Nir Rosen - Aftermath

I asked the men who they thought should lead Afghanistan. It didn’t have to be Mullah Omar, they said, as long as Islamic law was imposed. I asked them if they would allow people like Osama bin Laden and other foreign fighters in once they controlled Afghanistan. “Islam has no borders,” said Shafiq affirmatively. I asked why most Taliban were Pashtun. “Pashtun people have more principles and religious faith than others,” said Shafiq. “It’s also because Pashtuns are the majority.” This is not exactly accurate: Pashtuns are the largest group in Afghanistan, but they are not the majority. “Life was better under the Taliban because it was an Islamic regime,” said Yusuf. They asked me questions about the Americans: what they thought of their being in Afghanistan, and if they thought they would win. I struggled to find the right answer. One of the commanders told Shafiq that I was an American CIA agent. Shafiq told him I wasn’t. I heard the words “istikhbarat” and “jasus , ” which meant “army intelligence” and “spy,” as we readied ourselves to leave.

We left to meet more fighters. Yusuf stopped the car at a house where an American strike had killed two Talibs a year earlier and asked me to photograph it. We crawled through rocky paths between mud homes, a vast labyrinth. Everything looked the same to me. We got stuck in the sand, and a dust storm hit us, blinding and suffocating us as we struggled to push the car. We stopped in front of a shop with the PKM in full view and Taliban music playing. The people in the shop greeted Yusuf warmly. Six men came out to greet us as we sat waiting in the car. Yusuf bought many shoulder straps for AK-47s and put them in the car.

We drove to another mosque and found twelve men inside. A large shoulder-fired missile was on the floor, an anti-armor weapon I had not seen before. Most of the men in this room were older. Shafiq told me we were waiting to meet the commander who would approve my trip. I thought it had all been approved already. One of the men was called Abu Tayyeb, an Arabic nom de guerre. He spoke Arabic, so we were able to talk to each other. He told me he commanded two thousand men in Wardak and was visiting. He had lived in Saudi Arabia for one year and spent three months in a Saudi prison for mujahideen-related activities. He had joined the mujahideen fourteen years ago, he said, and under the Taliban he was a commander in the northern Kunduz province. He told me the large shoulder-fired weapon on the floor was an RR82, or some kind of recoilless rifle. I continued to ask him questions, but then the angry man—the one who had asked me if I was a Pashtun—came in holding a walkie-talkie and barked at him to stop talking to me until the commander, called Dr. Khalil, showed up. I noticed that some other men had walkie-talkies too, and that Kamal was nervous. There was a problem, he told me; the judge would decide what would happen to us. Upon hearing the word qazi (judge), I started to panic inside. As Shafiq had told me, a meeting with a judge could end with your head getting cut off.

We got up to go, and when we were out I was told to get in the car with the angry man and other strangers, who would take me to the judge. Yusuf was praying and Shafiq said he would pray and catch up with us. I told him I was not leaving him, that I was his guest. A desperate feeling was beginning to take over me. Holding their rifles the commander’s men shouted at me to get in their car. Yusuf came out, told me to get in our Corolla, and assured me he wouldn’t leave us. He put Qadim in the car with us. A standoff ensued. I called and sent text messages to my contacts back in Kabul to let them know I was in trouble. Qadim sat menacingly with an AK-47, his face concealed by a scarf. His phone rang: its ring tones were machine-gun fire and a song about the Taliban being born for martyrdom. Lack of water, fear, and the dust had dried my mouth, and I felt as though I had lost my voice. My friend in Kabul who had helped arrange the trip called Shafiq and told him he should not leave me, that I was Shafiq’s responsibility and he would hold him personally responsible if anything happened to me.

After an hour Shafiq told us we could get out. Abu Tayyeb, the Arabic speaker, tried to reassure me and told me not to worry. The angry man and his companions departed, taking the rocket launcher with them. I thought it was over, and put my hand on my heart as they left, to indicate no ill will. Then Shafiq told us Dr. Khalil was coming to see us. Abu Tayyeb had tried and failed to get them to let us leave. I wondered if all the increased phone traffic and movement of Taliban commanders would attract the attention of whatever American intelligence agency might be spying on us, and if we would be attacked. Abu Tayyeb apologetically explained that there were many Taliban groups and that the one causing me problems was different. Then the order came for us to go see Dr. Khalil ourselves.

We left in a heavy dust storm. The car crawled forward slowly, rocking back and forth on the rocky paths, and I felt as though I were in a boat being tossed about by waves. Yusuf said not to worry, that if they came to take me he would fight them. We drove from village to village with Qadim ahead on the motorcycle. In my loneliness it occurred to me that we had driven through an entire district, through many villages, and there was no authority other than the Taliban, who seemed completely comfortable in their territory and not half as concerned about the Americans as I was. “We have problem,” Kamal said, but he didn’t elaborate when I asked what it was. On the road I struggled to find network reception for my phone, cursing as the bars appeared and disappeared. I reached another one of my contacts. “I spoke to Dr. Khalil,” he said. “If they behave bad with you, don’t worry. They just want to punish you, but everything is okay. I have only one more guy to call, who is bigger than Dr. Khalil.” Shafiq also told me not to worry; he would get killed before he left me. We crawled at a snail’s pace to our denouement in a dark empty desert, which only made me more tense. I could see nothing on the horizon; it was clear we had a long way to go. I asked Shafiq if Dr. Khalil was a nice guy, a good guy. “He’s like you,” Shafiq answered cryptically. “No Muslim is a bad man. Don’t worry, the Doctor has a gun and I have a gun.” Dr. Khalil, apparently, was a Tajik, not a Pashtun, which was very unusual for a senior Taliban commander like him, and he was from the Tajik village of Asfanda in Ghazni. He had recently been released from an Afghan prison in a prisoner exchange. Shafiq later said that as soon as Dr. Khalil heard I was a foreigner, he thought he would be rich. He called his superiors and told them he caught Shafiq with a foreign spy. He called Mansur Dadullah and told him, “I arrested a foreigner and an Afghan in Wardak and brought them to Ghazni.” Mansur Dadullah was the brother of the slain Mullah Dadullah, who had commanded Taliban military operations after the 2001 American invasion until he was killed in May 2007. Mansur Dadullah was released with other Taliban prisoners in March 2007 in exchange for the Taliban release of an Italian journalist. He then commanded Taliban operations in some of the most dangerous southern provinces and served as a spokesman until he was reportedly demoted by Mullah Omar.

Mullah Abdillah called to say that he had reached a Taliban leader in Quetta in Pakistan and somebody in the United Arab Emirates, and they had promised to call Dr. Khalil and tell him not to harm us. “The Doctor will fight with me, not with you,” said Shafiq. My contact called again to tell me “they might slap you, but they won’t hit you or kill you, just punish you for coming without permission. They might keep you overnight as a guest. You are lucky you called me.” I felt some relief, but I was not convinced. Later he told me that Dr. Khalil had told him, “Don’t worry, we won’t do anything that isn’t Sharia,” but this was little consolation, since they considered Islamic law to permit beheading.