Swimming with Warlords

American MRAPs (“mine-resistant ambush-protected” vehicles) try to pass on the clogged Kabul-Jalalabad Highway.

The Taliban government collapsed November 12, 2001, and its leaders and followers went out much the same way they had come in: via Highway 1. They fled toward Jalalabad and to the mountains and caves to the south in Tora Bora. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his followers were believed to be among them.

But the southern city of Kandahar, the last Taliban stronghold, had not yet fallen. Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, known as the One-Eyed Mullah because he’d lost an eye fighting the Russians during their occupation, was still hiding out there. To hasten its fall—and perhaps capture Mullah Omar—the U.S. landed one thousand marines in a desert south of Kandahar during an air assault mission that employed Super Stallion helicopters and C-130 Hercules aircraft. There they set up Camp Rhino, a forward operating base on the Taliban’s home turf and the first significant presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the beginning of America’s involvement in the war on October 7.

I desperately wanted to get out of Kabul and go to Kandahar or Tora Bora to see up close what I thought would be the end of the war. My first attempt was inspired but dangerous—I tried to operate in an independent, self-sustaining “mobile news bureau” created from the shell of an old 20-foot passenger bus. It was innovative, but ultimately unsuccessful, as I detailed in my journal:

With reports that Kandahar will fall any day now, the conflict story is moving south. There’s little left to report on in Kabul but politics, rebuilding, and features on Marjan, the zoo’s indomitable lion. [NBC Correspondent Jim] Avila and I are eager to make a run on Kandahar. And I just got the green light from NBC’s foreign desk to buy a 25-person bus for exactly that purpose. It will be, I envision, a kind of Afghan caravan from which an advance crew can pursue this story whenever and wherever it moves. We will invoke the spirit of CBS Sunday Morning’s Charles Kuralt in possibly the world’s most lawless nation. My plan is to hollow the bus out, have wooden bunks installed, and desks and storage boxes for production equipment and personal gear. Local welders will attach a platform to the roof rack where a cameraman can shoot “beauty shots” and correspondent stand-ups from anywhere. A place where we can eat, sleep, and work—without having to worry about where we’re going to stay each night. Armed guards will travel with us to ward off bandits or Taliban or both. Depending on our destination, maybe we will call it the Kandahar Express or the Tora Bora Bus. It cost $5,000.

But there are problems before we even get started. The NBC engineers are not convinced, don’t like the idea of driving the road to Kandahar, a road that is legendary for being one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan. Then our crew tells us they’ve heard from too many sources that this isn’t even a fool’s errand, it’s a suicide mission. But even so, Avila and I are committed and quietly decide to make the trip alone. We’ve been given permission by the local Northern Alliance commander in Maidan Shari to drive south to the city of Ghazni, a third of the way to Kandahar. With a letter of permission from him and one of his soldiers as an armed escort, we should be safe, he says, at least that far.

It is morning and we are packing the bus for our journey. It’s a little rough, but close to what I envisioned. Though the plan is Ghazni, we both are thinking that if the path is clear, we’ll make a run for Kandahar. Despite the problems and warnings from colleagues, I’m excited for the momentum, to be moving from Kabul, which because of so much prior overstimulation, has become stale for me. I’m looking for another rush of adrenaline. Fear, I have learned, is the quickest fix. But I also feel some anxiety beyond the dangers we may encounters. Without a cameraman, soundman, or engineer, I must now become all three. I will shoot with a mini DV camcorder and transmit using a 7E videophone. I have used them all before, but not under this kind of pressure, not without a supply line or tech support nearby.

We’re going off into the wilds of Afghanistan again and we have nothing and no one to rely on but ourselves. While we are loading, Avila pulls me to the side. “We need to make a pact,” he says, “we need to be brutally honest with each other once we get out there.” Because neither Avila nor I have a reputation for mincing words or holding back, I am a bit surprised.

“I think you know that’s not going to be a problem, Jim,” I nod, continuing to pack. Before heading out, we stop at our driver’s house, Yar Muhammad. Yar is a tough guy, quick-tempered, prone to occasional fits of road rage. Once when we were driving to a story and a bicyclist didn’t move out of his way quickly enough, Yar stopped the van and confronted him. Within seconds fists were flying. I had to crawl over the front seat and out the door to break them up. But on a trip like this, into the danger zone, we are a bit more comfortable with his edgy nature. At his house, his ten-year-old son brings out a Kalashnikov and a harness filled with ammunition clips. He hands it to Yar, who hands it to me. We have done this before. As I lay it down on the backseat and cover it with my jacket, I see something I haven’t seen before. Peeking out from one of the ammo pouches is a handle and metal ring about the circumference of a dime. My translator Ahmed sees it too. He puts two fingers to his lips and then touches them gently to the grenade. It is the Afghan version of “good boy, stay right where you are, please don’t go anywhere.”

But despite the preparation and dramatics, we don’t get 50 miles outside of Kabul before we are stopped at a checkpoint and told to turn around and go home. A second commander in the region, a former Taliban who switched sides after the fall of Maidan Shar, doesn’t care about our letter of passage and tells us we’d have only a 20 percent chance of making it to Ghazni alive, let alone Kandahar.

“Maybe you can try next week,” he tells us in Pashto. We are disappointed, but mildly so.

Less than three hours after we started, we are back at the Intercontinental Hotel, unloading the “Kandahar Express.” Our colleagues look relieved to see us. Not one says to us, “I told you so.” Six porters varying in age from 20 to 60 appear to help us unload. They’re wearing tattered bellhop uniforms that probably looked great in 1973. When they put down the last bag, I count out 100,000 Afghanis apiece and place them in each of their lined, calloused, and dirty hands. A fine tip of about $1.50. Kandahar was out. It was time to look at Tora Bora.

Twelve years later, I was ready to get out of Kabul again. I hadn’t run out of stories, I was just eager to see what was going on beyond the borders of the capital. I had been to Kandahar and other areas in the south in 2010 and found the region buzzing with violence and suicide attacks. With the staggered withdrawal of America’s NATO allies from the area, insurgent activity had only grown bolder. Dutch troops deployed to Uruzgan Province withdrew from Afghanistan in January 2010; the Canadians, who had been operating mostly in Kandahar, began leaving a year later, leaving only a training contingent on the ground. The Australians would pull out at the end of 2013. That left the British and Americans to carry on the battle in the south, both with troop withdrawals scheduled for 2014.

I was interested in seeing how the south had fared since I had been there last. Even now it was not a drive you could make safely from Kabul, so I put in a request to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul to embed with U.S. forces in Regional Command South (RC-South), which seemed the only practical way to report from the region.

Unless you’ve been an avid Afghan watcher since the beginning of 2001, sorting out the current state of foreign military involvement in the country—even just trying to understand the difference between ISAF and NATO—can make you feel like you’re playing Scrabble with a cheater.

Here’s how it breaks down: ISAF is the UN security mission, mandated by resolution in December 2001 after the fall of the Taliban and part of the Bonn Agreement that created the power-sharing coalition government that replaced the Taliban. Its main purpose was to help rebuild government institutions and train the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), but it’s also been actively engaged in fighting the Taliban and other threats to the nation’s stability.

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is a collective international military alliance formed in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansionism following World War II and has since been involved in conflicts and peacekeeping operations around the world, including Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo. After the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, Article 5 of the NATO Alliance was invoked; it requires member states to come to the aid of any other member state subject to an armed attack. It was the first and only time Article 5 has been used. That’s what led NATO to take charge of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan.

As a part of the ISAF mission, Afghanistan was initially divided into five regional commands, which expanded to six after 2010; one of four NATO member nations took charge in each. The six regional commands were RC-North, led by Germany; RC-East, led by the U.S.; RC-West run by Italy; RC-South and RC-Southwest, both also headed by the U.S.; and RC-Capital, where Turkey is in charge.

ISAF says that it has more than 84,000 troops from 49 nations in Afghanistan—not all of them from NATO member states. While withdrawals change those numbers daily, the greatest number came from the U.S., with 60,000 troops, followed by the U.K., with more than 7,000, and Germany, with more than 3,000. By contrast, Iceland and Malaysia contributed 3 and 2, respectively.

Because of the withdrawal and restructuring, RC-South wouldn’t accept any media embeds from the middle of July to the middle of August 2013. I didn’t have time to wait them out, so just as I had in 2001, I looked to the east.

Even though it was the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Haroon and Hakim agreed to drive me to Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province so I could see what was happening on the eastern border. I invited another American colleague to come with us, a young Stars & Stripes reporter named Alex Pena. He too had been hamstrung by the embed blackout in RC-South. Military embeds were the lifeline of Stars & Stripes, a U.S. government publication whose focus was news about the American military. Despite the affiliation, the paper reported independently and often hit harder with their stories than other media. This did not make them the most popular news agency among some military brass, who believed they should be a public relations entity rather than a watchdog.

Pena had emailed me a few years back, when he was still in college in Florida, and asked me to critique some freelance work he had done for CNN covering the Mexican drug wars. I was impressed, and we stayed in contact, but I had never met him until this trip. A Cuban-American from Miami, he left Florida immediately after he graduated and went to work in Africa as a freelancer for Voice of America and ABC News, earning a lot of street cred before most young journalist got their first byline. Now he was working for Stars and Stripes in Afghanistan, gaining more experience while receiving a regular paycheck. He was just beginning his career as a foreign correspondent; I knew mine was closer to its end. Collaborating seemed to me a good way to pass the torch.

Since the east is much more conservative than Kabul, we decided to dress in traditional clothes. At the Safi Landmark Hotel, I put on the shalwar kameez, sandals, scarfs, and a pakool cap Matin got for me in the north. I was taller and had lighter hair and skin than the Afghans in the east, but I would at least be somewhat less conspicuous in the attire and wouldn’t draw as much attention in the nondescript blue station wagon we’d be driving—a loan from Haroon’s brother.

When Haroon and Hakim arrived, Haroon texted me, and Alex and I met them on the street below. Just as I had been years ago before setting out in the Kandahar Express, I was eager but aware of the risks. Haroon said the drive to Jalalabad was safe during the day, but our plan was to go beyond Jalalabad and into much more dangerous territory. I wanted to go to Tora Bora.

To get there we would have to take the Kabul-Jalalabad Highway, a 93-mile (150-kilometer) west-east section of Highway 1. This was Afghanistan’s ring road, the nation’s only major thoroughfare linking 16 of the country’s 34 provinces and most of its major cities. It’s also the nation’s connection to its Cold War history.

Highway 1 is 2,000 miles (3,360 kilometers) long, and three-quarters of Afghanistan’s population lives within about 30 miles of the road. Most of the two-lane highway was built with the help of the United States and former Soviet Union in the 1960’s, both countries vying for influence in Afghanistan. The Soviets built the Herat-to-Kandahar section while the Americans constructed the stretch from Kandahar to Kabul. Canadian defense analyst Anton Minkov told Walrus magazine that he believes the Soviets were contemplating invasion even then, almost a decade before their Christmas 1979 attack. Minkov notes that they had paved the connections across their own border and that the road was designed for heavy military transport.*

The Soviet invasion strategy had been to take the main cities and hold the ring road that connected them. But Minkov said the Soviets ran into the same problem the ISAF had today: the Taliban had made convoy attacks a major tactic in their insurgency. Minkov claims that every single Soviet convoy that drove along Highway 1 was attacked, with a loss of 11,000 military trucks. The cost was so great that 25 percent of the Russian forces had to be used exclusively for ring road defense.

The Kabul-Jalalabad section that we would take was not part of the actual ring, but a trailing west-east span that followed the Kabul River Gorge for about half its distance, climbing 2,000-foot cliffs and descending into the valleys below. It is considered one of the most beautiful—and most dangerous—roads in the world. Afghan officials said that nearly 200 people were killed and 5,000 injured in traffic accidents just between March 2012 and March 2013. Many of the casualties were blamed on overloaded cargo trucks using the road to haul goods to and from Pakistan. The trucks were so slow climbing the grade that cars and passenger buses attempted to zip around them often plunged off the road, and people met their deaths thousands of feet below.

Haroon’s good planning got us on the road early and we bypassed much of the traffic, enjoying the magnificent landscape of the roaring river and soaring cliffs. We used the time to reminisce, talking about friends and acquaintances and where they were today. While we laughed much of the time, there was one story that filled the car with silence after.

In early 2002, after NBC moved its bureau out of the Intercontinental Hotel to the house in Kabul’s Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, a young houseboy named Rafi worked for us. He was about sixteen, a sweet, innocent kid eager to learn English and curious about how to use our gym gear.

Rafi would have dramatic mood swings, happy and talkative one day, quiet and sullen the next. I didn’t learn the reason until told later by a colleague after I had already left Afghanistan following my second trip there: the man we’d hired to take charge of our house security, a dead-eyed Tajik from the Panjshir named Hamid, had been raping Rafi in one of the backrooms of the house. It was discovered only when one of the staff walked in on him in the act.

Hamid was a nasty piece of work. He had been foisted on us by the Panjshir “mafia,” which was taking control of Kabul real estate and other profitable business enterprises in the wake of the Taliban. The NBC Kabul bureau chief, Babak Behnam, an Iranian whose family had sought asylum in America after the fall of the shah, fired Hamid. But the damage had already been done. Haroon gave me the details during our drive to Jalalabad.

“Rafi’s father was dead and his mom remarried,” said Haroon while driving, “but the stepfather took all of the money that Rafi earned from working at the NBC house and ran away, leaving both of them behind. It was all too much for Rafi, and he got a gun and shot himself.” Hakim nodded silently, confirming the story.

Though I had heard the tragic tale of Rafi’s suicide in bits and pieces prior to our drive, its details weighed heavily on me. The injustice seemed analogous to some of Afghanistan’s own historical tragedies: a nice kid who gets an opportunity to get out of poverty by working with generous but oblivious Westerners instead ends up being raped and robbed and takes his own life in despair.

I wish I’d known what was going on while living in the house and wonder what I would’ve done if I had been the one who walked in on Hamid. Would I have beaten him? killed him? helped Rafi to take revenge himself? I will never know. It is in recounting stories like his that Afghanistan seems relentlessly savage and cruel. Although I know it’s really not so different from any other place in the world, the thought of Rafi’s abuse and despair made it seem so.

There is, in fact, a long-established, controversial culture of the sexual exploitation of boys in Afghanistan. Warlords, the wealthy, and other powerful individuals are able to take what they want without consequences. There’s even a name for it—bacha bazi, which literally means “boy play.” Bacha bazi boys are kept almost like pets, a status symbol for their “owners,” who sometimes dress them in women’s clothes and makeup with bells on their hands and feet and have them dance and perform for guests. Afterward, they may be required to have sex with the guests or their “owner.”

Some claim that Afghanistan’s institutionalized sexism, which makes women almost completely unapproachable, has created this culture, which preys on “female substitutes” who are both vulnerable and available. Afghanistan’s poverty and large number of displaced children provides a steady supply of boys, who are usually kept while they remain “beardless” or until they turn eighteen.

While homosexuality is illegal in Afghanistan, sex with bacha bazi boys is not seen as homosexual by the men who engage in it, partly because their partners are boys, not other men, and partly because they assume the active—traditionally “male”—role in sex.

Human rights campaigners don’t see it as homosexual behavior either: they consider it rape. But victims rarely report it because of the stigma and fear of honor killings or imprisonment. (Even female rape survivors are often jailed.) Some of the boys find the life preferable to poverty, as they are usually provided with food, clothing, and gifts.

Bachi bazi used to be confined to the rural areas of the south, but it has spread throughout the country, according to Suraya Subbrang of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

“When you don’t have a strong central government or rule of law, and the culture of impunity exists and laws are not implemented, many things happen,” she told the UN’s IRIN news agency in September 2013.*

American soldiers have long been aware of bachi bazi as well, according to Ben Brody, a journalist and former U.S. Army sergeant, who included this entry in a glossary of current U.S. military slang for the Global Post:

“Man-love Thursday”: Soldiers use this phrase to half-joke that on Thursdays in southern Afghanistan men customarily have sex with each other so that they will not be distracted by lustful thoughts on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Sexual relationships between boys and men are notorious in Kandahar, but the stories of Man-Love Thursday are likely apocryphal. A regional proverb goes, “A bird flies over Kandahar with one wing covering its butt.”*

When the Taliban rose to power, Mullah Omar and his followers allegedly rescued a bachi bazi boy from a warlord who had taken him from a local village to be his sexual plaything, making the Taliban principled and trustworthy in the eyes of an Afghan public weary of the excesses of the warlords.

With most interaction between men and women proscribed by Afghan society, how do regular Afghan men, the kind who don’t bugger little boys, learn about sex, I asked Haroon.

“But how do prostitutes do businesses in a place where adultery is still punishable by stoning?” I asked. “How can an Afghan man connect with a prostitute? You can’t go to a bar or a nightclub and pick one up.”

“Of course not,” he said, “Everything is done through contacts here. One of your friends knows someone who knows someone who is a prostitute.”

“But how does someone get into that life here,” I asked, feeling like a thirteen-year-old boy talking to his father about sex. “I mean, sex isn’t talked about here, and prostitution would be dangerous work, I imagine, what with the tradition of honor killings.”

Honor killings are a noxious practice in some parts of the Islamic world. A woman’s perceived adultery—anything from an unmarried couple meeting without a chaperone to premarital sex, unfaithfulness, even rape—brings shame on the entire family. Husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles therefore have a responsibility to kill their wives, daughters, sisters, or nieces to reestablish the family’s honor.

The Afghan Independent Commission on Human Rights documented 240 honor killings and 160 rapes reported between 2012 and 2013. Even more disturbing were its conclusions about who committed the crimes. The Commission claims that more than 17 percent of the honor killings were carried out by the victim’s relatives, 10 percent by one of the parents, 2 percent by the victim’s brothers, 1 percent by uncles, and another 4 percent was by neighbors, 1 percent by marriage advocates—and that 14 percent of the honor killings were actually carried out by the Afghan National Police.* The Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the Afghan National Police, denied the allegations and called the report “far from reality.”

Haroon told me there were a lot of reasons women become sex workers in Afghanistan. But poverty is the major driver: widows with no other means of support, orphan girls, and women who are trafficked from poor rural areas or from Iran and Pakistan.

“Where we are going now,” Haroon said, “actually has a ‘wives market’ where men can buy a wife or sell ones they are tired of. Sometimes they even swap them with another man. It’s been going on for a very long time.”

“We can try,” Haroon said, “but I don’t think they’ll be happy with outsiders there.

Subsequent research confirmed that he hadn’t exaggerated. In certain districts of Nangarhar Province, where people from the Shinwari tribe live, buying and selling of women is a long tradition, less widespread today than in the past, but still common, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

The respected journalism blog Afghanistan Today quoted a local resident, Qari Gul Muhammad of the Ghani Khel district, who said the sales were still common in his region.

“When someone visits, everyone knows and can provide them with the name and address of a girl for sale.”* Gul Muhammad said the price of a girl can range from 80,000 to one million afghanis (US$1,600 to US$20,000), depending on their beauty.

The blog also quoted another resident, Gholam Habib, saying that poverty drives some of the sales, but others occur because men become tired of their wives or families want to be rid of daughters or widows.

Sometimes the women are taken across the border into Pakistan and sold multiple times.

“We have five or six cases where a single woman was sold three or four times,” Zubair, the head of the district court in Ghani Khel, said.

Efforts to stamp out the practice are beginning to have some effect. The official said a man was recently sentenced to three years in jail for selling his wife.

Given that the practice has been ingrained in society for generations, it may take a few more generations to end. From bachi bazi to prostitution to wives markets, there are as many societal inconsistencies about sexual mores in conservative Afghanistan as there are in the next country—they just manifest a little farther underground.

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