Most of our clients had PSYOPS units attached to them and these were the people who we ultimately answered to. Many of them had no background in media and most of them rarely left their heavily guarded compounds. A lot of them came in and out of the country on high rotation—I was told that in the space of a year it was possible to deal with three different people, each of them eager to make a personal mark on ‘their’ project—and a lot of my time would inevitably be spent in managing unrealistic expectations or convincing the client that its ‘revolutionary new concept’ was in fact old or impossible to pull off in the allocated time frame, or that it simply wouldn’t be palatable to an Afghan audience.
The project I was assigned to had been floating around for months. Our newly formed creative team in Dubai was developing the idea and I really had no knowledge of it; somehow it had managed to slip through the cracks and suddenly it was panic stations. The client had approved the basic concepts but we still had scripts to write, storyboards to draw, actors to cast, locations to scout, props and wardrobe to be sourced and purchased . . . and I didn’t have a team. I immediately pulled Aleem on board to assist. The official project manager was an American guy, Virgil, but it was Nilu, an Afghan–American woman who had only recently started with the company, who was doing most of the legwork on behalf of business development.
Nilu and I hadn’t really known each other previously; in fact, it was only through arranging the shoot that we came to be friends. We had just two weeks to organise everything, from casting to costuming, and the fact that Nilu managed to laugh her way through the madness made me realise that I had been blessedly yoked to a kindred spirit.
An older, experienced Afghan director, Mirwais, had started with us just that week. I hadn’t even met the man and our first face-to-face saw me delivering the news, through Nilu, that he would be responsible for directing every component of the campaign. He just laughed and asked Nilu if I was insane. She apparently told him that I was, but that my directive was quite genuine. He laughed again, I laughed, Nilu laughed . . . and then I reached across the table, shook his hand and welcomed him to the company.
Three of those thirty-second spots were vehicles for promoting the Afghan army. Our first spot was to exalt the warriors of old—the turban-wearing, sword-wielding men on horseback who fought the British in the nineteenth century.
We were to shoot it in the hills of Mazar-e-Sharif, a city in northern Afghanistan. Our crew would consist of fifteen Afghans, most of them freelancers who I had never met before, and we would all be travelling the seven hours to Mazar on a bus. The trip entailed our travelling along the Salang Pass, a stretch of road built by the Russians in the 1960s. Reaching 3400 metres, it is one of the highest roads in the world and includes a two-lane, 3.2-kilometre tunnel. Avalanches along the Salang Pass are devastatingly common in winter. The tunnel itself has no exhaust system and people have died from carbon monoxide poisoning during traffic delays.
One look at the bus told us it was dodgy—it was a banged-up old beast and its chassis was peppered with patches of rust. Still, it looked adequate for an afternoon jaunt through the countryside. We were late heading off from the office but our best estimate was that we’d reach our destination by 7pm.
It took us about fifteen minutes to realise that the bus had no heating. It had been a fairly mild winter and the skies were clear as we rumbled out of Kabul, so we weren’t overly perturbed by this discovery. We were all in good form, excited to be out of the city and quite dazzled by the brilliant white landscape that lined our route. We stopped after a couple of hours, so I could take photos of the first real snow I had seen in Afghanistan. I romped off to the side of the road to stand knee-deep in it, but I was quickly stopped in my frolics by horrified shouts from our security guard, Omar—apparently the area hadn’t yet been de-mined and it seemed there was a distinct possibility that I would blow myself up.
Three hours into the trip, the weather conditions turned nasty; the pretty, soft snow was falling quite heavily by then and our trusty chariot became thoroughly bogged. While Nilu and I hugged each other for warmth by the side of the road, the rest of our team sweated and grunted for a good thirty minutes as they manually pushed and dragged the bus out of the snow.
At this stage, the bus driver thought it prudent to fit snow chains to the tyres before proceeding any further; he only had two and, after travelling just a couple of kilometres, one of them snapped. Omar and the assistant to the bus driver, a thirteen-year-old boy with big, weathered, grandfather hands, trudged back to the nearest village to try to find more.
I was now officially freezing and, as we waited for our saviours to return, I lit a cigarette. I had unilaterally decided that smoking would be allowed inside the bus and the sound of lighters clicking to life around me signalled everyone’s agreement.
It took the rescue crew an hour to return and, by that time, Nilu and I had made up nicknames for all the members of our team. The guy sitting behind us was ‘Dragon’s Breath’ because his breath could strip paint off a wall . . . Omar was ‘Box-Head Billy’ because he had a noggin the size of a small TV set . . . the Fixer was ‘The Camel’ because his voice was strangely reminiscent of some camel cartoon character we both remembered from our childhood . . . and our handsome lead actor, who sat quietly by himself reading a book, became the mysterious ‘Angel Face’. Okay, it was a tad juvenile, but much later I felt more comfortable about our silly little exercise when, after the shoot, I discovered that they had all been calling me ‘Grandma’ in Dari.
A huge cheer went up when Omar finally appeared beside the bus, victoriously holding aloft a single set of chains. However, our joy levelled out a little when we discovered that they didn’t fit. There was another solid hour of tweaking, fiddling and fixing before the bus finally limped off into a twilight blizzard.
I was preoccupied with wondering whether my feet had perhaps turned blue when Nilu brought it to my attention that the windscreen wipers had completely stopped working. It was at this point that I discovered why the dear little bus assistant had old-man hands—squeezing himself in next to the driver, every minute or two he would reach out of the window and wipe the sleet and snow from the windscreen.
A line of traffic was now snaking its way slowly towards the Salang Tunnel. A truck travelling ahead of us skidded off the road; the shoulders of the highway were littered with abandoned cars. Our bus was full of cigarette smoke, but we were all shivering uncontrollably because of the draft from the open window being used by our brave little human-windscreen-wiper.
A couple of blankets were produced from somewhere and, as we entered the tunnel at a crawl, I was suddenly cosying up in a most un-Islamic manner with the closest available bodies. We were halfway through the tunnel when we stopped altogether. Omar (who actually seemed to be taking great delight in the relentless drama) wandered up ahead to find out what the delay was. He returned with an unnerving smile stretched across his big, wide dial and excitedly informed us that a truck had broken down, then he skipped off to go and help direct the traffic.
After two hours in the tunnel, I was convinced that my breath was getting shorter. Nilu and I were constantly in the grip of compulsive giggling—another sure sign that we were on the brink of carbon-monoxide poisoning.
To take our minds off our predicament, she and I talked. She told me stories about when she first arrived back in Afghanistan, just after the fall of the Taliban. She had been a member of a women’s delegation that had come in a UN plane to Pakistan, from where they had driven across the border to Kabul (a life-threatening trip because the Taliban were still everywhere). Once they reached the capital, there were Afghans wanting to shake her hand on the street, women crying with joy at the sight of her. There was no running water, no reliable electricity, no guest houses, no supermarkets, but the exhilaration of being back in her birthplace, after close to thirty years away, made these deficiencies seem trifling.
She had been one of the first westerners to drive
into Istalif, a small town north of Kabul. Her eyes filled with tears as she recounted seeing headless bodies hanging from the trees, rotting in the streets. So many incredible stories—all told with a modest, unaffected nonchalance that shamed me. My prideful notions of being a ballsy, brave woman for coming to Afghanistan quickly evaporated as I talked to this remarkable woman. I came here for work and adventure; Nilu returned because she was driven by an overwhelming desire to save her homeland.
After four hours we finally edged our way out of the tunnel and into a raging blizzard; then at midnight the sweet, uncomplaining boy who had kept our windscreen clean during our twelve-hour trip announced that he could no longer feel his hand. We stopped at the next town and decided to stay the night.
Aleem and Omar ventured out to find accommodation and arrived back twenty minutes later to say that they had found a guest house further down the road. The only drawback was that the manager wouldn’t allow foreigners to stay. I wondered at this strange bias, but was too tired and deranged to question it. My glasses were removed; I was wrapped in a scarf, and I shuffled inside with my head bowed and my shoulders hunched. Unbelievably, I got through—and it was Nilu who proved to be the problem. Despite her perfect Dari and Persian good looks she was still clearly a ‘foreigner’. It took some soothing, conciliatory words from Aleem and US$20 to get the manager to finally relent, but we were told that we had to be out by 5am, before the day staff turned up for work.
When Nilu and I were shown to the tiny room we were to share, fog streamed from our mouths and we were a touch disturbed by the cigarette butts and rodent poo that littered the floor. The large, curtain-less window didn’t quite shut and our small, iron beds bore stained mattresses and filthy, dust-coated blankets.
The smell in the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor made us both gag and the steaming, fresh faeces that occupied the floor just shy of the squat toilet saw Nilu flee, determined to control her bladder for the next four hours. I, on the other hand, perched myself precariously above the stinking hole, juggling long-johns and underpants with one hand as I covered my mouth and nose with the other.
We were finally settled in our beds, fully clothed, when the door handle slowly turned and the locked door started straining against the frame. We both jumped up and hurriedly pushed a desk and the end of my bed up against it. Of course, we stayed awake all night, buoying ourselves with mindless chatter and irrational chuckling, our eyes widening with horror each time an attempt was made to enter our room.
We made our escape at dawn. The bus lumbered into Mazar at 2pm—twenty-six hours after our journey began. When we came to unpack the bus, we realised that we had been smoking our cigarettes while there had been a generator and two cans of fuel sitting in the aisle. Aleem also sheepishly informed us that the town we had stayed in the previous night was Taliban country—the manager of the guest house hadn’t wanted foreigners staying there because he couldn’t guarantee our safety.
The three-day shoot was as smooth as our journey up had been rocky. The weather was warm and the people of Mazar were friendly and urbane. On our last day, we went to watch a Buzkashi game. Buzkashi is the national sport of Afghanistan and is a hard-core pastime involving two teams of men on horseback, competing to get hold of a headless goat carcass and carry it to their goal area. There is prize money and great prestige on offer to the winners, and apparently a fair amount of cash changes hands by way of betting on the match. It appears to be a bloody free-for-all, but at least there are a few official rules in place—riders can’t intentionally whip other riders, deliberately knock them off their horses or trip their horses using a rope.
It was a stunning, cloudless day and there were easily a thousand men there to watch the game. As Omar led Nilu and me to a spot in the front row of the grandstand, it seemed that every one of them was suddenly looking at us. Phones appeared all over the place, held high to get photos of the two foreign, female Buzkashi fans, and it was an excruciatingly uncomfortable five minutes before focus once again returned to the game.
Later that afternoon, as we wandered through town, Omar happily allowed me to walk off ahead of him. I strode through the marketplace, sailing through a sea of flowing white burqas, pretending I was some tourist on a lone-wolf adventure. It was the first time since arriving in Afghanistan that I had truly felt free.
That same morning we started receiving reports that conditions along the Salang Pass had deteriorated, so Nilu and I made the decision to fly the crew home. She called our production manager, Mehrab, back in Kabul to arrange it.
Mehrab was a diligent young fellow, but his miserliness led you to believe that he was bankrolling the entire company on his own pay packet. He refused outright even to entertain the notion of flying us, and Nilu took immense pleasure in reminding him how his penny-pinching on the bus hire had placed us all in great danger. He finally agreed to look into it and get back to us.
Just after lunch, he called us with a compromise—Nilu and I could fly home, but the rest of the team had to go by road. We refused his generous offer—if our Afghan crew was catching the bus, then so were we.
It was early evening when Nilu suggested that between the two of us, we could probably pay for all the flights back to Kabul. We went to our room and counted our money, determining that we could just cover the cost for the entire team. Nilu was on the phone trying to book tickets when Mehrab called me—he wanted to ensure that I knew that I could fly home, and strenuously encouraged me to do so. It was 8pm; I was angry and over it. I told him that I was well aware of the offer and had already declined it, before launching into a tremble-inducing rant about the value of human life, regardless of race. I also told him that I would be speaking with Jahid about our appalling treatment as soon as I returned, before signing off with some veiled threat to resign over the incident.
Ten minutes later Jahid was on the phone. Management had apparently approved flights for the entire crew that afternoon and he was at a loss to explain where the communication breakdown had occurred. I honestly had no interest in getting to the bottom of it and was simply grateful for the news that we could all fly home. The next afternoon our whole team was on a plane back to Kabul. Our bus driver and his darling assistant would travel back as soon as there was a break in the weather.
Five days later, one hundred and seventy Afghans died in avalanches along the Salang Pass. The bus had made it back into Kabul the day before the disaster.
We had very little time to dwell on our Mazar misadventure because, two days after arriving back in Kabul, we were scheduled to film our two remaining army spots. These shoots were based around showcasing the present-day military, so we needed not only approval from the Ministry of Defence but access to Afghan soldiers, tanks and helicopters. For this, we needed the involvement of our head of security, Ahmad, who was the middleman between ourselves and any government ministries or agencies that we needed to deal with.
Ahmad’s job was to obtain all necessary filming permissions; he could be relied upon to round up police or army personnel as required. He called me ‘sister’, I called him ‘captain’, and we saluted each other every time we met. In his mid-forties, he was an old-school kind of Afghan and I sometimes had occasion to reproach him for censorious comments he made, for example to a female employee about the snugness of her top, or for making unfounded allegations about men and women at the company inappropriately fraternising. But he was a big-hearted bear of a man and every request I made was met with a ‘No problem, sister’. To his supreme credit, he never failed to deliver.
You would imagine that the government would pounce on free airtime glorifying the military and that the ministry would pull out all stops to assist. But it was never quite that easy, and on this occasion poor Ahmad had to drink endless cups of tea with a whole bunch of bureaucrats to get them on board. He was saved the considerable effort of having to secure a military base as a filming location by virtue of our client offering to sort that out for us.
&nbs
p; In our early meetings with the client, they had suggested that we shoot at a military base in Gardez, about two hours south of Kabul. They would organise everything. Our crew could all stay on the base and, due to the client’s security concerns about us travelling down there by road, they offered to transport our team in a Chinook—a huge, twin-engine helicopter that they had at their disposal. It all sounded too good to be true. It was.
Our first attempt to reach Gardez, on the fourth of February, was thwarted when the Chinook was required for an actual military operation. The client assured us that we could travel down later in the week, perhaps the seventh, but I started to get jittery about the Gardez solution. Call me crazy, but it seemed highly probable that the blasted war might, once again, get in the way of us filming our little TV spots. Nilu and I met with Ahmad that same day and asked him if he could find a location closer to home. He recommended a military training centre in Kabul and put through a call to them while we were still in his office, before hurrying off on his motorcycle to seal the deal.
Mirwais and I inspected the location the next day and deemed it ideal. We made a tentative plan to shoot there on 9 February and Ahmad set off on another mission to the ministry to get the necessary approvals in place. We now had two locations at our disposal and I couldn’t conceive how anything could go wrong. It could.
On 6 February, the client informed us that the Chinook would be unavailable to transport the team to Gardez the next day, and our back-up location in Kabul was looking incredibly iffy due to the fact that it had started snowing quite heavily and wasn’t going to let up anytime soon. When I had inspected the dusty training base, I had noted that, even after the snows, the ground would be slushy then muddy for another few weeks.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 6