Leaving our son asleep in the apartment, we drove toward the Bornholmer Bridge that crosses into West Berlin. When we reached the area, just before midnight, we saw a huge crowd. We had to walk the last hundred meters to the bridge. In the middle of the bridge, a white line marked the boundary. A West Berlin policeman stood near it, but carefully remained on the Western side. People were laughing and joking, urging him on. “Step over the line,” they said. “You’ll be in the East.” He kept hesitating. A group of young men pushed him over the line and everyone laughed.
When we crossed, we found a taxi and drove to where my wife’s sister lived. It was about 1:30 in the morning, and at first she didn’t want to open the door since she had been asleep and hadn’t the faintest idea it could be us. Excited, we talked for two hours before we took a taxi back to the crossing point so we could get back to our son. By 5 a.m., we were home. I felt everything would be different now. The world as I had known it was over.
title: “Crossing The Line” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “William Loftis”
For Abdul, that means crossing a military front line every time he goes to work. “I just came from Kabul a week ago,” he says, standing in the main bazaar in Jebel-us Saraj. “And I’ll go back there in a week to get my salary.”
Abdul, who didn’t want his real name used for fear of Taliban reprisals, receives $113 a month from a Western aid organization that still pays its Kabul employees even though its work has virtually stopped because of pressure from the Taliban and U.S. air strikes. So what about the hazards of crossing the front lines? “It’s an open road,” says Abdul. “The Taliban are on one side, the mujahedin [of the Northern Alliance] on the other. It takes two hours by foot to cross the lines, then another few hours by car.”
Abdul’s story is not that unusual. In fact, he’s one of a countless number of ordinary Afghans who pass between the fronts every day. Some are businessmen, paying off Taliban soldiers and risking roving bandits to transship profitable goods. Others are simply visiting relatives or pursuing various private matters. But all of them vividly illustrate the uniquely protean nature of warfare in Afghanistan.
Western reporting often conjures up images of the Taliban and their Northern Alliance foes facing each other over the hermetically sealed front lines of a World War I-style conflict. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. This is a war where military fortunes are transformed more often by the defections of enemy commanders than by the taking of land, and where ideological principles often take a backseat to clan allegiances and pragmatic needs. “People go back and forth all the time,” says Abdul Kalar of Kalai Malek, a village on the Northern Alliance side of the lines just north of Kabul. “They’re the normal people who have no relationship to politics or the war–they’re just trying to make a living.”
Gadaijon is one of them. A 23-year-old trader in Northern Alliance territory who, like many Afghans has only one name, he takes his white Toyota pickup truck down to the front lines near the village of Dornoma and loads up on sugar, margarine, rice and tea. “The Taliban bring it up to the front lines from Kabul, and we buy it from them.” Much of the business is handled by middlemen who hail from a local tribe that straddles the border. They purchase goods from Taliban officials and bring them across the border at designated points for sale at a 50 percent markup to northern traders. Other traders buy at Kabul shopping centers that specialize in customers from Northern Alliance territory.
Risks always remain. Amon, 25, says that he’s just returned from a five-day trip to Kabul. “It was successful. But there are lots of worries.” Such as? “If you don’t give the Taliban money, they put a gun to your head. They name an amount and if you don’t pay it right away they raise it.” At one crossing, the price of passage is around $12.
Still, sometimes the merchants can get by simply by knowing the right people–such as members of their own tribe or village. In Dornoma, the benefits of cross-border trade are so widespread that locals speak of an “unofficial ceasefire” along the section of the front where traders cross. Too much war is bad for business.
It’s hard to quantify the trade, since no officials on either side of the lines seem to keep track. Heavily-laden trucks pass over the border near Dornoma every five or 10 minutes even at slack times of the day, and most of the gasoline on sale in Northern Alliance territory seems to come from Pakistan by way of Taliban territory. Some merchants say they buy gas from individual Taliban soldiers lugging 30-liter (about seven-gallon) plastic canisters across the front lines on their shoulders. Ask a Jebel shopkeeper where he gets those cans of Iranian Pepsi and he’ll answer in the tone of someone stating the obvious: “From Kabul, of course. Where else?”
Where else indeed? The only way into Jebel from the rest of Northern Alliance territory is over a nightmarish road that crosses through the lofty Hindu Kush mountains via a 16,000-foot pass; the trip into Jebel from most big cities to the north takes about five days at best. In strictly economic terms, it makes sense to bring supplies in the natural way–from Kabul, which has easy access to imports from nearby Pakistan. But there are some things that the Northern Alliance supplies to the Taliban, as well. Sweet raisins grown on the sunny slopes of the Panjshir Valley and cotton from the Shamali Plain are in demand in the capital.
And then there’s the strangest trade of all. Because the Taliban government has virtually no international recognition, it can’t print its own currency. So the Northern Alliance Finance Ministry, which gets its money from a printing press in Russia, sells some of that currency to the Taliban for use in their territory–at a considerable markup, needless to say, and payable in dollars.
Nor is the cross-border traffic restricted to traders. “There’s no special place,” says Sher Pasha, 18, who leads visitors up to the Northern Alliance front lines just outside of Bagram Airport, north of Kabul. “People go through everywhere, through the villages. A guy from our village was about to go. But they told him, ‘Don’t go today. Tomorrow is better.’ So he decided to wait.” On a more sophisticated level, there’s Zmarai, who decided to stick with his job as a merchant in the Jebel bazaar in order to support his parents, wife and four children. The catch is that they’re all living in Kabul. “The quality of life in Kabul is better,” says Zmarai. “It is difficult to buy a house [in Northern Alliance territory] or even to find a house with electricity, and the schools here are not good. In Kabul, both my boys and girls get a private education at home. [But] I would like to see my family more often. Life on my own is lonely here.”
In the meanwhile, Zmarai has to settle for trekking between front lines once every month or two, a round-trip journey that costs him 1 million afghanis ($25). “We dream to have the kind of freedom we had before the Taliban,” says Zmarai. “I only want one thing. To go to work in the morning and at night to be able to go home, and in between to be able to dine with my family three times a day.”
Most of these cross-border dealings may seem harmless enough, but they do have implications for U.S. policymakers contemplating military action in Afghanistan. The information that flows freely back and forth across the lines could include valuable intelligence. And there are many Northern Alliance officials who have close family members in Taliban territory. The Soviets learned to their cost that they couldn’t tell their communist Afghan allies anything about pending military operations if they didn’t want the other side to know. The border-crossing phenomenon also underscores that the fronts here are far more fluid than most Americans realize and that Afghans on both sides still have far more in common with each other than they do with the foreigners they see as infidels. One Northern Alliance government official expresses a common sentiment: “A guy lets his beard grow out, he’s a Talib. He trims it, and he’s a friend. Either you foreigners finally solve this mess or we’ll get together again and send you all to hell.”
