“immorality.”
Before I left for Ghazni, I spoke to a senior UN official. “I don’t think you should go,” he said. “It’s deteriorated. Many Taliban commanders were killed there, and the leadership is totally fragmented. There is a lot of criminality within. In the past there was a sense of protection for foreigners here, but being a foreigner there is a major risk. There are Taliban checkpoints in the middle of Ghazni at night. Much of Ghazni is under Taliban control.” I put his admonitions out of my mind. Three months earlier an Afghan soldier returned to Andar to irrigate his land. He was wearing civilian clothes, but the Taliban arrested him and executed him near the district bazaar. “The Andar district compound near the bazaar has only fifteen police,” said one local who now lived in Kabul and was afraid to return. “They can’t even secure their compound, so how can they secure the district?” His cousin had once worked for the Parliament in Kabul, but the Taliban had threatened him with death if he returned to his work, so he stayed in Andar.
The Taliban governor for Ghazni issued ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers with land disputes went to the Taliban there to seek justice according to their interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence. Beginning in 2004 the roads in Ghazni started getting dangerous, but now the Taliban could stop you there in broad daylight and check your cellphone to determine from your calls if you were a worthwhile captive. The Taliban’s former minister of education had been released in exchange for the Korean hostages in 2007. He returned to assume a position of importance among the Taliban of Ghazni. In order to gain control of one district, a senior UN official told me, the province’s government-appointed governor had to move his troops and surrender control of another district. Before leaving I asked my friend if I should worry about my trip succeeding. “In Afghanistan you should always worry,” he said.
Shafiq, another commander from Ghazni, drove us down as Mullah Abdillah sat in the front passenger seat. We were accompanied by Kamal, a twenty-eight-year-old Afghan who knew just enough English to confuse both of us. I had tried and failed to find a real translator; some were unavailable, and others refused when they were told what the trip entailed. With the Arabic I knew as well as my basic Farsi and Pashtu, I hoped I would manage.
Abdillah had been injured recently in clashes with a rival commander from the Taliban, though at first he told me the wound was from an American bullet. He paid one thousand dollars of his own money for two surgeries at a private Kabul hospital to repair nerve damage. The wound was now covered with a bandage. He bore older scars on his arm and leg, and had lost one of his legs in fighting in the civil war during the ’90s. Abdillah was now a commander in the Dih Yak district of Ghazni. He told me he had five hundred men under his command. Abdillah was also a liaison with more senior Taliban leaders and regularly communicated with the Taliban’s minister of defense. Shafiq had light skin with a short light-brown beard and wore a cap with embroidery and rhinestones. He had fought the Russians with the mujahideen. I asked him who was a more formidable foe: the Russians or the Americans. The Russians were stronger, he told me, more fierce. “We will put the Americans in graves,” he said. Shafiq was a commander of fighters in Andar. He and Abdillah chatted and joked on the way to Ghazni. We were stopped at an Afghan army checkpoint, and the wary soldiers singled me out, growing more suspicious when they heard in my accent that I was a foreigner. One of the soldiers wore a brown T-shirt, and on his black vest he had a roll of plastic American flex-cuffs. My companions persuaded the soldiers that I was only a journalist. As we drove away, Abdillah and Shafiq laughed, explaining that the soldiers thought I was a suicide bomber.
We soon left Kabul province and entered Wardak. The road, lined with poplar trees and green fields, took us between arid sand-colored mountains with sharp peaks. Nomadic Kuchi women with colorful scarves draped over them ignored us, tending to camels as small boys herded sheep. On the hill-sides were cemeteries with rough tombstones haphazardly pointing in various angles and multicolored flags flying above them. In Wardak the new road was torn apart by craters. We circled around them as if they were giant potholes, but most had been made by roadside bombs buried in culverts beneath the road. Without the culverts floods would wash away roads, but they were an ideal location to hide bombs targeting Afghan security forces, the U.S. military, and its allies, as well as the convoys of trucks that provided logistical support. We drove by a truck still smoldering from an attack the day before and a truck charred from an attack a month before. Three or four American armored vehicles drove by, as did Afghan National Army (ANA) pickup trucks.
By the time we reached the town of Salar in Wardak, we had passed about six trucks destroyed by Taliban bombs on the road. In Salar we approached a large group of cars with people standing on the side of the road by a gas station. Shafiq and Abdillah called Taliban friends on their mobile phones to see what was going on. “The Americans are fighting the Taliban,” my companions explained. We could see smoke several hundred meters away and heard the chatter of machine-gun fire interrupted by the thuds of mortar fire and loud explosions—which clapped against my ears and got closer, shaking us. I flinched and ducked, gasping and cursing, as Shafiq and Abdillah laughed at me. “
Two small green NATO armored personnel carriers zipped by driving away from the battle. Shafiq and Abdillah laughed. Bulgarians, they told me. As more cars stopped on the road, more men got out to watch the battle, point at what they could spot, and chat. At a small shop by the gas station, my companions bought a syrupy Taiwanese version of Red Bull called Energy. People went to urinate behind rusting shipping containers. Afghan men squat all the way down when they piss. I couldn’t manage this feat of acrobatic skill, and a man standing as he relieved himself would have immediately attracted attention, so I waited until everybody had left before I went and pissed between shipping containers.
Several American vehicles drove by as well as two Polish and two ANA vehicles. A few minutes later three American vehicles sped in the direction of the fighting, shortly followed by three NATO vehicles. After an hour of waiting, everybody smiled and went back to their cars. Buses and cars drove toward us from the direction of the battle scene, honking to let us know the way was safe and the roadblocks had been opened. Trucks were ablaze on the side of the road, and large craters had torn through the asphalt, with chunks of the road tossed in our way. The trucks had been carrying drinks for the Americans, Abdillah told me. Sure enough, as we drove past them we could see hundreds of water bottles spilling out. We drove by the halted convoy. Dozens of trucks, some partially burned, crowded the road. The drivers stood outside the trucks, which had UKMOD (United Kingdom Ministry of Defense) stickers on their windshields. Armed escorts fanned around the road. Further down the road there were more craters and American armored vehicles blocked our path, with fire and smoke behind them. People told us to stop because the Americans were shooting at approaching cars. Shafiq slowly maneuvered the car to the front of the line and stopped. The Americans moved, and we all followed slowly like a nervous herd. We drove by yet more burning trucks down a stretch of road that had been smashed to bits. Abdillah pointed to three destroyed vehicles from an attack four days earlier.
We were on the “ring road,” the most critical road in Afghanistan. It was the fastest, most direct and practical means of getting from hub to hub, if you ignored the increasing risk. Without the ring road, one was relegated to using small provincial roads—which greatly increased the length of the trip, since many were just gravel or dirt. The ring road was the only one that was close to being a highway in the country and was the only viable route for those wishing to move large convoys. The Kabul-Kandahar highway had been a show-piece for the American coalition, connecting the two main American bases—in Bagram and Kandahar—and linking two halves of the country together. Now it was destroyed, and traffic in support of the Afghan government or the coalition forces was becoming more difficult. On June 24, 2008, the Taliban attacked a convoy of fifty-four trucks passing through Salar: they destroyed fifty-one of them, seized two Toyota escort vehicles that belonged to the security guards, captured loot, and killed some of the drivers. More recently, on September 8, in Zurmat—which is between Gardez province and Ghazni—a convoy of thirty-five trucks was attacked, and twenty-nine of them were destroyed.
At a lonely desert checkpoint manned by the Afghan army, a few soldiers with AK-47s asked us what had happened on the road. Later we passed by a pickup truck full of more Afghan soldiers. “They are bad,” Shafiq told me, explaining they were from Kandahar and were affiliated with President Karzai. “I fight them every day,” he said. Night fell, and we passed a police station. “From now on it’s all Taliban territory,” they told me. “The Americans and police don’t come here at night.” We no longer had mobile phone reception. Shafiq and Abdillah explained that the Taliban ordered the local phone towers to be shut down every night so they could better conduct operations. We stopped at a gas station, and they pointed to an Afghan in an SUV who they knew worked with the Americans at the nearby base. In the darkness we slowly rolled into the village of Nughi. It was the holiday of Shab-e-Barat, when Muslims believe God determines the destinies of people for the coming year. It seemed as though all the young boys of the village had gathered in small groups to swing balls of fire connected to wires. Like orange stars,
