A Rope and a Prayer Read Free Page B

me, but Abu Tayyeb is willing to be interviewed tomorrow morning in neighboring Logar Province. We can meet him after a one-hour drive on paved roads in a village near an American military base, he says. Abu Tayyeb needs an immediate answer, he adds. The Taliban have ordered local cell phone companies to shut off service after dark to prevent people from reporting their movements to Afghan and American forces. I ask Tahir if he thinks it is safe. The danger, Tahir says, will be thieves abducting us during the drive itself.
    “Nothing is 100 percent,” he tells me. “You only die once.”
    I feel my stomach churn. My mind races. My trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan have become an increasing source of tension with Kristen, who has asked me to be gone no longer than three weeks. A few days ago, I extended the trip to four weeks after landing an interview with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. I called my father and stepmother and canceled a weekend trip Kristen and I had planned to make with them to his college.
    Going to Logar seems safer than Ghazni. If I do the Taliban interview, I can return home with a sense that I have done everything I can to understand the country, get the story, and write the best book possible. The interview is just outside Kabul, I tell myself. I would not be going into the tribal areas of Pakistan, as the kidnapped American and British journalists did. This is safer.
    “Yes,” I say to Tahir. “Tell him yes.”
    Tahir tells me he will call me later to set a departure time. As a precaution, I ask him for the number of a European journalist who has already interviewed Abu Tayyeb twice with Tahir. In the fall of 2007, the reporter spent two days filming Abu Tayyeb and his men as they trained. In the summer of 2008, the journalist spent an evening with them and filmed an attack on a police post. I call the reporter and they say we should talk in person. We agree to meet at a restaurant later that night.
    Privately, I am still not sure I will go. I am having dinner with two close friends, an experienced journalist and a veteran aid worker who have both worked in Afghanistan for years. I plan to ask them if the interview is a crazy idea. I hurriedly finish the interview and meet the journalist and aid worker at a new Italian restaurant frequented by foreigners. Concrete blast walls separate it from the rest of Kabul. When I describe the opportunity to interview a Taliban commander, the aid worker immediately opposes it.
    “You just got married,” she says.
    “But this is what we do,” the reporter interjects.
    Then the reporter expresses their own reservations. The journalist says she has never felt the need to interview the Taliban in person and prefers phone conversations. She recommends that Tahir and I hire a driver to serve as a lookout and end the meeting after no more than an hour.
    “I know how you drag out interviews,” the reporter says, teasing me.
    I leave dinner early to meet the European journalist at L’Atmosphère, a well-known French restaurant in Kabul that caters to Westerners. As I enter I notice that it recently installed a reinforced door to stop suicide bombers. The reporter, who I have never met before, says deciding to go to the interview is my responsibility. I agree and say I know the risk. They point out that as an American I am more vulnerable than a European. But they also believe that Abu Tayyeb will not kidnap us, and that his objective is to use the media to get across the Taliban’s message.
    “I think it is a good chance,” they say.
    I drive home with an Afghan journalist I regularly work with in Kabul. I ask him about the interview. He tells me not to make the trip. There are many criminals, he says, on the road to Logar.
    Back at the Times bureau, the power is out, a daily occurrence in Kabul seven years after the American invasion. I had planned to look up other recent interviews with the Taliban but now have no Internet access. I had also wanted