Eight Pieces of Empire (34 page)

Then there was the future of Taliban-free Afghanistan.

With the war ineluctably moving south toward the capital, Kabul, and the Taliban being zapped by high-tech weapons when not on the run or hiding, it was natural to assume that a major page had been turned in the history of the blighted nation, and that the American promise of bringing freedom and democracy was just a matter of weeks or at most months away.

But even before the fall of Kunduz, the slaughter at Qala i-Jongi, and the capture of John Walker Lindh, Dostum and others in the Northern Alliance had already given unsettling indications that they would come to blows over who was going to run this part of Afghanistan. There were continual rumors about tension between Dostum, the big Uzbek known to like a drink, and the more pious Mohammed Atta, leader of the local Tajiks. As for the Pashtuns, many of whom lived in the nearby ancient city of Balkh (ironically, the scene of Tamerlane’s coronation in 1370), they were already complaining of ethnically based beatings and indiscriminate treatment at the hands of the Uzbeks and Tajiks. During a visit to the town, I sat on a dirt floor listening to the pleas of Pashtun town elders, who begged for an international peacekeeping force to prevent them from being exterminated.

Dostum, meanwhile, was the man of the moment and let it be known that what he wanted was any new central government in Kabul to allow a broad form of federalism, with him, Dostum, of course, at the helm in the north, just as he had been before the city fell to the Taliban. In those days Dostum was usually surrounded by provocatively dressed “assistants.” Other local women spurned even head scarves, let alone burqas. Shops selling booze were not hard to find. The big Uzbek even ordered
his own version of the local Afghani currency printed up—identical except for some telltale markings that shaved half of its value in comparison with the Kabul-printed variety.

The problem was, almost no one trusted Dostum as far as they could throw the gargantuan Uzbek strongman, and with good reason. His twenty-thousand-strong private militia fought on the Soviet side during their stay in Afghanistan, and he stayed loyal to the communist chieftain Najibullah until after the Russians ended financial support for Kabul as part of a “hands-off Afghanistan” deal struck with Washington in 1989. With Najib’s brutal murder in 1992 and the start of the real civil war, Dostum next aligned himself with the legendary Shah Massoud, and then briefly took control of Kabul, fighting the Pakistani-installed leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar before having a flirt with the Taliban, allowing them to enter Mazar-e-Sharif in the late 1990s, only to break with them soon thereafter.

One might say he never saw a temporary alliance he didn’t like.

Thus it was not wholly surprising when Dostum and Atta hastily convened a joint press conference to dispel notions of a split. The international community was putting great pressure on the factions, including Dostum, to come to some sort of workable national agreement, and it behooved them both to make the right noises—in this case, that they were full-fledged allies, uttering platitudes about the brotherly love between the ancient and fraternal Uzbek and Tajik peoples, amid questions about how to round up the sea of weapons floating around the country. Northern Alliance fighters, with no Talibs left to fight, were busy pawning theirs. I spent a day with one group of yahoos outside of Mazar-e-Sharif who offered me everything from a worn AK-47 ($150) to a slightly used Russian T-55 tank ($5,000).

At the end of the briefing, I asked Dostum how long it would realistically take to bring a degree of order to Afghanistan. His answer was neither evasive nor glib. Rather, it was straightforward and probably prophetic:

“In my opinion, minor conflicts will continue for the next ten or fifteen
years,” he dourly stated. “Even before these twenty-three years of war, even during the reign of the king, Afghans always fought. If they didn’t have guns, they fought with shovels and sticks.”

BEFORE SETTING OFF
from Moscow and heading off to Afghanistan, I had visited with dozens of Russians who shook their heads at the American decision to intervene in the so-called graveyard of empires. The United States, they predicted, would get bogged down and ultimately be forced to leave as well. In many cases, this was conveyed sincerely. In others, from former Soviet “Spetznaz” (Special Forces) types, the predictions of doom also contained a kind of smugness that the United States would ultimately fail to tame Afghanistan, just as they had, shattering the myth that the US superpower was omnipotent, just as the supposed Soviet superpower had turned out not to be.

THE BATTLE FOR
Qala i-Jongi over, John Walker Lindh captured, and America having suffered its first death of the war, I was instructed by my editors at NPR to head back to Uzbekistan and then to Moscow, leaving Steve Inskeep, now the anchor for NPR’s
Morning Edition
, to stay behind to cover the next developments. We spent a farewell dinner eating Afghan dumplings filled with meat, carrots, and onions in a bare-bones slop house with wallpaper featuring deer and horses with their eyes gouged out, which apparently had some sort of religious significance to the Taliban that no one was ever able to adequately explain to me. Along with this religiously motivated desecration of kitsch wall art, there was also plenty of usual graffiti, some in English.

Yes, it was time to go. I had already parted ways with the overly gregarious, dope-smoking, and fearless Bahuladin, who had latched on to a TV crew that was throwing something like five hundred dollars a day at him for his services. War can be good business for out-of-work Kabul actors, and I wonder what he is doing today.

Another Russian-speaking Mazar local drove me the hour-long drive
back up to the Bridge of Friendship with Uzbekistan, and I got my passport out as we approached the border. The interpreter turned white. “But it’s an American passport,” he said. “Yes, that’s because I’m American,” I countered. He had assumed that because I spoke Russian fluently, I was Russian. His demeanor turned from matter-of-factness and circumspection to a scramble of deference. In this part of Afghanistan, Americans were still, at this early stage of the war, the heroes who had gotten rid of the Taliban.

At the border, an Afghan official cheerily stamped my multiple-entry visa, and I walked alone across the long bridge toward the Uzbek side. When I got to the middle and showed the Uzbek guards my passport, also with a multiple-entry Uzbek visa, the border officials look startled. The bridge had indeed officially recently been opened with great fanfare, they said, but there was a problem: My exit stamp from Uzbekistan was a little ink blot in the shape of a boat, which indicated that I had left the country by barge. Therefore, according to their logic, I would have to reenter Uzbekistan the same way I had left—by barge. Except that no one knew when, or even if, one would sail across the Amu Darya to the Uzbek side again.…

Luckily the height of the bridge provided good cell coverage, and I spent hours dialing US embassy numbers in Tashkent, the NPR foreign desk in Washington, and the satellite telephone of one of Dostum’s Russian-speaking “colonels” back in Mazar-e-Sharif. But nothing seemed to work—not cajoling the Uzbek border guards with kind words, curses, or free cell phone calls to their distant families, or even proposing special “fees” to be shared equally with all their colleagues as the border post on the bridge. The bottom line was that they were obviously terrified of breaking anything even remotely interpreted as a rule, and they would not budge.

My next plan was to engage in a war of psychological attrition, making them so sick of my presence outside their customs post that they would beg me to just go through and
go
.

I lay down on the bridge in my sleeping bag. It was now December, and an icy cold wind roared around me. A thousand stars filled the sky.
I thought again about the euphoria over the quick fall of the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, the enthusiastic reception toward Americans I had received, and the general sense that the American war to smash the Taliban for their support of al-Qaeda—unlike the many foreign interventions of the past, most recently the Soviet—would be short, sweet, and successful.

Then I thought about what the mercurial Dostum often said—essentially that Afghanistan’s myriad regions were too different and unruly to be controlled by a strong central government—and that Afghans had been fighting for centuries with whatever came to hand, be it sticks or Stingers. Before I had arrived, not a single US military casualty had been recorded in Afghanistan. The first was Spann in the Qala i-Jongi uprising, him already dead on one side of the earthen walls and me hiding in a ditch on the other. But like a lone dark cloud drifting over the moon, the thought dissipated, and I was soon back in reverie. No, we were wanted here. How could one imagine that our entry into Afghanistan would result in anything but victory? Yes, lying there on the Bridge of Friendship, pondering, it seemed hard to believe that our exit from the country would ever be anything other than on our terms, and likely glorious.…

I woke the next morning to the gruff voice of an Uzbek military officer telling me to take my bags and head back to Afghanistan. I reminded him I was not on Uzbek soil. He angrily marched off and found his Afghan counterpart, the man who had seen me off the previous day. The Afghan was shocked I’d spent the night on the bridge and scolded a few underlings for not showing me the proper hospitality. He then offered me his own apartment in a Soviet-style bloc and sent a dozen of his young men in a halfhearted attempt to entertain me. They banged out tuneless ballads on upside-down baking sheets turned tambourines, and plied me with vodka, carefully concealed in a canvas canteen pouch. Dostum’s personal stash? I was allowed to imbibe—all of this the Afghani way to atone for their fraternal Uzbek brothers having so inconvenienced their guest on the recently reopened Bridge of Friendship.

I got lucky with the barge. Many days were known to go by without one making a crossing. But the next night, the UN ferried some medical
supplies across the Amu Darya into Afghanistan, and I copped a ride back to civilization, post-Soviet Uzbek style.

Behind me, the American campaign in Afghanistan seemed almost over.

It had hardly begun.

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

H
aving floated away from
Afghanistan on the obligatory barge, I later headed for the ancient city of Bukhara. The Soviet-style Uzbek picture guide books described Bukhara as “a Museum in the Open,” and that is not inaccurate. Despite a few propaganda posters praising “Papa” Islam Karimov and a new bronze Tamerlane statue, the city felt less touched by either Soviet Communism or post-Soviet commercialism than almost any other I had visited in the former USSR: a sweeping medieval expanse of one- and two-story sand-colored homes crammed together, bisected by tiny alleyways, and with minarets of six-hundred-year-old mosques towering above. Old men dressed in traditional robes and caps strolled about. Plump ladies stood outside the Ark, or fortress, in the center of the city, selling shiny pomegranates. A short distance away is the famous Jewish quarter, now reduced to a quarter or so of its original size after most of the twenty thousand Persian-speaking Bukharan Jews departed, mostly now émigrés to Brooklyn.

My stated reason to the Uzbek authorities was to visit Bukhara’s Mir-i-Arab Medresseh, sometimes called the “Harvard of Islam”—one of the Muslim world’s most respected centers of learning. Under Stalin and other Soviet leaders, it had been used to prepare ideologically “reliable” cadres of Muslim religious leaders—mullahs—in order to control Islam across the USSR. Now, it seemed, the venerated institution was being used for a similar purpose by the Karimov regime.

I pushed open the enormous wooden doors and was greeted by the
sounds of teenage boys running to and fro among the colonnades separating their living quarters. An older man who looked to be in charge approached, and I was led down a long, cool, damp corridor, past some of the rooms where the 115 future state-approved mullahs bunked, and into a library filled with Korans and other Islamic literature (as well as a copy of a book of the president’s writings, on prominent display). A moment later, I was introduced to my host, Mukhuddin Imonov, the dean of Mir-i-Arab. He had been expecting me.

Imonov had the air of a functionary, and it soon became apparent that was his role: to enforce the state-approved form of Islam in Uzbekistan.

“We explain to the students there are incorrect forces … books that poison people.… We do this so they don’t go astray,” Imonov explained. “We teach them about radical groups and the mistakes they make.” Imonov then went into some detail about how this was part of President Karimov’s “National Ideology Program,” a required academic complement to any study of Islam in Uzbekistan.

I asked to speak to some students and was led into a room where four boys were lying around on bunk beds. They had little to say when asked about their studies and life in the medresseh, except when I asked what they thought about radical Islam. All four began excitedly reciting almost the same words that Imonov had said about the dangers of radical groups and how they had everything “upside down,” as one put it.

It was difficult to argue against the concept of educating budding Muslim clerics about the undesirability and dangers of ultraradical Islam. Karimov’s desire not to see Uzbekistan succumb to the same ills that had gripped its neighbor Afghanistan under the Taliban and al-Qaeda was understandable. But I also had a sense that the inculcation process had another goal—namely, that it was all part of the attempt by the Karimov government to control everyone and everything, and all the time. Religion was simply being used as a form of control, or was being tightly controlled for those who wanted to embrace it openly.

In fact, my visit to the Islamic Institute had been something of a ruse.

My real purpose in traveling to Bukhara was to see Yusuf Juma, a dissident poet who had only recently been released by the Uzbek authorities.
He lived on a collective farm near a place called Chovli on the border with Turkmenistan, and Bukhara was an excellent jumping-off point.