No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  I asked Zaman whether he worried that all the conniving would catch up with him. After all, he had accrued his fair share of enemies, including the family of the late vice president Abdul Qadir, whose assassination he was widely believed to have plotted. He clasped his hands. “I have nothing to be ashamed of! I fought for my country. Only cowards and foreign agents have to fear. Not patriots. Not the people who survived all of these wars. We are true patriots.”

  A few months later, a suicide bomber entered a crowd of government officials and dignitaries, worked his way up to Hajji Zaman, and blew him to bits.

  PART THREE

  8

  Election Day

  One day, a letter appeared at Heela’s home bearing an impressive blue seal of a type she had never before seen. When Musqinyar arrived, he read the message aloud. “Afghanistan’s first presidential elections are upcoming. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is seeking individuals to work in the forthcoming voter registration drive. Women are encouraged to apply.”

  Heela and Musqinyar stared at each other. It was mid-2004, about a year since her neighbor Jamila had discovered Heela’s underground school and forced it to close. Since then, Heela had lost herself within the four walls of her house. It had been a particularly trying few months after her mother-in-law had passed away, for though the old woman had been a thorn in her side, the loneliness was oppressive. Now, this opportunity jolted her like news from a long-lost friend.

  So she and Musqinyar began to plot. This time, they would have to be doubly careful. Jamila’s words—“Keep going on like this and no one will see a single family member of yours alive”—still rang in her ears. To pull this off, Heela knew, she’d have to work somewhere far from her village.

  As the only educated woman in huge swaths of Khas Uruzgan, Heela had no trouble landing the job. Musqinyar was enlisted as well, and since Heela could not be trained directly, he was coached and passed along what he learned. One evening, he came home with a stack of voter registration cards that they were to distribute to poor villagers across the district. Most of the villagers had never voted for anything in their lives, but an unending stream of radio news and public service announcements had everyone thinking about the elections. People had started speaking knowingly about politics, the way they spoke about the coming rains or the year’s crops.

  It was warm outside on their first day of work, and Heela was up earlier than usual. Climbing into the back of the station wagon, she waited until Musqinyar appeared, dressed as usual in a crisp white salwar. They set out before the sky dawned to avoid the neighbors. After an hour of driving on a broken gravel road that wound through the dusty mountain country, they reached the far side of the district, home to a different clan, where their family was not known. Heela sat in the car and watched Musqinyar speak to the malek, the village headman. After some time he gathered all the menfolk in front of the mosque. They thronged around her husband, kissing his hand, and she could hear them pleading for better roads and clinics. For these villagers, who had never met a representative of the government or the United Nations before, it was as if he were an emissary from President Karzai himself. As dozens of curious faces looked on, Musqinyar explained that his only job was to register them to vote. He described the registration process, which required each person to fill out a card. Since few could read or write, he ended up completing most of the cards himself. And because most lacked proper identification, he created makeshift IDs with a Polaroid camera he’d brought along.

  After the crowd dispersed, Musqinyar walked the malek out of earshot. They spoke and then turned and looked at Heela in the car, and continued the conversation. Eventually Musqinyar shook the malek’s hands and hugged him, and he returned to the vehicle alone. Women getting caught up in politics, the malek had told him, would be like men going into the kitchen. Like men raising babies and women fighting war. There would be no female registration here.

  They drove on to other villages, and in each the result was the same. Back home, Heela and Musqinyar put their heads together. She wasn’t ready to give up.

  It was Musqinyar who first struck upon the ruse: medicines. The next day, as he discussed voting with the men of another village, Heela was escorted from house to house to hand out cheap medications from their pharmacy. Once inside, alone among the women, Heela delivered her speech on democracy and voting. She filled out cards for them and explained that, unlike for the men, a photograph wasn’t required. Some women, fearing their husbands, refused to accept a card. Others clutched them as if they were precious gifts. In some houses she met women who knew a thing or two about Kabul from the radio, and she spoke at length with them about the candidates. Although she wasn’t supposed to favor one contender, she couldn’t imagine anyone but Karzai for the job, and she never met anyone who disagreed. She explained that a woman’s vote was hers alone, not her husband’s; some housewives scoffed and said that it was wrong to divide a man and woman in this way, but others nodded in agreement.

  During those weeks, Heela wondered for the first time if she might have a future in politics. Working for a candidate, perhaps, or continuing on with the United Nations if they’d allow her. To be out in the world, teaching, connecting—she felt that tug again, that force inside her that had led her to risk so much already. At home she pored over the constitution and studied up on the candidates’ profiles, then lectured the women on what she’d learned. If only she could convince them that they, too, belonged to the public world, those small flashes of confidence she sometimes noticed in their eyes might grow into something of meaning and value. Just as they had for her.

  Still, she had moments of doubt. In one hillside village she gave a card to a woman married to an Afghan who was living in Pakistan. “Sometimes a village is so small,” Heela recalled, “that when someone gets a card, everyone knows, and so even her husband in Pakistan heard about it. People started talking—‘so and so’s wife received a card, she must be going out of the house on her own, she is getting involved in men’s affairs, maybe she has taken a lover,’ and so on. It was a big shame for her husband.” When two of the woman’s relatives escorted her back to Pakistan, they found her husband livid. A shouting match erupted between him and the relatives, whom he held responsible for his wife’s indiscretions. Physical threats followed, until the husband pulled out a pistol and shot them, killing one and leaving the other critically wounded. “This was all from a card I gave,” Heela said.

  But for every story like this, there were others that filled her with hope: women tearfully promising to vote, girls asking about life in Kabul, and even, in a few cases, husbands encouraging their wives to register. “The registration cards were like little bricks,” she said. “We wanted to build Afghanistan.” The election, scheduled for October 2004, was to be the showpiece of Western efforts over the previous three years. The candidates included Gelam Jam leader Rashid Dostum; warlord Muhammad Mohaqeq, who had commanded Hazara militias during the civil war; and twenty-one other figures from around the country. But in Heela’s estimation, Hamid Karzai, a fellow southern Pashtun, was the runaway favorite. Musqinyar agreed, and he could not find a soul who would speak ill of the interim president. Karzai had, after all, launched his uprising against the Taliban right there in Uruzgan, and the economy had blossomed since the Americans arrived.

  The summer came and registration slowed, as the men were busy in the orchards and the women with their dried fruits. The fields abutting Heela’s house had grown tall with the season, and it was in those fields that a boy from her village wandered one day, following the labyrinth of donkey trails that connected one plot to the next. He stepped through reeds up to his eyes and waded across tiny streams, and then he stopped cold. Lying in front of him, facedown, was a body. There was a single bullet wound to the back of the head.

  The dead man was not from the village. No one could quite say where he had come from. There had been sporadic killings elsewhere in the district, but something like
this had not happened here in the village since the civil war. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. For days, it was all anyone could talk about.

  A week later, a man working for an NGO in a neighboring district went missing. Musqinyar had known him well, having served him often at the pharmacy. Shortly after, the UN issued a warning to employees: the security situation was worsening as the elections neared, although no one in Heela’s village could figure out whom to hold responsible. As the mood shifted, men in the bazaar began speaking vaguely about “the situation.”

  Musqinyar concluded that it was just too dangerous for a woman to be moving about in far-flung villages. At first he said nothing, but Heela knew what he was thinking. When he finally told her, some days later, that “it’s better for you to stay home from now on,” she was unsurprised. And she knew that her husband could be a stubborn man, that once he made up his mind even the Prophet himself could not change it. But she tried anyway. She had been preparing a defense for just such an eventuality, and over dinner and the next morning she laid out her case. Without her, Khas Uruzgan’s women would be cut off, effectively disenfranchised. If they gave up at the first sign of instability, how could they expect to accomplish anything? And the money—they were now earning more together than ever before.

  He listened quietly but refused to budge. “If anything were to happen to you,” he said, “I would not be able to live with myself.”

  * * *

  One summer afternoon a year earlier, Qudus Khan, the governor of Khas Uruzgan, had been sitting in his office speaking to village elders when the district chief of police, Muhammad, pulled up in front of the building. He greeted the security guards out front, then strode briskly through the corridors and into the governor’s office. He aimed his Kalashnikov at the governor. The men looked up. Muhammad squeezed the trigger. The governor’s body jerked backward, and he fired again. The elders sat staring at the bloody mess. Muhammad turned, walked out, and drove off in his Ford Ranger police truck, lights flashing. He phoned officials in Tirin Kot to boast about his exploit, then continued on to another district and disappeared.

  It was then that the killings had started to become a regular occurrence, and bodies began turning up around the district. But the genesis of the bloodshed could be traced to much earlier. After US forces assaulted the school and the governor’s house in January 2002, wiping out most of the district’s pro-US leadership in a single night, local politics were changed forever. The tenuously balanced forces that had ruled the district for a decade were swiftly replaced by one man: Jan Muhammad. Shortly after the killings, he had appointed his ally, Qudus Khan, as district governor. The scion of an elite family, Qudus Khan owned ample tracts of land and commanded the allegiance of thousands from his tribe, the Alizais. Having survived the civil war with relatively clean hands, he enjoyed popular support, and under his reign Khas Uruzgan remained largely at peace. He worked closely with US forces, landing lucrative contracts for reconstruction and security.

  Such success did not go unnoticed in Tirin Kot, and JMK began to fear that his gilded position atop the province’s patronage pyramid was in jeopardy, that his own appointee was perhaps too popular. It so happened that Qudus Khan’s tribe was locked in a decades-long rivalry with the Karimzai tribe, so JMK replaced Malek Rauf as Khas Uruzgan’s chief of police with a Karimzai named Asadullah. Jealousy and mistrust followed, as each man jockeyed for influence and access to the Americans.

  Unsurprisingly, this did not end well. In the summer of 2003, Police Chief Asadullah was mysteriously gunned down as he drove to meet friends for dinner. The attack, the first political killing in the district since the American massacre, shook the authorities. But they chose not to conduct an investigation, and soon the bazaar was bubbling with speculation that Qudus Khan was the culprit. JMK, keeping with his divide-and-conquer approach, then appointed Asadullah’s grieving brother Muhammad as the new police chief for Khas Uruzgan. Muhammad wasted little time in securing his revenge. (Years later, he, too, would be mysteriously shot to death.)

  Upon Qudus Khan’s death, tribal leadership passed to his son Naqibullah, who had also inherited a bit of his father’s sense of stature. Suspecting that JMK was behind the whole affair, he denounced the governor publicly—a reckless move in Jan Muhammad’s Uruzgan if there ever was one. Naqibullah was promptly arrested by the Americans as a “Taliban agent” and shipped off to Bagram. JMK then appointed a close ally, Hajji Obaidullah, to the governorship. For police chief, he chose Commander Zahir, the son of erstwhile police chief Malek Rauf. Unlike his father, whose affable ways had won him community support, Zahir proved notoriously ill-tempered and combative. He was built like a cauldron, with an enormous wedge of a nose to fit his bulbous face, and wherever he showed up trouble usually followed. The district’s once effective police force became an open bazaar: drug traffickers bribed policemen, officers auctioned extra weapons on the black market, and criminals paid their way to freedom. Under the guise of security, Zahir established checkpoints and forcibly extracted a “tax” from motorists. For the first time since the civil war years, people felt insecure. In one area residents formed a pro-government militia for protection, but Zahir, viewing them as competition, informed the Americans that they were Taliban, and US forces killed them all.

  The venality felt “like a sickness,” as Heela put it. Finally, local elders convened a meeting of tribal leaders and educated people to address the ballooning sense of discontent. Musqinyar sat quietly through the discussion, listening as the graybeards considered how best to convince Tirin Kot to remove Zahir. He was not the type to speak up in meetings—in fact, he hated crowds of any sort—but he found the conversation excruciating. “You’re all avoiding the issue,” he finally said. “We can’t change anything around here so long as Jan Muhammad is running things.” The room went cold silent. As he proceeded to describe what everyone knew, the men stared into their laps or thumbed their prayer beads. When he finished, the elders continued to sit wordlessly, until one of them finally spoke and changed the subject.

  Afterward, people whispered that it was a brave thing he had done. But there wasn’t much more to be said, for JMK had informers everywhere. Everyone knew what had happened to Naqibullah—and he was from an illustrious family, no less.

  Still, it seemed that the entire village had heard of Musqinyar’s remarks. Gossip reached the bazaar and government offices, and soon enough hit the ears of Zahir himself. He said nothing and did nothing, but everyone knew that he had a long memory for such things.

  * * *

  Heela arose early, long before sunrise, on the morning of October 9, 2004. Outside, under an indigo sky, she could make out the silhouettes of several hulking men in the front yard. They wore large turbans and had rifles slung over their shoulders. “Our security for today,” Musqinyar said.

  It was the day of the first presidential election in her country’s history. Musqinyar had done so well during the registration drive that he had been hired to oversee election day for the entire district. It had meant late nights for weeks, traveling with US forces to help survey potential polling sites, hiring and training local staff, coordinating ballot distribution—sometimes using donkeys—and arranging for the results to be safely and accurately counted. Now, the UN also needed a woman to manage the sole female polling station, and Musqinyar allowed Heela to work on the condition that she was provided security.

  By sunrise they arrived at the polling center, the main schoolhouse. A curtain down the middle of the compound separated the male and female voters. As Heela proceeded to her section, she could see a crowd of men gathering near the gate a good hour before polls opened. She helped erect the booths and gather the documents, and then the gates opened and people rushed in. Khas Uruzgan’s sunburned farmers flashed toothy smiles and waved to UN photographers as they presented their registration cards and dipped a finger in purple ink to prevent multiple voting.

  On Heela’s side, however, the story was starkl
y different. “I didn’t see a single woman vote,” Heela said. “I was the first and last woman to cast a ballot that day.” At one point, men arrived with sack loads of registration cards. “They told me, ‘The women in our village don’t know anything about politics, so they asked us to vote for them.’”

  Still, by day’s end, initial results from around the district were already coming in—and the polls were proving to be a resounding success, with a turnout that even Musqinyar hadn’t expected. There were boxes from villages so far-flung that he had never heard of them. For a country just a few years removed from civil war and brutal dictatorship, the election seemed a watershed. As election workers hugged and congratulated each other, Musqinyar stood by watching quietly, his eyes brimming. Even Heela took heart. Changing villagers’ attitudes might take years, even generations, but she knew that their team had planted the first thoughts of equality in people’s minds.

  Karzai would go on to a landslide victory, the first popular mandate of any ruler in Afghan history.

  * * *

  That autumn, Musqinyar found himself thinking often about the future: about staying on with the UN, working the following year’s parliamentary elections; about his children and Kabul and the possibility of returning when the time was right, when they’d be ready for university. Omaid, his oldest, wanted to be a doctor when he grew up. He was coming into the pharmacy daily as a sort of apprenticeship, and for Musqinyar the company was a blessing.