The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (14 page)

As they finished their sweet green tea and looked pointedly at their watches, I asked them a final question. What about the rumour that the Taliban is backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency?

The insurgents laughed. “Everybody knows the situation,” one said.

He was about to elaborate, but his friend cut him off and they excused themselves. One of them asked my guide if we could offer him a ride into Quetta. This made me uneasy, so I sat in the backseat and gave him the front. If I was going to share a car with a Taliban organizer, I wanted to keep an eye on him. He saw my concerned expression in the rear-view mirror and reacted with amusement, muttering something to my guide with a smile. I asked for a translation.

“He says, ‘We won’t kill you,’ ” my guide said. “ ‘We’ll just kidnap you and sell you.’ ” This would have been a real possibility if my guide, a Pakistani journalist, had been less trustworthy. Such a venture
might have netted him tens of thousands of dollars, more than the modest sum I was paying him. But like many of the local reporters who generously offer their help to foreign correspondents in those tough corners of the world, he was a true believer in journalism. This particular translator had been working as a journalist in Pakistan for decades, never reaping much profit but becoming famous on the streets as a fair-minded narrator of current events. The kidnapping joke was laughed away, we dropped off our Taliban acquaintance, and my trip home went smoothly.

I had other meetings with Taliban in the years that followed, and even stayed in touch with the insurgent who had jokingly threatened me. He appeared in Kandahar several times and met for interviews in the backseat of my car as we drove around the city. But the bedrock of any relationship between a source and a journalist is trust, and trusting him was difficult as killings and abductions became more frequent. In the following years I would invent a better way of studying the Taliban, but in the meantime I stopped trying to cultivate them as sources. The last time I saw that insurgent with the manicured hands, he was vanishing into a street in Kandahar city, wrapped in a shawl that looked exactly like the others in the crowd.

I did stay in touch with some friends in Quetta, however, and returned there for a week in 2011. Almost four years after my first visit, the Taliban’s haven remained mysterious. Pakistan discouraged foreign journalists from spending too much time in the city, regulating their visits with a system of “no objection certificates,” paperwork required for any reporting from the borderlands. Pakistani intelligence also kept a close watch over the city’s main hotels, and had a history of harassing people who spoke with outsiders. I obtained a visa that exempted me from the certificate system, and wanted to avoid the hotels by staying at a friend’s house, but this proved tricky. The roads had grown more dangerous since my first trip, so I arrived
in Quetta by air, and when the authorities saw a foreigner’s name on the passenger manifest and did not see any corresponding registration at a local hotel, the intelligence agencies went on alert. After a few days of wandering the city, a local journalist warned me that I should check into a hotel where I could be more easily watched. The next day, an ISI colonel visited my room and demanded a list of all the people I had visited. He was friendly and immaculately groomed. We chatted for perhaps three hours. I tried to emphasize the most innocuous parts of my visit, such as my research about Pakistani’s mining industry, but he pushed me to account for every hour I’d spent unsupervised. I wasn’t exactly under arrest, he said, but it would be safer for me if I remained inside my hotel room. He apologetically explained that the streets had become too dangerous for foreign journalists because of protests against a US raid a few hours earlier in the northern city of Abbottabad. Some locals apparently believed that American commandos had killed Osama bin Laden, the intelligence officer said, rolling his eyes with the condescension Pakistani authorities often show the uneducated masses. “We will never really know what happened,” he concluded.

That was a breaking point, for me. Until that day, I had carefully included both sides of the story about Pakistan’s involvement with the Taliban when I wrote about the allegations of safe havens for insurgents. I reported the comments of the Pashtun nationalists and others who accused the ISI of “financing and harbouring,” but I also included the skepticism of those like the local JUI leader, who portrayed the Taliban as a spontaneous uprising. But sitting with the well-coiffed ISI colonel on the morning of Osama bin Laden’s death, listening to him tell me that nothing had really happened in Abbottabad—that the helicopter assault was part of an elaborate drama—required a superhuman act of willpower not to accuse him of lying.

It also clarified a scene I had witnessed earlier the same week, as I walked to a restaurant with some local journalists, and we stumbled upon what appeared to be a group of Taliban in the darkened street.
They were rough-looking boys with large turbans, swarming over a big yellow piece of construction equipment, a front-end loader with the words
Government of Balochistan
stencilled on the side. Two of the young men stood in the scoop at the front of the machine, reaching up to hang banners from the streetlights on Quetta’s main boulevard. The political flags and posters I had seen on my initial visit to the city in 2006 had given way to a more pro-Taliban mix. Up and down the streets, the black-and-white bars of the JUI were now interspersed with flags that did not merely allude to Taliban sympathies—these were the actual flags of the Taliban, adopted as the national symbol of Afghanistan during the years when it was known as an Islamic Emirate, a plain white background with a declaration of faith in Arabic script: “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

I turned to my colleagues: “Did those Taliban steal that construction vehicle?”

“No,” one of them whispered. “Look closely.”

In the shadows, I could see a few policemen standing nearby, sleepily guarding the young men while they used a Pakistani government vehicle to hang Taliban propaganda in the heart of a provincial capital. My friends steered me away, and when were out of earshot one of them said: “What else do you need to see? Now you understand the whole situation in Pakistan.”

On the street in Kandahar city

I spent a week in early 2007 trying to figure out who raided my office in Kandahar. It had been an oasis in the city, a small nook sandwiched between two other businesses, with two storeys and an open courtyard where sunlight and hanging plants cascaded down from the sky. In the months that I rented the place, it had evolved from a simple meeting spot into a base of operations. We rigged up a satellite connection, installed two computers, and spent hours fixing the system as it endured the finicky power grid and my fixer’s young relatives who sneaked onto the computers in search of pornography. There was a shabby kitchen where a cook made stewed okra and other delicious meals. I even slept there, sometimes, on the low cushions that lined the walls of the carpeted rooms. It was dangerous to step outside for a breath of air, but I could climb a stairway to the roof and peek out at the ramshackle skyline—at least, until the neighbours complained they had seen somebody up there and expressed concern about the privacy of the nearby yards where their women strolled without veils.

We never figured out why the place was attacked. A Taliban spokesman sounded genuinely confused when we described the
incident by phone. He didn’t think it was a Taliban operation, but he couldn’t be sure because the insurgents had many factions. Several days later, he called back to confirm that the Taliban had not raided the office. As if to make up for his earlier uncertainty, he gave us a little display of Taliban surveillance, declaring that he knew exactly who I was and proudly describing the colour of a bag I’d been carrying as I walked out of the military base earlier that day. We consulted two other Taliban sources, and they both suggested the raiders might have been bandits, not insurgents, perhaps in search of a foreigner for a kidnapping. We never entirely ruled out the insurgents, however: a military officer said he considered them the most likely suspects, as capturing a journalist would grab headlines. But plenty of others had reason to take an unhealthy interest in me, or any Westerner. The criminal gangs in Kandahar included many of the notoriously corrupt police, and I would later hear first-hand accounts of police running informal prisons, holding people for ransom. Other friends suggested I might have been raided by agents from the National Directorate for Security, the secret police, perhaps because they were curious about the unexplained presence of a Westerner. There was also the possibility that we’d been searched by one of the militias loyal to Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid, or provincial council chairman Ahmed Wali Karzai, but I detected no traces of animosity as I interviewed both of them later that month. Of the two politicians, Wali Karzai was more dangerous—a reputed drug dealer who lorded over the government-held zones of southern Afghanistan like a personal fiefdom—but I was always careful to treat him with respect.

There was also the possibility that I had attracted notice from the intelligence services of Pakistan and Iran during my fifteen-hundred-kilometre trip earlier that month to the three-way border junction those two countries share with Afghanistan. I had travelled by road from Kandahar, across the border into Pakistan, up through the mountain pass and into Balochistan. The rough scrub melted into
waves of sand as we reached the south side of the Registan—literally “sand land”—a desert that divides the battlefields of Afghanistan from the lawless quarters of Iran and Pakistan where drug dealers and insurgents find their havens. Our journey ended in a market called Taftan, on the Iranian border. It looked like a recycling depot from hell, a jumble of scrap-metal, fuel containers, anything that could be smuggled. The border was closed at that moment because of a dispute between Iran and Pakistan, and I had just arrived at the office of a local commander to interview him about the problem when the telephone on his desk started ringing. He picked it up and gestured at me with a quizzical look. “Mr. Smith?” he said. I hadn’t yet given him my name.

“Yes?”

“It’s for you.”

The voice on the phone sounded like a man who smoked too many cigarettes. Without introducing himself, he started asking questions about my movements in Pakistan’s tribal areas. I identified myself as a journalist and said I was researching a story about the border. The man asked why I was poking around the Pakistan side instead of venturing into Iran. He sounded like a smart guy, and his English was good, so I tried some humour: “Because,” I said, “Iran is not an open democracy like Pakistan.”

The man laughed and coughed. I’ve often enjoyed conversations with intelligence officers because they seem to appreciate irony. On that trip, in fact, I was mostly interested in Iran’s operations around the lawless three-way border junction. The research wasn’t conclusive, but the story we published just before my office got raided contained some examples of insurgents getting weapons and medical treatment from inside Iran. (Later that spring, the United States started making open accusations about Iranian support for insurgent factions.) Despite the timing, however, I never really believed the Iranians had ransacked my office. They were clearly wondering about my presence in Kandahar, but I made a point of stopping for
tea at their consulate in the city, and they invited me to their New Year’s parties.