I found this artice on
www.comebackalive.com and after reading it I have decided that Afghanistan must mean "HELL".
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I was unloading my luggage from a Flying Coach after pulling into Kabul when I heard a call to prayer coming from a mosque across the street. I flagged down a taxi and was still loading my luggage when three Toyota 4x4s came screaming around the corner, slamming on the brakes in front of me. Half a dozen taliban soldiers jumped out of each truck and ran toward the mosque. They started beating, kicking and dragging men who were missing prayer into the mosque. I pulled out my camera and started shooting what was going on. Suddenly, four of the soldiers saw what I was doing, turned, and ran toward me with sticks and AK-47s held in the air. I bolted to the taxi, dove into the back seat, and heard sticks pounding the rear of the car as we pulled away.
The taliban militia made a promise to bring law and order to Afghanistan by establishing an Islamic state running on strict Islamic law. It appears to me that their promise has been carried out. The crime rate in Kabul has dropped to almost nil. But not only are the laws coming out of the taliban mullahs' interpretation of Islamic law, but the rules for enforcing the laws are decided by the taliban soldiers themselves. They have their own set of rules and they change sporadically, usually on a whim.
I was walking through the Farshga bazaar when I saw a boy at the top of a traffic tower with a bruised and swollen face that was painted black. While the taliban soldiers surrounding him were laughing hysterically, he was beating an empty gas can with a stick and crying: "The one who does something like me will be punished worse than what is happening to me." Another witness told me later the real meaning: "They only beat me; if they catch you they will cut off your hand." He was taken to a "police station" where the soldiers could punish and keep him in jail as long as they wanted to. He was caught stealing a jar of purified butter.
I started moving away from the tower when I heard a big explosion in the center of the bazaar. I ran to where the terrorist bomb went off, believed to be planted by mujahedin, and found dead bodies and many people injured among bits and pieces of carts, boxes, meat, and sheepskins scattered across the open market. Within a flash, taliban soldiers came running in, swinging clubs and firing their AK-47s in the air to chase people away from the scene. They were beating people, trying to help the wounded and desperate vendors who were bleeding from where they caught shrapnel, but trying to collect their goods in a hurry to evacuate. Those who were in the bazaar were attacked by a terrorist bomb set by the mujahedin; they were then attacked by the taliban soldiers who had promised to bring safety and protect the innocent.
Another afternoon when I was getting a briefing at the UN office on their mine clearing operations, Dostum's planes came in and dropped several bombs two blocks away from the office. I scrambled to my feet after being blown to the ground and ran to the bomb site. I started taking pictures of people being dragged from what used to be houses when an AK-47 struck me across my back with full force. I stumbled forward and another taliban soldier grabbed my camera, threw it on the ground and kicked it. I saw soldiers all around hitting, pushing, and kicking me like I was a hacky-sack. Luckily, one threw me in the direction of where my camera was sitting. I scooped it up, saw an opening, and ran from the turban thugs. What a fool I was thinking that the taliban soldiers would assume that a journalist taking pictures of innocent victims would help prove their enemy is evil to the bone--which is what they believe about Dostum. Instead, it was attack the journalist for no particular reason.
On my way to the front-line north of Kabul, I was stopped four times at checkpoints. After I was ordered back to the city each time, I would get out of the car and talk to the soldiers about their recent success and what would be the results if they took the whole country. That earned me a cup of tea and freedom to move on to the front. Near the front I stopped to chat with soldiers sitting on a Russian T-52 tank. We got along well, and they invited me to get into the tank and take a look inside. As I was peering down the barrel through one of the "windows," I heard someone yelling as he was climbing up the side of the turret. I poked my head out of the hole and saw an AK-47 four inches from my nose. I crawled down the side of the tank cautiously and passively and listened to my translator standing near the tank interpret what the soldier was screaming while his gun was still trying to impale me. "If you come back here again, I will kill you!" As we drove away I was a bit thankful because an AFP veteran, Terrence White, told me what happened to him when a taliban soldier didn't like what he was covering. The soldier said in all seriousness: "If you come here again, I will diddly you, then I will kill you!"
If I was betting on what the taliban soldiers would do next, I would be broke in a day. They have little compunction to enforce law and order. But the topsy-turvy make-up of Afghanistan gets even better when you're in mujahedin territory, and the stakes get higher.
I was in the trenches surrounded by mujahedin soldiers at Dar Alaman front-line in August, 1996 just before the taliban rolled into the capital. We were drinking tea, but shells came whistling in sporadically that sent me to the dirt. I soon noticed that the soldiers kept moving in to get closer and closer to where I was sitting. They were pointing at my camera and my hair, whispering and smiling at each other. I quickly realized that I had to do something fast because I had suddenly become a target of the mujahedin, not the taliban artillery. I jumped up quickly to put them offguard. I raised my camera, made movements to get them to pose for a portrait, and climbed out of the trench to position myself as far away as possible to take the picture. Right after I took it, I waved and smiled to say "thank you," turned and ran to the last checkpoint.
My interpreter looked excited as he ran up to greet me. "You're back! You're back!" he yelled.
"You're right, I didn't get hit," I said, assuming that's what he meant.
"Sir, I didn't expect you to get injured by the taliban shelling. I didn't go with you because the mujahedin have no laws. They could have taken your camera, your money, and used you to please them. Then they would have used you for target practice. Nobody would have cared."
After we left the front and I was eating lunch at the Kamdeesh restaurant in Shar-i-Nau, one of the few areas in Kabul that was not leveled during the civil war, an aged Afghan sitting next to me told me an ugly story. "One night mujahedin soldiers came to my neighbor's house in a jeep. My neighbor has a beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter," he said tears rolling down his face. "The soldiers burst into the house, took my neighbor's daughter and turned her over to the commanders at their command post. They kept her and used her for one week. Finally, the commanders let her go and the soldiers left her on the doorstep. She and her family were shamed for life."
In December, after I moved into the mujahedin areas in the north, I had an interest in the Baglan province. An Ismailia warlord, fighting with the mujahedin, is the leader of the region and is famous for having bizarre quirks while keeping his forces intact and keeping his factories, power stations, and mines working, which is a rarity in Afghanistan. During the four hour drive from Dostum's stronghold to Puli Xamri, the Baglan stronghold, we were stopped a dozen times. The mujahedin demanded a payment for us to continue. My interpreter, Idrees, who learned the ropes by traveling with journalists in the past, told the soldiers that I was a foreign diplomat. After looking me up and down, they waved us on.
But at the last "checkpoint," the mujahedin dragged us out of the car, held us at gun point, and ordered a strip search. I couldn't even find the first button on my shirt to undo, while Idrees, acting very relaxed, sighed and started talking while unzipping his pants. "General Said Jaffer will be really angry when we don't show up for our appointment with him in Puli Xamri. As you know, he will throw a fit and send out a search party." I was standing there only in my pants near the Hindu Kush in the dead of winter freezing to death while the soldiers gathered in a huddle to decide what to do. They came back and growled at us to collect our clothes and get out of their sight.
Said Jaffer Nadiri, the Commander and Governor of the Baglan province, was educated in England and the United States. His father was in prison while the Afghani government backed by the Soviet Union was in control. Less than ten minutes after the interview started in his living room, the 32-year-old leader held up his hand to stop me asking another question and demanded in fluid English, "What do you drink? Vodka? Whisky?" He caught me offguard. "Well? Tonight we should have a drinking-fest in my guest house."
He led me from his living room to a guest house the size of a high school gym. There was a swimming pool, heated in the winter, with pool and ping-pong tables, a sauna, and a bar we were headed for. As we walked into the bar, I was jettisoned out of Central Asia. There were Bon Jovi, AC/DC, and bikini posters on the walls, a full bar on one end and a Sony stereo system on the other. "Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll!" he barked and laughed as he poured us our first drink. He ordered one of his servants to put on Pink Floyd and started reminiscing. "I watched The Wall ten times when I got a copy. Excellent movie! But when I asked one of my men to copy the video for a friend of mine, he accidentally erased it. Ha! Ha! I had him strip, lay down on the floor face down, and beat him with a horse whip until I was satisfied."
After our third drink, three commanders came in for a nightcap, After they had taken a few shots of vodka, the tall, bulky commander next to me jumped up, picked me up and screamed in broken English, "You spy! You spy!" The other two ran over and pinned me against Bon Jovi a foot off the ground while the first one frisked me (looking for a tape recorder). Said Jaffer came to my rescue and ordered the commanders to leave after one more shot. As they were leaving, a servant came in with a large chunk of hash that looked like a cow paddy on a silver tray. Said Jaffer pinched off a small piece and held it out for me saying, "Anyway, it's hash time! Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll!"
