Jalalabad, 2002
Hazrat Ali was eager to show off his new toy, a top-of-the-range Toyota Land Cruiser. He had left the factory plastic wrapping on the tan leather seats so they did not get sullied by the gunmen he always travelled with. ‘Look!’ he said, jolting us all in our seats as he fired the vehicle dramatically into reverse. The sensor beeped insistently as it tried to cope with warning of old men on bicycles, chickens, a stray goat, a beggar on stumps and all the usual mêlée of an Afghan street. Best of all was the flashing computer console on the dashboard, with satellite TV and GPS. The only problem was, it was programmed in Japanese, and there were no maps available for Afghanistan.
Hazrat Ali didn’t care. Perhaps because their own land is so devoid of modernity and so drained of colour, Afghan commanders adore glitter and gizmos. In the days of the war against the Soviets in the 1980s it was flashing fairy lights round the windscreen, or my personal favourite, a brake pedal which when pressed intoned ‘Bismillah’ – In the name of Allah.
The paymaster for Hazrat Ali’s latest car was the same – and as they always did back then, he had hung a sickly-sweet pine-tree air freshener from the rear-view mirror – but this was a whole new scale of warlord gadgetry. Black Toyota SUVs were the vehicle of choice of Third World militias, and he had just taken delivery of a fleet of six spanking-new ones, cementing his status as the biggest warlord in Jalalabad.
I was sitting in the restaurant of the gloomy Spinghar Hotel, staring at the one-item lunch menu – ‘Chicken kerahi or not’ – with my gloomy interpreter Dr Rais when we heard a vehicle roar up outside. It had a Dubai number plate, and I could tell it was one of Hazrat Ali’s as it had a large poster on the back of the late Ahmat Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader for whom he had fought. Out jumped five men in khakis clutching AK47s and grenade launchers, walking straight past the ‘No Kalashnikovs’ sign at the hotel entrance. They were my escort.
We sped through the city, which it was hard to imagine had once been the winter capital of the royal family, a place of palm trees and orange groves. The old palaces were all in ruins, but Dr Rais pointed out the tomb of King Habibullah, the son of Abdur Rahman. Like most Afghan Kings, he had been assassinated – in his case while on a hunting trip nearby in 1919. The garden was overgrown and scattered with old iron bedsteads and chairs, among which some men were scavenging for anything they might sell. ‘The merchants of ruin,’ sighed Dr Rais poetically.
In the distance we could see the Tora Bora mountains where Osama bin Laden had last been seen. Since then his only manifestation was on the occasional video or tape recording.
It was because of bin Laden that Hazrat Ali, at thirty-eight, and with three wives to support, was experiencing such a change in fortune. Barely able to read or write, he was from the small Pashai tribe, which was looked down on by the local Pashtuns. Behind his back they called him ‘shurrhi’, which means stupid mountain man. He didn’t care. Marshal Fahim, the Defence Minister, had named him military commander for Jalalabad; he claimed to have 18,000 men under his control; and more importantly, he had the most powerful backer of all.
Back at his house, two visitors had arrived. I was shown into the living room. Hazrat Ali was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sucking salted pomegranate pips that shone like rubies in a dish and click-clacking a string of blue prayer beads, lapis from the mountains of Badakshan. Next to him was a satellite phone.
His visitors were two Americans, squatting awkwardly on the floor cushions with a black briefcase in front of them. One was pale, grey-bearded and blue-eyed, the other olive-skinned and black-bearded, with thickly muscled arms and Oakley sunglasses. I recognised the pair immediately. They had been staying in the building behind the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul which had been taken over by the CIA/special forces operations team Taskforce 121, who were looking for bin Laden.
Hazrat Ali handed them a lined A4 sheet of paper torn from a notebook. It was a list of names. In return they slid over the briefcase. He popped open the catch and allowed himself a thin smile. Inside were stacks of $100 bills.
Similar transactions were going on all over the country. In the hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda the CIA was totally reliant on local informers. President Bush had demanded bin Laden ‘dead or alive’, and the Agency had $1 billion to spend, putting some 45,000 warlords on the payroll.
There was one major flaw. ‘How do you know they’re al Qaeda?’ I asked the Americans later. ‘Those names are probably just Hazrat Ali’s enemies and rivals.’ I had spent the previous evening at the house of Haji Zahir, a rival commander, who told me, ‘If there are five houses in a Pashtun village, at least three will have feuds.’ No wonder Hazrat Ali was smiling. He could get one of his enemies taken out by an American bomb, and be paid for it. There were even stories of one group of US special forces almost calling in an airstrike on another group because they were with rival warlords.
The Americans didn’t seem to care. They told me his list would be entered into the big Harmony computer at Bagram. The names would also be cross-checked with what they called ‘the 1267’, the sacred list of bad guys they all carried around with them, which some referred to as the kill-list. Some of those on Hazrat Ali’s list would end up in prison in Bagram or at Guantánamo.
Outside, his men glowered. Some were missing limbs, and several had eyes lined with kohl, and wildflowers tied onto their Kalashnikovs. Most of them knew nothing but fighting. One told me he only went to school till the age of eight, then joined the mujaheddin. A year later, some of these men would feature in a report issued by Human Rights Watch entitled ‘Killing You is Very Easy for Us’.1 It carries interviews with people claiming that Hazrat Ali’s commanders ran a reign of terror in the province, keeping secret prisons, raping young boys, making arbitrary arrests and demanding bribes to release people. It alleged that anyone who refused to do his bidding was warned that he would call down American B52s on them.
The Americans were shocked that I was travelling around on my own, and offered me a lift to Kabul. Against my better instincts I accepted. Four foreign journalists had recently been killed on the road – their names were on a plaque put up by colleagues at the Spinghar Hotel. As I climbed into the back seat I saw the glint of a Glock pistol strapped on the thigh of one of them. ‘Bet you’ve never felt so safe,’ he grinned.
Actually, I didn’t. I usually travelled very low-profile, in a battered vehicle, often wearing a burqa so as not to be identifiable as a foreigner to anyone watching from the roadside. The Americans would never look like Afghans, however much facial hair they grew, and they seemed very conspicuous to me. The pistols made me uncomfortable. I almost missed my hashish-smoking driver from my last trip along this road, whom I had christened ‘Easy Dent’ after we had smashed into another car and he had laughed, ‘No problem, easy dent.’
I never tired of this road. The tarmac had long disintegrated under columns of Soviet tanks and American bombing, and it was now almost entirely hole. But I loved the way it lulled one into a false sense of security by starting with soft painted scenes of green fields, watered by the turquoise Kabul River, papyrus grass blowing in the wind and occasional flashes of colour as young girls in pink and red passed with jugs of water on their heads, heading to mud-brick villages. On a patch of dusty ground a group of boys were playing cricket using a pile of balanced stones as a wicket. The mountains in the distance looked like crumpled paper.
Then, with the city no longer in sight in the back window, you round a corner and the landscape changes dramatically to grey, pebble-strewn mountains. The road becomes a switchback of hairpin bends between towering granite cliffs that lean on each other, goats perched precariously on ledges. I thought about the thousands of British troops and followers retreating this way in the wintry January of 1842 at the end of the First Anglo–Afghan War and being picked off by the tribals on the hillside until only Dr Bryden was left to tell the tale.
As we bumped along, the younger of the two Americans told me, ‘We’ve been handing out a lot of dosh to commanders. In J-bad [Americans seemed unwilling to allot more than two syllables to any Afghan town, so had abbreviated