A Rope and a Prayer (2 page)

Mary Jane Mulvihill
: Kristen’s mother

Lee Rohde:
David’s older brother

Carol Ruffo:
David’s mother

Michael Semple:
Expert on the region who works on case

 

AISC:
American International Security Corporation. Security consultants hired to work on case

Clayton Consultants:
The New York Times
’ crisis management firm

This is not a story of triumph. Throughout our case we made numerous mistakes. We wrote this book in the hope of helping readers learn more about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the American effort there. This book’s central narrative is the seven months when David, Tahir, and Asad were held captive in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Kristen’s effort to bring them home. Woven throughout the narrative are sections of history and analysis that are based on David’s seven years of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001. We also try to explore militancy, faith, and religion’s role as both a positive and negative force.

The second reason we wrote this book is in the hope of helping other kidnap victims and their families avoid the mistakes we made and survive their captivity. Around the world, the number of kidnappings is steadily rising, but governments have failed to develop a coordinated international response. Most hostages survive, but their panicked families frequently empty bank accounts, sell homes, or go into staggering debt to save the lives of their loved ones. We urge governments to develop a more unified approach to kidnapping.

A portion of our earnings from this book will be donated to the FATA Education Foundation, a Pakistani government foundation that provides educational opportunities to the people of Pakistan’s tribal areas, and to
Kiva.org
, a nonprofit organization that allows people to lend money via the Internet to microfinance institutions in developing countries and the United States. We are also working with the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit press advocacy group, to develop ways to support and assist the families of kidnapped journalists.

For seven months our family negotiated with the kidnappers—directly and through contractors—regarding a potential ransom. No ransom was paid. While David was in captivity, we believed the only way to keep him and his Afghan colleagues alive and encourage the kidnappers to remain in contact was to appear to be willing to pay for their release. In this book, we discuss Kristen’s calls with the kidnappers and the negotiations because they bring home the reality and pressures placed on a kidnap victim’s family. Yet we are not divulging our negotiation strategy or the amounts of money discussed. We believe such disclosures could encourage or complicate future kidnappings.

What follows is a good-faith effort to reconstruct the period in our lives surrounding David’s kidnapping and eventual escape, and its aftermath. David was not able to take notes for the seven months he was in captivity. All descriptions of his experience stem from his memory, supplemented, where possible, by records kept by Kristen, other family members, and colleagues. Direct quotations from his captors are his recollections of what they said and are based on translations from Pashto, the language they spoke. Kristen’s descriptions stem from memory and, where possible, journal entries, e-mails, transcripts, and other records. Undoubtedly, our recollections are incomplete, altered by the passage of time and flawed in places. All of the views expressed in this book are solely those of the authors. Any mistakes in the pages that follow are wholly our own. For safety reasons, certain details, information, and names have been withheld.

1.
Flew from Laskhar Gah, Helmand, to Kabul, Afghanistan:
November 9, 2008.

2.
Kidnapped outside Pul-e-Alam, Logar:
November 10, 2008.

3.
Held in four different locations in eastern Afghanistan:
November 10-17, 2008. Moved by car through Logar, Wardak, Ghazni, and Paktika provinces.

4.
Walked over mountains from Paktika, Afghanistan, into South Waziristan, Pakistan:
Night of November 17-18, 2008.

5.
Drove through Wana, South Waziristan, to Miran Shah, North Waziristan:
November 18, 2008. Held prisoner in five different houses in Miran Shah, North Waziristan: November 18, 2008 to mid-March 2009.

6.
Moved from Miran Shah, North Waziristan, to Makeen, South Waziristan:
Mid-March. Held in one house in Makeen until late April 2009.

7.
Moved from Makeen, South Waziristan, to Dosali, North Waziristan:
Late April 2009. Held in one house in Dosali until late May 2009.

8.
Moved from Dosali to Miran Shah, North Waziristan:
Late May 2009-June 19, 2009. Held in two different houses in Miran Shah from late May 2009-June 19, 2009. Escaped night of June 19-20, 2009.

9.
Flown by Pakistani army helicopter from Miran Shah, North Waziristan, to Islamabad, Pakistan:
June 20, 2009.

10.
Flown by American military plane from Islamabad, Pakistan, to Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan:
June 20, 2009. Flown by private plane from Bagram to Dubai, U.A.E., June 21, 2009.

O
n a Sunday afternoon, the Kabul Coffee House and Café is an island of Western culture in Afghanistan’s capital. American and European contractors, aid workers, and consultants sip four-dollar café lattes and cappuccinos. Young, English-speaking Afghan waiters dressed in Western clothes serve chicken quesadillas, fried-egg sandwiches, and cheeseburgers.

I marvel at—and dread—how much Kabul has changed since I first came to the country to cover the fall of the Taliban seven years earlier. A city I grew to know well has become more and more unfamiliar. Kabul has boomed economically and modernized to an extent I never dreamed when joyous Afghans gouged out the eyes of dead Taliban militants in 2001. At the time, Afghans yearned for a moderate and modern nation and an end to decades of meddling from neighboring countries.

Now, the gulf between the wealthy, westernized pockets of the Afghan capital and the grinding insecurity and endemic corruption that dominate most Afghans’ daily lives alarms me. Rivalries between the country’s ethnic groups that ebbed after the fall of the Taliban simmer again. Growing mistrust between Afghans and foreigners worries me as well. The American journalists, diplomats, and aid workers who were welcomed here in 2001 are seen by growing numbers of Afghans as war profiteers who do little to aid their country.

I am in the final stretch of conducting research for a book I am writing about the failing American attempt to bring stability to the region since 2001. I hope the book will be the culmination of seven years of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan for
The New York Times.
Yet I have become increasingly concerned that I am losing touch with the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground. After serving as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau co-chief and living in the region from 2002 to 2005, I moved back to New York and joined the newspaper’s investigations unit. Over the last three years, reporting trips sent me back to Afghanistan and Pakistan roughly every six months, but that is a fraction of the time I spent on the ground when based here. During that period, the Taliban have reasserted control over vast swaths of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

After privately wrestling with the decision for weeks, I have decided I need to interview a Taliban commander for the book to be as rigorous and thorough as possible. The majority of the population in Helmand—the southern Afghan province that is the focus of my book—appears to now support them. But it’s a fraught proposition, one that comes with the kind of extreme risk that I have tried to avoid for years.

Across the table from me at the Kabul Coffee House is Tahir Luddin, an Afghan journalist I met two years ago who works for
The Times
of London. Burly, boisterous, and confident, Tahir has short brown hair, hazel eyes, a round face, and a thin brown beard. He is a proud Afghan and prefers wearing local clothes to Western ones. We had met in 2006 but never worked together before. Recommended to me by two correspondents from
The Times
of London, Tahir is known for having good Taliban contacts and the ability to arrange interviews with them.

Tahir explains that his most trusted contact is a Taliban commander who uses the nom de guerre Abu Tayyeb, or “son of Tayyeb.” Abu Tayyeb commands several hundred Taliban fighters in three provinces around Kabul, and has fought against NATO and American troops in Helmand as well. Tahir says he has met him a half dozen times and that Abu Tayyeb has done face-to-face television interviews with two different European journalists without incident. He is aligned with a moderate Taliban faction based in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

“Would you be willing to go to Ghazni?” Tahir asks, referring to a dangerous province that is roughly three hours south of Kabul by car.

Tahir says I could interview Abu Tayyeb there. He could be the final character in the book, I think to myself, a Taliban commander who is the vehicle for describing the hard-line movement’s reemergence. I had tried for the last two weeks to set up an interview with a Taliban fighter in Helmand but had failed. I was not willing to leave the heavily guarded center of the provincial capital. No Taliban were willing to meet me there. Dozens of other journalists and I have been doing phone interviews with Taliban spokesmen for years. Yet it was impossible to verify whom, in fact, you were speaking to over the phone or their claims, which were often blatantly false propaganda screeds. I could briefly meet Abu Tayyeb in person, verify that he was, in fact, a Taliban commander, and then do follow-up interviews by phone.

From New York, it seemed as if a growing number of foreign journalists were safely interviewing the Taliban face-to-face. Over the last two months, interviews with Taliban had appeared in my old newspaper,
The Christian Science Monitor,
a French magazine, and one of my colleagues had safely interviewed them for my current newspaper’s Sunday magazine. I increasingly worried I was becoming a New York-based journalistic fraud whose book would be superficial and out of date. I felt I had fallen behind reporters based in the region.

At the same time, I knew meeting with the Taliban was perilous. Getting both sides of a story is vital in journalism but hugely dangerous in an armed conflict. In the end, each interview is a judgment call. As we sit in the café, Tahir warns of the danger involved. That spring, an American journalist and a British journalist who ventured into Pakistan’s tribal areas to interview militants were kidnapped in separate incidents, Tahir explains. He says the British journalist’s family sold their home to pay a ransom for his release. The concept of putting my own family through such an ordeal horrifies me. I had also recently read a story in
Rolling Stone
by an American journalist who was nearly kidnapped by a rival Taliban faction when he drove to Ghazni to interview a Taliban commander.