All black and white photos by Jason Florio
Two months back we featured a photo essay called “Life in Afghanistan” by English photographer Jason Florio (Vol. 8 No. 6 – The Photo Issue). Five images that could have just as easily been called “Hell on Earth,” these pictures showed us what Afghanistan really is. A pile of rubble. Dire circumstances, the plight of refugee camps and hopeful girls studying in underground schools, his shots depicted the consequences of war, the by-product of international neglect and the despotism of religious zealots.
The photos had been hidden in the ceiling of a Kabul hotel room and, after Florio was detained by the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue, they were smuggled out of Afghanistan and eventually landed in our hands.
Three days after submitting the photos Florio went back to Afghanistan because, as he so ominously put it, “it’s a critical time.” Attempting to sneak into the country on horseback (and dressed as a woman, no less), Florio was refused entry and had to resort to the easy way in: taking a UN flight from Karachi in the South of Pakistan to Tajikistan, getting a visa from the rebel embassy of the Northern Alliance, and then hiring a Russian helicopter to take him in. The mission on this second journey was to meet Afghanistan’s master of guerrilla warfare, General Ahmad Shah Masoud, AKA the Lion of Panjshir, bin Laden’s worst enemy.
From left to right: An Afghan T-shirt made before the attack that praises bin Laden as a “world hero.” The photographer ID that enabled Florio to visit Northern Alliance POW camps and army bases. A visa to enter the Northern Alliance-occupied section of Afghanistan. A visa to enter the Taliban-occupied part.
“He started waging war with just 20 men, 10 Kalashnikovs, one machine gun and two rocket launchers,” wrote Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, who accompanied Florio on his second trip back. “The intellectual arsenal was certainly deadlier: Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh, revolutionary tactics adapted to the Afghan mind to rouse rural peasants. In more than two decades he defeated Afghan dictator Muhamad Daoud and then the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union.”
In recent years Masoud and his Northern Alliance were the only hope for salvation in a country traumatized by the Taliban, the unelected ruling militia who spawned a reign of puritanical fanaticism and subjugation so profound it brought the Afghanis to their knees.
Florio succeeded in his mission and managed to talk to Masoud who, in the midst of commencing a massive offensive against the Taliban, was eager to talk about his plans for the country. It turned out to be one of his last interviews ever. Masoud was assassinated by Arab suicide bombers posing as journalists on September 9, 2001. The assassins had rigged up their cameras as bombs.
By the time of the assassination Florio was already back in New York, where he now lives. On the morning of September 11 he received a phone call from a French news agency telling him that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. He ran forty-odd blocks with his camera and got to the base of the towers, which were still standing when he arrived, and as he was composing his images the first tower disintegrated. Metal and glass began to shower down from 1300 feet above and he ran to the end of the block, escaping near death by tumbling down a stairwell into a subway station where an FBI officer and a transit authority employee pulled him into the token booth as the carnage continued to pour in.
The guys who killed Masoud in Afghanistan used the same suicide bombing methods as the hijackers who flew the planes in America. Jason is the only person in the world who was at the epicenters of both of these catastrophic events, masterminded (probably) by the same fiends.
“It’s really surreal that I’ve been in both places at very strategic times,” says Florio. “Especially because I’ve been a day late and a dollar short on just about everything my entire life.”
Now that America’s ripping the shit out of Afghanistan, we asked Jason to sit down and talk to us about the future of “Islam VS the West.”
VICE: How did you get into Afghanistan?
Once we got the visas, we took a Russian military helicopter to the Panjshir Valley (where the Northern Alliance dominates) and it took about four hours. They’re big military helicopters that look old but they’re actually quite new. The funny thing was that there was a French delegation that included a writer and a female photographer from Elle magazine, and she was all about liberating the Afghan women and came in with about twenty kilos of Lancôme makeup.
Actually, there are a lot of western loonies in the Panjshir Valley. There was a completely war-torn Italian photographer named Marco and he was with this really young, posh English girl. They were supposedly doing stories on geological sites that had been left in Afghanistan but they kept finding him at the front line, or at the prison, so finally Masoud found out about him and had him politely ejected out of the country.
I guess there wasn’t too much in the way of partying in Aghanistan.
Actually, while we were waiting to meet Masoud we got invited to a wedding. It was a real trip, hundreds of people, with the men and women separated. But they had these ongoing parties that were going on for a few days. Our friend said as long as the helicopter comes in then we got booze and stuff. All the Russian vodka was in these dirty old Evian water bottles. The vodka came in from Tajikistan and it looked like mineral water and then they had the local hash which was really nice.
Tell us about Masoud.
It’s interesting because as far as the North goes he was the absolute man there. He was the Che Guevara of our time, really. It took us about a week to finally get an interview with him. He was very busy but also very accommodating to the Western media, especially with the French media more than anybody because he spoke French. Unfortunately his openness to the press is what got him killed.
He was very much the character you anticipated. He was a very good-looking guy, and he was always immaculately dressed and he spoke very eloquently. We had 45 minutes with him and it was during a big offensive. Different commanders were coming in during the interview and handing him bits of paper and notes of what was going on around the country but he was very much in control. Now he’s gone, so it’s going to be interesting to see who’s going to fill his shoes because there is no one that charismatic or that savvy to the Western press.
His death was an absolute psychological blow to anyone who believed in him. He drove around in a Land Cruiser with blacked-out windows, he wore $700 shoes, but he was a leader, a commander, not some ragtag guy. He had extensive libraries at his home and in his office, and I think he tried extremely hard to understand the mentality of the West and take as many of the good things as possible while keeping traditional Afghan life. It could have been a really interesting fusion.
Left: Fighters for the Northern Alliance. The boy in the center is only 14. His entire family was killed by the Taliban and he says “I will fight to the death because I have nothing to lose.” Middle: Northern Alliance soldiers in an abandoned airport tower monitor Taliban discussions a kilometer away.
Right: A boy plays soccer, with a tank in the distance.
What was Masoud really trying to achieve?
His philosophy was to maintain the borders that had been created (the Northeast section of the country that he had established for the Northern Alliance). I think he really knew his limitations. He could have taken out half of Kabul if he wanted to with the stinger missiles they have lying around. But I don’t think the Northern Alliance would do that. Sure they got a few motherfuckers commanding, but they’re trying to alleviate the suffering, not create more of it.
Masoud’s goal was to make a democracy of the Northeastern section of the country. There were talks of actual elections and he kind of had a government together with ministers. It was a frail network of a government but it was kind of working, and they were trying to get schools built for the girls and he was even talking of building a university for the girls as well. He was quite progressive in that respect, but the area was still very traditional so there was only so far they could westernize, but education was the main thing. He dealt a lot with aid agencies, as far as bringing money in and it was good PR for him as well.
What were the main differences between the parts of Afghanistan run by the Northern Alliance and the Taliban-held regions?
In the Taliban region, which is ninety percent of the country, there’s a lot of fear. They thought they had protectors, but the Taliban turned out to be villains. The women are basically closeted in their homes. I met with an Afghan aid worker who’d come up from Kabul and his wife had had a series of nervous breakdowns because she couldn’t leave the house and she couldn’t lead a normal life. They don’t know when someone is going to knock on the door. There were incidents when the men weren’t in their households and the Taliban were coming in with a knock on the door late at night, saying “We can hear the radio, we can hear music playing,” and they would round up all the women and children and lock them in a room and basically ransack the house, stealing everything, and no one was doing anything about it. They were using their supposed laws against music and TV to become thieves and robbers, which was completely the antithesis of why the Taliban came in the first place.
In the areas held by the Northern Alliance I think there was much less paranoia, both on my part and the other Westerners that were down there, and just the Afghanis in general. People are just a lot happier. They’re out and about and moving around. The women are still covered, but that’s just traditional Afghan culture. It’s not to do with anything set down by the Taliban at all.
These guys in the Panjshir were just much more liberal. Masoud had this thing while we were there where he went around and had all the cigarettes rounded up. And that was his big thing, because everyone was smoking in the Panjshir Valley. And it wasn’t because he thought it was anti-Islamic but he said that the people who could least afford it were smoking the most. We thought he’d gone off the deep end when we heard about these mountains of cigarettes being burned, but his philosophy was about preserving people’s money. He said you’ve got limited amounts of funds, so why waste it on cigarettes? Get food on the kids’ tables first. That’s why it’s disappointing. I mean, he’d been a bastard in his time as well but at least he was kind of a renaissance guy as far as that area goes.
How was he a bastard?
During the time when his troops were in Kabul people said it was almost worse when Masoud’s groups of Mujahideen (freedom fighters) were there. There was a lot of raping, a lot of girls disappearing, a lot of murders.… He really didn’t have control over his guys. Basically Masoud and a couple of the Mujahideen groups, which were all vying for Kabul at the time, decimated the city amongst themselves. Supposedly when the Russians were there it was hardly touched. The damage was done to the city once the Russians left. Things regressed into a civil war and that’s when the Taliban emerged.
I think any of us would have seen the Taliban as a liberating force at the time. The myth behind how the Taliban started was that in Kandahar, which is now the Taliban stronghold in Southern Afghanistan, there were two girls who were being gang-raped by a bunch of guys, and Mullah Omar, their one-eyed Taliban leader, who was a teacher at the time, got all his students together and took these guys out.
During the Soviet occupation, didn’t Mullah Omar and Masoud fight side by side as Mujahideen?
They’d all been working together in some sense. And after the occupation ended in ’89, all the Mujahideen started switching sides, and different groups merged while others fell apart. The Taliban absorbed a lot of the commanders, either by paying them off or killing them. One way or the other they pushed through the country because they had a lot of cash from Pakistan and the United States to help them and a lot of technical support from the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s CIA), which was basically the shadow player behind the Taliban.
What about the refugee situation?
It’s really, really severe, and it’s getting much worse. On the Pakistan side it’s a bit more established. There’s a camp called Nazir’s Baag (Nazir’s Garden) but it’s the least garden-y place you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s been there for about twenty years and it started when people started pouring out during the Soviet occupation. It’s more like an Afghan town: There are about 70 000 people living there. They have a council, electricity, lots of mosques in the town. It was supposed to be bulldozed in September but it probably didn’t happen because of the current situation. But the newer camps are really dire. We went to one that had over 100 000 people, with people living under plastic, and it was 110 degrees when I was there. Limited water, limited food. They’re basically in complete limbo.
Top row: photo editor at large Ryan McGinley and friends ride BMXs around Ground Zero the night of the attack.
Bottom row: VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi photographs cars the next morning.
How responsible is America for all of this?
People on the ground that I spoke to, especially in the Taliban areas, their lives have become so harsh, they were very bitter and very disappointed that the Americans pulled out after the Soviets were defeated. It’s like having your mother and father taken away, in some way. You’re so reliant on them and then suddenly you’re just crawling on the ground. The Americans used Afghani blood to beat the Soviets and then left. It’s a shame really, because initially the Americans funded the Taliban because they thought these guys are going to clean up. Little did they know that it was going to become a Frankenstein for them and for Pakistan as well. I met a retired Pakistani MP who said that whatever we explode metaphorically in Afghanistan will blow back to Pakistan and that’s exactly what’s happening now, with the increase in fundamentalism in Pakistan. The mullahs are some of the most frightening people on earth. They’re highly listened to and they’re highly illiterate and by and large they’re highly stupid. They really don’t know the Qur’an.
Why do you think America was attacked? This has been the least asked question by the American media in the aftermath and I can’t help but think that no one wants to criticize America, their foreign policy, and all the blunders they’ve made over the years at a time like this.
Yes, that’s right, and I think it’s been a buildup over time. Anyone that is seen as an oppressor, and to a lot of people around the world America is not like the godfather coming in and handing out cash, propping up governments and doing aid projects…. A lot of people see America as a modern-day colonial empire. Look at Palestine, and the rest of the Middle East, and the sanctions against Iraq. There are people who support the US but there are even more who are angry with the US for their support of Israel.
And look at Pakistan. The Pakistani fundamentalists see America as the ultimate pusher, pushing product, lifestyle, consumerism and pushing obscenity. They see that as a breakdown in their own culture. They don’t want to have these western influences on their society.
I think all these things come together. If you’re a young guy and all this stuff’s been fed to you, then you get wrapped in the fervor of it. It’s similar to the people here saying “Get bin Laden!” We all get wrapped up in the fervor of it. And having religion as a shield that you’re fighting for makes you feel like you’re fighting a satanic power. It makes you feel invincible.
SUROOSH ALVI
Jason Florio’s “Life in Afghanistan” photos can be viewed by clicking here.
