Abstract
On September 11, 2001, I was in Paris, working as a radio reporter. The terrorist attacks shattered me, to a degree that took me by surprise. Covering the official condolence ceremony at the turreted French police headquarters, with the great bells of Notre Dame Cathedral throbbing in the background, I found myself weeping, unable to wipe my eyes because I had to hold my microphone. I was grateful to the French for dropping all the contentiousness that has characterized our peoples' long and intimate partnership. For days, they waited outside the U.S. Embassy to pay their respects. Conversations struck up between French men and women and Americans there had an achingly profound quality. Though the thought took days to surface, I began to feel that the horror that had befallen us might hide a miracle. It might goad us to go to work again, to be what we kept saying we were: the champions of human dignity, the exemplars of public participation in government, a government acting in good faith, the mentors of peoples struggling to be free.
Or it might not.
For there was something about the reaction to 9/11 that disturbed me. Along with the new openness, the surge of self-questioning in America, another tendency was emerging. It was a reflex to divide up the world into two opposing blocs: We the West versus Them–now embodied by Islam, which had suddenly appeared on the world stage to fill the role left vacant by the vanquished Soviet Union. The shorthand term for this notion, taken from the title of a book, entered our vocabulary: the Clash of Civilizations.
It was clear to me that the Al Qaeda terrorists who flew their planes into those enormously symbolic American buildings were trying to force people everywhere into splitting apart along these lines. Quite aside from the terrorists' use of mass murder, it was this intent that made them abhorrent to me.
But some of us seemed to want the selfsame thing. And some of our leaders seemed to be showing the way, deliberately blurring all the myriad distinctions that give our world its depth and richness. Suddenly, the world was being described in binary terms, and instinctively, I knew that was wrong. An “us versus them” reaction may be normal in humans when attacked, but is it accurate? Is it productive? Is it the reaction that those to whom we look for guidance should be bringing out in us? Is this the best we can do?
I don't think so. I don't believe in the Clash of Civilizations. I believe that most human beings share some basic aspirations and some basic values: freedom of determination, accountability, access to learning, and the reasonably equitable distribution of wealth, for example. How far different peoples have reached in their effort to achieve these things depends a lot on what has befallen them over the course of time–not on some irrevocable cultural difference.
And so it seemed urgent to me, at that assumption-shattering moment–that moment full of potential and peril–to do my personal best to help counteract the tendency to caricature, to help bring out the human complexity of this new exchange. My background and abilities equipped me for this effort. I could talk to people on both sides of the alleged divide. I could help them hear each other.
My editor at National Public Radio (NPR) sent me to Quetta, Pakistan, exactly where I wanted to go. Considered the most conservative and anti-American town in all of Pakistan, it had been the cradle of the Taliban movement. It was from Quetta that the Taliban, a reactionary group that used a radical reading of Islam as the basis for the world's latest experiment in totalitarianism, had set off in 1994 to capture nearby Kandahar, Afghanistan–to widespread international indifference.
A few years later, Osama bin Laden joined the Taliban leadership there. In return for financial and military assistance in their effort to conquer the rest of Afghanistan, the Taliban offered bin Laden a haven where he could nurture and develop his Al Qaeda network. Kandahar became the base from which the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces took over ever-larger amounts of Afghanistan, until an opposing coalition of militias called the Northern Alliance was left clinging to only a tiny sliver of the country in the far north.
Because of this foothold, it was in the north that most of the U.S. bombing had been concentrated after 9/11; and it was to the north that flocks of journalists had been dispatched. For the story most Americans seemed anxious to hear–of relieved Afghans welcoming American liberators–could be most plausibly reported from the north.
The south was different. Well after the start of the war, U.S. planners were still struggling for a similar scenario there. They were looking for local insurgents, like the Northern Alliance, that U.S. bombing could be said merely to support. But it was harder to find them in the south. Seen as hostile and dangerous, cloaked in a darkness to match the Taliban's black robes, home to the core of the elusive Al Qaeda network, the Afghan south seemed impenetrable.
But it could not be ignored. Kandahar had been the first capital of Afghanistan, and it was still the marrow of the nation's bones. And now, after 9/11, it was the antipode, the very place where the attacks had been planned. Quetta, with its promise of Kandahar once the Taliban fell, proposed just the challenge I hungered for. I arrived in the last days of October 2001.
As expected, it proved a difficult time and place to be an American journalist. But not for the reasons I had foreseen. The difficulty lay not in local hostility but in reporting back to a traumatized nation.
“The worst period in my entire career,” a friend and revered colleague confided to me as we compared notes afterward. He sent me a list of story ideas that his editors had rejected.
“Our people simply didn't want us to do any reporting,” my friend, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, complained. “They had already decided on the story they wanted and just assigned us to dig up some stuff to substantiate it.”
A CNN correspondent told me that she had received written instructions not to film civilian casualties. And I remember confabbing in the marbled hall of the opulent Quetta Serena Hotel with BBC reporter Adam Brookes in mid-November 2001, the weekend Kabul fell, listening to how he'd had to browbeat his desk editor to persuade him that Kandahar was still standing.
It was as though, because the 9/11 attacks had taken place in New York City and Washington, D.C.–the American nerve centers–they had blown out the critical-thinking apparatus in the people I had trusted to have one: the editors, the experienced journalists.
National Public Radio was not immune, though my one civilian casualty piece did enjoy the full support of my editors, to their credit. It was a story that simply had to be reported, for the Afghan refugees I interviewed every day could think and talk of nothing else. Their hearts shattered by decades of gunfire and explosions, these refugees had as yet seen nothing like the bombs that were blowing up their country now. With no experience of precision ordinance, they were almost mad with fear, as their imaginations overloaded their mental circuitry with remembered images of carnage. That U.S. bombing was accurate was an important point. But that the bombing was traumatizing the Afghan civilians whom it was supposed to be liberating was just as true. The anguish I heard every day–the pleas to tell President George W. Bush, for the love of God, to stop the bombing–was not an act; it was real. And it seemed important for me to expose Americans to the psychological impact that this war was having, not the least because it might have future repercussions. Ideological movements like Osama bin Laden's are rooted in collective psychology just as much as matters more concrete.
So I did the story, visiting a hospital ward in Quetta, where most of the patients were children. I chose one small boy to open my report–at random really, because doctors were arriving to examine him, and their activity would give me some ambient sound to record. The boy was terribly injured; I wondered how he had ever survived the drive from Kandahar. It was so bad that I decided to censor myself. I took out the description of one of his wounds; I was afraid such a long list would sound like overkill. Even so, my story drew vituperative reactions from listeners. One said he was so angry that he almost had to pull his car off the road to vomit.
My editors, bless them, did not hesitate to run the piece.
But as time went on, I began to sense impatience in Washington with my reporting. That same late 2001 period between the fall of Kabul and of Kandahar, when the BBC's Brookes had trouble with his desk, a senior NPR staff member whom I deeply admired wrote me an e-mail to the effect that he no longer trusted my work. He accused me of disseminating Taliban propaganda: I, like Brookes, was reporting that Kandahar was still in Taliban hands. He called my sources “pro-bin Laden,” for why else would they be leaving Afghanistan at the very moment that the Taliban was losing control and anti-Taliban Afghans were celebrating?
For that report, I had interviewed truck drivers who were transporting loads of Kandahar's trademark pomegranates across the border to merchants in Pakistan. Were those workingmen “pro-bin Laden?” A withering U.S. bombing campaign was under way. In that context, could villagers not be simply fleeing their homes under the rain of fire without guilt by association with the Taliban? And–a most difficult question for Americans to untangle–was pro-Taliban necessarily the same as pro-bin Laden?
These were the sorts of distinctions, I was learning, that it was imperative to make. Otherwise, we were going to get this wrong, with devastating consequences.
During the six weeks between 9/11 and my arrival in Pakistan, the U.S. government had worked quickly. CIA agents were dropped almost immediately into northern Afghanistan, with briefcases of money, to set about buying allies. Other officials sent out feelers to their contacts in the south, primarily in my destination, Quetta.
Alongside the teeming thousands of day laborers, bakers, trinket sellers, hustlers, and Taliban recruiting agents who clogged the streets of Quetta's Pashtunabad neighborhood–the flotsam of Afghanistan's various wars–a community of Afghan elites had also taken up quarters in the Pakistani town: engineers, many of them, the heads of humanitarian organizations or demining agencies, former officials of political factions, former resistance commanders. It was to this community that the American officials turned after 9/11, looking for anti-Taliban proxies to work with.
Two sharply contrasting candidates quickly emerged: dapper, bald-headed Hamid Karzai, whose father had been speaker of the Afghan National Assembly in the golden age, before a 1970s communist coup; and Gul Agha Shirzai, an uncouth former Kandahar provincial governor who had presided over unspeakable chaos there in the early 1990s.
Despite the stark contrast between these men, American planners decided to enroll them both. The notion was to mount a pincer operation against the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Karzai would sneak inside Afghanistan, pass Kandahar, then work his way back down toward it from the north, gathering followers. Gul Agha Shirzai would collect some fighters of his own and push up toward the city from the south.
On October 23, 2001, just before I made it to Quetta, Shirzai was boasting to the Los Angeles Times that he could raise 5,000 fighters. “We are ready to move to Kandahar and get rid of the evil there,” he told reporter Tyler Marshall. “Our men are inside and ready.” But Shirzai swore he wanted no role in any post-Taliban government. “I don't have any desire for this,” he claimed.
Not a week after Marshall's article came out, I was checking in at the Serena Hotel. A reporter's first imperative upon landing a new beat is to develop sources. That means striking up acquaintanceships with people who are part of the story, and who, for whatever reason, wish to talk about it. It took a while, after I fused into the mass of my colleagues all grappling to cover the same events, like sharks roiling in the water over a piece of bloody meat. But eventually I found one.
He was a commander in Shirzai's force whom I discovered in a public call office in Chaman, the Pakistani border town that rubs up against Afghanistan with the greedy voluptuousness of a spoiled cat. His name is Mahmad Anwar. He became a friend.
He proved to be a very good friend, and I never think of him with anything but warmth–even though I discovered later that he had yanked my chain with a charming shameless-ness back then, recounting the events not as they actually transpired, but as Shirzai and his American advisers wished people to think they had. He took a boyish delight in the bright colors he threaded through the tapestry he wove for me.
When I asked Mahmad Anwar, months later, to tell me the real story of the move on Kandahar, he agreed with relish. “We met secretly at Gul Agha Shirzai's house,” he recounted, recalling the excited preparations. It would have been about October 12, 2001.
It was a solemn session. Just three men were there. They accomplished the ablutions Muslims perform before prayer with a practiced ritual grace, and took a copy of the Koran down from its niche in a wall. Every Afghan house has one, placed somewhere aloft, above any other book.
Shirzai unfolded the cloth that was wrapped around it to protect it from the ever-present dust, touched it to his lips, and the three men placed their hands upon it and swore: “By God Almighty, we will fight the Taliban to our deaths, if we must. And when we defeat them, we will turn over the government to educated men. This by God we vow.”
Mahmad Anwar darted me a look to be sure I grasped the significance: “It was a sacred oath. We vowed to surrender our weapons and go home once the Taliban were done for.”
Such was the mood of self-sacrifice and the feeling of optimism about the implications of the coming Pax Americana, as many Afghans remember it. In that pregnant moment, they abruptly shed their bitterly earned cynicism. They were electrified by the belief that, with American help, the nightmare was going to end, and they would at last be able to lay the foundations of the kind of Afghan state they dreamed of: united under a qualified, accountable government.
Grasping a wad of bills in his left hand, Gul Agha Shirzai licked a finger and paged through them with his right, counting out about $5,000 in Pakistani rupees for Mahmad Anwar, to pay for his men and their supplies. Armies, in Afghanistan, are personal affairs. Each commander calls up his own liegemen. As the meeting drew to a close, Mahmad Anwar pronounced a warning to Shirzai: “Do not tell Pakistan what we are doing.”
The role of the Pakistani government in Afghan affairs is one of the most contentious issues not just in Kandahar, but throughout the country. After more than two decades in which it has meddled industriously in the destiny of their country, almost all Afghans–even those who might once have benefited–mistrust the motives of their southern neighbor.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. During the savage decade-long war that followed, Pakistan gave aid and shelter to Afghanistan's anti-Soviet resistance, not to mention to millions of Afghan civilians who fled the carnage. Still, most Afghans think that Pakistani officials tried to determine the political results of that war, tried to replace the Soviet puppet at the head of the Afghan state with a puppet of their own. And Afghans resent it. They resent what feels like Pakistan's effort to run their country's economy. They breathe on the embers of a boundary dispute, “temporarily” settled more than a century ago, but in their view still legally open. And they resent the swarms of intelligence agents that Pakistan sends off to Afghanistan in the guise of students, manual laborers, diplomats, and even Afghan officials, won over or bought during years of exile.
If the Pakistani authorities got mixed up in the anti-Taliban offensive, my border-dwelling friend Mah-mad Anwar feared, it would mean danger for him and the rest of the force, for Pakistan had supported the Taliban regime from its very inception. From his vantage point in Cha-man, Mahmad Anwar had observed the kind of assistance the Pakistani army and intelligence agency had provided the Taliban over the years. And now, in the wake of 9/11, they were turning on their black-turbaned protégés? They were converting to the antiterror cause? The switch was suspect, in most Afghans' view. Mah-mad Anwar was sure that he and his men would be ambushed if Pakistani spies found out about their plans. Or, even if the fighters did survive, a Pakistani connection with their activities could only hide some ulterior motive, Mahmad Anwar believed.
Shirzai nodded absently at his warning, and the men filed downstairs, where they bumped into a tall Westerner. Shirzai introduced him as “an envoy from the forces in the Gulf.” The presence of this man, at such an early stage, indicates how much it was at U.S. bidding that Shirzai rounded up his force at all. On his own, Kandaharis assure me, Shirzai had no followers at all. Only U.S. dollars, transformed into the grubby bills he had just counted out for Mahmad Anwar, allowed him to buy some.
About a month after that discreet meeting, a messenger arrived at Mah-mad Anwar's house. The rendezvous was for that night.
The dozens of wooly haired fighters left Quetta a little before 10 p.m.–under the noses of more than a hundred foreign journalists, not one of whom got the story. Pulling up at the turnoff, Mahmad Anwar gasped. At the head of a line of vehicles, two Pakistani army trucks were idling.
“Yeah, sure, we tried to hide from the Pakistanis,” he remarked to his men. “But here they are.”
It is hard to believe that Mahmad Anwar or anyone else involved really thought it possible to keep this venture secret, given the legendary omniscience of the Pakistani intelligence agency, and given the close U.S.-Pakistan cooperation on the anti-Taliban effort. Still, the overt collaboration was a sore point with the numerous Afghans who knew about it at the time.
Soon, headlights probing, another several dozen trucks drove up–Gul Agha Shirzai's personal contingent–and the militiamen and their Pakistani shepherds gunned it for the border. The herd of trucks thundered through a half-dozen police checkpoints along the rough dirt road, Pakistani escorts signing to their colleagues to lower the ropes. When they reached the border, the Pakistanis stopped and pulled aside.
The Afghans' trucks leapt forward, shouldering each other aside on the inky road, passing and being passed in a testosterone-fueled competition. Mahmad Anwar boasts that only he was able to keep up with Shirzai. It was wintertime, in the desert night. “We could hardly move our fingers.” After a while, the former governor stopped and had his men collect some twigs and light a fire. “We didn't even have any weapons yet,” Mahmad Anwar recalled, still dumbfounded at the memory. What kind of an invasion was this, anyway? “And now the Pakistanis knew all about us.” Furious, he strode over to join Shirzai.
“We agreed not to tell Pakistan about our plans. What happened?”
“We couldn't cross the border without Pakistan's permission,” replied Shirzai.
“We have the Americans with us,” Mahmad Anwar retorted. “What do we need with Pakistan?”
Looking back, Mahmad Anwar thinks Shirzai was putting his fealty on display. He judges the Pakistani government must have realized by then that its protégés in the Taliban were doomed. And, with characteristic versatility, it was already switching its bets. It was maneuvering to get some trusty of its own placed in charge of strategic Kandahar under the new Afghan regime. Gul Agha Shirzai was the man.
A few hours later, the ragtag invasion force reached its staging point just inside Afghanistan. “I couldn't make out what was going on,” Mah-mad Anwar remembered. “How could we fight without guns? So I asked Shirzai: ‘Where will we get weapons for this fighting?’ Shirzai answered, ‘Maybe the Americans will give us some.’”
As if on signal, the fighters sighted a ball of dust spinning toward them across the barren landscape in the pale, rising light. It was a truck. When a press of excited men rolled back its tarps, Mahmad Anwar eyeballed some 600 brand new Kalashnikovs, and machine guns and grenade launchers, straight from Pakistan. He watched his comrades crowd around the truck, like starving men at a food distribution. So this was why Shirzai had been so blasé, he thought.
Throughout the morning, meanwhile, new fighters were drifting in to join the force. Among them was another man who would become my friend, the future police chief of Kandahar and Kabul, Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal.
A year and a half later, when I was fitting the pieces of this story together, realizing how much of it I had gotten wrong in my reporting at the time, I asked Akrem for his version.
He invited me to come by his house around 4 p.m. It was July, hot beyond imagination. Most of Kandahar was still asleep, the leaden torpor not yet broken. I joined Akrem at his silent house, and, as he spread himself comfortably on his side, leaning one arm on a cushion laid with tasteful carpet, I flipped back the cover of a notebook.
Akrem confirmed Mahmad Anwar's estimate of 600 automatic rifles, plus 60-100 rocket launchers loaded in the truck that arrived the same morning he did. “I asked Gul Agha where he got them, for they were not the kind you find in the bazaar. He said the Americans had bought them from Pakistan and given them to him.”
A second weapons delivery came about a week later. “They told us to build fires to guide the plane,” he said, grimacing in recollection at the strenuous nighttime hike. The airdrop included weapons, ammunition, and food–cases of Meals Ready to Eat, sealed in heavy, dun-colored plastic. You have to open up the outside envelope, pour about two fingers of water in, and lean it up against a rock to let the chemical heat warm the food. Whether the Afghans figured that out is anyone's guess.
In any case, they got a tutorial by the next day. Two U.S. helicopters angled noisily at them and, touching down in a blizzard of dust and stones, deposited a half-dozen Special Forces soldiers near the Afghan encampment. The Americans set up their sophisticated communications devices on the hoods of some trucks Shirzai provided, all stems and antennae like a daddy longlegs.
The next day, this patchwork anti-Taliban force struck out toward the main road to Kandahar. The plan was to cut the Taliban's supply lines.
Circling like flies overhead in maddening figure eights, two U.S. jets tracked the force. The sound reassured the Afghans, with its promise of overpowering backup. But it also emphasized the danger of their position.
“We were really frightened,” Akrem recalled, an unsentimental admission. “We were sure the Taliban would fall on us any minute.”
But apart from the noise of the planes–mosquitoes' whines in a lower register–silence. At sundown, a moment of chest-constricting peace in the desert, when the slanting light paints the hills in burnished gold, the militiamen stopped at a stream to wash and pray.
And then the moment shattered like exploding glass. The stuttering bark of automatic weapons ripped the air, ricocheting against the rocks, amplified a thousand times. The men scattered from the stream. They dove for cover. Stony splinters shot past; the whine of deflected bullets lanced their ears.
And it got worse: Another group of Taliban fighters was closing in from behind.
“The American soldiers told us their friends in the planes would try to bomb them.”
The Special Forces soldiers struggled to bring some order to their proxies' pell-mell retreat.
Those droning bombers did get a bead and let loose, blowing up some seven trucks, Akrem estimated. And that settled the fight. The anti-Taliban militia captured a heavy gun and 20 prisoners. But the next day, Shirzai let the Taliban captives go, even giving them some money to speed them on their way. Hamid Karzai did the same thing, say men who were with him on the far side of Kandahar, in the mountains to the north. Asked why, the fighters shrug their shoulders, disapproval manifest, if unspoken.
Perhaps the leniency was aimed at post-war reconciliation, making a distinction between the Taliban rank and file–conscripted boy-soldiers, mostly–and the leaders of the movement. Maybe it indicated that the lines separating the opposing camps were not traced as sharply as Western observers might presume.
The next day, the fighters reached the main road, at a strategic pass. They were alone, unopposed. Celebrating, they began to deploy in the hills above, when a car approached, a single Arab at the wheel. The fighters captured him, binding his hands, and shot up the occupants of a second vehicle that approached a while later.
After that, for fully three weeks, Akrem said, “Not a single Talib, by God, did we see.”
Mahmad Anwar remembered the same thing. “There was no fighting at all,” he confessed. “The Americans did everything.” After the one skirmish by the brook, the Americans laid down the rule: “‘From now on, don't you move without our order.’ We didn't kill a single person with a gun,” Mahmad Anwar swore, innocently. Indeed, he remembered a rather embarrassing exchange with some of the U.S. Special Forces soldiers, after they all reached Kandahar. “So,” he remembered boasting to the American troops. “We brought you to Kandahar at last.”
“What are you talking about,” the U.S. soldiers retorted. “We brought you to Kandahar.”
I must say I blushed to hear these revelations after the fact.
Being a journalist, even one of good faith, is always an exercise in approximation. There is just not enough time, at least in radio, to be sure you got it right. Morning Edition has a 4.5-minute hole in tomorrow's show. You have to come up with something by the end of the day, almost anything. So you charge around talking to as many people as you can find in the closing window of time. You sort through the suspected manipulations. You work to put a story together that adds something, and feels plausible–given what you've been told and what you think of the people who did the telling. And when in doubt, you conform. It is the safest course, and it is the course your editors feel comfortable with. That stuff about scoops was never my experience. NPR, at best, strives to add a new angle or some needed depth to a story someone else has broken. My editors never really wanted me to do the breaking. They never liked having me out on a limb.
But Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time. It takes a long time to learn to read the signs, to learn how to discover behind people's words a piece of the truth they dissemble.
Like other journalists that November 2001, I reported frequent fighting between the Taliban and Shirzai's militia, the two sides, for example, “battling for control of the main road to Kandahar.” I told of the strategic pass changing hands; I told how, by contrast, the forces under Hamid Karzai “negotiated–not fought–their way toward the Kandahar from the north.” The military pressure that Shirzai's group was putting on from the other side, to help accelerate Karzai's negotiations, seemed at least partially to warrant the friendship that developed between the unsavory warlord and his American patrons.
But the whole picture was false. This din of battle was an illusion that both elements of the anti-Taliban alliance south of Kandahar wanted conveyed: the Americans so as to demonstrate the strength of the local resistance to the fundamentalist militia, and Gul Agha Shirzai–displaying a brilliant flair for the value of PR–to “gain prestige,” as Akrem put it. “Gul Agha kept saying there were battles,” he told me. But “Hitz jang nawa. There was no fighting at all.”
And I, like so many other reporters, fell for it.