Is This Your First War? (6 page)

Back on the Silk Road

S
cott
Anderson, editor-in-chief of the
Ottawa Citizen
, glowered at me across the empty pint glasses littering the rough wooden tabletop at Woody's Pub on Elgin Street. Half a dozen reporters and editors were there one night after putting the paper to bed a day or two after I returned from New York. Anderson had not yet reached forty years of age and normally had a reserved, if gruff, personality. He usually gave me a hard time, but I was pretty sure he liked me. I wore a shirt and tie. I wrote well, and quickly. And I was ambitious. I had spent much of that year agitating to go to Macedonia, where a conflict had flared up between the Macedonian armed forces and ethnic Albanian rebels. It took some gall to push for foreign assignments in between shifts on the cop desk, but whenever I did the corners of Anderson's normally scowling mouth would budge upwards. Tonight Anderson was unusually animated and seemed, half in jest, to be affecting the persona of a 1920s newspaper baron.

“What am I going to do with you, Petrou?” he said, rocking backwards in his chair.

I took a long swallow of my beer and stared back at him. We were both drunk.

“Send me to Afghanistan, Scott.”

I don't know whether Anderson had planned his response or was simply caught up in the moment, as if I had dared him and he couldn't back down.

“Fine,” he said. “You're going.”

Hung over and bleary-eyed the next morning, I decided not to ask Anderson if he was serious the night before. I started calling the Washington embassies of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan's tiny Northern Alliance-controlled enclave in the northeast of the country to arrange for travel documents. Other journalists were banking on getting into Afghanistan through Pakistan, but I reasoned that the Taliban controlled the border and that I might end up stuck in Peshawar if I did the same.

Over the next few days, as word spread through the
Citizen
newsroom and across the Southam newspaper chain that Anderson was sending an intern to cover the war everyone expected would erupt at any moment, some more senior writers got their backs up, as did the editors of other newspapers in the chain.

Anderson called me into his office at the front of the newsroom. There were a few framed front pages hanging on the wall and a novelty rubber ink stamp that read “Bad Idea” on his desk. I sat down in front of him.

“I've put my reputation on the line for you, Petrou. Don't fuck it up.”

I was terrified of fucking it up right from the beginning. But I was also confident and didn't think his decision to send me was that strange. I had just been to the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and had spent much of the past year reading about Afghanistan and Central Asia — albeit mostly histories about events that had taken place more than a hundred years earlier. And at least I had seen Afghanistan, which, in September 2001, was more than could be claimed by most reporters in the world.

A day or two later Scott stopped by my desk. “We couldn't get you life insurance, so don't get killed.” It was the kind of joke an editor could make then, before journalists in Afghanistan started dying. In December 2009, Michelle Lang, a young reporter working for Scott at the Canwest newspaper chain, was killed along with four Canadian soldiers by a Taliban bomb in Kandahar. I don't need to have talked about it with Scott to know her death tore him up inside.

In retrospect, though, the amateurism surrounding my dispatch to a war was remarkable. The office manager insisted on limiting the amount of money I could take with me to a couple of thousand dollars, suggesting I could pick up more from bank machines when I got there. I didn't have a laptop. I barely got a satellite phone in time. And of course the
Citizen
could have taken out life insurance for me. But it was expensive, so they chose not to. I didn't care. I still don't. A few years later, when we were engaged to be married, my girlfriend, Janyce McGregor, rolled her eyes when I wanted to invite Scott to the wedding. I insisted. The only thing a young reporter really wants is a chance. He gave me one.

I packed in a hurry. I stuffed the shalwar kamiz that a tailor had made for me the previous year in northern Pakistan into my backpack, along with an Afghan blanket and a rolled woolen
pawkul
hat that was popular with Afghan refugees. I brought long underwear, a handful of energy bars, candles, and a toque. I maxed out a cash advance on my Visa card so that I carried a total of about $5,000 U.S. in my pockets or folded into a money belt around my waist. I carried two hard-backed notebooks to write in and a Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, the April 2000 edition, complete with a chapter on Afghanistan. (“Best Time to Go: don't go.”) As an afterthought, I threw in a copy of Peter Hopkirk's book,
The Great Game
, a history of how the nineteenth-century imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia played out across Central Asia. Because I was rushed, and also because I was convinced that any checked luggage wouldn't make it to my final destination, I didn't take much more than this: no stove; no sleeping bag; no knife; no map.

I stood in the doorway of Janyce's apartment in an old house near Elgin Street on my last morning in Canada, the backpack tied shut and leaning against the wall. Janyce faced me half a foot away, her shoulder-length blonde hair wet from the shower. Our toes touched. There was a cab waiting outside. Janyce was already late for work. We had only been together a couple of months. It was an unusual way to begin a relationship.

“Will you be careful?”

“Yes.”

I dragged my backpack down the steep and narrow staircase and threw it into the waiting taxi. The previous night she had slipped a photograph of herself smiling in a black turtleneck sweater and with a message scrawled on its back inside one of my books: “Come home to me soon.” I wouldn't see it until I got to Afghanistan.

I had a brief episode of air rage when the woman at the Air Canada check-in counter refused to let me take my backpack on the plane as carry-on luggage, and I almost missed my airport rendezvous with the guy who was meeting me in Toronto with a satellite phone. But soon I was winging across the Atlantic on an overnight flight. I used my ten-hour layover in Moscow to take a cab into the city and spent about one quarter of my money on a laptop. I needed to switch terminals for my second overnight flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the grungy departure lounge, a priest wearing a coarse brown robe knotted at the waist asked me in English where I was going and promised, unbidden, to pray for me.

One afternoon the previous fall, Adam and I had sat on a balcony in a teahouse overlooking the bazaar in the old trading city of Kashgar, in northwestern China. A few minutes earlier a wide-eyed eight-year-old bathroom attendant in a mosque across the street had saved me from a beating or worse when, with much frantic hand-waving, he stopped me from pissing in what I had assumed was the cleanest, most pristine urinal in Central Asia. As I backed away from the white-tiled trough, half a dozen men filed into the room and sat down to wash their feet and hands in it before prayers.

Adam and I reclined on rope beds, drinking scalding tea from small, handleless, bowl-shaped ceramic cups that we refilled from a large metal pot, and plotted our next move on maps spread out before us. As was the case during the heyday of caravan commerce along the Silk Road trading route, Kashgar remained the place where roads from the Indian subcontinent and what are now the ex-Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan converged. Our visas were for Pakistan, to the south. But the romantic allure of the old Silk Road cities to the west of us, just over the Tian Shan Mountains, pulled at me with a force that seemed almost gravitational. We ultimately stuck to our planned route and turned south, but missing out on Uzbekistan had gnawed at me ever since.

Now, less than a year later, my eyes sticky and my mouth tasting foul, I stepped into the hazy early morning sun outside Tashkent's airport. I flagged down a cab, threw my backpack into the trunk, and asked the driver to take me to the city centre. The Taliban still controlled everything in Afghanistan south of the Uzbek border. To get to Afghanistan, I'd have to first travel through Tajikistan in the east. I planned on spending a day in Tashkent before moving on. My hopes of finding any evidence of Uzbekistan's fabled history in Tashkent faded the closer we got to downtown. It seemed clear that the historical era most influencing Tashkent's present was not the majesty of Silk Road empires but the seventy years of Soviet rule. It hung over the city, inescapable, like a bad smell. It was there in the dreary apartment blocks, the planned sprawl, and, most ominously, in the Stalin-like personality cult directed at Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, whose face looked down from billboards everywhere in the city.

Karimov, whose country's strategic location next to Afghanistan would soon make him an ally of the United States, was confronting his own low-level Islamist insurgency from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose fighters also fought with the Taliban. Karimov's methods of dealing with them included the widespread jailing and torture of anyone he feared posed a threat to his rule, including large number of moderate practising Muslims. His secret service agents have boiled prisoners to death.

The American Department of Defense was willing to overlook these atrocities for years, even if the State Department preferred not to. The United States funded the Uzbek military and trained its soldiers. In return, America was able to use an Uzbek airbase as its staging ground for war efforts in Afghanistan, and the CIA received cooperation from the prisoner-boiling Uzbek security services. American money and aid came with few other strings. Little pressure was applied to force Karimov to democratize his country or scale back human rights abuses. His assistance in the war on terror was considered too valuable.

Then, in May 2005, Uzbek security forces shot dead as many as 1,500 demonstrators in the town of Andijan, gunning down survivors who tried to flee into Kyrgyzstan. The demonstrators had gathered to hear speeches from businessmen who had been freed from jail, and to protest rising prices. Some even invited Karimov to hear their complaints. The Uzbek president nonetheless described the victims as radical Muslim terrorists. China, seeing obvious parallels with its own restive Uighur population, agreed. So did Russia, seizing an opportunity to drive a wedge between the United States and one of its Central Asian allies. The United States, however, could not ignore such a sordid slaughter of unarmed civilians. It condemned the massacre and accepted some survivors of the attack as refugees. Karimov ordered U.S. soldiers out of Uzbekistan that July.

Uzbekistan is now firmly part of Russia's sphere of influence, as it was for decades under Soviet rule. Islam Karimov's oppression, meanwhile, has increased. Not coincidentally, so has the radicalization of growing numbers of Uzbek Muslims. Hundreds have fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. According to Ahmed Rashid, there were maybe five or six hundred Uzbek militants in Pakistan's Tribal Areas after the September 11 attacks. By 2008, there were several thousand under the command of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. New recruits continue to arrive, including from outside Central Asia. In 2010, four German Muslims were convicted of plotting to bomb airports and nightclubs in Germany. The four belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union, a splinter group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. At least two of the convicted men, German converts to Islam, had trained with Uzbek militants in Pakistan.

“Excuse me.”

The woman sitting behind the desk at my hotel in Tashkent was about fifty years old, ethnically Russian, one of thousands whose families were encouraged to move to Uzbekistan during Soviet times and who then found themselves stranded there when the Soviet empire collapsed. Her hair looked as if it had been seared into a puffy helmet with chemicals and a blowtorch. She was smoking and a little overweight, but hard and thick rather than plump, and she wore a starchy uniform that must have been uncomfortable. She had already allowed me to pay for a room, a process that seemed to have required an enormous amount of effort on her part and drained whatever goodwill she might once have possessed.

“Excuse me.”

It took her a very long time to raise her head.

“Look, I'm sorry to bother you. I've been on planes and in airports for two days. I know it's really early in the morning, but I'm starving. Is your restaurant open?”

She looked at me with what I wanted to believe was motherly pity but recognized as contempt.

“
Nyet
.”

I tried to smile and stepped back from the counter toward the stairs heading upstairs to my room. I took a few steps, looked around, and noticed there were no hallways branching off to what might have been place to eat. This wasn't the kind of place with a rooftop patio.

“Do you have a restaurant?” I asked.

She inhaled and blew smoke.

“
Nyet
.”

I have a friend, Justinian Jampol, who used a chunk of money he inherited in his early twenties to purchase Soviet artifacts that were scattered around Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended and grew his collection into a world-class museum. I should have sent him a bar of soap from this hotel. It was pink and hard, about the size of a book of matches, and it refused to lather or break down even after prolonged exposure to hot water. But the room had a bed. I fell into it and was immediately unconscious.

A few hours later, with the sun now high and strong, I left the hotel and started walking toward Tashkent State University. I was only going to be in the city for a day, but I figured I'd file a story while there, and I needed a translator. Along the way I passed an Uzbek man wearing a traditional pillbox hat who was preparing street food in his market stall. He was kneading a ball of dough and then stretching it into strands between his fingers, folding them over and stretching them again. Ever longer and ever thinner. I recognized what he was making and smiled.