A Rope and a Prayer (4 page)

“Tell them the truth,” I say to Tahir. “Tell them I’m American.”

Tahir relays my answer and the burly driver beams, raises his fist, and shouts a response in Pashto. Tahir translates it for me: “They say they are going to send a blood message to Obama.”

The driver punches the accelerator and we cross into the open desert. The gunman still aims his Kalashnikov at us. No one speaks. I glance at the bleak landscape outside—reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye can see. I fear we will be dead within minutes. The longer I look at the gunman in the passenger seat, the more nervous I become. His face shows little emotion. His eyes are dark, flat, and lifeless.

I think of my wife and family and am overcome with shame. An interview that seemed crucial hours ago now seems absurd and reckless. I have needlessly risked the lives of Tahir, Asad, and me. We reach a dry riverbed and the station wagon we are following stops. Our car does the same. “They’re going to kill us,” Tahir whispers. “They’re going to kill us.”

Tahir and Asad are ordered out of the car. Gunmen from the station wagon beat them with their rifle butts and lead them away. A gunman from our car motions for me to get out of the vehicle and take a few steps up a sand-covered hillside. While one guard points his Kalashnikov at me, the other takes my glasses, notebook, pen, and camera. I am blindfolded, my hands tied behind my back. My heart races. Sweat pours from my skin.

“
Habarnigar
,” I say, using the word for journalist in Dari, another local language. “
Salaam
,” I say, using an Arabic expression for peace. The few words I know in Pashto, which is spoken by most Taliban, escape me. I wait for the sound of gunfire. I know I might die but remain oddly calm.

A hand pushes me back toward the car. I am forced to lie down on the backseat. Two gunmen get in and slam the doors shut. The car lurches forward. Tahir and Asad are gone and, I think, probably dead.

As we drive away, Taliban prayers blare out from the radio and my captors laugh with glee. They are clearly elated to have an American captive. I try again. “
Habarnigar, salaam
.” In response, the guard sitting in the backseat beside me pats me on the shoulder and says a phrase in Pashto that includes the word for American. I can’t tell whether he is gloating over his prize or trying to comfort me.

We drive down what seem dirt roads. Waves of regret, remorse, and humiliation wash over me. I have gotten two Afghans killed in my foolish pursuit of a better book. I have betrayed my wife and family. Even if Tahir and Asad stay alive and we all survive, I will be mocked by my peers as a two-time kidnap victim with a judgment problem.

The car comes to a halt after what seems like a two-hour drive. Guards untie my hands, take off my blindfold, and guide me through the front door of a crude mud-brick home hidden in a ravine. I am put in some type of washroom the size of a closet. After a few minutes, the guards open the door and push Tahir and Asad inside. We stare at one another in relief. About twenty minutes later, a guard opens the door and motions for us to walk into the hallway.

“No shoot,” he says, “no shoot.”

For the first time, I think our lives might be spared. The guard leads us into a living room decorated with maroon carpets and red pillows. A half dozen men sit along two walls of the room, Kalashnikov rifles at their sides. I sob, bow my head, and try to look like a frightened reporter.

The guard motions for me to sit down across from a heavyset man with a
patu
—a traditional Afghan scarf—wrapped around his face. Sunglasses cover his eyes, and he wears a cheap black knit winter cap. Embroidered across the front of it is the word “Rock” in English.

“I’m a Taliban commander,” he announces. “My name is Mullah Atiqullah.”

In the months ahead, I will learn that his name means “gift from God.”

 

 

Seven years earlier, in September 2001, I had arrived in Afghanistan with a consuming desire to cover what I thought would be the defining conflict of my generation. On September 11, I had heard a distant explosion, looked out the window of my Brooklyn apartment, and seen a cloud of smoke rise up the side of the World Trade Center’s north tower. After hearing on the radio that both towers had been struck in a terrorist attack, I jumped on the subway to the trade center.

Ten minutes later, I walked out of a deserted subway exit and found myself standing four blocks from the two burning towers. Ten full stories appeared to be ablaze. I scribbled a few words in my notebook: “smoke from something on the ground. Debris all over the ground.” I walked closer and ran into Sherry Day, another reporter from the paper, and scribbled more notes: “Debris cascading. People snapping pictures. Smoke rising.”

I heard a sharp crack and what sounded, oddly, like a waterfall. Somewhere above us, thousands of panes of glass shattered as the south tower buckled. Looking up, I saw the top half of the skyscraper begin slowly plummeting toward the ground. I grabbed Sherry’s hand and we sprinted away from the tower as a roar filled our ears. I felt her hand pull away and turned back to see what had happened. She was gone and a thick cloud of dust—like a giant wall—surged up the street.

I ran around a corner and down a flight of stairs into a subway station, the dust engulfed me and the world turned white. A few feet away, a woman began screaming. After several moments, we took each other’s hand, walked upstairs, and emerged into what we thought was the street. We could see nothing in front of us. Finally, a gust of wind revealed a speck of blue in the sky to our right. I told her to walk in that direction and she disappeared.

I tried to find Sherry. White dust covered cars, buildings, and streets. Car alarms wailed. Pieces of office paper cascaded to the ground like oversize snowflakes. Filled with a vague idea of somehow helping survivors, I walked toward the towers. The story—any story—no longer mattered. I simply wanted to help. As I walked, I realized I had no medical or rescue skills to offer. I felt like a vulture with a notebook. A man appeared on the street covered head to toe in dust. I asked him, “Is there anything I can do?” He replied, “There’s nothing anybody can do.”

Over the next two weeks, the heroism of thousands of volunteers from New York and across the country amazed me. I found Sherry and learned she was unhurt and had run into a store. Still nagged by my sense of helplessness that morning, I considered joining the military or becoming a paramedic. Two weeks after the attack, editors asked me to go to Afghanistan and I leapt at the chance. I had covered religious extremism in the Balkans and thought my stories could investigate, examine, and expose militant Islam. With thousands dead in my home city, I also hoped my journalism might somehow help prevent future attacks.

On September 25, 2001, a rickety, Soviet-built helicopter operated by the Northern Alliance—the ragtag Afghan anti-Taliban group—dropped me and several other journalists in the Panjshir Valley, one of the few areas in the country the alliance controlled.

On the ground, the epic scale of what the United States faced in Afghanistan was humbling. Dozens of burnt-out Soviet tanks lined the valley, a maze of mountains and ravines that seemed to epitomize Afghanistan’s reputation as a geographic and cultural fortress. With billions in aid from the United States in the 1980s, the Afghan “mujahideen”—an Arabic term that means “strugglers” or “fighters for justice”—had defeated the Soviets and fulfilled the mountainous country’s reputation for repelling foreign armies and humbling empires.

In the 1990s, civil war had erupted with India, Pakistan, and Iran backing the Northern Alliance and Pakistan backing Taliban fighters from the south. When I arrived in 2001, the Taliban and their foreign militant allies controlled roughly 90 percent of the country. The depth of the country’s poverty was staggering. Most towns had no paved roads or electricity. Farmers used oxen and wooden plows to till their fields. Twenty years of conflict had shattered government and social structures. Afghanistan was the world’s fifth poorest nation. Fifty-five percent of men and 85 percent of women were illiterate. The average life expectancy was forty-three.

When the Taliban front lines collapsed under heavy American bombing in early November, exuberant young Afghans thronged Kabul’s streets and hailed the fall of the Taliban. They devoured cellular phones, computers, and any other means of access to the outside world. Girls flocked to school and women relished basic freedoms. After twenty-four years of Soviet occupation, civil war, and brutal Taliban rule, Afghans welcomed stability, moderation, and foreigners. On December 22, 2001, I watched Afghan men weep with joy as Hamid Karzai was sworn in as the country’s interim leader. Hope filled the hall and the city. The Taliban appeared vanquished.

Like other foreigners, I was beguiled by Afghans, their bravery and sense of honor. I wanted to follow what unfolded in the country over the long term and answer a central question: how can religious extremism be countered?

I had been intermittently covering religious and ethnic conflict for the past fourteen years. I covered the war in Bosnia for
The Christian Science Monitor
in the mid-1990s and after joining
The New York Times
in 1996 reported on religious conflict in Israel-Palestine, Kosovo, Indonesia, and Nigeria. After covering the fall of the Taliban in 2001, I served as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief from 2002 to 2005, reporting on sectarian tensions in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh as well. The vast majority of my time, though, was spent reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I visited Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan for the first time in 2004 while reporting a story on Charles Grader, the last American to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, mission in Kabul before the 1979 Soviet invasion. A quarter century later, Grader had returned to Kabul at the age of seventy-two to manage an agricultural development program. We drove into Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital, and he raved about how the town had changed since the 1970s. Stores brimmed with food, household goods, and televisions.

“Look at that construction!” Grader shouted as we drove down through the city trailed by a half dozen Afghan security guards. “Look at the tractors!”

Lashkar Gah had fascinated me ever since. The town was built by American engineers as part of one of the largest foreign development projects in United States history. For thirty-three years, from 1946 to 1979, a massive American Cold War program tried to wean Afghans from Soviet influence.

In a bleak stretch of Afghan desert that resembled the surface of Mars, several dozen families from states like Montana and Wisconsin lived in suburban tract homes with one-car garages, green lawns and backyard barbecues. The Americans constructed a new provincial capital, two earthen dams, 1,200 miles of gravel roads, and 300 miles of irrigation canals. They promised to make 350,000 acres of desert bloom and create an Afghan version of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Depression-era hydroelectric system that spans five American states.

In 1960, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee visited Lashkar Gah and declared it “a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape.” The American-designed town was an “ultramodern world of workshops and offices,” Toynbee wrote in a memoir of his journey. Afghans called it “Little America.”

Laid out in a neat square grid, Lashkar Gah during the Cold War was a sweltering, dust-covered settlement of 15,000 residents perched above the swirling brown waters of the Helmand River, according to books and reports from the time. It had a four-lane, pine-tree-lined Main Street, a new hotel with a swimming pool and tennis court, and southern Afghanistan’s only coeducational high school. Downtown, a movie theater played the latest Indian films. The province and its massive development project was even a setting of a James Michener novel. After traveling through Afghanistan in the 1950s, Michener wrote
Caravans,
a 1963 novel that described local Afghan disappointment with an expensive foreign aid project that failed to meet their high expectations.

Toynbee, Michener, and other foreign visitors were enthralled by the Pashtuns, a fiercely independent ethnic group of 40 million people that predominate in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan. Their ancient system of governance is Pashtunwali, a 5,000-year-old tribal code of honor that governs all aspects of a Pashtun’s life. Under Pashtunwali, all Pashtuns must display hospitality toward guests, give asylum to anyone in distress, exact revenge on those who injure or insult them, protect the honor of women, and always display unflinching bravery, loyalty, and trust in God.

In rural villages, conservative Pashtun tribal elders tended to be devoutly religious, opposed to central government rule, and suspicious of foreigners. In the large cities and towns, an educated Pashtun elite generally supported modernization of the country.

In “Little America” of the 1960s and 1970s, educated Pashtun moderates dominated. During Christmas and Ramadan in Lashkar Gah, Pashtuns and Americans invited one another to each other’s homes to celebrate their respective religious holidays. Americans who worked in Lashkar Gah at the time told me Pashtuns were shockingly poor and isolated, yet dignified, generous, and welcoming.

David Champagne, a Peace Corps volunteer from Chicago, taught English at the high school in Lashkar Gah from 1968 to 1971. He recalled an experimental school where Afghan and American teachers worked together to train a new generation of Afghan leaders and technocrats. Champagne tried to infuse his students—particularly girls—with a sense that they could achieve anything through hard work. The school’s goal was to instill an ethos that Afghanistan could develop into a prosperous country through slow, painstaking education and government reform efforts over many years. “There was a certain amount of realism and optimism,” Champagne told me. “People thought they could help people with technology. Make the deserts bloom.”