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Outside Magazine December 2003
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The Kabul Express (cont.)

On the outskirts of Kabul, a boy waits beneath an image of the late Ahmed Shah Massoud. (photograph by Seamus Murphy)
IN 1969, 63,000 TOURISTS visited Afghanistan. As the Cold War rolled on, the Soviets and Americans competed for influence in the latest iteration of the Great Game, and Kabul was awash with Afghan royals back from ski vacations in the Hindu Kush. "The social scene was the best," recalled Greek diplomat Michaelis Maniatis, who came to Kabul in 1975, fleeing a coup back home, and returned last year as Greece's chief of mission. Reclining on a sofa in the garden of his official residence, dressed in a traditional black shalwar kameez, he remembered Kabul as "a green city, full of peonies," where "people were casual, very Westernized, but close to traditions."

But in 1978, tensions among Afghan communists and Islamic traditionalists broke into civil war. The disastrous 1979 Soviet invasion turned into a bloody guerrilla war, and the humiliated Red Army withdrew ten years and tens of thousands of casualties later. In victory, the mujahedeen warriors simply turned their guns on each other for most of the 1990s. An obscure group of religious students (taliban) parted this sea of chaos, rising first in Kandahar and then blitzing the capital in 1996. With the help of Al Qaeda's money and men, the Taliban controlled 90 percent of Afghanistan by September 11, 2001. America's foremost Afghan ally, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic Lion of Panjshir, was assassinated just days before the 9/11 attacks, but by October his U.S.-trained Northern Alliance army was rolling toward Kabul behind a barrage from B-52s.

Visitors weren't waiting for the dust to settle. Europeans climbed 24,580-foot Noshaq, Americans explored the Wakhan corridor, and Japanese travel agents cased the countryside.
The visitors didn't even wait for the dust to settle. The first tour group arrived in August 2002, nine months after the Taliban was routed, and left unscathed. In April 2003, Orfeo Bartolini, an Italian motorcyclist, lost the adventurer's gamble. Bartolini was en route to India when his bike broke down east of Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold. Two men described as Taliban shot him dead, sparing the Afghan driver who'd picked Bartolini up.

During the first seven months of 2003, 14 American soldiers died in Afghanistan, five of them from enemy fire. But by summer, hundreds of regrouped Taliban fighters were on the offensive, and Osama bin Laden was reported to be in either Konar or the Pakistani border region of Waziristan, inspiring the jihad. Four GIs were killed in August alone; another soldier died in Paktika in late September. A series of allied offensives—joint operations of the new Afghan army, U.S. troops, and even the Royal Norwegian Air Force—cornered large groups of Taliban, killing more than 200 in skirmishes near the Pakistan border. Meanwhile, assassinations of foreigners and Afghans who helped them were increasing: A Salvadoran from the Red Cross was killed in March, an Afghan driver for an American aid agency in August, and four more Afghans working for a Danish relief group in September.

Then again, exaggerating the horrors of this country has been good business since Marco Polo. In a 1928 book called Adventures in Afghanistan for Boys, blowhard American radio correspondent Lowell Thomas described a harrowing journey to Kabul in which he escaped "bullets and bandits" and "wily Pathans," mostly thanks to the fact that he never encountered any of the above. This February, Smithsonian magazine had a correspondent "dodge terrorists and tribal skirmishes," while failing to spot either. Most areas outside Kabul were "considered no-go areas by the UN and aid agencies," I read in London's Sunday Times Magazine—on the same day the UN published a map showing most of the country open for travel.

Afghan tourism has already reached its third wave. The first was, of course, the Afghans themselves. Next came the hundreds of mostly independent travelers who have already visited the country since the war ended. Now come the people Dupree calls "moneybags." During my stay, 14 Europeans from an Italian-led expedition team were climbing 24,580-foot Noshaq, the highest peak in Afghanistan; four Americans were in the Wakhan corridor, looking for rare Marco Polo sheep; and a group of Japanese travel agents was casing the countryside. In addition to the Brits, the Japanese dominate travel so far, captivated by this far edge of Asia. One tour company, Nippa Travel, already offers weeklong tours on the "If this is Wednesday it must be Jalalabad" model.

Half a dozen more tour groups were expected by the end of 2003, most bound for Bamiyan, the site of the Buddhist statues so famously destroyed by the Taliban, or for the Panjshir Valley. Asked whether this kind of travel was safe, Dupree said, bluntly, "It's fine." That's only true if you know as much as she does about where not to go, but the areas north and west of Kabul are generally considered safe, at least by Afghan standards. However, she added, "I wouldn't go to Konar at this moment, for example."

I wished she'd mentioned Konar earlier. My traveling companion, Irish photographer Seamus Murphy, and I had just spent four days planning an excursion to Nurestan to retrace Newby's steps. Nurestan is best accessed through Konar province. Our truck, translator, and supplies were all arranged, and our worries had been dismissed by both the 101st Airborne and a UN security briefer. But last-minute research warned of fresh fighting and a possible kidnapping in Nurestan. Even worse, the country's most infamous warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a pro-Taliban fanatic known for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women, had been spotted in the area.

We canceled the car, unpacked the groceries.

There had to be a safer place. Just off Chicken Street, I met Gul Agha Karime, the proprietor of the Karime Super Market, a dry-goods shop, as well as the leader of an Afghan initiative to rescue the mysterious Minaret of Jam, an ancient tower on the Harirud river, 340 miles west of Kabul. Leaning badly and vulnerable to looting, the tower is listed by UNESCO as one of Afghanistan's most endangered treasures. Karime gave me tea, a candid assessment of travel in Afghanistan ("Is no problem"), and two things to deliver to Jam: a letter of introduction and a heavy piece of brass. This last item was an official seal for the headman of the local village, a three-pound relic that I would now carry across the country—westward, along the old Central Route to Bamiyan, and beyond that to Jam, and Herat, the storied Persian capital of old Afghanistan.


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