He made a man tell his family he would die.
And then he smiled when they brought him into the Manhattan federal courthouse to hear his sentence.
“He smiled,” a woman near David Rohde said, watching Haji Najibullah walk in. “How dare he smile.”
The capacity of the human face to arrange itself into expressions of ease while the body it belongs to has done what Najibullah’s body has done is one of the things the law cannot reach and does not try. The law can only assign years — forty-two of them, as Judge Katherine Polk Failla did this week, a number the prosecutor called for and the defense argued against and the judge pronounced while Najibullah kept his hands in front of him and Rohde watched from the gallery. The law does its work in numbers. The heart does its work elsewhere.
Rohde stood at the lectern and addressed the man who held him for seven months. “He lied to us and he is lying today,” Rohde said. “He is refusing to take responsibility for his actions as I look at him right now.” This is not the language of diplomacy. It is the language of a man who spent two hundred and eight days at the end of a gun, and who stood in a courtroom seventeen years later and said what he saw.
What happened during those months is documented. In November 2008, Rohde, then a reporter for the New York Times, arranged an interview with Najibullah, who had spoken to media before without incident. Najibullah changed the meeting place by phone. When Rohde, his translator, and his driver arrived, the road was blocked. Taliban militants blindfolded them and drove them to a house. From there they were moved across the border into Pakistan. Over the following months, Rohde was forced at gunpoint to record ransom videos. His family watched. He delivered the lines they demanded — “If you don’t help me, I will die” — and knew each word was torturing the people he loved. He staged a hunger strike. He pretended to be sick. He faked a suicide attempt. He did whatever he could, because that is what you do when a man is holding your life in his hands and you have no rope.
Until you find one. On June 9, 2009, while cleaning a safe house, Rohde found a car tow rope. He hid it under a pile of clothes. That night, when the guards slept, Rohde and his translator climbed to the roof, scaled the compound wall, and fled to a Pakistani military outpost. He reunited with his family. He wrote a book with his wife. He called it A Rope and a Prayer. The title names the two things that got him out: the physical means nobody planned, lying in a pile of clothes, and the spiritual petition nobody saw, offered in the dark of a safe house. Neither alone would have been enough.
Najibullah pleaded guilty in April 2025 to hostage taking and to providing material support for acts of terrorism resulting in death — the latter charge arising from his leadership of Taliban militants who attacked and killed American service members. His lawyer asked for eighteen years, arguing his client, born during the Russian occupation, tried to flee to Saudi Arabia, was forced to return when the American war began, and joined the Taliban because it “felt like it was the only decision.” The Taliban killed Najibullah’s brother in retaliation for Rohde’s escape. Before the sentence was pronounced, Najibullah, through a Pashto translator, said he “deeply” regretted his role and added that American soldiers were sacrificed by “the bad policies made by powerful men in American leadership and Taliban leadership.” The prosecution asked for life. The judge split the difference at forty-two.
And here the pastoral-prophetic column must do what it is built to do: hold the naming and the door open in the same paragraph without either one softening the other.
The naming: what Najibullah did was evil. The word is not too strong. The prophets use it for less. To take a man, to hold him for seven months, to force him at gunpoint to make his own wife watch him beg for his life — the tradition’s vocabulary for this conduct is not unfortunate, not regrettable, not concerning. The tradition’s vocabulary is evil. Dorothy Day, whose Catholic Worker pacifism refused to call war anything but murder even as the country celebrated, would not have been soft on this. The pastoral register does not mean softening the word for what was done. It means refusing to close the book on the person who did it.
But Exodus 22:21 does not say “unless you were also a stranger.” Leviticus 19:33 says, “You shall love the alien as yourself,” and makes no exception for the alien who was himself oppressed. The commandment’s power is its refusal of the exemption: thirty-six times in Torah, the instruction to love the stranger is grounded in having been the stranger — not in having earned the right to pass the cruelty forward. To have been driven from your home does not entitle you to drive another man from his, and to have suffered is not a license to make others suffer. Najibullah did not merely drive Rohde from his home. He held him. He broke him. He made him beg. And the smile in the courtroom is not the face of a man who has reckoned with any of it.
I am also bound by the discipline that refuses the exempt-prophet posture. The United States prosecuted the war that destabilized Afghanistan enough to produce the conditions in which men like Najibullah could operate. The lives that war shattered — including Najibullah’s brother — are not abstractions to the families who carry them. We who funded that war, who voted for the people who ordered it, who served in it or sent others to serve in it, do not get to stand outside the field of accountability while we name the evil the war produced. The climate of violence that made a Taliban commander possible is a climate our own decisions helped to build. This is not a separate paragraph of confession before the real column starts. This is the column. The naming of evil and the confession of complicity are the same act, the way Archbishop Romero’s cese la represión and his open hand to the soldier were the same homily.
The driver and the translator — Rohde’s Afghan companions, held alongside him in the same rooms, under the same threat — deserve a reckoning the court record barely provides. Their names do not travel as far as Rohde’s. Their suffering was equal. The law that sentenced Najibullah heard Rohde’s name again and again, but the driver and translator were never asked to stand at that lectern. The Torah’s insistence that “you shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen” refuses to ignore this deficit. Thomas Merton, standing at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, was overwhelmed with the recognition that he loved all those people, that they were his and he theirs, “that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” The translator and the driver were not strangers. They were held in the same dark, and they deserve the same weight.
Rohde left a note for his wife before he left for the interview. “This is my responsibility,” he wrote. “I love you so much and am sure this will be OK. Please go and be happy and move forward if things go very wrong.” In court, he apologized to his family and broke into tears. “It was a huge mistake to go to the interview,” he said. “I will always regret it.”
A journalist going to an interview is not a mistake. A man who has been held captive for seven months standing in a courtroom and apologizing to his family for the pain his captivity caused them is not making an argument about fault. He is doing what the human heart does when it has been through something the human heart was not designed to carry and comes out the other side still beating. He is saying: I am sorry you went through this because of me. He is saying: I would take it back if I could. He is saying what every survivor says in one form or another, which is that the fact of having survived does not feel like vindication.
The grin works only if you have already decided the person across from you does not count. And the door the gospel always leaves open — the door Romero stood at when he commanded the repression to stop and then held his hands out to the soldier who had done the killing — stands in the same courtroom that heard the smile and the whisper and the sentence and the weight of a man against a compound wall. It stands there whether Najibullah ever steps through it or not. The law can assign the years. The rest depends on something the law cannot dispense and cannot withhold. And Christ’s account of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25, does not permit the option of grinning at the man you held captive and claiming you meant well. “I was a stranger,” he says, “and you did not welcome me.” The sentence is not about theological niceties. It is about what happens when you look at a human being and decide he does not count, and about the thing the gospel refuses to let any of us close.