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“This is smuggling. It's not supposed to be comfortable. ” —Alidad, Human Smuggler

REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Gregory Warner

Greg Warner

One evening, when I was living in Kabul, an American security contractor told me he was making six times the salary he could have made back home. "It's all about travel," he explained with a shrug. "You cross the border, you're gonna make the money."

My Afghan friends said the same thing to me, except they said it more wistfully, with less bravado. They all wanted to cross the border too, except the opposite way, into Western countries to find jobs they couldn't find here. But traveling out of Afghanistan is a lot harder than traveling into it. That's even more true today. Visas for Afghans are increasingly hard to come by. In Kabul, long lines form at the foreign embassies of desperate Afghans hoping for a way out.

Not surprisingly, those who can't get a visa sometimes decide to leave illegally. A friend of a friend explained how it worked. His brother was on his way to Turkey, but to get there, he was first driving to Quetta, Pakistan. "Quetta?" I said."Why Quetta?" Quetta was the opposite direction from Turkey – due south instead of northwest. "Because," my friend explained, "Quetta is where the smugglers are."

A few weeks later, I was on an overnight train to Quetta, the city near the Afghan border that the Taliban had used as their base of communications during the war. My translator, JD, met me at the train station and drove me to the house he had rented for us for the week. Actually, it was not so much a house as a gated courtyard, at the front of which was an outhouse, and at the back of which was a small concrete room with a carpet and two thin sleeping mats. JD and I slept on the mats pushed to opposite walls, with six feet between us. In the morning we'd go out to try to find a smuggler to profile.

It was not hard to meet smugglers in Quetta. Finding one to profile was more challenging. Frankly, I just didn't trust any of them. They were shady characters and I got an uneasy feeling talking to them. Alidad was different. First of all, he was older; he'd been a smuggler for over three decades. A lifetime of experience seemed etched into his wrinkled, weather-beaten face. He seemed like the kind of guy you'd meet in the park playing dominoes. The one who doesn't say too much but knows everything that's going on on the street.

Once while walking with Alidad I watched him walk up to an old man who was chopping firewood. The man was struggling to lift the axe, so Alidad leapt in, picked up a sledgehammer and smashed the log for him. Later I realized that Alidad and the old man were probably the same age.

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