The New Republic Online
On Sunday U.S. planes circled north of Kabul around the Bagram airport, then nose-dived toward their target, dropping two bombs each from their underbellies. All week long everyone had been complaining that the United States was refusing to bomb the Taliban's front lines. Now a new round of grumbling ensued: Why was the bombing so minimal? On Monday I went to the Northern Alliance side of the line, in the village of Qala-e-Nasru. El Ham, a commander there, was in his early forties and unmarried. His room at headquarters was decorated with cartoon colored posters of Islamic sites and Koranic stories, and photos of his youthful days with the mujahedin, when he looked like a Hell's Kitchen biker in square mirror glasses, or standing in a field with Massoud surrounded by looming poppies. He led us through a minefield, on a narrow stretch of treadupon dirt, to his perch in the trenches. There he polished his black army boots for the tenth time and looked 400 meters across the fields to the mud-baked Taliban buildings that housed his old friend, Sharif.
Sharif and Elham grew up together in the village of Qala-e-Nasru. Together they went to primary school, shot their first Kalashnikovs, at 17 joined the mujahedin, and five years ago fought against the Taliban invasion on Kabul. Then, four years ago, Sharif joined the Taliban forces. It was inevitable, Elham said. "He is Pashtun"--the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan from which the Taliban are largely drawn. Shortly before the United States began bombing Taliban positions in Kabul, Sharif and Elham told their soldiers to hold fire. They emerged from their trenches and traversed the fields between them, meeting in the no-man's land of Rabat. Sharif no longer looked like the man Elham knew years ago. He'd lost an eye from a bullet fired by El Ham's men. His face was scarred and his leg damaged from stepping on a mine, laid by El Ham's men. Sharif asked Elham what he and his troops should do. "I told him, `Your time is over. There's no way for you.' I told him, `You are with terrorists from Arab countries and Pakistan, and you should get out, join us, and save yourself.’" Sharif promised that he'd join his old friend soon. After two more meetings in no-man's-land, El Ham realized his friend was duping him to gather information about potential American attacks and the strength of the Northern Alliance. "I won't meet with him again. He's chosen his way and decided to fight us until the end," Elham told me.
Elham had his walkie-talkie with him and we decided to find out whether Sharif regretted his decision.
"Sharif, Sharif. Are you listening? How was the bombing last night?" yelled Elham, laughing his head off. There was a crackling, and then Sharif appeared on the frequency.
"Our morale is high. The bombs are just landing in the desert. Besides this is not new for us. We’ve seen it all before from the Russians.”
"How are the Arabs with you?" Elham asked. "There are no Arabs and no Pakistanis. We are all Afghans fighting for peace.”
"Why do you hate Americans?”
"All of them are human beings. We never said anything against America.”
"Why then did you attack New York and Washington?"
"It's not us. They have no proof for that. Islam says it's not good to kill anyone.” "Why are you protecting bin Laden?” "Osama is a Muslim mujahedin. He never did anything. It's just lies from America.... It's not good to kill poor Afghan people without any proof.”
"Why did you join the Taliban?"
"I am a mujahed Islamic soldier and because the Taliban are mujahed we joined them to finish the war between all these factions.”
I asked Elham to ask Sharif how he'd feel if he accidentally killed his old friend.
Sharif replied: "I'm not your enemy and I don' t want to kill you. You should leave this front line and don't fight with us.”
For his part, however, Elham wasn't troubled by the idea of killing his old friend in a firefight.
"He's no longer my friend. One hundred people of this village were killed in fighting in these two years. There were many from there and here killed and many dead bodies were in front of our house and we exchanged the bodies for burial."
It was a late-afternoon scene from Breugel's havest paintings. Silhouetted dusty mountains, russet autumn grass, and orange leaves. An indifferent horse grazed as American planes flew overhead. Shouting men led us up to the roof to watch the American bombs fall. In the courtyard below lay an unexploded rocket of a past war. Someone continued hammering to repair his kiosk. Children coming home from school stopped to stare at all the spectators on the street.
That evening we drove through the tunnel of golden-leafed trees that winds through Bagram village. The road is flanked on either side by mud-baked walls, which defend garden plots from the street. We climbed the Bagram air tower to the headquarters of the beefy, jovial, former Communist General Baba Jan, one of the savvier generals around. A storm was blowing in. Half the sky was black. The other half was illuminated by a quarter moon and a giant star. On the not-sodistant horizon we watched dozens of yellow lights making their way to the front line. “You see they have such confidence they don't even turn off their lights," one of Baba Jan's soldiers said of the Taliban. Baba Jan estimated that there are some 6,000 Arab, Chechen, and Uzbek mercenary fighters reinforcing the Taliban. The figure is possibly grossly exaggerated, but there are certainly some, and they've been amassing on the front line around the airport. As U.S. bombers flew overhead, Baba Jan looked out of the watchtower, its glass panels now gone. He was gravely disappointed that the Americans were not even attempting to hit the yellow lights across the way--which should have been easy targets. And so he fired up his walkie-talkie and ordered his men to begin an artillery barrage themselves.
As early dusk began falling over the Shamali Plain on Monday, however, it was clear the Taliban positions were rapidly collapsing. One success after another was signaled by the firing of a rocket and a plume of black smoke hovering like a parachute high in the sky, each one further south as the Northern Alliance captured another village. In one former Taliban village in the cradle of a small mountain to the west, the Northern Alliance soldiers set a blazing fire to tell the American pilots still flying not to bomb anymore because they'd taken the position.
That night I drove back north to Gulbahar to see Commander Qais, who I'd heard was advancing on his home village of Karabagh, one of the last before Kabul. He pulled up to his quarters in a pickup. One of his soldiers got out and breathlessly slipped a red backpack off his shoulder. "It's from an Arab I killed," he said, smiling. He pulled out some clothes and a handwritten driver's license for a man named Abdul Hakim. Wind was whipping around the willows over a brook that ran right down the middle of the road. Qais, a small, thin, modest man who looks much older than his 35 years, walked up to me slowly. His face was splattered with shrapnel wounds. His pockets were full of documents taken from Arabs and Pakistanis who'd been lying injured on the road until Qais's boys ran over them with their tanks. "I was a child when we started fighting terrorism and now my beard is gray. But maybe, finally, terrorism will be wiped out from all the world," he said. He was exhausted but he'd made the two-hour trip back north to see his mother and pick up ammunition, water, and food for his soldiers.
Early the next morning, we took the road out to Karabagh through a melancholy, eerie landscape of burnt-out mud and brick houses, standing like washed-over sandcastles on a beach. When the Taliban captured the place a few years ago, they even burnt the vineyards black. We were expecting to find a Northern Alliance front line, but except for a few soldiers we picked up along the way, the road was empty and we drove on, 20 minutes or so, until Khair Khana, just under the mountain pass that leads into Kabul. Some Pakistanis and Arabs were splayed out dead in the middle of the road, along with one huge, red-bearded Talib. He was a commander named Mahmoud, I later found out, who had been gunned down fleeing from Kabul that morning.
Further on we could see the outskirts of the city in the valley below and hundreds of young men moving up from Kabul to greet the Northern Alliance troops. It all happened so fast, and so unexpectedly. Though the Northern Alliance troops were piled on trucks and vans and buses and even donkeys, the push for Kabul was by all accounts meticulously coordinated, crushing the Taliban in the villages north of the city within hours. Hundreds and hundreds of Taliban defected, others ran, and the front lines collapsed around mid-afternoon on Monday. By about ten o'clock that night, the Taliban were fleeing the capital. Inside the city, Hindi music floated from the windows of yellow taxis. One driver told us he used to play his music softly; if he saw a Taliban checkpoint he'd switch to prayer music.
A traffic jam was forming on the pass while the Northern Alliance soldiers waited for the go-ahead from their leaders to enter the city, so we decided to walk. Though I had a large shawl over my head, I was wearing pants and boots and I wasn't wearing a burqa. An entourage quickly formed around us. Men shouted, "Welcome, welcome." Another shouted, "Oh, it's been so long that I've seen such a girl dressed like you. Five years. I love you." The women wafting along the roadside in their blue burqas said that yes, in a few days, if things were secure, they'd throw them off. "We're free. We're free. They were so horrible, they stoned us, they beat us if we wore these improperly," one woman said quietly through the screen covering her face.
I ran into a few soldiers I'd met in Jabal Saraj, and they led us to a jeep and a man named Amin Doulla, whose missing teeth gave his face the look of an ancient nomad, though he was only 40 years old. "If they'd give him to me I'd eat him," he said, tears filling his eyes as he shook his fists at a young Pakistani man sitting in a jeep between two Northern Alliance soldiers. Amin Doulla shouted at him, but the boy from the Punjab sat stiffly, unfazed. "Three years ago, he fired a mortar into my house," Amin said, pulling his arms back to imitate the firing of artillery. "I hid in the grape fields and watched him burn my house with petrol. All my children were killed. Eight children," he shouted. "I want to eat him. I want to eat him." It was incredible that the two should have met there, on the Khair Khana pass. Soldiers had seen the Pakistani trying to flee up the road. And when they arrested him, Amin Doulla happened to be passing by. Still shaking, Amin Doulla pointed at his own mouth. "He found me, arrested me, and I was in jail for two years and lost all my teeth." Soon, other men gathered round the jeep chanting, "Hit him, hit him, kill this fuck-off."
The crowd around us was getting out of control--the men wanted to look at and talk to the foreigners, especially the American woman--so we got into a taxi going into Kabul. The driver somewhat apologetically said, "You see how the Taliban have made our people so wild." He turned up the music and pointed to the children climbing through the gates of the Taliban barracks, just outside the city, that had been destroyed by American bombs.
For weeks we'd heard about the Pakistanis and Arabs gathering on the front lines, and the claims of the Northern Alliance that Afghanistan is under foreign occupation. Slowly, the truth of those claims came to light. Inside the city, under the pine trees and in the canals of a park near the shutdown cinema, lay the crumpled, stiff remains of several Arabs and Pakistanis who'd put up a two-hour gunfight that morning. Kids had stuffed cigarettes in the mouth of one Arab, wrapped tape from a cassette around his neck, and put a heavy stick in his hand--all symbols of the Taliban regime's repressive practices. Gathered round a sizzled pickup that had apparently been bombed by American planes, clusters of people were sifting through the debris, turning up fingers and hair of Taliban. Children on trucks, on the sidewalks, perched on the walls of the roundabouts chanted unabashedly, "Fuck off Taliban," "Fuck the Taliban mothers," "Death to the Taliban and death to Pakistan."