Look to the Taliban! Afghanistan Adventure

Afghanistan.  The name instantly conjures up all kinds of unpleasant images in the infantile American mind: the launching pad for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; Osama bin-Laden’s hideout; endless civil strife; suicide bombings; shadowy terrorist groups; U.S. soldiers mired in a long, futile war; thousands of people trying to flee the country at the airport in Kabul, the capital; the victory and government takeover by the Islamic fundamentalist thugs known as the Taliban.  Some of this is true and some of it is the usual Jewish media swill.

But I’m old enough to remember a very different Afghanistan.  Inspired by the Beatles’ spiritual conversion and journey to India in 1968, thousands of British and west European dropouts headed east on what came to be known as the “hippie trail.”  The last stop for most was India, or a bit further to dreamy Kathmandu, Nepal.  Some pushed on to southeast Asia or all the way to Australia.  Others, however, became enchanted with Afghanistan, two countries short of India, and established an odd presence there.  Why Afghanistan, you ask?  Well, the hippie cult was synonymous with recreational drug use, and after Turkey and Iran, where possession of illegal drugs could result in a stiff prison term, and in Iran the death penalty for trafficking, there were no such laws in Afghanistan, and actually few laws of any kind.  You could buy, sell or smoke dope, sleep in public parks, pretty much do whatever you wanted as long as you didn’t hurt anyone or flagrantly offend local sensibilities.  Outside the few big cities, where life went on as in biblical times, there was basically no government authority, only codes of conduct passed down by tribal elders, which carried the weight of written law.

Actually, I didn’t know much about the country back then.  The main picture I had formed came from reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, an entertaining book though I didn’t like the author’s occasional snooty attitude.  It’s about Theroux’s epic 4-month journey on trains, wherever they ran, clear across Europe and Asia, all the way from England to Japan, then returning to England on the Trans-Siberian railway.  At the time of his 1973 trip Afghanistan didn’t have an inch of railroad track, and today has only a few short stretches but no passenger traffic.  He wrote less than two pages about the country, describing it as “barbarous” and “a nuisance,” and making it clear that he wanted to get to neighboring Pakistan as quickly as possible.  He wrote: “The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle and violent.”  In the next paragraph he recounted how, arriving late, he spent the night smoking hashish (though he wasn’t a regular drug user) with two hippies at a decrepit hotel in the strip of no-man’s land between Iran and Afghanistan, waiting for the border post to open.  Then: “On our way into Herat the next day an Afghan passenger fired his shotgun through the roof of the bus and there was a fight to determine who would pay to have the hole mended.”  I’ve seen much of the world, but nowhere have I ever seen anyone carrying a shotgun on public transport.

Ancient, remote, unknown, “barbarous,” yet easy to visit.  I hadn’t even traveled to Europe at this point – that happened in 1978 – but Afghanistan fascinated me and I started thinking about going there, and maybe to a few other countries in the region, in the near future.  But I never did, and rued the missed opportunity.  Coming on the heels of the Islamic Revolution in Iran right next door, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, which initiated more than forty years of war, changed everything.  The country was now off limits to all travelers except a very few who liked to flirt with extreme danger, and this would remain the case until shortly after the Taliban swept into power in August 2021.  But for me the mystique kept building.  Despite their immense technological superiority, their frightful air power in particular, the Soviets could not defeat Afghanistan’s holy warriors, the Mujahideen, who later would evolve into the Taliban and who, if you’re old enough to remember, were portrayed in the Western media as the good guys fighting a guerilla war from their mountain strongholds, inured to physical pain and fearless in the face of death.  I also learned that the British, who had colonized a substantial chunk of Asia from the Near East to the Far East, had been unable to subdue Afghanistan despite wielding some influence.  The countryside was just too rugged, the people too tough to be subdued by any foreigners.  Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen, who founded what would become the world’s largest travel guide publisher, Lonely Planet, with the 1973 publication of the very first LP guidebook Across Asia on the Cheap, had set off from England in a battered car the previous year, selling it in Kabul before pushing on to Australia.  Reminiscing about that journey much later, he said – I’m paraphrasing here – “There was something special about Afghanistan.  As soon as you crossed the border all hassles vanished.  It was just so wild and free.”  Much earlier, in 1937, another British adventurer named Robert Byron, who had roamed around the continent and written the book The Road to Oxiana, reflected: “Here at last was Asia without an inferiority complex.”  Yes, there really was something unique about Afghanistan.

After nine years of scorched earth obliteration with little to show for it except millions of Afghan casualties and refugees, and 15,000 of their own dead and a demoralized army, the Russian bear, its nose badly bloodied, gave up and retreated to its lair, all its border provinces soon to become independent countries with the collapse of communism.  But you’d be mistaken to think of Afghanistan as a homogenous country, say like Japan, united in their victory over a common enemy.  The country is and always has been stressed by tribal, ethnic, and to a lesser degree linguistic differences, somewhat like the old Yugoslavia, Islam being the glue that holds it together.  All these fault lines ushered in an era of conflict right after the Soviets withdrew, as various Mujahideen warlords turned on each other and Afghanistan was plunged into civil war.  It’s tempting to romanticize the exploits of the Mujahideen, but in fact there was a good deal of corruption and depravity in their ranks.  One of their top generals, who had lost an eye in battle, and was disgusted with the state of affairs and determined to straighten things out, was a tall, quiet, honorable man named Mullah Omar, who in 1994 founded the Taliban, which in the Pashtun language means “students,” as in students of the Koran.  The Taliban crushed rival factions, Omar’s popularity soared, and in 1996 he became supreme leader of Afghanistan, a position he retained until the American military invasion of 2001, after which he went into hiding while directing the insurgency against the new U.S.-backed government.  He died of natural causes in 2013, though the Taliban didn’t announce his death until two years later.  His life story, condensed on his Wikipedia page is quite fascinating.  If you can read past the usual negative slant one expects of Wikipedia, surprisingly enough, in a few passages he is portrayed as a reasonable and upright man, which he was, even though he became one of those instant “most wanted” comic book terrorists in the eyes of the U.S. military.

Shortly after the events of September 11, as everyone knows, the mental midget George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and our military machine swarmed into Afghanistan.  The pretext was that Mullah Omar had refused to hand over Osama bin-Laden, supposed head of al-Qaeda and the supposed mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks who was supposedly hiding in some cave in Afghanistan.  That al-Qaeda and the Taliban were not aligned made no difference.  It was all nonsense, of course, as nearly all those reading these lines already know – “contrived wars for hallucinatory ends” as the late, great Revilo Oliver characterized all of our foreign military campaigns.  As I’ve written elsewhere – and I’m hardly the only one – a mountain of evidence points to September 11 as an Israeli operation, and I’ve always been skeptical about the very existence of al-Qaeda.  

I won’t go into the details of that contrived war here.  Compared to the obscene, pointless conflict in Vietnam, which I well remember as a teenager, it was much longer – the longest war in U.S. history by far, though American casualties were a minute fraction of what they were in the Vietnam War.  And it got comparatively little news coverage, nor was there a military draft, nor any protests to speak of.  Other than that, it was Vietnam all over again:  the same lack of any clear objective, the same huge expenditures on senseless projects, the same arrogant attitude toward the local population and ignorance of their culture, the same disagreements, delusions and incompetence among top generals and administration officials, the same lies and cover-ups that concealed endless problems on the ground, the same aerial slaughter of innocents, and in the end the same frenzied air evacuation of thousands of police, soldiers and civilians who had collaborated with the American enemy.  As a typically myopic mainstream journalist, Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post took the War on Terror seriously, but putting that aside, he brilliantly documented the whole sorry mess in his book The Afghanistan Papers.

As Operation Enduring Freedom – the absurd name given to the travesty by Bush – wore on through the 2010s with no end in sight, and as I wasn’t getting any younger, my hopes of making it to Afghanistan someday dwindled, though my fascination with the country and the call of the remote and unknown remained as strong as ever.  Then came the Covid scamdemic in 2020, followed by the wet dream of Bill Gates and friends to vaccinate the entire world.  As the psychosis spread, there was much talk about vaccine passports, and it seemed that almost every country on earth was signing on, requiring a bogus PCR test, proof of vaccination, or both.  There was simply no way I’d get injected for any reason with a Covid vaccine, or any vaccine for that matter.  Furthermore, with reports of vaxxed pilots suffering chest pains and a few slumping over the controls, I swore that I’d never get on a plane again and was sure that my traveling days were over.  I could only go to Afghanistan vicariously by watching YouTube videos and poring over a large, detailed road map of the country I’d purchased from an obscure company I’d found on the web.  Hundreds of villages with unpronounceable names were shown which, according to the map’s legend, were accessible only by tracks requiring 4-wheel drive, and many more appeared as isolated dots which presumably could be reached only by camel and compass.  I would never have imagined that I’d be taking that map with me to Afghanistan two years later.   

Things change.  Covid hysteria and the obsession with universal vaccination lost steam as the dark truth about these lethal shots spread globally.  Equally surprising to me was that Afghanistan had settled down considerably under Taliban rule.  Shootings and bombings still occurred, but much less frequently, and it could honestly be said that the country was at peace for the first time in 42 years.  Moreover, there had been a steady trickle of foreign visitors beginning in 2022, and a handful of offbeat travel companies were booking trips there.  I turned 70 this past November, right around the time I discovered all this, and since my energy level had obviously faded with age, I asked myself if I had one grand adventure left in me, and promptly answered, “Of course!”  From here it was a matter of choosing the best outfit to go with.  Although I’ve traveled mostly solo, there are certain countries, or regions of countries, where independent travel is so problematic that it only makes sense to go with a small group and let a tour operator handle the logistics.  Afghanistan definitely falls into this category.  Moreover, only a few countries recognize the Taliban as the country’s legitimate government, and of these, it seemed that the embassies in only two, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, issued the required tourist visas with little fuss, though you had to show up in person with a lot of paperwork.  I opted for the UAE, flying to the capital Abu Dhabi from New York, and from there to Kabul five days later.     

Of course, in a country recently ravaged by four decades of war and domestic terror, I wondered how safe it was to visit, two years of relative peace and calm notwithstanding.  The U.S. State Department publishes a travel advisory for every country in the world, so just for fun I checked up on Afghanistan, which unsurprisingly was rated Level 4, the gravest level, DO NOT TRAVEL.  Their report made it sound like you had to have a death wish to go there.  I laughed.  The same dire warning, with the same subtle and not so subtle fear propaganda, was issued for North Korea and Iran, which I visited in 2013 and 2016 respectively, and both countries were about the safest and most welcoming I’d ever traveled to.  But Afghanistan, well, Afghanistan was not quite the same – you know, those images of car bomb blasts with pandemonium, smoking rubble and body parts everywhere, and you wonder about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I wasn’t afraid to go, but quite honestly I was a little apprehensive.

I browsed the few companies on the internet offering adventures to Afghanistan and chose Safarat, founded and run by a freelance British photojournalist named Joe Sheffer.  Something about him impressed me.  Not only did he know the country intimately, having spent a good deal of time there during the war, but I got the feeling that he was the most attuned to the realities below the surface about which I knew nothing.  Regarding personal safety, his message was yes, Afghanistan is safer now than it’s been for a very long time, but things can change in a heartbeat and one must remain vigilant.  As a security precaution, no day to day itinerary and no hotel names were mentioned, though the proposed route was shown, and the two-week trip would take in the major cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, as well as small villages – a mix of hotels and homestays.  The group was limited to eight, traveling in four Toyota Land Cruisers.  What I liked about the itinerary, and what set it apart from other companies, was that it was all land-based.  Once I get to a country, I want to avoid airports; I don’t believe in flying just to cram in another city or “must-see” sight.  I want to stay on the ground, getting a feel for the land and people, even if it means seeing areas of no particular interest.  The route of our trip made a big loop around the interior of Afghanistan, which is about the size of Texas.  It appeared as a ring road, a reassuringly solid line on my map, though I would later learn that appearances can be deceiving.

The only country where I can say that I really felt culture shock is India, back in 1987.  Had I never been there, the bazaars in Kabul and Kandahar, medieval in their color and chaos, would have given me a full dose.  They alone were worth the trip.  Much of the country was what I expected to see: men with beards and turbans, women in blue burqas (the garment that covers the entire body, including the face); scruffy city streets and buildings; ruins going back to ancient history, some crumbling and some well-preserved; lovely tilework and calligraphy in mosques and shrines; shepherds with huge flocks of goats and sheep, occasionally blocking the road.  There were also sights I hadn’t anticipated: the graves of thousands of fallen Taliban scattered throughout the country, marked by a jagged rock, a mound of stones, and often a Taliban flag fluttering from a bent sapling; boys intently studying the Koran in a madrassa; the mangled remains of Soviet tanks rusting away; the jihad museum in Herat with its graphic dioramas of Mujahideen fighters bludgeoning Russian soldiers to death; long rows of razor wire and concrete walls with fortifications, especially in Kabul and around military installations; shops near the old Bagram air base selling boots, watches and knives left behind by American troops; men in protective gear detecting mines by the roadside; World Food Program truck convoys; the crowds standing on the bank of the Hari River in Herat watching the swollen, violent flow which upstream had turned into a deadly flood, washing away mud and brick houses, killing hundreds, and forcing us to cancel part of our route and fly back to Kabul; and the rugged, ever-changing topography, from rocky outcroppings to sandstone cliffs to snow-capped mountains to bleak desert to rushing streams surrounded by lush greenery.   

Taliban militia, strutting around with their AK-47s, are everywhere to be seen, and they’re especially concentrated in the cities and city outskirts.  They’re the government, which encourages tourism, and not to be feared.  They were a nuisance, however, at checkpoints, and we must have encountered at least 150 of these in our two weeks of travel – definitely part of the experience.  On rare occasions we were waved through, but since it was plain to see that we were not Afghans, an imperious wave of the hand would order us to pull over.  These delays usually lasted between five and ten minutes.  Sometimes they were satisfied after Joe, with his local partner Noory translating, showed them the proper permits; sometimes they wanted to see passenger lists; sometimes they collected our passports to examine them and record details; a few times they walked around the cars photographing us as we sat inside.  As with women, it was absolutely forbidden to take pictures of them, though in more relaxed settings they were usually happy to be photographed as long as you asked permission first, and this was also true of nearly all the boys and men we interacted with, who invariably were friendly and curious, so unaccustomed were they to see foreigners.  Our Afghan drivers, the hosts at our homestays, and hotel staff were without fail also very courteous and helpful to all of us, including the three women in our group.  Nevertheless, the code of sexual segregation imposed by the Taliban always looms.  Thinking it was okay to take a photo of some colorfully dressed little girls outside a mosque in Kandahar, I snapped a quick shot, but a Taliban trooper appeared out of nowhere and expressed his displeasure to Noory who relayed it to me.  We visited some holy places where women, including the women in our group, were not allowed to enter.  At a fuel stop in a remote area, in a windblown lot with a few rickety shops, another Taliban refused to let one of our women walk in alone to buy some bottled water, though he was an exceptional jerk.  Of course, the ladies knew about these policies before coming to Afghanistan and took it all in stride. Despite the restrictions, they were never mistreated in any way.

The road from Kabul to Kandahar, about one-third the distance of our planned route, was pretty bad with many potholes and bumps, and stretches of ripped-up pavement under construction where we had to take long, dusty detours.  From Kandahar to Herat there was a good tarmac road, and as alluded to earlier the 500 mile stretch from Herat to Kabul, part of which is said to be atrocious in the best of times, was impassable due to flooding, so we never got to see the Minaret of Jam, the gem of Afghanistan, a tall and incredibly intricate structure of Islamic significance built in the 1190s which stands alone and isolated in the central highlands.  This was the only real disappointment of the trip.  As in the rest of Asia, a maniac driver is born every minute, though we were lucky never to stumble upon an accident or, God forbid, be involved in one – and I thought, if a road accident is the worst that can happen, I’ll gladly take that risk to have an adventure like this.  The only other thing that unnerved me slightly was the extreme security protocols at our hotels in Kabul and Kandahar which were set back a good distance from the street, along which ran concrete walls and no signs indicating a hotel.  There were guards and a vehicle barrier bar which wasn’t raised until after a mirror examination of the vehicle undercarriage to make sure there was no bomb attached.  Then going inside there was a wand wave and pat-down for men and women in separate areas, and our bags went through an X-ray machine.  I have never experienced this anywhere else.  But there were no real problems the first week and I felt quite safe and happy to be here.

That serenity was shattered on May 17, the halfway point of our trip, when, at a checkpoint where we were stopped just before reaching Herat, Joe walked to our car and told us that some foreign tourists had been gunned down in Bamyan, which was four days away on our itinerary.  He had been bombarded with messages on his phone but details were sketchy.  It was only later that we learned that three Spanish tourists, their two Afghan guides and a Taliban escort had been killed, and four other Europeans wounded.  It was sobering news which instantly made the risk factor very real and very personal: had the killers decided to strike four days later, it could’ve been me and some of my companions lying in a pool of blood.  Word was that the assailants had been members of the Islamic State Khorisan, or ISIS-K, an offshoot of that nebulous organization.  There was no way of knowing if this was an isolated incident or the beginning of a campaign of terror against tourists.  To my knowledge, foreign tourists had never been targeted in Afghanistan before and it would have major repercussions.  

Bamyan, a mountain town in a spectacular setting, always was and still is visited by nearly all foreigners who visit Afghanistan.  It’s famous for the two enormous Buddha statues, 125 and 180 feet tall, which were carved into a cliff around 600 A.D. and blown up by the Taliban in 2001.  People still come to see the niches where they stood.  We were supposed to arrive there by road from Herat, 400 miles to the west, but after flying to Kabul, which is about 100 miles east of Bamyan, we drove there on a stretch of road which was in pretty good shape.  The decision to go there was not made lightly.  At one point, I overheard Joe say, “I might just cancel the rest of this trip.  I’ll never be able to live with myself if somebody gets whacked.”  But we did go to Bamyan, arriving on the same day, the 21st, as originally planned, though from the opposite direction.  It was left up to us as to whether we wanted to visit the bazaar where the tragedy had taken place.  Four stayed behind, and four, including me, went there.  My gut feeling was that it was an isolated incident, and lightning couldn’t strike twice.  Everything there seemed perfectly normal, nothing out of place.  It was an eerie feeling.

But that’s only half the story.  Once Joe made the decision to fly from Herat to Kabul, our drivers had to double back to Kabul, an 800-mile round-the-clock journey, most of it on the lousy road I described.  Those poor guys!  The plan was for us to spend one night in Kabul before heading to Bamyan, giving the four of them enough time to return, but on the way back one vehicle broke down near Kandahar, and another stayed behind with him until the problem was fixed.  They eventually made it back, but we had to hire another larger vehicle to accommodate the group and all our luggage for the round trip to Bamyan.  We were supposed to spend the night at a homestay in a picturesque village in the region, but apparently the government had gone into crisis mode after the May 17 shootings, and we ran into all kinds of problems with the Taliban.  At one checkpoint, the proper papers would be shown, approved, and signed, only to have permission denied at the next checkpoint.  We just sat in the car and waited each time so I never got all the details.  All I remember is that there were long delays at five or six checkpoints, and in the end we were prohibited from driving to the village, where we were supposed to arrive around 6 PM.  There seemed to be no chain of command and no common sense among the Taliban manning these posts.  Fortunately, we were able to stay at a basic hotel right in town where we pulled in at 10:45.  The place had character, but my room stunk like an open sewer.  I was just grateful to be here and collapsed into bed, exhausted.  

One more incident which occurred in Kabul on the last full day of our trip is worth mentioning.  We hiked up Bibi Mahru Hill, which offers a panoramic view of the city below and is a landmark where men gather in large numbers in a carefree atmosphere.  At the top of the hill flies the largest Taliban flag in Afghanistan.  It’s an attractive flag of flashy Arabic script in black on a white background which bears no resemblance to the flag of the previous government.  Nearby is an empty Olympic swimming pool built by the Soviets in the 1980s but never used.  After the Taliban seized power, they executed their enemies by forcing them to climb to the highest diving platform, then pushing them to their deaths far below.  Joe and I were relaxing on a bench eating a snack when three or four men, one of whom spoke some English, approached with the usual friendly inquisition – what is your country, what is your job, how do you like Afghanistan, and so on.  Soon more men gathered, then more surrounded us, and still more until there were around thirty, and the questions grew more probing – how many days are you staying in Kabul, what is your hotel.  I detected a slightly menacing edge to these questions, to which we gave evasive answers, and I didn’t like the vibe, especially with that swimming pool in the background.  It was time to get up and walk away.  We were followed, and the guy who spoke English kept on talking and asking questions, but after a few minutes they drifted off.

Traveling to Afghanistan was a great adventure, and a key part of it was Joe Sheffer.  His leadership, enthusiasm, intimate knowledge of the country, and the ability to handle any problem, like the logistical nightmare I’ve described, made a lasting impression on me.  He had been embedded with U.S. troops during the war and his personality and inclination for the military life seemed at odds with the media outfits he had worked for, like CNN, NBC and Vice News.  I would be remiss not to mention that his colleague Charlotte “Charlie” Faulkner joined us on the trip.  She was one of the few journalists who had stayed behind in Kabul as the Taliban closed in on the capital in August 2021 and many residents fled in terror, not knowing what would happen – nor did she.  But the kind of chaos and violence that people feared never happened, except at the airport.  Both had reported from war zones, not only Afghanistan but the Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine and beyond.  After returning home, I went on the internet to read some articles Charlie had published in major British newspapers.  They were incisive and well-written.  Joe and Charlie are, in fact, the first journalists, loaded with credentials, I’ve ever met.  I’ve written some nasty things about journalists, how so many of them are prostitutes, morons, and just plain pond scum, and I still believe that, but Joe and Charlie were very likable, unpretentious people and we had some engaging conversations during long rides.  They struck me as the best of the British, the type who are drawn to danger with a quiet grace because it’s in their blood.  They’ve been in situations where they easily could’ve been killed, and I’m sure they’ve seen some horrific things though we didn’t get into that.  They’re a lot braver than I am, that’s for sure.  But despite their courage and integrity, I sensed that they were mentally locked into the alternate reality that all mainstream journalists must adhere to, observing certain taboos and adjusting their viewpoints accordingly without consciously realizing it.  

And this brings me to the provocative title of this piece, which I thought about for a long time before deciding to go with it.  Let me get a few things straight first.  Needless to say, I’m not a fan of Sharia law.  It would be nice to see the Taliban lighten up on religion and become more secular as in other Islamic countries, like Turkey and Syria.  Their demolition of the ancient Buddha statues in Bamyan was an outrage.  Their policy of sexual segregation is unnatural and moronic.  Banning music at weddings is ridiculous.  Several armed Taliban militia posted at the numerous checkpoints where we were delayed, though not threatening, were swaggering idiots, kind of like TSA agents at U.S. airports. 

But let’s put things in their proper perspective, beginning with the fact that the only reason people equate the word Taliban with evil and terrorism is because of Jewish media conditioning.  This is an old, proven technique, another example that comes to mind being a “spit word” of many years, apartheid, a workable system of racial separation in South Africa which the great majority of Blacks there were content with.  Having traveled extensively around Africa in the 1980s, including South Africa while still under White rule and apartheid, and seeing the “facts on the ground” all over the continent, I know whereof I speak.  For more than forty years the media and the Disunited Nations lied about Blacks being oppressed in South Africa, so just because they keep harping on the plight of women in Afghanistan, especially being denied a formal education after the age of 12, doesn’t mean it’s true.  And what if it is?  Here in the decadent U.S. one in six adult women take anti-depression prescription drugs.  Something like 25 million, many of them childless, are in debt because of the loans they took out for a worthless college education, which on average takes 21 years to pay off.  What kind of life is that?  I’m not saying that strict Sharia law is ideal for Afghan women – far from it.  But maybe most consider the denial of certain privileges a slight injustice they can live with.  Maybe most are content with their traditional roles of staying home in the company of their extended families, caring for children, and performing chores traditionally reserved for women.  In this ancient land, where the burqa has been worn for centuries (though not by all women), and which has never really accepted European cultural influence, I suspect that life for most women under Taliban rule is not much different from the good old days of the hippie trail.  The bottom line is this: you can find injustice just about everywhere you look for it in the world, and the selective indignation directed at the Taliban irritates me.  With their rigid interpretation of the Koran, I see them as the Islamic version of the Puritans, a devout and highly patriarchal sect in England that lived in accordance with biblical law as they read it.  They were tough folks who braved a two-month trans-Atlantic crossing and endured many hardships in the New England wilderness, where they rose in government, and they too were a bunch of killjoys.  They banned gambling, Sunday sports and recreation, close dancing, and all religious festivities, even the singing of Christmas carols.  And if it’s really true, and not another media cock and bull story, that women can be stoned for death for adultery under the Taliban legal code, well, the Puritans are remembered for hanging women convicted of being witches in late 17th century Massachusetts.  But life went on in the New England colonies and it wasn’t all bad.

Badmouth the Taliban all you want; the fact remains that they and their Mujahideen predecessors, using only basic weapons and means of communication, whipped the world’s top two superpowers, though at great cost.  This fact alone should evoke our admiration, and inspire us when the now far superior force of the federal government and the media mind controllers brings our spirits down.  They were, and are, fearless warriors, hardened from birth in a land of earthquakes, floods, droughts, and periodic famines, and after forty years of conflict they have brought a fragile peace to Afghanistan, and from all appearances have the enthusiastic or at least lukewarm support of the great majority of the population.   I don’t doubt that many in their ranks committed atrocities and carried out brutal reprisals against their internal enemies, before and after they came to power, but for sheer savagery Americans ought to study their own Civil War and the 12-year period of Reconstruction that followed it, and ponder the fact that the U.S. has killed more innocent people outside its borders than any nation in history.  

Before going to Afghanistan, I knew very little about the Taliban and had never heard of Mullah Omar, its founder.  I still know very little about their military campaigns from 2001 to 2021, and how they managed to recruit so many young men, but I’m sure that the abuse and relentless slaughter of civilians by U.S. and NATO forces motivated a great many of them to join, especially those in the countryside who, as in all nations, are much tougher on average than city dwellers.  This is how the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in the 1970s, though that’s where the parallel ends.  Just recently, to get a better insight, I read a book entitled My Life With the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef.  Zaeef had seen heavy fighting in the jihad against the Russians in the 1980s, and was later involved in the formation of the first Taliban government in 1994, serving in several posts.  He was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan in 2001 when that country’s government, under heavy pressure, treacherously handed him over to American operatives shortly after the events of September 11.  He was subsequently shipped to the inhuman detention camp at Guantanamo where he spent more than three years before being released, never having been charged with any crime.  Understandably he was extremely bitter, not only about his personal experience but about the destruction of his country, and holds nothing back in his scathing indictment of our air terrorists.  The book was published in 2010, right in the middle of Operation Enduring Freedom, and is a gold mine of inside information, beginning with the author’s childhood in an Afghan village right through to his political career and imprisonment.  The chapter on the immediate aftermath of September 11, as it was discussed among the first Taliban government shortly before the American onslaught, is particularly enlightening.

The punishment of the Afghan people goes on unabated, as the Taliban begin their fourth year of rule.  The ghouls of international finance have frozen several billion dollars in assets that the previous government held in foreign banks, with devastating consequences for the people.  It appears to be a replay of the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, resulting in the deaths of half a million children in that country.  Many have not forgotten that, in a 60 Minutes interview aired on May 12, 1996, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, the ugly Czech-born Jewess Madeline Albright, said that their deaths were “worth the price” of keeping Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in line.  In an old edition of Across Asia on the Cheap, I recall a line about Afghanistan which went something like “The country is poor, but one rarely sees beggars,” implying that the people were too proud to beg, which I’m sure was true in the 1970s.  Well, I saw plenty of beggars of all ages when I was there.  One image that stays in my mind, which I saw quite often, is a woman in a blue burqa holding a baby with her hand out, sitting in the road near a big pothole where vehicles were forced to slow down.  I’ve read that malnutrition is a widespread problem in the country, and that one-third of the people eat only bread and tea on most days.  I didn’t see any signs of imminent starvation, which is a common sight in the cities of India, but then there’s a lot I didn’t see.  It’s clear that there are different socio-economic levels as there are in every country.  Fresh meat, mostly lamb and chicken, was available in the markets, as was a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, so obviously a fair number of people eat adequately, though I don’t know the percentage.  We even ate at an opulent restaurant in Kabul with gourmet dishes on the menu, which catered to wealthy Afghans.  That was a special night out, but we ate well the entire trip at local restaurants and homestays.

As for the population, as I said, Afghanistan is a bewilderingly diverse country which contributes to its lack of stability.  The country is divided into 34 provinces which are marked off by tribal and political allegiances.  There are just so many tribes and clans, and so many primeval feuds among them, that the situation is impossible for anyone to sort out.  Here, for example, is Zaeef’s depiction of the country in 1992, after the Russians were defeated and withdrew, but before the founding of the Taliban:

In Kabul, fighting soon broke out between Massoud and Hekmatyar.  Massoud had demanded full control of the city but Hekmatyar – as Prime Minister – didn’t accept this.  The old Communist party splits between Khalqis and Parchamis were being played out again, and while alliances were never clear, the Khalqis sided with Hekmatyar while the Parchamis seemed to support Massoud.  Soon the fighting reached Kandahar, where rival commanders clashed in the city.  Ustaz Abdul Haleem, a commander of Sayyaf’s faction, had taken the provincial police department, but Mullah Naqib’s forces turned it into rubble.  Abdul Hakim Jan was the commander of that battle, which lasted just one day before Ustaz Abdul Haleem fled.  Most people in the building were killed, but some escaped towards Sarpoza and to the main base of Ustaz Abdul Haleem.  

The Pashtun ethnic group, with its countless tribes, comprises about half the country’s population and predominates in the south and east, spilling over into the autonomous tribal regions of Pakistan, with which Afghanistan shares a 1640-mile border and an intertwined history.  Their origins are murky but they appear to be a mixture of people who migrated from the west, including Whites.  Many would not look out of place in southern Italy or Greece, but most are too swarthy and coarse to pass as Europeans, and some are various shades of nut brown.  At the other end, I saw nine or ten children with light hair and blue eyes, probably a legacy of genes left behind by the armies of Alexander the Great, which passed this way in the fourth century B.C.  In the north, especially around Bamyan, which was as far north as we got, Mongolian blood is evident in the slanted eyes of a sizable minority.  How much friction these racial differences cause below the surface of everyday life, I have no idea.  Again, Islam, the religion of 99% of the population, the great majority belonging to the Sunni denomination, is the cement that holds the country together.   

Only about ten countries in the Middle East and Asia look upon the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, and of these only three, I believe, extend full diplomatic recognition.  As crazy as it sounds, there are still Afghan embassies scattered around the world, mostly in Europe, that are staffed by representatives of the former government who refuse to accept Taliban rule.  Yet the Taliban are very reasonable and sincere in their attitude to the outside world, though at the same time they seem to be regarding the influx of foreign tourists whom they have welcomed – around 5000 since they came to power – as undermining the values of Sharia.  It’s a strange situation, which seems to be constantly changing.  One thing that struck me while reading Zaeef was his extreme piety, despite otherwise being a rational and honorable man. 

I’ve never read the Koran and I don’t know much about Islam, if in fact there’s anything that distinguishes it from the nonsense and hypocrisy of Christianity.  I get tired of hearing about Islamic extremism, the violent crimes of Muslim immigrants, and the like.  I’ve traveled around nineteen Islamic countries from Morocco to Malaysia and no one has ever asked me about my religion, nor have I ever brought up the subject.  I’ve never seen any signs of Islamic fanaticism.  I don’t know of anything in Islamic doctrine that’s more violent than Christianity and especially Judaism.  (Ever read the Old Testament?)  As I see it, the grave problems that natives of Islamic countries have brought to the White West boil down to race not religion.  It’s a matter of racial resentment of White superiority, or racial revenge for the past history of      slavery or colonialism, or hatred for the current Western support of Israel that has devastated their lands or those of their fellow Muslims.  Islam is a unifying force, in fact the only common bond among the variegated nonwhite hordes of the Eastern Hemisphere.  No Muslim community and no mosque belongs in any White nation, but so far as I can tell the greatest amount of “Islamic” crime by far is committed by north Africans infused with a good deal of Negro blood and west Africans who are purely Black.  There are large numbers of Turks in Germany and Pakistanis in England, both of whom are despised by the native population, but I would wager that the criminal element is much lower among the lighter skinned Turks.        

A passage from Soul on Ice, the autobiographical screed of 1960s American black Marxist revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver, illustrates my point.  Musing on his serial rape of White women, he wrote, “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law….that I was defiling his women….I felt I was getting revenge….I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”  Would you attribute this to the fact that both of Cleaver’s grandfathers were Protestant preachers?  That would be as absurd as blaming Catholicism for all the rapes and murders of White women in the U.S. carried out by Mexican and El Salvadoran mestizos.  So really, White folks, knock it off with all the Islam bashing which is just another Jewish ploy in their bottomless bag of mind-control tricks, helped along by Zionist boot-licking flunkies like Tommy Robinson in the U.K. and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

However, I found myself going back to the drawing board in light of the fact that I’m breathing right now, by which I mean May 17 and the vicissitudes of life.  Just what motivated these barbarians to spray a group of tourists and their guides with gunfire?  What were they trying to accomplish?  How do their minds work?  Imagine that they regard the Taliban as too soft in their application of Sharia law!  No doubt they make up a minuscule percentage of the world’s two billion Muslims, but they’re out there and they have massacred foreign tourists before, several times in Egypt.  There have been some ruthless crackdowns on political organizations that attract these throwbacks, the bloodiest of which was initiated against the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in 1982 by Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the current president.  I must confess that I don’t understand this phenomenon, which is obfuscated by the media and may have the clandestine support of Israel, since for some strange reason ISIS never seems to bother that country.  But it’s clear that there are some Muslims with feverish brains who think that butchering infidels or blowing themselves up in crowded places is sure to please Allah and score an instant ticket to Paradise.  Upon reflection, I think they amount to a much smaller percentage than crazed fanatics of other religions, namely bloodlusting Jews and their Christian Zionist friends in America who have been cheering the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since day one.  The difference is that the Islamic suicide bomber puts his money where his mouth is. 

Most people reading these lines are familiar with the mass mind control techniques so effectively employed by the Jewish media.   One such technique is eliciting a Pavlov’s dog reaction through repetition –  for example, diversity is good, racism is evil, anti-vaxxers are weirdos, and Taliban is terrorism.  The problem is, even independent thinkers will fall for the last one because they have practically no information to go by other than news reports and images projected on the television screen, and they never suspect that their own minds are being controlled through subtle lies and outright censorship.  That’s why travel to “controversial” countries is so educational.  In saying “Look to the Taliban!” I’ve tried to make it clear that they’re a different people with their own history and culture, and their policies are certainly nothing we should emulate.  What I mean is, they’ve shown that through courage and sacrifice it’s possible to defeat armies of incomparably greater strength, and that corrupt, vicious governments, like the one in Kabul that was propped up by the U.S. for twenty years – and the one that festers in Washington D.C. – are inherently weak in the face of a determined, morally superior enemy.  And let me add that the people of Afghanistan, including most Taliban, are quite human and not what Fox News and the rest of television have led American retards to believe.  George Orwell taught us a valuable lesson about the demonization of an unknown country’s leaders and the dehumanization of its people in his classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The older I get, the more I appreciate his prophetic insights.  One of the best passages in that great book, which I underlined a long time ago in my dog-eared copy, was about how the average dumbed down citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on the inhabitants of far-off Eurasia and Eastasia, but has nevertheless been conditioned to hate and fear them.  Orwell wrote: If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.  The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.

Link to video source: HELMAND: ONCE THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE IN AFGHANISTAN

I just came across this video made by a gutsy middle-aged woman named Emma Witters who has traveled alone around Afghanistan.  It reminded me so much of the interactions I’ve had with people in poor, forgotten countries, who rarely see foreign tourists, though being a blonde, blue-eyed female, she draws a much larger crowd!  If you really want to know what it’s like encountering both children and adults in Afghanistan and elsewhere – behind the headlines, behind the dehumanizing stereotypes, behind the “they hate us” crap – keeping in mind that Helmand Province was heavily bombed for years by U.S. and NATO forces, these people suffered terribly for it, and they have good reason to hate us – then watch this 25-minute video.  And go on a quick archaeological tour while you’re at it.  

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I want to end this essay on a high note by saying that the spirit of adventure, the quest to explore the unknown and accept risks, is alive and well among Europeans, and it was encouraging to see the younger generation picking up the baton (though two on my trip were of Indian background).  I thought I was hot stuff for having traveled to 97 countries across six continents, but some of my companions had gone to places and done things I didn’t think possible.  In addition to Joe and Charlie, dauntless in their own right, we had a middle-aged German man who had been to every country in the world except for ten and had personally led tours to several of them, and a British guy, only 28, who was fluent in French and Arabic and with much perseverance had taught himself to speak and read Mandarin and had hitchhiked all around China.  Whoa!

If by some wild chance I have piqued your interest in visiting Afghanistan, you can’t go wrong with Joe Sheffer, whose excellent website is safarat.co.  I know of only two other outfits, though there may be more, that can take you there.  One is Young Pioneer Tours (youngpioneertours.com).  I did a week-long trip to North Korea with them in 2013 and it was superb.  I can’t vouch for their many other exotic destinations but they seem to run a first-rate operation.  They’re based in China but all their top people are from English-speaking countries.  Joan Torres works out of Barcelona and runs Against the Compass (againstthecompass.com), which is somewhat similar to YPT.  He’s quite a character, harkening back to the great Spanish explorers of old, and has a terrific blog – and a perfect command of the English language – with riveting stories of his adventures to the far-flung corners of the globe.  Sadly, it was his group, though he wasn’t leading it, that came under attack in Bamyan and he has suspended his trips to Afghanistan for now.  Although I’ve already mentioned them on my site, I’ll once again put in a word for exploreworldwide.com.  Going back to 1985, I’ve done seven trips with Explore, mixing them in with my solo travels, and have always been thoroughly satisfied with them.  They’re tamer than YPT and ATC, and don’t go to Afghanistan, but they pretty much cover every region of the globe, and if you’d rather not venture beyond Europe, which has become increasingly spoiled by mass tourism, they’ll take you to authentic places in the Old World that are far from the maddening crowds.

In addition to Joan (I wish he spelled it Juan!) I want to give a shout-out to other brave souls who have crisscrossed the planet, often at considerable risk, and have blogs and great photographs well worth checking out, and great advice if you want to follow in their footsteps.  Englishman Jonny Duncan, at backpackingman.com, has been on the road and on many a rocky trail since 1997.  A young lady from Virginia, Alexandra Reynolds, has seen a great deal and has a lot to offer solo female travelers; she’s at lostwithpurpose.com.  Martin Malik is a young Polish fellow with British citizenship who has covered nearly every square mile of Asia, or at least it seems that way.  His site is compasstravelguide.net.  I feel a connection with him because he’s the only other travel writer I know of who openly defends the White race and Western civilization, knows the score regarding the cancer of Israel and the threat posed to humanity by world Jewry, and works these themes into his adventures.  I do, however, disapprove of his Christian faith, his hostility towards Islam, and especially his terrible advice to get a whole bunch of jabs before leaving home.  One of these days I’m going to email him and straighten him out about that.   

As beautiful as photographs can be, they can’t match videos in bringing the world’s last frontiers to life.  There’s a series of thrilling documentaries, The World’s Most Dangerous Roads, which have aired on British television andwhich you can watch for free on the internet.  The creators of this series have scoured the earth from Bolivia to Siberia, from Canada to the Congo, to find nail-biting routes where people routinely risk serious injury or death to get from A to B.  Footage is from ground level as well as from aerial drones, and video productions just don’t get any better.  But my vote for the world’s bravest traveler goes to Nick Fisher, a young New Zealander with balls of steel who has sought out the world’s worst slums and most violent societies, including war zones, to show us how ordinary people cope from day to day.  He goes by the handle “Indigo Traveler” and has close to two million You Tube subscribers.  It amazes me that this guy is still alive, and apparently has never even gotten into any serious trouble.

Even in my heyday as an adventurous traveler, that being mainly the 1980s, there’s no way I could have measured up to Joan Torres and Nick Fisher.  I doff my baseball cap to them and to the others I’ve mentioned.  One of my drawbacks is that I’ve always used a simple camera and am too digitally challenged to upload my photos.  I’m not even sure what upload means, and I’m still trying to figure out what an app is.  Hell, I’m lucky I can send emails!  But not to be hard on myself.  I take pride in being the last traveler in the world, I’m convinced, to leave home without any electronics – no smart phone, no tablet, no laptop, no nothing.  People can’t believe this; they literally flip out.  At the hotel in Abu Dhabi where I stayed four nights before flying to Kabul, I was a source of constant amusement to the entire staff – like some nut who doesn’t believe in wearing shoes and was traveling barefoot.  Well, listen to me, all you young whippersnappers: I salute you for what you’re doing, and by all means keep on truckin’, but I did okay for myself before you were born, when none of this technology existed.  And I have some great stories of my own right here, and you’ll be missing something if you don’t read them!