by Mahvish Khan
To add to the Third World experience, the electricity kept going in and out. I was freezing but afraid of the poisonous gas coming from my heater. I figured it was better to freeze than to be gassed in my sleep, so I turned the heater off. The next morning, I woke up early. I knew I wasn’t being fussy when I exhaled and saw my breath.
I had an interview set up with Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador and Guantánamo detainee. Once again, I was looking forward to a hot shower, but the water was still icy, so I jumped in and out quickly and gave myself a head-freeze washing my hair. I was trying hard to go with the flow, but I didn’t think I could last for two weeks with hypothermia and the constant threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. My blow dryer wasn’t working because the electricity was going on and off, so I just covered my wet hair with a black shawl.
I took a cab to Zaeef ’s mansion in Kabul’s Khushal Khan neighborhood, feeling very nervous about meeting the outspoken former Taliban ambassador. I’d gotten in touch with Zaeef through local journalists who had written about him and who had helped me request an interview. As I got out of the taxi, I counted ten armed guards outside the ambassador’s gated complex. Some were wearing camouflage and boots, but one wore plastic sandals with socks. Two were sitting in blue plastic chairs with their legs crossed. Another squatted in the driveway holding a gun. They seemed to be expecting me and were at ease. A man waiting by the gates escorted me into a room lined with gray sofas, where I sat down to wait.
Abdul Salam Zaeef’s guards outside his Kabul home. Author photo.
Zaeef became notorious when he made himself the public face of the Taliban by holding regular news conferences after September 11. While he publicly condemned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he maintained that Osama bin Laden was not responsible. When the situation got a bit dodgy in Afghanistan, Zaeef fled from the bombs to neighboring Pakistan, where he sought asylum and continued his media attacks on the U.S.-led war. Soon after, he was arrested in Islamabad by the Pakistani Secret Police, handed over to the U.S. military, and eventually wound up at Gitmo.
I was particularly curious about him because of his former political affiliations. I wanted to pick his brain about his former job as ambassador for the Taliban. Dechert was supposed to have represented Zaeef, but he was released in the summer of 2005 before Peter Ryan and I ever had the chance to meet him. I also thought it was peculiar that he’d been arrested at all, since international law dictates that he should have received diplomatic immunity.
When he walked in and greeted me, my nervousness didn’t immediately dissipate, although I was surprised to find him very soft-spoken. He was a tall, big-boned man with a thick, dark beard and eyeglasses. He was wearing a light-colored blazer over his Afghan clothes. He sat down across a glass table from me, and I was relieved that he apparently had no qualms about a woman interviewing him, although all he could see of me were my face and hands. A thin man came in and poured us green tea. I was freezing and quickly took a gulp, burning my lips.
Zaeef curled up in the sofa chair, drawing in his sock feet. He told me he was through with politics and was happy at home with his two wives and six kids, writing another book.
Over the next two hours, we downed a pot of green tea, and I picked his brain. I started off with questions related to his experiences at Gitmo and worked up the courage to ask him about how he’d justified working for a regime that allegedly executed women in a sports stadium.
Here are some excerpts of our chat:
Q: You were at Gitmo for three years and five months. Did you always cling to a hope that you would go home?
A: No, in the beginning, I had no hope. When I was first brought to Guantánamo, it brought back memories of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghan men disappeared [during that war]. I feared a similar fate. It was only after I saw other Afghans going home that I slowly allowed myself to hope that I might too. I knew I had not committed a crime, so I had hope that someday I would be released.
Q: What was it like when you were finally released? How did you get the news?
A: I was in Camp 4 with Haji Nusrat and his son Izatullah when I got the news. The soldiers came with the Red Cross and told me I would be going home. All of the other prisoners congratulated me. They asked me to visit their families and convey their greetings.
Q: Tell me about actually going home. What was the plane ride like? I’ve heard that prisoners are sent home in shackles. Were you shackled on the way home?
A: Well, I had never seen the Guantánamo Airport before because prisoners are always moved around in special windowless vehicles. It was night time, and when I got there, there was a general standing on the tarmac. His name was written on his shirt, but I don’t remember it. . . . He congratulated me. He told me I’d been through a lot of hardships but that I was a good person and that I was headed home. Then, he told two soldiers to free me. They cut my plastic handcuffs. There was a soldier on each side of me, and they led me to the plane. There was also a delegate from the Afghan government there, and he congratulated me.
Q: What did it feel like to be unshackled for the first time in years?
A: I thought I was in a dream—that none of it was real. I was in a special plane; I was unshackled. It was the first time in years that I could eat and move my legs freely . . . and decide when I wanted to eat. It was a strange experience.
Q: What did you feel?
A: I felt many things. I was feeling guilty for everyone left behind. I was excited to be leaving Guan-tánamo. But at the same time I was very anxious, very nervous.
Q: Nervous how?
A: I was nervous about where I would be taken. I was afraid I might be jailed somewhere else.
Q: Are you able to separate the American people from their government?
A: It is hard to separate the two. Right now, I am hating most Americans.
Q: Why?
A: Initially, I thought it was the policy makers and the American government that were to blame— not the American people. But the American people voted for Bush a second time. Although I do believe the American government has taken the American people hostage. They live in fear of their government’s lies.
Q: Would you ever visit America?
A: No. I have no interest in that.
Q: How do you justify your work as a representative for a regime that executed women in the sports stadium?
A: That incident was televised all over the Western media, but what Americans do not know is that this lady was sentenced to death for murdering her husband. It had nothing to do with adultery. Don’t Americans also have the death penalty? Would it make it better if she were executed in private?
Q: Tell me about some of your interactions with the guards at Gitmo.
A: I was always talking to them. I was explaining my situation to them and I was always inviting them to Islam.
Q: How’d that go over?
A: Sometimes they listened. Sometimes they didn’t. I always told the guards that if they had objections to Islam, I was ready to speak to them about it. Some people had no idea what Islam was really about. I thought it was my responsibility to expose them to true Islam. Alhamdulillah—praise be to God—two became Muslim.
Q: Tell me about that.
A: Two white soldiers, they accepted Islam after speaking with me for three or four months. They kept it a secret. They would come to me, wake me up, and I would talk to them. I wish I could meet those two again, but I don’t know their addresses or how to find them.
Q: What were their religions before?
A: One was an atheist, and the other was Christian. There were other soldiers who didn’t convert but were intrigued enough to listen to me and told me they would speak to an Islamic scholar when they returned to America. I was always trying to educate people about the religion; they know so little and have been so prejudiced. When I was called into interrogations, I would do the same thing there. Sometimes they would tell me they weren’
t interested in listening, but many of them were open minded.
Abdul Salam Zaeef rereading family letters received at Guantánamo.
Author photo.
Before I left, I photographed Za-eef sifting through a thick stack of his Guantánamo letters, many of them covered in dark censor strokes. He told me that letters were everything to prisoners. Now, they evoked painful memories, but he hung on to them. He echoed what so many of the released have said about Guantánamo: “It’s a part of me now.”
He also showed me a photograph of his daughters that he kept in his cell at Gitmo (at right).
As I hopped into a cab, I decided to check out of my hotel and go someplace with a generator and central heating. I asked the driver to take me to the Inter- Continental Hotel. It was only ten minutes away, but traffic was very heavy, and it ended up taking half an hour to get there. The driver made small talk. He asked me what I was doing and where I was from. I told him a bit about myself but omitted the part about America. But that was the part he was wondering about.
A photo of Zaeef ’s daughters, which he kept in his Gitmo cell. Courtesy of Abdul Salam Zaeef.
“But where is your home?” he asked. “You sound like you have spent time abroad.”
Amreeka kay usaygam—I live in America,” I finally said. “
He looked at me in the rearview mirror and smiled. “How fortunate you are.”
“This is my first time in Afghanistan. It’s really beautiful,” I said.
He started to tell me about his troubles. He had salt-and-pepper hair and six- or seven-day stubble. He wore an embroidered hat and honked the horn brazenly as he wove through traffic, all the while telling me about an entire generation of Afghan youth left without education because of war.
“Without education, sister,” he said, glancing back at me, “our future is bleak.”
Afghans hated the Taliban and lived in fear during their rule, he said. “God damn them for what they brought upon us,” he said angrily. Unlike many others, he could not afford to flee to Iran, Pakistan, or overseas. He told me that I should know about the hardships all Afghans face every day. He told me about his struggles to take care of his young children and his wife. We talked about the Russian invasion, the Taliban, the land mines littering the country, warlords, and U.S. bombs.
He drove onto the InterContinental’s long uphill driveway, stopping at several gates and various levels of security checkpoints where armed guards questioned him and peered into the trunk. They waved us through. When we pulled into the hotel parking lot, I handed him some extra dollars. He put his palm against his chest and nodded. According to the Afghan ministry of finance, the average Afghan makes about eighty cents a day. Up to that point, I had only known about the economic, social, and psychological effects of perpetual warfare from accounts by journalists, historians, and statisticians. I knew that the separation between the rich and poor was great, but beyond the dates and figures, I had no experience of it.
I had also heard a lot about developments in infrastructure, commerce, and education since the Taliban had been ousted, but I was still surprised when I saw the InterContinental. The taxi driver insisted on walking me in with my bags. We passed a large sign with a picture of a machine gun and a large red X drawn over it. “No Weapons,” it read. A doorman held open the glass doors to the lobby. I stood behind a barricade of red velvet ropes. The doorman told the cab driver to put my lug- gage on the table, where it was searched. Then, another man with a black mustache, wearing a blue suit, instructed me to walk through a metal detector into the chandeliered lobby.
I had no idea that Kabul had such a revamped hotel. I quickly discovered the InterContinental’s ostentatious list of amenities. All of a sudden, my taxi driver looked out of place in his tattered clothes and dusty shoes. He must have felt it too, because he hurriedly gave me a small card with his number, in case I should need him again. I thanked him profusely and said goodbye.
The hotel is a huge complex; all charges were to be paid in dollars only. I was surprised to see an ATM machine in the lobby—and further surprised when it dispensed U.S. dollars. The restaurant and room service menus listed a variety of American and Afghan cuisine with prices listed in U.S. dollars. An “American hamburger” was $8.
The complex included a spa, a business center—which charged by the minute, in dollars—a team of imported young Thai masseuses, a hair and nail salon, a ballroom, a swimming pool, restaurants, a tea and coffee house with huge dark leather couches, and a wide variety of imported teas and coffees. The hotel was full of businessmen, tourists making weekend trips from Dubai, and, as a hotel employee would tell me later, Afghan and U.S. intelligence spying on guests. Some of the rooms, I learned later, were bugged.
The hotel also had an airline counter and numerous small gift shops. When I asked one shop keeper how he justified his ridiculously inflated prices, in dollars, he told me that a small gift shop space at the hotel was $800 a month—and highly coveted.
The clerk at the front desk quoted me a rate of $160 per night. It seemed obscene for Afghanistan. I looked at him in disbelief and started to haggle. “I can’t afford more than $100,” I said firmly.
“Okay. We accept cash only. Dollars,” he said.
He asked me to pay for a few days in advance.
I was surprised when he handed me a modern key-card to my room. As I walked across the lobby to the elevators, I saw Westerners in jeans standing around speaking French. There were couples sitting on couches being served big slices of yellow cake and tea. The place was crawling with North Atlantic Treaty Organization soldiers, European adventure seekers, and other tourists browsing the antique jewelry shops. It was a weird oasis.
At the elevator, I was greeted by a guard.
“Which floor, madam?” he asked in English.
“Eight, please.”
Hardly anyone at the hotel wore Afghan clothes. None of the women covered their hair, and all of the employees spoke English. It was often broken English, but they were obviously instructed to speak it.
In my room, I plugged in my laptop and went online. I felt guilty paying so much for a hotel room when most Afghans didn’t have running water or electricity in their homes. Here, I had central heating, a huge bathroom with hot water, and high-speed Internet.
I e-mailed my family to let them know that I was fine. Then, I slipped into a pair of flats, wrapped myself in a pashmina, and prepared for my meetings with the families of detainees. Each day, I visited a former Gitmo prisoner or the families of men still imprisoned. The families were instrumental in helping gather evidentiary documents used in the detainees’ defense. For example, the U.S. military didn’t seem to buy that Abdullah Wazir Zadran was a shopkeeper selling tires in the Khost bazaar with his family. So, I asked his older brother Zahir Shah to collect photographs of the tire store. We also discussed getting affidavits of neighboring shopkeepers to give to the military courts. Zahir Shah brought a stack of about fifty photographs of the tire store with the family name clearly written on the sign above it. I held many of these meetings at the hotel because I was nervous about venturing into southern Afghanistan.
After my work for the day was done, I headed into the city. I loved the hotel’s comforts but was eager to get outside its gates. I wanted to see the real Kabul.
At the front desk, I asked one of the mustached men to help me hail a cab so I could explore the city.
“Are you going alone?” he inquired. “We can send someone with you if you prefer.”
The hotel’s Ariana Airlines desk officer closed the office and said he’d take me around. He had a short beard, and I immediately noticed a huge scar along the left side of his face and wondered what it was from. When our discussion eventually turned political, he explained that he had been beaten by the Taliban years before. He couldn’t afford to flee, as many of his friends had.
“There is no way I could have walked the streets with this short beard,” he said. “And there is no way we co
uld have walked together. It was a terrible time.”
He took me first to Chicken Street, a narrow lane lined with small shops selling everything from antique water jugs to handcrafted Afghan rugs, as well as the imported Persian variety. I picked up two, one for me and one for Peter Ryan. I wandered from store to store, checking out the antique jewelry, embroidered shawls, and jeweled, wooden boxes with hand-painted Persian hunting scenes. I picked up a rabbit fur jacket for $30 and a bunch of large dangly antique silver earrings. While the prices on Chicken Street were much more reasonable than at the gift shops at my hotel, I still wondered how Afghans could afford Kabul. Everywhere I went, I saw European men and women shopping.
After Chicken Street, my guide gave me a tour of Kabul. It seemed like everywhere we looked, there was bogus development. I saw little evidence of urban planning, or a desire to close the open sewage lines, or hospitals or schools. Instead, the city had seen a spike in high-end hotels, Internet cafes, bars, and swimming pools, which I was told were surrounded in the summertime by European women in bikinis. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it all. But the more I saw, the more it irked me. Living costs in Kabul are just as high as (or higher) than they are in the United States.
Before the U.S. invasion, it would have cost $50 to $60 monthly to rent a small house near Kabul City. Now the price had been hiked up to $1,500 a month. But in the upscale Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, prices were insane. It used to cost about $300 a month to rent a nice house there. Now, prices had soared from $5,000 up to a whopping $15,000 a month—higher than the cost of living in most areas of Beverly Hills.
All this so-called development wasn’t for Afghans or even for Afghanistan. It was for European and American NGOs, for people who chat up their sat phone bills and hook up their Sony Vaios at cybercafes. These were the sorts who stayed at the InterContinental— or Kabul’s new decadent Serena Hotel, where guests could drop $350 a night for a room or $1,200 a night for a presidential suite. The average Afghan would have to work for more than four years to be able to afford a single night there.