Days of Fear Read online

  I’m anxious, the piece cannot be delayed. Indeed, that morning I am awoken by important news from Afghanistan: a car full of TNT careened into the main entrance of the military base in Bagram, fifty kilometers north of Kabul, massacring countless Afghan citizens on their way to work. It is not a routine attack. It signals a new level of conflict, the deadly vanguard of an offensive that the Taliban officially announced would begin with the first days of spring, when the snows melt and the high mountain passes are once again accessible. The car bomb was meant for the American Vice President, Dick Cheney, who had arrived in Afghanistan the night before on a visit shrouded in secrecy. He had come in from Islamabad, Pakistan, where he met with Pervez Musharraf. It had been a tense meeting, during which the vice president intimated that Pakistan must take more effective measures to combat the Taliban, who circulate freely in the tribal zones on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Cheney had resorted to a bit of characteristically American pragmatism: he threatened to turn off the faucet, to block the eighty million dollars in aid that the Bush administration provides annually to one of its most solid allies in the region.

  Relationships between America and Pakistan have always vacillated between threats and flattery, declarations of esteem and shocking ruptures. But this meeting signaled a new crisis in their relations to which Musharraf was forced to respond in the only way possible: obtaining results on the ground, moving troops to the border, capturing, hindering, and laying siege to the Taliban. The Pakistani president takes firm action, getting the results that America has long been waiting for. And he does so in a way that makes waves: a wholesale blitz on a hotel in Quetta, in the extreme northwest of the country. Mullah Obaidullah, former minister of Defense during the Taliban regime, is taken prisoner. The news is kept secret, but, naturally, it doesn’t go unnoticed by the intelligence apparatus of the Qur’anic student movement—an information network whose efficiency and knack for infiltrating official Afghan intelligence I learned to appreciate during our captivity.

  The reaction, an act of naked revenge, comes within twenty-four hours: the car bomb in Bagram. Very few people knew about Cheney’s visit to Kabul. And even fewer knew that he had cancelled his meeting with Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, at the last minute because of a snowstorm that forced him to stay on the Bagram military base, run by US forces since 2001.

  The American vice president is unharmed. He was sleeping safely while the carnage was loosed upon the population outside. But the attack means that I have to get to Afghanistan as soon as possible—now! The country is going up in flames much faster than any of the experts predicted.

  My captors will repeatedly ask me if Vice President Cheney is dead. They have no idea he was not harmed, and they suspect the usual work of misinformation on the part of the international press, all on the payroll, they say, of the western propaganda machine.

  I’m held up for three hours at the Afghan Embassy. Assailed by the usual anxiety, my bags packed and ready but sitting at home, the final details still to be sorted out, and my cell phone glowing hot with calls from the editorial offices of my newspaper asking if I’m going to make my plane. The march of time is inexorable, trampling the minutes underfoot.

  I don’t know if it was destiny announcing itself via these signals. But I feel them weighing on me. They annoy me, they are like those obstacles that delay us during our evening commute, when we are eager to burrow ourselves away at home and enjoy a little calm and quiet.

  But I don’t see them as something that fate, or anything or anyone else inhabiting some higher plain of existence, is sending me under the guise of obscure premonitions. In the final equation, I am about to leave on one of the many journeys that my profession affords me. I’m going to a country that I know well, where I’ll be able to get things done as if I were a local.

  After what seems like an infinite wait, the consular official stamps my passport with an entry visa and distractedly hands it back to me. The ride to Fiumicino airport is an insane race against time. Luckily, my taxi driver is a specialist in mad dashes and he gets me to the terminal in time. I am duly greeted by smiling check-in personnel at the Emirates Airlines counter. The importunities of fate, all the obstacles thrown in my path, seem to lose their strength. Everything returns to its proper and natural course. As is always the case.

  I sleep long and deeply during the flight to Dubai, and then again in the small hotel where I am a guest for a few short hours while waiting for my connecting flight to Afghanistan. All goes well and I arrive, on time, at Kabul International Airport.

  My interpreter, Ajmal, is waiting for me outside. He looks happy, satisfied. But I notice right away that he has changed: his eyes are older; a few wrinkles have hardened his round face. He is quiet, engrossed in his own thoughts. He has never really opened up and confided in me—he is reticent and discreet by nature. But he now looks more hermetic than ever, like he’s hiding things. His family is always complaining about the same thing: he doesn’t tell them what he does, or where he goes, or with whom. His philosophy has always been to say as little as possible in order to protect himself and those who are closest to him.

  He’s put on a few kilos too many. He touches the “spare tire” around his waist, and sighs: “I have to lose some weight. Marriage is good for the spirit, but not for the body.” So, he finally got married. A girl of seventeen. He had known her for three years and every two weeks, on Friday morning, he would go to visit her in Logar Province, south of Kabul. I’ve never met her, he’s never told me her name. I know only that she’s from a well-to-do, influential family and that her father is a famous surgeon. My interpreter had to win her family over one day at a time, finally obtaining their consent for the union, a matter that is always decided by the patriarchs of the families concerned.

  Ajmal announces that his older brother, Lehmar, with whom he had once run the Everest Guest House in the center of Kabul—where I stayed for many months and which has now been returned to its Tehran owners—has left Afghanistan. He makes no mention of Taliban threats. I will learn about these only after my release, when Lehmar himself tells me the whole story. All Ajmal says is that the plans they had in mind never worked out. First a small hotel, then a restaurant, they even tried to run a gas station equipped with an automatic car wash. But none of these projects got off the ground. Lehmar chose to emigrate. He was granted political asylum in Belgium, where he is now waiting on a job, slowly and with great difficulty adapting to his new home. I ask for more news about Lehmar, whom I remember as a composed person, but Ajmal changes the subject, bringing the conversation back to himself. He says he’s unhappy, that he’s had to bear all the responsibility, not to mention the economic and psychological burden of his family—in addition to his parents, he has two sisters and three brothers. He still has a special relationship with his mother, whom he adores, and with his little sister, a child of ten. Their closeness is palpable. When he talks about her his eyes grow large and fill with pride. “She is my joy,” he confirms. Then, worried, he explains, “I have to take care of everything. The little one’s school, her friends, her whims. I had to give Lehmar, over there in Belgium, all my savings. I have to take care of another brother, Munir. He can’t stand on his own two feet yet but he’s planning on making a future in information technologies. Then, there’s my mother, who’s always asking me for money.”

  Ajmal shakes his head. I look at him, respectful of this pause. Then, still looking straight ahead, he starts talking again. He now drives an old Toyota Corolla. “You can see, can’t you?” he continues. “I had to rent out my truck. I have to do a thousand jobs, and I hardly have any time to devote to journalism. Every time I visit my parents they’re waiting for me impatiently because they know I’m the only one who brings home any money. If I tell them I don’t have any, my mother sulks in silence and starts crying. I know, it’s emotional blackmail and I hate it; it’s wrong and unfair. My wife always says the same thing. But there’s nothing else I can do. My fath
er works for Ariana airlines as a technician. But he pockets his pay and never pulls it out. He sacrificed a lot for us children—we never went without during the hard years of the civil war. Meat two times a week, fresh bread every day. He makes it clear that now it’s our turn. But the weight of everything, the real responsibility for the family, falls entirely to me.”

  I listen to him as he vents his frustration. Ajmal needs to talk and to voice his concerns. When, finally, it’s quiet inside the Corolla I look outside. Kabul seems different: more modern, more orderly. It is overrun by frenetic activity, by business that transforms it a little more each day. Modern buildings, skyscrapers, shopping malls made of glass and cement. And then, the big hotel, the Serena in the center of Kabul, a few steps from the Blue Mosque, built to the tune of millions by the prince, Aga Khan.

  We first stop by the offices of Ariana airlines. I want to buy our tickets for Kandahar right away and check the departure times. We learn that there is only one flight a week, on Saturdays. We reserve two seats—there will be time enough over the following days to buy the tickets.

  We are back out on the street. It has rained and there is mud everywhere. My shoes have lost all their color. Ajmal’s, on the other hand, black moccasins with thick soles, extremely popular among Afghans, are like new. We head in the direction of the hotel my newspaper booked for me. My interpreter starts to joke around. A light black beard that ends in a pointed goatee frames his face. He strokes it and looks over at me, bemused. He’s reminding me of the pact we made years ago. We’ll let our beards grow this time as well. It will be necessary, especially in my case, to mask my decidedly western appearance, the color of my hair, my eyes, and my face. “You never change,” adds Ajmal good-humoredly as he slaps my shoulder. “You look just like an American.”

  This fact is not encouraging. To be singled out as American, or English, or Dutch, one of the foreigners serving in the coalition forces, rouses too many suspicions. Afghans respect you, but the way they look at you betrays an easily understandable hostility. They feel they have been invaded. Protected by soldiers who incessantly patrol the center of town and the outlying suburbs, but also oppressed by a presence that they tolerate with great difficulty. I have noticed the same thing in every country in which foreign troops are present, from Iraq to Somalia.

  As we bounce over the craters that open before us along the road, I ask Ajmal the question that has been haunting me for five months: Why haven’t the Karzai administration and the coalition paved the Jalalabad road? It is a large artery that connects Kabul to Peshawar, in Pakistan, along which thousands of semis and hundreds of foreign military vehicles travel. But there it is, perpetually in ruins, left to its own devices, devastated by truck wheels and tank treads that devour the earth and dig potholes that fill with water and mud.

  Ajmal has no answer to my question. He smiles, because it’s a question that I ask him every time we see each other. I am convinced that even via these kinds of simple but vital measures a relationship based on trust can be built with a population that has never tolerated the presence of foreign armies on its soil.

  I check into my room, open the window and am immediately assailed by a dense smoke, acrid and bluish: car and truck pollution squats over the entire city like a low fog. Kabul is suffering from its leap towards modernity. It willingly accepts the advantages offered by the rich and opulent West, but it advances blindly, unable to keep pace. More often than not, it buckles under the weight of the changes, and it grasps desperately at rituals, customs, and sentiments belonging to a tradition that is slowly disappearing. Traffic is a problem, an environmental emergency, as are space heaters, which, despite bans, the Afghans insist on fueling with diesel.

  West and East, a love-hate relationship, cultures that are different but interdependent, struggling to co-exist.

  Ajmal and I make an appointment for later that afternoon and he leaves me in my room. He has to take care of a few things, confirm the final details of our trip to Kandahar and Lashkar Gah, and organize the timing and the format of the interview. It’s Wednesday, we have only a few days. We need to confirm our flight reservation and call the hotel, the only safe one in Kandahar, where we’ll be spending a night. I call my embassy and ask for Ettore Sequi, whose long experience as a diplomat I have had occasion to appreciate over the years. He’s not in, but I leave my cell number and a message to say I’m in Afghanistan. I am not nervous about our plans. On the contrary, I feel calm, for Ajmal seems serene, untroubled, sure of what he has done and will do.

  I spend this morning, like every morning, reading. It distracts and relaxes me, carrying me away to far-off lands. I read continually: books on Afghanistan, on Central Asia. I’ve brought with me all the works of Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist who introduced me to the world of the Qur’anic students. I reread what he wrote about the Taliban during their offensive. The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk—the story of the perennial struggle between England and Russia for control of a country that offered them nothing. Philip Roth’s most recent literary effort. And my old and worn edition of The Plague, which accompanies me like a lucky charm on every trip I make. Albert Camus is the only writer capable of conveying the real atmosphere of the places he describes, even down to their smells.

  The front desk calls: Ajmal has arrived. He’s waiting in the lobby of the Serena. From the window I see and smell nothing but city traffic. Everything is covered in dust that rises from streets stripped of their asphalt, covered in dirt that will turn to mud with the first rains, lined with drainage ditches carrying waste from the houses.

  Sewer stench filters into my room and forces me to spray deodorant all over, even on the air conditioner outlet.

  The Serena is a sumptuous hotel in the Oriental style with large rooms that are almost always being used for conventions, meetings of various kinds, and summits between the Afghan army, ISAF forces, and NATO. There are two restaurants: the classic bistro, with meals arranged circularly inside warmed aluminum containers, suitable for quick snacks and the big brunches held every Friday, the day of rest in Muslim countries; and a Japanese restaurant that even manages to put sushi—a rarity in a landlocked country hemmed in by mountains—on its menu a couple of times a week. The hotel is a kind of bunker. The cement barricades serve to remind everyone of this fact, especially the dappled crowds hanging about beyond them, or circulating in the central bazaar: merchants, artisans, beggars, mutilated and crippled victims of the anti-personnel mines.

  Ajmal and I order tea in a small private room in the back of the hotel. We discuss the details of our journey southwards, into the Taliban stronghold. He says everything is ready, the interview has been arranged.

  That evening I reach him on his cell phone at the new home he shares with his young wife and ask him for more information: the name of the commander we’ll be interviewing and the faction to which he belongs. Ajmal’s answers are vague. It isn’t clear if he wants to protect his sources or needs time to nail down the final details. I trust him, exactly as I have trusted him in the five years that we’ve known one another, during which our work together has always gone off without a hitch, without any blunders or setbacks.

  We meet again the following day and go to purchase our tickets. Then, we make a quick visit to the Italian military base, Camp Invicta, thirty kilometers south of Kabul. Finally, we go to the market to get my shalwar kameez, a traditional outfit comprised of loose trousers under a long tunic open along the sides.

  I don’t sport this dress to camouflage myself, but out of respect for local customs. When one is a guest in another’s house it is considered polite to wear a shalwar. Ajmal himself has requested I do so. I choose an electric blue cap called a pakol that matches my patu, a long shawl one wears either over the shoulder or wound around one’s head like a turban.

  On Saturday, March 3, we get up early. The small twin-engine plane connecting Kabul to Kandahar leaves at eleven, but it’s best to get to the international airfield two hours early. Ajmal
’s younger brother takes us there. Aimal has the same wide face as Ajmal and their older brother, Lehmar, the only two members of the family I have met. They seem to have been cast with the same mold, nearly clones. I leave my bags full of clothes in Ajmal’s care and I take charge of the equipment: the GPS, the BGAN antenna—a device that opens like a book and allows you to make a broadband internet connection anywhere—my PC, the small video camera that my colleagues at La Repubblica entrusted to me. My report on the Taliban is a big opportunity for everyone. Even the images I’ve started to collect while in Kabul might be useful as fresh material for stories on Afghanistan.

  It has snowed overnight, and this morning the flakes are still coming down, getting heavier all the time. I am starting to fear that the flight may be cancelled. This kind of thing happens all the time in Kabul, particularly during the winter, when it can sometimes snow for five days straight. We take cover in a small bar located outside the airport: a large room with a sheet-metal roof where travelers, crowding together to keep warm, wait for their flights while sipping tea and eating scrambled eggs and meat and tomato croquettes.

  We wait for three hours. The snow is still falling at noon, when an airline employee responsible for ingress into the airport bursts into the room and announces that the flight for Kandahar has been cancelled. We go back to the hotel. I’m disap­pointed. There will be more difficulties, I think, further obstacles. Ajmal reassures me. He says that the flight will leave to­morrow, that it’s only a short delay. I’m worried about our appointment and afraid that the interview is about to evaporate into thin air. “The Taliban sure aren’t going to wait until it stops snowing,” I remark. “Perhaps we should give up.” My interpreter doesn’t reply. His gaze, however, is troubled. I shut myself away in the hotel and ask him if we can meet later in the afternoon.