The New Republic
The small, white twin-engine plane veered sharply, looping across the sky, its wing dropping as it tilted away from the jagged mountainside at the gates of the Panjshir Valley. Across miles of open plains and desert, people on their farms, bikes, donkeys, stoops, and roofs, soldiers on their tanks, journalists wondering if they'd ever make it out of the valley now that the high mountain passes are snowbound, stopped and stared. It was a mysterious spectacle: No planes have come this way in years. The little plane touched down at the rough-hewn airstrip recently built by the Northern Alliance on the outskirts of the town of Gulbahar. Journalists who'd gathered not far away, near the white-walled ruins of the dead Ahmed Shah Massoud's old military headquarters in Jabal Saraj, murmured of CIA agents on board. They were here to witness a massive Northern Alliance military exercise with dozens of armored vehicles, artillery, and new professional attack forces. Seeing the plane, one journalist sped to Gulbahar in time to glimpse the white men awkwardly disembark in their fishermen's vests, carrying a mysterious cardboard box. A group of security guards with Kalashnikovs ferried the journalist away, but not before he managed to jot down the license number on the twin-engine otter made in Canada. A resourceful cameraman plugged the number into the FAA's website and discovered that it was, indeed, a spook plane. The registration number was issued a long time ago to a private doctor in Maryland for an acrobatics plane, and it has either expired or been revoked by now. Which means the Americans were essentially flying a vehicle with stolen license plates, an offense only the CIA can get away with.
An atmosphere of suspension hangs over the Panjshir Valley these days. The flies are dropping dead, piling up on our windowsills from the sudden cold. The dust is settling with the rains, and the mountains are turning rich colors of red, russet, brown, and orange. Every day brings rumors of an imminent offensive to take Kabul. Commanders say they're prepared but waiting for the word from their leaders. Their leaders say they're prepared but circumstances aren't right. They complain that until recently the American bombing was inefficient and ineffective and that what they most need they aren't getting--ammunition and fuel. "This delay is bad for the Northern Alliance, the Americans, and the British," said Hadji Qadir, one of the Northern Alliance bigwigs based in Gulbahar. He's a refined Pashtun leader who used to govern Jalalabad and whose brother, Abdul Haq, was executed two weeks ago by the Taliban during a mission to persuade other Pashtun leaders to abandon the Taliban. "The Taliban and their people work night and day while we wait."
In fact, the only Afghans who think the war is making any headway at all are those who have been spending their time not with the Northern Alliance, but with the Taliban. Last week a Talib left Kabul and crossed the front lines to the Northern Alliance side. For business, he said, though he was vague about what kind. Oil, sugar, flour, is all he'd say. These days, fabrics, fruit juice, shampoo, pistachios, and batteries come into Kabul from Pakistan and are then smuggled out, across the battle lines, by men like this Talib.
I met him, oddly enough, in the home of his family, all of whom are Taliban enemies and with the Northern Alliance. This is not unusual. The Talib, who identified himself only as "the engineer," is a Talib of convenience. He started out a security agent for the Communist government under the Russians; when the mujahedin knocked out the Communists, he worked for the mujahedin; when the Taliban knocked out the mujahedin, he worked for the Taliban. In Kabul he has a satellite dish, a video player, and a cassette and CD player, which could easily land him in prison. But his neighbors won't report him since he works for the Taliban. Besides, he invites the others to watch movies and the BBC, and listen to music, at his home. During our conversation his wife appeared wearing a leather bomber jacket, lipstick, and mascara; she said there's not a woman in Kabul who isn't dying for the Taliban to fall.
The engineer told me that the Taliban's grip on daily life in the capital is weakening. The Taliban Ministries have shut down, he said, including the Ministry of Religion, which controls the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Men are cropping their beards, an offense punishable by beating or prison just seven weeks ago. Even the Taliban's trademark wide turbans are being tossed in exchange for more subtle, white skullcaps. And though Taliban agents are everywhere, people are getting braver, bad-mouthing the regime in the bazaars and the streets. "The Taliban are so afraid of people in the city now that they won't go anywhere without their guns," said another businessman who'd just come from the capital. "There's not enough of them in the city and they know that the people hate them." Another young man, who runs a fruit shop in Kabul, left the city with his family because he feared the Taliban would haul him off to the front line like they've done to so many of his peers. "You cannot imagine how tired the people in Kabul are of the Taliban," he said. "They'd rather die than go on this way, and so of course they want the Americans to bomb."
That bombing, however, will not rescue everyone. The years of war, and of allegiance and betrayal by convenience, have gone on too long for that. I met a man who knows this. He may lose no matter who wins. He's in such desperate straits that when I met him, he asked me earnestly, "And if I'm not a case for the UN or the European Council, I should kill myself, don't you think?" People often ask why, if Afghans are so miserable under the Taliban, these famously heroic people haven't risen up from within. Saber Ali's story helps explain why.
I first heard about Saber Ali in the form of a letter he'd written and had translated. His story was so incredible that I finally persuaded his friend to set up a clandestine meeting. I waited for him at the home of someone he trusted, in a sunny room with plants and white curtains, looking out over the windy plains and the snow-covered Hindu Kush in the distance. Saber Ali zigzagged through the village, climbing over walls and through gardens, his head and face completely wrapped in folds of green-and-white checkered Afghan cloth. Out of the folds appeared a 28-year-old, lanky, handsome man with tousled brown curls, enormous brown eyes, and eyelids heavy with anxiety and insomnia. His tan skin was pale and almost sickly from the lack of sun: For years he has either been in hiding or covered in his makeshift turban.
Saber Ali joined the youth wing of Ahmed Shah Massoud's Islamic political movement when he was about 15. Once he arrived at university, where he studied engineering, he and seven other close friends decided to commit seriously to Massoud's government, the Islamic State of Afghanistan. This was around the year 1375, he said. (They don't, I realized just then, use the Gregorian calendar here.) Several months later, in September 1996, the Taliban swept into Kabul. Massoud retreated north with his men, armor, and artillery. And Saber Ali went to his family's village in Bagram, a district north of Kabul that has passed back and forth between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.
"What to do then? We had no idea. So we went to Massoud and he told us to go back to the university, revive the movement, and we'd be fully protected," Saber Ali said. For the next three years he and his seven comrades--all of whom were studying to be doctors or engineers--cultivated new members and began preparing for a United Front coup to overthrow the Taliban. About two years ago a salacious incident unexpectedly gave them their excuse to revolt. The dean of the dentistry faculty was discovered sodomizing a student (a boy; women are banned from schools). Saber Ali, his closest partner Sarajulhaq, a medical student, along with several others, grabbed the dean, wrapped his turban around his neck, and dragged him through the streets with close to 200 students marching behind. "We wanted to show that this is what the Talib are like--a dean of the university, who prohibits these activities"--homosexuality--"practices it himself. It was a very good opportunity for us to show the real face of the Taliban and start our demonstrations."
At the same time, Massoud's forces were advancing to the outskirts of Kabul. "Unfortunately we only made it five kilometers to the presidency before the Taliban security forces drove up in their bipurs," he said, and the three other university students sitting with us in the room burst into laughter. (A bipur is a Taliban mispronunciation of "four-by-four," as in a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. Most of the Taliban are Pashtuns, who pronounce f's like p's. This gaffe is a source of great hilarity for Persian-speaking Afghans.) The Taliban forces rounded up some 150 students from the demonstration. "They put us all in jail and beat us with cables--double-thick electrical cables with a thick metal end. And they kept shouting, 'Who are you working for?'" Saber Ali said, wrinkling his brow while the others in the room laughed nervously, murmuring the name of Mullah Kaibali--or Mullah Cable--the nickname of an infamous mullah who executes prisoners with one blow of an electric cable. It didn't take long for the other students to cough up the names of the eight leaders in their midst, two of whom were Saber Ali and Sarajulhaq.
After months of protests by their families, and by the university, Taliban officials met with Saber Ali and the other seven, beat them mercilessly, and then offered them a conditional release. They could go, but only after they confessed to the deans, teachers, students, and some family members that the dean was innocent, and that they had simply been making trouble. "Then we had to kneel down and kiss the hands of the Talib in front of everyone. There was simply no other way out," said Saber Ali, and everyone in the room winced.
One of the eight students suggested they escape from Kabul. They knew the Taliban were closing in on them. "But we wanted to continue our mission," Saber Ali said, "and we sent a message asking Massoud his advice. He said go on, and be careful." So they did.
And within a month they were back in jail. "This time the torturing was serious. They wanted us to confess that we were working for Massoud, so they could tape-record it and then hang us." That's when Mullah Cable appeared. "Day and night they tortured us until Mullah Kaibali came and killed one of our friends, an engineering student, right in front of us, with one cable blow. It was night. We were terrified. We saw ourselves passing into the next world. The other four told them that Sarajulhaq and I were the leaders, and we knew that if we didn't speak we'd be killed right there," Saber Ali said. "We were obligated to tell."
It was an awkward moment. One of the men in the room with us, though an affable, trustworthy friend of Saber Ali's, was also a commander of the Northern Alliance and a popular leader in Massoud's party. He could be killed for sheltering a traitor like Saber Ali. He laughed and rocked his head from side to side in sympathy with his friend, both for the nightmare of that moment in jail and the fatal consequences of his confession. Just then, his son brought in two old Soviet Makarov pistols with their old leather holsters and bullet belts. One was a prize the commander had pried away from a Russian soldier whom he killed during his days as a young mujahedin. The commander began taking aim at each of us, balancing the pistol on his raised forearm. When I saw him give a silent nod to Saber Ali, I realized he was attempting a comic diversion to get rid of two young men who'd wandered into the room. Finally the commander just ordered them out.
"We gave up two important names in our network. Haroun and Feraidoun," Saber Ali said quietly. "They were taking messages back and forth for Massoud and knew the entire network," he said. Haroun and Feraidoun were not students. They were the link between all the Massoud cells, and their cover was a Property Dealer Shop in Kabul. Pretending to be real estate brokers was perfect for meeting people all over the city. "Every day they had to pass messages on to each network leader. They also had another dangerous job--detonating bombs," Saber Ali said. "When the Taliban captured them, they brought them to the jail and tortured them for seven or eight days. We heard them crying out names. They had no choice. After that they were transferred to the prison in Kandahar." Saber Ali hasn't heard of Haroun and Feraidoun since.
For a brief moment it seemed Saber Ali and the other students would get a reprieve. They paid a hefty bribe to a key Talib in the foreign ministry, who drove them to the Khyber Pass border-crossing with Pakistan. But in Pakistan the men were hunted by Taliban agents. The Talib they'd bribed sent word that they must go into hiding. "We dispersed and each of us went to distant relatives, but they wouldn't even let us in the door!" Saber Ali recalled. Fortunately it was Ramadan, when people drift in and out of the mosque all day and night, and food is offered in the evenings. They took shelter in various mosques until Id-al-Fitr, the feast day that marks Ramadan's end, when they decided to celebrate with their relatives. "But after tea they said we had to leave!" At this, the boys in the room held their stomachs in paroxysms of laughter.
Perhaps it's 20 years of civil war, perhaps it's the lack of control over their fates, perhaps it's the absurd, lunar landscapes of desert and rock. Whatever it is, Afghans laugh more than any people I've ever met. They laugh if someone trips or knocks over tea, if a car backfires or a gun misfires or rockets whistle over their heads. The other day my driver, Tahir, decided spontaneously to bring me and an Austrian journalist to the workshop of Jamshid, an important man in Jabal Saraj. He repairs Kalashnikovs, pistols, machine guns, rocket launchers, and tank guns in an old U.S. shipping container--they make for great bazaar shops. Jamshid's 15-year-old assistant was hammering out a new handle for an old Kalashnikov. He was telling us that he'd worked there since he was eleven, and that he'd just taken his physics exam that morning, when suddenly the container shook and everyone cupped their ears. A machine gun the size of a pogo stick had fired off a round.
The little smith, Jamshid, several other boys in the container, and everyone else broke into a few minutes of raucous laughter, during which Jamshid pulled up his tunic to show where just such a bullet had lodged itself in his stomach a few years back. Another man sitting on a couch showed us his collarbone wound and his mashed ankle. And when I asked whether the round could have killed someone in the mud houses on the hillside across the road (where the machine gun was haphazardly aimed), the laughter only increased. Jamshid threw up his hands. "It's made for killing people. We have to test if they work," he said. "Besides, the women up there love us because of our firing. When the Taliban occupied this area, the women complained that our guns were silent. They accused us of being afraid, so we started business again."
Outside, it was a miserable, rainy day, and streams of mud clogged the road as we climbed back into the truck. Tahir was smiling. Why? I'd spent the previous day in the emergency hospital under an IV drip for dehydration and fever and some microbial disease. For days I'd been moving in sick, slow motion, so Tahir had decided I needed some entertainment. "I wanted to take you somewhere that would make you laugh." The gun repair container!
Saber Ali got up, covered a photograph of Massoud that hung in the direction of Mecca, and bent down to the ground for dusk prayers, insisting that the others join him. Then he went on with his tale. The students had pleaded with their relatives in Peshawar to shelter them until the UN High Commission for Refugees reviewed their asylum applications. Day after day Saber Ali and the other students kept pestering the Peshawar unhcr office until finally they were threatened by an angry UN officer, and four of the six decided to flee back to Afghanistan. There they met with President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who passed them off to Massoud, who arranged for them to finish their studies at the university in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. It was the end of this summer, and they'd just finished their admissions paperwork in Dushanbe, when they got word that the families of Haroun and Feraidoun had killed one of their fathers in retaliation for their confessions. They also learned that the cousins of Haroun and Feraidoun were stalking them in Dushanbe. They took the barge back across the river into Afghanistan, but by then the world had changed. Their mentor and sponsor Massoud was dead, and Osama bin Laden had attacked the United States.
"From one side we saw our enemies in Dushanbe, and then from the other we lost the only support we had. We were completely in danger with nobody to support us. The four of us dispersed, and our families have gone into hiding, too. Now if the high commanders find us, they'll kill us. First because we revealed the network to the Taliban. And second they will assume we're working now for the Taliban--otherwise how could anyone escape from the Taliban jails?"
An American plane flew overhead, and the rumble of a distant explosion seemed to set Saber Ali's mind racing. He flicked some dried chickpeas around on the floor and, with his chin on his knee, said, "If the United Front [the local name for the Northern Alliance] captures Kabul we'll be in the same danger. Only the system of government will change, not the idea of these people, and they'll find another excuse to condemn us." He looked up from under his heavy eyelids and said, in earnest, "The only way out I can see is for us to kill ourselves." I turned to the Northern Alliance commander fingering his yellow prayer beads. He shook his head. "Saber Ali's right. They'll kill him."
A cold northern wind was blowing. The windows were banging. The last amber rays were fading on the snow peaks outside, and Saber Ali suddenly sprang up. "Can I go?" he asked. He wrapped his Afghan cloth around his head and face, and his lanky figure disappeared over the garden walls.