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At War

The Hotel in Afghanistan That Refuses to Close Its Doors

Afghan Border Police troops playing cricket in the empty swimming pool at the Bost Hotel earlier this year.Credit...Andrew Quilty

The bay windows in the Bost Hotel’s dining room looked out across the Helmand River. For all the river’s immensity, the current, borne hundreds of miles from up in the Hindu Kush, spoke only in whispers. The air hummed with mosquitoes. Beyond the river, on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, red tracer rounds arced across the night sky.

It was spring 2016, and the Taliban were as close to overrunning Lashkar Gah as they had been since they’d been forced out in 2001. I had flown from Kabul for the third time in three months to try to illustrate, through photographs, the fallout from the mismanaged international military mission, and the consequences of its premature withdrawal, as the noose slowly tightened around Helmand’s capital.

Each time I checked into the Bost Hotel. Despite its decaying facades and jury-rigged amenities, with the river on one side, a street closed to traffic on the other and a garden of pink and purple chrysanthemums, the hotel maintained a tranquillity that defied the crisis unfolding only a few miles away. At night, that distance was just enough for the fighting to seem harmless, the bullets sailing dolefully through the dark.

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Since the early days of the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, Helmand, in the country’s Pashtun south, has been the site and symbol of the comprehensive failure of international military and development goals. Today, drug production and corruption are rampant; women’s empowerment, governance and security are threadbare. Support for the Taliban, whose austere tribal and cultural values are, to an extent, compatible with communities in the rural south, runs through Helmand’s villages like the water that feeds its crops, the biggest and most notable of which is opium. Perhaps what best defines Helmand to non-Afghans of this war’s generation is that more foreign soldiers have died fighting there than in any other province. For all that bloodshed, maybe as much as 90 percent of Helmand’s land area (much of which is desert) is today under Taliban control. It’s impossible to know with any certainty, and that alone speaks volumes.

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A member of the Afghan Border Police in the guard tower at the Bost Hotel.Credit...Andrew Quilty

Lashkar Gah has suffered many isolated attacks but has been held tenuously by the government throughout. The Bost Hotel, despite the constant risk of attack and, nowadays, occupancy in the single figures, has survived too. Named after the ancient city of Bost, an abandoned ruin a few miles south of the modern city, the Bost Hotel was the first of dozens of structures built by Americans, and the axis around which Lashkar Gah grew to be Helmand’s new capital in the 1950s. But after an idyllic early existence, the Bost has weathered not only decades of war but the occupancy of the cadres who have led the conflicts at each turn. It has hosted the masters of Helmand’s wars and all their cronies and chroniclers. If it had one, the Bost’s guest book would read like a glossary to Helmand’s four decades of war.

Once construction on the Bost was completed in the mid-1950s, development spread along the river and away from its east bank into the area that’s now the town center. Lashkar Gah began to resemble the modern prototype city that Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah envisaged. American aspirations were no less ambitious; Lashkar Gah was the center of a huge Cold War effort to counter Soviet influence in the country. American engineers from the construction behemoth Morrison Knudsen built dams and canals and opened up hundreds of thousands of acres of desert to agriculture, splitting the Dasht-e Margo, the Desert of Death, in two. The goal was to propel Afghanistan into regional markets and, eventually, into the modern world.

The engineers brought their families and lived in bungalows that ran two blocks deep along the Helmand River. They were built to American standards, with lush lawns that opened onto pine-tree-lined streets. On the weekends, the Americans would compete in egg-and-spoon races and picnic by the river. Afghan children would come from surrounding villages to marvel at the foreigners in their beautiful clothes. At the community clubhouse, American engineers and Afghan government officials hobnobbed by the pool in a garden of roses and palms overlooking the river. Gin and tonics were served at nightly card games, while movie screenings attracted families on the weekends. Locals say the king himself kept a room and an office on the first floor, as an escape from the bitter Kabul winters. That clubhouse, the center of life in the newly built company town, was the building that later became the Bost Hotel.

“Little America,” the locals called the city, without a hint of cynicism. Unlike the British, whose forays into Afghanistan as far back as the mid-19th century inspired suspicion and distrust among Helmandis even when they returned in 2006, the Americans had yet to make a bad impression. The occasional outcry over the presence of nonbelievers from religious zealots was outweighed by a welcoming and hopeful majority. But the Americans left in 1978, when a coup led by the leftist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan prompted Washington to recall its citizens. The following year, the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan, and Helmand became a battleground. The Bost Hotel was commandeered by Soviet soldiers, and the city resumed the role for which it had earned its Persian name: Lashkar Gah, army camp.

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A view of the Helmand River from the Bost Hotel during a dust storm.Credit...Andrew Quilty
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A guest in a room at the hotel in 2015.Credit...Andrew Quilty

Afghan opposition fighters, mujahedeen, advanced on Lashkar Gah in the early 1980s, but the city remained under the control of the Soviets and their Afghan allies throughout their nearly decade-long occupation. Fighting in the districts, however, was brutal. Aerial bombing and indiscriminate artillery fire flattened villages and destroyed irrigation canals. Soviet and government troops were accused of mass rape and massacres that wiped out whole villages. To wear down opposition factions, the Soviets deliberately exacerbated intertribal conflicts, ensuring the province’s slide into civil war after their departure, in 1989. It was during this lawless time that the Bost Hotel suffered its worst damage to date. Without a functioning state to contain it, fighting between factions went unhindered in Lashkar Gah, and much of the hotel’s riverfront facade was destroyed, the bricks from its three-foot-thick walls cascading down the steep bank and into the river. The building was abandoned, and its contents were looted. The Bost Hotel, like the city it was named after, was left in ruins.

After 15 years of war, with the population tired of the criminal rackets and warlords fighting for power in the wake of their jihad, a new force with a reputation for high virtue swept through the south from neighboring Kandahar: The Taliban took control of Lashkar Gah in 1994 with barely a bullet fired. Soon, mujahedeen commanders were disarmed, and violence was almost eradicated. For regular Helmandis, the Taliban’s harshness — rule based on fear and zero tolerance for crime — was a small price to pay for stability. In fact, there were few Taliban fighters in Helmand at all. With little opposition to their rule in the south, the majority were sent to fight the Northern Alliance. In Lashkar Gah, the handful of brick government buildings, including the Bost Hotel, were quickly occupied. After the damage was repaired, the hotel became a place for Taliban commanders and their fighters to convalesce away from the battlefield.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. After Al Qaeda’s attack, the United States led an invasion of Afghanistan. It began on Oct. 7; 12 weeks later, on the last day of 2001, a Special Forces team entered Lashkar Gah. They found the Bost Hotel abandoned and took up residence, building sandbag machine-gun positions on the flat roof.

Most Taliban in Helmand stowed their weapons and returned to agrarian village life; others allied themselves with the new administration in Lashkar Gah. American Special Forces teams worked with local militias, scouring the districts for remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They killed or captured scores who were neither, but were simply rivals of the Helmandi commanders they had chosen to work with. Some Taliban, fearing capture and extradition to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or worse, may have disappeared across the border into Pakistan. For a few years, with the Americans operating mostly in rural Helmand, and local tribal elites running the province with Kabul’s blessing, Lashkar Gah maintained an uneasy peace.

In 2002, one such tribal leader, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, settled in as the new provincial governor and opened up his office in a compound next door to the Bost. One of his staff members, Jan Mohammad, had worked at the hotel during the tumultuous years that followed the Soviet departure, before the Taliban took over. He and other staff members cleared the Special Forces’ fortifications from the roof; repainted the interior; laid new carpet; hung heavy, pencil-pleat curtains across the windows; and opened for business. The governor charged $50 per person per night. Jan Mohammad is still there, booking guests into the hotel today.

The large function room, flooded with light from a bank of windows that looks over the river, and the long, narrow dining room were used for meetings between local Afghan officials and American military officers. Paying guests were mostly journalists, international envoys and visiting Afghan officials. Some of the hotel’s first foreign guests were a British team sent to coordinate opium-eradication efforts. Concerned that they might curtail the lucrative opium business of his friends, Akhundzada convinced them, “for their own safety,” not to leave the hotel, according to Mike Martin, who served in Helmand as a British army officer and is now one of the top Western experts on the province’s complex web of factional wars. In the dining room, a famously ruthless Afghan general once held court at the head of the table and, in a show of faux humility that drew surreptitious eye rolls from around the table, served green tea and pilau to lower ranking soldiers and government aides, recalls one guest, who was visiting from Kabul as a political aide at the time. On summer evenings, journalists would eat dinner outside the hotel walls under the eucalyptus trees along the river, whose gray-green water seemed to absorb some of the lingering heat. In the comfort of clean rooms laden with plump cushions, visitors may have even divined the beginning of a return to the days of “Little America.”

Optimism, however, was short-lived. By 2005, insurgency was brewing again in rural Helmand. Assassins, whose work was often, rightly or wrongly, attributed to the Taliban, began picking off officials from the new provincial government, and by 2006 its shaky foundations were at risk of collapsing altogether. The British deployed about 700 soldiers to patrol Helmand but the increased foreign military footprint only exacerbated the violence.

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An Afghan National Army soldier firing on a Taliban position near Lashkar Gah in 2016.Credit...Andrew Quilty
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An Afghan commando treating another soldier who was injured in a firefight with the Taliban outside Lashkar Gah in 2016.Credit...Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

The West’s interest in Helmand was proportional to its military presence in the province, and journalists began cycling in and out. With security continuing to deteriorate, the Bost became one of the few places safe enough for visitors to stay. At times, the hotel reaped the windfalls of the war economy. One year, the exterior received a fresh coat of paint. At another point there was enough money for gaudy new vinyl couches, which are still there now, positioned around the perimeter of common rooms like circling wagons.

Journalists appreciated the Bost’s relative security and majestic river view. Qais Azimy, then a senior producer with Al Jazeera who stayed there many times starting in the mid-2000s, said that for him, the Bost Hotel was “like a safe bubble inside a fire.” But with the governor next door, the threat was never far away. The scrub across the river made perfect cover for insurgents firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. One of the Bost’s security guards still wears a cloth patch over an eye socket gouged out by shrapnel from a rocket strike in 2016. When the sun went down, the hotel curtains were always drawn, lest the light attract fire from a sniper.

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The defunct amusement park in Lashkar Gah.Credit...Andrew Quilty

At least twice, the Bost has been menaced by more concentrated attacks. In 2008, 300 anti-government fighters launched an attack on the governor’s compound. They made their way up the west side of the river, but were mowed down by British attack helicopters before they could reach their target. In 2010, heavily armed insurgents strapped with suicide vests occupied the unfinished Sun and Moon Hotel, right on the same street. British officers set up a command post inside the Bost and coordinated the joint Afghan-British counterattack.

During summer, daytime temperatures in Lashkar Gah frequently reach 115 degrees. The sky turns white, as if faded by the sun, and for hours on either side of lunchtime, the half-dozen main streets are empty. Visiting journalists can find respite in a handful of dark, cell-like rooms facing away from the river and the scorching afternoon sun and equipped with faltering air-conditioners. For a period during the late 2000s, however, arriving guests were occasionally told that the rooms were occupied. It wasn’t immediately clear by whom; the occupants were practically nocturnal. They would appear from time to time: a dozen hulking, bearded men wearing pale, slim-fitting shalwar kameezes like those favored by hip young men in Kabul and wraparound sunglasses. They were American Special Operations Forces, according to two journalists who spotted them occasionally. They disappeared into the districts at night, returning in dusty Toyota Corollas to sleep during the day. It wasn’t the only building on the street where outsiders tried to keep a low profile. For several years, the unremarkable compound opposite the Bost was a C.I.A. safe house, says a Western military official who worked in the area at the time.

In 2014, after British forces and American Marines withdrew from Helmand, interest in Helmand Province, and in Afghanistan more broadly, plummeted. News bureaus in Kabul shrank or closed altogether, and without stories of American and Europeans on the front lines, the news media’s appetite for risk dwindled. For the handful of foreign journalists who continued to cover Helmand (and the number could literally be counted on one hand), the province was awash with stories of an international effort gone awry, told by Helmandis who had been left to deal with the consequences.

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Staff of the Bost Hotel in the dining room.Credit...Andrew Quilty

The increasingly precarious conditions strangled the local economy. The opium industry was flourishing, but its multimillion dollar profits went into the war chests of the Taliban and their cartel allies or left the country altogether. Along with Lashkar Gah’s decaying amusement park and disused cotton gin, the hotel suffered from neglect. With the electricity in Lashkar Gah frequently cut off, money from the diminishing number of guests was poured straight into the hotel’s diesel generator. The swimming pool dried up and was never refilled; bored police used it as a cricket pitch instead. The ceilings and walls began to bubble from damp and crack in the oven-like heat. Bedsheets went unwashed, toilets and door handles went unfixed, and the cook fell into a tired routine: hard-boiled eggs and bread for breakfast, stewed okra and bread for dinner.

By the time I first traveled to Helmand in 2014, the Special Operations Forces had retreated to heavily guarded military bases and hadn’t been seen at the Bost in years. Journalists were increasingly scarce, too. One was far more likely, in fact, to share dinner with exiled district governors from Taliban strongholds like Musa Qala and Baghran. The insurgents were inching closer and closer to Lashkar Gah. Each time I returned, the front-line villages I had visited previously — and the ragtag government forces struggling to hold them — had been overrun by insurgents. By September 2016, the Taliban were at the city’s gates. They controlled almost all of Helmand beyond the government’s defensive lines, barely a mile from the hotel. Residents were leaving any way they could. The Taliban were regularly firing on the governor’s house from across the river at night. Business for the Bost atrophied once again. Jan Mohammad, the governor’s longtime staff member, wouldn’t check in another guest for months.

On the last night of my stay in 2017, silhouetted against the dusk on the hotel roof, I drank two bottles of beer I managed to smuggle in from Kabul with another journalist. I had chilled them in the Bost’s only refrigerator. Our legs dangled over the edge into the darkness. That night, only stars burnished the sky, and below, the Helmand River flowed silently by.

Andrew Quilty is a photojournalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he has worked since 2014. His work has been recognized with a Polk Award, Picture of the Year International awards and more.

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