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Kabul, Afghanistan The king is coming Clouds mass over the mountains in a black-blue sky, a planet glows, the crescent moon cups its dark side like a scoop of purple ice cream in a silver dish. Electric lights glimmer in a few shops; kerosene lanterns glow within others. Tonight there is a cocktail party, a well-earned relaxation. At Bagram in the afternoon, I had talked to a new PAO, USMC Major Nickovik, and asked him if I could go out with special forces. "Everyone wants to go out with specials forces," He says. "But no one 's been able to." "I want to make the request anyway." "That's fine. I'll forward your request." After Bagram, I caught a ride with the Chicago Tribune women back to Kabul. Then I went to the presidential palace to get my credentials to see the king. The entire press corps was storming the palace. Only 30 cards were printed up to attend the homecoming ceremony at the airport tomorrow morning for Mohammed Zahir Shah, the 87-year-old king, who was ousted in a coup by his cousin 30 years ago and has lived in Rome ever since. The journalists have been dying for a good story, since the war has quieted down and Israel has dominated the news. The 30 cards were snapped up, and a near riot broke out. The guy in charge, who seemed like he was making things up as he went along, asked people to come back at 5 p.m. At five, Farhad, who's translating for the Chicago Tribune, got me past the first guard. I also had a letter from the foreign ministry, with a photo attached, that I had picked up a couple of weeks ago. The letter is written in Dari, has a stamp on it and looks official. A welter of journalists shoved forward and back outside the gate. A guard lined people up single file, with ladies first, in the driveway. A car came, and everyone was moved onto the sidewalk. Minutes later, it became clear that nothing was happening, and the line disintegrated. People surrounded a man with a walkie talkie. For the next two hours, there was shouting, pushing, bitching. A German woman and an Asian woman, both reporters, took turns berating a guard like tag-team wrestlers. Then a man got frisked. He went in. We are formed into a line again. One by one we are frisked and crowded onto the palace grounds. Mike, the Knight-Ridder guy, flattens himself against my back; I look over my shoulder, and he backs off an inch. We dribble in past the guards. On my left, an arched pavilion is half collapsed. The presidential palace is as thoroughly destroyed as any neighborhood in Kabul. Shrapnel wounds pock the building faces. A round stone turret with a pointed roof is more ruined than intact. The reporters trail along a basketball court gown over with grass. Mike, the Knight-Ridder guy, has cleared security and speedwalks past me. On my right is a medieval looking fortress, with slits in the crenalated ramparts. It's not too badly scarred by shrapnel from rockets. A broad gate and a high arch breech the wall, like a Disneyland castle. On either side are two massive British artillery pieces, fat iron cannons on four wheels. Under the gateway, a tunnel through the wall. On one side is a door slightly ajar; a barracks room. A guard shack contains two iron bunkbeds with dilapidated mattresses. We move onto a walkway lined with pine trees, the bottom of the trunks painted white. Ahead is an ornate mosque with minarets, chipped paint but no bullet holes. We approach an office building. On the ground floor, water stands in a fountain, not working. Up stairs, another knot of people. Pushing. A door opens. Five go in at a time. Mike has insinuated himself into the front of the crowd, and jumped ahead ten spots. At the front, I'm counted in with four Afghans, and then in the recount, I'm counted out. I put up a big fuss, and they let me in. Relief. An office. The air is open. No press of people. A seated functionary. Couches line the walls. A photo of chairman Karzai. A woman is called first. She shows the functionary a letter. She is from the Los Angeles Times. The man reads. A translator interprets his reaction. "Someone came in with this exact same letter before. You can't have another card. Next." The L.A. Times reporter accepts the verdict and exits the room. Next is me. I come up with my papers. "Larry Flynt Publications," He reads. "Where did you get this?" "My office faxed it to me." "Larry Flynt Publications." The guy is unimpressed. He gestures to a chair. "Sit down." The next three reporters are issued cards without a fuss. Finally, the functionary beckons to me. He fills out my name on a small laserprinted card. It reads "Interim Administration of Afghanistan. Special Card for Escort of former king Mohammed Zahir Shah in international airport of Kabul." "Thank you very much," I say. "You're welcome." Back at the cocktail party, the palace ordeal already seems like a week ago. Al is apologizing to Stacey. "Stacey, I'm sorry I didn't have time to go by the jail and have that guy tortured." Stacey blanches. "I don't want anybody tortured. What kind of company am I keeping? A guy apologizes because he didn't have time to go down and get someone tortured?" Stacey's translator got beat up. Two thugs laid in wait, jumped him, and beat him to a pulp with chains. Why? Stacey, a photographer, had traveled to Jalalabad, about 120 kilometers east, with a CNN convoy. Traveling in company is a good idea. Local Afghans have been found with their throats slit on the road lately. The big story in Jalalabad is opium, which is now being harvested. The interim Afghan government is pushing an interdiction program, which has upset the local drug mafia. A few weeks ago, they tried to blow up General Fahim, the defense minister. Stacey initially planned to grab a yellow taxi and travel under a burkha for safety, but with throats being slit, it's more prudent to travel in the CNN armed convoy. Stacey's driver rented a car from a CNN driver. The car broke down. Died, rather. No oil. Engine ruined. So the driver complained. Stacey's translator, Rahim, complained. The CNN driver said he would have the translator taken care of back in Kabul. Stacey complained to the CNN security guy. Six hours after returning to Kabul, Rahim got jumped. He showed up bleeding, his eye swollen and purple. Stacey went to Al, an ex-military guy. Al grabbed Kendal, a former Green Beret. Kendal is a very big man. Al is not as big, but he wears sunglasses at night and talks and acts a lot like rebel porn producer Rob Black. Foul-mouthed, extroverted. Al has contacts with the warlords, the intelligence guys, and the Afghan police. Al and Kendal went to the CNN driver's house and busted down the door. The driver wasn't there. So they tossed his brother in jail. This is tribal justice. Al was apologizing to Stacey for not having the culprit's brother tortured. "The Afghan shit sack. It's the best way to torture a person." "What about breaking a kneecap?" "No good. You hit the kneecap once, pop it. It swells up, and then that's it. The guy doesn't feel any more pain. But you tie a guy up by his toes, tie his hands behind his back, hang him upside down and beat him on the bottom of his feet until you break every fucking bone in his feet. Sometimes he'll scream for 20, 30 hours." "Really?" says Andrew, the Washington Times guy. "Yeah really." "What about cigarettes?" "Cigarettes are all right for torture." "Can we talk about nice things?" Stacey asks. "This is supposed to be a birthday party." "What about skinning a guy alive?" That's Andrew. He has lots of questions. Skinning is supposed to be popular in Afghanistan. "Do you think it's true that Dostum skinned a man alive?" Rashid Dostum is a notorious Uzbek warlord who is in town to be a dignitary at exiled king Zahir Shah's arrival ceremony. Dostum is one of a storied group of guys who is responsible for the Dresden like look of Kabul. Currently, he is the deputy defense minister under Fahim, one of Ahmed Shah Massoud's deputies. Dostum is a bear of a man, with huge biceps, a fat gut, a thick moustache and a hairline that's just above his jutting black eyebrows. He no longer grants interviews since Andrew ran a piece in the Washington Times describing Dostum washing blood off his hands, supposedly after skinning a man alive. "Dostum would never do that," Al says. "He'd rather just tie a guy to a tank tread and run him over until he's ground up into little fucking pieces of meat. Skinning requires a certain type of personality, and Dostum's not fucking it. You got to be meticulous. Dostum--I never fucking heard him talk about skinning. He never mentioned it. Why would he skin someone if he could just run over him with a fucking tank?" "Dostum's cleaning up his act," says Robert, the Brit photographer. "He's hired a PR agency." "Where do you start?" I ask. "Put him in a suit." "That's right. Out of the jungle fatigues and into a suit." "And make sure he doesn't say anything. Just have everything go out through a spokesperson. Suddenly, he's a likeable chap." "A gorilla in a suit, but that's better than warlord killer." "Did you hear about the Brits killing a sheep today?" I ask. "Don't kill the fucking sheep," Al says. "There's no fucking women in this country. You can't kill the sheep." "I heard they called in an air strike," says Andrew. "That's not quite the story," I said I'm the only one at the rooftop table who had attended this morning's press briefing at Bagram. British commandos were up in the mountains on the Pakistan border, and they heard an explosion. They thought they were taking incoming mortar rounds and called in American fixed wing aircraft, probably an A-10, for an air strike. The strike was called off when they realized that the noise was the explosion of a sheep stepping on an antipersonnel mine. Al cups his hands and grins. "Don't fucking tell me that. The sheep in this country got that fat round ass. They're just made for it. Just back them up to the edge of a cliff and put some rubber boots on them backward. You can't kill the fucking sheep. Please. No more killing sheep. This country needs every sheep its got." "You'd think they could tell the difference between a mortar round and a mine." "No, not at all," opines Robert, a former commando himself. Dennis, a Turkish/Austrian photographer for German newsmagazine der Stern, new in town, approaches the table. He's large and rolly poly. At the presidential palace this afternoon, we were crowding a doorway together, part of the mob trying to get credentials to attend Zahir Shah's return ceremony. He had bumped me hard. He didn't turn around to apologize, because he's so big and clumsy that he bumps people badly as a matter of course. "Is this a private party? Or can I sit." "It's a private party," Al says. "Get the fuck out of here." The table is silent. No one's sure if Al is serious or kidding. The German dude turns around and starts to walk away. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding," Al says. "Come back, sit down. You're funny. I like you. We're going to get along great. Where you from?" "Germany." "Where?" "Stuttgart." "What do you do in Stuttgart?" "I live there." "I know that. What the fuck else do you do there?" "I take pictures." "What kind?" "Actually I've been mostly in Bosnia." "Didn't a Stern guy die out here in December?" "Yeah, he did." "What happened?" "He was on an APC [armored personnel carrier] in Torqualan," says Robert, the former commando. "He wasn't the only one that got killed. There were three other reporters. It was after dark, and the Northern Alliance had just taken some Taliban positions, and the reporters climbed on the outside of the APC, and the Taliban had regrouped and ambushed them." "You got part of it right," Al says. "I was there. It was a BMP [a Russian infantry vehicle], not an APC. They climbed up on the BMP and I told them not to get up on there, but they didn't' fucking listen. They went out, and an RPG came at them, and the driver made a quick turn and one of the women fell off. Then another RPG round came at them, the driver turned again real quick, and two more reporters fell off. The der Stern guy, the Taliban just killed on the spot. The two women they dragged back into the caves. The NA warlord sent all his guys into the caves to get the women back. Thirty guys died. He just threw them into a full frontal assault. I'm not saying the reporters should have got killed, but it was kind of their fault they got into that fucked-up situation. Stupid. That was a bad day. Sixty people died that day." The next morning, security check at 6:30 at the Interiro Ministry, a block away from the Mustafa. At the gates, the first frisking of the day. I'm asked to demonstrate that my cameras are not bombs. Inside, a few journalists mill around. I'm one of the first to arrive. Afghans beckon to me. This way. I walk, then another beckons, over here. I enter a building. Upstairs. At the landing, a door is open. There is an empty room, with a platter of fruit on a table from an early morning breakfast. An Afghan appears, looks at me quizzically. "What are you doing here?" Back outside, Interior Ministry officials are telling reporters to get back in their cars. Four of us who walked from the Mustafa have no car. "Motar nei," I tell the guy. "Can we ride in the back of that truck?" "Go ahead." The four of us hop in the back of a pickup truck and hang on tight as we wind through the capital. Every man with a gun and a uniform is on the streets. Soldiers carry burp guns, grenade launchers. A few gunless schmoes try to look menacing with police batons. The cars zip through the empty city streets. Every few blocks is a roadblock of seven or eight soldiers. We cut through with little trouble. The airport road, long and straight, is saturated with soldiers, Afghan and ISAF, who stand with their backs to the road. The ISAF guys have bigger guns. The AK looks small next to some of the heavy machine guns the ISAF guys sport. On a rounabout, a man stands with an RPG. Just outside the airport, we join a line of reporters. We are patted down. People ask for our cards. Cameras checked. Once, twice, three times. Every ten feet or so a soldier, in case an assassin pops out of a shrub in front of the thoroughly shot up terminal. In one doorway, check the card, to another doorway ten feet away, check the card again. Through the guards to a waiting room. Everyone up. In comes ISAF with a monster German shepard to do bomb sniffing. Then out, onto the tarmac, around to a grassy pitch behind a chain-link fence. This area is for reporters. It's just after seven a.m. We have three hours to wait. A blonde with two cameras climbs through a hole in the fence to establish a better position. A guard chatters at her in Dari. "I'm a photographer, Einstein," she says. "I can't shoot through this fence." The guard shoves her, and pushes her against the horizontal cables of the fence. Fellow journalists shout: "Hey, hey, hey." The blonde climbs back onto the grass. The photographers clamor, argue about angles, and a flatbed truck is pulled out and parked in front of the fence. We climb on. A splitner group of journalists asks for access to the roof. We climb down from the truck and march back inside the terminal to wait for roof access. Ivan from NPR detaches himself from his cell phone to announce, "Four Canadian soldiers were killed in Kandahar. An f-16 dropped a precision guided bomb on them." An Afghan comes through with more bad news: a five-hour delay in the king's arrival. We'll be here till 3 p.m. Suddenly the grass pitch outside seems like the French Riviera. Back downstairs, the waiting room that had been empty is full of men in traditional garb. I worm through the crowd to the guard at the door. The door is locked from the outside. The guard says, "It's not possible." Indira, from the Boston Globe, also winds up at the bottleneck. A guy with a white beard comes and opens the door. I hook my foot on the outside of the door, scrambling to get out. Three soldiers push me back toward the mass. A man in traditional garb clutches my jacket from behind. He has nothing to do with it, but he doesn't want me to go either. I grab the aluminum door frame and pull. Slipping through, I yank my jacket free and step out onto the tarmac again. People are now not allowed onto the grass, must not leave the truck. So I climb up onto the flatbed. The photographers have staked out their spots, and guard them jealously. They are reluctant to sit, but as the sun bakes down on us, one by one, we drop to the floor of the flatbed. Time passes, and I feel weary in the sun, and think about sleeping. Someone passes around a bottle of water, as if we are on a life boat in the middle of the ocean. Stacey passes around a package of cookies that people are grateful for. A crowd assembles on the airfield. Dozens of armed soldiers are positioned at close intervals out on the runway. A squad sits in a pickup truck. They wear uniforms, and white helmets. A long, red carpet is rolled out. Two soldiers run off, then return with brooms. The two of them sweep the entire length of the arrival rugs. Eveything perfect for the king. The carpet is inspected, and an honor guard marches in to flank its sides, executing a smart routine of saluting and moving weapons from shoulder to shoulder to ground. They stand and stare at each other across the carpet. Afghan representatives from all over the country tromp out onto the airfield and line up. Kandaharis, Pashtun noblemen in long turbans, men from Gardez with henna in their kinked beards, Afghan Hindus with blue and red turbans, babas with canes, Saudis in full length robes. A string of women, teachers, under scarves, hold placards of a young Zahir Shah. Dostum is distinct in the crowd. He wears a black suit, wears a buzz cut, thumbs a tasbeeh, the ubiquitous Islamic rosary. An old Afghan on the back of the flatbed truck is the boom operator for a Canadian TV crew. He used to have 13 members of his family, but only three are still alive. The Russians killed four brothers; more recent fighting and diseases killed the rest, including his parents. "The Americans have lost sight of the end of the string," he says. "Afghanistan is like a ball of string, with the end lost inside, that's rolling around everywhere, all over the place. Mark my words. Two years from now, the Americans will learn how badly they misunderstood this country." "What's going to happen?" The man smiles. "Just remember this day, when I told you." Some movement in the truck. A C-130 cargo plan descends from the sky, and is near to landing. The reporters have been lulled by the heat, the waiting, the false rumor of a five-hour delay. The plane lands at 11:27 in the morning. A historic moment. Two minutes later a second plane lands. Four minutes later, a third. It is not clear which moment is the historic one, which belong to the two dummy, decoy planes. No rockets flash out from the ground. No explosions. Who would want this kindly old king dead? Anti royalists, such as Hekmatyar. The planes taxi. One stops just where the red carpet ends. This historic moment is strangely bland. A man opens a side hatch. A man with a gun emerges. Then another. Then another. And another. And another. Three more. Another. Then the king. On the truck, a fusillade of rapid-fire photography. From the crowd, applause. The king has returned. The king leans to one side, steadies himself, and walks down the stairs. Karzai is next, in his resplendent green cape. He helps the king down. Zahir Shah wears a black-leather jacket zipped all the way up to the throat. He is swamped by greetings. None of the photographers on the truck can get a clear shot, and a shout goes up. It works. Karzai sweeps people out of the way with a wave of his hand. Karzai introduces the king to subjects he has never met. Anyone he knew when he left 30 years ago is likely dead. Everyone in his homeland is a stranger to him. Zahir Shah waves his hand, walking with a slight geriatric swagger. He shakes hand with Rashid Dostum, who is bearing a huge basket of red flowers, a gift for the king. The king progresses down the receiving line, walks the length of the red carpet to an Afghan rug, a small one at the end of the line. From there, he is swept into a brand-new, plateless black Mercedes sedan. There are two more behind him. The sedan is surrounded by well-armed guards. Ten minutes from the time the plane touches down, the motorcade takes off. That's it. The photographers are moping. "Couldn't get a shot. Did you get a shot?" "All I had was a 200. The wire guys had 400s. That's what you need." "I'll file what I shot, but everyone's going to pick up the wire stuff." Plus the king is back. That's bad news to them. "The king is here," says one veteran reporter. "This story is over." He's heading to the Philipines to check in on the American support for the anti-insurgency there. I ask him if Afghanistan is off the catastrophe circuit. "It's off my circuit," he says. |
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