Hazara Nation

NP Everyone had told me not to go west by road, not alone, not as a foreigner. Even my travelling through cities alone was regarded, by most of the expats I spoke to, as somewhat insane. To cross the mountains of central Afghanistan by van and truck was a voyage that not even my Afghan friends in Kabul would consider. Yet as scared as I was, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see the remote interior firsthand.

There were two main routes overland from Kabul to Herat, a major city near the Iranian border. The fast way was the long loop south over paved highway through Kandahar and Helmand. It was also extremely dangerous for foreigners, with Taliban checkpoints a regular occurrence. Even ordinary Afghans were at risk: while I was in Kabul, 23 civilians were pulled off a bus outside of Kandahar City and executed by the Taliban, on suspicion of working for the government.

The slow way was a straight shot west through the rugged mountain ranges of central Afghanistan, a four-to-six-day journey over serpentine, broken dirt roads. Gruelling as it was, it passed through what had until recently been safer, if desolate, territory. But with the security situation in the country deteriorating almost across the board, the route was now considered unsafe and exposed to bandits and militants, particularly in the territories between Ghor and Herat provinces where a renegade warlord named Mullah Mustafa was rumoured to be stopping traffic.

On the way was Bamiyan, site of the infamous destruction of the giant Buddha statues by the Taliban. To get there from Kabul I took a crowded public minivan -- one of the indomitable, four-wheel-drive Toyota Town Aces that ply the mountains here -- back north toward Mazar, and then east into the high mountains. I had to detour this way in order to avoid violent Wardak Province -- south and west of Kabul, the Taliban were operating nearly to the capital's doorstep.

The town of Bamiyan, nestled in a fertile valley at 2,800 metres, is the capital both of Bamiyan Province and the Hazarajat, a region in central Afghanistan inhabited by the Hazara people, Shia Muslims who are descendants of Genghis Khan's army ("Hazara" means "one of the thousands"). Long at the bottom of Afghanistan's socioeconomic hierarchy, the Hazara suffered terribly under the Taliban and have little sympathy for the current insurgency, making the area one of the safest in Afghanistan.

Even with the Buddhas gone, the area around Bamiyan contains a wealth of early Buddhist shrines and caves, and with its gorgeous mountain scenery would make, in some alternate universe, for a first-class touristic destination. There is in fact a small four-star hotel there, frequented mainly by NGO staff, that offers wireless Internet and Japanese cuisine, not far from where Bamiyan's poorest citizens were living in caves.
I met up with Yama Ferozi and Yaghya Ghaznawi, two Afghans working for a Japanese-funded literacy program, and drove down the valley with them to the little villages the program served, small clusters of mud and brick houses with piles of dry sheep dung stacked in front of them as fuel for the coming killer winter.

This is one of the poorest and least-developed places in the world. According to UN statistics, Afghanistan ranks at or near the bottom of every social indicator. With a life expectancy of 43 years, less than a third of the population is literate, and less than a quarter has access to safe drinking water --and the figures are lower in the rural areas.

We spent the day working the villages, speaking with teachers and restocking their supplies of books and pencils. We were a spectacle: the men watching us guardedly, the veiled women turning away from us, the children staring in unabashed fascination.

Programs like this provide a key first step in breaking the cycle of poverty, although its questionable what opportunities will exist for their students in the absence of further development. Yama spoke enthusiastically of what it could do for his country; still, the day came with disappointment, as he discovered that several of the teachers and their supervisors had not been showing up to class. "They don't even want to help themselves," he sighed.

From Bamiyan, my trip into the wilderness began in earnest. I was leaving the relative safety of the Hazarajat, and I now had to shed my identity as a Canadian, something associated both with extreme wealth and the troops fighting in Kandahar. Fortunately, my half-Japanese face resembled those of the Hazara, and with my beard, cheap shoulder bag and grubby Afghan outfit -- a knee length gown, turban, baggy trousers and a plaid waistcoat -- I looked like just another poor traveller. Still, my limited Dari meant that anyone who had a proper conversation with me would realize I was a foreigner -- to that end, I pretended to be Abdul Aziz,

The ravages of geopolitics have swept across this land, again and again a migrant labourer from Kazakhstan heading to Iran for work.

It was a three-day trip westward to Chagcharan, the capital of Ghor Province, the last two days in the cab of an ancient Sovietera cargo truck -- the south of the country had gotten so dangerous that even the truckers were taking the same route as me. During that time, I lived, ate and slept with Afghans, stopping by the rivers to wash before prayer, and bunking down at night in the one-room chaikhanas, where 30 rough-edged men laid out on the floor together.

The rutted, dirt road we travelled took us up over snowbound mountain ranges and down into narrow, jagged river gorges. Once we had to clear a small avalanche from the road by hand. There were hardly any other vehicles on the road, just laden donkeys and flocks of fat-tailed sheep and their shepherds. It seemed like a land lost to time -- until you remembered how the ravages of geopolitics had swept across it, again and again, and how some of those illiterate village elders had satellite phones.

My arrival in the little alpine town of Chagcharan brought new problems. As a young Kazakhstani travelling alone with a big blue shoulder bag, I fit the profile of a foreign jihadist, and I was arrested and questioned twice there, once by the local police anti-terrorism office, and once by the Directorate of National Security -- an "A" for vigilance, I suppose, but an "F" for inter-agency co-ordination.

A greater worry was the final two-day stretch from Chagcharan to Herat. The chaikhanas on the way over had been full of stories about how Mullah Mustafa, a former mujahadeen commander-cum-warlord ostensibly disarmed under a 2004 UN program, had recently turned against the central government and set his men loose -- an example of how complex the situation is, with far more actors than simply the government and the Taliban. Travellers from the west had seen gunmen on the roads, and two men from Kabul had been killed there a week before. With ransoms for foreigners reportedly in the millions, an Afghan could feed his family for a lifetime with a phone call tipping off militants or bandits to a kidnapping opportunity.

As I was pondering my next step in Chagcharan, I sneaked out to the base of the local Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), making my way through the maze of concrete walls and machine gun nests to the inner gate of the compound, where I was met by Lieutenant Ruta Gaizutyte, a young press officer from Vilnius.

The 200-strong, mainly Lithuanian PRT is responsible for assisting security and development in Ghor Province, and to that end they participate in medical programs and distribute aid through the local Afghan institutions.

"People back home ask what are we doing, why are we here, but when you go out to the villages and you are able to do something for these people who have nothing, well," Ruta gushed to me, her blue eyes shining with enthusiasm.

Ghor has traditionally been a safe province, but lately things have worsened. With bad neighbours -- there are full-scale insurgencies in nearby Helmand, Farah and Badghis Provinces -- attacks in the province have increased, including several rocket strikes on the base itself.

"This has been the most difficult rotation in the history of this PRT," Ruta said. They had their first fatality that summer: when reports that a U. S. sniper in Iraq had used a Koran for target practice surfaced, there was an angry demonstration here in front of the base. A hidden gunman opened fire during the riot, and two civilians and a Lithuanian soldier were killed. "Someone used the Koran incident for their own purpose here," she said.

The incident led to a change in rules as security around the base was tightened up. Indeed, as the situation in the province worsens, some of the PRT's aid work has been scaled back. "The NGOs are already leaving," she said. "If the situation gets worse we won't be able to do a lot of the work we are doing now."

The next morning, I left Chagcharan in a crowded Town Ace with 20 of us packed shoulder to shoulder. We followed the River Sargangal through its narrow gorges back down into the plains and stopped for the night in the village of Obe, near the border of Herat and Ghor provinces. I kept my mouth shut pretty much the whole way.

We didn't see any gunmen, though I hid in the van during two police checkpoints, in order to avoid comprising my identity. Two days later, we arrived in Herat, kilometres from the Iranian border. It was still Afghanistan, but after two weeks in the mountains, it felt like civilization again.