The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  The ewer arrived and I poured the water for my neighbor. As he washed his hands he sighed: "Al Allah II Allah. Muhammad rasull Allah." (There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.) For some, to be a Muslim it is enough to repeat this phrase.

  "The Englishman who traveled with his camel could say that phrase. But he was not a Muslim," commented Jalil.

  "He will go to hell," said the mullah.

  I was grateful when the food's arrival brought the conversation to a halt.

  Man with water pipe

  CROWN JEWELS

  Three small meat dishes were served for dinner: mutton and potato stew, a peppery innard sausage, and some lamb fat. With so many of us present, the meat was minutely divided to provide a hint of flavor with each handful of rice.

  "Is it true that Queen Elizabeth travels by carriage?" asked Jalil, when he had finished eating.

  "Yes, she does."

  "Why does she not have a car?"

  "England is a desert," said the mullah.

  "No, it rains a lot in England," I replied.

  "Perhaps I am thinking of Australia."

  "True, Australia is a desert."

  "What is your currency? The euro or the dollar?" asked the fat man with the water pipe.

  "It's a hundred yen to the dollar in Japan," interrupted the old man by the door.

  "The pound."

  "Mr. Pound," shouted the mullah, "do you have kerosene lamps, and rice and green tea in England? Do you grow rice? Is it green like Mazandaran in Iran?"

  Everyone was talking at once. I had learned my Persian through repetitive conversation in villages. This discussion tested my vocabulary. I must have missed a quarter of what was said. But what I heard proved this remote place was much more aware of foreign geography, monarchs, and currencies than I had imagined.

  "Where," asked the fat old man, "is the Koh-i-Noor diamond the English stole from Afghanistan? When are you going to give it back?"

  "When I was in the Indian Punjab, people asked me to give it back to them," I said.

  "But you took it from us..."

  Babur's diary is the first credible report of the Koh-i-Noor. It was almost certainly the diamond he captured at the siege of Agra, and he describes it as worth "half of the daily expense of the whole world." According to Babur, it had first been acquired by the Delhi Sultan at Malwa in 1304.

  There is no certainty about where it was before Malwa. Little evidence supports the Indian Sunday Tribune's claims that the Koh-i-Noor was seized by Alexander the Great at the battle of Jhelum in the Punjab in 326 B.C., and then owned by the great Buddhist ruler Asoka.

  Babur gave the diamond to his favorite son, Humayun, who probably carried it into exile in Persia and presented it as a gift to the Shah of Iran, who in turn sent it to his liege-king in the Deccan. On July 8, 1656, the diamond was presented to Babur's great-great-grandson Shah Jahan at Agra, where Babur had first seized it.

  In 1739 Nadir Shah, the ruler of Iran, acquired the diamond from Shah Jahan's eventual heir and carried it back to Iran across Afghanistan. He called it "Koh-i-Noor," Mountain of Light. It was then about 186 carats and common belief held that whoever owned it would rule the world, provided it was worn by a woman. Nadir's son subsequently gave it to Ahmed Shah Durrani, his Afghan Chief of Horse and the founder of modern Afghanistan.

  Ahmed Shah kept the Koh-i-Noor in his capital at Kandahar as the central symbol of Afghanistan's independence from Persia. His grandson then carried it back across Afghanistan to exile in India, where he was persuaded to give it to Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab. In 1849 Ranjit's heir gave it to the East India Company in a tin box as indemnity for the Sikh wars. Sir John Lawrence lost the diamond in a garden shed and when he found it, presented it to Queen Victoria.

  The Queen put it in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The public were not impressed by its lack of glitter. A distinguished committee decided to cut the stone and a patent steam wheel was imported from Amsterdam. The Duke of Wellington started the engine and Prince Albert laid the diamond to the drill. After a month of work by the Dutch team it was reduced to a "brilliant" shape of 106 carats, its historical shape wrecked.

  I was in India during the Queen's visit of 1997 when, on the basis of the Koh-i-Noor's time with Ranjit Singh, Sikhs demonstrated for the return of the diamond to the Punjab. Three years later, twenty-five Indian parliamentarians demanded its return to New Delhi on the basis of Babur's ownership. When I was in Iran, the Taliban demanded its return to Afghanistan on the basis of Ahmed Shah's possession. In April 2002, a Guardian leader—with no reference to the claims from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran—supported the Indians. I last saw it lying on top of the Queen Mother's coffin in Westminster Hall.

  By midnight I was determined to sleep, so I lay down in the corner while the men continued smoking and playing cards. The oil lamps were extinguished an hour later. It was a difficult night. Abdul Haq had poisoned himself with the ditch water and had stomach cramps; Aziz's painful cough now sounded tubercular. I woke at dawn and went out to the vineyards to relieve myself. Walking around a corner, I found Moalem Jalil squatting on the ground and wiping his bare bottom with gravel. I had been surprised that when I was shown to the fields in Afghanistan I was never given a pitcher of water with which to clean myself. The Afghan technique was now clear and I could see why Qasim and Abdul Haq so proudly displayed their toilet paper.

  At breakfast, which was very sweet black tea and dry bread, the old fat man who had dominated proceedings the night before behaved as though he were drunk, probably because of what was in his water pipe. Usually Afghans sit still, revealing little with their faces or bodies. But this man, who was the headman of a neighboring village, engaged in long heroic perorations, with melodramatic whispers, crescendos, and histrionic gestures, which I found difficult to follow. His large body rocked back and forth, his hands waved through the air, and he kept thrusting his turban back at a steep angle on his head. Every few minutes, he would twist his head to one side like a cockatoo and stare unblinking at me for five seconds, then straighten his head and launch back into his speech.

  It concerned various groups who intended to kill us on the road to Obey. Qasim, who had been quite relaxed the previous day, was frightened. When the headman had finished, Qasim told me that to walk the next ten kilometers would be suicide. "The young Commandant of Obey, Mustafa, is planning to kill us. We must travel to Saray-e-Pul at least by vehicle. We cannot do it on foot."

  I refused. I was determined to walk all the way. I had been fine in Nepal, where people had warned me of similar dangers. Finally Qasim insisted that Moalem Jalil accompany us to Obey. Again we waded through the cold water on an overcast day, Abdul Haq carrying Qasim and Aziz on his back in turn.

  This was our fifth day of walking together. We had moved only 140 kilometers east of Herat, sticking to the gravel plain beside the Hari Rud. The short-cropped grass and boulders under a dark sky reminded me of the Scottish battlefield of Culloden. On the far bank of the river stood two black wool tents of the nomadic Pashtun Kuchi people. Traditionally the Kuchi moved south with their flocks at this time of year. But either the politics or the climate had kept them in the Hari Rud valley for the winter.

  Walking ahead of the others, I felt the familiar liberation of escaping the men in the claustrophobic guest room and being outside, moving in the open air, on foot.

  We were approaching Obey, which was in Babur's time ruled by Zulnun Arghun:

  Zulnun Arghun ... was madly fond of chess; if a person played at it with one hand; he played at it with two hands ... He played without art just as his fancy suggests. He was a brave man. He distinguished himself above all the other young warriors in his use of the scimitar ... His courage is unimpeached, but certainly he was rather deficient in understanding The Sultan conferred on him the government of Ghor ... With but a handful of men he bravely vanquished and reduced large and numerous bodies of Hazara ... these tribes were never so effectivel
y settled and kept in order by any other person. Zulnun rose to very high rank and the countries on the Damenkoh [skirts of the mountains] of Herat, such as Obeh and Chaghcharan, were given to him.

  Shortly after Babur's journey, however, Zulnun convinced himself that a warrior supported by Allah was invincible. Like others since, he was wrong:

  Though a man of courage, he was ignorant and somewhat crazed. Had it not been for his craziness and ignorance he would not have made himself the dupe of such gross flattery and exposed himself to scorn in consequence ... When he was Prime Minister several sheikhs and mullahs came and told him that they had had intercourse with the spheres and that the title of Lion of God had been conferred on him; that he was predestined to defeat the Uzbeks and make them all prisoners. He, implicitly believing all this flattery, tied a handkerchief round his neck, and returned thanks to God ... He did not put the fort in a defensible state; did not prepare ammunition and warlike arms; did not appoint either an advance or pickets to get notice of the enemy's approach, nor even exercise his army, or accustom it to discipline, or battle-array, so as to be prepared and able to fight when the enemy came ... When the Uzbek leader fell upon them ... Zulnun ... relying on this prediction ... kept his ground against fifty thousand Uzbeks with a hundred or a hundred and fifty men. A great body of the enemy coming up took him in an instant and swept on. They cut off his head as soon as he was taken.

  BREAD AND WATER

  Abdul Haq walked beside me toward Obey, talking about his life. Perhaps because he was younger and stronger than Qasim or Aziz, he did not seem tired by the walking. The others had dropped five hundred yards behind. I enjoyed talking to him. Unlike Qasim he did not seem to tailor his stories in order to extort things from me. He told me he had become a holy warrior, a Mujahidin, ten years earlier, when he was thirteen.

  "I was a cook in Ismail Khan's camp before I was allowed to fight that Russian agent Najibullah. When the Taliban reached Herat in 1995, I did not take to the hills with Ismail Khan. Instead I fled to Iran, leaving my wife and two daughters."

  For three years he sold spare parts in truck stops in Shiraz and Tehran, which may have been where he picked up his clean-shaven look and his baseball cap. When he returned to Herat in 1998, he was imprisoned by the Taliban. He spent six months in a cell so crowded the prisoners slept standing up. His daily ration was one piece of nan bread and a glass of water.

  "One of the guards offered to help me escape if I could raise one thousand three hundred and fifty dollars. I told my wife to sell our clothes in the bazaar. My daughters went without meat. I sent messages to my friends and borrowed a hundred dollars from one, two hundred from another. Finally I had the money and he let me go. I went to the hills to fight for Ismail Khan against the Taliban. They were good times. We had a lot of money from Iran and other countries. We slept in tents. Every night we bought sheep from the Kuchi nomads to feast. Four months ago I went down to Herat. There a man—not a man—a shaitan—a devil—reported me to the Taliban and they put me in jail to execute me. But after ten days Ismail Khan captured Herat and I was freed."

  "Do you have any money?"

  "Yes. I am a rich man. My job in the Security Service is as a driver. I am paid eighty dollars a month but I get more, much more—a great deal—for doing little contracts in the villages."

  "What contracts?"

  "No one can check my truck because I am from the Security Service—so people pay a lot to use my truck. I can carry anything."

  "Aziz?"

  "Aziz is very poor. He has nothing. His detachment has not been paid for months. He will be lucky to get forty dollars this month. We have taken him with us to help him."

  "And Qasim? Is he as poor as he says?"

  "Qasim, no. Qasim is very rich. But his father and grandfather were nothing. Less than nothing."

  "But he is a Seyyed."

  "A descendant of the Prophet? So he says," said Abdul Haq and laughed, "but no one has ever heard of his family. Now he owns two villages next to Herat. He has six thousand dollars at home in cash."

  "Because..."

  "Because he is close to Ismail Khan. He can help himself to foreign money."

  "You are all officers in the Security Service?"

  "Qasim and I are. We are Mujahidin. Most of our colleagues used to work in the KHAD." (The body set up by the Russian KGB.)

  "But I thought you used to fight the Russians?"

  "What can we do? Qasim and I can't run a Security Service. We can barely read and write. We have to use the experts. Like the man who interrogated you. The one with the goatee..." Abdul Haq blew out his cheeks and traced the shape on his chin.

  "Yes?" He had not told me he knew the man who questioned me.

  "That was Gul Agha. He has a revolver hidden here." He patted the side of his chest. "He is a very big man. He was not a Mujahid. He was in Iran working in the Security Service while we were fighting in the hills."

  "And Qasim? What is his job? Is he a commander?"

  "Qasim? No. Qasim doesn't work in an office with paper. Qasim's job is to deal with bad men ... question them and deal with them for men like Gul Agha."

  Abdul Haq never elaborated on this comment so I do not know precisely how Qasim dealt with people on behalf of the man who had questioned me. This, however, is an eyewitness report of an interrogation that took place in Qasim's headquarters building six months later in September 2002, recorded by Human Rights Watch:

  They tied his feet and hung him [upside down] from the ceiling, so that his hands touched the ground. After beating him with whips, they brought two electrical wires, and they wound the wire ends, the metal part, around each of his big toes. Then they shocked him. On his big toes there were burns, like a ring about each toe. The skin there was black and bloody. A new man came in. He looked around and then said to the men who were torturing Arbab, "What are you doing? You are not doing it right." And he made the men take off the wire from [his] toes and wound it around his thumbs instead. His hands were tied together but hanging on the floor, and they stepped on his hands with their boots while they did this. Then the new man said, "Now I will make him do the death dance." And they shocked him again. He was moving all about and shaking all about by his feet. And he fainted and lost consciousness.

  When we reached a graveyard on the outskirts of Obey after three hours' walk, it began to rain. The largest tombstones were eleven-foot megaliths of black granite, framed by the obligatory piece of wrecked Russian armor and a ruined caravanserai.

  Walking down the main bazaar street, we were stopped by a group of armed men.

  "Is this the American?"

  "He is English. We have come from the Emir Ismail Khan," said Qasim.

  "That is impossible. You would be in a car."

  Aziz and Qasim's black-and-white keffiyeh scarves and their military radios marked them clearly as Ismail Khan's men, but we had reached a place where the governor's authority was diminished. The local ruler, Mustafa, was a new commander and his loyalties were uncertain. The Obey group did not want outside units coming in, but they probably pretended not to recognize Qasim as Ismail Khan's man because they were not prepared to challenge his leader directly.

  Qasim, Aziz, and Moalem Jalil were detained. Abdul Haq and I were ordered to sit in the truck stop. This was a modern version of the ruined caravanserai we had passed on the edge of town. Its courtyard was filled with truck-churned mud and the stench of human excrement. Rows of donkeys stood patiently in the rain. Their nostrils had been cut open to let in more air, a sign they were being taken to high altitudes. I had walked some way with a mule in Iran but had left it because the police thought I was an Afghan using the animal to smuggle opium or other goods on the mountain tracks. Unshaven men with bloodshot eyes loaded these donkeys with yellow waterproof bundles. The men wore fake designer hooded tops and heavy jeweled watches loose on their thin wrists. I guessed from their clothes that they lived in Tehran.

  Abdul Haq and I were sitting on the flo
or of the restaurant eating a large portion of mutton when Qasim entered to say we could not go farther because of the rain. Qasim would not say more, only that it was dangerous and that, had we not had a local like Moalem Jalil with us, we would not have got this far. I wondered if the Obey men didn't want us to see them loading opium onto the donkeys, but I doubted it. They didn't seem to care when we walked through the courtyard. The problem was probably rivalry between Ismail Khan and the Obey militia.

  I told Qasim I was leaving in an hour regardless and he went back to talk to the militia. Finally he returned and repeated that the road ahead was far too dangerous—there were roadblocks manned by bandits. I wondered if bandits was a euphemism for the Obey militia. We would be robbed and killed. We had to take a car to Saray-e-Pul.

  "How far is that?"

  "Twenty-five kilometers."

  That was five hours' walk and only four hours till dark. "I'm going to walk," I said.

  There was a pause and then Abdul Haq said, "And I will go with him."

  Qasim hesitated. "Well, Aziz and I will get a jeep and meet you there."

  THE FIGHTING MAN SHALL

  It was raining hard when we walked out onto the street.

  "Five hours ... no problem," yelled Abdul Haq at Qasim's departing back. "I can do it. Not Qasim. Me. Look at me ... a gun, two magazines, three hand grenades, kung fu ... I'll get them ... Should have seen me yesterday ... Then I had three magazines, five hand grenades."

  I walked out of Obey matching Abdul Haq's long strides and wondering whether the Obey militia would shoot us. We passed the next three kilometers in silence. We had entered camel country: three sheltered by a wall under their bundles, one walked beside an old man, and a herd grazed in the desert. When we reached the next village, Abdul Haq began shouting again about how many Taliban he had killed. He had never used earplugs when firing his automatic weapon and he was half deaf.