Rock and Hard Places Read Online Free PDF Page B

pretty much by weight, exchanging an inch-thick wad of purple 5000-Afghani notes for every 20-dollar bill. One kid holds my American money up to the sun and scrutinises it with an impatient eye, which is a bit rich considering that if I walk 50 metres back in the direction I’ve come, the notes he’s giving me will only be useful as novelty bookmarks.
    The Afghan customs officer is friendlier than his appearance, which isn’t difficult, and asks about the purpose of my visit. I mumble some obsequious platitudes about coming to learn the truth about his beautiful, historic country and its sensitive, cultured, deeply misunderstood people. This is all true as far as it goes, though it’s interesting to reflect that a dangerous-looking chap with a gun and an attractive woman will, if for entirely different reasons, reduce the average bloke to spouting exactly the same sort of fawning drivel.
    For my purposes, anyway, it serves better than “Well, think about it: you’ve got a country with no rule of law, other than that dictated by the whim of a bunch of crazy students, and not only that, but crazy students who control the world’s richest natural resources of recreational drugs—on paper, this place should be one gigantic Glastonbury. But, if we believe what we read, it’s a total no-fun zone populated by ill-educated peasants living in perpetual fear of bearded wackos with
rocket-launchers who think they’re working for God. What’s all that about?”
    The customs officer stamps my passport, and walks me out to the bus station: a muddy lot behind the money-changing tents, full of merchants trying to sell each other shoes, bread and watches. He helps me buy two seats—one for me, one for my pack—on a crowded minibus headed for Jalalabad, shakes my hand, and waves me off.
     
    THE REASON FOR my visit to Afghanistan is the reason that’s motivated every hack who’s come here since 1994. The Taliban, Afghanistan’s rulers, are the journalistic equivalent of an open goal with a keeper lying injured somewhere near the halfway line. You can’t miss. The Taliban are extremists so extreme they can’t be bothered pretending they’re not, and oppressors so oppressive they excite the liberal outrage of Iran. As if that wasn’t enough, they have an undeniable comedy value—the global guffaws that greeted the Taliban’s edict on facial hair were probably audible from deep space—and are also a convenient cipher for the image of Islam that so much of the western media, either through mendacity or ignorance, is keen to project. The Taliban, and their creed of the Koran and the Kalashnikov, are bloody good value, as long as you don’t have to live in Afghanistan.
    Under the Taliban’s uncompromising reading of Islamic sharia law, Afghanistan is the most repressive society on earth, a place where everything is illegal, except beards and praying, which are compulsory. If you’re trying to have fun in Afghanistan, you can forget the following: cinema (closed), drink (punishable by flogging), dancing (illegal), or being outside for any reason at all after 9:00 PM (curfew, about which the Taliban aren’t kidding—a few days before I got into Afghanistan, two foreign aid workers, lost on their way home in Kabul at 9:15 PM, flagged down a Taliban patrol vehicle, apologised, and asked for a lift, whereupon they were arrested, locked up for four days and threatened with a public beating, before the poor sods’ employers interceded and the Taliban settled for driving them to the border and throwing them out of the country). If you’re male, you can go out for a meal, but you can’t take your girlfriend, because eating would necessitate her removing the mesh face-mask from her all-over veil—the burqa—and women may not show any part of themselves in public, on pain of a sound thrashing.

    And if you decide, all things considered, to stay in and watch telly, you’re in for a slow night—there isn’t any. The only