We slid along the icy mountain roads in our tiny Toyota Corolla, our driver somehow expertly angling our bald little tires over the packed snow and ice of the curving road so that we didn’t slide off the nervously close unguarded shoulder and down into the abyss, disappearing into the bowels of Afghanistan. The early morning sun was rising gloriously through the clouds and we were right on time for our date with the Taliban.
We weren’t supposed to have a date with the Taliban. We were supposed to be avoiding them entirely. They had their part of Afghanistan, and the government had the rest, roughly 50/50. We had fully intended to leave them to their extreme Islam and beheadings while we merried about getting photos of beautiful cherry orchards. But then our flight was cancelled. And all the flights, for the rest of the week. Suddenly the only way to continue our itinerary from Kabul to Mazar e-Sharif was to drive nine hours across Afghanistan, dipping in and out of Taliban territory. So here we were. Our tires crunched through the snow as we wheeled around another hairpin turn.
We passed through a series of long and dark mountain tunnels so full of... dust? smoke? that you could barely see six feet in front of the car. Our driver was wearing sunglasses. What a badass. Occasionally a blurry smear would materialize out of the fog and a truck would thunder by us in the haze, like a surreal dream.
I was sitting in the middle back seat, the optimal place for a 6’3” man in a Corolla. To my left was my lovely Bulgarian friend Irina. To my right was our guide’s brother, our bodyguard who was along for the ride in case things got hairy. He had been dead asleep on my shoulder for six solid hours. So much for guarding our bodies. I feel so much better that he’s with us! I hope he wakes up in time for the beheading video. I’d switched places with tiny Irina because previous to that he’d been sleeping on her, crushing her so completely that she couldn’t breathe.
Irina and I were dressed head to toe in local Afghan clothing, hoping to pass at a glance as a local couple when we went through the Taliban checkpoint. She was wearing a local dress, a head scarf and huge sunglasses. I was wearing standard-issue Afghan pajama pants that reached my mid-shin (they were the biggest size, Afghans are not tall people), a man-dress top and a head scarf of my own, covering my very un-Afghan long hair. Irina passed quite well, I thought. I looked more like a Russian grandmother but I suppose better that than an American tourist fucking around in Afghanistan.
We were in the best hands possible, our guide Noor had previously worked advising the US military about security in Afghanistan. So being in the best hands in the worst situation kind of balances out, right? Hopefully? But I’d seen how nervous Noor was the night before as he laid out his plan to get us through Taliban territory. “I’m going to lose kilos in sweat tomorrow,” he confided in me. This guy had been cool as a Coke in the fridge all trip. We were definitely in some shit now.
The plan was to send a dummy car a few hours ahead of us to drive the same route and radio back where the checkpoints were, so we could avoid as many of them as possible. Then a second dummy car would travel the adjusted route a half an hour ahead of us and radio back if there was any trouble. Our group of five was split into two cars, Nasim and my friend Raoul in the lead car with our guide, Irina and I in the second car with our friend Krzysztof in the passenger seat, looking every bit as Afghan as a Swiss Polish man possibly can.
We passed through a town friendly to the Taliban as we neared the checkpoint.
“Don’t take any photos and try to avoid making eye contact with anyone on the street,” our bodyguard was suddenly awake. My shoulder throbbed from having been slept on for hours and my knees informed me that I’d never walk again.
“We don’t want to be noticed at all, they could call the Taliban and get a reward for reporting us.”
We slid through the congested streets of the town, trying to look nonchalant and Afghan AF, wondering which of the dozens of people on the street staring at us had an itchy dialing finger.
Exiting out the other side of the town into the open expanse of space felt like a relief, until the traffic bunched up and we realized the checkpoint was ahead. Here we go.
“If you are spoken to, do not say anything,” our bodyguard admonished. “Do not say anything! Let me do the talking.” Obviously the second we opened our mouths it would be clear we didn’t belong here.
“Pretend to be asleep,” he instructed in a nervous voice as we crept forward toward a Taliban foot soldier, head covered in a black turban and a machine gun slung over his shoulder.
Irina and I slumped down together in the back seat and closed our eyes. Just another Afghan couple bushed from a long drive. Or a girl out for a trip with her grandmother, I don’t know what we looked like. At least I closed my eyes, I’m pretty sure Irina was peeking.
“I see the guy with the black turban,” she whispered.
People I have told this story to always ask if I was shitting bricks at this point. Well... not really? Look, I’ve done a lot of really scary shit and as a result I’m broken inside, don’t judge me. Let’s just say the situation had my full attention. It was very exciting and I was on board to see what happened next.
Irina had just told me a story the day before about being shot at by a sniper when she was working for the Bulgarian government in Iraq, which she seemed amazingly nonplussed about.
“That must have been really scary!”
“Well, he didn’t hit me,” she replied.
So clearly no one on this trip was risk averse or prone to freaking out. But we all understood that it would get messy very fast if the Taliban spotted us. Our guides and drivers would be killed immediately, as punishment for working for Western infidels. We would be a bit luckier because of our value as hostages, and would likely spend some days or weeks in the custody of the Taliban while they negotiated with the Afghanistan government to trade us for Taliban prisoners.
Given the situation, I was more nervous for our drivers and guides than I was for us. When they asked us if we were okay with this plan, I replied immediately “Forget us, are you okay with this??” They were. It felt weird to be in this privileged position, but at the same time, taking these risks were what they had signed up for, for a chance to make far more money than they could working some other job here in Afghanistan. I hated that they had to make that choice, but us not going and them not having money to feed their families wouldn’t solve anything either.
The car rolled forward slowly as I pinched my eyes shut and tried to look really Afghan and super-duper asleep, possibly even dead. Invisible, if that was an option on the table. I hoped Irina wasn’t peeking too obviously. We inched forward.
And more. And more. And then the car picked up speed. Fresh air flowed through the car as we motored anyway. Are we… I peeked. We’re through! Whew!
The main purpose of the checkpoint was for the Taliban soldiers to tax truck drivers who were bringing goods through their territory. Drivers were hopping down from their trucks and ducking around the corner with the Taliban soldiers to discreetly bribe them before they could continue on. Thankfully the soldiers weren’t looking for or expecting us. All we had to do was not stand out at a glance as the non-taxable cars rolled through the checkpoint.
And we’d done it. Wheeeew.
In the center of Afghanistan sits a beautiful town called Bamiyan. This was a Buddhist land thousands of years ago before the Muslims came, and those long-ago Buddhists carved massive statues of the Buddha into a cliff face, which became known as the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
In 2001, the Taliban came along and blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, because they were idols of another religion and the Taliban are stupid. Actually, first they tried destroying these beautiful carvings with their machine guns, which didn’t do a whole hell of a lot to the hard stone, and after trying all of their war toys to little effect they realized they needed the help of an adult and had to threaten to kill the family of a local engineer so that he would rig up explosives and bring down the monuments.
This is sad as can be, but surprisingly the empty Buddha niches are still a beautiful site to visit. You can still take in the massive scope of how big the Buddhas were, and stand before the huge pieces of the statues that lie under tarps nearby, waiting for some future miraculous reconstruction. I stood in awe looking up at these epic voids in the rock, which felt holy to me, somehow, still.
The complex has tunnels and stairs that lead up the cliffside, so you can see the remaining bits of carving up close and stand up where the Buddhas’ heads used to be, taking in the beautiful expanse of Bamiyan all around you.
I was standing at a rock window way up on the cliff face, basking in the silent expanse, when the Muslim call to prayer rang out across the valley, hauntingly. This was one of the most beautiful moments of the entire trip for me. I can still hear it in my head.
I felt deeply moved by this place and tears kept welling up in my eyes, to the point where I began to wonder if I’d been there in a past life, during those ancient Buddhist times. The entire trip to Afghanistan was deeply meaningful to me on a level I couldn’t explain, so it made sense that I had potentially lived here before and was reconnecting to the place across the vast sea of time.
Once we were at the top of the tunnels, looking down at the gap where a buddha had once been, Raoul attempted to get some drone footage, and his possessed drone promptly attempted to kill us all, drawing the concerns of fearful onlookers.
In the afternoon we climbed up to the top of Gholghola, the City of Screams, a ghost town perched up on a hill overlooking Bamiyan, where ancient Afghans made their last stand after one of their archers had made the mistake of hitting the grandson of Ghengis Khan in the dork with an arrow. Whoopsie. Ghengis told his dudes not to come back until every man, woman, ant and influencer in Gholghola was dead. The ruins of the fortress town are all that remain.
The view at the top is incredible. I climbed out onto a boulder on the cliff’s edge and sat down to meditate. As I stared out across the valley and cleared my mind, I felt enormous emotion well up in me, happiness and gratitude at being there, and love for this place. I extended my arms out and felt somehow on some energetic level that I was wrapping my arms around the entire town and valley and drawing it all into my heart. I felt overwhelmed by love as I looked out across the vast valley.
While I was doing all this, my friend Raoul took approximately 4,000 photos of me meditating on the rock.
That afternoon we stopped in a local restaurant for lunch, when one of the guys suddenly said “Holy shit, that’s Eva zu Beck.”
Eva is a famous travel YouTuber who the guys had been talking about earlier in the trip. I kind of rolled my eyes whenever any of these names came up since it feels like following one of the Kardashians or something to me. But to each their own. Shortly after Raoul, Krzysztof and I were on Socotra Island last February, Eva arrived on the island and ended up being stuck there for many months due to the outbreak of war on the island immediately after we left, and then of course the pandemic. This gave her a measure of fame as the Western girl who was stuck in Yemen.
Ha, you guys, there must be somebody who looks like her here- Wait, nope, that’s really Eva zu Beck. We invited her to join us for lunch and she graciously accepted, joining us for a very nice meal and conversation about Socotra and other travel adventures. All this in spite of the fact that at the time, I had no idea who in the hell she was and was slightly annoyed that my friends were fawning over some YouTube celebrity. I kind of didn’t want to like Eva, because I don’t like the whole social media influencer economy and the shallowness it tends to represent. But she was actually a lovely person, intelligent, charming and self-aware. As a well-traveled vegetarian she was genuinely impressed and curious at how I could possibly make it work as a vegan, and she graciously overlooked the fact that I started out being slightly rude to her and also happened in that moment to be absolutely, completely and utterly filthy.
Walking around Bamiyan was a bit strange, because it was the only place in Afghanistan where I saw the young people wearing Western fashions and sporting Western haircuts. Many of them even spoke English, which was a rare find in Afghanistan. Noor explained that Bamiyan was a magnet for NGOs, so the people here had a lot of contact with Western aid workers and the exposure had clearly rubbed off on them.
After lunch we walked past a street corner where the Taliban had set off a bomb to show that no place in Afghanistan is safe, not even Western-friendly Bamiyan. The holes from the shrapnel were still visible.
On the other side of town, a collection of old tanks from Russia's invasion had been painted happy colors by the locals.
When we were visiting the buddhas, Noor made an announcement that seemed both amazing and far-fetched. By some incredible coincidence, we happened to be there on the 20th anniversary of the day the Taliban destroyed the buddhas. Because of that, the locals were planning a ceremony for that evening, where a massive projector would cast the image of the former buddhas into the empty niches and give us the experience of what it was like to be there before 2001.
Holy crap. I couldn’t believe that Noor hadn’t planned this, but he insisted that things had just worked out that way. Wow. How lucky can you get?
That night we returned to the buddha niches, where a large crowd had gathered. Krzysztof and Nasim were content to hang back and observe the festivities from afar, since you didn’t need to be very close to see the MASSIVE buddha images being projected onto the sides of the cliff. But Raoul and I wanted to be in the thick of it, so we quickly left the others behind and waded straight into the crowd.
Between us and the niches there was a concrete drainage channel that ran from one end of the complex to the other. It was about five feet wide and six feet deep. There was no bridge. We’d had to navigate this during our visit that morning, Raoul and I both jumping across the gap while compact Krzysztof had to settle for climbing down into the channel and back up out of the other side.
Now we were jumping across in the dark, which was a bit more daunting but Raoul and I both made it without issue. We joined the growing crowd as hundreds of candles were lit at the feet of the buddhas and a speech was made, as music played and costumed local girls danced.
This is amazing! How beautiful.
The gigantic projector blazed and the niche lit up brightly with a monumental image of the Buddha. Wow. I stood mesmerized.
Raoul and I mingled with the crowd and took photos from every possible angle, until it became clear that the rest of our group back by the van was waiting for us to leave. We swam upstream back through the crowd, through the gate and into the larger mass of people who had assembled outside while we were taking in the candles and dancing. I kept turning around to take photos of the lit-up buddhas from different angles, aware that this was something I would never see again in my lifetime.
I had finished taking a picture and turned around to realize Raoul was no longer standing next to me. He was down the hill, in the dark, turned around and looking back at me expectantly. Ah, he’s waiting at the channel so we can jump across together. That’s really nice of hi-
I took one step forward and disappeared down into the black.
Nope, the channel wasn’t where Raoul was waiting, it was literally right in front of me, invisible in the night, and I fell headfirst right into it. I wasn’t even trying to jump across, I had no idea at all that it was there. I didn’t even know what was happening until I was laying at the bottom of the channel, looking up at the stars. I had a vague memory of a tumbling feeling and a sense of confusion as if the world had suddenly stopped existing.
“WHOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAA!!” the entire crowd roared!
Noor later told me I had likely provided the local Afghans with generations of entertainment. Remember that time that American guy fell headfirst into the ditch? Wow that was something!
I stood up and took stock that all my limbs and organs seemed to still be there. Am I OK? I couldn’t tell, I was in shock and my whole body felt like it was floating. Before I knew what was happening, Raoul had run back to the edge of the channel and was helping to pull me back up out of it.
Wow, am I really OK? I pride myself on being good at falling, but this seemed like something you could die from if you fell wrong. At the very least break some bones. I guess I’m okay?
The commotion over my acrobatics had drawn even more of a crowd, and many of the young Afghans suddenly realized there was an American in their midst. Suddenly I was presented with a line of people who wanted a selfie with me, and I was passed from group to group to pose for photos. I was trying to return the gesture of putting my arms around a young local man for a photo when I suddenly saw in the light of the camera flash that my hands were COVERED in blood. Uh oh. I tried not to get any on the guy I was hugging for the photo.
People were lined up to shake my hand and I tried to comply without getting blood all over them as I gradually extricated myself from the crowd. Before I knew it I was being swept up into the van and we were pulling away.
“What took you so long?”
“Sean took a header into the ditch!!”
“Oh my god, you could die doing that! How are you okay??” Noor was visibly horrified.
When we got back to the hotel I rolled up my Afghan pajama pants. The shock was starting to wear off and for the first time I could feel the cuts on my hands. Something was also going on with my knee. I rolled up the pant leg and I had a gaping six-inch cut across my right knee.
Oh boy. If I was anywhere but Afghanistan I would go and get stitches for this, for sure, But I definitely do not want to see the inside of an Afghan hospital. I asked Noor if he could bring back some iodine and bandages and did my best to patch things up.
For the rest of the trip the guys were really gracious about giving me a seat in the van where I could put my leg up and keep it straight, since bending my knee was going to break things open all over again. And semi-miraculously it all healed okay without stitches and without me losing a leg in an Afghan hospital.
Thankfully it was all healed by the time I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro a week or so later, which was funny to me since I’d hiked the Inca Trail in Peru shortly after splitting my knee open with a hard drive in 2018. One of these days I’ll climb a mountain completely healthy and it will be amazing!
“I’ve learned a lot from you on this trip my friend,” Raoul confided in me in the end.
“Like how not to jump over a ditch?” I asked.
“Yes, that too.”
Two things stand out when you're visiting Kabul. One is that there are no traffic lights whatsoever. Nor stop signs. The entire city street grid is one giant snarl of chaos. Sometimes there are police officers in the street attempting to orchestrate the calamity. Normally though it’s just a gridlocked sea of unmoving cars full of people screaming at each other. It was fascinating.
The other thing you’ll notice is that all of the cars are Toyota Corollas. Somehow. All Corollas. I’m not sure how this is even possible.
Seeing another type of car is like seeing a leprechaun. You note it down in your diary.
Noor explained to us that Corollas were popular because it was easy to get parts for them and make repairs when everyone had the same car. Sure, that makes sense, but there’s popular and there’s “It’s apparently illegal to drive any other kind of car.”
So. Many. Corrollas.
The few cars that weren’t Corollas were some other kind of Toyota. For the rebels.
The thing that made me laugh the hardest were how proud people were to own a Corolla, like it was a Bentley or something.
“Suck it losers, I’ve got a Corolla!” Calm down Danny, so does everyone else. Literally everyone else. “Coooroooolla bitches!”
People had huge COROLLA stickers in their back windows, as if they could have owned any other car. One car had a window sticker that just said www.corolla.com. I laughed out loud. Is that even a real website?
Click. No. Not it is not. Sorry, Afghanistan.
The gridlocked streets were made even more complicated and fascinating by the fact that they seemed to have eight different lanes, each alternating lane featuring traffic headed in the opposite direction. What?? What is this? How does this shit work? I never figured it out.
Driving in Kabul involves a lot of U-turns, which means turning through both the no-traffic-signal chaos and all the alternating lanes like you’re crossing the Indy 500 in a yacht. Just absolute craziness.
Did Kabul feel safe? Generally. It’s the capital. It’s where business takes place. At night, in the distance, you could hear what certainly sounded like the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire happening somewhere else in the city, the sound echoing faintly over the quiet streets in the dark. Hmmm. Irina wasn’t worried.
The bazaar in Kabul was a fascinating mix of the explicable and the inexplicable, with an implausibly wide array of birds on offer.
A mosque outside of Kabul gleamed in the sun.
Whenever we visited a restaurant in Kabul I marveled over the “leave your machine gun outside” stickers in the windows, like this was casual normal daily business.
But the restaurants quickly distracted from this distressing business by having people dressed up as cartoon characters opening the front door for you. The first night, Mickey Mouse was our doorman, the next it was Donald Duck. H’okay, Kabul!
What do you eat in Afghanistan? I ate a whole bunch of bolani, which is a flatbread filled with delicious spiced vegetables and spring onions.
What do you drink? Why, Golden Life, of course.
Sitting around the dinner table our first night in Kabul, I got a text on my phone from work.
“Hey Sean. Could you please reset your password?”
“Uh, sure. Why?”
“We’re seeing some unusual activity on your account.”
“That’s me.”
“No, I don’t think it is, if you could please-”
“I’m traveling overseas.”
“Yeah, but I still think it’s not you-”
“I’m in Afghanistan.”
“...oh. Oh my God. Okay. Never mind. Have a good night!”
I had been planning to travel to Afghanistan for years, but the adventure travel company I like to use was only going to Mazar-e-Sharif, a city in the safest part of Afghanistan. I didn’t want to go all the way to Afghanistan and not see Bamiyan, Kabul and everything else. I’d been working with a competing company that had a more interesting Afghanistan itinerary, but they’d only take you if you had traveled with them before, so they could be sure you weren’t going to get everyone killed by being an idiot. Unfortunately, covid promptly hit and the pre-Afghanistan trips I had planned with that company to Cuba and Angola were both cancelled. Nuts.
Thankfully, my favorite company then announced an experimental new trip that was going to all of the places I wanted to go. All of my other trips booked in January and February had already been cancelled, as covid restrictions grew ever more intense in early 2021. I looked ahead at the calendar, and the United States military’s announced departure from Afghanistan in May loomed large. I didn’t think that was going to go well at all. I needed to get to Afghanistan before then.
The new tour was scheduled for March. In two weeks. Could I possibly get a visa that fast? I raced through the application, drove straight to the post office for a money order, and overnighted my passport to the embassy in Washington, DC. If I paid for rush processing, I would get my passport back juuuuust in time.
Then the embassy lost my passport. Then they stopped answering the phone. For days.
As the days ticked down to the departure I called and called, with no response. The tension grew. Finally, three days before my departure flight, somebody finally answered the phone.
Your passport? Let me check. The guy disappeared for a long time, then finally got back on the line. Yeah, okay, we’ll process your visa now.
NOW? Where the hell did you find it?? It was in the bathroom, wasn’t it? You can tell me.
By some small miracle, the embassy processed my visa and was able to overnight it back to me. I received it the afternoon before my flight departed.
My flight to get to Kabul had a layover in Istanbul. As I was boarding the final flight to Kabul, the gate agent tore up my boarding pass and handed me a new one. Business Class! Wow! I’ve never been upgraded before. I settled into my little flying apartment and enjoyed putting my feet up. The stewardess asked me what kind of drink I wanted, then disappeared into the back to make it. Swanky. I quickly fell asleep sitting up in my spacious seat.
I woke up a few hours later, and looked around. Everyone around me was flat on their backs, asleep. What the fuck?? You assholes! Somewhere my seat had a button that would turn it into a bed. After fumbling profusely I got my seat to lie flat for the last 90 minutes of the flight. Better late than never!
After getting through immigration in Kabul, I wandered around outside the airport, not sure where I was supposed to go. I saw some white guys with British accents and assumed they must be part of my group. I had been standing next to them for a while, nodding uneasily as they talked, when it suddenly dawned on me that they were all huge. Like, improbably huge. The more I listened to them the more I realized they were some kind of military contractors who were there to kick some ass. This isn’t my group! I'm here to avoid all ass-kicking whenever possible!
Eventually I found our guide and he had me wait in a corral in front of the airport. Irina soon joined me, and explained that the reason I had been upgraded to business class was that the entire rest of the flight had been Afghans who were being deported from Turkey back to Afghanistan. The gate agent had probably been concerned about my survival in coach. We waited and I wondered who else was going to be on this trip. Maybe someone I already know?
Then my friend Raoul appeared out of the crowd. Hey! Soon after, Krzysztof appeared. Wow! The three of us had been together on Socotra island almost exactly a year before. Now by complete coincidence we were on the same trip to Afghanistan. This is truly a small world.
Now Raoul, Krzysztof, Irina, Nasim and I were in Mazar, at the famous Blue Mosque. We were sitting in the open courtyard of the mosque with some young locals, who were asking us where we were from.
“Brazil.”
“Uh-huh that’s nice.”
“Bulgaria.”
“Okay.”
“Switzerland.”
“Whatever.”
“The US.”
“WOW that’s amazing!!!”
Over and over again, the locals perked up dramatically the second they realized there was an American in their midst. Hey, it beats the alternative. I’ve been plenty of places where people looked at me like I’d just farted when they found out I was an American. We should free people from the Taliban more often! It would make my travel a lot more fun.
The locals seemed to struggle a bit grasping the fact that I was American and yet was not in the military. I guess this made sense if soldiers were the only Americans they’d ever met before. Who the hell else was coming to Afghanistan? Soldiers and weirdos.
The enthusiasm about meeting an American grew and grew until there was somehow a long line of locals waiting to meet me and shake my hand. My other friends were being completely ignored, hilariously. This swelled until there were a crowd of young Afghans all around me, waiting in line to shake my hand.
One young man paraded triumphantly through the crowd holding up a digital scale. He placed it on the ground and stepped on it. Predictably, the short and stick-thin dude did not weigh much. He then gestured for me to stand on the scale. I did, and the crowd roared in amazement at my heaviness. Truly amazing, these Americans!
This whole thing swelled further until suddenly our guide was fighting his way through the crowd of 50 people I was in the middle of, and he promptly grabbed me and dragged me out of the crowd. I was attracting too much attention. Time to go!
Mazar had long been the safest place in Afghanistan for tourists to visit, but now the Taliban were only about 20 minutes outside of the city. And there was no telling who was watching. Time to go.
Cool as this experience was, the highlight of Mazar had to be buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan. Buzkashi features a bunch of guys on horses thundering around a dirt-filled arena, competing to snatch a dead goat carcass off the ground and run the gauntlet of the other kicking and whip-wielding opponents to get it around a flag pole and into a circle on the other end of the arena.
We wandered the grounds, noting curiously that Irina was the only woman in the entire stadium, and occasionally jumping up into the stands to avoid the crush of frenzied horses and riders bearing down on us and trampling the ground we had been standing on a split second before.
Outside of Mazar, our guide took just history-minded me to see the Charkent Gate, where the mujahideen had used this natural barrier to stop the advance of the Soviets in the 1980s.
I met some happy locals there who were either reveling in local history or using the seclusion of the location to get loaded. Either way, they were having a good time.
Many argue that the Panjshir Valley is the most beautiful part of Afghanistan, and we were on our way to see for ourselves. Our van rolled through endless fields of blossoming fruit trees carpeting the brown landscape.
The mujahideen were groups of Afghan tribal fighters who resisted the Soviet invasion in the 1970s and 80s and eventually defeated the much larger USSR. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the mujahideen and hero of the Soviet-Afghan War, went on to be the military commander of Afghanistan during the civil war and battles with the Taliban that followed the Soviet retreat. On September 9th, 2001, he was killed by al-Qaeda assassins disguised as journalists who were carrying a bomb hidden inside a camera. Osama bin Laden had ordered the assassination to appease the Taliban, knowing he was going to cause serious problems for them two days later with al-Qaeda's attacks on the United States. Massoud was from Panjshir and is buried there in a large tomb.
Images of Massoud and his quotes can be seen on banners all over Afghanistan.
Driving through the valley, cold water rushed between the craggy rocks in what felt like a completely untouched place.
In Samangan, we visited an ancient Buddhist stupa and sprawling meditation caves that I wandered through until the guide came back to see if I'd died or what.
On the outskirts of anything known by man, we stopped at the river border between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. I looked out across the water for a long moment and remembered standing on the other side of that river in 2018, in this same spot, looking across this way and dreaming of one day visiting Afghanistan.
Herat is Afghanistan's third-largest city, a historical center, oasis and origin point of the finest saffron in the world.
We flew up to Herat on a plane that had a large piece fall off inside the cabin during take-off, which after numerous cancelled flights and inexplicable airport waits, was both funny and slightly concerning.
Making it there in one piece (the same can't be said for the plane), we explored the bustling city and bought up enough saffron to begin a drug empire in each of our respective home countries.
In the center of the city, we wandered through the vast Herat Citadel, a fortress dating back to the time of Alexander the Great.
At the Friday Mosque in the city we admired the intricate tile work and watched as the artists there created even more.
Locals arrived for their afternoon prayers and some very sweet local teenagers we spoke with left excited and convinced they had converted us to Islam.
My favorite spot in Herat was the Shrine of Khwaja Abd Allah, dedicated to the sufi saint. We sat in this peaceful space and listening the the birds as the early morning sun warmed the air.
Outside, a really snazzy tuk tuk waited to take us anywhere, anywhere at all.
Sadly, we already had our own driver and the completely inexplicable thing hanging from his rear-view mirror.
Mickey Mouse agreed, that was just damned strange.
A small museum was most interesting for the bizarre stereoscope machine in the lobby that seemed to be from the 1800s.
Up on the hill overlooking the city we visited the Jahad House, which seemed to be dedicated to jihadists but to be honest we weren't 100% clear about this. The strange octagonal house was both lovely and, when I snuck up to the upper levels, seemed to have been mostly abandoned.
Outside, we took in the gorgeous sunset over Takht-e-Safar Park and all of Herat spread out before us.
In central Afghanistan, high up in the Hindu Kush mountains, there are a chain of six deep blue lakes called Band-e Amir, which are surrounded by Afghanistan’s first national park. We drove through the rolling hills and empty expanses until we rose up and up into the pure white snow to get there.
We had the park all to ourselves, not least of all because there was probably nobody else who could get their car down the snowy dirt road. Due to winter still being in control of the situation we didn't get to see the famous cobalt blue waters of the six Band-e lakes, but nobody could complain about the views we did get.
I walked gingerly to an overlook above the lake, Nasim fell on his ass in the slippery snow and Raoul brought out his infamous drone again, which managed to go an entire ten minutes without attempting to kill us, which we all considered a real accomplishment.
Afghanistan ended up being a surprisingly emotional trip for me, and one of my favorites I’ve ever taken. This made it especially painful to watch the country collapse about ten seconds after the US military pulled out in August of last year. Leaders said all the right things about how we had spent 20 years training the Afghan military to hold the Taliban at bay and that they were ready. But… even when we were there, it just didn’t feel like it was going to go well. The local government that the US had put in place in Afghanistan was corrupt and unpopular with the locals. Were the Afghani soldiers going to be willing to die for this sort of made-up country? The Afghani people were loyal to their individual tribes, not the modern country as a whole and especially not some corrupt puppet the US had installed.
It was surreal watching the scenes at the Kabul airport on the news last fall, as people desperately tried to leave the country and the Taliban sent suicide bombers into the crowds. To everyone else watching this unfold from the US, these were just tragic scenes from some foreign hellhole that wasn’t even really real to them. But I’d just been there, and I had spent a lot of time in that airport. A lot of time. It was part of my mental map of familiar places. I’d stood where those crowds of people were, I’d passed through those very gates several times. This was all real to me in a vivid and personal way.
And as the country not-so-gradually fell to the Taliban, I knew people who were being drastically affected. Once the Taliban got to Mazar, I began to worry about my guide Noor. That was his home town, and he had explained to us with heartbreaking candidness while we were there that if the Taliban ever took Mazar, it wouldn’t take them long to find him. He would be one of the first to be killed, as punishment for working for the infidels. He would be made an example of, all for the crime of helping foreigners understand his country and experience its beauty. Noor was a true Muslim, who had memorized the entire Koran and could recite it word for word. But he would be at the mercy of, frankly, morons who don’t understand the first thing about the religion they’re killing in the name of.
The Taliban fighters are primarily very young and uneducated country bumpkins, who were said to have marveled, slack-jawed, as they rode into Kabul, since they had never seen tall buildings before. Allow me to stress that Kabul is not an impressive city. But it is if you’ve been living in a mud hut out in the desert your entire life. And these were the people taking over Afghanistan. They don’t have any idea how to run a country. They’re uneducated kids who have been manipulated and sold a line.
It broke my heart thinking of Noor falling into their hands. Thankfully, the owner of our tour company helped those of us who had traveled with Noor over the years pool our donations to help him get the visas and paperwork to get out of Afghanistan. It was a tense few weeks for all of us watching from afar after Kabul fell, because Noor was still there, in hiding and separated from his family. Several rays of hope were snuffed out when opportunities to get out to Turkey and then the US fell through. But he stayed alive and eventually was able to get himself and his family out to Australia.
All of this is so different when you know people involved.
Afghanistan is on the verge of mass famine now. The Taliban made a lot of noise about how things were going to be different this time, compared to how it was in Afghanistan the last time they were in power, before the US invaded in 2001. This was the new Taliban, more progressive. More eager for acceptance and recognition by the governments of the world.
About four seconds after the Taliban claimed this, the people of Kabul rose up in protest of the Taliban takeover and were promptly machine-gunned by Taliban soldiers. So much for the new Taliban. They’ve since pulled all girls out of school and banned any women from being on television.
It’s especially heartbreaking watching this as a citizen of the US, the country deciding to leave the people of Afghanistan to this fate. It has been a real no-win situation, as in spite of the tragedy our departure has caused, I can’t convincingly argue that we should have stayed. We were there for 20 years. Were we going to stay there forever? Make Afghanistan the 51st state? Would another year of training their military have made a difference? I can’t imagine it would have. Would I be willing to go there and die fighting the Taliban, or send a family member to do so? No. Then how can I insist that someone else should do the same?
We could have handled the logistics of our departure much better, no question. We could have done a better job getting our local allies to safety before we left. But ultimately, we were eventually going to have to leave, and there was never going to be a good time to go.
At the end of the day, I resigned myself to the thought that this is Afghanistan’s fight. I don’t believe you can hand people democracy, it just doesn’t seem to work if the people don’t fight for it themselves. My hope is that the entire generation of young Afghans who have grown up in a world without the Taliban in charge, experiencing Western freedoms and values, will not just accept going back to the 1400s under Taliban rule and will fight over time to overthrow them and win their country back. That true leaders who the locals actually believe in will rise up organically from the local population and lead their people into something better. I know I'll be watching for this from afar with a lot more care and hope than I could have ever felt if I had never gone there myself.