CHAPTER 5
In Kabul that spring of 2005, the lack of war was as obvious as the bikinis at the pool of L’Atmosphère, the restaurant of wicker chairs, glass-topped tables, and absurdly priced wine that had become the equivalent of the sitcom Cheers in the Afghan capital. How quiet was it? It was so quiet that an award-winning war correspondent would spend the summer filming a documentary about a Kabul school for female drivers. It was so quiet that the photographer and I rode around in a government bus in Kabul where workers yanked beggars off the street, effectively kidnapping them for a day, holding them in a school and feeding them some gruel before releasing them, a catch-and-release program for the poor. (By now we knew the regular beggars and their acts. The boy with flippers for arms. The girl who wore her blind brother’s suit jacket and led him around by his one good arm. Egg Boy, an entrepreneur who sobbed daily next to broken eggs at various intersections, raking in egg money from concerned foreigners.)
It was so quiet that I went to a brothel for fun, so quiet that I knew I should probably fly home to India to spend time with Chris, so quiet that I decided it was a better idea to hang out in the quiet. It was also so quiet that the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, left Afghanistan for Iraq, his job done in Kabul, a job transfer that would only later seem significant, when the U.S. embassy finally got ambassadors who acted like ambassadors. In a blue tie, dark blue suit, and white shirt, Zal was predictably somber at his last press conference, telling the room that the country was in the fourth kilometer of a ten-kilometer journey. He also said he was not “a potted plant” and was available to help if Afghanistan ever wanted it.
“My time has come to say farewell,” he told the standing-room-only crowd. “I will never forget Afghanistan, and I will return.”
His show was Oscar-worthy, and I feared he was about to burst into a version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Afghanistan.” A few Afghan journalists actually seemed close to tears. Their deference toward Zal bordered on worship.
And then, with a wave and a smile that could have powered a small Afghan village, the Viceroy was gone. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last large press conference I would ever attend, or be invited to, at the U.S. embassy, because in the future the embassy would stop holding free-for-all events, stop opening its doors so wide. And Zal would be the last U.S. ambassador who talked to Karzai that often.
Because Kabul was so quiet, our team—Farouq, Nasir, the photographer, and me—went to the most decrepit circus on the planet, the Pak-Asia Circus, making its first grand tour from Pakistan. It featured a ripped tent, a tightrope that sagged dangerously close to the ground, and so much more. The big top here was more of a sad raggedy small top. The knife thrower accidentally hit his beautiful female assistant in the thigh, drawing blood, but here in Afghanistan, such minor bloodshed qualified as slapstick comedy. The circus was usually packed, mainly with government workers, even the army, who didn’t have to pay for the eighty-cent ticket. Nasir spotted a familiar face in the audience: the Titanic-loving taxi driver I had met two years earlier, who at the time said he was treated well at Guantánamo when he was mistakenly picked up and shipped there. Through Farouq, I asked about his life. He shrugged. He drove another taxi between Khost and Kabul, but he never got his first taxi back. He had gone to the circus twenty times in the past month—Kabul had nothing else to do for fun. But his tone had changed. He talked about an old man who recently had been shot dead in a nighttime raid near Khost by U.S. soldiers.
“America is no good,” the taxi driver said. “The Americans are no good. They are not treating Afghans right.”
Not much to say to that. He shifted his attention to the circus. So did we. A girl bent her feet over her back and used them to light a Pine Light cigarette. A man dressed up as a frog and hopped around. A boy did a headstand on a man’s head. A tightrope walker swilled liquid from an Absolut vodka bottle as he stumbled along the low-slung rope. We said goodbye to the taxi driver to interview a man who came to the circus to escape the headache of having two wives. We never saw the taxi driver again.
But we did drive south to Khost, the eastern town that bordered the tribal areas of Pakistan, to visit the family of the dead man he had mentioned—Shayesta Khan, who had been about seventy-five, a village elder with a long white beard. This was the other side of the war from my embed in Paktika, the side of “collateral damage,” the U.S. military term for unintentional injury caused while pursuing legitimate targets. Increasingly, such damage was becoming a problem throughout southern and eastern Afghanistan, the areas dominated by the ethnic Pashtuns and home to most insurgent activity. Anger about so-called “civilian casualties” and house raids was starting to bubble up there. Outside Kabul, in the places where public opinion mattered most, the mood toward the United States was shifting. It was not just the hostility displayed by Afghans upset at U.S. soldiers bursting into their compounds. It was the new willingness to believe the worst, even the most outrageous claims, without question. No one yet understood that what mattered in Afghanistan was not reality—it was rumor, the stories that raced from village to village.
The raid on Shayesta Khan’s house was nothing like the compound visits I had observed, where the U.S. soldiers drank tea and tried to respect Afghan culture. This was a nighttime, kick-in-the-door, suited-up raid. An informant had allegedly told the U.S. military that bombs were being made in the compound where about sixty members of Shayesta Khan’s family lived. Who the informant was, I could never find out, nor could I find any other evidence that the claims were true.
In the early morning hours, U.S. soldiers had broken down the compound’s side door, near steps that led to an open area outside Shayesta Khan’s bedroom. Family members said they heard shouting, then gunshots. Everything was a blur, and everyone had a different story. The local Afghan intelligence deputy said Shayesta Khan was shot reaching for a shirt. His sons said their father was shot trying to light a gas lantern. In their initial news release, U.S. military officials said an Afghan man was shot after he ignored a warning from an interpreter and a warning shot. The U.S. officials said the man was in the home of a known bomb-maker and kept moving toward a container on a dresser despite warnings, acting “aggressively” and making “threatening actions.”
Who knew which version was right? But I learned certain facts—Shayesta Khan was old, and he was partly deaf, and bullet holes and shattered windows indicated that he was shot from outside his window. Afghan officials who had seen the body said Khan was shot several times, on the left side of his head and body. Afghans we met in the province thought he was innocent, a defenseless village elder who liked to throw rocks to make kids laugh. (Yes, that passed for entertainment in these parts. Still no TV.) His older brother, eighty or so, had no teeth, could barely walk, and didn’t realize his brother was dead. His younger brother, seventy or so, said God had willed it.
“That was the decision from God,” he said, then shrugged.
Part of me wanted to yell at the man and even shake him. I found the blind acceptance of tragedy maddening in this region, the whole idea that God or fate inextricably decided one’s life, that free will had nothing to do with it. I had heard that argument from Hindus and Buddhists about the tsunami; I had privately wondered whether God might want people to use their wits to protect themselves, for instance building their homes more than ten feet away from the water’s edge. But in some ways, such unquestioning acceptance was probably the only way to get through mind-blowing tragedy. God was the answer; a peaceful afterlife was the only reason to go through the pain of living.
I stood with Farouq, Nasir, and the photographer inside the narrow room where Shayesta Khan once slept, with two lone black-and-white pictures hanging on the wall—one of him and his wife decades earlier, another of his former boss, a military hospital official from the Communist regime. His prized Holy Quran was wrapped in cloth, near the corner where he had often prayed. The room looked scorched, like someone had somehow set fire to the two metal trunks in the opposite corner. Bullet holes punctuated the wall just above Khan’s bed.
Farouq looked at the burn marks in the room. He was quiet, which meant he was upset. When he talked loudly or gruffly, that meant he was fine. I had messed that up in the past. “He was an old man,” Farouq said. “He was completely innocent. How could this happen?”
Nasir looked at me, as if I had any answer. He always did that, even though he rarely understood me, and he usually just started laughing at anything I said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Scared soldiers, the middle of the night, sudden movement. Someone fired. Messed up.”
“But how could the Americans mess up like this?” Farouq replied. “They have the technology to see who they are shooting. He was an old man. Someone should go to prison.”
The U.S.-led coalition spokesman described Khan’s death to me as “an unfortunate incident” but insisted that the soldiers violated no rules. The press release also said soldiers captured three insurgents suspected of being involved with roadside bombs.
And that was it. The military never put out another statement, one that said that all three supposed insurgents were released within days. Or one that said no bomb-making equipment was actually found in the compound. Instead, the soldiers found one “Jihad Against America” pamphlet, one Kalashnikov assault rifle, a 9-mm handgun, and ammunition. It was actually not a significant haul for a compound of sixty people—in fact, such a weapons supply in a country like Afghanistan, where every man was allowed to keep a gun, was the equivalent of bringing a slingshot to a mortar fight.
Khan’s death was a kind of breaking point. At a meeting with President Bush, Karzai asked for more coordination between Afghan and U.S. forces on raids. The Afghan defense ministry publicly criticized the U.S. military for the very first time. A wedge had started to form between the Afghan people and the international forces. The implications were obvious, though no one but Afghans seemed to notice them. The Pashtun code was based on honor, hospitality, respect, and, most important, revenge. An entire clan was obligated to take revenge for wrongs. This was eye-for-an-eye justice, or more accurately, a hundred eyes for an eye, which was why tribal disputes tended to last for generations. The Pashtuns had a proverb about a man taking revenge one hundred years after a slight to his ancestor, and fretting that he had acted in haste. Shooting an old Pashtun man in his home, even by mistake, violated a Pashtun’s core beliefs. Revenge was compulsory; not taking revenge would brand Khan’s male relatives as cowards. Every perceived injustice in the Pashtun code could conceivably create ten more militants. Even if God willed a death, God also willed a fitting revenge. That was the way of this world. Predictably, we would later learn that one of Shayesta Khan’s sons ended up in Guantánamo.
We spent three days in Khost before starting the long drive back to Kabul. About halfway up the bumpy mountain pass, on a road that still had not been paved, our SUV started to strain, utter strange noises, and then, horribly, grind to a stop. There we were, more than two hours outside of Khost, stranded halfway up a mountain. Afghanistan had no AAA. This pass had no phone reception.
“This is not good,” I said.
“No,” Farouq agreed. “This is a bad area. It’s known as the Bloody.”
“The Bloody?” I repeated. “It’s a mountain pass known as the Bloody? Seriously?”
Farouq nodded. “Not because of the Taliban. More because of thieves. Lots of robberies along this pass. It’s easy to hide and stop people. Even kill them. That’s why it’s called the Bloody.”
I was carrying $3,000 in cash, my computer, various equipment.
Farouq and Nasir argued. Then they announced their plan: They would pour water into the radiator—a move that had fixed one of our broken-down cars in the past. They would also dump oil in the oil pan. Other vehicles passed us, the men whiplashing when they saw me. I pulled my scarf up to cover my face and shrank into my seat, trying to hide in the middle of the Bloody.
“Not good, not good,” I told Farouq. “Call the police in Khost.”
“Kim. Calm down. Relax. I’m handling it.”
Farouq climbed out of the SUV with the satellite phone, looking for a signal. He reached a police official after calling several friends and asked the police to come help. “Right away,” the official said. Farouq then called Dr. Ali, our friend in Kabul, and asked him to start driving toward Khost to meet us.
We sat for half an hour. By coincidence, a police truck lumbered up the road. Farouq flagged it down and argued with the police to help us. Their answer—no. They were busy. He tried to call back the police official, who didn’t answer.
“They want money,” Farouq told us.
“They have foreigners trapped on a mountain pass called the Bloody, and they want a bribe,” I said, stating the obvious. Afghan AAA, after all. “Perfect. How much?”
“Fifty,” Farouq said. “And they’ll only tow us to the top of the mountain.”
“Of course. Fine.”
I could hardly blame the police—they made only about $60 to $100 a month, not enough to survive without corruption. The month before, one counter-narcotics cop had complained to me: “Our salary is too little. If you give a hundred bucks a month to a donkey, it will not fart.” So we gave the cops $50, and they tied a thick rope between their truck and our front bumper, looping it several times. The police truck strained with us, moving about ten miles an hour up the bumpy roads. Finally, after about ninety minutes, we made it to the top of the pass. The police untied us and waved. We waved back and started coasting down the other slope, fueled only by momentum, sailing around switchbacks and even passing the police truck at one point, Nasir laughing hysterically in the driver’s seat, avoiding tapping the brake. Finally, about half a mile after the road flattened out, we rolled to a stop. Nasir’s brother and Dr. Ali, in a tiny white car, pulled up in the opposite direction fifteen minutes later. Ali rolled down the window.
“Need a ride?”
That was logistics in Afghanistan—always figuring out a workaround, or anticipating the unexpected, which we should have expected. Most TV crews, aid agencies, and the UN traveled in convoys. Print journalists could never afford that. We gambled.
Back at the Kabul Lodge, sitting in front of my computer and writing about the dead elderly Afghan man, I wondered what my army engineer platoon would have thought about his death. Just one of the bad things that inevitably happened in war, I supposed. I often wondered what happened to those soldiers, and to Crowley, the intelligent smart aleck hoping to go back to graduate school.
I soon found out. Later that summer, the soldiers would tell another reporter that they felt I had betrayed them. After my story ran, Crowley and some of the other soldiers had been moved to a more dangerous base in Sharana, still in Paktika Province but near Kandahar, because of complaining that they had nothing to do in quiet Orgun-E. Crowley had also been busted to kitchen duty, frying up steaks for two weeks.
So that was my own collateral damage, my own unintended consequences. I was not happy that anyone got in trouble, but I soon forgot about it. Only years later would I find out what had happened to Crowley that August, almost three months after I met the platoon and he got married.
One evening in Sharana, Crowley was sent out on a last-minute mission. He was the gunner in the front vehicle, looking for land mines, for bags in the road, for suspicious cars, his eyes always scanning. But it was dusk—too dark to see much, too light for night-vision goggles. Then the explosion. His Humvee was blown up; a medic inside died. The other four men were injured. Crowley lost the lower part of his right leg. His new wife soon left him.
And that was Afghanistan, a country that lulled people into complacency, where hospitality was continually confused with support. When I finally found out what happened to Crowley, my heart hitting my kidneys during a random Google search, I would track him down, filled with guilt. If I hadn’t written the story, he wouldn’t have been moved. If he hadn’t have been moved, he wouldn’t have been blown up. Amazingly, he was gracious and kind. Luckily, he had remarried. He had also left the army and gone back to school. “I like to think of it as the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told me. “I don’t blame you.” But that would only make me feel worse.