All crazy on the Kunduz front
Greetings from the 10th century, where the Northern Alliance fighters who protect me by day try to kill me for my phone at night.
By Phillip Robertson
Nov. 26, 2001 | TALOQAN, Afghanistan -- I had no idea when I arrived in Afghanistan how much of my time would be spent waiting. I based myself in Taloqan, and I was in luck: Almost immediately I watched that city fall to the Northern Alliance. Kunduz, just 50 miles west, would be the next to go, I was told, and I had a seat at the front. But for almost two weeks, I watched and waited for the fall of Kunduz, in vain.
On Monday, the city finally fell, but actually witnessing peace will require more waiting. Northern Alliance commanders are now fighting among themselves, and there's no way to tell which side will prevail. Meanwhile, fighting continues in Mazar-I-Sharif, where Taliban prisoners revolted, and hundreds are reported dead. Farther south, U.S. Marines have landed at Kandahar. A string of quick Northern Alliance victories -- Mazar-I-Sharif, Kabul, Taloqan -- was supposed to mean the end of the Taliban, but didn't. All of this could go on for a while.
I have no idea how to get out of here.
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The war began for me, for real, almost three weeks ago. I woke up at 7 a.m. Nov. 8 in a hotel in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, deathly ill after being poisoned by the notoriously foul water. My local fixer was waiting for me outside the Hotel Tajikistan in his lime green Zhiguli sedan. I almost couldn't make it downstairs, and Azam, my elfin, bald protector, wanted to know if I'd been drinking.
"Mr. Phillip, I am very fond of you," he said. "Have you been at the bar?" Azam, this shrewd man in his 50s, looked like the Mongolian version of the great American physicist Robert Oppenheimer in his later years. Completely unable to speak, I piled into the car and we drove to the Foreign Ministry building where a convoy of journalists was getting ready to drive to the Afghan border. Breakfast was a handful of Cipro and a malaria pill.
After the obligatory mumbling and checking of names on a special list, the cops gave the OK, and a Tajik police car with wailing sirens and squawking bullhorn led our convoy of six cars up into the dust-colored hills, past the ruins of Soviet agricultural collectives. Soon the road degenerated into a rutted track, and in the small villages, everyone came out to wave at us as we passed. Tajiks stood by the road by the hundreds. The women with their hair covered by bright scarves, decked out in velvet dresses and looking very much like Hollywood fortunetellers, raised their hands and tried to peek in the windows of the passing cars.
At one of the last checkpoints before the ferry crossing to Afghanistan, Graham Day, a freelance cameraman from London, got out of his car and fed Jelly Bellies to the tribal elders. One bearded and turbaned ancient was unsure whether he should take one when Graham said, "Go on, don't be daft. Now pop it in." The old man ate the ruby-colored nubbin and moved on, after a puzzled grunt of thanks.
It took us another three spine-jolting hours to get to the border. By that time the light was failing, turning the Amu Darya river the color of motor oil. At the ferry, all was chaos as we handed over our magic safe-passage letters to the Russian troops, without which we were utterly screwed. Buses full of Afghans, journalists with expensive television equipment and mujahedin all piled onto a rusted platform on which we tried to arrange the weight so it wouldn't sink. Then, midway across the river, just as I noticed that the ferry was powered by a tractor engine, the shelling started, and all of us shut up. Taliban positions were just a few kilometers away, and when the shells hit, every 20 seconds or so, I felt the concussions in my chest.
On the other side, we cleared customs and lied to the Northern Alliance fighters about how much money we were carrying. Afghanistan is fundamentally a feudal society, awash in cheap Soviet weapons, where the most reliable form of transportation is a donkey. Next on the list of desirable transportation choices is the tricked-out pickup truck, a vehicle that has a monster suspension rendering it capable of fording rivers and driving up the sides of mountains. Afghans reverently call these "Datsuns," no matter who the manufacturer happens to be.
The familiar features of the West were beginning to disappear for me. The Hindu Kush mountains take the place of the Rockies, reducing them to foothills. Cars turn into horse-drawn carriages. Dust storms beat out rain. Women disappear. Men grow Kalashnikovs on their backs, and children become rocket bearers. After a long journey, I'd finally reached my destination, in the 10th century A.D.
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