by Anand Gopal
Heela canceled classes for the month. But the stoning started anyway. First, rocks rained down on the window and the roof. Then, when her boys left the house, village youths hurled stones at their heads. One month rolled into the next, and the students refused to return to class.
* * *
It was not long before Qudus Khan sent a delegation to Heela’s house to investigate why dress production had stopped. Heela answered through the door, as usual, but then grew concerned that the visitors would accidentally be stoned, so she invited them in. The four men sat cross-legged on the living-room floor as she served tea and sweets. Zabit, a sweaty bear of a man, barraged her with questions about the use of the equipment. She hardly gave it a thought.
That evening, when Heela related the day’s events to Musqinyar, he stared at her incredulously. She could see him becoming stiff with anger.
“I had to invite them in,” she said. “I didn’t have a choice.”
Without a word, he got up and walked out. This was serious, and she knew it. He almost never lost his temper. She shouldn’t have brought those men in or allowed them to hear her voice, but what else could she have done? Still, it would cause problems for the family. People would talk, bemoaning how her education had gone to her head, how she acted as if she still lived in Kabul. They would blame Musqinyar for not reining her in, question his manhood and the family’s purity.
She found him in the front yard and tried to apologize, but he would have none of it. Heela had never seen him this way. She continued to press her case, and as she spoke he flashed with anger and suddenly kicked her hard on the legs. As she cried out, he managed to land two more kicks. She stormed into the bedroom and slammed the door.
It took more than an hour for her to cool down. Then she went to the kitchen and chopped up some vegetables and threw chunks of lamb into the pan. When the food was ready she walked a plate out to him, but he grabbed it and hurled it across the room.
For days after, she refused to speak to him. Yet even as she seethed inside, she considered herself lucky. They almost never fought, and not once had he brought up the possibility of taking a second wife, as permitted by Islam and local culture. Unlike most village men, he seldom laid a violent hand on her. This episode, in fact, would be one of just two serious fights they would have during their time in Uruzgan. Heela knew that it could be so much worse. Her neighbor Wazhma, for instance, had talked back to her husband after he took a second wife, which had so enraged his family that the women of the household held Wazhma down as her brother-in-law shot her dead.
The new government would no more intervene in such matters than it would if you had in some private rage killed your own oxen or damaged your own house. So Heela was grateful for her good fortune, even though in their other serious fight Musqinyar had broken her arm. “But that was my fault,” she insisted. “I had talked back to him. Women out in the village don’t talk back to their husbands, it’s just a law. When men say something, women should just listen, and you should never talk in a loud voice, because a man outside might hear. I made that mistake, but I was lucky. In Tirin Kot, a man once beat his wife with an ax and she survived, but her head was split open. Husbands who only use their hands or feet are very kind.”
* * *
Weeks passed before the pair could make amends, and by then the damage had been done, just as Musqinyar had feared. Zabit had started a rumor that Heela was running a house of prostitution, and Jamila swore to her relatives that she had seen the girls in action. It was only by the grace of God that her students survived their beatings, some only barely so. Musqinyar closed down the school.
For months Heela had been living in stolen moments, snatched from a social structure that yielded little to women of ambition. In the end, she realized, you surrender that which you have taken—at least in Khas Uruzgan. And for the first time in years, the tug was gone. She waited patiently but it did not return. In time, even waiting for it seemed foolish, reckless in fact, and she hated herself for having believed otherwise. She started skipping meals and letting housework go. Her slide into someplace dark was steady and perhaps irrevocable. Musqinyar, however, refused to accept it. One evening Heela went to bed and found new jewelry on her pillow. Another time, a Pakistani-type dress that had been all the rage in her Kabul life appeared in her wardrobe. Sometimes, a wife of one of Musqinyar’s friends would be brought to the house for “treatment.” Yet Heela could not brighten, no matter how she tried.
As always, Musqinyar, summoning a seemingly endless reserve of hope, refused to give in. Yet his optimism now faced challenges on multiple fronts: if life at home was trying, things around the district were not faring any better. It started in that summer of 2003, when a motorist was mysteriously gunned down not far from the village. Later, a farmer was kidnapped, and another was held up at gunpoint. Someone fired rockets at the nearby American base. Heela ordered the children to stop playing outside. Musqinyar ate his dinners in silence, brooding over things better left unsaid.
The war had returned.
PART TWO
5
No One Is Safe from This
In early 2008, I traveled across Maiwand, a desert district west of Kandahar city. Here, more than one hundred years earlier, a girl named Malalai had led Afghan tribesmen, in Joan of Arc fashion, to a stunning rout of imperial British troops. Or so the legend goes. To this day, the battle figures powerfully in the Afghan national imagination. Thousands of girls are still named Malalai, while Maiwand is invoked by schoolchildren in verse and song, and by the dusty signs above pharmacies and banks everywhere.
Yet as I drove down the district’s lone highway, there were no traces of that past glory, only bare country running in all directions. Every mile or so, a culvert lay burst open, or a bridge railing mangled. Sad one-room shops clung to the roadside.
I turned south off the highway and followed a gravel road until reaching a river. The water was the color of sand and you could not hear a sound from it. Irrigation channels ran out to a few identical-looking terra-cotta houses off in the distance. The settlements were part of a stretch of countryside known as Band-i-Timor, the last human outposts before miles of trackless red desert.
I came to a small bazaar, a single lane flanked by shops selling motor oil, bicycle tires, cartons of eggs, and energy drinks. There were Coca-Cola bottles caked in dirt and signs obscured by dirt and windows crusted over with dirt. There were no cars. Near a water tank, a goat stood watching.
I passed the Band-i-Timor pharmacy, where a child sat behind a counter with his arms folded. Heading down the street, I came to a wooden stall selling freshly squeezed juices; behind it stood the proprietor, a boy who could not have been more than ten years old. Two figures approached from the far end of the bazaar walking a cow, and as they passed they looked at me and said nothing. They, too, were mere boys. They continued on and disappeared into a field.
It was as if I had stumbled into a frontier version of Lord of the Flies. Where were the adults?
“Some are in the mountains,” the juice boy said, pointing to the flat scrubland stretching to the horizon. He meant, it seemed, that they had joined the Taliban insurgency. Others, he said, were off harvesting poppies in neighboring provinces or had resettled in Pakistan or Iran, leaving the women and children behind. They had all left because of the war.
I followed the road as it bent away from the shops and ran along dying meadows to another bazaar, this one with shuttered shops and mud homes slumping in decay. It lay perfectly silent, devoid even of children. The doors to some of the homes had been left open.
The road continued away from the river until the meadows thinned and succumbed to open desert, each village along the route lying abandoned. I returned to the first bazaar, where the boy explained that fighting between the Americans and the Taliban had grown so intense that one morning the villagers had collectively decided to vacate Band-i-Timor forever.
The Americans and the Taliban. It was their war that
Heela and Musqinyar had seen hints of in 2003, a struggle for power once again lapping at the edges of their lives. To understand the sources of the conflict, I realized that I would have to go back even further, to the first months after the US invasion, when Band-i-Timor and Khas Uruzgan and the rest of the country were still at peace.
I thanked the boy and was about to leave when he grabbed my arm. “Listen, do you want to buy a generator? I have a really nice one—hasn’t been used in years.” I told him I was sure he could find a better use for it in his village, where electricity was so hard to come by.
“Oh, nobody uses generators here,” he replied. “If we start them up, the Americans think we’re running a bomb factory and raid our houses.” He looked off to the horizon. “And the Taliban think we’re using it to spy on them. Better to live without.”
* * *
The sky clotted gray and the winds gusted cold as the men crowded into an old roadside gas station. It was daybreak in Band-i-Timor, early December 2001, and hundreds of turbaned farmers sat pensively, weighing the choice before them. They had once been the backbone of the Taliban’s support; the movement had arisen not far from here, and many had sent their sons to fight on the front lines. But in 2000, Mullah Omar had decreed opium cultivation to be un-Islamic, and whip-wielding police saw to it that production was halted almost overnight. Band-i-Timor had been poppy country for as long as anyone could remember, but now the fields lay fallow and children were going hungry. With the Taliban’s days numbered after the US invasion, the mood was ripe for a change. But could they trust the Americans? Or Hamid Karzai?
An enfeebled elder, Hajji Burget Khan, rose to speak. A legendary war hero and a chief of the millions-strong Ishaqzai tribe, Burget Khan commanded respect that few present could rival. “He was an inspiring leader,” a tribal elder told me later, “as pure as the rain falling from the sky.” He was also a consummate pragmatist, having forged alliances over the years across the political spectrum, including with the Taliban. Now he was extolling the virtues of the coming American order. There would be jobs, he said, and there would be development. And, most important, farmers would be left alone to do the work they’d always done.
A second elder then addressed the audience. A generation younger and a few waist sizes larger than Burget Khan, Hajji Bashar was a leader of the politically important Noorzai tribe, a frontier tycoon who had made his millions smuggling opium. Like Burget Khan, he had a knack for backing the right horse—he was an early financier of the Taliban—and now he insisted that with American wealth and power on their side, the future had never looked brighter.
For the first time in years, hope took hold of the poor farmers of Band-i-Timor. The local Taliban council of religious clerics was declared null and void, and in its place the attendees formed a council composed of representatives from all Maiwand tribes. Hajji Bashar was elected governor of the district, prompting the former governor and police chief to flee overnight. It was, in effect, a bloodless coup, with the Taliban authority replaced by an America-friendly administration. Although Maiwand would have many governments in the decade to follow, only this one, farmers would say for years afterward, truly belonged to them.
The parched Maiwand desert began to show signs of life. Schools and clinics, long ignored and abandoned by the Taliban, reopened their doors. Aid workers arrived to repair water channels and irrigation systems. Step by step, elders worked to help the fledgling government stand on its own. Hajji Burget Khan persuaded hundreds of former Taliban foot soldiers to declare their allegiance to the Karzai government. It was a move as old as the wars themselves: just as these men had once flocked to the Taliban, they would now, for sheer survival, throw their weight behind the new power. Hajji Bashar delivered to the Kandahar governor fifteen truckloads of weapons, including hundreds of rocket launchers and antiaircraft missiles, that he had collected from former Talibs. Bashar, in fact, harbored ambitions to become a national player and was quick to find his way to the Americans. He had initiated contact as early as November 2001—when the Taliban was still in power—via clandestine meetings with US officials. Then, in January 2002, he showed up at an American base and spent a few days telling officers everything he knew about the Taliban. His crowning achievement came the following month, when he helped convince erstwhile Taliban foreign minister and Maiwand native Mullah Mutawakkil to surrender to US forces, making him one of the highest-ranking Talibs in American custody.
In fact, Mutawakkil’s defection was only the latest in a rush of Taliban officials looking to switch allegiances. Within a month of its military collapse, the Taliban movement had ceased to exist. When religious clerics in Pakistan launched a fund-raising campaign to get the Taliban back on their feet and waging “jihad” against the Americans, it was roundly rejected by the Talib leadership. “We want to tell people the Taliban system is no more,” Agha Jan Mutassim, finance minister of the fallen regime and Mullah Omar’s confidant, told reporters. “They should not give any donations in the name of the Taliban.” He added: “If a stable Islamic government is established in Afghanistan, we don’t intend to launch any action against it.”
Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for the new Kandahar government, declared: “Ministers of the Taliban and senior Taliban are coming one by one and surrendering and joining with us.” The list included the Taliban ministers of defense, justice, interior, vice and virtue, information, health, commerce, industry, and finance—in effect, the entire Taliban cabinet; key military commanders and important governors; diplomats; and top officials who had worked with Mullah Omar. The avalanche of surrenders knew no bounds of ideology: leaders of the notorious whip-wielding religious police were among the earliest to defect. A group of former Taliban officials even announced that they were forming a political party to participate in future democratic elections. “We are giving advice to Hamid Karzai,” said their leader. “We support him.”
By surrendering, the Taliban were following the pattern that had marked Afghan politics for much of the previous two decades. After the Soviet withdrawal, many Afghan Communists had rebranded themselves as Islamists and joined the mujahedeen. During the civil war, factions shifted loyalties based on nothing more than bald pragmatism. Upon the Taliban’s entry onto the scene, warlords across the Pashtun belt had either retired, fled, or joined them. Now it was the Taliban’s turn, and as one member of the movement after another submitted to the authority of the Karzai administration, there emerged the possibility of a truly inclusive political order.
It had long been Karzai’s desire to convene a loya jirga, a grand assembly of elders, to elect a transitional government. The idea took hold around the country. At Kandahar’s soccer stadium (last used under the Taliban as an execution ground), thousands of farmers and dignitaries packed the stands to rally for the jirga. Delegates were to be drawn from each of the nation’s three hundred–plus districts. In Maiwand, unsurprisingly, the revered Hajji Burget Khan was elected despite his advanced age. “We felt as if we were born anew,” recalled Kala Khan, a fellow tribal elder. “There was nothing we couldn’t accomplish.”
Spring washed over Band-i-Timor and the acacias bloomed and pomegranate groves grew thick, and for the first time in years the fields were lavender bright with poppies. Not far from the main river, overlooking those fields, stood a large quadrangle of mud buildings, with cars and jeeps parked out front and dozens of farmers milling about. This was the home of Hajji Burget Khan, who was busy day and night receiving Ishaqzai tribesmen from other districts, other provinces, even as far afield as Pakistan. They came to pay their respects to the octogenarian leader, and Abdullah, the family driver, would usually be dispatched to ferry them in from the bus stop.
One hot May night, Abdullah was sleeping in the courtyard when a thunderous blast shook him awake. Looking up, he saw a blinding white light in the space where the front gate had been. Silhouetted figures rushed toward him. He ran for the guesthouse, shouting that the house was under attack. Inside, Hajji Burge
t Khan was already awake; he had been sipping tea with visitors before the dawn prayer. His bodyguard Akhtar Muhammad raced into the courtyard, firing his weapon blindly. Before he knew it, he was thrown to the ground. Two or three men were on top of him. He was shackled and blindfolded, and he was kicked again and again. He heard shouting, in a language he couldn’t understand.
Hajji Burget Khan and Hajji Tor Khan, Akhtar Muhammad’s father, ran into the courtyard with other guests, heading for the main house. It was then, as the first morning light shaped the compound, that they saw armed men standing on the mud walls in camouflage uniforms and goggles and helmets. American soldiers. Gunfire erupted, and Hajji Tor Khan went down. Before Hajji Burget Khan could react, he, too, was shot.
Nearby, women huddled in their rooms, listening. Never before had strangers violated their home—not during the Russian occupation, or the civil war, or under the Taliban. A woman picked up a gun and headed into the courtyard to defend her family, but the soldiers wrested it out of her hands. Then a soldier appeared with an Afghan translator and ordered the women outside. It was the first time they had ever left their home without a mahrem. They were flexicuffed and had their feet shackled, and some were gagged with torn pieces of turban. The group was then herded into a dry well behind the compound. As the day broke and village farmers stepped out into the dawn air, the women’s cries rang out across the fields and mud houses, never to be forgotten.
The soldiers stayed for hours. House by house throughout the village, men were pulled out and marched to an open field. There, Hajji Burget Khan lay clinging to life. Then he and the rest—fifty-five of them in all, nearly the entire adult male population of the village—were loaded onto helicopters and trucks and taken away.