A Rope and a Prayer

by David Rohde

  “We’re in Pakistan,” I say out loud in the car, venting my anger.

  Atiqullah, our kidnapper, laughs, and the driver appears surprised.

  “How does he know it’s Pakistan?” the driver asks.

  “Because you’re driving down the left-hand side of the road,” I answer.

  “How do you know that?” the driver asks, immediately suspicious. “When were you in Pakistan before?”

  Atiqullah smiles and appears amused by the conversation. He knows from our conversations and my passport that I have been to Pakistan many times on reporting trips. For years, I have watched the Pakistani government largely stand by as the Taliban murder hundreds of tribal elders and seize control of the area. An abstract foreign policy issue is now deeply personal. When my wife and family learn that I am in the tribal areas, their distress will increase exponentially. They will not expect me to return.

  The mountainous area that spans the border represents the gravest single security threat the United States faces. Seven years after being driven from Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have reestablished their training camps in the area. Terrorism experts I have interviewed predict that the next major terrorist attack on the United States will come from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

  We arrive in a large town, and I notice a sign that says “Wana” in English. Wana is the capital of South Waziristan, the most radical of the seven administrative districts that make up the tribal areas. Its most powerful Taliban commander is Baitullah Mehsud, a widely feared Pakistani militant blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and a wave of suicide bombings that killed or wounded an estimated 5,000 Pakistanis over the last year.

  We stop in the main bazaar, and I am left alone in the car with the young driver. Desperate rationalizations swirl through my mind. Our captors want a ransom and prisoners. Killing us gets them nothing. The three of us will survive. These are all delusions, of course. Simply getting us this far is an enormous victory for the Taliban. We could be held here for months or killed.

  Outside the car, dozens of Pakistani tribesmen and Afghan and foreign militants mill around. Each carries a Kalashnikov assault rifle on his shoulder. Some wear thick black turbans or white prayer caps on their heads. Others wear camouflage jackets. All appear grim faced and menacing. A man with a large turban stops, peers at me in the backseat, and asks the driver a question in Pashto. The driver looks at me and says a sentence that I think includes the word for martyr. I tell myself the driver has said I am on my way to heaven.

  Atiqullah gets back into the car and I feel relief for no rational reason. He has kidnapped us, but more and more I desperately view Atiqullah as my protector, the man who will continue to treat us well as other militants call for our heads.

  As we drive deeper into the tribal areas, we enter a region that has been battered and neglected by the Pakistani government—and the world—for centuries. A backwater roughly the size of Massachusetts, the tribal areas are dominated by Pashtun tribes known for their independence, criminality, and fighting skills. Afghan, British, and Pakistani forces have all failed to gain firm control of the area. For centuries, bandits, smugglers, and kidnap rings have used it as a base.

  The tribes that inhabit the Pakistani side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region are the most independent of the Pashtun belt. In Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribes have generally accepted the writ of the national government, in large part because they played a large role in choosing it. For Pashtuns, the term “Afghan” is a synonym for the word “Pashtun.” Tajiks and other ethnic groups that inhabit northern and western Afghanistan, in turn, view “Afghan” as a broad term applying to all inhabitants of president-day Afghanistan.

  On the Pakistani side of the border, the Pashtuns have long been alienated from the national government and neglected by it. Pashtuns complain that Punjabis, who are the country’s largest group and make up 45 percent of the population, dominate Pakistan’s national government. Pashtuns are Pakistan’s second largest ethnic group and represent 15 percent of Pakistan’s people.

  The true origins of the Pashtuns are a mystery. They are one of the least studied ethnic groups in the world and follow an oral tradition in which history is passed from generation to generation in folktales and sayings. According to Pashtuns, all tribes trace their lineage back to a single man, Qais Abdur Rashid, who traveled from present-day Afghanistan to seventh-century Arabia, met the prophet Muhammad, and converted to Islam. The names of his descendants are reflected in the names of Pashtun tribes, with “Ahmedzai,” for example, meaning “sons of Ahmed” and “Yusufzai” meaning “sons of Yusuf.”

  Researchers believe that the present-day Pashtun tribal structure goes back thousands of years. For millennia, Pashtun elders ruled tribes. Elders are expected to be well spoken, generous, and brave, and are selected on the basis of family lineage and the individual’s ability to help his tribe flourish. If they protect and obtain wealth for a village, their standing soars. If they fail, they lose face. Lengthy jirgas—meetings of tribal elders—settle disputes by consensus and strive to prevent blood feuds. And wealthy tribal elders support impoverished tribesmen by hiring them as field workers. Elders also punish tribesmen who disobey their rulings or commit a crime. In its own way, the tribal system creates order.

  The division that foreign visitors noticed in “Little America” between educated urban Pashtuns and conservative rural Pashtuns spans the Pashtun belt and includes those in the tribal areas of Pakistan as well. Pashtuns from a group of tribes known as the Durrani are generally more urbanized and liberal and more accepting of central government rule. Pashtuns from a group of tribes known as the Ghilzai tend to be more disenfranchised, live in rural areas, resist central government rule, and more numerous than the Durrani. Many of the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan are Ghilzai, while many current and past government leaders, including Karzai, are Durrani. While some western scholars highlight the division, the Taliban and many Pashtuns deny that such a rivalry exists.

  The creation of the tribal areas dates back to the hated 1848 British demarcation of the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which divided the Pashtuns. The British annexed six Ghilzai-dominated mountain districts along the border with Afghanistan and then declared them “tribal areas” as opposed to “settled areas” under firmer administrative control. Hoping to subdue the area’s dozen major tribes, British colonial officials enacted an indirect system of government.

  Under the system, British-appointed administrators known as political agents maintained loose control of the tribal area’s inhabitants by applying a system of collective punishment. When an individual tribesman committed a crime or defied the government, political agents negotiated only with tribal elders—known as maliks—and demanded that the tribe arrest the wanted person. If that failed, the political agent used the Frontier Corps—a British-paid militia frequently made up of members of rival tribes—to punish a tribe en masse by withdrawing government funds or bulldozing homes. After a carefully calibrated punishment, the status quo resumed.

  Twelve years after the creation of the new system of collective punishment, British officials complained that it was failing to stop raids and kidnappings from the tribal areas into Dera Ismail Khan and other nearby towns. “They kidnapped children from the very town of Dera Ismail Khan and demanded exorbitant sums for their release,” Brigadier General Chamberlain complained in an 1860 government report. “And if the relations of the captives delayed to ransom them, they cut off their fingers and sent them to their relations to move their tender feeling.”

  Unbowed, the British launched a series of punitive military campaigns to try to again pacify the tribal areas. Thousands of tribesmen and hundreds of British and Indian soldiers perished in battles that achieved mixed results.

  In 1897, an ambitious young British army officer named Winston S. Churchill served as a journalist in an expeditionary force dispatched to punish rebellious tribes. The result was Chur
chill’s first nonfiction book: The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War. Littered with openly racist statements, the book catapulted the future British prime minister and World War II leader to fame. It described Pashtuns as barbarians who showed a remarkable ability to embrace modern technology and brutally employ it.

  “To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer,” Churchill wrote. “At a thousand yards the traveler falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.”

  The book accurately captures a Pashtun tendency toward deeply destructive infighting. In one passage, Churchill describes the fate of a successful tribal leader, referring to him as a “Pathan,” the Urdu term for Pashtun.

  “His success is now his ruin,” Churchill wrote. “A combination is formed against him. The surrounding chiefs and their adherents are assisted by the village populations. The ambitious Pathan, oppressed by numbers, is destroyed. The victors quarrel over the spoil, and the story closes, as it began, in bloodshed and strife.”

  A Pashto proverb that I had heard conveys the same sentiment: “When the one profits,” it states, “the other’s house is ruined.”

  The British struggles continued long after Churchill’s departure. In one widely heralded case, a Pashtun from North Waziristan known as the Faqir of Ipi led a tribal rebellion for more than twenty years. From 1937 until his death in 1960, he successfully eluded capture by the British and Pakistani governments. At one point in the 1940s, 40,000 British and Indian troops—backed by squadrons of British airplanes—hunted him.

  Despite complaints that the policy kept the area impoverished and isolated, Pakistan retained the system of collective tribal punishment after it won independence from Britain in 1947. Under the country’s new constitution, Pakistani laws did not apply in the tribal areas unless specifically decreed by Pakistan’s president. Its people were barred from voting in Pakistan’s national elections. The 3 million people of the tribal areas had no elected representatives in Pakistan’s parliament.

  Over the next twenty years, many tribal elders pocketed development funds doled out to them by Pakistani-government-appointed political agents. In order to maintain power, they discouraged education and most contact with the outside world. The result was that an estimated 83 percent of the men and 97 percent of the women in the tribal areas were illiterate—vastly higher rates than in the rest of Pakistan, where roughly half the population could read.

  In the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia poured approximately $1 billion a year into weaponry and military aid to mujahideen fighters in the tribal areas. Pakistan’s premier military intelligence service, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, oversaw the distribution of guns and cash. Acting as kingmaker, the ISI turned young Afghan and Pakistani fighters into hugely powerful military commanders, slashing the power of Pashtun tribal elders. Pakistani intelligence officials feared that the tribal elders wanted to secede from Pakistan, join their Pashtun brethren in Afghanistan, and create “Pashtunistan.”

  At the same time, Pakistani intelligence officials introduced a new interpretation of Islam that further undermined the strength of the Pashtun tribal elders. With assistance from Pakistani intelligence officials, Saudi Arabia constructed religious schools that created another source of authority—fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam. When Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, three sets of power brokers now existed in the tribal areas: young mujahideen commanders, radical clerics, and traditional elders.

  In the 1990s, Pakistani intelligence officials used the tribal areas as one of several bases from which they funded, trained, and dispatched militants to fight Indian forces in Kashmir, the disputed region over which Pakistan and India have fought three of their four wars. Hard-line religious schools also spread across other parts of Pakistan. The schools, in turn, supported religious political parties that called for the establishment of Islamic law across Pakistan. They also indoctrinated young Afghan refugees.

  In 1994, a group of young Afghans who had been educated in conservative religious schools in Pakistan founded the Taliban movement. First emerging in southern Afghanistan, the name they adopted—“Taliban”—meant “students” in Pashto. They attacked warlords in Kandahar who they accused of rampant criminality and corruption. With the backing of the ISI, the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 and established what Pakistani intelligence officials considered a friendly regime.

  The next year, the Pakistani government finally granted the inhabitants of the tribal areas the right to vote in national elections. Civilian political parties, though, were barred from campaigning in the tribal areas. As a result, fundamentalist clerics aligned with Pakistan’s religious parties and schools swept elections in 1997 and 2002. The clerics’ dominance allowed the ISI to continue to use the tribal area as a training base.

  As Atiqullah moves us farther into the tribal areas, I know we are entering an area cut off from the rest of the world where xenophobia and conspiracy theories are rife. One particularly poetic phrase that Churchill penned a century earlier has lingered in my mind for months. Since 2001, I have felt it applies to how effectively terrorist attacks sow fear, division, and mistrust.

  “Every man’s hand is against the other,” he wrote, “and all against the stranger.”

  Our first home in the tribal areas is in Miran Shah, the capital of North Waziristan. We arrive at night and I see nothing of the town.

  Our new quarters consist of two large sleeping rooms that look out onto a small courtyard. One even has a small washroom, separate from the toilet, for showering. Makeshift pipes have been fastened to the walls.

  The next morning, I go to the bathroom and make myself vomit in the hope it will somehow pressure our captors. An amiable older man who is a local doctor visits soon after. He speaks basic English and seems puzzled by my presence in Miran Shah. I intentionally tell him I am a journalist with The New York Times and hope he might somehow help us. Later, I learn that he did speak with local people about me. As a result, I am banned from seeing other doctors.

  All day, a parade of random Pakistani militants stops by the house to stare at us. I again feel like an animal in a zoo. Among them is a local Taliban commander who introduces himself as Badruddin. I will later learn that he is the brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, one of the most powerful Taliban factions in the region. Miran Shah is its stronghold. Their network of commanders guided us across eastern Afghanistan. They are known for discipline, ruthlessness, and ties to foreign militants.

  Badruddin, a tall, talkative man with brown hair, brown eyes, and a short beard, appears to be in his early thirties. He announces that he is preparing to make a video of us to release to the media. He smiles as he shows me a video on his camera of a French aid worker who was kidnapped a week before us as he walked to his office in Kabul. He is in chains and appears to have welts on his face. The aid worker implores his family and friends to save him.

  “It’s a nightmare,” he says. “I really beg you to pay.”

  I ask if Tahir and I can speak alone with Atiqullah, who I believe is the more moderate commander. I tell Atiqullah we should not make the video. The American and Afghan governments are more likely to agree to a secret prisoner exchange, I say, than a public one. I also know that if the Taliban set a public deadline and it is not met, they will enforce it brutally. Failing to do so would be a public loss of face, something deeply shameful to Pashtuns and all Afghans.

  Trying to reduce their expectations, I tell him it would be far easier to get prisoners from the main Afghan-run prison outside Kabul in the town of Pul-i-Charkhi. If the Taliban demand prisoners from the American-run detention centers at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram, they will never succeed. I am not worth that much, I tell him, and he should c
ompromise. I do not say it but I also want to spare my family the pain of seeing me in a hostage video. I know if a video arrives they will fear it shows an execution. To my surprise, Atiqullah agrees.

  “I am one of those kinds of people,” he says at one point. “I am one of those people who like to meet in the middle.”

  In the afternoon, he announces that Tahir, Asad, and I will be allowed to call our families tonight to prove we are alive. Atiqullah tells me to emphasize during the call that he wants to reach a deal quickly. He continues to cover his face with a scarf. I hope that means he plans to release us and does not want us to be able to identify him to American or Afghan officials.

  Ignoring the countless lies Atiqullah has already told me, I maintain some type of hope. This is my first brush with a dynamic that will unfold multiple times in captivity. My mind’s tendency to grasp at straws despite grim evidence to the contrary.

  I spend the rest of the day nervously scribbling a list of things I want to say to my wife. I add items and then cross them out. I want to ease my family’s fears that I am being tortured, but I also want to do everything possible to free us. I am not sure I will have another chance to speak with Kristen.

  THE TALIBAN CALL COLLECT

  Kristen, November 19, 2008

  The phone rings at 6 A.M. The FBI alerts me that my husband will be calling home. Within a half hour, a group of six agents floods our small apartment in lower Manhattan: a translator, two case agents, the two-person negotiation team, and a victim’s counselor. With the exception of Cathy, who led my phone training session over a week ago, all the faces are new to me.

  Jim is now the lead agent and investigator on our case. A former Port Authority policeman, he lost several colleagues in the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. When a national Joint Terrorism Task Force was established in the aftermath, he was eager to join the team. The lead FBI negotiation expert, Phil, is a former hostage himself. As a teenager, he and his family were held in their home for a brief but intense period of time. The ordeal ended when Phil distracted the armed hostage taker, a high school student, so his family could escape. Phil was shot in the process, but recovered. I am struck by the fact that each individual on the team has been motivated by personal loss or direct experience of kidnapping. We huddle together around the living room sofa and review the training points.