![]() He was too late for Vietnam – the last U.S. Idema enlisted in the Army in 1975, when he turned eighteen. Hear Kali Uchis Team Up With El Alfa, City Girls' JT on 'Muñekita' What’s more, he may indeed have disrupted a plot to assassinate officials in the Afghan government and carry out bombings in Kabul. The strangest thing of all is that Idema, a convicted con man who served four years in federal prison in the mid-Nineties, is telling the truth when he says that his terrorist-hunting operation in Kabul was known both at high levels of the Afghan government and within the murky world of U.S. military uniform, Idema was able to convince a surprisingly large number of people in Kabul that he was a supersleuth terrorist hunter with connections to the most secretive units in the American military. In Afghanistan, American contractors do everything from guarding local bigwigs, including President Hamid Karzai, to conducting Al Qaeda interrogations.Ĭruising around town in his SUV with his wraparound shades, AK-47, beard and almost-but-not-quite U.S. military, functions that were once handled by the uniformed services have increasingly been taken over by civilians. Idema straddled the civilian and military worlds in Afghanistan, a balancing act that attracted little comment until his arrest. And so he did, in a story that has unfolded like a movie written by a twenty-first-century Graham Greene, powered by a dark Middle-Eastern techno soundtrack by Deep Dish. It was perhaps inevitable that Idema, a convicted felon, was going to get into some kind of trouble in Afghanistan. It was only after he was detained that Idema’s criminal history and chronic litigiousness, which included abetting wire fraud and unsuccessfully suing film director Steven Spielberg, became widely known, as did his penchant for threatening journalists and, on one occasion, shooting in their vicinity. Before his arrest, Idema was regarded around Kabul as something of a blowhard. If he really wanted to impress you, he might also tell you what his ultimate goal was: to be the guy who captured Osama bin Laden. ![]() Idema told those who were curious that he was doing humanitarian work or that he was a security consultant for journalists covering the war against the Taliban or that he was a special adviser to the Northern Alliance. The king of the Mustafa scene, until his arrest last July, was Jack Idema, who first arrived in Kabul in fall 2001, shortly after the defeat of the Taliban. Ground zero for this crowd is the Mustafa hotel, a dingy joint where drinks are served by giggling Thai women from the massage parlor conveniently located inside the hotel. Kabul’s pleasantly edgy vibe has attracted its fair share of war junkies and mysterious guys in dark shades who aren’t about to tell you what they do for a living. Building sites rise seemingly on every corner, construction that is partly fueled by Afghanistan’s substantial heroin economy embassies and Western-owned enterprises are sheltered behind enormous blast barriers and miles of razor wire. A couple of miles from the airport you enter a city where speeding Suvs driven by menacing gun-toting bodyguards weave through epic traffic jams. The hulks of burned-out planes that once littered Kabul airport have finally been cleared away, but de-mining teams regularly sweep the runways. Three years after the rout of the Taliban, the city is enjoying an unprecedented boom, yet it remains consumed by fears of terrorist attacks. Only in the freewheeling atmosphere of post-Taliban Kabul could an American civilian like Idema swagger around town at the head of an armed, uniformed force on a mission to hunt down terrorists. ![]() Special Forces sergeant, who, in one of the more bizarre twists in the War on Terror, was arrested in Kabul last year and charged by Afghan authorities with running his own prison – a sort of freelance Abu Ghraib – where he was accused of torturing eight Afghan men he said were terrorists. Pul-e-Charkhi is also home to Jack Idema, a former U.S. Its dank cellblocks house scores of Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters. Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, a vast crumbling Afghan fortress twenty miles outside of Kabul, is not an easy place for an American to wind up. This story is from the issue of Rolling Stone.
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