The Crossing: A Journey Through North Afghanistan

"Don't even dare travel on that road": In the first entry of a month-long travel diary, our correspondent ponders maps and routes in Kabul.

BY ANNA BADKHEN | APRIL 12, 2010


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"He said that anyway it was not so much a question of a correct map but of any map at all. He said that in that country were fires and earthquakes and floods and that one needed to know the country itself and not simply the landmarks therein."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing.

The 2009 edition of Nelles' map of Afghanistan marks the country's imposing mountain ridges, its life-giving rivers, some historical landmarks, and all of its major and many of its minor roads (some are just well-worn stretches of desert or parallel ruts hollowed out in steep mountainsides by generations of motorists).

But when I show an Afghan aid worker in Kabul the road I want to take, one that humps over the Hindu Kush and descends into Afghanistan's northern plains, he shakes his head: This road is off limits. He knows what the map does not show -- that every ridge along the way can be a firing line; every gorge, an ambush; every valley, the backdrop for a massacre.

The last time I was here, Afghanistan's north was commonly considered the safest section of the country. You could hail down a taxi in Mazar-e-Sharif to drive to Kabul; you could stop for a lamb kebab at a roadside café; and if you decided to stay at a chaikhana for $15 a night you worried about bedbugs, not kidnappers.

Between 2001 and 2004, I traveled through the north a lot -- both during the fratricidal war between Taliban government troops and the U.S.-backed rebels of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, and after the strict Islamic regime collapsed. With the Taliban banished, villagers clenched by poverty still died of hunger and diseases, the literacy percentage among women remained in single digits, children as young as six still joined the work force, and landmines and cluster bombs continued to kill and maim hundreds of people each year. But, compared to now, those were happy times. The plains of Kunduz and Balkh provinces appeared to exhale in relief, with the expectation that after a quarter-century of bloodshed things were going to turn for the better. Even the massifs of Baghlan province seemed to have relaxed their Cretaceous frowns. U.S. forces and most of international donors focused their attention on southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban had retained a stronghold.

While the world was distracted, the Taliban quietly returned to the north.

Now it levies taxes on farmers and robs and kidnaps travelers in Baghlan, which is bisected by the north-south highway NATO uses as an important supply route. It controls virtually all of Kunduz, where the highway crosses the Pyandzh River into Tajikistan, the staging point for many European troops headed into Afghanistan. Afghan forces periodically exchange fire with Taliban rebels in Takhar, a province that before the American-led invasion in 2001 largely had been an anti-Taliban stronghold. The Taliban has forged an alliance with the insurgent militia of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the famously egomaniacal Islamist warlord who gained prominence as an anti-Soviet rebel commander in the 1980s, and who has opposed every Afghan government. The alliance is tenuous -- last month, a clash between Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami militia and the Taliban killed dozens of militants on both sides -- but Hekmatyar's men, who operate in swaths of Baghlan and Kunduz provinces, contribute to the general instability in the north by staging attacks on international and Afghan government forces and robbing local residents. (Hekmatyar has told the Afghan government that he would lay down his weapons -- provided all foreign forces agree to withdraw entirely within 18 months and a "neutral" government replaces the administration of President Hamid Karzai.)

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To follow Anna's path through Afghanistan, check out this Google Map.

  

How was it possible for the insurgency to sweep to power in the part of the country where the militia was so loathed, where it does not have a lot of ethnic ties (Northern Afghanistan is populated mostly by Uzbeks and Tajiks, with only a few pockets of Pashtun) -- an area that is cordoned off from the Taliban's southern hotbed by a mountain range whose lowest pass soars at a vertiginous 8,777 feet? What happened to the people I saw celebrate the Taliban's downfall in 2001: families who had returned from years of exile, brothers who had reunited after fighting each other, farmers who had reclaimed the fields the Taliban and the Northern Alliance had used as battlegrounds? What happened to Mahbuhbullah, my host in Takhar Province who made a living smuggling vodka from Tajikistan and fencing 2,300-year-old artifacts from a town Alexander the Great had built a mile from his house? And, the bigger question for the United States and NATO forces as they struggle to reassert control over the whole country: Is it possible to actually secure any territory in Afghanistan, even the most seemingly peaceable, for a significant length of time?

maps.google.com

 SUBJECTS: AFGHANISTAN, SOUTH ASIA
 

Anna Badkhen's reporting trip to Afghanistan was made possible by a grant from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Her book about war and food, Peace Meals, is coming out in October.

SIR_MIXXALOT

11:50 AM ET

April 13, 2010

From the CIA

"The young Nigerian in Detroit and the Jordanian bomber in Khost and his wife have told America’s Marines, soldiers, and CIA officers what they already surely sense, but what their political leaders deny. Both attackers cited motivations that pivot on U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians; U.S. occupation of Muslim lands; and U.S. attacks on their fellow Muslims. The three individuals’ words echo the components of U.S. foreign policy named by bin Laden in 1996 as the causes of war — which also include U.S. support for Arab tyrants and exploitation of Muslim energy resources — and which polls show 80 percent of the world’s Muslims identify as attacks on their faith.

While it is hard for Americans to hear, we are at war with a steadily growing number of young men and women in the Muslim world because of what the U.S. government has done in that arena since 1945. The current slate of U.S. foreign policies toward the Islamic world generates the basic and most compelling and uniting motivation for our Islamist enemies.

Should some of these policies be changed? I surely think so...."

http://thehill.com/special-reports-archive/699-homeland-security-january-2010/75531-when-troops-and-cia-officers-die-for-a-fantasy

When troops and CIA officers die for a fantasy
By Michael Scheuer - 01/12/10 06:25 PM ET

The men and women of the U.S. military and intelligence services are the most important part of America’s defense capital. When they enter the service of their choice they are well aware of the implicit contract between the nation and themselves. In return for their career, America has the right to call on them to go into harm’s way, very often at the risk of their lives. I have never known a Marine, a soldier or a CIA officer who did not accept this reality, and I have never known one who balked when called on to deploy. That said, each I have known — and I suppose all — hope that if defending America costs his or her life, the cause for which it is spent is clear and worthwhile. It is precisely on this point that the U.S. government’s executive and legislative branches are lethally failing these men and women.

The events of the past three weeks throw into sharp relief that we are sending our young men and women overseas to fight an enemy that does not exist. Among the first thoughts expressed by President Obama after the near-miss al Qaeda attack on Christmas — and then echoed by his lieutenants, various members of both parties in Congress, and numerous pundits — was that the young Nigerian bomber hated our way of life. And since seven CIA officers in Afghanistan were killed by al Qaeda on Dec. 30, the same thought has been expressed by the same people.

This central thought has been accompanied by additional assertions, among which are the attackers were nihilistic Muslim fanatics and the attackers’ motivation has nothing to do with Islam. The sum and substance of the U.S. bipartisan political elite’s response to recent events has been — as it has been since 1996 when Osama bin Laden declared war on America — that the Islamist terrorists hate us for who we are and how we live, not for what we do.

This contention is a fantasy. It is fair to say that all the U.S. Marines, soldiers and CIA officers who have died in Afghanistan since 9/11 and in Iraq since Saddam’s removal have died fighting an enemy that does not exist. In numbers now approaching 6,000, these men and women have bravely fought and died in combat against an enemy whose main motivation U.S. political leaders have consistently denied. No U.S. soldier, Marine, or CIA officer has been killed by an Islamist fighter who took the field because America has women in the workplace, beer is available in ample supply, and there are early presidential primaries in Iowa every fourth year. Indeed, Islamists motivated by such issues would not rise to the level of a lethal nuisance; they certainly could not stymie the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The young Nigerian in Detroit and the Jordanian bomber in Khost and his wife have told America’s Marines, soldiers, and CIA officers what they already surely sense, but what their political leaders deny. Both attackers cited motivations that pivot on U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians; U.S. occupation of Muslim lands; and U.S. attacks on their fellow Muslims. The three individuals’ words echo the components of U.S. foreign policy named by bin Laden in 1996 as the causes of war — which also include U.S. support for Arab tyrants and exploitation of Muslim energy resources — and which polls show 80 percent of the world’s Muslims identify as attacks on their faith.

While it is hard for Americans to hear, we are at war with a steadily growing number of young men and women in the Muslim world because of what the U.S. government has done in that arena since 1945. The current slate of U.S. foreign policies toward the Islamic world generates the basic and most compelling and uniting motivation for our Islamist enemies.

Should some of these policies be changed? I surely think so, but that is a discussion for another time and broad public debate, perhaps during the 2010 midterm elections. For now, the discussion must focus on our enemies’ motivation and the knowing failure of U.S. leaders in both parties to be honest with our fighting forces. If we fail to understand that motivation, America cannot shape a war-fighting strategy to either defend those policies or defeat the tenacious, talented, religiously motivated, and growing foe our soldiers, Marines, and CIA officers are now losing to in the field. Those men and women — and their parents, spouses and children — deserve to know they are risking their lives to defeat a skilled and enduring enemy, one who is motivated by the impact of U.S. policies, and one that genuinely threatens America. They are not fighting the cartoon-like foe described by their political leaders for the past 15 years.

Scheuer is a former senior CIA officer and adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

 

JAYDEE001

12:36 PM ET

April 13, 2010

HA!

"And, the bigger question for the United States and NATO forces as they struggle to reassert control over the whole country: Is it possible to actually secure any territory in Afghanistan, even the most seemingly peaceable, for a significant length of time?"

Also: Is it possible to root out the so-called global terrorists from their bases, when they can simply move to other bases whenever the climate becomes too hot for them in the base they currently use?

Our leaders seem to think it is. They are willing to spend a lot of money, and a lot more lives trying to prove that it is possible. And there is no Plan B. It would be cheaper in the long run to take Hekmatyar up on his offer to let us leave on his terms. Of course, we will not do that.