Faces In The Book

The warlord asks if I brought any rock and roll tapes. “’Highway to Hell’ is my favorite.”

Sayed Jaffar tells me he went to school in Birmingham, England and then Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he was manager of a McDonalds. “That’s why I make the best French fries in Afghanistan.” He also used to be a member of a hippie motorcycle gang. Now he is commander of a 12,000-strong private militia known as the Ismaeli Defense Force and controls the lives and deaths of the population of his Massachusetts-sized fiefdom.