Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  There’s not much of anything in Jalalabad today, except dust. The streets are paved with it, the people covered in it, the buildings apparently built from it, and the chicken I’m served at the Spinghar tastes of it. Jalalabad does have a bazaar, and though it’s a common fantasy among middle-class western dilettantes that markets in remote third world towns are full of picturesque natives selling each other exquisite hand-crafted jewellery and organic hair conditioner, there’s nothing for sale in Jalalabad except whatever crap fell off the back of the last truck that came through: plastic crockery from Uzbekistan, Azerbaijani chocolate and a startling amount of Pepsi Cola, stacked everywhere in blue crates.

  In the centre of Jalalabad, there’s a traffic roundabout, around which a large crowd is gathered. I gather with it for a bit to see what they’re waiting for. After an hour, I decide that maybe 300-a-side staring-silently-into-the-middle-distance has been decreed a right-on Islamic sport, or something, and leave them to it. That evening, when I go to meet someone in the UN compound, I’m told that the mob had been gathering to watch local Talibs administer a kicking to one of their own—for “dishonesty,” apparently. At the hotel at dusk, a few local women are sitting gossiping beneath a tree. When they see me approaching, they pull their masks back down over their faces, and fall silent.

  I leave Jalalabad for Kabul the following morning with Noel Spencer, a genial Northern Irishman who, after years defusing things for the British Army in Northern Ireland and the Kuwaiti Royal Family in Kuwait, now does the same for the UN’s mine clearance operation in Afghanistan. His experienced driver and his new 4WD pick-up take nine hours to negotiate the 200 or so kilometres between the two cities. At best, the road, devastated by decades of neglect, tanks and mortars, is appalling. At worst, it just isn’t there, degenerating into interminable sequences of ridges and cracks that engender the strange feeling of being seasick on dry land. More than once, the horizon disappears behind the lip of potholes big enough to fit the entire truck in.

  Which, given Afghanistan’s horizons, is an accomplishment. If the people of Afghanistan take the Almighty a little more seriously than most, they could rightly argue that this is where He’s done some of his best work. Snow-white and basalt-black mountain ranges as jagged as an Albanian bank’s profit-and-loss charts cradle the sort of sweeping green plains that make me wish that I had a troop of cavalry I could charge across them. Next to the road, the mighty Kabul River flows green, then grey, then silver, before disappearing as the road heads up to the plateau on which Kabul sits, and winds through immense gorges which look awesomely forbidding and final, like exits from the entire universe.

  Villages, made entirely from mud, hunch along the roadside. In one, too small to merit a name, we stop for lunch in a mud room where the floor is also the table, and the only way to pick the difference between the flies and the sultanas in the stew is that the sultanas are marginally less animated. In another town, Sarobi, there is a shop, operating out of a converted shipping container, offering for sale an impressive range of used assault rifles, mortars, grenade-launchers and anti-tank weapons. The shipping container next door is piled high with more crates of Pepsi.

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, THE first thing I do is the first thing all visiting media in Kabul have to do: check in with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The press office is run by a cheery old buzzard called Dr. Aminzai, a career civil servant who had a reputation, during previous regimes, as an impeccably groomed, Armani-clad dandy trailing clouds of imported aftershave. He wanted to keep his job, and so now wears a traditional robe and turban, and a beard you could hide crates of bootlegged Pepsi in. He makes me fill in some forms, gives me a Taliban press card, and reads me the riot act.

  “You must stay,” he says, “at the Intercontinental Hotel.”

  I checked in last night. It’s up on a hill commanding glorious views of Kabul, though the swimming pool and the cocktail bar haven’t seen use in some time. It has 150 staff and 200 rooms, but only two are currently occupied—mine, and one up the hall by a hotel employee who opens his door and booms, “Hello, Mr. Andrew!” every time I walk in or out (as the week wears on, I will try to catch him by leaving again straight after arriving, or creeping out at four in the morning to run up and down the deserted upstairs corridors, but he doesn’t miss a trick).

  “You must not take pictures of people,” continues Dr. Aminzai.

  I wasn’t going to try. Several photographers have been attacked by the Taliban for committing photography, though it isn’t illegal, as such—I later get a smudged black-and-white portrait of myself taken by a bloke on a street corner with an ancient box camera.

  “And,” he says, “you will not be able to talk to women.”

  That’s okay, I tell him. It’s like that at home.

  “It will mean trouble for you,” he says, ignoring my feeble, if heartfelt, attempt at levity, “and more trouble for them.”

  With that, Dr. Aminzai introduces my Taliban-appointed translator/ minder, whom I’ll call Akbar. Akbar is a twenty-one-year-old student at Kabul University. He’s not Taliban himself, but is happy to make a few dollars conducting journalists around town for them. Akbar speaks excellent English, and we get on surprisingly well, given that we both, I think, feel like we’re trying to explain earth to a martian.

  “You are not married?” enquires Akbar over lunch one day.

  No.

  “But you are twenty-nine.”

  Correct.

  “How is this?”

  Oh, I don’t know. Stuff.

  “But you have had girlfriends?”

  Mmm.

  “And you have. . . lain with them?”

  In general, yes.

  “What becomes of them, when you have finished with them?”

  They struggle on.

  “But what other man will want them?”

  It’s a topic we return to frequently, especially when Akbar—a devout Muslim, and engaged to be married—introduces me to other people. The first thing he explains to them is my unattached status, which he seems to find more extraordinary the more he thinks about it—the people he tells couldn’t seem more surprised if he told them that I had a tail. I begin to wish that I’d said to Akbar from the off what I’d been saying to the equally curious merchants in the bazaar back in Peshawar (“Yes, her name’s Winona, she’s an actress. Yes, three sons, Jehosophat, Ezekiel and Susan—we’re a bit worried about Susan”).

  In the Herat, one of Kabul’s few tolerable restaurants, we meet Kalahan, a twenty-four-year-old student (married, four children). He asks me earnestly about “prostitution houses.”

  Brothels, I correct him.

  “Please—what is that word?”

  He writes it down as I spell it out.

  “Please—are they legal where you live?”

  I’ve no idea. Sort of, I think.

  “But please,” he asks, “if everyone is allowed to sleep with each other anyway, what is the point of them?”

  I try asking Kalahan about the civil war that ravaged Kabul and killed thousands of its citizens in the early 90s. There’s enough of Kabul still standing up to give me the idea that it must have been quite an attractive city, once. It was also rather fun, according to long-serving expats I meet in the UN Club, now Kabul’s only licensed premises (“In 1992,” recalls one Belgian doctor, “you could stay out all night, and it was only about as far off the pace as Budapest, or somewhere like that”). Today, several suburbs of Kabul are uninhabitable ruins, though people still inhabit them. Even the less damaged areas look like English football fans have been staying in them (“And culturally,” the same doctor tells me, “this place has gone from 1976 to 1376”).

  Kalahan and others his age don’t really want to talk about the war, or the Soviet invasion that preceded it, or the Taliban takeover that followed it. This is understandable—it’s all they’ve ever known. UNICEF estimates that 70 percent of Kabul’s children lost a family member between 1992 and 1996. It’s like t
rying to get Mauritanians excited about discussing drought.

  “The Taliban,” explains Kalahan, resignedly, “stopped the war.”

  But aren’t you frightened of them?

  “Of course. But they won’t last. Nobody does.”

  Nobody, least of all the Afghans themselves, has ever succeeded in governing Afghanistan’s volatile mix of tribes (half Pakhtun, with the balance made up by Tajiks, Turkomans, Uzbeks and Hazaras). Many have tried: the Sikh and Persian empires, Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain. In 1979, the USSR decided it was the nation for the job and, just as America had done in Vietnam, found its immense, sophisticated army locked in unwinnable combat with motivated guerillas—performing the military equivalent of trying to swat wasps with a steamroller.

  When Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the jig was up in 1988, Red Army casualties stood at 50,000. The road between Kabul and the Pakistani border is still littered with rusting remains of dead Soviet tanks. The tribesmen of Afghanistan, the dashing horse-mounted mujahedin who had opposed the initial Soviet invasion with rusty cutlasses and flintlock rifles, were by this stage bringing down MIG fighter planes with Stinger surface-to-air missiles. They hadn’t found these lying around—America, reasoning that the enemy of its enemy was its friend, spent $3 billion equipping and training the mujahedin. In creating this army of Islamic holy warriors to fight the godless communists, decadent Christian America forged the heavily armed and anarchic environment in which the Taliban would flourish. Funny old world.

  The common enemy defeated, the mujahedin took their shiny new American weapons, and their captured old Russian ones, and fought amongst themselves. Throughout the early 90s, former mujahedin chiefs and sundry warlords—notably Ahmed Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rashid Dostum—fell in and out with each other at such a rate that the favoured black humour fashion item among foreign aid workers at the time bore the legend “My party raided Kabul and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

  Enter, in late 1994, the Taliban. The Taliban—the term is a plural of Talib, or religious student—formed in the madrasas (Islamic schools) of the southern city of Kandahar. They had Allah on their side like everyone else, only more so. They had weapons supplied by local merchants tired of the beatings, robberies and rapes perpetrated by the bandits who preyed on the roads around Kandahar (Noel Spencer had told me that, pre-Taliban, he’d been hijacked several times along the Kabul-Jalalabad road). The Taliban were tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime. They rounded up 50 local highwaymen and hung them off the barrels of tanks.

  To a population as harassed as it was uneducated (53 percent of Afghan men and 85 percent of women are illiterate), this robust approach to enforcing civic order had a definite appeal. Over the next two years, the Taliban annexed swathes of Afghanistan, recruiting as they went from Afghanistan’s uncountable gangs of freelance brigands, who knew a winning side when they saw one. In September 1996, the Taliban hoisted their flag over Kabul, a city which the mostly southern, rural talibs had always regarded with the same pious repugnance that Utah Mormons harbour for Las Vegas. The Taliban’s all-white—or rather, given Afghanistan’s chronic filth, all-grey—banner was alleged to be a symbol of peace. The Taliban removed Soviet-era President Muhammad Najibullah and his brother from their sanctuary in Kabul’s UN compound, and hung them off a traffic observation kiosk.

  Casual brutality and an enthusiasm for Islam were hardly innovations in Afghan politics, but the Taliban really weren’t messing about. They introduced a blizzard of laws. Some were biblically severe (public amputation of hands for theft, public execution for murder, often by relatives of the victim). Some were faintly hilarious (the criminalisation of kite-flying, the compulsory flowing beards for males). Except that even these really weren’t funny. According to a report in Peshawar’s Frontier Post, 500 Kabuli men were lashed the week before I arrived for having trimmed their beards. Akbar solemnly tells me that he has been warned about his fringe.

  One afternoon, when Akbar is taking me shopping for a rug on Chicken Street, a young, correctly hirsute Afghan approaches me and asks if he can practice his English. Over tea in a nearby cafe, he and Akbar ask me about Australia. I tell them about the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, which I’d been to a few months previously. Their minds boggle almost audibly.

  “What were the police doing while this was going on?” demands Akbar.

  They marched in the parade.

  “You have sodomites in your police?”

  Akbar clearly thinks I’m winding him up.

  “I was in Herat in March,” says our new friend, blandly. “The Taliban caught two sodomites there. They pushed a wall over on them with a tank.”

  The department that enforces these laws is the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The name, like many aspects of Taliban rule, manages to evoke both George Orwell’s satire and Monty Python’s comedy (the Spanish Inquisition sketch comes to mind more than once, especially one morning at the Intercontinental when eight turbaned Talibs appear behind the waiter to hear me order breakfast—Rice Krispies, I decide, to general muttered approval). This Ministry’s operatives are the public presence of Taliban justice, scowling beneath black turbans and behind blacker Ray-Bans as they sip Pepsi and patrol Kabul in Toyota pick-ups with tinted windows.

  Akbar and I go to the offices of Vice & Virtue, which are situated just opposite the roundabout where Najibullah and his brother were killed. I ask to see Alhaj Mawlawi Qalamuddin, the Deputy Minister. I am treated with customary Islamic courtesy, provided with tea and biscuits and kept waiting for ages before being told that Qalamuddin is away at the front line (fighting continues 20 kilometres north of Kabul, against forces loyal to Massoud). This happens every morning for a week, which suggests that one reason nobody can figure the Taliban out is that the Taliban themselves aren’t too clear on what they’re doing. The chap who runs the shop, a one-eyed thirty-something called Mullah Mohammad Omar, stays down in Kandahar and doesn’t do much press. There are, in theory, Ministers, but none of the ministries I visit know where the bloke in charge is—“Away at the front line” is, I suspect, a convenient shorthand for “Shagged if I know, and what’s it to you, anyway?”

  “There’s no power structure, no accountability,” one aid worker tells me, back at the UN club. “They’re just young guys with guns who think they know everything.”

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, outside the offices of the Taliban’s intelligence service, the Estekhbarat, I wait to see some young guys with guns who think they know everything. While Akbar is inside making representations on my behalf, I sit at the gate with the guard. Like a depressing proportion of young Afghans, he has the soaring cheekbones and blazing eyes of a 50s matinee idol—if the women are as pretty as the men are handsome, the burqa is as great an affront to aesthetics as it is to human rights. The guard is keen to test an English vocabulary apparently acquired from satellite transmissions of Play School.

  “My nose,” he says, pointing at his mountainous Afghan beak.

  “My eyes,” he continues, gesturing at two iridescent irises of a limpid aquamarine that suggests someone in his gene pool didn’t object too strongly to either the British or the Russians.

  “My ears,” he announces, resting his rifle on his lap so he can hold them out for emphasis.

  “And,” he says, “my . . . bread?”

  He has his fingers in the thatch trailing off his chin.

  It’s your beard, mate. Beard.

  “Beard,” he confirms. “Very good. Thank you.”

  Inside the Estekhbarat building, I am ushered into an office that smells of feet and resembles a student bedsit, except that the groovy oriental rugs on the walls were made locally. Inside, cross-legged on two camp beds, are two terse young Talibs in white robes and white turbans. One gives his name as Abdul Haque Waseeque, and claims to be Acting Director of Intelligence. The other declines to give a name or a title, but mentions that he’s just been away at the front. Ah, so it does
exist.

  As the inevitable tea and biscuits arrive, I start with the easy stuff. Like most Talibs, they’re of Pakhtun descent, and from outside Kabul—they both grew up in Ghazni, to the south, and were raised to regard Kabul as a sink of depravity. They’re in their mid-twenties, and won’t go into detail about their work, but say they’re the Afghan version of the CIA.

  “Laws made by humans have flaws,” begins Abdul. “The rule of Allah has none.”

  The tone is set for the next couple of hours: God said it, they believe it, and that settles it. But why does divine rule have to be this . . . miserable?

  “For the time being,” says Abdul, “it is delicate. How can cinema be right in war conditions? The Taliban pledged Islamic law and peace, and we have created that.”

  Granted, Kabul is no longer at war, though the airport was rocketed by Massoud just before I arrived (I’d originally hoped to fly to Kabul on the the Red Cross shuttle from Peshawar, but flights were suspended when Massoud started acting the goat). There are fewer guns visible in Kabul than on the streets of Belfast or Beirut. Crime, which was rampant, is now so rare that for the last few weeks there haven’t been any amputations or executions before the Friday football match at Kabul Stadium. Akbar and I had gone to the game the day before, a dismal 0-0 draw between two teams wearing shorts like you’ve only seen in footage of 1920s Cup Finals (the Taliban decided that football was un-Islamic for a while, but changed their minds). A few thousand people turned up, and mostly talked amongst themselves, though the wild, two-footed tackles that punctuated the match were greeted with appreciative laughter. Akbar, who I increasingly suspect of being a closet liberal, glumly admitted that on afternoons when someone’s due to get something lopped off, the place fills to its 30,000 capacity.