The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  Qasim paused.

  "No, I am not," I said in Persian.

  "No, he is not," repeated Qasim.

  "Is he a Muslim?"

  "Yes," said Qasim. I was not. Qasim was saying the first thing that came into his head. He didn't want to admit that he knew very little about me and next to nothing about my country. For the sake of his status, he wanted to show that he was not in charge of a young foreigner in shabby clothes but instead responsible for an interesting and important man. I also suspected that, like many villagers in Iran, Qasim took pleasure making people believe preposterous stories.

  When Mumtaz was called outside, I said to Qasim, "I'm not from the Ukraine—I'm from Scotland. The Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. He will think I am a Russian."

  "He will not. Even I don't know where Ukraine is."

  Mumtaz reentered. "Does he speak Russian, Commander Seyyed?" he asked.

  "Yes, very well," said Qasim. I didn't.

  "What is he doing?"

  "We are traveling with him because the Emir has instructed us to look after him. We are walking all the way to Chaghcharan."

  "Excuse me, Haji Mumtaz," I interrupted, "what are the villages ahead where we will be able to stop for the night?"

  "I know," said Qasim. "I'll tell you in the morning."

  "And you, Haji Mumtaz," I persisted, "how do you see the route ahead?"

  "Well, I suppose Sha'ede, Turon, Mawar Bazaar, Saray-e-Pul, Obey."

  They were presumably Tajik Sunni villages, but I had no idea what to expect.

  "Look at this," said Qasim to Haji Mumtaz. He turned his foot, revealing a purple and black pus-filled blister on his heel. We had walked less than three hours. I hoped his new boots would be better than his old ones.

  "Are you sure you will make it?" asked Mumtaz.

  "We will, of course. We are Mujahidin, but him ... I don't know..."

  "I think I'll be all right," I interjected. "I have done a lot of walking."

  "In Iraq and India and Russia and Japan," Qasim said impatiently, making up countries, "everywhere walking."

  "And what is his job?"

  Qasim paused. So did I.

  "I am a historian," I said.

  "He works for the United Nations," said Qasim.

  "Is he a doctor?"

  "Yes."

  "No," I said.

  "Well," said Mumtaz, "I've got a pain in my chest. What can you give me?"

  "I'll see," I said, opening my pack.

  Qasim shouted the question at me again as if he were translating rather than repeating. "Haji Mumtaz has a pain in his chest; what can you give him?" He treated me as though I were an exotic animal he had been selected to exercise for the Emir—a Barbary ape being danced down the Silk Road. He enjoyed talking about me in his loud, dominating voice, and he was pleased when I performed tricks for his friends and produced money or medicine. But he was not so keen on my tendency to speak for myself. Through all this, Abdul Haq remained silent, smiling to himself and occasionally shifting position to stretch his long legs.

  "He speaks Dari; do you speak English?" Mumtaz asked Qasim.

  "Yes," he replied.

  When I had handed over the antispasmodic pills, Haji Mumtaz's sons distributed the mattresses and blankets stacked in the corner of the room and we lay down on the floor to sleep. Haji Mumtaz and his two sons lay down with us to honor us as guests. I was tired, but found it difficult to sleep. Abdul Haq left his transistor radio on all night. All he got was a loud static hiss, but it showed everyone that he owned a radio.

  Elders in a guest room

  IMPERSONAL PRONOUN

  Leaving Haji Mumtaz's on my second day with the soldiers, I quickened my pace after half an hour and soon passed Abdul Haq, walking toward the rising sun. Only a hint of mountains was visible in the dawn haze. I could neither see nor hear my companions. I leaned forward against the weight of my pack, blinking the sweat out of my eyes. With each pace, I stretched further into my stride, jabbing the metal-tipped staff through the ice beside the track. My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm. My thoughts participated in each step, never getting ahead of me. A gravel desert was opening up on every side. It had snowed in the hills. A stream, swollen with meltwater, broke out of its ice shell and the dark blue flood pushed the ice blades out over the arid soil. I found it difficult to believe I had been allowed to do the walk. Despite my anxieties about the route and my companions, I felt I had been given a great gift. For two hours I was entirely absorbed in walking, feeling confident, elated, and free. Then the belt of my pack was chafing against my hips and, perhaps because I had not exercised for a month, I was a little tired.

  I slowed to allow the others to catch up and we walked silently in a line of four for some time. There was no wind. The gravel and sand under our feet was firm and we were walking quickly, all squinting slightly because of the bright sun. Abdul Haq rested his dusty weapon on his shoulder, holding it by the barrel. I was learning that Abdul Haq's rifle was his favorite possession, narrowly beating his hand grenades. I had watched him use it as a comic prop, a walking stick, and a source of impromptu firework displays when he was bored.

  A figure on the horizon grew steadily larger and became an old man riding a donkey. When he reached us, we saw that the animal was so small that the old man's oversize gum boots dragged in the sand. I smiled at him. Aziz asked angrily where he was going. The old man answered placidly and rode on and when I turned, he was again a miniature vanishing into an expanse of sand. I watched our own shadows moving. Qasim's small steps were smaller than before. He was walking in his new red leatherette boots half on tiptoe. I guessed that his blisters were getting worse.

  For some time we had been able to see a hamlet ahead of us in the heat haze. We reached it, walked through to a small roadside truck stall, and sat down. We had been walking for four hours and I was pleased to take off my pack. The stall's owner served us a stew of beef and rice, and tea, which came steaming from the samovar, thick with lime scale.

  The others had met a friend and showed no intention of getting up again. Leaning back in a corner with a small pot of tea in front of me, I took out my Iranian school exercise book, which had a class timetable on the back and a picture of seagulls on the front, and wrote in my diary that I could think of nothing better than the morning's walk. But my sense that I was on an adventure seemed self-indulgent in the context of the war. I found it difficult to write about the risk of death. I wrote "one" instead of "I," as though I were shying away from myself. "Strangely, walking makes one feel one has had a fuller life..."

  As I formed this convoluted prose, Abdul Haq and Qasim passed round painkillers for blisters. I was pleased when Qasim stood, cocked his head from side to side to stretch his neck, and said we should go. I wanted to walk more before I wrote again.

  Babur's decision to take this road into the mountains was one he lived to regret and perhaps as a result he blamed his older chancellor, Qasim, for it.

  We had consulted what was the best route to Kabul: I and some others proposed that, as it was winter, we should go by the way of Kandaharbecause though rather the longer road, it might be traveled without risk or trouble, while the hill road was difficult and dangerous. Qasim Beg, saying that that road was far about and this [the central route through Chaghcharan] direct, behaved very perversely; and in the end we resolved on attempting the short road.

  Not surprisingly, given the season and circumstances of Babur's departure, many of his courtiers refused to accompany him. Some returned later by alternative routes; others, perhaps drawn by the city's entertainments, never left Herat:

  Several of my followers stayed behind in Herat ... including Sidim, who took service with the ruler. Sidim was a man of valor in war ... He had a polished manner and address and his style of conversation and of telling a story was particularly agreeable. He was lively, witty, and humorous. His great fault was that he was addicted to pederasty...[Two years later] Sidim was put to death and thrown into
the river Helmand.

  Babur was not carrying supplies and relied on villages to provide him with water, food, and animal fodder along the way. Sometimes he paid for fodder, but he largely depended on traditions of hospitality. Although he often lived in a tent, he seems to have left his tents in Bamiyan. Later in the journey, his men were forced to sleep sitting on their horses—and he lay uncovered in a snowdrift—until the scouts found a cave. His horror at that night implies that the rest of the time he slept, like me, in village houses.

  The land through which Babur was traveling was then ruled by the prime minister of Herat, a man called Zulnun Arghun. There were administrative centers at Obey and Chaghcharan, and large settlements at Yakawlang and Bamiyan, but there was not much in the places in between. In that respect little had changed for five hundred years. The area was still very isolated, and Obey, Chaghcharan, Yakawlang, and Bamiyan were still almost the only places on the route where I knew I could find some semblance of government. The stretch from Obey to Chaghcharan was sparsely inhabited by seminomadic Tajik peoples called Aimaq and the stretch from Chaghcharan through Bamiyan by the Hazara. Then as now, the region contained four different ethnic groups (Tajik, Aimaq, Hazara, and Pashtun), two main languages (Dari and Pashto), and two different sects of Islam (Shia and Sunni). Its mountain landscape preserved traces of lost cultures, religions, and dynasties.5

  "Female" amphora heads from Ghor; pre-Islamic

  A TAJIK VILLAGE

  Two hours into our afternoon walk, we stopped to rest in a village. Qasim, Aziz, and I sat beside an old man, leaning our backs against the mosque wall. Abdul Haq paced in the desert, trying to talk to headquarters on the radio. His call sign, which he kept shouting, was "Ansari"—the name of an eleventh-century Sufi saint buried in Herat. The old man beside us was entirely still. He sat on his heels with his knees up, draped in loose clothes, a blanket, and a turban. His hands, immobile on his knees, were dark from the sun and swollen from work in the winter fields. Only his eyes moved. He looked at Abdul Haq, registering his youth and height and examining his American clothes, clean-shaven chin, and Chinese baseball cap. Every man left in this village had a beard and a turban.

  Many of the village houses were empty. Most of the men, if they had not taken their families to the refugee camps, were working in Iran. There was no electricity to power a television, no clinic nor school for the children. There were no women visible in the streets. The only public building that mattered was the mosque behind us. And it was not a new Iranian model with cement walls, bathroom tiles, and a bright aluminum dome. It was made of mud brick. This was the kind of village in which Abdul Haq had grown up.

  "What are you doing here?" barked Abdul Haq.

  "Waiting for afternoon prayer," said the old man.

  "I am Abdul Haq from the Security Service," he said, rolling the syllables and stressing them as if in an exaggerated Arabic. The name Abdul Haq literally means "Servant of Truth" just as Qasim means the "Divider."6 "My brothers and I are thirsty." It was curious that Abdul Haq was giving orders, but Qasim had closed his eyes and seemed too tired to care. The old man stood up, slowly walked to his house, and returned some time later with a tray. He unfolded a cloth in front of us. It contained pieces of thick nan bread. Then he laid out two pots, one of green tea and one of black tea, and five glasses.

  Silent and gravely polite in his traditional clothes, the old man poured our tea and then leaned back against the mosque wall, staring at Abdul Haq. These soldiers were all the old man had seen of the new administration. What impression of the government did he derive from the restless, half-modern Abdul Haq with his foreign equipment and muddled past?

  Abdul Haq sat down beside us and helped himself to a piece of nan. "There are bad men here," he whispered to me. Taking my hand he added, in a parody of my Persian accent, "Man haraji hastam" (I am a foreigner). Then, standing up, he stuck the barrel of his rifle in the sand, performed a pole vault, hopped twice on his left foot, and grinned. The old man remained expressionless for a moment and then laughed.

  The old villager paid no taxes and received nothing from the state. Government was something that happened in grand, bullet-scarred buildings in Herat and Kabul. There, three weeks after the Taliban had fallen, civil servants such as Yuzufi were again performing the ceremonies of fees and triplicate forms in front of skeptical congregations of war reporters needing visas. The Security Service was again putting people into characterless cars. Outside the cities, there were only Abdul Haq, Qasim, and Aziz—who with each ungainly stride carried a new culture into rural Afghanistan, like modern Alexander the Greats. And theoretically in control of all of this was the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan.

  THE EMIR OF THE WEST

  Ismail Khan is an appealing person ... He's thoughtful, measured, and self-confident ... I could tell you what we talked about, but I'm not going to.

  —U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,

  visiting Herat, April 29, 2002

  Ismail Khan was the most powerful man in western Afghanistan. Two days earlier, on my last afternoon in Herat, I had gone to meet him, hoping his support would provide some protection against the Security Service. A few bulbs still glowed in the chandeliers of the gold-columned audience chamber. In the dark corners, scores of Afghan villagers were asleep on the floor under pillars of stacked chairs. They were waiting to petition Ismail Khan.

  I joined the foreign journalists in a side room. They glanced up as I entered but did not greet me. They seemed preoccupied. I noticed that most of them had grown beards to look like Afghans or because their rooms had no hot water. This was not true of the beautiful correspondent with Television France 2, but even she seemed worn down. Nothing happened for half an hour. I chatted. It seemed everyone had the flu and had been waiting for an interview for a week.

  These were bright and dedicated reporters. Most of what the European and American public knew about Afghanistan came from these people. It was not easy for them, and the stress showed in their expressions. They could not speak an Afghan language; they were afraid to leave their vehicles; the food was unfamiliar; they were sleeping badly; it was three and a half months after September 11, 2001; and their editors were pushing for more and more words and demanding to know why they had missed the story of the "Secret Hunt for Usama Bin Laden." A month earlier, four of them had been dragged from their jeep on a road outside Jalalabad and executed. When I passed through the narrow, black-walled gorge shortly after it happened and saw the lonely spot, I understood why journalists were no longer prepared to travel on that road. Twelve foreign war reporters had been killed in Afghanistan in the previous two months.

  Yuzufi entered buttoning his baggy pin-striped suit. He, too, seemed tired. A Japanese photographer asked him when the governor was coming.

  "Soon," he said.

  Then Yuzufi saw me, smiled, and put his hand on my shoulder. "I'm glad you've come," he whispered. "At the end of the press conference I will point to you—then just introduce yourself quickly and tell him about your journey."

  Yuzufi left and then reentered beside a portly man with a bushy white beard, a neat black silk turban, and a baggy gray parka. The room was small and they had to squeeze past us. It was only when the man sat at the head of the table and wished us peace that I realized this was Governor Ismail Khan. Cameras flashed and the BBC crew cursed because they hadn't switched something on. When the photographers had finished, Ismail Khan stopped smiling and said something to Yuzufi. The governor was sitting in a low chair, pressed against the wall. Other governors would have entered through a separate door with a large train of gunmen, but he had come in with only Yuzufi. He did not like ceremonial etiquette. He would not allow even his followers to kiss his hands.

  Ismail Khan had captured Herat from the Taliban on November 13, 2001, six weeks before I met him. He had started the Afghan war with the Russians by killing hundreds of Russian advisers and their families in 1979. For the past twenty-two years, he had been fight
ing the Russians and the Taliban, interrupted by periods spent either as governor of Herat, in jail, or in exile in Iran. This time he had been governor for a fortnight.

  It was difficult to assess him. I had met his Security Service, which still tortured opponents with electric crank generators. He was rumored to receive nearly a million dollars a day in customs revenue and passed none of it to the central government. But his human rights record was better than those of many of the ministers in Kabul, and instead of pocketing the customs money he seemed to spend it on rural development projects. Many Heratis were pleased to have a modest and pious local man running their affairs. Kabul, however, worried that he was trying to create an independent kingdom, supported by Iran. He was said to have taken the title "Emir of the West."

  I needed to be able to tell people that I had met Ismail Khan. Every person I met in the next month of walking would be defined by their relationship to him. He had appointed the governors of all the neighboring provinces, and the district commanders for two hundred kilometers were all now his allies—even if they had been his enemies in the past.

  "If your own interpreters wish to translate that is fine," said Yuzufi, opening the meeting in English, "but I will retranslate." Ismail Khan nodded. He spoke good English, but during this meeting he would only speak Dari. He was facing television cameras from BBC, CBS, and Television France and journalists from most of the largest international newspapers. This was probably the first time he or Yuzufi had spoken to so many foreign journalists at once. Ismail Khan may have wanted the retranslation to give him time to prepare his answers. "In your questions please," continued Yuzufi, "only call His Excellency, 'Your Excellency,' never 'you.'"

  In six weeks Ismail Khan must have learned a new way of thinking and talking. For twenty years, Iranian clerics and American intelligence officers had lectured him on political Islam and anticommunism and rewarded him for killing Russians or Taliban. But now American intelligence officers pressed him on "international terrorism, narcotics, organized crime, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." Diplomats and uniformed military pushed for new political and security structures. The United Nations and the relief and development agencies gave him cash and grain according to World Bank—inspired "Needs Assessment Process" and "Quick Impact Projects for Afghan Reconstruction." He seemed to impress those he met.