KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — On the dashboard of his truck, Nowsher Awan keeps a colorful little box and a toy puppy biting on a candy cane. He says he bought the knickknacks in a market because “they just made me happy.”
He’s a humble man, this 30-year-old Pakistani in his torn plastic sandals, making a 435-mile journey that will take him through the Taliban insurgency to delivery 15,600 gallons of fuel for the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan.
It takes 100 such truckloads to keep the armies moving for a single day.
Awan may not reflect much on his importance in this complex logistical operation. He’s in it for the money - $112 a month to support a wife and five children in the distant northwest tribal region of Pakistan. He gets to visit them twice a year. For the rest of the time, he is mostly on the road.
Depending on the Taliban, the Pakistani and NATO armies, checkpoints, congestion and the weather, he says the journey from Karachi to Kandahar can take from four to 15 days.
Trucks get blown up or hijacked. Drivers are killed. Overall, fewer than one percent of trucks delivering everything from fuel to peanut butter are attacked, according to Lt. Bashon Mann, a public-affairs officer for NATO forces. But for Awan and other drivers, the fear of ambush and roadside bombs is constant.
Awan has been the recipient of the Taliban’s feared “night letters” - pamphlets that warn drivers against hauling supplies to “the foreign invader.” He says the message is always the same: “Don’t do this job, or else we will do something to you.”
Awan isn’t entirely alone on this run, his 14th. His younger brother is driving a truck behind him in the convoy, and they keep in touch by cell phone. Awan’s eyes keep darting to his side mirrors. “I amalways watching my brother,” he explains.
Awan’s journey had begun on a comfortable highway out of the port city of Karachi. Now he was in the southern province of Baluchistan, on a narrow and congested road that detours around a longsimmering clan feud. Ahead loomed the Kojhak mountain pass, a long, frightening climb alongside a precipice. Then it would be downhill and into Afghanistan for a final whiteknuckle ride through Taliban country.
Awan has never been attacked. But as he chatted in his brightly decorated cabin, between cell-phone conversations with his brother and blasts of music on an old cassette player, it became clear that he doubted his luck would last. “It is a very dangerous job,” he said. Later he would say in a tone of resignation: “I think one day theTaliban will kill me.”
The war, now in its 10th year, consumes roughly 1.5 million gallons of fuel a day, according to Mann, the NATO public affairs officer. The fuel and other supplies - from peanut butter to armored cars - come on four routes, two from Pakistan and two from Russia and the Caucasus.
In 2010, 27,073 trucks crossed at Chaman, the border post nearest Kandahar, roughly a quarter of them carrying fuel, according to Gen. Obeidullah Khan, the inspector general of the Frontier Corps in Baluchistan.
By his count, 194 of the trucks were destroyed in 159 separate attacks - a rate of about three attacks a week. Some of the loot from the hijacked ones - U.S. and British uniforms, military tents and cots - is on sale in the markets of Quetta, the Baluchistan capital.
The drivers work in an atmosphere of suspicion. They don’t trust - and aren’t trusted by - the NATO forces as well as the Taliban, while the U.S. and Pakistani militaries mistrust each other. A seniorPakistani military officer who requested anonymity so he could speak freely said the suspicions are reflected in the fact that NATO deals directly with private trucking companies, effectively cutting out the Pakistan authorities.
For the contractors, NATO is a gold mine. At a going rate of about 33 cents a gallon, each Afghan trip stands to earn the truck owner about $5,000, says Asghar Khan, who runs a clearing house for trucks on the Quetta-Kandahar run.
Awan’s $112 is a tiny fraction of the proceeds, but it’s better than a poor Pakistani’s monthly wage, and he says it has enabled him to enroll his children in school. He dreams of his daughter becoming a doctor.
It’s Feb. 8, and at 4:11 a.m. a night watchman armed with a shotgun pounds on the trucks parked in the Quetta terminal. Drivers sleeping in their cabins come awake, headlights blaze, and one by one the fuel trucks set out, kicking up mud. Next stop, if all goes well, is Chaman, 75 miles north, on the Afghanborder.
But at Abdullah Khan, a village of monotonous brown mud huts hugging the road, the trucks are waved down at a checkpoint maintained by a dozen privately employed guards. The clan wars have flared again, and the guards are there to make sure none of the drivers blunders into the crossfire.
Once cleared through the checkpoint, the convoy faces an even more daunting challenge: the 7,513-foot Kojhak Pass, one lane each way.
As the convoy climbs the mountain, a free-for-all develops among the uphill traffic, the faster cars trying to pass them, and the oncoming traffic barreling downhill. Cars weave in and out, often getting dangerously close to theprecipice.
Awan’s truck reaches the border post at Chaman around 1 p.m. It looks like chaos. Trucks barge across. Cars, horns blaring, weave among bicycles and rickshaws carrying passengers and luggage. The poorest push wheelbarrows carrying children and old people.
The first town on the Afghan side is Spinboldak, and traffic is at a standstill. A day earlier a bomb in the customs hall killed an Afghan customs officer and wounded two visiting Americans, and now troops are defusing a bomb on the road ahead.
At the truck terminal, the U.S. soldiers are jumpy, questioning the identity of those in the truck and whether they’re permitted to be on the road. A soldier speaks of reports that suicide bombers are lurking up the road, initially refusing to let the truck pass through. After an hour, when it becomes clear that they have no grounds to hold Awan and his passengers, they are released. But by now night is closing in and the oil tankers are not ready to move onward to Kandahar in the darkness.
The next morning it is bitterly cold as the trucks set off through flatlands flanked by gray streaked hills. Security has become much more intense. Bridges, a favorite Taliban target, are protected by barbed wire. Private security guards injeeps and trucks weave among the tankers.
On the cassette player, a singer named Shah Zaib Bulbul, a Pashtu like Awan, belts out a tune. The scratchy music puts a smile on Awan’s face. Soon he’ll reach the relative safety of his destination in Kandahar base, but first he has to pass the village of Takht-e-Pul. This place is dangerous, Awan shouts over the music. “They fire on us. They are unknown people. Their faces are covered.”
And don’t point a camera at the U.S. soldiers who are in a convoy heading toward the truck, he warns, “because they will start firing on us. It’s a big problem.”
The journey ends at the Kandahar base built up by U.S. and other NATO forces over the past 10 years of war. The tankers park in a holding area to wait for their number to be called.
It will be hours before Awan’s turn comes, so he’ll spend the night at the base and head back to Karachi in the morning to tank up for his 15th run to Kandahar.
Front Section, Pages 13 on 02/27/2011