Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  During this time, the Cold War continued to intensify and a new Great Game developed between the two most powerful twentieth-century empires, the United States and the Soviet Union. And Afghanistan was once again the playing field. The Soviet government invaded in 1979 while the United States chose covert intervention.

  Now I was about to land in this deeply traditional and religious country that was emerging from a fierce ten-year battle against an occupying army, a country that was now apparently mired in a civil war.

  Proof that there is reason to be concerned about safety comes when we are told not to worry about the landing, since Afghan pilots have perfected a spiral-descent tactic that avoids the missiles the mujahidin are hurling at the city! We hold our collective breath as the plane begins its twirling descent into Kabul and lands without incident. At the small, empty airport, several international aid workers are astonished to come across three Americans. We are, indeed, rare visitors.

  Zahera and Shakira, two women from the All-Afghan Women’s Council that is hosting us, greet us and drive us downtown to the three-story Hotel Kabul. We travel through a city that shows little damage from the war. A settlement for some twenty-five hundred years in the Kabul River valley, it is situated at an elevation of six thousand feet, lying in a bowl encircled by the treeless foothills of the Hindu Kush range. The city’s beautiful setting is also eminently strategic: it is key to the Khyber Pass and, potentially, control of the Indian subcontinent. The city was spared wholesale destruction during the war, as both the Soviets and the Communist government needed it in order to control the country.

  Zahera and Shakira are apologetic that we are not staying at Kabul’s luxury hotel, the Continental, situated on one of the hills surrounding the city like a necklace. But it is safer in town. We are told that we cannot leave the hotel without an escort and that we will not see any of the country outside Kabul. They justify the limits of our trip by explaining that the city is swollen with people fleeing from devastated villages, that the borders with Pakistan and Iran are “porous,” and that yes, as we have been told, the mujahidin are still battling the government. We are devastated. We had imagined we would be able to travel outside the city and be on our own once in a while.

  With many apologies, the two women leave us, and we head down to dinner in the hotel’s gloomy, cavernous, and nearly empty dining-room. The old, rambling, yellow stucco hotel is not centrally air-conditioned, the heat is oppressive, and flies are everywhere.

  Our hosts have given us our itinerary to review. It is a tight schedule of meetings with women’s groups and visits to hospitals, schools, orphanages, and museums—a typical agenda when visiting a country as guests of a sponsoring group. A tide of depression sweeps over me. Although I had taken for granted an agenda such as the one we face, I had assumed that we would then be free to wander on our own and would be taken to see other parts of Afghanistan. How was it that I hadn’t taken it in when Miagol told us that the country was in the midst of a civil war?

  My spirits revive the next day when Shakira and Zahera say that they had to leave us so quickly the previous night to return to their families because we had arrived on Eid-e-Qurban, a major Muslim holiday and, even in Communist Afghanistan, a national holiday. Women customarily prepare festive dinners for family gatherings, and Shakira was worried because her traditional husband expected her to be at home, instead of showing the sights to some American women. I laugh when she admits this, and tell her about the many times I had been at a demonstration or an international conference instead of home with my husband and children. Except that my husband and family were supportive of what I was doing.

  Sweet-faced, eager, and outgoing, Shakira is in her early forties and looks very American—a bit plump, with a short haircut and Western-style clothes. She is an English-language professor at Kabul University. “Oh, my God!” she says breathlessly that first morning as we get to know each other. “You are the first native English speakers I have ever been with! I am scared to death!”

  “Oh, my God!” turns out to be one of her favorite English expressions, a form of punctuation for her stories. “I do not just put the milk pitcher on the table and a glass beside his plate,” she says, describing how she waits on her husband. “I must pour the milk into his glass. I cannot just put bread and butter on the table. I must butter his bread. He never tells me that something tastes good, but if he doesn’t like it. Oh, my God! Kill me! I want to die.”

  It turns out that her husband, an airplane mechanic, is typical. At every meeting we go to we are told that with few exceptions Afghan men—even men in the Communist Party, even young men in the university—are traditionally opposed to women being politically active. Most of the women we meet began their political work in secret.

  Shakira, her husband, and their four sons live in a two-bedroom apartment in an old building. One son is presently in Moscow at a university; two sons share a bedroom; and the youngest sleeps in the living room, which is also where the family eats. “My kitchen is so small that I bump against the wall as I cook, and we have no shower or bathtub so we must all sponge bathe from a bucket of water,” Shakira tells us. Every morning before she meets us, she hand washes everyone’s clothes, irons, cleans, and prepares all the meals.

  As a young girl, Shakira says, she felt strongly about the inequality of people and the condition of women. Her story is not an unusual one among educated, urban Afghans. She spent fifteen years as a member of the All-Afghan Women’s Council, which had been illegal during the reign of Zahir Shah, without her husband knowing about her underground activities. But she was always afraid he would find out. When he did finally discover her secret political life, “there was much negative reflection,” she says. She continued her “struggle,” as she puts it, and now, she happily reports, “I don’t even have any trouble with my husband or his family.”

  Zahera is more serious than Shakira. Perhaps for this reason, I feel more affinity with her. Tall, well built, and also always dressed in Western clothes, including pearl earrings and a simple brooch, Zahera unfailingly appears dignified, yet gentle. Some days her engaging six-year-old daughter, Leila, comes with her on our tours. Leila looks just like her mother, the same high cheekbones, long, thick, curly hair, and sweet, laughing eyes. She is very shy and generally hangs back from us. Most unusually, Zahera was married late, to a widower, a man she worked with politically. I gather that they have an exceptional, mutually respectful relationship and that Zahera has no difficulty with her political responsibilities.

  Our host group, the All-Afghan Women’s Council, was founded in the 1920s during the reign of King Amanullah. During its long history, the council has survived by accommodation, but the focus has always been on empowering women and rendering assistance where needed. While we are in Afghanistan, the council calls for a compromise settlement with the mujahidin so that reconstruction of the country can begin.

  Our first meeting is with the council, at their bungalow provided by the government. At that point, I have no glimmering of how untypical the comfortable chairs, the flowers on side tables, and the coffee table set with tea and cookies are. All the women wear Western dress, mostly silk prints. On the streets in Kabul many women wear the burqa, although it is common to see women walking down the street together, one in a short skirt, another in a burqa with the top thrown back and the front left open, swinging back and forth, as she walks. Women appear to be free to wear what they choose. Nothing I see leads me to believe that women’s clothes will become a battleground of deep symbolic and political importance when, two years later, the government is overthrown by the mujahidin.

  Women from the council often visit refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, where millions of Afghans fled during the war against the Soviets. “We go,” one woman tells us, “to provide some education, even some work for the women, and to bolster their morale.” Another breaks in, “The mullahs dominate the camps. Women are even more oppressed there than in traditional families here. W
hen women in the camps go outside, they must be completely covered by the burqa, the girls get no schooling, and there is little opportunity for the women to earn a living.”

  On another day, we meet with a group supported by the council, called the Families of Martyrs, which was organized in 1985 to provide for widows and mothers who had lost husbands and children in the war. These women are more traditional than the political women of the council. They wear long dresses and shawls over their hair, or burqas with their faces uncovered.

  Each woman’s story is more horrifying than the one before. Fatima, young and very beautiful, her eyes a light seagreen, has a white scarf pushed back over her black hair. She had lived in a provincial village with her husband, a government army officer, and their six-year-old daughter. She was pregnant when the mujahidin attacked the village because it was in an area controlled by the government. Ten days after the fighting, she learned that her husband’s body was at the bottom of a hill outside the village. She sobs as she describes how birds had eaten away his eyes. She wanted to bring his remains back to the village but could not do it herself, so she asked her sister-in-law for help. The mujahidin were there, waiting, when the two women returned. They said she could have the body but they would take her sister-in-law. The young woman has not been seen since, and Fatima weeps as she considers the girl’s fate.

  Following another attack, Fatima and other village women were taken to a mujahidin camp, where they were forced to become sexual slaves. She escaped with her daughter and infant, and somehow made her way to a refugee camp in Pakistan where her brothers lived. But mujahidin were also menacing refugees in the camp, so she set out again with both children, crossing back into Afghanistan, and this time managed to get herself and her two small children to Kabul to live with her husband’s family.

  Fatima is almost hysterical by now, as she describes her father-in-law’s demand that she marry her brother-in-law, even though he is already married. According to Islamic law as it is being interpreted by some in Afghanistan, men can have four wives; widows are not allowed to remarry except to the husband’s brother, even if the brother is a baby. If they try to marry someone else, they lose their children to the former husband’s family.

  The stories go on and on. One woman, with tears streaming down her face, describes watching her son and his friends at play from her small kitchen window when suddenly a group of armed men passed through the village and casually turned on the children and shot them. Others tell of having their children brought home with arms or legs blasted away by land mines.

  But not all the stories we hear are of helplessness against war and weapons. We are introduced to a woman named Feroza, who is older than the others, a large, powerful-looking woman dressed in a long black dress with a black shawl over her head. I am struck by her look of force and dignity. When the mujahidin attacked villages, they often killed the men and abducted the women. We are told that Feroza organized a defense committee of two hundred women to defend the women of her village. She went to the government in Kabul for weapons, and when the next attack came, the women were ready, able to protect themselves. Her village has been spared ever since. Feroza says she is the commander of seven thousand armed women around the region. While the numbers she cites strain credulity, I am nonetheless filled with admiration for her.

  The women we meet never speak of abuse by the Russians, nor do they mention the people’s hatred of the Soviet troops or the Afghan Communist government. Of course, they all come from villages in the countryside that are controlled by the government and its Soviet allies, and their homes are under attack by the mujahidin. The mujahidin, for all the women we speak to, are the enemy, referred to as “counter revolutionaries.” But there is little love for the Soviets either. Although there are few signs of it in Kabul, I have read about the terrible destruction wrought by Soviet troops during the war. The Soviets had sent in 120,000 combat troops, including thousands of elite Spetsnaz soldiers, their equivalent of the Green Berets. The invasion was led by tanks and armored personnel carriers, bristling with heavy machine guns and rockets, and with tactical air support.

  As Afghans organized to resist the Soviets and the Afghan Communist government, three countries provided their main support: the United States, which used the mujahidin as Cold War proxies against the Russians; Saudi Arabia, which claimed that the mujahidin were holy warriors; and Pakistan, which sought an opening wedge for its own interests in Afghanistan. Thus the mujahidin were generously supplied with lethal modern weaponry. In 1983, Congressman Charlie Wilson, working with the CIA, provided them with US portable surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which destroyed Soviet air superiority. In response, the Soviets bombed villages and farms, poisoned wells, killed livestock, and tortured and murdered civilians. Over half the Afghan population fled their homes.

  And now Gabi, Cynthia, and I are sitting with women who have been caught between these forces, and we are constantly brought to tears by their heartrending stories. Equally upsetting is the way they plead, “Tell our stories. Tell the American people. If they only know, they will stop arming the mujahidin.” There is no way we can explain to these women that we are “outsiders” in the American power structure, that we have no influence on our government. The contrast between how blithely I have come on this trip and what these women expect of me becomes more oppressive as the appeals multiply everywhere we go.

  Early each morning, to maintain my equanimity, I take a solitary walk in the hotel’s overgrown, luxuriant garden. The old arthritic gardener who putters among the trees and flowers always greets me with a warm smile. As I wander down the paths, I look up at streaks of light, magnesium flares that flash across the sky to divert missiles from Arianna Airlines’ scheduled flights. I fantasize that I am in an ancient Islamic garden. I name each flower and tree: There are orange poppies, old pink and white roses, spectacular sunflowers that open wider every morning and that I photograph each day. Purple wisteria and lavender rose of sharon bloom alongside lilac and multicolored anemones. Shasta daises and petunias, red geraniums and brilliant zinnias grow entangled with each other. There are cedars and a eucalyptus tree.

  When I leave the garden, we begin our daily crisscross of Kabul to our many meetings, always accompanied by a caravan of small automobiles that carry armed men for our protection. It seems a poor and weary city, not like the one described by Robert Byron in The Road to Oxiana where a boulevard designed by King Amanullah is said to be “One of the most beautiful avenues in the world—four miles long, lined with tall white-stemmed poplars. In front of the poplars run streams confined by grass margins. Behind them are shady foot-walks and a tangle of yellow and white roses.” In 1990, the broad avenues are almost empty, although the narrow side streets teem with jostling people. Along these lanes open store fronts overflow with household merchandise and wagons are piled high with spices, fruits, and vegetables. There are lovely old tiled mosques and large Romanesque palaces, now used for museums and government offices. Farther out, on dusty unpaved streets, are clusters of houses built of mud-brick, and hundreds of large metal shipping containers, ubiquitous in developing countries, used for everything from workshops and makeshift factories to neighborhood markets. The encircling hills seem very close.

  One day, our hosts accede to our complaints about being confined, and our caravan of cars drives up a perilous, stony road so we can get out and walk through a village among dwellings that from a distance had looked as though carved out of rock. The ruins of an ancient stone wall run up and over the higher hills. From the heights, sand-colored Kabul is dotted with the green of trees and parks, and the Kabul River sends out sparkles of light.

  But we have little time for respite, as our rounds of visits and tours continues. We are taken to two government orphanages. Wars beget orphans. At the orphanage for babies, all dressed in blue pajamas, some of them are active and respond with delight to the candy we bring. Others are dull-eyed, too listless to respond. There are about five hundred babies
in the institution, but adoptions are not allowed because family members might return for them after the war. As we find everywhere we go, most of the directors and staff are women, replacing tens of thousands of men killed or disabled in the war. The government seems to be doing its best to provide for the children while appeals for help to the international community go unanswered because the Communist government is under boycott by the West.

  Another day we meet with Suraya Parlika, director of the Red Crescent, the equivalent of the Red Cross in Islamic countries. Her uncle, Abdul Wakil, is the foreign minister. I am especially interested when she mentions Peace Village—a community in Oberhausen, Germany, which I had visited three years earlier, where an extraordinary group of doctors and nurses treat and fit disabled children from war-torn areas with prosthetic limbs. As of 1990, Afghanistan, which leads the world in the number of unexploded land mines, has sent six hundred children to the Peace Village through the Red Crescent.

  Two special days have been set aside for visiting our hosts’ workplaces. We go first to the trade school for adult women that Zahera directs. The women are taught tailoring, weaving, and embroidery, along with literacy, nutrition, and family hygiene. A museum of tribal garments is on the top floor, and some of the younger women, as well as Zahera’s daughter, Leila, put on a fashion show for us, dressed in the old, elaborately designed, richly-colored robes.