Swimming with Warlords

Kevin Sites

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062339423
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The veteran journalist and author of In the Hot Zone and The Things They Cannot Say explores the impact of more than a decade of war on Afghanistan, from the American invasion after 9/11 to today, and offers insights into its future and the possible consequences for the U.S.

Kevin Sites made his first trip to Afghanistan in October 2001, staying 100 days to cover the U.S. invasion for NBC News. On his fifth trip to the country in June 2013, Sites retraced that first odyssey, contemplating the significant events of his original trip to explore what, if anything, has changed. He interviewed warlords, ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, women cops and dentists, farmers, drug addicts, international aid workers, diplomats, and military personnel.

In Swimming with Warlords, Sites examines Afghanistan today through the prism of those two parallel journeys, exploring that nation's past and considering its future in light of the drawdown of U.S. troops. As he tells the stories of the people he met—how they have been affected by this conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives—Sites provides a fresh perspective on Afghanistan and America's role there.

Swimming with Warlords contains 30 black-and-white photos throughout.

PART I
THE NORTH

An Afghan National Police officer stands guard, prepared for possible violence between Uzbeks and Tajiks on the streets of Taloqan City.

1

OVER THE BORDER

My second crossing of the Amu Darya River from Tajikistan to Afghanistan. The rusted-out shell of a boat was more seaworthy than it looked. The Amu Darya’s strong current forced the captain to throttle hard against it in an upstream arc to ensure we reached our landing spot directly on the other side.
(Photo by Dost Muhammad)

Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, is one of the least visited places on earth, but in June 2013 I was on my way there for a second time. I had traveled there the first time in 2001, with my NBC crew. We had been stymied in our attempts to enter Afghanistan from both Iran and Uzbekistan; Tajikistan would be our final and most reckless attempt. We had traveled thousands of miles by every conceivable means, only to be blocked at each successive border crossing. Desperate to get to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, we even bribed an entire Tajik flight crew to take a plane overloaded with our gear into the night sky. We thought we would be the only passengers, but after we boarded we were horrified to find that it was filled with other people—other people whom we might have gotten killed in a plane crash to reach a story that had started with plane crashes on 9/11.

Once in Dushanbe, we drove a few hundred miles south, and in the dark of night crossed the Amu Darya on pontoon boats, aided by Russian soldiers who had covered their faces with kaffiyehs. But the things we did to get there pale in comparison to the adventure that followed. Over the next hundred days, seven of our colleagues would be killed, I would videotape another being blown up by a Taliban mortar, and we would live in the house where legendary mujahedin commander Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated. In Kabul, we would unwittingly sleep next to an unexploded 500-pound bomb and discover that our houseboy was being raped by the dirty fuck we had hired for security. I would watch B-52’s drop 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bombs on the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora, and in Jalalabad, on my final night of that first Afghan odyssey, I would be visited by what I believed was the spirit of a CNN technician who had died only a day earlier on the very mattress on which I slept.

This time Tajikistan wasn’t a destination of last resort. I had specifically made it part of my story proposal to the editors of Vice magazine, pitching them on the idea of retracing the steps of my first journey twelve years later to see what, if anything, had changed in Afghanistan. To do that, I wanted to enter at the same spot.

While it added another plane, a car and driver, a Tajik interpreter, and hundreds of miles—and likely another thousand dollars to my costs—I believed it was essential to understanding my past and present experiences and for telling the full story of those I encountered.

I am fifty now, and had been in my first war zone, Nicaragua’s Sandinista/Contra war, when I was half this age. I am still an obsessive-compulsive traveler, packing and repacking, clicking and zipping, the rip of Velcro pockets and flaps making those seated around me in the departure lounge at Dubai International wondering what it was I’d lost. But that couldn’t be apparent to them—I’d lost my sense of order. When you have no control, I’d learned during a career reporting on war, you try to impose it on your surroundings.

All I had encircled me: a backpack bulging with cameras, cables, chargers, portable hard drives, my laptop—the tools of my trade—and a duffel bag filled with the necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter, body armor, Kevlar helmet, kneepads, first aid kit, ballistic sunglasses, a compass, broad-spectrum antibiotics like Cipro for the runs and Keflex for skin and respiratory infections. There were granola bars, peanut butter, packets of instant coffee, a water filter to get the dirt out and chlorine tablets to kill the bugs in it. While minimalist for most, some fellow war zone travelers might see my 60 or 70 pounds of gear and look at me disdainfully, as if I were a bubble boy who could not endure his hostile environment, wrapping himself instead in First World comforts and edibles to blunt, if not completely deflect, its impact. In truth, I simply wanted to be self-sufficient. And it was a lot less than what I used to bring. Ever-smaller digital gear and the go-light hiker revolution, after which everything from backpacks to sleeping bags to tents was made of wafer-thin nylon weighing about as much as dryer lint, made it possible to carry on my back everything I needed for a two-month trip.

Other things had changed, too. Unlike previous trips, this one frightened me. Maybe it was because my stepdaughter, usually as stoic as Demosthenes, started crying and didn’t want to go to school the day of my flight so she could see me off. Maybe it was because almost everything had lined up for this trip too smoothly. Maybe I believed I was going to buy it because I had survived more than a decade of covering conflict without so much as a nasty scratch and it was finally time to pay up, to lose a limb or my life. I also believed, superstitiously, that now was the time such a thing was most likely to happen—when I loved my life, rather than being indifferent to dying.

But there were plenty of annoyances to distract me from that dark feeling. The travel itself, for instance. Unless you fly first class, international travel is a monumental pain in the ass. There is nothing easy or efficient about it. Even in the developed world it sucks—sweating while hauling luggage, flights suddenly cancelled with no explanation, arbitrary gate changes, managing the complex logistical flow of getting unorthodox things like body armor and satellite modems across continents to the places where you’ll need to use them.

Fortunately, I had discovered a time-honored way to beat these oppressive systems like the airlines, security, customs, and the rules stacked against the common traveler: I flashed my pearly whites like they were lights on the Vegas strip. It was a smile that didn’t come naturally to me, but I had learned its undefeatable power—that taking the time to fully acknowledge another human being could buy you vast amounts of goodwill.

Nasir, the beat-down driver in Dubai who had had to leave a wife and three kids behind in Pakistan ten years earlier succumbed to it, even cracked a smile of his own when I asked him to pose with a Hello Kitty figurine (a running joke in my family). Even dour Ansar at the Tajik Embassy was no match for it; perhaps he disdained the grinning idiot across the counter from him, but he nonetheless issued a short-notice tourist visa for me during a brief layover.

And so it was done. I was coming to you, my dusty, heavy, red velvet Tajikistan. You of few visitors, wearing too much makeup, scuffed shoes, and a cheap dress—but still, your smile was pretty, too, even under the sad weight of all that oppressive Slavic history.

Boarding the Somon Air flight, I pushed past the babushka moms holding babies already showing signs of five-o’clock shadow and men with hair so thick it looked like black moss. On the plane, a 737-800, the seats were in rows so narrow you more or less had to stand. My forward view was a scalp dusted with dandruff. But unlike flights in the West, I could freely block the aisle with my oversize bag just like everyone else on the plane, and when a flight attendant asked me to shut off my iPhone for takeoff she gently rubbed my arm with a finger rather than ramming my elbow with the drink cart. I smiled again, this time to myself, as the jet lumbered down the runway. I would be in Dushanbe by midnight.

Early the next day, after just a few hours of sleep, I met my fixer, Elena (which is not her real name—she did not want to be identified) in the lobby of my hotel. She was a dark-haired woman in her early fifties wearing an easy smile and a colorful Tajik version of a muumuu. I had attempted to hire someone by interviewing contacts at Tajik travel agencies and then triangulating those names with endorsements on Internet message boards. It had still taken weeks of emails and phone calls to find her and a driver. Most car services demanded $500 or more for a day trip to the border, even without an English-speaking driver. Finally, one of my original contacts, an experienced pro who usually worked at rates double my budget, lined up both Elena and a driver for $300.

But that was only one of the hurdles in Tajikistan, the most trying segment of an otherwise smooth logistical operation. The agency I had hired in Los Angles to get both my Tajik and Afghan visas had secured only the latter, despite having an entire month and repeated appeals from me. Their failure, which I learned of only days before my departure, might have derailed the entire trip because of how tightly it was scheduled. I had six-weeks for on-the-ground reporting, then only another two weeks to write a five- to seven-thousand word magazine article. Theoretically, you could get a Tajik visa at the Dushanbe Airport, but I was arriving after midnight, when the visa counter would likely be (and actually had been) closed. Instead, I scrambled during a very short layover in Dubai to get one from the Tajik consulate there.

Arranging the travel from Dushanbe to the Kokol border crossing in the south had been just as troublesome. No one wanted to go to the crossing that connected the Tajik village of Kokol to the Ai Khanoum area of Afghanistan, an area whose commercial traffic was now mostly in illicit goods. Because of its remote location, it had once been a hotbed for transporting arms and other materials going to the rebel Northern Alliance during the years of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001.

With the Taliban toppled it is more or less irrelevant today, except for those with something to smuggle—guns, or drugs, or merely bags of cement and lumber for small construction projects on the Afghan side of the border. It was so remote that Elena and my driver weren’t sure how to find it. We had left Dushanbe at 8 a.m., and six hours later I was losing faith that we’d reach it at all. At one point, the road disappeared into trackless sand.

“That’s not a road, that’s a direction,” Elena said, pointing to the swirling sandstorm that seemed to be our path ahead.

Since I had only been there at night a dozen years ago I was little help, but finally, after another hour driving through dust and on rutted donkey paths, we found the entrance. The foothills that rose from the banks of the river looked vaguely familiar—more déjà vu then memory. The same pontoons were still there, along with the two rusted-out boats used to tow or nudge the rafts across. Not surprisingly, neither of them was working when we arrived.

We waited for the repairs on a ridge above the bank. Elena interpreted a conversation I had with a Tajik man named Muhammad who regularly transported supplies into Afghanistan for a hospital he was building in Khoja Bahauddin, a village about 10 miles to the east. It had once been a refugee village, the northernmost retreat of those attempting to escape the reach of the Taliban. It was also the headquarters of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan mujahedin* commander who had fought the Soviets and become a leader of the Northern Alliance in its battle against the Taliban. And it was there that he was killed by two Al Qaeda operatives posing as a television camera crew on September 9, 2001—just two days before the terrorist attacks on the United States. Massoud’s compound had become home for me and my colleagues for nearly two months after that initial crossing into Afghanistan in 2001.

On the ridge, I kicked up some rusted old .30-millimeter shell casings, likely from a Russian anti-aircraft gun once positioned on the border. Muhammad told me they were from fifteen years ago, fired at the Taliban by Tajik soldiers as makeshift artillery support for Massoud in his effort to hold on to one last piece of real estate in the north. To enhance the credibility of his information, Muhammad pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to expose a faded green tattoo of a soldier, the informal insignia, he said, of the Russian army unit he had been in when Tajikistan had been a Soviet republic. After decades of war in Afghanistan, remnants of battles past were everywhere, including neighboring states.

When the boat was finally fixed three hours later, the officer of the Tajik border forces invited us into a small metal shack where he checked our passports and our luggage. When he saw my camera and all my gear, he remained friendly but became suspicious. Elena told him I was a university professor, which was true, and that I was going into Afghanistan to conduct research—also true. I handed him a business card, which he couldn’t read but that confirmed my credentials as an associate professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong. He seemed satisfied, shook my hand, and ushered me out with a smile and instructions not to take any photographs during the crossing for security reasons.

Muhammad and I climbed aboard the ancient tug, surprised but grateful it floated. It looked like a metal quilt that had been patch-welded out of rusty corrugated sheets, and that one false step would result in lockjaw-inducing tetanus or a full breach of the rusty hull. But what the sad ship lacked in seaworthiness it made up for in horsepower. A large inboard prop engine drove the boat in a sweeping arc against the powerful current.

So little had changed here, I thought. So much water had flowed past these banks over the last twelve years, none of it able to wash away the memory and costs of this war. I had kept a journal during my tr...