“It’s a miracle I’m here this morning”Cyril Payen, France’s 24 special envoy to Afghanistan, said Monday, Sept. 6 about information from France. The journalist returned to Paris on Sunday, September 5, after an 18-hour trip, “by earth”, to leave Kabul, the Afghan capital, across the Pakistani border, an area “very infiltrated by the tough Taliban faction, but also by the Islamic State”. Cyril Payen was forced to leave the Afghan team he worked with behind him “with all the risks we know”. “It’s not the easy part”, he admitted. “This is something I wouldn’t want anyone to leave behind, face to face, teammates who expected too much from you.”
franceinfo: How did you manage to get back to France since there is no more air transport from Kabul airport?
Cyril Payen: It’s a trip I don’t recommend, you have to go over land, go through Kabul-Jalalabad. It is a city close to the Pakistani border, which is heavily infiltrated by the tough Taliban faction, but also by the Islamic State which has been remembered in good memory by the Taliban for carrying out various attacks. So it’s a complicated journey, a clandestine journey. Then I went to the tribal areas of Pakistan. Not many people make this trip in this direction, knowing that Pakistanis are pushing everything against the backdrop of a proxy war with Qatar. The path we take is fully secured by the Taliban. I was just being very discreet, because there was Taliban security coordination. I was undercover, with important security protocol. I had a pass stamped with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan stamp with my name, which allowed me to pass through the extremely numerous checkpoints. The real risk, in fact, was the Islamic State. It took 18 hours and it’s a miracle I was here this morning with you.
Is your Afghan team, the one you’ve been working with for the past few days, left behind?
It’s not the easiest part when you’re going out. We talk a lot about the thousands of Afghans who couldn’t be evacuated, but when it’s a face, a first name, Kayoum, the driver, and Hamid, the repairman… wish no one left behind, eye to eye, waiting companions a lot of you. From the beginning, they and their families really believed that France would accept them because they have been working with the French for a long time. I will campaign to get them out. We tried with the Santa Catarina, we tried with the Pakistanis, and today they are left behind, with all the risks we know, risks that all collaborators close to foreigners can take, since the Taliban will target them. Whatever the face, new or not, of the Taliban today.
Is the Taliban’s return already visible?
Totally. There is a kind of chaos. As soon as you leave Kabul, where the population is literate, emancipated and educated, you move on to the absolute burka. I have not seen a woman without a burka. A woman alone does not exist. These images do not give much assurance to the Taliban’s new liberalism. The future that awaits young women, students, emancipated people, homosexuals is absolutely frightening and frightening. There is also talk of crosses placed on the doors of houses where girls have not yet been married. So this Taliban 2.0 charm offensive is hard to believe.
So you don’t believe in the Taliban’s change…
The Taliban command is made up of former mujahedin, founders of the Taliban movement. Why did they change, especially after driving out the world’s first army, the US Army, after 20 years of war? Why would they compromise? However, not all Taliban are completely backward, they also know that the population has changed. The other very important geostrategic point is the very important risk of civil war, since there is no unity in Taliban command and the Islamic State group is present in the country. There is an extremely important and extremely dangerous game of influence. We have a responsibility to the Afghan people, we must not let them fall into utter chaos today. So, in a way, you have to play around with the Taliban a little bit.
Did they let you work as a journalist anyway?
They decided to let us work, but they are warlords, people who have been fighting for years and are extremely nervous. It’s intuition, negotiation, it’s like having decided to stay. We were very few. It was a bet on the future because we didn’t know what to expect. We began to feel the self-censorship of the Afghan population for a few days with the accelerated patrols of Taliban militants in the streets, with this expectation, this numbness, this amazement of the population who saw this lead coverage coming. There were no more miracles possible, so the Afghans shut down.
