DREAM DATELINE/LIFE CAN BE LIKE THIS

The Telegraph Sept 5 & Sept 6 2005
A pass not for Indians- Aishwarya & Rani get through, in posters
SUJAN DUTTA

Torkhum, Khyber Pass: Large turquoise eyes freeze in shock and the hand that can lift the purdah now pulls the veil down tight. It disappears inside the folds of the blue burqa before the camera zooms and clicks. Her handsome Pathan gives an apologetic smile and walks her through the gates to Landi Kotal, Pakistan.

Mehr Unnissa? Asma? Massouda? Rubaiya?

Life can be like this, this feeling of being in Torkhum, wanting to cross a pass you know you cannot.

Khyber Pass on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, Wednesday (August 31) last week.

“No photography,” says the Tajik border guardsman. He wags a finger and offers a consolation: “I love Aishwarya Rai.”

Man, woman and child, an unmoving queue of trucks and cars, civilian and military, border guard and soldier, customs official and vendor, tradesman and smuggler make for a raging river of life flowing amid magnificent desolation.

The black and barren Shamshadsar hill casts its shadow over the bridge. On the far, Pakistan side, the cantonment town of Landi Kotal is bustling. A blue mist rolls down the hills and meshes with brown dust raised by the daily footfalls of millions. Footfalls of Pakistan’s poor, Afghanistan’s dispossessed, tough truck drivers living on wages of fear. Those who can afford it fly over the Hindu Kush.

A step across on the bridge that marks no-man’s-land and there is refreshing green tea on offer from the soldiers of the Khyber Rifles. Green tea favoured by the Pashtuns. Here in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan.

But I have been forewarned: At no cost should an Indian go across in flesh and blood. Aishwarya Rai and Rani Mukherjee and Amisha Patel are couriered across in posters, posters stuck on suitcases and plastered on the chassis of trucks and buses.

One, two, seven, ten, twenty, forty, sixty men; two, six, twelve, eighteen women, some with children in tow, some with infants inside tenting blue burqas, walk across the bridge into Pakistan. Quietly.

There is no vehicular traffic; it is suspended this morning. A general from Pakistan is driving in and the motorcade will be here shortly. He will inspect the road being built in Afghanistan by Pakistan’s Frontier Works Organisation. This is not a border, it is a frontier.

Families walk from here to there, from Pakistan to Afghanistan in this flat in the Sulaiman Hills. Bundles overhead, bags strung from shoulders, like in so many border crossings: Wagah, Bongaon, Raxaul, Calais, Dover. Simple, really.

But you are a Hindustani, an Indian in this frontier, you can’t have a visa, you can’t be drafted into historical invading armies. Your Prime Minister wants transit rights. There aren’t any. The last time an exception was made was five months ago. A Mitsubishi Landcruiser 4x4 was imported through Karachi for the Indian consulate in Jalalabad. Islamabad alleges that the Indian consulate in Jalalabad is a hub of spies. But still it made an exception.

The consul general, A.K. Goswami, was not summoned to Kabul when the Prime Minister was in the Afghan capital this week. The mission called in diplomats from Dushanbe and Tashkent and Delhi and Abu Dhabi. But not a soul from India’s mission in Afghanistan’s second city.

They are on watch, watching the road from Kabul to Torkhum. Torkhum is where the road ends in Afghanistan; this is the western end of the Khyber Pass. The road is Afghanistan’s lifeline, Kabul’s jugular vein.

Should President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh strike a deal in New York on September 14, Indian vehicles and traffic will take this route to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It will be possible to drive from Amritsar to Tashkent in two days. But before that the road will have to be laid.

For now, it is a tremulous drive from Jalalabad to Torkhum. The path is lost in mud and scrabble and clouds of dust. The road exists because vehicles have to drive through and leave tyre tracks, because Pakistan has to export $224 million worth of goods to Afghanistan, because those goods are ferried in large containers sitting on trailers, because the US has to send its war materiel here, because Afghanistan is a landlocked country and its imports have to transit through Karachi.

Day and night, Taliban and Hekmatyar, US scouts in Humvees and Hummers, Canadian troops in armoured cars, German ISAF contingents, brigands, warlords, narco-mafia traverse the road, some authoritatively, others slyly, some chase, some flee. Everyone is highly strung. The journey must begin and end in daylight. All are warned, all keep their fingers crossed. Drivers from Kabul refuse to take the road despite offers of a bonus.

Jalalabad is the biggest city -- if it can be called that -- before the road takes the right bank of the Kabul River through Nangrahar Valley’s poppy country, climbs 11,000 feet to the Lataban Pass and rolls into the high plains of the Afghan capital.

It’s not a road really. It is an alignment for one. Less than a quarter of it is black-topped. The black-top is flattery, the road is deception.

It takes nearly four hours of a backbreaking drive from Jalalabad -- 75 km to the west -- to Torkhum. That is just about a round trip from Delhi’s Red Fort to the Honda factory in Gurgaon. A trailer carrying America’s war junk of military vehicles can’t make it to Torkhum, just 30 km away, any more. Its axles have snapped.

“I’m waiting here in this benzene (petrol) station because I have to stay the night,” says driver Latifi. “I should get some relief tomorrow morning, Inshallah.”

Around the petrol station are the Safed Koh, the white mountains. The tops have pickets built by armies in the past. They are still held by armies or the police. Every hilltop is an observation post, some are marked with the Afghan flag. Most are unmarked.

At Lalpur, the dust raised by the traffic is so thick that headlights are switched on. A ghostly shape looms through the cloud. The rusting chassis of a Soviet-era tank. Vehicles drive on either side of it.

From Lalpur to Torkhum the road is marked by the queue of trucks and trailers, richly decorated Pakistani vehicles mostly, a few overcrowded buses. No vehicles are being allowed across the frontier now. The general is on his way. At the frontier, a solitary soldier waves back.
He is standing next to a board. It reads: “Welcome to Pakistan. KHYBER RIFLES. Pepsi.”


Games in Afghan poppy land
SUJAN DUTTA

Torkhum/Jalalabad, Sept. 5: Zalmay: driver, friend, companion, interpreter, escort, guide. He’s worried like hell and wants us ‘outta’ here, Nangarhar, fast.

Poppy country Nangarhar. It has many highs -- America, Pakistan, India, Taliban, Hekmatyar and opium.

There’s a high also in the Kabul river, gushing liquid sapphire that flows into Pakistan; the high is in the hills of Nuristan across the waters with bluffs like chunks knifed out from a brick of frozen butter.

The high was in 2004; opium produce is down 95 per cent this year.

The low is in the Great Game.

It’s between the Americans and the Pakistanis and the Indians. In that order. Each wants a bit of this strategic space, the road to the Khyber Pass, gateway to South Asia.

Zalmay is driving through this province of stark hill and green valley. He fears the imponderables for himself and for me. Too many Kalashnikovs about here.
He has nothing to do with the Great Game.

Manmohan Singh is playing it. In South Block they said at first that the Prime Minister would visit Jalalabad on his Afghan trip last week. He did not. He did not come to Jalalabad, 75 km from Torkhum, 75 km from the Khyber Pass.

“The only excuse they could come up with for a Manmohan Singh tour of Jalalabad was a visit to Badshah Khan’s mazhar,” The Telegraph is told. Badshah Khan or Frontier Gandhi is/was Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Bharat Ratna. Then, Delhi let it be known that it was not safe for the Prime Minister.

It’s as safe in Jalalabad as it is in Kabul. But Badshah Khan, the historical horse India rides, is disliked here in Nangarhar. Badshah Khan echoed Gandhi in 1947.

This is 2005. They say Badshah Khan was from Jalalabad but he wanted Pashtunistan, a country of the Pashtuns, till Nehru and Gandhi said forget it, India is more important.

Badshah Khan is great game in little Nangarhar. Little Nangarhar is great game in our scoop of the world.

Nangarhar, home to Torkhum, in Afghanistan’s east is where the Khyber Pass begins or ends, as gateway to South Asia. America’s and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai -- as Pashtun as Zalmay Khalilzad, the US administrator in Iraq -- wants entry in Saarc.
Back to the highs, lows and the Great Game.

Only two countries have consulates in Jalalabad: India and Pakistan. On May 11, a mob in Jalalabad ran amok through the town’s main road -- the road from Kabul to the Khyber -- attacked official establishments and burnt down the Pakistan consulate. An American magazine had reported that the Quran was desecrated in Guantanamo Bay. The Indian consulate was stoned but the mob could be persuaded to target elsewhere.

In Jalalabad’s main market, you cannot pay for a gourd of the luscious sarda fruit in dollars or rupees because you will not get the change in dollars or Afghanis. The currency is the Khaldar, old Pakistani rupees. The buses and trucks and vans through the city are mostly Pakistani. Few know where the Indian embassy is. Most point to a microwave link TV tower that Indian engineers have built in the town centre. It’s far from that.

Unobtrusive and walled high, the Indian consulate in Jalalabad houses not only its offices but also it personnel.

Pakistan has objected to the Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Herat, down south in the province bordering Iran. The consulates are intelligence operations, says Pakistan. The Indian consulate in Jalalabad is inciting separatist insurgencies in its North Western Frontier Province and Baluchistan, it is alleged.

An Indian medical mission that has a presence in Kabul and several other cities of Afghanistan is due in Jalalabad shortly. A private company from India has set up the mobile telecom network in Nangarhar. India is far from here. Just 600 km across Pakistan to Wagah in Punjab.

Behind the sandbagged defences of the Jalalabad airport and the hills of the white mountains is a hidden war. The US has all its 1,700 troops for Afghanistan’s eastern provinces -- Nangarhar, Laghman, Kunar, Pakhtiya -- based here. Nothing new. Nangarhar and the Khyber Pass have witnessed the traverse of the world’s great armies -- British, Persian, Mughal, Greek.

Last week, the US forces were bundled into Chinook helicopters for an operation in the Korengal Valley in Kunar province after 16 of their troopers were killed by suspected Taliban. The Taliban is atop the mountains and across the Durand Line, the border that isn’t but it separates Afghanistan from Pakistan.

Throw in a little bit of democracy.

The leading candidate from Nangarhar is Hazrat Ali. There are 10 seats from Nangarhar in the Wolesi Jirga that is to be the lower house of the Afghan parliament. Four seats are reserved for women. There are 192 candidates contesting. About 25 are former commanders of the Taliban, the Hizb-e-Islami (Hekmatyar) and Hizb-e-Islami (Khalisa). The other candidate sure to win is Fazlur Rehman Ibrahim.

Hazrat Ali was the corps commander of the Afghan Army under the Soviets who later became Nangarhar’s chief of police. Fazlur Rehman is the director of the health services for Afghanistan’s eastern provinces.

Last year, the government of India posted an education mission here for the university of Nangarhar. A teacher of English and two trainers in computer languages.

The teacher of English was to train teachers of English. Nangarhar university’s head of the department of English told the Indian English teacher that the class VI NCERT text book was too tough and his staff could not attend the classes because their ignorance would show.

In the villages around Jalalabad, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has put up posters for the September 18 election that tries to teach Afghans the meaning of democracy: every individual has one vote, you cannot vote for your family.

It’s late in the afternoon and Zalmay is almost panicky. “I panic for you, not for me,” he says. “If I cannot take you back to Kabul in one piece I will feel insulted.”

Dignity counts for a lot in these parts.

Zalmay calls the shots. We drive back. Twisters funnel spirals of dust skywards from the high plains of Kabul.