by Graeme Smith
We left early on a damp morning in November 2006 and drove to Pakistan. My translator and I were both dressed in Afghan clothing, so we walked across the border using the standard local method, pressing a one-hundred-rupee note (equivalent to one dollar) into a guard’s hand. We passed under the Friendship Gate, a hulking three-storey marker constructed by Pakistan in an unfriendly effort to designate a border that Afghanistan has never recognized. We weren’t searched, weren’t asked for identification, and I ended up in Pakistani territory so quickly that I was disoriented. I’d had only a few hours’ sleep the previous night and I found myself a bit lost when my Afghan translator, who was crossing illegally, said goodbye and disappeared back across the frontier. I needed to get my visa stamped because I didn’t want to travel without proper documents, but nor did I want to attract too much attention from the crowds of tribesmen. I stepped into a building that looked like a passport office, but it turned out to be an outpost of the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary security force. By the time I realized my mistake, the soldiers had made it clear that I wasn’t free to leave. I was detained for a few hours, probably for my own safety, as the soldiers wondered what to do with a young foreigner. I drank several cups of tea with a well-mannered officer before I was rescued by the Pakistani journalist who had arranged to pick me up. He bundled me into a car, and as we climbed up the mountain passes he commented that moving a Western journalist across the border was, in some ways, similar to drug smuggling.
Even before we reached Quetta, I could see that the landscape was marked with signs of a political struggle. Descending from the rocky ledges onto the plains of Balochistan, I saw the colours red, white and green painted on every available surface: houses, placards, even big rocks beside the road. My guide explained these were the colours of Pashtoonkhwa, nationalists from the Pashtun ethnic group who favoured breaking the tribal areas away from Pakistan and forming an independent territory, or joining Afghanistan. They accused the government in Islamabad of helping the Taliban. Meanwhile, their main rivals also had flags everywhere, horizontal black-and-white banners that fluttered over houses and religious schools. These signified the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), a political party sympathetic to the Taliban. We drove past large JUI madrassas that looked more like castles than religious schools; these were suspected of feeding recruits to the Afghan insurgency. I was amazed at how openly people displayed their allegiances. In Afghanistan people camouflaged themselves for safety, while in Pakistan, supporters and opponents of the Taliban hung their advertisements from every lamppost and electricity wire. Their symbols overwhelmed the clutter of commercial billboards, like an election campaign.
This political contest gripped every corner of the city, including the entertainment market. My guide took me into a half-constructed shopping mall, past luggage stores and rug emporiums, up a flight of bare concrete stairs to a row of stalls selling cassette tapes and compact discs. A group of boys playing pool glanced at us suspiciously as we browsed the shops. Glossy posters showed Bollywood girls, glittering in their low-cut blouses and jewelled hair. Next door, more pious shops were plastered to the ceiling with album covers featuring mosques and holy sites in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Mullahs with heavy beards glowered from the posters. Under the glass counters, bumper stickers sparkled in Urdu, Pashto and English: “Down with Bush! Down with Clinton! Down with the foreign enemies!” A vendor happily talked about his discs with Islamic prayers and speeches, but he was not eager to discuss his Taliban videos. He denied selling any such thing, but when pressed he acknowledged, “Well, maybe one or two.” He reached into a stack and pulled out an unmarked disc. We found several hours of Taliban propaganda at the market, some for less than a dollar per disc, which my translators searched for useful information.
The footage usually contained an author’s note: “Published by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” using the Taliban’s name for their former regime. The videos were amateurish, but offered scenes of insurgents’ lives: A Taliban commander inspects trenches, test-fires a machine gun, even bakes some bread. A gang of armed fighters enjoys a boat ride near the Kajaki Dam—a site supposedly guarded by foreign troops—and a smiling gunman leans over the gunnel to taste the waters. The videos were edited to avoid giving away too much information, however, and were often deceiving. One of my translators noticed text scrolling across the video, announcing the Taliban had obtained Stinger missiles, and to my uneducated eye the dark metal object on a fighter’s shoulder did resemble one of the US anti-aircraft missiles that had proven formidable against the Soviet in the 1980s. I urgently sent copies of the image to weapons experts, but they responded unequivocally: No, that was not a Stinger missile. It was a cheap Russian-designed weapon called a Strela-2m, or SA-7B, common on the black market and easily fooled by flares. Still, it was proof that the insurgents had obtained surface-to-air missiles.
These bits of insight made it worthwhile to keep scrutinizing the Taliban videos. We kept going for several months, buying discs and churning through them for bits of news, but it was too distressing. The Taliban propaganda showed a sickening taste for blood. Many sequences included footage of bomb attacks, with military vehicles blown to pieces. Other clips were snuff films, as Afghan men confessed to collaborating with the foreign occupiers and then suffered slow beheadings. The victims writhed in agony while their captors sliced and sawed, until the Taliban finally held up the severed heads in triumph. One of the shots lingered on the blood spreading in long rivulets, the streams of red almost supernaturally bright in the Afghan sun. The onslaught of these images made me feel like crying, my chest and stomach tightening. My translators’ faces would twist with emotion as well, and eventually they needed to stop and compose themselves. We tried to fast-forward through the grisly parts, but we still kept seeing awful things. For journalists who risked falling into Taliban hands almost every day, it was too easy to imagine ourselves in those videos. We stopped watching.
Years later, a friend revealed how the Taliban would use the bloodthirsty imagery to taunt their opponents. A messenger left a package containing a video disc at the front gates of the Kandahar governor’s palace one morning in 2007. It showed a boy, maybe twelve years old, wearing a camouflage jacket and a white headband. In his childish voice, the boy denounces a blindfolded man as a traitor and a spy for the Americans. Then he kneels over the captive and slices at his throat with a knife, decapitating him. The child executioner would later make headlines as viewers around the world expressed shock that a small boy would be drawn into such depravity, but an important detail was never reported in the news. Kandahar’s governor at the time, Asadullah Khalid, had personally known the victim—who was, in fact, a spy. The hand-delivered video informed the governor that his agent was dead.
I tried to avoid being noticed in Quetta. I didn’t take many photographs, and slouched around the city disguised as an Afghan tribesman. In a city known as the Taliban’s headquarters, I figured it was best to look like one of them. This only made my acquaintances nervous, however, and my guide told me that I looked like a suicide bomber. He removed my Kandahari cap and shawl, and took me drinking. His social group turned out to be a raucous mix of intellectuals, businessmen and old communists. Many of them spoke English, and they consumed impressive amounts of liquor, in private. Listening to them tell crude jokes and chat with their mistresses on their cellphones, I was struck by how different these men seemed from the Taliban planners who almost certainly lived in the same neighbourhoods. It was like the Bollywood girls on display in the market, right beside the extremist mullahs. Quetta was a city invaded not only by Taliban fighters, but also by Western culture. New stores sold video games decorated with girls in revealing white tank tops, while nearby women covered their faces with burkas. The same contrasts exist in many parts of the Muslim world, but in Quetta the differences seemed especially sharp. A cultural war ran parallel with the actual war.
While my guide was trying to arrange a meeting with the Taliban, w
e passed the time by attending a Pashtoonkhwa political rally, where several of the speeches touched on Taliban culture. The rally seemed well organized, with trucks and busses ferrying people to an empty tract outside the city. Some people were wearing brand-new Pashtoonkhwa baseball caps, which made me wonder who was donating so much money to the Taliban’s political enemies. A party leader gave a rousing critique of the pro-Taliban religious parties. Shouting into the rasping loudspeaker, he pointed out that a senior figure from one of the conservative groups had two educated daughters in parliament, and yet supported Afghan insurgents who fought against female education. “If someone goes to school, they beat them up, they throw acid, they say, ‘This is not Islam.’ But what kind of Islam is this? In Pakistani universities there is co-education, but they don’t want the same thing for Afghanistan.”
Party organizers became curious about me, the only foreigner in the crowd, and afterward the main speaker invited me back to his headquarters. Sipping tea, he sketched out his understanding of how the Taliban are funded. I drew a diagram of his explanation in my notebook:
ISI → DRUG MAFIA → TALIBAN SHURA → FIGHTERS
The politician’s understanding was that Pakistan’s biggest spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), allowed drug smugglers safe passage through Pakistan’s territory in exchange for cash payments to the Taliban shura, or leadership council, which was believed to be based in Quetta. I would later meet a smuggler who confirmed this business model; he claimed to have witnessed drug dealers making payoffs to Taliban leaders, noting that the crisp bricks of money still had their original bank seals. But later interviews also suggested other ways the Taliban earned money, which would lend themselves to different diagrams:
ARAB SYMPATHIZERS → PAKISTAN’S RELIGIOUS PARTIES → TALIBAN
AFGHAN SYMPATHIZERS → FIGHTERS → TALIBAN
CRIMINAL ACTIVITY ↔ TALIBAN
CORRUPT OFFICIALS IN AFGHANISTAN ↔ DRUG MAFIA ↔ TALIBAN
It was quite complicated, in reality, but on that first trip to Quetta, drinking tea late into the evening with my hosts from the Pashtoonkhwa, the local politician made it sound deceptively simple. Pakistan’s government was nervous about the rebellious tribes in the borderlands, he said, so they were trying to divide and rule by funding militants whose anger was directed at Kabul—not Islamabad. “The Taliban don’t exist, it’s just the ISI, the Pakistani government,” he said, adding that he was perplexed about why America was not attacking the regime in Islamabad for supporting terrorism. “We are financing and harbouring. So what are you waiting for?” Like many people in the region, he addressed his comments to me personally—“What are you waiting for?”—as if I represented the West and its military power.
That misunderstanding, common in this part of the world, was especially dangerous when I visited people who hated the foreign troops. Three days later, I went to see the white-bearded provincial leader of the JUI, the main opponent of the Pashtoon nationalists and the religious party most associated with the Taliban. This was the party whose black-and-white flags I had seen everywhere around Quetta, and judging by the presence of their colours and the number of seats they held in the provincial assembly, they were winning the political contest. New religious schools operated by the JUI were being constructed so quickly that party officials at their local headquarters claimed they couldn’t keep track of them. When pressed, they estimated that the JUI had “thousands” of schools in the province, with at least four or five hundred around the city of Quetta alone. Their leader denied that his party was helping the Taliban, however, or that his schools were training militants. He also denied that Pakistan’s government had any role in helping the insurgency; on the contrary, he complained that the authorities sometimes arrested Taliban leaders. I asked him to name any insurgent leaders arrested in Quetta. He demurred, and launched into an attack on his critics: “Pashtoonkhwa and others are opposing the Taliban and the religious parties, they are supporting the Americans, so they blame us, or the ISI, saying we support the war in Afghanistan,” he said. “But they don’t have any proof.” Still, he didn’t bother to hide his sympathy for the Taliban. His office was decorated with anti-American posters, depicting a man firing an automatic rifle from behind fluttering JUI and Taliban flags, with the bullets aimed at a burning American flag. There was another American flag painted in the parking area of the compound, so the faithful could drive over the stars and stripes as they parked their motorbikes. A party member, seeing my camera, rushed to pull out another crudely painted US flag and demonstrate how it could be used as a shoe mat. In case the point hadn’t been understood, he crouched down and pretended to burn the flag with a pocket lighter. He waited patiently as I photographed the scene from several angles. He kept the lighter going for the sake of my pictures but never touched the flame to the flag; I was only one journalist, after all, and he was probably saving it for bigger crowds.
After days of hanging around Quetta, and a final night of hard drinking, my guide woke me early one morning. “The Taliban are ready to meet you,” he said.
We drove out of the city, into the ramshackle suburbs. I promised not to reveal the location, but this hardly mattered because my hangover made it difficult to stay alert. Our car left the main road and bumped along a narrow path, finally reaching a compound. This was neutral ground, the secret outpost of a Baloch strongman. Like the Taliban, the Baloch Liberation Army runs insurgent operations in the tribal areas, and like the Taliban they’re well armed and officially considered terrorists—but unlike the Islamist militants, the Baloch don’t usually kill Westerners. Our host was a jovial strongman with enough firepower to make sure the Taliban didn’t show up with guns, though in fact, the Taliban who arrived for the meeting looked as if they rarely handled weapons. Wearing pinstripe vests, gold watches and neatly trimmed beards, the two men looked different from the fighters I had encountered in Kandahar. The front-line insurgents were farmers, rough men with dirt under their fingernails, but these Taliban had manicured hands painted with henna. We greeted each other politely and sat down on a carpet, listening to the birds in the garden. One of them spoke a little English, and claimed to have worked in the Taliban government before 2001. (I later checked him out; he had indeed served as a bureaucrat in Kabul and as a diplomat at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad.) He claimed to have visited Panjwai district three times that year to assist with the fighting against US and Canadian troops. Before the climactic battles of Operation Medusa, he said, the insurgents had thousands of men gathered in Panjwai. Now, he declared, the Taliban had decided on a new strategy: breaking their forces into smaller teams of five to seven fighters and choosing less ambitious goals. This fit with the patterns I was seeing, and these Taliban continued to gain my trust with a few other things that I could corroborate. They confirmed that ammunition shipped by the government to remote districts of Kandahar regularly ended up in Taliban hands, as low-level administrators traded bullets for protection. This matched the observation of a US military officer who had told me a couple of months earlier that supplies for the Afghan army often went missing. (“Sometimes you get to see the ammo again,” the officer told me with grim humour. “Except you’re not on the giving end.”) The Taliban also confirmed my suspicion that the conflict was driven, in part, by tribal feuds. They listed the tribes associated with the Karzai government, and complained that a few tribes were monopolizing the spoils of the foreign invasion. This caused resentment among the disenfranchised tribes, which brought recruits to the insurgency. “This is not a fight between the Taliban and the government,” one of them said. “This is the tribes defending themselves.” I saw these as important statements, although my translator looked bored; these dynamics were well known locally.
After telling the truth about things I could easily confirm, however, the Taliban offered bits of malicious gossip about their enemies. This was a trick I would later recognize as standard practice, but—unfortunately—this time I fell for it, earnestly
scribbling notebook pages full of claims that major Afghan politicians were secretly helping the insurgents. This was probably a disinformation campaign; while political figures on both sides of the conflict regularly talked with each other, two of the people mentioned in that interview as secret allies of the Taliban were later killed by insurgents.
As they finished their sweet green tea and looked pointedly at their watches, I asked them a final question. What about the rumour that the Taliban is backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency?
The insurgents laughed. “Everybody knows the situation,” one said.
He was about to elaborate, but his friend cut him off and they excused themselves. One of them asked my guide if we could offer him a ride into Quetta. This made me uneasy, so I sat in the backseat and gave him the front. If I was going to share a car with a Taliban organizer, I wanted to keep an eye on him. He saw my concerned expression in the rear-view mirror and reacted with amusement, muttering something to my guide with a smile. I asked for a translation.
“He says, ‘We won’t kill you,’ ” my guide said. “ ‘We’ll just kidnap you and sell you.’ ” This would have been a real possibility if my guide, a Pakistani journalist, had been less trustworthy. Such a venture might have netted him tens of thousands of dollars, more than the modest sum I was paying him. But like many of the local reporters who generously offer their help to foreign correspondents in those tough corners of the world, he was a true believer in journalism. This particular translator had been working as a journalist in Pakistan for decades, never reaping much profit but becoming famous on the streets as a fair-minded narrator of current events. The kidnapping joke was laughed away, we dropped off our Taliban acquaintance, and my trip home went smoothly.