by Anand Gopal
She returned home, opened up her diary, and began thumbing through the pages in search of names and numbers of Musqinyar’s friends. In Khas Uruzgan it would have been downright scandalous for her to call one of these men, for her to allow them to hear her voice. But she wasn’t going to hold herself back, not when there were women out on the streets of Kandahar, surviving. It no longer mattered what anyone might think. She found a friend of Musqinyar’s in Kandahar city and dialed him. They had a long conversation. A few days later he showed up at the house and erected a signboard on the outer wall advertising the services of a midwife. Through this work, she was able to afford another month’s rent.
Not long after, however, Musqinyar’s friend left town and she was alone again. Without his help and cover she could not operate her midwifery business. But her trip outdoors had awakened something within her, and she scrabbled for more contacts. She knew that she would need to rely on Musqinyar’s old circle to survive. One or two kindhearted souls was all she needed. But none of his friends were in Kandahar. It dawned on her that only one hope remained, only one place in the country where she could go to find them. It was the option she had been avoiding all these months, the option she hadn’t even allowed herself to consider: Jan Muhammad Khan’s Uruzgan.
* * *
The bright noon sun baked the windows. Having finished a prodigious meal, JMK leaned back. A gold-rimmed portrait of Hamid Karzai hung above him. To his left, a photograph of a clock; to his right, of puppies. He spoke to me of his days as Uruzgan’s governor in 2005 and 2006. “Those were good times,” he recalled. “We opened up orphanages, built roads, built schools.” Of humble origins himself, he was widely known and appreciated within the Popalzai tribe for his generosity. He financed weddings and built irrigation ditches, loaned farmers money for seeds and refurbished the bazaar. One of his passions was female education, so he bankrolled the construction of girls’ schools in Tirin Kot. “Wherever women are educated,” he told me, “the country is strong.”
JMK wasn’t the type to sit in an office. He was one of the few provincial governors to accompany American troops on their missions, showing up with his heaving belly and gnarled sandals, walkie-talkie in hand, alongside militiamen who functioned as his praetorian guard and private army—with Washington footing the bill.
“We went everywhere, the Americans and me,” he recalled. “They were the only ones who truly cared about fighting the terrorists. Sometimes we even went into the neighboring provinces. Once I headed into Zabul, to the Dai Chopan area, and we went through their villages. The place was full of Taliban.” He laughed. “We started hanging them from trees. Everyone could see them hanging. After that, there were no more security problems in Dai Chopan.”
Once, during a joint Afghan-American mission to a Ghilzai region—home to Mullah Manan—they descended on a house where they uncovered weapons, a common enough occurrence in a country awash with arms. In a sequence captured by a documentary filmmaker, a villager was brought out to JMK for interrogation, with US troops and his militiamen seated around him. JMK then began rummaging through photos of young boys and men taken from the captive’s house.
“Where did you find these boys? Oh God, what good looks!” he exclaimed, as his militiamen chuckled. The prisoner sat nearby uncomfortably. “Aren’t they heavenly creatures? What beautiful boys they are. I wish I was young again. They’re more beautiful than ten women.”
After conferring with the militiamen over the evidence, Jan Muhammad told the prisoner, “Come on, man. You say this is the photo of a lion? It looks like a donkey.” He glared. “I’ll fuck your mother. I’ll make you suck my dick.” Then, through a translator, he sent a message about the captive’s fate to an American officer sitting nearby. “Tell the colonel we’ll take him along with us and for a few nights he will keep us entertained. He will do his thing and then we’ll see.”
By 2006, JMK’s malign influence had become apparent to everyone—everyone, that is, except the Americans. UN officials and European diplomats came to view him as a key destabilizing influence in the province, even as US commanders stood by his side because the very traits that made him so divisive also made him an ideal ally in the war on terror. Still, with the Taliban’s resurgence, Washington desperately wanted greater troop contributions in the region from its NATO allies. The Dutch government finally agreed to deploy a contingent to Uruzgan—but only if JMK was removed from office. After much wrangling, President Karzai was forced to comply. He appointed his old friend as special adviser to the president, a sinecure that brought him to Kabul.
When I asked JMK about the transfer, he leaned close and said, “The Dutch actually support the Taliban. I’ve got all the evidence. It’s a well-known fact among certain people. You see, they want to destroy our country so they can fund the Taliban. They and the ISI work together. This is our country’s tragedy, the tragedy we suffer through every day. The Dutch are weak, not like the Americans. They don’t understand right and wrong. That’s why they opposed me. They knew what I’d do to them. Anyone who supports the Taliban is not welcome in my province. That’s been my rule from the beginning.” He again praised the Americans as the only foreign nation that truly understood the stakes. The rest, he said, “want to bend us over and fuck us.”
* * *
On a spring day in 2005, Heela and the boys pulled up in a taxi to a small house in central Tirin Kot. Hajji Akhund, an old friend of Musqinyar’s, had arranged for her to stay on property he owned, promising to cover for her if locals discovered that a single woman was living in their presence. It was still JMK’s province then, and while he would likely learn of a single female newcomer to town, he did not know about Heela’s connection to Musqinyar and the politics of Khas Uruzgan. She planned to keep it that way.
Hajji Akhund showed Heela to her new lodgings, a squat house with faded butterscotch walls and a single set of windows out front. Mold clung to the eaves and the outer enclosure was crumbling to ruin. Still, Heela was grateful for what she had. Her compound adjoined Hajji Akhund’s and was only a few streets from the main bazaar. Everything within a three-mile radius was government-controlled. Beyond that lay a region that had fallen in part or whole to the Taliban. Khas Uruzgan, seventy miles away, was now insurgent central.
As one of Tirin Kot’s few educated women, she soon landed a job through Hajji Akhund with Afghan Health and Development Services, a local NGO that offered medical aid to women and children. They paid about $180 a month, more than she’d ever seen at one time. She would get up early to get the boys ready for school and then she’d be driven to the office in a car with tinted windows. By lunchtime she’d be back home, ready to receive the boys. Occasionally the routine was broken and she was brought to the American base, where she treated Afghan women who were casualties of the war.
Heela made sure to go about her work as quietly as possible. The car pulled in only when the coast was clear, and then she scurried out to it in her burqa. She spent the workday in a back room, away from the men, and when she returned home she did so with equal caution. It took a full year before the neighborhood discovered her presence. She had just returned from work one summer’s day, and was opening the main gate when she stopped short. “I saw madness,” she recalled.
Beans and sugar were scattered everywhere. Shelves were overturned, clothes spilling out. Her samovar lay smashed. Her sewing machine was missing. Shaking, Heela phoned a translator she knew at the American base, but she could not get through.
That evening she borrowed a Kalashnikov from Hajji Akhund and kept it by the bedside. By sunrise the break-in had already become the talk of the neighborhood, and the secret was out: a woman was living alone—and working—right in their midst. For some weeks she stayed away from the office and kept the children home, too. Then one night, as she was drifting off to sleep, she opened her eyes to a noise. She sat up and listened. Something like steps on gravel, or something being dragged across the outside wall. She peered through the wind
ow and saw the luminescence of a flashlight from that wall, and a man’s sandals and his baggy-trousered legs and his torso blending into the darkness. She screamed. The children, jolted awake, began shouting. In the clamor, the man stumbled off the wall; she heard him slam into the roof, and the pots and pans in her kitchen came crashing down. By the time the first neighbors came running, he was long gone.
In the following days, Hajji Akhund and other well-wishers advised her to quit working until the dust settled. With money saved up Heela could afford to lie low for a while, so months went by before she ventured out into the street again. Her first foray outdoors was to the American base to gather donations to distribute to other widows. Later, she started making occasional trips to the NGO office to see friends.
Even with this restricted schedule, though, trouble found her. On an autumn evening in 2007, as she was settling into bed with the boys beside her, she heard a knock on the front gate. She put on her burqa and stepped into the dark night. When she opened the gate her eyes washed across the street and saw nothing but emptiness. Only as she turned to walk back in did she spot the letter that had been forced under the gate. Neatly written, it said:
Dear Sister,
It has come to our attention that you have been working with the occupying and crusading forces who have come to destroy our country and Islam. Please be advised to cease this activity. If you do not, you have no right to complain.
It bore the official seal of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—the Taliban.
Some weeks later Heela received a phone call.
“Why are you meeting with foreigners?” the voice asked. It sounded like a mere boy.
“Who are you? What is this?” Heela asked.
“I’m telling you, sister. If you keep this up you’ll have to accept the consequences.”
Sister. The way he said it unnerved Heela. A boy that young would normally call her auntie.
“I’m only getting medicines,” she replied. “I’m giving them out to poor widows. I’m not helping them in any way. I’m just helping our people.”
“Then why don’t you help us? We need medicine too.”
Heela did not know what to say, so she hung up. The calls continued over the coming days, and she began to have violent dreams in which she found herself running from unknown men in the mountains. The dreams ended with her capture and execution, and she would wake up in tears. Hajji Akhund, who was well versed in matters of the dreamworld, explained that it was rare to die in your dreams. “It’s a good thing,” he said. “It means you’ll live a long life. This is what people say.”
She remembered these words the next time the boy called. “Stop calling me,” she snapped. “Just tell me what you want.” There was silence on the other end and then he politely said that he’d contact her at the appropriate time. That afternoon, he called back and told her to step outside. She threw on a burqa and opened the front gate. In the blinding white noonday sun it took her a moment to notice the tall, dark-skinned boy, a pattu wrapped around his face revealing just his eyes. He stared at Heela and then threw a package in her direction and ran.
She opened it to find a new SIM card for her phone and some women’s clothing. The boy called again.
“You’re a sister to us,” he said. “We know what happened to you. Any time you want to call us, use that SIM card.”
“There are clothes in here,” she said.
“Our gift to you. In return, please send us medicines. We’re desperate.”
Later that week she gathered medicines and first-aid materials donated by the foreign agencies and the Americans and left the bundle atop her front gate. She awoke the next morning to find that it had been taken. Over the next weeks, she settled into a routine of collecting aid when she could and leaving it for her new friends. For Heela, the war was not a matter of policy, not a neat delineation of allies and adversaries—it was life itself. Living a war was different from fighting one; it meant keeping yourself somewhere in the gray area of survival. So long as the Taliban left her and her family alone, so long as they dealt with her respectfully, she had nothing against them. These were boys not much older than Omaid, and given Jan Muhammad and Commander Zahir and the others on the government’s side, why wouldn’t they fight? The only troubling part was rumors from the countryside that she didn’t want to believe but knew were probably true, like the stories of Taliban stringing alleged spies up on trees and stuffing dollar bills into their mouths. She told herself that her Taliban unit couldn’t have been involved.
Once, a Taliban friend requested that she venture into the field to treat women injured in an American attack. Eager to travel, to see, Heela thought about it long and hard, but in the end she decided not to risk it. And it would be a lasting regret because one day the calls stopped, just as mysteriously as they’d begun. She waited for weeks, then months, but nothing. Much later she heard that the Americans had paid an informer to carry a tracking device to the home of the unit leader and then dispatched an aircraft to finish them all. But it was only a rumor.
* * *
The moments after the muezzin’s call and just before the boys awoke were Heela’s most precious. She would write in her diary about the day ahead, about days past, about Musqinyar. She would take apart the night’s dreams and Musqinyar’s messages to her, as if a proper divination could bring the coming daylight under control. When the boys woke they would sit down to naan and green tea and talk about school. Shortly after they went off for the day, a car would arrive to take her to the NGO compound. She had started working again part-time, and the neighborhood was, for the moment at least, leaving her alone.
At the office, she would sort medical donations into boxes. Occasionally a foreign aid worker would show up, and Heela would receive medicines for cold and fever and menstrual cramps. She would arrange for deliveries to be made to distant parts of the province. Some days she herself would travel to villages around Tirin Kot to distribute chickens and offer women some advice on their care.
Everyone would take their nap after lunch. Heela would return home before the boys, and when they arrived she would send them out to the bazaar to collect groceries for dinner. By the time the family was in bed, the car horns and the vendors’ shouts would be replaced by the distant whistle of falling rockets and the faint rapping of machine-gun fire. They were the only nighttime sounds Heela knew, and she slept soundly through them.
Since JMK’s departure the province had settled a bit. The constant scrapping for territory had ceased, the Taliban holding their ground and the government theirs. The countryside remained a world removed from the streets of Tirin Kot, but for the first time in years people began to feel that things were not deteriorating—even if they were not getting better, either. Heela wished that Musqinyar could see her now, making a life for herself in ways no one in Khas Uruzgan would have dared imagine. She found herself focusing increasingly on the future, especially on the possibility that one day Omaid might study at university in Kabul, just like his father.
She might have continued this way, losing herself in the promise of new beginnings, in the hints of a world slowly righting itself, if not for the events of a spring day in 2008. It began in the morning when she was at the office and the boys were off from school. Omaid was sitting indoors reading; he had not improved much since the Kandahar days. Due to numerous surgeries one of his legs was now shorter than the other, and his eyesight was somewhat impaired. A bigger problem was the all-consuming fear he had developed of open spaces, loud noises, unfamiliar streets, and, most intensely of all, men with guns—no easy phobia to live with in Uruzgan. By rights he should have assumed his place as head of the household. Instead, he appeared perpetually sullen.
Jamshed had fared better. He harbored no lingering injuries, although he rarely spoke of what had happened that night. He, too, was at home that afternoon, resting indoors.
It was Nawid, Heela’s third child, age eight, who was proving to be the strongest of the lot
. He’d tell anyone who would listen that someday he would avenge his father. He was also, in Heela’s eyes, the best-looking, with butterfly lashes and dimpled cheeks. On that day he was out by the front gate, playing with the youngest brother, Walid.
At some point that afternoon, a car rolled up in front of the house with two men inside. They spoke to Nawid as Walid stood watching. Nawid giggled and the men laughed, and then they opened their door and scooped him up and sat him down beside them. The door closed and the car drove off. Walid played by himself for some time, then returned to the house to relay the events to his brothers.
Omaid immediately called his mother. The news hit Heela hard. Walid had recognized the driver as Uncle Ruhollah, a cousin of JMK’s who sometimes came by the house—a man notorious for his predilection for young boys.
She ran to the company driver and begged to be taken home. From there, she called Hajji Akhund, but he wasn’t answering. She phoned her American contacts, but she couldn’t get through. She pleaded with the driver to take her out to JMK’s home village, Touri, on the outskirts of Tirin Kot, and finally he agreed. As the adobe houses and mud-and-straw shops sped by, Heela closed her eyes. She thought of Musqinyar and then thought of Jan Muhammad, and she felt sick.