In Enemy Hands
One man lives to tell a tale of the Taliban.
Rosanne Klass
Captive
My Time as a Prisoner
of the Taliban
by Jere Van Dyk
Times Books, 288 pp., $25
In January 2002, Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal became the first American journalist to be entrapped and abducted in Pakistan by radical Muslim terrorists. After nine days, he was hideously murdered—decapitated. In February 2008, Jere Van Dyk, reporting for CBS and freelancing for a book, became the second American journalist to be entrapped and abducted in Pakistan—in his case, by Taliban in the lawless border areas.
Like Pearl, he was lured by the prospect of an interview with a radical Islamist warlord. But unlike Pearl, he had been reporting on Afghanistan for much of the previous three decades and thought he had the skills and connections to pull it off. After 45 days of psychological torment somewhere in the remote mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, constantly waiting for the knife to fall on his neck, Van Dyk was unexpectedly released. This is his account of that ordeal.
By the time he walked into disaster, Jere Van Dyk was already an Old Afghan Hand. One day in 1981 he came to the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House (that is to say, me) and asked for assistance. A young freelance journalist, he proposed to go inside Afghanistan and report on the then-obscure struggle against an invading Soviet Army. I provided him with advice, information, and introductions to Afghan resistance leaders in Peshawar. A skeptical New York Times gave him a little funding. And off he went to become the first American journalist to go inside war-torn Afghanistan with resistance forces, meet some of their key leaders, and get into the midst of the fighting.
He came home a few months later to write a remarkable series of articles which, front-paged in the Times and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, did much to awaken the American press and public to the Afghan struggle. And like so many of us ever since Kipling, he was permanently hooked on Afghanistan and its people, particularly the Pashtun tribesmen who have shaped its national character, and he never entirely left them.
For awhile in 1984 he agreed to serve as director of Friends of Afghanistan, a supposedly private new NGO. (Unknown to Van Dyk it was actually created by the State Department to gain control of humanitarian aid funds that Congress had intended to avoid such control.) His stint there enabled him to renew his contacts with resistance leaders he already knew, and to meet others, including the treacherous, anti-American Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, promoted to Americans and the world by Pakistani military intelligence as the foremost resistance leader.
Over the next two decades, Van Dyk roamed exotic corners of the world for National Geographic, but he was repeatedly drawn back to Afghanistan. He met fighting commanders and political leaders. He wrote a book about his experiences. He studied Afghan culture and even began learning Pashto. He lectured, gave interviews, held a fellowship at the Carnegie Council, and taught a course on the politics of Islam. But once the Soviets withdrew their armed forces, most of the world lost interest in Afghanistan. The Communist regime in Kabul collapsed a year after the Soviet Union itself, and years of civil war and increasing chaos followed as two equally anti-American factions linked to the radical Muslim Brotherhood—Pakistan’s Pashtun protégé Hekmatyar and the Tajik Burhanuddin Rabbani—fought to seize power.
When the detested Hekmatyar failed to take Kabul, another Pakistani surrogate suddenly emerged from nowhere: the Taliban, ostensibly a spontaneous movement of Pashtun religious students. Aided by Pakistan’s military, the Taliban took over a desperately exhausted country in 1996, imposed order by way of a crude, brutal Islamist regime, and, almost unnoticed, gave shelter to an obscure Saudi fanatic named Osama bin Laden, who had been kicked out of Somalia.
Then came 9/11, and the world started paying attention to Afghanistan again. Soon Van Dyk was a consultant for CBS News, traveling frequently to Kabul and Peshawar. But he wanted to go further, to enter the raw tangle of mountains along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border that hide the headquarters of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and a network of other movements and provide sanctuary for their leaders, a remote wilderness where there is no law but the Pashtun code, Pashtunwali. He wrote,
Always I was drawn to the border region. I wanted to penetrate deep into the tribal areas, to return to where I had lived with the mujahideen as a young man, to find the leaders I had known from that time, to learn the true story of what was taking place there.
No Western reporter had gone into Pakistan’s forbidding tribal areas since the rise of the Taliban. “It would be dangerous, but I felt I could do it. I had contacts that no other journalist had. I knew this region. I knew its culture.” He thought he could revive his earlier contacts with Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other Salafist Islamic radicals who were now playing important roles in the Taliban and related movements, and that his known sympathy for the Afghans would give him some protection. He also wanted to test himself physically one last time: In his college days he had been an Olympic-class runner; he had kept himself in shape ever since. Although now in his early sixties, he felt he could manage one more mountain trek.
In August 2007 he returned to Afghanistan with a contract for a book on the borderlands. Gradually reducing his email contacts with CBS and home, he donned Afghan clothes, let his hair and beard grow, and began traveling, illegally, on both sides of the border, meeting tribal leaders, villagers, mullahs, and Taliban. The risks seemed to be paying off: By early 2008 he had made connections that would enable him to cross into remote, dangerous Waziristan and meet with an important commander named Abdullah. It had been set up through several nervous go-betweens with a good deal of difficulty, plus a sizable cash payoff.
On February 12, armed with cell phones and notebooks, Van Dyk set out with his interpreter, Daoud, a schoolteacher who had already assisted him in meetings with Taliban on both sides of the border. In Jalalabad they were joined by Van Dyk’s experienced driver, Ahmed. Three days later, Abdullah’s man Razi Gul arrived. On February 16 they set out, first by car, then by climbing all day over the mountains, led by another guide, Abdul Samad, who took them across the unmarked border into Pakistan. Van Dyk was pleased to find that he was still up to the march.
But suddenly, as dusk was falling and the weary hikers thought they were nearing their destination, they were ambushed: Black-turbaned Taliban armed with rifles, rockets, and grenade launchers came swarming over the rocks and seized them. Van Dyk was bound, blindfolded, marched to a car, and driven for more hours, expecting all the while to be killed. Eventually he was pushed into a small, dark, airless, filthy room in a remote mud-brick hut—and there he was to remain, suspended between terror, despair, and hope for 45 days.
His companions Daoud, Razi Gul, and Abdul Samad were chained to their rope-strung cots; Van Dyk was spared chains, and unlike his cellmates was not beaten—perhaps in respect to his gray beard, or perhaps because, had he escaped, as a clearly identifiable foreigner he would have been unable to get very far.
He was not beaten or physically tortured, as his cellmates were, but he was subjected to unending psychological pressures—above all, contradiction, unspecified threat, and uncertainty, a kaleidoscope of torment shifting throughout each day, each hour, even from moment to moment. A word, a glimpse of sunlight, a slice of apple, or a glance could raise his hopes of survival, even invite his trust, until another look, word, or gesture shook him with fear or plunged him into despair.
His life depended on others, but he could trust no one. He had either been set up or betrayed, but by whom? Some supposed friend in Kabul? Or even one of his cellmates? Was Abdullah, the Taliban leader he had gone to meet, trying to rescue him? Or was it he who had set the trap? Trying to cope with the uncertainties pushed Van Dyk into irrational speculation. What were his captors’ motives? Did they intend to kill him as a spy, or to make an example of him like Daniel Pearl? Were they only interested in his ransom value? (They demanded millions, and, irrationally, he tried to think how to raise it.) Did any of his friends know what had happened? Was anyone trying to rescue him?
Or were his Taliban captors more concerned with converting him to Islam? They tried, and may have thought they were succeeding. On the advice of an Afghan friend concerned for his safety, he had learned the Kalima, the profession of faith, and a few other basic Muslim prayers, and his studies had made him conversant with the basic postures. In hopes that it might gain him some protection, he began reciting the fragments of prayer that he knew, making the proper gestures. Soon he was being drilled in Koranic verses and plied with religious texts as his captors anticipated his conversion.
Throughout his ordeal Van Dyk was sustained, in large part, by two factors: physically, by his lifelong dedication to running and fitness; and psychologically, by the spiritual training of his youth. He had been raised as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, an austere evangelical Christian community. As an adult he had ceased to be devout, but now the faith of his childhood came back to support and comfort him. While he was reciting Muslim prayers to placate his captors, he was silently repeating to himself his own remembered prayers and Bible verses, praying not to Allah but to the God of his fathers. One can only wonder how his captors would have responded if they had known.
Then suddenly, on March 30, it all ended. He was told—truthfully or not—that ransom had been paid. He was blindfolded again, shoved into a car, driven for hours, marched back over the mountains far into the night, then trucked to the Kabul River and rowed across into Afghanistan where his captors could not go. Before dawn he was handed a cell phone and heard the voice of a CBS colleague telling him that he was safe at last. He didn’t really believe it. Hours later he found himself at an American military base, unable to comprehend his freedom, let alone his safety. Disoriented, he feared the doctor who examined him, suspected the young woman who offered him food, declined to shave the beard that had helped protect him, or even to take a shower.
A day or two later, when his flight home to the United States stopped in Dubai, he feared that Taliban hidden there would seize him again. And his fears were not totally groundless: Arriving at last at his apartment in New York, he found threatening messages on his answering machine, warning him not to speak ill of the Taliban.
Van Dyk has adapted this account from a daily journal he managed to keep during his imprisonment, and recounts only the plain facts of his experience. He seldom attempts to examine or analyze his responses, their possible long-term effects, or his recovery from the experience. He offers no judgments; he simply reports. Nor does he speculate about his captors. (He still seems not entirely sure about their motives and intentions, and is not free to tell how his complicated rescue was accomplished.)
This format limits the insights he offers. But Captive is valuable as an intimate account of a fearful ordeal, and of how one man managed to endure it. As such, it may be useful to others. In the long struggle the West faces against the various agencies of fanatical Salafist Islam, Jere Van Dyk was not the first victim, and he will not be the last.
Rosanne Klass’s account of Afghanistan, Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good (1964), has been reprinted by Odyssey.
