At Shafiq’s house I met his seventeen-year-old brother, who was studying at a nearby state school and knew some English. I was surprised that a Taliban commander would let his brother attend a government school. Shafiq’s brother told me he wanted to study engineering and didn’t want to fight. He had been with Mullah Abdillah all day, he said, and Abdillah had spent much of the day calling Taliban commanders to try to release me from Dr. Khalil. He had even called Mansur Dadullah in Kandahar.
Shafiq carried a television into the guest room and turned on the generator. He was able to read the English titles on the guide and found Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel. We watched coverage of attacks on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad and the ones we had driven by in Wardak. Boys were shown taking pieces of the trucks away. Shafiq got bored with Al Jazeera and put on Ariana, an Afghan channel, to watch an Indian soap opera dubbed in Dari. Women were shown in revealing Western attire. I was amazed that he would watch something so anathema to the Taliban. It was okay, he said. “It’s a drama about a family.” Later he put on a British Muslim channel called Islam and moved on to an Iranian American pop-music satellite channel. A portly singer with stubble and long hair imitated ’80s rock in Farsi. The next video showed an Iranian pop singer dressed up in leather like Davy Crockett and wearing brand-name tank tops. It was terrible stuff, but Shafiq told me he had no problem with these things. Qadim and Shafiq’s brother chatted. Shafiq read him something, and it became clear that Qadim was illiterate.
I finally managed to fall asleep, but at 11 p.m. there was shouting outside, and Kamal told me to wake up. “The Taliban are here for us,” he said, and my heart started racing again. Three young men carrying AK-47s with scarves and blankets draped around their heads and shoulders walked in. My knees felt weak as I stood up to greet them. “They’re a different group,” Shafiq’s brother said. They were not here for us at all. They hadn’t even heard of us but were merely a night patrol passing by. One of them sat on the floor with his barrel pointing at Shafiq. I eyed him nervously as he played with the trigger absentmindedly until Shafiq’s brother told him that his safety was off and it was dangerous. They left and came back again, this time leaving with Shafiq.
In the morning, I woke up to the sound of military planes overhead. I stepped out of the
Shafiq’s nephew had been arrested the night before after a Taliban patrol spotted him walking with a girl. Shafiq left us to go release him. In the meantime I spoke to a contact in Kabul, who told me that we had gotten caught in a rivalry between Mullah Abdillah and Shafiq, on one side, and Dr. Khalil, on the other. Mullah Abdillah and his men had killed nearly a dozen Pakistanis and Arabs for trying to burn down a girls’ school, but the foreigners were commanded by Dr. Khalil, so bad blood lingered. My contact told me he had been told by senior Taliban that we would be released in the afternoon but that once we were on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones. Shafiq had to deal with more headaches when other Talibs called to complain that they had heard music coming from his house when they called him the night before. Exasperated, Shafiq protested that it was only Al Jazeera.
Mullah Baradar, the Taliban minister of defense and Mullah Omar’s deputy, called Dr. Khalil and demanded our release because he had given us permission to travel in Taliban territory. Another contact added pressure on Dr. Khalil by calling his former commander, who had arranged for his release in the prisoner exchange. Early in the afternoon Dr. Khalil finally showed up. He examined my passport and visas, and carefully went through my bags. He was most fascinated by my Gillette gel deodorant, opening it and smelling it. He took my toothbrush out of its container and carefully thumbed through the bristles, bringing it close to his eye to examine it. He leafed through my notebooks and was intrigued by my many medicines for diarrhea and dehydration. He asked me to show him the pictures I had taken. “Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you, but I will not,” he told me. Dr. Khalil’s attitude was markedly different, and he made me feel at ease. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I asked him a few questions. He was fighting for a government of Islamic law, he said, but Mullah Omar did not have to be the leader again. God willing, it would take up to twenty or thirty years until they got rid of the foreigners. If the foreigners left, he would still fight the Afghan army, and he refused to negotiate with President Karzai. Women could go to school and work, he conceded. Dr. Khalil had studied in the Hakim Sahib Sanai Islamic School in the Pakistani town of Jub and then studied internal medicine in Afghanistan. In 1992 he joined the Taliban, and he was a commander in the far northern Taluqan district.
I wasn’t in the mood to ask too many questions, and we piled into the Corolla again, loading an RPG into the trunk just in case. Dr. Khalil got in the driver’s seat with Shafiq beside him holding the PKM. Qadim held an AK-47 and squeezed in next to me. Dr. Khalil’s escort followed on another motorcycle, as did Shafiq’s brother. We drove for about an hour through villages. The car got stuck, and I helped collect rocks to put beneath the tires. We drove through Dr. Khalil’s village of Asfanda, and he pointed to its outer limits. “This is the border between the Taliban and the government,” he said, proudly stressing his control. We drove undisturbed through the village. He asked me what I would write in my article. I told him that I would write about how much control the Taliban had in much of Afghanistan. He was now jocular and relaxed.
He pointed to a nearby American base with a spy blimp parked on the ground and told me to take a picture of it. At the edge of town close to the main road he got out, followed by Shafiq, who held his PKM. The locals appeared stunned. He stopped a pickup truck and ordered the driver to take us to the bazaar. We parted warmly and climbed on the back of the truck. Shafiq’s younger brother followed us on a motorcycle to the bazaar, where we met Mullah Abdillah, who was very apologetic for what had happened to me. Abdillah was supposed to have been with me during my trip through Talibanistan, but he was tired from his surgery and had gone home to relax. “I paid for my mistake,” he later said. “This Doctor, he is a very nasty guy,” my contact told me on the phone. “He might send somebody to kidnap you on the way, and then I can do nothing for you.” Abdillah was also worried that Dr. Khalil had set up an ambush for me on the road. Later I learned more. Shafiq had incorrectly told local Taliban that I worked for Al Jazeera. Dr. Khalil called the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan and asked him if he knew me. When the chief said no they decided I was a spy. By the time Mullah Baradar had made the call to Dr. Khalil, the leadership in Andar had already decided to execute me.
We dodged craters in the road on the way back with Abdillah, and the sides of the road were strewn with burned-out and exploded cars. The trucks I had seen burning two days earlier were still smoldering, and children were playing with them, removing pieces. I teased Abdillah for his Taliban having destroyed the roads and made our drive more difficult and perilous, and was surprised when he seemed to agree. He later expressed disapproval of the Taliban for killing Afghan civilians, explaining that they were not acting like Afghans. We didn’t stop fast enough at an army checkpoint, and the soldier raised his AK at us. It was a sunny day with clear skies, and I felt euphoric as we drove north to Kabul.
I RETURNED TO KABUL to find that the UN had been put on four days of restricted movement to coincide with Afghanistan’s independence day and the anniversary of the 2003 attack on the UN in Baghdad. While I was there rockets were also fired at the airport in Kabul and at the ISAF base. I told a Western intelligence officer about the extent to which the Taliban were in charge of Ghazni. “Andar is a very bad place,” he said, explaining that it had recently become one of the most dangerous areas in the country. “The Taliban showed a lot of confidence and freedom of movement,” he said. “They pulled people off buses. That level of control is right on Kabul’s front door. The writing was on the wall for the central region two years ago. The international effort was fixated with the south, but they didn’t create conditions to act as a buttress against the insurgency. Environments regarded as extreme two years ago are still extreme but much worse. There has been a staggering intensification, and there are ominous signs elsewhere in country.”
Between Ghazni and Kabul are the formerly peaceful provinces of Wardak and Logar. “Logar and Wardak were like canaries in a mine, and now they have gone,” a senior development official told me. His NGO had divided Afghanistan into stable, unstable, and volatile areas. “Now unstable provinces have become volatile,” he said. “Now it’s too late.” A former Taliban government official told me that Logar had become dangerous in the summer of 2007. “I was watching trends in Logar and Wardak because there was no movement from the government side to
