He has a quick mind and a keen sense of humour, and H and I both like him from the start. He talks freely in almost perfect English, and our conversation moves rapidly over the burning issues. The situation, he says, has never been more dangerous. Massoud’s forces are hanging by a thread, and unless more help comes he’ll be unable to withstand the Taliban. With help, he’ll be able to survive until rebellions can be spread among Pashtun groups within the Taliban’s own heartland. It’s an ambitious plan, which prompts H to ask if the Taliban can really be defeated. The answer surprises us.
‘Nobody can defeat the Taliban militarily,’ says Karzai, shaking his head. ‘As long as Afghanistan exists, the Taliban will exist. They are the sons of Afghanistan and they will always have their place. But the Taliban are not one entity. They are like – what is the name of that Greek monster with all those heads? If you cut off one, another will take its place.’
‘A hydra.’
‘A hydra. But the Taliban can’t unify my country. They cannot repeat their earlier success.’
‘Success?’ asks H. ‘Do you call their kind of government a success?’
‘My friend,’ he says, ‘for a scorpion, even hot sand is a relief. We have to start where we are. The Taliban have their place in that. You cannot deny them their achievements. People who have not seen the conditions in the country cannot understand their popularity. But by bringing foreign fighters onto the Afghan earth they have done a thing which Afghans cannot forgive. People can see where they are taking our country. That is why we need friends, real friends, who can help to defeat them politically.’
‘Does that include America?’ I ask.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Why shouldn’t it? I don’t dislike America. But America is like the Taliban. It doesn’t have one head. Listen, my friends. I have talked to American diplomats here and in Islamabad. I have talked to the State Department in Washington. I have talked to the CIA and the military. Every one of them has a different idea about Afghanistan, but only America is powerful enough to help us.’ He sweeps his hand again over his head. ‘Their great weakness is to see the world in black and white. It’s always good guys and bad guys with them.’ He chuckles. ‘In meetings they always ask, “Is he a good guy or a bad guy?” They want it to be black and white. But nothing is black and white in Afghanistan. There are a thousand shades between black and white.’
I ask if he thinks that bin Laden will be handed over.
He sighs deeply. ‘Before, it was possible. Now, I doubt. After they tried to catch him, he is too cautious.’ I didn’t know anyone had tried to catch him, but thinking back to some of the things Grace alluded to back in Washington, it makes sense. Karzai raises an emphatic finger in the air. ‘Osama will bring big trouble to Afghanistan, I guarantee. Even though he himself is not the most powerful one. Make no mistake. This is an international war with international players.’
We move on from this dark thought to more immediate things. Karzai doesn’t know, or want to know, the operational details of our onward journey. But he sits with us over our maps and tells us in detail about the Taliban’s deployments and what we can expect in different places. He agrees that to drive to the south via Kandahar will invite too much attention and that our planned approach from the north will be safer.
‘Whatever you think of them,’ he says, ‘the Taliban are Afghans, and unless you do something very foolish they will treat you as their guests. But al-Qaeda is a different matter. They are trained to think that Westerners are the cause of all evil. If they suspect something, you will have difficulties.’
‘When you say difficulties,’ asks H, ‘what do you mean?’
‘I mean they will shoot you and your bodies will never be found. Fortunately for you the majority are in the south of the country and you are unlikely to meet them. God forbid it should be so.’
He agrees to send a message to our contact in Kabul to alert him to our arrival and advises caution in the matter of who we trust. When it’s time to give him the money that we have promised to deliver on Grace’s behalf, we hand over the shrink-wrapped bundles of cash, each one of which contains a hundred thousand dollars. He picks them up, stuffs them cheerfully into the saddlebags of his bicycle, wishes us good luck and pedals away.
‘He’s pretty switched on for a bike messenger,’ says H as we go back indoors.
Not many foreigners take the overland route into Afghanistan. We haven’t actually got permission to enter the tribal territories between Peshawar and the border, but it can take weeks to arrange and H wants to see the Khyber Pass, which is actually a dramatic series of switchbacks on the Pakistani side of the frontier. It’s an unforgettable way to get to Afghanistan and there isn’t anywhere quite like it. So at dawn two days later, after our visas come through with the help of the trust, we change into local clothes and head for the border with our driver.
From the tribal point of view, we’re already in Afghanistan. The British drew the frontier a hundred years ago, but it was never recognised by the Pashtuns who live along both sides of its thousand-mile length, and Afghans still like to joke that they in fact own much of Pakistan. It’s wild territory. There are Pakistani police checkpoints along the way, but you get the sense their power doesn’t reach much further than the distance they can swing their long bamboo truncheons. As we leave Peshawar behind, the mountains swell and the road begins to sway between their steepening flanks as we approach the pass that officially connects the two countries. Everything looks more dilapidated except the mountains, which rise steadily higher and magnify the feeling that you’re entering a different world, with different and harsher but simpler rules. Even the sky begins to clear as the dust of the plains falls away, and the air cools as it thins.
The border post at Torkham is a chaotic place. There’s a scruffy collection of buildings and a pair of wide gates flanked by fence posts that are no longer vertical, beyond which an Afghan flag flutters in the wind. Hovering near the gates are about a dozen Pakistani policemen in khaki uniforms, picking at random on individuals from the flow of men and women approaching the crossing point.
As long as we are not recognised as foreigners, there is nothing to stop us from entering Afghanistan here, and I sense that H is enjoying the idea of reliving the Great Game for a day and slipping unnoticed into the country. So a hundred yards from the gates we get out of the car and our driver agrees to wait until he sees us cross before he leaves. I catch the attention of an Afghan boy pushing a dusty cart laden with sacks and boxes, to which I add our bags and pay him a small sum to meet us on the far side of the gates. Then we say goodbye to our driver and merge into the flow.
‘You look good in an Afghan hat,’ I say to H.
‘See you in Afghanistan,’ he says.
We walk past the police as nonchalantly as possible and meet gratefully on the other side of the gates. It’s an anticlimax. There doesn’t seem to be any passport control. We wander into the courtyard of what looks like a customs post, where an armed Talib is dozing under a tree with an AK-47 across his lap. We rouse an official and are invited to sit, and a few minutes later a boy brings us tea. Then from the building someone waves us inside to a run-down office with a dusty desk beneath a bare bulb and a ceiling fan that doesn’t work. He smiles and stamps our passports without much interest, then points us in the direction of some decrepit cars waiting to ferry passengers to Kabul. We’re officially in Afghanistan.
Nothing has escaped the years of war here. For almost the entire route, the surface of the road has long since disappeared. For lengthy stretches even the road itself has simply been torn away by flooding or collapsed. Even on the best sections we weave between craters and gullies gouged out by years of neglect. The telephone poles and pylons beside the road have been stripped of their wires. There is no building, wall or human structure that is intact. Everything seems on the verge of collapse or to have been reduced to its most elemental parts. All along the way we see the vestiges of conflict: destroyed and rusting armoured vehicles, stripped of every salvageable part, crouching silently beyond the shoulders of the road or in the surrounding fields.