by Sarah Chayes
But it was a real war. And it took an appalling toll in the elements of civilization that were more painstaking for Afghanistan to acquire than other countries: the orchards, the irrigation systems hollowed out of stone and laboriously maintained for generations, and in blood, in innocent blood. The Soviets, shot at from a village, would come back with their invincible helicopter gunships and raze the village, bring down the mud-brick houses on their occupants, splinter the bones of the elders, eviscerate the women never once seen by a stranger’s eyes, sow mines among the almonds and apricots so those who longed to tend the trees would be blown up trying. A million Afghans were killed in that decade of war, most of them civilians.
In time, the Afghans, with their rifles and their white horses, and finally with their U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles, won the war. But the victory, miraculous though it was given the odds, unimaginable though it was in its impact on the organization of the whole world, came too late to avert an irreparable loss. The Afghans lost their courage. For, before the Stingers arrived, courage could do nothing against a helicopter flying out of range, whose reinforced belly was immune to bullets anyway. The inequality in firepower between the Soviets and the Afghans was so great as to render courage irrelevant. The Afghans’ courage was disempowered, as was their mythical hardiness. I saw the marks from entrance and exit wounds in my Achekzai host-father’s lower gut. “But then what are you doing alive?” I exclaimed, eyeing a hand-breadth of scar tissue on his side where the slug blew its way out. “Oh, I just took my shawl and tied myself up in it,” he answered, perhaps with a touch of bravado. Even the courage to do this, even this superhuman ability simply to survive, could not keep a million innocent people from dying. And so the Afghans’ courage deserted them.
The meaning of this loss is that it is no longer necessary to kill Afghans to intimidate them. When I was reporting, I was astonished to find my big, strapping, dignified driver repeatedly malingering when I wanted to go someplace the least bit dangerous. I was astonished when my interpreter quit his fantastically well-paying job with me, citing the intolerable risk. The last straw came when I asked our driver to pull over, and I got out of the car to follow a dirt track toward the airport. “They’ll shoot you,” said my interpreter. I explained that U.S. Marines don’t shoot on sight. “There are mines,” he insisted. I pointed out the fresh tire tracks in the dirt, which showed me where to place my feet.
I was dumbstruck to discover myself more courageous than the fabled Afghans, and effortlessly. I gained a reputation in Kandahar, but it is false. I am not so very brave. Only, I have not been through their trauma. I am not violated and indelibly damaged by it, as Afghans are. Brutality and agonizing death have been visited on them in such unpredictable and unparriable ways that their ability to calculate risk is gone.
And so fear has grown to be a determining factor in Afghan society. Its power to paralyze can be invoked by the wisp of a threat. A “night letter,” instructing families to remove their girls from the infidels’ school lest something happen to them, produces results. A look, cast by a neighbor at the man who invites a foreigner to his home to take tea, can abort future invitations. All of the rituals and pantomime of courage remain, like fossils. But in today’s Afghanistan the impact of an intimidation campaign cannot be underestimated.
In the autumn of 2002 the verbal intimidation got reinforcement. That was the time of the shelling, constant but apparently random. Not a night would go by without the sound of an explosion, a rocket-propelled grenade, fired from somewhere, at something, maybe. There was rarely much damage, rarely a death. We would talk about it, try to analyze the previous night’s damage, wonder who the target might have been, who the perpetrators. Fruitlessly.
And we got used to it.
Then, with the new year, the aim improved. Something would blow up near the office of a humanitarian group, shattering windows. Or a stick of dynamite would be tossed over the walls of a compound when no one was there.
It was Akrem who pointed out these evolving stages to me, who helped me discern beneath the jumble of events the underlying pattern.
That winter, he managed to land a tribesman in one of the terrorist training camps that littered the Pakistani side of the border. The mole brought back the curriculum, a syllabus covering such subjects as demolitions and bomb making, especially with kitchen pressure cookers, or how to plan and execute the assassinations of public figures: how to track their routines, where to wait for them, how to aim. A Pakistani army colonel and two majors were the professors; Akrem gave me their names.
“The Pakistanis train people and give them money,” he said, “and the people plant bombs. Then, if the Afghans and the Americans get angry, the Pakistanis catch a few ‘Talibs,’ and tell the real ones to stay quiet for a month or two. This is the Pakistani strategy: they advance by taking two steps forward and four steps back.”
It was the first time Akrem told me this. He would say it again the night before he died.
By February 1, aid workers posted in Kandahar—the ill-omened city even Afghans were afraid to visit—were getting rattled. Several offices decided to suspend or curtail their missions. Security began to dominate the conversation at the weekly coordination meetings.
Of course, security had dominated conversation among Afghans for months.
But between the security concerns of the Afghans and the security concerns of the foreigners there was a gulf. The foreigners were worried about shadowy “former Taliban” and a putative anti-American insurgency. The Afghans were worried about the quite real depredations of the government those Americans had put in power.
For Afghans’ fears about what would take place if the warlords returned had been realized. Perhaps not in their goriest excesses, but with enough precision to bring back memories of the “mujahideen nights,” the early 1990s chaos that took the place of the retreating Soviets. There were chains on the roads again. Shirzai’s militiamen who manned them were taking tolls from taxis. Mama Ubaydullah, in Spin Boldak on the border, according to my Achekzais, was kidnapping the beautiful sons of merchants for ransom and who knew what else. The younger brother of the carpenter who built the studio for our radio station was captured right in Kandahar. He was turned over to soldiers for a theft he did not commit. The soldiers made him cook for them and serve them, and they wanted to make him do other things for them, but could not quite go so far because we were on the case. Nazar Jan’s men had a lean-to in my old backyard, the cemetery. Now women could no longer go to visit graves. The private prison was spawning tales, the one maintained by Shirzai’s Afghan American factotum, Khalid Pashtoon, now provincial director for foreign affairs. Prisoners were tortured there, it was said, sometimes for money. Everyone had a story. Everyone knew someone who had been hurt. And the fear of it radiated through Kandahar.
Frustration was radiating, too. This was the new Afghanistan? people began to wonder.
That winter of 2002, I brought together some of the delegates to the previous June’s Loya Jirga, or Grand Tribal Council, for a series of focus group discussions. The men and women, from rival tribes and hostile orientations, sitting in one room for the first time in six months, agreed resoundingly on one thing: they had had it with warlords. This is not a word that has been invented in the West. The concept, utterly familiar in Afghanistan, has a name: topak salaran, or “gun-rulers.” The delegates agreed that the presence of these men had distorted the June Loya Jirga, and their presence in government since then was distorting the nascent Afghan democracy.
The former delegates were not at all impressed by the claims of some notorious warlords to be religious leaders—claims I had heard Westerners acknowledge. “They are using the name of Islam all the time; but their deeds are unholy. To speak out against them is not to speak against Islam,” said one. Or “These people killed thousands of Muslims, and no one even mentioned it. We could have arrested them and put them in jail where they belong. But they were members of the Loya Jirga, so now we ca
n’t.”1
This was the delegates’ main complaint about the meeting that had affixed a seal on Hamid Karzai’s interim presidency of Afghanistan. They felt it had proved, in part, counterproductive. Most of the delegates had been dispatched to Kabul with a clear mandate: bring an end to warlordism and establish law and order, or qanun. “We don’t want schools or a hospital,” one delegate quoted his constituents’ instructions. “We want security.” But instead of curbing the warlords, instead of expelling them once and for all from Afghan politics, the Karzai administration was augmenting their power. That was how the delegates felt. “Before, the topak salaran had hundreds of followers,” said one, while the others in his group nodded. “Now they have thousands. Their position has been legitimized. Before, their hearts were shaking; now they are strong.”
These men and women, like the vast majority of Kandaharis, blamed Karzai and the Americans.
“The foreigners must like topak salaran,” shrugged another delegate.
My friend Mahmad Anwar had put it even more starkly a few months earlier: “Why are we warlords still in power?”
I asked if he would please repeat what he had just said.
“We topak salaran should have been sent home by now. The Americans warned us that anyone who took power with their help when they came into Kandahar would have to leave after the Loya Jirga. They should have kicked us out. This was supposed to be a government of educated people.”
Disgusted at how swiftly the solemn oaths sworn with Governor Shirzai had been forgotten, Mahmad Anwar resigned a few weeks after this exchange with me, and went home to Chaman.
I have often been asked whether we in the West have the right to “im-pose democracy” on people who “just might not want it,” or might not be “ready for it.” I think, concerning Afghanistan at least, this question is exactly backward. From my discussions with these elders and with countless others, I have found that Afghans know precisely what democracy is—even if they might not be able to define the term. And they are crying out for it. They want from their government what most Americans and Europeans want from theirs: roads they can drive on, schools for their kids, doctors with certified qualifications so their prescriptions don’t poison people, a minimum of public accountability, and security: law and order. And they want to participate in some real way in the fashioning of their nation’s destiny.
But Afghans were getting precious little of any of that, thanks to warlords like Gul Agha Shirzai, whom America was helping maintain in power. American policy in Afghanistan was not imposing or even encouraging democracy, as the U.S. government claimed it was. Instead, it was standing in the way of democracy. It was institutionalizing violence.
Unpredictability destabilizes the human spirit. It was clear, and Kandaharis said as much, that the Taliban oppression had weighed more heavily than the oppression they were experiencing now. And yet under the Taliban there was a system: there was law and order—there was some version of qanun. One knew the rules, for they were explicit. And if one only followed them, harsh and intransigent as they were, one could be relatively sure to be left in peace.
Now there was no law. Oppression was arbitrary. It struck without reason, and so it unsettled people. Perhaps the number of actual incidents in Kandahar was not so high. It was surely not so high as it had been during the mujahideen time, and Kandaharis did recognize that. They were grateful to the American presence for the comparative calm, swearing that if the U.S. soldiers left, blood would surge through the streets again like the Arghandab River in snow-melt flood. Still, the unpredictability of the incidents, their arbitrariness, gave them a disproportionate power to destabilize spirits.
And the people began remembering how it was under the Taliban. They told of driving to Herat at night, free from fear. They recalled that time they left a whole pile of money tied up in a shawl, right out in the street, while they walked away to buy some melons. They began harking back to the Taliban peace with some nostalgia.
In this way, the sketchy former Taliban began reconstituting themselves, in people’s minds, as an alternative. Not an attractive one by any means, but one that was not exclusively hostile to the people’s interests either. Nothing ideological entered this calculation. Ironically, Afghans are among the least ideological people on earth. Their thinking was practical, and they remembered that they had enjoyed some practical benefits under Taliban rule.
CHAPTER 19
THE COMING OF ISLAM
ONCE UPON A TIME—CIRCA A.D. 870
THE TALIBAN WERE infamous outside Afghanistan precisely for their ideology—their exaggerated and rigid interpretation of Islam. To the rest of the world at the end of the twentieth century, Afghanistan was a symbol for the Muslim faith, in its scariest manifestation. Yet Islam is not indigenous to Afghanistan. In fact, it took some time gaining a foothold in that rocky land.
Paradoxically, this makes Afghans proud. A man boasted to me once about some graves in Kabul believed to be the tombs of Companions of Prophet Muhammad. The holy men had died trying to conquer Afghanistan, he explained to me, manifestly proud that Kabul boasted such sacred resting places. But it was a source of equal pride to him that Afghans had killed the would-be conquerors. It was like the Arab cemetery near my first home in Kandahar, where people visited the Al-Qaeda graves for their intercession value, even though they had hated having Arabs rule their town.
Given the Afghans’ fierce and obviously complex attachment to their religion—the one thing, many say, that binds them together despite the searing scars cutting across tribes and ethnic groups—it seemed critical to me to come to a documented understanding of how Islam really did reach Afghanistan.
The place to start this quest was C. E. Bosworth, another Brit with two initials. He is the don, the absolute authority on the region around southern Afghanistan in the early Islamic period. He had recently retired from his professorship at Manchester University, as I found when I sent him this chapter to see if it would fly.
I photocopied his seminal monograph, Sistan Under the Arabs.1 To my surprise, I discovered among his sources for an early chapter several famous Persian poems. I hardly expected epic legends to be a foundation for a scholarly work of history. Nor did these particular poems seem to be all that relevant. They are the legends of Persia, as important to the national identity of Iran as Homer is to Greeks, even more visceral than Chaucer or Beowulf for England. But how, I wondered, did these Iranian folktales apply to the region that interested Bosworth—and me: southern Afghanistan at the time of the Muslim conquests?
I tracked down some volumes of this poetry to try to figure it out, and started reading in an old French translation:
“After terrible suffering and great travails, King Jamshid climbed up to Zabulistan,” went one fairy-tale line.
Zabulistan? I put down the book and actually clapped my hands. I had my answer. Zabul is the province immediately to the northeast of Kandahar, on the main road to Kabul. This Jamshid fellow and the other Iranian folkheroes that I had always connected with the heart and soul of Persia were not from Iran at all, it seemed. They had lived in my neck of the woods, the region around Kandahar. That was a discovery in and of itself.
I picked up the copied page and went on.
[Jamshid] caught sight of a city so beautiful it resembled paradise: its gates, its plain, its mountains were all gardens and cultivation. Its habitat was good, its fruits fresh, its prosperity recent, its earth joyful, its water light, its air soft. It was full of merchandise, crowds, and courageous men.2
The description didn’t fit any of the dry baked-mud towns I had seen; but perhaps things had changed since those mythical days. For what I was reading was nothing less than a creation myth—every bit as gritty and anthropomorphic and pagan as the Gilgamesh story or the Greek tales of the Titans and the Olympians.
Just after the dawn of time, according to these epic poems, King Jamshid ruled Iran. His father had subjugated the demons and the birds and evil spirits, lea
ving Jamshid centuries of leisure to order the affairs of men. He invented armor and textiles; he divided his subjects into the classes of priests, warriors, and craftsmen; and he set the demons to work as masons and architects.
But Jamshid grew arrogant, and “a mighty discontent arose throughout Iran.”3 Disgruntled nobles replaced him with Zahhak the Evil-Doer, from whose shoulders two serpents sprouted; they had to be fed a daily ration of fresh human flesh. Jamshid was in hiding, for Zahhak had proclaimed that whoever caught him and delivered him bound hand and foot would receive a great reward.
And so Jamshid became a ghost of the byways, a sovereign reduced to beggary, in constant flight until he reached the land of Zabulistan—roughly the region of modern Kandahar. There he fathered the dynasty of Iran’s national heroes.
It was during the eleventh century A. D., about five hundred years after the birth of Islam, that tales such as this began to be collected, translated from the archaic tongue that had conserved them, Pahlavi, and rendered into the exuberant poetry of a new language: Persian, or Farsi. This literary blossoming was part of an extraordinary Iranian renaissance that was to transform the culture of Central and South Asia over the course of the next six hundred years. It, just as much as the religion of Islam, defines the character of modern Afghanistan.
I had some familiarity with this terrain, and found myself drawing on knowledge buried since my stint in grad school as I plunged into Bosworth’s exposition.
In the early 600s, the great Persian Empire was sacked—morally and materially—by the conquests of the Muslim Arabs. They exploded on camels from the barren desert, armed with their novel religion, Islam. Iran, which included most of today’s Iraq, was the land of the king of kings and elaborate courtly culture, of complex linguistic overlays and choreographed rituals in honor of absolutism. And it came crashing down under the lance thrusts of barbarians raised on a diet of dates and milk. Nothing like this had happened to Iran since Alexander the Great tore a swathe through it about nine hundred years earlier. Even compared to Alexander’s uncouth Macedonians—rowdy drinkers and vocal egalitarians, violently suspicious of Persian hierarchy—the Arabs must have looked pretty rough. It took Iran centuries to recover.