Climbing and Exploring in the Hindu Kush mountains = Afghanistan

Today it was confirmed that I will be a guest speaker at the New Zealand Film and Book Festival to be held at Wanaka - Queenstown - Cromwell from June 28 to July 7, 2019; In preparation for my talks at the festival, I took time to update various climbs and expeditions I went on in Afghanistan during the period, 1993-1996.
John Tinker (l) and Ian Clarke with Mir Samir in the background. The route they attempted was a ridge on the face just to the left of centre to the left of a small avalanche in a snow gulley: Photo: Bob McKerrow

FROM THE AMERICAN ALPINE JOURNAL 1995
Mir Samir and ascent of P5000. After years when it was too dangerous to enter the mountains of Afghanistan, New Zealander Bob McKerrow and Englishmen Ian Clarke and Jon Tinker headed for Mir Samir in the Hindu Kush. McKerrow is head of the International Red Cross in Afghanistan and Clarke is a former Royal Marine, now head of the Halo Trust mine clearance organisation in Afghanistan.

Tinker has worked in the country a number of times in the last seven years.The three climbers set out from Kabul on September 23, 1994, acclimatizing near the Salang Pass before setting out for Parian in the upper Panjchir.

There four horses were hired to carry food and equipment up the Chamar valley to base camp at 3,400 m. Clarke's skills were put to the test when the saw air-dropped scatterable anti-personnel mines.

They established a high camp at 4,300 m on September 29. Because of the deep snow, the two Englishmen made slow progress the next day to bivouac at 4,900 meters on an unclimbed snow route on the southwest face of Mir Samir. On October 1 they made While Clarke and Tinker were climbing Mir Samir, McKerrow climbed an unclimbed peak at approximately 5000 metres, a prominent feature when viewed from the Chamar Valley. a summit attempt.but unseasonable deep snow turned the back at 5200 meters, some 600 meters from the summit.(end of article from American Alpine Club Journal, 1995)

Above, the peak climbed solo by Bob McKerrow on 1 October 1994. The peak was named P5000 by the American Alpine Journal 1995. The photo is taken from the Chamar Valley.  

We spent a few nights in the Panjcher valley. This trigger-happy commander put us up for a few nights free. Photo: Bob McKerrow



Tinker with parts of land mines which we found scattered through the region. Photo: Bob McKerrow

Bob McKerrow (l) with John Tinker at Base Camp on Mir Samir. Photo: Bob McKerrow

The donkey that carried our supplies in with Mir Samir in the background. Photo: Bob McKerrow

I couldn't resist putting the photo of Eric Newby taken on their attempt on Mir Samir in 1956 and an extract from his obituary in the New York Times, October 24, 2006.

Sixty-three years ago, in the summer of 1956, Mr Newby set out on the trip that would make him famous: a voyage by station wagon, foot and horseback to climb Mir Samir, a 20,000-foot peak in Nuristan, a wild region in northeastern Afghanistan. The fact that he had never climbed a mountain did not deter him in the slightest.

                                               Mir Samir. Photo: Bob McKerrow

Mr. Newby chronicled the trip in “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush,” published in Britain by Secker & Warburg in 1958 and in the United States by Doubleday the next year. As in all his work, the narrative was marked by genial self-effacement and overwhelming understatement.

Bob McKerrow reading some pages from Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush to children whose Grandfathers helped Newby. We retraced a large part of their journey, Photo: Bob McKerrow

Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review in 1959, William O. Douglas, a noted travel memoirist who by day was a justice of the United States Supreme Court, called the book “a chatty, humorous and perceptive account.” He added: “Even the unsanitary hotel accommodations, the infected drinking water, the unpalatable food, the inevitable dysentery are lively, amusing, laughable episodes.”


Here is the article I wrote on various climbs in Afghanistan we did between 1993 and 1996..

No foreigners have climbed in Afghanistan since the Soviets arrived in late 1978. I had heard about the passes and valleys strewn with land mines so it was with some trepidation I embarked from Kabul in October 1994 on what was probably the first expedition into the Hindu Kush for at least 17 years.
Roads in the Hindu Kush are difficult to negotiate in winter. We are heading up to the Salang Tunnel which is the only tunnel through the Hindu Kush. Photo: Bob McKerrow

I travelled with two British climbers, Ian Clarke and John Tinker, to the Chamar valley for an attempt Mir Samir, a peak made famous by Eric Newby in his book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Tinker was fresh off an ascent of Everest by a new route on the north side and Clarke was head of a British Mine clearance organisation in Afghanistan and was a necessary companion as the area had received large amounts of small scatterable mines, dropped from Soviet aircrafts to prevent the freedom fighters crossing the mountain passes.

Having lunch at our base camp with a bunch of Pashtoon soldiers returning from just being released from prison in the north, to their home in the east of Afghanistan, a journey of 400 km through remote wild mountain areas. John Tinker left, and Ian Clarke 3rd from left. Photo: Bob McKerrow

Our safety was dependent on his knowledge of mines and where battles had taken place. Tinker and Clarke attempted an unclimbed face on Mir Samir and got surprising high considering the unseasonably soft snow that had fallen.
The mountains to the extreme left of Mir Samir at the head of the Chamar Valley. Photo: Bob McKerrow

While the others were attempting Mir Samir, I climbed an unnamed peak around 5000 metres and looked over to the enticing mountains of Nuristan, formerly Kafirstan. We explored a number of neighbouring regions with the hope of returning to do further climbing. .In June 1995 I did another trip was Clarke, crossing from the Panjcher valley to southern Badakshan by way of the 4260 m Anjuman Pass.

Early 1995, Ian Clarke and I did another trip over the Anjuman Pass on a journey towards the Wakhan Corridor. Photo: Bob McKerrow

It was a unique opportunity to explore this spectacular part of the Hindu Kush and check routes on the major peaks in the area ranging from 5900 to 6500 metres.

A rather dubious group we came across. Photo: Bob McKerrow

One of the best peaks in the area in Kohi Bandak. The highlight of the trip was when returning back over the Anjuman Pass when at about 3400 metres in high alpine pastures we met about 50 Kuchi (nomad) families on their annual journey to this area. Some were on the move, other camping in their black, low-slung goat hair tents. We passed strings of camels with babies and young children with intricately embroidered bonnets, tied on the backs.


Camped at a lake on the northern side of the Hindu Kush. We crossed by Kotali Anjuman, the low pass on the right. Photo: Bob McKerrow


Kuchi nomads wending their way through the Hindu Kush.

Young girls with page-boy style hair cuts, flashed their shy blue eyes at us as we passed.

We stopped in tents to share pots of tea and watched how they cared for their animals. Young goats were inside the tent, sheltering from the hot sun, women tenderly carried young lambs in their arms, and an old lame sheep rode past on the back of a camel. Over the hillsides, women and children were gathering alpine herbs, wood, leaves and wild vegetables. Nearby an old woman was weaving a carpet. This is what the mountains of Afghanistan are about, tough friendly mountain people who have symbiotic relations with the hills. They name their children after the mountains, names such as ‘Kohzad’, the meaning of the mountains.


Kuchi nomads on the move.

Despite the warmth of the people, many disasters befall them. Thousands are killed annually by avalanches and landslides. In late March word reached Kabul that a massive landslides had hit the village of Qarluk, situated high in the mountains of Badakhshan.
I was part of a Red Cross survey team that walked and rode by horse to the site. The whole village had been engulfed killing 350 people, all women and children. The landslide occurred at 11 am when the men and boys were out in the fields and the women. We arrived to find only one female survivor, 11 year old Gulnesa Beg, her arm broken in two places and with her good arm, hugging her father. A whole village wiped out by nature. Here we spent weeks running a relief operation to assist during the emergency phase and started helping these rugged Hazara people put their lives back together again.

In August this year (1996), the highlight of my time in Afghanistan was a trip to Nuristan, the legendary 'land of light'.

Parun Valley, Nuristan. Photo: Bob McKerrow

The Afghan Red Cross is establishing a medical clinic in the Parun valley and I went with our medical staff. Nuristan hugs the southern side of the Hindu Kush and is been isolated from the rest of the country. Six main valleys make up Nuristan each with their own language and for four to five months of the year, the mountain passes in and out of Nuristan are blocked. In is an area where snow panthers, wolves and fox thrive in forests almost untouched by human hand, this is paradise on earth. These blue-eyed and sometimes blond haired people claim they are either descendants of the original Aryans, while others say they are descendants of Alexander the Great. In 1895 they were forcibly converted to Islam and even today there are remnants of their former pagan past. Nuristani villages cling to mountainsides, sometimes perched on peak-tops. a legacy of the past to avoid invaders. Like the mountain Tajiks, the Nuristanis are true mountaineers. In 1889 George Robertson the author of the book ‘Kafirs of the Hindu Kush’, described the Nuristanis as" 'magnificent mountaineers<-"' because of their mountain skills, fitness and agility.

Skiing near the Salang Pass. Photo: Bob McKerrow

The northern entrance to the Salang Tunnel and the men who keep the road open. February 1996. Bob McKerrow

  McKerrow and Tinker sorting out gear at Base Camp in 1994. Photo: Bob McKerrow

The writer sitting on an old Soviet tank. Photo: Bob McKerrow

Our last climbs in Afghanistan were in June 1996. I went with Mathias Luft, Ross Everson and Bruce Watson. Mathias and Ross climbed  Kohe Jalgya 6260m, the peak in the background in the photo above. Bruce and I climbed a 5300 m peak. Photo: Bob McKerrow 

This was quite a difficult expedition and the first mistake made, was letting a Frenchman buy the food without supervision. We ended up with pasta, stale and hard bread, rice, onions sugar and tea. There were no breakfast food, no milk powder, no salt, nuts, meat, chocolate meat or sardines. I wrote in my diary after six days we were starving. A group of armed locals stole equipment from us and Mathias was threatened by a soldier with an AK 47.

Bruce Watson on our Kohe Jalgya expedition at about 4,800 metres, just above our base camp. Photo: Bob McKerrow 

It took us five days to cross from the Panjcher Valley over Kotali Anjoman, down to Anjoman village, where we turned a sharp right up a side valley called Darrahe Paghar and set up a base camp at 4300 metres under Kohe Jalgya.

We soon realised that Kohe Jalgya was quite a technical climb and we didn’t have enough climbing equipment for such an ice climb. So Ross and Mathias head for Kohe Jalgya and Bruce and I for another less technical climb, an unnamed peak at 5,300 metres.

On the ascent of Kohe Jalgya, Ross and Mathias spent a night half way up the peak. They made good progress the next day but found the ice climbing difficult. After negotiating the hardest part of the climb, they came to a small snow field where they had to plug through waist-deep snow near the summit. They turned back at 4 pm on the 6th of June as the weather closed in. The descent turned into an epic in worsening weather. Mathias had two axes for front pointing down the face, but Ross only had one which slowed him down. Mathias gave Ross one of his ice axes, and he used one axe and an ice screw as a dagger, to descend. About 9 pm, Mathias lost footing and fell down an icy coliour and tumbled head over heels for 300 metres, just coming to a stop before a rocky bluff. Although cut and bruised, he was able to walk. Meanwhile, Ross continued descending alone in the dark on steep ice. Now separated by 300 metres, Mathias managed to stagger back to their tent situated on a snow ledge. Ross kept down climbing on ice another two hours, reaching the tent at midnight.

Meanwhile, at base camp, Bruce and I were anxiously waiting, for they were a day late. We had eaten our last spoon of milk powder and had no food left, not even a cooker to make tea.

So on Saturday 8 June, Bruce and I left a note and emergency equipment under a rock cairn, and said we were leaving for the valley to buy a sheep, cook it and come up with some locals to effect a rescue.

We got down to a small hamlet in the valley about 4.30 pm and I glanced back at the mountain, and saw two specks slowly moving on the lower snow slopes of the mountain. It could only be Ross and Mathias. Bruce and I were elated. They were alive! We bought a stringy old female sheep and got the farmer to skin it, cut it up and boil it, preparing a feast for Ross and Mathias. Four hours later Mathias and Ross crossed the risinf river, and joined us for a feast of mutton. Four days later we were back in Kabul.

Two of the best ! Over the years i have climbed with many high competent mountaineers but John Tinker (left) and Ian Clarke (right) are two of the best I have climbed with. We did an expedition to Mir Samir together and Clarke and I did a recce of the Anjuman Pass area in 1995, trying to reach the Wakhan.  The central Hindu Kuah in the background.

So during the three years I lived and worked in Afghanistan, (1993-96), I was fortunate to get out to many parts of the Hindu Kush, and explore, trek and climb. With the difficult security situation today, I am so grateful to have taken that opportunity. On reflection, I suppose it was minefield mountaineering. Thanks to Ian Clarke for giving me the confidence to travel in a country that was heavily mined, and teaching me what was safe and what was not.

pt type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js">

Writing a bad message when abandoning climbing friends.

This is one of the few notes I felt bad about writing. It is not good to abandon your mates who are out climbing. We were climbing in the remote Kohe Jalgye mountains of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, ;ictured below.

It was in June 1996 when the Talibans were closing in on Kabul and communities en route to the mountains, were very edgy towards us. Ross Evison and Mattias Luft set out to climb Kohe Jalgye but were late in returning to our high base camp. Bruce Watson and I who had climbed another peak the day before were waiting for them but had run out of food.

                                                               Mattias Luft and Ross Evison

8 June 96.
Dear Ross and Mattias - With the good weather and limited food we have, we thought you would be back by now. Bruce and I have run out of food and had the last few raisins for lunch. As we don't know what has happened, we will descend to our last camp by the river. We have left all the gear you need plus first aid kit. We will buy a sheep from one of the local shepherds and kill it tonight. If you are not back by Midday tomorrow, we will come back up with a search party and a few legs of mutton. Hope to see you soon. Bob and Bruce.

Bruce and I got down to the river, found a shepherd willing to a sell a sheep, and butchered it. We put it on a spit and cooked it, but we were so hungry we ate it half raw, with fat dripping off our beards. We kept the best pieces for Mattias and Ross, and just before nightfall, we heard someone shouting. They had returned. We soon learnt they got to the summit and fell on the descent, and got knocked about. Four days later we were back in Kabul, drinking Russian Vodka, as the Talibans were bombing the hell out of the city.

Stephen Masty, communications adviser - obituary

I first met Steve Masty in a club in Peshawar. He was managing the Khyber Club. It was late 1993, Steve was lounging in a wicker chair, wearing white Shalwar Kemeez, looking like a young Hemmingway. I used every drop of charm and decorum I had to try and get club membership as I knew I was going to work some years in Afghanistan and wanted membership badly, as it was the only place in this fundamentalist frontier city one could have a wee dram when visiting.

“No problem, “ he smiled. This was the start of a friendship that has lasted ever since.

What a talented man: Song writer, movie director, singer, author, artist, poet, development specialist, cartoonist and raconteur. He once was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan, Steve studied for a PhD at St. Andrews in Scotland and his thesis lies there unmarked.

In 2006 he published a book called The Muslim & Microphone: Miscommunications in the War on Terror (Social Affairs Unit, London, 2006). An astounding book.

Our relationship bonded strongly during the tough winter in Kabul in 1995 when the Taliban were relentlessly bombarding the city. I recall spending many winter evenings with Steve discussing literature, history, local savagery and world politics. I would often prompt Steve to get out his guitar and sing one of his songs about Afghanistan. Steve  and I spent the year of 1994 in Afghanistan together midst death and destruction. We saw in the New Year of 1995 together and celebrated with a bottle of cheap Russian vodka and sang Auld Lang Syne, a version that Steve had modified.

Since 1993, Steve dropped in to see me in Delhi and Dhake where I was living at that time, and I visited him in London in 1998 with my wife to be, Naila. When we arrived at a posh hotel in London, Steve had told the manager that a very famous and beautiful Kazakh Princess was arriving from Kazakhstan, and that they should address her as Princess Naila or H.R.H. Naila was amazed at the Royal treatment she received.

Steve, Kees Rietveld, Naila and I went to the London Musical 'Showboat' and a few days later went to Grenwich where we discovered a bookshop with a run of over one hundred Central Asian Journals that Steve and I divided between us. I have many cartoons that Steve drew for Naila and I.

When I heard that Steve died on Boxing Day 2015, I hoped someone would write a decent obituary of his life. Just recently I found the Daily Telegraph did that on 06 January 2016.

It is below.

Stephen Masty, communications adviser - obituary

Globe-trotting writer and adventurer who championed privatisation in the developing world

Steve Masty in central Asia Photo: Lisa Schiffren

5:01PM GMT 06 Jan 2016

Stephen Masty, who has died aged 61, was a speech writer to Ronald Reagan, a communications adviser who successfully sold reform to the developing world, an author, cartoonist, musician, song-writer, journalist, film-maker, and one of clubland’s more engaging raconteurs.

He also spent many years in Afghanistan and his work there gave an early warning of the rise of Islamic extremism.

Stephen James Masty was born in Grosse Point, on the edge of Detroit in Michigan, on December 12 1954. His father was a dentist and his mother a nurse. Stephen attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan, before reading English Literature at Hillsdale College, also in his home state; there he became a friend and protégé of Russell Kirk, the American conservative guru. Stephen went on to St Andrews in Scotland (which Kirk had attended) to do a PhD on the South African poet Roy Campbell.

According to one account, however, he did not set foot in the English department, meet his supervisor or do one jot of “research”, preferring to spend his time in the Cross Keys Bar, smoking and treating friends to such conceits as “The History of Western Philosophy in Limericks”.

He became president of the university’s Conservative association, reviving what he said was the ancient St Andrews tradition of burning heretics in effigy; heretics in Masty’s view being anti-Thatcherite “wets” or Left-wingers. He also found himself regularly in argument with fellow student and future SNP leader Alex Salmond.

One of Steve Masty's cartoons

At that time Masty met Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler, who would later found the Adam Smith Institute. He then went to live in Washington and wrote a weekly political column for the Washington Times. He also worked for the Republican National Committee, his duties including speech-writing for Ronald Reagan. Masty was responsible for many of Reagan’s jokes as well as for some of the president’s stronger Cold War messages and a well-regarded Lincoln Day address.

Amid all the thrusting ambition in Washington Masty struck a contrast with most of his contemporaries. “His dress and mannerisms made it look as though he had strayed by mistake out of the 1930s,” noted a friend.

He first started spending time in Afghanistan, in rebel-held territory, in the mid-1980s. After the Soviet withdrawal, he spent much of his time, from 1989, in that country helping on development projects.

He worked with a US charity called the Mercy Fund and taught people how to defuse the unexploded devices with which the Soviets had littered the country. A talented cartoonist, he used his skills in leaflets teaching Afghan children how to avoid these devices.

He went on to manage the American Club in Peshawar, nightly entertaining guests with witty satirical songs about the region’s idiosyncrasies. He invented a new genre which he called “Country and Eastern” (“like Willie Nelson in a turban,” a friend said). He was also a formidable punster.

Masty was in Kabul (where for a time he owned the Afghan bottling rights for Coca-Cola) when the city was finally captured by the Taliban in 1996. He did his best to alert the West to the dangers of Islamic extremism, but once the West did begin to respond he argued that the issue was being mishandled, and moderate Muslims were being alienated. In 2006 he published The Muslim & Microphone: Miscommunications in the War on Terror.

Stephen Masty

During the 1990s Masty developed a career as a communications adviser, championing economic reform to governments across the developing world. He persuaded them to implement privatisation programmes in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa in India as well as in Nepal, Tanzania, Nigeria and Guyana.

He produced a series of films that were shown to Indian politicians – including the federal cabinet – illustrating starkly the failure of state enterprises; the films played a pivotal role in persuading them to start serious privatisation efforts.

In Tanzania he used music to get the message across, producing probably the world’s first privatisation rock video, featuring Captain John Komba, a local politician, and explaining why privatising the state brewery would be good for everyone. It became an unlikely hit. Overnight the shortage of beer began to ease and thousands of jobs were created for waiters, now that they had beer to sell.

Back in Kabul early in the new century he advised the government of Hamid Karzai (whom he had known for many years) on policy issues, and promoted the idea that peace and prosperity could be achieved by encouraging tribesmen to grow melons, grapes and pomegranates rather than opium poppies.

In later years Masty settled in Kathmandu. He assisted with electrification projects, a cause he felt strongly about, and started a project to introduce the first children’s comics in the Nepalese language. But plans were disrupted by the earthquake in Nepal last year, which forced him to move out of his apartment.

He was an intensely private man. He did not like to own property, and generally lived in rented rooms of fabled squalor. He avoided all romantic commitments. Always rotund, resembling Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca, Masty said that his tragedy was that he had the mind of Holmes yet the body of Watson.

Masty could be accident-prone. On one occasion, staying with the writer Roger Lewis and his wife, he drank too much and in the night tried to relieve himself out of the window – but he had not opened the double-glazing. The Lewises had to repaint the wall.

He was at his finest in a bar or restaurant, telling his stories, drinking Manhattan cocktails and chain smoking. He had ambitions to be a novelist or writer for films and television, but his novels did not find a publisher, and he tended to dissipate his genius in chat, an exception being the witty blogs he wrote for the Imaginative Conservative website. Ill health dogged his final years.

He did privately publish one novel, called The Test of the Magi, adopting the pseudonym Johannes Bergmann, who “makes his home in the forests of the Low Countries and the lesser Himalayas”.

Steve Masty eventually took British citizenship and when in London lived at the Savile Club, where some of his cartoons hang and where his exotic aura prompted many fellow members to wonder whether he was an intelligence agent, though he vehemently denied it.

Steve Masty, born December 12 1954, died December 26 2015

Most important match in the History of Cricket. Afghanistan vs New Zealand.

Where can I start to describe the joy I feel at the World Cup cricket match between Afghanistan and New Zealand tomorrow?

I would say that for me it is the most important match in the whole history of World Cup Cricket since I first heard the first ever WC ODI in Kathmadu, listening with a Kashmiri carpet merchant,  in 1975. 

 A David Warner push manages to evade Samiullah Shenwari, Australia v Afghanistan, World Cup 2015, Group A, Perth, March 4, 2015

I first travelled to the then fabled Afghanistan in 1976 and I journeyed through  that peaceful country for 6 months working for the Red Cross on an earthquake and later, a flood relief operation at a time when it was such a peaceful country. Then I lived there for 3 years from 1993-96, during a period of anarchy and bloodshed.  I saw so much suffering and death, and over four million people displaced to neighbouring countries.

This was the time the Taliban was born and came to power. The Taliban’s never liked sport, but eventually agreed that cricket was an acceptable game. Then from 2000 to 2006, I visited Afghanistan on a regular basis and saw cricket becoming an important game in the country.

Who wins today is not important. For a country that has been penalised and picked on,  by its geographical location for many centuries, Afghanistan cricketers and nearly the whole nation, are celebrating this opportunity to be competing for the first time in  the ICC Cricket World Cup. Afghanistan also competes at a top level in handball, football, wrestling  and water polo.

 Over the past decades most photographs coming out of Afghanistan are of soldiers holding semiautomatic weapons, but in recent weeks, we are seeing delightful photographs of Afghan cricketer holding cricket bats, or going for spectacular catches, or bowling.

With a new Government in Afghanistan, and a cricket team that are doing well, let’s hope and pray Afghanistan is on the cusp on a new, positive era in its history, where sport will replace the Kalashnikov culture

Nowroz Mangal hits out, Australia v Afghanistan, World Cup 2015, Group A, Perth, March 4, 2015

I attach a documentary made by Ross Stevens for TVNZ in 1996. This shows why I love Afghanistan.

 

 

Why I’m staying in Afghanistan

As western troops withdraw from Afghanistan, a small number of foreigners remain. They talk about the war-torn country they have come to love. 

I spent three years in Afghanistan and knew Alberto and Nancy Dupree very well so I am delighted The Guardian put this excellent article together.

Nancy Hatch Dupree with science students outside the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University: ‘The young have found their voices,’ she says. Photograph: Joel van Houdt for the Guardian

Few people now move to Afghanistan to start a new life. Visitors once came for tourism or trade, but these days most arrive for work postings of a few months or a few years at most, to fight or deliver aid, take pictures, or flit from meetings in barricaded ministries to embassy cocktail parties. They do not expect to fall in love with a country that, in the west, more often makes headlines for its violence, extremism and corruption.
The past four decades of conflict have driven away millions of Afghans, and almost all the foreigners who had made a home here. But as British troops withdraw after a 13-year military occupation, and other Nato allies send their forces home, a small band of expats has stayed throughout the turmoil. Some have been seduced by the natural beauty of the country, the hospitality and extraordinary history – the stupas and temples, mosques and forts, decaying but still spectacular. Others kept coming back over the years, and eventually settled – staying for love, or for work – often seeing another side of Afghanistan. They may be worried about the future, in a land where the Taliban has stepped up its fight for both territory and Afghan support, infiltrating stretches of the countryside, where they control the roads, levy taxes, run schools and dispense justice. But they are not leaving the country they now call home.

Nancy Hatch Dupree, cultural centre director, Kabul University

Dupree arrived with her husband, a cultural attache, in the 1960s. They lived in Kabul, where foreigners mingled at parties with the Afghan elite, then took morning horse rides through grass meadows.
“We met all these beautiful people: sophisticated, elegant, dressed in the latest fashions,” she remembers. “[President Mohammad] Daud Khan insisted they all brought their wives, because that’s what you did in a modern nation. The highlight was the Queen’s birthday party at the British embassy, where we would dance until dawn, then go up to Qargha lake with our bottles of champagne and watch the sunrise.”
Kabul should have been just the first of many postings as a diplomatic wife, but her life was upended when she asked anthropologist Louis Dupree to edit a tourist guidebook she had written, the country’s first. She walked into his office, and found the love of her life. The cultural attache became an ex.
“I didn’t have any sense that I was going to stay here for so long, but when I married Louis I caught the bug with him,” she says.
The couple spent years travelling through the Hindu Kush and the deserts of the south, seeking traces of prehistoric civilisations and exploring villages for anthropology research. Those years were a golden age for the country. “Louis and I would go in one car, and never think about security.” But in 1978, Daud Khan was toppled in a Soviet-backed coup, Louis was briefly imprisoned, and the Duprees were expelled. They moved to Pakistan, where Nancy worked in refugee camps.
Louis died of cancer in 1989, and when Nancy flew back to Kabul, in 1993, it was to a city battered by civil war. She helped salvage the national museum’s treasures, and after the Taliban were toppled, in 2001, she returned for good. Already in her 70s, she secured the backing to build the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University, a home for the couple’s collection of historical documents.
Despite the current conflict, her optimism endures. “The young have found their voices,” she says.

Alberto Cairo, physiotherapist

‘To see all these patients with terrible wounds was quite tough. But strangely, I have felt since the beginning that I’m in the right place. I realised I was really useful,’ says Alberto Cairo. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Cairo’s office sits a few paces from a metal workshop, near rooms full of plaster casts of legs, arms and hands. More than 130,000 disabled Afghans have passed through the simple rehabilitation clinic over several decades.
Cairo grew up in northern Italy and trained as a lawyer, but realised, at 30, that he did not want to spend his life in courtrooms and offices. He went back to college to study physiotherapy, spending days in a wheelchair to better understand his future patients, then joined the Red Cross. His first assignment in Afghanistan, in 1990, was at a hospital for war casualties. Given just three weeks’ notice, he asked what language the locals spoke and what the weather would be like. “I did not know anything,” he admits.
He worked 15-hour days for several months to get to grips with his work. “I was in Africa before, for three years, but it was not a war situation,” he says. “So to see all these patients coming with terrible wounds, it was quite tough. But strangely, I have felt since the beginning that I’m in the right place. I realised that I was really useful.”

Alberto Cairo refereeing a game of wheelchair basketball. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Foreign staff were evacuated when a rocket hit the hospital in August 1992, but less than two months later, Cairo was back, driving ambulances across frontlines and working at the rehabilitation centre where he is still based. He has always pushed the Red Cross to be more ambitious in their efforts to help the country’s disabled. He threw out old rules and began helping people whose injuries were not caused by the war. Now, only one in seven people treated at the centre are victims of conflict; others are maimed in car crashes, industrial accidents, or difficult home births.
Cairo started the Red Cross’s first rehabilitation projects, offering education and job training, and he insists that all staff at the centre are disabled themselves – from the security guards to the teams that make prosthetic limbs.
“It’s society that makes the life of disabled people impossible,” he says. “In Afghanistan, the disabled are not rejected, but they are given pity, not rights. They are not given a chance to restart their lives. So we have to fight.”
Recently, he introduced wheelchair basketball to the country, after finding a Chinese firm that makes the special wheelchairs cheaply, and an American willing to coach.
“Physiotherapy is painful. Prosthetic limbs are not easy. But sport is fun, it’s joyful,” he says.
There is not much about Italy he misses, though he sometimes longs for theatre or cinema. He taught an Afghan at the centre to make Italian food, and when he returns from a visit to Italy, his cases are loaded with parmesan and coffee.
“I will never be an Afghan, but when you ask me where is home, I say Kabul. This is the place where I want to be.”

Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch, former Soviet soldier, now a taxi driver

Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch in a field near the airport in Kunduz, where old Soviet military equipment has been left behind. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

It was an unpromising introduction to Afghanistan. Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch’s plane had taken off from a Soviet Union airbase with no destination given; he and the other conscripts on board were not warned they were heading into a bloody, protracted war. When he stepped off the aircraft in windy Kunduz, he recognised the Afghan flag fluttering beside the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle.
The young Ukrainian was primed to face squads of ruthless foreign fighters and hostile locals, but found himself chatting to Afghan teenagers who peddled hashish to bored soldiers, and he realised the war was much more complicated than he had expected.
Yurivitch started selling Soviet ammunition to his mujahideen enemies, but got caught. In detention he was barely supervised, because the guards thought that the prisoners’ fear of the men waiting outside the gates of their military base was security enough. And so, one night, Yurivitch slipped out.
“I wasn’t nervous. I was born in Ukraine but these are my people – I felt it as soon as I escaped,” he says. “I converted on the first day.”

‘I was born in Ukraine but these are my people – I felt it as soon as I escaped,’ says Alexander. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Alexander became Ahmad, and within a month he spoke fluent Dari, the only trace of his origins a thick Russian accent that has lasted over three decades. He sent a letter home to his only relatives, his mother and brother, after he absconded, telling them he was alive but had switched sides. His mother, whom he never saw again, replied, “I want you to be happy. You don’t have to come back – forget your debt to me.”
Yurivitch has left Afghanistan just once, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, travelling on an Afghan passport. He spent six years in the mountains fighting his former comrades, once barely escaping a village ambush in which the only other convert in the group was killed. But he found a band of brothers, after growing up desperately poor and fatherless.
“It wasn’t so tough,” he says. “We had heaters, electricity, everything was well planned; we even had a cook, a baker...”
In 1989, Moscow finally ordered its soldiers home, so he was able to give up his guerrilla life, move into Kunduz and turn his thoughts to marriage, a challenge for an outsider in a country where most people’s partners are chosen by their parents.
“The mujahideen looked for an Afghan woman for me. A radio operator gave me his daughter,” he says. His wife is a teacher, and they live with their four daughters in a small village 20 minutes’ drive north of Kunduz. The land there was left to him by his commander from jihad days. The legacy is testament to Ahmad’s popularity, bolstered by his reputation as a devout Muslim.
“I didn’t have any problems with the Taliban because I was one of them,” says Ahmad, who drove trucks for them in a time he looks back on as a golden age. “I had a fixed salary then.”
Now a taxi driver, he is ambivalent about the past decade. “Back then, people were honest, good Muslims. Nowadays, people want democracy and open society,” he says.
Still, sitting among the rusting wreckage of military transport planes and helicopters, on the airbase where he first set foot on Afghan soil, he is hopeful.
“I think things are getting better because the Americans are leaving, and we are all tired of fighting. This is a holy land, which can’t accept foreigners. Just like the Russians, they have been forced out.”

Father Giuseppe Moretti, Catholic priest

Father Giuseppe Moretti in his church at the Italian embassy. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

To Father Moretti’s Afghan friends, the bishop of Kabul is “mullah sahib”, a token of respect for his status as a man of God, even if his God is not the one they believe in. Conversion to Christianity still carries the death penalty in Afghanistan, so Moretti’s diocese is a single church inside the grounds of the Italian embassy, its construction authorised nearly a century ago.
Communist secret police, civil war militias, Taliban vice police and now Nato soldiers have all passed through its gates in the years since 1977, when Father Moretti first flew into the city.
“I realised when I arrived that I could work from the presumption that I was European and therefore superior, and understand nothing; or I could open myself completely to this country and love it. And it was the latter,” he says.
His small house is crammed with mementoes of his life as an Italian priest in a war zone. When the country spiralled into civil war after the departure of the Soviet troops, he refused to leave – at first naive, then stubbornly committed.
“On 28 April 1992, the first night there was fighting, I thought it was a party with fireworks, beautiful. The second night, I thought the fireworks were continuing. The third night, our chargé d’affairs said to me, ‘There are no fireworks, that is fighting.’”
Undaunted, Moretti stayed to minister to the handful of nuns still doing charity work in the battered city. “We had nothing for our defence. I remember the boom, boom, boom, so close around.”
Two years later the shells hit his home and he barely escaped alive. “When I opened my eyes, my dog, Benji, was there in the ruins; he helped me cross to the ambassador’s residence. When the watchman saw me, he fainted. I must have been covered with blood.”
Moretti was ordered home to Italy to recover. When security returned to Kabul it was under the Taliban, and although they left the church and the nuns who prayed there in peace, there was no priest until the Taliban fell in 2001. That year, Pope John Paul II sent Moretti a simple message. “He said, ‘Father, it is time to go back.’”
The two celebrated mass together, and on the journey to Kabul, Moretti stopped to look around a small shop in eastern Afghanistan. With a surprise still evident, he found an oil painting of the pontiff there; it now has pride of place on his wall.
Newly invested with the authority of a bishop, he leads an eclectic congregation that has at times included ambassadors and Nato commanders. The only people he has not tried to reach out to are Afghans. “We are forbidden from proselytising, and I would not say anything about Christianity to my assistants, even as a joke. But they have respect: they change the flowers every day, ask me how many people came to the service.”
At 75, he is due for retirement, but has volunteered to stay on despite growing security problems. There have been two suicide bombings just metres from his gate, which have made him a virtual prisoner in his house. He no longer wanders freely through the city he remembers from decades ago. “It was not a splendid city, but every day you could see the mountains. It was a pleasant life. You could walk everywhere peacefully.”
His main worry is not the violence but his shrinking congregation. He feels an affinity with the Afghans because they are religious people. “For the Afghans, it’s impossible to think of a man without God. In the west, it’s the contrary: impossible to think of a man with God,” he says. “This is the most difficult thing for me as pastor of the international community: people are proud of their religious indifference.”

Hiromi Yasui, photojournalist

‘This is my home,’ says Hiromi Yasui. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Yasui’s garden is a shady escape from Kabul’s dusty, frenetic streets. A fountain sits among fig and mulberry trees, and two giant guard dogs given to her by nomad families loll on the lawn, longingly eyeing a small aviary.
“It’s comfortable to have a house of your own,” says Yasui, a photographer who was first drawn to Afghanistan by its wandering tribes of livestock herders. She had been captivated by an old book of photos of the country’s Kuchi nomads, and in 1993 she hitched a ride on an aid truck to the eastern city of Jalalabad. After a sheltered childhood in the historic Japanese city of Kyoto, she was shocked by the violence she found.
“I crossed the border and I was so excited, thinking, ‘This is Afghanistan.’ I only knew it from the book. I thought there would be caravans of nomads, and I looked and looked but couldn’t see a single one. There were just burning trucks and tanks, and then I realised: there is still a war here. I had never seen war,” she says. “I had to report these facts to Japan, instead of the Kuchi.”
After two weeks covering a sprawling, squalid refugee camp, Yasui travelled to Kabul, crossing the frontlines between several warring factions. Undaunted by her inexperience, or by the horrors she had already seen, she joined a handful of other journalists in the city’s dilapidated German Club and became a war correspondent almost overnight. “It was so surprising, so sad,” she says. “I was crying a little bit at the beginning… It was not necessary for so many children to die. But I was not frightened. It looks very dangerous being at the frontline but the [other soldiers] were a long way away.”
She returned to Afghanistan every year after that first trip, eventually photographing nomads in the Panjshir valley, and then befriending one of the war’s most famous commanders, Ahmed Shah Masood, known to his admirers as the Lion of the Panjshir.
“When his bodyguards introduced me, saying, ‘The Japanese female journalist is here’, he would joke: ‘She’s not a girl, it’s a boy.’ If you see the pictures, I have very short hair and I’m wearing men’s clothes for my work.” She laughs.
Masood gave her a Persian name, Mursal, which means rose. “After the war finished, all the mujahideen came to Kabul, everyone knew me. Every street, passing by, I’d hear ‘Mursal’ – someone calling to me.”
In 2002, after both her parents passed away, Yasui moved to Kabul full time. Months later she fell in love with an Afghan colleague, but dating was a challenge in a city so conservative that many couples don’t even meet until they are engaged.
“It’s difficult to secretly be boyfriend and girlfriend in this country, so in the end we decided to get married. We went to Turkey,” says Yasui, who converted to Islam for the marriage and sometimes worries that she is a “lazy Muslim”.
A decade later she has become famous in Afghanistan with a new generation, this time for her cooking and hospitality. Encouraged by an unconventional Japanese tour firm keen to invest in Afghanistan, she opened a small but immaculate hotel in the historic Bamiyan valley, looking out over cliffs studded with ancient Buddhist caves.
“At the beginning it was quite difficult, because I’ve no experience of being a hotelier,” she says. “But I have been a customer, so I try to put in what I think is comfortable.” That included introducing Japanese and Chinese food to a once-cosmopolitan valley that had fallen off international trade routes centuries earlier.
The Hotel Silk Road became the closest thing Afghanistan has to boutique accommodation, booked out for government retreats, charity workshops and diplomats’ holidays. Guests told her that, once back in Kabul, they missed her teriyaki chicken and tempura, so she opened a restaurant in the capital, and a handicraft business to provide jobs for local women whom the small hotel could not support.
She still works as a journalist, but her side projects now employ nearly 100 people. Security worries have already affected her business: roads into Bamiyan have been periodically cut off to foreigners and most government officials. But having endured one Afghan war, she is prepared to ride out another – and is still hopeful she won’t have to.
“I am ready to fight for things to go the right way,” Yasui says. “Sometimes I’m a little bit tired, but still I want to stay here. This is my home. We believe the future will be bright.”
Thanks to the Guardian for permission to reproduce this article.