The Network - Jason Elliot [123]
‘Khub ast?’ Asks Mr Raouf. ‘Alright?’
He’s supplied everything we need for a minor expedition.
Very khub indeed, I’m thinking. From my map pocket I take out a fat packet of hundred-dollar bills and press it into Mr Raouf’s hand. He makes a brief effort to refuse it, saying the whole thing is a gift to me as a friend, but we both know this is a ritual. Then he tucks it away into his jacket because he’s too polite to count it in front of me, but I know what he’ll be doing a few minutes after we’ve left.
He sends three men to the house that afternoon so that we can meet and talk over the general plan. H and I like them all at once. The oldest is called Sher Del, and has worked as a mine clearer for several years. His name means Lion Heart. He’s in his forties but looks at least a decade older and served as a soldier in the Afghan army before defecting to the mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation. He has dark hair but his beard is nearly white, and he has the indestructible look of a seasoned warrior. His swift physical reactions are allied to a habit of directness which, tempered by long experience, lends him a quality of charm and worldly reassurance.
His colleagues are younger men, in their late twenties or early thirties, though they have the old-fashioned civility of an earlier generation. Aref is one of the trust’s managers and speaks passable English. He’s tall and thin, has a hawkish nose and a thick black beard, but his voice is soft and almost feminine. His mind enjoys details and concepts, and he translates for me, with both care and precision, into Pashtu for the others. Momen is another mine clearer, and reminds me of an Afghan version of Friar Tuck. He is stocky and always seems to be smiling, and his beard is dyed orange with henna. ‘I could have been a doctor,’ he complains with a rueful grin, ‘or an engineer. But in Afghanistan there is nothing but war. Afghans are all donkeys,’ he jokes, and the others laugh. ‘They are too stupid to stop fighting each other.’
We look at maps. Our destination is in the south-west of the country and most easily reached from the southern city of Kandahar. But there will be checkpoints along the way, around the city and beyond it, and our convoy will not escape attention. Sooner or later we’ll be searched and the purpose of our mission will fall under scrutiny. It’s a risk we can’t take. We’ll travel through the remote centre of the country, and although it will take much longer, we’ll be much lower on anyone’s radar.
All the men agree that, given the military situation, it’s probably a good idea to travel via Bamiyan and get onward permission from the local Taliban commander there. We’ll take the southern route from Kabul through Wardak province, because to the north there’s fighting and the environment is more dangerous. There’s some discussion about the famous Buddhas, which were destroyed earlier in the year.
‘It was wrong to destroy them,’ says Sher Del. I ask him why. ‘Because no other Afghan rulers destroyed them before, and before our time the people were better Muslims than now. So what right did the Taliban have to destroy them?’
‘All the rich countries were unhappy that the idols were destroyed,’ says Momen. ‘But they didn’t care about all the Afghans who were being killed.’
He has a point. Before their destruction, most outsiders didn’t even know the Buddhas existed, much less that their faces had been removed hundreds of years ago. Now nearly everyone has heard of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, but few know of the Taliban’s massacre of thousands of Hazaras at roughly the same time, of the levelling of southern Kabul by Hekmatyar a few years earlier along with the loss of perhaps 20,000 human lives, or the carnage unleashed on the Afghans by the Soviet army and its communist underlings.
‘The Buddhas were destroyed on the orders of al-Qaeda,’ says Aref, ‘to make the world angry. Afghanistan will be much better when the Arabs have gone.’
After everything I’ve heard of the Taliban it seems like a kind of madness to introduce ourselves to their commander in