Excursus: Afghanistan at a Stone’s Throw

Tajik–Afghan border, Upper Panj River.

Por Richard Foltz (De su libro "A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East")

As an historian of Iranian civilization I have long wished to visit Afghanistan, that ancient and deeply troubledland. Much of Iranian historyunfolded in places that are now part of Afghan territory: until the establishment of Afghanistan in 1747 by the Pashtun tribal leader Aḥmad Durranī, himself a former general in the Persian army, the country was merely part of eastern Iran. Hence, my reading of this history over the years has been illustrated throughout with mental imagesof stories, sitesand peoples now claimed as part of the Afghan legacy, from the Silk Road caravans plying the route between Herat and Balkh to the heroic tales of Rustam, fearless champion of the 60,000-line Persiannational epic, the Shāh-nāma or Book of Kings. How could I not wish to bring these legendary visions to life by seeing the country with my own eyes?

These days it takes an admittedly peculiar kind of traveller to see Afghanistan as a dream destination, and whether actually seeking to turn this dream into reality is a sign of being intrepid, foolish or merely suicidal is a matter of opinion. The country has been in a state of war for the past forty years, and hardly a week goes by withoutnews of yet another round of civiliancasualties through bombings or other atrocities. Foreign journalists and aid workers have been kidnapped for ransom or killed in crossfire. Sixteen yearsof NATO ‘peace-keeping’ presence has utterly failed to keep the peace. The conflict shows no signs of abating,and indeed often seems to be gettingworse if such a thing were possible. While life somehow goes on for Afghans, this banal fact tendsto be obscured by the endless gruesomeimages and reportsof violence and suffering that have been the mainstayof Afghanistan’s depiction in the mass media since the late 1970s.

Amazingly for anyone conditioned by this enduring portrayal of a nation ruined beyond hope, Afghanistan is nevertheless visited by dozens, if not hundreds, of tourists every year. Most emerge unscathedfrom the experience, and many go on to post blogs or publisharticles extolling Afghanhospitality, the country’s stunning landscapes, its breathtaking historical monuments. Others,more self-focused perhaps,boast of survivinglife-threatening encounters or close brushes with terrorists, land mines, bad roads and corrupt officials. Despite having now been surpassed by such challenging locales as Syria, Yemen and Somalia,Afghanistan remains a major draw for ‘adventure travellers’. The fact that the rare visitor – no less than the average Afghan – is more likely than not to survive to see another day does not mean that Afghanistan is a safe place to be.

Amongst the regrets of my youth none looms larger than an opportunity – like so many in life, never to be repeated – which I passedup as a naïve seventeen- year-old in the summer of 1978. Hitchhiking south on France’s Autoroute du Soleil outside of Paris, I was picked up by a pair of heavily bearded hippies driving a clunky Citroen 2cv. Asked by them where I was headed, I said the Cote d’Azur. ‘We’re going to Afghanistan,’ they replied. ‘Would you like to join us?’ My horizons at that time being limitedto the image of a Mediterranean I was about to see for the first time, I declined this invitation. In doing so I unwittingly and permanently forfeited any chance to experience pre-invasion Afghanistan, as well as the pre-revolution Iran I would later spend decades hearing about from friends, colleagues and family. The thought gnawsaway at me, even now.

In my capacity as an academic,my idea of area studieshas always been that books alone are not enough to study a culture. Information absorbed through reading needs to be illuminated throughlived personal experience, which can be achieved only by subjective immersion in the target environment. How many times as a student did I hear my Western professors muse over the ‘unsolved problems’ and ‘conundrums’ plaguing their field of study, which, when later shared with my Iranian wife, she proved easily able to explain through the intuitive knowledge common to anyonehaving been raisedin her culture. Imagine my private shame, then, when I once accepted an invitation to speak on Afghanistan at no less prestigious a venue than the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Feeling like a completecharlatan, I spent the entire evening dreading questions from the audience that would force me to admit I’d never actually been there – an exposure from which, in the event, I was blessedly spared.

My lack of first-hand Afghanistan experience would rise to haunt me again in 2016 when I signed a contract to write this book on the historyof the Tajiks. Since as much as half or more of the world’s Tajiks live in Afghanistan, where anywhere from 35 to 50 per cent of the population is classified as ‘Tajik’, I felt discomfort at not having personally experienced such a significant aspect of my subject. I had lived in the Tajik-majority city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, as a graduate student in the 1990s, and had spent time in Tajikistan in 2012 (and would again in 2017 and 2018), but the Tajik population of Afghanistan likely equals or even exceeds that of those two countries combined. How could I claim to know the Tajiks without having seen Kabul,the world’s easternmost Persian-speaking city, or gazed up at the towering Jām minaret in Ghur Province, legacy of a twelfth-century Tajik dynastythat briefly ruled India?

I resolved to visit the country at last, dangersbe damned. Combingthrough successive internet posts by recent travellers to Afghanistan, I convinced myself that statistically speaking I would be putting myself at no more risk than by visiting, say, Chicago, and in this frame of mind I confidently sent off my visa application to the Embassy of Afghanistan in Ottawa. According to their websiteI needed only submit the duly filled form along with my passport and a moneyorder for the processing fee.

A few days later I was surprised to receive a phone call from a young man working at the embassy, who informed me that my application was ‘incomplete’. I needed a written invitation from someone inside Afghanistan, he told me. When I protested that this requirement was not listed on their website, he replied that the relevant page was ‘being updated’. Annoyed, I contacted an old friend from university, Masood, an Afghan journalist now working for the Voice of America in Washington. He managed to secure a letter of invitation from a relativewithin less than twenty-four hours, which I promptly passed on to the embassy. The following day I received another call from their young employee saying that in fact a letter from an individual would not suffice; it had to be from a registered tourist agency recognized by the Afghan government. At this point I was about to depart for Tajikistan and could not spend any further time chasing receding goalposts, so I reluctantlyrenounced my attemptto secure an Afghan visa.

I did, however, indulge myself in the luxury of writing an angry e-mail directly to the Afghan ambassador, with Masood’s name in the cc line, in which I complained that they appearedto be making up requirements as they went along. I further ventured the opinion that if the embassy were a business, taking fees without respecting their own publishedconditions might be considered to constitute a kind of fraud. For this insolence I was rewarded with a full refund of my visa fee by overnightcourier. Masood commentedthat while he was saddened I would not be able to visit his country, I should take solace in surely being the first person in the history of diplomacy to receive a refund on a visa application fee.

This dubioushonour notwithstanding, it was with a sense of bitterness and failure that I boarded the plane to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in April 2017 for a researchtrip that would not includemy getting to know Afghanistan’s Tajiks. My book would still cover their history, but without the benefit of the kind of first-hand, intuitive knowledge I had always preached as being a necessary part of scholarly expertise. At least I had tried.

As it turned out, my travels in Tajikistan would bring me closer to this elusive goal than I had imagined – indeed, quite literally as close as possible withoutactually reachingit. A lover of maps since childhood, I had practically memorized the geography of Central Asia. I knew that the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was demarcated by the tortuousmeanderings of the Panj River, which becomes the mighty Amu Darya (the Oxus to the ancient Greeks) at the confluence of the Vakhsh near the city of Shahrituz in southwestern Tajikistan. Further to the east this border runs nearly the full length of the Wakhan Corridor, a nineteenth-century geopolitical curiosity resulting from an agreement between tsarist Russia and the British Raj to recognizethis thin sliverof Afghanistan as a neutralbuffer zone betweentheir two expanding empires. Isolated between the soaring Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain ranges and connected to the outsideworld only via the often-narrow canyon carved out by the Panj, the Wakhan holds the romanceof being one of the world’s most inaccessible and least-visited regions.It was also, very nearlyup to the time of my first visit there in 2017, the only part of Afghanistan considered to be safe.

The only way in or out is via the Pamir Highway, a modern fragmentof the fabled Silk Road which has become legendaryfor its cliff-hanging curves and often poor condition. Officially known as the M41, the route begins in Tirmiz,Uzbekistan, on the banks of the Amu Darya. It winds north to Dushanbe,the Tajik capital, before bending southeastwards through Kulob to rejoin the Afghan border at Khirmanjoi. From there, the road hugs the right bank of the Panj – the Tajik side – for the next 353 kilometres as far as Khorugh, the Shangri-La-like capital of Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region or GBAO. At Khorugh the path splits,the M41 propercutting across the Pamiri highlands to the eastern settlement of Murghab and thence northward to the Kyrgyz border and ultimately to the city of Osh in the Ferghana Valley,where it formally ends. A branch route, meanwhile, continuessouth from Khorugha further hundredslow, bumpy kilometres as far as the villageof Ishkashim at the bend in the Panj, which it follows from there across the suddenlyexpansive Wakhan Valley spreading out towards the east.

Although I had seen photos of this dramaticroute, no printedimage could ever capture the utter immensity of the Badakhshan landscapes, starkly marked out by some of the tallestmountains and deepestvalleys in the world. Although I have stood in the mists beneath the falls at Iguassu and watched the glaciers calving in Greenland, never have I felt so dwarfed by nature as when following the diligent Panj along the narrow path it has carved over millions of years betweenthese rocky screes that stretchupwards as far as the eye can see.

Whatamazed me even more than the sheer scaleof these spectacular gorges was the fact that the Panj itselfis so small. How could a river that is rarely more than ten metres wide, and often as narrow as two, have created such a deep, plunging rift, driving apart 5,000-metre peaks immediately to either side? And moreover, where were the border guards? This looked less like an international frontier than any place I had ever seen. Was there anythingto stop one merely wadingacross to set foot in Afghanistan?

My Tajik travel companions stared at me with incomprehension. ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’ they asked me. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered defensively. ‘For smuggling?’ My friends looked at me like one would an idiot child. ‘If you want to smuggle, you just use the bridge,’ they explained, pointing out the obvious.

Not readyto give up, I spelledout my true intended meaning.‘What if I just wade across, put my foot on Afghan soil, then wade back?’ I suggested. That would be a bad idea, they said. Why? They might shoot you. Which ‘they’? There is nobody to be seen on the other side of the river except burqa-clad women hangingup laundry besidetheir mud huts, farmers tillingtiny terraced plots of grain or packing hay onto the backs of donkeys,and kids kickinga ball across a dusty makeshift soccer field. Look, they’re wavingat us. They’re less likelyto shoot me than inviteme to tea.

A chorus of reproachful stares from my friends finally persuaded me to back down and return to the car. But the longer we lurched and bumped alongour way towards Khorugh, the temptation to leap this tiny, artificially imposed divide only grew worse.Look at those two bouldersin the middle of the river! One could make it acrossin a couple of hops!

At Khorugh there is an official border crossing over the bridgeto Afghanistan, for those who have visas. Visaless, my hopes had been piqued by reading about a Saturday market at Ishkashim, the next and last border crossing a hundred kilometres to the south, held on an island in the river that was technically considered Afghan territory. Apparently the Tajik borderguards would allow foreigners on single-entry Tajik visas to cross over to the island for the marketjust for the day, meaningthat one couldthen legitimately claimto have been in Afghanistan. Upon arriving in Khorugh in May 2017, however, I was told that due to Taliban presence on the Afghan side of the river the Saturday market had been closed for over a year.

An onlinetravel club of which I am a member has an ongoingdebate about what constitutes a visit to a country. Some wonder whether airport transit counts, or observing the passing countryside from an automobile or train withoutgetting out. What about cruisinga country’s coastline by boat, or low flyovers in a private plane? I tend to side with those who feel that at the very least setting foot on a nation’s soil should be a basic requirement for a ‘visit’, but having at this point in my life travelled some 640 kilometres along the Panj River – much of it thrice – gazing eagerlyacross all the while to count the Afghan villages,admire their rusticarchitecture, and marvelat the endurance of age-oldfarming techniques, I have to confess that I feel I have seen more of Afghanistan than I have of numerous other countries for which my passport bears stamps. Still, nothing would ever possess me to claim that I had ‘been’ there. Hence the unrelenting temptation to cast all caution to the winds, roll up my jeansand wade, wade …

I am able to feel only slightly less embarrassed to admit this silly, but inescapable, obsession thanks to an acquaintance I made on my second trip to Badakhshan in May 2018, a young environmental scientist from British Columbia by the name of Chris. We met thanks to invitations from the University of Central Asia (UCA) – a brilliantly conceived new tri-country English-medium institution established by the Aga Khan – to visit their Tajikistan campus in Khorugh. Chris, along with three of his Vancouver- based colleagues, had come to serve as a consultant for UCA’s new sciencecurriculum, while I, in exchangefor providing a few lectures, was benefitting from the university’s unparalleled hospitality as I conducted research for my book. From the vantagepoint offered by the campus’sspectacular eagle’s nest settingKhorugh lay spread out below like a mountainparadise, a green oasis of tall poplarssnuggled in betweenthe impossibly high bare rock walls reachingup to the sky, with the snowy basin of Afghanistan’s Shughnani peaks forminga dramatic backdrop to the west. I e-mailed my mother a photo of the view from the living room window of my faculty apartment, accompanied by the caption‘Those mountains are in Afghanistan!’ ‘It is beautiful,’ she wrote back,‘but please don’t go there!’

As it turned out the scientists were travelling to the Wakhan Valley on exactlythe day I intended to make the same trip. There was extra space in theirLand Rover, so they invited me along. It was an excellent opportunity for me to learn from them something of the local geology, flora and fauna,as well as the ecological implications of certain traditional farming and grazing techniques still practisedin the region. My new travel companions flattered me that what theirexpedition had reallybeen missing up to that point was a historian.

These fellow Canadians were as amazed as I had been to see how little the modest Panj River resembled an international border, and how few obstaclesit seemingly placed in the way of transgression. Our own 8,891-kilometre frontier with the UnitedStates, sometimes referredto as the ‘longest unguarded border in the world’, seems positively forbidding by comparison. As our vehicle lumberedalong, Afghanistan appearedat times to be so close you could reachout and touch it. Chrismade the same observation I had done the year before: namely,that the riverseemed to be literally urging one to wade across.

We stopped and got out of the Land Rover. Frustrated, Chris picked up a rock and flung it across to the Afghan side where it crashed loudly against a boulder. A stone’s throw away, literally. Assuming the wise role of the more experienced, I repeated to Chris the admonitions that had been made to me by my Tajik friends during the course of my previous visit. But secretly, havingsensed a kindredspirit, I was already scanningthe river for places the two of us might eventually attempt a crossing, perhaps under cover of night.

Over the next two days as we explored the Wakhan Valley, hiking its tributary gorges and visiting man-madesites that includedSufi shrines, medievalfortresses, a cliffside spring overseen by an ancientfertility goddess, a Buddhist stupa and Bronze Age petroglyphs (the group did need a historianafter all!), the river remainedever in sight, stubbornly provokingus, daring us, mocking us with its apparent passivity. The opportunity to organize a crossing with Chris neverpresented itself, however,and at Langar, where the Wakhan forks into two distinct valleys heading always higher towards the impassable borders with China and Pakistan, I parted ways with my scientist friends and hireda jeep to take me to Murghab.

After Langar the road becomes little more than a track, climbing its winding way up to the barren plateau of central Badakhshan. Even the river, meandering in narrow streams across a stony alluvial bed, can support little vegetation at such an altitude. The notion that this patchwork of pleasantly gurgling streams could possibly constitute the only division between Tajikistan and one of the most dangerous countries in the world seems increasingly preposterous. Shepherds manoeuvre their flocks here and there amongst the various effluents (Figure Ex.1).

I ask my driver, what do the shepherds do if one of their sheep wanders across to the Afghan side? Don’t they just wade over and retrieve it? ‘No!’ he emphatically replies.‘The border guardsare extremely strictaround here! No one would ever do that!’ Which border guards? Again, I scan the banks for any signs of armed presence. Apart from a band of colourfully tribal-looking individuals on horseback plodding along single file in the distance, nothing. ‘So what do they do?’ I ask. My driver gives me an impatientlook. ‘They go to the nearest border post,’ he says, not without a hint of condescension, ‘and ask the Tajik guards to radio those on the Afghan side to go and bring the sheep back.’ This seems unlikely: the nearest border post is a hundred kilometres away! But, dauntedby my driver’s serious tone, and with one last longing look at a ‘river’ that is no more than an arm’s length wide and ankle- deep, I give up. It was my easiest chance, and my last. Is it for the best? Who can say.