by Anand Gopal
“God rarely gives second chances,” he announced one day. He had been saying this sort of thing for days now, seemingly having abandoned his secularism, but Heela now noticed a flicker of purpose in his eyes. If they squandered this opportunity, he said, they’d have no one to blame but themselves. There wasn’t a safe neighborhood left in the city, and the truth was becoming painfully clear: it was time to flee. But where? Pakistan was out of the question; they knew what life could be like in the squalid refugee camps and had no desire to run from violence to abject poverty. Iran was a possibility, but Musqinyar had heard that only refugees who practiced the Shia version of Islam were welcome. There was just one obvious destination: his ancestral home, the southern backwater province of Uruzgan. He’d heard that things were calmer there. He knew that the deep countryside was no place for a city-bred woman like Heela, but what was the alternative?
That evening brought another round of fighting. Once again the sky rumbled and flashed while the family huddled together in a corner. Early the next morning, during the lull in the shooting that came with the first call to prayer, they decided to make their escape. Heela took whatever she found within arm’s reach: a teapot, two mugs, a few stacks of stale bread. “We left in such a hurry that we left our apartment wide open,” she recalled, “and everything was there for the mujahedeen to take, money, jewelry—everything. I had to leave my wedding ring and wedding shoes behind. I’ll never forgive myself.”
At the taxi stand dozens of families were crowding around a pair of TownAce vans. The drivers, struggling to fend them off, were demanding huge sums. The road south out of Kabul, crisscrossed with roadblocks, passed through no fewer than a dozen warlord fiefs, a ride that drivers risked at their peril. Musqinyar squeezed his way through and waved cash—about $100, everything he had managed to take with him—and they were allowed aboard.
Not long after they hit the road, the van rolled to a stop in a small town just beyond the outskirts of Kabul. Posters of Hekmatyar, the leader of Hizb-i-Islami, were pasted everywhere. Fighters had billeted in the shops, and artillery pieces sat here and there.
A teenage fighter strolled up to Heela’s van. Peering through the window, he inquired after their destination. By now this was a well-practiced ritual; everyone surrendered whatever money and jewelry was on hand. Then the fighter caught sight of Heela and slowly smiled. A woman on the road was a prize, a rare jewel. He rapped on the window, gazing at her intently.
Then another van pulled up behind them—carrying more women. The gunman, having found a new object of interest, waved Heela’s vehicle on.
Hours later, they turned off the main highway and rattled down a rock-studded road. Staring out the window, Heela saw that they were in desert country now, with massive rufous boulders and miles upon miles of blood-red sand. This was a land of cattle raiders and feuding clans, a place untouched by the state or any other formal authority for almost two decades. In her twenty-two years, Heela had never ventured far from Kabul, certainly not this deep into the countryside—not into the vastness, the emptiness, that was now swallowing her. She found herself drifting back to Kabul, to the crowds at the Friday bazaar, to her school and her pupils—to opportunities lost, a motif for a whole generation. The war years were not only about survival; they also meant the wedding you never attended, the trip you never took, the movie you never saw.
When Uruzgan’s snowcapped peaks came into view, the van stopped at a small market. Musqinyar stepped out to speak with the locals and returned with tea and a small plastic bag. Heela asked about the situation in Uruzgan and learned that people were complaining of a cruel and vindictive warlord. His name was Jan Muhammad.
Musqinyar handed Heela the bag and she opened it and stared. She could not believe it had come to this. Folded inside was something she’d never handled in her life: a soft, sky-blue burqa. Immediately she protested, but Musqinyar was insistent. In mujahedeen-controlled Uruzgan, it was simply unthinkable for a woman to travel open-faced. Grieving, weary, and fearful, Heela decided not to resist. “At that point,” she recalled, “I was so tired of war and insecurity, I would have even worn a burqa to sleep if it helped.”
She held up the embroidered garment and inspected it. The head-to-toe wrapping had no openings except a thick mesh-like covering for the eyes. As she put it on, the rocky dirt road, the brilliant mountain peaks, the rumbling motor were all snuffed out. Heela’s world went black.
4
The Sewing Center of Khas Uruzgan
We walked uphill, my Afghan guide and I, stepping between the naked brambles, using the larger rocks as leverage. We continued until the larches thinned away, until the air cut cold and sharp. After a while there were no more camel thorns, no more boulders, just pure reddish soil straight to the summit.
At the top, lungs burning, we looked out. For miles and miles, nothing but the crumpled earth. Deep ferrous rocks and crimson-brown sand. It was as if we were the last two humans on the planet, as if we’d lost ourselves in some endless red emptiness. The only interruption was far off in the distance, a pair of mountains capped in pure white snow. The melted runoff dribbled down the sides, coalescing into five or six rivulets that merged into a tiny stream near the basin. And there, around the stream, nestled between the two mountains, was a tiny, solitary patch of green. People lived there.
Since the beginning, Afghanistan has been a country of valleys. Only 12 percent of Afghan soil is arable, just half of which is actually cultivated due to water scarcity, making the nation one of the driest, roughest-hewn patches of territory in the world. What water can be had is usually sourced from the mountains, the single immutable feature of country life. Life on the slopes themselves can be a struggle, so Afghans tend to live around the mountains or between them, huddled together in narrow dales. It can take days to travel from one valley to the next. Unsurprisingly, such conditions were not conducive to the development of a centralized state, either endogenously or through outside intervention.
(On the other hand, the conventional image of the wild, hirsute tribesmen of the Afghan frontier perpetually fighting back modernity and foreign invaders—which, in the eyes of said invaders, were invariably the same thing—doesn’t tell the whole story either. Before the modern era, Afghanistan was not, in fact, a “graveyard of empires.” Some foreign campaigners proved victorious, such as the Arab and Persian armies that, over centuries, brought Islam. And others regarded the country as nothing more than a convenient buffer, looking beyond it for riches. The British, for instance, may have fought, and lost, battles on Afghan soil, but the real prize was India.)
For a long time, the people of the Afghan valleys herded sheep and goats. Wealth in pastoral societies is a peculiar thing, because, being on the hoof, it can wander off or be pilfered or slaughtered. With too little to go around and no state to enforce property relations, fighting could be frequent and brutal. You adapted by leaning on those you trusted most: first your immediate family, then your cousins, your cousins’ cousins, and so on. Clannishness, in other words, was not a symptom of Afghans’ preternaturally backward ways, but rather a sensible response to harsh and precarious conditions. Over time, the mountain dwellers developed complicated kinship networks of trust and solidarity, organized into groups called “tribes” that they believed had descended from a common ancestor. Hundreds of Pashtun tribes, large and small, are scattered across the country.
In the lawless mountains, you needed strategies—conscious or otherwise—to survive. On the one hand, you had to stand ready to defend yourself against slights and intrusions, as there was no outside authority, no central government, to call upon. On the other, it was no less prudent to attempt to elicit the best in others, to promote generosity and hospitality. In fact, the two approaches tended to work in tandem, typifying what some sociologists call a culture of honor. Of course, Afghan tribal society, with its feuding clans and warm hospitality, is the prototypical honor culture, but to varying degrees you can find such societies where
ver life is rugged, resources scarce, and the state absent, from the deserts of Arabia to the highlands of Scotland—and even closer to home, in the nineteenth-century Appalachian foothills of the Hatfields and the McCoys.
For the ancient Pashtun mountain families, anything that marauding rivals could plunder was worth protecting and controlling—and this included women. Females were a family commodity; in some cases, mountain clans even tattooed their animals and their women with the same markings. As pastoralists settled into sedentary agricultural life, the intimate clustering of village communities curtailed women’s freedoms even further. A woman became the embodiment of her family’s “honor,” always signaling, through her behavior, the virtues of her parents and siblings. To safeguard this honor, families cloistered their women in the home, separating them completely from unrelated menfolk. Men inhabited the public sphere, women the private. This practice of seclusion, called purdah, became the dominant form of sexual organization in much of rural southern Afghanistan, varying in degree from village to village but almost always present in some form. If a woman needed to venture into the public sphere, purdah was preserved symbolically through the burqa. (Again, there’s nothing quintessentially Afghan or Islamic about purdah; it predates Islam, and can also be found in non-Muslim contexts, such as in certain Indian Hindu villages.)
To mention all of this is not to say that purdah is the “natural” state of things. Indeed, there is no immutable natural state—Afghan societies, like all societies, are forever transforming themselves. By the twentieth century, purdah’s emotional and symbolic power had driven urban elites into a culture war with traditional rural forces. Over decades, reformers campaigned to dismantle the system, their movement culminating in the 1959 decision that allowed women to unveil (and may have helped spark violent riots in Kandahar that left sixty people dead). By the 1970s, life in cities like Kabul, where women went to school, took jobs, and married relatively late, felt ages removed from the Pashtun countryside.
Following the Soviet invasion, the Communists, to their credit, passed decrees making girls’ education compulsory and abolishing certain oppressive tribal customs—such as the bride-price, a payment to the bride’s family in return for her hand in marriage. However, by massacring thousands of tribal elders, they paved the way for the “commanders” to step in as the new elite. Aided by American and Saudi patronage, extremism flourished. What had once been a social practice confined to areas deep in the hinterlands now became a political practice, which, according to ideologues, applied to the entire country. The modest gains of urban women were erased.
* * *
“The first time a woman enters her husband’s house,” Heela told me about life in the countryside, “she wears white”—her wedding dress—“and the first time she leaves, she wears white”—the color of the Muslim funeral shroud. The rules of this arrangement were intricate and precise, and, it seemed to Heela, unchanged from time immemorial. In Uruzgan, a woman did not step outside her compound. In an emergency, she required the company of a male blood relative to leave, and then only with her father’s or husband’s permission. Even the sound of her voice carried a hint of subversion, so she was kept out of hearing range of unrelated males. When the man of the house was not present, boys were dispatched to greet visitors. Unrelated males also did not inquire directly about a female member of the house. Asking “How is your wife?” qualified as somewhere between uncomfortably impolite and downright boorish. The markers of a woman’s life—births, anniversaries, funerals, prayers, feasts—existed entirely within the four walls of her home. Gossip, hopscotching from living room to living room, was carried by husbands or sons.
In 1994, the civil war was in its second year. Every attempt to cobble together some sort of détente between the rival factions had failed spectacularly. The Russians and the Americans, whose interventions had brought this state of affairs about, had lost all interest in the country. Osama bin Laden was living in Sudan, and al-Qaeda as we know it today did not yet exist. Nor did the Taliban. Instead, a country of thirty million that had at once been the center of the Cold War was now quietly and anonymously devouring itself.
Late that summer, Heela settled into Musqinyar’s ancestral home in a corner of Uruzgan Province called Khas Uruzgan (khas meaning “special,” the district having been the provincial capital ages ago). Although fighting was less intense than in Kabul, here, too, rival warlords—chief among them Jan Muhammad—were locked in a bloody power struggle, leaving the road dotted with rogue checkpoints and militia posts.
But Heela’s concerns lay closer at hand. In the countryside a woman was expected to work long and hard at keeping up her home, and in a way this was a blessing. Heela threw herself into the task of remaking their inherited house, which had sat empty for more than a decade. The squat, one-story structure was designed to honor the local virtues of family, privacy, and hospitality. A large compound wall of tawny mud bricks surrounded the property, with holes punched through to examine visitors. Upon entering you found yourself in a small courtyard, where weeds and crabgrass had edged onto the walkway. To the left sat a guest room, the quintessential mark of a southern home, set off by itself so that visitors might not inadvertently glimpse a female. A pair of apple trees stood near the opposite wall. It took about twenty paces to get from the main gate to the front door.
The house itself measured about fifty feet to a side and consisted of a number of narrow rooms arranged in railroad fashion. The living-room walls remained bare, because Heela hadn’t been able to bring photos from Kabul. Beneath the house was a small cellar. In the backyard, a vegetable patch grew near the door and privet lined the mud walls. In the far corner stood a tiny chicken coop.
Had Heela been able to leave the compound, she would have found a bucolic hamlet of maybe fifty homes, each very much like hers. There was no main road; instead, a web of narrow dirt tracks ran between the farmers’ fields, connecting one house to the next. The village was bounded on one side by a muddy stream, which ran just a few hundred feet from her house, and on the other by rock formations that rose rapidly skyward into a set of looming massifs. An old wooden footbridge crossed the stream to a grassy embankment, from which a gravel road led to the bazaar.
Heela’s village was one among dozens that peppered the basin of the mountain range, which stretched as far as she could see. In total, some fifty thousand souls called Khas Uruzgan District their home, most of them farmers and herders. If the women rarely left their homes, the men did not venture much farther—some had never set foot outside the district in their lives.
Out here you lived by nature’s rhythms, rising and returning with the sun, growing the food your family ate and sewing the clothes they wore. Without electricity there were no televisions or telephones, although by the late 1990s hand-cranked radios were making an appearance. To hear the latest news you headed down to the bazaar, a ramshackle row of windowless one-room shops fashioned out of old shipping containers, each with corrugated iron shutters and straw flooring. Out in front hung signs advertising Iranian colas, Pakistani biscuits, spare tires, and jerry cans of gasoline, which you could purchase once a week when the fuel truck came through.
The shops flanked an uneven dirt road, on one end of which stood the government office, where the local governor normally lived, and on the other an old schoolhouse. In 1994, both were vacant. When a car passed through, men and boys would step out of their shops and look. The nearest town, Uruzgan’s capital, Tirin Kot, lay seven hours away, on a highway that ran through multiple militia checkpoints. Even in more peaceful times, however, news came slowly. When the Americans appeared in 2001, some villagers assumed that the white-skinned interlopers were the Soviets.
After selling some of his inherited land, Musqinyar opened a small pharmacy in the heart of the bazaar. At first, with roadblocks and bandits, it had taken weeks for goods to reach the village; by autumn, they were not arriving at all. Prices soared, and the family relied on Musqinyar’s brot
her Shaysta, who had resorted to subsistence farming. Almost daily, bodies were being dumped in the mountains, victims of war and hunger. There were days when Musqinyar stood with Heela in the backyard looking at those snowcapped peaks as if they were some premonition of the winter and the hardship to come. As if death were now the common order of the land, the only principle binding country and city, men and women, holy warriors and Communists alike. And it may well have become so, if not for a new force that arose suddenly in the south to change everything.
* * *
Drive away from Uruzgan, taking the sole rutted pebble road running southeast. You’ll cross miles of low open brush in Ghazni Province, then wheat fields and apricot thickets, and farther on dry scrubland again, leading up to the barren gravel hills of the province of Paktika. In three decades of war much has changed, but in this corner of the country you can still find a smattering of hill tribes clinging, against the odds, to their old ways of life. They make a good starting point for those looking to excavate Afghanistan’s distant past. Surprisingly, however, they also carry a more contemporary relevance: a glimpse into the obscure origins of the Taliban. Most writing on the Taliban assumes that they originated in extremist Pakistani madrassas in the 1980s. In fact, the group’s origins lie much deeper in the Afghan past.
Visiting Paktika in 2010, I came upon a small hilltop village where locals had gathered around a silent, downcast man. Nearby, a young herder paced back and forth, watching him intently, and, off to a side, tribal graybeards stood conferring. One of them approached, pushing his way through the scrum, and announced a verdict: for killing Rahim Gul’s cow, Moheb Jan was to pay him two sheep and twenty days’ worth of labor.
Afterward, I sat down with the elder, who explained that each transgression in his community carried a fixed fine. Break someone’s nose in a fight, and you gave him a chicken. Break a bone, and you surrendered a sheep or goat. Murder, depending on the circumstances, could cost you a piece of land, your house, or even one of your women, who would go to the victim’s family in marriage.