Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  ‘We left, running all night, but then came to a line of Arabs who arrested us and took us back to the front. One night last month I was on watch and saw a truck full of sheep and goats, so I jumped in and escaped. I got back to Kandahar but Taliban spies saw me and I was arrested. Luckily I have relatives who are high-ranking Taliban members so they helped me get out, and eventually I escaped to Quetta to my wife and daughter.

  ‘I think many in the Taliban would like to escape. The country is starving and joining is the only way to get food and keep your land. Otherwise there is a lot of hatred. I hate both what it does and what it turned me into.’

  The following week, on 8 October, the bombing started. It was weird lying on my comfortable bed in the Serena watching CNN show the Pentagon footage of B-52s taking off on their bombing raids. The pictures were green and looked like a video game but the targets they were blowing up were real and just across the border.

  The start of the bombing provoked anti-American riots in Quetta. A cinema showing Antonio Banderas in Desperado was torched, the city’s only cashpoint was ripped out of the wall, and rocks were thrown over the hotel wall into the swimming pool. Police had to use tear gas to disperse the rioters, which gave ISI the excuse to lock us in altogether. Two hundred journalists locked into a hotel with no alcohol is not a good combination. A BBC crew rigged up their satellite so we could listen to Radio 5 Live’s commentary on England’s crucial World Cup qualifier against Greece. We sat on the floor of a corridor and cheered Beckham’s goal but it was not much of a distraction. Some of the photographers were so stir-crazy that they tried to climb out over the walls.

  Even when ISI allowed us out of the hotel, it was frustrating trying to report on a war so near but where we could not get in or talk to the people. All we could do was interview refugees fleeing the bombing.

  I spent much of my time with my old friends trying to find ways to sneak into Taliban Afghanistan. One of them ran hospitals in Quetta and Kandahar and offered to smuggle me in – my old ambulance trick. Unfortunately, by then, another British journalist, Yvonne Ridley from the Sunday Express, had been taken captive and my editor Dominic Lawson overruled the idea.

  Jamil Karzai ran a students’ organisation and when I first arrived in Quetta I had asked him if he could get an educated young woman inside Kabul to describe what it was really like living under the Taliban. One evening I was over in Satellite Town when he handed me a thin envelope. It was almost curfew so I did not open it till I was back at the hotel. Inside was a torn sheet from an exercise book. It was addressed ‘dear kind and beautiful lady’ and as I started reading I was soon in tears.

  ‘I hear the bombs drop and I pray that they will end our suffering’

  Sunday Telegraph, 14 October 2001

  THIS WEEK I LISTEN to the bombs falling on the airport and military command just a few miles away and, though we are scared by the bangs which shake our flat, we believe they will not hurt us and we come out and watch the flashes in the sky and we pray this will be an end to our suffering.

  Although Marri is not my real name, please use this as what we are doing is dangerous. I’m 30 years old and live in a three-roomed flat with my family on the outskirts of Kabul. I graduated from high school and speak Dari, Pashto and English as my father was a diplomat and my mother an English teacher.

  I know from our friend that you have a kind husband and a beautiful son and you travel the world reporting and meeting people. I dream of a life like that. It’s funny we live under the same small sky yet it seems we live 500 years apart.

  You see us now in our burqas, like strange insects scurrying in the dust, our heads down, but it wasn’t always this way. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government. We went for picnics and parties, wore jeans and short skirts, and I thought I would go to university like my mother and work for my living.

  Hidden in our house, behind all the burqas and shalwar kameez, is a red silk party dress, my mother’s, from the time when the king was in power and my father was in the Foreign Ministry. Sometimes I hold it up against me and imagine dancing but it is a lost world. Now we must wear clothes that make us invisible and cannot even wear high heels. Several of my friends have been beaten because the Taliban could hear their shoes clicking on the pavement.

  Life here is very miserable. At night there is no light. We do not have schools; the doors of education are closed on all, especially us. We cannot paint or listen to music. The Taliban ran their tanks over all the televisions. We asked the world, are we not human beings? Can we not have rights as women in other countries?

  Many people have left but my family is staying, praying for change. I hope they do not come and bomb, then forget us again. Maybe when you watch the bombs on CNN you will think of me and know we are real feeling people here, a girl who likes to wear red lipstick and dreams of dancing, not just the men of beards and guns.

  I do not know what you want me to write to you. If I start writing I will fill all the paper and my eyes will fill with tears because in these seven years of Taliban no one has asked us to write about our lives. In my mind I make a picture of you and your family. I wonder if you drive a car, if you go out with friends to movies and restaurants and dance at parties? Do you play loud music and swim in lakes? One day I would like to show you a beautiful place in my country with mountains and streams, but not now while we must be hidden. Maybe our worlds will always be too far apart.

  My past experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan had made me extremely sceptical that ISI would overnight reverse their policy of supporting the Taliban, as Washington and Whitehall seemed to think they had. Of course when the Bush administration gave Pakistan the ultimatum after 9/11 – ‘You’re either with us or against us, in which case we’ll bomb you back to Stone Age’ – they had agreed. Musharraf later admitted in his autobiography that he had ‘war-gamed the US as an adversary’ and concluded that Pakistan could not take them on.

  Even if Musharraf was genuine in his support, it seemed naïve to think that ISI would meekly obey. They had made the Taliban what they were and supporting them had been an ideology, not just a policy. When I lived in Peshawar in the late 1980s, ISI had been playing a double game, misleading the CIA over what was going on in Afghanistan and making sure most of the arms and money went to their favourite fundamentalists. I was quite sure they would do the same again.

  So I was not surprised to learn that when the ISI chief General Mahmood Ahmed went to see Mullah Omar in Kandahar after 9/11 at America’s behest, rather than asking him to hand over Osama bin Laden, he offered him help. Hamid Karzai was certain that ISI was still supplying weapons to the Taliban. I spoke to one of the chiefs of the Achakzai tribe, which was spread across the border, and he confirmed that a number of arms trucks had been crossing. I began investigating.

  I knew Hamid was planning to go inside Afghanistan to try to rally Pashtun tribes against the Taliban. I begged him to take me but he would just laugh. One day I arrived at his house to find him gone. His assistant, Malik, told me he was in Karachi. The next time I called, Malik claimed Hamid was in Islamabad. Malik was not a good liar. ‘He’s gone inside, hasn’t he?’ I asked.

  Eventually Hamid’s brother Ahmed Wali arranged for me to speak to him by satellite phone from their home. We had a long conversation on the evening of 8 November in which he told me he’d had a narrow escape (from the US, it later turned out – a pilot had been given the wrong coordinates and bombed them instead of the Taliban).

  That night I was fast asleep when, at 2.30 a.m., there was an insistent rapping on the door. I got up and looked through the peephole. The duty manager was standing there with four men in grey shalwar kameez. They looked like ISI.

  ‘Madam, there are some guests for you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s 2.30 in the morning,’ I replied indignantly. ‘Tell them to come back at 7 a.m.’

  As I started walking back towards my bed they snapped the door chain, snatched my mobile phone which was chargin
g at the side, and told me I was under arrest.

  Downstairs in reception I was made to pay my bill, then a dazed-looking Justin was brought down to join me.

  We spent the next two days detained in an abandoned bungalow that we later discovered had been the railway rest-house in colonial times. Fortunately Justin always carried two mobile phones and had smuggled one out. While I made a loud fuss to distract our captors, he phoned our newspaper from the toilet to alert them to our plight. We later learnt that Dominic called the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Three months later, after the abduction and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, we would wonder what might have happened had we not had that phone. Finally, on the third day we were moved to Islamabad and deported to London accused of being a threat to national security. The Information Ministry released a bizarre story claiming we had tried to buy plane tickets in the name of Osama bin Laden.

  As we were marched on to the familiar green and white Pakistan International Airways plane, I decided I’d had it with Pakistan. Then, shortly after take-off, one of the flight attendants brought a message from the pilot inviting us into the cockpit. His name was Johnny Afridi and he had long dark hair tied back into a ponytail, John Lennon spectacles and a refreshing irreverence for his country’s authorities. ‘Just ignore all those goons,’ he said to me as he let this ‘threat to national security’ sit in the co-pilot’s seat for the landing at Heathrow.

  Back in London, the head of consular services at the Foreign Office called us in and apologised that they had only been able to get us out of the country rather than be freed to do our jobs. ‘You understand it’s a very sensitive situation at the moment with the bombing and we need Pakistan as our ally,’ he said. I did not understand. It felt like my war had ended before I had even arrived where it was happening.

  But it’s funny how things work out. Being kicked out of Pakistan forced me to be more imaginative. While little of interest was coming out of Quetta, where our colleagues were again under lockdown, Justin and I went to Rome to interview the elderly ex-King of Afghanistan, a midnight meeting that took place with him in his pyjamas. We then managed to get a visa to Iran from where we could travel into western Afghanistan and the ancient Persian city of Herat, arriving there the day the Taliban fell.

  I was still in touch with Ismael Khan, the by then white-bearded old mujahideen commander for the area, and he sent one of his lieutenants to meet us at the border. Ayubi was an impressive man with a long, swirling woollen cape and a giant ruby on a silver ring. ‘Welcome my Afghanistan,’ he said as he scooped up some earth and kissed it. His theatricality suited my own excitement to finally be back in Afghanistan again after twelve years.

  The road to Herat had been completely destroyed and it was a long, dusty journey before the city’s leaning minarets came into view. On the way in we drove across a wide plain covered in tents. Ayubi told us it was a refugee camp. Its name was Maslakh, which meant slaughterhouse, and I had never seen one so vast. Eventually, the tents ran out and then there were shelters of plastic sheeting and after that families just huddled on the hard ground with nothing.

  ‘They must freeze at night,’ I said to Ayubi.

  ‘Yes, often the children die,’ he replied, pointing at rows of grey slates stuck upright into the ground, as is the custom when Afghans bury their dead.

  I kept thinking about the camp as we checked into the Mowafaq Hotel. A sweeping staircase suggested the hotel had once been grand but now it was cold and dingy with a manager who looked like Charlie Chaplin in a frayed suit. There was a dead bird in my bathroom and nothing to eat but eggs that came fried and congealed and one of which had a fly trapped in the white. Early the next morning we went back to the camp.

  A woman called Bibi Gul was burying a tiny cloth-wrapped bundle, her 2-year-old son Tahir, who had frozen to death the previous night. My little boy was the same age. Everywhere we walked hands clawed at us, begging for ‘a tent’ or ‘a piece of bread’. Justin, who also has a young son, is rarely short of words but we were both silent driving back after a day in Maslakh.

  At the hotel we climbed up to the roof to set up the satellite phone to be able to call the office. The old days when it was impossible to file from Afghanistan were long gone. The sat phone was bulky to lug around but once we’d locked on to the Indian Ocean satellite, using the built-in compass, we could connect our laptops and transmit my words and his photographs as we stood there shivering in the bitter cold.

  Dominic came on the line, delighted to hear we were finally inside Afghanistan. ‘You must be overjoyed,’ he said. ‘You must celebrate with a drink.’ I wondered where he thought we were. The only beverage available in the Mowafaq was green tea.

  Wonderful as sat phones are, they do presume some form of power supply. At the Mowafaq, the dining room was lit by pink and green neon strips that flashed on and off as electricity came and went. Most of the time there was no power but when it did come it was often in great surges, far too much for an ordinary surge protector to withstand. Such a surge came just as Justin was in the middle of downloading his powerful photographs of Bibi Gul burying her baby at the Maslakh camp. There was a shower of sparks and a smell of burning as his power supply blew up. All the pictures were lost. Justin was devastated.

  To try to cheer him up I suggested we went for a walk. Round the corner from the hotel was a street rather gruesomely called Bloodbank Road. A little way along was a small white building with a sign in Farsi and English saying ‘Literary Circle of Herat’. It was impossible to resist.

  When Zena Karamzade’s dreams of being a doctor ended under the Taliban, she joined a dressmaking circle – or so the regime thought

  Sunday Telegraph, 16 December 2001

  DOWN A MUD-WALLED alley adjacent to the Flower crossroads in central Herat, where only a few weeks ago the Taliban were still publicly displaying the bodies of those they had hanged, a small blue plaque reads: ‘Golden Needle, Ladies’ Sewing Classes’.

  Three times a week for the past five years, young women, faces and bodies hidden by their Taliban-enforced uniform of sky-blue burqas and flat shoes, would knock at the yellow iron door. In their handbags, concealed under scissors, cottons, sequins and pieces of material, were notebooks and pens. Once inside, they would pull off their burqas, sit on cushions around a blackboard and listen intently as Mohammed Nasir Rahiyab, a 47-year-old literature professor from Herat University, taught forbidden subjects such as literary criticism, aesthetics and poetry.

  The innocuous blue sign masks an underground network of writers and poets who became the focus of resistance in this ancient city in Afghanistan’s north-west, risking their lives for literature and to educate women during the years of Taliban control.

  Under a regime where secret police beat women merely for wearing heels that clicked, the sewing classes of Herat were a venture that could easily have ended in more bodies swinging above Flower crossroads. To safeguard his students, Professor Rahiyab’s children were recruited to play in the alley outside while classes were being held. If a stranger came near, the children would warn their father, who would slip into another room with his books while his place was quickly taken by his wife holding up a half-finished garment.

  Once, two years ago, the professor’s daughter was ill in bed and his son had gone to buy bread, so there was no one to raise the alarm when a black-turbaned Talib rapped at the door. ‘Suddenly, he was in the courtyard outside,’ said Professor Rahiyab, a shy, soft-spoken man who becomes passionate when he talks about his beloved Russian writers. ‘I just got out of the room in time and my wife ran in and the girls hid their books under cushions, but I realised that I had not cleaned the board nor hidden my Pushkin bust, which I always brought out for classes. I sat in the other room, my hand shaking so much my cup was rattling.

  ‘If the authorities had known that we were not only teaching women, but teaching them high levels of literature, we would have been killed. But a lot of fighters s
acrificed their lives. Shouldn’t a person of letters make that sacrifice, too?’

  To lessen suspicion that might be cast his way, Professor Rahiyab never openly criticised the regime, even though the Taliban laid waste to his syllabus for male students at the university, forcing him to replace most literature classes with Islamic culture.

  The ruse of using sewing classes as a cover for teaching women was thought up by Ahmed Said Haghighi, the president of Herat’s 90-year-old Literary Circle, after the Taliban not only closed all girls’ schools, but also began destroying them and using the sites as mosques.

  ‘When it became clear that the Taliban were going to retain control of Herat, we sat around discussing what we could do to stop the culture of the city dying and to help our female members,’ he explains. ‘The only thing we could think of that women were allowed to do and that would allow comings and goings without suspicion was dressmaking classes.’

  Inspired by the Golden Needle, hundreds of similar classes were held all over the city, some writers even dressing in burqas to go to women’s houses to teach. Had the Taliban investigated, they would have realised that the pupils never made any clothes. Instead, they were encouraged to write and were introduced to the forbidden works of Persian poets and foreign classics by Shakespeare, James Joyce and Dostoevsky. A Unicef study found that 29,000 girls and women in Herat province received some form of secret education while the city was under Taliban control.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that such resistance should have taken place in Herat, which has a history of standing up to oppressors – an uprising against the Russians in 1980 led to 24,000 deaths in a few days, after Moscow sent in helicopter gunships to pound the city. When the Taliban took over in 1995, locals saw them as another occupying force. The Persian-speaking city, with its large Shia minority, was anathema to the Taliban who were Pashto-speakers and Sunni Muslims. They treated Heratis particularly brutally, referring to them as ‘strangers’. The regime closed the city’s many shrines of Sufi saints, made Pashto the official language and whitewashed a mural depicting 500 years of the city’s history.