Afghanistan: My driver’s been shot and the Taliban are high

As foreign forces move out of Afghanistan and the Taliban surges through the country, the mood is both sombre and chaotic.

A woman prays at the graves of victims of an attack in Kabul last week.

Kabul, June 18

The car is late to collect me from the airport and when I ring my driver, Fahim, he answers from hospital with double gunshot wounds to both legs after a dispute with a soldier.

Dead men and gravediggers tell no lies, so I ask Fahim’s nephew to drive me to the cemetery of west Kabul to familiarise myself with the state of the nation. On the high, rocky slopes business is good but it affords gravediggers no joy. Ushering out the dead is hard labour and the men have that sinewy look of the truly tough. From their vantage point, they see many of the larger bomb attacks in the city. In May they witnessed three blasts that targeted the Sayed al-Shuhada school, killing 85 girls. “I saw the engine block from the first explosion, a suicide vehicle, flying in the air,” one man tells me. “Next day we buried 20 of the dead girls here.”

Afghan policemen sit on an armoured vehicle at a checkpoint in Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Picture: AFP.

Herat, June 22

Being embedded with western forces used to involve copious paperwork. Afghan irregulars require only that you are up for it. We bowl down the highway from Herat in tint-windowed Corollas on a recce with one of the sketchiest Afghan outfits ever. The commander is chubby, wears pink robes, but has killer eyes. His men are drawn mostly from a renegade Taliban unit paid off by the Afghan intelligence service.

One is a former cop, who tells me without a trace of irony that he has just served five years for armed robbery. Another, rescued days before from a besieged outpost in which most of his section were killed, is so traumatised that he jibbers. The patrol drives straight through a unit of Taliban, who mistake us for their own, so there is barely time to acknowledge the fast upcoming near-death experience before it disappears in the rear mirror, and everyone is laughing.

An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier takes a selfie inside the Bagram US air base after all US and NATO troops left. Picture: AFP.

Qargha Lake, June 25

The Taliban are off their heads. They have been smoking charas from Helmand and giggle goofily in the alcove of a tearoom beside Qargha Lake. Charas, made from the resin of a live marijuana plant, is technically “haram”, forbidden, so they look just a little sheepish.

One has a joint in his hand, the alcove is shrouded in a pall of the sweet-smelling smoke: they are all Scooby-Doo smiles, tilting turbans and glittery, bloodshot eyes. I have barely shaken hands when one of them rolls over prone on the carpet, spluttering uncontrollably. Two are mid-level commanders from Wardak province and have agreed to meet to talk about the progress of the war. On this occasion, though, most of the time they forget my questions while stumbling around trying to string together an answer. Little by little, and then quite quickly, Helmandi charas defeats me.

Firefighters hose down the site of an explosion targeting the convoy of Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan's vice-president, in Kabul last September. Picture: Getty Images.

Kabul, June 28

Amrullah Saleh, the country’s vice-president, is quiet and reflective as word comes in of Taliban advances and army reverses. The US withdrawal is all but complete and the omens look bleak. “It is what it is,” he says calmly. “I’m not dwelling on the past, nor trying to say things that create a sense of guilt, nor some sense of sin, nor to say ‘America you did wrong’. It is what it is. We have to deal with the consequences.”