War Diaries Part III
The War in Afghanistan | 99 Days

Chapter 9: Afghanistan Rocks

A neighbourhood in Kabul. Wednesday morning. October 17th. Abdul Basar is coming home from the market when he hears the explosion. He runs toward the sound. He arrives to find the west side of his apartment building peeled away like an orange. It is the side in which he lives. Then, on the ground--a sight no father should have to endure.

Under a pile of glass, rubble and broken furniture, his five year-old daughter. Her name was Nazalla. Killed by an American bomb. A dumb bomb. A bomb that missed its target by only a block, a Taliban military communications complex called Base 52. In this nation where, for the last 22 years, bombs have fallen more indiscriminately and more frequently than raindrops, it is very close. Very close for 30,000 feet. But not close enough for Abdul.

"She liked apples and pomegranates," he tells me, holding up her photograph, "only fruit, she would eat only fruit." She is brown-eyed girl wearing a yellow sweatshirt with an embroidered kitty on the front. She never knew what hit her. Never thought she would die. This way. This young. Abdul looks at her picture lovingly. "She would crawl into my bed at night when she was afraid of the dark." Abdul says he does not blame America, he knows it was a mistake, still, he cries every night when he thinks of her.

* * *

I'm sitting in the backseat of our van, removing the banana clip from an AK-47. Halim thought we should have one. A gun. We are driving to Maidan Shar, just 20 miles west of Kabul. There is still fighting there. Taliban that escaped from Kabul, but not ready to throw in the towel yet. They will soon, after an exchange of bullets, then an exchange of money. An apt illustration of the words of one foreign military officer on his experiences in this country, "You can't buy an Afghan, but you can rent one."

"This is Afghanistan," Halim says, "You never know what's going to happen." He is right. Has always been right. He is all of four foot nothing, impeccably groomed, and has been working for NBC since we came to town. Halim speaks Dari, Pashtun, English, German and Russian He is my favorite translator. He does not stare at you blandly when you say something funny. Halim gets it. Gets the joke. Gets the irony. Gets it all. And when he laughs, he laughs like a maniac; bends from the waist, opens his mouth and exhales from the back of his throat until all his oxygen is gone. It is the laugh of survival. It is a laugh in a place where laughs are as rare as a pair of clean, white trousers.

Halim says he wants to be the Minister of Tourism for the new Afghan government. It is our perpetual punch line. But he is half serious. The concept itself is the logical equivalent of asking for a balloon sandwich. It doesn't make any sense. There is a saying here that any man with a gun is like a king. If it's true, then every third Afghani is royalty. At $40 bucks a pop, Kalashnikovs are cheaper than prayer rugs and just as plentiful. It is a country so lawless and littered with unexploded ordinance that only journalists and the suicidal would voluntarily come here.

Afghan Minister of Tourism. Indeed. The perfect job for my madman friend. On the five day drive south from Khodja Bohaudin to Kabul, we try out slogans, Afghanistan: Watch Your Step, or Everyone's Dying to Come to Afghanistan, Afghanistan Rocks!

Now, on this short drive, I take off the safety and clear the chamber. There is no one following behinds us. Aim and squeeze. Click. It is painfully simple. Black metal and light brown wood. Folding stock. In my hands, the most popular gun in the world. On the seat beside me, a Sony DVX 2000. There will be shooting today, guns and rockets, but I will only be using the camera.

* * *

We are doing, an animal story for NBC Nightly News. A zoo story.

A lion story to be precise. Though it might seem too light, a puff piece, in the midst of all this war and destruction, it is actually a perfect illustration of Afghan absurdity. The warrior code unchecked by cooler heads, unchecked by the influence of women (more on that later). This is the story of Marjan, the one-eyed lion. Though his roar is more of a yawn these days it was not so long ago Marjan, used to be the king of Kabul's urban jungle. A mujahadeen fighter who had survived combat with the Soviet Red Army, was not so lucky when he jumped into the lion's den to tease the beast. Marjan promptly ate him. "The next day," says zookeeper, Sheragha Omar, "the man's brother attempted to avenge the death by throwing a hand grenade into the cage." Marjan pounced on it thinking it was food. The blast took out one eye and blinded him almost completely in the other.

And Marjan is not the only zoo casualty in Afghanistan's unending wars and civil strife. During the vicious factional power fights from 92-95 ñ a sadistic soldier killed the Zoo's elephant with a rocket-propelled grenade. Other animals were turned into meals for hungry fighters. Now an Afghan bear paces in his cage. His snout is red, raw and swollen. Zoo officials say Taliban visitors would tease the bear by holding out food, and then smack him on the nose with sticks when he reached for it.

In a place that used to have 39 species of animals, now there are only 17. The only reason the zoo is still open at all is because of Omar, who like Marjan, doesn't give up that easily. When the repressive Taliban regime wanted to shut the zoo down, Omar fought back. He went to the faculty of Islamic studies at Kabul University.
"They wrote down everything in the Koran that referred to animals and the Prophet Mohammed," says Omar, who then showed them to the Taliban ministry of justice.
Faced with evidence that the Prophet had indeed kept pets, the Taliban allowed Omar to keep the zoo open. Despite its sorry state, crumbling infrastructure and malnourished animals, attendance is up. Since the anti-entertainment Taliban fled the capital, the number of visitors to the zoo has doubled to 200 a day.

* * *

I'm breaking in a producer who may become a correspondent. Marina Fazel. She was born in Afghanistan, but lived half of her life as an exile in America. With this story she has returned home. The idea is, Afghanistan through her eyes. A video diary of sorts. This day we are attending a rally by reform-minded Afghan women. Women who are tired of not only being irrelevant, but invisible. Afghanistan is home of the cloth prison, the burka. The head-to-toe covering that turns women into draped furniture. The burka has been a part of Afghanistan's Islamic culture for centuries, but under Taliban rule it was enforced through physical beatings and worse.

Today, dozens of women have gathered in the house of woman named Suraiya. Suraiya has always been an activist on behalf of women's rights. During the Taliban regime she travelled to the homes of other women to teach them history, languages, current events. For this he was beaten and even jailed for a time. The other women have similar stories.

"I don't like to be completely covered," says a 28-year-old named Spojhmai. "I'm a Muslim woman, so I cover when I pray, but after that I'm free."

Looking around the room, I realize that since coming to Afghanistan a month ago, this is the first time I've actually seen the face of a native woman. Spojhmai looks over at Marina and her western clothes and uncovered head, most here are still wearing scarves at least. "That is what I want to be like," she says, "that kind of Afghan woman."

Suraiya's apartment is overflowing now and in the park area outside the building, at least 200 women are milling around, talking, laughing, some covered, some not. Only weeks ago, the Taliban's feared religious police would've been waving leather truncheons, herding the women away like cattle, or off to jail.

In the park, a group of young girls have gathered around Marina. She is speaking to them in Dari and they're smiling, jockeying to hold her hands or hold onto her arms.
I ask her if she sees herself as a young girl here, when she looks into there faces. She was around the same age, when her parents, because of the Soviet occupation, sent her to live with her sister in Florida. "Yes," she say, "I see myself in their faces, but I also see the story of my country, the story of disappointment. But in their fresh faces," she begins to tear up, "I also see clean slates." A single drop falls to her cheek.

* * *

The marines have finally landed. Dropped in on a little strip of desert 35 miles south of Kandahar. About 500 of them so so far, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield says there will be more, and there is no reason not to believe him. This is a big story. A very big story. American faces on Afghan soil, not just over Afghan airspace. Only one problem. We can't get to them. Kandahar has not fallen yet, still a Taliban stronghold, and it lies between us and the marines. The only way to get to them is to go with them. From Bahrain. The Navy's 5th fleet is there.

A Marine contact tells me there may be a "facility" towards the end of the week; military lingo for a press-ride-a-long into the war theatre. After two months covering this war with nary an American soldier passing in front of my viewfinder, I'm itching to go. I will take a videophone kit and my hand held camera. I will travel fast and light. I will chopper from Kabul to Dushanbe, fly from Dushanbe to Dubai, from Dubai to Bahrain. Once in Bahrain, U.S. Navy choppers will fly me out into the Arabian Sea and onto a U.S. aircraft carrier. Once there I will get a briefing, then it's off to see Americans in action, not just the Afghan civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, but the bigger picture, the reason we're all here, there, all over the place, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden has now officially begun.

I make plans, I make phone calls, I pack, I am out of here. But wait. Not today. Not for weeks. The Foreign Desk says no. Say they can't afford a hole in the Kabul operation. They are sending a team from somewhere else. We're welcome to try and reach them overland, over bandits, over bad roads, over Taliban, over our dead bodies. I know that at this point I've lost perspective. That my participation in the coverage has become more important to me than the story. This is a war, not the Superbowl. The time, the distance, the sleep deprivation, the endless MRE's (meals ready to eat) have warped my thinking. After so many days together, I am sick of my team and I'm sure they are sick of me. Time to start thinking of an out date.

* * *

Maidan Shar is a crooked little fight in a crooked little war. The Taliban commander there wants to switch sides, wants to join with the Northern Alliance, but hasn't been offered enough money yet. So, in between negotiations, they exchange fire.

Northern Alliance armour and artillery in a crescent moon around this Taliban hold out on a mountain foothill. When Halim and I arrive at the front., we believe it is a more noble fight than that. Would not have risked our lives otherwise. We walk over to a Northern Alliance BM12 or Katusha rocket battery. The commander tells us they have fired five times already this morning at the Taliban position. . I interview him, then begin shooting footage of the Katushas. A crew member whistles to me, then points to the sky. It is a visceral sound of metal slicing through the air, a high pitched doppler effect scream. The Taliban have their own Katushas and they just fired one at us. It lands several hundred yards away, but close enough for all the Northern Alliance troops to scramble into a Jeep Cherokee and fly down the road, out of range.

I am satisfied with my footage of the rocket and ready to head back, when a colleague of mine, Ibay, from Turkish TV pulls up in a taxi. He tells me that he was all the way into the town of Maidan Shar earlier in the morning, no more than a 100 meters from the Taliban. Did I want to see it.? Did I want to go with him now? There are no answers to those kind of question is those kind of moments, We are in our van, moving past Northern Alliance troops and tanks into the town. They tells us not to go, It's too dangerous they say. I'm looking for an out, anything, but Ibay is resolute. Halim is not anxious to go, but will stay with me, regardless. Same for our driver Yar Momad

The minute we drive into the town, I think we have made a bad decision. We are heading to a Northern Alliance forward position in the Maidan Shar graveyard, In between is a road and a mile of open space in easy range of Taliban guns. We leave the van door open, in case we need to roll out and look for cover. The town is deserted. Then the open stretch. Halim is driving very slowly, I can only think, what a great target, a large white van going five miles an hour.

We make it to the graveyard and immediately, the sounds of machine gun fire begin. I have heard a lot of it in Afghanistan, but none of it this close. It makes the ricochet sound that bullets make when they hit dirt and rock flying past their targets. I do a quick interview with a Northern Alliance soldier who is sprawled out on a grave, leaning against a headstone. He tells me he has been here for five days. That he is not afraid. He is so laid back, literally and figuratively, I tend to believe him. Why, I wonder, as we talks, does so much of the fighting here seem to take place in graveyards. But that's an easy one: because there is so much, many of both.

The soldier points to my head, tells me to keep low. The Taliban have a bounty of $50,000 for any foreign journalist killed. I have heard the story before, believe it is more rumor than fact. Nonetheless, I am flattered. But only a little. I was hoping for six figures. Then, A rapid burst of machine gun fire. He points behind us. I swing my camera around and see five Northern Alliance soldiers running across the same field we had driven across. They are under heavy fire. They bob and weave like boxers, sometimes diving into trenches until they are covered by the incline of the Northern Alliance position. Some have machine guns strapped to their backs, others rocket propelled grenades, and they are all carrying something in their hands, What are they carrying? Ammo? Grenades? They are huffing and puffing. They lay down their weapons and sit next to their comrades.

Carefully they unwrap their packages. Bread. They were carrying bread. Under fire while carrying bread across the front lines. We finish our coverage, get back in the van and, this time, speed across the open field. We make it out safe. We learn later that a deal has been struck. When the Taliban commander got his number, peace broke out in Maidan Shar. A little too late for the half dozen men from both sides that were killed there.

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