Afghan Scene Magazine September 2011

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ISSUE 86 - September 2011

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www.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene September 2011

Afghan Scene September 2011

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10A Kabul at Work vignette

16Traveling through Afghanistan in August 2001, Matthew Leeming little thought two Moroccan journalists he met on the road would turn out to be al-Qaeda assassins

22An exclusive extract from Lucy Morgan Edwards’s new book on Abdul Haq, the CIA and how western hurbris lost Afghanistan

46Edward Girardet looks back on his friendship with Ahmed Shah Massoud, squaring up to Hekmatyar and the sad decline of Afghan hopes in an extract from Killing the Cranes

Scene showcases photographs by Jason P Howe, whose oeuvre ranges from war photography to commercial shoots

64Pictures from the latest events and parties

66Scene looks at the latest developments at the U.S. Embassy

68 All you need to know about where to go in Kabul

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Publisher: Afghan Scene Ltd, Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul, AfghanistanManager & Editor: Afghan Scene Ltd, Kabul, AfghanistanDesign: Kaboora ProductionAdvertising: [email protected]: Emirates Printing Press, DubaiContact: [email protected] / www.afghanscene.comAfghan Scene welcomes the contribution of articles and / or pictures from its readers. Editorial rights reserved. Cover photo: Nasrullah Arsala


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ISSUE 86 - September 2011

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A second escalating stalemate is afoot in Afghanistan and it’s happening right here in Kabul. A row over the fate of 30 feline

friends is polarizing opinion among America’s Finest at the U.S. Embassy (as first revealed in these very pages three editions past); factions are forming; guerrilla tactics are coming into play and, according to a report in the Washington Post, deadlines are set, loom large and are met with no discernible progress being made. All that’s needed now is a list of impenetrable acronyms to conceal the scale of the calamity. Scene has its own take on the feline skulduggery on pages 66 and 67. Fresh information on the crisis will be gratefully received.

It’s also the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud and the 9/11 attacks this month and Scene is marking the occasion with reflections and accounts of events leading up to and following immediately on from those seminal events. Lucy Morgan Edwards looks at the assassination of Abdul Haq and the opportunities squandered recklessly following the overthrow of the Taliban. Edward Girardet recalls waiting to interview Massoud in the days before his death, squaring up to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and secretive goings on in the wake of the 2001 invasion. And Matthew Leeming relates how he unwittingly spent five days on the road with two al-Qaeda assassins, in the best innocent abroad style. William Boot would be proud.!"

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Afghan Scene September 2011 Team

David Gill is a British writer, photographer and videogarpher focusing on a social documentary and overseas development. His current book projectKabul, a City at Work is a selection of over 100 original portraits.

web.mac.com/shot2bits/work

Manu. Cartoonist, UN employee critic of B.U.LS.H.I.T. Task Forces, PhD student at UC Berkeley. Originally from Brittany, France, living in Brooklyn, NY. I contribute cartoons

to stuffexpataidworkerslike.com, HeloMagazine.org, and Rue89, a French news website where I have a guest blog. My personal website is www.manucartoons.com

and I am also on Facebook and, since very recently, on Twitter.

Edward Girardet has reported widely from disaster zones since the late 1970s. An award-winning correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, he began covering

Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Girardet is author or editor of Afghanistan: The Soviet War; Somalia, Rwanda and Beyond; Populations in Danger;

and The Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan.

Matthew Leeming is an adventurer, entrepreneur and scholar from England who has been coming to Afghanistan since the 1990s. He now divides his time between Kabul

and Aylsford, the Water Cress capital of the world.

Lucy Morgan Edwards arrived in Afghanistan as an aid worker at the height of the Taliban regime in Kandahar. She was an election monitor at the 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga and then

a freelance journalist, writing for the Economist and Daily Telegraph. From 2004-5 she was Political Advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul. She lives with her husband and two children in Geneva. She is married to Philip Spoerri of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

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Afghan Scene September 2011at work at work

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Afghan Scene September 2011Afghan Scene September 2011

Khosty says money changers prefer working at his market | David Gill




Afghan Scene September 2011at work at work

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$20,000,000 to $50,000,000 here at an auction that sets the price for a week; the money changers earn their living by adding a margin to that.

There is currency being exchanged from all over the world, from riyals, dirhams, pounds sterling, Australian and Canadian dollars, to Japanese yen, roubles and euros.

We have an electronic system here too, but as most people are not very skilled at doing deals through the internet and are not up to date on with the situation of other countries they often end up losing money – that’s why they prefer doing deals in the market here.

I am from Khost province. Unfortunately I couldn’t go to school, but I have taught myself a little. I spent most of the first half of my

life being a farmer. When the war started, we moved from our village to the Khost city, and then in 1985 we came to Kabul. My father was uneducated so he didn’t really write down my date of birth and I don’t know for certain how old I am.

At first I started working here in the street, just holding money in my hand with no shop or office. My biggest concern was who to hand over the money to in the evening so it could be kept safe.The exchange rate depends on the Central Bank’s need for Afghanis. Each week it sells

Khosty claims that intelligence agents keep tabs on the money passing through his market | David Gill

The mediator of conflicts | David Gill








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Terrorist networks and drug money affected the money exchangers badly, that’s why we make sure not to get involved in corrupt business and get rid of it as soon as we are informed.

I enjoy my job very much. Because it has been 27 years that I am involved in money exchange, and as practice is the mother of knowledge, I know better than those who have studied banking or monetary systems. I have a very good life, as good as you can imagine. "

As the President of the market my duties are to be the mediator of any conflict between two parties, to try and avoid the government authorities getting involved. I don’t get paid for it or gain any privilege. Each shop is issued only one vote and I have been the winner of the elections all the time, except once.

All the transactions happening in this market are under the control of the intelligence agencies that make sure that the money being transferred or received is from a legal source.

Kabul: A City At Work is a multi-media project, led by a joint international and Afghan crew collecting interviews, photographic portraits and video shorts of the people of Kabul in their working environments. You can find out more at www.kabulatwork.tv

“I have a very good life” | David Gill

at workAfghan Scene September 2011

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$200 per day, or – for the really reckless – the government’s ropy, Russian-built helicopters.

I had heard that if there is a Shangri-la it is the Panjshir in August, a narrow, fertile valley surrounded by arid mountains from which the Afghans have for centuries shot at their invaders. It ends at Kabul, which is now one of the main battle-fronts between the government and the Taleban. I arrived, after a torturing road journey from Khawja Bahauddin, between the mulberry and grape harvests, and as I walked along the road groups of men and children invited me to join them for lunch. It was a sponger’s paradise.

I was an official guest of the government, and now my guide, Qhudai, took me to their guest house, opposite the government helicopter base, before leaving me to recover. I was woken before dawn every morning by the shriek of helicopter engines starting up, and would take my breakfast watching soldiers embarking for the flight to another front. No expense has been spared on the house itself, nor on the bill for staff, and I was comfortable for the first time in a month. (I had been sleeping in chai khanas, which are a

Every year there’s one place in the globe worth going to where things are happening,’ says Basil Seal to his mother, immediately

before stealing her jewels to fund such a trip. ‘The secret is to find out where and to be on the spot at the time.’

This summer that place was Afghanistan, from where I have just crossed over the 16,000ft Shai Salim pass into Pakistan. I met a number of people who, by English standards, were decidedly weird – one man asked me if it were true that in England women could marry their dogs – so the two Moroccan journalists with whom I shared a house in the Panjshir seemed almost normal. It was not until after they had killed themselves and General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Afghan anti-Taleban forces, a week later that I realised I had spent five days living with two of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze fighters.

Foreigners in Afghanistan tread a fairly well-worn path, usually a triangle between the acting capital in Faisabad, the Panjshir valley and the government’s military base, Khawja Bahauddin, in the north. Transport is either by Jeeps that cost

nothing, but ate his way through the rice and mutton with a hearty appetite.

The next day the senior Moroccan saw me using a satellite phone, and he became a good deal more amiable. Satellite phones are status symbols but also basic necessities for travel in Afghanistan, and mine had got me out of a number of scrapes already. He approached me, and asked if I had the phone number of Bismillah Khan, the military commander of the Panjshir. I did, and volunteered the services of Qhudai to help.

‘We are doing a television documentary about Afghanistan, and we need to get on a helicopter to Khawja Bahauddin.’ he told me.

The person to arrange this was the commander of the Panjshir, Bismillah Khan. As it happened, I had met him several days before and knew his telephone number. But he didn’t answer.

‘Do you have General Massoud’s number?’ asked the senior Moroccan. I was slightly staggered.

‘No. I don’t think he gives it out. You see, they can find out where you are from a satellite phone and send a missile in to kill you. That was how the Russians got Dudaev.’

Qhudai looked slightly menacing.‘Why do you want to meet Commander Massoud?’ he asked the Moroccans. I remember them exchanging glances.‘For our TV film,’ he said.

Afterwards Qhudai said to me, ‘I think they are spies.’

cross between a night shelter for the homeless and a boarding school.) For two days I was served enormous meals of mutton and rice, alone in a dining-room designed to seat 30. This changed when the Moroccan journalists arrived.

I first saw them pacing up and down in front of the house. They did not return my hello. That evening I was served dinner on the floor of my room as the Moroccans made free with the dining-room. They spent all the next day in their bedroom with the door open, lying on their beds and staring at the ceiling.

On Qhudai’s return, I delegated him to make inquiries from the staff. ‘They are Arabs,’ he reported, with some disgust. ‘They are very unfriendly.’

The next day I determined to break the ice. ‘I’m not eating in my room,’ I told the major domo. ‘I shall eat with the journalists.’ At eight p.m. sharp I presented myself in the dining-room. Both journalists had already started on the bread. There was a definite hierarchy between them. The first sat at the head of the table. He was large and dark, but his most curious feature were two blackened indentations on his forehead, which looked like the result of torture with a cigarette.

I asked him where he and his companion came from and he said Morocco, but they lived in Brussels. I tried to have a polite conversation about holiday destinations in Morocco, but he was unforthcoming. There was something about his manner that prevented me from asking exactly where he lived in Brussels. His companion said

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realised that there was something wrong (the torture marks on the forehead?), and shouted to Asim to get them out. At this, the senior Moroccan exploded the bomb hidden in his camera. He and Asim were pulverised. The second Moroccan (the one who ate more) escaped and jumped into an irrigation canal, from which he was fished by guards and shot. Massoud died without regaining consciousness. The Taleban immediately claimed that he had been killed outright, and most press reports supported this, but it seems more likely that he hung on to life for nearly a week and died without regaining consciousness.

In retrospect, one can see that the murder of Massoud was a deliberate first step in a carefully planned series of atrocities. Massoud represented the only credible military threat to the Taleban. Known as the ‘Lion of the Panjshir’, revered by his men, he had defeated the Russians 15 times and almost certainly could not be displaced from his stronghold in western Afghanistan. Many people – including Massoud’s younger brother, Wali, the Afghan ambassador in London – have been urging the West for years to arm the Northern Alliance properly to ensure the Taleban’s defeat, but to no avail. Now the man who may go down in history as one of the great generals of irregular warfare, who, with proper support, could have defeated the Taleban in a year, is dead and the West is desperately looking for credible and committed Muslim allies with whom to fight the Taleban. "

This article was first published in The Spectator 20th September 2001

‘But everyone’s a spy in Afghanistan,’ I said. ‘You’re a spy.’ (This was true and was why I had employed him).

‘But they are Arab spies.’ There seems little love lost between Persian speakers and Arabs, so I put this down to racial prejudice.

We left shortly afterwards, and gave no further thought to the Moroccans, except occasionally to speculate that they were probably still waiting in the Panjshir for a helicopter.

A week later we heard that Massoud had been fatally injured in a Taleban attack, but it was only after we had crossed the border into Pakistan and saw a newspaper report that two Moroccans posing as journalists were responsible that we realised the identity our companions. Qhudai reproached himself for his stupidity. I was horrified that we had spent five nights sleeping next to a room full of several kilos of explosives.

After talking on the phone to some of Massoud’s lieutenants we managed to piece together an account of what had happened. While Massoud’s security was tight in many ways, he was always prepared to see journalists. He was a charming, well-educated product of a French lycée and journalists were always happy to see him. Access was controlled by a sidekick we had come to loathe – Engineer Asim – who was obstructive until he was offered money. Asim let the Moroccans into Massoud’s room.

According to our sources, Massoud immediately

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momentarily silhouetted against the moon. They were nervous, undecided as to what they were about to do. Three had their arms held high, intending to stop the Arab firing.

‘Move, go!’ the Arab screamed as Abdul Haq stepped forward from the shadow, still holding the pony by its bridle.

‘I need the pony, I can’t walk without my prosthetic,’ Haq said and his voice, normally steady, wavered.

When I heard this story over three years later, in January 2005, I was told that the reason Haq could not walk was because his prosthetic was actually broken. He had lost his foot to a landmine during his quest to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan during the 1980s.

But that night in October 2001 the Talibs weren’t listening. The pony was called for. He was helped onto the beast and led away, along with two of his commanders. Minutes later, thirteen shots were fired.

This was the capture of Abdul Haq as recounted to me, in Sarobi, by Aga Jan: the man who had been with him on this last mission, as well as countless others during the anti-Soviet jihad. There were varying accounts of what happened next. One was that Haq was tortured and shot in Rishicoor barracks in Kabul; the other, more credible, version was that a day later, the car carrying Haq from Hezarac reached Logar, on the outskirts of Kabul. A second vehicle – this one carrying the Taliban Interior Minister, Mullah Razzaq – sped towards it, from the city

Tera Mangal, Afghanistan, 25 October 2001

‘Al humdullilah, we’ve caught the American and British agents!’ they heard the man say in a thick, Arabic accent, and knew the Taliban were upon them. It was around ten pm and they were in the place named Tera Mangal, crouching on scree slopes dwarfed between slabs of vertical rock face which reached thousands of metres high.

Their Taliban captors moved out of the darkness and faced Abdul Haq. Some minutes earlier, when the group first realised the Taliban were close, Haq had instructed his men to sit apart from one another so they would not all be seen. They had left their weapons back in Hezarac village after lunch with the elders and now had nothing with which to defend themselves. As early as that afternoon, when the Taliban were in each of the four narrow Passes that met high in the Hezarac valley, it had been obvious to them there was no way out of the narrow incline.

The steepness of the slope meant Haq had been forced to dismount the pony. He leant against the animal, breathing hard. Despite being known as the ‘Lion of Kabul’ for orchestrating tactically brilliant operations against the Soviet regime during the 1980s, tonight Abdul Haq seemed spent. The situation was clearly hopeless. He couldn’t move fast and decided to give himself up before they saw the others.

The Arab cocked his Kalashnikov as the three other Talibs moved forward, their dark turbans



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Abdul Haq with Jalaluddin Haqqani at the Meeting of the Commanders, 1991 | Nasrullah Arsala





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transitional government. There was a distinct feeling that a new era of peace was about to dawn over Afghanistan, after twenty-three miserable war years. Despite some of the problems with bribery and intimidation in the first phase of the elections, the process overall had been fairly democratic and UN workers had expressed pride in achieving the election of over a thousand people across Afghanistan.

This Loya Jirga – the first Grand Assembly of Elders to be held here in twenty years – was the first step in the Bonn Process. The Bonn Process was the roadmap, agreed in November 2001, between the international community and a select group of Afghans (some now say too select) for the state-building and democratisation of Afghanistan. It was not strictly a ‘peace plan’ because it failed to include all parties to the conflict, namely the Taliban.

The tent where the Assembly would be held sat white and huge on the highest level of the site, dazzling in the sun against the ochres of the mountainside. The Germans had brought it from Munich, where it had been the principal beer tent at the Ocktoberfest, something the more conservative Afghan leaders coming here tomorrow would probably not be happy to know.

The screams cut through the still evening. A fellow election worker, an American, scurried up the steps shrieking that there were ‘gunmen’ on the site-level beneath us.

A UN political colleague walked towards us.

death questioned but so too was his life and, implicit to that, his ‘value’. When the New York Times described him demeaningly as ‘a middle aged man on a mule’ or a ‘privately financed freelancer trying to overthrow the Taliban’ the implication was that there should be nothing to regret about his loss. In London, an unattributed piece in Private Eye added snidely, ‘Like so many erstwhile terrorists, Haq managed to reinvent himself as a “moderate” and a “peacemaker” – so successfully that his murderous exploits were entirely omitted from every single obituary’.

Other pieces begged to differ and one, written by a cultural anthropologist and former US Diplomat to Afghanistan, had a different take on the story:

‘To hear them talk in Washington and Islamabad, you’d think there was some doubt. In fact, you’d think his death no great loss. Listen carefully. It’s scared talk, the kind of stuff you hear from bureaucrats whose backsides are exposed.’

Abdul Haq, they rush to insist, was on a mission of his own. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Either way, it’s shameful to demean him.

He added:

‘There is some doubt about how the man died and where and when. We know he was ‘questioned’ and then executed. But was it by hanging with his body then used for swaying small-arms target practice, or was he shot in cold blood in a prison courtyard? It was in

eastern Afghanistan – but Jalalabad or Kabul? It was two weeks ago – but late Thursday or early Friday? There’s some doubt about who sent him and who betrayed him. There could even be confusion about his name were it not so well known:

‘Born Hamayoun Arsala 44 years ago, he became “Abdul Haq” – Servant of Justice – in the crucible of our Cold War’s most decisive battleground.’

***

Kabul, June 2002

The evening was still and the dust had settled, now replaced by a light of such crystalline luminescence that the Mausoleum of King Amanullah stood like a cutout on its ridge above the city. On the other side of town, last-minute preparations for the Grand Assembly of Elders, known here as a Loya Jirga, were coming to an end. The buildings of Kabul’s 1970s-style polytechnic had been steadily refurbished: glass puttied into shattered windows, fountains reconnected to water, coats of paint brushed over the strafe marks of machine-gun fire, landmines cleared from the long grass between dorms, piles of mouldering excrement swept from lecture theatres whose last residents had been Arab Talibs.

The delegates who would participate in the Loya Jirga had been elected in their districts and regions, and their thoughts were now pregnant with the responsibility of selecting Afghanistan’s new President and the Cabinet of the country’s

centre. And there, on a piece of tarmac in the open air, Razzaq grabbed a Kalashnikov from his bodyguard. Seconds later, the man Afghans knew as the ‘Lion of Kabul’ was shot dead.

***

On 5 October 2001, the London Evening Standard (see Appendix I) reported a veteran commander of the 1980s Soviet jihad calling for George Bush’s imminent bombing campaign of Afghanistan to be delayed. The commander, whose name was Abdul Haq, needed time, he said, to implement his plan for an internal, peaceful toppling of the Taliban.

‘Every time I meet commanders who cross the mountains in darkness to brief me,’ he said, ‘they are part of the Taliban forces, but they no longer support them. These men will join us and there are many of them. When the time is right they and others will rise up and this Taliban Government will be swept aside.’

Haq went on to add: ‘The people are starving, they are already against them.’

But his voice, so authoritative when visiting Reagan and Thatcher to call for more support to the mujahideen during the Soviet war, was barely heard in the aftermath of September 11. The bombing started and Abdul Haq began his perilous mission. Two weeks later, on 25 October 2001, he was dead.

In November 2001, after his death, Abdul Haq’s obituaries were dismissive, even overtly condemning. Not only was the manner of his





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I decided to leave. But at the gate, British ISAF soldiers, virtually incoherent with tension, said the warlords had forced their way in. ‘Put a f***ing gun to the head of one of our lads,’ one of them spewed, his voice tingling with nerves. ‘He was tellin’ ‘em they couldn’t come in ‘ere with them guns or cars, but the driver slammed down his accelerator and burst through the cordon. F***, this is f***ing crazy,’ he screeched.

Outside in the car park scores of Hilux jeeps, laden with armed men, surged back and forth, like wild horses in a coral throwing up a miasma of dust. I dodged to avoid them, feeling intensely visible and alienated from this display of undiluted, aggressive testosterone. My elderly driver, Jan Mohammad, sat quietly at the far end of the car park, hunched over the wheel. He looked worried and, putting the car into first gear, commented that this perplexing, superfluous display of strength by the bodyguard militias of the warlords who had come to Kabul from the provinces was bistiar gharrab or ‘very bad’.

We drove to the Intercontinental where I had arranged to meet a friend, a Newsweek journalist. The press corps were gathered there in a gloomy interior awaiting a press conference and my friend was re-capping with his interpreter the events of that afternoon. ‘Khalilzad must be out of his mind’ he stormed, ‘Why the hell make such a public display of US interference? He could at least have let the King say it himself?’

He was talking about a last-minute press

building project. Now milling at the edge of the shamiana was Prof (Ustad) Rabbani, a thin man who, though no shia, wore an Iranian-style turban. He had been Afghanistan’s President during Kabul’s 1992!94 ‘terror.’ Behind was Fahim, who looked to me almost gangster-like and was scowling. A former Afghan female colleague who had taken me to visit the World Food Programme’s widows’ bakery programme in January 2002 had explained the significance of the Northern Alliance to the people of Kabul when I had commented naively that with Massoud’s poster plastered around Kabul, people must feel a sense of relief in this new, post-Taliban era. She had reacted with passionate fury.

‘These are not our people, they are from the Panjshir, not here. The people of Kabul hate Massoud because of what he did to us ten years ago! And of all Afghan factions, Massoud’s soldiers were the worst!’ But surely, I asked, these men were better than the Taliban? ‘No,’ she replied, ‘at least with the Taliban, we knew what the rules were!’ She wanted to know why the West had made Fahim Defence Minister. Didn’t we realise he was a terrorist’ who had executed thousands of people when he was head of the KHAD? Taken them out to the airfield where they were killed? Her reaction unsettled me, particularly as she herself had been imprisoned by the Taliban just weeks before September 11, for contravening some rule.

Kabul’s airport had desolate, open land around it. You could kill a lot of people there with no one watching. This evening though, the warlords

continued filing into the shamiana to take their seats. Behind Fahim came Sayyaf. Then there was the thickset, bullish General Dostum.

A couple of women, no doubt emboldened by the atmosphere of intense international interest now in Afghanistan and believing that the rules precluded those with a history of human rights abuses from participating in the Loya Jirga itself, unfurled questions at the strongmen like small arms fire. In short, why were the warlords, those responsible for destroying the country, here? The men stared back unflinchingly. Another woman challenged Rabbani to explain what had happened in Badakhshan for he had apparently bribed his way into a seat by buying votes with fake money printed by the Russians ten years before. As he attempted some explanation, there were peels of laughter from the women. A fellow election monitor, Amy, the daughter of an eye doctor brought up in Afghanistan during the Afghan civil war, was incredulous, having never witnessed Afghan women challenge those who had terrorised them. But at this stage the women – and I – still believed that the international community had come to Afghanistan in the wake of September 11 not just to rout al Qaeda, but to protect these women from the abuses to which they had been subjected for so long. Perhaps that is why they believed they had the ability to hold these men publicly to account. It was a defining moment for them. But it stopped right here. The warlords sat and faced the crowd defiantly and the uncharacteristic reaction of my colleague Nils was my first indication that all was not okay.

When he heard gunmen had entered the site, his brow furrowed and he shook his head, storming away uttering expletives. His anger, so out of character for a man who was one of the ‘elders’ of the monitors – he had spent some twenty-five years in Afghanistan running aid projects for a Nordic organisation – was unexpected. Despite his seniority, it was obvious there was an undercurrent or an agenda of which even he was unaware.

Below us, ordinary Afghans – men and women, old and young – streamed quietly towards a large open-sided Indian chamiana tent with a carpeted floor. All seemed innately proud to have been elected; serious about the task they had come here to undertake: the ‘re-birth of their nation’ in selecting its new government, and also serious about reconstructing Afghanistan after years of bloodshed and war.

However, something they had not foreseen was unfolding. Three shining black Landcruisers, codan masts still swinging after a high-velocity arrival, were parked on the level below us, surrounded by armed men. Through their open doors it was possible to see a stash of RPGs and Kalashnikovs; all strictly banned on the site. The Loya Jirga’s atmosphere, so hopeful even within the past hour, was now bloating with latent violence, like a balloon filling with water until reaching bursting point, unleashing its force without being checked.

These Landcruisers had just borne some of Afghanistan’s most ignominious characters into the heart of the site and – though we did not yet know it then – into the heart of the state-




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to the country of his birth after twenty-nine long years.

The relevance of the ex-King had become obvious to me days earlier on Chicken Street where Afghans sold knickknacks and carpets. An elderly man stepped forward from a doorway to greet me and another election monitor. We were invited into his shop where Uzbek saddle bags, small rugs and old Gardener teapots were stacked. The frail old man offered tea, which my colleague accepted as we continued the discourse. The mood turned wistful: the man had tears in his eyes. Perry conversed with him in dari and explained that the man was happy to see foreigners again and that the last thirty years had been a time of pain for Afghanistan. Everything was okay until King Zahir Shah left, then things had become very black. King Zahir Shah emanated from Afghanistan’s elite Mohammadzai clan of the Durrani Pashtun, rulers of Afghanistan since 1747. He had come to power in 1933 and presided over forty years of peace. It was only when his ambitious cousin, General Dauod, deposed him in 1973, while the King was in Italy for eye surgery, that things began to go wrong. Although Daoud had ‘modernising’ intentions, his was the first in a series of coups which would eventually plunge the country into war. I thought of what the old man must have seen in the years between Zahir Shah’s departure and now: several changes of government and ideology, the arrival of the Russians, a ten year jihad to eject them, then chaos as the various factions vied for power before the Taliban arrived. At our guesthouse, during breakfast table conversations between Nils and the journalists, it seemed there was still

conference which journalists had been called to attend. There, the US Ambassador, the Afghan-born Zulmay Khalilzad, had strutted menacingly up and down. Looking on were the UN chief, Lakhdar Brahimi and Hamid Karzai (who was nominally titled ‘President’ of the Afghan Interim Authority). But most surprisingly, in a quiet corner cowered Afghanistan’s former King, Zahir Shah. The press corps were unaware why they had been called here until Khalilzad, raven-dark eyes scanning the crowd, exhorted, ‘The King will not be running against Karzai as Head of State.’

He had apparently spun on his heels to face the press corps. An impregnable silence had fallen over the room. A protegée of Condoleeza Rice and Member of the Rand Corporation, Khalilzad had worked for UNOCAL, an American petroleum company that for years had courted the Taliban in an attempt to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. The former King, now eighty-three years old, had seemed defenceless to the journalists. When he had returned to Afghanistan the previous week, ending twenty-nine years of exile, Afghans had gathered around ancient television screens in anticipation of his words. The older generation remembered his peaceable forty-year rule with fondness, and so it had been a momentous occasion to see him reach the bottom of the airplane steps on his walking stick. A microphone had been put in front of him, he had opened his mouth to speak and … the sound system cut out. King Zahir Shah had mouthed words into nothingness and Afghans heard nothing of his sentiments about returning


Abdul Haq as a young mujahed | Haji Din Mohammad





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31www.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene September 2011 Afghan Scene September 2011www.afghanscene.com


The UN chief, Lakhdar Brahimi, responded to the disquiet of the election monitors by saying, ‘Tell them to go!’ This was transmitted – rather imperiously – via an aide. Those of us who wished to stay, so the message was relayed, could do so, but we must be content simply to monitor the intelligence police; however we were ‘on no account’ to interfere in their behaviour.

Looking back at what has happened – and what flowed from this event in June 2002 – it seems obvious that, as election monitors charged with protecting the integrity of the democratic process, we should, at that stage, have walked out. Although it was obvious that something was very wrong, I myself was not yet fully aware of the significance of what was going on. Perhaps, I thought naively, a larger and more purposeful plan for peace and stability was unfolding. But many of the monitors, particularly those who had spent more time in Afghanistan, as former aid workers, diplomats and writers during the anti-Soviet jihad, were very aware. One UN colleague had even quit prior to the Loya Jirga, telling Brahimi that he could not agree with the lack of representation of Pashtun elders from the south (for the UN had apparently deemed that they would be too closely associated with the Taliban). For the rest of us, it was only when the Loya Jirga had finished that we could assess what had happened in the cool light of day.

This morning I was to check that Amniyat were not hassling the women in their dorms. There were reports they had even been into the rooms; a surprising contravention of Afghan

Kabul, having routed the Taliban on behalf of the West? I should perhaps explain that Shura-e-Nazar was the name given by Massoud to his mainly Panjshiri-led ‘Council of the North’, a sub-set of the Northern Alliance and comprising members of Professor Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-islami Party. Throughout Kabul in the run-up to the Loya Jirga, the Shura-e-Nazar’ were buying off votes in some areas, intimidating in others and generally working to control the elections. In response to the journalist’s question, Nils sighed and asked them whether giving all the power to people from a valley representing less than five percent of the land area of the country was really sustainable? Afghanistan, he said, could easily end up like a federation, with the Panjshiris controlling Kabul. The problems would come when they tried to extend their influence into other areas. Then there would be fighting, and Pakistan, as well as neighbouring countries, would begin meddling again and things would get very bad.

***

The Newsweek journalist’s comments about Khalilzad’s bizarre behaviour at the press conference on the eve of the Loya Jirga, and its probable connection with the warlords’ subsequent violent arrival at the Loya Jirga site was now obvious. Most of these strongmen had returned rather haltingly from exile to Afghanistan, in the wake of the Taliban’s recent departure. The view of the UN political staff, who had come into contact with warlords and strongmen in the spring of 2002 during elections for the Loya Jirga, was that many of those who had returned would be subject to

some sort of accounting by the international community for the abuses they had committed during the civil war of the early 1990s. But this was not to be.

The following day Amy told me that after my departure those women who had dared criticise the warlords ‘were intimidated to silence by Amniyat’. Amniyat was another name for the Afghan ‘intelligence’ police, also known as KHAD (Khedamat-e-Ettela’at-e-Dowlati) after the Soviet-style state security apparatus built up during the 1980s. Amniyat was made up of the sunglasses-wearing men who had attended the pre-Loya Jirga elections in Kabul with notepads, apparently to record potential troublemakers at the Loya Jirga.

How these security / intelligence men had actually entered the Loya Jirga site, which was supposed to have been secured, was perplexing. Only when we saw Engineer Arif, the Panjshiri chief of Amniyat, who was standing at the top of the site, did it become obvious that their presence was ‘official’. Arif stood imperiously, with heavy-lidded eyes and radio in hand, directing his slick-suited minions around what was supposed to be a sealed meeting for the democratically elected delegates.

These men were loyal to General Fahim, now the most powerful man in the country. Earlier in the year, he had awarded himself the title of ‘Marshall’ and today his intelligence police came to the Loya Jirga armed with Polaroid cameras, video cameras and the threat of later retribution for ‘troublesome’ delegates.

hope the King would be brought back and Nils said:

‘He would be a useful symbol, a banner beneath which opposing factions could unite, in memory of better days. Certainly the older generation are keen for this. Afghanistan is a very conservative society. The King could provide the glue that’s needed. Better than religion.’

Nils had explained that the problems would begin after the Loya Jirga. For it was doubtful the ‘Three Musketeers’ – Fahim the Defence Minister, Qanooni the Interior Minister and Dr Abdullah the Foreign Minister – could all stay in the key ministries. All three were originally from the Panjshir valley, so could not all feasibly stay in power. Fahim should step down but that would be difficult; he was now the most powerful man in the country.

‘The Panjshiris stepped into the corridors of power, taking over Kabul from its inhabitants, without the rest of the country getting a look in,’ Nils explained to the journalists, adding that Fahim had ensured the ministries were staffed by Panjshiris loyal to him. Hence the chiefs of Intelligence and Security are both from Fahim’s village in the Panjshir. Fahim was also supported by Russia, Iran and the US, who needed to decide whether they preferred using him for their ‘war on terror’ or whether they preferred a truly democratic Loya Jirga. The latter would be better for Afghanistan’s stability.

An American journalist commented that surely the Shura-e-Nazir-e-Nazar ‘deserved’ to take





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without feeling harassed. Despite representing fifty-five percent of the population, women were still at risk, and in need of lawyers to take up their cases, as well as women’s shelters.

A Hazara by origin, she had a reed-fine face, short dark hair and laughter lines around the eyes. She had just returned from Washington DC with the other new Ministers. She told me:

‘In Washington, George Bush put his arm around me and said, ‘Don’t worry Sima, we are watching to see that the women of Afghanistan will be okay’. But the other ministers were watching him.’

Behind her words was a degree of isolation, a plea for us to recognise that, despite the renewed interest in Afghanistan’s women following September 11, an automatic progression in women’s rights should not be taken for granted.

Samar somehow resembled Audrey Hepburn: was it the oversized coat, the cropped hair, or her slightness? Yet there was an underlying determination in her tone. She said she had been threatened on the plane back from Washington by the other ministers, who were asking her why she was trying to Westernise Afghan women? Now, here with me, she slapped the table and said:

‘But I’m not asking for abortion rights. If I say ‘access to education’, is it Western? The only way we can change society is via education. Illiterate women think they are the property of men. We need equality, not privilege.’

culture. Outside the concrete building was a huddle of women, and amidst them a former Afghan colleague, Dr Massouda Jalal. She asked why Amniyat were present. Masouda was not just any woman. For several months, she had been preparing her campaign to stand against Karzai as Head of State. When she had first told me I hadn’t quite believed her. But it was her firm belief that if women played a greater role in politics, much of the fighting might be averted. She was nervous. An intelligence officer stood close to her robes, bent over taking notes in a scruffy notebook. She told me it was difficult for her to talk because he would report on her.

Six months earlier, a meeting with the Women’s Minister, Dr Sima Samar, had foreshadowed how things were going to unfold for Afghan women. It was a day sharp with cold, in January 2002 just eight weeks after the Taliban were routed from Kabul, and I had taken some Irish donors to meet some of the new Ministers. We had gone to Samar’s office which was then in a Kabul suburb, Wazir Akbar Khan.

Samar looked vulnerable, sitting on a 1950s sofa and huddled in a black overcoat. The chekhov style stove did little to assuage the blistering cold rising from a concrete floor in the women’s NGO. After six weeks as Minister, she complained that she still had no office. The son of Ismael Khan, Governor of Herat, had taken over the building reserved for her. The act was symbolic; for despite her being a Minister now he was a strongman and she did not matter. She said that she needed an independent place, so women could come

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Today they arrived in their glory; in strings of black Landcruisers whistling through the site, laden with guards and ammunition. Taking their seats they were recognisable by their head-dress: the Tadjik ‘Lion of Herat’, Ismael Khan, wore his trademark keffiyah; the Pashtun Governor of Jalalabad, Haji Qadir, looked monarchical in a gold turban; Dostum, the Uzbek leader of the north, wore a sharp Soviet-style suit and was accompanied by a bodyguard with a crew cut. Finally, the Pashtun Abdur Rassul Sayyaf was crowned with a vast white turban. They sat together in the front row of the meeting, united in their audacity. Behind sat the democratically elected delegates, now hushed to silence by the presence of those who had terrorised them during the civil war years within the past decade.

Most of the Loya Jirga Commission had wanted to disbar Sayyaf’s candidacy because of his human rights record, particularly his brutal campaign against the Shia in Kabul during the early 1990s. But as he took his seat regally a colleague whispered, ‘After the first phase of the election he invited all the candidates for dinner and threatened to slit their throats if they didn’t vote for him in the final phase’. Quoting William Blake, he added, ‘The tigers of wrath are wiser than their horses of instruction’.

But who were their masters? Ourselves? The Americans? The United Nations? Sayyaf wasn’t just any warlord with blood on his hands; he had opened the University of Dawal al-Jihad in the tribal areas of Pakistan using a large donation from bin Laden in 1980. It became a training school for extremists, men

‘I had a big fight with Karzai about this; the man is almost Mullah Omar. How then could he protect women’s rights or make changes?’

The men nodded sagely as she moved onto her third major issue: appointing unindicted former mujahideen to senior positions. In particular Mohammad Fahim, the Defence Minister, was ‘also a problem’, she hissed.

In the Defence Ministry, they have ten Generals but seven are Tajiks, two are Pashtuns and one is Uzbek. None are Hazara. Yet it was Fahim himself who gave the names to the British government. He chose his people. How could the British accept this? You know in Cabinet each day the leaders say they will appoint people on the basis of the Resistance rather than education.

The Afghan ‘Resistance’ were those who had fought the Soviets during the 1980s. Many came from rural areas and were known as ‘mujahideen’. Some Resistance leaders formed factional groups, normally on the basis of ethnicity. Their leaders, men who oversaw many commanders and dealt with foreign donors to the war, were usually called warlords. Energised with anger, Samar went on, ‘But I was also part of the Resistance, only I did not kill anyone! And who bombed the West of Kabul? These men!’

One of the Irishmen finally spoke, asking for an explanation of the pictures of Massoud now pasted up on lamp posts across Kabul. The Iranians, she said, had printed seven metric tonnes of posters of Massoud and the Panjshiris

were putting them up all over, ‘even at a womens’ conference!’

Today, at the Loya Jirga, some six months later, Sima Samar, who had initially been appointed as one of the three Joint Chairman found herself effectively sacked by Karzai. The warlords were apparently unhappy with her appointment.

Leaving the Loya Jirga site that day, I saw an ISAF soldier arguing with an officer of Amniyat. Perhaps the soldier might have been forgiven for assuming that the intelligence men, loyal as they were to Fahim, had no business being here. But evidently no one had briefed him that Mr Kar Sym Yar, now effectively Chairman of the Loya Jirga, had received a visit from the head of Amniyat and several Panjshiri gunmen on the eve of the meeting, the same evening the warlords had forced their way inside the site. Kar Sym Yar had then been forced to sign an ‘agreement’ stating that the ‘security’ of the Loya Jirga was no longer in the hands of the international community, but in the hands of the Panjshiri dominated intelligence police.

***

When the Loya Jirga finally began the next day, it had been delayed by further private meetings between the US, the UN and the warlords or ‘mujahideen leaders’ as they now preferred to be called. The term was a reminder of their more glorious past, when they had dispatched the Russians, before turning on each other in bloody inter-ethnic conflict, laying waste to vast tracts of Kabul and to the civilian population.

The Irishmen nodded sympathetically as she added that the big challenges in Afghanistan were education and employment. She wanted to give women skills so they were empowered. But it was important that the international donors act in a way that did not make the situation worse. She related an example of what irritated her about the weakness of donors in the face of the plight of Afghan women. A year ago the Taliban had announced that women and men should have separate hospitals. She was infuriated by the response of international donors, because the World Health Organisation (WHO) had agreed with the Taliban to ‘build a separate hospital!’ Samar said she believed that this had happened because the head of WHO was a Muslim, and added that when the Taliban closed girls’ schools, UNICEF responded by closing boys’ schools. ‘It gave the Taliban the opportunity to make boys go to the madrassahs!’

Samar looked tensely into her teacup before going on:

Even Karzai was scared to push women’s issues: ‘He’s concerned other leaders will not tolerate progress. So donors must make aid money conditional upon women’s rights being incorporated into projects’.

The Irish donors, who would have several million pounds to spend on Afghan reconstruction, leant towards her, transfixed. But then she was off the issue of ‘conditionality’ and onto the problem of appointing fundamentalists to senior positions. She had protested angrily to Karzai about his appointment of the new Chief Justice:





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But the imam of Kabul’s main mosque, Qari Abdurrahman Qarizada threatened Massouda with his words: ‘Koranic law says women are too weak and unintelligent to run for president’.

The vote for president occurred by secret ballot, although in practice many factional leaders, having worked out deals in the side tent, forced the people from their fiefdoms to vote behind them. Haji Qadir managed to get most Pashtuns to vote for Karzai and so, despite visible support for Massouda (who got over one 170 votes), the overwhelming majority of votes went to the handsome young man from Kandahar who was already interim President of Afghanistan’s Interim Authority.

In his first speech as Transitional President, Hamed Karzai said: ‘The Afghan people want to get rid of warlordism. They want to get rid of the gun once and for all. And once again we have a strong mandate.’

But he then disappeared with the US Ambassador, Khalilzad and Lakdhar Brahimi. They apparently went to the Presidential Palace to make further deals about Cabinet positions with the warlords. Meanwhile, security was tightened with new checkpoints and an earlier curfew across the city.

While the dealmakers were at the Palace, the delegates sat bored, impatient for the Loya Jirga to close and humiliated to have been excluded from the debate. One of them told journalists:

‘I am really disappointed with the Loya Jirga. Governors and officials are telling people

an American Embassy staffer whispered, ‘The Panjshiris are already handing out cards saying “Afghan Transitional Authority”. Like they already know they’ll be the new government.’

***

The die was cast for Afghanistan’s future a day later at the Loya Jirga. The Shiite Ayatollah Asif Muhseni called on delegates to re-name the country the ‘Islamic Transitional State of Afghanistan’. In unison with Muhseni’s suggestion Sayyaf swept to his feet, punching the air as his robes gathered around his legs. ‘Everyone must stand to signal his approval for the motion!’ Sayyaf shouted and the two front rows of mujahideen, including Karzai, rose quickly, eyes darting left and right, shouting ‘right!’ and ‘Allah e akbar’. To be seen with your bottom still on a seat when an issue with ‘religious’ connotations was being debated was to invite persecution. But behind the mujahideen, ordinary delegates rose reluctantly, many forced into doing so by the intelligence police who swept the tent from behind. Incredibly, there was a lone voice of opposition from the warlords: Kandahar’s jowly Governor Gul Agha Sherzai rose from his seat, wiping a bead of perspiration from below his black and grey turban: ‘I think we’ve had enough war since twenty-five years ago in the name of Islam’. Undeterred by a collective gasp from the audience, he continued:

‘This government has enough of a basis in Islam and everybody knows this is an Islamic government. We admire Islam and ... don’t need to put its name on the transitional government.’

But shouting broke out and men surged forwards, threatening chaos until the Governor of Nangarhar took to the podium, blue eyes flashing like headlamps beneath a gold turban. Grasping the microphone determinedly, Haji Abdul Qadir reminded the gathering that it was for ‘Islam’ that so many had sacrificed themselves during the jihad and the country would certainly be named an Islamic state. The motion was passed by a show of hands, few daring to dissent.

Outside the womens’ dorms, Massouda was talking to another woman. She appeared unnerved and distracted. She was about to give a speech about her presidential candidacy but was scared of the reaction of the Mullahs to her candidacy: ‘It is not in Sharia law for a woman to be able to run for president’.

She was hesitant as several black Landcruisers swept past. Dr Rabbani and General Dostum were leaving the site. But minutes later, Massouda, the first ever woman to run for President, gave her speech and said:

‘The women of Afghanistan are champions. And they have to tell the world that even though they have been forced inside the home for the last five or six years, they can free Afghanistan and the world can trust them.’

Afterwards, female and male delegates gathered around her. A male Professor of Medicine at Kabul University told her: ‘We see women in government positions as very patient and trustworthy, we think that if a woman was leader, Afghanistan would progress much faster.’

recruited from across the Islamic world. The terrorists Omar Sheikh and Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, responsible for the kidnap and killing of American journalist Danny Pearl and involvement in both World Trade Centre attacks respectively were reputed to have spent time there and one former student even set up Abu Sayyaf, taking Sayyaf’s name in honour.

A week into the Loya Jirga, former King Zahir Shah was to make a speech. The delegates waited expectantly to hear the words they had missed when Zahir Shah’s microphone had so mysteriously cut as he had stepped off his plane from Rome. The great tent was bathed in silence as the terrapin-like former King moved slowly towards the podium. At last on it, he gathered himself up to speak. His lips moved but his words were lost in the vast depths of the great tent. As the old King mouthed his words the delegates leant forward, straining to catch them. But oddly, the microphone which had worked perfectly just minutes before, had gone dead. It was the second time within a month. Again, King Zahir Shah’s moment had passed, silently. Afghanistan’s people were sorely disappointed.

As the days dragged on and the candidates sat silently in the tent, the real business of the Loya Jirga – the horse-trading – was being conducted without their involvement in a small tent marked ‘VIPs only’. There, Karzai, the warlords, the US Special envoy and the UN chief Lakhdar Brahimi remained for much of the two week meeting, returning only periodically to the main tent after agreements on (unknown) key issues had been made. At the back of the tent





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line of soldiers who towered over him.

The air inside the tent was thick with tension as everyone awaited Karzai. International diplomats and warlords alike had brought armed men. The whole event seemed like a superfluous show of testosterone as the bodyguards of opposing factions and international diplomats talked nervously into hand held radios, all the while eyes scanning the tent.

The new President had already delayed announcing the make-up of his Cabinet once and today the mood was of nervous expectation. Ordinary delegates knew that deals about which factional leaders had been chosen as Cabinet members had gone on elsewhere, instead of with their vote as promised by the Bonn Agreement. Still, they were unsure just who would be given government positions.

Finally Karzai swept in, cutting a fine figure in his long chapan silk coat, lambskin karakaul perched elegantly on his head. Taking his place on the podium, he began by making jokes to ease the tension. But he went on to announce his Cabinet haltingly. Those who had expected the Loya Jirga to rebalance the country’s ethnic power were disappointed. The hegemony of the Panjshiris was reinforced; of the three most powerful ministries – Defence, Foreign and Interior –the Panjshiris conceded one in name only. The only significant Pashtun to be offered a position was the Northern Alliance ally Haji Qadir, the powerful and charismatic Governor of Jalalabad, who was

what to say in their speeches. I myself have been threatened into supporting Karzai and my first candidate was the former King Zahir Shah. This is just a Loya Jirga in name only. The main issues have not been discussed so far. If it goes on like this, fighting could restart because Karzai does not have the support of the majority of the people.’

The choice of Cabinet seats was supposed to have been decided by the delegates but now that it was clear how the meeting was being conducted, the horse-trading had moved unashamedly from the VIP tent to the Presidential Palace. This went on for most of the ten day meeting.

Finally, it seemed, there had been an agreement. So on the night before Karzai was finally due to announce the Cabinet, a British ISAF soldier explained about security arrangements for the next day. ‘We’re gunned to f***,’ he declared nervously as a contingent of the Afghan National Guard marched past with Lee Enfield rifles swinging by their sides. Tomorrow, the tent would be filled with the more deadly armoury of the warlords’ bodyguards.

***

Fahim’s black Landcruiser tore through the site like a dust devil minutes before Karzai arrived the next day. He was a stocky man and descended the vehicle onto a red carpet on which the National Guard were lined up awaiting inspection. With his chin stuck firmly in the air and his thickset nose like a pile of squashed rugs, Fahim began to walk along the

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of Nangarhar, Qadir’s province, had been hiding in the bushes outside the Ministry for several hours waiting.

Three days after Qadir’s assassination, at a registration of journalists at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Panjshiri Press Officer, a small man with a splash of dark hair, a western suit and an east-coast American accent showed us into a minimalist 1970s-style office of leathered white chairs. His look was sullen, as though he really didn’t have time to deal with us. The door was closed and we were told to turn off recording equipment while he spoke: ‘I have just been to a Memorial Service, for a great man. For Haji Qadir’. He paused and looked around the room. The journalists sat in silence. The Press Officer continued, hissing to the group; ‘I’ve been reading some of your stories on his death over this weekend. Most of them are bulls**t!’ He looked around, checking the effect of his words before going on:

‘This was not an ethnic killing. Do I make myself clear? It had nothing to do with ethnicity and let me tell you people, I’m watching the stories you write and I don’t want to see any more bulls**t reporting, like saying this death had to do with ethnicity.’

Though some of the press had said the killing could be ethnically motivated, others assumed it to be the result of a drug feud. When leader of the Eastern Shura in pre-Taliban days, Haji Qadir had apparently made a lot of money. No one was quite sure how, but everyone knew that poppy was the major crop grown in his province.

were able to shape the meetings’ outcome and thus ultimately the outcome for the fledgling Afghan state.

Back then, in June 2002, as the monitors and UN colleagues met to assess the likely outcome of the Loya Jirga, another UN colleague commented, ‘If I had been in Brahimi’s shoes, I would have made a ‘heavier’ footprint and been more engaged. The chance to control the warlords is now lost.’ The warlords, he said, would now return to their fiefdoms emboldened. They had now been ‘legitimised’ before ordinary Afghans in the eyes of the international community. In the following weeks, reports dribbled back to the UN of revenge attacks by these strongmen who, once back in their localities, singled out those democratically elected candidates who had dared speak out at the Loya Jirga. Sima Samar was forced into hiding. Brahimi and Khalilzad’s notion of ‘Peace versus Justice’ seemed dangerously like renting peace. But for how long this peace could be ‘rented’ nobody was sure.

***

Within two weeks though an event occurred that set the stage for a further breakdown of stability. On a hot day in July, when the sun had reached its zenith on the far side of Kabul’s dry riverbed, Afghanistan’s Vice President was assassinated as he and his nephew left his Ministry building for lunch. Haji Abdul Qadir was also the Pashtun Governor of Jalalabad who had mobilised so many votes for Karzai only two weeks before.

When my interpreter Omar and I arrived at the Ministry of Public Works, a small group of journalists were already gathered around Qadir’s bloodied Landcruiser. The site was not yet cordoned off and the vehicle had been driven into a wall, its bullet-ridden sides now resembled a cheesegrater. On the floor and front seats, where the bodies had been pulled from the car, the two men’s ruby-coloured blood glistened. Bystanders said the assassins had rounded on Qadir as he was driven out of his Ministry’s gates, not letting up their firing even as the car plunged into a wall. The killers then took their leave in one of Kabul’s many thousands of yellow taxis, blending instantaneously into the traffic. Someone had clearly wanted Qadir dead and was taking no chances. ‘Shame, he was a nice man,’ said my Newsweek friend quietly. His fixer then reached into the car to pull out Qadir’s bloodied satellite phones and announced that in the last half hour before his death Qadir had tried, three times, to reach someone called ‘Haji Z’. This was probably Haji Zaman, an enemy and rival of Qadir’s from his home Province of Nangarhar, apparently driven out of the country by Qadir in the Spring. But the name which appeared on Qadir’s phone did not belong to Haji Zaman.

Today had been Qadir’s first official day at work as Public Works Minister. Oddly, the bodyguards normally guarding the Ministry were not Qadir’s but belonged to the outgoing Minister. Someone said they had received instructions from the Interior Ministry yesterday to leave their weapons at home today. And several onlookers remarked that the assassins, who had been wearing the white salwar kameez

made Minister of Public Works and one of the three Vice Presidents.

With the meeting closed, Brahimi and Khalilzad announced that its outcome was a triumph of ‘peace versus justice’. When someone asked what this meant Brahimi explained, in a laboured way which rather implied the naivete of the journalist, that to maintain peace within Afghanistan, it had ‘of course’ been necessary to subvert the idea of justice. In later opinion columns, this was explained by adapting a Lyndon B. Johnson quote to refer to the warlords: ‘It’s better to have them inside the metaphorical ‘tent’ pissing outwards than outside the tent pissing in.

But others disagreed with the view that those who had hoped for justice were simply ‘naïve idealists’. One UN official admitted that the UN had ordered the Loya Jirga Commission (which was Afghan led) not to disallow Sayyaf’s election. Although delegates were, under the rules of the Bonn Agreement, supposed to have signed an affidavit saying they had never participated in ‘war crimes’, because none of these people had ever been tried in a court of law, this could not be proven in practice. I witnessed Sayyaf make this point in response to a Washington Post journalist when – at an election at a school near the old British cemetery in Kabul - she had challenged him on his past. As a result of this ‘get out’, those who had previously terrorised Afghans were allowed to lie about their past. Then they were allowed to attend the Loya Jirga and – supported by the Amniyat who intimidated and threatened democratically elected delegates – the warlords





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Every time I meet commanders who cross the mountains in darkness to brief me, ‘they are part of the Taliban forces, but they no longer support them’. Haq explained, ‘These men will join us and there are many of them. When the time is right they and others will rise up and this Taliban government will be swept aside.’ The only condition, he added, was that the struggle be one ‘in which Afghans take the leading role’.

With even the most liberal commentators in Britain subscribing to the idea of unleashing the full might of the West’s military hardware on Afghanistan, the quiet words of this open-faced commander struck me.

That weekend the US-led bombing campaign began. It was Sunday 7 October 2001. A diplomat I’d known in Islamabad met me for supper. He now worked on the ‘Afghan desk’ in Charles Street, but like many Foreign Office officials, hadn’t visited the country. The FCO Security policy was so tight that the Islamabad-based diplomats were not, back in 2000, even been allowed to take a tourist trip up the Khyber Pass. But he had been fascinated by my stories of Kandahar. Tonight he was excited the bombing had begun. On the question of whether the strategy was really to use the Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban, he indicated that this was not the plan, even though, with most of the journalists behind Northern Alliance lines, this seemed unlikely. But he would not say just what the plan was because of ‘security’ constraints. So what was the plan?

‘Pashtun Commanders,’ he sighe. ‘We’re going to use Pashtun Commanders. So you see we’re not relying on the Northern Alliance.’

I asked if that meant they were going to use Abdul Haq, but he asked, ‘Whose that?’ I told him I had read about Haq in the papers the week before. He shrugged, ‘Not so far as I know’.

‘But who else is there?’ I replied, ‘He’s the obvious one isn’t he?’

‘No, not as far as we’re concerned.’

Haq’s brother, Haji Qadir’s strength had been as a pacifier, a bridge between the Northern Alliance and Pashtuns. During the jihad he had, unusually, been a Pashtun Commander representing the Northern Alliance in Kunar. This background had enabled him to push the Pashtun vote for Karzai during the Loya Jirga, while simultaneously keeping the Northern Alliance on board. As such he’d earned the sobriquet ‘Kingmaker’. This was deemed important during those days as the Americans were busy fighting the Pashtuns in the South. But Qadir was seen as the last man after Abdul Haq with significant cross-tribal following. Now both he and Haq were dead."

Lucy Morgan Edwards is author of ‘The Afghan Solution: the inside story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how Western Hubris lost Afghanistan’ www.theafghansolution.com

Haji Qadir had been the brother of another major Afghan commander: Abdul Haq. Ten months before, in the aftermath of September 11, the London Evening Standard had carried a story on 5 October 2001 about Commander Abdul Haq. The headline read ‘Rebel chief begs; don’t bomb now, Taliban will be gone in a month’. A picture showed a large Afghan man named Abdul Haq. Another smaller photo showed him clasping Margaret Thatcher’s hand. It was 1986 and she was lauding him for his role as a guerrilla commander in the Afghan-Soviet war. The reporter wrote that as well as being, ‘one of the most respected mujahideen commanders in the guerrilla war against the Soviets,’ Haq was now ‘a rebel commander at the forefront of a campaign to overthrow the Taliban’.

The Taliban is collapsing from within, Haq explained, ‘The people are starving, they are already against them … but if the missiles strike, this will be delayed, even halted. Mr Blair has the influence to put the hand of restraint on America. I beg him to do it.

But recent press articles had shown Blair leaving Moscow for Pakistan on the latest round of his diplomatic mission to shore up support for imminent US-led military action. He looked like a swotty schoolboy, frenetic and reactionary, desperate for approval. In contrast, Haq’s face appeared calm, cerebral even. His ‘strategy’, the piece said, was to persuade the Taliban’s own military forces to turn against their leaders in a secret war being waged against the hardline fundamentalist regime.





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“We’re doing a TV report,” he volunteered before returning to his sorting. The other Arab, a burly younger man with the broad face of a boxer, glanced at me briefly. He said nothing. When I asked them which network, the severe one shrugged. “A Middle East one,” he said. He nodded to his colleague and they both withdrew to their room, closing the door behind them.

Within a day of our arrival, heavy sand clouds began to envelop the mountains to the west, one of the effects of Afghanistan’s dust-bowl drought, but also a normal seasonal occurrence when the summer gusts known as hundred-day winds can blow for days, even weeks on end. With the sand reducing visibility to less than five hundred yards, the helicopters could not operate, and Massoud could not fly in. We repeatedly asked where he was, but for security reasons no one would say. Assim, in a conspiratorial tone, hinted that the Commander might be on the front line. Or, then again, in Dushanbe, where Massoud’s wife and children lived, to arrange for more ammunition and supplies for the much-awaited counteroffensive. He begged us to be patient.

“The dust will settle soon,” he said. When I suggested that Shuaib and I take off to do some reporting, perhaps even go to the front line, he pointed out that Massoud might come by vehicle. “You should not go far,” he warned.

Frustrated, I turned to Mohammed

September, 2001

I was surprised to see the Arabs. The two men, who wore jeans and T-shirts, did not join us for dinner. Instead, they sorted through equipment on the veranda just outside their room. Adjacent to my own quarters, it was crammed with the usual bulky packs of a television team. One normally did not find Arabs covering the United Front side of the story. They tended to report more from the Talib areas. Furthermore, given the large number of volunteers from the Middle East and North Africa fighting alongside the Islamists, many Massoud supporters regarded the Arabs with suspicion, even hatred. However, new Middle East satellite news organizations, notably Al Jazeera, were beginning to cover conflict stories normally reserved for weightier international broadcasters, such as the BBC and CNN, and I assumed the Arab journalists were part of a similar new venture.

Curious, I walked up to them and shook hands, introducing myself, first in English, then in French, as an American journalist. I asked them where they were from.

“Morocco,” replied the older one in French, but added that they lived in Belgium. He was a severe, intense-looking man in his mid- or late thirties with a tightly rounded face, short hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. He reminded me of the North African intellectuals one sometimes finds hanging out in the cafés of Paris or Brussels.

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whom were camped out in a series of fields on the eastern side of town. Each morning, Shuaib and I would scrutinize the dust clouds, just in case the wind lapsed long enough to allow the helicopters to fly in. Massoud still had a force of about a dozen helicopters shuttling back and forth among the front lines, Khoja, the Panjshir, and Tajikistan. Occasionally, we saw Russian-made Mi-8 helicopters cruising in low over the hills, but these were only local sorties or flights returning from the Panjshir to the south where visibility was better. No helicopters were coming in from Dushanbe.

To bide our time, I chatted with the other journalists and the American women’s group. I also tried conversing with the taciturn Arabs whenever I saw them. But they kept to themselves. They left the compound every morning, their vehicle loaded with equipment, apparently to shoot footage in and around Khoja. When I asked the severe one how the filming was going, his responses were always unenthusiastic. “Good, I suppose,” he said glumly. Neither appeared particularly energetic about their work.

I assumed that they were dejected about the endless wait for Massoud. Once, they made a trip to the Shah Ab POW camp, returning late in the evening. When I saw them the next day standing outside their room, I wandered over, inviting them to join us for tea. The older one declined politely. “Merci, you’re very kind, but we have things to do.”

of Massoud’s reconstruction team and had come to Khoja in search of funding for a sheaf of irrigation and hydroelectric projects. The Afghan engineer had exalted plans for supplying towns, even Kabul, with hydroelectric power as part of a series of grids fed into by local villagers with their own river-generated supply stations. But for this, he needed Massoud’s support.

“Everyone is obsessed with the war, but we must rebuild in those areas where there is no fighting,” he explained, showing me his project proposals splayed out on Assim’s office sofa. “If we do nothing now, there

Kamaludin, a heavyset Afghan engineer from the Panjshir and an old acquaintance from Peshawar.

“How long will this continue?” I asked.

“It could last another day,” Kamaludin said, but then added philosophically, “It could also drag on much longer.” He had previously worked as a logistics coordinator for the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA), one of the first international organizations to provide clandestine cross-border development aid during the Soviet war. He was now head

will be nothing left.”

Kamaludin had a point. Shuaib and I had indeed seen a number of road and bridge projects on our way to Khoja carried out by the British relief agency AfghanAid and the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) as part of their food-for-work initiatives. Yet numerous roads, irrigation canals, and other essential infrastructure were derelict for lack of maintenance.

Frustrated, Shuaib and I debated what to do. There was no question that we would wait it out in Khoja, at least for a few more days. But we had to do something. I was keen to visit other parts, perhaps even one of the camps where Massoud had incarcerated his prisoners of war. The nearest one at Shah Ab held mainly Taliban, but also Arabs and other foreign nationals. There were rumors that some Pakistani officers, including an air force pilot, were being held. The Islamabad government vigorously denied any form of military involvement on behalf of the Taliban, claiming that any Pakistani nationals fighting in the war were volunteers or retired military personnel. I wanted to confirm this for myself. But these locations were all five or six hours away by road. I could not risk missing Massoud should he suddenly show up, as he was apt to leave again just as quickly.

For nearly a week we waited. The only times we ventured out were to visit the bazaar or to talk with refugees, many of

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They’re only Arabs, not very important. The Commander will decide. He is very busy.”

By now it was clear that the dust was not going to settle. We would have to catch up with Massoud at a later date. We had only a few days left on our schedule before I would need to head back to Islamabad and then Europe. Most of the other journalists in Khoja were anxious to leave, either to return home or to get on with assignments elsewhere. Reluctantly, Shuaib and I decided to pull out. We planned to accompany the Feminist Majority women to Faizabad, traveling in two vehicles in case one broke down. They wanted to meet with President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the United Front head of the constantly diminishing rump state of Afghanistan still recognized by most of the international community.

It was now September 6. While waiting to leave the next morning, I saw the older Moroccan emerge from his ablutions in the bathhouse, a towel carefully draped over his head to protect himself from the sand. I walked over to say good-bye. Will you try and go?” I asked. “This dust could persist for days.” He shook his head. “No, we’ll wait for Massoud.”

***

Early 1987

It became increasingly apparent that neither Gulbuddin nor ISI were going to tolerate any form of criticism that might

effective. The long-term idea was to have the Soviet war drag on for as long as possible.

Not long afterward, I attended a formal garden party in Peshawar hosted by USAID honoring a visiting congressional team from Washington. I found myself discussing Hekmatyar with Tom Gouttiere, an old acquaintance and the highly experienced director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He strongly disagreed with me. “You know,” he said as we chatted over drinks. “Hekmatyar’s not as bad as you make him out to be. He’s one of the most effective of the mujahideen.”

Having lost several close friends and colleagues at the hands of Hezb, I found this hard to take. Almost shouting, I told him: “I can accept stupidity, but what I can’t accept is ignorance. You should know better.” There was a sudden silence as startled faces glanced in our direction. I stalked out of the compound, thoroughly embarrassed by my behavior, but also disgusted by the ongoing blindness of so many US policy makers. All one needed to do was visit the refugee camps or travel to find out what was happening. The trouble was that all too many visiting Americans were relying on the same unreliable sources lined up by the Pakistanis and the US embassy in Islamabad.

It was then that I realized that I, too, was beginning to walk a very fine line. In late

When I asked him what he had seen at the camp, he proved more forthcoming.

“We talked with some of the Taliban,” he said.

“Really?” I said, amazed. “What about Pakistanis?”

“Yes, there were some.” Then he smiled apologetically. “I am sorry. We must go. We have work.” They both disappeared back into their room.

Later, I stopped by Assim’s office to ask about them. He gave me a quizzical look. “Do you know them?” he asked.

“No, I’m just wondering who they are. Any idea which television network they work for?”

Assim reached into a desk drawer, pulling out a photocopied document. It was a letter of recommendation—in English—from a London-based organization, the Islamic Observation Centre, signed by its director Yasser Al-Siri. It vouched for the two men, Karim Touzani and Kassim Bakkali, as journalists for Arabic News International. I had never heard of the agency.

“They wish to interview Massoud,” Assim said, gesturing to another page with a typed list of questions. “In fact, they’ve been trying for weeks to get an interview. They were in the Panjshir before. I have told them to wait until Massoud comes.

undermine the Hezb image. Nevertheless, as a journalist, I never hesitated to refer to Hekmatyar’s abuses. Once, in early 1987, I was invited together with Jouvenal and Afghan cameraman Habib Hayakani to speak at a seminar on Afghanistan hosted by a Washington-based think tank. My book The Soviet War had recently been published, so I was considered an “expert,” while both Peter and Habib were known for their exceptional film coverage of the war for the BBC, CBS, and other networks.

The gathering brought together specialists to discuss support for the mujahideen. At least half a dozen CIA agents, all with name tags, were present. At one point, CIA director William Casey quietly entered the room to listen. Peter, Habib, and I were utterly astonished when the bulk of the participants persistently stressed the effectiveness of Gulbuddin and argued he was the key resistance politician to back. When we pointed out that Hezb did not have the on-the-ground support that they claimed, several speakers repeatedly refuted our views.

Later, during a coffee break, one of the CIA delegates rudely accused me of being politically naive and said that I had no idea what was going on. “Hekmatyar’s the best commander out there. He’s the one the Afghans support.” Cynics dealing with Afghanistan have noted that such attitudes were not surprising given that the United States never had any intention of supporting a resistance that was too





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“From good sources,” I said firmly. I tried not to make my nervousness felt. “You know, of course, killing me would not be good for your image.” The reality, of course, was that if something did happen, Hekmatyar would easily get away with it. He had murdered enough people to land himself before any international tribunal, yet probably never would. He was too well protected. We continued with our false chitchat. The mere presence of my colleagues made it clear that his intention to kill me, whether true or not, would be publicized. At least this might make the Afghan warlord think twice before dispatching his henchmen to deal with me. On leaving, I felt somewhat better, but hardly secure.

When I got back to my house, I realized that Malinowski’s warning had been dead serious. A good dozen mujahideen, several cradling AK-74s, were standing by the gate or sitting under the trees in the garden. Two were even holding watch on the roof. They were Massoud’s men. My friend Agha Gul walked up to me. He had heard the same reports in the bazaar of Hekmatyar wanting to kill me. “I have sent these men to protect you,” he explained. “It is important to show Gulbuddin that we are here.”

***

“What have you learned since the British and Soviets invaded this country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?” I asked a British colonel on the tarmac of the former

“I really don’t want a dead American reporter on my hands,” he added with faint smile. Despite Washington’s support for the Hezb politician, Malinowski was never a particular fan. Based on one of our conversations at the American Club, where, after a hard day in the field and everyone drinking too much, he confided, “We all know the guy’s a real f***. But that’s the way it is.”

I pondered Malinowski’s warning. “Well, you know what Hekmatyar can go do with himself,” I told him. I was determined not to become unnerved. At least, not in

1988, Mike Malinowski, the American consul in Peshawar, stopped by my house in University Town. He had come to warn me. “We’re hearing that Hekmatyar is out to get you,” he said. “As you’re an American citizen, it’s my duty to warn you.” Apparently, Hekmatyar was unhappy that I had been focusing so much of my reporting on his abuses. The reports were being picked up by the Afghan-language services of the BBC and VOA. Malinowski had always been helpful toward the foreign press corps. He seemed genuinely concerned. He suggested I leave as soon as possible.

public. Nevertheless, I was fully aware what Hekmatyar and ISI could do. As I walked back into the house, I contemplated my next move. I had no intention of backing down, although I knew that if I informed my editors, they would insist I leave. I decided to confront Hekmatyar in person. But not alone.

Together with two of my colleagues, I headed over to Hekmatyar’s house, which was only a few streets away. As usual, a good twenty or thirty Afghans, including several Pakistanis, milled around in the courtyard. We entered the building, a spacious villa behind the railroad track leading to the Khyber Pass. We were shown into Hekmatyar’s office. Wearing a black turban, he was sitting behind his desk, carefully sifting through papers. Another five or six militants sat drinking tea. He looked up, surprised to see us.

“Good morning, Mr. Gulbuddin. I hear that you’re trying to kill me,” I said, holding out my hand, which he took in his usual limp manner. He smiled wanly. “Please. You are mistaken. Please sit down. Have some tea.” His men immediately vacated their seats, while an aide poured green tea and placed bowls of raisons and nuts on the table.

“So where do you hear this?” he asked serenely, as if questioning me about the weather but clearly somewhat perturbed. It was a pleasure to witness Hekmatyar’s discomfort.

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debriefed. In the spring of 2001, four months before 9/11, Peter flew with him to Kuala Lumpur. The reason for this was that the runner was convinced he would be killed by any one of his three former employers if he remained in Peshawar. Once in Malaysia, he revealed that al Qaeda was planning to hijack aircraft as a means of attacking the West. ABC never used this information because of pressure brought about by a “certain intelligence agency,” which wanted the runner returned. During the briefings, the young Afghan had also showed Peter various locations, including Talib and al Qaeda houses, in and around Kabul on satellite maps.

Bin Laden’s wife and entourage had vacated the house three months previously. All that was left was a bra, a pile of ash where paperwork had been burned, and a promotional VHS video for the jihad. On viewing the video, Peter found images of himself and American journalist Peter Bergen when they had interviewed bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan in 1997. “It was really strange to see myself on an al Qaeda video,” Peter said. Peter and I stopped by the Khyber political agent in Peshawar to pick up our travel permits, and to drop off some blankets for Ajman, a twenty-three-year-old British Talib from Manchester, who was being held by the Pakistanis. Of Pakistani origin, he had been captured three years earlier by United Front troops and had been filmed by Peter for the BBC. The prisoner’s brother saw the story

found himself in the front lines being shelled by the United Front.

“We were all really scared, trying to hide behind trees so as not to be killed,” he said. Shortly afterward, he was captured. The Pakistanis held Ajman for three months before allowing him to return to the UK. Unlike John Walker Lindh, the American who received twenty years’ imprisonment in the United States for joining the Afghan Islamist faction and was accused without evidence of being al Qaeda, Ajman was never charged by the British. Some years later, when I asked Peter what had happened to him, he said that the ex-Talib had been tossed into jail for a barroom brawl. “Go figure that for a fundamentalist,” he quipped.

Once over the border, Peter and I were met by two off-duty Afghan policemen with Kalashnikovs who had driven down from Kabul to escort us. They worked for Agha Gul, our friend from the jihad days who was now a police general; this was a way for them to earn extra money. Many never received proper salaries. Security was now relatively good along the main Jalalabad highway, but there were still problems at Sorubi, where Hezb-e-Islami and former Taliban were known to be operating. Bandits, primarily former mujahideen, were also holding up or hijacking vehicles.

Driving up the Kabul gorge, we passed the point where, two months earlier, on November 19, 2001, four Western

Soviet air base at Bagram north of Kabul. “Never to occupy Afghanistan,” he replied.

His American counterpart, an army colonel, pondered the question. “We’re here to do a job. To bring peace and stability to this country. And to do whatever it takes.”

Bagram, northern Afghanistan, April 2002 My first trip back to Afghanistan was in early 2002, when I drove with Peter Jouvenal to Kabul. He had already rented a large house, which he planned to turn into a guesthouse, Gandamack Lodge, international journalists and aid workers. The house, in fact, had been previously rented by bin Laden for his third wife.

Peter had found it in an unusual way. Nearly a year before 9/11, he had been operating “runners” between Kabul and Pakistan as a means of tracking potential stories for the BBC, CNN, and other networks. One of these was a twenty-two-year-old Afghan called Massoud, who had been working for al Qaeda. He came to see Peter over Christmas 2000, seeking political asylum in the West. “He had also been working for ISI and the CIA, and had probably got in over his head with al Qaeda,” explained Peter. “He was desperately afraid, so I suggested that if he worked for the media, we could probably help him.”

ABC News in New York was the first to be interested in the runner’s information. The network proposed that he be properly

and contacted Peter for help. Peter then approached Massoud and managed to get the young Talib released, but warned him to wait in Afghanistan until his papers had come through. Ajman, however, insisted that the Pakistanis were his friends and decided to make his way to Peshawar. After all, he told Peter, he had traveled back and forth during the Talib period without any problem, and had even carried Kalashnikovs onto Pakistan International Airways flights with the full knowledge of ISI. With the Taliban overthrown, the Pakistanis were now playing another game. They arrested him, possibly in the hope of handing him over to the Americans as al Qaeda, which is what they often did. A substantial number of Taliban held at Guantanamo and Bagram had been palmed off to the Americans by Afghans and Pakistanis alike as al Qaeda based on little or no evidence, but in return for hard cash.

We found Ajman watching a Chuck Norris movie with his guards. Since his arrest, he recounted, he had been visited by British and American officers who wanted to know what he had been doing with the Taliban. When I asked him why he had joined the movement, Ajman shrugged. Back in Manchester he had gotten into drugs and alcohol, but then he decided to come to Pakistan to visit his family and get himself straightened out. He also met some Taliban who had convinced him to join the jihad. With almost no military training, he soon





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APCs, and trucks still littered the roadside. Occasionally, pairs of US Chinook helicopters roared down toward Jalalabad from Bagram or Kabul following the Kabul River.

The American bombing had devastated the outskirts of Kabul along the Jalalabad road. Whole buildings, such as the military academy, which had been damaged only partially during the jihadist battle for Kabul, now lay in utter ruin with rubbled walls and collapsed roofs. Groups of Afghan de-miners wearing blue protective gear worked in the nearby fields and container lots demarcated by small piles of stones and painted red markings. Land mines were not the only problem. Rocket-propelled grenades, artillery shells, bullets, and other unexploded ordnance lay strewn like spilled beans on the ground.

For the first time, I saw also US and British troops. The Americans were helmeted with full armor, while the British wore berets. The Americans were almost always in vehicles, glaring aggressively through sunglasses with their assault rifles at the ready. Their personal contact with the local population was dismal, which is one reason why so many problems later emerged. They acted like occupiers. They also came across as uncommunicative and nervous. I felt desperately sorry for these young men, just as I had felt sorry for those young Soviets who had been thrown into their own ugly and incomprehensible occupation of the 1980s. Only near the American embassy and ISAF headquarters did I ever see

year with more and more attacks. The UN, the embassies, and other organizations were only allowing their personnel in the streets with permission or accompanied by security guards.

Many of the journalists who covered Kabul now stayed at Peter Jouvenal’s Gandamack Lodge, which was a villa in Kabul’s upmarket Shar-e-Now district. Built during the 1930s, when the Kabul bourgeoisie was gentrifying the capital, it had a large, walled garden and was already operating as a guesthouse. A slew of late-nineteenth-century Enfield rifles lined the hallway as one entered. A small British cannon from the same period, which Peter had “liberated” from a former PDPA garrison outside Jalalabad, stood vigil in the garden.

Peter had begun renovating the house in a comfortable Victorian style, strongly marked by a Harry Flashman influence in a bid to recall that cowardly character in George MacDonald-Fraser’s historical novels. He ordered handmade furniture from Nuristan and Peshawar and had a team of Afghan workmen, recently returned refugees, painting the walls. His plans were to have a pub, a pizza oven, and a proper restaurant. It was a good place to relax over a cup of tea, meet new people, and sit in the garden to read. Peter, later described by one British reporter as a “soldier, combat journalist and hotelier,” saw no shame in maintaining Western hotel standards.

journalists had been stopped at gunpoint and executed by armed men. They were Harry Burton, a Reuters cameraman; Azizullah Haidari, an Afghan-born Reuters photographer; Maria Grazia Cutuli, a reporter for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera; and Julio Fuentes of the Spanish daily El Mundo.

According to their drivers, a group of turbaned individuals armed with assault rifles forced the journalists out of their cars near Tangi Abrishum bridge and accused them of being American. They responded that they were European journalists traveling to Kabul. Their assailants then tried to march them off into the mountains, but the journalists refused.

Beating their captives and pelting them with stones, the attackers then reportedly said: “Do you think the Taliban are finished? We are still in power and we will have our revenge.” Moments later, they shot Cutuli and one of the others. The two remaining journalists were killed sometime afterward.

The Jalalabad-to-Kabul highway was even more dilapidated than I had remembered. The asphalt had eroded away, turning the journey into a jolting ride with fine, eye-blistering dust seeping in through the windows and engine. Often, too, we were forced to veer off into the surrounding desert, much of it still mined, to avoid collapsed bridges or open craters. The hulks of burned-out or shattered tanks,

regular US military foot patrols.

The UK soldiers, on the other hand, at least during the first six months when they were based in the Afghan capital, did most of their patrolling by foot. Performing what was known as the “Belfast Waltz,” an experience brought with them from “the troubles” in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and ’80s, they walked single-file through the streets. At least two soldiers were designated “speakers,” who would chat with the kids, hand out sweets, or “A Salaam Aleikum” the shopkeepers. The others fixed their eyes in constant surveillance of their surroundings. Moving forward, they twirled in slow motion to ensure that every angle was covered. In this manner, they cultivated good relations but also performed their security duties with a professionalism that many Afghans came to respect.

The Norwegians, also members of the ISAF contingent, adopted a far more laid-back approach. As a convoy of vehicles drove through central Kabul, the soldiers casually looked out the windows, elbows resting on the frames. With his machine gun pointed skyward, the rear gunner was happily taking tourist snapshots of the bazaar.

Of course, in those days many thought that the Taliban had been beaten and that Kabul was now secure. For several months, this was indeed the case. But then, steadily, the security situation began to disintegrate. A car bomb, a shooting. It got worse every






recollects the events he has seen unfold in Afghanistan—beginning with the Red Army occupation in 1979, the collapse of the communist regime, the bitter Battle for Kabul in the mid-1990s, the Taliban takeover, and the post-9/11 US invasion. "

Edward Girardet has reported widely from disaster zones since the late 1970s. An award-winning correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, he began covering Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. In Killing the Cranes, he

Edward Girardet has reported widely from disaster zones since the late 1970s. An award-winning correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, he began covering Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. In Killing the Cranes, he recollects the events he has seen unfold in Afghanistan—beginning with the Red Army occupation in 1979, the collapse of the communist regime, the bitter Battle for Kabul in the mid-1990s, the Taliban takeover, and the post-9/11 US invasion. This article is reprinted from Killing the Cranes copyright 2011 by Edward Girardet and used with the permission of Chelsea Green Publishing company (www.chelseagreen.com).

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Three people much taller than scene’s snapper | Matt, Melissa and Rima at Nick’s farewell

70s soiree Ariel and Jules at Altai

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A Night to Remember | Joanie and Tom at House 69 Adorable rogue | Matt is back in Kabul Big in Afghanistan | Front man Travis jamming in the pit

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off limits because of the persistent rocket and mortar threat.

“We basically can’t go out at all,” one diplomat confided. “We can’t walk across the street; we have to take a tunnel. There are no kids, no families, and basically what we have is the cats. It’s as close as we come to normality.” But set against the pro-cat lobby are the sticklers for the rules. “I’m not anti-cat,” said one senior diplomat. “I’m pro-public health.”

In April, one of the embassy’s top diplomats, James Keith, set a 60-day deadline for staff members to adopt and ship the cats home– or leave them to their fate. The fight-back, led by the cat committee, did not take long to materialise. Pro-catters claimed an extermination order would do away with valuable mousers, paving the way for a new range of pests to invade the Embassy. These might include not just vermin and poisonous

This is the pressing issue confronting Ryan C Crocker, the new US ambassador to Kabul, and it’s polarising opinion at one of the

world’s largest embassies, the Washington Post reports.

When one of the semi-domesticated cats living on the high-security premises mauled one of the staff earlier this year, health and safety ordered the extermination of the Embassy’s feline population. Ever since, America’s finest have been engaged in a fierce and escalating row over the fate of Gordo, Freckles, Dusty et al.

To understand how emotive the issue has become it’s important to venture inside the claustrophobic atmosphere of the US Embassy in Kabul, where security protocols have not been designed to make diplomats’ lives easy. Entrance is through a series of checkpoints and barred doors that can take 10 minute to navigate. Taking a turn in the garden is often

snakes but feral cats, unused to human contact and far more vicious than their predecessors.

Nor was that all. Unknown activists pinned a letter, Taliban-style, to the wall of the Embassy pub, the Duck and Cover. “Warning,” it read, above an image of two insurgent cats toting AK-47s. “We will break out our fellow comrades from your compound.” Another pro-catter secretly distributed flyers picturing a cat posing as Che Guevara. “Viva la revolucion,” it read.

The other side fought back. One staff member wrote to Afghan Scene. “In one of your publications I saw an NGO supporting the pets... We have cats that needs [sic] to be taken out from the compound. Can you please pass my email/contact info to them or ask them to contact me to talk about the project?” Meanwhile, rules allowing diplomats to keep small pets were quietly revised to exclude cats.

The signs are all that America has stumbled into another escalating stalemate in Afghanistan. "

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Herat RestaurantShar-e Naw, main road,Diagonally opposite Cinema Park

Mixed/WesternLe Dizan (formerly L’Atmosphere)Street 4, Taimani Tel: 0798 840 071, 0700 209 397

Flower Street CaféStreet 2, Qala-e Fatullah. Tel: 0700 293 124, 0799 356 319

Kabul Coffeehouse & CaféStreet 6, on the left, Qale-e Fatullah Tel: 0779 020 202, 0786 226 223, 0785 192 421

Le BistroOne street up from Chicken Street, Behind the MOI, Shar-e Naw Tel: 0799-598852

Red Hot Sizzlin’ SteakhouseDistrict 16, Macroyan 1, Nader Hill Area Tel: 0799 733 468

Le Pelican Cafe du KabulDarulaman Road, almostopposite the Russian Embassy.Bright orange guard box.

IndianNamasteStreet 15, left Lane 4, (last house on right side) Wazir Akbar KhanTel: 0772 011 120

Delhi DarbarShare – Naw, Butcher St, Lane # 3.Tel: 0799 324 899

Anar RestaurantLane 3, Street 14,Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799 567 291

LebaneseTaverne du LibanStreet 15, Lane 3, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799 828 376

Hotels and Guesthouses

Kabul Serena HotelFroshgah Streetwww.serenahotels.comTel: 0799 654 000

Safi Landmark Hotel & SuitesCharahi Ansariwww.safilandmarkhotelsuites.comTel: 0202 203 131

The Inter Continental HotelBaghe Bala Roadwww.intercontinentalkabul.comTel: 0202 201 321

Gandamack Lodge HotelSherpur [email protected]: 0700 276 937, 0798 511 111

Sanpo Guesthouse(formally Unica Guesthouse)Royal Mattress Haji Yaqoob Square

Golden Star HotelCharrhay Haji Yaqoob,Shar-e Naw. www.kabulgoldenstarhotel.comTel: 0799 557 281 , 0777 000 068

Roshan HotelCharaye Turabaz Khan,Shar-e Naw.Tel: 0799 335 424

RestaurantsAfghanRumiQala-e Fatullah Main Rd, between Streets 5 & 6Tel: 0799 557 021

SufiStreet 1, Qala-e Fatullahwww.sufi.com.af Tel: 0774 212 256, 0700 210 651

The GrillStreet 15, Wazir Akbar Khan.Tel: 0799 818 283, 0799 792 879

TurkishIstanbulMain road, on the left, between Mas-soud Circle Jalalabad Road Rounda-bout. Tel: 0799-407818

IranianShandizPakistan Embassy Street, off Street 14 Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799-342928

Italian/PizzaEverest PizzaMain Road, near Street 12,Wazir Akbar Khan, www.everestpizza.comTel: 0700 263 636, 0799 317 979

Bella ItaliaStreet 14, Wazir Akbar KhanTel: 0799 600 666

ChineseGolden Key Seafood RestaurantLane 4, Street 13, Wazir Akbar Khan. Tel: 0799 002 800, 0799 343 319

ThaiMai ThaiHouse 38, Lane 2, Street 15, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel:0796 423 040

KoreanNew WorldKarte 3, in front of Abdul Ali Mostaghni High School. Tel: 0799 199 509

DeliveryEasyfoodDelivers from any restaurant to your home www.easyfood.af Tel: 0796 555 000, 0796 555 001

Room serviceFood. grocery, errand service [email protected] Tel: 0794952001

Supermarkets, Grocers & Butchers

A-OneBottom of Shar-e Naw Park

ChelseaShar-e Naw main road. opp Kabul Bank

SpinneysWazir Akbar Khan, opposite British Embassy

FinestWazir Akbar Khan Roundabout

Fat Man ForestWazir Akbar Khan, main road.

Enyat Modern ButcherQala-e Fatullah main road,Near street four

ATMs

Afghan Spinneys Supermarket, Wazir Akbar Khan(AIB)

AIB Head Office, Shahr-e-Naw, Haji Yaqoob Square, Shahabudin Watt (AIB)

AIB Microrayan Branch, 2nd Micro-rayon

AIB Shahr-e-Naw Branch, Ansary Square, opposit of Kabul City Center, Shahr-e-Naw(AIB)

American Embassy, Massoud Square

Bearing Point Compound, Shahr-e-Naw, Ansary Square (AIB)

Camp Eggers Second ATM, Wazir Akbar Khan

Camp Eggers, Green Bean (AIB)

Camp Gibson -Mil Base, Qasaba Roadd (AIB)

Camp Phoenix, Jalalabad Road (AIB)

Faisal Business Center, Lycee Maryam Khair Khana (AIB)

Finest Food Superstore, Shahr-e-Naw Between Hajee Yahqoob Square, Hanzala Mosque (AIB)

Finest Superstore, Pul-e-Surkh, Kart-e-Se (AIB)

Finest Superstore, Street #.15, Wazir Akbar Khan(AIB)

Green Village, Stratex Hospitality Green Village, KAIA Gate-3, Off of Jalalabad Road (AIB)

ISAF HQ -Military Base, Shashdarak (AIB)

KAIA-Military Base, Beside Kabul International Airport (AIB)

New Kabul Compound, Massoud Square (AIB)

Pinnacle Hotel Services, 5 Industrial Parks, Bagram New Road (AIB)

Supreme Truck Park, New Bagram Road (AIB)

World Bank Guard Hut, Street 15 Wazir Akbar Khan (Standard Chartered)

Standard Chartered Branch, Street 10, Wazir Akbar Khan (Standard Chartered)

Hairdresser(Men & Women)Call Mustafa on 079 888 4403Salon in Sanpo Guesthouse

Afghan Scene Magazine September 2011

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Transcript of Afghan Scene Magazine September 2011