CIA whisky and a suicide battalion: Taliban on camera
They look like bumbling hicks, but ‘these are not the Taliban of the 1990s’, says documentary maker Ibrahim Nash’at. Thanks to the US they now have Black Hawks and a suicide battalion - and should not be underestimated.
Among the most disturbing sights after the fall of Kabul three years ago was Taliban fighters riding around on American Bradley armoured vehicles wearing Oakley sunglasses and US Marine baseball caps, and waving the white flags of the Islamic emirate.
This was a tiny fraction of what the Pentagon estimates was $10.6 billion worth of American kit left behind in the rush to leave - including sophisticated Black Hawk helicopters - some of which was on display on Thursday at a military parade to mark the Taliban’s third anniversary in power.
One Egyptian film-maker set out to document this, having arrived days after the last American soldier left, and somehow having persuaded the Taliban to let him and his Afghan translator follow the new commander of the air force and one ground soldier at Kabul air base.
Ibrahim Nash’at, 34, spent seven months during their first year in power filming them with a small handheld camera - often, he says, in fear of his life.
Hollywoodgate, which is now in selected cinemas, is a rare portrayal of life inside the Taliban regime. The protagonists presumably envisaged it as a promo but it is anything but.
The title sounds like a scandal, but is the name of the CIA complex that the Taliban took over. Nash’at follows the commander and his men as they wander round the hastily abandoned base, astonished by all the weapons, supplies and aircraft left behind.
Malawi Mansour is a film-maker’s dream. The most self-important of commanders, he seems to go everywhere with an entourage of wide-eyed fighters, some in the classic Taliban trappings of long hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and above-ankle trousers. We see them rifling through everything left at the CIA base, from a fridge stocked with whisky and beer to crates of medicine and an array of aircraft. And a forest of large satellite dishes. All the best stuff was trashed by the departing forces but Mansour orders his soldiers to catalogue and repair everything they can.
“The Americans have left us a treasure,” exclaims the film’s other protagonist, Lieutenant Jawad Mukhtar, an ambitious soldier. “I swear if the Taliban had the same they would rule the world.”
He is particularly excited by American M16 rifles and AK47s, far lighter than their own Kalashnikovs, endlessly shooting bursts of fire at mountains. “Hey Jews, you lost your war,” he boasts as he shows off the foxhole in which he used to operate.
Under his deal with the Taliban, Nash’at was forbidden to record anyone but them and was kept under constant surveillance. Commander Mansour’s men keep asking: “Who is the little devil?” and why is he filming.
“I don’t like journalists,” mutters one. “They are always connected to some country’s intelligence.”
“It’s a documentary,” Mansour explains, grandly. “Like a movie but with real people.” Then he assures them: “If his intentions are bad he will die.”
Nash’at admits there were times when he feared for his life. “I was dealing with people who had PTSD and were therefore quite impulsive, so could do something dangerous at any moment. There were many moments when I thought this was it.
“But the reality I was going through was nothing compared with the daily suffering Afghans were going through. I had chosen to go and could leave at any moment but they didn’t have choice about the Taliban taking them over or for the Americans to come and fight a 20-year war, then abandon them at the last minute.”
Nash’at had never been to Afghanistan before and says he was shocked by the poverty, given the billions that had been poured in by the West over 20 years. “In reality it seems most of that money went to build bases like Hollywoodgate and roadblocks.”
No women appear in the film apart from a few in tattered burqas, begging. Commander Mansour reveals at one point that his wife is a doctor then boasts that he stopped her working the moment they got engaged.
“This is a portrayal of the world of the Taliban and in that world, women are only present outside as beggars,” Nash’at explains.
At times he questioned what he was doing. “Everyone in the street was looking at me walking around with the Taliban and filming them and thinking I am a Taliban, and this haunted me. Every morning I was telling myself, ‘I have got to continue for the sake of Afghan people, not be like the US and Nato, making promises to everyone then betraying them, but to show them I stand by you and am with you.’ ” Parts of the film could be straight out of Monty Python. Mansour is astonished by the Americans’ well-equipped gym, in which he delightedly tries out the walking machine. At one point, he and his men try to multiply 67 by 100 and come up with everything from 61 to 210,000 before settling on 67,000 - out by a factor of ten.
They might look like bumbling hicks but there is no messing around when it comes to quashing opposition. When there is a report of resistance fighters in Panjshir, Mansour orders his men to “disappear them before daylight”. When his fighters crowd on to a helicopter, he slaps them so sharply he sprains his hand.
Spending so much time up close with the Taliban left Nash’at convinced that these are not the Taliban of the 1990s: “They are indeed Taliban 2.0, and not in a good way.”
They are still as ideological and hardline - there are scenes at graveyards venerating suicide bombers - while women’s rights have been stripped away. At one point Mansour explains the need for women to cover themselves by asking whether an infidel would eat a chocolate that had been unwrapped and thrown on the ground.
“This is a totalitarian regime who now have an armoury of western kit and a PR strategy,” he warns. They are also operating in a new geopolitical reality, as is clear in the final scene of the parade, in which the diplomats present are Chinese, Russian and Iranian.
Perhaps the most alarming moment in the film comes when the parade announcer intones: “And now . . . the Suicide Bomb Battalion.”
A cavalcade of Taliban fighters on motorbikes strapped with yellow jerry cans, used to carry homemade bombs during the war against Nato forces, roars past an audience of officials in turbans and diplomats in suits, all of them men.
Nash’at had to leave in a hurry as soon as that was shot. “On the morning of the parade, secret service came to me and told me, ‘You must come to our office with all footage tomorrow (Monday).’ I knew that wasn’t good, so got out straight after.”
He has heard nothing from the Taliban since, having thrown away the burner phone he was using in Afghanistan.
His film has, he says, an important message. “I went with the mentality that Taliban are simple people who can’t achieve anything, and when I saw them not being able to multiply 67 by 100, that fitted. But when I saw them fixing the weapons, I realised the problem was my judgment, just as the US thought they could leave all this kit thinking the Taliban wouldn’t ever be able to repair it.”
The Times
More Coverage
Mystery end of one of Hollywood’s enduring stars, Gene Hackman and his wife
While police investigate the unsettling circumstances surrounding the death of Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa, tributes roll in for one of the most celebrated actors of the past 60 years.
Will Donald Trump’s war on woke topple Oscar?
The US President is intent on rewriting American culture but the Academy Awards line-up suggests Hollywood hasn’t got the memo. This first Oscars since Trump II (The Sequel) opened will presumably feature tribunes of left-wing causes.