We woke up in Ghazni, one of the most ancient cities of Afghanistan rich with old monuments and shrines. It was a small city though these days. Just really for passing through. I was glad though to be able to spend some time to see what the city offered though with my cameras in hand. The Ghazni minarets had been restored and worth seeing and the there was plenty of shrines to visit. The citadel still contain relics of the Russian war when the Russians had used it as a base to fight off the mujahideen.
Blasted and destroyed tanks made great places to get portraits and a selfie. But the weather and rain had caused much erosion of the relics.
Years back I saw these sights but we had to fly in on helicopter and another time when I was on the road I didn’t get to enjoy anything of the sights as my job was to help bring in the oil tankers south towards Kandahar which is another story.
We tried to visit the sight of Tapa Sardar, some hindu statues that I had seen pictures but unfortunately the rains had deteriorated them or they were vandalised by visitors. Infact when we were looking for it, the Taliban checkpost guys didn’t know such a spot existed and came up with us ontop of the hill.
They weren’t so disappointed as they made me take their portraits and asked me for my whatsapp number which I gave Naweeds so they harassed him for several days till I graded them.
One thing I do have to say, is Talibs in peace time are ridiculously nice and hospitable. There is no more death to foreigners and those with western education. I had been injured years back by Taliban who wanted to kill me for trying to bring schools in the tribal areas but now they wanted to shake my hand in be in their pictures.
The two things though that griped me about the Taliban though was women rights and music. Music being banned cuts deep into Afghan culture. We listen in secret as we drive the car and have to shut it off when we come to their checkpoints. Weddings can have a DJ but no live bands.
Well women’s rights truthfully was still pretty fucked before the Taliban came along but there was progression. When I lived in Afghanistan earlier on, women in sports team were told to sleep with their head of committee if they wanted to play abroad which was the case with the female soccer team or paid less than a tenth of men. Women were subjected to sexual advances at work and husband often controlled them if they worked jobs and threatened their resignation if they were not paid to the man’s satisfaction.
But there was progression and some women excelled. I always remember my female colleague who I was teaching in UNDP, shoot and edit her first video for the organisation and it was brilliant. Women deserved to go to school and university in Afghanistan and it is often quite mixed with Taliban who did want such things. A Talib guard from Serena once asked me if his family could go to the US for an education.
Even some of these ministers like the Haqqanis had their daughters and wives with college degrees in Pakistan and Qatar. So why ban it in the homeland? I was hoping a visit to the Supreme Leader could answer such things. Anyway we had to get to Kandahar to find him.
A truck had crash into a gateway blocking the road for kilometres. Luckily no one was killed but everyone loved staring. We grabbed a quick lunch and made our way down south.
The road was long and straight but more so the erosion made what was 100km road a 25km road with sometimes getting a little bit of speed between the bomb craters and roads destroyed by oversized trucks.
It was hot and sweaty but once we got through the wretched highway of Ghazni we hit halfway into Zabul province and the road was back to being rebuilt. I could only hope that in the future all of the A1 would be fixed.
Naweed’s front window had a crack in it so I always had to move forward and frame out the crack to get pictures. We never wore seatbelt in a car in Afghanistan though if I saw a driver do it, I realised we were going to go mad race. Shafiq had no interested in doing such things because it would possibly wreck the engine and I could only assume he had experience on the costly mistake of driving like a maniac in Afghanistan.
It was evening time but we made it to Kandahar and found a nice hotel where my German photographer friend Sebastian Backhaus was staying at. It had been ages since we connected again as we were on a media junket in Iraq shown around by the Hashed Al Shabi.
We finally made it to Kandahar.