KABUL, Afghanistan — One of the most troubling things about the national conversation about
Afghanistan is that it tends to focus almost solely on the decade since the 2001 American-led invasion. Perhaps this is understandable, since the Afghan conflict marks the longest stretch of time that the United States has actively been at war. And as always, the latest crisis, any of them, dominates attention: the growing threat posed by Afghan forces who kill their NATO colleagues, the unwillingness of Pakistan to stop sheltering militants who carry out attacks in Kabul, the plague of official corruption that undermines Western trust and the Afghan public’s support.
But both Afghanistan’s current throes and any educated guess about its future can only be appreciated by considering not just the course of the American-led occupation but three other distinct periods over the past
quarter-century as well. Illustrating the arc of all four — and thus giving a glimpse of the sort of possibilities that could be in store for the next phase — is the accomplishment of “A Distant War,” a new book-length project by
Bob Nickelsberg, one of the region’s longest-serving photojournalists.
Mr. Nickelsberg came to Afghanistan the year before the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a period that some compare to the current American and NATO coalition: A large, long-term foreign occupier that built up a huge indigenous security force only to withdraw after failing to defeat rugged guerrillas, who in many parts of the country, remained the de facto government administration.
In “A Distant War,” Mr. Nickelsberg dwells into all four violent phases that followed: His first chapter encompasses the ending years of the Soviet occupation in the late 1980s and the fight for Kabul and other major cities that ensued. The second tracks the 1992 fall of Kabul and the Soviet-backed government and the brutal four-year civil war that followed, one fought more for power than ideology.
It was the depredations of the warlords who ruled this period, many of whom are nearly as powerful today as back then, that laid the groundwork for the third chapter: the rise and dominion of the Taliban, who seized Kabul
in 1996, and before the United States invasion, controlled 90 percent of the country despite being almost entirely made up of Pashtuns, who are less than half the population. After a decade of occupation — the subject of Mr. Nickelsberg’s fourth chapter — the Taliban still effectively control much of the country, particularly in the south and east and some of the north, where local residents, out of expediency or fear, or both, turn to mullahs to settle disputes instead of whatever anemic and corrupt government presence exists.
So with nearly all Western troops scheduled to be pulled out in two years, the last phase Mr. Nickelsberg chronicles is beginning to draw to a close. What will be the fate of the fifth? A collapse of the foreign-backed government, followed by civil war, similar to what happened after the Soviets left? A successful peace deal that allows for the Pashtun-dominated Taliban to share power with their nemesis, the old Northern Alliance factions? Or perhaps the minority groups — the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, who have a disproportionate presence in the country’s fledgling security forces — will be able to defend Kabul, while the Taliban dominate the south and the east.
And will the Hazara, the long-oppressed Shiite minority group, be able to retain heart-stirring advances in education, employment and political representation? Will women be consigned to abuse and illiteracy?
Mr. Nickelsberg doesn’t see an identical repeat of the early 1990s replaying after Western troops leave: Some of the mujahedeen leaders who drove the Soviets out are now heavily invested in the new Afghan order, both politically and commercially. And despite all the recent “insider” killings by Afghan forces, Western military troops are seen by many Afghans as far more benevolent than a Soviet war machine that killed one million people in a decade. Some Western troops — and a lot of Western aid money — will remain as well.
Robert NickelsbergGovernment soldiers fire at opposition Hezb-i Wahdat forces during factional fighting in western Kabul. March 1993.
But looking back on his two decades roaming the most austere corners of Afghanistan — the very places where the country’s power brokers derive their greatest influence — Mr. Nickelsberg believes the West is in for
disappointment.
“A lot of things have improved,” he said in a phone interview from New York. “But the cohesiveness that a lot of countries had sought will never come. They had high hopes that Afghans would rally around a central
government, but that is never going to happen. It’s just the nature of the place. There is no real trust in a central government, and because there are no properly-functioning civil institutions in Afghanistan, politics is all about the people, and all very locally oriented.” And in Afghanistan, local politics all too often means warlords and Taliban mullahs.
Conflict has been a constant for so long here that only those in their late 30s or older remember life before the Soviet occupation, leaving only a precious few with memories of anything besides war, given that some
estimates of average life expectancy are still no better than 50. Even after the mujahedeen defeated the Soviet-backed government and took control of Kabul 20 years ago, all that meant was the beginning of an even more horrific phase for those who live in Kabul, who soon came under bombardment from warring factions, signaling the start of the 1992-96 civil war.
“There was very little time to celebrate that victory, because it immediately turned into another battle,” Mr. Nickelsberg said. “There has never been any period of celebration; it just continued on to another chapter of violence. And unless you stopped and pulled back from this, you wouldn’t gain any sense of continuity from one chapter to another.”
Mr. Nickelsberg, who would shoot for Time magazine, The New York Times and other publications in Afghanistan for more than two decades while based in New Delhi and New York, first came here in January 1988. (Bob and I are friends and we have worked together in Afghanistan and Iraq.) He traveled to all corners of the country in taxis rented by the week or the month, and sent rolls of film out of the country with friends or businessmen traveling to Pakistan’s Islamabad, New Delhi or Europe, where undeveloped film could be sent onward to picture editors in New York and Hong Kong.
The reporter who worked most closely with him in Afghanistan, Tim McGirk, recently recalled seeking him out when he arrived in 1990, “thinking, unwisely, that he would keep me from getting shot at. It was quite the
reverse. Nickelsberg reacts to gunfire like a bird-dog to the rustle of quail.” Mr. McGirk, a former Time magazine bureau chief, claims to be the faster runner in retreat, but he admired Mr. Nickelsberg’s style.
“He dresses for war as if going for a brisk walk in the Vermont hills, his hair as clipped as a military officer’s, perfectly parted,” he wrote on Time’s
Web site. “In the midst of Afghanistan’s chaos, Nickelsberg always kept his composure.”
For anyone here, one of the first pictures Mr. Nickelsberg ever took in Afghanistan has a spooky resonance: An Afghan soldier handing a small flag to a Soviet soldier riding in the hatch of a troop carrier as a Soviet column departed the country. The two men, Afghan and Russian, are smiling. In the last months before Kabul fell to the mujahedeen and the city was decimated by warring factions, Mr. Nickelsberg also captured Afghan men performing a traditional dance in Kabul’s Babur Gardens. They do the same dance there now as well, though many of the country’s young and educated fear such expressive liberties may disappear.
It was also in this period that Mr. Nickelsberg first met Jalaluddin Haqqani (Slide 8), leader of the fearsome clan that now dominates a portion of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier and who American intelligence officials say functions with support from the Pakistani spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The Haqqanis carry out many of the deadliest and most sophisticated attacks on American and Indian targets in Kabul. But when Mr. Nickelsberg snapped a picture of the patriarch in May 1990 at his jihadist training base in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, he encountered not hostility but a vain man who cared a lot about his appearance — especially a beard as large as his head.
Mr. Haqqani has been a C.I.A. ally in the 1980s and by then was growing committed to global jihad, but “nobody took that concept seriously back then,” Mr. Nickelsberg recalls. But the warlord made an impression: deft
and manipulative, if a bit preening.
Robert NickelsbergAfghan National Army soldiers had their hair cut in Band-e Sardeh, in Ghazni Province. Much of the rural province has little or no Afghan government presence and is a Taliban-controlled territory. March 2009.
“He reminded me of Ben Cartwright,” he said, referring to the family patriarch in the show “Bonanza.” “He knew how to manipulate extremely well, to stay in power not only politically but also commercially, as his family was heavily into smuggling. He took a lot of care about his appearance but had an air of confidence.” As Mr. Nickelsberg took pictures, Scud missiles fired by government forces who then still controlled the provincial capital landed nearby. Mr. Haqqani just chuckled.
Many of Mr. Nickelsberg’s most remarkable pictures are from the 1992-96 civil war and document the destruction not only of Kabul’s buildings but also the souls of its harrowed residents. In one of the seminal pictures of that era, Mr. Nickelsberg captured a frame of two fighters loyal to the Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum firing on Hezb-i-Islami forces of the Pakistani-backed warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in southwest Kabul.
Mr. Hekmatyar (below), still a powerful insurgent leader today, was Mr. Nickelsberg’s bête noire, in his view the worst of the warlords of that era, “at least as far as indiscriminate killing and violence in Kabul.” (Many Afghans would rank some other warlords right alongside him as well.) Mr. Hekmatyar’s deviousness was only surpassed by his competitiveness with other warlords, Mr. Nickelsberg recalls. He controlled much of the east and recruited from refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan, and other places. Mr. Nickelsberg was struck by how Mr. Hekmatyar used a translator even though he spoke English, a device, perhaps, to make it easier to deflect questions he cared not to answer.
Robert NickelsbergGulbuddin Hekmatyar, March 1994.
Mr. Hekmatyar also represents what Mr. Nickelsberg admits is an obsession with a singular theme that has bedeviled the country throughout decades of fighting: Foreign influences, particularly the Pakistanis and their
highly-effective spy agency that turned the Pashtun clans on the frontier into sophisticated and fearsome movements that can strike at the heart of the most guarded enclaves of Kabul.
For the Pakistanis, Mr. Nickelsberg believes, it all goes back to the 1947 partition and a continuing paranoia that India, now wealthier and more powerful, will undermine Pakistan by strengthening its alliance with Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan stuck in the middle.
Pakistan seethes that “India plays big brother through their foreign relations, and Afghanistan was one place that this anger and animosity would play out,” Mr. Nickelsberg said. Yet Pakistan was hardly alone: Iran supported minority Shiite groups, the Saudis supported the fighters of warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf as well as Arab Al Qaeda fighters and other Sunni movements, and Tajik fighters got backing from India and Russia.
Pakistan eventually shifted much of its support from Mr. Hekmatyar to the Taliban, who eventually did what Mr. Hekmatyar could never do: capture Kabul.
As the Taliban moved on the capital in September 1996, Mr. Nickelsberg was there, shooting pictures as they fired rockets at retreating Northern Alliance forces, until one very angry Taliban commander chased him away.
And he was with the Taliban in May 1997, when for a very brief period they were part of a power-sharing arrangement with Uzbek commanders in Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s northern hub. Thirty-six hours after the truce, Mr. Nickelsberg and a handful of other journalists heard pings on rooftops, and venturing onto a main street, he snapped away as a Taliban fighter perhaps a 100 feet from him was gunned down by an Uzbek militia fighter who had lured him into an ambush. It proved the beginning of an all-out massacre of the Taliban; the city’s Uzbek population had quickly rejected decrees to stop educating girls and for men to turn in weapons. As gunfire erupted, Mr. Nickelsberg and some colleagues were pinned down for 15 minutes before scrambling away and taking shelter at an International Committee of the Red Cross clinic. For two days, huge numbers of Taliban fighters were massacred across the city.
If Mr. Hekmatyar was the most craven figure he encountered, the most charismatic was Ahmed Shah Massoud — Mr. Hekmatyar’s rival from university days — and the military commander of the Northern Alliance. Mr. Massoud’s picture still bedecks banners across Kabul, his handsome, bearded and chiseled features staring out over squares in the capital city.
But Mr. Massoud was actually a little shy and aloof, and not much of a public speaker, Mr. Nickelsberg said. Always in motion, brave and intuitively and strategically brilliant, Mr. Massoud, who also spoke French, last granted Mr. Nickelsberg an audience in May 2001 at his camp in Takhar Province near the Tajikistan border. The Taliban by that time controlled almost all of the country, and it was only a matter of time, Mr. Nickelsberg said, that they would drive Mr. Massoud’s forces even out of Takhar. It wasn’t from lack of resolve against the Taliban, but by 2001, there had been too much starvation, too much blood and too much fatigue. The Northern Alliance was tired and ripe to give way, Mr. Nickelsberg felt.
He also remembers Mr. Massoud saying during that last visit, just four months before the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, that his enemies had something major in the works. “Massoud’s contacts in Kandahar were picking up that something was going on,” Mr. Nickelsberg recalled. “They were working on something, some big Western project.”
Robert NickelsbergThe Mujahedeen commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, in Khoja Bahauddin, Takhar Province. May 2001.
Indeed, for Mr. Massoud and the Northern Alliance, fate would intercede a few months after Mr. Nickelsberg photographed him striding out of his headquarters in Takhar as he rolled up his sleeves (above): Mr. Massoud was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001 by two Al Qaeda members posing as journalists. Two days later the twin towers fell — perhaps the project Mr. Massoud’s agents had caught some hint of — and soon C.I.A. paramilitary forces were working to drive out the Taliban with Northern Alliance forces. Two months later, Kabul would fall for the third time in a decade.
Mr. Nickelsberg, now 61, still has the curiosity and energy of a college student. He can keep pace-for-pace with troops one-third his age, as he did in the 125-degree summer of 2009 in southern Helmand Province, where
he documented Marines doing the civil and administrative jobs in a tiny village that Afghan forces were supposed to be doing. And he did it that year as well in Ghazni Province, talking pictures of a fledgling Afghan police force decimated not so much by the Taliban but by thievery of their own leaders and corruption so endemic that the commander of an American outpost described the Afghan promotion system as: “Hey, your sister has a pretty mouth — do you want to be a general?”
Mr. Nickelsberg takes no position on whether the Americans and NATO should stay or go in 2014, the planned pullout date. But he finds it hard to be optimistic about what will follow. He recalls being one of a handful of journalists watching as the United States closed its embassy in Kabul in 1989. The flag was lowered as it snowed.
“I nearly put my camera down and walked away,” he said. “It was so evident that things were going to spiral out of control.”
Robert NickelsbergA Kabul family flees their home during factional fighting between President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government forces and opposition Hezb-e Islami and Hezb-i Wahdat fighters in western Kabul. The fighting was a continuation of a Feb. 11, 1993 operation by government forces that killed 800 to 1,000 unarmed ethnic Hazara Shia residents from the Afshar district. March 1993.
