back into Islamabad.

"Arif why did we go to the jungle spot?"

"To look for my diary. Don't you trust me?"

Main Page