The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  The Taliban had grown and changed since I’d lived in Afghanistan as a reporter at the beginning of the war. In late 2001 and early 2002, some midlevel field commanders had cut deals with the new government and melted back into Afghan society. The Americans had killed and detained a handful of deposed Taliban leaders, while others had declared their loyalty to the Karzai government and received amnesty. In the villages, Taliban loyalists kept their mouths shut. And in Kabul, Kylie Minogue blared from car speakers, men shaved their beards and styled their hair with gel, and women walked proudly to new jobs, their headscarves pushed back to reveal several inches of hair, their open-toed high heels caked in mud.

  Amid the euphoria, it was easy to forget that many prominent Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were lying low in Pakistan, where they had old and powerful friends. But by 2003, the insurgents were edging back. Using Pakistan as a base, they attacked American forces along Afghanistan’s eastern border. In the south, a new, more extreme brand of Taliban were targeting aid workers and sabotaging Western-funded reconstruction projects. Then came the assassinations: a moderate, progovernment mullah here, an earnest, progressive police chief there. One by one, the insurgents picked them off. Afghans had been weakened by decades of war, and few remained unbroken. Now, simply advocating progress was becoming deadly, not just for the outspoken ones, but also for their families.

  By the time I visited Kandahar in 2009, the insurgency’s tendrils had spread into government and the business community, its attacks motivated as much by economic gain as by political resistance. The insurgency was rooted in Pakistan, and felt largely disconnected from any meaningful Afghan national goals. Foreign fighters and outside moneymen were understandably more interested in promoting jihad and killing Americans than in prospects for meaningful reconciliation, and Afghan lives mattered little to them. To complicate matters, the power of warlord militias, criminals, and drug cartels had surged under the weak and increasingly corrupt Afghan government. Rising lawlessness made it virtually impossible to figure out which crimes were insurgent attacks and which were the work of drug dealers or ordinary bandits. For Afghans, it didn’t much matter. They got killed either way.

  Hajji Sadoo Khan, an Alokozai tribal elder from Maiwand and a member of the district shura, had agreed to meet us at the reconciliation office. He was an elfin man with a yellowish beard and a high-pitched voice that emanated from somewhere far back in his throat. He wore a brown turban and a khaki military surplus jacket that said “Österreich,” the German word for Austria, on the arm. He said he had heard about Salam’s attack on the American woman from his brother, who had witnessed it.

  Abdul Salam was in his twenties, Sadoo Khan told us. He was a poor laborer who, like many Afghans his age, had been born in a Pakistani refugee camp and spent part of his boyhood there before moving with his family to Maiwand. For as long as most people could remember, he had lived with his father near the highway in Chehel Gazi, about five hundred yards from the lane where he had thrown gasoline on the American woman and set her on fire. He was married and had recently become a father.

  Salam’s family owned a tractor, a rare and valuable piece of equipment in Maiwand. His father, Mohammad Umar, had worked as a day laborer, making mud bricks and building walls, but now Mohammad Umar was old. He had bought the tractor with borrowed money, and his sons—Salam and his brother—used it to make a living. They did some work for the local district government, bringing gravel to the district center and tearing up poppy fields as part of a government drug eradication effort, for which they were paid about five hundred Afghanis, or ten dollars, per hour. At some point, angered by Salam’s collaboration with the government, the Taliban had captured him and seized his tractor. Salam had pleaded with them, saying he had only agreed to work for the government because he needed the money. The Taliban held Salam and his tractor for several days. Finally, they offered to let him go, but they kept his tractor, the key to his family’s livelihood. If he wanted it back, they told him, he would have to do something for them. It wasn’t clear whether the Taliban gave him a specific assignment, or just assumed that he would know what “doing something” for them meant. ‘If you don’t do this for us, it is easy for us to catch you,’ the insurgents told Salam, and he knew this to be true. Shortly after his release, he saw the American woman in the market and attacked her.

  Another man soon joined us, tucking himself into an armchair and accepting a cup of tea. His name was Hajji Qala Khan, and he, too, was an elder from Maiwand and a leader of the district shura, the council of progovernment elders who worked with the district governor. Qala Khan looked much younger than Sadoo Khan because his hair and beard were a deep black, but he confided that he had recently married a second wife and had dyed his hair for the occasion. He wore a traditional tunic under a gray pin-striped blazer and dark sunglasses, which he never took off.

  Qala Khan was a distant relative of Abdul Salam. When he heard about the attack on the American woman, he had berated Salam’s father: ‘What bad work you have done!’ Qala Khan said he told his kinsman. ‘Your son left a bad name for the people of Maiwand, to kill a woman!’ Salam’s father was distraught. “He just cried and screamed,” Qala Khan told me. “He said, ‘My son was not doing that. He was compelled to do that.’ ”

  Qala Khan agreed that Salam had been captured by the Taliban, but he could give no details about how or when this had happened, or about the bargain that Salam had supposedly struck with the insurgents. All he knew was that Salam had disappeared for a short time. People guessed that ordinary criminals had seized him, but two nights later, he resurfaced. ‘I was arrested by the Taliban and I was beaten and they have tied my hands,’ he told people. Neither elder had talked to Salam directly, but both had heard this story. After Salam set the American woman on fire, villagers crowded around the crime scene, trying to figure out what had happened. ‘Who did this?’ they asked each other. ‘This was done by the son of Mohammad Umar,’ someone said. ‘He was arrested a few days ago by the Taliban.’ And people began to talk about how the Taliban had told Salam that if he didn’t do something for them, they would kill him.

  If people in modern, developed countries use stories to master the violence that occasionally disrupts their carefully ordered lives, imagine the power of stories in a place where the better part of reality is constantly open to interpretation. In Afghanistan, hard facts are exceedingly difficult to come by. Official accounts are not written down and bound into books that say the same thing every time you open them; they are not numbered and placed in investigative files like the one the Army produced on the killing of Abdul Salam. Afghan stories are told around hot coals in wintertime, changing and evolving as each teller elides something or adds something, for stories are not just a way of preserving the past, they are also sources of entertainment and works of art. A storyteller’s choice of allegory over literal truth, his decision to exaggerate one detail and change another, are matters of creative agency that Afghan listeners expect. Afghan stories don’t just order the world; they remake it.

  The villagers who gathered near the bazaar the day Abdul Salam attacked Paula Loyd had a lot to make sense of, because the attack was unusual, perhaps even unprecedented in Afghanistan. On the Indian subcontinent, fire is linked to notions of ritual purification. The immolation of women survives in the old and now outlawed practice of sati, in which a widow throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre to expiate his sins, or because her family or community compel her. Bride burning persists in India, and immolation is a known form of domestic abuse in Pakistan, where dozens of women are also subjected to acid burns each year. But such crimes are less common in Afghanistan. Instead, Afghan women mostly set fire to themselves. Dozens of Afghan women have spoken of trying to burn themselves to death to escape domestic abuse, forced marriages, or the pain of everyday life.

  The notion of burning as a form of purification lingered in the legend that sprang up around Paula Loyd’s killing. If the
ideologically motivated Taliban had viewed this unveiled Western woman as an abomination, perhaps they had also believed that only fire could cleanse Maiwand of her influence. Lighters bearing English lettering—in Salam’s case, the word “Health” in green—and jugs of gasoline are not common weapons of the insurgency, but this would not have been the first time insurgents had chosen to attack with whatever lay nearest at hand. In 2006, at a routine community meeting in Kandahar, an Afghan man swung an axe into the head of a Canadian officer, shouting, ‘Allah-ho-Akbar.’ The attack was completely unexpected, but soldiers later recalled that children had been escorted away from the gathering a few minutes before the officer was struck, suggesting that someone had known it was coming. In Maiwand, the platoon medic had told Army investigators that he saw Abdul Salam pick up a little boy and carry him inside the compound with the green door before he began talking to Loyd. The medic remembered this detail because the boy wore a skullcap that reminded him of a character from Fat Albert. But in this as in so much else, Salam’s intentions were not entirely clear. Earlier in the patrol, another Afghan had been trying to hurry the kids along, saying they would bother the Americans. The interpreter, Jack Bauer, had his own reasons for wanting to minimize the number of children hanging around. Even an American staff sergeant had tried to disperse the kids pooling around Loyd’s legs, until she told him to let them stay.

  But the main problem for the people in Maiwand as they tried to make sense of what had happened was that while Abdul Salam was known as an oddball and an annoyance in the village, he was not known as an insurgent. Like the people in the bazaar, the Maiwand elders were perplexed by Salam’s behavior. Salam and his family were ordinary poor people, Qala Khan told us. “They were working all the time. They were not in touch with any politics.” Sometimes at night, the Taliban would fire their guns around Salam’s neighborhood, and his father, Mohammad Umar, would come to the bazaar the next day and curse the insurgents. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Mohammad Umar would say. ‘We are innocent people!’ Qala Khan shook his head as he recounted this. Salam’s father, he told me, was “totally against the Taliban.”

  The Afghans in the bazaar after Paula Loyd’s attack were confronted with several pieces of “information” that didn’t fit together: This was done by the son of Mohammad Umar; he was arrested a few days ago by the Taliban; the victim was an American woman and the attack happened in the middle of the bazaar. The story of the stolen tractor and the bargain with the Taliban was a device to force into alignment an array of details that otherwise refused to congeal. Salam had said nothing to anyone, as far as I could tell, about agreeing to “do something” for the Taliban in exchange for the return of his tractor. The only evidence to support this was something else Sadoo Khan told us: that after Salam’s death, the Taliban sent a message to Salam’s father praising his son for killing the American woman, and returned the tractor to Salam’s family.

  Something else about the tractor story didn’t make sense. If Salam had hoped to get it back so that he could return to work, why had he committed what was essentially a suicide attack? A platoon of soldiers had surrounded Loyd. Salam must have known they would kill him. The elders discussed this among themselves. The path down which Salam fled twisted beneath the trees, they said. Maybe he didn’t know that more soldiers waited farther down, near the footbridge. If he had managed to slip into the narrow alleys between the compounds in Chehel Gazi, the Americans might never have caught him.

  Sadoo Khan and Qala Khan condemned Salam’s crime in the strongest terms. They were at pains to tell me that it was not rooted in or accommodated by Afghan culture. But whatever might once have been called “Afghan culture” had by now been so profoundly altered by violence and the sudden, disjointed modernity that Afghanistan had been thrust into by the war that no one could say with any certainty what it was or wasn’t. Suicide attacks, unknown in the early years of the conflict, had grown common. In Kandahar, men sprayed acid at Afghan girls as they walked to school, scarring their faces and marking them forever. Maybe immolating a foreign woman surrounded by soldiers on a sunny morning in the middle of a village had likewise entered the realm of the unremarkable.

  The widespread misogyny that Westerners attribute to Afghans is real enough, but it is also true that many Afghans would consider attacking a woman, especially a female visitor, more egregious than attacking a man. There was a place in Maiwand where bandits had always waited to attack caravans, Sadoo Khan told me. Even if several nights passed without any spoils and the bandits were hungry, they would not attack a convoy with a woman in it; they abstained out of respect. “I’m the grandson of Malalai,” Sadoo Khan said firmly, speaking of the heroine who had roused the Afghans’ fighting spirit when they defeated the British in Maiwand more than one hundred years before. “The grandson of Malalai is not killing a woman.”

  Like most things in Afghanistan, the mistreatment of women is more complicated than it looks. Afghan boys and young men are also frequently deprived of control over whom they will marry, how and where they will live, and who has access to their bodies. Nevertheless, it is true that many Afghans in the conservative, rural south don’t like Americans or other foreigners, particularly women, wandering around their villages. I saw few Afghan women on the streets during my visits to Maiwand, and although I was never singled out for mistreatment there, I heard stories from other foreign women who ventured out in the company of the U.S. Army. A female American lieutenant who approached a patient in the local clinic to inquire about the quality of his care was stunned when he told her that she was the daughter of a whore. The acid attack on schoolgirls in Kandahar occurred shortly after the attack on Paula Loyd, and across the country, girls’ schools have been burned and female teachers threatened with death. In at least one case, insurgents even threatened to burn a teacher’s daughter if the woman didn’t quit her job.

  These divergent views on women stem in part from a clash between traditional, indigenous Afghan culture, conservative and patriarchal as it is, and the outsider culture that has grown prevalent since the Soviet invasion, and whose influence on the insurgency has become even more pronounced since 2001. The anti-Soviet war forced millions of Afghans to flee to Pakistan and Iran, where they lived as third-class citizens in refugee camps, subsisting on a steady diet of Islamic extremism that replaced the more moderate strains of Islam traditional in Afghanistan and starved them of any understanding of Afghan culture. The Taliban were the inheritors of this ignorance. Since the American invasion, the Taliban and their fellow travelers had gone back to Pakistan, where they had grown even more radical and alienated from what Afghan culture used to be. In Sadoo Khan’s view, there were Afghans who lived “independently” and clung to their culture, and there were others—men he called “slaves”—who, while technically Afghan, knew little about their culture and were being used by more powerful people, often foreigners, for the latter’s own purposes. The men who had thrown acid at the girls in Kandahar were slaves, the elders said, like the insurgents in Maiwand who planted bombs in the roads that killed ordinary people. “Who is giving permission for that?” one of the elders asked. “Is Islam giving that? Or the Koran? None of them are allowing this.” The old men were not angry that Abdul Salam had been executed. “We are not blaming the Americans for what they have done,” Qala Khan said. “We told them, ‘You have done good work.’ She left her country and she was in Afghanistan. Why? To help us.”

  The elders had one more piece of information to impart. Salam had a brother, they said, who was mentally unstable. “His brain is not working,” one of the elders explained. Salam, on the other hand, had been “a very wise person, a smart person,” Qala Khan said. “I never saw him with an AK, a Kalashnikov gun.”

  * * *

  Amir Mohammad worked as a police officer in Maiwand. He was off duty the day we met him at the reconciliation commission, and instead of his uniform, he wore a gray T-shirt, a tunic, a pin-striped vest, and a red and silver skullcap
. He said he was about twenty-one and that his family came from Kandahar. He had thick dark hair, hazel eyes, and a steadiness that made me trust him.

  Mohammad had been stationed in the district center the morning that Salam attacked Loyd. He hadn’t actually witnessed it, but a fellow officer watching from the roof had seen it and cried out, and Mohammad and four other policemen had run into the street. They saw the American woman lying on the ground, smoke still rising from her body. She moaned softly, a low sound that followed the slope of her breathing. From this Mohammad knew she was alive.

  Farther down the path, Abdul Salam lay on his stomach in the dirt, and Mohammad recalled that an American soldier was holding the Afghan’s hands behind his back. The Americans were shouting to each other up and down the path, while Salam shook on the ground and rolled his head back and forth “just like a crazy person.” Mohammad heard him utter the words “Allah-ho-Akbar”—God is great. “It looked like he had lost his mind,” Mohammad said. Another policeman heard Salam murmur: ‘Leave me, I want to go to my mother.’

  What had Salam told the interpreters? I’m crazy. Sometimes I’m walking naked in the night. He had also said something about having epilepsy, the Afghan interpreter known as Tom Cruise later told Army investigators. Epilepsy. In this part of the world, where mental health treatment means bringing the patient to a shrine to banish the djinns, “epilepsy” is what they call it when the spirits seize you.

  Amir Mohammad watched a uniformed American walk close to where Salam lay. The American raised his gun. He walked around Salam’s body and stood in front of him, aimed, pulled the trigger. Salam’s face turned in the dirt. The young policeman was astonished. “What we were expecting was that they would hand Salam over to the law,” he told me. “The law might execute him, might sentence him. Otherwise, if he is going to be killed on the spot, maybe the woman should have killed him. The woman was still alive at that time.”