THE SMART SET GETS ONE UP

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan: My fixer -- no self-respecting Westerner does Central Asia without one, without a local to smooth his way -- tried to take me to the Hotel Dushanbe. But I'm no sucker. I didn't let the big rooms or working boilers seduce me.

"Take me to the Hotel Tajikistan!" I insisted to Sadullo. An anguished look crossed Sadullo's face: "But it's ... cheaper."

In Tajikistan, as back home in Manhattan, cheap means bad. But here in the waning days of the Afghan war rush, the Hotel Tajikistan is THE place to be. Dushanbe, the worn-out capital of the most-failed of former Soviet Republics, sight of a not-unlike-Afghanistan civil war during the '90s, is the jumping-off point for anyone who wants to get into Afghanistan, a country with no international airport. And the Hotel Tajikistan has become a Scene: There are more "journos" in the lobby than in the entire New York Times building.

When you catch Christiane Amanpour and the rest of the talking heads broadcasting from the roof of the Islamabad Marriott in Pakistan, know this: People who don't know jack about this part of the world go to Pakistan to get into Afghanistan. You would, too, if you looked at a map; the Khyber Pass offers the best geographical connecter between Afghanistan and the outside world. But the Pakistani-Afghan border has been closed since U.S. bombs started falling; the closest thing to actual action is interviews with Afghan refugees at camps in Peshawar and Quetta.

Tajikistan has received remarkably little coverage in America's new war, as cable TV news calls it. When the Taliban still ruled, the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance used the country as a supply line -- opium paste and emeralds out, guns in. Even when the Islamic State of Afghanistan controlled just 5 percent of the country, the Alliance ran a regular helicopter shuttle between Dushanbe and Faizabad, Afghanistan. Now, that chopper and government-sponsored journalist convoys have become the only reliable ways in and out of the land of the mujaheddin.

"Are you with a relief agency?" a thinned-lipped 50ish lady from Seattle asks me in the elevator, obviously sizing up my suitability for a middle-of-nowhere one-nighter. "Journalism," I reply, "talk radio and The Village Voice." "Ohhhh," she says. We both know what that "oh" means. The aid agency workers, mainly Christians and retro-granola types, consider the journalists vultures of the lowest order, gleefully snapping pictures of gore and cruel acts. The laptop and video-feed set look at the aid workers with a mix of pity and contempt, for they believe their efforts are both pointless (feeding a few thousand while millions starve) and self-interested (converting Muslims to Christianity).

Naturally, both are right. The real winners here are the Afghans and Tajiks sufficiently educated in English and the ways of the marketplace to exploit the army of expense-account-funded scribblers and proselytizers in their midst.

The Northern Alliance charges $550 for a one-way helicopter ride that takes 20 minutes; to increase revenue they sell twice as many tickets as there are seats and let Darwinistic fisticuffs work out the difference. The same experience, minus the double booking, cost just $130 a year ago. English/Dari/Pashto translators go for more than $100 a day in a nation with an average monthly income of $1.40. Even a 20-mile taxi ride, at most a buck a year ago, will set back the accounting department at CNN $40 or more.

According to the Afghan embassy, more than 1,000 journalist are running around inflating the Afghan economy; every day, roughly 40 to 80 more enter the country. The war hasn't been completely gentrified, however; the car convoy, which travels some of the worst mountain roads anywhere on the planet "for eight or nine hours, or maybe three days," according to my fixer, costs a mere $400 per car. Before the war you could've done the same thing for $80.

"I just hope the Taliban hold out at Kunduz," I overheard a guy from German Channel 4 say in the elevator here at the hotel. Many residents of Dushunbe feel the same way.

COPYRIGHT 2001 TED RALL
Originally Published on November-24-2001

ALL THINGS FALL APART: FREEDOM COMES TO AFGHANISTAN

TALIQAN, Afghanistan -- One week after the Taliban fled this dusty provincial capital to join their comrades defending nearby Kunduz, freedom was in the air. Eleven-year-old boys toting rocket launchers bigger than themselves milled about the central square, playing soccer, flying kites and shooting their AKs into the air. Women briefly lifted their burqas to take a clear look at the workman painting over the Taliban logo on the local school.
I wandered the streets feeling more like Mick Jagger than a citizen of the nation dropping bombs on the locals; a throng of men and boys followed me as I made my way to the market to buy Nescafe and flea powder. Because of Ramadan the bazaar is quiet during the day, but at night the Shah Masood restaurant springs to life. The local specialty is Afghan steak kabobs mixed with eggs (like the country itself, they are interesting but dangerous).

In a scene straight out of the Wild West, fierce gunmen sprawl over the tables, their weaponry laying about as they sing along to Indian movie music blasting from a loudspeaker and occasionally engage one another in fisticuffs. It's hard to believe that just a week ago most of these men were Talibs.

"Of course we will throw away our burqas," a young woman told me at the bazaar, "but we are afraid the Taliban will come back. If they do, they will punish anyone who removes their burqas."

There is uncertainty in the air about whether "the current government", as locals call it, will stay in power. But it's more than that. Women as well as men dread a return to the "Mad Max"-like state of anarchy that characterized the early '90s, when the Northern Alliance last ruled this country.

From the April 1992 deposal of President Mohammad Najibullah until 1996, when the Taliban dragged him out of a U.N. compound and castrated, shot and hanged him, the Northern Alliance's Islamic State of Afghanistan was less a government than a state of institutionalized chaos. The highways were trolled by rapists and warlords, and the cities became so unsafe that few Afghans dared venture out after dark.

During this period, Afghanistan secured its role as the world's leading supplier of heroin. The Taliban put an end to all that, but at a terrible price -- the rule of law found its pinnacle at 3 o'clock Friday afternoons when criminals were taken to the soccer stadium east of Kabul and subjected to amputation, stoning and execution.

The bad old days, it seems, may be coming back. At this point, the sole expression of government authority here is a lone traffic policeman standing at the Pakistani-style rotary in the middle of the main intersection. By yesterday, even he had repaired to a disused ammunition dump nearby where he could be found fast asleep, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. Half of the male population -- the heavily armed half -- is cruising the streets looking for people to rob. And the drug trade has made a remarkable overnight comeback; pure opium paste is selling briskly a few blocks off the main drag.

The American bombing campaign, which continues to take a toll on Kunduz and much of Takhar Province, has heightened the sense that there are no longer any rules.

I confronted one of the customers at the opium joint: "Isn't that illegal in Afghanistan?"

"Nothing is illegal in Afghanistan," he replied. "You can do whatever you want and no one cares."

"That's not always true," I suggested.

"The Taliban would have cared," he responded, grinding the paste into fine dust and sprinkling it into a cigarette. "But you Americans have gotten rid of them, and now we are free."

Certainly the Taliban's purist vision of Islam has taken a beating. Though people are faithfully fasting during Ramadan, nary a head turns in response to the mullahs' call to prayer. Alcoholic beverages have become the hottest consumer item in town.

"What? You didn't bring wine?" my guide and "fixer" asked me last night, as he geared up for a night of opium-induced haze.

"All the western journalists bring wine from Tajikistan," he scolded. Along with the collapse of legality and religiosity has come a wholesale plunge into the kind of societal cynicism that could mean real trouble if and when the new (and old) Northern Alliance gets its act together.

"In this country it's hard to tell the difference between life and death," the wine aficionado told me between bites of laghman noodles. "So we might as well live a little between all the dying."

COPYRIGHT 2001 TED RALL
Originally Published on November-28-2001