by Fritz Galt
“If you fail to see my point, then I strenuously deplore sending you in there.”
“I completely fail to see your point, unless it is that you want to go in there yourself.”
“As a matter of fact, I intended this as a polite offer.”
“You dug your hole. Now you just buried yourself.” She picked up her ticket and flight bag.
“Don’t forget this, ma’am,” the older man said, and handed her a thick file folder. “They’re briefing papers. You will need to destroy them before you land.”
“Great.” She snatched the parcel and stormed onto the aging Boeing aircraft.
As her flight stood in line for takeoff, Natalie stared with disinterest at the file wrapped in waxy brown paper.
Even though she would enter Afghanistan within hours, her mind was still on finding a treatment for Mariah. As soon as she could, she had to get into the United States, locate Dr. Rajiv Khan and investigate his background.
Somewhere along the line, she would have to get a different passport to enter the States, one with no Indian visa stamped in it.
Wide strips of nylon-reinforced tape tightly sealed the package in her lap. The care and precautions in setting up her trip to Kabul to rescue the American ambassador didn’t impress her in the least. Who cared if some idiot political appointee rotted in an Afghan jail? Her daughter lay comatose on a remote island. Natalie might also be infected with the deadly disease. It was hard not to think in the very short term. As far as she was concerned, the file could remain sealed forever.
Nevertheless, she had a job to do. She would play the good soldier one last time, save some ambassador’s butt, then go undercover to solve the real problems at hand.
An old Afghan man smelling of goat hair sat beside her. Hardly a security threat. She turned away, slipped a finger under the tape and tugged off the wrapping.
The briefing papers had been hastily assembled in an accordion-style folder. Five internal pockets had no labels, and someone had placed reports inside the pockets in no particular order. She noticed that the reports were printed on a variety of paper sizes and were bound differently. A peek at the cover pages told her why. They were from different agencies.
She had embarked on her mission with little guidance. Maybe she could find some clear direction from the stack of reports.
She began by unfolding a map of Afghanistan. She noticed that Afghanistan had many neighbors, nearly all of them named after someone called “Stan.”
Afghanistan was landlocked, sandwiched between Iran on the west, Pakistan to the south and east and the former Russian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan from west to east on the north. Surrounded and transversed by rugged mountains, the otherwise oval-shaped country extended a thin finger to the east touching China in the high Himalayas. Kabul sat on a narrow eastern plain, accessible to Pakistan only by way of a treacherously steep route through the Khyber Pass.
She picked up the first bound report, a militant polemic against the ill treatment of women in Afghanistan. After her encounter with the American officers at the Karachi airport, she was ready to toss the paper aside. However, curiosity prevailed and she scanned the main points.
The minute the Taliban Islamic militia took Kabul on September 27, 1996, their mysterious founder and elusive supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, closed girls’ schools, banned women from the workplace, and required them to dress in full hijab. They were forced to wear an all-enveloping burqa, a shroud-like veil with only a small slit through which to see.
Not to exclude males from Islamic law, all men were required to pray five times a day and were given a month and a half to grow a decent beard.
She tried to visualize a street scene. She could see veiled women clustered at street corners and pious men pausing to bow on prayer rugs at midday.
The report then described the result of such laws.
Apparently, Kabul was teeming with tens of thousands of widows, victims of two decades of war. Penniless, destitute and banned from work, somehow they had to support their families. They were forced to beg on the streets.
Afghan women had traditionally worked in the health profession, education and government. Not only were these jobs now closed to women, but the effects on other women were devastating.
Women were denied education except for small girls who were given enough schooling to read the Koran. Women were barred from most medical facilities, and doctors, who were all male, weren’t allowed to care for them without accompaniment by another male chaperone. Women’s physical, mental and reproductive health had deteriorated considerably. Young mothers gave birth to children on the floors of hospitals with no medication available. The suicide rate was high.
In Kabul, Afghanistan’s largest city of one-and-a-half million inhabitants, women were forbidden from entering hammams, public bathhouses with warm running water. During Ramadan the “esteemed sisters” weren’t permitted to leave their houses without a legal reason. Given the cold winters that blew across the steppes and the lack of electricity and running water for the previous five years, disease and infections were rampant.
It was a country without government, except perhaps for the Department for Promoting Virtue and Suppressing Vice. Normal citizens enforced the restrictions.
Women were routinely beaten or harassed for walking on the street without a male escort or not completely covering their skin. At one time, the beauty parlors of Kabul had been busy and prosperous, television had brought news and entertainment to the Central Asian steppes, and women had held prominent positions as doctors and government officials.
Now, a giant shroud had fallen over the country’s population.
Setting down the report, she stared at her reflection in the dark plane window. Ground lights whisked past. They were departing Pakistan and the Twentieth Century for the comparatively medieval society of Afghanistan.
She watched the terminal disappear from view. Her confrontation with the American officers, her last contact with her fellow countrymen before flying off into the cold, couldn’t have been more combative. And yet, she already missed the familiar vernacular of American speech. Perhaps, the men were only being friendly and helpful, and she had been a bit too defensive.
A bit too defensive? She sighed. She was turning into a bitch. Those Taliban had better beware.
The State Department had drafted the next report. It outlined Afghanistan’s modern history. A second report attached to that related the recent history of American relations with Afghanistan.
The first historical outline began by discussing nothing less than the Aryan race, of which Afghans were proud members. The country of “Iran,” a name that meant “Aryan,” didn’t have exclusive right to the appellation. The original Aryans populated Central Asia and came down from the mountains into Persia around 2000 BC. Remnants of the ancient Aryan tribes were today’s Afghans, Persians and Kurds.
Afghans had more than blood in common with Iranians. They spoke similar, recognizable versions of New Persian and both had succumbed to the Arab cultural and religious influences in the region. Like Iran, Afghanistan followed Islam zealously, the suppression of women and holy war “jihad” being only two of Islam’s more extreme, if not distorted, extensions.
Natalie nodded impatiently as the paper refreshed her memory about Afghanistan’s more recent history. Afghanistan had been a monarchy until 1973 when King Shah’s cousin Mohammad Daoud overthrew him, proclaimed a republic and named himself president. Today, King Shah, who had reigned for forty years, lived peacefully in Rome, whereas Daoud was killed when the Communists took power.
It was a fragmented Communist Party that took power in Afghanistan. At first Nur Mohammad Taraki’s People’s faction wrested control from other wings. They banished the leaders of rival factions to ambassadorial posts abroad. Hafizullah Amin rose up within Taraki’s faction, took power in 1979 and had Taraki killed. But Taraki wasn’t the only casualty during the Communist period of infighting.
Tens of thousands of Afghans, who historically swam in a sea of weapons, died during the political unrest.
In December 1979, the Soviets stepped in to bolster the unsteady Communist government. The Red Army occupied the streets, Amin was killed and Babrak Karmal of the rival communist faction was brought in to serve as president.
What followed were ten years of unmitigated bloodshed that killed over a million Afghans, wore down the Soviet army and, in the end, helped bring down the entire Soviet Union. Karmal was replaced by Dr. Najibullah who amazingly clung to power until 1993, a full three years after the Red Army slinked away into what later became the independent nation of Uzbekistan.
She heard the old man snore beside her. What was his story?
After chasing out the Soviets, the mujahideen turned their guns on the Moscow-backed Najibullah. Afghan cities endured merciless attacks that killed tens of thousands of civilians and flattened half of Kabul. Eventually the mujahideen took Kabul, left Najibullah’s body swinging in front of the Presidential Palace and selected Professor Burhannudin Rabbani as president of the country.
At a loss for whom to shoot next, the mujahideen spent the next year assaulting each other in a quest for ultimate power.
Then one day in 1994, a new force hit the Afghan scene and took everyone, especially the mujahideen, by surprise. The Pakistani government wanted protection to open up trade routes between Pakistan and Central Asia. They turned to a group of Afghans trained in religious schools in Pakistan along with some former mujahideen to escort a convoy into Afghanistan.
This group, calling themselves the Taliban Islamic Militia, drove off would-be looters and successfully forced their way through mujahideen territory. Soon they took over the ancient capital of Kandahar. Brutally executing and amputating criminals, they drove out corruption with their law-and-order resolve.
Weary from years of lawlessness, many Afghans, especially the ethnic Pashtuns prevalent in southern and eastern Afghanistan, embraced them with open arms. Encouraged, the Taliban continued their advance and took Kabul in 1996, President Rabbani and mujahideen forces retreated to northeast Afghanistan where they continued to put up stiff resistance to Taliban incursions.
As the plane leveled out at cruising altitude, Natalie reached for the second report by the State Department. It was labeled, “Recent U.S. Relations with Afghanistan.”
At first the White House had backed the Taliban Islamic Militia.
Then, to Washington’s chagrin, the Taliban began a version of “ethnic cleansing.” They concentrated on throwing out, jailing, or exterminating ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Afghans. Their reasoning was that the other ethnic communities would sympathize with mujahideen rebel leaders such as Ahmed Shah Massoud. Their other goal was to root out minority Shi’a Muslims who didn’t agree with their vision of a country of “pure Islam.”
Headquartered in Kandahar, the former ancient capital in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled eighty to ninety percent of Afghanistan. The Taliban accused the U.S., Israel, India, Iran and Russia of being the masters of Ahmed Shah Massoud, whose opposition troops successfully held back Taliban militia advances. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. They were the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Since the cruise missile retaliation in Afghanistan, high U.S. officials, including the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and the Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs had met with turbaned, rifle-wielding Taliban Islamic Militia leaders, but only on Pakistani soil. There they had read the Taliban the riot act criticizing, for starters, Afghanistan’s poor human rights record by citing UN reports of Taliban troops massacring thousands of Afghan civilians and eight Iranian diplomats at Mazar-i-Sharif on the northwestern border. The U.S. officials also pointed out the Islamists’ atrocious treatment of women and their complicity in drug trafficking in Taliban-occupied areas. Finally, the officials condemned the Taliban endorsement of terrorist training camps that harbored such criminals as Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban had countered lamely that they had no evidence of Osama bin Laden’s crimes, and furthermore, bin Laden, ever the builder, was busy constructing a mosque in Kandahar.
The American officials proceeded to deliver a blunt warning to the Taliban leaders. If Osama bin Laden struck U.S. assets like the two American Embassies in Africa again, America would hold the Taliban responsible. Additionally, as long as Osama bin Laden remained the Taliban’s “honored guest,” there would be no chance of diplomatic recognition of the Taliban regime either by the United States or the United Nations.
The report concluded that the former U.S. Embassy in Kabul had been closed since January 1989 due to security concerns, and no American staff was present in Afghanistan. Natalie’s status as a representative of the U.S. Government would be completely denied.
“Good-bye and good luck,” Natalie read between the lines.
She paused to take a deep breath. Her status was unofficial and the government of the country she was entering was unrecognized. She had no idea how to accomplish her mission.
As a diversion, she scanned several Internet printouts that described the Dari and Pashto languages, the two official languages of Afghanistan.
Written in their own scripts, the languages were incomprehensible to her. However, the spoken form seemed easy to grasp. Pashto was related to Dari and spoken by the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, and most importantly the Taliban. In Pashto, “Ho” meant yes and “Nah” meant no. Dari, a close variant of the Persian Farsi, was used in business and government transactions and didn’t sound unfamiliar to her ear. The fact that verbs usually ended sentences, as in many languages such as German and Hindi, seemed completely reasonable to her.
She smiled at the male flight attendant who was offering her a glass of orange juice that seemed to glow with radioactivity. “Nah,” she said.
It worked. The man walked on.
The old man seated beside her was suddenly wracked by a cough. It sounded deep in his chest like tuberculosis.
She turned away from him and prayed that he wouldn’t die in his seat. The flight attendant took a few steps back, slapped the man on the back and handed him a glass of radioactive juice.
Now, that would really help.
She flipped open a CIA report. The paper seemed written to shock someone, perhaps even the president.
Its vivid portrayal of Afghan atrocities toward its own citizens would chill even the most hardened autocrat.
It depicted a country whose Soviet-built universities spawned world-class engineers and scientists who in turn purchased weapons-grade plutonium from Russia and the Ukraine.
It told a tale of terrorist webs spread over the Middle East with tendrils that reached far into Europe and the U.S.
The report went on to catalog Afghanistan’s contribution to the world’s heroin supply. It was the world’s second-largest illicit opium producer after Burma. It cultivated forty thousand hectares and was increasing production by three percent per year. The country’s other major cash crop was hashish.
In short, the CIA report seemed to imply that there was no end to the mayhem a rogue state could create in the modern world, and the Taliban’s venom seemed particularly aimed at the United States.
Although the country was waging its own internal war, Afghanistan had dispossessed many fanatic fighters who were eager to fight wherever the world needed them.
Natalie shut the report and closed her eyes. The implication for the rest of the world was clear: topple the Taliban government or continue to pay the price.
At length, she turned to a perfumed, buff résumé. At the top was a photograph of the smiling, dark face of Ambassador Lucius Ford. Below that, his vita showed a solid academic background in international relations, followed by years as a business negotiator in New York and his most recent career move into consulting for national leaders before President Damon tapped him to be ambassador to the United Nations.
Everything in the résumé said, “I’m a good guy” and “I’m connected.” She wondered how one person could be so all knowing and all-powerful, and so self-confident to claim it in their résumé. She hadn’t written a résumé since college two decades earlier, but despite her worldly experience as an American diplomat, she couldn’t really claim that she could influence world leaders. Maybe get the ear of one or two. But the résumé implied that Lucius Ford had them all in his back pocket, and she was skeptical.
Lastly, a ruled page of bulleted notes in a mysterious, swirling, feminine handwriting spelled out her mission and its potential pitfalls.
Her job was to meet with the Taliban authorities holding Lucius hostage, request his release and offer absolutely nothing in return. She was to appeal on behalf of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons” such as senior government officials and diplomats. She was to make no appeal on humanitarian grounds. She was not to bargain whatsoever, unless his captors should ask her to deliver a message to the President of the United States in exchange for Lucius’ release.
She carefully folded the piece of paper and placed it back in the file folder.
What might the Taliban want in exchange for Lucius? Official recognition, release of terrorists from jail? All she could offer was the ear of the president.
Maybe that was why her department had sent her. She had no sway with the Pentagon, no political connections, no expertise in Afghanistan. She had nothing whatsoever to offer.
At the bottom of the folder, she found an unlabeled vial of clear liquid. After many interesting years married to a CIA officer, she didn’t need to ask its purpose.
She carried the package down the aisle to the rear bathroom where the jet’s engines droned loudly. After shutting and locking the door, she emptied the papers into the sink and poured the liquid over them.