Word: kandahar
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...journey begins in Kandahar on a rainy weekday morning. After a long drive, we reach a Pakistani checkpoint. The 4x4 is discarded for motorbikes, on which we travel along back paths across the border. Once we get inside Pakistan, a car, indistinguishable from the swarms of similar models around it, picks up the travelers and cuts through the slow traffic of the border bazaar. It proceeds along a back road to the outskirts of town. "There are many Talibs here," says a guide. "Everyone knows, but everyone protects them...
...border. Yet here they sit, sipping sweet green tea, untroubled, gregarious and masters of their domain. Mullah Palawan, who commanded an armored corps in Herat before his flight to Pakistan, has spent the morning browsing through the bazaar. Hajji Mullah Sahib, once a Taliban ideologue and functionary in Kandahar, passed the time at home chatting with friends and neighbors. Both seem to go about their daily business without a care in this bustling gateway to Afghanistan...
...States, and they want to make trouble for America," warns Hajji Mullah Sahib. "Now they are sending us money, guns and men." On this score, he's right. Iran has been sending supplies and munitions to disgruntled Afghan commanders who are not being paid by the new government. In Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual center, a government commander says disaffected elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency have been covertly assisting al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives with logistics, escape and safe havens...
...burka, or more correctly the chadari, has long been traditional wear for Afghan women in the countryside and in conservative cities like Kandahar. In 1919, the first Afghani king encouraged women to shed the head to toe garb by revealing the face of his wife in public. Many women in the more liberal cities obliged and by the 1980s less than half the women in Kabul, the capital, wore the burka. Under the Taliban, women had little choice: wear the robe in public or face a vicious beating. But Afghan women say this was more inconvenience than hardship. "Under...
...spend much of my time hanging out with Afghans, watching Indian movies with the local mujahedin in Kandahar, eating what they eat, sleeping where they sleep, now dressing as they do. In Kandahar, I live in the Noor Jahan hotel, room number two. It's the one where a lot of local commanders, their bodyguards and other dubious characters come looking for Mick. Michael is too difficult for them to remember. A month ago, when I was quite ill with a stomach flu, they were constantly there, believing that it was good manners to visit with a sick friend...