Doing time in Spin Boldak

>> Detained correspondent describes making it out of a Taliban jail

by KEN HECHTMAN

Dubai, United Arab Emirates--Dec. 2 Kandahar may be the Taliban's home base but the border town of Spin Boldak is where it all began. I've heard a few versions of the Taliban's founding myth, but most of them go like this: in 1994, a family of Afghani refugees returning home to Kandahar was detained by the local mujahideen commander of Spin Boldak, who decided he wanted to watch the pregnant wife give birth. After the wife died in labour in a holding cell, the distraught husband went to Mohammed Omar's madrassah in Kandahar and begged him to "do something."

Omar and 12 of his students (talibs) drove down to Spin Boldak and, depending on the version of the story, either ran the offending commander out of town or strung him up. As word of the students' brand of vigilante justice spread, others rallied to their banner to rid Afghanistan of the predatory mujahideen government.

On Sunday, Nov. 25, I left a message on my home answering machine ("I'm going to Spin Boldak this morning, I'll be out of touch for a while") and caught a bus for the border. After walking across the border I split a cab with a Pakistani aid worker from one of the many Spin Boldak refugee camps. The cab stopped at the Taliban border post, but the driver returned about 15 seconds later. "Nobody there," he said, and drove on. What he distinctly didn't say was, "Listen, Ken, the border doesn't really matter for us Pakistanis, but as a foreigner, you're committing a death-penalty offence just by staying in my cab so you might want to think about getting out and waiting for some border guards to show up." I think I'd definitely remember getting a warning like that. Still, Mistake #1.

I got out at the Malaysian refugee camp (every Muslim country sponsors one, so people talk about the Saudi camp, the UAE camp, the Malaysian camp and so on) about half a mile back from the Foreign Office, where I had been advised to ask for a Maulvi Najibullah, who could sort out my visa problems. On the way, I made Mistake #2. I stopped in at the Al Rasheed Trust camp, or to give its full name, The Al Rasheed Trust Refugee Camp for Victims of the American War. The best organized and supplied camp on this highway isn't run by a national government but by a private organization. If most Canadians have heard of the Al Rasheed Trust, it was when George Bush declared them a terrorist organization in mid-September and seized their U.S. bank accounts.

Spy gear

I spoke with one of the doctors there who showed me a tent city housing 20,000 people, a bakery that fed several of the camps on the highway strip and a field hospital in which four doctors treated 500 patients per day. He also offered an explanation of why the Americans tried to cripple an obviously bona fide charitable organization. Besides their declared sympathy with the Taliban, they got involved in a power struggle that embarrassed the UN World Food Program: in 2000, the WFP threatened to shut down their Kabul bakeries unless they were permitted to employ women. Al Rasheed stepped in, opened their own bakeries and delivered 150 tons of food per day to the Afghan capital, sustaining 300,000 people. Another story the doctor told concerned the hospital they lost in the sack of Kabul. He claimed Northern Alliance soldiers picked the 400 bed hospital clean, stealing all the supplies and equipment. Al Rasheed was still trying to negotiate a security guarantee with the Northern Alliance that would allow them to re-stock and re-open the hospital, but they weren't optimistic.

While we were talking, an official from the Ministry of Public Health came into the hospital on some other errand and overheard me talking in English. He asked if I had a visa and when I admitted I didn't, he offered to call some Foreign Office representatives to the camp. I was planning to go see them anyway, so why not have them come to me? After speaking with the Foreign Office reps in the hospital, we went back to the Foreign Office and then to an army post to see a local commander and then back to the Foreign Office. All this took six hours, during which the tone was friendly. I wasn't even aware I was a prisoner and nobody ever said the word "spy." That evening, the first American airstrike of the war hit Spin Boldak and attitudes changed instantly. The Talibs were convinced I had called it in.

That wasn't a completely unreasonable guess on their part. Even paranoids have real enemies and the Americans really do have people on the ground spotting for airstrikes. What's more, the story that Special Forces troops are doing the spotting is American misdirection. The Taliban has caught between 20 and 25 spotters and they all look just like me. They're Pakistani-Americans, with Afghani-style clothes and hair, six-week-old beards and CIA-issue satellite phones (not the clunky briefcase model, but almost identical to my rented Ericsson cell). Mistake #3. Also, the Talibs were suspicious of my contact list, which included aid agencies, religious parties, cheap hotels, but also had the locations of half a dozen Al Qaeda and mujahideen camps, along with the dates of evacuation of last known occupancy. Mistake #4. Nobody wants to hear that all their military secrets can be compiled in an afternoon of 'Net-searching and the Taliban is no exception.

One tough language exam

My second to last stop of the night was at the home of the city commander, who doubled as the city judge. This is not unusual among the Taliban. They consider themselves religious scholars first (using no titles but Mullah, Maulvi or Maulana), soldiers second and whatever else they do last. I've defended myself in court before, despite the advice that whoever does so has a fool for a client, but never in a death penalty case, never in a language other than my own. "Okay, no problem. I can do this. I just have to stay cool." Then I get thrown a curve. Before the trial begins, the judge tells me to pick a name out of his hat. "What does he win?" I asked, indicating the big, black-turbaned Talib with the shit-eating grin. "He gets to shoot you, just as soon as we finish this formality of a trial. Okay, let's get started!" Ya gotta love these guys and their wacky black humour! Did I mention that my translator, a doctor from the Malaysian refugee camp where I'd started the day, was convinced I was guilty and never missed an opportunity to tell me or the judge so?

The session lasted two hours, in which I kept asking the judge and translator to look at my notebook with seven weeks of interviews and story drafts, completely unaware it had already been sent ahead to Kandahar on the request of Mullah Fazil, head of Taliban Intelligence. I was sent to the city jail overnight with the understanding that the trial would resume in the morning. In the morning the judge/commander had other ideas. If I was a Pakistani-American airstrike spotter, he reasoned, I would speak Urdu, and a little bit of stress-testing would soon establish that.

I'd had rifles dry-fired at me the night before, but always in crowded rooms and I always figured even the angriest of hot-headed kids isn't going to start spraying when his friends are sitting right behind me. That morning, the commander came into the prison yard with a dozen young soldiers. These kids had spent a month at Mazar-i-Sharif watching thousands of their people die in the "Amrika Bombardikeh" without being able to do anything about it. Finally, they were going to get their hands on the guy fingering their positions for the B-52s. I was in the middle of the yard, surrounded by the soldiers when they all suddenly backed away. There was a kid on the roof with a Kalashnikov, shouting what I assume was, "You're going to say something in Urdu or you're going to die." "No Urdu! No Pushtu! No Farsi! No Arabi!" Click. Then the kid racked the bolt, pulled the trigger three-quarters of the way back and repeated his demand. "Oh shit, now he's got a live round in the chamber! Look kid, I do not speak your language. I do not know what you want me to do." Click again. The whole banana clip was empty. They left convinced I wasn't a Pakistani and never bothered me again.

A federal case

Getting out wasn't that easy, though. The decision was no longer in the local commander's hands; I had become a federal case, I'd have to convince someone in Kandahar that I was what I said I was and I'd have to spend a lot of time sitting around the jail until that happened. The actual prison conditions weren't as bad as the Canadian news said. I wasn't chained to the wall, or kept in solitary confinement, or tortured or held for ransom. The food... well, think about what prisoners must eat in a country where 5-7-million people are facing starvation and the germ theory of disease is still just a theory. A lot of it I would have crossed the street to avoid, back in the world.

The other prisoners joined in roughing me up with the soldiers that first morning (not the worst treatment I've had in custody), but stopped when the soldiers left, and afterwards went out of their way to make life easy for me. At the top of the prisoner pecking order were the four Pakistani heroin smugglers and the two Taliban commandos. The Taliban don't have separate military and civilian jails, so when a soldier breaks military discipline (and commandos are the same the world over--they think military discipline is for other people) they go to the city lockup. Both groups had outside money coming in, which meant they were able to supplement the bread and water ration with vegetables and meat from the bazaar. The vegetables were welcome; the meat was a bit of a mixed blessing.

Also, they were both serving short sentences which meant, as low escape risks, they weren't shackled. Technically, I was still a death penalty case, so I was. The smugglers were shocked to learn that possession of one's body weight in heroin, which got them a three-month sentence, and profuse apologies for the political necessity of doing that, was worth 25 to life in Canada. Heroin has been part of Pushtun culture since forever, and because the Taliban had eradicated a large part of the cultivation over the summer, the smugglers had to be made an example of. But no one took them seriously as criminals. Guess what? They think our attempts to legislate morality are barbaric, puritanical and doomed to failure.

The other prisoners included a carjacker, also under a death sentence, an Uzbek kid who supported Abdul Rasheed Dostum and didn't care who knew it. "That's General Dostum to you," he'd say whenever Pidam Ahmad, another prisoner, went through his repertoire of impressions of Afghani political figures. The kid also had a gay thing going with a Turkoman kid and didn't care who knew about that. There were two older men who in Canada would either be in mental hospitals or on the street. In Afghanistan, they lived in the jail--but not as prisoners. They could leave whenever they wanted, did the grocery shopping in the bazaar and other odd jobs.

Getting the word out

Each day, three or four groups of soldiers came trooping through the jail--everyone wanted to get a look at the foreigner. Most were Afghani Pushtuns, though I did see a few scattered Pakistanis, some proudly wearing the black and white striped flag of the JUI. I also met six Al Qaeda mujahideen from Qatar. "You mean Qatar, like Al Jazeera Qatar?" They wanted to see my sophisticated CIA communication gear and were quite disappointed that I didn't have any. Although I'd been keeping the Ramadan fast--if I wanted to get on the guards' and prisoners' good side, eating and drinking in the middle of the day while they were hungry and thirsty wasn't going to help--the Arabs insisted on bringing me lunch.

The jailer believed at least part of my story and brought his cousin, Mohammed Zai, in to see me. Zai asked for the phone numbers of people in Pakistan who could vouch for me. After contacting them, he returned a day later asking for phone numbers of my family in Canada. He went to my hotel in Chaman, and passed the numbers on to Jonathan Steele of the Guardian and Vivienne Walt of USA Today, who called my family and the Mirror, who called Foreign Affairs Canada, who sent a couple of diplomats to negotiate my release. After spending four days wading through rumours and false information, the diplomats made contact with Maulvi Aminullah, the commander I'd seen at the first army post. As far as he knew, I'd been sent home the first day. After all, I'd left his post without any charges against me. He agreed that if he could be convinced I wasn't a spy, he'd convince the higher-ups in Kandahar and arrange my release. Aminullah was quite offended by the rumours of ransom demands that were circulating, pointing out that hostage-taking is one of the worst crimes in Pushtun culture. He said that if I was a spy, no amount of money would save me, but if I wasn't then I was entitled to the near-sacred protection of a guest, they would release me immediately and nothing would be asked in return. They did and nothing was.

Leaving town

There was a series of stumbling blocks before I could actually leave Afghanistan. The key to my shackles had been lost and a hammer had to be found to break the padlock. The first two Toyota pickups we got into wouldn't start, even with eight men rocking them to get the engine to catch. The one that would start was loaded to capacity with rocket launchers, RPK machine guns and ammo boxes and had to be unloaded before they could take it to the border. I asked Aminullah if I could come back the next morning, get my passport stamped and go on to Kandahar, as I originally planned. After all, what are a few mock executions between friends? He answered, "Sure, why not? Now that we know who you are, there won't be any problems."

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. The Canadian diplomats told me it had been a slow news week in Canada and my story was on all the front pages. One of those papers, the Journal de Montréal's, outed me as being Jewish. That put an end to my ability to be the Mirror and Straight Goods' man in the mujahideen. In every conversation with Talibs or mujahideen, within five minutes the question of religion comes up, and saying, "My grandparents are..." cuts no ice in this part of the world. I couldn't be kaffir, an unbeliever--no one would talk to me. I couldn't be Jewish--Jews are the enemy and everyone believes they framed Osama. So I became Isa-idi (Christian). The best advice I got before coming to Pakistan and Afghanistan was, "Just because these guys look like barefoot hicks from the sticks, never make the mistake of assuming they're stupid." They're not. They've already proven themselves capable of running a 'Net-search to check up on me and have caught me out on a few things that were minor, but important to them.

The waiting horde

The media feeding frenzy began within minutes of leaving the Chaman border post. Four television vans, including one from the CBC, had staked out the border, spotted us leaving for Quetta and gave chase. The route from Chaman to Quetta is 50 miles of narrow, twisting, unlit mountain roads--probably the worst place in the world for a Princess-Di-style high-speed car chase.

The pursuit ended with the CBC van cutting us off in the driveway of the Quetta safehouse. The first statement I made to the press following my release wasn't about how glad I was to be free but, "Try that shit with a Taliban Toyota pickup sometime--they'll blow your ass off the road with a rocket launcher!" Thing to do when I get home # 47: Learn some diplomacy...

Ken Hechtman's dispatches

Flight from Kabul Two Taliban commanders (it can be difficult to tell who's who in an army where everyone from sergeant to general is simply called "commander," but these two rate something between captain and major) who retreated from Bagram through occupied Kabul say they witnessed looting and systematic murder during the sack of the city by the Northern Alliance. Nov. 22 Jihad's umbrella There's a perverse satisfaction in venting at a government official with the sure and certain knowledge that in 24 hours he'll be on the unemployment line. The morning that Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, I was in the absolutely-business-as-usual Afghani Consulate--the only place in Peshawar where nobody had heard the news, or if they had, didn't believe it--making a last-ditch effort to get some kind of authorization to see their side of the war. No help. "You go to Islamabad. Journalist visas are approved in the Foreign Ministry in Kabul and issued in Islamabad." Nov. 15 Shariah or bust My plans to go to Khyber Agency to help out on a propaganda movie about the tribal warriors is dead because the director/cameraman/tribal contact, Lakhkar Khan, is also dead, killed in last Wednesday's bombing of Kabul. I feel like I dodged a bullet because he offered to take me into Afghanistan on Monday and I turned him down because I thought his plan sounded a bit dodgy (no visas, carrying a video camera and staying in the big cities). Nov. 8 The Pushtun want you! Threats, bargaining and patriotic appeals are common recruiting techniques among Afghanistan's warring parties. Nov. 1 Where the Kalashnikov is king I got my visa in Islamabad and it's time to hit the frontier. Next stop, Peshawar. CNN takes Pakistani Airlines for 80 bucks; the Mirror takes the jeepney, an overcrowded taxi-van more often than not used for moving livestock, for 80 cents. Then again, you meet a better class of people on the jeepneys. Take Kamran, for instance. Oct. 25 Notes from a new war zone It's 12 noon and I'm walking down Embassy Road, making my way from Step Two to Step Three of the The Visa Extension Dance. All foreign correspondents arrive here with at best a week to go on a 10-day visa and have to apply for a 30-day extension before they can start working. This is a three- to four-day process that requires getting a recommendation in one office, an approval in a second, a voucher in a third, paying for it in a fourth and stamping the passport in a fifth, with each office located between two and 10 miles from the last. Oct. 18