A Rope and a Prayer (15 page)

I feel relieved when I ascend the subway steps to 57th Street in Midtown. I give myself a mental pat on the back as I approach the Hearst Publications building, where
Cosmopolitan
is headquartered, and pass through the shiny glass doors, past the security kiosks, and up the escalator. The office building has an air of glamour about it. It’s modern, clean, bright. A waterfall serves as a calming backdrop in front of which the escalators ascend. The sound of cascading water soothes my mind. I feel like I have entered a sequestered world, one of well-dressed women and polite security guards. Everything is picture-perfect. Nothing need be explored or examined in too much depth. And you can start over again every month with some new outlook, style, or workout. I am able to skim the surface here and put the vortex of the last few hours behind me, momentarily. I breathe a sigh of relief and feel my energy restored.

An idea meeting has been scheduled for this afternoon. We will be discussing production and casting for our Man Manual shoot. This month it’s “Bachelors in Their Boxer Shorts.” I wonder if the Taliban wear boxers or briefs.

S
tanding in the remote darkness of Waziristan at the mercy of Taliban militants, I feel at peace. I have spoken to my wife for the first time in nine days. I expected panic or tears, but Kristen sounded collected and confident. Her words “It’s going to be all right” will linger in my mind for months. Her composure will sustain me.

Atiqullah and Badruddin had driven us fifteen minutes outside Miran Shah, stopped the car in a dry riverbed, and turned off the engine. Leaving the headlights on, I called Kristen from a small handheld satellite phone Badruddin produced and followed their instructions to tell her we were being held in terrible conditions. I hope the tone of my voice somehow comforted her.

Now Badruddin and Atiqullah tell me to call
The New York Times
bureau in Kabul. Instead of ordering me to make specific demands, they instruct Tahir, Asad, and me to exaggerate our suffering. They also tell me to say that Atiqullah is not with us, even though he is standing beside me.

“We are in terrible conditions, Tahir is very sick,” I tell Chris Chivers, a close friend and
Times
reporter who answers the phone.

Tahir then speaks to Chris and asks him to tell his family that he is alive and in good health.

“They keep telling me that if things go wrong they will repeat the story of Helmand,” Tahir says, referring to the beheading of the Afghan journalist in 2007. “So I am just afraid they are going to kill me.”

Asad then speaks in Pashto with an Afghan reporter in the bureau.

“I am fine, I am okay,” he says. “Tell my family that we are in the mountains but we are okay.”

The conversation drags on, with Atiqullah continuing to tell me what to say. He orders me to tell Chris that Asad and Tahir will be killed first.

I refuse. “Kill me first,” I tell Atiqullah, “Kill me first.”

Chris overhears me and interrupts.

“Nobody needs that, David,” he says. “Nobody needs to die.”

“They are threatening to kill the driver and the translator,” I explain to Chris. “I have to tell you, I have to tell you. I don’t want to tell you.”

“We understand that they are making those threats,” Chris says. “But that will not make our job easier.”

Chris explains that if the Taliban kill anyone it will make government officials angry and make any deal even more difficult.

“Please don’t let them kill the driver and the translator,” I say. “Please don’t let them kill the driver and translator. I am sorry about this,” I add. “I apologize to everyone.”

“David, this is not your fault,” Chris says. He urges me to tell Atiqullah to keep calling.

I can tell Chris is trying to prolong the call, which drags on for twenty minutes. Growing impatient, Atiqullah and Badruddin order me to end the call.

“Okay, all three of us, Chris,” I say. “It’s gotta be all three of us. I gotta go.”

I hang up the phone and Atiqullah and Badruddin order us back into the car. Worried that the call has been traced and a drone may be approaching, they quickly drive us out of the barren riverbed. Sitting in the back of the car, I am relieved. Kristen sounded calm. Chris said the paper was doing all it could. I feel that I fought for Tahir and Asad.

The car stops. With a scarf placed over my face, I am hustled into a new house. We have returned to Miran Shah.

 

 

I awake the following morning and I’m surprised by the quality of our new house. It is the finest of any we have been held in so far. The house has freshly painted white walls and regular electricity. We can wash ourselves with buckets of warm water. I receive a new set of clothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo. Guards allow us to walk in a large dirt yard, which is roughly fifty feet by thirty feet and has a small patch of grass near the well. The weather is unexpectedly warm. We receive pomegranates and other fresh food. Nestlé Pure Life water bottled in Pakistan is delivered for me to drink. To my amazement, I am even brought English-language Pakistani newspapers. Delivered to a shop in Miran Shah, the newspapers are only a day or two old.

For years, the Pakistani military has portrayed the tribal areas to American officials and journalists as the deeply isolated mountain stronghold of primitive Pashtun tribes. Instead, I find the tribal areas to be more developed than many parts of neighboring Afghanistan.

After breakfast, Badruddin visits us. He sits me down on the house’s front steps and explains to me that the Haqqanis are loyal servants of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. He says that American military reports that the Haqqanis work with foreign militants and operate independently are false. I don’t believe him. His father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is a legendary Afghan anti-Soviet mujahideen fighter who is believed to shelter Al Qaeda members on the family’s territory here in North Waziristan. The Haqqanis are aligned with the Afghan Taliban but they have grown so powerful that they largely operate on their own. They personify how American support for fundamentalist fighters in the 1980s backfired.

During the anti-Soviet jihad, Badruddin’s father, Haqqani was on the payroll of the CIA. Twenty year later, he and his sons are allies of the Taliban and operate the most lethal insurgent force the United States faces in Afghanistan. I also know that they are at the center of one of the most hotly contested debates in the American military and intelligence community. Is the Pakistani military—the United States’ purported ally—covertly aiding the Haqqanis and other Afghan Taliban as they attack American troops?

Twenty-one years before I arrived in Miran Shah as a prisoner, an American congressman named Charlie Wilson met Badruddin’s father here in 1987 and declared him “goodness personified.” Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch, was the favorite Afghan mujahideen commander of Wilson, a garrulous, hard-drinking Democrat from the Houston, Texas, area who was famous for womanizing. Eager to exact revenge on the Soviet Union for American deaths in Vietnam, Wilson secretly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in covert funding to the Afghan mujahideen.

Dressed in Afghan clothes and escorted by Pakistani intelligence officers, Wilson passed through Miran Shah in Pakistan’s tribal areas and then secretly crossed the border into Afghanistan. For the next four days, he received a covert tour of mujahideen operations in the Afghan province of Khost from Haqqani and other Afghan commanders. Living in the mountains, Wilson ate dinner in caves with bearded gunmen he saw as the descendants of indomitable mountain warriors who stood their ground against vastly more powerful foreign armies. The Afghans’ religious devotion seemed to give them no fear of death, Wilson later recalled. At one point, the congressman even gleefully fired a salvo of rockets at a Soviet base.

On the final night of Wilson’s trip, Jalaluddin Haqqani apologized to the American politician for not having a good-bye gift for him. Haqqani demanded that Wilson name the gift he wanted. The congressman half jokingly replied that he wanted helicopter pilots shot down by American-provided Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Roughly thirty minutes later, Haqqani’s men produced two terrified-looking Afghan pilots. Wilson expressed his appreciation but said he meant Soviet pilots. Haqqani promised to produce them in two weeks. The following morning, as Wilson prepared to leave, Haqqani had hundreds of mujahideen gather to say good-bye. One of the congressman’s guides snapped a photo of a grinning Wilson sitting astride a white horse with four Kalashnikov-wielding Afghans behind him.

“I felt I had entered the ranks of the initiated,” Wilson later recalled.

Wilson, like the other American architects of the anti-Soviet jihad, ignored the militant Islam that Haqqani and other mujahideen fighters fervently embraced. In the late 1980s, CIA officers viewed him as one of the most impressive, fearless, and organized Pashtun battlefield commanders. They trusted him with new tactics and weapons, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles, rockets, and even tanks.

Born in the village of Srana in the Garde Serai district of southeastern Afghanistan’s Paktia Province, Haqqani was a deeply conservative rural Pashtun cleric. After studying in a local Afghan madrassa as a youth, he completed his religious studies at the hard-line Darul Uloom Haqqania, or “University for Education of Truth,” in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Several other future Taliban leaders would attend the same school as well. The school banned televisions and music, taught young boys to memorize the Koran, and indoctrinated them in conservative Deobandi Islam.

In 1974, Haqqani took up arms against the Afghan government after the country’s king was overthrown in a coup Haqqani perceived as left leaning. He left Afghanistan, crossed into Pakistan’s tribal areas and based himself in Miran Shah. The town would serve as his headquarters for decades. His presence in Pakistan’s tribal areas caught the attention of Pakistani intelligence officials, who began funding him. Later, they introduced him to CIA officials, who did the same. To the delight of his Pakistani and American backers, Haqqani and his men laid siege to Soviet and Afghan forces garrisoned in the Afghan city of Khost in southeastern Afghanistan.

Deft at cultivating support from various sources, Haqqani also spoke fluent Arabic and opened fund-raising offices in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Already married to an Afghan woman, he married an Arab woman as well. Between both wives, he fathered nine sons. Haqqani’s ability to build coalitions among a dizzyingly diverse array of resistance groups stood out among Afghan commanders.

At some point in the mid-1980s, Haqqani met Osama bin Laden, who had traveled to Pakistan to aid the Afghan resistance. Several months after giving Congressman Wilson his 1987 tour, Haqqani helped Bin Laden achieve his first battlefield victory. The two men and a few dozen of their fighters fought off a weeklong assault by two hundred Soviet paratroopers on a camp Bin Laden had constructed for Afghan and foreign fighters—called the Lion’s Den. The following year, Bin Laden founded Al Qaeda and built training camps in Haqqani-controlled territory in southeastern Afghanistan’s Khost Province. Bin Laden would later call Haqqani a “hero mujahed sheikh” and “one of the foremost leaders of the jihad against the Soviets.”

When the victorious mujahideen took Kabul in 1992, Haqqani was named justice minister, but fighting over the city quickly erupted between rival mujahideen commanders. Haqqani declined to join any side and returned to Khost, the largest city in his home region. His reputation for piousness and not engaging in the criminality and corruption rampant among other mujahideen commanders gained him standing among local Afghans.

When the Taliban emerged in southern Afghanistan in 1994, Haqqani apparently did not trust them. A year later, he joined the group, possibly after coming under pressure from Pakistani intelligence officials who saw the Taliban as a friendly proxy force against India. During Taliban rule, Haqqani served as the minister of borders and tribal affairs and governor of Paktia, the province in southeastern Afghanistan where he was born. He also commanded members of his Zadran tribe who battled anti-Taliban forces north of Kabul. By joining the Taliban, he greatly strengthened the nascent group whose leaders included many of his fellow graduates of Darul Uloom Haqqania religious school in Pakistan.

That same year, 1995, I visited religious schools in Pakistan while working as a reporter for
The Christian Science Monitor
. On my first visit to the country, I toured three madrassas and two Islamic universities in the city of Peshawar and found burgeoning fundamentalism. An estimated 200,000 Afghan and Pakistani boys studied in 8,000 madrassas, a 50 percent increase from seven years earlier. At one school, young Afghan teachers proudly stated that 400 of the school’s students had gone on to join the Taliban. At the same time, Afghan refugees living in a fetid refugee camp accused the United States of mounting an “anti-Muslim” conspiracy to prevent the Taliban from establishing an Islamic government in Afghanistan. They also said the United States had “deceived” Afghans by convincing them to fight the Soviet Union and then abandoning them.

When I spoke with American diplomats, they played down the problem of fundamentalism. Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was exaggerating the problem, they said, to persuade the United States to lift sanctions it had placed on Pakistan for developing nuclear weapons.

“Pakistan is not a major link in an international terrorist conspiracy,” an American diplomat told me in 1995.

A year after I departed, the Taliban took Kabul and began enforcing strict Islamic laws across Afghanistan. Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other Taliban leaders welcomed Osama bin Laden back to Afghanistan. With Haqqani’s support, Bin Laden refurbished and expanded camps the Saudi jihadist leader originally built in Khost to support the anti-Soviet mujahideen. After Al Qaeda bombed two American embassies in Africa in 1998, the United States fired cruise missiles at the camps in a failed effort to kill Bin Laden. The missiles struck the camp where Congressman Wilson had slept during his tour of Afghanistan eleven years earlier.