by Anand Gopal
This was how the hillspeople had learned to live with each other in a world without a state or police or judicial system. Each tribe had its own set of intricate rules, decided by elders elected by the clan’s entire male population. The elders derived their status from experience and the respect traditionally accorded to the aged. No man, however, outranked another in rights, and it was rare for one family to possess significantly more than any other. For men, at least, a deep egalitarian ethos ran through the tribal system.
For a long time, most of the Pashtun belt had functioned this way. Eventually, however, when some tribes moved down from the mountains into agricultural settlements, certain enterprising individuals developed ties with distant state authorities, and soon hierarchies sprang up. In eighteenth-century Kandahar, for example, the Safavid Empire of Persia had established suzerainty, incorporating tribal figures of their liking into their military or using them as intermediaries in dealing with the native population. The egalitarian system of the mountains slowly gave way to one dominated by tribal strongmen, and decisions were increasingly made not through traditional tribal law but on the whims and biases of a small clique of notables. It was not long before Kandahari tribes were the most thoroughly hierarchical in the country.
As a consequence, a different form of justice grew in popularity as an alternative to the tribal system: religious law, or sharia. Like tribal law, religious law expressed itself in a detailed set of punishments and restitutions for particular crimes. Its main practitioners were mullahs, who led Friday sermons and could adjudicate disputes. To become a mullah, you studied for up to twelve years in a madrassa, where you learned the intricacies of Islamic law, along with history, philosophy, and logic. In Pashto, such students were called taliban. Because a mullah was guaranteed employment for life, this was a course of study particularly well suited to those from the humblest backgrounds. It was in greater Kandahar, where tribal structures were the weakest, that the taliban were most fully integrated into social life.
In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval.
After the Soviet withdrawal, intra-mujahedeen bickering exploded into outright warfare, but the talibs would have no part of it and put their weapons down, retiring to a life of preaching and study. They watched as Kandahar plunged into a civil war as brutal and rapacious as Kabul’s, a near-total breakdown of society with rogue gunmen and militias running wild.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king—and in Kandahar, this one-eyed man turned out to be a small-time taliban preacher named Mullah Muhammad Omar. A minor figure known only for his bravery (he lost his eye in battle against the Soviets), he was part of a burgeoning movement of talibs looking to end the terror. With an unfailing air of simplicity and modesty, Omar was seen as less politically ambitious than his colleagues, and was soon anointed by the movement as its leader. “The religion of God is being stepped on, the people are openly displaying evil,” he said in a speech at the time, “and the evil ones have taken control of the whole area; they steal people’s money, they attack their honor on the main street, they kill people and put them against the rocks on the side of the road, and the cars pass by and see the dead body on the side of the road, and no one dares to bury him in the earth.”
Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law.
Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.
So the Taliban’s history is fraught with complication. But the important point is that they, like so many other factions in Afghanistan, were never an alien force. Rather, they were as Afghan as kebabs or the Hindu Kush—a fact that US soldiers would learn the hard way.
* * *
When winter came to Khas Uruzgan, the meadows were left yellow and ruined, the mountain passes and roads buried under snow. Life retreated indoors, and no news from the outside would come until springtime. It had always been that way, until one winter afternoon in early 1995, when a neighbor came by to inform Musqinyar that the war was over. When Musqinyar reached the bazaar, he saw Toyota jeeps with rocket launchers piled in the back and some mullahs milling nearby. The big landowning families and the major warlords were surrendering their weapons to the new authorities. If the men of the bazaar rejected the rule of the Taliban mullahs, they did not show it. Instead, they approached, one after another, to kiss their hands and thank God for peace.
As the weeks passed, it transpired that life went on much as before, except that now you could drive the breadth of the district without worry, which meant that the shops were stocked once again and the prices settled back down to reason. Heela watched the events with little interest. There was no whip-wielding religious police because the men of Khas Uruzgan had beards and prayed regularly anyway. There was no shuttering of girls’ schools or orders for women to stay indoors because there had been no such schools to begin with and women were confined to the home as it was. With no TVs or cameras, the ban on moving images meant nothing. Heela might have disliked the injunction against music, but the civil war had already rendered outdoor music parties obsolete, and no one would stop her from listening to her cassettes in the privacy of her own home.
In time, as Musqinyar returned in the evenings to relate the news of the day, she grew to appreciate her new rulers. She was pleased to learn that authorities were clamping down on the tribal practice of using females to settle feuds, for which they found no sanction in their version of religious law. They were even prepared to look the other way when the stubborn details of state making clashed with deeply held beliefs. When the wife of Mullah Abbas, the new Taliban minister of health, fell ill, he ran up against the prohibition of contact between women and male doctors and nurses, which had created a dire shortage of female medical practitioners. In response, he pus
hed for the creation of a nurse training program in Kabul. One afternoon in 1998, Abbas, a Khas Uruzgan native, called Musqinyar to explain that Heela, as one of the few educated women in the district, had been selected to participate.
Heela and two others, with chaperones, were taken in a van across a gutted country, along highways that lay ruined but bandit-free. They arrived in the city of her birth on a quiet spring day. From the car, she stared at what had become of her childhood streets: crippled beggars wheeling themselves about, roads torn seemingly beyond repair, almost no traffic anywhere, whole neighborhoods lying in apocalyptic ruins. She turned away, wondering how Muslims could have done this to themselves.
For six months, she trained under the watchful eye of her Taliban supervisors and was not allowed outdoors even once. But the work was engaging, and as she roomed with women from other provinces, it almost felt like her university days. She learned midwifery and basic nursing, and it filled her with hope that she might be able to make Khas Uruzgan her own, that she might carve out a future for herself there.
Back home, news of a woman with medical skills spread quickly through the village. Husbands started to bring in their pregnant wives or ailing mothers. For many women, it was their first trip outside in years. Some even feigned illness for the opportunity.
From her patients, Heela learned that extended confinement had varied psychological effects. For some, the compound walls so completely delineated the limits of their universe that they had developed something akin to agoraphobia. For others, especially those who’d had a taste of freedom in childhood, the internment of married life plunged them into depression. (One favored method of suicide was self-immolation; another was throwing oneself down a well.) A third group, certainly the largest, adapted to their confinement, if only because it was the sole world they had ever known.
Although she was a transplant, Heela herself had been slipping into this last category as the demands of the household and her growing family consumed her. After Omaid had come Jamshed, now rapidly turning into a sprightly toddler, and then Nawid and Walid, baby boys born just a year apart. Weeks and months bled into years, and the 1990s drew to a close. “We all thought,” she said, “that life would just go on that way, forever.”
* * *
The first snows had already set upon the lower slopes of the ranges behind Heela’s house in the autumn of 2001 when Musqinyar heard a terse radio proclamation: the Taliban government was finished. At the bazaar, he saw some shopkeepers standing nervously about, and nothing more. The governor’s house stood vacant, and village elders had gathered in a nearby home, preparing to elect a new government. Within weeks, the air began to throb day and night with the sound of helicopters. In December, a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence appeared in a desert clearing near the bazaar, curling around a set of massive camouflage tents. Sandbags were piled high out front, and a group of Afghans, whom villagers did not recognize, stood watch outside.
Heela greeted these events with as little interest as the previous change of power, eight years prior. Life began and ended within her compound walls, a life in which dreams and memories were lost or deadened, leaving only the incessant din of daily being. Her days started before sunrise: “In our area,” she recalled, “if a woman doesn’t wake up before the morning prayer call, they say she isn’t really a woman.” After praying, she headed for the tandoor, a clay oven dug into the ground used for making naan. She stoked the fire with wood collected the day before and then loaded the oven. Musqinyar and the boys rose at dawn and they all sat around a communal breakfast of warm bread and green tea. Sometimes she would watch Musqinyar as they ate. He was always dapper, his clothes unstained and freshly pressed; it never ceased to surprise her how meticulous he was, how fortune had graced her with a self-sufficient husband.
After he left for work, Heela tended the goats and chickens in the backyard, put out milk to set yogurt, tidied the house, peeled vegetables, and looked after the boys, the two oldest of whom were now of school age. Caring for Musqinyar’s elderly mother, who had come to live with them, was an added responsibility.
In all of this, in every working day, Heela found a certain necessity to things, a growing conviction that these realities pressed upon her for a reason and that there was much that was good and even holy in them. She knew that she had mastered homemaking as few others transplanted from the city could have, and she only wished that the rest of the village could see it for themselves. One elderly woman who sometimes visited with vague medical complaints said that Heela’s was the cleanest, most orderly house she’d seen in her years. But in general guests were rare. During harvest season women would be busy in their courtyards cleaning and drying the apricots and almonds that their husbands had brought home, and it was only during growing season that there was time for medical concerns. Patients dribbled in to Heela’s house at a rate of about one per month. Usually they would complain of highly nonspecific ailments, but occasionally a pregnant woman would present with symptoms of anemia. Without access to a clinic, there was little Heela could do beyond offering dietary advice. Sometimes, in severe cases, she dispatched the patient’s male blood-relative escort, her mahrem, to a mullah or a peregrinate Sufi saint to collect an amulet containing a Koranic verse suited to the problem at hand.
It was well into the springtime of that first post-Taliban year before she saw a sign of change: a shipment of medicines donated by the US government arrived at the new base and was subsequently parceled out to community leaders. Heela could now prescribe iron pills. Shortly after, an NGO showed up to remove mines left over from the Soviet war. It was the first time, as far as anyone could remember, that an international aid group had ever visited the area. Then, that summer, workers from another agency appeared, to distribute seeds to needy farmers.
Musqinyar began to see the world anew. Ex-Communists around the country were embracing the US-backed government—many were even working directly for the Americans—and he didn’t want to be left behind. He began making trips to the base to meet soldiers, who were members of the US special forces, and he often took Omaid along. In the evenings, he would regale Heela with tales of his visits. Old dreams were dusted off and updated. For the first time in years, he spoke of traveling abroad. He promised that Germany awaited, and maybe even Mecca, too, where they would make their holy pilgrimage together.
And just like that, Heela felt the tug herself. That something inside her that had driven her to economics at university against her parents’ advice, that something that had given her the courage to travel cross-country with Taliban officials to study nursing—it was pulling at her again. It had now been four long years since she’d last set eyes upon anything outside the main wall of her compound, four years of births and meals and quarrels: life lived, no doubt, but she wanted more. When Musqinyar came home in the evenings, she started to beg him to take her somewhere, even just for an afternoon. She had no idea how such a feat could be accomplished, but she didn’t see why they shouldn’t try.
The trouble was, Musqinyar did not have the slightest idea how to pull this off, either. If villagers caught Heela walking about outdoors, the gossiping and backbiting and the resulting shame could be enough to tear apart the strongest family. Not long before, there had been the case of a woman of marriageable age sighted walking alone near the bazaar, prompting folks to say that she was up to no good. Even Heela had assumed so, for what other reason could there be for a woman of that age? Sure enough, it was later learned that she had run off in an unsanctioned marriage or had turned to prostitution. She was not seen again, and the family left Uruzgan in shame.
But for Heela, there was also an obstacle much closer to home: her mother-in-law, the family’s octogenarian upholder of tradition. Since marriage, Musqinyar’s mother had left her house only a handful of times in her life, and she spoke with the stubborn authority of someone who knew that this was the way things had always been and would always be. She saw it as her duty to protect the family name
, especially since her daughter-in-law had arrived with her Kabul ways.
Musqinyar thought hard for some days, and then he announced to his mother one afternoon that Heela had fallen sick and needed to be rushed to a nurse on the far side of the district. The old woman demurred, insisting that exposing Heela would do the family more harm than having her sick in bed for a few weeks.
“And if she gets worse?” he asked. “Do you want to be responsible?”
She had no reply. Heela, listening in the next room, ear to the door, could not believe the ruse was working.
After dinner, she fitted herself into a mud-green burqa and stepped outside, following Musqinyar and the children. She didn’t know where they were headed, and she didn’t care.
The sun sat low and fat and pink on the horizon. Through the burqa mesh, she could make out Musqinyar’s sandals swinging into and out of view. They headed along the dirt path leading to the stream.
Holding his hand, she crossed the wooden footbridge and stepped into the backseat of the car, which was always parked on the far embankment. Musqinyar drove them to the bazaar, by now almost shut down for the night. Around this time, boys would bring their goats into town to feed on the garbage heaped by the roadside, a de facto sanitation service. The children working the shops would be busy pulling down the rusted iron shutters. Their sunburned grandfathers would be squatting nearby, repeating their tired tales. Yet even in its crumbling decay, the bazaar still showed some signs of the new era: a poster of a Bollywood starlet, a small satellite dish perched atop a shop.
They waited until the street was clear, Heela ducking out of sight, and then rolled slowly toward the shops. As they pulled up to Musqinyar’s store, she could just make out through her mesh the flowing, cursive script on the window: KABUL PHARMACY. Inside, the dusty shelves were choked with Chinese- and Pakistani-made medicines. With no hospitals for miles, this was it. You addressed your health care needs here at Musqinyar’s pharmacy, or you didn’t address them at all.