Our trip to Jalalabad took about 10 hours. Half of that was spent waiting to leave Pakistan; the other half was spent on a road that passed through the historic Khyber Pass–still adorned with British-style messages like “THE KHYBER RIFLES WELCOMES YOU.” The city itself, though, was less welcoming. Taken from the Taliban just three days ago, several Northern Alliance commanders are now competing for control of the eastern outpost and the city was tense, full of heavily-armed men.
Our convoy broke up there, and–dressed in a head-to-toe burqua–I looked for a ride to Kabul. I managed to rent a dilapidated land cruiser (less tempting for bandits) and grabbed a young English-speaking Afghan whose name I didn’t know to be my translator. After checking with local taxi drivers, we set off on a terrible, bone-crushing ride down the cratered highway to the capital. The road was littered with war debris accumulated over two decades. Burnt-out Soviet tank carcasses. Rusting anti-aircraft guns. At one point we passed a completely crushed truck that had swerved out of control when its Taliban passengers, trying to flee Kabul, had plunged over a steep mountainside.
At one roadblock outside Jalalabad, fighters representing three different commanders–one from the Northern Alliance, one former Taliban leader who’d switched sides, and one anti-Taliban local warlord–tensely jostled with each other in a testosterone contest over who was top dog at the checkpoint. “Why are you talking to someone introduced by that other guy?” demanded one red-bearded fighter toting an AK-47 assault rifle as he bashed a few bystanders with his clipboard. “Why don’t you interview one of my people?”
It was stiflingly hot under the burqa. But it felt handy when, about halfway to Kabul, two men in camouflage fatigues flagged down my vehicle with an insistence that was hard to ignore, given that both carried AK-47’s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They were anti-Taliban commanders who were aggressively searching for a ride for one of their colleagues. Our land cruiser only had three people in it, and it was hard to justify carrying on half-empty (especially when someone is brandishing a Kalashnikov). I told my new translator not to argue. Then, trying my best to imitate a local villager, I sat mutely way back in the vehicle as a man loaded two bulging satchels and hopped aboard, simply hitching a ride.
On the outskirts of Kabul, when I was sure we were firmly in Northern Alliance territory, I abandoned the burqa. The trip had taken four hours. We saw some devastated military buildings that had literally had their roofs blown off by U.S. airstrikes.
But after Jalalabad, the capital feels–on the surface, at least–like an oasis. My hotel doesn’t have heat or hot water, but after two nights of no sleep I’m more interested in the bed. More significantly, all of the armed men here are wearing uniforms–an order by their defense minister to distinguish them from the ragtag fighters employed by Pashtun warlords and clad in baggy civilian shalwar kameez. The uniformed Alliance troops do seem to be following orders of some sort, manning checkpoints around the capital and strolling through Kabul bazaars buying towels and running shoes.
Northern Alliance representatives also have occupied Kabul’s strategic ministries and–just as in real estate–are asserting a sort of squatters’ rights over government functions. As a single shiny black Mercedes idled in the spacious but largely deserted Foreign Ministry compound, a handful of Northern Alliance representatives rattled through the echoing corridors of the ministry, keen to show they’re open for business. “Our offices will be functioning tomorrow. A lot of staff will be coming in,” said Northern Alliance foreign ministry representative Haji Qahar as he briskly recited his satellite phone number. “We’ll begin registering foreign journalists and maybe hold a press conference.”
On the streets, local residents are celebrating the ousting of the Taliban. The strains of once-banned music can now be heard in public places; men are shaving off their previously-mandatory long beards and some women have shed their burquas and ventured back to the work place.
Still, just as Taliban invulnerability turned out to be a myth, so is the notion that the beleaguered Afghan people are free at last. Outside the capital, the situation is particularly uncertain. NEWSWEEK’s Scott Johnson reports from the northeastern town of Taloqan that Northern Alliance soldiers were sleeping in the dirt and begging food from passing journalists, claiming they hadn’t eaten in three days.
Nor will the harshness of Taliban rule be easily forgotten. At Taloqan’s Takhar hospital, doctors say that Taliban members regularly beat patients inside the hospital. Steel whips, made out of twines of metal cables, were kept inside the hospital for patients who “misbehaved.” “The Taliban came every day,” said Abdul Satar, a nurse who worked at the hospital for the 14 months of Taliban rule in the city. “They beat us with the cables for anything, not working enough, not praying, anything.” The Taliban also often refused care to patients who hadn’t gotten the right kind of permission–leading, in at least one case cited by hospital staff, to the death of a child with anemia.
Roya, a 20-year old woman forced by the Taliban to quit school, says that in the last year she saw women beaten in the streets for walking unaccompanied by male relatives. Some were killed, others who tried to cross the front lines to escape were raped in the trenches. Roya doesn’t want to turn her back on her Muslim heritage. “Afghanistan is not America. We don’t want to go out wearing mini-skirts and things like that now,” she says. What she does want is “that our lives now become better.” Playing with the fringes of her scarf in the small hospital room where she agreed to be interviewed, she has another simple wish: “Please don’t forget us.”
