Friday, Jul 4, 2008
On the treacherous Kabul-Kandahar road, our correspondent falls into the hands of a gang of feral kids with Kalashnikovs.
Feb 4, 2002 | The road to Kandahar from Kabul has such an evil reputation it was hard to get anyone at the Mustafa Hotel to talk about it. Even thinking about taking it made people uncomfortable. The common wisdom was that you had to go with your own private army or not go at all. Most Westerners instead chose the absurdly long route through Pakistan, which meant flying to Islamabad on a U.N. plane, flying south to Quetta, and then tunneling back into Afghanistan at a place called Spin Boldak. A heroic multinational detour, complete with high bribes and visa hassles, just to avoid the Kabul to Kandahar shakes. But if you didn't have the money or the time to do the Pakistani shuffle, driving started to look like a real option.
The word was that the road was full of bandits, part of an ever-worsening security situation following the end of the war. Of course, ordinary Afghans trying to visit relatives in another province can't take the U.N. flights, so they take their chances.
It's a trip that takes about two days if nothing goes wrong. Coming from Kabul, most travelers stay the night in a town called Ghazni, about 150 kilometers from the capital, then get up before dawn and drive the rest of the way to Kandahar, another 400 kilometers. The road, a southwestern arc that crosses Wardak, Ghazni, Zabul, and Kandahar provinces, also crosses cultures and tribes. People in each province wear signature clothing, turbans and caps of certain colors, and speak slight variations of Pashto. Moving south, turbans take the place of pakuls, the woolen hats worn by the mujahedin, and the cloth of choice gets darker. Kandaharis wear black turbans.
We decided to leave Kabul on Friday, Jan. 25, after we learned that the blind lion at the Kabul Zoo had died. That was our signal to start packing. A veteran of two wars, the 25-year-old cat died in bed, surrounded by his friends, after receiving better medical care than most Afghans. He passed away like a head of state. Until then, Kabul had this bad gravitational field that wouldn't let us go. The usual delays, permission letters, security fears. Everything took forever.
Kabul had become dry and sleepy. Kofi Annan's visit snarled traffic for a whole day. At one point the big news was that a British Gurkha regiment had arrived to join the peacekeeping force. In the Mustafa Hotel, one TV crew was so hard up for a story they interviewed the owner, a new low. The cyclops eye of the world media was beginning to stare at something else.
Kandahar was promising, and Aman Khan, my translator, said he could get us there if that was what I really wanted. But our driver, Abdullah, did not want to go to Kandahar. Abdullah was from Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, and it was too far for him, too distant from his own people. Asking him to drive all the way across the country was like asking him to become an astronaut or a Russian test pilot. I wheedled, bullied, then begged him to pull his minivan together so we could go. He ultimately gave in, but he still didn't want to do it. We packed on Saturday night, and prepared to leave at 7 the next morning for Ghazni.
A few days before, in the bird market, I'd found two canaries for the room in the Mustafa. They lived in a Chinese wire cage and fought all the time. Walikh, a kid who was always hanging around our floor, kept stopping by with presents for them. Boiled egg, bits of bread. The bird market gangsters had kept them outside in the cold, and the gray canary was weak, but Walikh brought him back with all the attention. We took them down to the car on Sunday morning with everything else.
It was bright and cold as we drove out to the gates of the city, which were two shipping containers standing on end. We cleared the checkpoint after an argument with the militia. On our way out of town, listening to the Persian singer Nagma on the tape deck, we drove through the destroyed suburbs, a monument to the unrestrained bloodletting of 1993 in which 10,000 civilians were killed as Gulbuddin Hikmetyar attacked the Rabbani government. Only a year later, Hikmetyar and Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord from Mazar-e-Sharif, fought for control of Kabul, destroying even larger sections of the city. We drove through miles of ruins. Since then, Dostum, a man known for his brutality and shifting allegiances, has become deputy defense minister in the Karzai government, leaving many people with a sense of foreboding that won't go away.
At Sur Pol we crossed the Kabul River, a bright silver band. Pointing to the hills and ridges, Aman said, "Do you see those mountains? They are not rock, they are made of dust." There were deep washes and gullies that marked the boundaries of a much larger river, but the water had retreated underground. The drought-ridden land looked like it had been scoured of anything green, and I wondered how the citizens of the villages hung on, living so far up in the mountains without water or fuel. Fifty kilometers outside Kabul the paved road ended and the van bounced along in the ruts, Abdullah swerving to stay out of the path of trucks. The canaries fluttered and chirped in the back seat.
For security, we had brought a Chinese automatic from Nangarhar province. We wrapped it in three plastic bags and hid it under the jack and a few greasy tools. The gun was strictly a last-chance deal, and we never referred to it by name, always saying, "Is that thing loaded?" or "Do you have that thing?" The pistol seemed like a suicidal gesture in a place where the weapon of choice was a Kalashnikov, but it did have the element of surprise going for it. The gun lived under the front seat and we tried not to think bad thoughts. The way to Ghazni was peaceful, the villages relaxed and we were there by 12:30, feeling good.
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