A Rope and a Prayer (16 page)

A month after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the ISI brought Jalaluddin Haqqani to Islamabad for a secret meeting with American and Pakistani officials. The ISI hoped Haqqani would join a new post-Taliban government that did not include officials they viewed as loyal to Pakistan’s rival India. The Americans asked Haqqani to defect from the Taliban. Haqqani rejected the offer and complained that the United States had abandoned Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets. Soon after, American bombs destroyed three of Haqqani’s homes in Afghanistan. He survived and is believed to have played a role in helping Bin Laden—his friend of fifteen years—escape from the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan and cross into Pakistan’s tribal areas in December 2001.

As they did during the anti-Soviet jihad, Haqqani fighters regrouped in Pakistan and then began launching cross-border attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan with the support of foreign fighters. Assassinating and intimidating moderate tribal elders, the Haqqanis steadily weakened southeastern Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. They told the Pashtuns that their primary loyalty should be to Islam, not to their tribe. Gradually gaining strength, they killed moderate clerics and beheaded Afghans working with Americans. Their long-standing ties with Arab militants brought them extensive funding from the Persian Gulf and an acceptance of suicide bombing, a tactic more moderate Taliban still questioned.

Between 2003 and 2007, I embedded with three different American military units that battled the Haqqanis in eastern Afghanistan. The first embed ended with a soldier having his lower leg blown off when our Humvee struck a mine five hundred yards from the Pakistani border. The second involved a unit trying to help a poorly equipped Afghan police chief who feared his own men would kill him because he was from the wrong tribe. And the third involved the Haqqanis beheading a tribal elder who American military officials hoped might work with a team of anthropologists they deployed to better understand Khost’s tribal structure.

In 2004, the former NFL player Pat Tillman was killed in a friendly fire incident during an operation to block a cross-border infiltration route used by Haqqani fighters. Two years later, the Haqqanis used a teenage suicide bomber to kill Hakim Taniwal, a former sociology professor who returned from exile in Australia to serve as governor of two southeastern provinces. After killing Taniwal, they dispatched a second suicide bomber to his funeral, killing six more people.

By 2008, the Haqqanis had fielded several thousand fighters and were mounting complex operations in Kabul itself. They carried out a January 2008 assault on the Serena Hotel that killed six, an April 2008 assassination attempt on President Karzai that killed three, and a July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy that killed fifty-eight people. American intelligence officials reportedly intercepted calls in which Pakistani intelligence officials guided the Haqqani operatives during the Indian Embassy attack. Pakistani officials denied the reports. American officials who were skeptical of the Pakistani military argued that the Haqqanis were still proxies that the ISI continued to use to prevent India from gaining influence in Afghanistan. They argued that the strength of the Haqqanis showed that the Pakistani military was playing a “double game” with the United States. Pakistan arrested Al Qaeda members in the country’s cities, but continued to covertly support the Haqqanis and other Afghan Taliban.

After no public statements emerged from Jalaluddin Haqqani for several years, rumors circulated that he had died. His son Sirajuddin was said to have taken over day-to-day operations of the Haqqani network. In the spring of 2008, a frail-looking but ever-wily Jalaluddin Haqqani appeared in a video.

“This is not a battle of haste; this is a battle of patience,” he said. “If a strong animal fights with a small and weak animal, the big animal uses all its power, not against the enemy, but against itself.”

I had watched the video with a colleague in the newspaper’s Kabul bureau after it appeared. I knew the Haqqanis were the Taliban faction with the closest ties to Al Qaeda. Now I am their first American prisoner.

 

 

In the day after my call to Kristen, Atiqullah and I discuss religion again. He wants to know how devout I am. I tell him that my parents took me to church when I was young, but I know little about Christianity and am not religious. I don’t tell him, but my years of covering religious conflict has made me skeptical of organized religion.

Atiqullah asks me to recite the ten commandments and I struggle to remember them from the Episcopal Sunday school my mother had me attend. My parents were raised Episcopalian but my father became a fiercely independent Unitarian Universalist. In the end, I make up the final three or four commandments. When he asks me if I believe Jesus was the son of God, I say I believe Jesus was one of several prophets, including Muhammad. He tells me that he has sent for an English-language Koran for me to read. My religious beliefs appear to amuse him. I get the sense that he sees me as primitive. The following day, Atiqullah announces that he needs to return to Afghanistan, but that two of his men will stay behind to guard us.

“I will return in seven to ten days,” he promises, then disappears.

One of the guards who stays with us is Akbar, the seemingly kind guard who brought us food in Afghanistan. The other is a heavyset young fighter who recites the call to prayer beautifully each day and rarely speaks to me. We nickname him Chunky. I am allowed to exercise in the yard, and I find that any exercise—no matter how small—raises my spirits. I walk back and forth dozens of times in the yard, which is strewn with bits of trash. Pakistani military helicopters occasionally rumble overhead. Airliners do as well. At certain times of day, I think I’m staring at the Dubai-New York flight I have taken home countless times.

One day, the guards buy a board game called Checkah, a Pakistani variation of Parcheesi, to help us pass the time. Instead of beating us, as I expected, our captors are trying to meet at least some of our needs. But as in so much of what will be seven months in captivity, reasons for optimism are overtaken by harsh realities.

At night, a stream of Haqqani commanders overflowing with hatred for the United States, Europe, and Israel visit us, unleashing blistering critiques that will continue throughout our imprisonment. As they enter the room, I stare at the floor as Tahir has advised me. By not looking at their faces, I hope I am being respectful and showing that I will not be able to identify them in the future to American officials.

First, teenage boys bring in large plates of rice, kebab, and spinach for dinner and place them on a plastic sheet on the floor. Our guards, Tahir, Asad, and I scoop up pieces of food with small sections of flatbread and eat it. There are no tables, chairs, or utensils. We sit on thin maroon floor cushions. Cans of Pepsi are brought in for me to drink. Grapes and pomegranates are served for dessert. I decline, fearing the water in the fruit will make me sick.

The commanders harbor many delusions about Westerners. But I also see how some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. One commander demands that I be chained, citing the shackling of prisoners by American forces. Another commander says he was detained for months by Pakistani ISI intelligence agents in a dank underground cell. When American officials arrived to question him, he was brought to a clean, bright room with a bowl of fruit. When the Americans departed, the Pakistanis returned him to his dungeon.

All the commanders fixate on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi, and Palestinian civilians in American air strikes as well as on the American detention of Muslim prisoners for years without charge. They all know of the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and are infuriated by it. To Americans, these episodes are aberrations. To my captors, they are proof that the United States is a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouts international law. America, Europe, and Israel preach democracy, human rights, and impartial justice to the Muslim world, they say, but fail to follow those principles themselves. When I tell them I am an innocent civilian who should be released, they respond that the United States has held Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Why, they ask, should they treat me differently?

Other accusations are paranoid and delusional. Seven years after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, they continue to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to occupy the Muslim world. They say the United States is forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believe, are making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases. Their hatred for the United States seems boundless.

I
arrive at
The New York Times
building. The offices are bright and modern. The lively red walls seem a stark contrast to the intense and dour expressions among the employees working there.

David’s brother Lee has once again set up camp in an office on the seventeenth floor. David McCraw, the newspaper’s lawyer, has been assigned to help us work with the
Times
’ crisis management firm, Clayton Consultants, and to coordinate the efforts in New York and Kabul to release David. We speak with him each day at noon for updates on the case, to assess different strategies—for example, whether the media blackout is effective or not—and to figure out our next steps.

Today, David McCraw, Lee, and I will interview a private security firm to work along with the people from Clayton. The head of Clayton is joining us for the meeting. We want his evaluation of the firm as well. We need to send someone to Kabul to represent our family during negotiations and relieve the pressure on the paper’s Kabul bureau, which has been fielding the phone calls from David’s captors and trying to get information related to the case. Since the FBI’s hands are tied in terms of helping get David released, the paper, along with Lee and me, has decided to hire an outside security consultancy to conduct negotiations. The head of Clayton Consultants arrives and greets us. Most of the security contractors I have met so far are former employees of government intelligence agencies. He is no exception.

With sandy brown hair, a handlebar mustache, and a monotone demeanor, Clayton’s representative is a walking caricature of an FBI agent—the kind you see on television. He looks vaguely familiar. Later he tells us he has actually portrayed an FBI agent in small parts on television shows.

He also explains that most likely this is a kidnap for ransom case. Our goal, he says, should be to draw out the process, decrease David’s value in his captors’ eyes, and maintain a dialogue with them. Over time the captors will lower their demands, until a realistic amount is agreed on. Prisoner exchanges are not possible, so he advises that we steer clear of this issue during negotiations with the captors. We expect that any haggling will occur over the phone. He says it is customary for families to think about what they might be willing to pay.

It is surreal to be putting a price tag on David. And trying to figure out what the markup might be when we include his two Afghan colleagues. The whole idea of the captors pricing human life like a perishable commodity is revolting. Yet I do not lose sight of the fact that this is a sad situation all around. I imagine life must be incredibly bleak in Afghanistan for kidnapping to be a viable business. Any potential funds we give them could be used to fuel future terrorist attacks or violence. This greatly disturbs us.

Even more upsetting is that I feel we do not have the luxury to debate this topic. While we hope for a ransom-free solution, we are not idealistic about the situation. There is no question that our family will raise funds in any way possible to protect the lives of David, Tahir, and Asad if it is the only means of seeing them alive again. We’ve decided to pursue this course in future communications with the captors.

At present, we are not in the same stratosphere: they are now asking for millions of dollars and the release of prisoners from Guantánamo and Bagram. Lee and I resign ourselves to trying to reach an agreement when the captors diminish their demands to a reasonable amount. We have no idea how long this will take, and at this point we also know that it is nearly impossible to apply logic and reason to an irrational situation.

Lee, McCraw, Clayton’s representative, and I are seated around a conference table in a corner meeting room, tucked away behind the stairwell and removed from the flow of office traffic. The interview begins. We hear from the leader of the private security consulting firm American International Security Corporation, or AISC, which has been recommended to us by a former special operations soldier.

Mike Taylor, the head of the firm and a special forces veteran as well, explains that he has experience “in the field, on the ground.” He is very fit and seems to be in his forties. He never cracks a smile and at first appears put off by our questions. Quiet but hyperalert, he seems to be taking in the details of our surroundings as he seats himself a few feet away from the table.

He proclaims that his agency has never paid ransom for a hostage. “We’ve never exchanged funds,” he says. Awkward silence. Lee and I glance at each other.

We are all a bit baffled by this statement. We thought the private security team would be providing a negotiator. We ask what exactly he means. Mike replies that his team has contacts on the ground, through a local network of informants in Afghanistan, and the region. They have the ability to move money and evacuate hostages. They are not opposed to paying ransom, he says, but have never needed to do so in previous kidnapping cases.

Uncomfortable pause.

I ask bluntly how it is possible to get someone out if no money is paid.