A Rope and a Prayer

by David Rohde

  Peshawar. David visited the city several times, always with the utmost caution. Despite my desire to see David home soon, I have no wish to don a headscarf and travel to Pakistan alone. Everything in my being feels opposed to this. I tell myself I am just being a wimp—maybe fear is clouding my judgment. Still, I cannot ignore the sinking feeling in my gut. I turn to others for a reality check.

  Lee is immediately opposed. I do not ask him to consider joining me. He has a two-year-old daughter. I mention it casually to my sister, which leads to a flood of calls and e-mails from her begging me not to go. “It is enough that David is in harm’s way. You do not need to make the same mistake,” she says.

  McCraw, at the Times, is also skeptical, but tells me the paper will help facilitate my transportation within Pakistan if I decide to go. He advises, though, that it might be best to hold off on a trip until we have reestablished contact with the captors or are somehow close to a release of our three. He suggests I consult Jane Perlez, another correspondent and colleague of David’s who is based in Islamabad. Jane tells me to stay put. She says there is a lot of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan at the moment and adds that all the local news people are aware of David’s case. The minute I arrive, the story of David’s kidnapping will most certainly become public. This is the most persuasive argument against visiting Pakistan.

  Nevertheless, I contact Ambassador Anne Patterson at the embassy in Islamabad. She reluctantly agrees to put me up at the embassy if I decide to take the trip, but advises me that I will not be able to come and go freely. Basically, I would be under “house arrest.” She cannot guarantee my safety. She informs me that a member of her staff was nearly abducted recently. The woman was only able to avoid capture because her driver had recently taken an evasive driving course.

  I am concerned it may look suspicious if I am a guest of the United States Embassy. Many Taliban think that all American journalists are spies. A jaunt to the embassy on my part could be misconstrued to mean that either David or I work for the government. If word got out that I was a guest at the embassy, the captors might think David is indeed a spy. I also know that airfare to Pakistan is not cheap. I do not want to send a message that we have money to spare.

  Even though I have more than a dozen sane excuses for not traveling overseas, I secure a visa and purchase a ticket to Islamabad for the first week in February, less than a week away. Flights are scarce and fill up quickly. I will see what transpires in the next forty-eight hours, then I’ll make my decision to stay put or head east.

  WORDS AND PICTURES

  David, Late January 2009

  Tahir and Asad ask me to make our case public as the end of January approaches. The American and Afghan governments have forgotten us, they believe, and public pressure is the only way to get them to act. I believe going public could result in the Taliban’s setting a deadline and first Asad, then Tahir, and finally me being killed. Tahir and Asad say they are ready to die. I defer to their wishes and tell Timor Shah that I want to make a video for the news media.

  For the next several days, we receive contradictory reports on when and how the video will be made. At one point, our guard Akbar suggests that a local prisoner be brought to the house. With cameras rolling, the prisoner would be executed in front of us. Hoping to prevent an execution, I offer to weep on camera instead. Over the next few days, I silently prepare for the video, memorizing sentences I plan to say to Kristen and my family. I sit in the sun for long stretches, hoping sunburn will make me look healthy.

  Badruddin arrives several days later with a video camera and, to my relief, no prisoner for execution. Instead, white sheets inscribed with the seal of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and a verse from the Koran are taped onto the wall of the room where we sleep. Our Barbie and Hannah Montana comforters, my stack of English-language Pakistani newspapers, and my bottles of Nestlé Pure Life bottled water are moved out of the shot.

  Tahir, Asad, and I sit side by side on the room’s red-checkered carpet. We wear salwar kameezes, jackets to make us look cold, and prayer caps to make us look devout. Two guards with scarves over their faces stand on either side of us pointing machine guns at our heads. Badruddin turns on the camera and motions with his hand for me to speak. Tahir stares straight ahead. Asad looks at the floor. I say my name, identify myself as an American journalist, and give the date of our kidnapping. Then I recite the words that Badruddin specifically demanded.

  “Our lives are in great danger,” I say. “I ask President Barack Obama, I ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and I ask special envoy Richard Holbrooke to please meet the Taliban demands.”

  I try to convey a message to our families and tears well up in my eyes. I’m more emotional than I expected. On one level, it’s a relief. I worried I would be unable to cry on cue. As he holds the camera, Badruddin nods. He is happy with my performance.

  “I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart to the families of Asad and Tahir,” I say, beginning the message. “I’m so sorry that they are going through this.

  “And I apologize from the deepest part of my soul to my wife Kristen,” I say. “And to my parents, and to my siblings, and to all my family and all my friends.

  “I love you all very, very much and I thank you for all the joy you’ve given me throughout my life,” I add. “I’ve lived a very blessed life because of you.

  “I’m so sorry that you have to see this video and I’m so sorry that you’re going through this again,” I say. “If we are released I promise to spend the rest of my life doing absolutely everything I can to pay you back. And to do absolutely everything I can to somehow make this up to you. I apologize to you all.”

  Badruddin continues filming. I am thrilled that I have been able to express a message that I hope will console Kristen and my family if we die. I then repeat my call for Obama, Clinton, and Holbrooke to meet the Taliban demands.

  “I beg you, I’m so, so sorry, I beg you, please, please meet their demands,” I say, hoping this will satisfy Badruddin. “Please save the three of us. Please save the three of us. Please save the three of us.”

  I bow my head and Tahir introduces himself. He speaks in Pashto and appeals to Afghan president Hamid Karzai to please help us. Asad does the same. After the video, the guards quietly snicker at me for weeping on camera. I don’t care and feel relieved. I hope my words will comfort Kristen and my family.

  Badruddin says he will be back in two days. He returns a week later. After several minutes of small talk, he casually pulls a white envelope from his pocket, places it on the floor, and announces he has Red Cross letters for all three of us. The envelope is like a talisman. Tahir, Asad, and I stare at it eagerly. It holds words from our families.

  Badruddin hands me the envelope. I give Tahir and Asad their letters and suddenly find myself staring at Kristen’s unmistakable handwriting. Her words flood my mind. “It was wonderful to hear from you,” she writes. “I am warmed by memories of our marriage and time together with our family.”

  She apologizes to our captors and asks them not to be angry with her. “I am also frustrated with this process,” she writes. “Trust and a clear channel of communication are both important to all of us.”

  She encourages me. “There is hope. No matter how long it takes, we will not give up and we will not forget about you. Not a moment goes by without us trying to bring you, Tahir, and Asad home.”

  She talks about the effort to free us. “Our family is doing all we can, as quickly as possible, but some things are beyond our control. We will keep trying.”

  I am not sure, but believe she is referring to prisoners.

  “But, you must promise me, that you are going to do your best to survive this ordeal,” she writes. “You must be strong because I am strong.”

  Kristen says she will meet soon with my mother and siblings to continue working for our release. She says my brother and father have been strong. I am touched. She knows news of my family will buoy me.


  “Your father is grateful to the men holding you because they are keeping you safe,” she says. “He asks for their patience.”

  I am impressed. She is clearly trying to navigate Pashtun culture. She is making requests herself but also having my father—the patriarch of my family—pose them as well.

  Her next line is an attempt to comfort Tahir and Asad. It touches me that she shows respect for them, their lives and families. “I will relay your message to the dear families of Tahir and Asad,” she states. “Please tell them salaam alaikum and they should not lose hope.”

  She concludes the letter with her trademark positivity. “I know God is watching over all three of you. I hope your spirits will be strengthened by this,” she says, her words echoing her cheery voice. “Thank you for writing to us! Love always, Kristen.”

  I am disappointed by the seeming lack of progress in negotiations, but heartened by the letter’s eloquence. Tears come to my eyes. Her words will strengthen me for months.

  Tahir translates the letter to Badruddin, who is disappointed that it contains no offer of high-level prisoners and millions in cash. I again tell Badruddin that it is impossible for my family to produce five prisoners and $15 million. He pays no attention.

  Badruddin inspects Tahir’s and Asad’s letters as well. Tahir’s eldest daughter has written that she and her siblings deeply miss their father. Asad’s father has written that Asad’s two sons miss him but are well. At the end of the note, Asad’s father makes a seemingly casual comment. “People say you’re in Miran Shah.”

  Badruddin explodes in anger. He is furious that our location is known and quickly departs. The momentary bliss generated by our letters evaporates.

  Later, the guards tell us Badruddin has decided not to send our video to the news media. Instead, we will shoot a new scene that will prove we are being held in Afghanistan, not Pakistan.

  I spend my days doing chores and saying my prayers. I place Kristen’s letter in the left-hand pocket of a vest I wear every day, close to my heart. A week later, the guards ask for all three of our letters and say Badruddin wants to copy them. The letters are never returned.

  In late January, Badruddin arrives and announces he is going to drive us to a remote, snow-covered hillside to shoot the final scene of our video. Roughly ninety minutes after we leave the house, Badruddin sees a group of trucks stopped on the opposite side of the road and quickly pulls over. A nervous-looking Pakistani soldier points a rocket-propelled grenade at our pickup truck. Mansoor, the guard sitting beside me and Tahir in the backseat, loads his Kalashnikov and orders me to put a scarf over my face. A group of Pakistani civilians standing nearby moves out of the way, anticipating a firefight.

  The soldier is in the lead vehicle of a Pakistani army supply convoy in North Waziristan. After surveying the road, the soldier gets back in his truck, and the convoy rumbles forward.

  Running into a Pakistani army resupply convoy at first appears to be an enormous stroke of luck. As I watch the convoy drive toward us, I hope that the Pakistanis might somehow rescue us.

  I wonder if we should make a run for it, but quickly realize Tahir and Asad will never make it. I am seated in the left rear passenger seat and can open my door and jump out of the truck. Tahir is in the middle of the seat and will be shot by Mansoor if he moves. Asad is riding in a car behind us and I have no way to signal him.

  Frustrated, I watch in dismay as Badruddin gets out of the truck and calmly stands on the side of the road. As trucks full of heavily armed government soldiers roll by, he smiles and waves at them.

  After the convoy disappears, Badruddin seems amused.

  “Do you know who that was?” he asks me.

  “No,” I say, playing dumb.

  “That was the Pakistani army,” he responds.

  Badruddin explains that under a cease-fire agreement between the Taliban and the Pakistani army, all civilians are required to get out of their cars when an army convoy approaches. For Taliban vehicles, though, only the driver has to get out. The practice, I realize, allows the Taliban to hide kidnapping victims and foreign militants from army convoys.

  As we continue our journey, we pass a half dozen government checkpoints that have been abandoned by the Frontier Corps, a tribal militia that is supposed to police the tribal areas. Badruddin says that under the cease-fire agreement, only unarmed militia members can stand at the checkpoints. He is correct. As we drive, I occasionally see members of the militia standing on the side of the road without guns. Some casually chat with local tribesmen.

  The trip confirms suspicions I have long harbored as a reporter. The Haqqanis oversee a sprawling Taliban ministate in North Waziristan with the acquiescence of the Pakistani military. A 2006 truce the Pakistani army signed with militants has given them complete control of North Waziristan. Repeated Pakistani army claims to the contrary are false. The Haqqanis are so confident of their control of the area that they take me—a person they consider to be an extraordinarily valuable hostage—on a three-hour drive in broad daylight to shoot a location scene for an outdoor video.

  For years, dozens of Pakistani, Afghan, foreign journalists, and I have written about the systematic takeover of the tribal areas by foreign militants and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. After being driven from Afghanistan by the 2001 American invasion, Uzbek and Arab militants began slowly reorganizing themselves. The foreigners rented compounds from local tribesmen who fought alongside them in Afghanistan, sympathized with their cause, or were in search of money and security. The foreign fighters paid two to three times the normal rate for rent in the impoverished area. The Haqqanis—my kidnappers—welcomed Arabs and Uzbeks.

  Surrounded by high mud-brick walls, the Pashtun family compounds are oases of privacy and protection for conservative tribesmen. The high walls prevent strangers from seeing—and dishonoring—Pashtun women and shelter families from attacks from rival clans. They also hide the inhabitants’ identity.

  In some ways, the Arabs and Uzbeks are returning home. Many of them used the tribal areas as a base during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. Dozens of Arabs and Uzbeks married local women.

  In the spring of 2002, CIA officials began reporting to Pakistani army commanders that large numbers of foreign fighters appeared to be hiding in South Waziristan. Pakistani military officials were skeptical. In an interview nine months before I was kidnapped, a former Pakistani military official who served in the tribal areas told me that he did not believe large numbers of foreign militants had settled there. “There were conflicting figures about the number who crossed the border,” he told me. “Nobody was sure. It was all guesswork.”

  General Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai, a tall, commanding Pashtun whose family hailed from the tribal areas, was Pakistani president Musharraf’s main adviser on the issue. After serving as the military commander of the region from 2001 to 2004, he served as its civilian governor from 2006 to 2008. For years, he argued that American officials exaggerated the threat in the tribal areas and that the Pakistani army should avoid sparking a tribal rebellion at all cost.

  The former senior Pakistani military official defended the army’s record to me, contending that the Pakistani military had doubled the number of troops in South and North Waziristan from roughly 2,000 to 4,000 in September 2002. He said Pakistani soldiers also pushed into dozens of square miles of “no-go” areas that Pakistani or British forces had never before entered but “found nothing.”

  American officials said that Pakistani army sweeps, though, were slow moving and easily circumvented by militants. A former CIA official who served in Islamabad told me that Pakistani generals were “dismissive” of the reports because they feared sparking a tribal rebellion.

  “Aurakzai and others didn’t want to believe it because it would have been an inconvenient fact,” the former official recalled. “Going out there, rooting around, trying to root out foreigners was going to cause real problems for them.”

  Another American official was blunt. H
e derided Aurakzai as a “snake oil salesman” and “the Neville Chamberlain of Pakistan,” a reference to the pre-World War II British leader who downplayed the threat from Nazi Germany.

  Throughout 2002, officials in Washington largely ignored a chorus of warnings from American officials in Afghanistan that the Pakistani tribal areas were becoming the Afghan Taliban’s new base of operations. Instead, they downplayed the group’s importance and praised the Pakistani government for arresting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan’s major cities.

  A conversation with one American diplomat in Islamabad illustrated the mentality. He told me that the Afghan Taliban no longer represented a national security threat to the United States while Al Qaeda remained one. When I contended that the Taliban and Al Qaeda worked closely together, he dismissed my argument.

  In December 2002, I visited Miran Shah on a reporting trip. At that time, it was still under Pakistani government control. Escorted by members of the Frontier Corps, the government-paid tribal militia, I found the tribal areas simmering with anger at the United States. On the roads leading to Miran Shah, men carried Kalashnikovs. On the roofs of houses, flags of Pakistan’s hard-line religious parties fluttered. And in front of religious schools, fierce-looking young students strung ropes across the road, stopped cars, and demanded donations.

  “Mosques, mosques, mosques,” I scribbled in my notebook. “This is a completely different world.”

  We first stopped at a border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan fifteen miles outside Miran Shah. Members of the Frontier Corps went through the motions of checking cars as they rolled across the border. An officer told me it was impossible to control the border because smuggling routes blanketed the surrounding hills.