Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the essay of the week—another ‘travel’ piece. The underlying idea with these is to record, as literally as possible, both external experiences and my own feelings on various trips—with the aim of giving a very unfiltered view of a particular place and a particular moment in time. This piece is slightly complicated in that it’s about a rescue operation in Afghanistan but through the prism of Dubai.
Best,
Sam
AE: DUBAI
Idris is Afghan but has a very cosmopolitan sort of life. He grew up—the first seventeen years of his life—in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Then he graduated high school in Omaha, Nebraska—his family settling there as part of a grant with the university. Then he served as an interpreter for four years with U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. Then he lived between Washington, New York, Nebraska—mostly he’s been in New York with his girlfriend, a Broadway director—but his organization, dedicated to evacuating refugees from Afghanistan, has opened up a quasi-office in Dubai, and Idris finds himself spending considerable time there.
For the documentary I’m working on that’s in part about him there’s a constant stop-and-start, constant hovering over the buy button on Expedia, to figure out which of his various adventures we should follow along with. There’s the wife of a Taliban commander who runs away from her husband and is being escorted across the Pakistan border. There’s a baby that is somehow passed off to his organization in the Dubai airport. And there’s something we decide to pull the trigger on, which is an American citizen being held by the Taliban in a northern province and Idris’ organization delegated, essentially, by the State Department to try and get her out.
Office is a strong word for what the organization has in Dubai. Basically, they have a seat poolside at the house of Rashid, a youngish man who works in gemstones and has a very nice lifestyle. Fred the cameraman and I are there. So is Rashid—with precious little evidence of the work that goes into maintaining his luxury. He smokes a lot of hookah and a lot of cigarettes. His poolside table has a lavish array of drinks—although he doesn’t drink himself. Idris is there, looking very much at home—as he does everywhere he goes. His brother Ibrahim—the most level-headed of their group—is there, although has bad jet lag and isn’t heard from much while we’re in Dubai. There’s a woman, Sophia, who takes care of the tea and hookah, may be from somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, and doesn’t say a word. And then, like an inspired piece of interior decorating on Rashid’s part, there’s also a general hanging out in the house—he had been the right-hand man to General Dostum, a notorious warlord (and also U.S. ally) throughout the Afghan war, and is now stuck in Dubai while his visa application to the U.S. is processed.
For Idris, the whole thing is a very normal operation. Ever since the U.S. withdrawal, he’s been working day and night—pretty literally—to get people out of Afghanistan, and he now has a smoothly-flowing machine. He has various operatives on the ground in Afghanistan. His experience with Special Forces has been invaluable—as has his deep knowledge of the country—and he has a network of safe houses, a whole system that feels very chill and inconspicuous but actually has evacuated, by this time, many thousands of people. “The way it’s set up, it’s all in plain sight, the Taliban can see everything we’re doing, but they don’t know what they’re looking at,” Idris explains at one point.
Earlier in the year (this is 2022) Idris had gambled by going to Afghanistan himself to further develop his networks. He had been detained by the Taliban, held for three months, was badly beaten, went on hunger strikes and on food-and-water strikes. I’ve written about it here. In Idris’ endlessly-buoyant view of things, the trip to Afghanistan actually had been a success. “I still think it was the right decision,” he had said to his very-disbelieving girlfriend. Yes, the detention, the near-death experiences, the rift with one of his brothers (held in the same cell as him), had all been unpleasant, but he had acquitted himself well, his release—widely reported on— had boosted the organization’s profile, and the incident had brought him to the attention of the State Department. And now his organization is being used as some kind of a cut-out to conduct negotiations with the Taliban that the State Department would like to be handled at an informal level.
That’s what this is. His contact, E.J., has asked him to deal with this wayward American, and Idris clearly feels that it’s well within his wheelhouse. His contact is driving from Kabul to Jowzjan province in the north to negotiate with the local authorities there—and trying to do so before the case comes to the attention of higher authorities on the Taliban side. What the U.S. citizen is accused of is of traveling without a male escort—which is a crime but not so severe as to be unnegotiable.
Idris hangs out by the pool. He fools around on his phone, chats with different people, checks in from time to time with his people on the ground and with the State Department. Rashid and the general get restless sometimes and want to go out to eat—there’s a lunch place that’s been their spot; and there are lavish dinners. Rashid is particularly eager for the American—Zahra—to come to Dubai, and there are some jokes about all the hospitality that he’ll show to her.
But there’s a hitch. Zahra, it’s emerging, really has a screw loose. Idris goes through a bit of crisis when he looks at her social media profiles. “She has 94,000 TikTok followers,” he says. “That’s a lot.” Idris has been very excited about his recent Twitter ‘verification’ and he is not unimpressed with this, but on her Instagram there are all sorts of hashtags beneath her Afghanistan photos like #TravelAfghanistan and #TravelBucketList. She’s of Afghan descent but has never been and has decided that 2022 is the time to visit Afghanistan—and to boost her social media presence in doing so. And the word from Jowzjan is that the charges may be getting more serious. Apparently she had gone to the houses of people in the province—not realizing that some of them were policemen—had offered money, had offered to bring people to the U.S., and, allegedly, encouraged them to convert to Christianity. This carries with it the possibility of the death sentence and, even if Idris is as chill as he always is, there’s a new edge to his conversations with people on the ground—or at least an exasperation with what Zahra has done and why she’s suddenly his responsibility.
But, meanwhile, while this unfolds, there are many meals to be consumed. Social hierarchies get thrown a little bit by having a general in the house—but a general who is also, clearly, a dependent. I don’t know enough about Afghanistan to recognize the name, but General Dostum—who always has the word ‘warlord’ prefixed to his name—is, apparently, a legendary figure. “Does he drip blood wherever he goes,” says Nils, the film’s director—a former war reporter—when I mention that Dostum’s right hand man is in the house with us. “No,” I tell him truthfully, “he’s like the nicest guy you’ll ever meet.”
There’s a bit of a language barrier with him, but he really is unbelievably considerate. He’s sort of in charge of the table. He carefully makes sure that everybody has their tea filled. He’s a large man, mustachioed, the only one there who drinks—and if he seems to be a bit on the margins during the rescue efforts, he’s the one guiding the conversation, in Afghan, when everybody is prevailed upon to sit and eat. Rashid is clearly very proud about having him in the house. He had been involved in an incident that got international play in the early 2000s when a bunch of Taliban prisoners were placed in a shipping crate and then somebody had riddled the crate with bullets between its point of origin and its destination. “That was him,” says Rashid proudly—and encourages me to look it up. The general himself brings up his other point of fame—tells us to look up a book by one of his wives, an American hairdresser, about the beauty school that she founded in Kabul—and, sure enough, there he is, various photos of the general and his wife. In the book she also notes how considerate he is, how attentive to making sure that everybody has their tea. The general, charm itself, participates with Rashid in the various conversations attempting to put him into context for us—‘warlord’ seems too grandiloquent a term and he wouldn’t wish to upstage General Dostum. “I am a baby warlord,” he concludes finally—and that’s how we think of him the rest of the time.
I always look forward to sitting near the general at meals—we can’t really speak to one another, so it’s all tea and smiles. I’m a bit more apprehensive whenever I’m next to Rashid. There’s nothing exactly wrong with Rashid—he’s a very gracious host, seems not to mind at all anybody being in his house, doesn’t ask any questions about how long they’re staying—but I do dread the conversations that are revelatory of his worldview. “There are two kinds of people in Dubai,” he says when we’re out at dinner. “There are people who are here for the luxury life—millionaires and billionaires. And then there are workers, who never see it.” It’s very clear which side of the fence Rashid chooses to be on. ‘Luxury life’ seems to be his favorite phrase and he keeps giving me these pearls of hedonist wisdom: “Life is short, you might as well enjoy it,” he’ll say. Or he’ll give his verdict on the city: “Dubai is the best place to live if you have money,” he says. But I must say that he doesn’t strike me as being particularly happy. The pool is very well-maintained, the house very clean. He nicely provides Armani shower shoes for his guests. He says that he is in the habit of giving out business cards to airline hostesses when he is flying to and from Dubai and sometimes they come party at his place, but there isn’t a sign of much female companionship here—he’s consistently overeager for Zahra to be released from Taliban captivity and to arrive. He’s a bit burdened by his 5-year-old daughter in the UK wanting attention—it’s about to be her birthday and her mother really wants him to fly there.
Part of Rashid’s discomfiture seems to be about the absence of readily-available status symbols. He’s very eager to take us for a walking tour of the man-made lagoon, which I find to be a bit of a desultory experience—nobody there and not much to do, although the general goes for a swim. And, when we’re out at dinner, we come to be aware of how many more levels there are to status in Dubai. When we’re waiting on the sidewalk for the valets to bring round Rashid’s Land Rover, Ibrahim strikes up a conversation with another of the valets. He’s asking about the different cars, with their extravagantly-opening doors, that are lining up in front of the restaurant. This one is a few hundred thousand, that one maybe a million, the valet says. But, really, the valet tells him, you’re asking the wrong question. The thing to do isn’t to look at the car but the license plate. It turns out that license plates numbers 1-200, or something like that, are given to the royal family, and then the next numbers are auctioned off, with number 201 starting at like $20 million. It’s—come to think of it—really the perfect status symbol. A nice house like Rashid’s has only a certain kind of value—it’s tucked away in a gated community; and he wouldn’t want just anybody to come to it. But a license plate, stating in numeric terms your status, travels with you everywhere you go, lets everybody you pass know exactly where you are in the pecking order.
Something about the license plate story depresses me very much—as, really, does everything in Dubai: the guard post for the gated community, then the gated community itself, which really is endless, a whole city full of mansions just like Rashid’s, with each mansion the same as every other mansion.
We bring the camera with us out to lunch—their usual spot, a quasi-Italian restaurant next to an indoor fake waterfall. While we’re there, Idris gets a call from Zahra from her detention facility. He goes outside to talk to her and we rush outside, to a mall entrance, to film. Everything has gone great—his contact (a Taliban leader who has been promised humanitarian aid) has rendezvoused with the local authorities and has secured her release—but she’s saying that she doesn’t want to go to Kabul with him, that she wants to continue her work of helping people in Jowzjan province. She also believes that she’s secured her own release—by agreeing to marry a local and thereby getting rid of the ‘male escort’ problem—but, since she has a husband in the States, the Taliban would just need to look her up online and then could pin a charge of bigamy on her. And the new husband wants to get a cut of the action that’s swirling around Zahra and wants to exercise his husbandly prerogatives and be the spokesman with Idris. And Idris, who’s more tired than he lets on—who has an ongoing fantasy about getting out of the rescue business altogether and taking up the med school acceptance that he keeps deferring—just finds himself speaking very slowly and wearily, telling her that they have a flight ready for her from Kabul and that he really recommends that she take it.
When he hangs up, he’s sort of resigned. “I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do,” he says. Meanwhile, we’ve been observed by mall security as we’re filming, and, once the camera goes down, the security guard, a Nepali, has a bunch of questions about who we are and whether we have the appropriate permission to film in Dubai. This is the kind of crisis that Rashid seems to spend all his time waiting for. He’s wandered out of the mall and shouts at the guard with a contradictory welter of information. “We’ve been filming the entire time, why didn’t you say anything before,” he says, and tells him that in any case we have already deleted the footage. The guard stands his ground and has his boss, a Ukrainian, come down. It’s actually a very easy problem to solve—there are just a few assurances for us to make—but Rashid is beyond contemptuous for them, screeches away in his Land Rover the instant he can.
And then driving back to Rashid’s gated compound—Rashid weaving his way through traffic, just the ridiculousness of everything that Dubai represents, the way that the whole place feels like it was designed by a ten-year-old on Sim City. What should a city have? Well, it should have the world’s tallest building—let’s start with that. What else should a city have? How about a skyline—let’s make sure we have that as well (and at this stage in the city’s development it seems to be a lot of empty or under-construction office buildings). What else should a city have? Well, workers, I guess— and so all these migrants, some from the Arabian Peninsula, some from across the Indian Ocean, have their housing somewhere off in the outskirts, and, as Rashid has put it, are kept discreetly away from the luxury. What does not seem to have registered with the builders of Dubai is any need for human rights or media freedoms.
That’s striking me as the lesson of this phase of history. Everybody thought in the ‘90s and ‘00s that free markets entailed other kinds of freedoms as well—but that’s just not the case. And the new model—Dubai, Singapore, China most conspicuously—is such a rebuke to the Western fetish of democracy and equal rights. As it turns out, you have wealth and everything else follows—no need for annoying human rights, for annoying declarations of equality, definitely no need for film crews to be filming public buildings, let alone any politically sensitive material, without the proper permission. And it seems to work for everybody—definitely works for somebody like Rashid and everybody else in the gated communities.
Because Zahra is being obstinate, everything on my end gets pushed back. I delay our departure flights several times. While we’re waiting for Zahra to agree to be rescued, I take refuge for a full day in a coffee shop; and then spend a half-day shopping at the mall—when in Rome, right? But the mall sends me into a fresh wave of depression. It really feels like some Nordstrom outlet in Irvine but without the soul. The mall—the largest in the world, needless to say—is infinite. It couldn’t be more American, more familiar, but it’s as if somebody saw straight through all of our pretenses and reduced us to what we actually are, as if all of humanity, all of human potential, had been sifted through, and our true essence finally revealed, at the ‘end of history,’ as shoppers. I try on shoes and pants. I keep passing by the mall’s enormous aquarium, and the shark strikes me as a poignant sort of a metaphor. I chat up a few of the salespeople. A woman from Kerala says she’s here for a few months—“just to work,” she emphasizes. A woman from Malaysia just shakes her head when I ask her how she likes Dubai.
Then, of course, when it’s time to leave and meet Zahra at the airport—she’s relented, been talked into leaving—I can’t find the exit, keep finding myself in these different parking garages, asking for directions from very unhelpful attendants. Perfect, I’m thinking to myself. They’ve borrowed casino architecture—the whole thing is a trap; the gated community from hell; the mall you can’t escape from. Fred and I meet at the airport, but fortunately the plane is late and Idris even later than that. The rendezvous scene—which we film on a cell phone to avoid being shut down by airport security—is a bit underwhelming. Zahra seems not to be completely clear on who Idris is and what sort of operation was needed to get her out of detention.
On the ride back, Rashid heavy on the accelerator, Idris not only has to elucidate all the moving pieces, here, on the ground, with the State Department, to get her released, but feels compelled to tell her a bit about how the world works. “Afghans all live through deception,” he says. “Once they’re out it’s different, but they’re always looking for angles and opportunities. Everybody you met was looking to get paid—or was telling the authorities about you.” The news that anybody outside Jowzjan province had anything to do with her release is a real surprise to Zahra. As far as she’s concerned, it was her marriage with the local, the affidavits she got from people in the community, that got her out. “If you had 25 people or 25,000 people vouching for you it wouldn’t have made any difference,” Idris says, losing his cool. “What mattered was having a Taliban leader—and then having the people on the ground getting paid.”
“I don’t think anybody got paid,” Zahra says.
“Trust me,” says Idris, “everybody got paid.”
Faster than Idris, Rashid has also lost his cool—this was not the reunion he was picturing. “This is who rescued you,” he says loudly to Zahra, pointing to Idris. “Him. The people here.”
Zahra looks like she might cry. She seems to be very sweet and well-meaning, but it’s apparently sinking in for her that she’d gotten herself into something more complicated than she’d realized.
Back at Rashid’s, there’s a spread laid out for her—the general pouring tea—but, really, she just wants to have a shower and lie down.
Idris is pretty tired of the whole thing. “You can’t choose who you rescue,” he says. He’s used to evacuating far larger numbers of people—and Afghans who really are in dire straits, as opposed to people in problems of their own making. For him, this excursion has become more about the strategic health of his organization. Proudly, he shows me a message from E.J. saying “She’s an idiot but you’re the only people who could have pulled this off.” Well, Idris says, perking up, “She’s done some pretty stupid things but at the end of the day she’s a U.S. citizen.”
So, a small win for Idris. It’s such an uncertain time in Afghanistan, and more and more outfits like his are becoming vital middlemen between the U.S. and the Taliban. It’s hard to keep track of how everything works exactly—my understanding is that the State Department funneled some cash for the rescue through the organization, but these are the sorts of details that Idris is very discreet about. Basically, everything is corrupt—everybody on the ground getting greased, everybody with their angle, the whole episode a good lesson in how things really get done.
Fred and I get to the airport early and go through multiple full-body scans, sensors whirring all around us before we’re able to get to our gate. Of virtually anyplace I’ve filmed, I’ve never been so thrilled as to be out of Dubai. The feeling is that this is what the future looks like—what the world is tilting towards: harshly capitalistic, authoritarian, deeply unequal, deeply unfree, but everything working smoothly. I just really don’t want to be a part of it.
Names have been changed for this piece.
This was fascinating to read and really absorbing. I was initially taken by that apocalyptic idea of Dubai as a vision of our future and of the shopper as the emblem of humanity as the "end of history." Forgive me for being a gadfly -- I know Substack prefers sunny support to critical questions -- but I'm wondering about how well Dubai represents the rest of the world? Particularly in the claims this line are beginning to make: "The feeling is that this is what the future looks like—what the world is tilting towards: harshly capitalistic, authoritarian, deeply unequal, deeply unfree, but everything working smoothly." Man, that is a seductive line. But does it map onto the U.S.? We presently have an investigation of Trump, possible indictment -- pretty clear resistance to authoritarianism. Iowa and Florida are beginning to feel dangerously unfree. But I'm not sure this is true in Pennsylvania, where I live. Maybe the real power lies in the warning?