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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
A trip to the front in Afghanistan turns into a nightmare after a Taliban ambush sets off a panic.
Dec 21, 2001 | In an unheated apartment in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a few days before crossing the border into Afghanistan, I had a nightmare in which I was making terrible mistakes. It was one of those quick, bad turns your head sometimes takes when you arrive in an unfamiliar place and the dreams are unnaturally vivid. There was a fake tank at a fake checkpoint in a fake war-torn country, and then something happened that couldn't be undone. In the sequence, I had given the wrong answer to a soldier's question.
A bad dream, no big deal, hatched by anxiety and anti-malaria pills, but I remember it now because of what would happen 10 days later, at the bridge over the Bangi River on Nov. 12, the day after the Northern Alliance took Taloqan in a nearly bloodless victory. It was a victory that made us feel all warm and happy inside because we had the good fortune to witness the column of fighters glide into the city, where the population came out to greet them by throwing coins and banknotes onto the hoods of tanks and jeeps as they passed while some even held out pieces of bread to the fighters, which they took and ate as part communion, part welcome.
The crew of journalists I'd fallen in with, five writers and photographers from the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Portugal, had witnessed the fall of Taloqan from the back of a Toyota pickup.
After the town fell, we spent a cold night on the second floor of a shop in Taloqan, without blankets, crashed out on piles of luggage and coats. In the morning, we found some female doctors at the clinic who told us what life was like under the Taliban, and we were so excited at the prospect of speaking to unveiled women, we fell upon them with a hail of inane questions. The interview went longer than we had expected, and by the time it was over, Daoud Khan's soldiers had already left for the front, now moving west. He had offered to take us with him, but we were stranded, left to find a place to stay in Taloqan.
Our driver, whose name was Kandahar, stopped the Toyota in front of a place on the main street, a house owned by a rich man who claimed that he had rented it to Arabs before the Northern Alliance had arrived. We were welcome for $20 a night, but there would be no food, no running water, no electricity, and rent was to be collected in the morning before we were out of bed. In one long room, the room we would stay in, there were sleeping mats and pillows; covering the windows were sheets of milky plastic. All in all, it wasn't a terrible deal, but we needed shelter from the relentless cold and dust, which would make everyone sick as dogs.
Like our new pad, every house in Taloqan has a garden surrounded by high mud walls. More often than not, the garden will have roses, which are fed by delicate irrigation channels dug into the packed earth, which, if followed to their source, go through the walls, out to the street, finally threading back to the river. The city is a maze of these channels. Old men wash in them, rub their teeth with the water, using it prepare themselves for prayer. On the street, the trees line the irrigation channels, their leaves covered with the dust from passing trucks.
The correspondents milled around the guest house garden wondering what to do next, whether they had enough to file for the day or whether they would have to pile into a car and drive through the rice fields to find the mujahedin column. The consensus was "bad idea," and most of them stuck around to file the hospital story.
I kept talking about driving up to the front toward Kunduz to find the mujahedin, but Kevin Donovan from the Toronto Star told me to forget it, saying it wasn't a good plan since we didn't know what was going on up there. He was a good reporter and swaggered a bit, an act that went well with his Marlboro Man looks. As we debated what to do, the Afghans, a knot of translators and drivers, squatted near some young trees waiting for us to make a decision. Kevin chose to stay, which meant that I was without a ride and a driver.
A minute later, Sion Touhig, a Welsh photographer, came up and said to me casually, "So how about we go up there and just have a look?" He said it like there were girls having a pillow fight in the next house, and maybe we should take a peek before their brothers get there. I agreed.
Donovan said to me, "You're going. Are you going?"
"Yes."
"You understand that I can't let you have Kandahar take you up there?"
Donovan didn't need Kandahar, but he wasn't happy about lending him out.
"No problem," I said.
It was a huge problem.
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