War Diaries Part III
The War in Afghanistan | 99 Days

Chapter 8: The Road to Kabul?

We are lost in a minefield. One-fifth of all the landmines in the world are planted here, so it is an easy thing to do. We are on the road to Kabul. A journey of less than 200 miles. It will take us five days. This is just the beginning. It does not bode well. We were supposed to be in a convoy with other journalists. Safety in numbers. But it dissolved before we left Khodja Bahaudin. Now we are alone. Just our twoToyota pickups, a Russian jeep, and a minefield. We took the wrong road. That is not true. There is no road. Not one that I can see. Just some tire tracks in the sand. Sometimes the tracks disappear.

That's what happened here. Now we have two choices: forward or reverse. My translator Shafiq and I inspect the ground in front of our lead truck. We see them. Faintly.Treadmarks.They lead back to the road we missed. The one that will not explode. Forward. We go forward, driving very carefully in the treadmarks of some guardian angel that passed this way not so long ago. Kabul has fallen.

* * *

It is the day after three European journalists were killed here on Northern Afghanistan's front lines. It is a cruel day for this reason: the front line where they died no longer exists. It is now three hours to the south. The Taliban is on the run and Northern Alliance forces, which recently controlled only ten-percent of the country, now control eighty. If the journalists had waited one more day, just one more day before climbing aboard Alliance armoured personnel carriers (APC) there would not be three crude wooden coffins in Khodja Bahaudin today.

My friend and colleague Levon Sevunts and I are talking at the NBC compound. It is his 32nd birthday. He is a writer for the Montreal Gazette. He was also once a soldier in the former Soviet Union. That is probably why he is alive today. He knows about war. Has been shot at before. He was on the same APC as the other three journalists when Taliban fighters fired a rocket propelled grenade in their direction. It hit, but did not explode.

"When they started shooting at us with their Kalashnikovs, the others jumped," he tells me. "But I promised myself, once I got on the APC I wasn't going to get off," It was unfamiliar territory, he explains, and there were also the landmines.

"I grabbed the APC's gun turret and held on as it turned around and headed back to Northern Alliance territory," I'm just glad it didn't fire back at the Taliban," he continues, "because my leg was right in front of their machine gun." Later that night, Levon would ride outside the same APC again--this time holding the body of Radio France reporter Johanne Sutton as she was taken to a position in the rear. A four-hour journey, Levon would later write for his paper, under a billion stars in the Afghan sky.

* * *

I am inside a Taliban bunker in the valley below Puze Pulekhomri. It is an 8x10 room dug into the earth and with a roof made of tree branches covered with sandbags. It's an unsettling realization that only two days earlier, men were shooting in my direction from this position. It is deep enough for me, at 6'1, to stand fully upright. As I shine my camera light around it, the murkiness of this damp, dark place makes me think of the underwater video of the sunken Titantic. A still life of common objects, as if the Taliban left with only moments to spare. There are matches and a candle on a tiny shelf cut into the clay. There's a fire pit in one corner and what looks like a small aluminium tripod in another. Actually the trigger device for a landmine. The explosive is somewhere else. I also see the bottom of a plastic water bottle. Inside a sliver of soap and a filthy rag. A losing an attempt at personal hygiene within this rabbit burrow, this dirty hole. Nearby is the carcass of a mouse. Skinned to the bone. A tiny snack, a mouthful of protein for men at war. But this is the prize: a sheath of notebook paper folded in half. It's covered with what looks like writing in two different languages.

My translator tells me it is a homemade dictionary of sorts. Urdu to Pashtun. The language of Pakistan to the language of Afghanistan's Pashtun tribe, many who support the Taliban. It confirms, anecdotally, what Northern Alliance commanders have been telling us; that many Taliban fighters are actually foreigners, Pakistanis, Saudis, Chechens, Somalis. Islamic fundamentalists from around the globe. But there is also a larger picture here. Archaeology of war, Pompeii without the volcano, withought the centuries before. All that is missing is museum glass and the mannequins. Here is what men will endure when they are locked in battle.

* * *

This site is a metaphor for our Afghan journey: 21st century technology in a biblically primitive land. NBC engineer Jim Bruton is cooking outside, over an open fire--surrounded by an array of satellite phone panels. Nearby, correspondent Jim Maceda is checking the news wires on his computer while sound technician Stanley Ouse is paying bills online. We can shoot, edit and transmit video from anywhere in the world, but all of our technological muscle does little to feed us or keep us warm in a place where electricity and running water are luxuries, not utilities. We are in Taloqan city, one of the latest to be abandoned by the Taliban and first stop on our way to Kabul. Two local teenage boys greeted us in English as soon as we arrive. Now that the Taliban are gone they can listen to music again, they tell us and the black turbans they were once forced to wear, now lay heaped with other garbage. Young men play soccer in a park across the street. Now that the Taliban have fled, we are told; the teams can wear shorts again, as part of their uniforms.

* * *

It is Ramadan. A month of fasting and prayer for Muslims. During this time they do not eat between sun up and sun down, breaking their fast only when the last light of day has disappeared. Unfortunately this has happened at a bad time. It is dark and we are on the middle of a mountain pass, our drivers stop their vehicles to munch on crackers and sip juice. We sit and wait. Actually, we could use the break. We have been driving since 3 A.M. The roads have alternated between camel paths of dust which have coated us inside and out, to kidney busting stalactite trails. I laugh, thinking about those sport utility vehicles spots, back in the states, which sell the concept of seeing the backcountry, without getting a case of hemaroids. If they only knew.

For three days now, we have driven through minefields, over tire-shredding rocks, across waist-deep rivers, and climbed nearly vertical berms, all without incident, until now. On the Khawak Pass, over the legendary, snow-topped mountain range known as the Hindu Kush, I can see our jeep. It is on its side. Jim Maceda, Jim Bruton and a Voice of America Reporter named Iris, are climbing out over the top as we pull behind them.

Maceda has banged his knee and the driver his head, but otherwise they are in good shape. We're not so sure about the jeep. They tipped while making a turn around a very steep bend in the road. We tie a rope around the top front axle of the overturned jeep and use the pickup to pull it back onto its wheels. Surprisingly, its starts up without hesitation. The driver's side mirror and door, however, are toast. I switch Maceda and Iris to my truck. Bruton and I ride in the jeep. Like a thirsty horse that cannot pass a stream, we must stop at every water source to refill the radiator. For the rest of the journey, we rarely top 30 kilometers per hour.

We will reach Kabul two days later with no brakes, no clutch , limping past 20 foot deep craters and the Swiss cheese remains of outlying buildings all destroyed by American bombs. On the left, before we enter the city, is Farqah 16, a major Taliban military base, now just acres of twisted rebar and scorched earth.

Our colleagues have rented a house for us in Kabul. It has running water and wood-burning stoves for heat. After five days on the road wearing the same clothes, we are giddy with the thought of a hot shower and some rest. Everyone sleeps peacefully that night, never knowing that in an unexamined adjacent room there is a hole in the roof. A hole where a five-hundred pound American bomb had pierced through weeks earlier and now stands, at a jaunty angle, nose buried in the concrete floor, unexploded.

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