by Graeme Smith
I had other meetings with Taliban in the years that followed, and even stayed in touch with the insurgent who had jokingly threatened me. He appeared in Kandahar several times and met for interviews in the backseat of my car as we drove around the city. But the bedrock of any relationship between a source and a journalist is trust, and trusting him was difficult as killings and abductions became more frequent. In the following years I would invent a better way of studying the Taliban, but in the meantime I stopped trying to cultivate them as sources. The last time I saw that insurgent with the manicured hands, he was vanishing into a street in Kandahar city, wrapped in a shawl that looked exactly like the others in the crowd.
I did stay in touch with some friends in Quetta, however, and returned there for a week in 2011. Almost four years after my first visit, the Taliban’s haven remained mysterious. Pakistan discouraged foreign journalists from spending too much time in the city, regulating their visits with a system of “no objection certificates,” paperwork required for any reporting from the borderlands. Pakistani intelligence also kept a close watch over the city’s main hotels, and had a history of harassing people who spoke with outsiders. I obtained a visa that exempted me from the certificate system, and wanted to avoid the hotels by staying at a friend’s house, but this proved tricky. The roads had grown more dangerous since my first trip, so I arrived in Quetta by air, and when the authorities saw a foreigner’s name on the passenger manifest and did not see any corresponding registration at a local hotel, the intelligence agencies went on alert. After a few days of wandering the city, a local journalist warned me that I should check into a hotel where I could be more easily watched. The next day, an ISI colonel visited my room and demanded a list of all the people I had visited. He was friendly and immaculately groomed. We chatted for perhaps three hours. I tried to emphasize the most innocuous parts of my visit, such as my research about Pakistani’s mining industry, but he pushed me to account for every hour I’d spent unsupervised. I wasn’t exactly under arrest, he said, but it would be safer for me if I remained inside my hotel room. He apologetically explained that the streets had become too dangerous for foreign journalists because of protests against a US raid a few hours earlier in the northern city of Abbottabad. Some locals apparently believed that American commandos had killed Osama bin Laden, the intelligence officer said, rolling his eyes with the condescension Pakistani authorities often show the uneducated masses. “We will never really know what happened,” he concluded.
That was a breaking point, for me. Until that day, I had carefully included both sides of the story about Pakistan’s involvement with the Taliban when I wrote about the allegations of safe havens for insurgents. I reported the comments of the Pashtun nationalists and others who accused the ISI of “financing and harbouring,” but I also included the skepticism of those like the local JUI leader, who portrayed the Taliban as a spontaneous uprising. But sitting with the well-coiffed ISI colonel on the morning of Osama bin Laden’s death, listening to him tell me that nothing had really happened in Abbottabad—that the helicopter assault was part of an elaborate drama—required a superhuman act of willpower not to accuse him of lying.
It also clarified a scene I had witnessed earlier the same week, as I walked to a restaurant with some local journalists, and we stumbled upon what appeared to be a group of Taliban in the darkened street. They were rough-looking boys with large turbans, swarming over a big yellow piece of construction equipment, a front-end loader with the words Government of Balochistan stencilled on the side. Two of the young men stood in the scoop at the front of the machine, reaching up to hang banners from the streetlights on Quetta’s main boulevard. The political flags and posters I had seen on my initial visit to the city in 2006 had given way to a more pro-Taliban mix. Up and down the streets, the black-and-white bars of the JUI were now interspersed with flags that did not merely allude to Taliban sympathies—these were the actual flags of the Taliban, adopted as the national symbol of Afghanistan during the years when it was known as an Islamic Emirate, a plain white background with a declaration of faith in Arabic script: “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God.”
I turned to my colleagues: “Did those Taliban steal that construction vehicle?”
“No,” one of them whispered. “Look closely.”
In the shadows, I could see a few policemen standing nearby, sleepily guarding the young men while they used a Pakistani government vehicle to hang Taliban propaganda in the heart of a provincial capital. My friends steered me away, and when were out of earshot one of them said: “What else do you need to see? Now you understand the whole situation in Pakistan.”
On the street in Kandahar city
CHAPTER 7
MASKED MEN FEBRUARY 2007
from: Graeme Smith
to: Stephen Northfield, Foreign Editor
Foreign Editor
date: Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 8:09 AM
Hi guys,
As you know, we rent a small office in Kandahar city. It’s a tiny, modest affair on a dirt road in the south end of the downtown, and we share the space with our fixer’s brother, who runs a construction company. Yesterday evening, around 6 p.m., my driver got a panicked telephone call from a cook who works in the office. He reported that three gunmen had burst through the metal doors and searched the place. They wore cloths tied around their faces; two carried Kalashnikov rifles, and the third was armed with a pistol. Without saying anything, they beat the cook and rummaged through the office. Nothing was stolen, despite the fact that valuable computers, Internet routers and other equipment are stored there.
We don’t know who did this, or why. My fixer in Quetta was visited by the ISI today and questioned about my recent visit to a notorious refugee camp near the Afghan border, but I’m skeptical about whether the two incidents are related.
I’ve decided to avoid returning to the office. I’ll keep doing my work in Kandahar city, using the car as a temporary base, and with your permission I’ll also devote some time to reviewing the way we do business in this city. I want to talk with trusted people about how we can maintain a presence in Kandahar without taking unnecessary risks. My working hypothesis is that we should rent an office in a more central, more secure part of the city and avoid taking roommates, but I want to check out the situation a little more carefully.
take care,
Graeme
I spent a week in early 2007 trying to figure out who raided my office in Kandahar. It had been an oasis in the city, a small nook sandwiched between two other businesses, with two storeys and an open courtyard where sunlight and hanging plants cascaded down from the sky. In the months that I rented the place, it had evolved from a simple meeting spot into a base of operations. We rigged up a satellite connection, installed two computers, and spent hours fixing the system as it endured the finicky power grid and my fixer’s young relatives who sneaked onto the computers in search of pornography. There was a shabby kitchen where a cook made stewed okra and other delicious meals. I even slept there, sometimes, on the low cushions that lined the walls of the carpeted rooms. It was dangerous to step outside for a breath of air, but I could climb a stairway to the roof and peek out at the ramshackle skyline—at least, until the neighbours complained they had seen somebody up there and expressed concern about the privacy of the nearby yards where their women strolled without veils.
We never figured out why the place was attacked. A Taliban spokesman sounded genuinely confused when we described the incident by phone. He didn’t think it was a Taliban operation, but he couldn’t be sure because the insurgents had many factions. Several days later, he called back to confirm that the Taliban had not raided the office. As if to make up for his earlier uncertainty, he gave us a little display of Taliban surveillance, declaring that he knew exactly who I was and proudly describing the colour of a bag I’d been carrying as I wa
lked out of the military base earlier that day. We consulted two other Taliban sources, and they both suggested the raiders might have been bandits, not insurgents, perhaps in search of a foreigner for a kidnapping. We never entirely ruled out the insurgents, however: a military officer said he considered them the most likely suspects, as capturing a journalist would grab headlines. But plenty of others had reason to take an unhealthy interest in me, or any Westerner. The criminal gangs in Kandahar included many of the notoriously corrupt police, and I would later hear first-hand accounts of police running informal prisons, holding people for ransom. Other friends suggested I might have been raided by agents from the National Directorate for Security, the secret police, perhaps because they were curious about the unexplained presence of a Westerner. There was also the possibility that we’d been searched by one of the militias loyal to Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid, or provincial council chairman Ahmed Wali Karzai, but I detected no traces of animosity as I interviewed both of them later that month. Of the two politicians, Wali Karzai was more dangerous—a reputed drug dealer who lorded over the government-held zones of southern Afghanistan like a personal fiefdom—but I was always careful to treat him with respect.
There was also the possibility that I had attracted notice from the intelligence services of Pakistan and Iran during my fifteen-hundred-kilometre trip earlier that month to the three-way border junction those two countries share with Afghanistan. I had travelled by road from Kandahar, across the border into Pakistan, up through the mountain pass and into Balochistan. The rough scrub melted into waves of sand as we reached the south side of the Registan—literally “sand land”—a desert that divides the battlefields of Afghanistan from the lawless quarters of Iran and Pakistan where drug dealers and insurgents find their havens. Our journey ended in a market called Taftan, on the Iranian border. It looked like a recycling depot from hell, a jumble of scrap-metal, fuel containers, anything that could be smuggled. The border was closed at that moment because of a dispute between Iran and Pakistan, and I had just arrived at the office of a local commander to interview him about the problem when the telephone on his desk started ringing. He picked it up and gestured at me with a quizzical look. “Mr. Smith?” he said. I hadn’t yet given him my name.
“Yes?”
“It’s for you.”
The voice on the phone sounded like a man who smoked too many cigarettes. Without introducing himself, he started asking questions about my movements in Pakistan’s tribal areas. I identified myself as a journalist and said I was researching a story about the border. The man asked why I was poking around the Pakistan side instead of venturing into Iran. He sounded like a smart guy, and his English was good, so I tried some humour: “Because,” I said, “Iran is not an open democracy like Pakistan.”
The man laughed and coughed. I’ve often enjoyed conversations with intelligence officers because they seem to appreciate irony. On that trip, in fact, I was mostly interested in Iran’s operations around the lawless three-way border junction. The research wasn’t conclusive, but the story we published just before my office got raided contained some examples of insurgents getting weapons and medical treatment from inside Iran. (Later that spring, the United States started making open accusations about Iranian support for insurgent factions.) Despite the timing, however, I never really believed the Iranians had ransacked my office. They were clearly wondering about my presence in Kandahar, but I made a point of stopping for tea at their consulate in the city, and they invited me to their New Year’s parties.
Regardless of who raided my office, however, the attack made it clear that I needed better security. I considered renting a compound in a more expensive, better-protected neighbourhood near the heart of the city. Rents were vastly higher in those areas, because anybody with a connection to the foreign presence wanted police checkpoints between their front doors and the Taliban villages outside the city. Shopping for real estate turned into a surreal experience, however, because the acquaintances who toured me around their empty compounds assumed that I’d be hiring a small army of guards, so their selling points usually came down to tactical considerations. I climbed onto the rooftop patio of one compound and the guy showing me around patted a low concrete wall and said, “Good construction, solid materials, could take an RPG hit. No problem.” He paused to admire the view of nomads herding sheep in a nearby field, and suggested that the property would be especially comfortable in summer, when I could sleep on the roof. Presuming there weren’t any rocket-propelled grenade attacks, of course. I didn’t rent the place.
We also considered buying a gun for my translator, who was eager to get himself armed after the office raid. He even discussed handgun models with an Afghan security official who offered to sell him a Russian-made Makarov pistol. Kandahar’s police chief took me aside and tried to persuade me about the importance of armed bodyguards, and for a fleeting moment it seemed like a good idea. I was frightened, and still inexperienced. Fortunately, my editor nixed the plan. He was right: journalists should avoid becoming part of the wars they cover, and a small pistol would not have provided much safety in a place where most thugs carry automatic rifles.
I went back to work cautiously. The incident had shaken me, and for the first time I sat down and typed out a security briefing for my boss in Canada. It’s an absurd document, in some ways—my editor probably did not care about details such as my hair care routine—but it gave me comfort. It’s also a picture of my daily life at the time, so I’ve edited some of the sections for publication here. They offer a sense of how I tried to blend in, how I travelled, and my struggle to find a safe place to sit down for interviews.
SECURITY BRIEFING
1. DISGUISE
Every day as I’m leaving the military base, I change into my Afghan outfit. This consists of a shalwar kameez, Kandahari cap, scarf and beat-up shoes with the heels mashed down. I also keep my beard and moustache very long, and I use moisturizing soap instead of shampoo in my hair to give myself a slightly unwashed appearance. I have a wardrobe of about seven shalwar kameez, and a few different scarves, so my appearance changes on a daily basis. My camera and notebooks are carried in a locally obtained plastic shopping bag. Sometimes I carry prayer beads, slinging them around my elbow in the customary way. My gait changes as I leave the base: I slouch, take smaller steps, walk more slowly and don’t swing my arms. I’ve learned to greet passersby with a reasonable facsimile of a Pashtun greeting. Over time, I’ve had some indications that this does help me blend in. I’m most commonly mistaken for an Achakzai tribesman from the northern border areas. I once sat quietly in a Kandahar restaurant for half an hour without being noticed as a foreigner. Another time, I met a military translator who shook my hand, sat down next to me and talked for five minutes in Pashto before his amused friends pointed out that I didn’t understand a word.
2. TRAVEL
We vary our timings for everything, partly because of security and partly because of the random nature of arrangements in this country. I leave the gates of Kandahar Air Field sometime between 6 a.m. and twelve noon, most days. Recently I’ve been varying my patterns further by basing myself at another military camp in the city for a few days at a time. The advantage of KAF is that our vehicle blends into the busy traffic of contractors, translators, and Afghan army soldiers and their families. The benefit of the other camp is that we avoid the twenty-five-minute run down Highway 4, which is notorious for roadside bombs. The other camp does have a nasty choke point a few hundred metres outside the gate, however, where the road and nearby walls are heavily scarred by bombs. Neither location is completely safe.
My driver usually watches for me through a piece of chain-link fence that he knows I’ll pass as I’m walking to the gate at KAF. By the time I’m leaving the perimeter, he’s already driving out of the parking lot and we meet just outside the gate. He served in the Afghan army before quitting to become a driver, and he’s from the same village in Wardak province as one of my translat
ors. We give him plenty of vacation time and a generous salary, on top of which I often give him small gifts of phone cards so he can call his new wife and family back home in Wardak. We’ve been working with him for more than a year, and he seems to have a strong sense of duty.
The car we’re using for KAF runs at the moment is a dark blue Toyota Corolla, an entirely average vehicle on the roads around Kandahar. In town, we sometimes use a white Corolla. Both vehicles are shabby but not remarkably beat-up. Our deal with the vehicles’ owner is that he must change them every three months, but he tends to be sluggish with that—it’s more like every six months. In the car I’m usually sitting in front, not wearing a seatbelt. I’d rather buckle up, because the roads are insane and I’ve witnessed a dozen accidents myself, but wearing a seatbelt would mark me as a foreigner. We often encounter Afghan police and military checkpoints, where they ask for our driver’s ID, search the car and look in the trunk. Sometimes they frisk us. During these encounters I usually try to avoid revealing that I’m a foreigner. Luckily, most Afghans treat these cops with surly disdain so I don’t stick out by keeping my mouth shut. Sometimes, especially if we’re stuck in a traffic jam downtown, I throw my scarf over my face and pretend to sleep. This hides my light-coloured eyes, the most un-Afghan part of my appearance.
