I. Jalalabad
The unmarked plane buzzed the city, landed at the dilapidated airport and then took off again. This banal incident attracted the notice of perhaps 20 news-starved journalists, the last remaining reporters in Jalalabad. All of them raced to the airport.
“It was only Afghan Airlines,” declared the mujahedeen soldier guarding the airport gate. “The pilot asked us to cut the grass alongside the runway.”
No one believed him. Not for a minute. It was the U.S. Marines, a French TV reporter exclaimed bitterly, convinced that the media was being kept away — as usual — from the real action in Afghanistan. A BBC correspondent muttered darkly that the plane was CIA: The spooks had unloaded secret teams to comb the caves of Tora Bora. Somebody said the plane was spiriting away Al Qaeda prisoners.
The journalists bullied their way past the protesting guard. Tires squealing, their Afghan drivers roared onto the empty runway. The drivers had never seen such a vast, lovely expanse of asphalt in their lives.
They were gripped by ecstasy. Careering up and down the airstrip, they hooted and weaved and honked — blowing the carbon out of their sad jalopies. Now it was the journalists’ turn to protest. They rolled helplessly in the back seats of their cars, cursing in many languages.
Brownian Movement: the random motion of atoms in a vacuum.
This is one way to look for Osama bin Laden, a frustrating obsession for many, notably the U.S. government, since Sept. 11.
II. Kabul Prison
The Taliban was frog-marched out of a prison hut. He was a slight Pakistani clad in the usual pajamalike chemise and baggy pants, and he bowed to touch my boot toe in supplication. He thought he was going to be shot.
“Stand up,” Mahfuz ordered. Mahfuz was a bearish man with a gray beard and big belly overflowing the web belt of his Russian uniform, the standard issue of a Northern Alliance officer. “Talk.”
But the prisoner wouldn’t talk. A friendly Alliance soldier whispered Urdu reassuringly into his ear. I asked him about his father. About his mother. Was there a message he wished to deliver? The prisoner said nothing. He gazed straight ahead with what can only be described as a condemned man’s stare. Unblinking. Wet. Drinking in the world fiercely.
Mahfuz dismissed him, apologizing.
His unit had surrounded 19 foreign Talibs at the front that morning and they had refused to surrender.
Mahfuz had shouted out suras from the Koran at them, telling them they were all brother Muslims. The Talibs almost sniped him.
“We attacked them,” Mahfuz said. “This one survived.”
The prisoner squatted by the wall. We locked eyes and I tried to outstare him — was I not looking for bin Laden? — but this was a mistake. I blinked in stupid amazement.
His deadened look: not despair, but perfect, murderous, undistilled hatred.
III. Madoo
The Pentagon, in its own brash way, looked for bin Laden in Madoo.
American planes blew up the village.
Three weeks later, four ragged, dusty men — the village’s only male survivors — were still raking through the rubble, pulling out and reburying bits of their relatives. One of these men, a farmer, was still quaking with repressed fury. Another, resigned, had collected pieces of the bombs for their scrap value. The shards were all he would have, he said, to sustain him through the winter.
Smashed, embittered Madoo. A mud village of almost nothing reduced to nothing.
Needless to say, there’s no need to look for bin Laden there now. Check back in a few years, though.
IV. Kabul
After five years, Afghan television was back on the air.
The starving engineers, pulled out of a forced retirement imposed by the Taliban, were celebrating in the dingy control room. They shook hands earnestly — wrinkled ghosts of Afghanistan’s cosmopolitan past, desperately trying to rebuild a future from the Dark Ages.
Homay, the bespectacled program director, was filling the first hours of programming with old Afghan music videos.
“Sadiq Fetrat Nashnas,” he said proudly of a middle-aged crooner belting out folk tunes. “He was exiled to Canada.”
And the next singer?
“Awal Mir,” Homay said, stifling a giggle. “Died a few years ago.”
And him?
“Ahmed Zahed,” Homay chortled. “The Taliban blew up his gravestone. He was too popular.”
Dead. Defeated. Exiled. With each of the crushed musicians who appeared oncreen, the engineers guffawed louder. Western journalists who had come by to record the historic moment began to join in. Those trying to hold back, out of a sense of decorum, only ended up in hysterics. Poor, poor Afghanistan.
Heartbreaking joy: To search truly for bin Laden, one must know where not to look.
V. Rabat
The Solangis went into battle singing. Some held hands. The Taliban threw AK, heavy machine gun, tank and RPG rounds at them. They didn’t care. The louder it was, the happier they seemed. They were positively elated to be shot at. They loved war.
When the Taliban front broke, the Solangis didn’t pause. They stormed the trenches, scooped up the rice cooking over smoldering fires, grabbed the abandoned weapons, carried their mangled dead back to waiting pickup trucks.Out of the corner of the eye, in the latest offensive since time immemorial to sweep across the Shomali Plain, bin Laden was spotted everywhere.
VI. Kabul
Probably the closest most reporters ever came to bin Laden was at the safe houses of the city’s Karte Parwan district.
A chilling mess. Al Qaeda operatives had abandoned their sandals, books, toothbrushes, bomb diagrams and piles of shaved beard hair in ugly walled compounds that mimicked the Tijuana school of architecture.
Bin Laden’s haunting presence was everywhere: in wall maps with pins marking U.S. military bases, in “best hit” videos of speeches exhorting followers to holy slaughter.
“The Only Medicine for Unbelievers” went the sign above one Al Qaeda clinic. It showed an AK mowing down a line of people.
Bin Laden’s foot soldiers, it was depressingly clear, knew virtually nothing about life in the cosmopolitan Western world they had set out to destroy. Just as the average American still can’t distinguish between Tora Bora and Bora Bora. (Tourism in Tahiti is yet another casualty of the Afghan war.)
Ands so, at the safe houses of Karte Parwan we learned the best way to look for bin Laden: Peer into the vast chasm of mutual incomprehension that separates them from us.
It isn’t easy. But I promise. He is lurking there, somewhere, even now.
