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I got a character reference from the Taliban

When Ben Farmer applied for a visa, he needed clearance from Kabul’s pariah regime

The Taliban functionary could hardly mask either his pride or his amusement as he listened to my request. “I never thought I would hear such a thing,” he smiled, beckoning colleagues to come over and listen. “That foreigners would come to our emirate because now they need our documents!”

He was not the only one surprised by my predicament. After years dealing with the paperwork hurdles which are part of being a foreign correspondent, I still could not fathom how I had got myself into this mess. The South African government would not issue my wife and I visas for my new posting, unless the Taliban’s repressive pariah regime vouched for our good character.

Our problems had begun more than 12 months earlier, when I was appointed to move to Cape Town as one of The Telegraph’s Africa correspondents. At the time, I had been living in Islamabad, where I had been covering Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2018. It was my second stint for the paper in the region, having lived in Kabul from 2008 to 2013.

When the new job was decided, I popped round to the South African high commission in Islamabad to say hello and apply for a long-term visa. As I exchanged pleasantries with the South African visa official, he asked where else I had lived. I listed a few countries, including Afghanistan. He replied that my wife and I needed a police clearance certificate for everywhere I had lived, showing we had not committed any crimes. The certificates were easily available from embassies, or could be ordered online from their respective countries. It seemed straightforward, if laborious. I went on holiday.

When I returned, the Afghan government had been swept away. Too busy reporting, it was weeks before I thought about applying for the visa.

When I did, I was told by both the Afghan embassy in Islamabad and the interior ministry in Kabul that everything was in disarray under the new Taliban regime and they were not issuing police certificates. Fine, I thought. The visa authorities might be understanding. But rules are rules. Either I supplied a certificate, or I applied to Pretoria for a waiver. I applied for the waiver and waited. Weeks turned into months.

Then, after five months, the waiver request was finally granted… but only for me, not for my wife. I had filled in the forms incorrectly. She would have to apply again.

On my next reporting trip to Afghanistan, I decided to ask the Taliban. Governments come and go, but bureaucracy remains. In Afghanistan, that means traipsing through the corridors of ministries for signatures, stamps and slips of paper.

So I joined the queues at the ministry of interior affairs. Since the fall of Kabul it had been presided over by Sirajuddin Haqqani, who previously led a Taliban faction notorious for murderous suicide bombings on government targets. His long-haired fighters now walk the same corridors as civil servants they would have recently tried to kill.

In each office, my request was met by surprise but efficiency. Details were taken and a biometric reader checked if my fingerprints revealed my existence on old criminal databases – which almost certainly included Taliban officials now at work there.

The bureaucracy took two days. Back in Islamabad, I was called to pick up letters from the Afghan embassy, now also run by the Taliban. The documents, bearing the letterhead of the former republic, rather than the newly restored Taliban emirate, assured the South African high commission in diplomatic language that neither of us had criminal records.

Safely vouched for by the Taliban, our visas were granted, to the amusement and relief of my bosses. The letter, meanwhile, is destined to hang in my Cape Town house.

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2022-10-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/282071985785521

Daily Telegraph