by David Rohde
When we hear over the radio of the November 26 terrorist attacks on luxury hotels in Mumbai, our guards are elated. Mansoor cheers as the carnage drags on for three days and 173 people are killed. I ask him why he is celebrating. Mansoor declares that the luxury hotels are dens of prostitution, alcohol consumption, and debauchery. The guests deserve to die because they are sinners.
Another week passes and it becomes clearer that Tahir and Asad will be separated from their families for Id al-Adha—a major Muslim holiday on December 8 that marks Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and show his devotion to God. They are more and more frustrated.
Tension is also growing between me, Tahir, and Asad. They are angry with me for my promises to Atiqullah on the second night of the kidnappings that he would get prisoners and millions of dollars for us. I tell them I was trying to save our lives. They say I have vastly raised our captors’ expectations.
My attempts to play sick are going nowhere. I have made myself vomit in the new house but the guards do not appear worried. Qari says that I am intentionally making myself sick. December 10, the one-month anniversary of our kidnapping, is approaching. There are no signs of a deal. After taking Tahir to a local doctor several times for stomach and skin problems, the guards stop taking him to the doctor without explanation.
Becoming more desperate, Tahir and I talk over what we can do to create pressure for our release. We settle on a hunger strike, an option we have both been considering for weeks. We have no idea if it will work, but are running out of options. That night before dinner, Tahir announces that he is going to stop eating food. I decide to stop eating food and drinking water, hoping it will make the guards think I will die quickly. Asad does not join us.
The following day, I lie on the mattress where I sleep, staring at the ceiling for hours at a time. I think of the hunger strikes I have read about over the years but cannot remember how long a person can survive without water. I experience less pain than expected and I am pleased by the initial results. At the end of the first day, our guards panic and beg us to eat dinner. We refuse. Relatives of the commander who owns the house beg us to eat as well. It is an enormous shame to them, they say, to have guests who refuse to eat. We decline.
As the second day comes to a close, my stomach begins to ache, my throat is dry, and I have cottonmouth. Pressuring our captors, though, elates me. I am finally doing something concrete to relieve the suffering of my wife and family. That night, the guards announce that Atiqullah has called and said a deal for our release is imminent. It only needs the approval of Karzai, who is on a foreign trip. The French aid worker whose video I was shown when we first arrived in Miran Shah has been released, they say. We are next.
Tahir says we should continue the strike. As a Pashtun, he does not want to show weakness by stopping without achieving our goal. Asad urges us to begin eating again. He says we are angering our captors, not pressuring them. I am torn. A recent radio news broadcast confirmed that Karzai is, in fact, at a meeting abroad. I worry that our continued defiance will cause our captors to refuse to compromise and scuttle a final deal that could be days away. Recent kidnap cases in Afghanistan have ended in four to eight weeks. I hope our month-old case will end in that range as well.
I tell Tahir that we should end the strike. He has kidney problems, is in intense pain, and I worry about his health. The guards have promised to begin taking Tahir to the doctor again if we begin eating. At first, Tahir refuses. We receive a second call from Atiqullah, who swears our release is days away. Tahir relents and we eat for the first time in forty-eight hours.
Instead of releasing us, Badruddin moves us to a nicer house. It is larger than the previous one but feels more like a prison. Twenty-foot-high brick walls covered in peeling white paint surround a thirty- by thirty-foot concrete courtyard. We have a freshly painted blue bedroom to ourselves and the guards sleep next door in a room of their own. Three times a day, a boy from the family who brought us food in the previous house arrives with our meals. When the electricity goes out and the house’s water pump has no power, another boy brings us barrels of water for washing.
After several days, the guards announce that we must begin cooking our own meals. The family that has been preparing our food will no longer do so. With cash from Badruddin, the guards buy food from the local market and order Asad to cook it. I try to wash the dishes, but the guards initially urge me to stop, saying it is shameful to have an elder clean for them. We agree that I will wash only the breakfast dishes. At dusk each day, Asad sautés onions over a small propane burner before adding rice. There is a momentary sense of good cheer among us. The food, at least, is fresher, cleaner, and better tasting. But cooking for ourselves gives a worrying sense of permanence to our imprisonment.
Our lives settle into a monotonous routine of meals, washing our clothes, and Checkah board games. While washing the dishes one morning, my wedding ring falls off my finger. I frantically chase it across the courtyard, grab it, and put it back on. Later, it falls off as I take a bucket shower in the bathroom. I am losing weight, but I wonder if this is a sign that something is wrong with Kristen. Worried I will lose the ring, I take it off before I wash in the bathroom, kiss it, and carefully place it in the pocket of my baggy local pants for safekeeping. The narrow gold band with KRISTEN engraved on its interior is the only physical connection I have to the outside world.
Boredom and claustrophobia begin to take a toll on the guards. Qari tears the Checkah board to shreds after he loses several games. Then Tahir and Asad rip up two Checkah boards out of frustration when they lose as well. I worry that Qari will shoot Tahir if he loses another game.
Each day, I spend hours walking in circles in the walled courtyard alone. In my mind, I relive happy memories of my times with my family, friends, and wife. I play out trips I took with Kristen to Europe and South Asia, our wedding, and our honeymoon. I remember the small, everyday beauties of life with her, such as having coffee together each morning. I pretend I am walking beside her down the Hudson River bank at dusk as we do in New York.
As time passes, I realize I must control my thoughts to fight off depression. Certain actions immediately raise my spirits, such as walking, talking with Tahir, and reliving moments with Kristen. Other actions leave me discouraged, such as conversations with the guards. Strictly managing my day and my thoughts becomes a survival tool.
For the first time in my life, I begin praying several times a day. I struggle to remember the Lord’s Prayer and don’t know if I’m reciting it correctly. Resorting to prayer heightens my sense of desperation, but it also gives me something to do each day, a task the guards cannot stop me from silently completing. In the months ahead, I will realize that prayer is something they can never take from me.
One day I pray in front of Mansoor and Qari, trying to demonstrate that I, too, have faith. They seem unmoved by it. I shift to silently praying as I walk in the yard. I don’t know if some higher being is hearing my prayers, reaching down and comforting me, or if prayer is simply a psychological trick that gives humans a false sense of control. I decide it does not matter. Whatever is happening, prayer centers and strengthens me.
Badruddin visits us intermittently at night and promises that negotiations are continuing. He is generally polite and respectful. During one visit, he gives me a woolen Afghan blanket to stay warm. During another, he gives us a Chinese-made shortwave radio with a hand crank to generate electricity when the batteries run out. It is familiar to me. The American military has distributed thousands of these radios to Afghan villagers in the hope of winning their support.
To my amazement, Badruddin arrives with a laptop computer one evening, opens it, and plays Taxi to the Dark Side, an American documentary film that won a 2007 Academy Award. The film recounts how two of my colleagues from The New York Times exposed that American soldiers had beaten to death a young Afghan taxi driver in the main American detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. I am elated. The film is a perfect
opportunity to explain American journalism to Badruddin.
As Badruddin and the guards watch, the documentary recounts how the American military initially stated that Dilawar, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan taxi driver, died of natural causes in 2002. One of my colleagues then visited his family in Khost Province and discovered an American military death certificate that declared the driver’s death a “homicide.” His brother could not read the document, which was in English.
“My friend!” I shout, as my colleague describes confronting the commanding American general in Afghanistan. “My friend!”
A still photo of two men arrested with Dilawar in his taxi that day flashes across the screen.
“I found those two men in Khost,” I say, explaining that I helped write a follow-up story. “I interviewed them and took that picture.”
The next segment describes how another colleague obtained a 2,000-page American military report that confirmed Dilawar was innocent and had been beaten to death. A final segment recounts how the same American military police unit was transferred to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison where similar abuses occurred. Photographs then flash across the screen of a female American soldier, Lynndie England, smiling as a naked Iraqi prisoner masturbates in front of her. Other images show naked Iraqis stacked in pyramids and England’s boyfriend, Specialist Charles Graner, giving a “thumbs up” over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner.
Badruddin and the guards grow visibly angry. The images reinforce their view of Americans as malevolent hypocrites who preach human rights but torture privately. I try in vain to explain that American journalists, in fact, exposed the Abu Ghraib abuses. My explanations do not matter. My captors pick the information that fits their worldview and ignore the rest. I realize that Badruddin does not fit the Western caricature of a Taliban fighter—a cave dweller who rejects modern technology. Instead, he and other young Taliban embrace technology and use it to strengthen and spread their worldview. Globalization impacts their lives and exposes them to vast amounts of new information, but does not moderate them.
At the end of the film, autopsy photos of dead prisoners appear. Each prisoner is naked. I am sure the film’s director included the images to force American viewers to face the reality of the abuses. To an Afghan audience the images further insult the dead. For Afghans, public nudity is deeply humiliating.
After the film ends, the guards complain that none of the American prison guards were seriously punished for the abuses. I have no answer for them.
We reach mid-December and I find myself hanging on to each word uttered by Badruddin. We have not heard from Atiqullah for weeks. Badruddin is increasingly unpredictable. During one visit, he declares the Taliban will not kill me.
“You are the golden hen,” he says, expecting me to lay a golden egg.
I ask him to promise not to kill Tahir and Asad. Speaking directly to me in broken English, he says the Taliban have decided to kill Asad if their demands are not met in a week. Then he leaves the house. I panic. Our worst case scenario is unfolding.
When we tell Asad about the deadline, he is fatalistic. Escape from our current house—with its twenty-foot walls—is impossible.
“The Afghan always gets fucked,” Asad says.
Over the next two days, I frantically try to think of ways to save our young driver. Since we were abducted, I have spent hours talking politics, religion, and survival with Tahir, but I can barely communicate with Asad. I speak little Pashto, he speaks little English. I try to help him with chores, searching the rice for stones each day before it is cooked. When an English-language newspaper arrives, I show him photos and try to explain what they are about. He laughs, but I feel like a monster. Asad is an impoverished, hardworking father of two—and I am going to get him killed.
On the third day after Badruddin’s visit, I tell Mansoor that I am willing to make a video—or do anything they want—to save Asad. Mansoor says he will check with Badruddin. The following day, Mansoor announces that it has all been a misunderstanding. There is no deadline to kill Asad. I feel enormous relief but do not know what to believe. The lies from our captors are constant and, it seems, intentional. While researching my book, I had heard a Pashto saying that described lying as a tactic of war.
“Speak good words to an enemy very softly,” the proverb says, “then gradually destroy him root and branch.”
Several days later, Badruddin arrives to make the video. He tells Asad that he had recently watched the video of the beheading of Sayed Agha, the Afghan driver kidnapped with the Italian journalist in 2007.
“I’ve decided that I don’t want to do that to you,” Badruddin says with a smile.
He promises us that the video will go only to our families, but what he instructs us to say makes me think it will be released publicly. As we sit in the room where we normally sleep, Mansoor and Qari put scarves over their faces and point assault rifles at our heads. Badruddin aims a handheld camera at me. Following Badruddin’s orders, I call for President Bush and President-Elect Obama to meet the Taliban’s demands.
“If you don’t meet their demands,” I say, “they will kill all of us.”
Tahir and Asad then make similar statements in Pashto. Badruddin departs, and I tell myself that our families will at least know we are alive.
Several days before Christmas, Atiqullah and Akhundzada appear. Atiqullah has spectacular news.
“We are here to free you,” he declares, wearing no scarf over his face for the first time. “We have come here to release you.”
Atiqullah is bald and his face is pudgy. He is not the dashing Afghan warrior that Americans idealized during the anti-Soviet jihad. Delivering the news of our release, though, his round face looks sincere to me. I am euphoric. My confidence in Atiqullah is not misplaced. He is a moderate and reasonable Taliban leader who will release us.
Two of Atiqullah’s younger brothers accompany him as well. They also make him seem more moderate. One is a respectful young man in his late twenties named Timor Shah. The other is in his early twenties and says he is a fan of American wrestling. He lifts weights and says his favorite wrestler is John Cena.
After dinner, my conversation with Atiqullah turns menacing. Before we are released, he says, we must answer his questions.
“We’ve investigated you,” he declares. “We know every interview you did. We’ve analyzed every stamp in your passport.”
I tell him I have nothing to hide and to ask any questions he wants. Atiqullah announces that on the morning we were kidnapped the American military had mounted an operation to arrest Abu Tayyeb, the Taliban commander who had invited us to the interview. Stunned, I tell Atiqullah I know nothing about a military operation.
He accuses me of sending text messages from my cell phone to Saudi Arabia before the interview, to tip off the American military about Abu Tayyeb’s location. I tell him I have no idea what he is talking about.
Finally, he declares that I am a spy, along with other employees of The New York Times in Afghanistan. His men have prepared a suicide attack on the paper’s Kabul bureau, he says, which he could set off with a single phone call. His men nearly kidnapped another one of our reporters, but they left an interview just before the Taliban arrived, he says. I know he is probably lying on both counts, but I fear he is telling the truth.
Finally, Atiqullah begins asking me a series of questions about the time I lived in New Delhi and served as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau co-chief. He demands to know exactly how many times I met the American ambassador there. I answer truthfully, saying that I spent the vast majority of my time in Afghanistan and Pakistan and met the American ambassador in New Delhi once at a group interview and once at a holiday dinner. Atiqullah scoffs at my reply.
Our imprisonment, I think, has reached a low point. Our captor believes I am a spy and my colleagues in Kabul are now in danger as well. Atiqullah’s talk earlier in the day of our imminent release seems farcical. The following morning, Atiqullah insists that there is, in fa
ct, a deal. At one point, he says we will be exchanged within “days.” He toys with me, asking which flights I will take back to the United States and how many television cameras will be at the airport. He asks me what I will say to Kristen when I see her.
By this point, I have begun to doubt everything he says. Then I learn that he has lied to us from the beginning.
In separate conversations when our guards leave the room, Tahir and Asad each whisper to me that Atiqullah is, in fact, Abu Tayyeb. They have known since the day we were kidnapped, they say, but dared not tell me. They ask me to stay silent as well. Abu Tayyeb has vowed to behead them if they reveal his identity.
Abu Tayyeb invited us to an interview, betrayed us, and then pretended he was a commander named Atiqullah.
I am despondent and left with only one certainty: We have no savior among the Taliban.
VIDEO GAMES
Kristen, December 22, 2008-Early January 2009
Around noon I receive a call at my office at Cosmopolitan from Jim, the Joint Terrorism Task Force FBI agent assigned to our case. The kidnappers have made a video of David. Jim cannot say how the FBI obtained the video, but offers to bring it to me for a private screening. The FBI is honoring our family’s request to see the footage first, before the newspaper and security team, in a discreet setting. Everyone involved in the case has been jockeying for my trust of late. This is clearly a gesture on their part. Jim and his fellow agents tell me to look for the blue car parked outside Starbucks on West 57th Street, not far from my office in Midtown Manhattan. I find this slightly amusing as I recall a similar scene from a Sopranos episode.
