Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  Nasrine, who speaks French as well as Dari, meets and converses with everyone. From her I learn that the Afghan visitors in the compound are all Muslims, but vehemently opposed to the Taliban. As a practicing Muslim, Nasrine feels comfortable with them; but she is also a strong feminist, which she publicly asserts by refusing to cover her hair. Like a growing number of Muslim feminists, Nasrine is committed to struggling for women’s rights within Islam.

  The strong link between all of Massoud’s allies is that they revile the Taliban and its close ties with Pakistan, which they believe plans to exert its power over what would become a failed Afghan state. Afghanistan’s lucrative drug and smuggling economy is said to be one of the lures for Pakistan. Equally important is the country’s strategic position in relation to India.

  One afternoon, I sit with Nasrine and Shoukria, Assim, and the Engineer, whose name, it turns out, is Kamal Nezaami. He owned a construction company in Kabul, which he abandoned after the Taliban arrived, and then worked in Pakistan. Kamal tells us that he has, completely on his own, developed a reconstruction plan for the region, with an astonishing four hundred projects mapped out. The war with the Soviets, the civil war, ongoing battles with the Taliban, plus the terrible drought, have heaped devastation upon devastation. Kamal has surveyed the locations of destroyed bridges, roads, irrigation channels, schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure necessary for economic restoration. He is anguished that he has the plans and the people who could do the work, but no funds.

  The conversation shifts to the large number of women’s associations in the region, and Shoukria wonders whether these groups could possibly help with reconstruction. Nasrine explodes with enthusiasm. “It’s a fantastic idea,” she cries out. “We can organize women in the States and they can adopt the women’s associations here and provide them with funding and goods. We can get something really big started!”

  “What are you talking about?” I blurt out. “Where are these US women? And who will organize them? Certainly not just you and me and the few others in NEGAR USA.” I am really worried that the Afghans will take her seriously.

  But Assim thinks I am questioning the existence of women’s associations inside Afghanistan. He leaves the room and comes back with a map. Spreading it out, he sweeps his hand over most of the area north and west of Kabul. This, this, and this, he says, is under Northern Alliance control. Then he names towns and villages where there are women’s associations.

  “It’s wonderful,” I tell Assim, “that women are free to organize in your territory and it would be great if they can help with these projects. But I am sorry to say that it would be very, very hard to get many American women really involved.” Nasrine nods glumly. I am truly unhappy to disappoint them. I know that there are a great many American women who are involved with local, national, and international projects, to address a multitude of needs, but I have had too much organizing experience to think that the few of us in NEGAR would have much success with a massive project such as this.

  Nasrine suggests that I show Assim the photographs of my 1990 visit to Kabul. I have brought them with me in the hope that someone might recognize Shakira and Zahera, whom I still think about. Zahera’s daughter, Leila, would now be seventeen years old. If they survived the fall of the Communist government and the chaos of the following years, they would now likely be living under the Taliban. I dream of rescuing them, of providing Leila with a college education. I never find anyone who knows them, but Assim does recognize the guerrilla leader, Feroza, who told us how she had organized the women of small villages to defend themselves.

  “Oh, yes!” he nods. “I know who she is. She was a very famous fighter. Our enemy, certainly, but she did lead a band of women warriors.”

  I had never known whether to believe Feroza’s story of being the commandant of seven thousand armed women who fought the “counterrevolutionaries,” as she called the mujahidin, so Assim’s confirmation elates me.

  The next day, I have a private conversation with Assim about religion and the problems with state religion. Since I know Israel fairly well, I talk about the role of state religion there and the fact that Israel does not have a constitution to protect civil rights. The Orthodox have special status and privileges that are not available to other Israelis, which leads to endless internal tension. I know that Islam sees state and religion as unitary, but I remind Assim that there are secular Muslim states, such as Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia. Both Assim and I, a Muslim and a Jew, are pleased to be talking like this. I’m particularly aware that we’re having this discussion not far from the Taliban capital and the battlefields of their massing militia.

  That same day, Assim informs us that Massoud is “supervising” our agenda, and that he hopes to meet with us. Assim also assures us that the helicopter that will be taking us to Faizabad should arrive soon. But not yet.

  We decide to use our extra time in Khodja Bahauddin to visit a nearby school for displaced girls. We head off in the jeep with Zubair, Assim’s assistant, and drive down a leveled gravel road that ends at a windswept plateau, empty except for the school. On a path of new concrete slabs, we walk past a neat, clean concrete latrine to the one-story school building. Constructed in a small U, it surrounds a tiny courtyard garden planted with grass and corn. The building holds four classrooms, a meeting room, and an office and serves between 160 and 200 girls each day, with twenty-five girls to a classroom and double sessions.

  The girls are lovely, as most Afghan children seem to me. They have warm, taffy-colored skin, brilliant, large, dark eyes, and eager expressions. They are dressed in brightly colored loose dresses that fall to the floor. They remind me of children in eighteenth-century picture books, except for the headscarves they all wear. Some scarves are tied under the chin, some are tied behind, gypsy style; others are loosely draped over dark hair.

  I want to embrace them all, but I also feel like weeping with the knowledge of how vulnerable they are. Something like a prayer keeps running through my mind, a prayer that somehow the means to safeguard these children will be found.

  Although the girls sit three to a table, I am surprised at how well provided they are with supplies—textbooks, writing tablets, and abacuses. One class is learning numbers; another is working on art projects, and all the girls have colored pencils in cases. Nasrine talks to the children, asking them what they want to be when they grow up. All want to be teachers or doctors. We hand out candy to the delighted girls.

  We sit down with the principal—a man—in his office. He has been a high school principal in a coed school and expresses great anger that in much of Afghanistan half of all children—the female half—cannot be educated. This little school teaches Islamic catechism, but as part of a larger academic program. It is a joint project of two nongovernmental groups, ACTED from Turkey and ECHO, the European Community Humanitarian Office.

  Back at the compound, a new guest has arrived: Edward Girardet, an American resident in Switzerland, and a well-known foreign correspondent who writes for the Christian Science Monitor and National Geographic, among other publications. He has come with an interpreter, Mohammad Shreib, an Afghan exile who lives in Virginia. Ed had been in Afghanistan with the mujahidin many times during the war with the Soviets and was highly thought of for his dispatches and his powerful photographs. He has come to Khoja Bahauddin for an interview with Massoud. Although it is obvious that Massoud is not here, Ed plans to wait a few days in hope that he will arrive.

  The next morning, I wake up much earlier than the others, as always, and stroll out to the rear verandah. Leaning on the balustrade, I glance down at a small house below. It is a segregated guesthouse for mullahs, uncontaminated by the presence of infidels. I heave a great sigh. Despite that jarring concept, I am so happy to be in Afghanistan. How fortunate I am to have this experience—a Jewish woman in this extraordinary Muslim country.

  I sink into a chair and fall into a reverie. I dream that I am on a hill, in a white castle, and the handso
me young mujahidin are princely knights gathered around King Massoud’s Round Table. The peasants are all below. But—there is no Queen Guinevere! I sit up. Even though it has been obvious since the first day we arrived, it suddenly occurs to me that there is not a single Afghan woman in the compound. All the servants are men, the cooks are men, and certainly all the Northern Alliance staff are men. Of course, this is Massoud’s northern base and a prime target for the Taliban so perhaps that is why there are no women around. Still, I am suddenly sobered. How will women ever become part of public life when they are isolated even from this more open resistance group?

  Later that day we go for another visit, this time to a camp for the internally displaced that the French journalists traveling with Shoukria are eager to see. We are a large group: the French, two Arab journalists who are new guests, and Nasrine, Sara, Shoukria, and me. Zubair drives us to another high, barren plateau, where we come upon a village of tents. It is strikingly different from photographs I have seen of densely crowded refugee camps. The treeless plateau stretches to the horizon, and the tents are not cheek by jowl; here there is space, and sweeping vistas, a sense of openness, but also one of emptiness.

  When we step out of the car, we are immediately surrounded by a group of ragged, unsmiling children and old men, many of them disabled, clothed in tattered kameez and turbans and, despite the heat, dog-eared jackets. One group of women stands apart, bunched in front of a few tents. Other women stand at the single well, silently watching us.

  The men start speaking, almost shouting, torrents of words that, according to Nasrine and Shoukria, describe the horrors they suffered under the Taliban until they escaped from their villages. The men also complain that the world has forgotten Afghanistan, that the UN has abandoned them. These complaints seem almost a memorized litany to me. Nasrine tries to rapidly translate, but it is unnecessary. Their wails and their body language tell most of their stories.

  I walk away. In Kabul in 1990, I had heard similar laments about the destruction, the tortures, the murders that people had suffered at the hands of the mujahidin. I have heard so many hideous stories about the viciousness, the loathsomeness of the Talibs; I know it is weak of me, but I just do not want to hear any more. So I walk away to observe more of the camp.

  The most common shelters are shabby tents. Blankets are stacked in the rear to use in the cool nights and for the freezing winter to come. Rags tied to thin poles serve as walls or screens to separate one family’s space from another’s. The most wretched shelters are made of straw. Generally, straw is only for the flimsy huts that are used to store family belongings such as plastic tubs and buckets, iron cooking pots, and what look like more rags—but are surely the families’ only clothing. Cooking is done in pits dug in front of the tents. I pass some deep pits that I guess are latrines. It is not just the stark poverty that is so grim but also the barrenness, which imparts a sense of despair.

  We spend most of the afternoon at the camp, walking around, watching and listening as Nasrine and Shoukria speak to the people and translate for us. The sun is setting and the darkening sky shows the first stars of evening as we head back to the truck. Shoukria and Nasrine are moving slowly, finding it hard to leave without having been able to help in some way. They have vitamins and medicines and two hundred dollars to give to an administrative entity running the camp. But they have found no management, no camp committee. We are almost at the truck when Shoukria spies a strange construction. It is made of stripped-down tree branches covered with sheets and blankets, to form a tentlike room. Shoes are lined up outside, and inside we can see forty or fifty men kneeling on a grass floor mat.

  “A mosque!” Shoukria crows.

  She motions to Nasrine and me to follow her and strides into the makeshift mosque, walking straight through the rows of kneeling men. Shoukria has done the inadmissible! Not only are women not allowed to enter the area of a mosque where men are praying, but she is dressed as she always is: in pants and a shirt with a long beige silk scarf cascading from her neck. She never covers her mop of black hair. Nasrine and I are also in slacks, and have not covered our heads—much more of a problem for Nasrine than for me, but clearly all three of us have broken just about every rule there is about women’s presence and behavior in a mosque.

  Shoukria continues straight up to the front and stands before the group of mullahs sitting there. There is a stunned silence. The camp children and men who have been following us rush to peer inside. A woman has entered the mosque! A woman is demanding attention from the mullahs! Nasrine sits down on the ground and motions me to do the same. There is no way I can get down on the ground so I hunch over, trying to be inconspicuous—not very easy under the circumstances, but Shoukria begins to speak and everyone’s attention shifts to her. First she addresses the mullahs. Then she turns to face the congregation. I cannot understand her words, but something about her rhythmic cadences reminds me of the great African American preachers of the civil rights movement. Shoukria spreads the dollars she has brought like a fan. She raises her arm in a commanding gesture. There are excited shouts and exclamations from the men. Nasrine begins translating for me.

  First Shoukria asks the gathering, “Who are your leaders in the camp?” The men respond, “There are none.” She asks, “Then who are the influential men among you?” The men shout and point out six men, “This one and this one.”

  Shoukria tells the men that we have brought money from the people of France and the people of the United States to help the camp. “This is your money,” she says.

  She turns to the mullahs and then back to the people. “I give this money to your mullahs,” she declaims. “But it is not for them. They will keep it safe for you.”

  She lowers her voice. “You must work with your leaders. You must divide yourselves into six groups. Bring your women with you. Talk together about what the camp needs. What will make your lives here better. What will benefit your children. Then go to the mullahs with your leaders, and use this money wisely.”

  The sound of expelled breath from the massed men flows like a wave through the enclosure. It is dark inside the mosque. Dusk has passed into night. Blindly, I aim my camera in Shoukria’s direction and click. The flash illuminates the scene for an instant and then I click the camera again. Miraculously, back in the States, I find that I have captured the dramatic scene.

  Shoukria leads us out of the mosque and we walk quickly to the truck. As the truck pulls away, the three of us burst into excited shouts, “You see,” Nasrine, once again the educator, tells us, “you see the genius of Shoukria’s organizing. She has begun the process of transforming this dispirited, chaotic camp into a community.” I believe, at that moment, in the possibility that Nasrine is right. My admiration for Shoukria overflows.

  Two days have passed since our dramatic visit to the camp, and we are still unable to get to Faizabad. Sandstorms have made helicopter travel dangerous. A gritty haze fills the air, and the infrequent breezes have turned into a sharp wind. We decide that, despite the weather, we can wait no longer and will go by land. Ed has also decided to leave, since there has been no sign of Massoud. He suggests that we hire two vans and drive as a convoy as far as Faizabad, from where he will travel on to Kabul and then go home to Europe. The primitive roads are hazardous and we will be driving through desert, so Ed says it will be safer to travel with two vehicles in case one breaks down.

  We all head by jeep into a nearby town to make arrangements for the vans, to place satellite phone calls to extend my ticket even longer than anticipated, and to alert Cindy that Sara will be traveling overland to Faizabad to interview Mary MacMakin.

  The jeep pulls into a large, empty square, where a few staked saplings are bent double in the wind. Zubair stops before the first in a line of boxlike structures on a raised walkway above the dirt street. We clamber up onto the walkway—there are no steps—and go into a small store—nothing more than a recycled storage container. The young man who owns the store and the sa
tellite phone sits on the floor near the open doorway. We pay him and place calls to the United States that go through quickly. Nasrine speaks to Max, her husband, and makes arrangements. I speak to one of my sons and send messages to the rest of the family. Sara’s employer gives her approval.

  We agree to leave at six the next morning. At 5:30, I get up, and walk over to the other side of the compound, where I find Mohammed Shreib standing beside two beat-up vans, the best they can find. We finally leave at 8:30, both vans piled high with all the luggage. We embrace Shoukria, who will be returning to France, and Assim, Zubair, and Jaheen, our constant companions. I have become particularly attached to Jaheen, who I have come to realize is wretchedly unhappy, ardent for an education, desperate to get out of war-torn Afghanistan and build a future for himself.

  I am in the first van, in front, beside the driver, with Ed and Shreib in the back. As soon as we leave the township, the landscape becomes a wasteland, an eternity of dry, cracked earth. Sterile hills loom on the horizon. In a good year with enough rainfall, this land would have been rich with sweeping fields of grain, opulent with herds of braying cattle. We ride in silence, overwhelmed by the wretchedness of the scenery. Until the first breakdown.

  The engine has been smoking for some distance. The driver jumps out and retrieves cans of water from the back. We wait as the engine cools down. It is obvious that the van has a leaking water tank. Ed curses softly under his breath. We haven’t seen the second car since we left Khodja Bahauddin.