AFGHANISTAN—Where were you on September 11, 2001? No doubt you remember exactly where you were when you heard the news. I was in Afghanistan. When terror began a new chapter in the life of America, my homeland, I was sitting in the lap of “the enemy.”
Like most Americans, I got up and went to work that morning. Unlike most Americans, though, I was very aware that terrorism could strike me at any moment. In fact, a terrorist attack had just occurred in the area where I was working. The immediate future looked dismal and uncertain. Before September 11 dawned, I already knew it was going to be an incredibly difficult day.
No matter how lightning-fast news travels electronically, it never catches up with real time. That disastrous Tuesday morning, when four commercial airplanes intentionally plunged into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, my 9/11 was almost over. The Afghan time zones put me ahead of the news. My September 11 actually started ten hours before that diabolical day began in New York City. When the sun was rising on New York City, it was already setting on Afghanistan.
Sunday, September 9, 2001:
THE LION IS DEAD
KHVAJEH BAHA OD DIN—To describe September 11 from my catbird seat in Afghanistan, I need to step back two days. Sunday, September 9, began as most other days in a war zone.The war itself hadn’t slept at all; so daylight meant the still-living went out to count the now-dead and assess the damage done in darkness. Night drew back her mysterious black covering to reveal a land of haunting beauty. But the lovely face was scarred by blackened rocket craters, bomb-splintered houses, and bullet-riddled bodies. The terrifying nightmare was all too real in the creeping light of day as the earliest call to prayer echoed eerily across the land, rising from both sides of the battle line. That Sunday morning, fewer Afghans remained to roll out their prayer rugs and bow before Allah.
In Khvajeh Baha od Din, right on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, many people stayed awake with the war all night. Warriors and medics had too much work to do to sleep. The town served as the headquarters of General Ahmad Shah Massoud, military leader of the northern territories of Afghanistan. He commanded the forces locked in a life-and-death struggle with the infamous Taliban. Khvajeh Baha od Din is just twelve miles from my house in Dasht-e Qaleh (pronounced “Dusty Color,” especially if you’re from North Carolina, as I am). The noisy sounds of war had kept me up part of the night too.
No one suspected the two ordinary-looking Arab African journalists who arrived in Khvajeh Baha od Din earlier in the week. They casually joined other journalists waiting for an interview with General Massoud or a guided tour of the front lines. After all, journalists covering the war came and went all the time. Known as “the friend of journalists,” General Massoud often granted private interviews to the media to offer stories and exclusive glimpses of the victories, atrocities, and politics of war.
Massoud lived under the intense pressures of being a military leader, but he was a gracious man, who would make time for a civilized cup of tea with journalists. He obviously realized that resisting the Taliban and rescuing his homeland from yet another oppressive power depended in part on getting the story out. Journalists were Massoud’s access to the world’s ears. They needed him to fill their quotas for stories about Afghanistan’s war against the Taliban. And he needed them to awaken the world’s attention to the many other crises his devastated country faced: drought, earthquake damage, refugee problems, the effects of previous wars, and the growing threat of Al Qaeda terrorists being trained in camps virtually in his backyard in Afghanistan itself.
General Massoud’s hectic schedule of military planning, casualty assessments, and other administrative duties that Sunday included a typical break for a news interview. Tea was served. Then the typical turned tragic.
One of Massoud’s visiting journalists focused his camera on his companion and the general as they talked. Moving in closer for the shot, he pressed the shutter button. That was his last conscious act. The world exploded! The expected flash shook the building and turned the general’s elegant office into a tomb full of rubble.
The cameraman was blown apart in the explosion. Massoud’s furious bodyguard quickly dispatched the cameraman’s badly injured partner. And few doubted the instant assessment of the tragedy: Two Taliban or Al Qaeda terrorists, posing as Arab African journalists, had wired a bomb into their camera to carry out the assassination of General Massoud. Unfortunately the suicide bombers succeeded in their wickedly devious plan.
Within hours, confusing stories and conflicting rumors resounded throughout the country and around the world. At first, we heard that General Massoud had been badly injured but would survive. Many Afghans considered Massoud almost untouchable and expected to see him driving down the road the next day, like a murdered television hero who shows up bigger than life on another program. More depressing stories soon followed, indicating that Massoud might actually be dead. A tidal wave of fear and uncertainty swept over the country. Massoud’s death might mean the end of resistance against the Taliban.
As the swirling rumor dust began to settle, Massoud’s assassination became a horrible, undeniable fact. Although the other commanders of the resistance desperately tried to delay confirmation of their leader’s death, for fear of the effects it would have on the people, the truth spread like a prairie fire. And everyone asked the same awful question: What will happen now?
Until his death, Massoud’s legendary leadership abilities kept alive the hopes of what the media dubbed the Northern Alliance. He first came to prominence during the 1980s, when the native Afghan people fought against the Russian invasion. Massoud’s cunning and effectiveness earned him the nickname “Lion of the Panjshir,” referring to a mountainous area north of Kabul that he and his men fiercely defended against the Soviets. Massoud became a leader of the famed Mujahidin guerrilla fighters, who harassed and decimated the Soviet forces until they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Our own U.S. embassy in Kabul closed that same year.
ABANDONED BY THE WORLD
Massoud served in the temporary government that emerged after the fall of the puppet Communist leadership the Soviets had been defending in Afghanistan.The world was eager to recognize the new government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, but it quickly lost interest in the ongoing needs of Afghanistan when the Russian army pulled out.And now, history was about to repeat itself yet again. Afghanistan, the ancient crossroads of competing cultures and powers, had once again been trampled underfoot and left for dead.
The nation lay in shambles. The political situation showed almost-daily signs of increasing instability. The temporary lull in fighting simply highlighted a host of other overwhelming needs in the country. Over six million refugees were still displaced. Some had escaped to the west into Iran; many others had fled east into Pakistan. Millions more wandered aimlessly in the countryside, just trying to find food and shelter to survive. Refugees who trickled back into their country often found little of their previous lives to reclaim. Conditions were impossible for outsiders to grasp. Practically every major city was destroyed, the countryside lay decimated and desolate, and the people were hungry, homeless, and hopeless. They had been deserted by the world, like orphans left to dig for food scraps in garbage cans of dark alleys.
Afghanistan’s war against the Soviets left the country littered with multitudes of dead and wounded, thousands of bombed-out homes, and entire villages wiped out. Basic infrastructure, like bridges, irrigation systems, water supplies, medical services, and road systems were severely disrupted or totally destroyed. Farmlands were sown, not with life-giving crops, but with deadly mines.
The people of Afghanistan had been abandoned. Massoud himself often remarked that he couldn’t understand why a rich America, which had supplied so much military equipment to help them resist the Soviet Union, didn’t care enough to help them clean up the mess the war they sponsored had created. I’ve heard those same feelings expressed repeatedly during my time in Afghanistan.
ENTER THE TALIBAN
With the loss of world support, Afghanistan was vulnerable to internal pressures and external enemies. One group with ties inside and outside of Afghanistan became known as the Taliban—a radical Islamic fundamentalist group led by Mullah Omar. These young religious bandits saw Afghanistan as an ideal place to create what they consider a truly pure Islamic state.
Unfortunately they also had a larger, more insidious scheme in mind. They hoped to make Afghanistan the base from which they could launch a worldwide movement to restore their version of Islam to its rightful place as the correct expression of Allah’s authority and power over the earth. That demonic hope is still alive. They are convinced that Allah has called them to eliminate everything and everyone who is not like them or refuses to join them. Even other God-fearing Muslims suffered at the hands of the Taliban, because they are not considered as devoted or pure. Rabbani’s fragile government struggled unsuccessfully to handle the pressure.
Bold military moves by the Taliban led to an outbreak of civil war in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Rabbani’s government didn’t have the resources to match the strong support the Taliban received from wealthy Osama bin Laden and other foreign interests.
Main cities like Kandahar and Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996. Rabbani fled north and reestablished his government in Feyzabad, the capital city in the northernmost state of Badakhshan. General Massoud served then as Rabbani’s minister of defense and military leader. The anti-Taliban forces, who retreated northward, eventually became known as the Northern Alliance. These small groups of Afghan soldiers and local commanders rallied around the charismatic and experienced leadership of General Massoud. They held out bravely against the relentless pressure of the Taliban, who were organized, trained, and backed by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and the Muslim extremists of Pakistan. Outnumbered by their enemies, and largely ignored by those who claimed to be their friends, the Northern Alliance fought a desperate campaign to protect their precious homeland.
In this area of the world, ancient ethnic territories, family feuds, and tribal conflicts or animosities play a much more important role in daily life than nationality or international borders. In fact, most of the national boundaries in Central Asia were established in modern times by outside governments.
The recent conflict in Afghanistan also had a fairly distinct ethnic character. Most of the Northern Alliance forces, for instance, come from Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara ancestry. Meanwhile the Taliban draws its numbers primarily from Pashtun groups, although it would be unfair to say that even the majority of Pashtuns side with the Taliban. The allies of the Taliban are Al Qaeda—a merciless group led by Osama bin Laden, primarily made up of Arab Islamic fundamentalists, who have come to the misdirected conclusion that barbaric acts of terrorism can somehow make the world a better place. For bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Taliban are a useful local group, who share their goals and provide locations for training camps.Together they had planned for Afghanistan to serve as a base of operations for their worldwide mission of religious conquest.
By the time I arrived in Afghanistan in September of 2000, the Northern Alliance and the Taliban had fought to an uneasy stalemate. The Taliban already controlled almost 90 percent of the country. The front line followed roughly the course of the River Kotcha, just west of the village of Dasht-e Qaleh. Since my work keeps me in the area around Dasht-e Qaleh, the daily background noises include the distant sounds of rockets, artillery rounds, gunfire, and occasional Taliban aircraft dropping bombs. We are definitely in a war zone. I see the results in lined faces of suffering people every day.
Though I believed God was ultimately in control, during the next hectic months, things rarely made much sense to me. I often became frustrated and angry at seeing so many people hurting day after day because of the war. I gradually realized that my unmerciful thoughts and feelings were an internal warning to me, as were the external evidences of war around me. I realized how easily I could be caught up in evil. How quickly I could wish ill on others. How hard it is to love your enemy when he is trying to kill you and those close to you.
Five years of civil war came to an abrupt climax on September 9. The death of General Massoud meant one of two things: the end of the resistance against the Taliban, or a renewed determination to fight on. None of us knew that events on the other side of the globe would completely transform the situation in Afghanistan in the next few days. At the time, we were busy just trying to cope wisely with a rapidly unfolding scenario. The situation was obviously about to become much worse.
Monday, September 10, 2001:
A RELUCTANT RETREAT
FEYZABAD—Word came to us from the United Nations office in Feyzabad early the morning of September 10 urging all foreign relief workers to gather for an emergency meeting.The agenda was centered around how to prepare for evacuation.
Everyone thought the Northern Alliance was probably about to crumble. Many were fearful that, since the great General Massoud was dead, the Taliban would soon capture the last 10 percent of northeastern Afghanistan, where our Shelter for Life group had been working peacefully since 1998. We all knew that the Taliban would likely first capture Dasht-e Qaleh, because it was next in line. The city was strategic for General Massoud’s forces, because it naturally guarded the border crossing between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, through which most of the Northern Alliance’s military supplies arrived.
I reluctantly left the Dasht-e Qaleh area and went to Feyzabad. Getting away from the front lines did little to calm my internal struggle, however. I felt bad about leaving suffering people when they needed my help the most. But if the Taliban had taken the area, they would have killed me before asking questions. Of that there is little doubt. The Taliban would not have liked meeting a green-eyed, curly-haired American on a mission of mercy to their sworn enemies. And my innocent, native staff, even though they were Muslims, would suffer and perhaps die.
My real concern was not for myself. I fully trusted in God’s protection, and I thought I would have enough warning to leave in a hurry if the front line collapsed. Naturally I didn’t want to die, but I had accepted the fact long before that God sometimes allows his servants to suffer and die. I worried, instead, about my Afghan coworkers and local friends.
I also had to consider what the Taliban would do to the refugees we had been helping, if they overran the IDP camps. (IDP stands for Internally Displaced Persons. A person displaced from his home is not technically a refugee as long as he is still in his own country.) We had heard reports of places where village people had been massacred by Taliban fighters simply because they had accepted help from outsiders. But the refugees still needed our assistance.
Things could change, but so far they hadn’t. The sounds of warfare were still in the background; they weren’t coming closer. My Afghan friends believed, though, that the more intense fighting would soon begin in our area, since it was the last remaining stronghold of the Northern Alliance. After capturing Dasht-e Qaleh on the border, the Taliban would take Khvajeh Baha od Din (Massoud’s military base), then Rostaq. Then it would only be a matter of time until they would march up to Feyzabad, the capital of Badakhshan (home of President Rabbani), and capture it.
As I reluctantly drove out of Nowabad, through the mountains of Rostaq and on to Feyzabad, I prayed for our Afghan staff and the thousands of refugees I was leaving behind. I asked for God’s divine protection over their lives. I had told them before I left that I intended to return as soon as possible. I planned to inform them by radio of the results of our meeting at the United Nations office.
I arrived in Feyzabad on the evening of the tenth and joined five other SNI/Shelter for Life staff gathered there. We were all the expatriate men and women left in Afghanistan with our organization at that time. We also represented the wonderful mix of backgrounds that serve together in relief and development work. Four of us were Americans, one was Japanese, and the other was British. Our skills included health or nursing, education, nutrition, teacher training, engineering, and computer science. Our individual responsibilities varied from construction management to program administration, running food programs or overseeing distributions to teacher training, health education, development activities, and emergency/disaster response services.
By appointment, rather than by my own choosing, I was the leader of our Shelter for Life team in Northern Afghanistan during those troubled days. I had been in Afghanistan the longest and knew the languages a little better than the others. I was, therefore, our spokesman at the UN meeting the next day. When our staff discussed the situation that evening, we were undecided about what to do. All of us agreed that evacuation might be necessary and wise at some point, but none of us felt that the time of evacuation had come. We decided we should wait, stay here, and continue faithfully helping wherever we could for as long as we could.
The farther away I got from the front lines at Dasht-e Qaleh, the wilder the rumors became. I knew that Feyzabad was well protected because it’s nearly surrounded by the awesome ranges of the Hindu Kush. If an attack did come, it would have to come from the west, and we would probably have days, if not weeks, to organize our evacuation. But other factors had to be considered too. So we decided to wait until after the United Nations meeting the next day to make our own final plans.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001:
PRELUDE TO TERROR
FEYZABAD—On the morning of September 11, I contacted our national staff in Dasht-e Qaleh for an up-to-date report. The Taliban hadn’t launched an offensive yet, and the front lines of the Northern Alliance were still holding. I remember thinking that perhaps General Massoud was actually alive, or maybe he had left some plan of action in the case of his death.
As I walked through the oppressive heat and fogging dust to the United Nations compound, the air felt heavy with uncertainty and nervousness. I could see it etched in the worried faces of unarmed doorkeepers at the UN buildings. After we greeted each other in Dari (the Afghan language derived from Farsi or Persian), they were full of questions. These men had become my friends over the past months as I frequently visited the UN offices to arrange details of our wheat distributions and food-for-work programs. They knew I had come from the front lines and were anxious to confirm any of the rumors they had heard. It was hard for them to believe I had been in Dasht-e Qaleh just the day before and nothing had changed there. I was touched by their sincere concerns for me, because if things turned out as badly as they feared, these simple, warmhearted, caring men had little hope themselves. They had pinned their expectations of freedom from the tyranny of the Taliban on the abilities of General Massoud. Without him, they doubted that anyone could defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The last few decades have taught the United Nations some painful lessons about safety. Massacred peacekeepers and recurring nightmares over members of their staff held as hostages in various conflicts have forced the UN to err on the side of caution when situations become unstable. The real questions quickly became these: How unstable is the situation, really? Is a possible Taliban takeover imminent? Is staying here a real security risk?
The meeting I attended included about fifteen representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Northern Afghanistan. At least five of them were my fellow non-Afghans. In many ways, this conversation was like an instant replay of the discussion our own SFL staff had shared the night before, with one important difference. These were mostly hired humanitarian workers, and their discussion of safety was strictly pragmatic. There was no room in their conversation for God’s role in the events unfolding around us.
The dividing line in the meeting cut between those who were ready to declare the struggle against the Taliban finished and those who held out hope that the Northern Alliance would use General Massoud’s death as a rallying cry to continue their resistance. I also heard several older, wiser voices suggest what I had been hoping. Since Massoud lived under the constant threat of death for years, he had probably left orders for his own replacement. So, it appeared to me at the time that there were more reasons to stay a while longer than to quickly evacuate to what seemed to be a safer place.
One underlying theme in the meeting was the need for a clear evacuation plan. In my simple North Carolinian mind, only two options were clear. Feyzabad had an airstrip that remained in use, and the UN had access to several airplanes. Plan A involved all of us getting on planes, if possible, and flying north to Tajikistan or east to Pakistan. That plan depended mostly on the weather and the air security over Afghanistan. Plan B required driving further east to the only available border crossing at Eshkashem, which would take us into Tajikistan. I became frustrated that the meeting dragged on and on about the evacuation plan when it was obvious that we had only two real options. I suspected that some people, out of unspoken fears, were simply trying to rationalize an immediate evacuation.
Several of us continued to insist that it was too early to evacuate. The Taliban were not moving. Even if they did move forward, the Northern Alliance had typically dug in and become more fierce when their backs were against the wall. So the Taliban would at least be delayed.
One person reminded us that Feyzabad itself has throughout history seldom been taken by force. The city is so well protected by mountains that it can be effectively defended. The city has only surrendered to superior forces after a long siege or after negotiations. But when it comes to battle, Afghans stand and fight. For a year, I had lived close to the front lines, and the discussion of evacuation had come up almost weekly. As I listened to this discussion, it wasn’t that I was feeling bold or fearless. I just didn’t agree that we were in the kind of danger people were describing.
When I had agreed to stay in Dasht-e Qaleh a year before, we had devised a simple, rough-and-ready evacuation plan. If the front lines broke, I would leave. My first way of escape was only a few miles away at the Dasht-e Qaleh border and into Tajikistan. After twelve months, I had become used to uncertainty and rumors. The more I had become part of the local culture, the more I had come to expect that if I really needed to leave, I would know, and God would provide a way. I would escape inshallah (God willing), as my Muslim friends say.
Now I was sitting in a meeting a hundred miles behind the front lines, wondering why I should feel less safe than I felt only a few miles behind the front lines.The people I was there to help couldn’t evacuate. Should we run from danger when our leaving might actually make things worse for those in need? Why should I evacuate before it was necessary? I was convinced we were jumping the gun, but I also understood that the UN had strict security standards that its staff was just trying to follow.
When the meeting ended, it was clear that the evacuation plan was in place—an airlift by the UN. No timetable was established for when that would occur. Evacuation might come as early as the next day, but word would come to us from the UN if that were the case. The meeting ended around five o’clock in the evening, Afghanistan time, which meant that it was about seven o’clock that same morning in New York City. The day of terror was dawning in America.
THE DAWN OF DISASTER
NEWYORK/WASHINGTON D.C.—I met with the rest of our team for dinner at the Shelter for Life office in Feyzabad. I filled them in on the UN meeting while we ate. In the context of that conversation, we prayed for God’s wisdom and for the protection of the Afghan people. We were deeply concerned about the innocent victims who would suffer if the fighting intensified. We wondered what God was doing.
About eight o’clock that night our radio crackled to life with an incoming call. One of our staff from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, was calling with the first reports of something horrific happening in the United States. We quickly switched to our shortwave radio and scanned the broadcasts of large stations like CNN, BBC, and Voice of America. The news filled us with terrifying questions and overwhelming heartache.
The frequent news summaries quickly became repetitions of the same mind-chilling facts: First one, then two, then three large, commercial planes had intentionally crashed into highly populated buildings in New York and Washington. A fourth commercial plane was also feared down in Pennsylvania. First estimates suggested that tens of thousands of innocent Americans had been killed.
Shortly after we joined the worldwide audience glued to televisions and radios, watching and listening intently as the surreal turned real, we heard that the first tower in New York had just collapsed.Without the shocking images that so many were able to see on television, we had difficulty even comprehending what was happening. But the underlying evil seemed remarkably familiar. We couldn’t help but think that the assassination of General Massoud and the possible imminent collapse of Afghanistan were somehow part of a diabolical scheme that had just been unleashed on the rest of the unsuspecting world.
We listened, wept, prayed, and talked in an exhausting cycle far into the night, until the news reports became endless echoes of the same sad story over and over. I finally withdrew to another room for some quiet. Of course, I wondered if and how these terrible developments might affect our decision to stay in or leave Afghanistan. I tried to apply the faces and stories of the refugees, who had been my neighbors for the last year, to the people in my own country, but I couldn’t. How could something like this happen in the States? And why? Why had so many innocent people been called to suffer at the hands of cruel, evil terrorists? What could happen next?
Exhausted by tension and tears, I drifted into restless sleep. I remember mentally reviewing the decade-long journey that had brought me so far from home to this mysterious place where I felt I now belonged.
My homeland was under vicious attack, and I longed to be there to help the hurting. I also thought about the need for people in Northern Afghanistan to continue receiving food, shelter, and other forms of hope from around the world. God has provided generously to some peoples so that they, in turn, can be generous with others. I simply serve as a channel for that help.
I believe I was sent here to distribute God’s blessings. I know, deep in my heart, that I am privileged to be where I am—right where God wants me to be. In light of world events, is there really a better or safer place in the world than inside Afghanistan?