An observant Jew faced warlords and despots in risky territory, but never hid his Jewish identity

Photos: Eli Greengart, personal archives

The three-mile drive from Hamid Karzai International Airport to Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul is one of several roads in this war-torn central Asia country that bear the name Ambush Alley.

Ambush Alley has been the final journey for countless soldiers and civilians massacred in roadside attacks perpetrated by the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or a host of local militias.

The road signs don’t warn you of the dangers. You must know the turf.

Dr. Elie Krakowski learned it well and has lived to tell his tales.

Dr. Krakowski — an Orthodox Jew, a Yeshiva University (YU) graduate, and a relative of both Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, zichronam livrachah — learned about the region and developed contacts in the 1980s, when he served as the Pentagon’s director for Central Asia during the Reagan administration.

That was a desk job, but he got his boots on the ground for the first time in the late 1990s, when he established a consulting firm to assist nations and private clients on security and political matters. Armed with a generous grant from a corporate sponsor, he embarked on a series of diplomatic forays into dangerous military zones in Afghanistan and its eastern neighbor Pakistan, to promote an elaborate and ambitious plan he developed for regional cooperation under US supervision.

His closest call on Ambush Alley came in 2001, just four months before 9/11. He arrived in a remote location in northeast Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. His host was the nefarious militiaman, Ahmad Shah Massoud, commander of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance forces, who were fighting the Taliban.

“I landed there, and it turned out to be 14 miles from the front lines of the Taliban,” Dr. Krakowski recalled. “The day after I arrived, the Taliban attacked. We had to flee further inland to the Hindu Kush Mountains.”

Dr. Krakowski survived the visit, but he never saw Massoud again. Al-Qaeda assassinated Massoud two days before 9/11 in a suicide bombing ordered personally by Osama bin Laden.

Dr. Krakowski once told the Review, a YU alumni publication: “The work I do entails meeting with people in high-risk professions who sometimes meet their end in a violent manner.”

Dr. Krakowski experienced other close calls in Afghanistan on his first trip, three years earlier, when he met with Hamid Karzai, who later became Afghanistan’s president.

An armed convoy escorted him from the airport to spartan accommodations that consisted of a sleeping bag cushioned by just a thin mat. Guards armed with machine guns patrolled around the clock to keep insurgents away, but they couldn’t do much to rein in the local snake, scorpion, and rat population. While both Dr. Krakowski and Karzai survived that visit, Taliban agents assassinated Karzai’s father a few months later.

Even though 20 years have passed since his dangerous journeys, which also took him to Iran, I’m astonished by the matter-of-fact way Dr. Krakowski speaks. Well-educated in both Torah and geopolitics, he neither overplays nor underplays the drama of his travels. He says he never thought about being afraid until other people mentioned he should be, and at most, he admits to having underestimated the risks.

“By all normal means, I shouldn’t be here talking to you today,” he says as he sits comfortably in an office chair in his study.

Behind him is a map of Biblical Israel showing the division of the land by tribes, and to his right is a map of Israel in relief, along with some family pictures on overhead shelves.

“It is a bit unique. If I’d been told when I was 20 years old that I would end up doing all the things I have done, I would have told them they were completely crazy. Why would a nice Jewish boy be doing those things? This is what I can tell you — it’s all Hashgachah pratit and siyata d’Shmaya. I was in dangerous situations, but I actually thought that there was something important that I needed to do, and to do it, I had to go to these places.”