A Rope and a Prayer (23 page)

Hoping to increase the pressure on my family, Badruddin orders me once again to falsely state that we are in the mountains of Afghanistan. Hoping to tip off my family that I’m being ordered to lie, I write: “They are telling me to tell you that we are in a mountain area in Afghanistan with cold weather, snow and Afghan food + water that make me sick.” Badruddin then dictates more lines. “They say that if their demands are not met they will kill the three of us,” I write. “They are telling me to tell you to hurry up + meet their demands.”

There are only a half dozen blank lines left on the small form. I try to communicate the argument I’ve been making to our captors. “I’ve said I’m a journalist who has spent my career writing to help Muslims but they say you must meet their demands,” I write.

Three lines remain on the page. I scribble my final words.

“Please, please, please help us,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I’ll pay back anyone who helps us for the rest of my life.”

“I’m so, so sorry,” I repeat. “I apologize to you, my family and friends.”

I scrawl “I love you!!!” in large letters and sign my name.

Badruddin takes the letter and has Tahir slowly translate each passage to him. When he hears the phrase “they are telling me to tell you,” he grows suspicious. I immediately offer to blot those words out with the pen. He agrees and then departs. For hours afterward, I berate myself for how I constructed the sentence. I need to be humble and patient and think small. Haste had gotten us into this disaster. Being impatient will only make things worse.

Roughly two weeks pass and we hear nothing from Badruddin. Then he arrives without warning and tells us we are going on a picnic. At first, I think he is joking. The guards tell me to cover my face with a scarf, follow Badruddin outside, and get into his pickup truck. After a five- to ten-minute drive, I am allowed to take the scarf off and look around.

Dust-covered hillsides surround us as we wind our way up a valley somewhere outside Miran Shah. There are no trees or discernible landmarks. We could be anywhere in the tribal areas. As we drive, I ask Badruddin if he has any response to my letter. He says the International Red Cross will not act as an intermediary for negotiations. My hopes fade. Badruddin stops the truck and we walk up a barren hill. I ask him how the negotiations are proceeding. He says he has nothing new to report. What has he been doing all this time? I ask. He says the problem is on my side. He scoffs at the amount of money they are offering for our release.

Badruddin asks me if I want to fire one of the guard’s Kalashnikovs. I decline. If I look like I know how to fire the rifle, I will appear to be a soldier. And if I take the rifle and try to shoot Badruddin and the four guards who are with us, I’m unlikely to kill all of them before they shoot me. Asad walks to a nearby hillside and fires a Kalashnikov with one of the guards. Badruddin has the most advanced Kalashnikov, which has a grenade launcher mounted on the end of it. For entertainment, he fires a grenade at a nearby hillside and it detonates loudly, and he and his men watch to see if it frightens me. I try to show no reaction.

Badruddin, the guards, Tahir, and Asad then spread scarves on the ground and perform afternoon prayers. After they finish, Badruddin invites me to sit down. I oblige him. Unsure when I will see him next, I again tell him he will never get five prisoners and $15 million for us. He vows that he will and tells me the United States freed seven Serbian military officers in exchange for my 1995 release in Bosnia. Amazed by his statement, I tell him that is absolutely false. He responds that I told him that when we first arrived in Miran Shah.

“You said I was slow,” he says, smiling. “You said seven prisoners were released for you after only ten days.”

He is lying, apparently for the fun of it. No Serbian prisoners were released for me in 1995. The Haqqanis have turned my arrest for helping to expose the massacre of 8,000 Muslims into a liability in my case, not an asset. We sit in silence for several minutes.

“I could shoot you here and end this now,” Badruddin offers with a smile.

I do not respond.

He again ridicules the ransom being offered for us. “I will sell your bones to your family” for that amount, he says.

Again, I do not respond.

We drive back to the house in silence. The following day, I learn that the guards are angry with me. They say Badruddin took me on a picnic and I was rude to him.

 

 

As January progresses, events in the outside world become a growing source of tension. The Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip infuriates the Taliban. Along with monitoring Western news broadcasts on Afghanistan, our guards closely watch world events as well. As the number of Palestinians killed spirals to 1,400—as compared with 14 Israelis—the Taliban seethe. Our guards see the campaign as the latest example of Muslims being slaughtered by an arrogant, hypocritical West. I wonder if we will be killed on videotape in retaliation. A second date also hovers: January 20, the inauguration of Barack Obama. I worry that the “blood message to Obama” that our kidnappers promised on the day we were abducted will finally be delivered.

The Israeli assault on Gaza ends on January 18 and Obama’s inauguration passes without incident two days later. I read about it in one of the Pakistani English-language newspapers the guards bring me once or twice a week. The newspapers continue to be a godsend. I have begun reading each newspaper cover to cover to pass the time. I find myself drawn to stories that I glanced at in the past. Reading them transports me to another place.

Editorials condemning the Taliban remind me that most Pakistanis oppose the group. A book review on a study that examines the history of religion states that human beings create gods when confronted by forces greater than themselves. Science section stories bolster my belief that human civilization is progressing. A paid advertisement printed on the day of Obama’s inauguration shows me another side of the Pashtuns.

It is a historical piece about a nonviolent Pashtun political leader known as the Frontier Gandhi. The political party he founded purchased ad space to print a biography of his life on January 20, the eleventh anniversary of his death. The party’s version of his life is glowing and I know from things I have previously read that much of it is true. The existence of a pacifist Pashtun seems improbable. Their fighting skills are what has made the region so forbidding.

Born in 1889, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a devout Muslim and lifetime follower of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance. A towering figure who was six and a half feet tall and had a hawk nose, Ghaffar Khan founded a 100,000-strong movement called the Servants of God, or Red Shirts, in the 1920s. Its members were famous for their willingness to stage nonviolent strikes to protest British colonial rule—and die by the hundreds in the process.

A friend and compatriot of Gandhi’s, Khan had the goal to free South Asia from British colonial rule and establish one independent, secular state where Muslims, Hindus, and people of all faiths could live peacefully. Later in life, he also campaigned for the reunification of the Pashtuns divided by the despised British-dictated border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Before dying at the age of ninety-eight, Ghaffar Khan achieved one of those goals but failed at the two others. Colonial India won independence from Britain in 1947 but was divided into two countries—a predominantly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan also failed to be reunited. The partition of British-controlled India into two nations sparked one of the greatest and bloodiest mass migrations in human history. Over the course of several months in 1947, 14 million Hindus and Muslims crossed the newly created borders in the hope of finding a safer life in the country where they would be in the religious majority.

To the dismay of Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi, cataclysmic religious clashes erupted. As many as one million Muslims and Hindus perished on both sides of the new border. Two months after independence, war broke out after the Hindu ruler of the majority Muslim state of Kashmir said it would join India, not Pakistan. It was the first of four wars that India and Pakistan waged between 1947 and 1999.

Since arriving in the region in 2001, I had seen how the rivalry between the two countries fueled instability in Afghanistan and the wider region. For sixty years, partition colored nearly every move by India and Pakistan. Since 2001, India had backed the Karzai government with vast aid programs and record numbers of Indians living in Kabul. Threatened by what it saw as India encroaching on its flank, Pakistan’s military quietly maintained its longtime support for the Afghan Taliban. Over time, I came to see the fighting in Afghanistan on one level as a proxy war between India and Pakistan, with American soldiers caught in the middle.

As I finish reading the story, Ghaffar Khan emerges as a tragic figure. In some ways, he reminds me of the educated Pashtun moderates I have followed in “Little America” since 2004. Their efforts to promote reform were hampered by religious conservatism and regional rivalries as well.

Instead of being hailed as a hero after Pakistan achieved independence in 1947, Ghaffar Khan was repeatedly placed under house arrest or jailed by the military-dominated Pakistani government. His fealty to Gandhi was seen as loyalty to India, not to the principle of nonviolence. All told, he spent more than twenty years in Pakistani and British detention. Ghaffar Khan died in Peshawar in 1988 and retained some popular support among Pashtuns for his campaign for Pashtun reunification. He asked to be buried in Afghanistan to show his continued devotion to the goal of unifying the Pashtuns.

His pro-Gandhi and pro-socialist stance, though, took a toll on his popular support on both sides of the border. Pakistani nationalists marginalized him by declaring him pro-India. Afghan’s mujahideen accused him of supporting the Soviet Union, the country’s atheist occupier. In the decade after his death, the Taliban in Afghanistan and hard-line religious parties in Pakistan proclaimed themselves the true leaders of the Pashtuns. A moderate Pashtun nationalist political party founded by Ghaffar Khan’s son gained only limited electoral support from Pashtuns.

In February 2008, I covered elections in Pakistan’s Pashtun-dominated northwest that pitted the secular Pashtun nationalist party of Ghaffar Khan’s descendants—the Awami National Party—against Pakistan’s hard-line religious parties. In 2002, conservative parties had won control of the provincial government for the first time, but subsequently failed to deliver economic growth, clean government, and security. In the 2008 elections, the moderate party of Ghaffar Khan triumphed. Now led by his grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan, the moderate Pashtuns defeated hard-line religious parties and won control of the provincial government. The question I posed in 2001 about how best to counter religious extremism seemed to have an answer: electoral politics.

Yet after taking office the moderate Pashtuns struggled to effectively govern. Stepped-up Taliban suicide attacks and kidnappings ravaged Peshawar, the largest Pashtun-dominated city in northwestern Pakistan. In the newspapers I received from our guards, story after story described public disappointment with the moderate Pashtuns’ inability to stop suicide bombings and abductions. Rumors of corruption hovered over the government as well. The pattern was similar to what I had seen in Afghanistan.

After decades of neglect, moderate Pashtuns were weak and poorly organized. Trying to reverse decades of shortsighted American, Saudi, and Pakistani support for hard-line Pashtuns was enormously difficult, slow moving, and bloody. Yet it was vital. To me, finding ways to more effectively support Pashtun moderates was the key to stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan.

D
avid McCraw has become a stable, regular character in my life. His calm and wholesome midwestern manner is paired with a savvy wit and deep intelligence.

He, David’s brother Lee, and I talk all the time about everything from conflicting reports and information to media strategies and personal frustrations. McCraw is also thoughtful enough to contact me in advance of the noon call on days when updates may be unpleasant. A few weeks ago, McCraw forewarned me that in response to our request for proof of life, the captors responded: “We’ll give you a finger.” (My mother was present while I took this call. She was quick to point out, “A finger is not proof of life.”)

Today, McCraw is calling with the latest rumblings from the Afghan rumor mill. A tribal elder who knows the Haqqanis has relayed a message to the paper’s Kabul bureau. Rumor is that David is on a “ransom farm” in Afghanistan with as many as sixty other hostages, including the engineer’s son. The elder claims that David has his own room, but keeps Asad and Tahir with him at all times. He is free to move about the compound and chat with other captives. It sounds like he is at the Club Med of hostage camps. It seems too rosy to be true. We have heard stories of other people currently being held hostage, among them a Polish hostage, and several aid workers from the World Food Program. It is difficult to know if this information is accurate or merely a fabrication, though the messenger did not request money.