by Sarah Chayes
I hardly entertained any delusions of the same kind of outpouring from the prickly Afghans. And yet this historical juncture was pregnant with a unique potential. In contrast to the Balkans, Afghanistan was blessed with visionary leadership in Hamid Karzai. But the Afghans had suffered from too many leaps of faith in their recent turbulent past to sustain another if it did not pay off fast. Eve and I judged there were about six months to make a palpable difference before the moment would be lost. I went back to Afghanistan to meet Qayum in person and search for likely projects.
Qayum and I hit it off instantly, connecting, fanning the embers of each other’s enthusiasms.
One decision I urged upon him during that exploratory trip was to base Afghans for Civil Society in Kandahar, not Kabul. I knew how it went with postconflict capitals. They always draw the bulk of the international resources, as humanitarian organizations devise projects within driving distance of their spacious headquarters, and new restaurants open up to cater to the foreign crowds. I felt that it was important to reach beyond the capital and the artificial world that develops there. Only by that extra effort can money be distributed with any fairness through the country being assisted. And only by that effort can any sense be gained of the country’s real conditions. In the capital, solutions are viewed as abstract models, while the details—the local anecdotes that illustrate the projects’ true impact and meaning—never come to light.
A new culture takes root in postconflict capitals like Kabul. I am not sure—to adopt the terms of a debate among some humanitarians and some of their beneficiaries—whether humanitarian action as currently practiced constitutes a form of colonialism. I do find, however, reading those accounts of the nineteenth-century British in Afghanistan—with their servants, foxhounds, and cigars—a certain parallel with at least the lifestyle of Western aid workers in Kabul.
They live apart from Afghans in guarded compounds. They do not walk about, but are driven by chauffeurs. They eat special food, imitation Western, bought in special stores—instead of popping down to the corner for fresh-baked local bread. They indulge in riotous drinking parties, with almost no thought for how this may offend their Afghan staff, almost no realization that such behavior in itself constitutes a security risk: in a strictly dry culture, many Afghans take exception to the injection of such taboo behavior into their country, seeing it as exactly the kind of corruption that Westerners bring with them—another reason to keep Westerners out.
My bias in favor of local action immersed in local knowledge was to be confirmed and reconfirmed during my time in Afghanistan.
Such a bias would have argued in favor of any provincial town over Kabul. Even more so Kandahar, with its special symbolism as Afghanistan’s former capital and the native region of all its rulers. Kandahar, I knew, also had a special symbolism as the native region of the Taliban. In the new Afghanistan, it was a pariah. But I was sure that if Kandahar was left behind, the rest of Afghanistan would not be going anywhere.
Besides, I loved the place.
That spring of 2002, residents of the city dizzied by this latest revolution—their fourth in a quarter century—wore out a path to the house of the younger Karzai brother, Ahmad Wali. As the de facto representative of the new president in his home base, the de facto elder of the Popalzai tribe now that President Hamid was off in Kabul, and as a man known for getting things done, Ahmad Wali Karzai was one of the few fixed landmarks in sight.
Like most houses in Kandahar, his consists of two separate buildings, one for the family, one for receiving guests. The private residence is set back from the public one across a few feet of dry rose garden, where birds in wicker cages sing. Small bedrooms, a kitchen, and a Western-style living room for private talks or honored friends open onto a carpeted hallway with cushions on the floor, which serves as the general gathering place. Tea and glass dishes of raisins and pistachios, and meals laid out on a plastic cloth, are served here in shifts: first family and friends, then the platoon of young men who keep the place running. They are “Karzai’s people,” utterly devoted, utterly respectful, but reveling in a certain irreverent intimacy. Inside this sanctum the Karzai magic reigns, a kind of gracious calm, in the face of the hot, dusty whirlwind—human and meteorological—buffeting the house.
The front building is dedicated to the tribal elders and petitioners who fetch up at all hours, and must be welcomed and heard out without exception. Five separate receiving rooms are arrayed about its two floors. The indefatigable, beturbaned Lajwar guides each delegation to its appointed place, according to its rank, and whether—because of some feud or private confidence—it might be inopportune for its members to see or be seen by some other party present. Lajwar executes the steps of this complicated minuet with a surefootedness born of a detailed but unspoken familiarity with the private histories of all comers.
That spring of 2002 the building hardly emptied. You could tell with a glance if Ahmad Wali was home by the crowd of shoes waiting outside the door.
The tale of one group particularly moved him. The delegation, led by an elder with a running sore on one hand, explained that their village, Akokolacha, was in ruins. Abutting the perimeter of the Kandahar airport, it had been caught in that last withering barrage of U.S. bombing that delivered the deathblow to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Of some thirty mud-brick houses, ten and the village mosque had been reduced to misshapen mounds of earth. Families had scattered to Pakistan or were doubled up with friends in nearby hamlets.
Ahmad Wali Karzai made the trip to Akokolacha, a half hour out the airport road, to survey the damage. He came back genuinely distressed, and mentioned the villagers’ predicament to me.
There it was: a perfect project. Again I was reminded of Kosovo, where the rebuilding of houses the Serbs had trashed and burned in their final, furious bout of ethnic cleansing became the symbol of a new era. Within weeks of the Serbs’ retreat, the defiant skeletons of dozens of new homes aimed their limbs at the sky, with, snapping from their roof beams, the black eagle of the long-banned Albanian flag splayed wide against a red ground.
I was surprised at the contrasting lack of attention in Afghanistan to “shelter,” as it is termed in the aid biz, especially given the staggering number of refugees who had been camped out in neighboring countries not for days or weeks, but for years. Rebuilding the village of Akokolacha would be an important symbol, I thought, and even more so if American soldiers, in uniform, were to do the work.
I thought about the marine I had interviewed in his foxhole on Christmas day. How eloquent a message, if Americans were to be seen repairing what Americans had destroyed. What better way of demonstrating that President George W. Bush’s proclamation at the beginning of the bombing campaign was sincere: that the war was not against Afghans or Afghanistan, but against the criminal regime that had taken power there. Akokolacha’s impoverished farmers, long-distance taxi drivers, or small-time mechanics, who had fled the deafening violence of the U.S. bombing, could surely not be held accountable for Usama bin Laden. If they could regain what they had lost in this latest Afghan regime change, maybe they would understand that this one was different from the others, promising a better future for all Afghans, not just those whom chance had tossed to the top of the pile.
That I had even conceived of such an idea, complete with U.S. soldiers armed with picks and shovels, indicates how removed I was from contemporary humanitarian theory.
In the ongoing international debate about “humanitarian intervention,” one of the arguments made by responsible aid organizations is that troops participating in an armed intervention—even if the military action is said to be motivated by humanitarian or human rights concerns—should not be involved in postconflict relief and reconstruction. As parties to the conflict, humanitarian theorists argue, soldiers have no business mixing with civilian humanitarians in the field. The lines inevitably become blurred, and the neutrality that is a credo of humanitarian action is cast into doubt. Soldiers should keep to sold
iers’ work: maintaining the security and freedom of access necessary for aid agencies to do their job, ministering to the people.
To me, I confess, these distinctions seemed a bit theoretical. I suppose my thinking was stuck in the past, tangled up in the legend of the Marshall Plan in post–World War II Europe. Moreover, I could not efface yet another memory from the Kosovo conflict. When, with explicit prior warning, the Serbs deported tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians to Macedonia as the first NATO bombs fell, the United Nations refugee agency was caught hopelessly by surprise. I stood in the NATO briefing room in Brussels gaping up in horror at a television set on a wall bracket, watching masses of wretched Kosovo Albanians corralled in the mud of a no-man’s land just inside the Macedonian border, at the mercy of the Macedonian army.
Thousands of NATO troops were billeted right nearby. If they boasted no other skill, they certainly knew how to pitch a camp. “Why aren’t the soldiers building tents for those refugees?” I would practically shout to my fellow reporters, gathered in a knot below the TV. I later learned that it was the humanitarians’ refusal of assistance marred by military uniforms that had kept the troops away for several agonizing days.
In this matter as in others, Afghans for Civil Society was iconoclastic. We went right to the U.S. soldiers for help. We argued that rebuilding Akokolacha would enhance their image, and thus their security, just as I had told that young marine.
We could have saved our breath. U.S. Army Civil Affairs, the branch of the army charged with interactions with local civilians, and in this case, with any relief activity the army sponsors, does not actually perform any reconstruction itself. It pays local contractors, then monitors the work. And in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Civil Affairs was not contracting out the reconstruction of private property.
As general policy, this made sense. Otherwise, there were bound to be inequities. The army might find itself obliged to drill a private well or build a house for every village chief as the price of permission to assist his people.
In our own view, Akokolacha hamlet seemed worthy of an exception, since its inhabitants had been rendered homeless as a direct result of U.S. action. And yet that fact seemed to make it even more taboo. Above all, a precedent must not be set, we were told. It must not appear that Washington was taking any legal responsibility for war damage, lest it be induced to pay compensation or reparations. We talked to USAID, the State Department’s overseas development agency, which was spearheading the overall U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. We got the same answer. No precedents.
So we fell back on the goodness of ordinary American people. September 11 had unleashed such pent-up generosity and hunger to help, much of it frustrated; we hoped to tap into the receding tide.
In April, I returned to the United States from that quick Afghan trip for a period of intense, creative NGO conception side by side with my sister Eve. Some friends from the town of Concord, Massachusetts, Mary and David Clarke, had invited me to give a talk at the First Parish Church. In their farmhouse kitchen, familiar and comfortable to me as a pair of old jeans, Eve and I brought up the idea of rebuilding Akokolacha.
True to its central role in America’s own founding mythology, Concord preserves the spirit of direct democracy and community involvement in public affairs that animated the Thirteen Colonies during the years surrounding the American Revolution. It is one of those places still governed by town meeting, a yearly gathering of all interested citizens to thrash out and vote on issues of municipal importance. In between, committees and forums marshal Concord residents’ interest, energy, and money toward various worthy causes.
The Clarkes were enchanted by the Akokolacha idea, and went at it in their unparalleled way, mobilizing a whole network of Concord-and-beyond folks. A cabal of local activists (primarily women) dubbed themselves the Concord Friends of Afghans for Civil Society, and invited a select forty people to a fund-raising tea. The public middle schools joined in, holding a vote among the students on the slogan for T-shirts to send to kids in Akokolacha. “Concord and Akokolacha,” they chose. “We are the Bridge to Peace.” The declaration, traced in my laborious Pashtu, hung above an outline of the Concord Bridge where our own famous battle against the Redcoats was fought in 1775.
Struck by the similarities between the Pashtun tradition of the shura, or council of elders, and the selectmen who govern New England towns, the Concord Friends decided they wanted to send gifts and a letter from their selectmen to the Akokolacha elders. I called Ahmad Wali Karzai in Kandahar. He was thrilled and suggested sending radios. He said that when I came back we would go together to Akokolacha and convene a shura to explain the whole project and describe the special significance of Concord, and we would build a council room and name it the Concord Room.
I gave three talks in Concord in one day, the last one at the First Parish Church, which crowns the Puritan dignity of Concord’s village square. As assorted Clarkes and Eve and I and a few other friends stood around the church basement wolfing turkey sandwiches, with Mr. Clarke enjoining me to “just relax,” I realized this felt like nothing so much as the frenetic, exhausting energy of a political campaign.
Something like two hundred people showed up that night. It was an exercise totally unfamiliar to me. As wide a public as I might have reached during my reporting days, I never had to watch the people listening to me. I filed my stories from the privacy of my Paris apartment, often from under my winter parka, which I tented over my head to dampen the echo.
But I could feel the people with me. In a way, they knew me personally, since most of them listened to National Public Radio. Some had probably endured my company while they brushed their teeth in the morning. That night had the sparkle and intimacy of addressing a family reunion. For a grand finale, one lady asked me to do my NPR sign-off: “Sarah Chayes, NPR News, Paris.” For some mysterious reason it captivated people more than my reporting ever had. Something to do with the final s being pronounced like a z, and the long a in the middle—the name rhymes with haze. I had never done this SOC-out, as it is called, for an audience, and it normally comes at the end of a story, not just hanging out there by itself. So to trick myself into it, I turned my back, solemnly read the last paragraph of one of our project proposals, and signed off, “Sarah Chayes, NPR News, Concord.” To roars.
“It just about killed us,” Eve told her daughter on the phone a few days later, “but we got the money.”
And it went on like that. The people of Lincoln, Massachusetts, stepped up, in a neighborly competition with next-door Concord. Lincolnites turned out, another couple hundred of them, on a snowy Friday night at seven-thirty. I looked around the room, in wonder. What are all these people doing here? Like Concord’s, Lincoln’s commitment proved to be in persisting earnest. After a magic potion of a dinner Eve concocted one night, a brilliant, intuitive philanthropist named Greg Carr wondered if we could use an office in the middle of Harvard Square. He eventually funded the radio station we launched in Kandahar to the tune of $100,000.
We were stunned by the response we generated with our simple plea to do something concrete and direct and our promise that we would communicate our friends and donors about the fortunes of their project, in detail. We were not CARE or the American Red Cross, we promised. Contributors would not be receiving glossy self-congratulatory pamphlets in the mail. They would hear exactly what became of their money, personally, in the flesh. Suicidally, we promised that every single penny would go to project activities. We would find our overhead elsewhere. It began to dawn on me that I was offering myself up to donors as a kind of human sacrifice. Was there enough flesh and blood in me to satisfy them? As we registered people’s hunger for this approach, we grew almost frightened. What were we unleashing? What kind of sacred trust were we taking on by inspiring people this way? It got so that we almost avoided telling the latest new acquaintance what we were doing, lest the person offer to help.
And so we glimpsed the precious well of civil society
lying frustrated and untapped just below the surface of apparent U.S. indifference.
CHAPTER 14
PLUNDER AND SUBSIDY
MAY–SEPTEMBER 2002
THE RULE FOR CASH IS $10,000. If you’re taking more than $10,000 out of the United States, you have to declare it to customs. But having worked in various places lacking banks in my day, I was yet to be convinced of the value—for me—of that particular formality. So with $18,000 of Concord’s money secreted in various private places about my person, I returned to Afghanistan in May, just in time for the first offensive of summer heat.
Nothing came easily. I moved back in with my Achekzai family in the graveyard, which felt familiar, though the promiscuity and lack of a toilet were hard to contemplate as part of a permanent arrangement. With the windfall they had reaped from me and the NPR reporter who had replaced me, they had bought a television set and a dented satellite dish that they had anchored precariously to their mud roof. Now, of an evening, my maelmastun was filled will male neighbors glued, agog, to raunchy Bolly-wood images. Our card games were over.
It did not take long for Zabit Akrem to catch wind of my presence back in the house. He sent over a flunky this time, bearing a letter on provincial government stationery. I was still not allowed to live with a private family. My oldest host-brother and I went to see the big police chief in his office.