The Network - Jason Elliot [61]
It’s the beginning of a series of long disturbing reports that confirm the violent intentions of the broad spectrum of foreign militants gathering in the south of the country. They are financed from overseas and the Afghan government is too weak to touch them. The Afghans, in any case, don’t have the money to finance terrorists and can’t even pay the salaries of their own government ministers. The religious fervour of these new foreigners has no place in their culture.
To judge from his reports, Orpheus has also gained access to lists of names, financial details and plans for plots against targets all over the world. I can only wonder about how he’s being affected by the company he’s keeping. He writes at length about the ideas and aspirations of the organisations he’s learning about. A new kind of international war, aimed far beyond Afghanistan, is steadily incubating. Its proponents use Islam, traditionally a religion of tolerance, as a rallying banner, but increasingly stripped of its humane principles and twisted towards violence.
Extremism is new to Afghanistan, but it’s on the rise. One of Orpheus’s reports accurately predicts the unprecedented mas-sacre of Hazara families in Afshar by henchmen of the brutal warlord Sayyaf, and in another he forecasts the assassinations of rival mujaheddin leaders both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But there are also details of larger-scale acts of terror, which are increasingly inventive and ambitious. They seem fantastic and unrealisable. There are plots to blow up hotels in the Middle East and public buildings in New York, and to hijack airliners in Europe. There are details of a plan to kill both the Pope and the US president. Orpheus has been tasked to translate American military manuals on improvised explosives, poisons and the manufacture of biological toxins. But in the very country where these unprecedented campaigns are taking shape, the powers at which they are directed have no plans to intervene.
Then the reports stop. The newly formed Taliban is advancing through the south and west of the country, and I can only assume that the headquarters where Orpheus lives has been overrun or dispersed. Communication and transport between Kabul and the rest of the country are virtually severed. I allow myself to hope that he’s safe, but that it’s become impossible for him to get messages out from wherever he is.
Three months pass and there’s nothing from him. The daily stress of life adds to my feelings of desperation. Twice I visit the front lines in the west of the city towards the Taliban positions in Maidan Shahr, and find myself drawn too close to the fighting for my own good. I notice that I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don’t know it at the time, but the effects of the war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the intimate whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what at first seems unendurable.
One evening, in the gloomy, oak-panelled bar of the United Nations club, an Australian journalist friend who’s been covering the war gives me his characteristically frank assessment.
‘You’re a bloody basket case,’ he says. ‘Got it written all over you,’ he gestures, drawing a finger across his chest. ‘Burned out. You need to get yourself out of this