Bird of Chaman: Flower of Khyber

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Bird of Chaman: Flower of Khyber

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BIRD OF CHAMAN, FLOWER OF THE KHYBER

RIDING SHOTGUN FROM KARACHI TO KABUL IN A PAKISTANI TRUCK BY MATTHIEU AIKINS

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MATTHIEU AIKINS • BIRD OF CHAMAN, FLOWER OF THE KHYBER

Preface

About the Borderland Series V

Introduction

Dangerous Cargo 1

I.

Stalled In Karachi 5

II.

Flatland Roads 20

III.

In Pictures: Road Warriors 40

IV.

The Lawless Frontier 44

Postscript

Jahangir and Ahmad Ride Again 67

About the Author 71

Edited by Susan B. Glasser and Margaret Slattery Art-directed by Dennis Brack with assistance from Erin Aulov Cover and interior photographs by Matthieu Aikins ii

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To my friends in Afghanistan and Pakistan who made this trip possible.

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PREFACE

ABOUT THE BORDERLANDS SERIES

Heading into Afghanistan at the Torkham border crossing. (Photo by A. Majeed/AFP/Getty Images/AFP/Getty Images)

GLOBALIZATION HASN’T KILLED borders; it’s made them more interesting. Over the past year, Foreign Policy in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting commissioned leading writers to travel several of the world’s most impenetrable fault lines, the global gray zones where countries and people—and our often flawed ideas about them—meet. In this, the second in a series of ebooks to result from our Borderlands project, Matthieu Aikins rides by truck from Karachi to Kabul, traveling along the NATO military supply route that has become the lifeline for the war in Afghanistan—a conduit for billions of dollars of supplies passing through Pakistan’s heartland and treacherous borderlands into the Afghan warzone. During six days spent in the back of a rickety 1993 Nissan truck, Aikins observes how the vast logistical operation for the long-running war v

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in Afghanistan is wound up not only in the shady deals of Pakistani contractors, violent militants who haunt the roadways, and predatory police demanding bribes for safe passage, but also in the lives of rural Pashtuns who over the last decade have left their tribal homelands for trucking jobs in droves—like the two hash-smoking brothers in whose cabin Aikins rides. Along the way from Karachi and through the famed Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, Aikins, who has been reporting from the troubled region for the past five years, defies roadside bandits, Kalashnikov-wielding tribal patrols, and hawk-eyed toll guards (not to mention confinement in the truck’s blazing-hot cabin). The result is both a harrowing account of life on Pakistan’s highways and an anatomy of the way foreign military intervention can transform a society. —Susan Glasser, Foreign Policy editor in chief

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INTRODUCTION

DANGEROUS CARGO

An oil tanker truck pulls out onto the main road in Karachi.

AFGHANISTAN WAS CLOSE, and a strain of fear now inflected the drowsy monotony that had accompanied us over the last four days, as constant as the bumping and rattling of the truck. The previous morning, we had finally left behind the scorching flatlands of the Punjab and, after crossing the Chenab and Indus rivers, begun our climb into the spindly foothills of the borderlands. The police stations here were fortified with wire-and-earth barriers and heavy machine guns, and signs of the war were becoming increasingly visible. But for my Pakistani driver, Jahangir, and his assistant and brother, Ahmad, this part of the trip through the Pashtun tribal areas was a welcome homecoming from the crowded cities of the lowlands 1

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and their predatory police. The brothers’ fear lay instead with their strange additional cargo: me. I had been riding with them in their truck since it had been loaded up in the Pakistani port of Karachi, and we were heading into the mountains on a mission to deliver a containerful of goods to the Afghan capital of Kabul. I was disguised as a local in order to undertake a journey through some of the most violent terrain in the world. Since the first Western troops entered Afghanistan in 2001, most of their supplies have been hauled into the country by Pakistani truckers like Jahangir and Ahmad. Afghanistan is landlocked, so everything has to be either flown or trucked in over the mountains via its neighbors. There aren’t many good options: Iran is out for political reasons, and the routes through Central Asia are long, expensive, and burdened with their own sensitivities given Russia’s unhappiness about NATO’s presence in the region. That leaves Pakistan. Over the last decade, tens of billions of dollars in supplies have arrived in Karachi and then traveled over one of two land routes that wind their way across the rugged borderlands. While the United States may boast the most technologically advanced military in the world, its supply chain in Afghanistan has depended largely on decrepit, colorfully painted trucks like the one I was riding in, driving over crumbling roads vulnerable to militant attacks. This route is so vital that when it was shut down for a seven-month period in 2011 and 2012 following a dispute between the United States and Pakistan, the U.S. military estimated that the closure cost $100 million per month. U.S. President Barack Obama has promised to wind down the combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but even so thousands of tons of equipment and vehicles will need to be carted away in a process that could take years—to say nothing of the residual U.S. presence of special forces and military advisors, along with the U.S.-funded Afghan security forces, that will need to be supplied indefinitely. So for now and the foreseeable future, much of the war effort in Afghanistan still rides on Pakistan’s derelict roadways and the truckers who ply them. After more than a decade, this improvised system has become not only the lifeblood of the Afghan war but a major force in its own right inside Pakistan—a vast industry that has grown to encompass everyone 2

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from the rural Pashtun families who send their sons to drive the trucks to the millionaire Punjabi businessmen who hire them, from crane operators and gangsters in Karachi to international contractors and Western lobbyists. It has linked the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands to the heart of the global economy, and its complex and volatile development offers a dramatic example of how a foreign military intervention alters the economic and social fabric in the region around it. When I set out on my trip last summer, I was living in Kabul and had spent almost five years visiting Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had traveled into the border regions before, and I was curious to see if it was possible to go by truck from Karachi to Kabul. It was something no foreign journalist had done before; besides being long, arduous, and fraught with danger from militant and bandit attacks, the journey would take me through the tribal areas in Pakistan, which are technically off-limits to Westerners. Special permission is required to enter, and although I had left Karachi with assurances from the Pakistani government that I would get it, the bureaucracy in Islamabad did not come through in time. What’s more, Pakistan’s soldiers and police officers were now extra-vigilant for foreign spies creeping around the tribal areas, in the wake of CIA contractor Raymond Davis’s killing of two Pakistanis in Lahore, as well as the humiliating assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces on Pakistani soil. With my camera gear and filthy shalwar kameez, I would fit the bill of an undercover spy nicely. As we entered the borderlands, Jahangir and Ahmad were getting nervous. The night before, while we lay on open-air litters in a truck stop, Ahmad had asked Sardar, my companion and translator, if I had a proper visa to be in Pakistan. We realized at that point that my friend in Karachi who arranged the trip had never told the brothers that I was Canadian. Although Sardar and I talked in English together in the truck, whenever we stopped for lunch or to sleep, out of caution we spoke only Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, which I have spent the last few years learning. Jahangir and Ahmad, who spoke neither language, had assumed that with my half-Asian features and local garb, I was a Persian-speaking Afghan from the north looking for a cheap ride home. They were worried that I didn’t have proper documents, which would be a problem if we were 3

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stopped by the Pakistani army, as we almost surely would be at the Kohat Tunnel checkpoint, only a few miles ahead. In fact, my passport and visa were not going to be of any help if I was caught entering the tribal areas. Sardar and I consulted, and we decided not to tell our hosts that I was actually Canadian. They might feel deceived, or inadvertently let my secret slip at the next truck stop. Most of all, they would be consumed by even more worry all the way to the border. They might even ask us to get off once we made it to the next major city, Peshawar, 40 miles from the Afghan border. Then again, if the army busted me in Kohat, even if I could somehow talk my way out of the situation, Jahangir and Ahmad would come to know my true identity. The whole trip was in danger of falling apart. “Don’t worry guys, I have a visa,” I said, as the truck rattled up a steep switchback. Jahangir nodded but didn’t seem reassured. “Hey, I could just hide in the crawl space in the back of the cab,” I said, only half-joking. “They will search it,” Ahmad replied glumly. An awkward silence ensued. Things had seemed much easier when I started out, 600 miles and two months earlier in the megacity of Karachi.

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1.

STALLED IN KARACHI

The main truck yard of Karachi’s Shireen Jinnah Colony.

WITH MORE THAN 16 million people, Karachi is Pakistan’s most populous city and one of the biggest in the world. Its crowded suburbs and slums have sprawled away from the port over the years, but the city’s main roads still radiate out from where ships arriving from the Arabian Sea unload their cargoes. At the southern end of the harbor, two spits of land curl together to enclose a protected inlet. The western spit holds the naval yards and the main container port; on the eastern, larger spit are the oil terminals and the dense settlements of Shireen Jinnah Colony and Kiamari Town. From the air, both promontories are textured in a peculiar geometry of tightly serried rectangles. One houses thousands of shipping containers and the other, hundreds of parked oil tankers. Neither Ramadan, the holy month when observant Muslims fast from dawn until dusk, nor summer, when temperatures soar above 100 degrees, 5

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is an ideal time to visit Pakistan. In July 2012, when the two coincided, a certain torpor had fallen over the city as I arrived to begin my search for a trucker willing to take me to Afghanistan. Each day, I waited until the peak of the afternoon’s heat had passed and then, accompanied by my friend and local guide, Sohail, walked to the truck yard from the main road in Shireen Jinnah, which is named for the sister of Pakistan’s founding father,

Azim Khan, a tanker driver, stands atop his truck in Shireen Jinnah.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Sohail and I would head down a lane of hardpacked, greasy dirt lined with one-room shops selling spare tires, tools, and engine oil until we came to the trucks. On this particular day, I was meeting Azim Khan, a tanker driver I had befriended through Sohail, in the hopes of arranging a voyage with a truck headed to Afghanistan. A donkey cart piled with engine parts rattled past. The smell of diesel mingled with the sea breeze. At the end of the lane, I climbed over a low concrete ledge, ducked under an opening in the barbed wire fence, and then threaded through the lines of long tankers until I found Azim by his truck. He was short and broad-shouldered, with long eyelashes and short brown hair that he kept tucked under a sequined pillbox cap, a standard Pashtun accoutrement. Azim hadn’t been driving much lately. On Novem6

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ber 26, 2011, an errant U.S. airstrike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border with Afghanistan, prompting the Pakistani government to close the supply routes in protest. For more than seven months, Azim and hundreds of other tanker drivers who supplied the U.S. and NATO forces with oil had been stuck in Shireen Jinnah. Every night during that time, Azim slept inside—or, in the warm summer months, on top of—his truck in order to safeguard it from thieves. The truck yard was a magnet for them. Just the week before, truckers had caught a drug addict trying to pilfer a battery, and had beaten him half to death. It wasn’t just addicts stealing, either. After seven months without work, people were desperately short on cash, not only the truckers but the entire ecosystem that depended on their wages: trucking assistants, mechanics, tire salesmen, hotel owners, fruit vendors, truck artists, and butchers. “Even the hashish dealers are suffering!” Azim exclaimed. No one had expected the supply-line closure to last so long. The Pakistani government had shut down the route once before, after a similar incident in 2010 when a NATO helicopter killed three Pakistani soldiers at a border checkpoint, but the ban lasted for only 11 days. There was just too much money involved. This time around, however, weeks had turned into months, and Azim and his friends were beginning to wonder if the border would ever reopen. By 2012, the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan had reached its lowest point since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, and negotiations over the supply line had become entangled in deeper, more intractable issues. Pakistan wanted an end to the CIA’s unilateral spying and assassination missions on its soil, and the United States was fed up with Pakistan’s clandestine support for militant groups that were targeting U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan. In public, however, Pakistan stuck to a single key demand: It wanted an apology for the deaths of its soldiers, which the United States insisted were accidental. But, in the wake of May 2011 U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, just down the road from the country’s military academy, anti-Pakistan sentiment was so high in the U.S. Congress that the Obama administration balked. Both countries’ stubbornness cost them dearly. The Pentagon estimated that it was paying the aforemen7

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tioned $100 million per month extra to send its supplies to Afghanistan by air or through the longer northern land route via the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Finally, on July 3, 2012, a deal was brokered whereby the United States expressed its “regrets” and Pakistan announced that the lines would reopen. I arrived in Karachi two weeks after the deal was struck, expecting to find truckers like Azim in a joyous mood. But the supply lines had yet to reopen. Security in Pakistan’s tribal regions was so bad that the oil contractors—whose trucks went off like giant bombs when attacked—refused to budge until the situation improved. The container truck drivers, while less concerned about security, were on strike until they received money from NATO’s subcontractors for the time they had spent idle. Azim and I walked through the narrow alleys between the parked tankers, stepping aside to avoid porters shouldering yokes with slopping tins of used motor oil. It was like watching the gears of a giant, brokendown machine that was beginning to creak back to life. The rust and dirt that had accumulated on the vehicles were evidence of deeper mechanical issues—tires that had gone flat, engines locked solid, batteries and spare parts that had been sold off to make ends meet. The drivers needed money to fix their trucks, Azim told me, but that money would have to come from the contractors, who in turn were waiting, like all of Shireen Jinnah, for money from NATO. I would have to wait too.

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O HOW DOES a container of supplies or tanker of oil destined for U.S. or NATO troops make it to Afghanistan? The system is highly complex and constantly evolving, but in essence it works as follows: Using public funds, the U.S. government or NATO logistics command puts out a tender in Washington, D.C., or Brussels, which is in turn bid on by a host of multinational corporations that specialize in supplying the military occupation in Afghanistan (and formerly in Iraq)—companies like the logistics giant Supreme and the Danish shipping line Maersk. The contract might be to transport communications equipment from Europe or to supply a fixed amount of goods and services to military bases in Afghanistan. Supreme, whose contracts in Afghanistan were estimated to be worth $8 billion between 2005 and 2011, handles the main U.S. and NATO logistics contract. 8

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It is an end-to-end supplier, meaning that it sources frozen hamburger in, say, Malaysia, packs it into a refrigerated container, hires a ship to bring that container to Karachi, has it trucked into, say, Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, and runs the facility and staff that unpack, flip, and serve the burger. Other companies supply fuel or, like Liberty Global Logistics, transport roll-on-roll-off vehicle cargo. Below the multinational corporations are the Pakistani logistics companies subcontracted to deliver cargo from Karachi to military bases in Afghanistan. They’re known locally as simply “contractors,” and they come from Pakistan’s business elite, which means they are mostly ethnic Punjabis and Urdu-speaking muhajirs—unlike the truckers, who are almost all Pashtuns from the borderlands—and have close links to the military and political establishment. The contractors tend to be a media-savvy and wary group, fearful not just of negative attention for their involvement with the unpopular U.S. war effort, but also of kidnapping and extortion, which have become highly lucrative businesses in Karachi. Everyone from criminal gangs associated with political parties to the Taliban has gotten involved, and businessmen have come to dread receiving calls from Google Voice and other untraceable Internet phone services. In Karachi, through a personal contact I met the owner of a Pakistani contracting company who agreed to speak with me as long as I didn’t reveal his identity. Sipping scotch and soda at his home in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, he regaled me with stories of the wild years, when the floodgates really opened: the U.S. troop surge from 2009 to 2012. There was no denying it, the war in Afghanistan was great for business, he told me, and the worse things got, the more money there was to be made for those who were clever and connected enough to survive in a cutthroat, highly politicized industry. At the height of the surge in 2010, there were 140,000 foreign troops deployed in Afghanistan, plus about 90,000 private contractors employed by the U.S. Department of Defense alone. The Afghan army and police were put on a crash expansion to 350,000, which meant that their arms and infrastructure had to be shipped in from abroad too. The construction business went wild in Afghanistan, building roads, schools, hospitals, but mostly military bases—approximately 1,500 U.S. and NATO military installations of all types—including megabases like 9

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Kandahar Airfield, whose population peaked at about 30,000 troops and contractors. At KAF, as it is known, temperatures can reach 120 degrees in the summer, but gas-powered generators ran air conditioners in every tent or building, and the cafeterias stocked ice cream, hot wings, and steaks shipped in frozen from overseas in generator-powered refrigerated containers. By 2011, the U.S. military was spending almost $100 billion per year on the troop deployment in Afghanistan. “It’s big business,” the Karachi contractor told me. “The people who run it are like mafia.” Those were fat days for the trucking industry, before security problems and the deteriorating U.S.-Pakistan relationship became such a headache. According to a Pakistani government report, of the half-million containers that traveled through Pakistan into Afghanistan between 2005 and 2010, 166,949—one-third—carried U.S. military cargo, and 52,929 of them had NATO supplies. Virtually all of them were unloaded in Karachi, where they were handed over to Pakistani contractors, who were responsible for delivering them safely to Afghanistan and hiring private security escorts if need be. This torrent of wealth had corrosive effects on Pakistan’s dire corruption problem, a systemic rot that threatens to destroy its once-strong institutions. Of all the many unintended consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, one of the strangest is that it precipitated what is likely the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history. In 2010, an anonymously sourced TV report claimed that thousands of shipping containers that had ostensibly been imported to supply the United States and NATO were actually being unloaded in Pakistan with the collusion of customs officials. The Pakistani Supreme Court, which takes an activist role in the country, appointed a former police officer, Shoaib Suddle, to lead an inquiry into the report. What Suddle found was fraud of almost unbelievable scale and brazenness. Suddle requested data on shipping container imports from both the Pakistani customs department and the National Logistics Cell, a Pakistani military-run organization that coordinates Afghanistan-bound transport. Whether through incompetence or malice, the information provided by both groups was “absolutely nonsensical,” Suddle told me when I visited him in his office in Islamabad. “They had received thousands of trucks at the border which had never left Karachi.” 10

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His inquiry might have ended there, but Suddle went to the three private companies that load and unload containers in the port of Karachi and found that they had been keeping detailed and accurate records for their own business purposes. By adding up these figures, Suddle was able to piece together a picture of the movement of all Afghanistan-bound containers across Pakistan. Operating under the assumption that it is physically impossible for a container to travel over the mountainous, 1,000-mile road to Afghanistan, be unpacked, and then return to the terminal in less than eight days, Suddle found that between 2007 and 2010 almost 8,000 containers had impossibly short transit times. Some had even left and “returned” on the same day. There was only one possibility: that the containers were being unpacked in Pakistan. What had been inside them? In Karachi, I met with a senior retired customs collector who worked at the department at the time of the container scam and agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity. He explained that there were actually two separate logistics chains, one for U.S. forces and one for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Both of them were exempt from customs inspections in Karachi— the Pakistan government was not allowed to open the containers—but it was the NATO system, he said, that had been rife with abuse. This was because the American embassy in Islamabad had taken responsibility for designating which incoming containers belonged to them, and therefore were not subject to customs inspection, as well as for ensuring their passage into Afghanistan. In early 2002, ISAF established a team, called a forward mounting base, in Karachi to do the same thing, but within a year that function was shifted back to Kabul. “We wanted ISAF to decide who could take responsibility and claim each container,” the former customs collector told me. “But they said they couldn’t, and that each [NATO] embassy should give the authorization.” The container scam was simple. An individual—either someone at a legitimate company or someone who had created a fake one—managed to get a bogus shipment designated as part of the special customs-exempt NATO scheme. To do that, the culprit had to forge or scam a certificate from a NATO-country embassy or else obtain a certificate from the Afghan embassy, which, according to the customs collector, would sell them 11

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for $1,000 to $2,000 per container. That container would enter Pakistan but never leave the country. Since NATO-designated containers could not be inspected by Pakistani customs in Karachi, it was possible to bring in anything: weapons, explosives, alcohol, anything. “There was a container caught by the Malir police that was full of weapons,” the customs collector said, referring to an area east of Karachi. “But mostly, we think, it was liquor. They used to declare it as mineral water, and we couldn’t examine it.” The sale of alcohol is restricted in Pakistan, and foreign imports are heavily taxed. Of course, the higher the tariffs, the greater the benefit of smuggling the stuff. Suddle’s report details the case of a fake company called MS Lunar that used fake ISAF letters and an authentic certificate from the Afghan consulate in Karachi to import 52 containers from 2008 to 2010—most of which were later documented as having crossed the border, at least on paper. After receiving a tipoff, the police busted one of the containers in Peshawar in April 2010. The container, listed as having 40,000 cans of soda, was found to contain 36,000 cans of beer and 4,800 bottles of scotch—which should have brought in about $150,000 in customs duties. At black market rates in Islamabad, the booze would have had a final street value of close to $1 million. And that’s just one example of the 8,000 containers Suddle identified with impossible transit times and 15,000 that had very improbable ones. Of course, plenty of containers might have been unstuffed and returned within a more plausible timeframe, or never returned at all. The businessmen he interviewed estimated the portion of fraudulent transit trade at between 10 and 40 percent, which would translate to 100,000 or more smuggled containers. These figures suggest that the value of the container scam must have been, over the years, in the billions of dollars. “It’s the largest scam in the history of Pakistan,” Suddle told me.

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WASN’T HAVING MUCH luck finding someone to take me to Afghanistan. To kill time, one day Azim and I went for a walk around Shireen Jinnah. We headed out of the truck yard, crossed back over the main road, and entered Shireen Jinnah’s crowded market. The streets were 12

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A young Pashtun boy runs down the road in Shireen Jinnah.

choked with a weaving mass of pedestrians, bicycles, and motorbikes. Above them were hundreds of signs in Urdu and English, fronting small, one-room shops and advertising lawyers, dentists, and traders. The neighborhood had an unfinished look, with piles of leftover cinderblocks and clots of desiccated, grayish refuse accumulating in corners. Here and there you could catch a glimpse of a woman in a colorful shalwar kameez or powder-blue burqa, but mostly the crowd was men: men loitering, men striding with fruit-filled shopping bags and tanks of propane, men gathered in knots around half-disassembled motorcycles, men conversing in pairs, men staring at their cell phones or just into space, everyone betraying, in their languid motions, the hunger and thirst pangs of the Ramadan fast. We turned down a side alley, and the hubbub of the market faded. There were kids swinging cricket bats and calling to each other—not in Karachi’s lingua franca of Urdu, but in Pashto, the language spoken in the mountainous area straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The region was famously divided by British imperialist Mortimer Durand in 1893 as a way of establishing a weakened Afghan buffer state 13

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between the advancing Russian empire and British India. In the process, Durand also split the Pashtun community in two. Today, Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, where about 30 million Pashtuns make up some 15 percent of the population, they are a marginalized group—concentrated in the provinces of Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)—with lower education and higher poverty rates than Pakistanis in the lowland areas. “It’s become like the FATA,” Azim joked, as we passed the Pashtun kids playing cricket, and glimpsed a woman in an all-enveloping burqa at the end of a dirt lane. In the distance, over high exterior walls surrounding nearby houses, we could see the tops of the big cranes at the container terminal where little more than sand and mangrove forests had once stood. Although it was hard to believe while looking at this urban sprawl, Karachi had once been a small fishing town inhabited mainly by ethnic Sindhis and Baloch. As part of British India, the city grew into a modest port and trading center, and it was actually majority non-Muslim at the time of partition in 1947. Karachi was initially selected as the capital for the newly formed state of Pakistan, and an influx of Muslim refugees caused the city’s population to swell to more than a million by the end of the decade. These Urdu-speaking muhajirs, as the refugees were known, came to dominate Karachi’s economy and politics, but recent years have seen increased competition from newly arrived ethnic groups, like the Pashtuns, leading in turn to waves of street and gang violence. Shireen Jinnah, which is controlled by the Awami National Party, a largely Pashtun secular nationalist group, and monitored heavily by Pakistani security forces due to the vital oil terminals nearby, serves as a refuge from that violence for Pashtuns like Azim. The area was first settled when Pashtun laborers—the impoverished tribal areas have long served as a source of work for the wealthier lowlands—were brought here to construct the port after the partition. In the 1950s, Pakistan’s first military dictator, Ayub Khan, decided to modernize the transportation sector through a combination of government-funded projects and regulation. He granted licenses to businessmen from his own area, the northwestern frontier district of Hazara, which borders the FATA. Other Pashtuns who worked as 14

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itinerant merchants and cross-border smugglers were also well positioned to take part. As Pakistan’s population exploded—from 37.5 million in 1950 to more than 180 million today—and the Soviet- and U.S.-backed wars in Afghanistan flooded that country with weapons and narcotics, the transport industry grew into a vibrant sector of the economy—it’s now up to an estimated 10 percent of GDP, with deep links to the criminal underworld, the military, and the conflict in the tribal areas. Shireen Jinnah and Kiamari became the hubs of that big business, and of the Pashtuns who run it. In fact, Karachi today has the world’s largest urban Pashtun population, an estimated 5 to 6 million. The sense of distance between the city and the borderlands has faded, with mobile phones in every village allowing relatives to keep in touch, and buses leaving Karachi at all hours of the day and arriving in Peshawar, the main border hub, 24 hours later. People come here seeking economic opportunity and an escape from the strictures of village life. The city has its own kind of lawlessness. “If people commit a crime in the tribal areas, they run away to Karachi,” Azim told me. It works the other way, too: If a Pashtun truck or bus driver gets into a traffic accident in Karachi and someone is badly injured or killed, the labor supply chain springs into action in reverse, and that evening he is whisked away back to the tribal borderlands, where the regular police cannot operate by law. On the street, we ran into Azim and Sohail’s friend Mehboob, a Pashtun working in Shireen Jinnah as a truck artist. Tall and skinny, with a bald spot that he was careful to hide in photoshopped portraits of himself he liked to make, Mehboob had first come to Shireen Jinnah in search of work in 1998, on a bus from the border town of Quetta, more than 400 miles to the north. He had gotten his start painting stars and starlets on cinema billboards, but when the cinema owners switched to using photographs, he got into the truck art business instead. In order to escape the heat and Ramadan languor, we decided to go to Mehboob’s apartment, which was nearby, on the way surreptitiously buying some cookies and a bottle of Mountain Dew despite the public fast. Mehboob’s apartment was a single square room, about 12 feet across, bare except for a mat at one end, an ancient-looking computer sitting on the carpet across from it, and a few film posters on the wall. He set a glass 15

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in front of us and filled it with the Mountain Dew. Famished and thirsty, we took turns chugging it down and then blinked at each other as the sugar rush buffeted our brains. “Tell him about the time you painted my truck Telenor blue,” Azim said. Telenor is a Norwegian company that operates one of the biggest cellphone networks in Pakistan. The year before, Mehboob had painted Azim’s entire tanker in the company’s distinctive bright blue color scheme, with “Telenor” in yellow letters. On the side were a moon and a dead tree being consumed by flames, while the back panel featured a tree with a dove sitting in it. The trunk had “I love you” carved on it in English. The company had not paid Azim to put the logo on his truck, or even given him permission. He just liked it. “Oh brother, that was the best job! Whenever I passed the bazaar, people would call and shout to me,” Azim said, smiling in recollection. “That vehicle was so beautiful, you could look at it all day.” To be honest, Mehboob had sort of a crude pop style in comparison to Pakistan’s traditional truck artists. Ever since Pashtun truckers first started careening around, there has been a tradition of elaborately decorating the vehicles. The first trucks that were widely used in Pakistan were British Bedfords imported after World War I. Many of these are still in use on more rural and isolated routes, where they are known as “rocket trucks.” They were eventually customized to each have a high wooden prow on the front of the truck bed—known as the taj, or crown—as well as large decorative bumpers and wooden paneling inside and outside the cabin, all of which are decorated in increasingly lavish ways. Today, owners spend thousands of dollars to decorate their trucks, getting them painted in highly intricate patterns and affixing them with embossed metal plates cut out in the shapes of birds and animals. The bumpers are hung with hundreds of chains that dangle just above the road, each affixed with a tiny bell giving the vehicles their common English name: “jingle trucks.” There is no clear commercial logic to spending these sums on decorations; the practice instead seems to be linked to the shrine culture of the Sufis, adherents of a mystic form of Sunni Islam popular in Pakistan, who venerate holy sites with decorations as a way of accumulating spiritual blessings. “The idea is, if we don’t honor the truck, it won’t give back to us,” Durriya Kazi, an artist and professor at the University of 16

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Karachi, told me. Mehboob’s Telenor blue paint job came to a sad end. Pakistan State Oil (PSO), which licenses and regulates the tanker trucks, had started enforcing uniform paint designs recently, and when Azim took his truck to get his registration renewed, PSO officials had made him repaint it in the company’s standard yellow and green. Now Mehboob limited himself

Pashtuns dominate Karachi’s privately owned system of buses that run throughout the city, like the highly decorated one here.

to painting floral designs or small landscape panels, or writing lines from Urdu and Pashto poetry. Alpine scenery and eagles are popular, since most of the truckers come from mountain villages. Modern container trucks tend to be drabber, since the lack of a rear bed eliminates most of the design space—a testament, perhaps, to the homogenizing aesthetic of modern capitalism. The truck art points to an alternate economic logic that exists within the Pakistani trucker’s world, one based on the moral economy peculiar to Pashtun tribal society. The transport industry in Pakistan is not a free market per se, but rather is divided up into what you could call tribal and ethnic oligopolies. For example, the dump truck business is exclusive to the Wazir tribe, from the northwest region of Waziristan. Oil tanker own17

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ers are almost all Afridis, from the northern border town of Landi Kotal. The NATO container business is a little more freewheeling, but the owners and drivers are principally Shinwaris, a tribe that straddles the border between Landi Kotal, in Pakistan, and Jalalabad, in Afghanistan. This is because Pakistan’s trucking industry, which operates in dangerous, lawless terrain in the absence of functioning legal or modern financial systems, relies on the fabric of Pashtun society in order to do business. Pashtuns work with their relatives or with people from their own villages, whom they know they can hold responsible for their actions and promises—if a business partner fails to keep his word, his family can be held to account. In lieu of credit scores or court-enforced sanctions, it is this web of reciprocal obligations and punitive sanctions that holds the truckers together. Azim is an Afridi from Landi Kotal. He got his start in trucking at the age of 14, working as an assistant or “conductor” for his cousins, who owned a couple of trucks that plied the local routes. That was how he learned to drive, before he got his heavy vehicle license when he was 20. A decade ago, he might have continued working for the rest of his life in the tribal areas, trying to earn enough money to buy his own vehicle, but the sudden arrival of the NATO supply trade changed the game. And Karachi was where the money was. Faced with the demand to expand their fleets dramatically after 2001, contractors turned to the “commission kar” system (“kar” is Urdu for “work”), whereby they fronted down payments for trucks—the full cost could exceed $50,000 for high-end oil tankers—to their drivers, who were in turn obligated to work exclusively for those contractors. With drivers earning between $500 and $1,000 per trip, it took years of work to pay off a truck. The system was a way of binding the truckers to the contractors at usurious rates and, equally importantly, of eliminating the moral hazard of sending drivers out on the road with valuable equipment and cargo and no guarantee of return. Under this new system, drivers shared the risk and responsibility for the trucks, an advantage for the contractors at a time when the volume and chaos of the NATO boom made proper oversight all but impossible. For the drivers’ part, the system was an opportunity to rise out of poverty and become an owner, a man of consequence, albeit a 18

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heavily indebted one. “People who couldn’t even afford a donkey are now the owners of trucks,” Azim told me. He himself had only bought his truck a year ago. Al-Haj, the largest fuel contractor in Pakistan, had fronted him the $45,000 he needed for the down payment, and he now looked forward to a good four or five years of work to pay it off. Then, the disaster of the supply-line closure struck. Azim had to borrow extra money just to pay his living costs, and for the past seven months he had not been back to his home village. “I was married a year ago, but no kids,” he said. “I’ve been sleeping with my truck.” Yet Azim confessed he had mixed feelings about the supply lines reopening. There had been so much anti-NATO sentiment in Pakistan since the closure—much of it whipped up by the religious political parties with the tacit encouragement of the military—that he feared the supply lines would turn into a shooting gallery. Even before the closure, trucks would sometimes get stoned by locals in border towns like Chaman. “They say our fuel is for the drones in Afghanistan,” he said. The Taliban had publicly promised to slaughter any trucker who worked for NATO. They especially loved to hit tankers. Already, Azim had witnessed many attacks on the remote, mountainous roads near the border. Once, near the Torkham crossing, a bomb was placed on a row of about 30 tankers. “I’ve never seen such a fire like that in my life,” he told me. His friend was killed by shrapnel from the explosion. Other truckers have burned to death. “Sometimes, when we get back the bodies of our friends, there is nothing left but bones,” Azim said. The road through Pakistan was now more dangerous than the Afghan side of the border, and Azim was certain the situation would get worse. But he had no choice. “I’m afraid,” he said. “But I bought this vehicle, and I have to pay back all the money that I borrowed.”

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2.

FLATLAND ROADS

Jahangir and Ahmad’s 1993 Nissan diesel truck.

I

RETURNED TO KARACHI after Ramadan, hoping once more to find a truck that would take me to Afghanistan. The oil tankers still weren’t moving because of security concerns, and Azim Khan had found a job ferrying fuel to the airport in order to earn a little money while he waited. That left the container trucks, which had finally started moving supplies across the border again, after the strike had more or less fizzled. By now, I had been searching for nearly two months, and my Pakistani visa was running out. Given that it could take four or five days to get to the border, I had to leave as soon as possible. The trouble was finding someone I could trust who would also be willing to take me—at the risk of getting in trouble with any police or soldiers we might encounter. After I arrived in Karachi, I learned of an additional complication. Heavy rains had flooded the highway west of Sindh, cutting off one of the 20

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two main truck routes over the mountains into Afghanistan. The shorter route, which was now impassable, was about 600 miles long and went through western Pakistan into the sparsely populated and dangerous province of Balochistan, up through the Khojak Pass to the border town of Chaman, across into Kandahar in Afghanistan, and then on to one of the many military bases in the country’s south. This Balochistan route was faster but more treacherous, on account of the ongoing insurgency there by Baloch nationalists as well as the threat of Taliban attacks. Bandits and hijackers lay in wait in the lonely, lawless stretches around Sibi. The second route went north, up through Peshawar, and into the tribal areas, then crossed via the famous Khyber Pass into eastern Afghanistan and onward to Kabul. This route was about 1,000 miles long but better secured, though that came with its own hassles as the police demanded heavy bribes from the NATO truck drivers. It was also, like the rest of the FATA, generally off-limits to foreigners like me. To enter the FATA, I needed a special permit called a “no-objection certificate,” or NOC. For months—in the hopes of avoiding the Balochistan route—I had been coaxing the Ministry of Information to issue me my NOC. They were friendly enough but frank about the fact that the real deciding power lay with the military. Eventually, I managed to meet a senior officer from the military’s press wing. When I explained that I wanted to travel with Pakistani truckers, the officer was surprisingly amenable to the idea. “Those fellows have a tough time of it, no doubt,” he said. The military gave its blessing; all that was left was for the civilian bureaucracy to process the paperwork. I had been calling the ministry every couple of days for the past month, and each time I was assured the process was almost finished. With little more than a week left on my visa, I couldn’t wait any longer—I would have to seize the first decent truck ride I could find and hope my NOC would come through while I was on the road. After turning down a truck hauling a flatbed trailer loaded with Humvees for the Afghan army, I was introduced to a lanky young man from the border town of Landi Kotal whom I’ll call Nadir Shah. (I’ve changed the names of Nadir and everyone who was involved with my trip from this point forward, so as not to get them in any trouble for helping transport me.) Nadir, who had a square, curly beard to match his Grecian profile, 21

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worked as an administrator for one of the major international shipping lines and spoke good but idiosyncratic English after several years working for the company on military bases in Afghanistan, where he mingled with rough-and-tumble contractors from around the world. His exposure to curse words in various languages had not roughened his character, however, and he was as eager as a puppy in his hospitality once he set eyes on me. When he heard that I was looking to cross to Afghanistan in a truck, he promised to find someone trustworthy from his village to take me. “I will be very careful because there are many drivers who are… how can I say this?” he said, his fingers plucking at the air for the word. “Ah, gay.” At the same time, I had been hunting for a Pashtun translator willing to accompany me on the trip. Sohail, understandably, wanted nothing to do with it. After being turned down by half the fixers in Karachi, I finally met Sardar, a 29-year-old sociology student. Sardar was born in Karachi, but his parents had been refugees from Afghanistan, so he had both Afghan and Pakistani documents. A close friend in Kabul had recommended him to me, and, best of all, Sardar spoke not only Pashto, the language of the truckers, but also decent Dari, the Persian dialect used in Kabul and northern Afghanistan. Having Sardar as a companion would make it easier for me to pass as a Persian-speaking Afghan when the situation required. Sardar, who was married with a 4-month-old son, had his own doubts about the sanity of my trip, but he was saving up to study for a Ph.D. in Malaysia and needed the money I would pay him for accompanying me. “When I was growing up, my father used to do work for an American man who lived in Karachi,” he told me. “He did strange things. He would shave his head, put on a turban, and travel around the country. He would even bring camels to his house, and one day when I was visiting, my father told me, ‘This crazy man is riding those camels to Balochistan!’” We both laughed. Sardar looked at me. “When I told my family that you were going in a truck to Afghanistan, they asked me, ‘Is he like that?’” Sardar was finally convinced when I took him to meet Nadir, and it turned out that one of Sardar’s cousins, a journalist in Shireen Jinnah, knew Nadir well enough. This was crucial, because though the legendary hospitality of the Pashtuns was a good enough starting point, it was not something you should rely on entirely, given that ransoms for Westerners 22

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fetched a lifetime’s worth of earnings, the kind of money that could lift a family out poverty and out of the battlefield of the tribal areas. As Sardar knew well, it was necessary not only to rely on a gut assessment of someone’s character but also to arrange a plausible chain of badla—revenge. If anything were to happen to us, Sardar’s family would be able to take vengeance on Nadir in Karachi. By this point, Nadir had selected a driving team for us: two brothers from his village in Landi Kotal, Jahangir and Ahmad, who were headed to Kabul with a container of dry foodstuff. It was listed in the shipping manifest as cooking oil and biscuits, though since we couldn’t look inside the sealed container, it could just as well have been weapons or whiskey. It was a private contract for an Afghan company, rather than NATO, but we would be traveling the same route, and at this point I couldn’t be choosy. In any case, any militants we encountered weren’t likely to make a distinction. “Often the Taliban does not stop first to see which trucks are NATO and which are private,” Nadir pointed out. That evening, Sardar and I went over to Nadir’s dera, or guesthouse, which was a sort of bachelor pad in Shireen Jinnah where a rotating cast of truckers from his village stayed when they were in town. There, over sickly sweet energy drinks, Sardar and I were introduced to Jahangir, the elder brother and the truck’s driver. He was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and skull cap, had a slight build, and looked to be in his mid-thirties. He had russet-colored hair, short-trimmed at the sides, a cropped mustache, and salt-and-pepper beard stubble. There were crow’s feet in the olive skin at the corners of his eyes, and his mouth carried a faint, perpetually mocking smile. He was heavily stoned that night, his eyes slightly glazed over. Nadir explained that two strangers would be riding for 1,000 miles across the tribal areas in his truck for the next week. “OK sure, no problem,” Jahangir replied indifferently. Early the next morning, Sardar brought a taxi to my house in Karachi. Crossing the Lyari Expressway flyover, we followed the highway to the industrial outskirts of the city, passing a burnt-out garment factory where 314 workers had died in a fire just the month before, and stopped at a weigh station along the Northern Bypass road outside Karachi. Ahmad, Jahangir’s younger brother, was waiting for us there. He was at least a head 23

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taller than Jahangir but nearly as slender, and he had the same narrow, square jaw and finely wrought features, though his lips were fuller. We exchanged greetings and then hauled our bags over to a dirt lot facing an open-air restaurant fronted by a row of charpais, low wooden bedsteads with twine netting stretched over them that we would find at every truck stop along the route. The truck was parked in the nearly empty lot. It was a 1993 Nissan with a six-cylinder diesel engine, which Jahangir had bought four years earlier. It had three main parts: the cab and midsection, which were joined, and the long shipping container, which sat on a trailer attached to the midsection. The cab, above the two front wheels, was flat-nosed and painted a metallic royal blue, with a broad orange racing stripe beneath the windows. Behind the cab was the midsection, a low, flat part with eight double-stacked wheels that supported the swiveling metal trailer hitch. The midsection, which was part of the same chassis, had an enclosed metal extension that was built out of the back of the cab, with a small sliding door at the rear, which opened into a space big enough for a person to lie down in, though it was filled with gear and spare tire rims. The midsection had once been richly decorated, but by now the paint was badly faded. On each side was a large, silver tin star encircled by a fan of embossed metal set with multicolored plastic disks and, below that, a blue-and-white panel painted with an osprey in flight. The bottom-most panel featured a pastel-hued alpine scene with ice-cream-cone conifers, blue mountains, an orange sky, and a steep, red-roofed chalet with an open doorway that resembled that of a doghouse. A narrow steel platform was bolted onto the truck’s rusting roof, its forward slanting sides giving it the look of a silver tiara crowing the vehicle. The shipping container, which sat on a teal-colored trailer, was the same blue as the cab. The logo WAN HAI—the name of a Taiwanese shipping line—was painted on its corrugated sides in alternating red and blue letters. The back doors of the container were fastened with the yellow and blue Pakistani customs seals, which looked like plastic padlocks. Disappointingly, there were no bells. It looked more than a little rusty and decrepit, in fact. After placing our bags in the truck, Sardar and I sat down with Ahmad on one of the charpais and had a breakfast of fried eggs and the fried 24

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flatbread known as paratha. Jahangir joined us. Both he and his brother seemed strangely incurious about Sardar and me or why we were traveling with them, though in retrospect, since Nadir had not told them I was a foreigner and we were speaking Persian together, they must have assumed we were just hitching a ride back to Afghanistan in order to avoid paying bus fare. After taking tea, we climbed on board the truck to begin our journey. It was still early in the morning on a Friday, and the roads were not crowded. The cab was dismayingly cramped. Behind the driver and passenger’s seats was a narrow bunk, just big enough for one person to lie down. With two people, our options were either to sit side by side, with our legs splayed out into the space between the two front seats, or to turn and face each other, with our backs reclined but our knees drawn up and feet touching. Our upper and lower bodies couldn’t be comfortable at the same time. I was expecting at least four or five days of this before we reached the border. On our way out of Karachi, we were quickly introduced to two of the trip’s principal impediments: bribery and breakdown. As we passed through a cloverleaf that connected the Northern Bypass to the highway leading northeast, a Suzuki motorcycle swung in front of us, bearing two tubby traffic cops in white uniforms. The cop in back clambered down, swaggered over, and spoke sharply to Jahangir through the driver’s window, taking the truck’s papers. Ignoring the folded hundred-rupee note that Jahangir offered, the officer made him get out of the truck and began an angry pantomime. Through the front window we watched them gesticulate—the cop’s motions domineering, Jahangir’s placatory. Ahmad looked mildly concerned. Finally, they exchanged the truck’s documents for some cash, and Jahangir got back inside. “How much?” Ahmad asked, after we started moving again. “Four hundred,” his brother replied. That was about $4, which Ahmad said was a little higher than a typical bribe since the cop had noticed that their registration papers were for hauling oil tanks, not containers. “He doesn’t have a driver’s license, either,” Ahmad said. Jahangir corrected him, explaining that he did have a license—just not with him. It turned out the traffic police in Karachi had taken it earlier in the week; Jahangir had been stopped without any cash 25

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on him, and he didn’t feel like going to the station and paying a bribe to get the license back since it was almost expired. Neither brother seemed concerned about the fact that Jahangir was about to drive a truck across the Afghan border without a license. “They don’t need papers,” Sardar said, seeing the expression on my face. “They know that the only thing that can solve their problem is money.” We pulled onto the main, four-lane highway that led to Hyderabad, Sindh’s second-largest city, and then north to the Pakistani heartland of Punjab along the Indus River. Not long after passing outer Karachi’s dilapidated factories and car dealerships, we pulled off into a wide dirt lot, where several other trucks were parked. The muffler needed to be fixed, Jahangir explained. He promised us it wouldn’t take long. The mechanic’s shop was decorated in a style I like to call South Asian road pit—a look that would become very familiar in the coming days. It was part of a long row of squat one-room whitewashed-concrete shops with garage doors that came down at night. Extending from the front of the shops was a line of awnings cobbled together from metal bars, wooden poles, straw mats, drooping flaps of canvas, and a bedraggled acacia tree, which shaded a scattering of charpais. Above the awning of the mechanic’s shop, a plastic banner had been stretched out on bamboo, displaying a blue truck racing down the highway and, in yellow Pashto letters, the words “Tank-Waziristan Guesthouse Suspension Maker.” Under the awning, dangling from metal poles and wires, propped up on sticks, or sitting on the hard-packed dirt floor, was a collection of sundry objects that gave the shop a post-apocalyptic feel: stamped decorative metal truck plates, including a red rose; coils of fat rubberized welding cords; a stack of rusting suspension leaf springs, big like dinosaur ribs; an ancient box-shaped power distributor with a pair of painted pheasants; rows of multicolored jacks; an anvil; a rack of flat piston casings hung like hunting trophies; several grease-encrusted oil drums; and a spindly chair welded out of wobbly iron bars that might have been designed by Giacometti. The shop’s smeared whitewashed walls were painted with green and red script: “Welcome,” it said, then the proprietor’s name, Saif ur Rehman, his phone number, and “Pardes,” a Pashto word for someone who lives away from home. It’s a sad word, more melancholy than “traveler” or “stranger.” 26

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In order for the mechanic to get at the engine, the entire cab of the truck had to be lifted and canted forward on a hinge, powered by a hydraulic jack, until the front windshield was pitched at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Jahangir and Ahmad watched the mechanic spot-weld the muffler back onto the exhaust pipe with an acetylene torch, while Sardar and I wandered around the truck, inspecting the rusted suspension and the flaps of rubber flaking off the tires. On the back of the trailer, Jahangir had painted in Pashto, “Their claim of building the world is false, as long as the homes of the Pashtuns are destroyed.” (“It’s about the foreigners,” Jahangir explained.) The right rear mud flap said, “Bird of Chaman.” The left read, “Flower of the Khyber.” After twenty minutes, the muffler was reattached. We got back on board and started to pull out onto the road. But Jahangir repeatedly shoved the long stick shift forward only to receive a grinding sound—the transmission wouldn’t shift into second gear. We stopped and got down again, jacking up the cab. The mechanic came sauntering out and squatted down to peer at the gear box. “Don’t worry, it won’t take long to fix,” he said, and then promptly left for Friday prayers. We spent another two hours lounging on the charpais, swatting flies and watching the truck broil under a sun so hot that it seemed to set the dirt of the yard ablaze with white light. I could feel time thickening around me, as if my heartbeat and thoughts had slowed, as I adjusted to a pace of life that was very different from my own scheduled and regulated existence. There were long days and nights ahead, and I knew from my past travels in the borderlands that I would need to welcome monotony as a form of relaxation in order to remain sane. The matter of the NOC continued to weigh on me, but it was Friday afternoon and nothing would happen until Monday at the earliest. For now, inside the truck I was relatively safe from discovery. The police weren’t interested in passengers, just in extracting as many bribes as possible from Jahangir and Ahmad. The first real challenge would be in a few days when we would reach the Kohat Tunnel, a 1.2-mile passage that cuts through the mountains south of Peshawar. After multiple militant attacks in the tunnel in recent years, the Pakistani army had introduced stringent checkpoints at either end. Their soldiers did not take petty bribes. 27

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Finally, the mechanic returned on his motorcycle and changed back into his grease-stained shalwar. Placing a pan under the gearbox to catch the oil, he opened it and adjusted the gears, as a scrawny, dark-skinned Christian boy scampered about fetching him tools. “It’s fixed for now, but you’ll need to get it done properly when you come back,” the mechanic warned when he was finished.

A mechanic repairs the truck’s muffler in Sindh province.

We got back on the highway and headed northeast to Hyderabad. It was now late afternoon, and we had barely made any progress since leaving the restaurant that morning. And we were hardly speeding along. The truck, whose 260-horsepower engine had seen better days, was hauling 38 metric tons in the container and moved agonizingly slowly. It had six gears. On a flat stretch, after working slowly up through the gears over a mile, we might manage to break 30 miles per hour in sixth. But give it even the slightest incline or one of the frequent rough patches of tarmac, and our speed dropped dramatically. On steep hills, the truck would slow to a moderate walk or even a brisk crawl. Our average speed was about that of a fit bicyclist. Traffic in Pakistan drives on the left, British-style, but Jahangir kept 28

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the truck in the right-hand passing lane, where the asphalt was better and traffic swarmed past us. Even so, the truck jarred violently at the tiniest bumps, and in certain gears the engine itself shook the cabin mercilessly. (Later, I would find that my notes looked like the enigmatic scrawls of a drunk.) The heat outside continued unabated, even though it was late in the day. Possibly as a result of the busted muffler, the engine’s hot exhaust rose up around the back of the cab until the rear window became too hot to touch. The backseat of the cabin was like an oven. The heat and motion made us drowsy, but when I tried to rest my head in the back, I would wake up after a few minutes bathed in sweat and gasping for air. It was better to sit up in the middle, where we caught a bit of breeze from the windows. Ahmad rolled a spliff of hash and passed it to his older brother. Ahmad liked to smoke too but would never do so in front of Jahangir out of respect, even though they were only a few years apart in age. Jahangir was 34, though he looked older, and he had a son and a daughter; another son had died in infancy. Ahmad, 26, was unmarried. They had both grown up in the Khyber Pass town of Landi Kotal, where they lived in a large compound with more than 100 members of their extended family—the sons- and daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of Azam Khan, a now deceased itinerant merchant. Jahangir had bought the truck four years ago, after a decade-long apprenticeship as a conductor. Trucking was his family’s livelihood, which he risked each time he set out on the long road from Karachi to Kabul. The brothers originally started out hauling oil tanks for the NATO supply routes in 2008, earning upwards of $500 per run. They could make two runs in a month if all went well—good money in a country where the annual per capita income is about $1,250. After five months of waiting during the 2011-2012 supply line closure, Jahangir decided to switch to hauling private containers—far less lucrative, but at least it was work. Lately, with all the negative attention surrounding the NATO supply lines and protests from the religious political parties and militant groups, Ahmad and Jahangir were worried about the consequences of resuming their work on the supply line for the war. “No one will help us if our truck gets destroyed while we are working for NATO,” Jahangir said. As darkness fell, we lurched on into the night, our headlights illumi29

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nating an arc of pavement on the unlit highway, throwing shadows against the lush tropical foliage that hemmed us in. Fellow trucks traveled in their own pools of light, sometimes with little motorcycles drafting behind them like sucker fish, and occasionally a fast-moving vehicle, a Toyota Corolla or the shiny pickup truck of a landlord and his guards. At intervals along the side of the highway a police pickup and cops, wearing slovenly black uniforms and cradling Kalashnikovs, lurked like predators. “Sometimes they change their clothes and rob vehicles,” Jahangir said. This part of rural Sindh was the most dangerous stretch of road before the tribal areas. Whatever their day jobs, bandits came out on the road at night. Jahangir had once been accosted in a desolate area just up ahead in the city of Sukkur. Four men with Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by scarves, came out on the road and waved at him to stop. He put his head down below the dashboard and floored the accelerator. The bandits jumped aside and Jahangir escaped, but he had seen plenty of looted trucks beside the road in this area. An even worse place for banditry, he said, was the road in Balochistan on the way to Chaman and Kandahar in Afghanistan. There, you could be killed if you weren’t Baloch. The sun had set hours ago, but there was still no respite from the heat, and the air was humid and heavy with the scent of diesel exhaust and fetid rice fields. The road was badly potholed from the monsoon rains, and the cabin of the truck lurched violently. Jahangir smoked joint after joint. He blared a cassette of old Hindi music to stay alert and danced, swaggering his shoulders and swinging his fists to lyrics like, “Those who love cannot know fear/And those who fear cannot know love.” I looked at my watch— it was well past midnight. The lights from the highway swam in the liquid arc of the windshield. The heat and the motion and the blasting music made it impossible to sleep. There was nothing to do but stay up, watch the road, and try some of Jahangir’s hash.

I

AWOKE WITH LIGHT filtering through the thin fabric of a roughspun cotton blanket that was pulled over my head and tucked tightly around me. For a moment, I thought I was home in Kabul. Then I felt the checkerboard twine digging into my back, heard the buzzing of flies, and remembered that I was lying, fully clothed, on a charpai on the side 30

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of the road in rural Sindh. I was still for a moment, with the faint touch of flies landing on my face, vainly seeking the salt and moisture of my eyes, mouth, and nose. Flinging the blanket off, I sat up and saw that the truck yard was bathed in the flat light of midday. We had slept all morning after finally relenting at 4 a.m., when Jahangir began to fall asleep at the wheel, and pulling into a truck stop outside of Ranipur, just south of the Indus River. The row of charpais out front was filled at the time with sleeping truckers; now we were the only ones still here besides a few waiters. I got up to wash my face and use the foul-smelling outhouse, then sat down with Ahmad, Jahangir, and Sardar for a breakfast of sweetened green tea and packaged biscuits. We drove north for a couple of hours and then stopped again for a nap and to wait out the afternoon heat. This would be our schedule for the next few days. We woke up late and did a few of hours driving, then stopped for a mid-afternoon lunch and a nap. Once the heat of the day abated, we drove on through the evening with a second stop for a late dinner—the only full meal that Jahangir would eat. The end of the day was a marathon hash- and snuff-fueled session on the road that stretched as far into the night as Jahangir could stand before we collapsed, exhausted in the pre-dawn darkness, resting up to begin the cycle again. Sardar and I became connoisseurs of the truck stop, which was our only respite from the cramped monotony of the truck. Jahangir stopped only at restaurants owned by Afridis or, failing that, Shinwaris, a fellow border tribe. The clientele was mostly Pashtuns from the tribal areas, too. The basic layout never varied: a three-walled building, its front open to the road, filled with rows and columns of charpais, some indoors, some outside, with low tables between them, each set with a plastic water cooler and tin mug. At lunchtime and in the evenings the restaurants filled up with truckers, chatting in groups or reclining lazily, smoking and spitting snuff. “Alaka, chai rowla!” Jahangir would call above the din. (“Boy, bring tea!” though it doesn’t sound so rude in Pashto.) Glass mugs of steaming green tea would arrive, and then Jahangir would drawl out our order: perhaps rosht, a salty stewed meat; or kabuli palaw, rice with mutton, raisins, and carrots; or even karahi, chunks of chicken or mutton chopped and served 31

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sautéed in a pan with peppers, tomatoes, and oil, always accompanied by freshly baked naan, flat and flaky from the oven. Breaking off hunks of the bread, we took turns scooping from the communal dish. In the evenings, as the hours passed, the truckers retired to the rearmost charpais, wrapping themselves in their cloaks against the flies. After meals, I noticed that Ahmad would slip away, either tinkering around the truck, despite the blazing heat, or else disappearing entirely. “He goes to sit with the other conductors,” Sardar explained to me. Jahangir would lounge alone or chat with another driver he recognized. Despite spending most of their waking hours together, the two brothers rarely talked or joked around. Jahangir was a taciturn man. His only real show of emotion was his steering wheel dance, which he cut short after hearing Sardar and me helplessly laughing. Jahangir was curt to his younger brother, and Ahmad obeyed without question. Despite, or rather because of, their kinship and their partnership on the road, they were divided by a more fundamental hierarchy and so, in a sense, were alone in each other’s presence. “It’s the shahgard-ustoz relationship,” Sardar explained, using the Persian words for student and teacher. When we set off again in the late afternoon that second day, as the sun’s rays were losing their bite, Sardar and I climbed the rickety, narrow ladder on the side of the cab. We spread a blanket on the crown-like metal platform and sat on top of the truck as it rode along. The night before, when I had glimpsed conductors sleeping outside on the roofs of moving trucks, it had seemed ludicrously unsafe—an accident would mean getting ejected onto the pavement. But now, with the wind cooling our faces and the countryside unfolding all around us, I was glad to be out of the stifling heat of the back bunk. There was no backrest on the platform, so we had to lean forward, with our legs dangling over the front. It was comfortable enough. Even the lurching seemed less violent, since we were further back on the truck, where the suspension was stiffer. From about 12 feet off the ground, we could see a ways off into the flatlands of rural Sindh, which was severely flooded after heavy monsoon rains during the preceding weeks. In some places, we could see the silver surface of the water extending to the horizon, broken only by trees, a solitary farmhouse, or the dark line of an elevated roadway. It seemed like 32

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a gigantic disaster. “All their crops have been destroyed,” Sardar remarked. “This happens every year, but they never do anything about it.” In many places, refugees from the flooding had clustered in ragged tents along the margins of the highway, the women out cooking or hanging laundry in the open, livestock and children moving among them. Also lining the highway, at intervals of a few hundred yards, were large posters of politicians from the governing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The party’s founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was from a prominent family of landlords in Sindh, and the PPP still dominates the countryside, where many feudal lords keep their tenant farmers in informal serfdom. The posters all bore the angelic martyr’s visage of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Zulfikar’s assassinated daughter, surrounded by a cloud of leering PPP politicos, whose lax lips, prodigious jowls, and bloodshot eyes betrayed a lifestyle of voracious consumption. Many of them seemed hungover—one stoat-faced youth was wearing sunglasses. “They even look like criminals,” Sardar laughed. The top of the truck was also a marvelous place to view the particular chaos that is Pakistani traffic. There were no passing lanes or turn signals. No one obeyed traffic laws. The only laws were the laws of physics, of mass and momentum. Everyone was nimble and prepared for sudden, evasive action. The highway was shared by an incredible variety of vehicles and creatures, from late-model cars to barrows drawn by water buffalo. Size and speed determined the pecking order. The top predators were the intercity passenger buses—hulking, rectangular Volvos that could make the trip from Karachi to Peshawar, almost 900 miles in a mere 24 hours. They barreled down the highway with the authority of trains and had distinctively strident, ululating horns. When you heard the din in your ears, you knew you had to get out of the way fast. Next in order were the newer cars and SUVs that threaded recklessly through slower traffic, also bullying a path with their horns. They were followed by the slower cars and vans, battered old Toyotas and Suzukis. Then it was fast trucks, like the empty dump trucks and German-built haulers bound for the steep mountains; next, slow trucks, from the Hinos down to the ancient Bedfords (we were in this category); then, motorcycles, rickshaws, people on bicycles and donkey carts, pedestrians, and livestock. Finally, there were the unclassifiable oddi33

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ties: a mob protesting the inflammatory “Innocence of Muslims” video that blocked half the highway at one point, or a pair of bare truck chassis, recently imported and heading to be fitted with bodies and cabs. They were driven by a turbaned man sitting on a wooden chair nailed to the bare frames, with the steering column and engine naked in front of him. Jahangir was a steady driver. He made his way through the chaos deliberately, always thinking ahead, never prone to sudden braking or swerving. Like most truckers, he had a horn capable of a variety of different sounds, so sitting atop the cab we could get sense of his mood and intentions—a collegial toot to a passing truck, a more urgent, quadruple bleat to warn someone straying from their lane, or a full, looping series of trumpet blasts when a car stubbornly refused to let it pass. To pass the time that second day, Sardar and I told each other our life stories. He had short, tufted black hair with a widow’s peak above his high brow, rounded cheeks, long earlobes and lower eyelids, and a full bottom lip, which he liked to pooch out for comic effect. When we first met, he came off as abrupt and mostly concerned with money. But over the course of the trip, as we warmed to each other, I found him to be capable of great friendship and emotion, as well as a certain craftiness he had honed growing up in a working-class Pashtun neighborhood in Karachi. Sardar’s parents were raised in a small village in Kunar, a remote and mountainous province in eastern Afghanistan that borders the Pakistani tribal areas. They had known a communal harmony that had since been lost to war: Hindu families lived alongside Muslims in the village, and they attended each other’s weddings. After Afghanistan’s communist coup in 1978 and the subsequent war, Sardar’s parents fled to Karachi. His father never sold their land in Kunar, and he never bought any property in the city. He was waiting for the day when he could return to Afghanistan and find his village at peace, but it never came. He died a few years ago without ever seeing his home again. Sardar went back to visit the rest of his family in Kunar and stopped at the spot where his father’s house had stood. There was now only a patch of empty ground. “It hurts to see that,” he said. For a rural Pashtun family, moving to Karachi meant adapting some customs to the ways of the city and fighting to preserve others, a task made easier by the fact that they lived in neighborhoods with relatives and oth34

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ers from their village. When they left the house, the women still wore blue shuttlecock-shaped burqas that obscured their bodies from head to toe and their eyes with fine mesh. Sardar’s family lived in a joint house, shared among himself and his three grown brothers and their wives and children. There were five bedrooms, one for each married couple and one for his mother and the children who were “old enough to know what’s going on at night.” Sardar was the only one in his family with an education. His brothers, like his father, were illiterate construction workers and craftsmen. But Sardar had been lucky. He was younger, so by the time he was a teenager, his older brothers were working and provided enough income for him to stay in school. He earned good grades and secured a scholarship to attend university in Karachi. While he was there, his father fell ill with a serious liver ailment. His brothers had jobs, so Sardar went home to spend time with his father during the day and, as he grew weaker, spent nights there as well. Toward the end of his life, Sardar’s father told him a story: Once he had been digging a foundation outside in the summer, sweating under the scorching sun. He had had to go to the bank later that day, and it was then that he stepped for the first time into an air-conditioned office, where the employees were sitting comfortably in chairs. This was a proper life, he marveled. Sardar realized at that moment that he was the vehicle for his father’s hidden ambitions. He swore to his father that he would not stop pursuing his education until he earned a Ph.D. That night, his father died. Sardar had finished his master’s degree in sociology the year before I met him. For him, sociology was more than an academic pursuit—it was an alternate vocabulary for interpreting the world, like a bag of magical tricks that allowed him to understand and manipulate the customs that bound those around him. And yet he remained enmeshed in those same customs himself, so his relationship with his traditional heritage was riddled with paradox and ambiguity. For he still led a life both circumscribed and nourished by ironclad relations of reciprocity. He and his brothers still gave their earnings to their mother, who pooled the money and ran the household, but they each quietly kept a portion for themselves. The sun, now low and reddening in the sky, had set the mirrored plain of stagnant water ablaze. At the opposite end of the horizon, the moon, 35

MATTHIEU AIKINS • BIRD OF CHAMAN, FLOWER OF THE KHYBER

nearly full, had risen and was climbing. The red floodwaters darkened, until on their limpid surface the stars appeared, faint at first and then strengthening in the blackness of the countryside. The truck rumbled on, creaking and swaying beneath us, the cooler night air rushing against our faces and flattening our hair. It felt as if we were on a ship at sea. Sardar and I turned to face each other. Putting our legs side by side, we lay back and shared the narrow platform. The flooded Sindh plains were still visible in the wan moonlight. The intimacy of darkness grew between us, and our talk turned to love and sex, as I’ve found it often does with young Afghan men. They were eager to hear about the perverse freedoms of the West, and I was fascinated by their world, cloven by stark dichotomies and prohibitions and yet alive with contingencies, hidden exceptions, and the messy pulse of human emotion. Rural Pashtun society is probably the most gender-segregated on Earth. Women keep purdah, which for the most conservative families means never allowing anyone but their closest relatives to see their faces after puberty, until advanced age releases them. Adultery, or even impermissible contact between unrelated men and women, is punished by the harshest community sanctions—often death. And while Pashtun men love ribald jokes, personal details are rarely discussed even between male friends. It can be considered rude even to ask a man about his wife’s health. Of course, with its many ethnic groups, cultures, and classes, Pakistan at large is far more varied, with rural Pashtuns at one extreme of the spectrum. Growing up in Karachi, Sardar interacted with women in markets and offices, and played with girls his age in school. At university, he had a few girlfriends, some romantic, but he had never crossed the line and tried to sleep with them. He knew that even though they were Urdu speakers or Punjabis, they had hopes of marrying him, and he didn’t want to trifle with that. He had enjoyed the freedom of being single, especially because it let him focus on his studies, so he tried to delay marriage as long as possible past his early twenties, when men from his village were typically wed. But his family kept insisting, and he finally agreed on the condition that they find him a beautiful girl, one with pale skin, light hair, and blue or green eyes. “That won’t be a problem,” his mother said, chuckling. “Half the girls 36

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in Kunar are like this.” A few months later, his older brother called him. “Congratulations, you are engaged,” he said. Sardar’s wedding night arrived soon after his engagement, while he was still at university. His in-laws, who were from a village in Kunar close to his family’s, were pleased with him, as they wanted an educated man for their daughter. His bride had seen photographs of him, but the first time he set eyes on her was at the end of the evening on his wedding night, when he went into the nuptial bedroom and saw a girl sitting on the bed, her arms and knees drawn up tightly to her chest. He was the first man outside of her immediate family to see her face since her childhood. She was indeed beautiful, her green eyes filled with apprehension. “And then,” Sardar told me, and I could see his Cheshire grin in the dim light of a passing truck, “I used one of my sociological tricks.” As she watched him, he got down on his knees and offered a solemn prayer of thanks to God. Seeing him pray relaxed her, and he came and sat next to her on the bed. “I told her, ‘Listen, I’m not one of these village men who will abuse you. I’m an educated man, and I will respect you. We won’t have children until you decide you want to. I won’t even lay a finger on you until you ask me to,’” Sardar recounted. He laughed and crooked his finger. “And by the end of the week, she was calling me honey!” In Sardar and his wife’s relationship, she is the one who has pushed back against any deviation from the conservative mores of the Pashtun village. When she came with him to Karachi, he told her that she didn’t have to wear the full burqa anymore, that she could wear the niqab—an Arabstyle cloak with a cloth drawn against the face—or even just a headscarf. But she didn’t feel comfortable going out in anything but a burqa. In fact, she and the other women in his house in Karachi didn’t really go out at all except to visit relatives or attend a wedding or funeral. The men took care of everything that needed to be done outside, or else the women sent the children out for small errands. Sardar and his wife had their first child, a boy, in the spring of 2012, and now they didn’t plan to have another one for a few years. Sardar was trying to convince his wife to go with him to Malaysia, where he was applying to a Ph.D. program in sociology. “It’s a Muslim country, after all,” 37

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he said. There, she would be free from the watchful eyes of the family and would have the opportunity to expand her world beyond the home—if she chose to. There was still the question of how they would come back to live with the family in Karachi once they had adapted to that freedom. Sardar was the kind of young person who could have gone anywhere in the world and made himself into anything. Perhaps in an earlier time, when his passport was less of a black mark against him, he might have. But he had chosen to make his life in Pakistan and was bound now by ties to his family. He sought a kind of balance, searching for ways to move forward in life without losing what his old community valued. He loved the dense weave of his relatives, the way that they cleaved to each other. “When we get older, my brothers and I will marry some of our children to each other,” he said. Marriages among first cousins were not uncommon in Pakistan, and it was a way of stitching the family together for another generation. I asked him how that squared with his belief in ensuring his children’s individual freedom. He wasn’t sure that it did. Up ahead on our left we could see the giant red flare of the Qadirpur gas field, one of the country’s largest, dancing in the star-strewn blackness. Further along, the shimmering lights of the Fauji Fertilizer Company plant rose on the horizon. The plant was a Pakistani army project, one of the military’s many state-sponsored intrusions into the economy. We drew abreast of the compound, a whole galaxy of cold fluorescent lamps arrayed along webs of scaffolding, pipes, and catwalks, and illuminating great warehouses and empty parking lots. Three giant cooling towers dominated the plant, steam rising from them in illuminated billows. The air there was thick and unwholesome, and our eyes started to catch big particles of dirt. Acrid waves of smoke swirled by—the villages around the plant were burning brush and garbage in order to ward off dengue fever-carrying mosquitoes, which had multiplied in the floodwaters. We pulled our scarves over our faces and settled lower on the platform. We wore only our shalwars; the night air was still mild. “Is it true that in your culture you put your grandparents away in hospitals when they get old?” Sardar asked me in English. “Sometimes,” I said, “Yes.” Today in the truck stop I was watching an old man come in and sit 39 38

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down, and a young man came and offered him tea, put sugar in it, had him check it to make sure it was the right sweetness,” Sardar explained. “He was very kind. That’s how we treat our elders.” It was true. Even the hippest and toughest adolescents I had met still behaved with careful respect around their elders. In Pashtun culture, to be old—to be a spin giri, or white beard—was a blessing, a reward for a lifetime of obligations fulfilled. “After lunch, I was watching you sleep and thought about how you would be alone when you got older,” Sardar continued. “I thought that you could come live with me when you get old, and my grandchildren would take care of you.” I laughed and thanked him, then thought for a moment. “You’re just going to have two kids, right, Sardar?” I said. “So let’s say that they’ll each have two kids as well, so that you’ll have four grandchildren, OK? And let’s say that your two children get a good education and are very successful, and that at least one of them finds their success in some other city, maybe even abroad, in Dubai or Europe. So that leaves you with two grandkids. And they’ll be busy, maybe one or both of them will go to university abroad as well. So then, tell me, who’s going to take care of you?” Sardar stared at me for a moment and then laughed. He hadn’t thought about that. “It happens fast, doesn’t it?” I said. We lay back and watched the stars for a moment, and then Sardar answered. “My brothers’ grandkids will take care of me.”

39

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3.

THE LAWLESS FRONTIER

The main valley of the border town of Landi Kotal, at the top of the famous Khyber Pass.

M

ERCIFULLY, THE TRUCK stop had small outdoor wooden stalls with showers that streamed fresh well water. After passing the fertilizer plant, we had crossed into Punjab province—the traditional heart of Pakistan—and then stopped for the night in a small town called Chani Goth, some 15 miles from the city of Ahmedpur. In the morning I hung my shalwar on a nail and stood under the cool, clean downpour, turning my face up to the open sky. My hair was matted with dust and soot after riding on top of the truck, and the water ran in brown streams down my sides. I didn’t have a towel, so I put my clothes back on while my skin was still wet. By the time I was finished with breakfast, the shalwar had dried in the mid-morning heat. We rode on. Now that we were in the Punjab, the PPP posters had been replaced by posters for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML44

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N), the PPP’s archrival. Instead of Benazir Bhutto, we saw the chubby visage of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, along with his brother, Shahbaz, then the province’s chief minister, and often a prancing tiger, the PLM-N’s mascot. Otherwise, the interchangeable, gouty faces of minor politicians seemed no different from the PPP’s. The police here drove newer white Toyotas, in contrast with the battered police pickups in Sindh, and the round mustachioed men with rifles wore tan instead of black. The fields were not flooded, the roads were wider and smoother, the bridges and overpasses less crumbled. Even the gas stations had a luster to them. Punjab is Pakistan’s richest and most populous province, after all, the seat of bureaucratic and military power. But we didn’t spend long there. That afternoon, we turned left off the highway and cut west through back roads, weaving a shortcut to a set of bridges that crossed over the Chenab and Indus rivers. A long span of concrete on pyramid-shaped pylons bridged the Indus, which had receded from its flooding, and several twisting channels overlapped the river’s wide, brown mud riverbed. It was a Monday. Powering on my phone, I checked my email and saw that I still hadn’t heard from the government about my NOC, the document I needed to keep going on the trip. The week before, I had learned that after receiving approval from the military, my case was being sent from the Ministry of Information to the Ministry of Interior for final approval. “They tell me that they will finish it by the end of the week,” an official told me at the time, making the approval process sound like a mere formality. But a week had passed without any word, so I got the phone number for the relevant ministry department and called from the truck, giving the reference number for my case. “Ah yes, sir. I have your documents,” the man said, after a moment of rifling through papers on his desk. “They will take a minimum of two weeks to process.” I hung up and started cursing. Jahangir and Ahmad turned their heads around and stared. I was screwed. I should have known I couldn’t rely on the Pakistani bureaucracy to come through at the last minute. Now I had to decide whether I should continue my trip past Peshawar into Afghanistan. In theory, the military had already given its permission for me to cross at Torkham, the gateway at the end of the Khyber Pass between 45

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the two countries, and they were the ones who held real authority at the border. But I had no documents verifying that authorization. If the police were to catch me crossing through the FATA, things would get messy. In the end, though, I couldn’t bear the thought of conceding defeat to Pakistan’s bureaucratic inertia—it was too banal of an evil. I resolved to press on and explained the situation to Sardar. “Fuck their NOC,” he responded. Having crossed over to the west bank of the Indus, we were now in Dera Ghazi Khan. The district marks the frontier between Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which means “Land of the Khyber Pashtuns,” though everyone refers to it as KPK. We passed women wearing burqas with tall spindles on their crowns, like Hershey’s kisses. From there, we followed the Indus north and crossed the provincial border into Dera Ismail Khan, the first district in KPK. The road worsened, becoming potholed and rutted. Soon we could see cragged foothills in the distance, and then we were winding between them. KPK had been known as the North-West Frontier Province since the time of British India, but Pakistan made the change in 2010 to acknowledge the Pashtuns’ own history, rather than a colonial one. The province lies along the southern edge of the Hindu Kush mountain range that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, and it has never been fully integrated into any central state. The province is divided into two main portions: the so-called “settled districts,” which are administered by the provincial government, and the FATA, the tribal areas that border Afghanistan and are run directly by the Pakistani federal government. The FATA, which has been deliberately kept undeveloped, became the staging area for the Afghan mujahideen who resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1970s and ’80s. American and Pakistani support for these militant groups in turn flooded the tribal areas with weapons. Today, many of the same infiltration routes and training areas are used by the Taliban and other militant groups to launch attacks against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Our road would take us right through them. We were traversing KPK along a northward arc, through Dera Ismail Khan and other settled districts and on to Kohat, at which point we would pass through the Kohat Tunnel and arrive in Peshawar, the capital of KPK and home to some 3 46

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million people. From there, we would enter the tribal areas of the Khyber Agency and cross into Afghanistan. The FATA—where the United States has been waging a campaign of drone warfare, and the Pakistani military has launched a series of ground offensives—was close by. We drove on into the night through the arid plains, finally resting at a truck stop near Lakki

Two drivers enjoy a meal under a mural at a truck stop in Karak, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province.

Marwat district, not far from the Kurram River. The nights were cooler now that we were gaining altitude. It was in Lakki Marwat that Ahmad first asked Sardar about my documents. They were worried I was one of the many Afghans who don’t bother getting visas when crossing into Pakistan, though they are technically required. Sardar and I realized then that the brothers didn’t know I was Canadian. It’s not uncommon for educated Pakistanis to speak English, as Sardar and I did, and the fact that we also spoke Persian together when we were in public, along with my local garb and half-Asian facial features, had led Ahmad and Jahangir to assume that I was an Afghan from the northern part of that country who didn’t speak Pashto. Sardar had also been calling me “Mati,” which is short for the common Muslim name Matiul47

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lah. Nadir Shah, the man in Karachi who had arranged my trip, had not told them otherwise, and neither had we. Perhaps it was just beyond their powers of imagination to think that a Westerner would be riding in their truck through the tribal areas and sleeping in grimy rest stops with them. No doubt they found me strange and a little suspicious, but in the end the most important thing for them was that Nadir Shah had vouched for me. I hadn’t planned to deceive them, but after discussing it with Sardar, I decided it was best not to correct the misunderstanding, as there was no telling how they would react. When we set off the next day, climbing now in earnest through the broken foothills after Karak, I could see that Jahangir and Ahmad were growing increasingly tense. We would reach the Kohat Tunnel that afternoon, and they feared the army would ask all of us for our documents, unlike the police and customs officers we had encountered so far, who had only been interested in bribes. About 30 minutes south of the city of Kohat we stopped in a truck yard and sat for tea. My phone rang. It was Nadir Shah. I walked out into the dirt lot and answered the call. After we exchanged greetings, he got to the point. He had already spoken with Jahangir and Ahmad, and they were worried about what might happen at the tunnel checkpoint. He said he had been speaking to truckers in Karachi who complained of harsh behavior by the army. Nadir said he was worried the soldiers might insult me, but after a moment I understood that he was actually concerned about what would happen to Jahangir and Ahmad if I were caught. He thought it was best for me to get out and cross the tunnel by some other means. “What other means?” I asked. “For example, a Flying Coach,” he said—the local name for small Toyota passenger vans that travel between cities. Crossing by van, I would be much more likely to be asked for my documents than if I were to stay in the truck, as the army would be more interested in the truck’s cargo than its passengers. But Nadir had already spoken with Ahmad and Jahangir, so I really had no other choice—it wasn’t fair to jeopardize them, even if it meant taking on more risk for myself. After saying goodbye to Nadir, I walked over and explained the situation to Sardar. He insisted on going with me, though I could see that he was afraid. 48

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Jahangir and Ahmad were visibly relieved when I told them I would take a van across the tunnel and meet them on the other side. I changed my dirt-streaked clothes—it looked like I had just come out of the hills with the Taliban—and put on a clean shalwar. We drove in silence for another 20 minutes, and then they let Sardar and me down at a small roundabout, where the locals from Kohat picked up vans heading to Peshawar. The tunnel was less than a mile away. Sardar and I stood curbside and watched the truck rumble off. A small knot of people had already gathered, and after about 15 minutes, a boxy white van came careening down the road and drew up beside us. It was almost dusk, and the van was nearly full already. People crowded anxiously around the sliding door as a few passengers got out and then started pushing each other and scrambling for seats. Sardar wormed his way in aggressively, but I couldn’t bring myself to shove aside an elderly man who had cut in front of me. The van seemed full, but after a moment Sardar shouted out from inside that he was saving a space for me. The crowd parted to let me through. There were three rows of seats behind the driver, each of which fit four people across. Sardar had gotten us the two middle seats in the very back row—I was on the left and he on the right. I had barely squeezed into my seat when the van shot off down the road. After four days in the truck, we seemed to be traveling absurdly fast, the van’s little tires barely making contact with the tarmac. I caught glimpses of the countryside through the window and then a series of fences as we approached the tunnel. I kept silent, not even daring to speak in Dari. I tried to measure my breaths and studied the fabric in the turban of the man in front of me. We drew up to the tollgates of the tunnel. Everyone reached into their pockets, pulled out small green identity cards, and held them up to be checked. The man to my left pressed his card against the window, which seemed annoyingly overzealous. I kept my Canadian passport in my pocket. Arriving at the main checkpoint, I saw a soldier in a tan helmet and flak jacket approach the left window. He looked Punjabi and very young; he had a beard with frayed ends splaying out under his chinstrap and a shaved mustache, in the manner of the very religious. The van was so 49

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crowded that I could catch only small glimpses of him between the heads and shoulders of the other passengers. He started at the front of the van and worked his way back, peering intently through the window at each person’s ID and taking the time to read each one. As he came around to my side, Sardar put his own card on top of my hand, as if I were holding it. The soldier read my neighbor’s card against the window and then gazed flatly into my eyes before passing around to the other side. After a moment, he signaled for the driver to go, and the van jerked forward. Soon the darkness of the Kohat Tunnel enveloped us. I exhaled slowly, leaning my shoulder against Sardar’s. The tunnel’s lights flicked overhead. It was more than a mile long. The Japanese had helped build it, and it was finished nearly a decade ago. By the time we came out the other side, it was dark. We passed through the checkpoints searching southbound traffic and then drove on for a bit before stopping at a roadside mosque to offer evening prayers. As the passengers stretched their limbs and filed into the mosque, Sardar and I stood off to the side of its small cobblestone yard and tried to call Jahangir and Ahmad. Their phones were off, and for a second I wondered if they had decided to be rid of us. I remembered they would have no reception in the tunnel. “What do you want to do?” Sardar asked. “This is a safe place, we can stay here.” The low, feathery branches of an acacia tree hung overhead, illuminated by a street lamp, and we could hear the murmuring of a stream or fountain nearby. But it was better to keep moving. Jahangir and Ahmad had given us the name of a gas station and truck stop just outside of Peshawar where they planned to stay the night: the Hajiano. Sardar told the driver where we were headed, and we clambered back into the van with the rest of the passengers. Soon we were barreling off into the darkness again. We were in the FATA now. To our right, down below in a valley, were the lights of Darra Adam Khel, where there had once been a famously lawless arms bazaar. The craftsmen there were said to be able to make replicas of any weapon, though the handmade rifles and machine guns they produced were of dubious reliability. You could buy hashish and heroin, as well, not to mention grenades, night-vision goggles, and counterfeit goods of every variety. When the NATO supply routes opened, the bazaars in the region filled up with supplies that had been 50

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looted from containers, even laptops with sensitive military information and once, it was rumored, an entire helicopter engine. Both NATO and the trucking contractors had tried to stop the problem, but there were a million ways to pilfer the containers while keeping their seals intact. Truckers could cut through their roofs or take doors off their hinges. Sometimes they set up fake attacks, stealing the cargo and then torching the containers and trucks. Eventually, Taliban militants grew strong in the area, culminating in an attack in which they took control of the tunnel for a few days in 2008. A Pakistani military operation to seize back the tunnel and the surrounding areas shut down the gun market for about a year. It was reopened, but since then it has become harder to find the more exotic, and illegal, items once sold in Darra Adam Khel. We came to another checkpoint. The sliding door opened, and I saw to my dismay that it was an army soldier. He asked those in the row nearest to the door—the people sitting right in front of me—to hand him their documents. One of them had an Afghan refugee card, which the soldier scrutinized for a long time. Then, handing it back, he closed the door and waved us on. Sardar had chosen good seats. There was one more checkpoint after that, but it was run by the police. The day shift was ending, and the exhausted officers merely flicked their flashlights in the direction of the van as we passed. To my relief, we finally pulled up to the Hajiano truck stop, and Sardar and I jumped down onto the lot. The pavement was reassuringly wide and solid. We walked over to a little convenience store, bought some ice cream bars, and sat on the curb unwrapping them. Sardar called Ahmad, and this time he answered. The brothers were on their way, having just cleared the tunnel, though it would take them two hours to travel what had taken us 20 minutes in the van. We sat and watched the evening traffic sweep by. Finally, we saw the welcome sight of WAN HAI on the blue container. It was a happy reunion. Jahangir and Ahmad were grinning with relief as we all embraced. I felt elated. For the first time, crossing the border seemed like a reality. After a celebratory spliff, we walked over to the row of charpais outside the restaurant and ordered dinner. Sardar and I joked about our close 51

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Classic Bedford trucks await their cargo in a rain-flooded neighborhood of Peshawar.

call at the checkpoints. “Now there will be no problems until Torkham,” Jahangir said, promising that the next day we would be entering their home turf, the Khyber Pass. It was unlikely that we would be able to cross into Afghanistan that same day, so we planned to spend the night as Jahangir and Ahmad’s guests in their family home in Landi Kotal. The waiter brought over plates of mutton and rice. As we tucked into the dishes, I looked up past Jahangir’s shoulder and saw, about three charpais away, a paunchy, balding man starting at me intently, a scruff of matted beard covering his chin. We made eye contact, and I recoiled— there was something unbearably intent about his glance. Staring into the rice, I felt a wave of paranoia. Did he somehow know that I was a foreigner? I was suddenly aware of the fact that I was sitting in the open air on the side of the highway in the tribal areas outside of Peshawar, and I felt extremely exposed. The area was teeming with criminals and militants. Anyone could simply pull off the highway and grab me. As I ate, I kept glancing up casually at the man, but each time I found his beady eyes boring into mine. Compounding the strangeness of his gaze, he had his teacup held against his lips, as if he were taking one long 52

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continuous drink, thereby obscuring the lower half of his face. Finally, in the periphery of my vision, I saw him rise and walk toward us. He was squat, and the front of his potbelly pushed out his stained shalwar like the prow of a ship. As he neared our charpai, he turned to walk away, but his head swiveled as he went past, his gaze fixed unabashedly on me. It was the kind of look that might have started a fight if we had been in a bar in the United States. But we were on the side of a highway outside Peshawar, where things were a lot weirder and more serious. It occurred to me that his interest might be sexual. That didn’t feel reassuring, either. As we washed up after dinner, Sardar sidled up to me. I need to talk to you, he mouthed, with his back turned to Jahangir. Sardar and I stepped into the truck yard and strolled between the silent, hulking machines. “We must be very careful in Landi Kotal,” he warned me. “Anything can happen in the tribal areas.” “I know,” I said. “But we’re traveling with Jahangir and Ahmad. It’s their area, and I trust them. Don’t you?” He was silent for a moment. “They think you are a Farsiwan from Mazar-e-Sharif, an Afghan and a Muslim,” he explained, using a term for Persian speakers. “Are you prepared to face their family? What if they ask you to pray with them?” There was the hum of a truck passing by on the highway. I felt another wave of anxiety and regretted having smoked that hashish. “Look, I’ve prayed as a Muslim before,” I said. “I can do it again if I have to. We’ll just see what happens, OK?” We went back to the restaurant and climbed upstairs, where men lay on rows of charpais with their blankets pulled around them and over their heads, like shrouds on corpses. As I lay down and pulled up my own blanket, I wondered which one concealed the beady-eyed fat man.

T

HE NEXT MORNING, we woke, washed, and boarded the truck. We set out along the bypass road that skirted Peshawar’s sprawl, moving slowly through the morning traffic. Making our way to the western edge of the city, we got on the Torkham road and re-entered the tribal areas. The khasadars, or tribal levies, were standing roadside with Kalashnikovs and long black shalwars, scanning traffic. They were from local tribes but 53

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controlled by the federal government. The NATO supply trade had been a boon for the police in the area—we were now entering an intense gauntlet of bribery. In Karachi, the truckers I knew complained that the khasadars gouged them for the equivalent of more than $500 in bribes per truck between Peshawar and Torkham. We would get off easier because we were hauling private cargo. Still, at each of the five main checkpoints, Ahmad had to jump down and jog ahead with the truck’s customs documents. A khasadar standing in front of the customs station took his thousand-rupee note and returned him 500. Ahmad gave the 500 to the customs agent inside, who then stamped his paperwork. He ended up paying about $50 in bribes in total on the road from Peshawar to Torkham, plus smaller amounts here and there to roadside cops. We kept rolling in the slow-moving traffic, and eventually Ahmad came running up behind us and jumped back on board. As usual, the police weren’t interested in truck passengers. Those traveling in taxis and vans, however, were a different story. Anyone with irregular paperwork offered a chance for the police to make some money. “They are looking for Afghans,” Sardar said. “A Farsiwan is like a fish for them.” The year before, one of Sardar’s friends had come from Kabul to visit Peshawar without a visa. He did not speak Pashto, and the police fleeced him out of about $40 in short order. The size of the bribe depended not just on your legal status, but also on how much you could plead, bully, argue, or threaten. Local knowledge and connections were power. “They can tell who is coming from Torkham because the cars get so dusty,” Sardar explained. “If you’re worried, you can pay the driver to wash the car before you get to Peshawar.” We passed through the infamous Karkhano bazaar, along the main road west out of Peshawar. There was a strip of hashish shops, numbered from one to 23, with silver scales in their windows. In the backstreets, you could buy weapons in shops. It was like a toned-down version of the old Darra Adam Khel market. Beside the road a big sign read, “Entry of Foreigners is Prohibited.” “The Torkham road is full of spies,” Sardar explained to me. He had often traveled this road when he had a job working for an NGO in Kabul for a couple of years, and had developed a strategy for discerning who was 54

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in the employ of the Pakistani government. “Most of the taxi drivers are spies. Think about it. It’s a very sensitive area and important road. If the drivers think you’re suspicious, or that the police can get a good bribe out of you, he will quickly blink his headlights as he approaches a checkpoint, so that they know to stop and check you. Many of them are retired members of the army or intelligence.” “But I have some sociological strategies for exposing them. While we’re driving, I will pretend to make a call on my phone to my brother, and ask him about his operations and how the general is doing. Then, of course, the taxi driver will get interested and ask me, ‘Who is that?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, my brother is deputy inspector general in the police’ or ‘a colonel in the army.’ And the guy will answer, ‘Oh really, I too served in the government. I was a civil servant’—they will say it like that. And I’ll say, ‘Well, if you ever have any problems with the police or army, let me know, and I will call my brother. He can help you.’ And they say, ‘No, thank you, I have good relations with them as well.’” Sardar’s face, which had been mimicking an easy, bantering smile, fell drastically grim. “And then I know that he is a very dangerous man.” We watched as a young khasadar waved a taxi to the side of the road. “Yes, I know these sociological tricks,” he said. “But I’m very tired of them.” After Karkhano, we passed into the town of Jamrud, in Khyber Agency. Jahangir and Ahmad grew quiet. This was where the danger from militant attacks really began. Two weeks earlier, the Taliban had shot a trucker in this very spot, the third such attack in Jamrud since the supply line reopened. As if on cue, the sharp report of a blast suddenly buffeted the windows of the truck. Up ahead to our right, we saw a cloud of white smoke rising and twisting in the wind. We kept moving with the traffic, and as we came around a turn, we saw a truck full of Army troops pull over on a bypass road that ran off to the right. The soldiers jumped down and fanned out, their rifles leveled. Judging by the cloud of dust, the explosion seemed to have come from a little cluster of houses set back from the road, where there was a crowd of men gathered. “That is the road for NATO trucks,” Jahangir said. The trucks had to get off the highway there and go through a government registration point. It didn’t seem like the best system. “Even a 55

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child can sit here and tell which trucks are with NATO.” It wasn’t clear what was going on—whether a truck had been hit, a mortar round had landed, or a bomb had detonated prematurely. There was nothing to do but continue past Jamrud. We started climbing up into the storied Khyber Pass, which looped in long switchbacks through a series of arid, brown ridges. The road was badly broken up, and the morning’s traffic from the Afghan side, rushing down the pass, kicked up clouds of dust. Two trucks with Humvees strapped to their flatbeds shot past us up the hill. “See how fast they’re driving,” Jahangir said. “I’m driving nice and slow, so that people know I’m a private truck and that I have nothing to be afraid of.” As we crawled up through the pass, I thought of all the many travelers who had come through here over the millennia, of the great armies of Greeks, Persians, and Mongols that must have presented fantastic sights to the local tribes. The Khyber, which runs for 33 miles through the brown and rocky ridges of the lower Hindu Kush, is a historic gateway between India and Central Asia. Conquering armies came, for the most part from the west, intent on plundering the fertile plains of South Asia. Alexander the Great passed through in 326 B.C.E., and Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan who lost his kingdom in present-day Uzbekistan, led an army eastward more than 18 centuries later to capture Agra and Delhi, where he founded the Mughal Empire. In the 19th century, however, the invaders marched westward: British colonial armies passed through the Khyber during the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars. The first, from 1839 to 1842, resulted in the famous retreat and massacre of the British at the Gandamak Pass, for which the British retaliated by razing Kabul. The second, from 1878 to 1880, was an expensive battle to maintain the status quo of Afghanistan as a Britishallied buffer state between India and the expanding Russian Empire. It was during the same period that Peshawar and the Khyber came under British rule, after Britain defeated the Sikhs on the plains of the Punjab. The border between British India and Afghanistan—the famous Durand Line— was not demarcated until 1893, and the mountainous tribal areas were left as a sort of lawless intermediate zone that came under the influence of both Calcutta and Kabul. 56

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The British initially instituted what they called a “closed border” system of managing their frontier with what would one day become the FATA. The Pashtun tribes living on the other side of the border from the Punjab and Sindh were forbidden from entering British India, and British officers and colonial subjects were likewise banned from crossing into the frontier. When the hill tribes raided across the border, the British punished them collectively with military expeditions that burned crops and razed villages. It was an expensive and violent means of control: From 1849 until the end of the century, there were 62 such punitive campaigns. In the late 1860s, Colonel Robert Sandeman, a young colonial officer assigned to govern a volatile stretch of the Punjab frontier around Dera Ghazi Khan, began experimenting with a system of direct engagement with the Brahui tribes across the border. With the support of his superiors in Lahore, Sandeman began cajoling and browbeating the tribes into stemming their raids, and he even established his summer residence just outside the frontier, in the Marri hills. Sandeman coined the term “hearts and minds” to describe his efforts to win over the Brahui chieftains with a combination of bribes, threats, and honorifics. As the historian Benjamin Hopkins explains, the Sandeman system was based on three key premises: first, that the tribes had natural leaders that the British could identify and ally with; second, that the British could recruit tribal levies or militias who, in return for payments, agreed to control terrain and keep the roads open; and third, that the British could deal with the tribes via “traditional” institutions of governance, such as the jirga and shura assemblies. By 1876 Sandeman’s method had won official recognition in Calcutta, then the capital of the Raj; by the end of the century his system would be formalized in the code of exceptional laws that govern what is now known as the FATA. Today, Sandeman’s triple strategy is recognizable in the “key leader engagements,” “militias,” and “shuras” that have become cornerstones of the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. The adoption of his epithet “hearts and minds” by American counterinsurgency advocates like General David Petraeus is a reminder of the genealogical link between modern counterinsurgency and imperial strategies that were designed to secure the dominance of the colonial state over recalcitrant frontier peoples. 57

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After the independence of British India in 1947, the new Pakistani state inherited these colonial forms of governance. To this day, FATA citizens are not covered by parliamentary legislation or the Pakistani Supreme Court and are instead ruled by political agents appointed by the executive government in Islamabad. (Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Pakistani military’s intelligence services have also come to play a leading role in manipulating power structures in the FATA.) The Frontier Crimes Regulations, the criminal code of the FATA that was instituted by the British in 1901, is still the law of the land in the region—and allows “tribals” no right of legal representation, no right of appeal, and no right to present evidence and confront their accusers in court. FATA citizens, in other words, are second-tier citizens in their own country. Generations of Pashtun activists have sought to end their colonial status. But geopolitics has worked against them. The U.S.-funded Afghan war against the Soviets empowered the most fundamentalist and criminal elements of FATA society and in turn allowed the Pakistani military to disregard the autonomy of local tribes in the name of political expediency. Today, activists in the FATA are still fighting to reform British-era laws. On an earlier visit to Peshawar, I had spoken to members of the FATA Lawyers Forum, a legal activist group that has waged a campaign to repeal the FCR. “It is a black law, an onerous law,” said Qamar Nadeem Afridi, a lawyer at the high court in Peshawar. “We are asking for the same rights as other Pakistani citizens. When people can’t get justice, they turn to militantism.” This unresolved colonial legacy of the FATA had left it simmering with violence, as I was about to learn firsthand.

W

E DROVE ON into main valley of Landi Kotal, which was ringed by sharp ridgelines and dotted with green orchards and mud-brick compounds that were the same dun color as the hills. We pulled off the road across from a gas station and parked. Jahangir and Ahmad’s uncle Malik drove up in a mini Suzuki pickup, along with Jahangir’s small son and daughter. Their eyes were lined with black kohl, and they were bouncing with excitement to see their father, who was away from home more often than not. Jahangir handed them some plastic toy guns he had bought outside of Peshawar. Ahmad went out and fetched lunch: Landi Kotal’s 58

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famous chapli, or “sandal” kebab, flat grilled patties of minced, spiced lamb mixed with chunks of tomato, onion, and chili peppers. We spread some newspapers on the ground in the shade of the truck and placed the chapli on it, squatting down on our haunches to pinch off hunks of meats with pieces of bread. Malik gave us the news from the border, and it wasn’t good: There was a long line of trucks, and we weren’t going to be able to cross that day, he said. To kill time, we rattled around town with Malik in the little Suzuki. We paid a visit to the rose-filled mausoleum of Amir Hamza Shinwari, a 20th-century Pashtun poet and Sufi mystic. Shinwari, who is known as Hamza Baba, was central to the development of an authentically modern Pashtun ghazal, a form of poem composed of rhyming couplets and a refrain that is considered as influential and widespread in classical Central and South Asian poetry as the sonnet is in Europe. Here is a couplet from one of Hamza Baba’s poems, about Laila and Majnun, the Romeo and Juliet of Pashtun literature: Do not touch the blister on my Pashtun heart, Lest the lovely tent of Laila be broken. Afterward, we went to Landi Kotal’s main bazaar. I was expecting the standard dusty strip of cinderblock shops, but it turned out to be a graceful warren of cool, covered alleys that sloped down from the main road and were accessible by foot, with piles of fresh vegetables and spices and, of course, shops selling hashish and firearms. By then, it was late afternoon, so we all piled into the pickup and rode out to Jahangir and Ahmad’s house, the home of their grandfather, Azam Khan, and his progeny. The typical rural Pashtun home is divided into a private area, where the women stay, and a public area, often just a single room, where male guests can visit. Azam Khan’s family had a whole separate building as their guesthouse, called a hujra, with a walled, tree-lined courtyard, a well, a large sleeping room, and a smaller adjacent carpeted room that served as a mosque. We sat down on a straw mat and cushions in the grass of the courtyard. Jahangir and Ahmad ducked off to see their families, but their 59

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brothers, cousins, and uncles came out to visit us, some of them with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They seldom had visitors from the outside. Sardar was considered relatively mundane, since he was Pashtun, and Kunar was only a couple of districts away. But a Persian-speaking Afghan from Mazar-e-Sharif, as I was introduced, was quite exotic. The family was very large. Azam Khan had been a trader in appliances and other goods and had traveled back and forth between Kabul, Jalalabad, and Landi Kotal. He died about 10 years ago, but the matriarch of the family, Bibi Khanom, is still alive and had just turned 80. She had her first child at the age of 14 and her last at the age of 53, giving birth to nine boys, two girls, and an additional two stillborn infants. “She is stronger than all of us,” laughed Jahangir’s younger brother, Afzal. Of those nine sons, two had gone off and founded their own separate residence together. But the other seven brothers lived under one roof, along with their children—Jahangir’s generation—some of whom had children of their own. All in all, their sprawling compound was home to about 100 people. Here in the FATA, where tribes serve as their own law, it was advantageous to have a large number of cousins and uncles ready to fight by your side or, if necessary, avenge your death. Their pooled fortunes also provided a support network in uncertain economic times. Some of Jahangir and Ahmad’s family members were truck drivers, some were merchants, and others were laborers; they counted as a moderately well-off family in Landi Kotal, though in abstract economic terms they were probably well below Pakistan’s poverty line. After a hearty dinner held in our honor, most of the older men bid us farewell and returned to their wives and children. Sardar and I lounged on the cushions with the younger men, some of whom were nephews and uncles to each other, though they were the same age. We smoked and sipped green tea, and they told me about life in Landi Kotal. They were true sons of the mountains. They had once loved to wander through the high valleys in the summer, carrying food and weapons, drinking from pure springs, and sleeping in the open air. But those days were at an end. The army and the Taliban—really more of a loose collection of militant groups, some religiously inspired, some more criminal—had taken to the hills over the last decade, and anyone armed was a target. Deeper into the FATA, there 60

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were American drones in the skies, hunting men. With the elders gone, Sardar and I started speaking English together, and some of the younger cousins crowded around, eager to practice with us. Education was valued in this family. They were impressed by Sardar’s degrees and his plans to earn his Ph.D. in Malaysia—he was a Pashtun like them, from the borderlands, and yet he seemed to occupy an alternate sphere of possibilities in the big city. Jahangir, who loved to read, had been forced by financial necessity to end his education after high school. Ahmad was barely literate. But their income had allowed Afzal, their younger brother, to attend university in Peshawar, where he got a master’s degree in Pashto literature and won a gold medal for his marks, a big achievement in the Pakistani system. His family said he was the first gold medalist from their village in Landi Kotal. The younger cousins were studying English and computers at the local community college. They knew about email, Facebook, and Google, but the electricity here was intermittent at best, so there wasn’t much of a chance to go online. In fact, there wasn’t much one could do with an education in Landi Kotal. Afzal was teaching at a local high school, which paid him a pittance and still left him free time in the afternoons, which he spent playing volleyball or cricket. Afzal and I ducked off to the side and chatted alone in English. With his sandy, swept-back bangs and cherubic grin he looked like Shahid Afridi, the famous Pakistani cricket player they all worshipped. He asked me if I was married, and I said that I wasn’t, teasing, as I often did here, that I was still too young. (At 28, I was practically an elderly bachelor to them.) What about him? Azfal was engaged. To whom? To his cousin, he said sheepishly. He insisted that they loved each other. How did he know? They had never spoken, it turned out, even though they lived under the same roof. The rules in a joint household like Azam Khan’s were complex. Frank social interaction was only allowed between men and women who, under Islam, were mahram—forbidden—from ever marrying each other or having sexual relations, regardless of their age. This included brothers and their sisters, parents and their children, uncles and aunts and their nieces and nephews—but not first cousins. Afzal had seen his betrothed around the compound over the years wearing just her headscarf, and they had exchanged burning glances. He could feel the attraction, he said, and 61

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he had been delighted when their parents arranged their engagement. It was the closest thing to a love marriage that either of them could hope for. After they became engaged, she sent her little brother to him to ask for his phone number in secret. But Afzal refused. He didn’t want to sneak around. For now, they had to wait. The house was bursting at the seams, and there were no more rooms to accommodate new couples. We went inside and sat down to play carom board, shooting the game’s wooden disks with our fingers. Afzal poured white powder—boric acid, he said—on the board to make it slick. I turned out to be terrible, especially compared to my opponents, who had honed their sniper-like abilities over countless slow nights without electricity. Jahangir arrived, newly shaven, heavily stoned, and looking much refreshed after a visit with his wife. When our game ended, I asked him to recite one of his poems in Pashto, which he had occasionally chanted on the road, so that I could record it. He stood and recited: Tell me, what did I want from this truck? That I’ve taken myself from the sweet camaraderie of a friend Once you drink water from the oilcan You become unworthy of your rivals in the end. When the tire is punctured, The poor conductor must come down now, If he tries to speak, the driver will get angry And so the sweat will pour from his brow. Some things people do for the pleasurable sensation So this began, but now you must work out of obligation. He had composed the lines while he was still a lowly conductor, serving as another driver’s shahgard, or apprentice, in order to learn the trade and scrape together enough money to buy his own truck. Perhaps he had more empathy for Ahmad than I had realized. It was late now, and we prepared for bed. Jahangir returned to his wife and children. With no electricity for miles, the stars were alive and 62

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web-like above us. Despite the chill, I asked Afzal to pull the chairpais out into the courtyard so that Sardar and I could sleep in the open air. Our feet were pointing east; the moon rose above our toes as we settled under our blankets. Not long after drifting off, we awoke to the sharp boom of an explosion and the concussion of a blast wave. Opening my eyes, I saw the sky above me turn orange with light. I instinctively pulled the covers over my head and curled into a ball on the charpai. The blast felt so close that I thought shrapnel and debris would rain down on us. After a moment, I let down the blankets and lifted my head. I could see the whites of Sardar’s eyes shining next to me in the moonlight. “What the hell was that?” I whispered. “A bomb blast,” he said. We cocked our heads and listened. The night had returned to its profound stillness. High up on the ridges at the end of the valley, the army outposts had turned on their searchlights, the pale beams probing into the darkness. The explosion felt as if it had happened right next door, and yet there were no cries or commotion. Could it have been a mammoth bomb far away at the Torkham border? We heard low voices from outside the compound and then the metallic double click of someone cocking a Kalashnikov. Sardar and I lay helplessly in our beds—it was better to stay there, rather than stumble around in the night and be mistaken for an attacker. After a moment, a figure entered the hujra from the back door and walked into the courtyard. We watched him tensely as he stood there observing us, before walking back out. The night’s silence deepened once again, and the army posts put out their lights. The stars and moon reclaimed their paramount brightness. “I will stay up all night,” Sardar said. “You go to sleep.” “Look, if they’re going to kill us, there’s nothing we can do about it,” I said after a moment. “We might as well get some rest.” We went back to sleep.

T

HE NEXT MORNING, over a light breakfast of tea and whole-wheat naan, Afzal and his cousins explained what they had learned from the neighbors. Someone had placed a small bomb against the door of the 63

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The author sits in the cab of the truck behind Jahangir as they enter the final pass to Torkham.

house next door, not 10 yards from where we were sleeping. The explosion blew in the neighbor’s door and rattled him and his family. The family got out their rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and were ready for a fight, but no one had been injured. Afzal and the others didn’t know why their neighbor, a well-off businessman who owned a small fleet of vans, was the target of an attack, but everyone assumed it was related to a personal or business dispute—that someone had sent him a message. It appeared to be a total coincidence that the explosion happened while we were staying next door, but in the eyes of the village it was highly suspicious that such an event would take place on the very night that Azam Khan’s family took in two strange men from out of town. Sardar and I decided we needed to leave immediately. After breakfast, we walked out of the hujra, where Malik’s pickup was waiting. A crowd of elders had gathered on the village commons beside the road. They turned to stare at us as we drove past. Jahangir and Ahmad met us back at the truck. As we set off toward the Torkham border, Ahmad explained that he and Jahangir had been harshly criticized by their father and uncles for bringing two strangers on 64

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board with them from Karachi, thereby risking one of the family’s main sources of income. It seemed the bomb blast had introduced a sour note of paranoia. The elders had demanded that we leave the truck and cross the border on our own, and the two had no choice but to comply. I had already decided to leave the truck in Jalalabad, on the other side of the border, as the brothers were planning to stay there for a few days, and after six days on the road I had had enough. My house in Kabul was just a few hours away by car. It was a pity I wouldn’t actually get to cross the border in the truck, but I wasn’t going to push Ahmad and Jahangir’s hospitality. We drove in silence through a final stretch of switchbacks past Landi Kotal and then into a dirt lot full of parked trucks, where the brothers would wait until their documents cleared customs. Sardar and I gathered up our gear, and I gave Jahangir some money. After going through the polite ritual of him refusing and me insisting, Jahangir finally accepted, and I watched much of the worry on his face disappear. It was clear they had spent what was for them a considerable sum to host us, during a trip that already had slim profit margins. The money would help ease things with their family, as well. It was time to leave our two friends and their truck. We embraced and said goodbye, promising to meet again once they arrived in Kabul. Sardar and I took a taxi a short way to the Torkham bazaar, a cluster of shops and restaurants that crowded each side of the road in front of the border post. We could see the Afghan flag flying on the other side. Streams of pedestrians hauling bags of goods were flowing both ways—taxis are not allowed to cross the border. Locals, mostly old men and children, were heaving big pushcarts laden with pallets of soft drinks, burlap sacks of produce, stacks of luggage, and even women and children. Here and there a khasadar meandered through, scanning the crowd. A fight between two drivers had broken out in the taxi parking lot, drawing gawkers. The smell of barbecued meat wafted through with the crisp mountain breeze. We walked off to the side and set down our bags. I called a colonel in Peshawar, whose number the military’s press office had given me. He said he would talk to the passport office in Torkham and that there would be no problems. Sardar and I heaved our bags onto our shoulders and set off 65

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down the road. There is no actual physical barrier between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and locals are allowed to cross freely without documents. If you are foreign-looking, however, or you want to travel deeper into either country’s cities, you might be stopped by the police, and so those who want stamps in their passports have to go to the offices on either side of the crossing. In my disguise I could have just walked into Afghanistan, but I would have problems later in Kabul if I didn’t have exit and entry stamps. Our plan was that I would get my paperwork taken care of, while Sardar would hang back and watch from a distance in case something went wrong. The Pakistani passport office was on the right, behind a cast-iron fence. A small crowd of Afghans had gathered at the gate. They were pushing their passports, with small bribes tucked inside, at a Pakistani official who stood in the open gate and would periodically collect a bundle and take them inside to get stamped. I elbowed my way to the front of the group and stepped up to the official. He seemed about to shove me back, but I pulled out my Canadian passport and held it up, saying in broken Pashto, “I am a Canadian journalist.” Everyone went silent and stared at me, dumbfounded. With my other hand, I dialed the colonel and handed the phone to the official. He spoke briefly and then asked me to come inside the office and wait. After a moment, a clerk slapped a big red Torkham stamp on my passport. I walked back outside and toward the border, with Sardar shadowing me from a distance. After walking an unremarkable couple hundred yards down a fenced-in pedestrian passageway, we arrived on the Afghan side. I went into the passport office, where the Afghan official stamped my visa without comment. I walked out into the sunshine and saw Sardar waiting. We embraced, grinning like idiots. It was an immense relief to be back in Afghanistan. I hired one of the taxis lined up at the far side of the border crossing— Corollas driven by locals—to take us straight to Kabul, and we sped off through the arid valleys that led to Jalalabad, a big, bustling city that has benefited greatly from its trade with Pakistan and relative stability over the past 10 years. Passing the American military base in Jalalabad, we watched a Predator drone sweeping in over the highway to land, its wingspan 66

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surprisingly large up close. It might very well have just come from circling over the FATA. We passed an American convoy, its tan heavily armored vehicles hulking over the local traffic, and then crossed through the center of the city, stopping on the outskirts in Darunta for a meal of its famous fried river fish. We followed the Kabul River west along the valley past Laghman Province and then climbed the long, steep loops near the town of Surobi, where young boys scampered around waving plastic-bottle batons to guide truck drivers through turns and warn them of oncoming traffic, hoping to earn a few rupees flung from a window. The Afghan army was out on the roads in armored Humvees. There wasn’t much Taliban activity on the highway between Jalalabad and Kabul—the biggest danger was the traffic. Afghans tend to be reckless drivers, and on many steep, sharp turns there are no barriers between the edge of the road and the cliffside. Each time I had driven this road in the past, I had seen the remnants of at least two or three almost certainly fatal accidents—sheared and blackened fragments of Corollas littering the side of the road. In the final stretch, the road rose and piled on itself in a series of switchbacks and short tunnels cutting through the jagged Mahipar Pass before coming around a bend beside the Kabul River. Sometimes, there were massive traffic jams here as trucks queued up and vehicles trying to pass them got snarled in the opposing lane. But the road was clear this time, and we passed through a set of police checkpoints and into the capital at last, about three hours after we had left Torkham. It was a relief to be back in dusty old Kabul and to see the mud-walled houses piled together on the ridgelines that hemmed in the city. We joined the heavy traffic moving west along Jalalabad Road, passing Pul-e Charkhi Prison and then the big U.N. and World Food Program compounds, as well as an ISAF yard piled high with containers. Many trucks end their journeys in Kabul, where their supplies feed the military bases and embassies, countless NGOs, or the massive aid boom underway in the capital. If the trucks don’t stop here, they might go onward to Bagram Airfield, the largest American base in the country, just north of Kabul, or else join one of the convoys heading south along Highway 1 toward Kandahar, a route pocked with craters from roadside bombs and littered with burnt-out 67

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trucks destroyed in countless Taliban ambushes. In my travels on the road from Karachi, I had seen how the war in Afghanistan has changed the lives of those who live and work in the region—what we could call the unanticipated “second-order” effects of the conflict. As I returned to Kabul, I thought about how these effects were in turn changing the war, and why, as a result, the task of bringing peace to Afghanistan has defied the efforts of the best and brightest in the American establishment and the international development community. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent on the war and the thousands of foreigners and Afghans who have lost their lives, the country remains violent and its future uncertain. Attacks by the insurgency are at a higher level today than before the 2009 U.S. troop surge. While this may confound proponents of the intervention, who believe that Western military might, ingenuity, and dollars are a panacea for troubled countries like Afghanistan, to others it suggests that the foreigners who launched the war do not stand outside of the real forces driving the conflict, as if they were firefighters battling a fire. The tremendous amount of money and vast logistical efforts have proved self-defeating in Afghanistan, fueling corruption and giving local powerbrokers incentives to stoke the flames of conflict. In the country’s violence-wracked south and southeast, where the bulk of the U.S. and NATO military forces are stationed, supply trucks and tankers can usually travel only in convoys escorted by armed security. This has led to the development of a large convoy security industry—just a part of Afghanistan’s swollen private security industry, which employed an estimated 70,000 armed guards at the peak of the surge, in 2010 and 2011. Like the transport industry in Pakistan, Afghanistan’s security business feeds into pre-existing social and economic networks—only here it is to even more malignant effect. As a result of decades of war, Afghanistan is politically fragmented, with “commander networks”—armed men linked in solidarity, whether tribal or otherwise, and led by a commander—dominating the social and economic terrain. After 2001, these local warlords were hired out as protection by international military and development contractors. Unsurprisingly, many of them turned out to be involved in drug smuggling, corruption, and human-rights abuses. Some became vastly wealthy 68

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and powerful as a result of their connections to the convoy business—like Matiullah Khan, the highway police chief of Uruzgan Province, southwest of Kabul, who rose from obscurity thanks to his monopoly over the route between Uruzgan and Kandahar. One sad irony of this is that American taxpayers have even ended up funding the same groups who have been killing American soldiers. In 2011, in response to critical press coverage and a congressional inquiry, a U.S.-led task force documented $360 million in payments from private Afghan security contractors to the Taliban and other criminal groups. Some of the contractors accused of paying off the insurgents were likely still receiving American money in 2013, according to the office of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The contracting process is just too complex and enveloped in too many layers for the American military to understand it properly, let alone control it. The same money, of course, funded the whole unlikely chain of actors that I had witnessed from Karachi to Kabul, from the big contractors down to the khasadars taking bribes on the way to Landi Kotal. And while the billions that have been spent trucking in military supplies have undoubtedly allowed some Afghans and Pakistanis to improve their lives, the money has also fueled chaos, corruption, and criminality on an epic scale. Massive criminal networks and a new generation of warlords—and the accompanying “criminalization of the state,” as the Africanist scholar JeanFrancois Bayart calls it—will be, just as much as schools and roads, part of the West’s enduring legacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Our taxi finally arrived on my street in central Kabul, and I stepped out and breathed the dry mountain air. I had traveled 1,000 miles since leaving the sultry breezes of Karachi, over a chain of mountains and across the heartlands of the war that was being waged there. I thought of the hard lives of those who had carried me here, the men who carry the cargo for this war. Nothing was ever as simple as the charts the generals and politicians showed in Washington. No one got in, or out, cleanly. I stood for a moment on my street and listened to the din of the city’s crowded traffic and the throb of a distant helicopter. Then the metal of my front door creaked as our gatekeeper opened it. I went inside and stood in the shower for a long time. 69

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POSTSCRIPT

JAHANGIR AND AHMAD RIDE AGAIN

The Pakistan-Afghanistan border crossing point at Torkham. (Photo by Shabbir Hussain Imam/EPA)

ALMOST TWO WEEKS after I arrived in Kabul, and long after I had given up on them, I received a call from Jahangir and Ahmad. They were in the capital but leaving the next day. Could I meet them at the edge of the city, at a fuel pump on Jalalabad Road? Sardar had gone back to Karachi, so I brought a Pashtun friend along to translate, jumping into a taxi to meet them. Soon enough, there it was—the familiar blue WAN HAI. We laughed to see each other, hugged, and shook hands. I asked them what had taken them so long. It turned out their trip from Torkham to Kabul had been much more eventful than mine. After waiting a day at the border for their documents to get cleared, they had passed through Torkham, paying bribes to the Afghan Border Police along the way. But they were then held up at the customs house 70

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in Jalalabad for another five days. Like every other truck, they were told they had to contribute to the “Sherzai fund,” that is, the slush fund of the corpulent governor of Nangarhar Province, Gul Agha Sherzai. At last, they continued on to Kabul, but the same day their oil pump broke down near Surobi. A local mechanic spent another day trying to fix it, without any success, so they sent for a friend from Peshawar. He decided the pump needed to be rebuilt with spare parts from Kabul. Jahangir and the mechanic set off for the capital, and Ahmad stayed behind to look after the truck. While they were gone, the Taliban attacked. The militants were going after two flatbed trailers with Humvees on them, which sped off from the shoulder of the road, where a bunch of trucks, including Jahangir and Ahmad’s, were parked. A rocket-propelled grenade struck the stone wall next to their truck but failed to explode. The Afghan army showed up and started exchanging fire with the militants, who approached the truck and yelled at Ahmad to get out and run. He pleaded, explaining that the truck was hauling private cargo and refusing to leave the cab, which took a few shots in the crossfire as Ahmad huddled inside. He pointed out to us a bullet hole on the driver’s side of the truck, at the back of the cab. It had carved a track through the vinyl molding right where I used to rest my head. Another bullet had ripped off a piece of the dashboard. Eventually, the battle ended when the Taliban escaped, leaving Ahmad still stranded and waiting for his brother. In Kabul, Jahangir and the mechanic had trouble finding a hotel that would take them in since they lacked passports or visas. Finally, they convinced one place to let them stay the night. That evening, another guest—a man from Khost Province—died from an unspecified illness. When the police came and found that Jahangir and the mechanic were Pakistanis without proper documents, they arrested them and took them to the police station. Fortunately for them, the dead man had medication and a working cell phone on him, so the police were satisfied, believing he had indeed died of natural causes. Jahangir and the mechanic managed to escape by paying a 1,300 Afghani bribe, about $25. In the meantime, the owner of the cargo had sent another truck to pick up the container while Jahangir and Ahmad’s truck was broken down 71

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in Surobi—and stiffed them out of most of their fee. After all their expenses, the brothers had barely made a profit on the trip, about a couple hundred dollars. But there wasn’t much they could do about it. Afghanistan wasn’t their country. Demoralized, they were ready to head back to Landi Kotal. “We’re done with this place!” Ahmad exclaimed to us. “We’ll take cargo to Jalalabad, but not Kabul.” As they prepared to leave, we exchanged farewells and vows of friendship. “When you got down from the truck at Torkham, my heart became heavy and I became angry at the world,” Jahangir told me, his hand over his heart. I gave them some more money and told them that I would always be grateful to them for taking me in and protecting me during the long trip. We said goodbye and parted, I for my home in Kabul, and they for the open road.

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