NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (13 page)

With the ever-present threat of violence, I was surprised that Kabul had a thriving nighttime underground. You could party it up in the former Taliban capital almost like you were back in LA or NYC. Hardcore drugs were everywhere, with opium and hashish being the easiest to purchase. A river of booze flowed through the city. Every Chinese brothel had a bar and there were a few pubs hidden in the smaller hotels and a few safe houses. Driving around the city late one night, I was taken to a discotheque in the basement of a safe house that was large enough to fit two or three hundred people. It was jam-packed with folks from NGOs, the UN, and the embassies. I also saw soldiers whom I knew from Camp Eggers and Camp Phoenix.

It could be perilous frequenting the after-hours bars. Back in late 2006, a friend of mine was picked up and beaten badly in a roust. He was hanging out in a club called Coco Loco’s when the police conducted a citywide raid of known brothels and bars. I visited him in early 2007 after I had returned with MPRI. “Dave, the ‘police’ took me outside and beat the shit out of me.” He lifted his shirt. There were still huge welts across his back and chest. Luckily for him, they didn’t break any bones. “Yeah, the fuckers held me at their ‘police station’ until Blake came and gave me enough to pay the bribe. The bastards. They weren’t wearing police uniforms. I think it was a rival gang of thugs.”

After paying a five-hundred dollar “fine,” he was released. This was the raid in which six Filipino girls were kidnapped, raped, and murdered. The international backlash was intense at first but soon gave way to reality TV. The Afghan government staged raids whenever they were accused of being corrupt. To distract attention, Afghan officialdom would close down various establishments across the city. Within a month or two of the raids, “new” places would start popping up throughout the city under different names. Any place that sold alcohol in Kabul was subject to being raided by one faction or another.

None of the pubs or brothels was a state secret. Anyone who’d been around Kabul for longer than a minute heard of these late night diversions. I wondered why the Taliban never hit them. Every brothel, restaurant, pub, or club operated with sanction from high-ranking Afghan officials, despite being subject to raids by the Afghan police. Nearly all of them were hit about twice a year. The only brothel that I knew of that didn’t get raided was Silk Roads. I was told that its sponsor was too senior to anger. That made perfect sense to me. Silk Roads’ owner was the Afghan Minister of Interior—the top Afghan law enforcement official.

You had to know where to look or who to ask. It wasn’t easy to have a good time in Kabul if you were an outsider. Although once you met a couple of people and learned the city, Kabul was insane. I never had a bad experience there. The Safi Landmark Hotel, which is a part of the Kabul City Center, was a nice place to survey the city from their roof top cafe. The Qa’bool Coffee House was a good place for an iced mocha with other expats. It was in Wazir Akbar Khan that we danced the night away or had a few drinks and checked out female expats. There were always Chinese hookers and Filipino gals as well. The Filipino women mostly worked in the NATO/ISAF PXs and bars. The Marco Polo restaurant and L’Atmos were always good for Italian cuisine. Some of the Chinese restaurants actually served Chinese food instead of hostesses. These joints even delivered.

One of the odder Islamic-flavored phenomenon in Kabul, and Afghanistan in general, was the raids on women’s beauty salons. These seemed to me to be a throwback to the days of the Taliban. Beauty salons were subject to invasion at anytime on the slightest pretense by what I call the “Guardians of Afghan Female Propriety and Chastity.” An Afghan beauty salon can be raided for the most minor of infractions. All it took was a flimsy accusation by a drug-addled Afghan or the police hearing music emanating from inside. The average Afghan male thinks that women who listen to music while in the company of other women are prostitutes. Apparently, this is a major theme of mullahs in the mosques of Afghanistan. If a beauty salon is accused of being a house of prostitution, the owner is hauled off to jail. Women accused of prostitution are nearly always convicted.

Another form of Afghan corruption centered on the checkpoints spread throughout the city, infamous for semi-official shake downs of Afghan nationals and foreign visitors. Police would attempt to bribe everyone they stopped. It usually took a 20-spot to pass through their territory. This was easily circumvented, though, by anyone associated with the American forces in Afghanistan. Most of the Afghan police were easily cowed by U.S. military credentials. “I’m with the U.S. Army. What the fuck do you want?” That was all it took to get them to back down. The Afghan police never stopped military convoys.

The danger and corruption in Kabul are mitigated somewhat by the historical sites that dot the city. One such site is Bagh-e Babur—the Gardens of Babur. Babur became the king of Kabul after capturing the city in 1504. He was a descendant of the great warrior Genghis Khan, and his father carried the blood of the legendary Turkic ruler Timur Shah, conqueror and ruler of the ancient city of Samarkand. While Babur was living in Kabul, he had built the gardens before expanding his empire to the Indian subcontinent where he became the first Mughal emperor. When he died, he’d requested that he be buried in Kabul—the city that he loved. His son, Humayun, packed his corpse in ice and returned his body to Kabul from Agra according to his request.

The Bagh-e Babur was decimated during the Mujahideen siege during the early ‘90s when Massoud, Hekmatyar, Rabbani, and other Muj leaders bombed the city to hell and back, destroying nearly everything. Mujahideen means “holy warrior” in Arabic. The Afghan holy warriors had descended on Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal and proceeded to sack their own capital. In an ironic twist, it was the Afghans themselves who had destroyed the capital city and nearly all of its historical treasures. It was a terrible waste and led directly to the initial acceptance of Taliban rule. When your heroes are murdering and raping your neighbors anyone looks like a savior by comparison.

The Babur Gardens are surrounded by a hillside cliff on two sides and on the other two sides by the walls of what was once a caravanserai—a place of rest for caravans and other travelers along the Silk Road. Souvenir stores run along the caravanserai walls. There is also a tea shop and a store filled with beautiful carpets, rugs, and tapestries. A courtyard opens onto the gardens which are terraced up to the Babur mausoleum and the Shah Jahan Mosque. Shah Jahan was the great grandson of Babur. He built the Taj Mahal for his great love Mumtaz. The mausoleum and mosque are built of marble. The Taj has the same marble lace and column work as the mausoleum and mosque. Babur’s mausoleum contains a marble monument with writings from the Qu’ran on it. Unlike other parts of the gardens, there are no bullet holes in the monument. No pockmarks. No dents or dings. Nearby is the grave of Babur’s most beloved daughter. She died before him and was interred a decade before Babur.

Darulaman Palace is another place of historic interest. This is the famous king’s palace. The Muj obliterated it, too, during the fighting. Whole walls collapsed from artillery fire. Rubble is still strewn all about the insides of the main building. Rooms are entirely obscured by debris. The Muj must have shelled it for days. It had been the seat of power since King Amanullah in the 1920s. That king had been a reformer. He had attempted to drag Afghanistan into the twentieth century by secularizing the country. The rural Afghans had resented secularization thinking it a slight against Islam.

The National Museum of Afghanistan was used as a Muj military base in the ‘90s and only recently opened. When I was there most of the statuary was Buddhist and the rest of it is from the pre-Islamic period. There were no artifacts from Babur or Tamerlane. From the museum, one can easily drive to Antenna Hill and see all of Kabul. From this vantage point, one can see the Safi Landmark Hotel and also all the way out to the airport. Off to the northeast sits the Ghazi Stadium where the Taliban executed Afghans during their unholy reign. On the opposite side, there are miles and miles of mud brick houses with the occasional mansion. Off in the distance are the snow covered Pamir mountains.

¹⁴
FOB—forward operating base—refers to any secured military position, usually an airfield, used to support tactical operations.

¹⁵
Addresses in Kabul were marked in this manner—Wazir Akbar Khan, Street 10, Line 15.

The Taliban’s House of Murder

Late June 2007

My first real experience with Afghans in Kabul was with the interpreters that MPRI hired for its teams. Two “terps” were loaned to each team until it moved on to its final destination in the hinterlands. Both of my terps were young. Neither of them was all that skilled at translation. Sometimes, I think we would have done better communicating with symbols and drawings in those early days. Mahmud and Reza were the two guys loaned to us. Mahmud always seemed angry and thin-skinned to me. We were driving down Jalalabad Road once and I looked over at a wall along the roadside and casually remarked, “Damn, I’d hate to be near that when it falls.” Mahmud took my words as a personal affront, as if I’d just stated that Afghanistan was a shit country that didn’t know how to do anything. He’d start saying things like, “Ach! You Americans think that you do everything better than everyone else!” My buddy Alan would jump in and try to change the subject. Most of the time, I’d let him. Sometimes, though, I wanted to get a few more digs on Mahmud. Usually, I did it just to let him know that I knew what button to push.

Alan was my boy. We were both free spirits. He’d quit drinking a while back because he has a violent temper. “No one wants to see me drunk, Dave.” I saw his temper flare a few times but he had learned to keep it under control. Despite the anger management issues, Alan got along with everyone on the teams.

One day, as we sat bored in our temporary office whiling away the hours on the Internet, I said to him, “Let’s go out and find some trouble on Thursday night. I’m bored to death doing fuck all every damn day. Let’s find something to do.”

“I’ll call Hamdi. He’ll drive us around the city.”

“Anywhere? I want to go to the Olympic Stadium.”

“What’s that?”

“Dude! Come on. It’s where the Taliban executed people. It’s not far from the Kabul Zoo either. We can head over there as well. I want to see the lion that some stupid ass Taliban commander shot in the eye.”

“Why’d he shoot a lion in the eye?”

“I shit you not. When some reporter asked this Talib dumbfuck why he did it, he answered ‘because I didn’t like the way he looked at me.’ That, if nothing else, shows how idiotically stone age those morons are.”

Hamdi always seemed to get a kick out of our banter. He was one of a pool of company drivers. One of the more laid back ones. He didn’t mind driving out to restricted areas. “Hamdi, I want to go to the Qa’bool Coffee house.” Hamdi would shrug his shoulders, “Okay, Mister Dave.” Hamdi came and picked us up. Zach, Alan, and I piled in. We took Zach with us so we would be semi-official. Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to the Kabul Olympic Stadium. Hamdi parked and walked to the entrance with us. He spoke some Dari to the ANP guards. They looked us over, shrugged, and waved us in.

As we walked through the entrance tunnel, chills ran down my spine. This was the Taliban execution grounds shown on CNN and Fox News so many times during the reign of the Taliban. Black turbaned men in black flowing gowns held AK-47s and stood in the middle of the green field. More Talibs stood around the running track. Others patrolled the stands to ensure that the people were properly attendant to the punishments being doled out. A Toyota pick-up would rattle out to the center of the field. Blue burqa-clad women and brown-clad Afghan men would be dragged out begging for their lives. Crimes were read out. Sentences handed down. The Taliban would take out their blade and chop off the hands of men and women accused of thievery. Women accused of adultery or “crimes against chastity” would be forced to kneel as their oppressors fired AK-47s at their backs. My mind replayed the scene of frail women falling forward into their burqas and the Taliban disdainfully dragging their bodies and hurling them into the bed of pick-up trucks as if angered at being inconvenienced by the lives they had taken.

I walked out on that field and could feel the evil that had once dismissively ended lives thereon. I looked up into the stands and could envision thousands of Afghans staring in shock, while others cheered savagely and still others cried for the loved ones lost to the merciless “justice” of the black-turbaned barbarians. It was an emotional moment. Tears ran down my cheeks for the victims of the injustice and savagery of the Taliban.

I asked Hamdi if he’d ever been witness to those maniacal events. He told me that he was in the crowd once. The Taliban had caught him out in the city and rounded him up. He was forced into the stands. They pointed their guns at him and told him to cheer or they’d shoot him. Hamdi’s face was blank as he spoke. His voice carried resentment. There was no love or longing for the Taliban. Hamdi fled the city and took his family to Pakistan. There was nothing for him here when the Taliban took over.

Hamdi took us to a small area that was once the dressing room for athletes. The roof had been blown off during the Mujahideen battles for Kabul. There was a gutted Toyota pick-up truck inside. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. Thousands of marks. Each representing lives ended by the Taliban. The room had been used to hold the people accused by the Taliban. If a woman was found outside with no male escort, they brought her here. If a man was caught stealing, he was brought here. Rapists and murderers were held here. Sometimes, they took them on the field to meet their end. They killed them in here too. They would line them up against the walls and shoot them.

“Hamdi, I can see a murderer being brought here for justice. But a woman who was simply out walking about with no male escort?”