Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  He arrived at dawn as I stood outside the hotel’s front doors. The light was grey. A man was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with shovels along the sidewalk. He looked far too old and thin to lift it. He padded by quickly in his flip-flop sandals.

  “Okay?” the driver asked.

  I threw my bag into the trunk. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We left the city before any traffic appeared on the roads. Soon Tashkent disappeared behind us. The sun rose above the horizon. On either side of the highway stretched ocean-flat cotton fields, another leftover of Stalin’s forced collectivization. When we reached the border with Tajikistan, an embarrassed-looking teenaged soldier with an AK-47 demanded a five-dollar bribe.

  “What are you doing in Khujand?”

  The man who approached me in the small airport in Tajikistan’s northernmost major city was thin with high cheekbones and a thick toothbrush moustache. He wore a fake leather jacket and held a smouldering stub of a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, which he neither brought to his lips nor discarded. I was pacing back and forth in front of my backpack, which I had tossed on the floor, periodically stopping to stare at the departure schedule. No flights were leaving for Dushanbe until late that evening.

  At the time, I was obsessed with filing stories back to Ottawa as frequently as possible. I had convinced myself that if a day went by in which I didn’t send the newspaper a story, Scott might decide the gamble of sending me to Central Asia had failed and I’d be called back home to account for ruining his reputation. Waiting for eight hours in a smoky airport meant a wasted day and a newspaper edition without my byline in it.

  “What are you doing here?” the man asked again.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m trying to leave. Afghanistan. Well, Dushanbe first.”

  “Wait here.”

  I knew the man was a cab driver, or at least knew people with access to cars. And sure enough he returned with news that a friend of his, Bachrom, was willing to drive me to Dushanbe. I looked at the very basic map in my Lonely Planet and calculated that Dushanbe was two or three hundred kilometres away. The cartographer had drawn some rough mountains between Khujand and Dushanbe, but I didn’t pay them much notice. Four, maybe five hours, I thought. I’ll be there by mid-afternoon. Lots of time to work. We negotiated a price.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  A few hours later, crammed into the back seat of a tiny hatchback, I stuck my head out the window and stared up at the jagged peaks of the Fan Mountains that towered above us in all directions. They’d make your stomach turn if you looked too long. On our right, a few feet of broken rock extended beyond the edge of the paved road, and then a drop into nothingness. We rounded a corner and faced a truck coming from the opposite direction. It seemed to occupy the entire road and showed little sign of stopping or slowing down. Bachrom downshifted and guided the car closer to the edge of the road. The truck driver blared his horn. I closed my eyes.

  “Mikhail, a little beer?”

  Ali, a round-faced man with thin, straight hair and a friendly manner, was squeezed beside me in the backseat. He held up a bottle and smiled. His eyes were clear. After several hours on the road, this was the first bottle he had opened. As soon as we started climbing switchbacks into the Fan Mountains, it became clear that the trip to Dushanbe would be an all-day affair. Fortunately, Bachrom, Ali, and Azirov, another passenger, were good company. Ali in particular befriended me immediately. He had been trained as a medical doctor during Soviet times, but Tajikistan’s civil war and its corrupt and dictatorial government meant that he sometimes earned less than five dollars a month. He decided it wouldn’t be right for a foreigner to visit Tajikistan without drinking fermented mare’s milk and insisted that Bachrom detour to find some.

  “Is it alcoholic?” I asked.

  “A little bit of alcohol,” said Ali. He smiled and rubbed his stomach. Bachrom hissed a whistling stream of air between his teeth and cursed. There were soldiers on the road ahead. They flagged us down. Bachrom wordlessly handed the soldier a small bribe and was waved on. “You will see that money solves everything in this country,” said Ali.

  By now it was getting late in the afternoon. Shepherds were bringing their flocks into the valleys. Some sold honey by the side of the road. Others set up camp and boiled tea over open fires. An old man on a horse picked his way down a mountain path and rode across the road ahead of us. He wore robes and an ancient long-barrelled rifle strapped to his back. A massive shaggy grey dog trotted beside him, lifting its muzzle often to look at his master on the horse. The man stared straight ahead and didn’t quicken his pace to clear the road as Bachrom stopped to wait for him to pass. He reached the other side of road and climbed back into the hills.

  We stopped for dinner at a bare-bones teahouse on the side of a hill. Ali bought yoghurt, mutton, tea, and bread, which we ate with our fingers from communal bowls while sitting on rope beds covered with carpets. Around us were shepherds who could afford to pay for food. Their dogs circled beyond the reach of a thrown stone. Farther down the mountain were visible the fires of shepherds without the means to pay someone else to cook for them. Ali insisted on paying for everything.

  “We want you to know that you have friends here, Misha,” he said, using an affectionate Russian diminutive of Michael. “We are your friends.”

  Ali tried to smile, but his eyes were flat, and he was soon lamenting the state of his country. “We have no democracy here, no freedom. The police are always taking, taking, taking.”

  I tried to guide the conversation toward the attacks in New York and the war in Afghanistan that had just begun in earnest with the start of the American bombing campaign against Taliban targets. Nobody thought the war would affect them. “The Americans will come. The Americans will go,” said Bachrom. “We’ll still have our problems.”

  Ali (left) and Bachrom on the road between Khujand and Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

  We got back into the car as night fell. Bachrom picked up speed, braking and easing his car to the right as we approached every blind turn and then accelerating when the road opened up briefly ahead. We rounded one corner, and Bachrom slammed on the brakes. A column of expensive cars was ahead of us, driving in the same direction.

  “Military command,” Ali said, while Bachrom cut his speed and coasted. “They are bad, dangerous people.”

  Conversation didn’t resume until after the convoy had disappeared. We rounded another corner, and our headlights picked up a roadside hut and two soldiers pacing outside, their young, smooth faces shadowed by the stiff green peaked caps above them. One waved at us to stop. Bachrom rolled down the window a couple of inches and passed out a tightly folded bill. I looked over at Ali. His face was buried in his hands.

  By the summer of 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks, the Taliban had taken over almost all of Afghanistan, driving the Northern Alliance into an ever-shrinking pocket in the north, and in the traditional resistance fighter redoubt of the Panjshir Valley. Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, was fighting another seemingly hopeless war. He was a master of guerilla tactics, but the odds against him were as long as they had ever been when facing the Soviets. The Taliban still had the firm backing of Pakistan’s largest and most powerful spy agency, and their depleted ranks were continuously refilled with recruits from Pakistan’s madrassahs. Their most notorious guest, Osama bin Laden, provided them with cash, international connections, and the guns, muscle, and ideological zeal of the foreign, mostly Arab, jihadists in al-Qaeda.

  Massoud’s allies were much more fickle. He received some support from Russia, Iran, and India. His agents cooperated closely with the CIA. But while America recognized that the United States and Massoud shared a common enemy in Osama bin Laden, there was little interest in confronting the Taliban under the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. America wanted to narrow the scope of its terrorist problem. And one man was much easier to deal with than a movement that controlled mil
lions of people and most of a country.

  Massoud tried to change this. He sent envoys to America to meet with State Department officials to try to convince them that the Taliban should be considered part of a larger Islamist network funded by bin Laden and other wealthy Gulf sheiks. Simply getting rid of bin Laden wouldn’t solve the problem. As recently as August 2001, Massoud dispatched his longtime friend and foreign minister, an ophthalmologist named Abdullah Abdullah, to Washington, where the Northern Alliance’s resident lobbyist managed to book a few appointments at the State Department and on Capitol Hill. Abdullah went with Qayum Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai, who was then a leader among anti-Taliban Pashtuns from Afghanistan’s south. They got nowhere. As Steve Coll documents in Ghost Wars, a history of the CIA in Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks, “the members they met with could barely manage politeness.” Even arguments based on the oppression of women under the Taliban found little traction. Instead, the two Afghan envoys heard counter-arguments about “moderate” and “non-moderate” Taliban. They left after a week, completely dejected.

  It wouldn’t take long before bin Laden demonstrated how closely al-Qaeda co-operated with its Taliban hosts. On September 9, 2001, two Arab television journalists with Belgian passports arrived in the village of Khodja Bahuddin, where Massoud kept a base in northern Afghanistan. Hidden inside their camera was a bomb that they had carried with them from Pakistan, to Kabul, and finally to Massoud’s compound. When it exploded in Massoud’s face, he was fatally wounded and died soon afterwards. Twenty-five thousand people attended his funeral a week later, which was held, fittingly, in the Panjshir Valley.

  “The murder plot had been meticulously planned by al-Qaeda,” writes Rashid in Descent into Chaos. “If the attack had taken place a few weeks earlier, as planned, and the Northern Alliance had been destroyed by the Taliban offensive, the Americans would have had no allies on the ground after 9/11 took place. For the first time in more than a decade, the trajectory of Afghanistan’s sad, desperate history was to cross paths with a major international event, and Massoud was not alive to take advantage of it.”

  The Northern Alliance was devastated by the loss of Massoud, but the Taliban offensive did not destroy them. Massoud was officially succeeded by General Mohammad Fahim. And now, finally, the Americans were joining their long war against the Taliban. When I visited Afghanistan’s lacklustre embassy in Dushanbe, however, it was Massoud’s face that peered from posters lining the walls. It was easy to understand why so many foreigners swooned. Massoud was very handsome. But he had refused to play the role of a globetrotting revolutionary extolling his cause on speaking tours and from university podiums. He had commanded the loyalty of so many Afghans because he didn’t leave their side even during Afghanistan’s darkest hours. Now the soldiers who had fought for him squatted on the curb outside the embassy while I picked up my visa inside. Their uniforms looked as though men unused to needlework had sewn badges and patches on generic green tunics. We looked each other over as I left the embassy. It wasn’t the last time I would underestimate their skill as fighters.

  I had been told a convoy would be leaving in a couple of days. There wasn’t much to do in the meantime but wait and wander. Dushanbe was a bleak city. Most people couldn’t afford to drive, and those who could drove SUVs. They were either drug runners or staff at the various NGOs and United Nations agencies clustered in a posh and gated area of a town. The international aid types drove white SUVs. The drug runners had more diverse tastes. That’s how you could tell them apart. I also called the Citizen’s office manager and insisted that the newspaper wire me more money. They agreed to a few more thousand dollars, which pushed my total back over five grand.

  I spent the day before the Northern Alliance convoy was scheduled to leave in a neighbourhood of Dushanbe inhabited by Afghan refugees. They had made homes here that were more permanent and comfortable than the ones their countrymen found in the refugee camps outside Peshawar. A market catered specifically to their unique appetites. But all were anxious to leave.

  “As soon as the Taliban are defeated, we’ll go back to Afghanistan. It’s our motherland. We have to go back. If they were defeated today, we’d leave today,” a man named Sharif told me. He had once been an engineer in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but fled when the Taliban took the city. Now he sold tea and shoes in a market stall.

  “They wash themselves with juice instead of water before they pray,” he said of the Taliban, meaning they claim to act in the name of Islam but are not true Muslims. “America must help us defeat the Taliban. But we don’t want them to stay. We don’t want any other country to rule us. We want to govern ourselves.”

  From a nearby stall another Afghan named Mohammad Hakim beckoned me to follow him. We wove our way through the market, past a smoking fire pit where a young boy was cooking a large pot of plov, a Central Asian rice pilaf. Gusts of wind blew walnuts off the branches of overhanging trees. They clattered off the tin roofs of market stalls and onto the ground where children scrambled to pick them up. We entered a darkened hallway and emerged in a room where several Afghan men sat around a table supporting sweets, pistachio nuts, and a pot of tea.

  The men stood up as we entered. Mohammad introduced me to each man in turn, and each rocked forward slightly, right hand on his heart. It was an infectious gesture.

  Salam alaikum.

  Wa alaikum salam.

  Peace be with you.

  And also with you.

  Maruf, a friend of Mohammad, poured tea into my cup and then dumped it on the ground, refilling and emptying the cup several times before leaving it on the table.

  “I left my house there. I left my land there. I left a piece of my heart there,” he said. Others nodded and murmured. “We can only be free in our own country.”

  Maruf blamed the Taliban for his lot as a refugee but bore them no grudge. Once they are defeated, he said, they must be welcomed to become part of a new Afghanistan. “The enemy is someone with a gun. If they reject their guns, they are no longer enemies.”

  I asked Maruf why he was so intent on returning to Afghanistan. It had been destroyed by war. People were starving. Rebuilding it would take years. Meanwhile, I said, here in Tajikistan, you have carved out a good life for yourself. Why go home?

  “Afghanistan is a beautiful country,” Maruf said. “It is worth loving.”

  The next morning I rose at dawn so as not to miss the convoy’s departure. I had never before stolen so much as a chocolate bar, but after staring at it for five minutes, I rolled up the blanket on my hotel bed and stuffed it into my backpack. I then headed for the market and bought bags of nuts, dried fruit, and water. Thirty ancient Russian military jeeps were parked nearby. They would take us to the border.

  “Are you coming with us?”

  A smiling middle-aged man called out to me. He had a stubbly white beard and bright, almost mischievous eyes. His ethnicity and accent were hard to place, but he sounded educated. All around us people were grunting and swearing, hoisting bags onto the roofs of jeeps, and yelling into cell phones. He appeared to take no notice.

  “I am Doctor Awwad,” he said. “This,” he continued, gesturing with a flourish at a much younger and slightly flustered South Asian man who was trying to disassemble a tripod, “is Arvind. He’s my cameraman.”

  Awwad’s first name was Waiel, though I never called him that, even weeks later, after we had been shot at together, slept under the same blanket and worn each others’ unwashed clothes. I don’t think I ever even addressed him without the honourific “Doctor.” It wasn’t that he was stuffy or full of himself. He simply had a professorial air about him that made it difficult not to show him respect. He and Arvind worked for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation. They were based India. Awwad, who was Syrian, lived there with his Persian wife. He was a medical doctor by training but said he could make more money as a journalist. I think he also preferred reporting to medicine.

 
Loud, belching, mechanical coughs sounded as the jeeps in the convoy sputtered to life. “We’ll see you there,” Awwad said and turned to jog away. Arvind followed, lugging his camera equipment. I climbed into the back seat of a jeep that had been reserved for me. There was a Tajik man beside me. I don’t know what he did or why he was going to Afghanistan. He spoke no English. Shortly after we left Dushanbe, he was asleep on my shoulder.

  Waiel Awwad.

  The journey south took all day. We were held up by checkpoints. Jeeps got stuck in the sand and had to be dug out. At times the dust and sand blowing across treeless mountains obscured the sky so that it was impossible to tell whether the sun still shone. Periodically we’d pass through a cluster of mud brick houses. Brightly dressed women waved while their sons ran to open windows with bags of nuts to sell. But these scenes disappeared the closer we got to the border. Soon, there were only tumbleweeds, sand, and dust so pervasive it was difficult to discern thorn bushes from barbed wire.

  We were held up at the last checkpoint, just north of the Amu Darya River, as darkness fell. The river marked the border, and the front lines lay not far beyond that. Deep, rumbling explosions rolled over us, rattling my chest and catching the breath in my throat. They came with muted flashes of light that briefly glowed just above the horizon and were followed by the staccato clatter of small arms. Tracer bullets and rockets lit up the sky. I had never before heard weapons fired in anger. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. I turned on a flashlight to write in my notebook.