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An excerpt from “Absurdistan” by Eric Campbell, available only through booksellers in Australia, or if you have a friend there who can send it to you.

Chapter 24
Kabul and Tora Bora, Winter 2001-2002

Jackistan

“You ain’t gonna fuckin’ believe this. You are not gonna fuckin’ believe this!”

We looked up to see Jack standing in the doorway, dressed in his usual sunglasses and US Special Forces-style uniform, holding a Russian assault rifle.

“Fuckin’ peacekeepers, fuckin’ Kraut peacekeepers! They tried to take my fuckin’ gun!”

Jack was a 46-year-old ex-Green Beret with a short, stocky build, a Tom Selleck moustache and a sharp military haircut. He went under the name Jack for “security reasons”, but also enjoyed cultivating an air of mystery and seemed to prefer his pseudonym to what we have found to be his real name, Keith. He had become such a regular visitor in our house in Kabul that he’d effectively moved in, bringing quantities of Pepsi, Snickers Bars, and, on one occasion–ammunition. Every evening, Jack heralded his arrival with an expletive-filled account of his day.

Today it seemed that he and his Afghan militia had been wandering back to their van when a German peacekeeping unit asked them to hand in their weapons. The new post-Taliban Government had a policy of disarming the mujahideen roaming the capital. But nobody had counted on trying to prise a weapon from a paid-up member of the National Rifle Association. After a testosterone-filled standoff, the Germans had apparently thought better of it and let them on their way.

It was another small victory in what, for Jack at least, had been a highly successful war. But he was now glimpsing the end of a dream. “Jesus,” he said sadly.”Gun control in fuckin Kabul!”

It was Afghanistan’s world-beating lack of gun control that had first brought Jack here shortly after September 11. Like many retired Special Forces soldiers, he had volunteered to return to the fold in any capacity after watching the Twin Towers collapse. Just how he got here was never quite clear but Jack’s version had him flying into the opposition-controlled north of Afghanistan on a Pentagon mission.

His job, as he explained it, was to help bring in humanitarian aid drops and to find out why so many Afghans were getting sick from eating them. In the early days of the bombing, the parachuted food aid had not been the public relations triumph the US had expected. Reports filtered back of Afghan villagers being crushed to death when the food crates dropped on their homes and of other Afhgans losing limbs, trying to collect crates that were inadvertently dropped in minefields. More alarmingly for the Pentagon, many who survived the humanitarian drops were showing signs of poisoning after eating them. The Taliban were suspected of foul play.

Jack said he flew in from Tajikistan under the auspices of a “humanitarian aid group” to help sort out the mess. He told us he soon solved the poisoning mystery by noticing something that had eluded the finest minds of the Pentagon. Each food parcel contained a drying sachet with a warning not to eat it that was incomprehensible to illiterate Afghans–who were eating them.

Mission accomplished, it should have been time for Jack to go home. But he hadn’t come all the way not to kill some Taliban.

Fuck that! thought Jack.

So he’d hung round the Northern Alliance frontline in his Special Forces-style uniform. One day he showed the mujahideen how to redirect their wildly inaccurate mortar fire. Within moments they were excitedly slaughtering Taliban in the trenches opposite and Jack was a hero. Or at least that’s what Jack told us. One thing led to another, and Jack eventually became a military adviser to the Northern Alliance, who had by now taken over most of the country. Whether they realized he was just a civilian with absolutely no official status was also never quite clear.

And now Jack had moved into the ABC bureau in Kabul and was showing no sign of ever leaving.

We had met Jack not long after Sebastian and I were sent to Afghanistan to cover the aftermath of the new War on Terror. We’d missed most of the fighting thanks to taking holidays the day before the Twin Towers collapsed. but we were expected to make up for it by spending the next two months based in Kabul, which had just been liberated by the Taliban.

The city was at once depressing and uplifting. The wintry gloom made the bombed-out city look even less habitable than when I was here in the summer of 1997. Armed militias of the Northern Alliance patrolled the streets, suggesting that the gunt-toting brutes of the Taliban had simply been replaced by rival gun-toting brutes. Yet there was an unmistakeable air of optimism. The streets seemed to be coming to life after a long hibernation. Men sat on street corners fashioning homemade satellite dishes from flattened tins of cooking oil for their once banned televisions. Shops again played music, Pakistani trucks were bringing in consumer goods, restaurants and cinemas were opening, and children were even flying kites-one of the many singful activities outlawed by the Taliban.

It was hard to imagine that just weeks earlier the same streets had seen mass rallies denouncing US bombing and vowing to destroy the Taliban’s enemies. Afghan allegiances had always been fluid. Warlords changed sides regaularly for fun and profit, and civilians had learned that pragmatic acceptance of whoever had the most guns was the best way of surviving.

As much as people had tired of the excesses of the Taliban, they had good reason to be nervous about the Northern Alliance. Most of its commanders were former mujahideen who had fought among themselves after defeating the Soviets. Kabul suffered no damage under Soviet rule and relatively little was caused by the Taliban. The leaders of the Northern Alliance bore most of the blame for the ruination of the city. Even so, most people seemed happy with how things had turned out. After 23 years of conflict, the fighting was finally over. People wanted peace above all else, regardless of who could bring it. For now, Kabul was unusually calm, which was good for locals but bad for journalists.

The big story had shifted to Tora Bora near the Pakistan border where Osama bin Laden was believed to be making his last stand. B-52s were pounding the mountains and US Special Forces were beginning to sift through the caves where the al-Qaeda militants were holed up.

The problem was, we couldn’t get there. The road from Kabul to Jalalabad, the town nearest to Tora Bora, was a no-go zone. Four journalists had been murdered on it less than three weeks earlier, including an Australian cameraman, Harry Burton. So the ABC had grounded us in the capital. I had almost given up hope of getting out of Kabul when a notice appeared on the hotel foyer, promising safe escort to Tora Bora. The price was ridiculous–$5,000 per car. But with no other option, I rang the number.

An Afghan named Syed answered and took my details. A few hours later, he and another man arrived at my state room. Unlike most Afghans, Syed was neatly groomed and wore Western dress. He spoke fluent English and had an air of quiet authority. However, something about him seemed shifty. He said the convoy was “official” but was evasive about who was organizing it and why it was so expensive. I was inclined to turn him down but I was intrigued by his companion–a musclar American in a black T-shirt and sunglasses who introduced himself as Jack.

Jack didn’t say much and wouldn’t really answer questions. But he hinted that there could be an “American adviser” on the trip. This was getting interesting. I negotiated the price down to $1000a person and said I’d think about it. Later we found that six other media groups had signed up for the trip, including Newsweek and the New Yorker. On the principle of safety in numbers, Sebastian and I decided to chance the trip and the Foreign Desk gave us approval to go.

The following dawn we assembled at a meeting point on the outskirts of the city and found Jack coordinating everything. It was heartening that all the other journalists were from magazines and press agencies, meaning that we wouldn’t have to compete with other television crews for shots. On the downside, there was Jack’s militia.

He’d taken a rag-tag group of Northern Alliance fighters and was trying to turn them into an elite protection unit for aid workers and journalists. And they clearly had a long way to go. There were about dozen of them, most in their teens and early twenties. They were heavily armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades but looked just as likely to shoot each other as to protect us from the Taliban. Standing with 50 metres of them made you feel instantly insecure. Even so, there were fewer than we’d been promised and some of the jouranlists were threatening to pull out. Jack explained he had to hire more guards along the way, at a town called Surobi. It was the price of passage from the local warlord. The road was supposed to be safe until there so we agreed to go.

We set off in a six-car convoy, a vanload of soldiers at each end and Jack scooting back and forth between them in a beaten-up sedan. At every prayer and pee-stop, Jack sent his soldiers off in pairs to scan the horizon, which they faithfully did until the moment he looked away, when they sat down and smoked.

The least motivated was Jack’s interpreter, Zabi. Jack who couldn’t get his head around Afghan names, called him Joe. Zabi (or Joe) was about twenty years old (Afghans are rarely certain of their age) but looked about fourteen, with puppy-dog eyes and a fuzzy adolescent beard. He spoke only rough English and rarely had any idea what Jack was shouting at him, feigning comprehension by nodding and looking interested. He owed his position more to family connections than talent. All Jack’s soldiers were from the Northern Alliance stronghold, the Panjshir Valley. But Zabi was from the same village as Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated just two days before the September 11 attacks.

We were fortunate to be travelling with a former Kabul University professor. Dr. Iqbal, who had agreed to be our interpreter. His family was part of the exiled Afghan community in Pakistan, who were now coming back to try to rebuild their country. He was a reminder of the urbane, educated middle class which had dominated Kabul before the warlords and fundamentalists destroyed it. Dr. Iqbal had a dream of building a railway line around Afghanistan to link the main Tajik and Pashtun cities; “like an iron bracelet to hold the country together,” he said.

It would certainly be a hell of an improvement on the road. The potholes were even worse than I remembered from four years before and we had barely left Kabul when the van burst a tyre. There was little other traffic on the lonely dirt road. It was a perfect place for an ambush. I imagined the fear and helplessness that Harry Burton must have felt when his car was pulled over by gunmen.

When we arrived in Surobi two hours later, I instantly had a bad feeling about the place. Armed men loitered around the road. Some of the buildings had machine guns mounted on the roof. Most of the country had been pro-Taliban before the US bombing, switching allegiance only when it was obvious that the Northern Alliance was going to win. Judging from the sullen mood of Surobi, it was clear that our new bodyguards were recent Taliban.

By the time we arrived in Jalalabad, the main town near the battlefield of Tora Bora, it was dark. The streets were full of soldiers and military vehicles. Most of the hotels were full of media so Jack split us up. The guards took Sebastian, Dr. Iqbal and me to a dirty concrete hostel with cold rooms and grubby mattresses. the other journalists got the last rooms in the relatively good hotel next door. We were about to meet them for dinner when Dr. Iqbal whispered that we had a problem. Our guards, it seemed, were planning to murder us.

He had overheard the Surobi soldiers aruging with the Panjshiris about whether they should kill and rob us. The Surobis had somehow heard how much we had agreed to pay for the trip and felt they were being cheated. Their proposal was to demand that we pay twice the wages. If we disagreed, they could slit our throats on the way back through Surobi and take our money.

I passed this onto Jack. He was already having a stressful day and started throbbing in fury, first at Dr. Iqbal, whom he accused of telling the Surobis about the money, and then at the “fuckin’ Surobi assholes”. He stormed off with one of our group’s translators to confront them. His message, he later told us, was roughly as follows: “If you try to stop us passing we will shoot it out with you, and if I die, US Air Force planes will come and bomb your town into the ground and there will be nothing left for your children to inherit.”

Given the level of collateral damage caused by US bombing, it must have seemed a credible threat. The Surobis agreed to behave. Jack even insisted we go back to spend the night in the hostel, promising that the Panjshiris would keep an eye on us. “No problem,” he said. “It’s cool.”

The only other option was sleeping in the car so we went back to our room and barricaded the door. But before I could go to bed, I had to call the ABC in Sydney to say I’d arrived safely. I couldn’t get a signal from the room so I crept out past the soldiers to the hostel balcony. As quietly as I could in the dark, I set up the phone and satellite dish and dialled the Sydney Radio Desk. A muffled-sounding voice answered on an almost inaudible line.

“It’s Eric Campbell calling from Afghanistan,” I whispered.

“Hello?”

“It’s Eric Campbell calling from Afghanistan,” I whispered slightly louder.

“Can you speak up?”

“It’s Eric Campbell, ” I muttered. “I’ve arrived in Jalalabad.”

“Good-o. What have you got for us?”

“I can’t talk right now.”

“Hello?”

“I can’t talk loudly.”

“Listen, we need something for seven and seven forty-five.”

“I can’t talk now.”

“Hello?”

“Look, there are people wanting to kill us.”

“You’re going to have to speak up!”

“Sorry, the signal’s going,” I shouted, “I’ll try to call back.”

“I can hear you fine now. What have you got for us?”

I hung up, looking around nervously and crept back to bed. It was a sleepless night.

At daylight, with the street now bustling, I went back to the balcony to set up the satellite phone again. the day of travel meant that I hadn’t been able to film, but, as the ABC’s only reported in Afghanistan, I still had to file a story. One of the downsides of covering breaking stories on your own is how often you have to fudge it by writing somethiing to accompany pictures you haven’t seen of events you didn’t witness. I dialled into a London web server, downloaded the news wires onto my laptop, wrote a television script based on what I could have read on the internet in Australia, recorded a voiceover and emailed it to Sydney. The Foreign Desk would edit it to news-agency pictures of overnight bombing.

Jalalabad felt very different from Kabul, where Afghanistan’s various ethnic groups–Tajiks, Pashtuns, Hazaras and Uzbeks–lived side by side. Most of the population here was Pashtun, the ethnic group that gave rise to the Taliban. As in nearby Pakistan, the streets were full of motorised rickshaws and brightly decorated trucks, and the shops were full of Pakistani goods. This had been friendly territory for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Jack’s Northern Alliance Panjshiris seemd out of place.

They were also running late. We waited for more than an hour before they were ready to leave for Tora Bora, minus the Surobi guards, who remained in Jalalabad despite being dismissed. But Jack made up for it with a bonus excursion along the way. He had found the address of the house where Osama bin Laden had lived in his Jalalabad days. It was an impressive compound just outside the city, with a huge metal gate decorated with stars. The abandoned interior had been ransacked but among the rubbish was some evidence of how al-Qaeda leader’s acolytes amused themselves. There were bomb-making diagrams and brochures for hi-tech radio transmitters.

Our arrival brought a crowd of curious onlookers. They were Osama’s old neighbors and they were sorry he had left. “People think he was a very nice Muslim,” one man told us. “He was a very kind man.”

The mood was very much the same at Tora Bora. B-52s were still circling high overhead, visible by their vapour trails, but they had given up bombing. After weeks of bombardment, the mountains were pockmarked with craters and littered with unexploded ordnance but most of the al-Qaeda fighters were believed to have escaped including bin Laden. The US was relying on the local soldiers to track them down. The Jalalabad militias were nominally allied to the Northern Alliance, but the foot soldiers clearly didn’t have their hearts in it. We stopped a party of them returning from the “hunt”. All they were interesting in was collecting the pay and going back to their villages.

We headed back down the mountain towards Jalalabad to begin filing our stories but Jack had one more mission in mind. He wanted to punch the metal stars form the gate of Osama bin Laden’s compound and he wanted Sebastian to film the mission. “Shoot it on night scope,” he said. “It’ll look fuckin’ cool!” It didn’t seem quite right to be looting private property, even if it belonged to the world’s most wanted man, but it made for an interesting photo. “I’m gonna give this to the Special Ops museum in Fort Bragg,” Jack said, clutching a star. “They’re gonna love it!”

Outside Osama bin Laden’s old house in Jalalabad. We had taken stars off his security gates as souvenirs. From left, a member of Jack’s fearless militia, Sebastian, Jack and me.

Back in town we managed to move into the good hotel–without the Surobi guards who wanted to kill us. It was just as well, as we had to cut two television stories and a radio feature that night and wouldn’t be getting any sleep. Sebastian was always happy to keep doing whatever was required, no matter how tired or dirty or uncomfortable we were. All he needed was a constant supply of Marlboro Reds and a continuous soundtrack of Pink Floyd, CDs of which he carried with a Walkman wherever he went. But that night he seemed unusually tired and I wonderered if his age was finally catching up with him.

We finished cutting the pieces just in time for a quick breakfast before we headed to the satellite feed points that news agencies had set up in the rambling 1920s-era Spinghar Hotel. A small plaque on the entrance commemorated the cameraman Harry Burton and his colleagues. They had spent their last night in the hotel before they were murdered on the road to Kabul. A sign asked visitors not to bring in Kalashnikovs.

Jack had another treat for us at the Spinghar Hotel–an exclusive interview with the newly returned pro-American warlord Hazrat Ali. Dozens of news crews were camped out trying to get him but he’d agreed to speak only to Jack’s group out of respect for his being a military adviser to the Northern Alliance. The other crews were outraged as we walked in. They tried to follow, with CNN and NBC pushing their way to the front of the pack, but Ali’s armed bodyguards shoved them out and closed the doors. “What did I fuckin’ tell you?” Jack aid. “I look after you guys.”

Ali was an ethnic Nuristani whose family had ruled much of the area like feudal lords until the Taliban drove them out in the early days of their revolution. At that time, most people believe the Taliban were liberating them from the corruption and brutality of the warlords. The Taliban’s subsequent corruption and brutality diminished their popularity but not everyone was pleased to see the old order returning. Ali had been directing operations against Tora Bora and he had no doubt that some of the Pashtuns were deliberately letting his opponents flea. “They are not all finished, ” he said. “Their bases are destroyed but they are still throughout the country.”

It wasn’t clear if many had been captured. The day before we arrived, Ali had paraded a dozen al-Qaeda militants before the media in a phot-op but not allowed them to speak. Jack now asked if we could interview some of the captives in Jalalabad’s prison. Ali was reluctrant but the Afghan sense of hospitality prevailed. He’d let three of us go in, so we settled on Sebastian to film it and the New Yorker writer and photographer to pool for the print media.

The prison was in an old brick fort that had seen better days. The guards ushered them inside the prison courtyard and locked the metal gates behind them. After a revolt by al-Qaeda prisoners in northern Afghanistan which left hundreds dead, the guards were understandably nervous about their inmates. But Jack clearly relished the chance for some face time with ‘ass-wipe terrorists’ and went in with them.

There were about 40 prisoners from Tora Bora int he fort, most of them locked in cells. Two men were allowed out into the garden to be interviewed. Both denied having anything to do with al-Qaeda. One of them, Fayez Mohamed Ahmed, claimed he was a 26-year-old businessman from Kuwait. He was wearing a traditional long, baggy shirt called a shalwar kameez with combat trousers. The other man, Nasir Abdul Latif, who was 36, wore a combat jacket but also claimed to be a businessman. He insisted he had come to Afghanistan to live under proper Islamic rule, not to fight.

Jack noticed that both men’s hands bore small cuts that could have come from firing Kalashnikovs. The older man, Nasir Abdul Latif, eventually admitted having seen Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. “He was saying that you should believe in God, you should believe in me. We are living the jihad for the sake of Allah. We will win this jihad.”

After a few prompts, he became a businessman with considerable attitude. “We came to fight the Americans and we will fight them. We will fight them forever, up to the time that we destroy them totally.”

“He fuckin’ said that?” Jack asked when he heard the translation.

Fayez Mohamed Ahmed, the Kuwaiti ‘businessman’, quickly qualified the threat, saying they only wanted to fight Americans who were fighting Muslims. Jack was unimpressed. “America will come and get you,” he said in parting.

We headed back to Kabul for the inauguration of the new Afghan administration, motoring slowly through Surobi on the way. The guards’ grudging agreement not to slit our throats was obviously as friendly as the town would get. Bearded Taliban types sa on the rooftops with Kalashnikovs, belt-fed machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

“I pity the poor fucker who stops here to buy an apple,” Jack said.

When we were safely back in Northern Alliance territory on a winding pass outside Kabul, Jack stopped the convoy, suggesting that everybody relax with a little shooting practice. He and his soldiers too turns firing across the gorge with glee, then offered us the rifles, laughing at our clumsy attempts to shoot. Everyone took happy snaps of each other holding weapons in one of the silly, matey rituals of war zones. Within minutes we heard the crack of gunfire overhead as soldiers further up the mountains joined in. It was not much of a threat as a kind of answering birdcall. After 23 years of conflict, gunfire had become part of the natural order. The new government faced an interesting future.

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

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