Over the next seven years, I gradually developed a more nuanced understanding. Afghanistan was not unconquerable. Foreign armies had taken control of Kabul and other large cities in the strategically located swathe of Central Asia dozens of times. First the Persians, then Alexander the Great, then the Safavids, and finally the Muslim Arabs; Ghengis Khan’s Moguls, British, and Soviets did the same.
As a means of self-defense, Afghans deftly cultivated an image of their country as “Yaghestan”—a term used by Persians to describe the lawless areas to their east, a place both chaotic and criminal. In truth, Afghanistan was an impoverished band of high mountains and barren deserts with few natural resources, wholly dependent on outsiders for trade, arms, and wealth. Fractious Afghans also fought among themselves, created divisions outsiders exploited.
Centuries of conquest created a clear pattern. Afghans initially put up little resistance to invading armies and then extracted what lucre they could from their new rulers. Quickly shifting their loyalties, Afghans rebelled when they sensed an end to subsidy, the approach of a wealthier suitor, or flagrant disrespect. Foreigners found that the country was extraordinarily difficult to govern over the long term. The pattern led to a clichéd adage about the country: you can rent an Afghan, but you cannot own one.
Afghanistan did not become an independent nation until 1747, when a tribal council, or “jirga,” chose a young Pashtun tribesman from Kandahar, Ahmad Shah Durrani, to serve as its king. For the next 225 years, Durrani’s descendants ruled the country.
The new nation was a dizzying ethnic, tribal, and religious mix, “a purely accidental geographic unit,” in the words of Lord George N. Curzon, the nineteenth-century British colonialist.
Ethnic Pashtuns spoke Pashto, dominated the south and east, and made up the vast majority of the population. Ethnic Tajiks of Persian descent dominated the north and west, spoke Persian, and were the country’s second largest group. Ethnic Hazaras, descendants of the Mongols and minority Shia Muslims, were the country’s third largest group. Uzbeks, Turkmen, and other ethnic groups from neighboring countries made up the remainder.
In the mid-1800s, Afghanistan became the coveted prize in the “Great Game,” the celebrated British and Russian competition for control of Central Asia. The same pattern of conquest and rebellion emerged. In 1838, a British army seized control of Kabul. Three years later, Afghans revolted, hacking to death two British envoys in Kabul’s main bazaar. When the British withdrew from Kabul several months later, Afghan marksmen firing from surrounding hills decimated the column. Out of a force of 15,000, only one man survived, purportedly spared so that he could describe the horrors that awaited future invaders.
In 1878, a larger British force of 40,000 soldiers bent on reasserting the empire’s supremacy seized Kabul and other large cities. Three years of relative calm followed, until a rebellion erupted and 1,000 British were killed in the Battle of Maiwand, a few dozen miles from where “Little America” would be built decades later. Two months later, a larger British force decisively defeated the Afghans in Kandahar.
Aware that a long-term British presence would spark another uprising, the British installed an Afghan regent named Abdur Rahman. He agreed to British protection, subsidy, and control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs, moves all designed to block Russian expansionism toward British-controlled India.
In 1893, the British imposed a 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and British-controlled India that annexed vast parts of Afghanistan and divided the Pashtuns, placing roughly 25 million of them in British-controlled India and 10 million in Afghanistan. The division would rankle Afghan Pashtuns for decades and lead to repeated calls for the establishment of a new nation called Pashtunistan. With the stroke of a British pen, the Afghan Pashtuns lost two-thirds of their population and dropped from being Afghanistan’s overwhelming majority to a plurality of its people. Ethnic Tajiks, who dominate Afghanistan’s north, had their hand strengthened.
In 1919, a bold young Afghan king named Amanullah Khan attacked the British and tried to retake the Pashtun areas the British had seized. In a three-month war he failed to do so, but regained control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs. For the next decade, American diplomats considered Afghanistan within Britain’s “sphere of influence,” though, and declined to recognize it as an independent nation.
Leon B. Poullada, an American diplomat who served in Afghanistan in the late 1950s and wrote a history of relations between Washington and Kabul, referred to the American view as the “Afghan blind-spot.” Poullada argued that American policy makers dismissed the country as hostile and hapless, and repeatedly failed to see its strategic importance. “This feeling of unreality, of an inability to focus or define American interests in this ‘far-off’ land will appear as a recurring theme,” Poullada wrote, “and will help to explain the many inconsistencies of American diplomacy in Afghanistan.”
Poullada blamed the misperceptions on early American writing about Afghanistan. It began in 1838 when Josiah Harlan, a quixotic mercenary from Pennsylvania, became the first American to enter Afghanistan. Over the course of a decade, Harlan carried out an astonishing run of opportunism and skullduggery across South Asia, posing as a surgeon at one point and culminating in his 1838 position as a military adviser to Dost Muhammad, Afghanistan’s ruler.
Harlan claimed he led an entire division of Afghan troops—and a heavy artillery train—over the Hindu Kush range, the forbidding mountains that separate northern and southern Afghanistan. Standing astride a 12,500-foot mountain pass, Harlan said he ordered his men to fire a twenty-six-gun salute as he unfurled an American flag. “I unfurled my country’s banner to the breeze, under a salute of twenty-six guns, and the star-spangled banner gracefully waved amidst the icy peaks, seemingly sacred to the solitude of an undisturbed eternity,” he wrote grandiloquently.
Months later, the British deposed Dost Muhammad and ousted the upstart American, who fancied himself heir to Alexander the Great. Harlan returned to the United States and published a memoir of his exploits, which years later became the basis for Rudyard Kipling’s
The Man Who Would Be King
.
Poullada questioned the accuracy of Harlan’s memoirs and maintained that Harlan was the first in a long line of American writers who unfairly portrayed Afghans as savages. After driving from British-controlled India to Kabul in 1922, Lowell Thomas, the famed American journalist, wrote a travelogue called
Beyond Khyber Pass: Into Forbidden Afghanistan
. Thomas assailed the Pashtuns, who he said were “more elusive than the robber bands of Albania, more daring than the Moros of Mindanao, more cunning than the Yaquis of Sonora, even more savage than the Mongol bandits of Chinese Tibet.”
In truth, Afghanistan’s ruling family, which was Pashtun, was desperate for help modernizing the country. Dismissed by British and American officials, Afghanistan’s royal family eventually turned to continental Europe for help. In 1929, King Nadir Shah had French and German advisers train a 40,000-soldier army. Palace guards sporting incongruous Prussian-style helmets patrolled Kabul’s streets. German-made aircraft supported military expeditions that punished rebellious tribes.
In 1933, Nadir Shah was assassinated and his nineteen-year-old son, Zahir Shah, took the thrown. For the next forty years, he and his uncles would rule Afghanistan. Zahir Shah, who inherited a kingdom with only six miles of railway, all of them in Kabul, and few telegraph and phone lines, redoubled his father’s modernization efforts. He recruited Italian, Japanese, and German advisers to develop a new road and communications system. Japanese built Helmand’s first canals.
The outbreak of World War II finally ignited serious American interest in Afghanistan. American officials saw that the country offered a land route Allied forces could use to supply Soviet troops. Following the war, the United States vied with the Soviet Union for influence in Afghanistan. While Soviet engineers built roads and factories in the country’s north, Americans built a highway linking Kabul and Kandahar, a sprawling new airport in Kandahar, and the massive Helmand project. Professors from the University of Nebraska taught agriculture at Kabul University and Pan American World Airways stewards trained employees of Afghanistan’s new national airline.
The massive 1979 Soviet invasion followed the same pattern as past conquests. Soviet forces took control of major cities and faced primarily rural resistance. Thousands of Soviet advisers introduced atheism, a state-controlled economy, and a massive secret police system. Over time, brutal repression by Soviet forces and their Afghan allies—as well as billions in American aid—fueled a broad-based uprising led by religious conservatives.
In 2001, the ease of the American victory should have come as no surprise, given the country’s history. A simple lesson should have been apparent to American policymakers: Afghans would welcome Americans, but only temporarily. At most, Washington had three to five years to demonstrate to Afghans that allying with the United States was to their benefit. Otherwise, Washington’s newfound allies would desert them.
As our captivity enters its fifth day, Tahir, Asad, and I talk about trying to escape. Asad believes our captors will either kill us or hold us indefinitely. That afternoon, when Qari steps outside and leaves his Kalashnikov rifle behind, Asad grabs the weapon, loads it, and announces he wants to shoot his way out.
We urge Asad to wait. He will kill one or two guards, we tell him, and then be killed by others who hear the gunfire. Asad says he does not care, then reluctantly relents and places the rifle back on the floor.
We agree that Asad should try to escape that night after the guards fall asleep. If he makes it to Kabul, Asad can give the newspaper our location. Tahir and I are happy to stay behind if it allows Asad to return home.
We all know that in post-9/11 Afghanistan and Pakistan all lives are not created equal. If our captors are going to kill one of us, Asad will be the first. Tahir will follow, and I will likely be last, given their view of me as the hostage who can produce the most ransom or publicity.
Our calculus is based on the 2007 kidnapping of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo. Two weeks after their abduction in Helmand, the Taliban beheaded the group’s driver, Sayed Agha, and threatened to kill Mastrogiacomo and the Afghan journalist working with him, Ajmal Naqshbandi.
After Italian officials pressured Karzai, he released five senior Taliban prisoners in exchange for Mastrogiacomo. The Taliban then demanded another Taliban prisoner in exchange for Naqshbandi. When the Afghan government refused, the Taliban decapitated the soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old Afghan. Tahir and hundreds of Afghans attended Naqshbandi’s funeral in Kabul. They bitterly accused the Karzai government of caring more about the life of a foreigner than the life of an Afghan.
While many foreigners are shuttled around Afghanistan in armored cars, Afghan civilians are forced to negotiate Taliban checkpoints largely on their own. The Taliban stop cars, trucks, and buses and arrest or execute Afghans who work with foreigners or the Afghan government. A month before our abduction, the Taliban had killed twenty-seven bus passengers who they believed were Afghan army soldiers in civilian clothes, decapitating six of them. The Afghan government, in fact, does not allow soldiers to travel by civilian bus. The Taliban-executed passengers were innocent men journeying to Iran for work.
That night, Atiqullah arrives with no warning and scuttles Asad’s escape plans. “We’re going to move you to a place where David can have bottled water,” he says. “A place to walk. There will be doctors.”
Guards load us into what looks like the same four-door Toyota station wagon. They put blankets in the hatchback and tell me to lie on top of them. Just before we depart, the Taliban doctor returns and gives me a final needle injection for my stomach.
In the car, Atiqullah tells me to cover my face with a scarf whenever we pass through a village or town. Arab militants and hard-line Taliban will try to kidnap and kill me, he says, if they recognize me as an American. He is probably lying, but I feel I have no choice but to obey him.
The four-door Toyota sedan we drove to our ill-fated interview follows behind our station wagon. At times, Asad is ordered to drive it so guards can rest. Qari rides a motorcycle to scout the way ahead. For four to five hours at a time, he rides through billowing dust clouds. He seems inhuman. Altogether we are a small group—two cars and a motorcycle—a modest, seemingly innocuous convoy moving across the Afghan countryside. Tracking us is next to impossible.
For the next three days, we live in the car and endure a bewildering and grueling journey. We traverse mountains and vast stretches of open desert where no roads exist. We cut across paved roads but never drive down them. And we pass through villages where local children bring the Taliban bread and tea. I don’t know if they do so out of support or fear. I spend twelve hours a day lying in the back of the station wagon, forbidden from looking out the windows. Meals consist of pieces of flatbread handed to me by guards and sips from bottles of water. Bathroom breaks every few hours occur on deserted stretches where only our captors see me. The entire enterprise is designed to move us while arousing the least possible suspicion.
Throughout the journey, I try to talk with Atiqullah, still blindly hoping he will see us as human beings and quickly agree to a deal. During the first night of the drive, Atiqullah asks us if his guards are treating us well. We lie and say yes, fearing retaliation from Qari if we report his beating of Tahir. Long bouts of silence are interrupted by brief exchanges between Atiqullah and me. Attempting to be cautious, I try not to be cavalier in what I say and offend him.