by David Rohde
On other nights, at Sharif’s urging, I switch to American tunes. In a halting, off-key voice, I sing Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York” and describe it as the story of a villager who tries to succeed in the city and support his family. I sing Bruce Springsteen‘s “Born to Run” and describe it as a portrayal of the struggles of average Americans. When I sing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” Sharif shows little interest in the lyrics and asks for something livelier.
I realize that my guards, too, need a break from our grim existence. But I feel like a performing monkey when they tell me to sing in Pashto for visiting commanders. I know they are simply laughing at me.
I intentionally avoid American love songs, trying to dispel their belief that all Americans are hedonists. Despite my efforts, romantic songs—whatever their language—are the guards’ favorites.
The Beatles song “She Loves You,” which popped into my head soon after I received my wife’s letter from the Red Cross, is the most popular. For reasons that baffle me, the guards relish singing it with me. I begin by singing its first verse. Timor Shah, Akbar, and Chunky, along with Tahir and Asad, then join me in the chorus.
“She loves you—yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sing, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.
A GOAT WILL NEVER BE A COW
Kristen, Early to Mid-March 2009
I receive a text on my BlackBerry from an American who works with local journalists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has heard of our alleged communications with Siraj Haqqani. “Siraj is hopeful,” he claims. How he knows this, I am not quite sure. He asserts that a local journalist has just interviewed Siraj and inquired about David.
I relay this to the team in our noon call. Our team has been on a cultural sensitivity kick of late, perhaps influenced by information from John and Michael. After four months of this nightmare, we want to deliver the message to Siraj that enough is enough, urging him to accept what has been offered, an amount well below what the Taliban are asking.
The gruff voice of Dewey Clarridge chimes in and tells us we need to be mindful of the local culture. “We need to say it in the Afghan, Pashtun way: ‘What you have is a goat and a goat will never be a cow.’ This is the Pashtun way of saying things,” he states plainly.
Frustrated with the lack of progress, I simply cannot resist, and chime in, “Then tell those jackasses to let my husband go.” Dewey is clearly amused. “That’s pretty good,” he admits. Dewey and I have had a love-hate relationship over the phone. This is one of our lovelier moments. I think back to the very beginning of this ordeal. The captors referred to David as a “golden hen.” Tahir’s father sent me a moving letter in which he thanked our family for continuing to work on behalf of our three, adding that without our help he would be like “a blind rooster.” I also recall a recent interview with Siraj that was e-mailed to me by a local Afghan journalist. In it Siraj notes the similarities between the Obama and Bush administrations by stating, “They are two ears of the same donkey.” It seems the only common and consistent thread in our communications—and cultural exchanges—has been the repeated reference to barnyard animals. A mildly amusing but sad comment on our state of affairs.
The divided agendas in our team are starting to turn into a full-fledged schism. Consultants from Clayton, the security team on contract for The New York Times, disagree with AISC, the private security team we have hired, and vice versa. One of the contractors calls me and claims that McCraw is giving Dewey a hard time because of his role in the Iran-contra affair. Lee, David McCraw, and I are constantly having to weigh contradictory opinions. Clayton has years of kidnapping negotiating experience, but very little of it has been in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The private security team has contacts within the region and within the governments there. AISC is often skittish about sharing information with Clayton. The lack of transparency, maintained with the intention of protecting sources, has at times led to division and mistrust among our team members. At times we have considered jettisoning some or all the consultants. But we feel that starting from scratch would only confuse the kidnappers and prolong David’s captivity. The one player who seems to get along with everyone is Michael. He is also the only one who actually lives in the region. He does not try to divide and conquer. I don’t know what his larger agenda might be, but at least it doesn’t get in the way here.
We are told by Michael that contact from the captors will be imminent. Someone who identifies himself as Atiqullah has started calling John again. Back in January, the FBI told us that Atiqullah was an alias used by both Badruddin Haqqani and Abu Tayyeb. They also told us that as the head of the Haqqani network, Siraj is ultimately the one in charge.
Michael maintains that Atiqullah is just a middleman. He is uncertain as to whether it is Abu Tayyeb, Badruddin, or some third party trying to take a cut of the money for himself. Michael believes the real point of contact needs to be Siraj Haqqani or a family elder close to him. He continues to push to have our guy on the ground meet face-to-face with them. But each time a meeting is set to take place, there is a delay. The weather turns foul, or it’s suddenly time for a hajj to Mecca, or an elder simply fails to show up.
I have learned through months of dashed hopes, bizarre video communications, and misinformation to embrace the old adage, “Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” Privately, Lee and I speak with the other members of our team one by one and get their recommendations. Should we increase our offer, and if so, when?
John insists it should be at a face-to-face meeting and that the captors need to come down and name a price we can match. The Clayton team advises us to raise our offer preemptively. We are told by John that it seems we are close to reaching an agreement.
My fortieth birthday is March 9, also the four-month anniversary of David’s abduction. It’s a dreaded milestone—not so much in terms of my age, but because it has been a time the family looked forward to, thinking surely David would be home by then. I now fear I will be a widow at forty, after only six months of marriage.
To boost my spirits, I decide to pack a suitcase. If David is indeed released, I am to meet him in Dubai. Lee will come along to fend off the press. We have had the “evacuation strategy” in place for months. The situation has been so unpredictable, I haven’t been getting my hopes up, but I also cannot let myself wallow in sadness.
I recall my conversation with Alan Johnston, a BBC journalist who was held hostage in Gaza for nearly four months, in 2007. I remember thinking four months was an unfathomable amount of time.
Alan reached out to me a few weeks ago and his words of wisdom linger. “This situation is going to run its course. You will not have control over the outcome,” he says. “It will have the same outcome whether you spend fifteen hours a day worrying about it—or whether you try to make the space and time to relax and find some joy in your life.” He encouraged me to find and embrace the moments that sustain me—time with friends, family—and not to feel bad for continuing to find those moments of happiness in my life. He told me that during his own captivity, he learned a lot about how his mind worked. He quickly realized which thoughts would boost him, and which ones would lead him down a negative spiral. He trained himself, over time, to extend the positive thoughts. He encouraged me to do the same. He added that he was certain, judging from his own experience, that David would want me to do this. He also reminded me that in some ways, the situation is worse for the family.
“David knows his circumstance. He will adapt. And he can imagine what your life is like back home,” Alan said, pointing out that for me and other family members, everything about David’s experience is an unknown.
BIRTHDAY WISHES
David, Early to Mid-March 2009
In early March, Badruddin arrives for a visit. We have not seen him for weeks. At this point, I’m entirely dubious of him. He is either making impossible demands or telling outrageous lies, both of which I find infuriating.
He sits down and we excha
nge pleasantries. Each meeting is more formulaic than the last. I pretend to be meek and respectful; he pretends he is seriously negotiating for our release. He tells me that the engineer’s son has been released. I am delighted for the engineer’s family, but see this as another setback. The engineer is out of the picture. Another negotiation channel has failed.
Tensions continue to simmer between Tahir and Asad. One day, they come to blows and none of us is sure why. Asad said that Tahir insulted him. Tahir accuses Asad of the same.
March 9—a day I have dreaded for months—arrives. It is Kristen’s fortieth birthday, and I have visions of her alone in New York. I spend the morning praying for her and then, to my surprise, Timor Shah takes Tahir and me on a rare drive outside the walled compound. In reality, it’s not simply a magnanimous gesture. A drone has been circling over Miran Shah all day. Fearing a missile attack, Timor Shah hustles me into the back of the station wagon and speeds away from the house. Once we are outside town, I am allowed to sit up, remove the scarf from my face, and look out the car’s back windows.
My first trip outside in weeks instantly raises my spirits. I watch the Waziristan countryside roll by and relish its arid beauty. Farmers tend fields of wheat and rice surrounded by networks of irrigation canals amid rock-strewn hillsides. While thirty years of conflict have devastated Afghanistan’s infrastructure, Pakistan’s infrastructure appears comparatively intact. The canals were one of the products of limited Pakistani, American, and British development programs designed to pacify the tribal areas.
I had recently found out that our house-turned-prison was as well. To my surprise, Tahir informed me that our house was built by the Pakistani government in 2005 to serve as a health clinic. When I looked at our bedroom, I saw it was a waiting room. The two adjoining bedrooms were examination rooms. The construction of the clinic was likely part of a government campaign to win the support of the local population. After the Taliban seized control of Miran Shah in 2006, Sharif took over the clinic and made it his house.
As we drive past more of the irrigation canals, they appear similar to ones I have seen in Helmand Province, the part of southern Afghanistan that was the focus of my book and site where the United States built “Little America.” I have fond memories of the province, which fascinated me. As I completed my research, I had come to see Helmand as a case study of how the American and Afghan governments had grown vastly weaker between the Cold War and the war on terror. The post-2001 effort in Helmand was a shadow of the endeavor there in the 1960s and 1970s.
After the fall of the Taliban, the only foreign troops to deploy to Helmand, a province twice the size of Maryland with a population of one million, were several dozen American Special Forces soldiers. They built a base in the center of the province in 2002, hired several hundred Afghan gunmen to protect them, and focused solely on hunting Taliban and Qaeda remnants.
Helmand Province’s voluble young governor, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, was largely left to do as he pleased. The son of a famed local commander who fought the Soviets, Akhundzada entered Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001 at Karzai’s request and won control of Helmand with the help of American Special Forces. Rumors abounded about the boyish governor. In interviews with journalists, Akhundzada said he was in his early thirties and a high school graduate. Afghan aid workers said he was in his late twenties and illiterate.
Whatever he may have lacked in administrative skills, he made up for in muscle. As the head of Helmand’s largest and most influential Pashtun tribe, the Alizai, he commanded several thousand gunmen. As time passed, other Pashtun tribes grew frustrated with Akhundzada. First, tribes accused him of falsely declaring his potential rivals Taliban and having American troops arrest them. Then they accused him of funneling land, reconstruction projects, and cash to his own tribe. Finally, reports began to reach the American officials in 2003 that Akhundzada himself was promoting the growth of opium poppy, the raw form of heroin.
After the fall of the Taliban, poppy growth had exploded in eastern and southern Afghanistan, fed by poverty and weak law enforcement. An epic five-year drought made poppy—a lucrative cash crop that required little water—a talisman to farmers in Helmand. Partly in response, American officials expanded their development effort in Afghanistan in 2003, increasing American assistance from $962 million to $2.4 billion. In Helmand, a field commander in the new development effort was Charles Grader, the contractor who first brought me to Helmand in 2004. Twenty-five years after running USAID’s Afghanistan office, he was back at the age of seventy-two, managing a $130 million U.S. government contract to revitalize agriculture and slow the growth of poppy.
Grader’s career was a marker of how the American approach to development had changed since the 1970s. No longer a government worker, he was now a private contractor paid $130,000 a year by Chemonics International, a for-profit consulting firm based in Washington. Short on personnel, USAID hired the company to implement and manage its agricultural development program across Afghanistan.
In 2004, I was with Grader when he toured a USAID-funded demonstration farm bursting with cotton, pomegranates, and other crops designed to show farmers they could make a legal living. Grader asked the Afghans who ran the farm what would persuade others to stop growing poppy. Their responses had little to do with agriculture. They said the biggest problem was poverty and corruption. Farmers, they said, no longer believed the government would punish them for growing poppy.
“There is an inverse relationship between security and poppy growing,” said a local engineer trained in Lashkar Gah by the Americans in the 1970s.
A local farmer was more blunt. “We don’t have law. This is a warlord kingdom.”
Grader discussed creating public works projects that would repair the province’s irrigation system and employ large numbers of farmers. But four months later, he resigned after clashing with USAID officials over the direction of the program. He was not alone. High turnover rates among aid agency officials, contractors, and the military were common. Americans generally arrived in Helmand on twelve- to eighteen-month tours. Determined to make a mark, they announced new projects or revamped existing ones. The result was a constantly shifting array of Americans and projects that to Afghans produced few tangible results.
Some American projects did get under way in Helmand. And an alternative-livelihoods program put 37,000 Afghans to work cleaning hundreds of irrigation canals. By 2006, a dozen new or refurbished health clinics were opened, more than a hundred wells dug or deepened, and ninety miles of highway paved. Overall, USAID spent about $180 million in Helmand between 2001 and 2006.
Over time, though, the American-funded development projects did not provide enough jobs for Helmand’s 100,000 farmers to counter the lure of growing opium or joining the Taliban. In addition, a popular perception took hold that after foreign contractors and subcontractors took their cut of aid money, little cash was left for average Afghans. Locals grew suspicious of the foreigners who lived in heavily guarded compounds with electric generators and satellite televisions while local people lacked regular running water and electricity. Afghan government officials were seen as corrupt as well.
One Afghan working on an American agricultural development program declared both Americans and Afghans corrupt. Americans made their money through high overhead and expense rates, he said. Afghans made their money through old-fashioned kickbacks and bribes.
“For you, it’s white-collar crime,” he told me. “For us, it’s blue-collar crime.”
Along with the stepped-up reconstruction effort, the United States deployed one of eight new military units known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Helmand in 2004. The units tried to integrate efforts to provide security, mount small reconstruction projects, and help Afghan government offices deliver schools, health clinics, and jobs. The units were recognition that the various efforts were interconnected. Over the next two years, the team spent $9.5 million to build, refurbish, or equip twenty-eight schools, two p
olice stations, two orphanages, a prison, a hospital ward, and twenty miles of roads.
A few hundred yards from the Provincial Reconstruction Team base on the edge of town, the United States built a women’s job-training center for Fowzea Olomi, the Afghan woman educated by American teachers in the 1970s who was one of the people I was following for my book. The Americans provided dozens of computers and sewing machines and even set up a mock beauty salon so women could learn marketable skills.
In May 2006, Taliban gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead Fowzea’s driver as he drove through Lashkar Gah. False rumors had been spread that the center’s female students were being taken to the nearby American military base and forced to have sex with soldiers. The center was closed for security reasons. The attack was one of several by the Taliban that shut down American projects across the province, including the canal-cleaning project that employed 37,000 men—perhaps the Americans’ most successful undertaking in Helmand to date.
Security quickly emerged as the single most important factor in developing Helmand, but the country’s nascent army and police force were unable to deliver it. The first units from the new, American-trained Afghan National Army arrived in Helmand in 2005, but they comprised only several hundred soldiers and carried out few operations. A new provincial antinarcotics force was created that year, but it consisted of just thirty officers.
Police training also lagged. Police from Helmand attended a two- to four-week training course in Kandahar run by contractors from DynCorp International, an Irving, Texas, company, hired by the State Department. European officials derided the classes as “conveyor-belt courses.” In 2006, two retired American sheriff’s deputies arrived in Lashkar Gah to serve as advisers to roughly 2,000 police in Helmand. One was from Santa Cruz, California, and had trained police in Bosnia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The other was from a small town in Wyoming and before arriving in Helmand had never been east of Wisconsin. Security was so bad that the two advisers could not leave Lashkar Gah to visit any of the province’s thirteen districts.
