A Canadian soldier on a foot patrol in Kandahar province.
I landed in Kabul and turned on my BlackBerry. It used to take a satellite phone to reach home or anyone else in Afghanistan. Now all the emails that had been sent to me while I was flying started stacking on the phone’s display screen. One was from an acquaintance at the Canadian embassy in Kabul. I was a little surprised to see the government email address. I wasn’t planning on meeting any Canadian diplomats in Kabul, and my professional relationship with the Department of Foreign Affairs is usually strained. A request I had made weeks earlier to interview the Canadian ambassador in Kabul was ignored. I opened the email. It included a forwarded message from an allied embassy, which I later learned was the British one: “As of 11 May 2011, we have been made aware of an increased threat of kidnap to an unidentified international journalist within Kabul. Please pass this information to any journalist contacts you may have, so that their security providers can mitigate against the threat.”
I looked at my plane ticket to be sure of the date. It was May 11. As for “security providers,” I didn’t have any, banking instead on looking vaguely Afghan and keeping a low profile. It was an unnerving way to begin my visit. I shouldered my duffle bag and hiked to the parking lot, where Shuja, the Afghan friend of a friend whom I had hired to drive me around, was waiting. I threw my bag in the back seat of his beat-up sedan and shook his hand. He told me he came in third place in a Mr. Kabul bodybuilding contest. At least that was something.
We pulled out of the parking lot and immediately into a snarl of traffic. Pickup trucks in Afghanistan, the last time I was in the country, usually had a heavy machine gun mounted on the cab, or a cargo bed full of men with assault rifles, or both. It was strange, then, to see one carrying raucous teenaged members of a soccer team. They stood swaying in their uniforms, holding on to the truck with one hand and waving the other in the air. It was stranger still to see the cheering teenaged girls in the car that followed. Schoolgirls with simple blue uniforms and white headscarves picked and scampered along the broken sidewalk beside us.
Shuja wove in and out of traffic and told me his story. It wasn’t unusual. He was in school when the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. The next day several Talibs burst into his classroom and arrested thirty-five Tajik students they accused of coming from the Panjshir Valley, where Massoud and many of the anti-Taliban fighters made their home. Shuja is not Panjshiri, but they took him anyway because he looked like he might be. The Taliban held him for four days before letting him go. “I ran five hours to get to my aunt’s house,” he said. “The next day we left for Pakistan.”
He dropped me off at my guesthouse, a place with no sign out front and a bar in the basement where Afghans were forbidden from drinking. It attracted a steady stream of NGO workers, foreign businessmen, and “security contractors” still sporting the rangy, muscular frames they had acquired in previous military lives. “An airborne unit,” was all an otherwise forthcoming Brit said when asked with what regiment he had served. Elsewhere, male NGO workers drunkenly circled one of the few women there like children around a campfire. “You’re watching a pathetic display of my desperate attempt to get laid,” one confided loudly. The only Afghan in the place, the barman, looked on impassively.
My guesthouse wasn’t the only isolated bubble in the capital. NATO bases were another. They were enormous affairs, ringed with multiple layers of concrete, roadblocks, and razor wire. On occasion a contact inside could not even greet me at the farthest gate. I’d pass one checkpoint, walk several hundred metres, and meet her halfway. Some bases required fingerprints and iris scans. Staff at one wanted to know my religion.
“I’m not going to tell you that,” I said to the young American army clerk who had just taken my second round of iris scans in about ten minutes.
“You have to.”
“I’m a Jedi Knight,” I responded unfairly. She hadn’t made the rules.
“That’s not on here,” the clerk said. “You can say Jewish, atheist, Chinese …”
“Chinese is a religion?”
She shrugged.
Talk in Kabul was of President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to strike a peace deal with the Taliban. Western nations, groping for an exit, backed the process and did their best to ignore the many Afghans who did not. Some 10,000 rallied in Kabul before I arrived, to protest a deal and the prospect that Karzai might make fundamental concessions to the Taliban in an effort to reach one. “Death to the Taliban,” they shouted. “Death to suicide bombers. Death to Punjabis” — a reference to the Pakistanis many Afghans feel control the Taliban.
The rally was organized by Amrullah Saleh, Karzai’s former intelligence chief and once an aide to Massoud. Forced by Karzai to resign in 2010, he began building a political movement opposed to reconciliation with the Taliban. Beside him at the rally was Abdullah Abdullah, whom Ahmed Shah Massoud sent to Washington in August 2001 in a futile effort to warn America of the danger posed by the Taliban. I saw him once or twice that autumn in Khodja Bahuddin. He was later Afghanistan’s foreign minister under Hamid Karzai from 2001 to 2005, and then ran against him in the fraud-ridden 2009 presidential election. Saleh derided Karzai for his habit of referring to Taliban as “brothers.” “They are not my brothers. They are not your brothers. They are our enemies,” he told the crowd.
I met with Saleh soon after. There was heavy security at his office and a long wait in a small reception room where aides brought glasses of sweet juice before I was ushered into his office upstairs. Another half dozen of his aides sat on chairs against the wall there. We sat and waited some more, and then Saleh strode into the room — clean-shaven and wearing a stylish suit. He moved quickly and looked directly at the person he was speaking with. He seemed full of energy and confidence. He spoke fluent English and avoided utterly the circumlocution that afflicts many public officials. Afghan politicians often speak euphemistically about their “neighbours” or “outside countries” when criticizing Pakistan. Saleh hates the place and doesn’t bother hiding it. Islamabad, he said, wants to use the Taliban to control Afghanistan the way Iran does with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Afghans must resist this, he said, since they must fight for a pluralistic and democratic society.
“What I call the anti-Taliban constituency, it’s not ethnic, it’s not south−north. It’s a constituency that wants justice. Without implementing justice, you bow to a group that only knows beheadings, intimidation, suicide bombings, marginalization of society, crushing of civil society. That will not bring stability…. I do see the argument to have peace. I am not saying we should continue fighting. I say at what price? The current approach will not lead to peace. It will create a different crisis, far worse than what you see.”
That Afghanistan’s international allies were backing Karzai’s reconciliation efforts did not faze Saleh. He had fought the Taliban long before most people in the West had heard of them. “We were not fighting for Americans and we are not fighting for America,” he said. “Yesterday we were fighting for the protection of our dignity, and today we have raised our voices for the same purpose.”
The far worse crisis to which Saleh alluded was the prospect of renewed civil war. He suggested Afghans would fight rather than accept any reconciliation with the Taliban that compromised on the freedoms they had gained since 2001. It seemed appropriate to visit the part of Afghanistan that had most resisted the Taliban the last time the movement took control of the capital.
The road that snakes through the Panjshir Valley 100 kilometres north of Kabul is lined with the rusted hulls of Soviet tanks. Beside them, in mid-spring, are fields of new wheat dotted with bright red tulips. Cliffs rise on either side of the valley, and through its centre a silt-darkened river rushes with melt water from the higher peaks of the Hindu Kush to the north. Massoud’s tomb is here, set atop a hill overlooking the valley. A ragged man with a milky eye swept dust from the dirt path leading up to it in exchange for handouts. “Whenever I get the chance, I come to re
member and give peace to my soul,” Abdul Razaq Malin, a judge who once fought with Massoud, told me when I asked why he was there.
Ruins of destroyed Soviet tanks litter the Panjshir Valley.
Most at Massoud’s tomb were skeptical about the chances of reconciliation with the Taliban. “All Afghan people want peace, but we must be clear about who is a friend and who is an enemy,” one said. “What I think is that there is only one type of Taliban. And if they come back, it will be like it used to be.”
“Wars always end with negotiations,” Malin, the judge, said. “There should be negotiations. We’re not opposed to negotiations. But the Taliban are not ready to accept the constitution. They are not willing to accept human rights and Afghanistan as a democratic country. The Afghan people will never join with a group that they fought for so long, that accepted terrorism and stomped on human rights in Afghanistan.”
Downriver from Massoud’s grave, I stopped at the home of Ahmad Zia Kechkenni, an Afghan-Canadian whose wife and kids now live in Toronto. Kechkenni is a nephew of Abdullah Abdullah. His family has deep ties to the disbanded Northern Alliance, and to Massoud’s anti-Soviet guerillas before them. We sat in his shady, flower-filled garden next to the river, drinking tea and eating almonds. Two family members lie amongst the shrubs and flowers close by. They were killed in a Soviet bombardment and buried there because it was too dangerous to take the bodies to a cemetery. A ceasefire between Massoud and the Russians was signed in the same house.
Kechkenni acknowledged the ethnic dimension of the movement opposed to peace with the Taliban. The predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance, he said, had accepted a Pashtun president in Hamid Karzai. But the Taliban “show some traditional Pashtun values. We are living in the twenty-first century. We have to come out of these tribal locks. Other ethnic groups are willing to do that.” He accused Karzai of pandering to the Taliban to gain Pashtun support. “It goes back to this tribal thing, that only one ethnicity has the right to lead Afghanistan.”
Faheem Dashty, Kechkenni’s brother, an Afghan journalist, and a former member of the Northern Alliance, had come to visit. He, like Massoud Khalili, was with Ahmed Shah Massoud at his assassination. Dashty’s hands were webbed with scar tissue, and he said his memory was affected by the blast.
“There are two extremes that come together,” he said, leaning back into a white plastic chair. “On this side we believe in human rights, women’s rights, freedom, justice, democracy. But from that side they are fundamentally against these values. They believe in a fundamentalist Islamic system, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with the teachings of Islam. If we reconcile, one side has to sacrifice its values, either this side or their side. The people of Afghanistan will not accept that. Their side will never sacrifice its values either. Our options are either to defeat them or lose the war. There is no third one.
“If we lose this war, Afghans will not lose much. What do we have to lose? A few hundred kilometres of asphalt road. A few hundred schools. Of course, we may lose our lives, as we have before. But our allies, the international community, will lose a lot. Because they have a lot to lose. The civilization that they have built up over hundreds of years, they will lose that, because this land will become a centre of terrorism. The war that we have to fight now in Kandahar and Helmand and sometimes in Kabul, then we will have to fight in Paris or Barcelona or Ottawa. It doesn’t mean that you will have active war. But they will follow you there. Before 2001 they may have had this fear that if they do something, they will be attacked. But if we lose this war, they will not have this fear. Because they will already have defeated us.”
Not all Afghans believe reconciliation with the Taliban is so fraught with risk. Shukria Barakzai is an Afghan member of parliament who helped draft the country’s current constitution. She’s Pashtun but eschews ethnic labels. “We didn’t have that disease before the civil war,” she said. “Then everyone talked about ethnicity, Shia, Sunni, whatever.” Barakzai scoffed, however, at the notion that Karzai might win over Pashtuns by pandering to the Taliban. Pashtuns, she said, are the insurgency’s greatest victims.
During the Taliban’s rule over Kabul, regime thugs beat Barakzai in the streets. But she didn’t cower, instead establishing a secret school to educate girls. Today, like all Afghan women with any sort of power, Barakzai is regularly threatened by the Taliban. Reaching her office meant passing numerous checkpoints. We met in a small ground floor room with smudged walls. Barakzai breezed in, cheerful, speaking in slightly accented English. She had wide eyes and a round, open face. It seemed she could barely be bothered to keep a thin length of cloth draped over the top of her head. It would slip back to her neck, she’d hike it up a few inches, and it would fall down again.
“Reconciliation is not an option. Reconciliation is a need,” she said.
“Let me explain what I have achieved since ten years and don’t want to lose,” she continued. “I have achieved the beautiful, wonderful constitution. And I’m proud of what I drafted for my nation. I’m really proud. That constitution says what rights the Afghan citizens get, and what jobs and duties the government has. We have to keep it. There will be no compromise on it.”
Other Afghans who also cherish the new constitution and the rights it enshrines fear those rights might be bargained away. Barakzai said this isn’t possible. “This is not something that will be in the hands of Hamid Karzai. The Afghan constitution is not a Karzai diary book that he can change, write in, or remove pages from.” And if he tries, she said, Afghans like her will not stand for it.
“I’m the one who during the Taliban years had my own girls’ school under their regime. I am the one who wore the burka for five years by their orders. I’m the one who ran a women’s organization under the Taliban regime when everything was closed and there was bad discrimination. Why? Because I’m a woman. I was the one who would not keep quiet at the time. How can you say that today I will accept whatever they want to order me? No way. Maybe in a dream.”
After ten years of Soviet occupation and a few more fighting the puppet government they left behind, in 1992 Abdul Rahim Wardak, a mujahideen commander, found himself approaching the outskirts of Kabul, with the government in the city collapsing. The trip to reach the capital from Jalalabad in the east had taken longer than he had thought, he recalled when telling me about it, because he himself had destroyed part of the road during earlier fighting. But he pushed on until the Kabul Valley opened up before him, a clear path to the capital. There, at about eight o’clock in the morning, he confronted a couple of Communist generals.
“Before that, I was always thinking if I get my hands on them I will kill them,” said Wardak, who was now Afghanistan’s defence minister. Aged seventy or so, Wardak was a large man with an expansive belly that wasn’t quite contained by the vest of his three-piece suit. He had laconic and world-weary mannerisms. A few weeks before we met, an armed attacker stormed the Defence Ministry and made it to the second floor where Wardak has an office before he was shot dead. If this rattled Wardak, he didn’t show it. He often sighed and chuckled; mostly, it seemed, to himself.
“They killed my brother and my uncle, and so many others. Two dozen cousins,” he continued, speaking of the Afghan Communists. “But then I saw them there, and they were in a weak position, and they were reconciling in peace. And I was totally different.
“You see, the source of all evil here was the Communist Party, which brought all these miseries upon us. If they didn’t do the coup, we will not be here. So they initiated everything — more than two million Afghans were killed, and there were hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans and handicaps, right now also. We were able to forgive them. So what do you think the chances are of forgiving these others?”
The Taliban, however, were not asking for forgiveness. All that spring, their bombing attacks continued, as efforts to strike some sort of peace deal persisted, stubbornly, blindly — driven by the West’s desperation to get out of Afghanistan
and the inertia of ten years of unconditional support for Hamid Karzai.
“This thing has become too personalized,” said Mahmoud Saikal, a former deputy foreign minister under Karzai and a longtime diplomat, when we met in his Kabul home.
“We should have supported processes. We should have supported systems. We should have supported the democratization of the country. We should have supported strengthening the rule of law and the institutionalization of Afghanistan, as opposed to looking for a figurehead and putting whatever we have behind this person and believing everything will be fine. It’s not.
“To me, a peace deal means absolutely nothing. What is needed is to make sure this country functions. It looks like we’ve put all our eggs in one basket now, looking for peace with the Taliban. And I can tell you one thing — that after a lot of effort and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars, you may reach that peace deal. But you will have lost the Afghan people.”
I left Afghanistan just ahead of the last Canadian combat soldiers in the country. Canada agreed to keep about a thousand troops in Afghanistan until 2014 to train Afghan security forces. Other nations, including the United States, announced plans to scale back their troop commitments as well. Insurgents bombed a hospital. They strapped explosives on an eight-year-old girl and blew her up at a police checkpoint. In September 2011, two Taliban met with former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had been tasked by Karzai to negotiate peace. The envoys said they wanted to discuss it. At least one had explosives hidden in his turban, which he detonated, killing Rabbani.
Is This Your First War? Page 21