We heard shots ring out from the fortress, just a few miles away from our dumpy hotel. The shots mounted into a sustained roar and subsided sporadically. A few journalists already in the city who had entered Afghanistan via Tajikistan were already returning from the fortress, confirming that a savage battle was under way at Qala i-Jongi. We headed the other way; Bahuladin grabbed a taxi, and we set out for the fortress.
The Kabul actor-turned-war-front-translator sat in the front and extracted some opium paste wrapped in cellophane from a pocket, preparing to smoke it. He seemed entirely unconcerned about the dangers of heading toward the scene of the battle, and the continuing sounds of mortar rounds and explosions coming from that direction. He just smiled and smiled.
We soon closed on the Qala i-Jongi but were forced to stop by Northern Alliance troops, as outgoing mortar rounds were landing not far away. “Outgoing,” that is, from the fortress toward us. Exercising caution, I thought it best to study the edifice from a ditch. The dimensions of the nineteenth-century mud-brick structure were still impressive. The walls were pitched at a seventy-degree angle, and the fortress seemed to be several football fields long and at least one wide. Yes, it was an impressive, if Spartan-looking, structure—and one about to be blown into rubble.
Inside the fort, according to witnesses from both sides, Spann and Tyson tried to fight off the mob with near fanaticism. Tyson fired off clip after clip from an AK-47. Spann emptied his pistol before the prisoners tore him to pieces. He thus became the first American to die in Afghanistan.
Spann’s hopeless attempt to take on the hundreds of Taliban prisoners had bought Tyson time enough to run along a wall and into the northern section of the prison, where he found a German television team. “Mind if I use your satellite telephone for a moment?” said Tyson, or something to that effect. Then, on camera—how could he ask the Germans not to film him while using their phone?—Tyson dialed up someone at the US embassy in Tashkent, gave the exact coordinates of the Qala i-Jongi, and begged for reinforcements.
Bahuladin and I were oblivious to this as we huddled in our ditch along the side of the road, listening to explosions coming from the fortress and the occasional mortar round landing outside, a few dozen yards away from us. The Northern Alliance fighters chuckled at my self-preservation efforts; explosions never fazed them after so many years of war.
Whatever had happened inside the fort seemed to be dying down, anyway. Now there were only short bursts of occasional fire, and I was starting to think it was time to take a closer look when a blinding flash lit up and a shock blast shook the ground we were standing on as an explosion went off in the southern section, which the Taliban had overrun, followed by a loud whooshing noise—likely a US guided bomb or a missile of some sort.
US helicopter gunships buzzed the fort all that night, as well as central Mazar. It was difficult to make out what they were up to, as the city was pitch black and there was no electricity. But our balcony faced westward, in the direction of Qala i-Jongi. We heard occasional explosions and saw flashes of light, but so far nothing like the all-out onslaught that had been rumored to be in the offing.
The next day, we headed to the fortress again to see what truths there were to report. Not surprisingly, we found perhaps a couple dozen US and UK Special Forces in place around it, evidently there to help direct the fighting against the Taliban and to coordinate air strikes. They had made a respectable attempt to blend in with the Afghans, dressing up in traditional robes and having grown beards. But while the “purdah” had a nice style element, it was patently obvious who was who—the Americans and British had been staying at safe houses in the city, were obviously getting daily showers, and their air of cleanliness made then stand out from their unbathed Northern Alliance allies.
Northern Alliance troops perched upon the upper walls with automatic weapons and extra ammunition, shooting down into the southern area of the compound. What the cameras could not capture was the Taliban returning fire with small arms, shooting up. All other action was sporadic, such as a mortar round landing in the field next to the fortress where I was standing, doing an interview with NPR host Bob Edwards for Morning Edition. Then an Alliance commander stepped over to me and tapped at his watch, strongly suggesting I move myself and my equipment. Another air strike was on the way. I didn’t question his authority.
We vacated the area, and bombs were soon shaking the ground as we drove back into Mazar-e-Sharif, Bahuladin laughing about the guile of the escaped Taliban prisoners all the way. “Blyad” (“Fuck”), he cursed in Russian. “Man, but those Chechens have balls!” The Afghans, it turned out, were referring to any Russian-speaking Taliban volunteers as “Chechens,” a mistake that was to get into the vernacular of many foreign correspondents over those few days. It was a matter of confusion, not intentional. But it was wrong. Uzbeks and men from Russia’s various Muslim republics were the main fighters among the Russian speakers who had joined up with the Taliban. Chechens were still busy with their own war at home, and few, if any, were ever conclusively documented as having fought in Afghanistan.
When we returned to the fortress later, we learned that one of the US air strikes had missed its target by a few dozen meters, slamming into Dostum’s part of the fortress and killing more than a dozen Northern Alliance guys. An enormous part of one of the mud walls had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in the Qala i-Jongi defenses, offering further proof—if any was needed—what modern high explosives can do to medieval-style adobe fortress walls.
And yet still the Taliban, trapped like rats in a cul-de-sac sewer, fought on.
Then, toward nightfall, we were given to understand that the Americans had run out of patience and were going to bomb Qala i-Jongi into oblivion. The best place to watch the spectacle would be from the safety of my balcony with its view toward the fortress, I decided.
Darkness fell. The odd explosion rang out; an occasional flash of light flickered. The low-intensity battle continued. Then came a different sound, a sort of whoosh that must have been aircraft but felt like longrange missiles coming from hell itself as the anticipated earth-shattering bombardment commenced. Huge orange balls of fire mushroomed into the sky, followed by smaller explosions when the initial blast had clearly detonated some of the tons of munitions General Dostum kept stored at the fortress. There was almost a sick beauty to it all, and flames shot into the heavens all night.
When morning came, we returned to the fortress to see what was left of it. Remarkably, there were still periodic shots coming from inside the complex, and the press was not being allowed in. That would take until the next morning.
When we were finally allowed to enter, it was a scene of absolute carnage, medieval in its choreography, gruesome beyond anything I had seen to that point in a decade of covering wars. Hundreds of bodies were strewn about in all sorts of warped poses of death, probably a spectacle Tamerlane would have delighted in. One man’s chest had been splayed open with what must have been a bayonet or some sort of sword. Others lay next to some of Dostum’s dead horses who had gotten caught up in the fighting. There was another group lying on the ground next to one another, hands bound and thus probably shot execution-style. Wandering around amid the sea of bodies, now attracting flies, was a small group of foreign war reporters. A battle-hardened, thick-skinned lot, some of them close to war-junkie status. I knew many of them. Even their mouths were agape at the slaughter and the sight of the bodies of the dead Taliban being tossed into flatbed trucks—four, five, and six deep, looking like livestock carcasses being loaded for processing at a meatpacking plant.
The Northern Alliance “victors”—who had just lost more than a hundred men in the battle—meanwhile, took a different approach. Many joked or laughed and posed for pictures next to the dead Taliban, putting their boots atop lifeless heads while smiling for the cameras. Another group was arguing over war booty—the bombs poured onto the fortress had blown open a storage depot containing automatic rifles with retractable coils�
�World War II–vintage stuff. They were still wrapped in old brown wax paper and were regarded as a real find.
Nearby there was the remainder of a staircase going into the basement of a building that had been blown away in the bombing. A couple of Northern Alliance men stood next to the hole. As I stood a few feet away recording, one held a grenade, pulled the pin and tossed it into the basement, laughing hysterically. It exploded with the predictable kaboom, sending the two Alliance fighters into even greater hysterical mirth. “There are still a few of them left down there,” said one of the fighters.
And there were. A couple of days later, when we had left the charnel house better known as Qala i-Jongi because the battle seemed over, the Alliance forces got tired of tossing grenades and flooded the basement with water and diesel fuel, and the last starving, wounded, and dying fifty Taliban prisoners finally gave themselves up, begging for mercy.
Among those to ascend the stairs was the “Irishman” Taliban, John Walker Lindh, known to his associates by his nom de guerre, Sulayman al-Faris. (He would be taken away by CIA officials, interrogated on a navy ship, and finally be sent to the United States, where he would eventually be given a twenty-year prison sentence on a variety of charges related to his Taliban life after a plea bargain designed to save him from worse.)
Then General Dostum arrived, walking nonchalantly through the carnage and up into the terraced compound that overlooked the fortress grounds. Sipping tea and nursing what looked to be one of his common hangovers, he gave an impromptu press conference, emphasizing that the Taliban prisoners had been treated “humanely,” but that his men had erred by not handcuffing the lot and even failing to check some for concealed weapons. The prisoners, he suggested, had violated a kind of unwritten Afghan trust and had only themselves to blame for the slaughter. (More serious were the allegations that the men who surrendered to Dostum had been packed into airless, scorching container trucks, and that several hundred of them had suffocated to death in the process. The general denied this, although he tried to prevent the examination of mass graves discovered years later that seemed to give credence to the ghastly story.)
Then there was the future of Taliban-free Afghanistan.
With the war ineluctably moving south toward the capital, Kabul, and the Taliban being zapped by high-tech weapons when not on the run or hiding, it was natural to assume that a major page had been turned in the history of the blighted nation, and that the American promise of bringing freedom and democracy was just a matter of weeks or at most months away.
But even before the fall of Kunduz, the slaughter at Qala i-Jongi, and the capture of John Walker Lindh, Dostum and others in the Northern Alliance had already given unsettling indications that they would come to blows over who was going to run this part of Afghanistan. There were continual rumors about tension between Dostum, the big Uzbek known to like a drink, and the more pious Mohammed Atta, leader of the local Tajiks. As for the Pashtuns, many of whom lived in the nearby ancient city of Balkh (ironically, the scene of Tamerlane’s coronation in 1370), they were already complaining of ethnically based beatings and indiscriminate treatment at the hands of the Uzbeks and Tajiks. During a visit to the town, I sat on a dirt floor listening to the pleas of Pashtun town elders, who begged for an international peacekeeping force to prevent them from being exterminated.
Dostum, meanwhile, was the man of the moment and let it be known that what he wanted was any new central government in Kabul to allow a broad form of federalism, with him, Dostum, of course, at the helm in the north, just as he had been before the city fell to the Taliban. In those days Dostum was usually surrounded by provocatively dressed “assistants.” Other local women spurned even head scarves, let alone burqas. Shops selling booze were not hard to find. The big Uzbek even ordered his own version of the local Afghani currency printed up—identical except for some telltale markings that shaved half of its value in comparison with the Kabul-printed variety.
The problem was, almost no one trusted Dostum as far as they could throw the gargantuan Uzbek strongman, and with good reason. His twenty-thousand-strong private militia fought on the Soviet side during their stay in Afghanistan, and he stayed loyal to the communist chieftain Najibullah until after the Russians ended financial support for Kabul as part of a “hands-off Afghanistan” deal struck with Washington in 1989. With Najib’s brutal murder in 1992 and the start of the real civil war, Dostum next aligned himself with the legendary Shah Massoud, and then briefly took control of Kabul, fighting the Pakistani-installed leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar before having a flirt with the Taliban, allowing them to enter Mazar-e-Sharif in the late 1990s, only to break with them soon thereafter.
One might say he never saw a temporary alliance he didn’t like.
Thus it was not wholly surprising when Dostum and Atta hastily convened a joint press conference to dispel notions of a split. The international community was putting great pressure on the factions, including Dostum, to come to some sort of workable national agreement, and it behooved them both to make the right noises—in this case, that they were full-fledged allies, uttering platitudes about the brotherly love between the ancient and fraternal Uzbek and Tajik peoples, amid questions about how to round up the sea of weapons floating around the country. Northern Alliance fighters, with no Talibs left to fight, were busy pawning theirs. I spent a day with one group of yahoos outside of Mazar-e-Sharif who offered me everything from a worn AK-47 ($150) to a slightly used Russian T-55 tank ($5,000).
At the end of the briefing, I asked Dostum how long it would realistically take to bring a degree of order to Afghanistan. His answer was neither evasive nor glib. Rather, it was straightforward and probably prophetic:
“In my opinion, minor conflicts will continue for the next ten or fifteen years,” he dourly stated. “Even before these twenty-three years of war, even during the reign of the king, Afghans always fought. If they didn’t have guns, they fought with shovels and sticks.”
BEFORE SETTING OFF from Moscow and heading off to Afghanistan, I had visited with dozens of Russians who shook their heads at the American decision to intervene in the so-called graveyard of empires. The United States, they predicted, would get bogged down and ultimately be forced to leave as well. In many cases, this was conveyed sincerely. In others, from former Soviet “Spetznaz” (Special Forces) types, the predictions of doom also contained a kind of smugness that the United States would ultimately fail to tame Afghanistan, just as they had, shattering the myth that the US superpower was omnipotent, just as the supposed Soviet superpower had turned out not to be.
THE BATTLE FOR Qala i-Jongi over, John Walker Lindh captured, and America having suffered its first death of the war, I was instructed by my editors at NPR to head back to Uzbekistan and then to Moscow, leaving Steve Inskeep, now the anchor for NPR’s Morning Edition, to stay behind to cover the next developments. We spent a farewell dinner eating Afghan dumplings filled with meat, carrots, and onions in a bare-bones slop house with wallpaper featuring deer and horses with their eyes gouged out, which apparently had some sort of religious significance to the Taliban that no one was ever able to adequately explain to me. Along with this religiously motivated desecration of kitsch wall art, there was also plenty of usual graffiti, some in English.
Yes, it was time to go. I had already parted ways with the overly gregarious, dope-smoking, and fearless Bahuladin, who had latched on to a TV crew that was throwing something like five hundred dollars a day at him for his services. War can be good business for out-of-work Kabul actors, and I wonder what he is doing today.
Another Russian-speaking Mazar local drove me the hour-long drive back up to the Bridge of Friendship with Uzbekistan, and I got my passport out as we approached the border. The interpreter turned white. “But it’s an American passport,” he said. “Yes, that’s because I’m American,” I countered. He had assumed that because I spoke Russian fluently, I was Russian. His demeanor turned from matter-of-factness and circumspection to a scramble
of deference. In this part of Afghanistan, Americans were still, at this early stage of the war, the heroes who had gotten rid of the Taliban.
At the border, an Afghan official cheerily stamped my multiple-entry visa, and I walked alone across the long bridge toward the Uzbek side. When I got to the middle and showed the Uzbek guards my passport, also with a multiple-entry Uzbek visa, the border officials look startled. The bridge had indeed officially recently been opened with great fanfare, they said, but there was a problem: My exit stamp from Uzbekistan was a little ink blot in the shape of a boat, which indicated that I had left the country by barge. Therefore, according to their logic, I would have to reenter Uzbekistan the same way I had left—by barge. Except that no one knew when, or even if, one would sail across the Amu Darya to the Uzbek side again.…
Luckily the height of the bridge provided good cell coverage, and I spent hours dialing US embassy numbers in Tashkent, the NPR foreign desk in Washington, and the satellite telephone of one of Dostum’s Russian-speaking “colonels” back in Mazar-e-Sharif. But nothing seemed to work—not cajoling the Uzbek border guards with kind words, curses, or free cell phone calls to their distant families, or even proposing special “fees” to be shared equally with all their colleagues as the border post on the bridge. The bottom line was that they were obviously terrified of breaking anything even remotely interpreted as a rule, and they would not budge.
My next plan was to engage in a war of psychological attrition, making them so sick of my presence outside their customs post that they would beg me to just go through and go.
I lay down on the bridge in my sleeping bag. It was now December, and an icy cold wind roared around me. A thousand stars filled the sky. I thought again about the euphoria over the quick fall of the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, the enthusiastic reception toward Americans I had received, and the general sense that the American war to smash the Taliban for their support of al-Qaeda—unlike the many foreign interventions of the past, most recently the Soviet—would be short, sweet, and successful.
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