by Rory Stewart
"Well, you mustn't say so. They would be disappointed."
"I'm afraid they would," he said, frowning, "but then they cannot speak English and you would not tell them what I said? Please."
"Of course not."
"Good. I like you."
"Why are you here?"
"Because my father summoned me. I have not been in Afghanistan for four years. This is all quite unfamiliar to me. I have had to come in from Quetta to Herat. I think my father is in trouble. He wanted me to return to help. I would rather remain in school. But I am already twelve and I am the eldest son. What can I do?"
"Where are your brothers?"
"In Pakistan. Tell me, please—where are you going?"
"To Chaghcharan."
"Then you should travel with me. I am going to Chaghcharan. You can keep me company."
"When are you going?"
"I will arrive there in about a fortnight. It is not safe at the moment. We are going to visit some of my father's estates before I join him there. You will come with me. I can practice my English and you will stay with my father and me in Chaghcharan."
"I am afraid I would like to be in Chaghcharan sooner than that."
"How soon?"
"Three days."
"But how can you go so fast? You don't have a horse. I will give you my horse."
"Thank you, but really I must walk."
"I had hoped you would be my friend. I have no friends here. They are all very old."
An old man appeared at the door and whispered "Your Excellency" to the boy.
"This is my retainer," said the boy. "He is a fine man who knows many things. You must meet him. Abdul, this is Rory, a Scotsman, who is walking across Asia."
"Peace be with you," said Abdul. "But your Excellency, it is time for us to go. It is getting dark and the path will be dangerous for us."
"Yes. Yes. Well then I hope to see you in Chaghcharan."
I never saw him again, and when I last heard, his father was still on the run from the coalition and from Ismail Khan.
Perhaps because I was sick, I was often irritated by villagers and village hospitality. On the fourteenth day, when I came off the snow plains after five hours' walking and turned into a village hoping to get lunch, I was left standing in the snow with my pack on my back for half an hour while the headman decided whether to speak to me and another villager told me I would never make it to Barra Khana by dark. Finally I shouted, "Right, that's it. If there's no welcome here, I'm off to Barra Khana now," and began to walk away. Only then did the headman invite me in and give me some dry bread. After the meal I found a gully, a necessity with diarrhea, and half the village followed to watch me defecate. Back in the village, the headman's son asked if he could try my camera and proceeded to finish the roll of film by pointing the lens at the ground and clicking again and again. I now had only one roll to see me to Kabul. I was angry for the rest of the day. That night I dreamed I was buying a plane ticket to Venice.
During the day, before reaching Chaghcharan, Babur and I were alone again, following a track into a snow plain and squinting into the morning sun. Babur paused frequently to chase smells in the cold wind or to relieve himself. I turned around a number of times to take in the rich light on the low hills, to look at our footsteps in the snow, or to readjust my pack. Twenty minutes passed before we found our stride and settled into the silence and the space. There was no birdsong and the high, dark blue sky was empty. The only sound was the regular groan of my pack and the creak of firm snow beneath our feet.
We reached a village. The next village was fifteen kilometers away and I wanted to let Babur drink. Off the path, the snow was knee-deep and Babur walked carefully in my footprints. I wondered if he was worried about mines. The Hari Rud was frozen, and it took a number of blows to break the ice with the stump of my staff. Babur simply stood, head up, staring at the mountains. I tried to pull him down but he pulled back. We had found no water the afternoon before, and I knew we had a day without water ahead. I squatted by the ice hole, splashed the water, and dripped some on his nose. Eventually, he spread his front legs in the snow, cautiously stretched his neck forward, and began to drink. He drank for three minutes.
When we reemerged from the snowfields onto the track, we were stopped by a man carrying a Kalashnikov and leading a group of young men. "Hey, boy! Where are you taking that dog?"
"To Kabul," I said.
He came closer and stared at me. But not too close, because he was wary of Babur.
"You're a foreigner, aren't you?" the man said.
"Yes, I'm from Inglistan [Britain]."
"From Hindustan [India]...," he said thoughtfully.
"No, Inglistan."
"Yes." Most people in this area had not heard of Britain, though they had heard of America. Some had even heard of the World Trade Center, but they had no real concept of what it had been or why the coalition had bombed Afghanistan. The man paused for a moment and then suddenly shouted, "Give me your dog."
"No, this is my dog. He goes with me. I'm taking him to Inglistan."
"Give me your dog, and you can go free," he said again. Babur and the crowd watched us impassively.
"What is this?" I shouted back. "Who do you think you are? This dog was given to me by Bismillah of Barra Khana. I was a guest in his house last night. He is my close friend. If you have any questions, you talk to Bismillah." I barely knew Bismillah and Babur was not Bismillah's dog, but the man seemed suddenly uncertain, perhaps because a man with an unclean animal was speaking with the confidence of a village headman.
"What is this? Who is this?" he said to the young men.
"We heard a foreigner was in Barra Khana at Bismillah's last night."
"And this is Bismillah's dog."
"Perhaps..."
"It is, indeed," I said coldly. "Now if you'll excuse me...," and I stepped past him. Babur was lying down but I was in too much of a hurry to plead with the dog. I yanked at his collar, dragging him through the snow until he found his feet and we strode off. Shouting at people could be dangerous. For ten minutes, I waited to hear a voice or a shot from behind me, but neither came.
FROGS
I reached Chaghcharan, the capital of Ghor, just before dusk, after a lonely walk down a series of gorges. The town consisted of a scattering of mud and brick compounds alongside the river. I walked toward the airfield to the east of town. Fair-haired men in jeans carrying large automatic weapons were feeding an Afghan dog corned beef hash from a British army ration pack.
They watched me walking in with Babur, stinking in Afghan clothes, and one of them said, "Who the fuck is this?" in a cockney accent.
I replied in English, and, when they had stopped laughing, one of them asked if I was working for the British government. I said I wasn't. I was on holiday.
"Like fuck you're on holiday," he said, and they laughed some more.
I had heard about the men at the Chaghcharan airfield in many of the villages along the way. The villagers liked them. The headman of Barra Khana, Bismillah, had said, "British soldiers have chests as broad as horses. We wish there were more of them to keep the peace. Every morning they hook their feet over the bumper of their jeep, put their hands on the ground, and push themselves up and down on their hands two hundred times without stopping. I don't know why."
These men were not in a position to discuss what they were doing, so I didn't ask questions and didn't hang around. They were in a difficult situation—dropped by helicopter and left for months in the middle of Afghanistan with the nearest backup two hundred kilometers away—but they didn't show it. They brewed me a cup of Tetley's tea with milk and gave me a giant bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and I told them a little about my journey. They seemed to enjoy the story. They were funny and relaxed. I liked them and it was refreshing to talk English. When I left, they gave me an airport thriller, some rations, some Wagon Wheels in a Marks & Spencer bag, and some meat for Babur. It was a fine welcome to Chaghcharan.
The Taliban captured Chaghcharan in 1995 and immediately executed sixty-four Northern Alliance soldiers who had surrendered their weapons. On October 20, 2001, three months before my arrival, the Taliban retreated. Some of the people of Chaghcharan came out to celebrate prematurely. A returning Taliban column saw them in the main bazaar and killed forty-four between midday and two in the afternoon.
As I walked through the bazaar, I saw a number of fair-haired children. Afghans are often fair-haired. They sometimes say it is because they are descended from Alexander's troops, but there were probably blond inhabitants before Alexander's arrival.43 The marines at the airfield, however, thought they were descended from the Russian soldiers who lived in Chaghcharan when it was one of the few permanent Russian bases in the interior of Afghanistan. Afghans in the bazaar told me a Russian had deserted and converted to Islam, and was still in Chaghcharan twelve years after the Russian withdrawal. They wouldn't tell me where he lived.
That night I found the other foreigners in town. The office of the International Committee of the Red Cross consisted of a Swiss manager, a Dutchman, and Colin, who was from somewhere near London. They all seemed to have worked in Rwanda. Now they were coordinating food aid and running flights in and out of Chaghcharan, which was the center of the "hunger belt." With the roads blocked by snow, the town was only accessible by plane or on foot. These men had 175 grain-laden trucks stuck in the snow on the road from Herat. The next day the bazaar heard that I knew the Red Cross and I was besieged with requests for extra ration tickets.
The ICRC men did not seem interested in making their own lives more comfortable. They wouldn't buy local meat or fruit in the bazaar because they thought it too expensive, and they were opposed to importing foreign food on their airlifts. For a month they had been living on rice and nan bread, supplemented with sachets of strawberry jam. They did not seem very interested in the history or culture of the area. They did not socialize with the soldiers, because they wanted to remain neutral. It must have been quite depressing. But they were very kind to me. They shared their rice dinner with me and, against regulations, let me sleep on their office floor, and later gave me some food to take away.
The following afternoon the third pillar of the international involvement in Afghanistan arrived in two giant Chinooks. The choppers swept in low over the hills from the east, with machine gunners seated on the open rear ramps. Two foreign civilians in their thirties emerged flanked by soldiers. One civilian was a German in a Chitrali cap. The other was a large Irishman, bareheaded in shalwar kemis. These were the political officers of the United Nations.
The agreement setting up the future shape of Afghanistan had been signed in Bonn a month earlier. In five months a Loya Jirga assembly was to choose a new government. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative running this process, had staffed his Political Affairs office with some of the most competent expatriates in Afghanistan: people who spoke Dari or Pashto well, had worked in Afghanistan for years, and had experience with village culture. But these few people had to manage the conflicting interests of foreign governments, other UN agencies, warlords, international organizations, and Afghan technocrats. They knew too much of the reality on the ground to be popular with either the new Afghan government or the international bureaucracy. By the end of the year they had been moved into almost meaningless jobs.
At this point, however, they were still in charge. The German and the Irishman were driven in jeeps to the only concrete building in town. Its flat roof was packed to the edges with spectators; heads crammed every window; and a thousand people crowded the forecourt. The foreigners stepped out of the jeeps and moved down the crowd, shaking hands. It was a sunny day and everyone was enjoying the warmth.
The Irishman stood at a microphone to explain the Loya Jirga process in Dari and, as he did, caught the eyes of the three foreigners in the crowd: Colin from ICRC, me, and a soldier from the airfield. He smiled. We smiled back—each I suppose surprised at being in the middle of Afghanistan.
The Irishman explained to the audience that they could select a new kind of representative for the Loya Jirga. Traditionally this assembly had been dominated by feudal landlords and district chiefs such as Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan of Kamenj. The plan was for more ordinary people, including women, to be nominated. Everyone applauded. I wondered, however, whether anyone thought it possible. Haji Mohsin certainly intended to go to the Loya Jirga, and it would be a brave villager who stood against him. Three months later, before they could reach the assembly in Kabul, three of the new Loya Jirga delegates from Ghor were killed by local militia.
Dr. Ibrahim, the new governor of Ghor, stood to talk about democracy. He wore a turban and a pair of large aviator sunglasses.
"Don't use the word democracy. It is un-Islamic," shouted a mullah beside him.
"Democracy is not an Arabic word; it is English," replied Dr. Ibrahim.
"Well, in that case it's all right," said the mullah. I don't suppose this exchange meant anything to anyone, but everyone seemed satisfied.
Half an hour later the helicopters took off again.
***
I left Chaghcharan the next morning. I had had two days off, but I was not well rested as I had hoped to be. I had spent a night on the floor of the night watchman's room in the ICRC compound, a cold night in a swept-out donkey stable in the center of town, and one night in the Afghan Aid office. But my hosts were busy and wanted me out early in the morning. During the days, I had nothing to do but limp between the two teahouses in the bazaar with my pack on my back and Babur behind me. I had kept the metal top and bottom of my walking stick, and I persuaded the ironmongers to fix them to a new pole. I wrote nothing in my diary. I had a migraine; everything I tried to eat made me sick, so for a day and a half I ate nothing.
THE WINDY PLACE
Any regrets I had about leaving Chaghcharan faded after half an hour on the road. My pack was still heavy, the hills tall, and Babur reluctant, but I felt my confidence and ease returning with the familiar motion of my muscles. The road ran gently up from the Hari Rud onto a plateau and then into rolling hills. Among the pugmarks, footprints, and hoof blows on the pale track, melting snow had left patches of dark, glutinous mud. To my right the line of mountain peaks curled, fell, and rose again in silhouette, as regular as waves or ocean liners, heading east.
I pressed through a group of teenage donkey drivers in shabby turbans with dust-caked faces. They were fighting about who would ride the donkeys. When they saw me they poked Babur with their sticks, whistled, shouted questions, beat their donkeys so they careened into the side of my pack and nearly toppled me over, and told me I would never make it to Badgah by dark.
We soon left them behind. An hour later I sat down beside a mud wall and opened a green packet of British army cookies marked BISCUITS FRUIT S. I didn't feel up to eating more than one so I offered the rest to Babur. He wouldn't touch them. Finally, in the late afternoon, we came into a valley with an old mud caravanserai at the bottom and two mud towers on the slopes above. The Hari Rud was mostly frozen and a line of bare silver poplars stood along the bank. A shepherd sat by the ice, playing a flute.
This was Badgah, "the windy place," the home of Commandant Haji Maududi, who had once been allied with the Pakistani-supported warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and was now the owner of the only Stinger missiles in Ghor. I had a letter of introduction but he was away. We found his sixteen-year-old son in the family mill, covered in flour. He was very uncertain what to do with me, but after a long delay he led me to a guest room and then left me for the rest of the evening. He did not come to say good-bye the next day. I was grateful to be left alone.
The next morning it began to snow again. I turned off after ten minutes of walking to let Babur drink. Just above us the river was frozen and we watched four men from a neighboring village stamp across the thirty-foot width of ice without pause. Then we turned away from the Hari Rud, following a gorge through low hills. A gentle snow-hail started. B
lack hairs rose on Babur's golden pelt, each tipped with a small ball of ice. But for some time the day was warm enough for me to walk without my coat. Then the hail strengthened and I pulled my jacket out of my pack. We continued for three hours through winding, brown, snow-stained hills, with the sun hidden in thick cloud. So far we had been luckier with the snow than the Emperor Babur:
The farther we advanced, the deeper was the snow. At Chaghcharan the snow reached above the horses' knees. Two or three days after Chaghcharan the snow became excessively deep; it reached up above the stirrups. In many places, the horses' feet did not reach the ground and the snow continued to fall.
One Sultan Pashai was our guide. I do not know whether it was from old age, or from his heart failing, or from the unusual depth of snow, but having once lost the road he never could find it again, so as to point out the way. We had taken this road on the recommendation of Qasim Beg [Babur's ancient chancellor]. So, anxious to preserve their reputation, he and his sons dismounted, and after beating down the snow, discovered a road, by which we advanced. Next day, as there was much snow, and the road was not to be found with all our exertions, we were brought to a complete stand.
Babur the dog, in the heart of the blizzard, stopped to savor the bouquet of a wet grass hummock. As we moved on the weather shifted, as did the sharp angles of the slopes, revealing new valleys on each side. My mind flitted from half-remembered poetry to things I had done of which I was ashamed. I stumbled on the uneven path. I lifted my eyes to the sky behind the peaks and felt the silence. This was what I had imagined a wilderness to be.
At midday I reached the village of Gandab and from there left the road and took a narrow footpath into the mountains. "Stay high and right," said the villagers. "Don't be tempted by the path to your left."
When we were halfway up the mountain, the snow began to fall faster, obliterating the line of footprints I had been following. Babur and I stumbled again and again into three- and four-foot-high drifts, and were soon both drenched. Visibility was down to fifty yards. Eventually we reached a ridge and the clouds cleared suddenly to reveal some peaks. But I saw no sign of any path or village. To my right nine hundred feet above was what appeared to be the shoulder of the mountain and a potential pass. I started up the hill through deep snow, sinking on every step and making slow progress. The powder slopes below seemed very long.
