A Rope and a Prayer

by David Rohde

  The Bush administration, meanwhile, declared success in Afghanistan and handed over responsibility for security and development in Helmand to the British. One of the foreign occupiers most hated by Pashtuns, the British were still despised for dividing the Pashtuns between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their arrival appeared to boost Taliban recruitment.

  More than 3,600 British troops arrived in Helmand in 2006, ten times the number the United States had deployed there, and set up bases across the province. In response, the Taliban launched their largest offensive since 2001, killing twenty-nine British and dozens of Afghan police. Scores of schools and courts were also shuttered.

  As a condition of their arrival, the British demanded that Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the province’s young governor, and the local police chief, Abdul Rahman Jan, be removed from power. Both were reported to have links with the narcotics trade. Karzai agreed to the move but it added to growing suspicions he held that the British—and later the Americans—planned to weaken the Afghan leader and remove him.

  Muhammad Hussein Andiwal, the other moderate Afghan from “Little America” who I was following for my book, became Helmand’s new police chief in 2007. Educated by American teachers in Lashkar Gah High School in the early 1970s, he represented the kind of moderate, educated Afghan that Western officials hoped could do an effective job running the province. At first, he did. Lashkar Gah residents lauded Andiwal—whose name means “friend” in Pashto—for arresting a 13-member kidnap gang that had been abducting local children. He and his men intercepted 11 suicide bombers before they carried out their attacks. Most important, he arrested 117 police on corruption charges, displaying the rule of law that Afghans craved.

  British advisers hailed Andiwal as well, but they said he was “in command but not in control” of Helmand’s roughly 2,000 police. Outside Lashkar Gah, police were loyal to their local tribe. Worst of all, the former governor and police chief tried to win back their jobs by sowing chaos and undermining their successors.

  In September 2008, the Taliban took two strategic districts outside Lashkar Gah—Marja and Nad Ali—and panic spread among Afghans that Lashkar Gah itself would fall. Police who were members of the former police chief’s tribal militia reportedly handed over the districts without firing a shot. Officials in Kabul blamed Andiwal for the loss of the two districts and fired him after fourteen months on the job. An ally of the former police chief replaced him.

  On the night before going to my Taliban interview, I met with a frustrated Andiwal in Kabul. He said officials in Kabul were not interested in fighting corruption and the British were not aggressively confronting the Taliban in Helmand. Disgusted by the level of Afghan government corruption and angered by British and American raids that killed civilians, most of the people in Helmand were beginning to support the Taliban.

  “They are completely dissatisfied with the government,” Andiwal said. “In my lifetime, I have never seen such a corrupted government.”

  The Taliban, meanwhile, stopped some of their harshest practices from the past and promised to create law and order. In the two districts they seized outside Lashkar Gah, residents reported that the Taliban were not enforcing unpopular, pre-2001 edicts against television, radio, kite flying, shaving beards, or growing poppy. They also reported a major improvement in security under strict Taliban rule.

  In October 2008, in my last interview with her before the kidnapping Fowzea told me she feared that the Taliban would take “Little America” itself. Two years after her driver was shot, the American-built women’s center remained closed due to poor security. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, Lashkar Gah still lacked regular power.

  “The situation that I see now, it’s not ‘Little America,’ it’s a village,” Fowzea lamented. “‘Little America’ had schools and roads and electricity.”

  Americans, meanwhile, expressed frustration with corruption among Afghans. One American aid worker who had served in Iraq and several other countries told me that the corruption in Afghanistan was the worst he had ever seen. Police and government officials demanded bribes for the most basic of services.

  “It just seems to be endemic in the whole society,” he said. “They just don’t seem to have any compunction about it.”

  Four years after I first visited it, “Little America” highlighted the worst of Afghanistan and the United States. After thirty years of chaos, Afghans took whatever they could whenever they could for their families. With no strong institutions and a weakened Pashtun tribal structure, they had no guarantee how long they would hold their posts or that merit would be rewarded.

  Helmand acted as a mirror for the United States as well. It showed how the American government’s ability to devise and carry out complex political and development projects had atrophied. Since the cold war USAID had shrunk and the American public’s desire for quick solutions had grown.

  With the Taliban on the doorstep of “Little America,” the United States deployed 2,200 marines to the province in 2008 to aid the British. I embedded with an American marine company dispatched to the town of Naw Zad in northern Helmand to train police. Instead, the marines found themselves engaged in heavy combat, short on helicopters, and suffering heavier casualties than they did in Iraq.

  While most of the Taliban they fought were local Afghans, they heard militants they battled in one corner of Naw Zad speak a foreign language. It was Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. The marines nicknamed the area “Pakistani alley.” Like American soldiers I had occasionally embedded with since 2001, they expressed frustration at the Taliban safe havens in Pakistan.

  The final blow to the troubled American and British effort in Helmand was the ability of the Taliban to carry out a ruthless insurgent campaign. More than anything else, relentless Taliban attacks derailed the American effort to re-create “Little America.” With their safe havens in Pakistan, the Taliban could not be stopped.

  Our afternoon drive in Pakistan’s tribal areas continues. At one point, I see furtive figures clad in burqas crossing a distant field. It is the first time I have seen a woman since arriving in Waziristan four months earlier. Women are virtually invisible in public.

  Like so much else, they are surrounded by contradictions. According to the introduction to my English-language Koran, Muhammad expanded the rights of women. He urged his followers in seventh-century Arabia to stop the widespread practice of burying baby girls at birth. He increased women’s inheritance rights.

  Yet the Taliban are accused of reducing women’s freedoms. In our conversations Abu Tayyeb argued that the Taliban protect women from dishonor, sexual exploitation, and other harm. Women in the United States are forced to wear revealing clothes, he said, and define themselves solely as sex objects. To him, the Taliban treat women better than Americans do. I realize that I do not fully understand his views, but this core difference between us seems irreconcilable.

  On the ride home, I see groups of teenage boys and young men playing cricket and volleyball. They appear to meet at dusk and celebrate the end of the day with a game at a local park. In some small ways, life inside the emirate is no different than life outside it.

  We stop and watch a local soccer game. Several dozen men sit around a dirt field with virtually no grass. Young male soccer players battle furiously on the field for the ball, like young men in any corner of the globe. Pakistani and Afghan jihadists dot the crowd of spectators. They have long hair and beards, wear camouflage jackets, and relax as they watch the game.

  For me, the drive cements my belief that the Haqqanis run a Taliban ministate in North Waziristan. Taliban policemen patrol the streets, Taliban road crews carry out construction projects, and Taliban religious teachers indoctrinate young boys in local schools. Haqqani commanders and foreign militants stroll the streets, comfortable and confident in their sanctuary.

  We return to the house at dusk and are greeted with horrible news. Sharif announces that the negotiations have failed. Tahir, Asad, and I will
be moved to South Waziristan, he says, the stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban that lies roughly fifty miles south of Miran Shah.

  South Waziristan is a worst case scenario. We will be under the control of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the man blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the mastermind of suicide attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians. For months, Tahir has heard rumors of an underground prison there where other hostages are being held in caves. Now we will join them.

  Our departure from Miran Shah is deeply depressing, the clearest sign yet that the negotiations for our release have failed. Our captors, I assume, refuse to lower their demands. I walk in the yard and let my mind yet again come up with rationales for why the situation is not, in fact, hopeless. I have none. I think of Kristen, who is likely just now rising in New York, where it is her birthday morning. Our chances of surviving will be much lower in South Waziristan.

  That night to our delight, Sharif tells us that our move to South Waziristan has been canceled. Overjoyed, we tell ourselves that this may finally be the breakthrough in negotiations that we’ve been waiting for. I again somehow think Kristen has managed to give me a gift on her birthday.

  A week passes. Sharif announces that we will definitely be moving to South Waziristan. Again, nothing is as it seems. The following morning, we silently load our sleeping bags, clothes, and pots and pans into the back of an Afghan police pickup truck that has been captured by the Taliban. A green Ford Ranger with an Afghan flag painted on the door, the truck is one of hundreds of American-made pickups the United States has provided to the Afghan police as part of the American police training effort.

  I lie down in the back of our station wagon, on top of blankets that our guards have placed there for me. The guards—Timor Shah and Akbar—insist they will continue living with us and we will not be handed over to the Pakistani Taliban. As we drive away, I feel an emotion I never expected: I long for Miran Shah.

  For the next several hours, we drive south down a modern, two-lane asphalt road in broad daylight. I stare out the window at the green tree-covered hills. The landscape again reminds me of the Rocky Mountains.

  We cross into South Waziristan and enter the territory of Baitullah Mehsud. At dusk, our car pulls into the parking lot of a large government building or school. Sharif says good-bye. “We’re bringing you here because you’re going to cross back into Afghanistan,” he says. “Ten days, ten days.”

  A Pakistani Taliban commander politely ushers all of us into a room at the rear of the compound. I am told again that no one must know that I have arrived in the area. If local Arabs find out an American hostage is present, they will kill me. We are given fresh tea, rice, and bread for dinner. As we eat, the Pakistani Taliban commander stares intently at me. I’m sure I am the first American he has ever seen up close. The zoo animal phenomenon is happening again but I don’t care. As the months pass, the experience has become normal. After sharing a cup of tea with him, we drive in the darkness to a house that will serve as our new prison.

  Over the next several days, it becomes apparent that the Afghan Taliban have not handed us over to their Pakistani counterparts. Instead, the two groups work seamlessly together. The Pakistani Taliban are giving the Haqqanis a remote house where we can be imprisoned. In military terms, they are providing logistical support for their Afghan allies.

  Our new house has a half dozen rooms and is the largest we have been imprisoned in. It is also the most primitive. All the floors are dirt. There is no running water. Within days, fleabites begin appearing on my skin.

  I feel for the family that normally lives here. A cowshed with heaps of drying manure is located inside the compound. Pots, pans, and other utensils in the mud-floored kitchen appear to be poorly washed, apparently due to the lack of water. Piles of ash show where they cooked food over an open fire. The people of the tribal areas are destitute.

  GREETING CARDS FOR THE MUJAHIDEEN

  Kristen, Late March-Early April 2009

  My suitcase has been packed for nearly three weeks, but there has been no word from the captors.

  Silence is torturous. Our imaginations run rampant when things are quiet. This leads to all kinds of impossible schemes. The latest: AISC, the private security team, wants to bribe David’s guards. They also want to enlist the help of the United States military to retrieve David. By official policy, our government will not interfere in Pakistan.

  The FBI continues to maintain that David is in the tribal areas of Pakistan, specifically an area called Miran Shah, known to be a Haqqani stronghold. But the private security team says David continues to be moved between Miran Shah and surrounding border areas of Afghanistan. We spend hours on noon calls and follow-up calls debating these issues. It passes the time, but gets us nowhere.

  There are three tracks our team is simultaneously pursuing: the moral track, which consists of pressuring the mullah in Swabi to continue to plead for the release of our three on humanitarian grounds; the monetary or negotiation track, which at the moment has come to a standstill; and the bribery track, which seems highly unlikely since none of us know for sure exactly where David is.

  Word comes back to us from John that Siraj and the kidnappers are now demanding $5 million and prisoners. They are sure that we actually have the $5 million. They will not settle for less. This is a far cry from the report a few weeks ago from an Afghan journalist that they were “hopeful” about a deal. Someone has apparently told the kidnappers we have $5 million. Something has happened to stop communications.

  Soon after, we find out that the State Department has recently raised the bounty on Siraj Haqqani’s head from $200,000 to $5 million. This is a stunning example of the lack of communication between government entities. How hard would it be for one agency to touch base with another? We have kept the State Department and FBI aware of our progress and of the captor’s slow decline in demands. The State Department and the FBI clearly have no plan to keep each other updated on current cases. We know the captors are Internet savvy, despite their archaic beliefs. It’s quite possible they set up a Google alert and found out about the increase in bounty that way.

  The private security team blames the FBI. The FBI claims another agency has set the government’s bounty and that they are not responsible. I fire off an e-mail to Richard Holbrooke, asking what the State Department was thinking—is this a tactic or negligence? He says he had no idea they’d raised the bounty. He calls me soon after to tell me in no uncertain terms that any other course of action beyond family negotiations is futile at this time. He feels the contractors are grossly misleading us and “playing a dangerous game” with David’s life in considering alternative options. A rescue operation is out of the question because our government believes David is in Pakistan. And the diplomatic approach, meaning pressuring the Pakistanis, has yet to yield a tangible result. Holbrooke advises me to ignore the advice of AISC. “You are the only person in this situation who has David’s interest purely at heart. Everyone else has to worry about setting precedents.”

  I appreciate his candor, but I am frustrated by our exchange. I feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Even if we do raise some substantial money, what good is it going to do if we can’t communicate with the kidnappers?

  At this point, I am going to work three to four days a week and dedicating the rest of my time to David’s case. I feel like I am living a double life, experiencing global terrorism at the most personal level. There is a constant influx of information and misinformation. Sifting through it proves to be exhausting, maddening. Each entity involved in David’s case—the newspaper, the government, the security team—has its own bias and agenda, despite their good intentions. I do not fully trust any of them. My own agenda is simply to secure my husband’s release. I listen to all opinions, but trust no one. It is not unusual for me to spend entire days on the phone or computer, contacting government officials, sharing concerns with Lee and McCraw, and following up with Michael
Semple. Days have lost their significance. I am stuck in a seamlessly never-ending season of waiting. I feel I am in the middle of a complex game in which time and silence are my opponent’s greatest weapons. I have no control over the situation. Despite the collective efforts made on David’s behalf, only the captors have the power to release him. I am increasingly convinced that our fate lies in their hands.

  On March 22 we receive a message from Team Kabul concerning the engineer, the go-between whom the Haqqanis dispatched in David’s case. The plan was that the engineer would work on a negotiated resolution for our three as he made his own attempts to free his son, who was also being held by the Haqqanis.

  The message from Team Kabul is that the engineer’s son has been released. Their report reads: “Approximately two weeks ago the engineer was finally successful in resolving his son’s situation. He was able to convince the Haqqanis that he had no power to enable prisoner release and that the governments were not going to help. In addition to whatever had been paid on his release, he was able to negotiate a payment of $60,000 for his son (down from $100,000).” The update continues: “The engineer continued to make efforts to call Atiqullah on behalf of Team Kabul/ David. He states that Atiqullah has not taken his calls for approximately sixteen days. He states he will continue to try.”

  Not a good development. And local negotiations through John have produced no better results. The kidnappers have turned off or dumped their cell phones. Michael still tries to create a channel directly to Siraj, the older brother of Badruddin whom the FBI has identified as one of David’s kidnappers and who he believes has the authority to strike a deal for our three.