As always, our long and twisting journey through Central Asia began with the long and twisted journey of a typical office memo.
The Americans had just launched their offensive in Afghanistan. For years, that country fascinated and intrigued me. As early as 1998, when I was chief of reporters of the Manila Times, I had a short talk with Ghazali Jaafar, vice chairman of the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front. For years during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Filipino muslims traveled to Central Asia to join the mujahideen. Filipinos who learned to fight in the jungles of Mindanao traveled thousands of miles to fight and die in the desert wastelands of Central Asia. The numbers vary, from several hundreds to more than a thousand. Upon returning to the Philippines, the veterans of Afghanistan would form the core officers corps of the MILF.
Invariably, our discussion led to MILF veterans from Afghanistan, and to the subject of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden had just been the target of US cruise missile strikes for his role in the bombings of the US Cole and the US embassies in Africa. It seemed ironic that after helping the mujahideen fight off Soviet gunships and missiles, US missiles were now raining on Bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.
Jaafar began talking about their experiences with the various mujahideen factions in Afghanistan during the war against the soviets, and I asked him if it was possible to set an interview with Osama Bin Laden through his contacts. I didn’t really think it feasible to go to Afghanistan for an interview with the man; a phone interview would have sufficed. But Jaafar laughed and asked if I was willing to travel to Afghanistan. The question lifted me off my seat. Was it possible, I asked? The border with Pakistan was a sieve. How else do all the foreign mujahideen get in? Do you think they just take the train? I was hooked. I asked our acting editor in chief Chit Estella if the company would be willing to fund a trip to Afghanistan, and she seemed intrigued by the idea. The idea would die a natural death when the Bin Laden story was overshadowed by more local concerns of the newspaper. But that early, I was already playing with the idea of walking across the Hindu Kush, or Indian Killer, as the mountain ranges dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan were called. Of course, there was a reason why they called the mountain range Indian Killer, and it didn't have anything to do with cowboys.
Three years later, the world would change with 9-11. Afghanistan was again in the headlines.
Afghanistan has often been described as the crossroads between Asia and Europe, and for that reason, it has been the persistent battleground of races, religions, and ambitions. Relics and bones of centuries of near-conquests litter the landscape for any historian or archeologist brave enough to explore, at the risk of adding his own bones to the landscape as well.
The country’s terrible history owes to its favored position, in the middle of great powers and their many proxies. Alexander the Great and his armies swept in from the west in his drive towards the riches of India in the East. The Mongol hordes came down from the north to lay waste to, well, the waste. Barbarians are not overly picky. During the so-called Great Game between Imperial Russia and Imperial Britain during the 19th century, the two great powers and their allies clashed on Afghan plains, whole armies swallowed up by the desert.
That proxy war would be repeated again in more contemporary times, when the Soviet Union swept down like the Mongols from the north and tried, and failed, to subdue the Afghans for a decade. The West waged its proxy war through Pakistan and the mujahideen, as we will see later. But even after the departure of the Great Powers with the end of the cold war, the proxy wars continued, this time with the minor leaguers like Pakistan, China, India, and Iraq.
The world turned the corner with 9-11. It was amazing really. Suddenly, everyone was immensely interested in a country that wasn’t even one, that didn’t even have a gross national product [how do you measure opium] or an economy to speak of. Networks and media outlets rushed to dust off their list of contacts in South and Central Asia, and dragged into the studio any analyst or expert that had the remotest connection with Afghanistan. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be an expert in Afghanistan.
I remembered the tantalizing half-offer years ago, and quietly wondered to myself if this was it. I went back to my MILF contacts in Cotabato, and interviewed rebels who claimed to have fought there during the jihad against the Soviets. Each one had vivid memories to tell. Most were telling their stories for the first time in public. All these years, no one had really cared for what they had gone through, at least until a character named Osama came along and put Afghanistan back on the political map.
It was very difficult, one would recall. You would either freeze to death, or fry under the sun. There was almost no middle ground. And that’s only talking about the weather. Fighting the Soviets was another thing altogether. There was nowhere to hide, just endless miles of sand and rock. No trees, no bushes with which to take cover in, no lakes and streams brimming with fish and wildlife to feed a guerilla army. No water to slake your thirst. It was hard to imagine why anyone was even fighting over a place like this.
There were no hiding places so we would bury ourselves in the sand beside a road, recalled another, and leap out and ambush a passing Soviet convoy. It was a good thing the common weapon in the region was the sturdy and reliable AK-47. You could bury it in sand, submerge it in mud, and still come out firing. Bury yourself with the temperamental M-16 in the sand, and you may as well bring a lapida or tombstone with you.
There are no figures. But some Filipino volunteers never made it back. Others came back with a completely different view of the world they lived in, and the country they came from.
When the US started bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, everyone was glued to the TV sets. The most advanced nation on earth was raining high-tech smart bombs on the most backward country in the world. The country was mostly rubble from two decades of bitter fighting that the US probably dropped more bombs on Afghanistan than there were buildings left to bomb.
At this point, I was torn. I desperately wanted to go. On the other hand, the network had a terrible record for sending news teams on assignments like this abroad. I had flown to West Timor, East Timor, and Cambodia with nary a cent of support from ABS-CBN. The network was more willing to spend money to cover celebrity scandals abroad.
As the war against terror heated up, I bumped into an organizer of overseas workers, who told me he had some Filipino friends in Pakistan who may be able to help me get into neighboring Afghanistan. It was an intirguing thought. Even before I could propose an official trip to Afghanistan, I had to make sure that it was actually possible to get in. But when i called his so-called friend, I got a pretty chilly reception. Apparently, they were not really friends after all. But I had gained momentum, and I quietly started calling Philippine diplomats in Pakistan inquiring about the possibilities of sliding into Afghanistan. Mostly, they proved discouraging, although our network of Filipino contacts in Pakistan grew. Finally, I gathered the courage to broach the idea of deploying a team to Afghanistan for The Correspondents through a memo. It took the bosses a long time to warm up to the idea. The network had never sent a news team on that kind of a coverage since the Vietnam war. The general thinking among the bosses was that we could just rely on CNN and the other foreign news services to feed us information and video. I tried to sell them the idea of doing the Afghan story from a Filipino perspective. This was a land that bred the new generation of Moro fighters. This was the land that allegedly bred the masterminds of the attack on the World Trade Center. The potential for stories outside the mainstream western media was astounding. We were lucky in that we got the support of our old friend, DJ Sta. Ana, who was also head of news operations of ABS-CBN. Since we offered to do the coverage for both news and public affairs, we hoped to get the news department to fund the whole affair. For this, we needed DJ’s backing to get the proposal past the initial cynicism of the big bosses. Now, DJ is really a reporter who unfortunately got snagged into the wilder and more violent world of news management. We belong to the same generation of reporters; in fact we have been good friends since college. To say that DJ was interested in the idea is an understatement. This was a guy who, while heading the news desk of GMA-7 the year before, snuck off to Mindanao for a weekend to cover the all-out war against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. In fact, I’m almost certain that DJ, at least for a fleeting moment, considered bumping us off the trip and taking our place.
The bosses at first expressed doubts that we could get into Afghanistan at all. After all, they had already sent their news reporter, Erwin Tulfo, to Pakistan to report on developments there. Then, they worried about our safety. This was of course Afghanistan, a country way way off the beaten track.
But we all knew that the biggest consideration of all was probably the expense. Sending a news team abroad always entails a great deal of huffing and puffing on the part of the bean counters in Finance. As icing on the cake, I cut corners and started weeding out all extraneous expenses from the budget. In fact I cut corners so much that the paper the budget was printed on would probably have looked more circular than rectangular. In the end, I proposed a minimalist budget of roughly 6,000 dollars for the entire trip, inclusive of airfare.
Six thousand dollars. While the figure may seem astronomical to some Filipinos, it is really laughably and idiotically small for big networks deploying their teams abroad, much less to wartorn areas. A small western news team can spend that much money in just one day. That amount alone would not be enough to buy protective gear and hire security consultants for typical western news teams, as we would later see in Afghanistan. In fact, half of our money was immediately spent on our plane tickets. We were left with roughly two to three thousand dollars, and we hadn’t even left Manila yet. It would be one of my first suicide budgets. It would not be my last.
To my surprise and delight, in mid october 2001, the green light came down. The team also grew. Aside from me and Val, there was also Patrick Paez and Jim Libiran. The bosses balked at sending such a "large contingent", but we argued that this was Afghanistan, and there was much safety in numbers. Besides, they didn't increase the budget anyway, so what were they complaining about?
The first problem, as in any trip, was getting the money. Having uneasily resolved that issue, the next problem was how to get there. The most logical route was through Pakistan, which hosted the mujahideen through the long Soviet occupation. Most journalists who penetrated Afghanistan during the long Soviet occupation did so through Pakistan, through the sieve they called a border along Pakistan's northwestern frontier. But with the war against the Taliban in full swing, another channel had opened up. The Northern Alliance had started using bases in Tajikistan ever since the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban took charge of their country. Masoud was also a Tajik. So most of the major news agencies flew into the capital Dushanbe to wangle a way into Afghanistan from the north. While this was now the preferred route to link up with the Alliance, this route was horribly expensive. You fly from the Philippines to Europe and then to Russia. There, you try to get a visa and a ticket to Tajikistan. Once you land in Dushanbe [assuming you get the proper paperwork done in a matter of weeks], there was still no guarantee that you could get into Afghanistan. There were horror stories of journalists getting stranded in Dushanbe for weeks with no story, and no way into Afghanistan. The only route was over the mountains in one of the few Northern Alliance helicopters. It was fine for the big networks, because they could afford to station newsteams for weeks at a time in a backwater city to diddle their thumbs. They could also afford to bribe officials to give them a helicopter ride over the border, as many did. Almost all the journalists who made it into Kabul in time for the fall of the Taliban had taken that northern route and ridden into the capital with the Northern Alliance.
Having resolved that, we landed in Islamabad Pakistan on the tail end of October, and were promptly picked up and assisted by the Philippine charges d'affaires Jose Pepe Cabrera. Pepe was more than helpful; his driver would take us around, he would treat us to lunch and dinner, and to cut down our expenses, he offered to adopt us in his apartment. We stayed several days on mattresses on the floor of his unit. But more than that, he linked us up with Filipinos in Islamabad and Peshawar who could help us cross the border with Afghanistan. Thank you, Pepe, for your kindness and generosity, and our apologies for our forgetfulness.
Islamabad is a low-slung, sprawling government city cut cleanly into nice symmetrical lines, with streets that have numbers and letters like a map grid instead of names. The pace is so laid back that there's hardly anyone outdoors at midmorning; most of the shops and offices seem to open just before lunch, and sometimes not even that. There were days when we wandered the streets looking for food to eat and finding all the shops still closed. Most of the people who live here are government functionaries and diplomats. Ordinary people crowd it out in the suburbs or nearby cities like Rawalpindi, which looks more like Divisoria on a bad day.
Islamabad is a relatively new city, created after the August 1947 partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines. Prior to the partition, this part of the world was simply known as India "and the wild frontier." When the British let go of India in 1947, they also agreed to carve out a new nation for muslims in the northwestern part of the subcontinent. The new nation's capital was established at bustling and chaotic Karachi to the east, and all muslim records were hauled there at the start of the partition.
That partition proved pretty bloody, as seven million muslims migrated to Pakistan, and close to ten million Hindus went east to India. Generations of pent up anger and frustration exploded throughout the region as mobs from both sides attacked trains loaded with migrants in one of the earlier flashes of religious extremism in the Indian subcontinent. Trains pulled into their stations with rivulets of blood spilling onto the tracks, and most conservative accounts put the number of dead from religious fighting at more than half a million. Mind you, these were not soldiers who were killing each other, these were ordinary people. Not even the great Mohandas Gandhi could stop the slaughter. India and Pakistan would go to war three times in the next five decades, but ironically, it would never be as bloody as this. The shadow of the past still hovers over these two countries; New Delhi and Islamabad continue to rattle their sabres at each other, but this time the swords are nuclear tipped. Pakistanis have a love affair with their nukes. Almost everywhere in Islamabad, you would see monuments to their nuclear missiles - long grey phallic symbols with fins at the base. Pakistanis beam with pride at being a nuclear power, and many analysts predict the next flashpoint for the next world war to be the Indian subcontinent. The Indian-Pakistani conflict would also spill over to Afghanistan.
Pakistan of course is an islamic country, with Islam as the state religion. The word Pakistan means "land of the pure" in Urdu and Persian. It is here in the madrasas of Islamabad, Quetta, and Peshawar, where a more radical and intolerant brand of Islam took root while their Afghan neighbor battled it out with the soviets across the border. When the soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, the Americans adopted a policy of containment of the soviet bear. The Americans poured vast amounts of aid to Pakistan, and used it as a proxy in the Afghan war against the Russians. American money was used by Pakistan to buy Chinese arms and ammunition, to be funneled to the Afghan mujahideen through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. This way, the Americans could have plausible deniability in a proxy war against the Soviets. It was a laughable charade, because everyone knew that the Americans were funding the Muj, although the Americans took great pains not to get caught with their hand in the Afghan jar. While the Soviets muddled through the quagmire of the Afghan conflict, the Reagan administration crowed that the Russians have finally found their own Vietnam. The ISI established guerilla training camps in Pakistani soil just across the rugged border with Afghanistan, and recruited thousands of Afghans from refugee camps in Pakistan. Muslims from all over the world heard the call for a new jihad against the godless communists, and crossed the porous border through Pakistan. Peshawar, the Pakistani border town, became the new wild west, harboring all sorts of spies from the ISI, the KGB, the CIA, and the occassional journalist and adventurer. The various Afghan guerilla factions also set up shop in Peshawar, each one guarded by heavily armed Afghans. Obviously, the idea of a gun ban was alien in this town. These guerilla headquarters were shadowed by KGB agents trying to figure out the guerillas' next moves; by ISI agents trying to decide which factions would best serve Pakistan's interests; and by CIA agents trying to find out where the American funding was going. Occassionally, the guerillas would blast it out with Russian or Afghan intel agents, or have it with each other.
But if handing the funding to the Pakistanis carte blanche shielded the Americans from a direct confrontation with the Soviets, it resulted in an even bigger problem. The Pakistanis chose which guerilla factions to support, and they invariably chose mujahideen groups that hated the Americans as much as they hated the Soviets. In the meantime, the faction of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famed tiger of the Panjshir, did most of the heavy fighting with the Soviets, yet he hardly got any money. Massoud was the friendliest with the west; two days before 9-11, Al Qaeda would assassinate Massoud with a suicide bomber to remove the last thorn on the side of the extremists. On the other hand, the factions identified with the more extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar got the bulk of the money. Several reasons have been put forth to explain the actions of the ISI. Much of the Pakistani military and the ISI sympathized with the more extremist faction. Pakistan, after all, is a staunchly conservative Islamic country. On a more strategic perspective, the Pakistanis had more to gain by waving the extremist card at the Americans. By showing they held the extremists by the collar, the Pakistanis could squeeze more aid from the US.
But part of the blame appears to rest on history and the vagaries of American foreign policy. For decades, Pakistan had relied on the US for its war materiel and defense needs as part of the Central Asian Treaty Organization and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. India was, after all, cozying up to the Soviet Union. But during the second Indo-Pakistani war in 1965, sparked again by a crisis in Kashmir, the United States imposed an embargo on all ammunition and replacement deliveries to both Pakistan and India. At that time, Pakistan was heavily reliant on US military supplies and training. But the Americans were apparently more worried that the weapons and bullets they were providing to kill communists were instead being used to kill Indians and Pakistanis. In the end, neither country came out of the conflict with any noticeable gains, although both had significant losses. But it was the Pakistanis who felt the sting of America’s ficklemindedness the most.
After five weeks of fighting, Pakistan had already used up 80 percent of its US supplied ammunition. The US-made M60 medium tanks were being lost at an alarming rate. The Pakistani high command was having nightmares as the two nations ground down each other. Both sides eventually sued for peace. The Pakistanis were not to forget this moment that the US chose to abandon them at their greatest hour of need.
Pakistan fared far worse in 1971 during the third Indo-Pakistan war that ended up with the breakup of part of Pakistan into Bangladesh. This time, the Pakistanis were decisively routed. This time, the US sent aid, but to no avail. Close to a hundred thousand Pakistani troops were captured by the Indians, the biggest number of POWs since the second world war. Pakistan even issued a commemorative stamp at that time to drum up world support for the release of its POWs.
Pakistani army officers were to carry the resentment borne out of the 2nd Indo-Pakistani war with them for decades to come. After all, they had trained under the belief that the US would back and support them all the way.
In 1977, Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed a little known general and a devout muslim, Zia Ul-Haq, as the army chief of staff, bypassing five other senior generals. Bhutto apparently thought of promoting a general who seemed "more interested only in offering prayers and playing golf" than in overthrowing him. A few months later, Zia overthrew Bhutto and declared martial law. Two years later, Zia had Bhutto hanged.
Zia was a character on his own. Archival photos of him show a broad-faced man with the deepest penetrating eyes and the stiff upper lip stance of someone who could only have been trained by the British Army. But underneath that secular exterior was a very conservative islamist.
Several factors come into play here that would later involve Afghanistan. During the disastrous 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, Zia was assistant quartermaster of the 101st division. Undoubtedly, he remembers very well the betrayal by his American patrons, who, just a year earlier, sponsored his studies at the Command and General Staff College.
More importantly, Zia’s strict religious convictions would shape the destiny of two nations. Whereas post partition Pakistan inherited a legal system that was patterned after the English Anglo-Saxon legal system, Zia imposed a strict pro military interpretation of Islamic Law. Secular policies were replaced with the introduction of sharia law. Most historians say this resulted in increasing religious influences on both the Pakistani civil service and the military.
The undercurrent of anti-US resentment and the growing Islamic identity would reveal itself even before the decade ended. In 1979, just as the US struggled with its Iran hostage crisis, Pakistani mobs burned the US embassy in Islamabad and killed one US marine. It turned out that someone had started the rumor that the Americans were behind a plot to raid Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca. US officials were surprised by the ferocity of the assault, and the absolute, and some say, deliberate failure of Pakistani authorities to respond with any form of help. The embassy was, after all, in Islamabad, not on some far off mountain. Still, the embassy burned for a whole day, and it was only after nightfall that Pakistan sent troops and police to, well, replace the mobs. US diplomats had locked themselves in a windowless vault, wondering why no one seemed to know what was happening to them while rioters pounded on the doors and walls and swarmed all over the roof. Witnesses say that the whole time, Pakistani police were standing around outside, watching the riot unfold. After that incident, the Americans turned their Islamabad embassy into a virtual fortress.

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We landed in Islamabad in 2001 with no illusions that crossing the border into Afghanistan would be easy. In fact, it turned out to be virtually impossible. In our first morning in Islamabad, we marched up to the Taliban embassy hoping for a quick visa. There was a huge crowd of journalists lined up at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad, each one begging to be let in. The Taliban would just keep everyone at bay, collecting passports and visa fees, but granting no visas. By the time we filed our visa applications, there were already 800 other applications by fellow journalists ahead of us. We went back two or three times, each time hoping that the Taliban would finally grant visas. Each time, the growing crowd of journalists would swap optimistic stories of the Taliban organizing a press tour of sorts for those waiting in line. Of course it was all wishful thinking. The Taliban had always been wary, even hostile of media, given the fundamental differences between the two groups. The Taliban forbade photographs, believing it was akin to making graven images, something akin to idolatry. Moving pictures, or video, was a step closer to heresy. The Taliban leadership frowned on photography and videography so much that there are pitifully few recorded images of the Taliban. In fact, the only known photograph of Taliban leader Mullah Omar is a grainy shot taken surreptitiously by a western journalist who was undercover. Once in a while, the more moderate faction within the Taliban would get the upper hand, and call the rare press conference. But even these Taliban "liberals" would look extremely uncomfortable in front of the camera. Still, we hung around the embassy, hoping for a break in. At this time, the war in Afghanistan was already in full swing, and the Northern Alliance had knocked out Mazari Shariff in the north and begun laying siege to Kabul. Those journalists who did manage to hang out with the Northern Alliance entered Afghanistan from the north, through Tajikistan, a long, tortuous, and very expensive detour where major networks would throw money around to hire Soviet era helicopters to bump them up from Tajikistan to alliance bases in northern Afghanistan.
But while the situation seemed impossible to us, Manila saw things differently. We fed stories over the videophone almost everyday about rising tensions in the closed border as the Taliban government tottered on the brink. That was the most we could do. First of all, the Filipino community in Pakistan was tiny. Secondly, Val and Erwin Tulfo had made a trip to Pakistan just a month before [with roughly the same budget that the four of us were sharing now, the same budget we would use to jump into Afghanistan], and he had just about exhausted all the human interests stories that could be wrung out of the Philippine community here.
Yet Manila would occassionaly shoot rockets over our heads for sending them "useless" stories when the major story was Afghanistan, and not Pakistan. The office was apparently getting impatient that we were still stuck in Pakistan, which was quite unfair. These rockets resulted in some pretty colorful language from our side of the satelite phone, especially since the bosses, in a fit of CYA syndrome (CYA = cover your ass) before we left Manila, made us promise them that we would stay in safe sunny Pakistan and not do anything as dangerous as entering wild and wooly Afghanistan. If I recall, the approved budget was really for a trip to Pakistan, which was why they gave us the same budget as the one they gave Erwin. Of course, the unwritten expectation was that we would try to skip over the border, but these are things you don’t want to put on paper.
So after being sternly advised to stay in Pakistan, we bristled at the idea of Manila rushing us to get into Afghanistan ahead of the rest of the pack. Meanwhile, Western journalists who have been waiting for a chance to get through the border for months, simply cooled their heels at the Marriott poolside sipping government-licensed cocktails (locals are banned from drinking alcohol in Pakistan, and foreigners must fill-out a government form everytime they want to buy a drink in the government-licensed bars) while dipping into their expense accounts. Ahhh, the travails of a 3rd world journalist.
To be fair, we did a fair amount of "acclimatization" with the help of Pepe Cabrera and his trusty driver, Munawar, a Christian Pakistani. Munawar has been around Filipinos so long that he could turn to us in his cab and ask, "saan tayo?", To which we would reply without hesitation, "Kabul!" Munawar would just shake his head at the crazy Filipinos and roll his eyes. We learned what Pakistanis wear (the cool, billowing shalwar chemis), what they eat (kabab, kabab, kabab, and more kabab. Oh yeah, and some of that marvelous chicken tikka.) and more importantly, what they think of Bush’s war on terror. Clearly, there was a lot of resentment on the streets against the United States, and a lot of support for the Pakistan’s godchild, the Taliban. In thousands of mosques and madrasas from Lahore to Karachi, Imams thundered against the war of terror and exhorted Pakistanis to cross the border to help their brethren. There were reports of ten thousand Pakistanis who heeded that call and rushed to the Taliban’s side. Many of them would die in the hands of angry Afghans.
While we were in Islamabad, we also met up with Angie Ramos, a fellow Filipino working with the international wire agency Reuters. As expected, our conversations revolved around the biggest question on everyone’s mind – how does one get into Afghanistan? Angie suggested that we try a well known Pakistani journalist.
Hamid Mir is no ordinary scribe. He’s also known as the official biographer of Osama Bin Laden. Whether he was really authorized by Bin Laden to write his biography is unclear. What seems clear is that Mir has met and interviewed Bin Laden in Afghanistan several times, and appears to have Bin Laden’s confidence.
So we went through Islamabad’s gridwork of streets and finally located Mir’s house, a simple bungalow off one of the city’s major arteries. There was no doorbell, in fact there was no gate. So, we went halfway inside the garage, where a white sedan was parked, and called out to Mir. What followed was quite strange, even by our standards.
A stocky man peered outside the door, and gave us a once over.
"Where are you from?"
Oh, we said quite confidently, we are journalists, we are from the Philippines.
With that, Mir shot back:
"You are dangerous people. You have connections with Bin Laden."
Now, we didn’t exactly know how to react to the first. But the second sentence stumped us. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one with the clearest and direct connection with Bin Laden? If we say, yes we have connections with Bin Laden, would he embrace us like long lost comrades, or blow us away?
Noting our hesitation, he continued:
"You are Abu Sayyaf. You are terrorists. I do not like to meet you!"
Now that really had us rocking on our heels. At least this guy knows about the Philippines.
No, no, no, we pleaded, we are not Abu Sayyaf, we are journalists.
But he slammed the screen door in our faces.
We were stunned by the exchange, and, walking out of the garage, we wondered aloud if he was serious or joking. It was really hard to tell.
We had a short conference near our parked car, before we decided that we had nothing to lose by going back to Mir and asking him a second time. This time, he was more receptive, and he told us to come back later in the day since he was still quite busy. We did come back and had a brief chance to get Mir on tape. But we didn’t get our real objective, which was to get Mir to endorse us to the Taliban, or perhaps give us ideas on how to skip across the border into Afghanistan. On that aspect, he refused to help.
We tried several other avenues. One time, we visited an international relief group’s office, hoping to hitch a ride into Kabul. It was there where we met a man who offered us an alternative, and in hindsight, crazier way into Afghanistan.
I do not recall his name; all I remember is his New York accent. He was an Afghan who had somehow found his way to New York, where he worked as, what else, a cab driver. His many years in New York had given him an accent that was half Pashto half New York cab driver, which is to say that he ended every sentence with a "Ya know?" After 9-11, he was trying to get back into Afghanistan through Pakistan. And he said he was leaving the next day, and could bring us with him if we wanted.
His was a tempting, although frightening offer. We had never met the man before, yet were we to trust an Afghan who talks like a New Yorker?
His proposed route was also unusual. He planned to enter Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, which is controlled by Pakistan’s unruly tribes, travel further north, and enter Afghanistan’s Badakshan province on foot. We had no idea what he was talking about, although we were entranced by the idea of sneaking into Afghanistan on foot while everyone else was trapped in the border. Fortunately, we later dropped him as a potential looney. It later turned out that the border area he was talking about was fraught with bandits and kidnappers, and the mountain passes he intended to cross were high and covered with snow. Badakshan province is a fingerlike projection of Afghanistan that punches into Pakistan’s northwest region. It’s climate, terrain, and tribes were not well known for their hospitality.

In the meantime, we also spent a little time getting more of the local culture. For that, we visited the nearby city of Rawalpindi, which is far more urbanized, congested, and chaotic than Islamabad. Think of Islamabad as the Malacanang complex, and Rawalpindi as Divisoria.
On Pepe Cabrera’s advice, we set out to buy some Pakistani clothes. The idea was that if you can’t speak the right language, at least wear appropriate clothes. We stood out in a crowd because of our western outfits. By buying the shalwar chemise, we hoped to, well, blend in a little more. Of course, we were still beardless, but that couldn’t be helped.
Now, it takes a great deal of courage for the unfamiliar to wear the shalwar chemise. It is basically a very loose affair, with a top that billows and reaches down to the knees, and an extremely baggy and loose pair of pants. And I mean baggy. Patrick took out the pants from the plastic and was surprised to see that the waistline was at least a meter across. The only reason the trousers stay up is the cotton cord that acts as a general purpose belt. Truly, this garment was one-size-fits-all.
It was also one-garment-worn-by-all. Everyone used it, from the wealthy businessman in his Benz, to the construction worker sweating it out with a load of bricks on his back. Needless to say, the garment could be really hot and constricting. Imagine Filipino construction workers wearing it while working under the heat of the sun. Yet culture dictated that it be worn at all times.

We were to get another lesson in culture, courtesy of a fellow Filipina we met in Pakistan. Aminah is married to a Pakistani, and bore a stunningly beautiful daughter.
We noted that there were a lot of Pakistanis who were wearing the burqa. Most people thought that the burqa was an Afghan, specifically, a Taliban icon. Yet the burqa was as common in Pakistan as the shalwar chemise.
Aminah told us that the burqa is really part of tradition, and not religion. Pakistan and the Taliban’s shared interest in the burqa may be the result of their shared Pashtun legacy.
"Women who had to follow the tradition of their forefathers, feel they are bound to follow that [practice], the wearing of the burqa," Aminah said.
While Amalia was thankfully not covered by a burqa, she was more comfortable with the idea of a burqa or the less traditional purdah or head veil, than going out in public without a head covering.
"The people, the men especially..." Amalia giggled, "you have to do purdah, or they stare at you... like you are some..." and then she broke out again in a fit of embarassed giggles.